In his 2009 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama challenged Americans to “commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training…. Every American,” he said, “will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country.” During most of the last century, steady increases in the proportion of the labor force that had graduated from high school fueled the nation’s economic growth and rising incomes. The high school graduation rate for teenagers in the United States rose from 6 percent to 80 percent from 1900 to 1970. By the late 1960s, the U.S. ranked first among countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on this measure of educational attainment.

Between 1970 and 2000, however, the U.S. high-school graduation stagnated while in many other OECD countries it rose markedly. By 2000, the high school graduation rate in the United States ranked 13th among the 19 OECD countries for which comparable data are available.

Until quite recently, it appeared that this long stagnation had continued into the 21st century. Yet evidence from two independent sources now shows that, in fact, the graduation rate increased substantially between 2000 and 2010. The improvements were especially pronounced among blacks and Hispanics, who have long been far less likely to complete high school than their white peers.

Yet despite these encouraging trends, substantial graduation-rate gaps along lines of race, income, and gender persist. Moreover, graduation rates in other OECD countries also increased in the past decade. As a result, the U.S. high school graduation rate in 2010 was still below the OECD average.

What might explain these patterns in American graduation rates? Researchers from several social science disciplines have studied teenagers’ decisions about whether to persist in high school and earn a diploma. Sociologists tend to emphasize the roles of peer groups and school cultures. Many psychologists have examined teenagers’ decisions from a developmental perspective, recently enriched by evidence from neuroscience on brain development and the attraction of risk-taking during the teenage years. Ethnographers from various disciplines point out that for many youth, dropping out is a process rather than an explicit decision: irregular attendance leads to failed courses and eventually to the perception that the obstacles to graduation are overwhelming.

Economists, meanwhile, typically focus on factors that teenagers may consider in deciding whether to remain in school for another year. That is, most economic models posit that high school students are rational agents who weigh the expected benefits and costs. While there is no question that a great many teenagers do not plan beyond the next weekend, the relevant question when it comes to explaining trends is whether the degree of teenage myopia has changed over time.

As we demonstrate below, the available evidence from the economic perspective suggests that two factors are critical in explaining the stagnation that persisted until 2000: the growing availability of the GED (General Educational Development) credential and increases in the nonmonetary costs of completing high school. Even though high school graduates earned higher wages than dropouts, additional requirements for a high school diploma counteracted what were substantial economic returns to the credential. More difficult to explain is the recent increase in the graduation rate. Improvements in both school quality and the circumstances of at-risk students outside of school may have played a role.

Measuring Completion

Graduation rates can be calculated in various ways using various sources, including the U.S. Census and related household surveys; administrative data from school systems on the number of enrollees and graduates each year; and (more recently) longitudinal databases that track individual students over time. Estimates of high school graduation rates are very sensitive to the choice of data source. They are also sensitive to choices about how to use the data.

When determining how to measure the graduation rate for the nation as a whole, two decisions are particularly important:

Do you include GED recipients among high school graduates? If you do, rates are much higher. But employment and income outcomes for GED holders look more like those of high school dropouts than of high school graduates.

Do you include recent immigrants in the analysis? If you do, the graduation rate for Hispanics is much lower. It makes sense to include them if you are trying to understand what share of young adults are high school graduates, but not if you want to understand the performance of the nation’s school system in producing graduates over time.

The estimates reported below are based on the “adjusted status completion” approach used by Nobel Prize–winning economist James Heckman and co-author Paul LaFontaine to document trends over time. Status completion means estimating the share of 20- to 24-year-olds who have a high school degree in a given year, thus including all graduates rather than only those who complete high school on the expected four-year time line. Adjusted means that the approach 1) uses data from the GED Testing Service to count the number of GED recipients and to subtract this number from the total number of individuals who report that they completed high school, and 2) excludes from the calculation recent immigrants, in particular, those who came to the U.S. after age 11 and therefore were educated primarily in non-U.S. schools. Data are from the decennial censuses and the 2010 American Community Survey.

Graduation Rates over Time

The data reveal striking patterns in high school graduation rates between 1970 and 2010 (see Figure 1). After increasing rapidly for most of the 20th century, the high school graduation rate peaked at about 80 percent around 1970. During the subsequent 30 years, the graduation rate stagnated or fell slightly. The estimated status completion rate in 2000 for 20- to 24-year-olds in the United States, excluding recent immigrants, was 77.6 percent.

High school graduation rates have been consistently lower for black and Hispanic youth than for white youth. Again, excluding recent immigrants, the percentage of 20- to 24-year-olds identified as black or Hispanic almost doubled between 1970 (13.9 percent) and 2000 (26.9 percent). Changes in the makeup of the population during this time period therefore depressed the graduation rate as measured for the population as a whole, accounting for at least 75 percent of the overall decrease. Even so, the decline in the graduation rate of whites was almost as large as that for the population as a whole.

Between 2000 and 2010, the overall trend changed. The U.S. high school graduation rate increased by 6 percentage points, a substantial shift in a relatively short period of time. The rate of growth over the decade was quite steady. Not all racial and ethnic groups saw an equal rise in educational attainment, however. Figure 1 shows that the graduation rates of black and Hispanic youth born in the late 1980s were more than 10 percentage points higher than those of comparable youth born a decade earlier. As a result, the black-white and Hispanic-white gaps in graduation rates narrowed to 8.1 and 8.5 percentage points, respectively.

A gender gap favoring females opened in the 1970s and grew steadily throughout the remainder of the 20th century (see Figure 2). During the first decade of the 21st century, gender gaps in graduation rates fell, especially among Hispanics, even though graduation rates for females in all of the major racial and ethnic groups rose. The gap narrowed because the graduation rates of males, especially Hispanics, experienced greater increases. Yet even with these increases, the high school graduation rate is still higher for females than for males in each of the major racial and ethnic groups, and particularly among black youth (12.2 percentage points among 20- to 24-year-olds in 2010).

Explaining Stagnation

The long period of stagnation in graduation rates between 1970 and 2000 is especially puzzling given that the financial rewards for completing high school rose sharply during these years. The growth in the wage gap between dropouts and high school graduates, particularly during the 1980s, stemmed largely from changes in the economy that increased the demand for particular skills during a period in which the supply of workers possessing those skills grew more slowly. All else being equal, these wage trends should have caused the graduation rate to increase. So why didn’t it?

One possible explanation is that general wage trends do not reflect the expected wages for adolescents on the margin of dropping out of school. A substantial proportion of students enter high school without the skills needed to complete graduation requirements. Many teenagers who drop out may correctly perceive that, as a result of their low cognitive skill levels or unproductive behavioral characteristics, they are unlikely to earn much more as a high school graduate than they would as a dropout, and certainly not enough to offset the negative experience of attending classes and completing work for which they are ill prepared.

In fact, economists Zvi Eckstein and Kenneth Wolpin show that, among white males who entered 9th grade in the early 1980s, those who failed to graduate from high school had lower academic skills and were less motivated for schoolwork than those who did graduate. One explanation for the stagnation of the high school graduation rate, then, is that by the early 1970s, the four out of five students who entered high school with the skills and behavioral traits necessary to benefit from a high school diploma were receiving one. One in five teenagers had very weak academic skills and/or behavioral tendencies not attractive to employers and therefore would not benefit much from a high school diploma, at least given the then-prevalent “shopping mall” structure of most American public high schools.

Potential criticism of this explanation comes from research on compulsory school-attendance laws. Several studies find that that the labor-market payoff to adolescents completing an additional year of schooling as a result of being compelled to attend is as large as 10 percent. But these studies do not provide information on the benefits of remaining in school for students who fail to pass the core courses required to progress to the next grade level, a pattern that is particularly prevalent for black and Hispanic youth. Although laws compelling 16-year-olds to remain in school for an additional year increased by 0.16 years the average number of years of schooling that white teenagers completed, they had no impact on the number of years of schooling black and Hispanic teenagers completed.

Despite the overall pattern of stagnation, the graduation rates of black males, after increasing for several decades, fell sharply between 1986 and 1996. William Evans and colleagues attribute this decline to the emergence of the crack cocaine market, which increased the murder rate, the incarceration rate, and the opportunity for illicit employment for black males. All of these factors reduced the economic value of a high school diploma for black males. While crack did not disappear altogether from American cities by the end of the century, it ceased to have a large impact on the graduation rates of black males because stabilization of markets reduced homicide rates markedly.

Gender gaps in educational attainment, which are not unique to the United States, are more difficult to explain using conventional economic models than gaps based on socioeconomic status or race, because males and females grow up in the same families and attend the same schools.Recent evidence provides one possible explanation for the especially large gender gap in high school graduation rates among blacks and Hispanics. Changes in judicial policies, particularly those related to drug offenses, have led to a large increase in the incarceration rate of minority males. Black and Hispanic females appear to have responded to the consequent reduction in the number of marriageable men by completing more schooling.

Alternative Credentials

Student willingness to expend time and effort to acquire a high school diploma may well depend on the attractiveness and cost of alternatives, the most common of which is the GED. Between 1970 and 1995, the percentage of new high-school completion credentials awarded through GED certification rose from 2 percent to 17 percent, with approximately half of GED recipients in the 16 to 20 age group. Factors contributing to the growing role of the GED during the last three decades of the 20th century include reductions in the minimum age for taking the exams, investments by states in GED preparation programs, the creation and expansion of programs to prepare incarcerated individuals to take the GED examinations, and increased requirements for receipt of a conventional high-school diploma.

Does the availability of the GED lead some teenagers to drop out of high school who, in the absence of the GED, would graduate? In recent work, Heckman and his colleagues exploit sudden changes in GED policies within specific states to answer this question. For example, they show that the California legislature’s decision to make the GED available to civilians in 1974 lowered the high school graduation rate by 3.6 percentage points for males and by 2.6 percentage points for females. Conversely, a 1997 increase in the GED minimum score requirements of several states reduced the dropout rate among black and Hispanic 12th graders by 4.4 and 7 percentage points, respectively.

These displacement effects matter because, on average, GED recipients do not fare as well in the labor market and in postsecondary education as conventional high-school graduates. The poor track record of GED recipients reflects weaknesses in socioemotional skills such as motivation and persistence, skills that high school graduates demonstrate by completing course requirements. Heckman and Yona Rubinstein have therefore characterized the GED as a “mixed signal,” one that indicates to potential employers that the recipient has mastered basic cognitive skills but is unlikely to have the socioemotional skills that result in regular attendance and punctuality, which employers generally value.

Teenagers with stronger cognitive skills leave high school for myriad reasons—they dislike school, they experience problems at home, or they are expecting a child. The modal reason they take the GED tests is to gain access to funding for postsecondary education or training. Indeed, 43 percent of GED recipients enter college or training programs within six years of obtaining the credential. However, only half of these return for the second semester, and very few complete a degree program. This explains why the GED credential provides little or no economic benefit to these recipients.

In summary, the availability of the GED credential leads some teenagers to drop out of school who otherwise would have persisted to graduation. Its increasing availability to teenagers between 1970 and 2000 likely contributed to the stagnation of the high school graduation rate.

