The Education Gadfly Weekly

The new school year is getting underway just as the nation is grappling with new national data confirming dramatic, pandemic-related declines in student learning. Even as educational leaders weigh strategies for addressing this achievement crisis, we also hear opinions that it is “impossible to ask kids to tackle difficult academic challenges” without first attending to their underlying emotional needs—a take that has been commonplace throughout the pandemic. “For many students, their mental and emotional health needs to be stabilized in order for learning to take place,” said one Pennsylvania teacher last year, reflecting this sentiment.

It is certainly true that the pandemic accelerated a mental health crisis for children and teens that was already apparent prior to spring 2020. It is a serious issue and schools—including Success Academy Charter Schools, of which I am CEO—have expanded mental health services to meet the needs of a greater number of struggling students.

At the same time, as we commence a school year in which educators must continue the intensive work of repairing the pandemic’s academic damage, I want to draw attention to the fact that engaging students in challenging academic learning is not in opposition to supporting their emotional wellness; on the contrary, it can play an important contributing role.

The truth is that, while nothing can replace supportive mental health services for children in crisis, there are tremendous opportunities to inculcate vital social and emotional skills through teaching and learning. In particular, resilience is strongly associated with mental health, and teachers are perfectly positioned to help their students build this abundantly fruitful habit of mind.

Resilience is the capacity to bounce back from adversity and challenges. Research consistently finds that children with higher degrees of resilience are less likely to suffer depression and anxiety. Studies also find that resilience isn’t static—individuals can become more resilient through interventions.

The classroom can be a locus of such interventions. Our goal at Success Academy is to cultivate our scholars as lifelong learners. Toward that end, children must take pleasure in learning—and real learning can be hard. It often involves failure and the courage to keep trying in the face of uncertainty. To take pleasure in learning, therefore, children must develop resilience, or “mental toughness.” For some children, this mindset comes easily, but for many, their natural response is to give up or simply go through the motions when things get hard. That’s normal, and our job as educators is to build children’s zest to persist through challenges.

Cultivating this mindset is therefore part of our core value system and integral to every aspect of our schools. It is not a separate social-emotional learning curriculum layered on top of an academic program or something we attend to before getting down to the business of teaching and learning. Rather, our educators work holistically to fully invest scholars in the joy of taking intellectual risks and pushing themselves to try their hardest, even when there is a possibility that they may fail. Within this framework, every class, every lesson, and every homework assignment becomes a mini-exercise in building resilience.

Of course, lessons and assignments cannot build resilience when they are simplistic and below grade level. Texts, problems, assignments, and assessments must challenge students and demand a deep level of engagement. An important way to build excitement to take on such challenging work is by using students’ work to drive learning. When scholars experience how errors in their own or peers’ work can give everyone greater clarity and understanding, they see that small failures can be a source of valuable information and a springboard for growth. As this insight takes hold, they become increasingly courageous about grappling with new and difficult concepts and problems—and, critically, they become willing and able to share when they need help.

This healthy mindset, cultivated in the classroom, spills over into the rest of our scholars’ lives. Having a safe space to try, fail, and try again, consistently experiencing success through effort and persistence, helps build a strong psychological foundation for meeting challenges outside the classroom. We have seen abundant evidence of this when our scholars have gone on to college. Many have been daunted when they first arrive, by being in the minority at a predominantly white college, by the workload, by being far away while their families face a crisis at home. But we have seen them face these challenges with resilience. Rather than falling into despair or indifference, they have taken active steps to address their challenges. They have made a commitment to regularly go to their professors’ office hours, joined clubs to build a sense of belonging, reached out to Success Academy’s alumni office to ask for help.

Engaging children in rigorous, student-led academic learning is never the answer to serious mental health challenges. But it is a mistake to believe that the best way to address the struggles that students encountered during the pandemic—illness, poverty, isolation, fear—is by denying them access to the struggles inherent in rigorous academic learning. On the contrary, when done in a supportive environment, this type of productive struggle can play a critical role in building the habits of mind that help children face life’s inevitable challenges with courage, optimism, and self-belief.

