The Education Gadfly Weekly

There’s a lot of buzz right now about the potential for the Institute of Education Sciences to finally get the resources and authority to support major breakthroughs in teaching and learning. Some of that is due to $30 million in funding included in the end-of-the-year spending package for fiscal year 2023 to support a stronger R & D infrastructure at IES. The big excitement, though, is around the NEED Act, a bill sponsored by Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), and about to be reintroduced in the current Congress, which would create a National Center for Advanced Development in Education (NCADE)—or, as others are calling it, “ARPA-ED,” modeled after the Defense Department’s DARPA program. Here’s how IES director Mark Schneider describes its potential:

In the heart of every federal agency lies a dream of becoming the next DARPA—the folks that brought us advances like GPS and the internet. I want to bring you up to speed on our most recent efforts to create ARPA-ED and open a discussion with our stakeholders about where we will go from here as we pursue its creation.

While ARPA-ED won't create a new internet, there are many questions a DARPA-like unit might tackle: How will we identify the new literacy skills Americans need and develop them in learners across the lifespan? How do we even conceive of appropriate literacy and writing skills in a modern, AI-dominated world? How can we best harness innovations to create a personalized system of education so that instruction is tailored to the needs of learners? How can we use new technology to relieve the paperwork burden on teachers, freeing them to do what they do best—teach students?

I am proud to be a member of the Alliance for Learning Innovation, a coalition that advocates for ARPA-ED and similar initiatives, and I certainly hope that IES will receive a Congressional charter to do more to balance its impressive research agenda with an equally impressive development one. And I hope Director Schneider is right that an ARPA-ED could lead to a wave of instructional innovations. (Fordham and the Center for American Progress highlighted what some of those might look like through our Moonshot for Kids initiative in pre-pandemic times.)

But beyond all the razzle and dazzle, let me admit that I am desperate for something even more fundamental, starting with basic information about what the heck is going on in America’s classrooms. We arguably know less about the typical American school than about the dark side of the moon. Indeed, what we desperately need is a sort of Mars Rover for our classrooms.

More on that in a bit. But first, contemplate just how little information our policymakers and education leaders can tap about the impact of their decisions in the real world of teachers and students, desks, and books.

Take a simple example. Like many states, Ohio is on the verge of significantly strengthening its literacy policies to align them with the science of reading. The hope is to improve teaching and learning in the subject, in a way that will eventually be apparent via higher student achievement and greater student success.

How will we know if that new policy package works? Most likely, we won’t. Yes, policymakers might commission an evaluation, and we will be able to see which reading programs districts and charter schools say they have adopted, and we can gauge how well those programs are aligned with the science of reading. But we won’t have any trustworthy information about whether those adoptions are embraced and faithfully implemented by individual classroom teachers, nor whether those teachers get the support and ongoing professional development they need to shift their practice. (Perhaps we could survey teachers about this, but self-reports are famously unreliable.) We’ll know almost nothing about whether this rubber actually hits the road.

Someday, to be sure, we’ll be able to look at test scores, but we will have a hard time knowing if the policy reforms can explain any changes in student achievement. That is always a challenge, what with so many confounding factors in education, but the pandemic has made it more so. If reading scores for young Ohio students continue to slide over the next several years, will that be a sign that the reading policy failed? Or will it simply be because lots of today’s elementary school students missed out on preschool, as well as key developmental milestones during the pandemic? On the other hand, if test scores go up, will that mean that the new reading policy was a success? Or would that have happened anyway, as post-pandemic students enter the system?

What will be missing from a look back at Ohio’s reading reforms, as with any evaluation-type study in education, is the most important part. The middle stuff between policy enactment and its impacts. In other words, what actually changes (or not) in the classroom, in terms of teaching and learning.