Nonmonetary Costs

Increases in the nonmonetary cost of obtaining a high school diploma may also help explain the stagnation of the graduation rate in the three decades prior to 2000. This line of reasoning has two parts: first, requirements for earning a high school diploma increased, and second, the expanded requirements had a negative impact on the graduation rate of vulnerable groups. We consider the two parts in turn.

In response to the slow rate of economic growth after 1973, states took a number of actions to improve the skills of students graduating from public high schools. Nineteen states introduced minimum competency tests for graduation. These early steps were followed by increased course requirements and more challenging exit examinations, all of which raised the cost of obtaining a high school diploma for students with weak academic preparation.

The watershed document on the quality of the nation’s public school system was A Nation at Risk, published in 1983. The authors recommended that a condition for receipt of a high school diploma be that students complete four years of English and three years of mathematics, science, and social studies, and many states complied. By the early 1990s, attempts to improve public education had morphed into the standards-based education reform agenda, often called test-based accountability. Although details vary from state to state, standards-based education reforms typically include content standards that specify what students should know and be able to do, performance standards that specify the levels of performance students should satisfy, assessments that measure the extent to which students meet performance standards, and incentives for students and educators to meet the standards.

Although not without exceptions, the evidence generally indicates that more stringent graduation requirements reduced high school graduation rates among vulnerable groups, specifically low-achieving students (including those with learning disabilities), students of color, and urban low-income students. Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob, for example, report that exit exam requirements reduced high school graduation rates by about 2 percentage points, with larger effects in states with more difficult examinations, and with effects concentrated among black students and among students in districts with large percentages of students of color. It is important to bear in mind that states increased high school graduation requirements and introduced other aspects of standards-based education reforms in order to improve the quality of education students receive and to make a high school diploma a stronger signal of skill mastery. Advocates of standards-based education reforms can point to accomplishments. For example, comparisons of the transcripts of 1990 and 2009 high school graduates reveal that larger percentages of 2009 graduates from all major racial and ethnic groups completed a rigorous curriculum than did comparable 1990 graduates, and, on average, 2009 graduates completed about 420 more hours of coursework than did 1990 graduates. Nonetheless, the imposition of stricter requirements does appear to have played a role in reducing graduation rates for vulnerable groups.

Explaining the Rise

If increases in high school graduation requirements during the last quarter of the 20th century contributed to the stagnation in graduation rates, why did rates rise during the first decade of the 21st century, a period in which high school graduation requirements were not reduced and in some states were increased? By the 2011–12 school year, 70 percent of all public high-school students had to pass at least one exit examination to obtain a high school diploma, a hurdle that may certainly have precluded some students from graduating.

To our knowledge, there is no compelling explanation for the overall growth in the 2000s or for the especially large increases in the graduation rates of black and Hispanic students. Yet evidence from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) provides some clues. Figure 3 displays trends by racial or ethnic group between 1978 and 2008 in mathematics and reading scores for 13-year-olds from the NAEP Long-Term Trend Assessment. We focus on the scores of students at the 25th percentile of the distribution of achievement for each group, because it is low-performing students who are at greatest risk of not graduating from high school.

The 25th percentile math score for black 13-year-olds was virtually unchanged between 1986 and 1999. In contrast, between 1999 and 2008, it rose by approximately 0.35 standard deviations, equivalent to more than a full grade level. The pattern for Hispanics is similar, with the 25th percentile math score remaining almost unchanged between 1986 and 1996, and then increasing by 0.38 standard deviations between 1996 and 2008. The 25th percentile mathematics score for 13-year-old white students also increased, but by just 0.29 standard deviations over the same period. The trends in 13-year-old reading scores are somewhat different, but equally striking. Between 1988 and 1994, the 25th percentile reading score of blacks and Hispanics fell by 0.25 and 0.13 standard deviations, respectively. Between 1996 and 2008, the corresponding scores increased by 0.36 and 0.11 standard deviations.

Thus, evidence from the NAEP indicates improvement over the last 10 to 15 years in reading and mathematics achievement among students entering high school at the bottom of the skill distribution. This may have reduced the nonmonetary costs of completing high school graduation requirements. Moreover, the impact may have been particularly great for black and Hispanic students larger shares of whom enter high school with weak mathematics skills than of white students.

Schools or Society?

It is not clear why the academic skills of 13-year-olds at the bottom of the skills distribution have risen. It could be the result of improved schooling in Grades K–8, perhaps due to the standards-based reform efforts discussed above.

However, it could also stem from improvements in the out-of-school circumstances of American children most at risk of academic failure.

Between 1980 and 2000, the fraction of U.S. four-year-olds enrolled in classroom-based preschool programs rose from one-half to two-thirds. This trend could have resulted in more children acquiring the cognitive and socioemotional skills needed for success in school.

In addition, the birth rate among 15- to 17-year-old girls declined by 44 percent between 1990 and 2008, and by 60 percent among black teens. Because children born to teenage mothers are prone to develop problems that inhibit academic success, this trend could have contributed to both the increases in the mathematics skills of 13-year-olds and to an increase in the high school graduation rate. Moreover, the decline in the teenage birth rate could have reduced the number of girls who left school to care for children and thus resulted in higher graduation rates.

Yet another salutary trend is a 47 percent decline between 1994 and 2009 in the arrest rate of teenagers for violence-related offenses. One of several reasons this could have contributed to a rise in the high school graduation rate is that involvement with the criminal justice system typically results in a marked increase in absences from school.

Finally, it is possible that the introduction of more difficult GED examinations in 2002, which resulted in a temporary decline in the number of 16- to 18-year-olds obtaining the credential, contributed to the increase in the high school graduation rate during the decade ending in 2010. In 2002, after the GED Testing Service introduced a more difficult set of GED tests, the percentage of high school completers receiving the GED dropped from 17 to 10 percent. Since 2004, it has held steady at about 12 percent, again with about half of GEDs going to 16- to 20-year-olds.

Conclusions

Understanding the role of school improvement efforts and nonschool factors will be important to designing policies that contribute to continued increases in educational attainment, especially if new requirements tied to the Common Core standards raise graduation requirements further.

An assumption implicit in existing state education policies is that the quality of schooling will improve sufficiently to enable high school graduation rates to rise even as graduation requirements are stiffened. It has proven much more difficult to improve school quality than to legislate increases in graduation requirements, however. One reason is that a large percentage of the economically disadvantaged students most affected by the more stringent graduation requirements enter school with weak cognitive and socioemotional skills, which tend to trail them throughout their school careers. Economically disadvantaged students also tend to be concentrated in a subset of the nation’s schools where peer group influences hinder a positive learning environment. Conventional comprehensive high schools do not engage the interest and effort of many teenagers, especially those who enter with weak skills. Finally, graduation rates may be depressed by the use of the GED option by a significant number of students, particularly black and Hispanic students, in some cases with encouragement from high school staff.

Raising the high school graduation rate will require a set of complementary investments and structural changes in the education system. Investments aimed at improving the school readiness of economically disadvantaged children are critical. So are policies to increase the quality of teaching in schools serving high concentrations of poor children so they do not enter 9th grade without the skills and behaviors to succeed in high school. Finally, it seems important to create a variety of high school options for students, including ones that provide significant experiences in workplace settings, and clear connections between the skills students are asked to master and access to jobs that make use of these skills.

Richard Murnane is professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where Stephen Hoffman is a doctoral student. This essay is adapted from an article in the June 2013 issue of the Journal of Economic Literature.

Ask any high school student in a well-heeled suburban community around the United States the best strategy for applying to college, and chances are you’ll hear something like this: apply to several schools, most with students whose grades and test scores are similar to your own. But be sure to include one or two “safeties” at which admission is all but guaranteed and a couple of “reaches.” And data on the colleges to which high-achieving, high-income students apply and that they attend suggest that they are paying attention.

The situation for low-income students appears to be quite different. The vast majority of even very high achieving students from low-income families do not apply to a single selective college or university. In other words, having worked hard in high school to prepare themselves well for college, they do not even apply to the colleges whose curriculum is most geared toward students with their level of preparation.

This is particularly puzzling because there are good reasons why many of these students should attend more-selective colleges. First, they are likely to succeed if they do. The high-achieving, low-income students who do apply are admitted, enroll, progress, and graduate at the same rates as high-income students with equivalent test scores and grades. Second, taking into account financial aid, low-income students generally face lower net costs at selective institutions than at the far less-selective institutions with fewer resources that most of them attend (see Figure 1).

One potential explanation for this pattern of behavior is that high-achieving, low-income students do not have access to good information about college quality and costs. These students are quite dispersed throughout the country and are often the only high-achieving student or one of just a few such students in their school. Thus, their high school counselor is unlikely to have much expertise regarding selective colleges and likely to be focused on other issues. Nor are recruiting visits to their high school or community likely to be cost-effective for college admissions staff. Moreover, it is often the case that neither parents nor other trusted adults are able to fill the deficit in information about college quality and costs for high-achieving low-income students. In short, traditional information channels may bypass high-achieving, low-income students, even if counselors and admissions staff conscientiously do everything that they can for these students.

Many low-income students may therefore be poorly informed about their college opportunities or deterred by apparently small barriers such as the paperwork required to request a waiver for application fees. Although a great deal of relevant information is available on the Internet, it is not easy for an inexperienced student to distinguish reliable sources of information on college admission standards, curricula, and net costs from the numerous unreliable (sometimes egregiously misleading) sources that are also online. Furthermore, many available information sources assume that low-income students are low-achieving and offer guidance that reflects this assumption. Because high-achieving, low-income students are atypical, these materials, aimed at students who are at the margin of attending any college, will provide little assistance.

For this study, we designed an experiment to test whether some high-achieving, low-income students would change their behavior if they knew more about colleges and, more importantly, whether we can construct a cost-effective way to help such students realize their full array of college opportunities. We do so by randomly assigning interventions that provide different types of information to roughly 18,000 students, including 3,000 students who serve as controls. The most comprehensive form of the intervention, which we call the Expanding College Opportunities-Comprehensive (ECO-C) Intervention, combined application guidance, semicustomized information about the net cost of attending different colleges, and no-paperwork application fee waivers.

The ECO-C Intervention costs just $6 per student, yet we find that it causes high-achieving, low-income students to apply and be admitted to more colleges, especially to more of those with high graduation rates and generous instructional resources. The students who receive the ECO-C Intervention respond to their expanded opportunities by enrolling in colleges that have students with stronger academic records, more instructional resources, and higher graduation rates. Their first-year grades in college are as good as those of the control students, despite the fact that the control students attend less-selective colleges, where the other students’ preparation for college is substantially inferior to their own.

The Expanding College Opportunities Project

We designed the Expanding College Opportunities Project to test several hypotheses about why most high-achieving, low-income students do not apply to and attend selective colleges. The application guidance component of ECO-C provides the kind of advice that an expert college counselor would give a high-achieving student. An expert counselor would advise such a student to apply to eight or more colleges, including a combination of “safety,” “match,” and “reach” colleges. We call this group of colleges that are within an appropriate range for a given student’s achievement “peer” colleges.

An expert counselor would also advise a student to obtain letters of reference; take college assessments on schedule; send verified assessment scores to colleges; write application essays; complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid and the CSS Profile (an additional form required by many colleges that offer the most generous financial aid); and meet all other deadlines and requirements of selective colleges’ applications. Finally, an expert college counselor would advise a student to compare colleges on the basis of their curricula, instructional resources, other resources (housing, extracurricular opportunities), and outcomes (such as graduation rates).

