Reporters love to tell “how I got that story” stories about landing an exclusive interview or being in the right place when news happens. American Public Media’s Emily Hanford, though, is hard-pressed to identify a specific moment or event that set in motion her project of the last several years—a high-profile series of radio documentaries and reports on how America’s public schools teach kids to read. Collectively, these efforts amount to the most significant body of work produced by an education journalist in the last few decades. The effects of Hanford’s reporting are undeniable: shifts in classroom practice, countless school-district curriculum adoptions, and legislation in nearly every state in the country aimed at advancing instruction grounded in “the science of reading.”

Hanford’s job afforded her an opportunity rare among education journalists: hours of time to spend in schools observing teachers and students. “I spent a whole lot of years in a lot of classrooms,” she recalls. “I would just put a microphone on a kid or a teacher and follow them throughout the day. When you make documentaries, you put in all these hours of just trying to see something unfold in search of a scene or a moment that illustrates a point.”

Hanford describes many of her early efforts as “low-impact,” but over time those hours of following kids and teachers around prompted her to reflect on what they were actually accomplishing. “I feel like I went to school from 2008 to 2018, and in the back of my mind I was always thinking, ‘What are the kids really learning here?’”

A report on remedial education in college brought her in contact with students who, by their own admission, couldn’t read or write very well, which made Hanford curious how it was possible to get so far in school lacking in such basic skills. “It’s not as if they didn’t deserve to be there,” she explains. “It was pretty clear to me from talking to them and their instructors that they were bright people.” If there was an aha moment that launched her investigation into reading, it was interviewing one such student who told Hanford about her dyslexia. Subsequent conversations with researchers and advocates in the dyslexia community opened Hanford’s eyes to “a huge body of cognitive-science research on reading and how it works. It helped me understand that those kids’ troubles were connected to something larger that was affecting all kids,” she recalls. Dyslexic kids “are the most screwed when there’s not good instruction, but a whole lot of kids get screwed.”

In 2018, Hanford traveled to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to report on a school district that seemed to have cracked the code on reading instruction. From 2015 to 2018, the percentage of kindergarteners at or above the DIBELS (Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills) benchmark reading score soared to 84 percent from 47 percent. The explanation? Bethlehem Area School District administrators had begun training teachers to teach reading in a completely different, research-backed way. The report and podcast that came of this, Hard Words, made waves around the education world and beyond, winning the Education Writers Association’s inaugural Public Service Award. Since then, Hanford has continued her crusade, finding school after school where kids have been harmed by poor curriculum and instruction and fundamental misunderstandings about reading and how to teach it.

Hanford is a rarity in education reporting, in that her work focuses almost exclusively on classroom practice rather than education policy, politics, or personality stories. With this specialty, she has struck a rich vein of ore and, perhaps unwittingly, written a playbook for other education journalists. At the very least, her methods and focus raise an intriguing question: are there similar stories waiting for enterprising education journalists to pick up and run with the way Emily Hanford has done with the science of reading?

Hiding in Plain Sight

In no way does it minimize Hanford’s effort or impact to observe that, from the perspective of reading researchers and literacy experts, her work wasn’t news per se. America’s “reading wars” have been waged longer than most of their current combatants have been alive. In 1955, Why Johnny Can’t Read–And What You Can Do About It by Rudolf Flesch brought attention to the insufficient “look-say” method of “Dick and Jane” readers. A Nation at Risk reported in 1983 that “some 23 million American adults are functionally illiterate by the simplest tests of everyday reading, writing, and comprehension.” More recently, the National Reading Panel’s 2000 report “Teaching Children to Read” martialed explicit evidence that systematic phonics instruction is more effective at teaching kids to read than instruction that does not include phonics.

Nor was every education journalist asleep at the switch. In 2007, Education Next published Barbara Feinberg’s withering assessment of the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project and its founding guru, Lucy Calkins (see “The Lucy Calkins Project,” features,  Summer 2007). Ten years ago, Alexander Nazaryan, a former teacher, penned a New York Times op-ed titled “The Fallacy of ‘Balanced Literacy.’” Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute wrote dozens of articles and op-eds as far back as 1997 criticizing unsound literacy instruction in New York City schools and championing the work of E. D. Hirsch Jr. In 2014, Tim Shanahan, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Education at the University of Illinois Chicago, wrote an authoritative takedown of leveled reading, pointing out that there was virtually no evidence supporting it. “I don’t believe that these experts have intentionally misled teachers,” he wrote, “but that they were so sure they were right that they misled themselves.” Hanford says she read all of these “hugely helpful” articles while developing her work; another inspiration she cites is the 2017 book Language at the Speed of Sight by Mark Seidenberg, retired professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin Madison.

Hanford’s achievement, then, was not in discovering the weaknesses in popular approaches to teaching reading but in making their flaws accessible to lay readers and listeners—getting them invested by humanizing the story, quantifying the cost to students of subpar instruction, and explaining in vivid detail the intersecting impulses and interests that made it possible for reading instruction to go so wrong for so long. But even this doesn’t fully account for the galvanizing effect of her podcasts Hard Words (2018) and Sold a Story (2022). When studying schools from afar, it’s easy to view bad reading scores as the fault of bad teachers. If you increase spending on teacher training, and the improvement is still not there, then there’s even more blame to unload on them. Decades of education reform and associated media coverage largely accepted this judgment. But Hanford’s reporting flipped this assumption on its head, creating a permission structure for teachers to be seen (and, critically, to see themselves) as unwitting victims of poor training and inadequate curricula—not the indifferent, incompetent, or union-protected layabouts of common caricature, reluctant to change and unmoved by low reading levels or achievement gaps between groups of students. This flipped perspective helped catapult Hanford into the limelight. Sold a Story was the second-most shared show on Apple podcasts in 2023. It earned an Edward R. Murrow award, an Alfred I. duPont-Columbia award,  and a nomination for the Peabody, among the oldest and most prestigious awards in broadcasting.

Indeed, the contrast between Hanford’s framing and major-media coverage of education over the past two decades helps explain how her work broke through where earlier, similar efforts failed. Recall that in 2008, TIME magazine put Michelle Rhee on its cover holding a broom, symbolizing her intention to “sweep” bad teachers out of classrooms in Washington, D.C., the school district she ran as chancellor. Rival magazine Newsweek was even less nuanced. Its 2010 cover story blithely asserted that the key to saving American education was simply (and simplistically) “we must fire bad teachers.” These high-profile pieces of education journalism tacitly assumed that teachers knew what to do and that poor results represented incompetence or failures of will.

Those assumptions were also baked into test-based accountability policies and largely unquestioned in the media reports and documentaries like Waiting For Superman that marked the No Child Left Behind era: show me bad student outcomes and I’ll show you bad teaching. In Hanford’s telling, teachers are less the sinners than those sinned against—literally “sold a story” by schools of education, commercial publishers, and a rogues’ gallery of self-interested gurus including Calkins, Marie Clay, and Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, among others. The Bethlehem school district adopted the motto “When we know better, we do better” as an acknowledgement of past mistakes and a commitment to future students. Hanford showed that teachers cannot be held solely accountable for decades’ worth of false and largely unquestioned premises embedded in so-called best practices and functionally enshrined in education policy. Vindication for the misplaced blame was evident in teachers’ responses to Sold a Story—Ariela Young, a teacher from Florida, wrote to Hanford and said, “As I was listening, I kept saying—oh my goodness, this is me! I am angry! I am frustrated! I hope to pass on the knowledge I have gained to my fellow teachers and to keep looking forward.” The contrast with two decades of finger-wagging at teachers for poor performance can hardly be overstated.

If the measure of education journalism is its influence on classroom practice and public policy—and other journalists—Hanford’s impact is unmatched. As improbable as it may sound, the minutiae of reading instruction have become national news. In August of 2022, TIME published Belinda Luscombe’s “Inside the Massive Effort to Change the Way Kids Are Taught to Read.” A couple of weeks later, The New Yorker weighed in with “The Rise and Fall of Vibes-Based Literacy,” effectively mocking the ineffective “cueing” strategies at the heart of the failed instructional practices that had supplanted phonics-based lessons in elementary schools. In April 2023, after Sold a Story was released to critical praise, the New York Times chimed in with a piece called “‘Kids Can’t Read’: The Revolt That Is Taking On the Education Establishment.” Other prominent outlets to cover the issue include PBS (“Why More U.S. Schools Are Embracing a New ‘Science of Reading’”); New York Magazine (“Did New York City Forget How to Teach Children to Read?”); and Slate (“The Decades-Long Travesty That Made Millions of Americans Mistrust Their Kids’ Schools”).

The impact on public policy has been even more pronounced. In July 2023, the Shanker Institute published a report titled “Reading Reform Across America,” which tracked evidence-based and science-of-reading-based legislation from 2019 to 2022, overlaying neatly on the years in which media coverage of the science of reading reached its zenith. The report found 272 bills containing the word “phonics,” 146 containing the word “evidence,” and 40 containing the phrase “science of reading.” Legislation aimed at changing classroom practice spanned 45 states and the District of Columbia—all in the years following Hanford’s Hard Words. Shanahan describes a “Hanford effect,” which has transformed the way we talk about reading. “I looked up the term ‘science of reading’ in LexisNexis over a period of years,” he said. “In a typical year during the 2000s it came up about 4 times a year. Then Emily posted her first documentary that used the term and voila, it was showing up about 150 times!”

Finding the Next Sold a Story

The impact of Hanford’s exploration of reading instruction invites a thought exercise: if the weaknesses of common literacy curriculum and instruction have been known for decades to education researchers, dyslexia advocates, and some number of practitioners—and if those weaknesses have been waiting for effective public-service journalism to break through and galvanize a public-policy response and drive changes in classroom practice—are there other facets of classroom practice ripe for the same treatment?

Let’s consider the conditions and characteristics that enabled Hanford to devote the time and energy necessary to produce her body of work. Again, her job as a documentary journalist means producing “long lead” work with many hours of unstructured observation time in K–12 classrooms—an advantage few daily print or broadcast reporters can match in the face of daily deadlines. “I have the kind of job where I can read like crazy and dig into research,” Hanford adds. “And I tend to be a pretty fast reader.”

Education reporters rarely enjoy that kind of unfettered access to classrooms, and even when they do, they often lack the experience to be shrewd judges of teaching and learning. This almost certainly explains why so much education reporting tends to focus on policy, politics, and out-of-school issues, which can be produced with little or no classroom time or experience. A review of the Education Writers Association’s annual Fred M. Hechinger Grand Prize for Distinguished Education Reporting gives an idea of the type of reporting currently in favor and most likely to garner attention. The most recent winner, “The Price Kids Pay” by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards of ProPublica and the Chicago Tribune, was a series of pieces on Illinois police ticketing students for classroom misbehavior. Other recent winners include “How Missouri became a safe haven for faith-based boarding schools” by Laura Bauer and Judy Thomas of the Kansas City Star, and “Racism at the Virginia Military Institute” by the Washington Post’s Ian Shapira. Jacques Steinberg’s New York Times series on 3rd-grade reading, titled “Room 3-223,” was the most recent Hechinger prize–winning piece covering curriculum and instruction. It was published in 1997. The relative glamour and accessibility of political hot topics and policy fights in education has taken center stage, while the arguably more consequential business of curriculum and instruction remains under-covered and largely undiscussed. Hanford’s work revealed the scope and scale of these types of issues when they go ignored for decades. For reporters inclined to dig further into them, the door is wide open.