Just in the nick of time for the last days of summer beach reading, there were a pair of big stories about reading instruction in TIME magazine and The New Yorker last month. That’s about as mainstream as media attention gets, and signals that maybe the tide really has turned on literacy instruction in American schools. Given the undeniable magnitude of learning loss after three successive school years disrupted by Covid, such a shift couldn’t be more welcome or timely.

A third recent piece got less attention than those other two but deserves no less. Last month, the Knowledge Matters campaign (I was a co-founder in 2015) released a statement from its scientific advisory committee, which rightly lauds the blossoming “Science of Reading” movement as “an important catalyst for improved and more equitable outcomes for all students.” But the statement wisely observes that this laudable and overdue enthusiasm for research-based instructional methods and materials has “often been interpreted far too narrowly as exclusively focused on foundational skills.” The statement continues:

Reading success requires much more than foundational skills. There are other factors critical for literacy development, including those that address language, meaning, and communication. Among the most important is knowledge. Knowledge is necessary to comprehend what we read. Foundational skills are literally meaningless unless readers can make sense of words and texts. This sense-making requires knowledge that must be systematically built (not just activated!) through instructional experiences and curricula that evoke curiosity and the desire to learn more. In short, knowledge matters.

Regular readers know that I’m a fervent disciple of E.D. Hirsch, Jr., who has articulated a clearer view of educational “equity” than any other researcher or theorist of the last half century. “We will be able to achieve a just and prosperous society only when our schools ensure that everyone commands enough shared background knowledge to be able to communicate effectively with everyone else,” he observed. This is no mere homily. Hirsch’s body of work centers on a simple fact about how language operates: Writers and speakers make assumptions about what their readers and listeners already know, which makes language a kind of shorthand. When those assumptions are correct, communication is fluid and effortless; when they’re faulty, comprehension collapses.

This scientifically unassailable insight, however, has vast and unavoidable implications for K–12 education, for curriculum, and ultimately for the long-term success or failure of the science of reading movement itself. Following the science where it leads suggests that the most important job of public education in a diverse nation is to ensure that every child—rich or poor; Black, White, or Brown—has fair and equal access to the same body of knowledge in history, science, art, and literature. Foundational reading skills are just the starting line of literacy and language proficiency.

Getting to the finish line will be uphill work. Fashionable thought in education practice and policy has long run in the opposite direction, dwelling on socioeconomic differences between students, and nearly fetishizing personalized or culturally-affirming curricular content. Think the “reading wars” pitting phonics against whole language were painful? That was small beer compared to fights over curriculum content. Our reluctance to state what kids need to know surely contributed to the dominance (and failure, mostly) of content-agnostic “comprehension strategies” instruction and “leveled” reading.

I’ve never given a talk on the importance of building background knowledge to improve language proficiency where someone didn’t ask, “Well, fine. But whose knowledge should we teach?” It’s a question usually aimed at probing for cultural biases in curriculum. University of Virginia cognitive scientist Dan Willingham, one of the signers of the Knowledge Matters statement, has heard the “whose knowledge” question, too. He sympathizes with educators’ reluctance to make decisions that might make people uncomfortable or angry. “But we can’t avoid choosing,” he usually replies. “Doing nothing is a choice and probably the worst one. It leads to incoherence across years which is bad for everyone and worst for children with limited opportunities to acquire background knowledge outside of school.”

Follow the science: If we know that shared knowledge is essential to language proficiency, and that reading comprehension cannot be reduced to an all-purpose suite of “skills and strategies,” then our reluctance to build knowledge in a systematic and coherent way is not merely a poor choice, it’s choosing to impose illiteracy on disadvantaged children. Initiatives like the Knowledge Map project being undertaken at Johns Hopkins under David Steiner (another Knowledge Matters science advisor), which evaluates the content knowledge that an English language arts or social studies curricula reinforces or omit, might offer a way forward to schools, districts, and states squeamish about answering the question of “whose knowledge” is to be taught.

