The Education Gadfly Weekly

During the news lull between Christmas and New Years, the Wall Street Journal published an alarmist piece about the high rate of teachers and other public educators quitting their jobs. Reporters Michelle Hackman and Erick Morath examined Labor Department data on employee turnover during the first ten months of 2018 and found that educators were exiting at the rate of 83 per 10,000 per month, which would work out to almost one in ten over the course of a full year. This, they noted, was the most since job departures began getting tracked in 2001, although they cautioned that it didn’t necessarily mean all were quitting public education altogether; some number of them were changing schools, relocating, etc.

It’s worrying, though, especially when this turnover is combined with the teacher shortages that many districts (and charter and private schools) are facing, creating an absolute inability to fill some jobs with qualified individuals.

Yet making sense of these data requires some context and additional explanation. The journalists provided a bit of the former when they noted that the overall rate of turnover among all American workers during that period—231 per 10,000 per month—was almost triple the rate for public educators. This, too, turns out to be a seventeen-year high. And it’s a lot worse in other fields. Whereas close to 2 percent of educators quit monthly, other state and local employees have been leaving their jobs at almost twice that rate; for those in the “leisure and hospitality” fields, it’s closer to thrice.

That’s not to excuse or minimize the difficulty that many schools are finding when it comes to hiring and retaining first-rate (or even minimally qualified) teachers and other staff members. (We’re seeing that within Fordham’s family of Ohio-based charter schools, too.) Kids’ education definitely suffers when a teacher quits, when a long-term sub or assistant principal fills in, or when the person placed in charge of their classroom lacks the knowledge, experience, or competence to do the job well. That’s much more damaging to society’s future well-being than an abrupt turnover of waiters in your restaurant or clerks at the DMV.

Part of what’s going on in public education is, of course, the same as what’s going on throughout the American economy. First, unemployment is very low right now and jobs are plentiful, so if you’re bored, restless, mobile, or ambitious, it’s a good time to seek a better one, whether that’s in a nicer, richer, safer, or more convenient school, or in another field altogether. Second, tons of baby boomers are retiring, which produces more vacancies to fill—and fewer veterans to fill them. And third, we’re living in an era of job-hopping, career-sampling, and impulse-buying, a time when the typical college graduate works at a bunch of different things before—if ever—“settling down” in something akin to a permanent career. Twenty-somethings going into education are like their agemates going into anything else: I’ll try it and see if I like it. If I don’t, or if I’m just keen to try something else, I can happily move on.

The larger part of what’s going on, however, are the inevitable consequences—unintended, to be sure—of the education industry’s conspicuous failure to anticipate and forestall the HR woes that beset it today. From where I sit, five such failures are particularly notable.

There’s no mechanism for calibrating teacher supply to the demand via either the preparation pipeline or the compensation system. That’s why we face (in most places) a surfeit of generic elementary teachers but a shortage of special-ed, math, and science teachers. Most of our colleges of education encourage people to enroll in whatever they think suits them, not the fields with particular shortages, and public education’s union-enforced refusal to pay differentially means that the middle school gym teacher earns as much as the high school physics teacher. Given what’s going on in the rest of the economy, that’s certain to result in a plentitude of the former and a dearth of the latter.

Though teachers in most places aren’t badly paid when one calculates their compensation on a per-day or per-hour basis (factoring in those six-hour school days and long vacations), and those who stick with it are generally well taken care of when it comes to benefits, it cannot be said that public-school teaching is a high-paying field. Even as per-pupil spending on public education has doubled and tripled over the decades, teacher salaries in most places have barely kept pace with inflation. (In some places, they’ve lagged behind; in some prosperous and heavily taxed communities, they’ve forged ahead.) The main culprit here, as I’ve written before, is our long-standing proclivity to hire more teachers rather than better-compensating those we’ve got. Insofar as paying more generous salaries is a way to induce people to stick with jobs, and to attract abler, better-qualified people into those jobs, American public education has made decades of bad decisions, swelling its teaching ranks—nearing four million now—instead of settling for larger classes in return for smarter, abler, longer-serving—and more generously compensated—instructors.

The unions have encouraged that swelling while blocking the kind of professionalization they say they want for their members. Behaving more like teamsters or steel workers than lawyers, accountants, or musicians, they have insisted that all teachers be treated alike and paid alike; that there be no differentiation or compensation on the basis of performance; that everyone be retained forever—and that weak performers be endlessly defended and protected. That’s no way to earn professional respect or public admiration.