ECO-C includes application guidance along these lines and gives students timely and customized reminders about deadlines and requirements. It also provides students with comparative information on colleges’ graduation rates and other resources tailored to where students live. The student is always presented with the graduation rates of his nearest colleges, his state’s flagship public university, other in-state selective colleges, and a small number of out-of state selective colleges.

Even with this information, some students may focus unduly on colleges’ “list prices” (the tuition and fees that an affluent student who received no aid would pay) and fail to understand that net costs for students like themselves are much lower. Many low-income students may not realize that they would generally pay less to attend colleges that are more selective and have richer instructional and other resources.

ECO-C therefore provides students with information about net costs for low- to middle-income students at an array of colleges. This information is again semicustomized in that a student always receives the list prices, instructional spending per student, and net costs of his state’s public flagship university, at least one other in-state public college, nearby colleges, a selective private college in his state, one out-of-state private liberal arts college, and one out-of-state private selective university. The net-cost information is shown for hypothetical families with incomes of $20,000, $40,000, and $60,000.

The net-cost materials are not intended to give a student precise information but, rather, to demonstrate the fact that list prices are often substantially greater than net costs, especially at selective institutions. The materials emphasize the importance of application as a student will not learn exactly how much a given college will cost him unless he applies. The net-cost materials also explain how financial aid works, emphasize how crucial it is to complete the FAFSA and CSS Profile on time, clarify how a student’s Expected Family Contribution is computed, decipher a typical financial aid offer, and illustrate the trade-offs between loans, grants, and working while in college.

Finally, some low-income students may be deterred from applying to college by application fees. Such students may fail to realize that application fee waivers are available to them, or they may balk at filling out financial aid forms that will reveal their family income to a counselor. Or counselors may be too busy to do their part of the fee waiver process. ECO-C therefore provides students with no-paperwork fee waivers that allow them to apply to 171 selective colleges.

Data and Methods

In our main experiment, we randomly assigned each of 3,000 high-achieving, low-income 2011–12 high school seniors to the ECO-C Intervention and the same number of students to the control group. To be defined as high-achieving, we required that students score in the top 10 percent of test-takers on the College Board’s SAT I or the ACT (1,300 math plus verbal on the SAT, 28 on the ACT).

We identified low-income students by combining student data from the College Board and ACT with data from an array of sources that allow us to estimate whether a student comes from a low-income family. We started with data that contain a student’s SAT I or ACT scores, neighborhood, and high school. We then matched each student to 454 additional variables that describe the sociodemographics of his neighborhood, the sociodemographics and other characteristics of his high school, the history of college application and attendance among former students of his high school, the scores of former students of his high school on college assessments and statewide high school exams, and incomes in his zip code. We used all of this information to produce an estimate of each student’s family income. We then focused our analysis on students with estimated family incomes in the bottom one-third of the income distribution for families with a 12th grader.

Finally, we exclude from our main analysis students who attended a “feeder” high school, which we define as one in which more than 30 students in each grade typically score in the top 10 percent on college assessment exams. We focused on high-achieving, low-income students from nonfeeder schools because we hypothesized (and the early data confirmed) that they would be more affected by the ECO-C Intervention than students who attend a high school with a critical mass of high-achieving students.

To study students’ responses to the ECO-C Intervention, we obtained two sources of data on their application behavior, admissions outcomes, and college enrollment. First, we surveyed students each summer after they were selected for an ECO treatment or control group. Second, we collected information on their enrollment, persistence, and progress toward a degree from the National Student Clearinghouse. These data are reported by postsecondary institutions and cover 96 percent of students enrolled in colleges and universities in the United States.

In a large randomized experiment such as this, we can estimate the effect of receiving the intervention by simply comparing the average outcomes of the treatment and control groups. We present the results of these comparisons in two different ways. First, we present some “intent to treat” results that compare outcomes for the treatment and control groups, regardless of whether they actually experienced the intervention. Second, we discuss in full the intervention’s effects on the 40 percent of students surveyed who could recall ever seeing ECO materials. We believe the latter results are more relevant for policy because a scaled-up version of the ECO-C Intervention would likely attract more attention from students and their families if it came from a widely known organization such as the College Board or ACT.

Effects of the ECO-C Intervention

The ECO-C Intervention has substantial effects on students’ behavior at each stage of the process of applying to and enrolling in college. For example, we find that the ECO-C Intervention causes an increase of 19 percent in the number of applications students submit (see Figure 2). It increases by 22 percent the likelihood that they apply to at least one peer college, which we define here as a college with students whose median SAT scores are within 5 percentile points of the applicants’ own scores.

Still, these results likely represent a lower bound on the effectiveness of the program. Many of the students may have disregarded the mailings as they did not recognize the ECO organization. We expect that the effectiveness of the program would have been greater had the materials been distributed by a well-known organization such as the College Board or ACT. Indeed, based on our surveys, roughly 60 percent of students assigned to receive ECO intervention materials could not recall receiving them. To the extent that students disregarded the materials, the effects of the program were diminished. To correct for this, we perform what economists call a “treatment on the treated” analysis to produce estimates of the effects that a trusted organization such as the College Board or ACT would achieve were it to conduct the intervention. Thus, if a student could at least recall having seen ECO materials, the ECO-C Intervention caused her to increase the number of applications submitted by nearly 48 percent and be 55 percent more likely to apply to a peer college. In the text and figures that follow, we focus on the estimates that adjust for the likelihood of exposure to the materials.

Because the students targeted by the ECO program have high college assessment scores and grades, we expected that they would be admitted to more-selective colleges if the intervention did, in fact, cause them to apply to such colleges. This expectation was correct. Students receiving the ECO-C intervention were admitted to 31 percent more colleges and were 78 percent more likely to be admitted to a peer college.

It is not obvious that the ECO-C Intervention should have affected college enrollment outcomes simply because it affected the colleges to which students applied and were admitted. After all, a student might be willing to invest the time and effort to apply to a college in order to learn about it and the financial aid package it would offer. The same student might, upon receiving this information, decide that the college was, after all, not for him.

But the ECO-C Intervention did, in fact, alter students’ enrollment decisions (see Figure 3). Students receiving the ECO-C materials enrolled in a college that was 46 percent more likely to be a peer institution, with a graduation rate 15 percent higher, instructional spending that was 22 percent higher, and student-related spending that was 26 percent higher.

Finally, we test whether students who attended more-selective colleges as a result of the ECO-C Intervention struggle in the more demanding environment. Although it is too soon to address this issue definitively, our preliminary results provide little cause for concern: despite being in a more competitive environment, these students earn similar grades and persist to the sophomore year at similar rates to those of their peers who did not receive the ECO-C intervention and attended less-selective colleges.

More Experiments

In addition to our main experiment testing the ECO-C Intervention’s effects on our target group of high-achieving, low-income students, we also used the same approach to study its effects on students who meet the same test-score criteria but who have estimated family income above the bottom one-third or attended a feeder high school. Although these students are outside our target group, this enabled us to test whether the effects of the ECO-C Intervention are different for the target students than for nontarget students. And, in fact, the results of this separate experiment confirmed that ECO-C generally had larger effects on our target group than on these other high achievers.

We also randomly assigned three groups of 3,000 students who met the criteria for our target group to receive just one of the three ECO-C components (application guidance, information on net costs, or fee waivers) rather than all three. This allowed us to test whether some parts of the ECO-C Intervention were more important than others. We found that the fee waivers tend to have larger effects on application behaviors, whereas the application guidance information tends to have larger effects on enrollment behaviors. The bottom line, however, is that the ECO-C Intervention as a whole tends to have larger effects than any of its parts. We therefore see no reason why an intervention based on our results should not incorporate all three components.

Costs and Benefits

The costs of the ECO-C Intervention are quite modest: approximately $6 per student to whom we sent materials. Because 60 percent of students could not recall looking at the materials (our minimal definition of treatment), the cost of actually treating a student was $15. We believe, however, that a reputable organization like the College Board or ACT could achieve a cost of treatment of approximately $6 simply because mail from such an organization would likely be opened and at least cursorily reviewed. Such an organization would presumably also have lower mailing and in-house printing costs than our small experimental organization had.

Even without those advantages, the benefits our intervention produced far exceeded its costs. For every $10 we spent, the ECO-C Intervention caused students to apply to four more colleges and to be 51 percentage points more likely to apply to a peer college. The same $10 caused students to enroll in colleges where graduation rates were 13 percentage points higher, instructional spending was $5,906 greater, and median SAT scores were 65 points higher. A growing body of evidence suggests that these differences in college quality will translate into substantial differences in the college graduation rates and lifetime earnings of the students who received the ECO-C Intervention.

The most prominent alternative strategy for influencing college-going behavior of low-income students, in-person counseling, typically costs upwards of $600 per student. Thus, in order to be as cost-effective as the ECO-C Intervention, such interventions would need to have effects that are at least 100 times as large. Needless to say, no existing in-person counseling interventions have been demonstrated to have this sort of impact.

It is worth noting that the ECO-C Intervention is likely a much more cost-effective means of changing students’ college-going behavior than reducing the cost of college through tuition reductions, grants, and other forms of aid. Importantly, the successful provision of information related to college choice through initiatives like ECO-C is likely to magnify the return to existing federal and state aid policies, while the return to high-cost interventions such as expanding the Pell grant program is likely to be very limited unless students possess sufficient information about college alternatives.

Conclusions

Using random assignment of thousands of students, we successfully demonstrated that a low-cost, fully scalable intervention can help many high-achieving, low-income students recognize their full array of college opportunities. The ECO-C Intervention leads students to apply to and enroll in colleges with higher graduation rates, greater instructional resources, and curricula that are more geared toward students with very strong preparation like their own. Put another way, the ECO-C Intervention closes part of the college-going behavior “gap” between low-income and high-income students with the same level of achievement. The high-achieving, low-income students who are induced to attend more-selective colleges do not earn lower grades than they would if they had enrolled at the less-selective colleges attended by the control students. Under any reasonable assumptions about the value to these students of attending a more-selective college, the benefits of the ECO-C Intervention far exceed its costs.

The social benefits of the ECO-C Intervention are harder to define in dollar terms, but they are the benefits associated with increased income and sociodemographic mobility for high-achieving students from low-income families. For instance, such students may “pave the way” to selective colleges for other students from their high schools or neighborhoods. Or, such students may inspire other low-income students to study more because their experience makes the benefits of high achievement more salient.

We are often asked why some large-scale intervention akin to the ECO-C Intervention does not already exist. Our answer is twofold. First, the database capabilities that power the intervention (but are extremely inexpensive per student) did not always exist. Second, no one postsecondary institution has the incentive to implement such an intervention, since many of the benefits would accrue to its competitors. That is, the benefits ECO-C Intervention produces are largely of a public nature. Thus, a natural host for such an intervention would be a consortium of colleges and universities or a related organization with social goals.

Caroline Hoxby is professor of economics at Stanford University. Sarah Turner is professor of economics and education at the University of Virginia.

An axiom of American education policy is that it waxes and wanes between equity and excellence. And these rhythms are attuned to the business cycle.

