Vladimir Kogan is a professor in The Ohio State University’s Department of Political Science and (by courtesy) the John Glenn College of Public Affairs.

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

Kogan, V. (2024). Are Student Surveys the Right Tools for Evaluating Teacher Performance? Education Next, 24(2), 32-37.

In the Summer 2022 issue of Education Next, in an article headlined “Locally Elected School Board Are Failing,” Vladimir Kogan synthesized the research and recommended, “reformers should remain laser focused on improving school governance—to ensure that the reform process prioritizes the interests of kids rather than the demands and political agendas of adults.” The article has generated a response from Rachel S. White, assistant professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville; Sarah Stitzlein, professor at University of Cincinnati; Kathleen Knight Abowitz, professor at Miami University; Derek Gottlieb, associate professor at University of Northern Colorado; and Jack Schneider, associate professor at University of Massachusetts Lowell. Kogan, associate professor at The Ohio State University, responds to the response. The resulting exchange offers an excellent encapsulation of the range of views about the purpose, performance, and possibilities of not only the boards but also the schools they govern.

Are Locally Elected School Boards Really Failing?
A work in progress, with multiple purposes
By Rachel S. White, Sarah Stitzlein, Kathleen Knight Abowitz, Derek Gottlieb, and Jack Schneider

 

The Choice in Education Governance Debates: Complacency or Reform?
Too many school districts are the equivalent of municipal water systems constantly producing cholera outbreaks
By Vladimir Kogan

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

White, R.S., Stitzlein, S., Abowitz, K.K., Gottlieb, D., Schneider, J., and Kogan, V. (2023). Are School Boards Failing? A feature sparks a response and a defense. Education Next, 23(1), 68-74.

This is part of the forum, “Are School Boards Failing?” For an alternate take, please see “Are Locally Elected School Boards Really Failing?,” by Rachel S. White, Sarah Stitzlein, Kathleen Knight Abowitz, Derek Gottlieb, and Jack Schneider.

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

White, R.S., Stitzlein, S., Abowitz, K.K., Gottlieb, D., Schneider, J., and Kogan, V. (2023). Are School Boards Failing? A feature sparks a response and a defense. Education Next, 23(1), 68-74.

For much of the past year, growing evidence on pandemic learning losses painted a dire picture. Fortunately, the latest test data from Ohio suggest that we may have turned a corner, with students beginning to make up some of the ground lost.

Ohio was one of the first states to administer its official assessments in person in Fall 2020, and the results showed that third-grade students at the time were substantially behind earlier cohorts. Our latest report now adds another year of data, from Fall 2021, and finds much smaller shortfalls for the most recent cohort of third graders. Overall, the results provide grounds for some optimism about the trajectory of students’ academic recovery, but also suggest that the students hit hardest by pandemic learning disruptions have also made proportionately smaller gains since then, causing many inequities to persist.

One challenge to comparing student achievement over time is that the pandemic affected both test participation rates—causing them to fall substantially last year—and also the composition of students attending public schools, with enrollments declining in many places. It is thus important to isolate actual changes in student achievement from differences in the mix of students who are tested each year. Our analysis does so by applying statistical adjustments that account for observable student demographic characteristics as well as pre-pandemic differences in achievement as recorded on district-administered reading assessments in lower grades.

On the positive front, although current third graders remain significantly behind pre-pandemic cohorts, the magnitude of the gap has shrunk by nearly two-thirds from last year. Overall, third-grade test scores in Fall 2021 were about 0.08 standard deviations lower than the year before the pandemic, corresponding to between 1 and 1.5 months of learning. For some student subgroups—including English learners and students with disabilities—achievement has largely recovered to pre-pandemic levels.

Nevertheless, considerable gaps remain, especially among some of the most disadvantaged populations. Test scores of Black students remained 0.15 standard deviations lower in fall 2021 compared to this group’s pre-pandemic baseline, nearly double the size of the shortfall observed among their white peers. Black students also appear to have recovered a smaller share of the initial learning losses. In addition, the gap in urban districts remains larger than for other types of school systems.