Even careful, sophisticated mainstream media pieces like those in TIME and The New Yorker elide or fail to parse sufficiently the difference between decoding and reading comprehension, or teaching foundational literacy skills and the long-term, patient, and painstaking knowledge-building work needed for language proficiency. I’ve long noted that my fifth grade students in a low-performing South Bronx elementary school could all decode. Yet they struggled with comprehension of what they read. The issue was not lack of student engagement, “culturally relevant pedagogy,” or our failure to get students to fall in love with books, which New Yorker writer Jessica Winter eviscerates as “vibes-based literacy.” It was the inevitable result of an education that was, as I’ve written elsewhere, all mirrors and no windows—a proof point of the caution sounded by Knowledge Matters’s science advisors.

If you’d told me ten or fifteen years ago that educators and state lawmakers would embrace a movement called the “science of reading,” and that hundreds of thousands of teachers would join online forums to learn everything about reading instruction they weren’t taught in ed school, I’d have responded, “Well, great. But not in my lifetime.” So, it’s hard for me to be sanguine that we will develop taste for prescribing content at a time of heightened “culture war” sensitivity.

But neither did I expect the rise of the science of reading movement.

Whether or not the bipartisan education consensus is dead, one of its most visible and effective reforms lives on: so-called “No Excuses” model schools, institutions famous for their exacting behavioral and academic standards. While most people know of these schools from national charter networks like KIPP or IDEA, many local schools and districts have followed their lead.

I recently began working at one such K–8 school, and so have gotten a unique look into what makes them work. The teacher-led instruction, rigid behavioral structure, and knowledge-based curriculum are certainly aspects of its success. But an often less-remarked cause for the success of the No Excuses model is the role of a coherent culture and uniform vision within these schools.

I first noticed the difference in school culture in hearing other teachers refer to students as “scholars”—a practice common in No Excuse schools. I’m still not entirely comfortable with this. It feels contrived. But looking at the word’s origins—from the Latin “schola”—it is fitting. More importantly, there’s a purpose to calling all students “scholars.” It establishes a tone. It communicates to students who attend this school that they are here for more than babysitting or socialization. This simple shift in language signals to these kids that they are in this building for a serious academic undertaking.

Everything that a school does sends signals to students—what behavior is sanctioned or rewarded, what books students read, who designs curriculum, which posters hang on the wall. Every tiny decision communicates values and the vision to those within its walls. What does this school value? What does it mean to be educated? What is proper behavior? Good character?

Nobel laureate George Akerlof wrote a compelling essay on the role of identity in schooling, namely whether students identify as nerds, jocks, burnouts, or otherwise. Schools communicate an ideal to students who then “choose whether or not to adopt the school’s social category.”

No Excuses schools succeed within this reality. In my own school, we have regular pep assemblies to cast an academic vision for students and explain various policies, teachers name classrooms after colleges, we spend our first week practicing and justifying various routines and procedures, we refer to students as scholars, and are encouraged to post data walls up in our rooms, tracking students’ growth on various tests and standards. The ideal of an academically minded student is set forth constantly and intentionally.

But setting forth an ideal is insufficient. As Akerlof notes, students may reject it. Often, this rejection comes when they see such an ideal as unattainable. For example, if their prior schooling was lacking, they might worry about failing to reach the ideal and so, in a face-saving decision, choose to reject the institution’s values.

And so these No Excuses schools pair an academic ideal with excellence in curriculum and instruction. Administrations coach teachers constantly. Teachers review data to modify instruction. Curricula are sequenced, knowledge-based, and rigorous. These factors provide students a near-guarantee of reaching the ideal, so they’re less likely to reject it.