Take the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and Head Start, two fronts of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. As Charles Murray explained in his seminal work, Losing Ground, poverty wasn’t anywhere to be seen on the policy agenda in 1960. And for good reason: after 15 years of a booming economy, in the wake of the Great Depression and then World War II, poverty had dropped dramatically. Living conditions were on the rise. Prosperity was widely shared.

What changed? The civil rights movement became ascendant and started to raise expectations, Michael Harrington published The Other America, and the issue was suddenly on everyone’s lips. As political scientist James Stimson would say, the public’s mood had shifted. Just a few years later, President Johnson envisioned the Great Society and implored his countrymen to help the “forgotten fifth.” The timing was no coincidence, argues Murray. The country was eager to do something about poverty because it could afford to do so.

And so Title I and Head Start were born, and with them a focus on narrowing the gaps in educational opportunity between black and white, rich and poor. Equity was dominant.

Fast-forward to 1983. After a decade of oil shocks and stagflation, and growing economic threats from Japan, the U.S. economy was in the midst of its worst recession in a generation. Social programs were under attack. And A Nation at Risk was born, with its warnings about a “rising tide of mediocrity.” With Ronald Reagan’s help, the pendulum had shifted to excellence.

That’s where it stayed for the next 15 years, giving birth to several iterations of the standards movement, efforts to raise graduation standards, and the beginnings of test-based accountability.

By the late 1990s, the economy was roaring again. To everyone’s surprise, the national debt evaporated. Wages rose, even for the poorest. Equity came back in style. Achievement gaps were rediscovered, and soon No Child Left Behind was born, along with an obsession on the performance of “subgroups.”

What about the last few years? According to this historical pattern, the recession of 2008–09 should have jolted our discussions away from equity and back to excellence. Did it? Without the perspective of time, it’s hard to know for sure. But I decided to go looking for some early indicators. Have we changed the way we talk (or write) about education? Are issues of equity less commonly raised now than before the economic downturn? Are issues of excellence once again on the rise?

To find out, I looked for a few key words in the country’s newspaper archives since 2007, using LexisNexis. Specifically, I searched for “achievement gap” as illustrative of equity concerns, and “international competitiveness” as indicative of excellence. (For the latter, I included a search for “internationally competitive,” too.)

Figure 1 shows what I found. My hypothesis did not exactly pan out. Though the focus on the “achievement gap” took a hit in 2008 as the economy started to fall apart, it quickly rebounded. Meanwhile, “competitiveness,” a relatively uncommon term, peaked in 2010, and then subsided.

By this measure, at least, the recent recession was a mere speed bump on the race toward equity.

Maybe we’ll see things differently a few years from now. If the Common Core standards live up to their promise of raising the rigor of America’s tests—and schools—we might see this as a time of resurgence for excellence. Doubly so if Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s regulatory waivers of the No Child Left Behind Act take the pressure off schools for closing achievement gaps. Maybe the key factor is having a liberal Democrat in the White House—and maybe President Obama’s tenure will be seen as the last gasp for equity, the end of an era.

Maybe. For now, though, it appears that equity reigns supreme.

“By 2019 about 50 percent of courses will be delivered online,” wrote Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn in a pathbreaking essay in 2008 (“How Do We Transform Our Schools?” features, Summer 2008). Five years later, the authors stand by that prediction (see Forbes.com blog entry, May 30, 2013), though they expect most of the online delivery to be blended into traditional brick-and-mortar classrooms. In my view, the estimate, optimistic even when written, now seems out of reach. Although digital learning is making definite advances, it has yet to disrupt secondary education.

When it comes to higher education, however, the prediction is deadly accurate. Hardly a day passes without news of another institution joining the online stampede. As I write this, Coursera, a for-profit firm, announces that it is inviting professors in 10 state university systems—from New York and Colorado to Georgia, Tennessee, and New Mexico—to create online courses for the company to market. The firm, barely a year old, already offers 375 classes taught by some 500 professors from 80 different institutions. Meanwhile, the spread of online learning in K–12 education is halting, uncertain, and unsure, as Michael Horn reports to us in his fascinating survey of the state legislative landscape (“Digital Roundup,” features, Fall 2013).

Purveyors of conventional wisdom place the blame on either students or teachers for the difference between secondary and higher education. College students, they say, can be expected to study on their own, while high school students need to be motivated (or pushed) by classroom teachers. Yet we all have met a plethora of highly motivated 16-year-olds and been appalled by gaggles of slovenly 20-somethings.

Or the problem may lie with their teachers. Many of today’s secondary-school teachers were trained in the predigital era and chose the profession for its dependable salaries and tenure guarantee. Anticipating few rewards, most teachers are reluctant to spend time inquiring into the latest innovations.

As compelling as the latter arguments may be, they apply no less to the college professoriate. When San Jose State University decided to offer for credit an online Harvard-based course in political theory, its professors went ballistic. Fifty of my Harvard colleagues recently signed a letter complaining about the university’s venture into online learning. At a recent seminar, I listened to many of them insist that students could learn only if a professor was at the other end of the log, or at least wandering about the room. Research would suffer if colleges could no longer demand high tuitions. Above all, jobs would be lost.

Despite faculty objections, online learning is hardly missing a step as it marches across the higher education landscape, even while it is being bottled up at the secondary level into just a few cutting-edge charter and district schools. Why?

Surely, the best explanation is that old stalwart: competition breeds innovation, while monopolies stultify it. School districts are monopolies that operate within a state regulatory framework that insists that high school students not take any online courses unless they take all courses online at an all-virtual school that can admit only a limited number of students. Only in a few instances can students choose between course providers. Other digital-learning initiatives are no less burdened with restrictions.

By comparison, higher education looks like the Wild West in the days before marshals and sheriffs. Students pick their college, and federal and state money helps to pay the cost via scholarships, Pell grants, and student loans, creating a free-for-all battle for student applications. Nor does a provider need government approval to enter the higher education space. A college has to be accredited, but entrepreneurs can turn even marginal ones into profitable, inexpensive, largely online institutions of higher education. Other colleges must then cut costs to survive. Higher education is doomed to suffer changes not unlike those that have swept through the print media.

Perhaps then the transformation of the K–12 system will begin.

—Paul E. Peterson

The past few years have seen a raft of efforts to reform teacher evaluation, pay, and tenure. Amid all this, less attention has been paid to another thorny question, the role of teacher preparation in licensing teachers for the field. In this issue’s forum, both contributors agree that teacher preparation requires some big changes. Making the case that teacher preparation demands innovation and ongoing evaluation is David Chard, dean of the school of education at Southern Methodist University. Arguing that teacher licensure ought to be retooled but retained is James G. Cibulka, president of the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation.

• David Chard: Training Must Focus on Content and Pedagogy

• James G. Cibulka: Strengthen Oversight of Teacher Preparation

What happens inside the classroom is the most critical ingredient in ensuring that all students are able to achieve their career goals. Improving educational attainment for all students in today’s schools can only happen if we improve the quality of teaching.

Just over 30 years ago, I decided to become a classroom teacher, specifically a teacher of mathematics and chemistry. I was prepared at a midsize university in the Midwest. Despite the university’s great reputation for teacher preparation, faculties in mathematics and chemistry discouraged me from the profession, noting that I was not going to be adequately compensated, would work in difficult conditions, and would be much happier in industry. This should have been a message to me that as a society we had moved down a path that dissuades the best and brightest from seeing teaching as a viable career option.

Nevertheless, I was hired to teach mathematics in California in 1985. At the time, like today, far fewer individuals were being prepared to be mathematics teachers in California than the state needed. Many of us were hired from the Midwest and from eastern states, and given emergency certification in California conditioned on passing a course on California history and the National Teacher Exam in mathematics. I didn’t realize then that my experience in California was the beginning of 30 years of slow but steady decline in the quality of candidates we were attracting and preparing to teach in our schools.

Over that period, it has become clear that current state control of teacher preparation and licensing does not ensure that teachers will be of high quality. State regulations that promote a one-size-fits-all approach to teacher preparation have limited our ability to innovate, customize, and study features of preparation programs that may positively affect student achievement. Bold new approaches to teacher preparation that are thoroughly evaluated for effectiveness in the classroom are long overdue.

What’s Wrong with the System

Each state sets standards for teacher certification largely through its regulation of the teacher preparation programs that are operated by the institutions of higher education located within its boundaries. With few exceptions, this approach is unsatisfactory. In most states, in order for a program to recommend teachers for certification, it must meet a series of requirements that read like a laundry list. In my home state of Texas, for example, the State Board for Educator Certification (SBEC) requires that in addition to the content standards specified for each grade band, the curriculum for teacher preparation programs must include 17 specific subjects of study. On the surface, there is nothing wrong with any of them. However, given as a list, none appear to have any particular emphasis (i.e., learning theories (#5) seems as important as parent communication (#13) and motivation (#4)); they are not tailored to fit the needs of teachers in any specific context (i.e., urban or rural, turnaround or successful); and they do not consider the developmental stage of the student as it relates to each topic. Perhaps most importantly, this approach assumes a state-held knowledge base on optimal teacher preparation, which simply doesn’t exist. The insistence that all preparation programs cover these topics discourages innovation or research on more effective approaches to teacher preparation.

What Makes Teachers Effective?

By all accounts, it is difficult to define precisely what sets good teachers apart from ineffective teachers or even average teachers. We do know that effectiveness in today’s classroom is multidimensional.

It is difficult to conceive of an effective teacher who doesn’t have a deep understanding of content knowledge. Deep understanding starts with the content itself (e.g., proportional reasoning, Shakespeare, the Krebs cycle), learned through disciplinary study. Content knowledge has to be backed up with experience in designing instruction that conveys content most effectively, enabling students to achieve mastery. In other words, knowing how to solve mathematical problems using proportions falls short of the content knowledge needed for teaching proportional reasoning. An effective teacher must be able to determine where students’ understanding has broken down and how to support their cognition.

Unfortunately, it is difficult and time-consuming to master content knowledge and even more so to become an expert teacher. Mastery comes only with adequate experience and professional support. Certainly, in the process of preparation, we can instruct new teachers in how to recognize when students don’t understand and how to identify their needs, but the numerous possible variations that underlie students’ difficulties reduce the likelihood that new teachers will be experts from the start.

Pedagogical knowledge and skills require an understanding of a child’s development involving biology, developmental psychology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, behavioral psychology, and cultural anthropology. That’s just to work with one child. When we place students together in groups, we have to consider sociocultural factors, systems dynamics, learning histories, and relationship histories. Then we get down to the engineering of instruction: how to plan and deliver content to groups of students who enter the classroom each day or each period. Teachers must estimate students’ level of understanding and take an approach to teaching that will stimulate curiosity and engagement with the content.

I highlight these two components of teaching because they seem to be the most central to the work of teacher preparation programs. In short, they represent the development of a teacher’s knowledge of the “what” and “how” of teaching. Recent advancements in education research have brought a new lens to these two areas and suggest that in many cases, teacher preparation programs are not currently designed to provide adequate content knowledge or to teach pedagogical practices that are supported by research evidence. The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) (see “21st-Century Teacher Education,” features, Summer 2013) has launched an initiative that will identify those teacher-preparation programs that set high standards with regard to content and pedagogy. As NCTQ found in its analysis, far too few teacher-preparation programs currently provide what is necessary for a new teacher to be successful.