If hiding-in-plain-sight pedagogical issues spark the interest of ed journalists, then those journalists will need the kind of support that Hanford received, particularly in time and funding. Fellowships offered by universities and foundations can afford journalists the resources required for high-impact investigative reporting like Hanford’s—but, like recent Hechinger Prize winners, many of these fellowships are more likely to invest in politics and policy controversies than in-depth coverage of classroom practice. Though the Spencer Foundation’s “large” research fellowships in education reporting purport to “span a wide range of topics and disciplines,” five of the seven most recent awardees are centered on identity or inequality. Only two of the eleven recipients in the Education Writers Association’s 17th class of reporting fellowships focused on curriculum adequacy. Sparking change in instructional practice requires deep engagement and thorough attention to research. The success of Sold a Story should lead fellowship judges and philanthropists to support education journalism that seeks the classroom access Hanford enjoyed and the discerning eye she developed.

Reporters looking to follow this playbook must also be prepared to defend their work against sometimes strident criticism from “experts.” Critics have complained that Hanford’s reporting, and the burgeoning interest in the science of reading it helped trigger, risk creating the perception that phonics instruction alone is the key to raising strong readers. Her reports “do not provide a comprehensive examination of all aspects of a reading program,” observed Tim Shanahan, “but I don’t think we should expect them to do so, and I don’t accept that her identification of this problem prevents anyone from teaching other essential aspects of reading.”

The most obvious next act for education journalism is a deep-dive into reading comprehension, how it is taught and tested. Enterprising reporters will find a rich irony here: if decoding (phonics) is a skill that’s been insufficiently taught, reading comprehension isn’t a skill at all. Yet generations of educators have been trained to teach it like one, relying too heavily on instruction in reading strategies that ostensibly can be applied to any text. A walk-through of elementary school classrooms will often reveal posters encouraging children to make predictions and inferences, visualize what they’re reading, and employ tips and tricks like “determine the author’s purpose” or “make connections” by relating a text to their lives, other texts, or the world around them. Such displays hint at a mistaken belief that comprehension is a transferable skill like riding a bike: once you learn to pedal and balance, you can ride virtually any bike. Reading comprehension is much more complicated, heavily dependent on students’ vocabulary and background knowledge specific to a text—a reality that schools often neglect. (Doug Lemov, author of Teach Like a Champion 3.0, begins to scratch that reading-comprehension itch in his article “Why Are Books Disappearing from English and Reading Classrooms?” features, Summer 2024.)

The nature of reading comprehension implies the need for a school curriculum that is rich in vocabulary and that valorizes knowledge-building across a wide variety of subjects, using a wealth of challenging texts. If education journalists were to probe, they might find surprisingly little attention given to curriculum and a near-reckless indifference to ensuring a student experience that is coherent and cumulative—an experience that builds knowledge and skills within and between grades. Contrary to popular belief that public school curriculum is top-down and aggressively monitored, nearly all U.S. teachers—99 percent of elementary teachers; 96 percent in secondary school—draw upon “materials I developed and/or selected myself” in teaching English language arts. And unfortunately, these supplementary materials have been shown, more often than not, to be of questionable quality, low rigor, and unlikely to build content knowledge.

Reporters who view education through a social-justice lens might find their base assumptions being challenged as they dig deeply into a topic such as reading comprehension. Fashionable thought and practice dictate that school curriculum should reflect students’ cultures and prior experiences. However, this well-intended impulse might do more harm than good if it limits access to the language, contexts, and background knowledge that literate speakers and writers assume their readers possess: historical and literary allusions, cultural references, and idiomatic language. As E. D. Hirsch Jr. has argued, “public education has no more right to continue to foster segregated knowledge than it has to foster segregated schools.”

Doug Lemov is currently at work on a book on “the science of reading post-phonics.” He cites “the overwhelming importance of fluency” as a subject that deserves closer scrutiny. When students are not fluent readers, they read less, and when they do read, their working memory is devoted mainly to figuring out what the words say, not what they mean. Lemov, who has visited thousands of classrooms in his career, also cites the role of attention in reading and learning as a topic that’s ripe for investigation. “Reading is an act of managing your own attention and sustaining a state of concentration,” he said. Quiet is essential to thinking and learning, “but we almost build schools to be distraction machines,” he observed. “It’s almost like we’re oblivious to the research.”

The greatest lesson from Hanford’s reporting, and the thing that made Hard Words and Sold a Story at once gripping storytelling and impactful journalism, is more subtle yet more easily replicable by education journalists across all media. To put it bluntly, the critical theme was the failure of experts. Indeed, the “villains” of Hanford’s exposés were the experts. Lucy Calkins was a professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Irene Fountas is on the faculty of Lesley University. Gay Su Pinnell is an emerita professor at Ohio State. For reporters, skepticism is a virtue. When it comes to covering the classroom, it’s essential. But effective investigative reporting will require journalists to cultivate a wider network of sources, including parents, advocates, and researchers—particularly cognitive scientists and others who study learning—rather than reflexively deferring to credentialed experts in education whose thumbprints are all over failed pedagogies and curriculum.

Emily Hanford’s stellar work has made it clear that uncovering misconceptions embedded in common classroom practices is fertile ground for education reporters to work, but it’s unlikely reporters can mount such an effort on their own. News outlets must see this kind of work as valuable and support it accordingly. Philanthropists and support organizations must recognize that journalistic probes of what happens in the classroom have greater impact than the personality and politics stories that the media currently tends to favor. And above all, education reporters need to make it their business to study the ins and outs of teaching and learning and go deeper than covering school board meetings and budgets. There is so much for children to gain through the sustained and enterprising efforts of journalists.

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of How the Other Half Learns (Avery, 2019). Riley Fletcher is a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute.

This article appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Pondiscio, R., and Fletcher, R. (2024). How to Be the Next Emily Hanford: Journalism has driven a generational shift in how reading is taught. Similar stories are waiting to be told. Education Next, 24(3), 14-21.

Folks in education policy and practice often obsess over whether pop-culture depictions of school life are accurate. But they aren’t, even when they try to be. How plausible is it, for example, that “Prez,” the hot-headed and impulsive rookie cop in HBO’s gritty drama The Wire, accidentally kills a fellow police officer during a botched undercover operation yet somehow still gets hired and finds redemption as a compassionate and dedicated Baltimore public school teacher?

Worse, when the favorite reforms and policy plays of education reformers are skewered by the entertainment-industrial complex, we react as though the takedown carries the weight of an executive order. When John Oliver did an anti-charter school exposé on HBO’s Last Week Tonight, it was as if he were not a comedian but the reincarnation of Edward R. Murrow himself, who famously denounced Joe McCarthy on See It Now. When I asked one high-profile ed reformer why she was treating a comedy show as an existential threat to her work, she sternly replied, “This is where people get their news!” Well, then, people are fools.

This brings us to the latest pop culture artifact to inspire sturm und drang over the policy ramifications of its setting, characters, story arc, and political point of view. Abbott Elementary is a television sitcom created by Quinta Brunson, who also plays the lead as teacher Janine Teagues. The show, which premiered on ABC in December 2021, revolves around the daily lives of the teachers and staff of a fictitious public school in Philadelphia. It has been widely praised for its witty portrayal of life in an urban school, attracted millions of viewers, and won three Emmy awards.

The show is set in Abbott Elementary School, located in a working-class neighborhood of Philadelphia and beset by the standard litany of features associated in the public imagination with struggling inner-city schools: lack of funding, outdated equipment, and a staff that is overworked and underpaid. Despite these obstacles, the teachers and staff are (naturally) dedicated to making a difference in the lives of their students.

Brunson herself is aware of the limitations of her creation and seems almost embarrassed by the attention it’s received among educators. “I know it sounds bad, but a lot of people are like, ‘Wow, you did this thing to show how under-appreciated teachers are, to change the world,’” she said at a TV industry panel discussion last year. “Not really. I really just wanted to make a good workplace comedy.”

So, does Abbott Elementary get the details right?

No, of course not! Am I mumbling? It’s not an ethnography of an inner-city school; it’s a network sitcom, for Pete’s sake! Are you serious?! When the script requires teachers to talk to one another, which they do constantly, they don’t think twice about leaving their classrooms unattended. For all their complaining about never having time to prepare lessons, they spend an awful lot of time hanging out in the faculty lounge and chatting in the hallway. The main characters teach a range of grade levels, from kindergarten to the upper grades, yet somehow, they all seem to have the same lunch period. On staff development days, the room is filled with extras, suggesting the school has a large faculty. Yet when a charter school peels away some 3rd-grade students, Abbott’s 2nd grade teacher is forced to teach both grades in a single classroom. Children are little more than set dressing on Abbott Elementary and they only rarely speak (yeah, right). In my Bronx 5th grade classroom, I had students as old as 12 and 13, but some of the upper-grade Abbott kids look old enough to drive.

The show’s idea of a “disruptive student” is a child who calls out off-topic references to a TV show in class while his classmates are sitting in rapt attention to the teacher’s science lesson (on TV, teachers are still the “sage on the stage,” not the “guide on the side”). It’s the kind of mild misbehavior that calls for “planned ignoring” at best and likely wouldn’t even merit a teacher’s attention in an actual classroom, let alone become fodder for a storyline. The child is sent to the office of the principal, a vain, self-absorbed, and ineffective figure who commands little respect from her staff. When she sends the child back to class with a toy, the rest of the class erupts. That’s his punishment? Now they, too, want to be sent to the principal’s office.

OK, so that part is realistic. Nailed it.

A major plotline in the second season of Abbott Elementary involves a charter school that opens nearby. Naturally, this sent the commentariat into overdrive for an inevitable round of plumbing light entertainment for important political messages. The New Yorker devoted several pages in a March issue to a discussion of how Brunson’s “superb sitcom became an unabashed polemic against the privatization of a public good.”

Must we? Really? Very well, if we are going to take our public-policy cues from a network sitcom and fact-check the script, let the record show that charter schools are public schools, not private; they do not hand-pick high-performing kids, nor can they kick them out for struggling academically. The Abbott crew mistakenly receives a box of textbooks meant for Addington, the gleaming new charter down the block run by Legendary Charter Schools. When they deliver the books to snoop on the upstart school, they run into a former Abbott teacher who was let go for kicking a student. “I don’t do that anymore. Anger management,” the charter-school teacher chirps brightly, then adds in a conspiratorial stage whisper, “At a charter school there’s a lot less oversight in the hiring process. So, it’s been pretty sweet.”

Abbott Elementary does drop the occasional hint that traditional public education, too, is something less than an unalloyed civic good. When Brunson’s earnest and adorable main character, Janine, wants to paint her classroom to match the look and feel of Addington, the principal stops her because that would run afoul of the rules laid down by “the Philadelphia Department of Education, Animal Shelters, and Traffic.” A veteran teacher tells a young colleague to take down a schedule he created to ensure the school’s new curriculum gets taught. “Being a teacher is being asked to do the impossible, year after year,” she tells him, “and our only solution is to show up every day and try our best.” It’s meant to be maternal advice, but it could just as easily land as low expectations. On Reddit, real-life teachers have expressed disapproval at the sins the show commits against the science of reading: the three-cueing method of instruction debunked in Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story podcast lives on at Abbott Elementary.

