In cities across the country, selective high schools are facing increasing pressure to change their admissions policies to make their incoming student populations more socioeconomically and racially diverse. Closing these gaps is a laudable and important goal. But the most common strategies for accomplishing it are racially discriminatory, misguided, and ineffective.
In a fast-growing number of cities across the country, selective high schools are facing mounting pressure to change their admissions policies to make their student populations more socioeconomically and racially diverse. In some cases, the push is to eradicate selectivity altogether. Reforms of this sort have already been implemented in New York City, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and the Washington, D.C., metro area. But pushback—political, legal, and grassroots—is mounting, too, making this an ever-shifting landscape. And it’s an area where advocates and policymakers seeking to improve opportunity for disadvantaged students ought to rethink recent efforts, lest they force changes that—in being racially discriminatory, misguided, and ineffective—do the opposite of what many of them intend.
The desire for reform is understandable. In all the aforementioned cities, before new polices were implemented, the racial profile of teenagers admitted to these “exam schools” was significantly more affluent, White, and Asian than the district-wide populations. In New York City, for example, where the most-selective of these schools remain untouched by reforms because they’re sheltered by a state law, one-tenth of those who attend are Black and Hispanic, even though two-thirds of the district consists of such students. Similar figures exist in the other metropolitan areas.
The question isn’t whether these gaps should persist. In a better and fairer world, they wouldn’t. Virtually everyone wants them to narrow. The question, instead, is how best to accomplish that. So far, reforms have generally come in two forms: 1) reducing the weight of standardized test scores in admissions, and 2) capping the number of admitted students from neighborhoods or middle schools that historically have won a high proportion of seats when compared to their community representation. Boston, for instance, reduced the weight of tests from 70 to 50 percent and gave the city’s eight census tracts equal numbers of seats. For Thomas Jefferson High School, located in Fairfax County, Virginia, just outside the nation’s capital, policymakers dropped standardized test scores as a requirement and guaranteed seats for students at middle schools that had previously been underrepresented. And Chicago adopted a new mix of grades and tests scores, and split 70 percent of seats equally across four socioeconomic tiers based on census tracts.
It’s obvious why such changes are being pursued. Their effects are immediate and seem to directly combat some of the dynamics that lead to misbalance. But, for three reasons, they’re also the wrong approach.
First and foremost, these policies can themselves be racially discriminatory. Many directly harm another minority group—Asian-American students, including those who are low-income. Last year, a group of primarily Asian-American parents sued the Fairfax County School Board over the aforementioned admissions changes at Thomas Jefferson High School, alleging that they violate the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. And late last month, a federal judge granted the plaintiffs summary judgment—meaning that he deemed the case so much in their favor that a trial was unnecessary—saying that the new policies amount to “racial balancing for its own sake” and are therefore “patently unconstitutional.”
Beyond the legal and constitutional problems, in cutting back the numbers of Asian-American admittees, these policies often worsen the very condition they are intended to rectify. Boston’s policy changes, for example, are poised to significantly reduce the number of seats that go to low-income students living in the city’s Chinatown. These families are neither privileged nor well-resourced. Many are immigrants for whom English is a second language, and who regularly face other forms of systemic discrimination. Policies that are supposed to promote equity should not make it harder for these students to succeed.
The second problem with these policies is that their focus is misplaced. The Black, Hispanic, and low-income children who grow up to be underrepresented at selective high schools are just as capable of high achievement as their peers. But poverty, racism, and crummy primary and middle schools stack the deck against them. So by the time they seek admission to selective high schools, they’re far behind the peers they’re competing with for seats. Being systematically shortchanged by their public education systems is a significant part of this, and that’s where education policymakers ought to focus their energy.
They should create and sustain school systems that better develop the natural ability of all high achievers, and should do so from an early age. Their schools should “frontload” their offerings for disadvantaged children, with academic rigor and academic supports from kindergarten onward so that that these students are ready for more advanced offerings later. They should identify the highest achievers in each school for services that enrich and accelerate their educations. Universally screen everyone beginning by third grade, for example, using standardized tests already in use, as well as grades and other markers of uncommon potential. And make sure to maintain these high-quality services through middle school.
The third problem with recent policy changes is that they threaten to weaken a valuable resource. These institutions have long provided unique benefits to the students who attend them, especially those from low-income and disadvantaged families. When done right, they drive excellence and upward mobility. This is due, in important part, to superior educational elements like course offerings, peer influence, instructors, and alumni networks. Abler students demand and take more advanced classes, for instance, that can cover content more quickly and deeply—especially in challenging fields like mathematics, physics, and computer science. This attracts exceptional faculty who are prepared and eager to lead such courses, and it produces graduates who are better equipped to excel and, in time, to assist fellow alumni—in part because they know what a diploma from that institution means.