Ideally, our system of teacher preparation would also determine who has the personality and disposition to be a teacher before preparation begins, and ensure that they develop the skills and professionalism needed to be effective within a school. These areas lie on the margin of what is currently in the purview of teacher preparation programs. In addition, there is compelling evidence that the quality of the individuals who are attracted to the field may be more powerful than differences in teacher preparation programs. Recent efforts by the newly formed Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) to establish stronger criteria for selecting top-notch candidates are a step in the right direction.

Setting the bar higher is only the first step, however. Over the past several decades, fewer and fewer well-qualified candidates have seen teaching as an acceptable career choice. On average, U.S. teachers earn only about two-thirds of the salaries of other professions with comparable preparation, there is little room for advancement within the profession, and the working conditions in many public schools are challenging at best. Teacher preparation programs alone can’t adequately attract a pool of strong new teachers to the field. One of the most promising outcomes of initiatives such as Teach For America (TFA) is that it helps bring to schools well-educated college graduates who might otherwise not have considered education as a career option. But even TFA falls short of filling the need for new teachers in the next decade. Without powerful new incentives, it seems fewer high-quality teachers will be drawn to the field.

What’s the Solution?

In an effort to create immediate and enduring improvements in student outcomes, most states have adopted Common Core State Standards or other content standards that reflect higher expectations for student learning than previous iterations. Efforts to establish similarly comprehensive standards for teacher preparation, such as those being developed by CAEP, should be applauded. We should not simply adopt new teacher competencies, however, without a thoughtful and strategic plan for evaluation and evidence-based revision of our teacher-preparation programs.

I envision the first steps in this process to be a broad and inclusive conversation that brings the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors together to forge a concrete plan for studying and strengthening teacher preparation. While the conversation would be broad, the agenda should be narrow and focus on three immediate needs: 1) radically improving the quality of candidates coming to the field; 2) identifying the specific content of coursework necessary to improve teacher knowledge; and 3) and detailing the practical experiences that new teachers need in order to ensure they are effective in the types of classroom contexts in which they plan to teach. This conversation will require a thoughtful analysis of why our system of teacher preparation has not changed appreciably for decades and what we need to do to make needed changes happen.

In terms of the optimal content of teacher preparation programs, we have only begun to understand what specific amounts of knowledge and skills one needs to possess to be an effective classroom teacher. We also know very little about how those needs change depending on students’ developmental stages (e.g., pre-K, middle school) and the teaching context (e.g., urban, suburban, rural). It’s easy to see where content is absent, however. Even without empirical evidence, we can make logical decisions about how to improve the quality and quantity of the most important knowledge and skills. For example, it is common in many elementary-educator preparation programs to see few courses on the science of reading instruction or on mathematics content. These limitations should be immediately addressed. Another example involves how little teachers understand about the home language and culture of their students. This is particularly important given the dramatic demographic shifts we are witnessing in most of our country. Efforts to understand the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that are critical to sustained success in the classroom are under way, but further state and federal investment in research is needed to guide the reform of preparation programs.

Finally, we need to encourage experimentation with the practical requirements of teacher preparation. At my institution, we assume that more experience in the classroom than is required by state regulation provides teacher candidates with valuable practice and important information regarding their choices of where to teach. However, the “more is better” approach has not been adequately evaluated. As an example, teacher residency programs have captured interest nationally, but we have only limited evidence of their effectiveness compared to more traditional teacher-preparation programs. Again, logical analyses remain our only short-term tool for making informed decisions, but more evidence is needed to improve our practice.

At a recent dinner for incoming merit scholars to our university, I asked several of them whether they had considered teaching as an option. There was collective nervous laughter. One young lady said that they would never teach because they knew it paid poorly, the working conditions were not good, there was little respect for teachers, and there were no opportunities to advance and lead. Here was a high school senior unwittingly communicating key changes that need to be made to attract high-quality teachers to our field. We will need to set a significantly higher bar for admission to the teaching field and, at the same time, muster financial and professional incentives (e.g., salary, retirement, and career opportunities) to boost interest among our very best candidates for teaching. In addition, attracting top-notch teachers will require more investment in our knowledge of the impact of pay-for-performance models.

Shortly after the turn of the last century, physician preparation in the United States was examined critically for its quality. The results were significant improvements in medical school quality, higher standards for admission, and higher medical costs overall. Similar improvements to teacher preparation could result in better teaching and improved learning outcomes for students. Likewise, these changes will likely require a significant investment in research and development to fuel improved practices and to inform teacher preparation. If we want better teaching, we will have to pay for it.

This article is part of a forum on developing better educators. For another take, please see “Strengthen State Oversight of Teacher Preparation“ by James G. Cibulka.

As the president of the sole specialized accreditor for educator preparation, I certainly agree with Dr. Chard’s assertion that “[i]mproving educational attainment for all students in today’s schools can only happen if we improve the quality of teaching.” As Dr. Chard mentions in his essay, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) is already working toward some of the solutions proposed through development of the next generation of accreditation standards for educator preparation as well as convening a data task force to provide guidance and help determine some of the very research questions for studying and strengthening educator preparation, as Dr. Chard suggests.

While one of the hallmarks of CAEP as a new kind of accreditor is its focus on research and evidence that will further advance the field of educator preparation, this does not negate the need for a reformed teacher-licensure system.

Like many other features of our Pre-K–12 school system, the current design of teacher licensing, or certification as it’s often called, has outlived its usefulness. It was suited to a bygone era when the nation’s principal concern was to produce teachers that “do no harm” to their students. This concept of primum non nocere, originally applied to medical ethics, set a low bar for entrants to teaching. It seems strangely out of place today, when expectations for teachers emphasize their competence to help all learners become successful in a knowledge-based, globally competitive economy. Yet eliminating teacher licensure altogether likely would be to worsen the current dysfunctions. I will offer strategies for reforming teacher licensure that I believe have greater potential for success.

The Impact of Teacher Licensing

Some economists argue that the social and economic costs of licensure outweigh its benefits by reducing economic growth and/or the distribution of economic benefits. They argue that by invoking licensure, government improperly values the special interests of the practitioner over other interests. These criticisms date back to Adam Smith, but were given currency by Milton Friedman, who argued that government and professional associations were using licensure to reassert the monopoly of cartels by creating market entry restrictions.

Other economists, however, reject this critique of licensure in favor of a theory of “market failure.” According to this perspective, governmental intervention in the market, via such activities as professional licensing, can be justified when the market fails to operate efficiently. Market failure occurs when it is difficult for the consumer to judge the qualifications of a provider or the quality of a provider’s work.

The empirical evidence is mixed. With the pathways into teaching growing in number, including training programs offered outside of higher education, it is hard to argue that current licensure policies substantially restrict entry, for example. And even critics acknowledge that licensing may lead to benefits such as higher-quality outcomes for those who obtain services from licensed professionals.

For many critics of teacher licensure, the gold standard is whether it promotes or impedes student learning. Yet research on the impact of licensure on student outcomes is inconclusive, with some studies finding little, if any, difference among traditionally certified and uncertified teachers and others finding substantially higher student test scores among traditionally certified teachers.

The comparisons in a number of such studies are complicated by the fact that teachers self-select into teaching with different skills sets and training, and they are not, of course, randomly assigned to schools, making inferences about their productivity imperfect at best. Moreover, labels can be confusing. Alternative approaches to licensure often are equated with the term “uncertified,” yet individuals taking an alternative route are typically intending to become fully licensed while they teach. Alternative paths to certification may produce different outcomes in the field than traditional paths. An analysis by Paul Peterson and Daniel Nadler found that states that encourage alternative licensure have greater diversity in their teacher pools, for example (see “What Happens When States Have Genuine Alternative Certification?” check the facts, Winter 2009). Given these complications, the most that can be said is that the research has not shown licensure by itself to have a negative or positive effect on student learning.

Teacher Licensure in the States

Current licensure requirements vary significantly among states, as reported by the testing company Educational Testing Service (ETS):

Praxis: Thirty-six states accept the Praxis exam to establish basic skills proficiency (Praxis I), content knowledge (Praxis II), or both. Thirty-four of these require either the Praxis I or II specifically for at least one level of licensure, generally for the initial level. However, the score required to pass varies considerably: on a 100-point scale, the most demanding states tend to set a cut score 20 to 30 points above those of the least-demanding states, whose cut scores are below what is recommended by ETS.

Bachelor’s degrees: All states require some form of bachelor’s degree, yet requirements for content-specific degrees are variously defined and inconsistently applied. The standard requirement is a major in the subject, although most states allow substitution of a major with course credits. Due to the inconsistent approaches within higher education, the Praxis examination has, by default, become the threshold for entering the profession.

Master’s degrees: Twenty-five states require a master’s degree in order to obtain one or more kinds of certification. However, states are moving away from this type of requirement toward outcome-based induction programs.

Alternative routes to licensure outside of higher education: According to a 2010 U.S. Department of Education report, 8 percent of teacher preparation programs were designated as “alternative, not based in institutions of higher education,” provided instead by for-profit or nonprofit organizations. Combined, the states of Alabama, Florida, Oklahoma, New Jersey, and Texas produce 74 percent of teacher candidates trained outside of institutions of higher education. There is wide variation in the quality of teachers produced both within higher education and via alternative pathways, a signal that the systems of quality control need to be overhauled through regulation and market mechanisms.

Licensing Can Be Improved

Teacher licensure has little impact on teaching quality because it sets too low a bar for entry into teaching. Also, licensure policies have often been relaxed to assure that an adult is in each classroom, but not necessarily a qualified adult. In short, educator licensure suffers from weak controls:

• Licensure regulations in some states focus only on courses and degrees for some pathways into teaching. As soon as they enter the classroom, graduates of preparation programs should show evidence of their ability to teach diverse learners according to rigorous college- and career-ready standards.

• Many licensure tests lack rigor. Worse still, most states use low cut scores that further weaken their rigor. Licensure tests must be redesigned to focus on the more rigorous content required for Pre-K–12 students, general pedagogy, and pedagogy within a discipline (pedagogical content knowledge).

• Current licensure policies make little use of performance-based assessments that capture a candidate’s actual preparedness to teach on entering a classroom. Some states are moving away from licensure based on paper-and-pencil tests in favor of assessments that demonstrate competence to teach and to raise Pre-K–12 student learning.

Addressing basic licensure issues could have a considerable impact on teacher quality. More focus on performance assessments such as those noted above would, among other things, lessen unduly burdensome course requirements for nontraditional applicants entering college and university preparation programs. A shift to a focus on measuring outcomes will open the licensure process to high-quality alternative pathways into teaching and encourage innovation among higher education providers who wish to compete on cost and quality rather than on traditional curriculum and seat-time requirements.

Relicensure requirements for practicing teachers should be aligned with improved initial licensure requirements. They should specify a more advanced level of practice with accompanying evidence, including instructional practices, student learning, and other measures. Similarly, advanced master’s programs should be redesigned to serve this purpose as well.