The most unrealistic touch of all is Abbott itself. If neighborhood public schools were filled with the funny, likable, and dedicated teachers of Abbott Elementary, there would be no charter schools. Addington is filled with new books, French classes, a new computer lab, and more—in contrast to Abbott, which (you know how this sentence is going to end) is “underfunded,” not badly managed. Still, if charter advocates are looking for retribution for the sins committed against their sector by Abbott Elementary, they can start and finish with the Philadelphia public school system, where only a third of students in grades 3 to 8 met reading standards in the 2021–22 school year. And that was robust compared to math, where just 17 percent were up to snuff. According to data released in May by the district, three out of four Philly schools met between zero and 33 percent of their academic targets for the school year, which is no laughing matter.

Abbott Elementary plays to the conventional notions of those outside the edusphere and mines for laughs many of the standard myths and homilies of teaching. The city predicts the prison population based on reading performance. Barbara, a wise veteran, tells her young and earnest colleagues, “Your students can either fear you or respect you.” Sending a kid to the principal’s office makes a young white teacher, an awkward and clueless newbie whom savvy viewers will recognize as a Teach For America tintype, feel like “the mayor of White Guiltsylvania.”

But don’t blame the lack of sophistication on Brunson and company. They’re actors, writers, and comedians, not ed policy people. They’ve created a slight but amusing enough workplace comedy whose major faults lie not in its portrayal of an urban elementary school, but in the irritating tics TV viewers have come to associate with other workplace comedies, such as The Office, on which it’s modeled: the “mockumentary” style of rapid shifts and zooms, and characters breaking the fourth wall and shooting knowing glances at the camera to land weak jokes that even the writers seem to know merit more smirks than belly laughs.

As a kid, I watched an ungodly amount of television. Columbo and The Streets of San Francisco made detective work look fascinating. And every Saturday night, Emergency! made working as a paramedic seem like one exciting adventure after the next. Welcome Back, Kotter, though, didn’t make me want to be a teacher. The “Sweathogs” in that sitcom’s remedial ed classroom reminded me a little too much of the tough kids who mocked and intimidated me in metal shop. The point is, a lot of us form our ideas about various occupations from television shows—and most of these impressions are far from realistic.

But television is meant for entertainment, not elucidation. And know—as always—that when those of us in the education arena argue over whether a TV show is true-to-life or not, accurate or mythologizing, it’s a telltale sign of motivated reasoning: “Abbott Elementary reminds me so much of the teachers I know!” (Read: pay us more). “That’s not what it’s like at all!” (Read: open more charter schools). It’s just a television show. If every district-run school in Philadelphia were like Abbott Elementary, you wouldn’t put your kid in a charter. Or teach in one.

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of How the Other Half Learns (Avery, 2019).

This article appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Pondiscio, R. (2023). Does Abbott Elementary Get Teaching in an Inner-City Public School Right? Entertainment, not elucidation. Education Next, 23(4), 56-59.

Hours before the polls closed, I realized my upstart campaign for a seat on my local school board was doomed.

At about 4 p.m., the school parking lot in my small upstate New York town began to fill up with cars of spectators arriving to watch a critical girls’ softball matchup. For the next several hours, until the polls closed at 9 p.m., parents would be coming to school to watch their kids play sports, perform in the student orchestra, see their work displayed in a school-wide art show—and to vote. An evening of family activities that normally would warm my small-town heart suddenly felt ominous.

My opponents in the campaign for school board in Greenville, New York, a town of about 4,000 people a half-hour’s drive south of Albany, weren’t the other two candidates. I ran against apathy and complacency. I raised questions about the budget and student outcomes, which seemed mediocre given the district’s per-pupil spending, demographics, and relatively low poverty rate compared to the highly disadvantaged urban schools where I’d taught. My pitch was least likely to resonate with parents flooding the school for the evening’s activities.

How had I never noticed this before? The vote for open school board seats and on a referendum to approve the district’s $34 million budget was held on May 16, with every ballot cast in a single polling place: the elementary school. The school district is the community’s largest employer. The most self-interested voters, district’s administration and staff, needed only to walk a few steps to the school cafeteria to vote their self-interest by passing the budget. The parade of parents, whose kids would be most negatively impacted if the budget failed and extracurriculars cut, provided the second wave of motivated voters. I didn’t stand a chance.

School budgets have long passed in New York State at a rate and by margins that would make Fidel Castro blush—nearly 99 percent statewide this year. It’s counterintuitive that New Yorkers would be so eager to vote themselves a tax increase year after year. But suddenly it all made sense. These hiding-in-plain-sight features were dots I’d simply never connected before, functionally enabling those with the most at stake to tilt the odds overwhelmingly in their favor.

School board elections have long been ripe for reform. In many places, balloting is “off-cycle,” occurring in May, not Election Day in November, when every other national, state, and local race is contested. The timing decreases voter turnout and favors organized interests, particularly teachers unions. I saw this in my ill-fated campaign. A few days before the election and budget vote, an expensive mailer dropped all over town paid for by the New York State United Teachers calling for voters to pass the budget, and to re-elect an incumbent school board member and a second candidate, a parent and active school volunteer.

But it was the hours of sports and entertainment that really caught me off-guard. One friend, a veteran school superintendent who has run three different upstate school districts, describes the practice of scheduling activities to lure the most engaged and favorably disposed families into schools on the day of the budget vote as “a well-hidden secret in plain sight” and a “nearly universal” school district practice. Colleagues who teach in other districts confirmed that their schools too, have sports, concerts, and other activities scheduled the day of the budget vote.

Parent engagement is an unalloyed good in public education. Scheduling an afternoon and evening of family activities may seem harmless, and even a well-intended way to boost voter participation. But just as certainly, the parents who flock to sports fields and auditoriums are those whose children are actively engaged in extracurricular activities, having a positive experience in school, and least likely to vote for change or reject a budget increase.

Reform advocates have long argued to improve participation in school board elections by moving them to November’s Election Day and making them partisan contests, with school board candidates identified by party affiliation. But at the very least, a simple legislative fix also seems in order: move school board and budget votes off-campus. This would level the playing field by making school-district employees travel to cast their ballots, just like everyone else. It would also dull the impact of school district’s de facto get-out-the-friendly-vote efforts.

Some may object that I’m proposing making it harder for people to vote, or that physical voting locations or even the timing of elections matter less in these post-pandemic days of widespread mail-in voting. But it’s a basic democratic principle that all citizens of voting age should get an equal say and none should be privileged. Imagine if the military budget were subject to approval in elections held only on army bases, or if state health-care budgets were voted on in elections that took place only in hospitals.

The lesson I learned as a first-time candidate is that holding school board and budget votes at the school itself is a bit like choosing between Christians and lions at the Coliseum. It has the appearance of a free and fair election, but the outcome isn’t really in doubt.

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is author of How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice.

Few people in education policy get to see visible evidence of their work in real time and three dimensions. Not once, but whenever she wants it, Susie Miller Carello can stand on a subway platform in Harlem, and, for a few minutes on any given school day, watch the world she helped midwife pass before her eyes. “If you go to the subway station at 125th Street and Lenox from 7:15 to 7:30 in the morning, it’s filled with kiddos with school uniforms and backpacks,” she says. The kids in navy blue and white are en route to Harlem Village Academies. The bright orange polo shirts and ties or plaid jumpers belong to children who attend one of the four Success Academy schools in the neighborhood. Scholars in yellow and blue are on their way to Democracy Prep a few blocks up the street.

For a dozen years Carello served as executive director of the State University of New York’s Charter Schools Institute, the lead authorizer for well over half of the state’s 357 charter schools. The explosive growth of New York City’s charter sector happened first on her watch, and then under her nose. “The first time it happened, I had just hopped on the train in Times Square and noticed the moms and dads and the kids in the subway car,” she recalls. “And when I got off the train, I was like, ‘Oh my God, look at this! These are all our kids.’ And they’re going to these schools that are providing them much better options than they would’ve had 20 years ago.”

At a different moment, both politically and in education reform, Carello might have lots of company taking in the view from that subway platform. For some politicians, philanthropists, and other members of New York’s elite, the city’s charter sector has been an object of civic pride. That’s so particularly in neighborhoods like Harlem, the South Bronx, and downtown Brooklyn, where educational failure stretches back decades. Those neighborhoods have large concentrations of charter schools, including dozens run by the largest and most well-established charter management organizations in the country: KIPP, Success Academy, Uncommon Schools, and Achievement First, among others. A visitor might look at the passing parade of school uniforms and smile at the sight of disadvantaged children put on the “path to possible,” as one charter advocacy group’s slogan puts it, by energetic reform efforts backed by philanthropy and effective public policy. Over the last 20 years, New York City charters have launched tens of thousands of low-income Black and brown children to college and beyond.

In recent years, though, those cheering on the charter sector have seen their numbers dwindle. With few exceptions, the bipartisanship that ushered in the heyday of the education-reform movement has badly eroded. That means diminished political support for charter schools and minimal appetite to thwart the will of the powerful teachers union in deep-blue New York City. In March 2019, the city reached a state-imposed cap on the number of charter schools permitted to operate. Less closely examined or well understood is the resistance that has risen from within the education-reform movement itself. Charter schools, particularly those run by networks with resources sufficient to staff energetic recruitment efforts, have long relied disproportionately on young, recent college graduates to staff their classrooms. But the energy, idealism, and agenda of those recruits has changed. To the founding generation of New York’s highest-performing charter schools, strict classroom management, academic rigor, and high expectations were the hallmarks of well-run schools and conditions necessary for student achievement. But that same school culture can register as abusive and harmful, even grounded in white supremacy, to younger staffers steeped in the argot of social justice and committed to “anti-racism.” This clash of ideals happens largely over the heads of parents, who continue to swell charter-school waitlists and whose vision of a good school never seems to change much: safety, solid academics, character education, and a fair shot at college and upward mobility, whether their children attend a school that’s part of a large network or a single-site “mom and pop” charter school.

New York is emblematic of charter schools nationwide and indicative of the growing pains in the sector, buffeted by changing ideals and priorities, including from within the sector itself.

* * *

After disgorging students onto the platform in Harlem, the 2 train rumbles north to 241st street in the Bronx, where other high-performing charter networks like Icahn Charter Schools and Bronx Classical opened schools in neighborhoods long beset by educational failure. But to catch a glimpse of an up-to-the-minute symbol of the state’s charter sector, you need to leave the City entirely and travel 150 miles up the Hudson River to New York’s capital region. There you will find Re’Shawn Rogers, one of the state’s newest charter-school pioneers.

There is still “cap space” to create new charter schools in New York state outside of the five boroughs of New York City. Thus, in September of 2021, Carello and her staff recommended to the SUNY board of trustees that they approve Rogers’ application to launch Destine Preparatory Charter School the following fall with 116 students in kindergarten and 1st grade and to enroll 435 children up to and including 5th grade over the next five years. The school’s name is meant to invoke “Destiny,” but there’s a Destiny Prep in Jacksonville, Florida. Rogers didn’t want to risk copyright infringement or bad press, so “destiny” became “destine.” The shortened name is meant to invoke the great things the school’s students are destined to achieve.

On a Saturday morning in May 2022, Rogers is expecting about half a dozen families for an information session in a nondescript office building in between Union College and a riverside casino in Schenectady. The place once grandly called itself “the city that lights and hauls the world,” a reference to General Electric, which was headquartered here, and the American Locomotive Company, which went out of business in 1969. The city has been losing population for nearly 100 years. A demographic mix of 65,000 people call Schenectady home today, nearly one third fewer than at the city’s 1930 peak. The poverty rate is 20 percent, roughly double the national average.