Akerlof points to this identity thesis as a factor that promotes the success of Catholic schools, in which I have also worked. “These schools make their ideals clear,” he writes, and “all the teachers assume responsibility for shaping student character.” Because of their religious nature and ties to a dogmatic church, these institutions clearly communicate expectations to students, and teachers foster and advance those ideals.

This understanding of schooling and identity also informs the success of school choice. Both families and teachers can opt into schools that align with their values or ideal education, and so schools have a stronger mandate to advance one coherent vision.

In his studies of the successes and failures of charter schools, Harvard economist Roland Fryer has confirmed Akerlof’s predictions. He found five factors that successful charter schools had in common. A culture of high expectations was chief among them, a factor that can manifest beyond the walls of No Excuses charter schools. As such, he not only identifies this culture of high expectations as a factor in success, but also isolates ways that other schools can adopt these practices:

The first week of school should be a “culture camp,” a time to focus on what behaviors and actions are conducive to achieving success. Classrooms should post goals on the walls as a constant reminder of the high expectations, and schools should visibly promote a culture of going to college by hanging posters about college and by discussing college readiness with students. Students must be cognizant of their individual goals and the steps needed to achieve them.

I compare that to other public schools where I’ve worked. The messages sent to students were a hodgepodge. Even the curriculum was a messy mix of student-led and teacher-led approaches. Behavioral expectations varied from classroom to classroom. My colleague across the hall and I disagreed on just about every issue one could bring up in education. We enjoyed debating that disagreement, but it’s akin to asking a church to advance Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Muslim doctrines while expecting a coherent result.

With the back-to-school season upon us, and America’s students desperately in need of excellent instruction to address their massive Covid-era learning losses, such an ecumenical approach to school culture is not going to cut it. Districts either need to adopt and enforce a uniform vision for all their schools or embrace a meaningful approach to school choice to allow each campus to go its own way. But leaving questions of vision, identity, and culture to individual teachers is a recipe for stagnation, which our kids cannot afford.

As money and attention focus on career and technical education (CTE) at ever greater levels, researchers can help gauge program effectiveness by digging into the data. Common research questions include: Does CTE lead to college success? Are CTE students better off skipping college and jumping into the workforce? Can CTE students be both college and career ready upon graduation?

A new report published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis is a good example of how data can be analyzed to reach finer-grained conclusions on such questions. Analysts Walter Ecton and Shaun Dougherty start with a rich dataset from Massachusetts’s longitudinal data system and focus on nearly 252,000 first-time ninth graders whose on-time graduation from high school was expected between 2009 and 2017. Their most comprehensive analysis focuses on the first three of those cohorts (graduating 2009–2011), which allows for seven years of post-high school observation. They look at enrollment data, demographics, attendance, residence, state test scores, immigrant status, disability status, and English learner status. College enrollment and completion data come from the National Student Clearinghouse, and employment and wage information come from the Massachusetts Department of Labor’s unemployment insurance system.

Almost 20 percent of students in the sample are classified as “CTE concentrators” based on the federal definition: enrollment in CTE courses for two or more school years at any time during high school. While this is useful shorthand—and indeed many career-based clusters in CTE are two-year sequences with a licensure/certification exam at the end—other research has shown that students can and will take unrelated courses for multiple semesters without such a “concentration” in mind. Ecton and Dougherty wisely break out these “dabblers” from their peers who persist in a cluster sequence. They also distinguish between students who attend CTE-dedicated schools, where a larger and more varied menu of courses is available, and those who take CTE courses in “comprehensive” high schools.

Overall, CTE concentrators are more likely to be male, from lower-income families, and English language learners than their non-CTE concentrator peers. Hispanic students are heavily overrepresented, while Asian students are underrepresented among concentrators. Concentrators score well below the state average on eighth grade tests and are nearly 13 percentage points less likely to attend and graduate from college. Male students are widely overrepresented in the construction, transportation, manufacturing and technology, and information technology clusters; female students are similarly overrepresented in education, health care, and business and consumer science. Students scoring in the lowest quintile of eighth grade test scores are overrepresented in every career cluster studied—highest in transportation, hospitality and tourism, and construction.