More rigorous licensure requirements should focus on meeting the needs of today’s diverse learners, whatever the school setting. Also, licensure requirements should complement new, more rigorous teacher-evaluation systems that capture the context within which teachers work, using teacher observation protocols, student learning measures, and student surveys that measure student engagement and related evidence of a teacher’s effectiveness. Neither a licensure system nor evaluation alone can accomplish what these quality-control mechanisms can do if they are complementary and rigorous.

Leverage State Authority

If the teacher licensing bar is to be raised, more rigorous state program-approval authority for teacher preparation programs is also needed. The recent report of the Council of Chief State School Officers found that state program-approval policies for preparation programs, both those for “traditional higher education programs and for new pathways, suffer from weak and inconsistent regulation.” Weak controls at the front end lead to highly inconsistent quality among entrants to teacher preparation programs and ultimately new hires. This pattern contributes to high retraining costs for school districts and to destabilizing and costly turnover rates. States could use their authority over teacher preparation programs to strengthen the qualifications of beginning teachers and lower costs to districts by focusing on the recruitment and admission of a qualified pool, rigorous clinical preparation, and collecting evidence of program impact (hiring rates, graduate and employer satisfaction, Pre-K–12 student learning, and related measures). States should work closely with CAEP, as the new accrediting body for educator preparation, in aligning program approval and licensure policies with accreditation standards.

Tightening regulation to assure candidate and program quality is likely to lead to a more qualified pool of graduates competing to teach, better hiring decisions, less attrition, and a more favorable learning environment for Pre-K–12 students. Markets have their place as mechanisms for introducing quality. However, the market will work much better if government regulates the providers more effectively and if preparation programs produce graduates whose readiness to teach can be clearly identified by the school districts that hire them.

As Dr. Chard indicated, the efforts of individual groups like CAEP are not enough: we must approach education reform holistically and at a systemic level. In coming years, a record number of new teachers will be hired to replace those retiring. As a nation, we cannot afford to fail. We will have a once-in-a-generation chance to get it right.

This article is part of a forum on developing better educators. For another take, please see “Training Must Focus on Content and Pedagogy“ by David Chard.

Proponents of market-based education reform often argue that introducing charter schools and other school choice policies creates a competitive dynamic that will prompt low-performing districts to improve their practice. Rather than simply providing an alternative to neighborhood public schools for a handful of students, the theory says, school choice programs actually benefit students remaining in their neighborhood schools, too. Competition motivates districts to respond to the loss of students and the revenues students bring, producing a rising tide that, as the common metaphor suggests, lifts all boats.

But in order for this to happen, districts must first recognize the need to compete for students and then make efforts to attract those students, who now have the chance to go elsewhere. Since 2007, enrollment in charter schools has jumped from 1.3 million to 2 million students, an increase of 59 percent. The school choice movement is gaining momentum, but are districts responding to the competition? In this study we investigate whether district officials in a position to influence policy and practice have begun to respond to competitive pressure from school choice in new ways. Specifically, we probe whether district officials in urban settings across the country believe they need to compete for students. If they do, what is the nature of their response?

A small number of studies and numerous media reports have attempted to capture the reactions of public school officials to these new threats to their enrollments and revenues. A few reports of obstructionist behavior by districts stand out and have been chronicled in these pages by Joe Williams (“Games Charter Opponents Play,” features, Winter 2007) and Nelson Smith (“Whose School Buildings Are They, Anyway?” features, Fall 2012). Yet our evidence suggests that the dynamics described in Williams’s report of guerilla turf wars may be evolving in many locations to reflect new political circumstances and the growing popularity of a burgeoning charter sector.

To explore the influence of school choice on district policy and practice, we scoured media sources for evidence of urban public-school districts’ responses to charter competition. Our express purpose was to catalog levels of competition awareness and types of responses by public school officials and their representatives. Our search retrieved more than 8,000 print and online media reports in the past five years (since the 2007 Williams article) from 12 urban locations in the United States. We then reviewed minutes from school board meetings, district web sites, and other district artifacts to verify if, in fact, the practices and policies described in media reports have occurred.

We selected cities according to specific criteria. We chose three urban districts with high percentages of minority and low-income students (at least 60 percent on both counts) in each region (Northeast, Midwest, South, West). In addition, districts in our sample needed to have a minimum of 6 percent of students in choice schools, the level Caroline Hoxby identified as a threshold above which districts could reasonably be expected to respond to competitive pressure (see “Rising Tide,” research, Winter 2001). Finally, we sought to include cities across the range of choice-school market shares within each geographic region, so long as they were above the 6 percent threshold (see Figure 1).

Competition Awareness

When the charter movement began in the early 1990s, few students were leaving the traditional system, and district officials were not particularly threatened with the loss of revenues as students and their funding went to other providers. That reality has changed. But before they can respond in meaningful ways, district officials need to recognize the new competitive market. Our first task was to find evidence that district officials recognize incentives associated with competing for students and meeting parental demand. We find at least one piece of evidence of competition awareness in all 12 cities, indicating that traditional public-school leaders generally acknowledge students’ alternative schooling option of attending a charter school.

In Denver, for example, school board members Jeanne Kaplan and Andrea Merida provided evidence of their awareness of competition among education providers in a 2011 guest commentary in the Denver Post. The board members raised the following point:

Before adding more charters or other new schools, the district should wait for the data to come in to justify doing so…We challenge Superintendent Tom Boasberg and our board to commit to a level playing field so neighborhood schools receive the same resources as charter and innovation schools.

In New York City, Joel Klein, chancellor of the New York City Department of Education until January 2011, was keenly aware of competition and openly welcomed charter schools, even if it meant publicly criticizing the public schools he oversaw. In a May 2011 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Klein wrote,

A full-scale transition from a government-run monopoly to a competitive marketplace won’t happen quickly, but that’s no reason not to begin introducing more competition… We pursued that goal in New York City by opening more than 100 charter schools in high-poverty communities. Almost 80,000 families chose these new schools—though we had space for only 40,000; the rest are on waiting lists. Traditional schools and the unions have been screaming bloody murder, which is a good sign: It means that the monopolists are beginning to feel the effects of competition.

Los Angeles Unified School District superintendent John Deasy has expressed his awareness of competition from schools of choice. Although not all of his subsequent actions conform to his claim that he is seeking healthy competition, this quotation makes it clear that he is aware of a competitive dynamic. Speaking at the Charter School Leadership Symposium in Los Angeles in 2010, he said,

Charter schools are a viable and necessary part of education. We are now in a multiple-provider world…. We’re in a moment of unhealthy competition, and I’m looking forward to healthy competition.

These are just a few examples of media reports that demonstrate cognizance of the threats posed by alternative providers, but awareness is just the first step. We next sought to figure out if knowledge actually led to action.

Characterizing Competitive Responses

Having established that districts acknowledge charter schools and are aware that they compete with them for students, we then attempted to characterize public school districts’ responses to the competition. Our characterization of responses is informed by basic economic assumptions underlying competitive markets and the premise that functional markets will lead to a rising tide of achievement for all students. Competition between charter schools and traditional public schools for students may induce a constructive reaction, an obstructive reaction, or no response.

In a constructive response to competition, school faculty and administrators may implement reforms that use resources more efficiently, improve the overall quality of education within the traditional public schools, and increase responsiveness to student needs. If the efforts are successful, then the quality of traditional public schools will increase relative to what it would have been in the absence of competition from charter schools.

In an obstructive response to increased competition for scarce public resources, public school officials may attempt to block the growth of charter schools by limiting access to buildings and information, adding burdensome bureaucratic requirements, or supporting legislation that would hinder the development of such schools.

Of course, school and district officials may choose not to respond at all if, for example, the threat or the school’s or district’s perception of a competitive threat to their resources is negligible. Similarly, schools and districts, when faced with competition, might make public statements about how they need to change but never translate these statements into action. We consider the symbolic responses described by Frederick Hess in Revolution at the Margins (2002) as effectively falling into this third category of offering no response. It is for this reason that we verified that any policy or practice change referenced in a public statement by a district official and reported in the media actually did occur.

Constructive Responses

Contrary to the largely symbolic reactions to competition evident when the school choice movement was just beginning, we find evidence of significant changes in district policy and practice. The most common positive response, found in 8 of the 12 locations, is district cooperation or collaboration with charter schools. We were even able to find evidence of this constructive response in Atlanta Public Schools, a district previously relatively unwelcoming to charter schools: in late October 2012, the U.S. Department of Education awarded a collaboration grant for teachers and administrators at B.E.S.T Academy Middle School, a district-run school in Atlanta, to participate in training conducted by the KIPP Metro Atlanta. The next three most-common constructive responses, found in seven locations, are partnerships with successful nonprofit CMOs or for-profit charter school operators, education management organizations (EMOs), to operate schools; the replication of successful charter school practices; and an increase in active efforts to market district offerings to students and families (see Table 1).

The decade between 1999 and 2009 saw a dramatic expansion in CMO schools, with increases of approximately 20 percent per year, a higher growth rate than seen by independent charter schools, according to a recent study by Mathematica Policy Research. The KIPP network and CMOs Uncommon Schools and Rocketship Education have demonstrated the ability to achieve success with challenging populations, so it may not be surprising that districts pursuing reform seek to partner with them or with equally successful EMOs. In March 2011, for instance, Detroit Public Schools (DPS) emergency financial manager at the time, Robert Bobb, proposed inviting charters and private schools to take over Detroit’s 41 most academically challenged schools. Dubbed the DPS Renaissance Plan 2012, the purpose was to engage proven charter-school operators in the district’s school-improvement effort. In April 2011, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers agreed to assist DPS as the district designed a competitive and rigorous RFP (Request for Proposal) process to identify schools that it would authorize as charters beginning in fall 2011. The district’s portfolio now includes two DPS schools that were converted to charter schools in partnership with CMOs (EdTech and the Detroit Association of Black Organizations) and three in partnership with EMOs (SABIS, Solid Rock, and the Leona Group).

As an example of a district imitating successful charter-school practices, Denver Public Schools is, as Education Week has reported, “aiming to re-create within its own buildings the innovation seen in top charter schools, and keep the state funding.” The approaches used by Denver schools in the Blueprint Schools Network since 2011 are supported by high-quality research and guided by the following five “tenets”: 1) excellence in leadership and instruction; 2) increased instructional time; 3) a no-excuses school culture of high expectations; 4) frequent assessments to improve instruction; and 5) daily tutoring in critical growth years.

Across all four regions, districts have increased marketing efforts to recruit and compete for students. For example, in Harlem, Jennifer Medina of the New York Times reported in 2010, schools were putting out fliers and actively seeking to change their images. She quoted then principal of Public School 125 Rafaela Espinal saying, “We have to think about selling ourselves all the time, and it takes a concerted effort that none of us have ever done before…We have to get them in the door if we are even going to try to convince them to come here.”

In addition to the responses described above, we find evidence of three other constructive competitive responses: expanding or improving district schools, programs or offerings (6 locations); improving district efficiency (5 locations); and supporting semiautonomous charter-like schools (5 locations).

Obstructive Responses

Although obstructive responses continue to exist and may occur in far greater number in districts not covered by our study, we found fewer visible instances of resistance to competitive pressures than of other types (see Table 1). This could reflect the activities that receive media coverage or districts’ acting more covertly when they are working against charter schools. The most common obstructive response we observed was districts seeking to block access to buildings. We find evidence of this response in three locations, with one district in three of four region display- ing this behavior. Two districts, Los Angeles Unified School District and the District of Columbia Public Schools, have recently demonstrated such unwillingness to share public space with charter schools.