The first person to arrive for the information session is Osei, a bright, energetic, and chatty five-year-old boy, who bounds into the third-floor conference room several strides ahead of his father and announces boisterously, “I’m here to meet my new school!” Almost immediately his attention is captured by a pile of donuts on the conference table. Without breaking stride, he marches around the table and grabs one, which his dad orders him to put down. When Rogers asks the child to say his name again, perhaps to redirect his attention from the treats, the little boy reaches for a pen and paper and insists on writing it out, first and last name. He pushes the paper across the table to Rogers. “Now I get a donut,” Osei says, making an announcement, not asking permission. His father, Harry Rolle, smiles and relents. “You worked up an appetite writing.”

“Good job, buddy,” Rogers smiles warmly at the child. “Hard work gets rewards. I’m in the same bucket as you.”

Rogers has been working hard on the launch of Destine Prep for two years; his reward is only now coming into focus as the school moves from two years of planning and authorization to meetings with prospective students and their parents. Charter-school applications are mind-numbingly detailed, running hundreds of pages. Would-be school founders must document a demonstrated need for a new school, describe their academic model in detail, and show community support in the form of a strong local board of directors. Then there is the nuts-and-bolts work of real estate, contracts, construction management, hiring staff, fundraising, and persuading families to take a chance on a school that exists only as a PowerPoint presentation.

“I helped scale up Success Academy, but we had extraordinary resources, seemingly unlimited support, and [Success founder] Eva Moskowitz busting through barriers,” remarks Emily Kim, who founded the Zeta Charter School network after several years as general counsel at Success. “I know exactly what needs to be done because I’ve done it so many times. When I think about independent charter schools, given all the challenges school founders face, I don’t know how they overcome these massive obstacles solo.”

When no other families arrive for the information session, Rogers gamely launches into his presentation with Destine’s operations manager, Mashoma Brydie, who joins the meeting via Zoom. Much of Rogers’s talk could have come straight from a pitch for a no-excuses charter school two decades ago: Destine will offer an extended school day and year; kids are expected to be in school every day; and learning doesn’t stop over the summer. Rogers believes in “logical consequences” for behavior management and stresses he’s “big on communicating” with parents. Osei starts running laps around the table and trying to get his father’s attention as Rogers finishes his presentation. The mission of Destine Prep is to develop students in grades K–5 to become FUTURE CHANGE MAKERS (the PowerPoint slide renders this in all caps) through “rigorous academics, social and emotional learning, and affirmation of their identities.”

* * *

There was a time, fast receding into memory, when big-city charter schools were media darlings, lionized in movies like Waiting For Superman, and the subject of fawning coverage on 60 Minutes. They were the flagships of a fast-growing education-reform movement, luring the best and brightest new graduates of elite universities away from law schools and investment banks and into Teach For America, and from there to inner-city classrooms aspirationally named Harvard, Princeton, Georgetown, or Michigan instead of Room 222. Tightly run charter schools were celebrated as a rebuke to district-run dropout factories, which had relegated generations of low-income students to second-class citizenship. Charters bristled with do-gooder energy and dubbed themselves “no-excuses” schools, in the belief that the Black-white achievement gap was evidence of low expectations and indifference, not poverty and certainly not race. When students failed, it proved merely that adults had failed them. And there must be no excuses for adult failures. Period.

At the federal level, charter schools had patrons and champions from across the political spectrum. Bill Clinton was an early charter-school supporter; so was George W. Bush. The number of U.S. students in charters more than doubled from 2009 to 2018, to 3.3 million from 1.6 million, with most of those gains coming during the eight years of the Obama presidency. In the years since, bipartisan support for charter schools has significantly weakened. Earlier this year, President Biden’s Department of Education proposed new regulations on the $440 million federal Charter School Program. Progressives cheered the move to rein in money “squandered on unneeded, mismanaged schools and the operators.” Conservatives complained the move was “designed to bring the boisterous, popular charter school sector to heel.”

No single event heralded the change in the weather. In 2011, the biggest and most well-established urban charter network, KIPP, released a study showing that one third of its earliest cohorts of students had graduated from college—four times the rate for low-income Black and brown children at large, but less than half of the figure its founders believed they could achieve. The report led to significant changes in KIPP’s program and pedagogy. As the decade wore on, a palpable reform fatigue set in as some Americans soured on the standards, testing, and accountability regime that had come to dominate public education at large. Antagonists like Diane Ravitch hammered relentlessly at charter schools, questioning their results, attacking their “harsh disciplinary policies,” and turning “no excuses” from a rallying cry to an epithet. When widespread protests over racial discrimination inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement broke out on college campuses in 2015, charter critics adopted the protesters’ language. Teaching “taxonomy moves” common to no-excuses teachers represented “carceral pedagogy” aimed at “controlling Black bodies.” Students marching through school hallways in tightly supervised straight lines was “practice for prison.” White-led charter schools were said to echo power structures in society at large.

The charter sector has largely accepted the criticism as sincere and tried to adjust to it rather than rejecting it outright. That’s somewhat puzzling, given that there was ample material with which to construct a defense. First, college-preparatory no-excuses schools had lost little of their luster among parents for whom high expectations, tight classroom management, and school uniforms were reassuring signs of safe, well-run schools and an antidote to chaotic inner-city classrooms. Internal measures of parent satisfaction and “net promoter” scores (e.g. “How likely are you to recommend your child’s school to a friend or family member?”) remained consistently strong. Even more pertinently, the schools delivered measurable results. A 2017 study by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes examined charter schools across 24 states, New York City, and Washington, D.C., and found that attending an urban charter school run by a larger network of schools was associated with improved educational outcomes.

That was precisely the point of nearly two decades of education policy. As the authors of the Stanford report observed, “we would expect that only charter organizations with a demonstrated track record of success would be allowed to open multiple schools.” The report concluded, “it is reasonable to expect current policies to result in continued improvement. However, there is still room for charter school authorizers to accelerate the rate of improvement by ensuring only the finest of charter school organizations are given the privilege of expanding their services to multiple schools.”

Written only five years ago, that language already feels anachronistic. New York has gone in a different direction, functionally denying high-performing charter management organizations the privilege of expanding their services to meet the demand. The sector itself now responds to different sets of impulses and metrics than in its days of heady and explosive growth.

* * *

When charter schooling’s old guard talked about the importance of their schools and movement being “led by people who look like the people we serve” and mused about the day their students would come back to teach in the schools they once attended, they were imagining Re’Shawn Rogers. He was a charter-school student in his native Detroit and worked as a teacher for several years after graduating from Eastern Michigan University in 2012, rising to be humanities dean at Achievement First’s Aspire Elementary school in Brooklyn’s East New York neighborhood.

As a child he struggled in school. “I didn’t really learn how to read until middle school,” Rogers says. During those years, his family moved from Detroit to Lansing, Michigan, where Rogers attended a diverse public school and got involved with its theatre and band programs. For high school, he moved back to Detroit and attended one of the city’s first charters, operated by Detroit Community Schools. “My teachers were just great and met us wherever we were,” he recalls. “For the first time I started to feel successful. I got into AP classes and stuff that I never would have imagined in elementary school.”

His dream was to open a charter school back home in the Detroit area, but in the summer of 2020, he was accepted as a fellow at BES, a Boston-based leadership-development program (the initials originally stood for “Building Excellent Schools”) that identifies and supports emerging school leaders. It was BES that encouraged him to consider applying for a charter in upstate New York, which was terra incognita to Rogers. “I created this huge spreadsheet of anyone who was doing anything important in the Capital region and started calling them,” he says. “‘Did you go to school here? What was your experience like? What do you think about a new school?’” His initial impulse was to apply to SUNY to open a school in Albany, but neighboring Schenectady hadn’t had a charter school in 15 years, since International Charter School was closed due to poor academic performance and financial stress.

As a BES fellow, and with both financial and technical support and advice from the organization, Rogers began working on the application for what would become Destine Prep at a tumultuous time in the charter-school movement and the nation. The Covid-19 pandemic had closed schools for the last several months of the school year and put much of the country on lockdown; the May 2020 death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police ignited profound anger among many. The summer when Rogers began his BES fellowship brought to a boil tensions that had long simmered in charter-school networks and the broader education-reform movement.

Seemingly overnight, social media accounts such as Uncommon Truth, Survivors of Success Academy, BnB@DP (Black and Brown at Democracy Prep) and dozens of others began springing up with students and staff posting accounts of perceived racist slights and abusive practices in their schools. KIPP, a national network of more than 240 schools serving more than 100,000 students, announced it would retire its famous “Work Hard. Be Nice.” slogan. CEO Richard Barth explained that the trademark phrase “ignores the significant effort required to dismantle systemic racism, places value on being compliant and submissive, [and] supports the illusion of meritocracy.”

“As a white man, I did not do enough as we built KIPP to fully understand how systemic and interpersonal racism, and specifically anti-Blackness, impacts you and your families—both inside of KIPP and beyond,” co-founder Dave Levin wrote in a plaintive letter to KIPP alumni. “It is clear that I, and others, came up short in fully acknowledging the ways in which the school and organizational culture we built and how some of our practices perpetuated white supremacy and anti-Blackness.”

KIPP was the most visible example of the culture clash between veteran figures in the charter-school movement and younger staff and alumni more attuned to current thinking about social justice. However, few organizations are more emblematic of the shift in values and mindset than BES, which was also transforming itself in response to activism and heightened racial consciousness.

“The big networks—KIPP, IDEA, Uncommon, Green Dot, Achievement First, and more—build from within,” wrote Richard Whitmire in his 2016 book about early charter schools, The Founders, in an admiring chapter about BES. “It’s a winning formula, but it skips over another promising glide path: potential charter leaders who come from outside that pipeline—school pioneers who could build networks every bit as successful as KIPP and Achievement First.”

For nearly two decades under its founder Linda Brown and chief academic officer Sue Walsh, BES had operated as a kind of boot camp for school leaders who would visit top charter schools across the country like Newark’s North Star Academy; Brooke Charter Schools in Boston; and Purpose Prep and Nashville Classical in Tennessee. Brown routinely plastered the word “urgency” in office windows and around the walls at Fellows’ training sessions, which sometimes began at 5:30 in the morning. “If you’re going to start a school, you’re going to be showing up at your office at 5:30 in the morning,” explains Walsh, “because your teachers are showing up at 6:30 and your kids are showing up at seven.”

BES fellows have founded more than 200 schools in 50 U.S. cities, educating more than 63,000 students. In 2018, Brown stepped down from the organization she founded. Aasimah Navlakhi was promoted from chief of staff to chief executive officer; she had initially joined BES as communications director four years earlier. She began her tenure with a listening tour, meeting with past and present BES fellows. “These conversations illuminated a gap between BES’s stated mission and lived values,” said Navlakhi in an interview posted on the organization’s website. She responded by launching an effort to “evaluate our programs and internal operations through a DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] lens.” It concluded with a commitment to make BES “an actively anti-racist organization.”

“I felt in my gut that this path forward was the only way that we could support leaders to truly transform education for the students in their communities,” Navlakhi said. The organization soon rebranded itself, keeping the acronym BES but changing its name from “Building Excellent Schools” to “Build. Excel. Sustain.” Walsh followed Brown out the door. “The seminal moment for me was when we were given readings as a staff that ‘urgency’ was racist,” Walsh told me.