When this model is weakened, its benefits begin to crumble. This is what research shows happened in Chicago after, in 2010, the city diversified its selective-high-school population by reducing the role of tests and reserving seats for students from different socioeconomic tiers. As The 74 reported, after the changes, “students at Chicago’s selective enrollment high schools see no improvement in their test scores. In fact, academic records show that they earned worse grades and GPAs than their peers who were rejected from the schools.” Moreover, “the most disadvantaged saw the biggest declines. Disturbingly, they were also less likely to enroll in selective colleges than similar kids who weren’t offered admission to an elite high school.” This means less diversity at selective colleges and myriad professions. That does nobody any good and, in the long run, undermines America’s global competitiveness.
So proponents of these changes to selective-high-school admissions should think twice. And parents, policymakers, and others should continue pushing back against the wrong kinds of reform. That pushback can have an effect. In addition to the successful lawsuit in Virginia, real change has happened in San Francisco and Boston. In the former, voters just recalled three of the five members of the city’s school board, in significant part because that board had scrapped merit-based admissions policies at Lowell High School, the area’s most prestigious institution. And parents in Boston successfully petitioned the city to change an earlier version of its selective-high-school reforms that stood to harm Asian-American students even more that the most recent iteration does.
In many ways, the fight over these schools is a reflection of America’s intensifying culture wars. But we mustn’t let partisan politics, short-sightedness, or blunt-instrument policymaking harm the thousands of students who benefit from these great institutions. Too much is at stake, both for them and for the country. Recent successes prove that there’s hope that good sense will prevail.
Remote learning is hard to love. The nation’s forced experiment in online education the past few years has been a disaster for kids. Educators and parents alike have come to view virtual learning as a necessary evil at best, an ad hoc response to a national crisis. In a survey by McKinsey & Company, 60 percent of teachers rated the effectiveness of remote learning between one and three out of ten. Many attribute remote learning to the catastrophic decline in academic outcomes and an alarming spike in mental health problems, with plummeting test scores and rising rates of depression and anxiety among students.
It’s also assumed to widen achievement gaps. The challenges of remote instruction “apply in affluent, English-speaking, two-parent households,” my colleague Rick Hess recently wrote. “Things get tougher still for single parents, families in tight quarters, or parents trying to communicate about all this in a second tongue.” Online charter schools in particular had a poor reputation even before Covid, associated in many minds with low-rigor credit recovery, poor performance, and mediocre graduation rates. A recent Brookings study of virtual charter schools and online learning during Covid was particularly grim, concluding that “the impact of attending a virtual charter on student achievement is uniformly and profoundly negative.”
Given that bleak and unpromising landscape, an outlier may be emerging: The online version of Great Hearts Academies is proving to be both an academic standout and popular with families. That has officials at the Arizona-based charter school network quietly thinking about launching a low-cost, online, private-school model to bring classical education to anyone who wants it at a price point below—even far below—other options, including Catholic schools. It’s one of several initiatives Great Hearts is weighing to expand its offerings.
Great Hearts is the largest operator of classical charter schools in the U.S. with thirty-three schools serving 22,000 students in Arizona and Texas. They’re high-performing; its high school students earn an average SAT score of 1237. Demand is also high, with over 14,000 students on waiting lists last year. Great Hearts Online (GHO), a tuition-free charter school, launched in Texas a little over a year ago, serving 500 students in grades K–6, more than half of whom were new to the network. An additional 600 charter school students enrolled online in Arizona for the current school year.
Early returns are promising: Seventy-nine percent of GHO students are above the 50th percentile in reading; 72 percent in math. Both of those figures slightly beat the average across the network’s traditional brick-and-mortar schools. Parent satisfaction will always be the most salient metric, and here GHO shines. An internal survey shows 85 percent of parents are more satisfied with Great Hearts Online than with their previous “brick-and-mortar” schools, a number that swells to 92 percent among families who came to the online classical school from traditional public school districts, according to Kurtis Indorf, who leads Great Hearts Nova, an “R & D” division of the fifteen-year-old charter school network.
Indorf acknowledges that GHO is not a perfect fit for every family. “I think our ideal market is almost like homeschool light,” he tells me. “The kind of parents who might think ‘I like homeschooling. I want to be with my family. But the daily pressure of planning and delivering a high-quality education that is safe and aligned to my values is too much to do.’” Then there’s the appeal of classical education, which is experiencing a boom in popularity, with demand far outstripping supply. Great Hearts Nova is looking to satisfy some of that demand and grow its footprint by franchising micro-schools, and through “asynchronous course development,” which would allow GH remote students, homeschoolers, and even some traditional public schools to tap into Great Hearts’s course content. The most intriguing concept emerging from the Nova skunkworks is the possibility of launching a low-cost, online private school, which would conceivably make a classical education available to any family with Wi-Fi.