Schools and districts, too, have failed to structure themselves in ways that make the most of a high-turnover situation. Other fields—most obviously the military—do a competent job of integrating short-timers with career staff, blending the freshness, energy (and relatively low cost) of those who just do it for a few years with the wisdom, experience, mentoring, and leadership potential of skilled veterans. But not K–12 education. Sure, some of the top charter networks have figured this out, and yes, some smart districts are engaging instructional coaches to soup up the newbies—though always by adding more staff, which squeezes everyone’s pay. In most places, the beginner teacher is trying to figure it out in a classroom down the hall from a veteran who has mastered it.

With a growing handful of exceptions, American public education is also woefully behind in developing the kind of “blended” classrooms that supplement teachers with technology in ways that compensate for inexperience and blind spots on the part of some instructors, while enabling the skilled veterans to manage (and individualize) more kids without missing a beat.

Finally, and most obviously, we throw endless unpleasantness into the paths of teachers, starting with policies that make it impossible for them to discipline (or evict) the malefactors in their classrooms. Inconveniences such as no classroom (or desk or computer terminal or parking space) of one’s own. Parents who don’t do their part—and complain when the teacher is too strict or doesn’t give enough A’s. Politicians who meddle with curriculum. And administrators (and policymakers) whose overemphasis on test scores in reading and math squeezes out other content, even as they promote into one’s class kids who are far below grade level.

Who in their right mind would want to stick with such a job?

For the better part of two decades, school improvement has been focused on narrowing “achievement gaps” by raising the reading and math scores of low-performing students. While this charge has undeniable merit, it also carries some real costs. Among these is a lack of attention to students who are performing passably but are eager to pursue learning that stretches beyond the corners of state academic standards.

For those concerned about the failure to adequately challenge these students or push their intellectual horizons, this state of affairs has been disheartening. William Fitzhugh, founder of The Concord Review, the world’s only quarterly journal for academic research papers by high school students, is one of them. Frustrated by decades of mostly-ineffectual efforts to persuade high schools to prioritize long-form, rigorous student work, he recently offered a suggestion that’s half tongue-in-cheek but wholly worth pursuing.

As Fitzhugh puts it:

One of my favorite scenes in the movie Hoosiers is when the coach first drives into the town early in the morning or late in the evening, and he passes the HS senior shooting hoops. This student is the one who defends the coach and puts up the winning shot in the state championship.  

Could we provide more high school students with an incentive to spend part of their spare time on Independent Study History papers, with no teacher time required—as in the shooting hoops case? This should help with the problem everyone cites—that teachers have no time to guide students on serious term papers . . .

Fitzhugh’s notion seems especially well-suited as we enter 2019, a time when concern about the degree to which testing mania has fueled a lowest-common-denominator mindset, and when talk of “personalized learning” is inescapable.

Of course, the downside of “personalization” is that it can be an invitation to empty-calorie education, undermining rigor and leading to the problems of anything-goes instruction. That’s why Fitzhugh’s project has always been so alluring. Allowing passionate learners to pursue a historical topic that enthralls them and then have them pen an extended, extensively researched, clearly written essay on that topic is the best kind of personalization.

As Fitzhugh observed in a note which was accompanied by a remarkably accomplished student essay, “This 21,000 word paper was written as an independent study, and I have reason to believe the teacher didn’t even know about it. This kid is applying to Harvard . . . We could at least try to reach and encourage the crazy ones.”

This runs contrary to how many schools and school systems approach their work today. Even as the enthusiasm for test-based accountability recedes, discussions about success tend to focus on movement in reading and math proficiency for various student demographics. There is little reward or support for the time teachers spend encouraging the crazy ones.

This can be rectified. That may require retooling teacher evaluation to place more weight on teachers who provide extraordinary opportunities for students and who make it a point to nurture student learning that extends beyond state standards or isn’t captured on state tests. It may mean creating room in the schedules of high school students for things like Concord Review-style essays, and perhaps even providing coaching or giving some teachers a period to mentor and support such work. It may call for partnering with educators who have a track record of supporting extraordinary student efforts, as is the case in math instruction with the remarkable Art of Problem Solving.

Our schools have never been as good at encouraging the crazy ones as we might like, but it’s safe to say that things have gotten worse on this count over the past two decades.