Interviewed jointly, both Brown and Walsh make a point of praising Navlakhi’s “commitment to equity and humanity.” But Walsh adds, “What we did not expect was the clear rejection and denigration of our work and our intentions, which are manifest in so many strong schools that are the platform on which the work of BES sits.”

“It’s become clear they’ve shifted from the primacy of academic excellence to the primacy of anti-racism,” observes Ed Kirby, an ed-reform fixture who was intimately involved in the design and launch of BES, and authored its “core principles,” which guided its work for two decades. “I’m not going to get into judging them and their new direction. But the place is completely unrecognizable to me,” he says. For her part, Navlakhi says she sees no tension in BES’ evolution. “In quality schools, academic excellence and anti-racism reinforce one another,” she says. “Promoting anti-racism and a community-centered approach creates an environment that respects students and families and, in turn, contributes to academic success.”

Some New York charter-school leaders are worried, however, that these shifts in emphasis will adversely affect students. Stephanie Saroki de Garcia, who runs the Brilla charter school network in the South Bronx, describes what she sees as competing priorities of charter-school parents versus staff “who have gone to elite colleges” and see schools as vehicles to promote societal change. “I think it’s going to have a real impact on academic outcomes for underserved kids, and the opposite of the intended effect. Kids are not getting what they need academically,” she says. “Even in my own child’s charter school, half of their professional development is on racial equity. How are they learning how to be excellent teachers? It’s really worrisome.” Saroki de Garcia has occasionally faced pushback from her own staff over Brilla’s classical curriculum and school culture. “Our response has always been, ‘Look, we’re here because the state has given us permission to teach kids a set of academic standards, and that’s Job One.’ If we don’t do that well, we shouldn’t be in business,” she says.

The transformation of BES stunned Brown. Walsh suggests that current voices in education reform “don’t have enough grounding in bad schools.” This last point comes up frequently in conversations with charter-school veterans: as the movement has grown and evolved, younger staffers have either forgotten or never knew the conditions to which no-excuses charters were created as an antidote.

“The numbers certainly show that parents prefer order and safety over chaos. It also shows in high school and college matriculation,” observes Lester Long, a 2004 BES fellow and the founder of Classical Charter Schools, a network of four schools in the South Bronx. “Deep learning can’t happen in fearful environments, either of other students in a too-chaotic school or of the teacher in a too-strict one. Ultimately, great teachers and schools find that balance.” Long also points out that “no excuses” was too poorly defined, but it was “a shorthand form of deep respect for Black and brown students. The key point was ‘I know you can do this. I believe in you.’ There were disappointing exceptions, but the original meaning and intent was one of empowerment,” says Long, whose schools were frequently visited by BES fellows prior to the change in leadership, but not since.

For Re’Shawn Rogers, meanwhile, the die was cast when there was an opening to become the interim principal at his school, but Achievement First turned him down. “We had a number of meetings with [co-CEOs] Doug [McCurry] and Dacia [Toll] about equity and just having more Black people in positions of senior leadership within the network,” Rogers says. But he didn’t see that happening for himself. “My overall feeling was that there was not a place for me as evident by the lack of senior leadership that looked like me or thought like me.”

* * *

In hindsight, New York was an unlikely locus of charter-school dynamism. “There was never a moment where there was great political enthusiasm for charters in New York,” notes James Merriman, the longtime head of the New York Charter Center, an advocacy organization. “It was just not in the DNA of New York, New York,” a Democratic stronghold and a stalwart union town. In 1999, Governor George Pataki approved a pay raise for state lawmakers in a political bargain that led to passage of the law authorizing charter schools. In New York City, a few years later, charter-school operators lucked into a pair of staunch allies in Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his schools chancellor Joel Klein, who raised millions of philanthropic dollars and lured the most successful charter management organizations with the promise of rent-free “co-located” space alongside traditional schools in buildings owned and run by the city’s Department of Education. The availability of facilities for start-up charter schools was “more than a shot in the arm,” Merriman recalls. “It was life itself.”

Bloomberg’s last day as mayor was December 31, 2013, but he remains a player in the city and in education reform. In April 2022, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced a pair of $100 million dollar gifts, one each for Harlem Children’s Zone and Success Academy. In Schenectady, Re’Shawn Rogers is operating on a much smaller scale. He and his school have received grants totaling $100,000 from BES, another $50,000 from the Albany’s Brighter Choice Foundation, and $70,000 from the Schenectady Foundation. “I had to work for that myself, so I’m very proud of that,” Rogers tells me over sandwiches and coffee at a downtown Schenectady pub. He’s equally pleased to have secured a deal that folds construction costs for his new school into the monthly rent for the space, which also offers room to expand as he enrolls more students in the next five years. And there’s another thing he’s proud of, now that he’s left a big charter management organization to open his own school: “It’s become important to me to make sure I see people of color in positions of power, and now I have the opportunity to put people in those positions.” A lot of his friends who are leading and starting schools are people of color, he adds, “so it’s starting to become more normalized to me.”

After lunch, we walk a few blocks to his school. Destine Prep is wallboard, insulation, and ductwork—a construction site, not an elementary school. It seems inconceivable that more than 100 kindergarteners and 1st graders will march up the stairs and into classrooms in less than two months. Rogers is unfazed. Like those early charter-school founders, he does not suffer from a lack of confidence.

But it’s all different now. The mission and vision of charter schools, the politics, the concerns of activists and advocates, and the deliverables demanded by philanthropists have all shifted over time. So have the values and ideals of the young people who still flock to this work, albeit in fewer numbers than in its halcyon days. Carello left SUNY over the summer to join the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. New York’s charter-school cap remains in place, but lobbyists and advocates suggest things might be different under Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City mayor Eric Adams, who sometimes sounds more favorably disposed to charter schools than the staunch enemy he replaced, Bill de Blasio. When charter advocates nowadays pitch lawmakers on lifting the cap, conversation is more likely than not to mention creating opportunities for more community-based charter schools like Destine Prep, rather than giving more charters to the big networks.

The one thing that hasn’t changed in 25 years are the parents. On an unseasonably chilly Saturday afternoon in June, Mashoma Brydie welcomes parents to a community center in Schenectady. Two dozen kindergarten and 1st graders are scheduled to be fitted for school uniforms for the school year that’s now just two months away. One of the first to arrive is Christine Lawson, whose grandson Jayceon will start kindergarten this fall.

If Re’Shawn Rogers is the school leader that charter trailblazers imagined would one day lead their movement, Lawson is the matriarch of the archetypal family charters were built to serve. Her own mother worked for the New York City Board of Education, but Lawson wanted something better for her five children, who today range from 18 to 45 years of age. So she cobbled together a mix of public, private, and Catholic schools in Brooklyn and the Bronx for them. All five graduated, which she suggests was no mean feat “during the drug era” in New York City. One went on to earn a degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Jayceon’s mom Whitney is also at the uniform fitting, but when it comes to schools, Lawson is clearly the decision maker in the family.

Her youngest son is about to graduate from Schenectady High School, but Lawson’s grandson will not be setting foot in the city’s schools. “Public school? Nah,” she says, then quickly adds she has nothing against them. The teachers in her son’s school “go hard for the kids,” but public schools “believe in social promotion” and don’t have high enough standards. “You’re just not walking out of high school with everything you need. I know that for a fact,” Lawson tells me. She’s certain Destine Prep will offer a “deeper level” of attention for her grandson. “It’s a brand-new school, but I trust them. I just trust them,” she explains. “We need more attentive people and hard-working teachers, and they’re in charter schools.” She learned about Destine Prep via a Facebook post. If she hadn’t, she would have “done her homework” on other options for her grandson. Even now, her daughter is still considering moving back to New York City. “If she goes back, then I’m gonna follow her, and we’re going to choose a Catholic school” for Jayceon.

She joins a handful of other families in front of a long table, covered with an array of neatly folded sky-blue Destine Prep uniform shirts and khaki pants. Lawson smiles, sighs, and says to no one in particular, “There’s just something about a charter school.”

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He is author of How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice.

This article appeared in the Winter 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Pondiscio, R. (2023). What Next for New York Charter Schools? The era of explosive growth of network-run, “no excuses” charter schools is over. Tentatively emerging: “community-based” charter schools. Education Next, 23(1), 36-44.

I’ve heard you say more than once that you’re a good “venture bureaucrat.” Can you explain what that means?

Knowing what makes a good school as well as what it takes to run a strong organization is the key to creating an authorizing environment where great schools can take root and thrive. Authorizers have to know both of those things, and be able to analyze new charter proposals to identify what works for an education program, as well as what it takes to run a great organization. That’s the venture part. We’ve made some pretty good bets. We’ve figured out over the years how to analyze a strong business proposal for a charter school, how to determine whether an organization has the capacity, and the commitment of its board and the founders to actually get it done.

How about the bureaucrat part?

The bureaucrat part is holding schools accountable for actually delivering on the promises they make when they get a charter. If you look across the country, the biggest reason that charter schools fail is financial. We haven’t had schools that have failed financially, not any. We have a really good set of protocols and processes to work with a school when it hits a financial glitch. We also make sure we’re working closely with their boards, help them in doing their budgeting, or when there might be a governance glitch in the school. And when it doesn’t work, if you don’t provide results for kids, evidence of success and achieving the mission you were chartered to achieve, then you don’t get your school renewed. We’ve closed twenty-six schools in twenty-one years.

Education politics has gone sideways in so many cities that were ed reform hot spots, especially in New York. The charter sector is among the highest-performing in the nation, particularly for low-income kids of color. It should be a point of civic pride, but there’s been a charter school cap for years with no end in sight. That has to be frustrating.

There are no incentives for traditional school districts absent the kind of visionary district leadership you had in New York City under [Mayor Michael] Bloomberg and [schools chancellor Joel] Klein to support what’s actually working. But, yeah, one of the things I don’t understand is—especially now, post pandemic—when you have parents who are asking for schools, asking for high-quality choices, and we can point to those schools, why you don’t expand that? The politics of New York after twelve years in this gig still elude me.

Is that why you’re leaving?

Well, it has been twelve years. And I’m a sixty-year-old white woman who turned six fifteen days after Martin Luther King was murdered. Who remembers watching Bobby Kennedy climb on the back of a truck forty-five minutes from my home to tell the people of Indianapolis about King’s assassination. And two months later? Kennedy was also murdered. These two men and the loss of their love and leadership to all of us as a people? They formed my commitment to kiddos and parents, and I think the results for New York’s charter kids show some pretty darn good results. Others disagree. My biggest wish is that the next Institute leader can help New York understand that more great schools for parents and kids to choose is the love and leadership we owe every child.

What’s changed over the last twelve years?

There are many more complications, starting with, as you said, there are no more charters available in New York City. And there are shifting priorities from the [New York State Board of] Regents in terms of what we are going to use to determine the quality of a school. I feel like we’ve done an awful lot. We know how to scale good schools. But now is the right time for the sector to have some new leadership. The organization deserves a leader that can actually dive in to some of those challenges.

I worry about shifting priorities within charter schools themselves. We oversold “college for all” and test scores, but that’s taken a back seat to “equity” concerns.

Has that been your biggest frustration?

