The 2022 results from the “main” National Assessment of Educational Progress will be released October 24. They’ll include fourth- and eighth-grade scores at the national level, as well as state by state and for two-dozen large urban districts. Especially after the Covid shut-downs, it’s a big freakin’ deal. Here are three major storylines to look forward to.
The 2022 results from the “main” National Assessment of Educational Progress will be released October 24. If you’re feeling like the 2022 NAEP results just came out, you’re not wrong. The scores released around back-to-school time were from a special implementation of NAEP’s Long Term Trends version. That one looked only at nine-year-olds, tested a fairly small sample of students, and used a version of the exam that has not been updated since the 1970s. What’s coming later this month is much more comprehensive: fourth- and eighth-grade scores at the national level, but also state by state and for two-dozen large urban districts. Plus, a big-enough sample to permit breakdowns for racial subgroups, special education students and English learners, as well as for charter and Catholic school students.
While state assessment data, and results from interim assessments like the MAP and i-ready, are more relevant for individual kids, teachers, and schools, for policy wonks—and a lot of elected officials and other policymakers—this upcoming NAEP release is a big freaking deal—and even more than usual in the pandemic’s aftermath.
So what are some of the storylines we might look forward to? It will depend, of course, on what the actual data show. But here are the major ones that I can foresee.
No. 1: Could any state’s results factor into November’s election?
It’s been at least two decades since NAEP scores were released in the same autumn as an election. That’s because starting with No Child Left Behind, the test was administered on an every-odd-year schedule. But the pandemic pushed the 2021 assessment into 2022. It would not have been hard for the NAEP governing board and the National Center of Education Statistics to slow-walk these results until after the election, but to their credit, the scores are being announced on an impressively fast timeline. Which raises the possibility of those scores having an impact on this year’s elections, especially gubernatorial races. (This could happen in future election years, too—the next round will come in a presidential year—which could become a real problem for NAEP.)
The big state-by-state story, of course, is going to be about the pandemic and the resulting school shutdowns. Will red states outperform blue ones because they mostly got their kids back to in-person learning faster? And might that help incumbent Republican governors and hurt Democratic incumbents? That’s plausible, so watch how the scores look for states such as Georgia, Florida, and Texas, where Governors Brian Kemp, Ron DeSantis, and Greg Abbott were aggressive about reopening schools. They will certainly crow to the press, and possibly cut some new campaign commercials, if their test scores hold steady. (Granted, none of those elections looks especially close right now.)
On the flip side, watch how Democratic-led states that were more cautious about reopening do on the test, and see whether big declines will hurt incumbents running for reelection. Nevada, Wisconsin, and Kansas are probably the most salient ones on that score, with Governors. Steve Sisolak, Tony Evers, and Laura Kelly leading their races but not blowing their opponents out of the water. If there are big drops on NAEP in any of these states, expect—overnight—to see new campaign commercials from their Republican opponents.
Don’t be surprised to glimpse bad news from California, as well, given that it was the state that was the last to reopen schools. Governor Gavin Newsom doesn’t appear at risk electorally, but NAEP results could become a last-minute issue in the race for state superintendent. Low scores might also be likely, and embarrassing, for Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, though both appear to be easily heading to re-election.
Bottom line: If any state fared significantly better than others, expect incumbents to try to score points. If any fared worse, challengers may try to capitalize.
All this is speculation, of course. It’s also entirely possible that all states experience roughly equivalent declines, with red states doing merely a bit better than blue ones. After all, plenty of kids were learning at home for long stretches even in GOP strongholds, and virtually everybody had to deal with a lot of interruptions to learning between NAEP 2019 and NAEP 2022.
No. 2: Will the scores deflate happy talk about kids bouncing back from the pandemic?
While the Long Term Trends results were devastating across the land, they provided no state-level data, and several states have been busy this fall spinning their own test scores as demonstrating rapid progress in the wake of the pandemic. Here’s a sample of state press releases:
That all sounds pretty good; but now—and not for the first time—NAEP will play an indispensable role as auditor and truth squad, serving (as Congress intended starting with NCLB) as an external check on states’ testing and reporting systems. I won’t be surprised if several of the states quoted above turn out to have egg on their faces.