In the case of Ohio, it would be great to know, ideally for every classroom, or at least for a representative sample: Which reading programs do teachers stop using and start using after enactment of the new reading law? Did those teachers thoroughly implement the new programs? Did they get skilled support in training? How much time did students spend with the new materials? What about interventions for students who were struggling? How frequent were those, and what was going on in them? Which programs were used for the interventions? Were they different than what teachers had used before? How adept were the interveners? Did teachers have students use any online programs to help support their reading? Which ones? How often and for how long? What else was happening in the classroom and around the school that might have impacted students’ achievement, experience, and engagement? For example, are schools spending more, less, or the same amount of time on English language arts than before the policy shift?

Those are critical questions, but are very difficult to answer because they call for nuanced and precise data collection. In the old days, researchers would hope for a multi-million-dollar federal grant to be able to send out graduate students to sit in the back of classrooms and collect such information by hand, systematically “coding” what they saw. Even then, it was exorbitantly expensive and extremely time-consuming, so inevitably you could only visit a relative handful of schools and classrooms.

Solving this evaluation challenge is a tough problem—precisely the type of problem that DARPA and its clones are supposed to tackle.

So enter my Mars Rover idea. (Be warned: This is going to sound far-fetched!) Imagine that we could design a small robot that could be sent into a classroom for a week or a month or even a whole school year to collect all of this information and more. It would be tricked out with high-tech gizmos that would collect data and beam it safely to the cloud. Then AI would make sense of those data, giving scholars, leaders, and policymakers an accurate, comprehensive picture of what was happening in our schools.

First and foremost, our rover would record everything going on in the classroom. As I’ve written before, video would be most powerful, but audio could work if that made people more comfortable in terms of student and teacher privacy.

Given that modern classrooms tend to have lots of movement and activity, the rover might have a sensor that could make sense of it all—for example, tracking the composition of student groups, and how much time the teacher spent with each one. Were those groups reshuffled frequently, as students made progress? Or were low-achieving students getting stuck in slow-moving instruction?

The rover should also have a little scanner built into it so every night teachers could insert any paperwork they had students complete, along with their own feedback and grades, so researchers would get some insight into what kind of work students were being asked to do, and the standards that teachers were holding that work to.

Since many assignments and grading (and even instruction) happens online now, our rover would also have the ability to track any digital activity of students in the classroom, seeing, for example, which programs they were using, how engaged they were, and the dosage.

To be sure, designing such a marvelous rover would be no small feat. Yet the toughest nut to crack would likely be political: How to get educators and families to buy in? Strong privacy protections would go a long way, but teachers especially would need to get something out of participating in a rover-assisted evaluation. Perhaps they could get real-time feedback about their instructional practices and/or grading standards. Or maybe they simply need to be paid for their involvement.

With the blizzard of information generated by our rover—tied to particular teachers, students, and schools, and then connected to other data from test scores, student surveys, and beyond, and analyzed by AI—scholars, leaders, and policymakers would actually have some insight into what’s going on in our schools and whether their policies and decisions were making things better.

This is, of course, how most modern organizations already operate, with a deluge of data, allowing them to fine-tune and adjust and continuously improve. As far as I can tell, flying blind is something that has been relegated just to our education system.

I’m just a policy wonk, and something of a dreamer, so I’m sure there are many reasons that make what I have described here technically challenging. Even with the use of artificial intelligence and high-tech sensors, it might be impossible for anyone or anything to make sense of what the heck is going on in an American classroom, given the cacophony that is so typical.

Then again, a lot of people were skeptical that we could land a rover on Mars.

Indiana’s Republican governor just signed into law a bill that mandates, among other things, that schools in the Hoosier state adopt curricula and supplemental materials that align with the science of reading. This new statute is the latest in what has been a flurry of activity to improve student literacy across the country. Notably, more states are cracking down on curriculum, constraining what local districts can adopt when it comes to the selection of instructional materials.