There are two. The first one is the fabrication that we didn’t authorize community-based charter schools. The numbers show again and again that we replicated strong charters that partnered with community organizations every time they applied. The narrative that we only authorized huge networks is false. But it seems truth is elusive these days. The second frustration is that we worked very hard to diversify the teacher pipeline, making a pathway to certification to teach in charters we authorized by partnering with our community organizations. Because the state demands that teachers be certified and because we know how important it is to have teachers and leaders of color for our students. And very, very wise minds disagree about the effectiveness of certification…

Let the record show you’re smirking.

No, seriously, people that I really admire argue for the value of a master’s degree on the way to teacher certification. So we worked really hard with the deans of the colleges of education at the State University of New York to put together an acceptable process whereby some of our schools could certify their own teachers. SUNY has, like, eighteen of the top twenty performing elementary schools in the state of New York. They know something about supporting their teachers, and how to organize for instruction, how to put coaches in the classroom that build those teacher muscles in a way that I wish to God I would’ve had when I was a teacher.

The best professional development I’ve ever seen was at Success Academy.

It’s not just the big networks. It’s our community-based organizations, some of which have schools that beat the big networks from time to time. They would tell me, “Oh my gosh, we have so many people in our community that have a bachelor’s degree, and they’re ten years into a career. They would be great teachers but they are not going to go back to college and spend all that money.” SUNY worked with us get a really streamlined process for getting your master’s degree so you could be certified and teach. But we got sued [by the New York State Department of Education] and we lost.

Was that the biggest “L” of your twelve years?

Yes, I think so. Interestingly, before I left, the folks at the State Education Department called and asked for all the things that we use to create our process. So, fingers crossed, maybe in the future, we can figure out a way and talk to the leaders of communities of color in New York that contain people who would be great teachers but aren’t going to stop mid-career and go back and get a master’s while raising a family. I’d still love to create that pipeline.

What was your biggest win?

I don’t know of anyone in the last twelve years that quadrupled the number of students or tripled the number of charter schools, over 80 percent of those students economically disadvantaged and exceeding their districts of location in English language arts. SUNY charters are frequently outperforming the highest-income districts in the state, Westchester, Shenendehowa, etc.

Given the state cap, slower growth, and changing priorities, I’m worried that New York charter schools’ best days are behind us. Should I be?

It depends on how you define “best days.” If it means there are plenty of charters and every parent gets a choice and that choice is high quality, that’s on pause, to put it nicely. It’s being thwarted by adults who are making decisions that seem adult-oriented and not focused on giving every kid and every parent a choice of a high-quality seat. But there are still between 18,000 and 22,000 seats yet to be filled in New York City charters because not every school that we have authorized has grown to serve all the grades it is already approved to serve. That’s not new charters, not new grade levels, just what they’re currently authorized to do.

What’s been the hardest part of this job?

You’re always “the state” in any interaction with any school or any school leader. If you asked my staff over the years, we’ve had lots of conversations about power. You are the entity that controls whether someone continues to operate a school. When you walk in the room, when your name appears on their phone, there is a power dynamic. I am aware of that in every interaction, or I try to be, when I walk into a school. I know that every interaction is one that includes a power dynamic so I try to make it a positive one.

I’ve been to enough New York charter schools to see that they view you not just as the authorizer, but as support. Even an advocate.

The politicians won’t like to hear that. We give charters to schools because we want them to be super successful for kids. And so we do everything we can to focus the schools on doing that and not focusing on us. Listen, over the years, do we ask for more information as compliance and regulations have grown? Yes, that has happened. But—and I hope this continues—at every renewal we ask for a lot of information, and we’ve always said to ourselves, “Can we get this somewhere else? Have they already reported it to state ed? Have they already reported it to the New York City DOE? Can we get it from them so that we don’t have schools having to feed three different state agencies the same information that takes time away from focus on kids?” A good authorizer becomes the least bureaucratic it can possibly be, so that as much attention as possible goes to kids, families, and staff.

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

One of the most unlikely education stories of the last decade has been the rise of Mississippi as a star of NAEP and a science of reading proof point. When looking for models to follow, researchers and policy wonks usually point to places like Shanghai and Finland, even Massachusetts. But Mississippi? Who saw that coming?

But under Dr. Carey Wright, whose tenure as State Superintendent of Education is coming to an end this week, students in Mississippi have made greater gains than in any other state, making it a national model for both practitioners and policymakers alike, owing to the raft of reforms Wright led, including the adoption of higher academic standards, a focus on teacher training and professional development, and a statewide mandate to retain struggling readers in third grade.

Wright is also among the longest serving state ed chiefs in the country, having been appointed to her position in 2013. She reflected on her work and success in this conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Why are you leaving?

It’s time to go back home and be with my family. I’ve been here eight and a half years. My youngest daughter’s getting married in September, my grandson is turning three, and I’ve been doing a lot of self-reflection about how important my parents were to my children. I am the only grandparent my grandson has. My family all live in Maryland, and that part of my heart was really tugging at me. It will be hard to leave because I’ve loved this job from the moment I took it and love the people I work with.

Usually people in your role shouldn’t buy green bananas; they don’t last long. But you’re one of the longest serving state chiefs. How’d you pull that off?

You don’t do this job alone. I have an amazing leadership team that believes in the same kinds of things that I do about children and the importance of putting children first and foremost. And you’ve got to have a pretty hard shell because you’re going to have your detractors. Since my feet hit the ground I’ve heard, “Why in the world are we hiring somebody who is not from Mississippi? She’s not from around here.” That’s continued to this day. I try to stay out of the politics. I didn’t want to make this job a political football. I knew I wasn’t going to get anything accomplished if I was seen as partisan one way or the other. So I’ve been very clear that my focus is on improving student outcomes in the state and not leaning in one way or the other to either side of the aisle. I think people have respected that.

But surely it’s easier to get things done at the state level when one party is calling the shots.

Well, yes and no. Yes, because my state education committee chairs are very supportive. But no, because not everybody puts a priority on education. There was a culture of low expectations here. We’d been 50th for so long that I think people had just given up on education getting any better. You just have to accept that it’s not at the top of everybody’s priority list. Sometimes when you make decisions based on what’s in the best interest of children, it does not make adults’ lives that much easier. Looking back, I watch the pride that has taken place across the state with our children doing as well as they are. People are like, “Wow, our kids really can achieve more!” I have always believed they could achieve more.

I’ve always been skeptical that state-level policy can really move the needle or shape classroom practice productively. But Mississippi is the outlier. How’d you do it?

People can be resistant to change. But I’ve found that data and accountability will drive the behaviors that you want to see in schools and in classrooms. If you put what’s important to change student outcomes in policy, people are going to pay more attention to it. We put that out in the public so parents and communities and other stakeholders can see what’s happening inside their schools and districts in a very transparent and neutral way. We don’t slant the data. We report the data. Sometimes that’s made people happy, and sometimes that’s made people not so happy. My point is, if you’re not happy with the data, then what are you doing to change it?

But surely Mississippi’s not the only state in the country that worships at the altar of data and transparency?

I think it’s the strategies that we’ve put in place. We’ve been very clear that we are teaching the science of reading and providing a tremendous amount of professional development. I’m a firm believer in building teacher and leader capacity because I think that people want to do the very best that they can, but some come to those classrooms with more gifts than others.

Our coaching strategy has been very strong for us, but unlike [other states], we hire the coaches. I was not going to just give the money to the districts and let them hire the coaches because I feared some principals or district superintendents might use it as an opportunity to move an ineffective teacher out of the classroom and make him or her the literacy coach. We have hired every single coach we have out there.

On the one hand, you paint a picture of a warm working relationship with districts and teachers. On the other, with coaches, you’re saying “Those are my employees, not yours.” Where do you draw the line between being the state authority and having an ongoing, productive working relationship with districts and teachers?

There are times with me that things have to be non-negotiable. When it comes to what I believe, based on research, experience, input, or what’s in students’ best interest, I’m not going to waver. If I vacillated every time I got pushed back, we’d never get anything accomplished. Like the science of reading. I believed so strongly that was going to be the [focus of] professional development. For some teachers, it was brand new. And so now we were coming in saying, “This is really how you teach reading.” And we had teachers coming out of the professional development who actually were in tears saying, “I feel like I failed all these kids that I’ve had before me.” Our point was, no, move forward. You can’t change the past, but you can affect the future by doing exactly what you need to be doing. So part of it is a give and take. But when it comes to students and what they need, I stand pretty firm on that.

How about your schools of education? In the ed reform era, I feel like we’ve kind of given ed schools a pass. Just kind of assumed there’s not much we can do to improve the preparation that that teacher candidates have when they come to us.

I have found the institutions of higher learning slower to move and change than I think they should be because “this is the way we’ve always done it.” And you’ve got professors at some universities who are still wedded to whole language. You’re right, we’ve heard all, “I’ve got a terminal degree.” And so we’ve tried to work with them over a number of years, and I think we’ve made some progress. Getting back to my policy piece here, I realized, you know what? We have the authority to approve their programs, right? So let’s do that. We’re going to evaluate their programs because we can do that. And everybody came to the table. I think one came kicking and screaming, “How dare you mess with my ed prep program?” But I’ve been pretty public about this. I don’t think it’s fair for students, parents, grandparents, or whoever it is to pay for a four-year degree, and then the state has to come in behind it and pay for more professional development to get them to where they need to be day one. So students coming out of ed prep programs, in order to be licensed in the state of Mississippi, have to pass what’s called a foundations of reading assessment based on the science of reading. I want to find out what’s the first-time pass rate by educator prep program. They don’t want us to publish those data, but to me the data are what the data are. So that’s one thing I’ve been talking to the team about. Let’s figure out how we can get this together and get this published.

Is that going to happen?

I think so.

What was your biggest mistake? Anything you did badly? Or didn’t do and wish you had?

I will be quite frank with you about my biggest mistake. I was very naive, very naive. It was 2016, I think, and I’d been here for a couple of years. The U.S. Department of Education, at the time, would send out what they call these “dear colleague” letters to the states with updates and new pieces of information. Typically, what I did was take these letters and just push them to the districts and say, “Here’s what we’re getting from USED.” No comments about it, just “here it is.” So then I get one that came jointly from USED and the Department of Justice on LBGTQ guidelines, which I sent out. I was not prepared for the response, “How could you put this information out there?” It became the “Bathroom Letter.” [1] Even the governor was asking for my resignation over just passing along this letter. And so that was a lesson to me about just being more conscious of the political environment. But it stunned me. It stunned me because I don’t discriminate where it comes to children.

Outside of being grandma, what are your future plans?

I probably will do some consulting. I can’t imagine myself not doing something in the education realm. I just can’t. I’m now trying to see exactly what that might look like. But not another full-time state chief job.

What’s your parting advice to your forty-nine colleagues?

Stay focused on children, stay focused on their outcomes, and keep looking at the data to make sure that you are doing exactly what you should be doing to give every child access to as many different opportunities as they can. I used to tell my teachers when I was a principal, I want you to treat each day like this is the only day they’ve got, because when the bell rings at the end of the day, you can’t get this day back. And so what are we going to be doing each and every day to make sure we’re doing the best for children?

1. The letter, dated May 13, 2016, stated that DOJ and DOE “treat a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex for purposes of Title IX and its implementing regulations.” The guidance covered a range of issues, including participation in educational programs and activities, access to facilities, and recordkeeping and privacy.

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

This article appeared in the Fall 2022 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Pondiscio, R. (2022). “How’d You Do It?” Mississippi’s superintendent of education explains state’s learning gains. Education Next, 22(4), 87-88.