Now, despite some overheated claims that No Child Left Behind-style accountability or test-based teacher evaluation were motivated by a villainous enthusiasm for “shaming and blaming” educators, the problem was not the intent of these efforts. The goal of ensuring that all children should, at a minimum, be proficient in reading and math was admirable, and it’s tough to quarrel with the insistence that teachers and schools should do their part. The problem, rather, was with the ill-conceived machinery and the lack of appreciation for how these policies would ultimately change teaching, learning, and the culture of schooling.

One costly consequence was that teachers felt far less free to devote time and energy to encouraging the crazy ones. Making it a point to reverse that state of affairs would be a healthy resolution for school improvement in 2019, and beyond.

Frederick Hess is the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

This article was originally published by Forbes

On January 7, 2019, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Evers, a Democrat, will take the oath of office as Wisconsin’s next governor. His narrow defeat of Republican Scott Walker represents the end of an era for education reform in the Badger State, which now faces a governor who is famously hostile to school choice. He must, however, work with Republican choice-supporting majorities in both houses of the legislature, so it is unlikely that he can get much through by way of statutory changes, but there's plenty of other ways of making mischief on the education front. Here’s what you need to know.

Evers wants to increase school funding—even more than Walker

Despite a lack of evidence that spending increases (above a certain threshold) improve traditional public school performance in Wisconsin, Evers made much during the campaign of his plan to boost it. His final budget as state superintendent sought a $1.4 billion increase for public schools—10 percent more than current funding. Of particular interest to Evers are increases for special education and for low-spending, primarily-rural school districts that have seen their state aid stagnate in recent years. 

After a one-year decline at the end of federal stimulus in 2012, Wisconsin saw K–12 spending rise every year under Governor Walker, who prioritized public school spending increases over other education reform initiatives. While funding levels have not reached pre-recession levels once inflation adjustments are made, it is worth noting that public school systems realized billions of dollars in savings with the passage of Act 10—a set of collective-bargaining reforms in 2011 that, among other things, mandated public employee contributions to healthcare and retirement accounts.

Today, funding for Wisconsin’s private-school choice programs is tied to public-school budgets. Though Evers’s proposed increases would do nothing to narrow the very wide funding gap between public and private, they would give a bit of a boost to participating private schools, schools which currently receive $7,747 per student in K–8 and $8,393 for high-school pupils.

Both Milwaukee and Wisconsin voucher programs will be threatened 

Tony Evers has long opposed school choice. He’s the first major gubernatorial candidate in ages to run on rolling back the Milwaukee voucher program, and his rhetoric on the campaign trail did not help private school leaders sleep easy.

Evers has repeatedly asserted that the performance of Milwaukee’s voucher schools are no better than their public-sector counterparts, despite extensive peer-reviewed evidence to the contrary. In a humorous (kind of) moment during his last run for state superintendent, he called the “Apples to Apples” study—which compared school performance after controlling for socioeconomic factors, and was conducted by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL), where we both work—"Apples to Giraffes”! During his recent campaign, Evers proposed to end the state’s voucher programs or, if that proves impossible, to drastically increase regulation on them.

At minimum, he could use the bully pulpit and the budget process to trigger a major debate on these programs. Fortunately, the 35,000 children currently taking advantage of vouchers will be living testaments to the programs’ benefits. Yet much could be done to weaken them behind the scenes and via the regulatory process.

Wisconsin must also contend with a new state superintendent (appointed by Evers) and a new attorney general, whose position on vouchers and charters is unclear. The triumvirate could pack a wallop. You may recall the Obama Justice Department’s investigations of Milwaukee’s and Louisiana’s programs. Evers’s Department of Public Instruction (DPI) cheered them on—and was a willing accomplice. WILL’s attorneys have a long record of fighting burdensome regulations and rules from his agency. In one example, DPI refused to accept an independently certified audit from a private school in the MPCP, who WILL represented. But DPI did not have the legal authority to essentially audit the auditors. In addition, two years ago, WILL sued State Superintendent Tony Evers for refusing to follow state law which provided a greater check on DPI’s ability to promulgate regulations (a case now in the State Supreme Court).

We will monitor for similar overstepping by DPI in the future, as well as the governor, and we will monitor whether this gets worse.

Wisconsin’s lackluster ESSA plan is unlikely to change

Wisconsin’s state plan was largely written by Evers’s Department of Public Instruction. We criticized the plan in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere, calling it “reflective of the status quo mindset of the state bureaucracy.”