State laws vary considerably regarding the curricula that schools can use to teach reading. Only a dozen or so take an active role in prescribing how districts pick their core English language arts programs. There’s also appreciable variation in how states approach a slew of other components that affect reading instruction, including mandating phonics, implementing interventions, providing training, and—more recently—prohibiting three-cueing. Indeed, there are differing opinions on whether classroom practice can be improved at all from the lofty perch of statehouses, but emerging research points out how some laws work better than others.

First, a report released in February by ExcelinEd and the Wheelock Educational Policy Center at Boston University suggests that having a retention policy in place is an important consideration for states that are serious about legislating their way toward reading proficiency. The study found that ELA scores for Mississippi third graders who were retained were substantially higher in sixth grade than for those who were just barely promoted, a positive effect that was driven primarily by Black and Hispanic students.

Studies out of several other states have also shown that retention in the early grades is connected to improvements in literacy outcomes. A new study of Indiana’s test-based retention policy—installed over a decade ago when I was working under former Governor Mitch Daniels and State Superintendent Tony Bennett—found “large positive effects” on student achievement in both ELA and mathematics, with the effects persisting into middle school. To be sure, retaining kids for whatever reason has plenty of detractors, but the prospect of student retention often has attention-focusing effects that can impel adults to take action before a child is held back.

Second, a new study from researchers at Michigan State University underscores the importance of taking a comprehensive approach to reading legislation. The upshot: Some states that passed early literacy laws saw increased achievement on state tests, but only those with “comprehensive policies”—legislation that provided support, training, funding, and test-based retention—also realized performance gains on national tests.

These comprehensive policies led to more sustained achievement effects on state exams. Overall, the findings are consistent with previous research on retention policies that show holding students back is most effective when done earlier and paired with additional support.

Third, a new long-term study by University of Virginia researchers seems to validate the efficacy of the Core Knowledge sequence and, by extension, the beneficial effects of a rich, knowledge-based language arts curriculum. Specifically, the study found that elementary school students who attended Core Knowledge charter schools in Colorado were better readers, with reading gains particularly large for low-income students.

The paper garnered mixed reviews, in part because it’s hard to run experiments on knowledge building. Still, there’s a productive role for policymakers, if not in mandating specific curricula, then in creating and sustaining the conditions, most particularly patience (more on that below), required for primary schools to be grounded in the science of reading. Being able to decode comes first; developing rich content knowledge is what comes (forever) after.

Finally, a new NBER working paper by Brown University’s Emily Oster et al. calls out two early science-of-reading adopters as among the biggest post-Covid recovery states thus far:

Most notably, we find that the two states in our sample with the earliest adoption of SOR legislation (Mississippi in 2013 and South Carolina in 2014) are the only two states to fully recover their pandemic learning losses by 2022. Legislation from both states addressed, at a minimum, teacher preparation, professional development, and instruction…the correlation may indicate that such legislation could be an important component in academic recovery.

What does this all mean? Every state should commit to a comprehensive approach when it comes to early literacy. Don’t be like Michigan and Nevada, which have taken their foot off the gas vis-à-vis test-based retention. Be like Indiana, in its “urgent and necessary” call to action, Arkansas with its enforcement provisions, and Mississippi by emulating its patient, decade-long march toward a better mix of legislative levers, as counseled by Kymyona Burk and Carey Wright:

Any successful recipe has several complementary ingredients, and it is no different for Mississippi’s reading policies. Making sure that teachers are trained in the science of reading is critical, as are early screening and intervention for the youngest students and dedicated reading coaches in schools. The curriculum must be phonics-based, and families must be included every step of the way. But like any recipe, removing or diluting just one ingredient [i.e., retention] can affect everything.

It bears repeating: From teacher prep and job-embedded professional development to measurement and accountability, getting reading legislation right is an all-inclusive proposition that requires time and patience to do well. Hence states have their work cut out for them. Appallingly, a recent scan of districts’ plans for spending American Rescue Plan funds showed that only 4 percent explicitly identified the science of reading as a priority.