Remote learning is hard to love. The nation’s forced experiment in online education the past few years has been a disaster for kids. Educators and parents alike have come to view virtual learning as a necessary evil at best, an ad hoc response to a national crisis. In a survey by McKinsey & Company, 60 percent of teachers rated the effectiveness of remote learning between one and three out of ten. Many attribute remote learning to the catastrophic decline in academic outcomes and an alarming spike in mental health problems, with plummeting test scores and rising rates of depression and anxiety among students.

It’s also assumed to widen achievement gaps. The challenges of remote instruction “apply in affluent, English-speaking, two-parent households,” my colleague Rick Hess recently wrote. “Things get tougher still for single parents, families in tight quarters, or parents trying to communicate about all this in a second tongue.” Online charter schools in particular had a poor reputation even before Covid, associated in many minds with low-rigor credit recovery, poor performance, and mediocre graduation rates. A recent Brookings study of virtual charter schools and online learning during Covid was particularly grim, concluding that “the impact of attending a virtual charter on student achievement is uniformly and profoundly negative.”

Given that bleak and unpromising landscape, an outlier may be emerging: The online version of Great Hearts Academies is proving to be both an academic standout and popular with families. That has officials at the Arizona-based charter school network quietly thinking about launching a low-cost, online, private-school model to bring classical education to anyone who wants it at a price point below—even far below—other options, including Catholic schools. It’s one of several initiatives Great Hearts is weighing to expand its offerings.

Great Hearts is the largest operator of classical charter schools in the U.S. with thirty-three schools serving 22,000 students in Arizona and Texas. They’re high-performing; its high school students earn an average SAT score of 1237. Demand is also high, with over 14,000 students on waiting lists last year. Great Hearts Online (GHO), a tuition-free charter school, launched in Texas a little over a year ago, serving 500 students in grades K–6, more than half of whom were new to the network. An additional 600 charter school students enrolled online in Arizona for the current school year.

Early returns are promising: Seventy-nine percent of GHO students are above the 50th percentile in reading; 72 percent in math. Both of those figures slightly beat the average across the network’s traditional brick-and-mortar schools. Parent satisfaction will always be the most salient metric, and here GHO shines. An internal survey shows 85 percent of parents are more satisfied with Great Hearts Online than with their previous “brick-and-mortar” schools, a number that swells to 92 percent among families who came to the online classical school from traditional public school districts, according to Kurtis Indorf, who leads Great Hearts Nova, an “R & D” division of the fifteen-year-old charter school network.

Indorf acknowledges that GHO is not a perfect fit for every family. “I think our ideal market is almost like homeschool light,” he tells me. “The kind of parents who might think ‘I like homeschooling. I want to be with my family. But the daily pressure of planning and delivering a high-quality education that is safe and aligned to my values is too much to do.’” Then there’s the appeal of classical education, which is experiencing a boom in popularity, with demand far outstripping supply. Great Hearts Nova is looking to satisfy some of that demand and grow its footprint by franchising micro-schools, and through “asynchronous course development,” which would allow GH remote students, homeschoolers, and even some traditional public schools to tap into Great Hearts’s course content. The most intriguing concept emerging from the Nova skunkworks is the possibility of launching a low-cost, online private school, which would conceivably make a classical education available to any family with Wi-Fi.

The 2021 EdChoice “Schooling in America Survey” shows demand for private education far exceeding supply. While barely 10 percent of American children attend private schools, a whopping 40 percent of parents say they would prefer private school for their children. There’s no mystery to solve here. Availability, price, and transportation present hurdles too high for most families to clear comfortably. A trusted school “brand” at a modest price with zero transportation costs theoretically wipes away those issues in a single stroke for a significant number of middle-class Americans—a role Great Hearts seems particularly well-suited to play.

Great Hearts Online plans to enroll 1,620 students across Texas and Arizona in the coming school year. For the 2023–24 academic year, Indorf says, GHO hopes to grow enrollment in the charters and launch a private school across multiple states with an enrollment target of 2,700 students. “By the 2025–26 academic year, we plan on serving over 7,000 students in public charter models as well as a national private model in multiple states,” he tells me.

Great Hearts seems particularly well-suited for this strategy. Where most large charter networks have tended to concentrate in low-income urban neighborhoods, Great Hearts’s classical curriculum and pedagogy have proven particularly popular with middle-class suburban families. Their Texas charter briefly functioned as a private online school before it was authorized by the state, and over 100 families proved willing to pay tuition. Teachers seem no less eager. Great Hearts received 1,400 applications to fill forty online teaching slots. Even though it operates today in just two states, its staff and faculty log on from over two dozen different states.

To be sure, remote learning is not everyone’s cup of tea. But according to a study by the RAND Corporation, the demand for virtual schools is growing. About one in five district administrators have either already started an online school or are planning to start one at the end of the pandemic. Other educators and families fall somewhere in the middle: While they prefer in-person instruction, they hope that schools retain the best that online learning has to offer, even as a supplemental tool.

Could GHO become a breakthrough private school model that’s affordable and attractive to middle-income families? It’s hard to compete with free, but “free” and “excellent” aren’t always available in the same school. It doesn’t take a great deal of foresight or imagination to envision a scenario in which Great Hearts could create something truly new: a high-quality, low-cost private school that taps into Americans’ rising discontent with traditional public schools and that offers a curriculum grounded in the timeless appeal of “the true, the good, and the beautiful.”

I wouldn’t bet against it.

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

The school board in McMinn County, Tennessee, voted 10-0 to remove Maus, a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel by cartoonist Art Spiegelman, from its eighth grade curriculum last month, citing concerns about explicit language and disturbing illustrations. When word got out last week, the condemnation from across the country was swift and pointed. That the vote seemed to coincide with Holocaust Remembrance Day (it was actually taken two weeks earlier) only fanned the flames.

“Yes, it is uncomfortable to talk about genocide, but it is our history and educating about it helps us not repeat this horror,” said teachers union president Randi Weingarten. “It has the breath of autocracy and fascism about it,” Spiegelman himself told CNN. “I’m still trying to figure out how this could be…I think of it as a harbinger of things to come.”

The story is not quite the way it’s been portrayed in the press and social media. And the episode, like several other curriculum battles in recent months, raises any number of questions that are proving too fine-grained for the ready-fire-aim cauldron of Twitter, Facebook, and our polarized public discourse. What kids should and should not be exposed to in school, at what age, and who should decide: Parents? Teachers? School boards? Someone else?

Let’s start with a precise description of the action taken by the school board. One sane voice, Derek Thompson of The Atlantic, pointed out that Maus had not been “banned”; it was removed from the district’s eighth grade curriculum. “Those are really different things. I found and read—and loved—Maus in our school library,” he tweeted. “It was never a part of the curriculum.”

But Maus had been part of the curriculum in McMinn County. A big part. None of the voluble coverage I’ve read has cited the fact that Maus is the “anchor text” in EL Education’s eighth grade language arts curriculum. Thus, when a school board member asked why they couldn’t just swap another Holocaust-themed text for Maus, the district’s instructional staff described how difficult that would be, since the entire curriculum module and several weeks of instruction revolve around that specific text. The same issue was cited when the board was reminded of its own policy allowing parents to opt out of materials they think are inappropriate for their children.

The biggest misconception is that the removal was because board members didn’t want kids learning about the Holocaust. “Our children need to know about the Holocaust, they need to understand that there are several pieces of history that show depression or suppression of certain ethnicities. It’s not acceptable today,” noted one board member, whose specific motion (which ultimately passed) directed “that we remove this book from the reading series and challenge our instructional staff to come with an alternative method of teaching the Holocaust.” A high school teacher at the meeting chimed in to say she teaches the Holocaust every year, but she doesn’t use Maus either. So the frequently repeated claim that the controversy was about keeping kids from learning “honest history” is simply incorrect based on a transcript of the meeting, which is available to any who care to read it.

Here are my takeaways from this high-profile and obviously distorted episode: Would I have let my eighth grade daughter read Maus? Yes, I would and without hesitation. I’m also favorably disposed toward EL Education’s language arts program. It’s knowledge-rich, usable for teachers, and draws upon complex texts and thoughtfully curated supplemental resources. If this controversy were to repeat itself in my town, I’d speak in support of Maus, the curriculum, and teaching the module as written. Finally, anyone inclined to make dark imprecations about teachers and administrators in rural east Tennessee should read the transcript. They made a very strong and sophisticated case for Maus. If I were on the McMinn County Board of Education, I would have cast the lone “no” vote on removal.

But here’s the thing: I’m not on the McMinn County Board of Education. So I draw the line at telling the people of a distant rural school district, six states and 500 miles away, what their children must read for a simple reason: I don’t want the people of McMinn County, Tennessee, telling me what my kid must read.

You don’t have to like or agree with the decision, but the question I haven’t seen considered in all the howling outrage is what alternative wouldn’t be worse in a diverse and divided nation, where even state control of education feels too distant and the grain size too large? If you don’t think a local, democratically-elected school board is the appropriate body to decide whether a book belongs in their school’s curriculum, who is? If not the nation’s 13,000 local school boards, in whose hands would you place the power to dictate the terms and conditions that govern your child’s school culture and curriculum? And what happens when a decision that’s in friendly hands and aligns with your tastes and values today ends up tomorrow in the hands of people you do not know and cannot stand?

Shout all you like. It’s a free country, at least for now. But recognize that a strange spirit is at loose in the land. We seem eager to limit people’s access to ideas we don’t like, and at same time impose our ideas on people we don’t like. We see no conflict in these obviously contrary impulses. We condemn the McMinn County school board for “banning” Maus and in the very next Tweet applaud Neil Young trying to muzzle Joe Rogan on Spotify. Yes, yes, I know. It’s a false equivalence. One’s a government action and the other’s the free market doing its thing. But might I humbly suggest that if your first impulse is to explain why something is or is not censorship or compelled speech rather than being reflexively uncomfortable with it, you’ve already lost the plot.

Half of the seats on the ten-member McMinn County school board are up this year. The primaries are in May; the general election is in August. Now that they have offered a high-profile demonstration of their feel for community values and displayed their pedagogical discernment, the good people of McMinn County, Tennessee, will have the opportunity to express their support or disappointment with their board at the ballot box.

Got a better plan? Because I sure don’t.

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

The proof of a powerful idea is how well it sticks. Once you hear about it “you start to see it everywhere,” as Bari Weiss puts it. She was describing “luxury beliefs,” a phrase coined by Rob Henderson, an Air Force veteran and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Cambridge, who defines luxury beliefs as “ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class.” You can afford to believe in defunding the police, for example, if you live in a safe neighborhood that’s unlikely to be negatively affected by diminished police presence. It’s someone else who will suffer the consequence of your fashionable idealism.

Henderson described luxury beliefs on a recent episode of Weiss’s excellent podcast, and she’s right: They’re everywhere. And nowhere is the gulf between upscale ideals and everyday reality wider or more obvious than in education policy and practice. Too few of us know or have personal experience walking in the shoes of the families and students we claim to serve. Instead, we opine about what’s best for other people’s children from the safety of our respective bubbles, indulging our own set of luxury beliefs.