CTE concentration generally has no impact on the likelihood of students attending college compared to non-CTE concentrators, but that masks huge variation in different career clusters. Health care concentrators are more than 15 percentage points more likely to attend college than non-concentrators; education concentrators, 13 percentage points more likely. Transportation concentrators are 14.9 percentage points less likely and construction concentrators 12.7 percentage points less likely to attend college. Ecton and Dougherty believe that the expectation of attending college—especially community college—is baked into a number of CTE clusters such as IT and health care in order to complete the required learning.

CTE concentration is associated with a large increase in initial earnings compared to non-concentrators, which persists even seven years after high school graduation. The gap is especially pronounced when comparing CTE concentrators who do not go to college to non-concentrators who also do not go on to college. These results are driven by male concentrators, as females’ initial advantage is smaller and decreases more over time. Lower-income concentrators, Black and Hispanic concentrators, and those with lower prior achievement scores also see earnings boosts compared to their non-concentrator peers.

The highest earnings are seen in construction, transportation, manufacturing and technology, and health care clusters. In most clusters, the advantages begin to decline in years five through seven post-graduation, likely indicating that college-educated students in those clusters are joining the work force. However, non-college goers in health care and construction continue to see higher earnings than their college educated peers. This is an indicator that college is perhaps less germane to these clusters, although schools must make clear to students the real postsecondary prospects that await them. For example, concentrating in the health care cluster does not indicate a path to medical school but to nursing assistant, phlebotomist, and home-health aide jobs.

Finally, concentrators who take courses in CTE-dedicated schools—which enjoy a strong reputation for excellence in Massachusetts—show even higher income boosts than concentrators in comprehensive high schools. In testing for unobserved characteristics such as selection bias (especially for students opting into CTE-dedicated schools) that might have influenced results, Ecton and Dougherty examined dabblers in CTE-dedicated schools and concentrators who only have access to comprehensive high schools. They find very similar patterns to the larger analysis, namely that significant advantage is achieved by concentrators in whichever setting they are educated. Thus they are confident that most of the characteristics driving outcomes are accounted for in their methodology.

While not conclusive proof that CTE course concentration can prepare students for both college and career, this detailed analysis does indicate that positive outcomes in either college or career are likely for CTE students and that these outcomes can be predicted based on concentration level and, especially, on career cluster pursued. Most encouragingly, concentration in nearly any of the CTE clusters typically available can lead to either college enrollment or higher income after high school graduation, an important point as CTE concentrators are often low academic performers whose post–high school prospects might otherwise be bleak.

SOURCE: Walter G. Ecton and Shaun M. Dougherty, “Heterogeneity in High School Career and Technical Education Outcomes,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis (August 2022).

Four-day school weeks saw a sharp increase in popularity between 1999 and 2019, then the pandemic added impetus to the already growing trend—with districts seeing shortened school weeks as a way to retain teachers and cut expenses. Certain districts were able to drop the extra day by extending instructional hours for the remaining four days, though this has been shown to still reduce learning time by three to four hours per week. Qualitative data showed positive sentiment from families and educators toward four-day schedules, yet teacher retention and budgetary issues remain largely unchanged.

But what about achievement? Quantitative studies have revealed small adverse effects, but most prior research was limited by single-state and district-level data. A recent study conducts a more comprehensive multi-state, student-level analysis of the impact of a four-day school week on math and reading achievement and confirms negative effects on average, although achievement varies depending on rurality.

The researchers used twelve years of data from thirty-five schools across six states—Colorado, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming—and used a difference-in-differences research design to examine the causal effects of a four-day school week on math and reading achievement compared with students with a five-day week. Achievement was measured in two ways: (1) spring standardized math and reading test scores, and (2) fall-to-spring test score gains.