Not all is gloom and doom, though. There’s reason to be guardedly optimistic, in large part because of these encouraging new research findings. At last count, forty-one states and D.C. now have an early literacy policy on the books. If the post-pandemic era leads to an exponential increase in student literacy outcomes, it will be because lawmakers and other officials helped by doing their part to smartly optimize the policy conditions in their states.

Since the release of Chat GPT last year, the professional classes have suffered an existential dilemma. The artificial intelligence-powered chatbot can generate paragraphs of fluent, eerily human-like writing so quickly that journalists, engineers, and advertisers started to worry that they might soon be replaced. (ChatGPT also writes a pretty good poem, as if the job market for poets wasn’t bad enough.)

It was only a matter of time before teachers were added to the list of endangered professionals. This demise appeals to Luis von Ahn—creator of the popular language app Duolingo—who aired his grievances against human teachers in a recent New Yorker profile: “We’ve all gone to school… Some teachers are good, but the vast majority are not all that great,” von Ahn lamented. Humans “are just hard to deal with. You need a lot of human tutors, and they’re kind of hard to use, and we can’t get them for free.”

Von Ahn sees artificial intelligence programs as ideal replacements for flesh-and-blood teachers. The profile notes that, “When von Ahn saw what [GPT-4] was capable of, he scrapped…two programs involving human teachers.” The decision took him “approximately one minute.” He organized a Duolingo team to work on AI-powered educational programs that same day.

Having been a teacher, I admit that von Ahn has some points. The quality of human educators varies widely. It’s difficult to scale up the impact of the highly effective ones. And they certainly don’t work for free. (They may not be paid enough, but they’re paid more than most people assume.)

But von Ahn’s goal of replacing teachers with AI will almost certainly fail—at least for the foreseeable future. One reason is obvious: It’s impossible to run a school without living, breathing adults in the classrooms. Another reason is historical: Children have been attending schools since ancient Egypt, and no technological advance has ever replaced teachers. Instead, teachers have adopted and adapted those technological advances into their practice, making themselves more effective in the process.

Recent history is instructive. I attended elementary school in the age of bulky, loud, heat-emitting overhead projectors. When I became a teacher, my classroom was equipped with a SmartBoard. At the time, it seemed like something out of science fiction: Not only could I project visuals for my class, the content could be controlled by touch. I could write in digital ink and create interactive lessons for my students. Like a chalkboard, it was erasable, but I could save the work for the next day, or even the next school year.

But the SmartBoard didn’t replace me. It made my teaching more engaging. (Ralph W. Tyler noted a similar process with overhead projector adoption in a 1980 study.) So we should stop fretting—or in the case of von Ahn, fantasizing—about the latest bit of tech replacing teachers. Instead, we should be thinking of ways AI could make teachers more effective.

Done right, teaching can be a grueling job. Delivering quality instruction to students in math, reading, social studies, and science is a full-time position in itself, but we ask so much more of educators. In addition to teaching lessons, many teachers are tasked with creating those lessons in addition to countless other tasks. Robert Pondiscio and Jessica Shurz recently noted that, “One concrete improvement to teacher effectiveness would be to reduce the burden placed on them by lesson planning, which tends to be incoherent, below standards, and incredibly time consuming, taking time away from potentially higher-yielding uses of their time and energy.”

Pondiscio and Shurz would probably agree that schools should adopt high-quality, standards-aligned curricula so that teachers don’t need to create their own lessons. While that should be the goal, there needs to be a stop-gap measure in place until it becomes a reality.

AI could help. ChatGPT writes surprisingly good lesson plans, more complete and detailed than many teachers would create on their own. Enter the prompt “write me a lesson plan for a third grade math class” and the result is something that would not be out of place in the teacher’s edition of a textbook. The lesson plan I generated was organized into sections like “materials” and “objectives.” The plan even had sections for “direct instruction,” “guided practice,” and “independent practice,” also known as the “I do, we do, you do” model of gradual release. This process is tricky to master, especially for new teachers, but it took ChatGPT five seconds.