Where to begin? It’s easy to be blithe about school safety and policing when your child goes to a safe, well-run school. Similarly, one can be quick to label disruptive behavior as “a form of communication” and focus entirely on “disparate impact” in student suspension rates when your child’s school is orderly and she faces minimal risk of physical threats or having her education frittered away by endless disruptions. Hand-wringing about overstressed teens groaning under the weight of hours of homework and the pressure of taking too many AP classes to impress college admissions officers flies in the face of data suggesting just the opposite: The average American student is challenged not too much, but too little.

A grating luxury belief of recent vintage is the haughty insistence that “learning loss isn’t real,” and that Covid-induced school shutdowns haven’t had a profoundly negative effect on children—particularly disadvantaged children.

A particularly selfish belief is common to “proud public-school supporters” who oppose school choice measures that would benefit low-income families while failing to recognize that they themselves utilize the most common form of choice: the ability to buy a home in a community with good schools. Corey DeAngelis of American Federation for Children has made a cottage industry of unmasking or calling out elected officials and advocates, from Elizabeth Warren and Terry McAuliffe to Diane Ravitch, who play a particularly obnoxious form of this game touting the virtues of public education while sending their own children to private schools.

Classroom practice is similarly riddled with luxury beliefs. For years, I’ve noted my own “complicated relationship” with testing, which lends political will and moral authority to reform efforts but has also had a deleterious effect on school culture and instruction, particularly in reading. Yet it’s hard to have patience for the anti-testing activism of those who don’t have to worry if their child will ever read on grade level.

The list goes on. I’ve written elsewhere that the demand for “antiracist” pedagogy and practice tends to come mostly from young, “woke” staffers in urban charter schools, not from the parents who swell those schools’ waiting lists. Similarly, one glance at NAEP history and civics scores should suffice to retire tendentious arguments about what is or is not critical race theory’s place in the classroom. When a mere 15 percent of America’s eighth graders are proficient in history, it’s a luxury belief to think U.S. school should “just teach history honestly.” Honestly, just teach history.

My AEI colleague Ian Rowe has made himself something of a lightning rod in recent years by championing the “success sequence” and insisting we have a duty to share it with children. Citing the work of Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill, Rowe never tires of reminding educators, philanthropists, and policymakers that if a young person graduates from high school, works full-time in any capacity, and gets married before having a child, that child is statistically almost certain not to grow up in poverty.

It would be grand understatement to say that Rowe has received strenuous pushback to his commonsense argument from educators horrified at the notion that they might be stigmatizing single parents, who are the majority in many low-income neighborhoods. Yet Rowe often observes that those who have pushed back hardest against his advocacy for the success sequence are often those with stable marriages and nuclear families who would surely be upset if their own children didn’t follow those norms. There are few better examples of “ideas and opinions that confer status on the rich at very little cost, while taking a toll on the lower class” than refusing to preach what we practice to children most in need of adult role models and guidance.

Henderson, the man who coined the term “luxury beliefs,” has a fascinating backstory; it’s no surprise that he saw, described, and named the phenomenon. He was a freshman at Yale in 2015 when the infamous Halloween costume controversy made national news. Angry students accused professor Erika Christakis and her husband of failing to create a “safe space” for resident students when the former wrote an email defending students’ right to be a “a little bit obnoxious, inappropriate, or offensive” in their choice of costumes. After reading the email several times, Henderson guilelessly asked one of his fellow classmates what made it offensive. She responded, “you’re too privileged to understand the pain that this email caused.” Unbeknownst to his peer, Henderson had arrived at Yale a genuine outsider, having spent his childhood far below the poverty line. His father abandoned the family when he was two, and his mother was addicted to drugs, leaving him to be raised in multiple foster homes. Henderson was a poor student, ran with a rough crowd, and eventually fell into alcohol and drug abuse before joining the military and righting himself, ending up at an Ivy League bastion of power and privilege. Few of us can claim a comparable first-hand view of both the seduction of luxury beliefs, and their cost.

Henderson’s story reminds me of Andy Rotherham’s frequent observation that education policy and reform are dominated by people “who not only liked being in and around schools, they excelled at academic work.” That’s fertile ground for our unique set of luxury beliefs to take root and grow. The views of those whom schools served badly are seldom represented; worse, we often assume we simply know better. The failures and conditions of their schools are filtered through the lens of an idealized “normal.” It doesn’t necessarily make us hypocrites, but it does leave us susceptible to narrow and technocratic thinking. At worst, it casts in sharp relief the wide gulf between abstract ideals held by elites—us—and the day-to-day lives of the children and families who pay the price when those ideals are enshrined in policy and practice.

Just look around.

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

Scripting the Moves: Culture and Control in a “No-Excuses” Charter School
by Joanne W. Golann
Princeton University Press, 2021, $27.95; 248 pages.

As reviewed by Robert Pondiscio

In the early days of KIPP, or the Knowledge Is Power Program, and other networks of urban charter schools that drafted in its considerable wake, the highly prescriptive form of classroom management and teaching these schools pioneered was a subject of intense fascination and considerable optimism. A 2006 New York Times Magazine article by Paul Tough titled “What It Takes to Make a Student” described the belief of KIPP founders David Levin and Mike Feinberg that middle-class kids learn certain methods for taking in information early on and employ them instinctively. KIPP students, by contrast, needed to be taught those methods explicitly. The network’s model included the technique known as “Slant,” an acronym that reminds students to sit up, listen, ask questions, nod, and track the speaker.

“To anyone raised in the principles of progressive education, the uniformity and discipline in KIPP classrooms can be off-putting,” Tough reported. “But the kids I spoke to said they use the Slant method not because they fear they will be punished otherwise but because it works: it helps them to learn.”

Fifteen years on, Vanderbilt University professor Joanne W. Golann’s new book, Scripting the Moves, revisits this highly prescriptive brand of teaching and finds it mostly wanting. The book takes its title and frame from Suzette Dyer, a school principal who observed that success needs to be “scripted” for students and even for teachers. “You’ve got to script the moves for students. You have to narrate the experience so students understand exactly what the outcomes are,” Dyer said in an interview for Restoring Opportunity by Greg Duncan and Richard Murnane.

The author writes that she was initially “not taken aback” by lessons at “Dream Academy” (her pseudonym for the high-performing middle school in a medium-sized northeastern city where she made her observations) that “literally spelled out what students needed to do to conform to school expectations for showing attention.” But the more time she spent at the school, the more she questioned the efficacy of these rigid behavioral scripts. The prescriptiveness, she writes, “left little room for them to develop what I call tools of interaction, or the attitudes, skills, and style that allow certain groups to effectively navigate complex institutions and shifting expectations.” Golann’s object is cultural capital. Middle-class students use it in schools and workplace as “a flexible tool, not a straightjacket,” she notes. “Scripting,” then, is a self-limiting factor, a kind of paint-by-numbers version of “what it takes” to succeed in school and beyond.

Working-class parents “already emphasize to their children ‘no excuses’ problem solving—to work hard and not bother others with requests for accommodations.” Middle-class parents, by contrast, encourage their children “to negotiate with their teachers and bend rules to their benefit.” If the school wanted to teach middle-class expectations to its students, Golann writes, “it should have taught them how to effectively make excuses.” Likewise, the rigid scripting Golann witnessed at Dream Academy allowed for little flexibility, leading teachers to “gloss over legitimate excuses, hiding the structural issues that shape students’ behaviors and actions.” This is a valid observation, if an ungenerous interpretation of a school model whose purpose, right or wrong, was never intended to cultivate unthinking compliance among students, but resiliency and determination.

In general, Golann’s observations are thoughtful, scholarly, and, in contrast to many who have sought merely to discredit the no-excuses model, mostly empathetic. There is a problem, however, and it’s a significant one: Her analysis rests largely on 18 months of fieldwork dating back to September 2012. That’s a long time ago, and an eternity in urban charter schools. She notes that no-excuses charter networks “have begun to reflect on the implications of their rigid behavioral scripts,” but this understates the considerable degree to which charter schools have dialed back their discipline practices and the prescriptiveness of their pedagogies, an iterative process that began a decade ago with KIPP’s disappointment over its graduates’ college-completion rates. This process accelerated more recently with concerns in American education at large about the disproportionate rates at which nonwhite children have been subject to school discipline and suspensions. The long lag time between Golann’s fieldwork and the arrival of the book (some portions were previously published in academic journals in 2015) means Scripting the Moves can read at times like a time-capsule glimpse into a category of schools that long ago recognized and responded to many of the author’s most important critiques.

Indeed, some of the data she presents remind us why “no excuses” came under such intense scrutiny after years of replication and fawning media coverage. Over the course of a single school year, “Dream Academy” teachers meted out an eye-popping 15,423 infractions to the school’s 250 students, an average of more than 60 per student. Only six students managed not to incur a single infraction; one 5th-grade boy drew 295. Numbers such as these caused critics, not unreasonably, to decry the inflexible behavioral demands of “no excuses” schools. On the other hand, Golann notes the school had very few major infractions, such as fighting, graffiti, and bullying, illustrating precisely the “sweating the small stuff” mindset that early no-excuses schools fetishized, taking their lead from the era’s “broken windows” policing model.

Many of the practices Golann describes are best left to molder on the classroom-management compost pile. At the start of the school year, students sit on the floor until they “earn” their seats. Minor behavioral infractions lead to students being “benched,” a tactic borrowed from KIPP’s practice of “porching” (“If you can’t keep up with the big dogs, stay on the porch.”) Benched students must wear their shirts inside out like a middle-school scarlet letter and are forbidden from interacting with peers. These kinds of wince-worthy punishments go a long way toward explaining how the model went from halo effect to heel turn in the minds of so many observers, including Golann.

“If ‘no excuses’ is supposed to be about the school making no excuses for student failure, it ends up being about the school accepting no excuses for deviating from the school’s rigid behavioral script,” Golann writes.

She’s not wrong about the excesses of rigid school cultures and behavioristic teaching, but her critique is at times overly broad. My own book based on a year of observations at New York City’s Success Academy noted that a lesson could be rich and invigorating in the hands of a talented teacher but excruciating under another teacher who seemed not to grasp the “why” behind behavior management, viewing it as an end in itself rather that the starting line for deep learning and inquiry. Similarly, while intellectual fashions have largely turned against no excuses, there is a danger in memory-holing the conditions that made the model’s practices appealing and effective, particularly to parents who prized the physical safety offered by tightly run schools that stood in stark contrast to chaotic neighborhood schools with low graduation rates and few opportunities for college acceptance or success.

Golann clearly means for us to see “scripting” as a problem and even a failure. But strong and successful institutions—from families and churches to the U.S. Marines—have long played an essential role in shaping character by “scripting the moves.” The challenging question implied in Golann’s book is whether the problem is the act of scripting or the particular script. “In many ways, no-excuses schools create an alternative universe for students . . . one that promises upward mobility if students will only follow the school’s scripts for success. Students are asked to ‘overcome’ their backgrounds and assimilate into dominant culture,” she writes. “But it is not easy—and perhaps not prudent—to insulate students from their home worlds. It risks not recognizing the ways in which students are affected by out of school factors and can potentially be detrimental to students’ sense of identity and feelings of connectedness.”

Golann’s critique is on point and resonant with the present moment. Still, one wonders where parents’ desires for their children fit into the calculus. For some, an “alternative universe” is a problem. For others, it’s the point.

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of How the Other Half Learns.

This article appeared in the Fall 2021 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Pondiscio, R. (2021). No Excuses, Revisited: A thoughtful but dated criticism of “no excuses” schools. Education Next, 21(4), 78-79.