California provides constitutional assurance of adequate charter school facilities. Under Proposition 39, public school districts are required to provide “reasonably equivalent” space to charter and district students. A protracted legal battle between the California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) and L.A. Unified began in May 2007. At issue was the formula used to calculate how much space should be offered to charter schools. A settlement was reached in April 2008, but the charter association returned to court in May 2010 citing failure of the district to comply with the agreement, and again in May 2012 to enforce the trial court’s earlier order. In June 2012, L.A. superior court judge Terry Green ruled that the district should factor in rooms not being used for regular classes. The school system appealed the order, and it was reversed in December 2012. In his opinion for the court of appeals, Judge Edward Ferns ultimately found the district’s formula for assigning classroom space to charter schools was consistent with the intent of Proposition 39. This case is now headed to the California Supreme Court.

While she has increased efficiency by consolidating district schools that have lost students to charter schools, Washington, D.C., schools chancellor Kaya Henderson initially seemed intent on preventing charters from accessing the empty buildings. Fifteen D.C. public schools were marked for closure in January 2013 as a result of underenrollment or underutilization of facilities, yet Henderson did not plan on making these facilities available to charter schools. Recent developments on this front, however, suggest that the district may allow more than a dozen charter schools to enter into leases of former district school buildings. Time will tell whether the district follows through on these plans.

The five other categories of obstructive responses observed are: 1) excessively denying charter applications, 2) creating legal obstacles to charter schools, 3) freezing or delaying payments to charter schools, 4) withholding information from charter schools, and 5) using regulations to restrict choice or interfere with competition.

In Atlanta, for example, media reports indicated that local boards were denying charter applications and setting up legal obstacles to charter school formation. In response to this behavior, in 2008 a group of lawmakers created a commission to approve and fund charter schools. In May 2011, however, the Georgia Supreme Court struck down the law after seven districts, including Atlanta Public Schools, sued to have the state law that created the commission declared unconstitutional. Ultimately, despite the efforts of these districts, a referendum passed in November 2012 that will amend the state constitution to allow for an alternate charter-school authorizer.

Broadening of Responses

The ground war between charter schools and their opponents described by Joe Williams has begun to shift. As the charter sector continues to expand, some of its competitors appear to be changing strategy. Where school districts once responded with indifference, symbolic gestures, or open hostility, we are starting to see a broadening of responses, perhaps fueled by acceptance that the charter sector will continue to thrive, or by knowledge that many charters are providing examples of ways to raise academic achievement.

Traditional public schools are aware of the threats posed by alternative education providers, but they are analyzing the moves made by competitors and demonstrating that they may have the savvy to reflect, replicate, experiment, and enter into partnerships with school choice providers. This evidence suggests that while bureaucratic change may often be slow, it may be a mistake to underestimate the capacity of these bureaucratic institutions to reform, adapt, and adjust in light of changing environments.

Marc J. Holley is evaluation unit director at the Walton Family Foundation and research fellow in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, where Anna J. Egalite and Martin F. Lueken are doctoral academy fellows.

As online, or digital, learning grows across the nation, state legislatures are feverishly passing bills in an attempt to shape, propel, and, in some cases, stunt its growth. In 2012 alone, according to Digital Learning Now!, a national campaign run by former Florida governor Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, more than 150 bills related to K–12 digital learning were signed into law. State legislatures were hardly less busy in the spring of 2013. But for all the action, nothing is happening in K–12 education that is remotely comparable to the pending digital disruption of the higher education system.

Many predict that recent innovations—including low-cost online universities, competency-based instruction, online partnerships between for-profits and traditional universities, and MOOCs (massive open online courses)—will quite literally transform higher education, as they threaten the future of large numbers of traditional postsecondary institutions. Although there are certainly political and policy obstacles to creating online educational opportunities in higher education, a great deal of innovation can take place outside of the reach of regulation. In the K–12 education system, however, replacing traditional schools with new schools powered by digital learning would require wholesale policy changes. As a result, even as digital learning grows rapidly in both sectors, the regulatory infrastructure that shapes K–12 education is likely to exert far greater influence on the ultimate effects of online learning.

The reasons for this disparity are many. In higher education, students have far more choices than they do for secondary school. College attendance is voluntary, and students can choose from among hundreds of institutions of varying cost and quality, including formal credentialed learning experiences and informal ones. Many people choose not to attend postsecondary institutions at all, as they find them too inconvenient or expensive. This creates opportunities for entrepreneurs to launch disruptive innovations that will likely replace many mainstream colleges.

But in the K–12 school sector, there is virtually no nonconsumption, that is, nearly every student has access to a government-funded school of some sort, and in fact state laws make attendance compulsory to a particular age. As a result, creating new digital-learning schools presents a direct challenge to the traditional education-system monopoly. Policymaking around digital learning in K–12 education is accordingly becoming more contentious as online opportunities expand. Because of these dynamics, the bulk of K–12 online learning will likely develop within schools rather than in competition with them, and squarely within the reach of regulation.

These realities became increasingly clear as the 2013 legislative sessions unfolded across the United States. Although many in the burgeoning education-technology start-up world downplay the role of policy, ultimately policy is decisive in a highly regulated system where school districts hold near monopolies over publicly funded instruction. Policy helps to determine the rules of the public education–technology marketplace: what will and won’t be funded, and what incentives will and won’t exist to create products and services that boost student outcomes.

Although students and families often have little consumer power in public K–12 education, and providers operate within a highly constrained system, digital learning is making headway, even when policy is less than fully supportive. In California, for example, schools from Silicon Valley to the inner-city neighborhoods in Oakland and Los Angeles are using blended-learning techniques to provide exciting new learning environments (See “Can Khan Move the Bell Curve to the Right?” features, Spring 2012, and “The Promise of Personalized Learning,” features, Fall 2013). Part of the driving force have been the cost constraints imposed on schools by the recent financial crisis. Such growth in digital learning, even without new state policy initiatives, may yet transform K–12 schooling, but it could also reinforce the inequities and weaknesses of the current system.

In the 2013 legislative sessions, the assortment of bills focused on K–12 digital learning ranges from the creation of commissions to study the modality to the funding of infrastructure to addressing student data issues. The most significant legislation in the states, however, clusters around three categories: 1) creating opportunities for students to take courses from alternative providers; 2) placing caps or moratoriums on full-time virtual charter schools; and 3) increasing flexibility in state requirements to make way for innovations such as competency-based learning.

Letting the Student Choose

The Florida Virtual School (FLVS) is one of the oldest, most established, and most highly praised staples of the K–12 digital-learning scene (see “Florida’s Online Option,” features, Summer 2009). When the state of Florida moved FLVS from a year-to-year line-item appropriation in the annual budget to a per-pupil funding model in 2003, public funds began following students to the FLVS course of their choice. Enrollments in FLVS soared. More than 148,000 students took FLVS courses in the 2011–12 school year. The funding does not just follow students to the online course; it also creates an accountability mechanism of sorts, as FLVS only receives payment when a student passes a course.

In 2011, Utah went a step beyond Florida and passed SB 65, which freed state education dollars to follow any high-school student to pay for an online course offered by any school district or charter school. If a student living in the Salt Lake City school district wants to take a particular online course that a full-time virtual school outside the district is offering, he or she now can, and the school district is not allowed to stand in the way. Utah’s funding mechanism pays online providers 50 percent of the per-pupil funding up front and 50 percent upon course completion. Currently, funding is not tied to any independent assessment of student performance. The amount the state pays per online course depends on the course subject. If a student takes an academic course, such as one in math, science, or language arts, the maximum payment permitted is $350. If a student takes a course in financial literacy, health, fitness for life, computer literacy, or driver’s education, the maximum amount that can be paid is $200.

Louisiana’s legislature has enacted similar legislation as part of an overall reform effort that included vouchers for students to attend private schools. After the state supreme court struck down the proposed funding mechanism, the Louisiana State Board tapped $2 million from an oil and gas trust fund to pay for the course-choice initiative. The law will accomplish many of the same things as Utah’s program. Dollars will flow to the provider that offers the course the student selects. The legislation authorizes up to one-sixth of 90 percent of the state’s basic per-pupil funds to follow a student to a state-approved online course. Students can take more than six online courses with public funding so long as the total cost is less than 90 percent of the state’s basic per-pupil funds. As in Utah, the online provider receives 50 percent of the funding up front and 50 percent upon student completion within the course’s published length. The course instructor, not an independent assessment, will decide whether the student has done well enough to complete the course. Unlike Utah, however, the state of Louisiana must first approve a provider—whether governmental, nonprofit, or for-profit—before it can offer courses to students. In addition, the new funding plan includes an cap on course enrollments of 500 per provider.

More states are following suit this year. Florida passed a bill allowing dollars to go not just to FLVS but also to other online providers, be they districts or even MOOCs. Texas passed a bill that expands on its Texas Virtual School Network (TxVSN) structure and created a choice program that, like those in the aforementioned states, gives students the right to take courses from online providers outside the district. The law is limited, however, as it only allows students to take up to three online courses in a given year, and the payment mechanism in Texas appears to be more ambiguous than those in other states. Michigan passed a similar measure that expands the online choices available to students. Governor Rick Snyder’s budget bill allows students to take up to two online courses offered by another district each semester without having to receive the consent of the student’s resident district except under a few limited circumstances. The state will maintain a catalog of available online courses, and the resident district will pay 80 percent of the cost of the online course upon enrollment and 20 percent upon completion as determined by the outside district.

Course choice programs create considerably more options for students, but questions about their potential impact remain. First, it’s not clear how many students will avail themselves of the new options. In Utah, the only state with a program that has been in operation for any length of time, the number of courses taken outside the district appears to be modest thus far. Still, some argue that the number of students who take advantage of their new choices is less important than the competitive environment the program creates. Because funding can follow the student out of a school district at the course level, districts have a new incentive to bolster their own digital-learning offerings and keep the funds in the district. Consequently, one way to gauge success may be monitoring how districts respond to these measures. Indeed, several districts in Utah have created blended-learning schools, in which some instruction is online. Also, the shift from funding mere enrollment to funding course completion may be an important milestone on the road toward a competency-based learning system. Still, today, most initiatives do not go so far as to tie funding to independent assessments of student performance, thus replicating some of the counterproductive incentives in the existing system to serve students but not necessarily serve them well.

Capping Full-Time Virtual Schools

Political battles over virtual charter schools provide even more compelling evidence of the strength of the opposition to online learning within K–12 education. In higher education, it has proven politically impossible to prevent even for-profit, fully online universities from competing directly for students with brick-and-mortar institutions. Although these institutions have come under pressure from the U.S. Department of Education for inducing students to take loans that they will not be able to repay, the for-profit university bird is still flying. But in K–12 education, access to full-time virtual schools, which provide comprehensive education services to their students, remains uneven and, in many states, highly controversial. Districts are usually free to start up full-time virtual schools for their own students, but operating full-time virtual schools for out-of district students or statewide is a different story. In the school year ending in 2013, 31 states allowed full-time, multidistrict online schools. The previous year they served roughly 275,000 students. But continued growth may be stymied by legislative action in the same ways that states have placed limits on the numbers of charter schools that can be authorized and the numbers of students who can attend them.