While the lesson plan contained no worksheet, I was able to create that by entering the prompt “write a worksheet for the concept of multiplication and its relationship to repeated addition.” The worksheet wasn’t extraordinary, but it addressed the objective. A teacher would need to tweak, edit, and add to the lesson plan and worksheet, but that would take a fraction of the time as writing them from scratch. Early in my teaching career, I would spend almost a whole day writing lessons for the coming week. With ChatGPT, it would take me an hour, maybe two.

There are other responsibilities that AI could streamline. Grading student work is a big time commitment, especially when class rosters swell above thirty students—and already, there are guides on how to use ChatGPT to lighten this load. Keeping families informed through regular communication is essential to building relationships between home and school; ChatGPT can generate newsletters in over fifty languages, which is helpful when students speak a language other than English at home. ChatGPT can even help with field trips. Enter “field trip to Gettysburg,” and the bot will plan the entire outing short of reserving buses. The plan I generated contained a section on what history to cover before the trip, specific places to visit, and even an assessment to test how much students learned on the trip.

In each example I’ve cited, the AI-generated content doesn’t eliminate the need for human teachers, but it saves them time and expands their reach, much like a dishwasher handling the dirty work but still requiring a person to load and unload it. It’s true that, in each case, a teacher would need to tailor the content for their particular students, but the time saved could be rededicated to face-to-face instruction. Armed with AI, highly effective teachers could even increase their class sizes without sacrificing the quality of that instruction. And if it’s true that many states are facing teacher shortages, districts will soon be asking more of a shrinking workforce. Instead of dreading a future in which AI replaces teachers, we should be considering the ways in which AI could make the teachers we do have become more effective.

A few weeks ago, I finally sat down with Joe Feldman’s Grading for Equity (2018), expecting to nod my head along with every page. I loved teaching at an alternative school, considered myself flexible about deadlines, and frequently encouraged students to revise their writing. Based on what I’d heard, Grading for Equity was going to be right up my alley.

And what I’d heard was quite a lot. In the five years since the book’s publication, it’s only gained steam. Within the last month alone, it’s received both positive and negative coverage from the Dallas Express, EdSurge, the National Desk, NewsNation, Newsweek, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Examiner. That’s not to mention Joe Feldman’s ongoing collaborations with the Network for College Success, the National Association of Independent Schools, and various school districts—or the upcoming Grading for Equity Virtual Summer Institute (registration fees start at $900).

But despite my high hopes, I was about to be disappointed. Yes, several of the book’s suggestions resonated with my own beliefs after having taught high school English for six years (not that long, and yet—cough—twice as long as Feldman was a classroom teacher). I agreed wholeheartedly with several of Feldman’s specific recommendations, including rubric scoring, no grades for effort, no extra credit, and aspects of mastery grading. I also appreciated his argument against grading homework. While I believe there’s a time and place for graded homework, he’s right to remind us that it’s a tricky issue: Grading homework for completion inflates grades, whereas grading it for accuracy may encourage cheating.

Even so, I couldn’t get on board with the book’s bigger ideas. Grading for Equity was filled with one moment after another where I wondered: Had this guy actually been a teacher? Of real, live kids? I taught in two very different school settings—a small, urban, Title I alternative school and a huge, suburban, relatively wealthy public school—and much of what Feldman is advocating would have been disastrous in either place.

My major objections fell into three categories:

1. Yeah, actually, everyone getting A’s is problematic.

One of Feldman’s arguments is that it’s OK if “equitable” grading raises tons of students’ grades up to an A. “Meeting an external standard, like writing a persuasive essay or passing the driver’s license test, or even exceeding it,” he writes, “is not like taking a limited resource, like gold or oil, which fluctuates in value depending on how much there is.” To the contrary, A’s do fluctuate in value depending on how many there are.