The 2021 EdChoice “Schooling in America Survey” shows demand for private education far exceeding supply. While barely 10 percent of American children attend private schools, a whopping 40 percent of parents say they would prefer private school for their children. There’s no mystery to solve here. Availability, price, and transportation present hurdles too high for most families to clear comfortably. A trusted school “brand” at a modest price with zero transportation costs theoretically wipes away those issues in a single stroke for a significant number of middle-class Americans—a role Great Hearts seems particularly well-suited to play.
Great Hearts Online plans to enroll 1,620 students across Texas and Arizona in the coming school year. For the 2023–24 academic year, Indorf says, GHO hopes to grow enrollment in the charters and launch a private school across multiple states with an enrollment target of 2,700 students. “By the 2025–26 academic year, we plan on serving over 7,000 students in public charter models as well as a national private model in multiple states,” he tells me.
Great Hearts seems particularly well-suited for this strategy. Where most large charter networks have tended to concentrate in low-income urban neighborhoods, Great Hearts’s classical curriculum and pedagogy have proven particularly popular with middle-class suburban families. Their Texas charter briefly functioned as a private online school before it was authorized by the state, and over 100 families proved willing to pay tuition. Teachers seem no less eager. Great Hearts received 1,400 applications to fill forty online teaching slots. Even though it operates today in just two states, its staff and faculty log on from over two dozen different states.
To be sure, remote learning is not everyone’s cup of tea. But according to a study by the RAND Corporation, the demand for virtual schools is growing. About one in five district administrators have either already started an online school or are planning to start one at the end of the pandemic. Other educators and families fall somewhere in the middle: While they prefer in-person instruction, they hope that schools retain the best that online learning has to offer, even as a supplemental tool.
Could GHO become a breakthrough private school model that’s affordable and attractive to middle-income families? It’s hard to compete with free, but “free” and “excellent” aren’t always available in the same school. It doesn’t take a great deal of foresight or imagination to envision a scenario in which Great Hearts could create something truly new: a high-quality, low-cost private school that taps into Americans’ rising discontent with traditional public schools and that offers a curriculum grounded in the timeless appeal of “the true, the good, and the beautiful.”
I wouldn’t bet against it.
A couple of weeks ago, I shared some ideas about how schools and districts can move away from the well-intentioned but deeply flawed “college for all” mindset that has permeated the education reform world and has, in turn, harmed many of the disadvantaged students whom the approach is meant to benefit. Here I build on that argument with a more granular dive into where a lot of these students actually go when they matriculate, and why those schools end up being bad choices for them.
Accepting that not every child should go to college is a natural evolution for the education reform movement. If the goal of ed reform is to narrow achievement and opportunity gaps, one way to do that is through empowering parents. Charter schools emerged as alternatives to a structurally broken education system that trapped lower-income students in poor-performing schools for generations. (It’s no coincidence that, in many cities, school district lines almost perfectly mirror redlining maps of the 1930s.) More options for families will yield better outcomes for students.
Seen through this lens, helping some students develop career paths that might run through non-college, post-secondary training is in keeping with the goals of education reform. The child and family—not the school—choose the career path, basing it on their own interests and circumstances. But our current college-at-all-costs culture minimizes the circumstances of families. It’s still common to see high schools—traditional and charter—brag that 100 percent of their seniors are accepted to college, even if we know that statistically many of those students will not persist through.
All kids deserve a high-quality education, but we also need to recognize that poor kids don’t have the same wiggle room as rich ones. The affluent have other resources to support children who may not complete college, may take longer, or may emerge with less-marketable degrees. It’s not a big deal for a wealthy family to pay the almost $200,000 cost of Sarah Lawrence College, even though its median graduate will only earn $45,000 annually ten years after enrollment.
Lower-income, first-generation students simply don’t have this safety net. Moreover, many of them wind up in less-selective or open-enrollment colleges, where they are unlikely to graduate. And even if they do graduate, these credentials aren’t as marketable as those from more-selective institutions. The numbers matter for these students, and the numbers are daunting.