Yes, there can be explanations beyond an honesty gap for why state scores and NAEP results might diverge. Some states are looking at (and boasting about) changes from 2021 to 2022; NAEP will provide trends from 2019 to 2022. Moreover, state tests are more closely aligned to state standards and (one hopes) to the curriculum taught in the state’s classrooms. Additionally, states can track individual students over time, so they can look at the progress that particular kids might be making; NAEP can look only at changes in scores from one cohort of students to another.
Still, if the aforementioned states and others like them record big drops in their NAEP scores, reporters shouldn’t be shy about asking officials if they stand behind their claims of gains, improvement, and rebounding.
No. 3: Will Catholic schools shine?
Another storyline to look for might be a triumph for the Catholic school sector. After all, virtually all Catholic schools were back in person full time by fall 2020, unlike many traditional public and charter schools. Given that, it would be a huge surprise for the Catholic schools to see their pupils record anywhere near the learning loss experienced by others.
If their schoolkids do well, it will offer a glimpse at what might have been—if all American children had gotten back to school in the fall of 2020, like Catholic school pupils did, and those in most European countries. Also expect the school choice world to celebrate. (It would be great to have data for private schools as a class, but as has been true for many years, not enough non-Catholic privates took part in NAEP. What could they be hiding?)
So, political junkies and education policy wonks alike: Mark your calendars for October 24, and let’s see whether the news is more pumpkin-spice-nice or Halloween ghoulishness.
Editor’s note: This was first published by The 74 in slightly different form.
In a way, the battles we’ve seen in recent years over what to teach schoolkids in civics class resemble the war in Ukraine: They’re wholly unnecessary—and may be entirely the work of aggressors.
The American public is divided over many issues. Certainly our politicians are. Culture wars abound in the K–12 world, too, including touchy aspects of school management and curriculum, what should be in school libraries, above all issues bearing on sex, gender, and “gender identity.”
Yet more than you probably realize, Americans are mostly of one mind when it comes to civics education. Here’s some of the evidence, starting with parents, cribbed from a June 2021 piece by Anna Saavedra:
Between mid-April and the end of May 2021, the University of Southern California Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research asked 1,510 K–12 parents from the nationally representative Understanding America Study (UAS) how important they feel it is for students to learn about civics education topics in school. As we show in Figure 1, we found parents across political parties feel it is important or very important for students to learn about how the U.S. system of government works (85 percent), requirements for voting (79 percent), the U.S.’s leadership role in the world (73 percent), the federal government’s influence over state and local affairs (72 percent), how students can get involved in local government or politics (71 percent), benefits and challenges of social programs like Medicare and Social Security (64 percent), and contributions of historical figures who are women (74 percent) and racial/ethnic minorities (71 percent).
No, it’s not unanimous, it’s just big percentages in favor, percentages that for the most part cut across political lines.
Support for teaching some topics is a bit more tepid—and partisan—among parents:
Lower proportions of Republican parents deem important discussion of topics including the U.S. leadership role in the world (67 percent), federalism (64 percent), social programs (54 percent), how students can be involved (65 percent), and contributions of women (65 percent) or racial/ethnic minorities (60 percent). But the clear majority of parents across political parties feel learning about each of these topics is important for students.
As for the broader public, support for teaching key topics is even stronger:
We...found even greater levels of support for teaching each of the listed civic education topics among adults without K–12 children in the house—including majorities among Republicans. For example, while overall 70 percent of K-12 parents feel it is important for students to learn about racism in the U.S., 75 percent of adults feel the same (51 percent Republicans, 92 percent Democrats). While overall 61 percent of K–12 parents feel it is important to discuss political issues, the percentage is 71 percent for adults without K–12 children living in the home (55 percent Republican, 82 percent Democrat).
Parents and the adult population more broadly, overwhelmingly, support the schools educating students about the rights and responsibilities of citizens, no matter their political leanings, and the majority of U.S. adults across parties also feel children should be discussing political issues and racism at school.
I declare that the civics-curriculum glass is considerably more than half full and could be the basis of agreement rather than conflict.
No, you don’t have to see it that way, and some folks would rather not. Some love culture wars and earn their livings and get their grants by fanning flames, picking fights, calling names, donning armor, and lobbing arrows, missiles, and fireball drones into what they want you to believe are enemy camps.
Such warriors can peer at the Republican numbers above, for example, and declare that barely half want to see kids taught about racism and hot political topics, thus leaving plenty of room for conflict.