Achievement Losses Compared to Pre-Pandemic Cohorts, Ohio Fall 3rd Grade English Language Arts Exams

 

And although Ohio schools have now largely returned to full-time in-person learning, the previous modes of instruction available to students remain associated with the impact of the pandemic on achievement. Students attending districts that spent most of last year in virtual learning continued to post lower average scores in the fall of the current school year.

There are two important caveats to these findings. First, Ohio’s fall exams cover only one grade and subject (3rd grade English language arts). As we saw last year, the impacts on spring math scores were generally larger on average than in reading, but the differences between student subgroups were also smaller. Second, the fall exams were completed prior to the Omicron wave in December and January, which resulted in widespread student and teacher absences and disrupted learning substantially for many.

Nevertheless, the latest data provide strong evidence that—with sufficient political will, effort, and resources—pandemic learning losses can be reversed, and reversed relatively quickly. They also highlight the importance of targeting our efforts on the students who remain most behind and ensuring that the various remediation programs actually reach the subgroups and populations who most need them.

Vladimir Kogan is associate professor in The Ohio State University’s Department of Political Science and (by courtesy) the John Glenn College of Public Affairs.

Over the past two years, the nation’s school boards have had to grapple with one thorny controversy after another. Local news reports, op-ed pages, and viral social-media posts have featured outraged parents and advocates protesting the presence of armed police officers in schools, the use of entrance exams for selective programs, mask mandates for in-person learning, and allegations that Critical Race Theory was infiltrating the K–12 curriculum.

These displays of activism and acrimony took place at a time when local school officials were tackling two of the weightiest policy questions in recent memory—how to make up learning lost during the most prolonged and widespread instance of school closures in American history and how best to spend an unprecedented infusion of federal relief dollars. The apparent disconnect between the issues that adults seemed most riled about and what was at stake for students did not escape notice. In January 2021, the San Francisco school board voted to remove the names of presidents Lincoln and Washington (among other historical figures) from district schools because of their supposed roles in perpetuating slavery and racism, even as those same buildings remained vacant and students were still learning remotely. San Francisco Mayor London Breed pleaded, “Let’s bring the same urgency and focus on getting our kids back in the classroom, and then we can have that longer conversation about the future of school names.”

The events of the past two years underscore a question that has long been a subject of debate among education-policy researchers and reformers: Is our school-governance model—featuring decentralized control and locally elected school boards—the most effective and efficient approach to educating America’s youth? In a seminal book published 30 years ago, Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools, John Chubb and Terry Moe argued that it is not. Presaging many of the dynamics on display recently, Chubb and Moe warned that institutions of democratic control—meaning locally elected school boards—often fail in carrying out their core missions, instead empowering vocal and well-organized adults at the expense of the educational needs and interests of students, who do not get a vote in local elections.

With three decades of additional evidence and the pandemic still disrupting business as usual in our schools, now is an opportune time to revisit their arguments. Much has changed in the education world over the past 30 years, and new data sources and research methods have revealed the inner workings of local democracy in much greater detail than was possible when the book was written. Nevertheless, Chubb and Moe’s conclusions have aged surprisingly well. Their central thesis—that local democracy fails to incentivize pivotal policymakers to give priority to students’ academic needs—has been confirmed by a growing body of research on school-board elections. Indeed, increasing partisan polarization over educational issues and the changing demographics of American society have only exacerbated these governance challenges. The pandemic served as a worrying stress test of school governance in America, bringing popular attention to many of the issues Chubb and Moe first highlighted in their work.

Satan and the Origins of “Local Control”

Some critics of Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools attacked the book for being “openly antidemocratic.” Presumably, these detractors believed that local democracy is the default or preferred mechanism for running public schools, but in much of the developed world, schools are typically overseen by centralized national agencies. In fact, our model is largely a historical artifact, dating back to the first public-education law adopted in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the mid-1600s. As evident from the law’s title, the Old Deluder Satan Act, it was the moral concerns of adults, rather than a desire to address the holistic educational needs of children, that mainly drove the public-school effort—not unlike some of today’s battles over sex education, intelligent design, and social-studies curricula.