This year, slightly more than 8,600 students will enroll at Medgar Evers College, a four-year college with a 90 percent acceptance rate that is part of the City University of New York system. Ninety-eight percent of them are students of color, and 67 percent will qualify for Pell grants. But according to the Equitable Value Explorer tool designed by the University of Texas system, their median annual earnings are $16,000 less annually than the overall median of those with a bachelor’s degree in New York state ten years after enrollment. A similar situation exists across the country at Los Angeles Southwest College, which is open-enrollment and serves 87 percent students of color. Its enrollees will earn $10,500 less than the median holder of an associate degree in California ten years after enrollment.
In the vast majority of cases, students don’t even complete their degree. As Michael Petrilli noted in these pages, “[w]e call it the ‘college wage premium,’ but we should really call it the ‘college completion premium.’” As much as we might wish otherwise, the colleges that low-income kids default to tend to have shockingly high dropout rates. Only 13 percent of students complete Medgar Evers or LA Southwest. Bunker Hill Community College, only a few miles from Harvard and M.I.T., enrolls over 18,000 students but graduates just 14 percent of them.
Financial concerns play a role in college persistence, but even in New York State, where the Excelsior Scholarship covers the cost of tuition at public universities for families making less than $125,000, almost 80 percent of community college enrollees will drop out. In many cases, they’re simply not prepared for the academic rigor. In New York City, even as the previous administration touted increases in college readiness metrics, the education department at the time conceded that most of the growth was tied to the removal of an advanced math requirement, not to student achievement. And this is before one considers the social and emotional challenges of the transition to college, the lack of institutional support, and for some students, the lack of a sense of purpose or motivation in being there.
College may well still be the best post-secondary plan for most kids, and we should take as many steps as we can to ensure that our high school graduates succeed there when they choose to enroll. If we do our job right, even if students enter ninth grade behind grade level, most should graduate academically prepared for the next step. Providing students opportunities to earn college credit while in high school also makes a huge difference, since kids who enter college with credits in the bank are less likely to drop out. And as the CUNY ASAP program shows, intensive support for community college students can have dramatic effects on college persistence (though the program currently serves just a fraction of community college students).
Still, given the challenges that many low-income students face every day, it’s naive to think that there aren’t some for whom there are better choices, at least immediately after graduation. Objectively, it’s hard to make a case for attending a college where more than 85 percent of students fail to graduate, and even those that earn a degree don’t gain much economically from it. But these crucial nuances get lost in the “college for all” narrative.
As ed reformers, we take pride in our focus on outcomes. A cleareyed analysis shows that, for many of our students, the college options they have are simply not good choices. We need to let go of our myths and do what’s right for our students.
It’s rare that a piece of social science makes you question the nature of your reality, but such was my reaction to the latest, much-discussed update on the performance of Tennessee’s pre-k program—or more specifically, on the fate of the 2,990 children from low-income families who applied to oversubscribed pre-K program sites across the state and either did or did not attend the program in 2009 and 2010.
As others have noted, this study—which includes data from grades four through six, in addition to the K–3 data that was the basis for previous appraisals—is the first truly randomized evaluation of a statewide pre-K program. And perhaps not so coincidentally, it is the first pre-K study of note to find unambiguously negative effects for participants, at least in the United States.
Specifically, the study finds statistically significant negative effects on third, fourth, fifth, and sixth grade reading and math achievement, as well as statistically significant declines in attendance and significant increases in the probability of disciplinary offenses (across all grade levels) and special education referrals.
So what explains the negative results? And can they be reconciled with the broader pre-K literature, which isn’t quite so discouraging?
Since the study has already been covered by The Economist, Vox, Brookings, Emily Oster, and any number of other competent outlets, I’ll keep it brief.
First, research and common sense suggest that the quality of pre-K declines as the scale of the program increases. And a statewide program is a fully scaled program.
Second, the quality of the counterfactual matters—perhaps even more than the quality of the program. And in this case, 63 percent of kids who weren’t in pre-K were at home (which sounds inconvenient but at least potentially educational and emotionally stabilizing).
And of course, the fact that pre-K seems to have worked poorly with a particular set of teachers and students at a particular point in time doesn’t mean that it’s failing everywhere or for everyone. (For example, pre-K programs in Boston and Chicago seem to work pretty well.)
In short, there is no iron law of pre-K.
In fact, when push comes to shove, there is really no such thing as “pre-K”—just a bunch of early education and/or childcare programs with overlapping features that may or may not include things like basic healthcare, advice for new parents, and other social services—in addition to academics.
Presumably, some combination of these factors is responsible for the Tennessee study’s disappointing results. But what’s considerably less clear is what to do with those results, given the number of conflicting findings and unresolved questions that are swirling about, as well as the undeniable centrality of work in American society and the corresponding need for some sort of childcare.