For example, to meet ESSA’s requirement to determine a “rigorous state-determined action” to improve low-performing schools, the Evers team offered “engaging with families and the local community.” When one considers that other states have included measures such as turning chronically weak schools into charters, or closing them altogether, this is extremely thin gruel. Under a third Walker term, pressure could have been exerted on DPI to strengthen the plan, but such pressure is unlikely to come from the person who authored it. Note, though, that a recent study by our colleague Libby Sobic showed how Wisconsin is leaving money on the table by not embracing ESSA.

Outlook for public charter schools is unclear

Evers’s plans for charters are murkier. As state superintendent, he sought a number of grants for charter schools that have been used to open and expand charters throughout the state. But he seems to distinguish between charters run by the school districts and so-called “independent” charter schools authorized by the University of Wisconsin system and technical colleges.

In 2015, he was critical of the creation of a new authorizer for independent charter schools in Milwaukee and Madison, saying that this expansion would “weaken local control of public education.” This would be concerning in any case, but it’s doubly so given that independent charters are among the highest performing schools in Wisconsin. Any effort to curtail them would be decidedly negative for families that depend on them, especially in Milwaukee.

Evers faced criticism during the campaign from the growing contingent of anti-charter Democrats. It remains to be seen how much he will defer to those interests now that he’s in office. More than in the other areas discussed here, we don’t yet know whether we have a friend or foe of charter schools in that office. Or what exactly he could do to threaten charters.

The legacy of Walker’s collective bargaining reforms (i.e., ACT 10)

Act 10, passed during Walker’s first term in office, was a sweeping reform of Wisconsin’s collective-bargaining laws. Under the law, labor unions were only able to collectively bargain on wages and salaries. Moreover, teachers were required to contribute at least 5.9 percent of their wages and salaries to their pension and 12 percent of their healthcare premiums. These reforms have saved the state billions of dollars. They have permitted school districts to experiment with merit pay for teachers, and the reforms have led to improved math scores for students, among other positive results.  

Evers has voiced support for a compromise that would restore collective-bargaining rights to public employees yet still require them to pay for a portion of their own health insurance. But he faces a legislature that is unlikely to support any substantive changes to the law, which have already been approved by the state’s highest courts.

All is not lost

Although bold education reforms are likely off the table in Wisconsin for the foreseeable future, all hope is not lost. Under Evers, DPI was willing to work with school choice proponents to streamline redundant regulations, leading to the passage of a bill last session backed by the agency and private voucher schools. These reforms were primarily technical, but there may be room for similar bills in the future that ease the burden on what is ranked as one of the most regulated school choice programs in the country. Moreover, the statewide program has enrollment caps in place that are set by statute to rise every year. Assuming legislative changes can be staved off, the constituency of school choice families in Wisconsin will continue to expand, making elimination of the program ever less politically tenable.

Also possible are expanded opportunities for public school open enrollment and Wisconsin’s course choice program. A limited gifted and talented ESA also received some bipartisan support in the last session, though it did not pass. This may open the door, if ever so slightly, for similar reforms. And via recent accusations of plagiarism, we know that Evers is at least exposed to the wise reform ideas from the Fordham Institute!

***

Wisconsin’s biennial budget needs to be approved by both legislative chambers (Senate and Assembly) and governor, else the existing budget remains in place. Deals will have to be made, which could result in opportunities for education reformers. Or not.

Education reformers should, as the saying goes, prepare for the worst and hope for the best.

CJ Szafir and Will Flanders, Ph.D. are, respectively, Executive Vice President and Research Director at Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.

One of the key tenets of the American Dream is the opportunity for children to grow up to earn more than their parents. Although millions of Americans aspire to get ahead, there are considerable challenges—such as poverty and racial barriers—that can get in the way. For the approximately 60 million people living in rural America, a prevalence of additional obstacles like declining populations, limited job options, and the opioid epidemic make it even harder. 

To identify solutions to these unique challenges, the National 4-H Council and The Bridgespan Group collaborated to release a field report highlighting rural communities that are leading the way in social mobility. The report is based on four main sources of information: 1) interviews with experts from the public, private, and social sectors; 2) site visits to nineteen towns in ten rural counties that included focus groups with over one hundred youth and over 120 nonprofit, business, and civic leaders; 3) county level analysis of demographic, economic, and outcomes data that was used to hypothesize about upward mobility trends; and 4) discussions and focus groups with local leaders in an additional six rural counties in four states to field test initial findings.