The districts in the study that adopted a four-day schedule tend to have smaller enrollments, have higher percentages of low-income students, and be located in more rural areas than schools that follow a five-day schedule. Students classified as living in non-rural areas are located in suburbs or towns, as no city districts have authorized four-day schedules.

The study finds, on average, a significant negative effect on reading scores and a negative, but not statistically significant, effect on math scores. Fall-to-spring gains, however, experience a “medium” decrease (0.06 SD each) in math and reading compared to five-day schools.

The researchers further dissected the data to find that non-rural districts experience larger negative effects than rural ones. For rural schools, there was no discernible effect of four-day weeks on spring test scores. In non-rural schools, however, there is a significant decrease in math (0.08 SD) and reading (0.11 SD) scores. There are additional differences between rural and non-rural districts in fall-to-spring growth. Four-day rural schools show a 0.04 SD decrease in reading gains over the year and no effect for math. In contrast, non-rural schools with a four-day week show a significant decrease in both math (0.08 SD) and reading (0.09 SD) gains. To put this in context, fifth grade students typically see a 0.40 SD improvement in achievement over the year, so non-rural fifth grade students attending school four days per week are losing a quarter of their expected achievement.

Districts have been implementing four-day schedules for two decades in the name of cost reduction, but with limited research on other effects. Now that the once blurry picture of shortened school weeks and their impact on student achievement is coming into focus, policymakers should follow the data: less school means less learning. Previous research has shown small effects of four-day school weeks on student achievement, but now that the data have been deconstructed, we see that non-rural schools experience a disproportionately larger impact.

Even more disconcerting, rural districts show very little learning loss as a result of shifting to four-day weeks. What does this say about the education system in many parts of the country? Perhaps our focus should shift away from futile attempts to cut spending, and toward providing a meaningful and effective education for all students.

SOURCE: Morton, Emily, Paul Thompson, and Megan Kuhfeld, “A Multi-State, Student-Level Analysis of the Effects of the Four-Day School Week on Student Achievement and Growth,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (August 2022).

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show Podcast, Elliot Regenstein joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss his new book, which calls for changes in three areas of education policy: accountability, teacher pay, and school choice. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber Northern discusses a paper that identifies common transportation challenges for cities with lots of charter schools and other forms of school choice. 

Recommended content:

• Elliot’s new book: Education Restated: Getting Policy Right on Accountability, Teacher Pay, and School Choice (Rowman & Littlefield, August 2022).
• Amber’s article that she reviewed on the Research Minute: Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj, “Student Transportation in Choice-Rich Districts: Implementation Challenges and Responses,” Education Finance and Policy (April 2022).

Feedback Welcome!

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

Cheers

• Many schools responded to the financial challenges of Covid with surprising nimbleness, a trend that should outlast the pandemic. —Marguerite Roza and Katherine Silberstein 
• Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina is introducing legislation to nullify the Biden administration’s onerous charter school regulations. —Highland County Press
• Despite serving high-poverty communities, several school districts in the Rio Grande Valley earn high ratings in Texas’s school evaluation system. —Texas Tribune

  Jeers

• Fewer students in the early grades are developing basic phonics skills, show new testing data show. —The 74
• “Few Detroit third graders are held back under reading law, as district favors exemptions.” —Chalkbeat Detroit

• "The State of the American Student," —CRPE
• The twists and turns of the Choose Your Own Adventure series encouraged children to experience books—and the world—through exploration and curiosity. —New Yorker
• Flush with unprecedented windfalls of federal cash, but given little guidance on how to use it, many school districts struggle to spend billions in Covid relief funds. —New York Times Magazine
• Child poverty in American declined 59 percent since 1993, a drop aided by reforms to the federal safety net and to an increase in work among low-income parents. —New York Times
• Changes intended to improve the equity of math instruction in California could have the unintended consequence of shutting out students of color from advanced coursework. —The New Yorker