And conflict we do have. Look, for example, at last week’s brouhaha in Colorado over civics standards for K–12 schooling in the Rocky Mountain State. After much debate, the state board of education’s four-person Democratic majority rejected the three Republicans’ proposal to substitute the “American Birthright” civics standards for those that the state has been using (and is currently overhauling).
When writing or rewriting their academic standards, regardless of subject, states typically empanel large committees of educators and others to go through draft after draft, seeking agreement on what that state’s young people should learn—and its public schools should teach—every year from kindergarten through high school.
Colorado has such standards in ten subject domains—and its standards for “social studies” contain separate strands for all of the four core disciplines: history, geography, economics, and civics.
When Fordham’s reviewers recently reviewed Colorado’s civics standards, they were underwhelmed, assigning an overall grade of “D,” terming them “inadequate,” and stating that “they fail to specifically reference essential content, and the sporadic lists of persons or events that accompany the broad grade-level expectations don’t delineate a proper scope or sequence.” (The U.S. history portion of Colorado’s standards rated another “D.”)
State lawmakers weren’t happy with their standards, either, and mandated an overhaul.
What to do? The Colorado state board has been struggling as every homegrown draft of new social studies standards has come under fire from one direction or another, often slammed for paying insufficient attention to some favorite group or issue.
So why not import a fully-formed set of standards from outside? That’s what the R’s on the board suggested, and the set they chose to promote, dubbed “American Birthright,” is the product of the “Civics Alliance,” a loose-knit body of several dozen organizations and many individual advisors, experts, and public officials, pulled together by the National Association of Scholars (NAS).
It’s important to note that, while American Birthright flies the flag of “civics education,” its 115 pages of actual standards incorporate hefty doses of history, geography, and economics, too, in that respect paralleling Colorado’s approach to social studies.
Many of those involved in the Civics Alliance are proud conservatives and “American Birthright” undeniably arrives with a big conservative chip on its shoulder. This starts with ringleader David Randall, who is the NAS research director and has made something of a career in recent years denouncing other civics-reform ventures, such as Educating for American Democracy (EAD) and its “roadmap for excellence in history and civics.” I think well of EAD myself, applaud its valiant effort at consensus-building, and have served on a couple of its committees. Randall, however, calls it “the central political-administrative push to reshape American civics education into a radical mold.” (He has also denounced the Fordham civics and history review that gave Colorado a pair of “D”s.) So yes, he qualifies as a card-carrying culture warrior, and so do some advisors to “American Birthright.”
It also bears noting that the fourteen-page introduction to that document is something of a screed, denouncing the teaching of “skills,” as well as “civic engagement,” inquiry-based learning,” “social-emotional learning”—and “virtually any pedagogy that claims to promote ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ or ‘social justice.’”
You can see them spoiling for a fight, eager to get into the ring with EAD and others that push hard for “inquiry” and “critical thinking” and suchlike.
But here’s the thing. When we dig into American Birthright’s voluminous standards themselves, I doubt that the typical American (or parent) will find much of anything there that they disagree with or think ought not be taught to and learned by U.S. school kids. Nor is it just a dry list of names, dates, and places to memorize. Far from it. Despite the rhetoric of its introduction, the grade-by-grade standards are full of such thought-provoking expectations as “Explain the characteristics of the American republic, including the concepts of popular sovereignty and constitutional government, which includes limited government, representative institutions, federalism, separation of powers, shared powers, checks and balances, republican virtue, and individual rights of life, liberty, property, and due process” (for fourth grade), and “Identify and explain the meaning and importance of civic dispositions or virtues that contribute to the preservation and improvement of civil society and government” (for twelfth grade).
Yes, much of it is “factual.” It is in many ways the flip side of EAD, which is all about posing questions that students should wrestle with and work to answer. American Birthright might be described in significant part as supplying answers to hundreds of such questions, supplying the “stuff” that would enable kids to wrestle successfully. It’s possible even to see the two ventures as complementary. Each can be faulted for what it leaves out. Both should be praised for how much farther they would take us toward a society in which high school graduates actually know something about how their country works, what have been its strengths and weaknesses and successes and failures, and why they should care about these things and work to make them better.
We could, if we really wanted to, work to unify, to consolidate, to compromise, and to agree on what kids should learn in realms like civics. I don’t mean it should be exactly the same in Oregon, Virginia, and Arizona, or in Cleveland, Fort Worth, and Seattle, but they’d have a lot more in common than they’d be different. That’s what the American public appears to think.