Results from the site visits are particularly important because they offer a ground-level view of communities with particularly strong outcomes. To identify site visit locations, the report’s authors worked from data on economic opportunity in rural America gathered by economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues. First, the authors identified 133 counties that rank in the top 10 percent of all rural counties for youth economic advancement. Then, using characteristics that correlate with upward mobility (such as teen birth rates and high school graduation rates) and demographic data (to identify counties with diversity in terms of population size, adjacency to metropolitan areas, racial makeup, and predominant industries), they narrowed it down to ten counties. Specifically, they identified nineteen towns located in four regions—the Texas panhandle, southwest Minnesota, northeastern Nebraska, and western North Dakota—to visit. (Sadly, no rural areas of Ohio were visited.)

The identified towns had populations ranging from 600 to about 20,000 people. Most of the counties in which they were located had economies based on agriculture, energy, and some manufacturing, and seemed to have sidestepped the worst of the opioid epidemic. Although each town was unique, the authors observed six common factors within each that are associated with social capital. The presence and integration of all six seems to create real opportunity for young people to build better economic lives than their parents. The factors are:

• A high expectation that youth will “opt in” and work hard to acquire the skills to build a better future; a low tolerance for opting out. Within these places, participation in community is the norm. Young people are encouraged to fill their time with a diverse set of activities, including jobs, sports, the arts, and volunteering. In Spearman, Texas, for example, 260 out of 266 students at the high school were involved in at least one afterschool activity.

• Strong informal support systems, with neighbors helping neighbors. These communities have very few direct service nonprofits. Instead, they offer students informal support systems, such as neighbors who band together to solve challenges or informally “adopt” children facing financial and transportation barriers. Religious institutions play a crucial role in organizing activities and offering services. Communities invest significantly in communal spaces like libraries, parks, schools, and recreation centers. And they routinely celebrate youth achievement through the local paper and radio stations, as well as through events like annual banquets that honor academic achievements.

• An early focus on career pathways. Parents and teachers expect graduates to pursue some form of post-secondary education, and there is little stigma around community or vocational colleges. In one Minnesota middle school, for example, every sixth and seventh grader has two job shadowing placements a year. Schools offer career-oriented curriculums and classes, and administrators design out-of-school activities toward career development. Students credit summer jobs as having helped them prepare for their careers.

• A wealth of opportunities for youth to build life skills, regardless of community size. These communities are committed to providing plenty of access points for young people to get involved, and they are small enough that every young person can take on a leadership role, often in multiple activities. Quite a few use technology to offer remote learning opportunities.

• Many potential challenges to accessing opportunities, but creative solutions for overcoming them. Communities overcome financial barriers by offering most afterschool activities at low or no cost, offering dual-credit classes to lessen the number of college semesters student must pay for, and raising money for local scholarship funds. In Minnesota, the community of Redwood Falls is working to overcome transportation barriers by testing a “Green Route” bus that travels between key community locations, such as the library, the hospital, and the community center. And in multiple locales, school systems are working together to share resources.   

• A sense of shared fate and deep commitment to sustaining the community. Community members report banding together in the midst of shrinking populations to improve both the supply and demand aspects of economic opportunity. In terms of supply, that means helping young people build critical skills. But on the demand side, communities are working to create career pathways and public amenities that young people will want to return to. For example, Spearman, Texas, residents raised over $1 million to build a community center. A town in Nebraska secured a $5 million loan to extend broadband internet locally. And in Perryton, Texas, the community is supporting two local students while they attend medical school in exchange for their commitment to return to the town after they complete their residencies.

In these communities, individualism and collectivism coexist in a healthy balance. Young people and adults are expected to participate and work through challenges, but they do so in part to improve and sustain their community. There is still plenty of work to be done, particularly in terms of overcoming racial barriers, but by and large the presence of these six factors seems to be leading to positive results.

To close out the report, the authors sought to broaden their perspective on the six factors by interviewing and surveying community leaders in six additional counties that had relatively average levels of economic mobility. Although each county had geographic or cultural areas where all six factors existed to a varying degree, they also had places where the factors were nonexistent. In general, the counties had fewer organized activities, a diminished sense of shared responsibility, limited summer and part-time employment, and a lack of opportunity to build life skills.

This field report studied only a small set of communities. More research is needed to deeply understand not only the unique needs of rural communities, but also potential solutions. Nevertheless, this report and the six factors it identifies are a solid framework for any rural Ohio community interested in creating a brighter future for its youth.