Perhaps we’re scaling too quickly. Perhaps a better funded and/or less bureaucratic system would get better results. Perhaps we need to reconsider what we mean by “pre-K.” Or perhaps we’d all be better off with an expanded child tax credit, much longer and more flexible maternity and paternity leave, and a broader cultural shift that makes it socially acceptable for new-ish parents to work fifteen to twenty hours per week and parent for the remainder—you know, so they can actually have it all.
Nah. That’s just crazy talk.
SOURCE: Kelley Durkin, Mark W. Lipsey, Dale C. Farran, and Sarah E. Wiesen, “Effects of a statewide pre-kindergarten program on children’s achievement and behavior through sixth grade,” Developmental Psychology (2020).
In a laudable quest to boost the number of adults with postsecondary credentials, a number of states—including Ohio—are focusing time and treasure on former students who have earned some college credits but have not yet completed a degree. These “some-college-but-no-degree” individuals (SCNDs) are considered to be the easiest to persuade to return and the likeliest to see an economic benefit from completion. A new working paper testing this idea returns some rather disappointing results.
Data for the study come from detailed administrative records for students enrolled in credit-bearing courses at any of the Virginia Community College System’s (VCCS) twenty-three campuses. State unemployment insurance records and the National Student Clearinghouse provide labor force data and information on postsecondary credentials earned at non-VCCS institutions, respectively.
The initial sample comprised 376,366 first-time students who enrolled in VCCS for any length of time between the 2009–10 and 2013–14 academic years but did not complete a credential or degree. Because of their interest in adults who are most likely to return and complete a credential, the researchers restricted their sample to students who had accumulated at least thirty college credits and who had a minimum GPA of 2.0 during the term immediately before leaving VCCS—a relatively high-achieving group as compared to the typical college dropout. The analysts also focused on those who remained out of VCCS for a minimum of three years, as analysis indicated this was a good statistical demarcation between those temporarily leaving college and those whose separation was more likely “permanent.”
The final sample consisted of 26,031 individuals who, believed the analysts, had the greatest potential to finish their post-secondary education. The comparison group, referred to as “Grads,” are students who left VCCS with a degree between the 2009–10 and 2013–14 academic years and had no subsequent enrollment at any other institution within three years of their graduation. (This excluded students who finished an associate degree and went on to a four-year university.) The Grads sample consisted of 28,795 students with demographics similar to SCNDs, although Grads were more likely to be White and female. Grads were also approximately two years older when they left VCCS, and had earned approximately 1.5 times the number of credits than their SCND peers.
Overall, following their separation from the Virginia community college system, SCND individuals were less likely to be employed and, conditional on employment, earned less than students who graduated during the same time period. However, these differences were relatively modest—typically less than 5 percent lower than Grads’ employment or wage mean, after controlling for other observable differences. It is likely that the researchers’ focus on higher-achieving SCND individuals, most of them almost two-thirds of the way to an associate degree, is having an impact on the paper’s employment and earnings outcomes.
SCNDs who remained employed also earned steadily increasing wages over time, characterized by the researchers as a significant disincentive to returning to school. Approximately 50 percent were employed in every quarter of the third year following their departure from community college, and a substantial majority (approximately 80 percent) were working in fields where the earnings differential between Grads and SCNDs was narrowest. Even among SCND students whose earning differential was widest compared to Grads—those who might want to return to better their earning potential—the vast majority were working in healthcare-related fields. Those majors are typically oversubscribed in community college, creating another strong disincentive for those SCNDs to return even if they wanted to.
Collectively, these employment, wage, and enrollment patterns suggest to the authors that there are relatively few SCNDs (approximately 3 percent) who could easily re-enroll in fields of study and reasonably expect a sizable earnings boost upon finally completing a degree. These findings mitigate against the extensive efforts of some states to convince SCNDs to return. However, while this is likely true as far as this study goes, other such analyses have gone farther. In those studies, by including shorter-term credentials and four-year degrees as outcome measures, both the number of SCNDs who stand to benefit from additional postsecondary education and the possible premium to be earned appear larger.
As long as the focus remains set on the best possible outcome for SCND individuals—rather than simply having folks earn credentials for its own sake—the wider the options for completion, and the more substantial the support to get there, the better.
SOURCE: Kelli A. Bird, Benjamin L. Castleman, Brett Fischer, and Benjamin T. Skinner, “Unfinished Business? Academic and Labor Market Profile of Adults With Substantial College Credits But No Degree,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (January 2022).
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast (listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify), Lizzette Gonzalez Reynolds, Vice President of Policy for ExcelinEd, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss the pros and cons of the college-for-all movement. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern discusses a study on how winning public-school-choice lotteries affects public school enrollment.
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