We could do that if we really wanted to. But then the culture warriors would need new jobs. Child care, perhaps? There are plenty of openings. Actually, there are also plenty of openings for real warriors to join the U.S. Army.
Few reporters in education journalism have had greater impact in recent years than Emily Hanford. In the five years since she started exploring why America’s students have a hard time learning to read, states across the country have made encouraging progress in advancing early reading policies. Today, the first two of six episodes of her newest podcast, “Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong,” became available. I got access to embargoed copies recently, and came away impressed and eager to listen to the remaining episodes, which will be released individually over the course of the upcoming weeks.
Hanford’s first documentary on reading examined the failure of America’s schools in serving students with dyslexia. Subsequent stories and podcasts sorted through the reading mess from other angles, all infuriating as well as heartbreaking. In these new podcasts, Hanford homes in on the complicity of one publishing company and four of its top authors. The publisher remains nameless through the first two episodes, but anyone who has followed Hanford’s work or have themselves worked in an elementary school anytime in the last twenty years will deduce that she’s referring to Heinemann, a division of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH).
Sold a Story opens with a recording of a fluent fourth grader effortlessly reading a passage about guide dogs, juxtaposed starkly against a reader who haltingly fumbles and stumbles her way along the same passage. It’s a short vignette, but it powerfully hits home the devastating effects when children are not taught how to decode—an avoidable negligence with severe and lasting repercussions. Hanford explains how reading instruction in primary classrooms went so off course:
Kids are not being taught how to read because for decades teachers have been sold an idea about reading and how children learn to do it. And that idea is wrong. The people who have been selling this idea—I don’t have any reason to believe they thought it was wrong. I think they wanted what I think everyone wants. They wanted kids to learn how to read. They wanted kids to love reading. But they believed so deeply in their idea about how to do that that they somehow ignored or explained away a whole lot of evidence that showed the idea was wrong. And they went on to make a lot of money.
A lot of money. Heinemann was the primary driver of HMH’s annual revenue of nearly $600 million annually. I’d like to share Hanford’s generosity when it comes to motives, but I can’t help but suspect that some of those pushing this misbegotten idea knew perfectly well what they were doing.
The rest of the show traces the gut-wrenching stories of parents like Corinne Adams and Lee Gaul, who painfully discover that their children did not read as well as they had been led to believe. When their kids were home doing Zoom school in response to the pandemic, Adams and Gaul were able to watch everything, and what they learned was that their children’s schools weren’t teaching their kids how to read. They were teaching kids, as Gaul put it, to sound like they could read. Luckily, Adams and Gaul intervened, but not all children are so lucky to have parents with the bandwidth or wherewithal to swoop in when their schools fall short.
The second episode focuses on the bad idea driving the poor reading strategies that have become so pervasive in America’s elementary schools. Simply put, the idea is that beginning readers don’t have to sound out words. Instead, they can look at the picture or use other cues to make educated guesses when confronting an unfamiliar word. This notion is deeply entrenched in American education. From educator preparation programs to professional development and curriculum materials, teachers encounter it everywhere. Having a big hand in the idea’s proliferation is the first of the four authors Hanford targets in the documentary: New Zealander Marie Clay, the founder of Reading Recovery. (Close followers of the Reading First story may recall that Chris Doherty, the first director of the program, was vilified for attempting to keep programs like Reading Recovery and Heinemann from receiving federal grants.)
Clay did not believe in phonics instruction. In fact, she described it, regrettably, as “nonsense.” Instead, Clay’s theory dovetailed with what has become known today as “whole language.” She was of the opinion that the letters in a word are “incidental” to reading; sounding out a word should only be used as a last resort, when all other clues are exhausted. However, brain scans and eye-tracking technology now show the opposite to be true: Skilled readers are able to recognize words without relying on context or cues at all. Good readers aren’t good problem solvers, as Clay thought; they see a word and recognize it—all in a split second.
It’s hard to overstate the lasting footprint of Clay’s research and advocacy, but Hanford provides the listener a strong sense of the scope (and damage): Former President Bill Clinton and his education secretary Richard Riley were enthusiastic proponents. By the end of the 1990s, Reading Recovery was in more than one in five American schools, to say nothing of its reach across the English-speaking world, from Australia to Britain. Indeed, the Queen made Clay a dame, equivalent to a knight. According to one survey, Clay was the researcher most likely to be introduced to teachers when they were in training, followed by two American women we’ll learn more about in the next episode.