When lots more students get A’s, two undesirable things happen. First, they become less meaningful as a signal to students and parents about their achievement in the class. Are they really excelling in the subject? Should they pursue advanced study? Or are they merely proficient? If so many students are truly excelling, then maybe it’s time to make that class more challenging. On the other hand, when students receive A’s for mere proficiency, we risk decreased student effort and warped decision-making when it comes to college applications, choices of major, and career path.

Second, a bounty of A’s results in student transcripts that communicate less information, including to admissions officers and employers. Everyone getting A’s only increases colleges’ reliance on high-stakes entrance exams—which many schools are dropping—and more inequitable criteria like extracurricular involvement.

No, we don’t have to send prospectors to dig more A’s out of the earth, but that doesn’t mean that their value remains constant no matter what we do.

2. Unbounded optimism isn’t practical.

Teachers must hope for the best (embracing their students’ potential) but prepare for the worst (having structures in place for when lessons and assignments don’t go as planned). Feldman, on the other hand, seems only to hope for the best. He encourages teachers not to grade any assignments but end-of-unit summative assessments, arguing that students will understand the importance of those smaller assignments to prepare them for the bigger ones, and even if they don’t, then they won’t do well on their final assessments, and isn’t that punishment enough? Oh, except that Feldman also supports unlimited retakes with literally no end point: “Most schools and districts allow grade changes after a semester is over, so doesn’t that explicitly allow, perhaps invite, a student who wants to learn unmastered material to continue learning beyond the term and have her grade reflect that learning?”

I am exhausted just imagining what this would look like in practice. Human beings naturally procrastinate, plus kids’ executive functioning capacity isn’t refined yet (deadlines, by the way, can help accelerate this developmental process). Many students are glued to TikTok and Discord; many others are working to support their families, experiencing homelessness, or facing health challenges. If students fall behind for any reason, it gets harder and harder for them to catch up. It’s teachers’ job to set students up for success, and grades are an effective means of motivating students to prioritize learning. Sure, it’d be great if all kids were always motivated solely by the joy of learning, as Feldman envisions. But not every topic is going to pique the interest of every person, and distractions and other obligations abound in the real world. Teachers need another reliable source of motivation.

And speaking of teachers—they are already plenty burnt out. Limiting retakes and extensions hugely helps them manage their workloads. Teachers should grade for equity, not eternity.

3. Equity isn’t equality.

To my last point: Equity is about giving individual students the tools and opportunities they need. It isn’t about giving every student the same thing. Yet Feldman argues for across-the-board changes to grading policies, making claims like, “Retakes are equitable only when they are mandatory.” I understand the impulse here: Some students will hesitate to self-advocate, some won’t believe they really can do better the next time, and so on. But an effective teacher can, on a case-by-case basis, identify and reach out to the students who would really benefit from a retake or extension. Doing so can mitigate the impact of the “intermittent catastrophic failures” that rightly worry Feldman and help students continue to feel motivated—without abandoning all meaningful expectations and boundaries. 

Especially as achievement gaps grow in the aftermath of the virtual-learning era, educational inequities remain a tremendous ethical and economic problem for the United States. But as the second edition of Grading for Equity makes its way toward bookstores later this year, Feldman fans ought to keep in mind that disregarding students’ and teachers’ realities still isn’t the solution.

Stackable credentials are a sequence of postsecondary credentials that are earned over time, build on each other, and offer different levels and types of training. Pathways typically encourage individuals to start their education with certificates—short-term credentials that take anywhere from a few weeks to two years to complete—that prepare them for various middle-skill jobs. These jobs require more than a high school diploma but less than a college degree, and are in high-demand. Stackable credential pathways also allow learners to build up to a degree over time and earn credentials incrementally while working, a flexibility that can be particularly attractive to those balancing the demands of work, family, and school.

Advocates argue that stackable credentials have the potential to increase postsecondary enrollment and completion rates for historically underserved populations. By offering flexible programs with multiple on- and off-ramps, stackable credential pathways could increase economic and educational opportunity and reduce inequities. On the flip side, there are valid concerns that they could have the opposite effect, as some short-term credentials lead to jobs with low earnings and limited wage growth.