In Tennessee this year, a new law places a ceiling of 1,500 students on initial enrollment in any full-time, multidistrict virtual school. It also dictates that students outside the district in which the virtual school is operating may not comprise more than 25 percent of the school’s enrollment. If a public virtual school meets expectations under the Tennessee Value-Added Assessment System, then the school may grow, but no matter how well a virtual school does, its total enrollment may not exceed 5,000 students.

Political drama has followed in Illinois as well, where a full-time virtual charter school’s plan to operate across 18 school districts prompted legislators to draw up a moratorium on new virtual charters and to charge a charter commission with studying the matter.

The campaign against virtual schools is also under way in other states. A bill introduced in Maine prohibits any new virtual charter schools. In Pennsylvania, spurred by stories about underperforming virtual schools, legislators have proposed stark funding limits for existing full-time virtual schools as well as a moratorium on the establishment of any new one before 2016. Opposition to digital-learning opportunities can break out even where no virtual schools exist. The New Jersey Education Association filed a lawsuit against two blended-learning charter schools that opened this past year in Newark. Absurdly enough, the lawsuit alleged that, in essence, the schools should not be allowed to operate because they were virtual schools, even though they were not. The union lost the suit, but the fight is not over.

If one wants to generalize from New Jersey, a case can be made that online learning via virtual charter schools is essential to the broader digital-learning movement, because they absorb the opposition’s main line of attack. In the absence of full-time virtual schools, teachers unions and other opponents use their resources to attack blended-learning charters, even though the latter do not differ in legal structure, brick-and-mortar presence, or enrollment practices from other charter schools. Although digital learning in K–12 education may not grow significantly outside of existing school structures as it has in higher education, pushing for policies that safeguard the development of new models of online schooling may be critical for digital learning to have any transformational impact, even inside existing schools.

The opposition has cited concerns about the quality of virtual schools as the chief justification for stalling their growth. An increasing number of full-time virtual schools are simultaneously growing enrollments and failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) in states across the country. Some of the most critical studies ignore the fact that virtual schools now serve many high-school students who had previously dropped out of or had significant problems in more traditional schools (see “Questioning the Quality of Virtual Schools,” check the facts, Spring 2013). Barbara Dreyer is CEO of Connections Education, the second largest full-time virtual-school provider in the nation. In an article in The AdvancED Source, Dreyer discusses the students who enroll in Connections Academy and notes that “33 percent indicated they have not been successful academically,” and “about 30 percent of the new students [Connections Academy serves] enroll after the start of the school year.”

A 2012 report by iNACOL, the International Association for K–12 Online Learning Association, titled “Measuring Quality from Inputs to Outcomes: Creating Student Learning Performance Metrics and Quality Assurance for Online Schools,” argues that none of the existing metrics for judging schools captures adequately the true performance of full-time virtual schools. It suggests that a better accountability system would look at five indicators: student proficiency, individual student growth, graduation rate, college and career readiness, and closing the achievement gap. Because no states today track these measures adequately, capturing the true performance of full-time virtual schools has been difficult. As a result, efforts to expand the schools or cap their growth make judgments based on limited information at best. Advocates argue that access to a full-time virtual-school option is critical for those who need it; others say we need more time for study before extending such access to be sure it is a high-quality option. Without a valid accountability system in place, it is hard to know.

Unseating Seat Time

For digital learning to succeed, students need to be given credit mainly for the amount of knowledge they have acquired, rather than for the amount of time they have spent taking a particular course. But seat time in a classroom has been the measure of elementary and secondary education for more than a century, and most state aid formulas are based, in some measure, on the number of days a student is in school. The policy change that is potentially most transformative would alter the rules for compensating school providers to reward knowledge and skills acquired instead of time served.

In an effort to move toward an education system that is focused more squarely on student outcomes than on inputs, advocates for digital learning have identified policies and regulations that lock in rules around seat time as some of the most pernicious. Competency-based learning—in which a student only progresses once he or she has demonstrated mastery of a concept or skill—is critical for digital learning to optimize the experience for each child. For true competency-based learning to emerge, policy changes are necessary. This is true not only for K–12 education, incidentally, but also for the majority of colleges and universities. Institutions that choose to implement competency-based learning may need to seek waivers from current regulations in order for students to obtain access to public funds, such as student loans and Pell grants. Policy change is less important for the few emerging forms of higher education that are so affordable that their students do not rely on public funds.

A scant few years ago, the mention of competency-based learning in a state legislature would draw blank stares. Increasingly, however, states are seeking ways to move beyond the seat-time system, with its accompanying pacing guides and tests given at fixed times, toward competency-based measures of learning. Some legislatures are working to give greater flexibility and autonomy to schools and districts in hopes of spurring innovation, whereas others are directly creating competency-based pathways for students.

Legislation that gives students a choice of provider for each course begins to unshackle learning from seat time by affording students the flexibility to progress at their own pace through their online courses. Utah is taking further steps toward competency-based learning for all schools: in the 2013 legislative session it passed a law that requires the state board of education to make recommendations about the funding needed to develop and implement competency-based education and progress-based assessments prior to the 2014 legislative general session. The bill lists the issues the board must think through in determining an appropriate performance-based funding formula and permitting a school district or charter to establish curriculum standards and assessments that would result in course credit if the student demonstrates competency in the subject. This legislation could move its current online course-choice program from rewarding mere course completion to rewarding true student performance.

In Idaho, legislation recently enacted expands on an existing pilot program. The law allows any district or charter school to submit an application to move to a mastery-based progression system of learning. Just how many institutions will apply and win state approval remains to be seen.

Competency-based learning is on the agenda in other states as well. A Vermont bill that Governor Peter Shumlin signed into law, called the “Flexible Pathways Initiative,” requires each K–12 student to have a personalized learning plan, but it also includes a variety of pathways in which “credits awarded shall be based on performance and not solely on Carnegie units [a measure of hours spent in class].” In Texas, a new law offers similar opportunities, as it allows students to accelerate through grades or courses if they pass a board-approved test that must be administered by districts at least three times a year. Although not actually competency-based learning, the measure breaks down the artificial distinction between secondary and higher education and might open up more opportunities for competency-based funding of courses in the longer run.

Other states are offering more flexibility for school districts to spur innovation. In Florida, a new law allows school districts to establish innovation schools of technology, or blended-learning schools. The Alabama Accountability Act permits “programmatic flexibility or budgetary flexibility, or both, from state laws, including State Board of Education rules, regulations, and policies in exchange for academic and associated goals for students that focus on college and career readiness.” To receive this flexibility, districts must submit an innovation plan for approval.

Conclusion

As all this suggests, state policy is crucial to the spread of digital-learning opportunities at the elementary and secondary level. A review of recent legislative action reveals policies that are constantly in flux and differ quite markedly from one state to another. Some have hoped for model digital-learning legislation that could handle all the various issues related to digital learning and push it to be of high quality and student-centric. Others have hoped to isolate digital learning from other policy issues, and yet digital learning touches on several areas of state code. Even adopting model language for funding online courses from one state and transporting it to another creates challenges for legacy state codes. One-size-fits-all legislation that creates a coherent framework in which digital learning can grow is, as a result, likely a pipe dream.

The only guarantee seems to be that even as K–12 digital learning—or certainly the hype around it—continues to expand, efforts to regulate and channel the new instructional models will be both frantic and uneven. Some will fight to stunt their growth, and others will seek to give them more freedom. Still others will seek to provide more access, so long as it is focused on student outcomes. If the digital transformation of higher education continues apace, it will have a major impact on secondary schooling as well. However things end up, state policies seem certain to play a major role.

Michael Horn is executive editor at Education Next and executive director of the education program at the Clayton Christensen Institute.

The Internet has become a tremendous resource for teachers both for the sheer volume of information available and for opportunities to connect with each other. Educators can collaborate through virtual learning networks like Edmodo. On Twitter, there is a chat group with the hashtag #edchat, run by Tom Whitby (@tomwhitby), where one can ask questions on all things education and fellow educators respond. You can also find great materials with broad searches, as long as you are willing to adapt what you find to your classroom needs. I recently combined material from different online sources to prepare my students to write an essay on racism.

My inspiration came during one world history class, when a seemingly innocuous comment about race made by one student was found to be offensive by others. Students began to argue using reasoning based on their own experiences but without any historical perspective on the roots of racism. Our next unit, on 19th-century imperialism, was the perfect opportunity to continue the discussion. For their subsequent writing assignment, I asked my students to examine the political, social, and economic justifications for imperialism and to consider whether it was, or is, valid for one nation or culture to impose its values on another. I posed the question, Was racism an excuse for or a by-product of imperialism?

To provide the right content for the lesson, I needed more than the textbook had to offer. I started my Internet search by typing “imperialism” and “lesson plan” into Google. I found a number of potentially useful sites, including several that charged a fee to join. Not knowing the caliber of the lessons, and working with a tight budget, paid sites were not an option. Looking for lessons that were of high quality and free, I checked one of my favorite sites: mrdonn.org, on which teachers Lin and Don Donn collect the best free history lessons from cyberspace.

Although I found plenty of information, I wanted my students to understand why the imperial powers colonized. While searching on mrdonn.org, I came upon Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands.” Kipling wrote the poem in 1899, urging the U.S. to follow the lead of Britain and other colonizing European nations. It begins,

Take up the White Man’s burden—

Send forth the best ye breed—

Go bind your sons to exile

To serve your captives’ need;

To wait in heavy harness,

On fluttered folk and wild—

Your new-caught, sullen peoples,

Half-devil and half-child.

Kipling’s poem summed up the paternalistic mind-set I wanted my students to understand, but I knew it would be difficult for them to decipher. I needed an English-language-arts strategy for teaching poetry, preferably one that was interactive and aligned to the Common Core State Standards.

My next stop was one of the best sources of effective teaching strategies, especially those tied to Common Core skills, the Teaching Channel (teachingchannel.org), which features videos of real lessons by real teachers. I remembered seeing a video in the language arts section called Literary Analysis through Interactive Stations, in which small groups of students move through a series of stations to develop their understanding of a central concept before they write about it.

The first station is called the Wall of Silence. Students write an idea or quote from their reading on the wall and then read and respond in writing to the remarks placed on the wall by their classmates, drawing connections and asking questions. In Power Tableau, students act out a key idea and freeze in a pose when time is called. Finally, in Circle Discussion, each group addresses a question that is designed to make them think deeply about the text. After the groups complete all three stations, the students write their essays.

Any sound teaching strategy can be adapted to different content. But teaching is not just about content delivery: an effective lesson leads students to explore, question, and understand. The stations approach was originally created to help students explore the idea of silence in a nonfiction text; I made some adjustments to the strategy to make it fit my students and Kipling’s poem. Exploring Kipling’s poem through the interactive stations worked brilliantly, and my students’ essays on the complex topic of racism were some of the best they have written.

Jeanne DelColle is the 2012 New Jersey Teacher of the Year, a 2013 National Hope Street Group Fellow, and a history teacher at the Burlington County Institute of Technology.