The Massachusetts law, which charged local government with the responsibility for funding and operating local schools so kids would become literate enough to read the Bible, was copied across the country in one of the earliest examples of what political scientists now call policy diffusion. Over the course of the 20th century, this system underwent several important transformations. The shift from single-room schoolhouses to grade-banded schools necessitated consolidation into larger school systems, moving the locus of political control from boards overseeing individual schools to districtwide bodies. At least in theory, the emerging norm of appointing professionally trained superintendents to oversee day-to-day operations limited the influence of elected school-board members. Starting in the 1970s, lawsuits over funding inequities massively increased state-government investment in K–12 education, giving state lawmakers greater say in public-school policy. And over the past three decades, state and federal reforms greatly increased transparency over student outcomes and ratcheted up accountability pressures designed to improve student achievement.

As this history shows, our system of “local democratic control” was not intentionally designed with student academic outcomes in mind and has become less local (and perhaps less democratic) over time. Nevertheless, elected school-board members still occupy a central policymaking role, with final say over teacher contracts, curriculum choices, disciplinary policies, and many other important issues. Recent research shows that who serves in these positions is consequential for students. When voters elect more nonwhite school-board members, districts diversify their staffs, increase investment in facilities, and narrow racial achievement gaps. Similarly, school boards with more Democrats appear to decrease racial segregation, while greater teacher representation on these bodies leads to lower charter-school enrollments and higher teacher salaries.

Student Achievement and School-Board Elections

Although who wins a particular school-board contest can matter a great deal, there’s little indication that voters use elections to hold school boards accountable. A study by Christopher Berry and William Howell found that voters in South Carolina appeared to reward school-board incumbents for improvements in student test scores in 2000, when the scores first became public (see “Accountability Lost,” research, Winter 2008). However, media attention to test scores faded in 2002 and 2004, and so did electoral accountability. In an analysis focused on the introduction of “report cards” for schools in Ohio, which I conducted with Stéphane Lavertu and Zachary Peskowitz, we found little evidence that highly publicized performance indicators affected the outcome of school-board elections in the state. In California, voters do appear to hold school-board incumbents responsible for student learning—but only when school-board elections are held concurrently with presidential contests and turnout is high.

Even in the rare cases where student achievement does matter for school-board elections, the effects have been surprisingly modest, typically increasing or reducing the share of votes won by individual candidates by fewer than 5 percentage points. This differential is far lower than the margin of advantage enjoyed by incumbents in local races, and it appears to be a fraction of the electoral boost conferred by securing the teachers union endorsement. If school boards are asked to choose between a policy that improves student achievement and one that benefits teachers, the pressures of seeking reelection perversely encourage school-board members to prioritize adult employees over the education of students. These dynamics are likely amplified in large, urban districts, where teachers unions tend to enjoy stronger organization and access to greater political resources.

Some might argue that the interests of teachers and students are necessarily aligned, and perhaps this is true in many cases. However, the pandemic provided a clear counterexample. Fortunately, Covid-19 resulted in relatively mild infections for most school-aged children who contracted the disease—on par with seasonal influenza—but it was far more dangerous for school employees. Although few school-board members publicly acknowledged it, the decision about whether to resume in-person instruction in fall 2020 involved a difficult tradeoff between providing the best learning opportunities for students and minimizing the health risks for workers. There is little doubt that in cities including Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., organized opposition from teachers unions delayed the return of students to their classrooms, although it is less clear how much of this was attributable to union political influence rather than the obstruction opportunities built into the collective-bargaining process.

Are Voter and Student Interests Aligned?