Without getting too deep into the reading wars, Hanford’s first two salvos in her latest offering will feel both bracing and familiar. Listeners who know her work will recognize the formula—agonizing stories interwoven with science, data, and a just-the-facts-ma’am ethos—and be spellbound by it nonetheless. The truth is that reading scores were low even before the pandemic, and they’ve been that way for a while. Many have come to accept student illiteracy as something schools have little to no control over. Adams, one of the parents Hanford interviews, says that her big takeaway from all of this is that if you want to make sure your child can read, you should teach her yourself. Now there’s an idea that schools, schools of education, and textbook publishers alike should think long and hard on.
A new study released this month by Kenneth Shores and Matthew Steinberg tackles the question of whether federal pandemic relief for public schools was provided in the right way and in the right amount. The study does some informed but essentially back-of-the-envelope math to estimate how much it would take to fix learning loss, and although the authors give a range, the number circulating in the headlines is $700 billion. Not only is that estimate far more than the $190 billion in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) federal Covid relief funding that went to schools: It’s also more than the Census’s figure for total current expenditures for all public schools in the US in FY 2020. However, this rough figure has a host of estimation problems, and a perspective problem to boot.
The totals Shores and Steinberg provide range between $325 billion and $1.4 trillion. That enormous range—roughly 150 percent of total current public school spending—should cast some doubt on the middle $700B figure the media latched on to, and some estimation problems bear out such doubts. Shores and Steinberg’s total costs estimates are the product of three measures: 1) The duration of students’ remote instruction, 2) remote students’ learning loss, and 3) the cost to recover that lost learning. All three of these measures are hard to pin down (disclosure: they use my AEI Return To Learn (R2L) data for some of their estimates) and thus result in wildly different cost estimates.
For calculating the duration of students’ remote instruction, the authors base their high-end estimates on anonymized cellphone tracking data. My technical concerns about these data’s precision aren’t hard to see. If you gauge how many students are in school based on the relative number of cellphones that show up in the building, you might get decent estimates for high schools, but not for elementary grades. High schoolers were both more likely to have cell phones and stay remote longer, so the cell data probably overestimates remote instruction.
The lower end estimates of remote instruction use my R2L data, but even that data tracks districts instructional offerings, not how many students showed up in-person when they could choose to stay remote. For these reasons, all estimates of the duration of remote instruction are uncertain.
Estimates of learning loss (from America) are reasonable to a point. Estimates from studies by Goldhaber et al. and Kuhfeld et al. are quite similar (and the Goldhaber paper also uses R2L data, which helps with apples to apples comparisons), and both lean towards the lower end. Nevertheless, even these estimates don’t mesh with the rapid progress already seen in some states. In Tennessee, Texas, and Mississippi, spring 2022 test scores in reading almost bounced back to pre-pandemic levels, and test scores in math saw significant progress, as well. Most states are making slower but still substantial progress, which suggests that the durability of learning loss may be less than measurements from fall 2021 suggest.
Primarily, the totals the study provides hinge on how much it costs to make up a given unit of lost learning. The authors do their best to find an informed estimate of that unit cost, but that estimate is, to put it bluntly, a guess, and one that doesn’t wash with the progress we have already seen in states. As mentioned above, academic recovery is already progressing to some degree without anything like the spending Shores and Steinberg suggest. That’s important because it suggests that their unit cost is excessive and that so are their estimated totals.
Overall, these estimates have problems, but they are not the only problems here. This study, and news coverage of it, willfully ignores why remote instruction, and the learning loss it drove, was so uneven. The R2LTracker shows 2020–21’s closures differed tremendously between districts. Those closures were local policy choices and these policy choices had consequences—terrible consequences for students. The authors’ suggestion that “adapting ESSER allocations to remote learning would have been a feasible adjustment the federal government could have made in real time” would have meant that more federal relief would flow to districts’ whose excessive Covid caution overextended school closures and resulted in greater learning loss. Such a policy would have both treated that excessive caution as acceptable and shortchanged districts who reopened sooner.
A thorough discussion of what else needs to be done to make up for learning loss is worth having. Recovering from the pandemic will be schools’ primary challenge for years to come, and no doubt, it will be difficult to do with the limited data on hand. However, that discussion needs a clear-eyed look at what caused pandemic learning loss if it is to honestly deal with what should be done and spent, and by whom.