SOURCE: Mark McKeag, Mike Soskis, Luis Ramos & Bill Breen, “Social Mobility in Rural America: Insights from Communities Whose Young People Are Climbing the Income Ladder,” National 4-H Council and The Bridgespan Group (November 2018).

In 2015, Ohio imported a successful program used to help community college students in the City University of New York (CUNY) system persist in school and complete a degree in three years or less. A new policy brief from the nonprofit, nonpartisan policy research organization MDRC—also an implementation partner in both the CUNY and Ohio programs—looks at the first data from Ohio.

The Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) began in 2007 with a suite of supports and requirements for CUNY students. Based on research showing where students’ ambitions and abilities were mismatched, these efforts included incentivizing full-time enrollment; encouraging students to take remedial courses immediately rather than putting them off to focus on whatever credit-bearing courses are available; providing comprehensive support services such as intensive advising and financial support; and offering blocked courses (seats held open in specific courses that college officials deem necessary for participants) and condensed schedules. Six years of data on the CUNY program can be found here.

The Ohio iteration, implemented at three independent and geographically separated community colleges—Cincinnati State Technical and Community College, Cuyahoga Community College, and Lorain County Community College—was designed similarly to the New York program. The Ohio Department of Higher Education coordinated the effort, and financial support was provided by a range of national and Ohio-based philanthropic organizations. Participating students had to be degree-seeking, willing to attend full-time, majoring in degree programs that could be completed in three years or less, and Pell Grant eligible. A lottery determined which students entered the program (806 participants) and which comprised the control group (695 non-participants). Students in the control group had access to the usual suite of support services the colleges provided but not the more-intensive support given students in the treatment group.

Students in the treatment group not only had access to a suite of additional services and supports provided by the program, but also faced some important additional requirements. They were required to enroll full-time in at least their first two semesters and were encouraged and supported to attend during the summer as well. Outside financial support covered any tuition amounts above students’ Pell Grant awards, as well as textbooks and class fees. Students could also earn multiple monthly financial incentives—in the form of gift cards for groceries or gasoline—for participating in program-provided activities, such as advisory meetings and career-development activities. Meetings with advisers were required twice a month in the first semester but became optional (while still strongly encouraged) for most students in further semesters. Students who were deemed at risk of dropping out of the program maintained stricter advisory requirements for a longer period of time. Full-time enrollment also became optional for some students in later semesters.

After two years, the treatment group outperformed the control group in all measured outcomes: persistence in school, persistence of full-time enrollment, credit accumulation, and graduation. All program effects were large, significant, and increased over the four semesters under study. But it is important to keep things in perspective. Credits earned by program group students showed a 37 percent increase over control group students at the end of two years, although that amounts to only eight additional credits. Similarly, after two years, 19 percent of the program group had completed a degree or credential, compared to just 8 percent of the control group.

That impressive increase still represents a small slice of the total number of students, and we have no data showing how close the remaining students in either group are to graduation in the final year of the program. Additional data will, hopefully, tell the tale.

MDRC researchers note that the program effects in Ohio largely outstripped those in the CUNY system. Three things stand out which could explain the difference. First, roughly half of the students in the Ohio study (both program and control) were nontraditional as compared to about a third at CUNY—meaning they were adults long out of K–12 education—many with jobs and family obligations and some without a high school diploma—looking to return to formal education to better their standing in life. The financial incentives appeared to have played an outsized role in supporting these students’ ability to persist and finish—as compared to young people just out of high school—and perhaps led to the better outcomes observed in Ohio versus CUNY.

Second, the financial incentives as a whole cost less and went further in Ohio than they did in New York City, leading to a leaner and more efficient program with superior outcomes.

Third, the independent nature of the Ohio community college sites allowed for a degree of individual adaptation that does not appear to happen in the CUNY version of the program. Block scheduling, for example, appears to have been a particular weakness for the schools with large numbers of nontraditional students whose work and life commitments precluded a more traditional weekday/daytime class schedule. Being able to flex this aspect of the CUNY program and move courses to fit the students’ schedules seems to have paid dividends in Ohio.

There’s a lot to the story for something appearing so simple at the outset. But the big picture is important: Common-sense academic supports, advising, and incentives can increase students’ odds of college persistence and degree completion. That’s not a bad lesson for high schools to learn either.

SOURCE: Colleen Sommo, et. al., “Doubling Graduation Rates in a New State: Two-Year Findings from the ASAP Ohio Demonstration,” MDRC (December 2018).