Parents account for a larger share of the electorate in even years, when high-profile national races appear on the ballot, which could be why school-board members seem to face more pressure to improve student outcomes in those years. The conventional wisdom is that off-cycle school-board elections—a practice established by Progressive reformers early in the 20th century—increase the influence of school employees and their unions because most other voters stay home. More recent research, which takes advantage of the growing availability of electronic voter-turnout records and big-data methods to link these records to other information (including teacher-licensure databases), suggests that such concern about off-cycle elections may be exaggerated. Even in exceptionally low-turnout elections, school employees account for a relatively small fraction of voters. Of course, unions influence election outcomes through mechanisms other than voting—including endorsements, campaign spending, and neighborhood door knocking. These strategies may well have a greater impact on lower-turnout elections, though there is no compelling empirical evidence that they do. But the research does suggest reasons other than union influence to doubt that the interests of school-board voters and students are likely to be aligned.

In several recent papers examining school-board elections in various large states, my coauthors and I found that voters who turn out in these elections typically do not have kids of their own and are generally much whiter as a group than the students that local schools educate. Indeed, we showed that most of the school districts with majority-nonwhite student bodies in these states were governed by school boards elected by majority-white electorates—in many cases, overwhelmingly white electorates. Particularly in low-turnout elections, elderly white voters without children appear to be the pivotal voting bloc, and there is little reason to believe that these voters are any more motivated to improve student outcomes than school-employee interest groups are.

The experience of the East Ramapo Central School District, which was profiled in an episode of the public-radio series This American Life, illustrates the downsides of a system in which education policy is dictated by voters who do not look like the students that the policies affect. The district is in a racially diverse suburb in New York state. While two thirds of its residents are white, Black and Hispanic students account for 92 percent of school-district enrollment. Orthodox Jews make up much of the population and tend to send their kids to private religious schools—which enroll far more students than the public district does.

According to recent litigation, white voters effectively control the East Ramapo school board, even though few of their kids attend the public schools. District court judge Cathy Seibel found in 2020 that the school district’s at-large election system was essentially “diluting” the Black vote. The district has advantaged the interests of white residents and the private schools their kids attend: keeping property taxes and instructional expenditures to a minimum, generously funding special-education services for private-school students, and selling off public-school buildings to private religious schools. Although this is an extreme example, the underlying representational problems and perverse incentives created by local democratic control in East Ramapo play out in a broad set of school districts—especially those serving mostly students of color—where the interests of voters and public-school students are likely to be out of sync.

Revisiting Chubb and Moe

The worrying findings documented in the research—that school-board members face minimal electoral pressure to improve student outcomes, that they are often cross-pressured by employee interest groups, and that they do not prioritize the interests of minority-student populations—is largely confirmed by school-board members themselves. In one recent survey, nearly 40 percent of incumbent school-board members reported running unopposed in their last election. In other surveys, school-board candidates identified teachers unions as some of the most active and influential actors in school-board elections. Another recent survey, using a clever design meant to elicit honest responses to sensitive questions, asked California school-board members to identify considerations important to voters. Forty percent of respondents said they felt no electoral pressure from their constituents to close racial achievement gaps. One can think of no stronger endorsement for Chubb and Moe’s critique of local democratic control.

In several important respects, the challenges of education governance have evolved over the past three decades. In identifying the mechanisms through which electoral politics can impede the provision of high-quality education, Chubb and Moe focused primarily on entrenched employee interest groups and sclerotic bureaucracies. They put less emphasis on two other factors—partisan polarization and identity politics—that have become much more salient in education-policy debates today.

The late 1990s and early 2000s were a high point of bipartisan consensus on education reform. Elites from both parties supported standardized testing, holding schools and educators accountable for student performance, increasing school-choice opportunities for families, and the need for dramatic turnaround of chronically underperforming schools. This consensus began to unravel during the highly partisan debates over the Common Core standards, and divisions over reform intensified during the Trump years. The impact of this polarization was seen clearly during the pandemic, when local partisanship—rather than Covid case counts or hospitalization rates—emerged as the strongest predictor of whether local schools resumed in-person learning in fall 2020.