Unfortunately, there is little hard evidence on whether stackable credentials succeed in improving the educational and economic outcomes of underserved populations. But a recent study by RAND Education and Labor, in collaboration with the Center for the Study of Higher and Postsecondary Education at the University of Michigan, addresses this gap by examining stackable credential efforts in Ohio and Colorado to determine their impact on low-income individuals. These states were chosen because they are both deeply engaged in efforts to build stackable credential pipelines at the state, system, and institutional level. Both states also have substantial numbers of middle-skill jobs, and are interested in expanding stackable credential pathways in areas such as advanced manufacturing, energy, information technology, and health care.

The researchers used a mixed methods approach. Data provided by the Colorado Community College System (CCCS) and the Ohio Longitudinal Data Archive, as well as matched records from each state’s unemployment insurance database, allowed them to examine patterns in credential stacking and employment outcomes for low-income adults relative to their middle- and high-income peers. The primary data sample included individuals who earned their first-ever certificate from one of thirteen CCCS colleges or twenty-three Ohio community colleges between July 1, 2006, and June 30, 2015. The sample was limited to those who were between the ages of twenty and sixty-four when they earned their first certificate, were Colorado or Ohio residents, and were never dual-enrolled in high school. Individuals were identified as low-income if their wages were below 200 percent of the federal poverty level.

There were several important findings. First, low-income certificate-earners stacked credentials at higher rates than middle- and high-income certificate earners. In Ohio, 43 percent of low-income certificate-earners completed a second credential within three years, compared with 36 percent of middle- and high-income certificate earners. In Colorado, the figures were 39 and 33 percent, respectively. In both states, low-income stackers earned degrees at higher rates than middle- and high-income stackers—about 53 percent of Colorado and 61 percent of Ohio low-income stackers completed an associate or bachelor’s degree, as opposed to 52 percent of middle- and high-income stackers in Colorado and 56 percent in Ohio.

Second, although this study is a descriptive analysis and thus cannot be used to draw causal conclusions, it appears that vertical stacking—stacking which results in higher-level credentials, including degrees—is associated with sizeable earnings gains compared to completing just one certificate. That’s good news, as low-income stackers in both states stacked vertically at higher rates than middle- and high-income stackers. In fact, within a year and a half to two years of completing their first certificate, low-income vertical stackers out earned low-income non-stackers. Unfortunately, low-income vertical stackers continued to earn less than middle- and high-income stackers. But they also experienced “positive economic returns” from stacking, thus narrowing the earnings gap.

Third, there is “promising evidence” that credential stacking could improve outcomes for low-income students. When they earned their first certificate, less than 20 percent of low-income vertical stackers in both states earned at least a middle-income wage, which is defined as one that is equal to or greater than 200 percent of the federal poverty level. Six years later, nearly 80 percent of low-income vertical stackers had attained a middle-income wage.

A qualitative analysis of interview and survey data from key stakeholders uncovered four systems-level barriers that could be limiting opportunities and driving inequities in stackable credential pipelines. Stakeholders also identified potential solutions to overcoming those barriers.

1. Limited opportunities to stack credentials in some fields. If low-income individuals are pursuing educational opportunities in fields that haven’t been as quick to scale stackable credential programs, they may have fewer opportunities to benefit from stacking than their peers. The data suggest that low-income certificate-earners were indeed concentrated in some fields with lower stacking rates (such as education or family and consumer sciences) but also some with higher stacking rates, like mechanics. Low-income certificate-earners were also underrepresented in some fields with the highest stacking rates, like information technology (IT) and manufacturing and engineering technology (MET). Stakeholders believe the factors driving this barrier include limited workforce needs and industry engagement, substantial program startup costs, and insufficient access to equipment and instructional resources. They suggest improving coordination with industry, as well as providing financial assistance to support startup costs and fund instructional resources, as solutions.