Editor’s note: This was originally published by the American Enterprise Institute.
Is it possible that attending a high-performing school may help young people live healthier lives? An intriguing new paper from the American Medical Association’s JAMA Network open access journal says yes, though with some important caveats. A research team lead by Dr. Mitchell Wong from UCLA followed more than 1,000 students for six years—through high school and beyond—and surveyed them annually on issues such as substance use, delinquency, and physical and mental health. Those who attended a high-performing charter school generally reported far fewer injurious behaviors and negative health outcomes than similar peers, with one major exception.
Dr. Wong and his team leveraged the natural experiment created by lottery-only admission at five charter schools in Los Angeles. These schools were chosen because they were among the thirty highest-performing high schools in the city, served predominantly low-income students, and reported at least fifty more applicants than available spots at the start of the project in October 2012. The initial treatment group consisted of 694 students who won spots via lottery to start ninth grade at one of the five schools; the control group consisted of 576 students who were not offered spots. (Students who were admitted on the basis of sibling preference and those who moved out of Los Angeles County were excluded.) Slightly more than half the sample was female, and nearly 90 percent was Hispanic. Treatment and control groups were nearly identical at the start, including eighth grade GPA (approximately 70 percent in each group had earned a C or better), eighth grade test scores (more than half of each group scored proficient in math and English), and family structure (more than 83 percent reported two-parent families and an “average” parenting style—somewhere between “authoritative” and “neglectful”).
Students in the study were surveyed annually between March 2013 and November 2021. That is, from the end of eighth grade through high school completion and up to age twenty-one. Surveys prior to graduation were conducted in person; subsequent surveys were conducted in person or over the phone. The outcomes of interest were self-reported and included patterns of alcohol and cannabis use, physical and mental health, delinquent behaviors, and body mass index (BMI).
Participants who attended a high-performing charter school had a 53.3 percent lower rate of hazardous or dependent alcohol use disorder at age twenty-one, compared with those in the control group. Among male participants, the intervention group had a 42.1 percent lower rate of self-reported fair or poor physical health at age twenty-one and a 32.9 percent lower rate of obesity or overweight status as measured via BMI. Among female participants, however, the results were opposite. Girls who attended a high-performing charter reported a 16.8 higher rate of fair or poor physical health at age twenty-one than their non-charter peers, and a 19.3 percent higher rate of overweight or obesity status.
Differences in cannabis misuse were significantly lower for both males and females in the treatment group in the early years of the survey, but showed no statistical difference by twenty-one. The proportion of participants who reported engaging in one or more delinquent behaviors (such as graffiti, damaging property, shoplifting or stealing, driving a car without the owner’s permission, burglary, selling illicit drugs, or gang activity) was significantly lower for treatment group students at ages twenty and twenty-one than for their comparison peers; however, the two groups were generally similar in reported delinquent behaviors in all earlier surveys. Few differences in mental health outcomes were reported at any point. Adjusting for educational outcomes—such as actual graduation versus dropping out—did not significantly change the findings. The research team notes the limitations of self-reported data and the potential for social-desirability bias in students’ responses, although they are able to partially compensate in their modeling and by comparing other relevant research that does not use self-reported responses.
Overall, the news is good. Lowering the rates of delinquent behaviors and misuse of alcohol and cannabis among young people is hugely positive, especially in low-income communities. And the positive influence of a high-performing school on young men’s physical health is a welcome addition.
Dr. Wong and his team speculate as to the mechanisms by which attendance at a high-performing charter school would lead to these results—more adult monitoring of student behavior due to smaller school size, favorable staffing configuration, exposure to peers focused on academics and not risky behaviors, but also with the possibility of higher academic stressors detracting from young women’s physical health—but do not have data to really lock anything down. Family structure could be part of the equation, as well. While schools cannot and should not be charged with solving all societal ills, it is possible that simply engaging in more and more rigorous academic work during high school can help students focus on learning and the future while ignoring some of the more pernicious negative influences around them.
SOURCE: Mitchell D. Wong, MD, et al., “Association of Attending a High-Performing High School With Substance Use Disorder Rate and Health Outcomes in Young Adults,” JAMA Network Open (October 2022).
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Quentin Suffren, Senior Advisor of Innovation Policy for ExcelinEd, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss industry-recognized credentials and why their impact has been muted so far. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern reviews a study that examines how college graduates’ earnings are influenced by the performance of their schools’ football teams.
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