2. Limited opportunities to stack credentials in some institutions. Low-income students are often limited, for a variety of reasons, to pursuing education at local institutions. If these institutions offer fewer stackable credential programs, there might be limited opportunities for students to benefit. The data indicate that stacking rates varied substantially across institutions. There was no evidence of a systematic relationship between an institution’s concentration of low-income certificate-earners and its stacking rate. Nevertheless, stakeholders believe that the same factors driving the previous barrier are at play here, and thus the same solutions should be applied.

3. Insufficient information and resources to identify and stack credentials of value. Clear and concise information is crucial. Stackable credentials can only help improve equity if low-income students are aware of what’s available and are able to identify the pathways and credentials that provide meaningful career opportunities. The data indicate that low-income certificate-earners were underrepresented in some fields with the highest returns (IT and MET.) Stakeholders believe the factors behind this barrier include common student perceptions of college credentials and certain fields, as well as limited messaging from employers about credential value. To overcome this barrier, stakeholders recommend enhancing informational resources on stackable credentials and credential value, providing institutions with additional resources to improve advising support, and encouraging greater partnership with industry.

4. Challenges moving from noncredit to credit programs. To offer students the most benefit, stackable credential programs should allow them to move between noncredit programs and those offered for college credit. Unfortunately, the data suggest that both low-income and middle- and high-income noncredit certificate-earners who stacked “almost always” earned a second noncredit credential, and rarely completed credit certificates or degrees. Stakeholders believe that the factors driving this barrier include a lack of alignment between noncredit learning and credit course work, limited awareness of articulation opportunities, and administrative burden. Potential solutions include improving alignment between noncredit learning experiences and credit-bearing courses, investing in outreach to improve awareness, and streamlining administrative processes.

Overall, this study is a crucial addition to the research on stackable credentials. It suggests that stacking credentials could improve equity in postsecondary education, which is welcome news. But it also points to several areas of concern that policymakers must address.

SOURCE: Lindsay Daugherty, Peter Riley Bahr, Peter Nguyen, Jennifer May-Trifiletti, Rooney Columbus, and Jonah Kushner, “Stackable Credential Pipelines and Equity for Low-Income Individuals: Evidence from Colorado and Ohio,” RAND Corporation (2023).

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss his new book, The Great School Rethink. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber discusses a Massachusetts study that found a connection between teachers’ scores on CTE licensure exams and the long-term earnings of their students.

Recommended content:

• “How can we liberate students from drudgery? It’s time for a Great Rethink” —Rick Hess
•  “Education commentary is dominated by optimism bias” —Freddie deBoer
• The study that Amber reviewed on the Research Minute: Bingjie Chen et al., “CTE teacher licensure and long-term student outcomes,” Education Finance & Policy (March 2023)

Feedback Welcome:

Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to our producer Nathaniel Grossman at [email protected].

Cheers

• Dallas’s new admissions policy for honors classes—which automatically enrolls high performing students—has dramatically increased student diversity. —Education Week
• “Kids’ reading scores have soared in Deep South states.” —Associated Press
• Launchpad, a new Philadelphia nonprofit, offers high school students free career and technical training and even pays them for their work. —The 74

Jeers

• “Parents don’t understand how far behind their kids are in school.” —New York Times
• One teacher attempts to pin blame for student misbehavior on testing. —Chalkbeat Indiana

• New data show that rates of adolescent mental health emergencies are still high but falling compared to 2021. —Education Week
• Eric Hanushek’s previous four decades of research suggested that there was no clear link between school funding and performance. But a surprising new paper by the economist shows a connection between spending and test scores. —Chalkbeat
• San Francisco public schools could reverse a policy that prevents all students from taking algebra until ninth grade. —San Francisco Chronicle
• Democrats are growing increasingly hostile to meritocracy, putting them at odds with the general public. —Ruy Teixeira