Chubb and Moe also arguably underestimated the importance of race in local education politics. Members of minority groups, who have historically faced discrimination in the private labor market, have long relied on government jobs. Especially for Black Americans, such work has provided an important source of upward economic mobility. In cities such as Baltimore and Washington, D.C., local school systems supplied well-paying, middle-class jobs for Black families. Sometimes, well-intentioned school-improvement efforts put these jobs at risk, undermining support for reform among not only the affected school employees but also other prominent Black community leaders, including clergy.

Such dynamics have played out recently in New Orleans, where Hurricane Katrina triggered a state takeover and a wholesale overhaul of local schools that created the nation’s first all-charter district. Rigorous evaluations have shown that these reforms dramatically improved student achievement and substantially increased rates of high-school graduation and college attendance and persistence, with the largest gains in educational attainment for low-income and Black students (see “Good News for New Orleans,” features, Fall 2015). However, the reforms also led to significant job losses for the city’s majority-Black teacher workforce, perhaps explaining why Black residents were ultimately less supportive of changes in school governance and were less likely than white residents to say that schools had improved as a result.

Public-opinion surveys during the pandemic documented similar racial polarization in opinion on schools, with parents of color far more likely to prefer keeping their children learning online and less likely to opt for in-person opportunities when schools did reopen in the largest cities. Although these racial gaps narrowed over time, some interest groups attempted to weaponize the racial disparities in the political battles over the pace and timing of decisions to reopen. When California lawmakers offered districts financial incentives to resume in-person learning, for example, the Los Angeles teachers union called the move “a recipe for propagating structural racism.” Race has also figured prominently in debates on issues related to school discipline, school resource officers, and selective-admissions schools.

On the other hand, Chubb and Moe arguably overestimated the extent to which market-based mechanisms could correct many of the school-governance problems they identified. Since the publication of their book, both private-school vouchers and charter schools have introduced important elements of market forces to the education ecosystems in many states. Particularly in urban areas, charter schools have posted substantial achievement gains, although charters continue to educate a relatively small share of students outside of a few cities such as New Orleans, Detroit, and Washington, D.C. Competition from charter schools and private-school choice has also led to modest improvements among public schools, although competition has hardly proved to be a panacea for most underperforming school systems.

Without Reform, Things Will Only Get Worse

As discouraging as recent trends may seem, the governance challenges are likely to grow worse in the absence of meaningful reform. The decline of local newspapers will further erode watchdog journalism and oversight, perhaps reducing voters’ access to independent information on student performance. The nationalization of local politics will continue, making partisan polarization over local education issues even more intense. The growing diversity of public-school students—a population that became majority nonwhite in 2014—will likely further increase the demographic disconnect between school-board electorates and students. The aging of the general population will bring intergenerational conflict—sometimes described as the coming “gray peril”—over school funding. Finally, the substantial enrollment losses seen during the pandemic will likely accelerate the decline in public-school enrollment, exacerbating local political battles over school closures and distracting attention away from academics.

Fortunately, the pandemic may also help open the door to transformative change. If history is any guide, substantial test-score declines in the coming years will push educational concerns higher on the national policy agenda and help mobilize support for reform. The infusion of federal funding will provide a welcome defense against the oft-repeated argument that lack of resources and disinvestment are the main barriers to boosting student achievement in the most-disadvantaged communities. When the policy window opens, reformers should remain laser focused on improving school governance—to ensure that the reform process prioritizes the interests of kids rather than the demands and political agendas of adults. Such reforms should include holding school-board elections on cycle, when participation among parents is highest; reworking accountability systems to ensure that district-performance ratings emphasize each school’s contribution to student learning rather than the demographic mix of students it serves; and timing the release of school ratings to coincide with school-board election campaigns. Every crisis brings an opportunity, and we cannot afford to let this one go to waste.

Vladimir Kogan is associate professor at The Ohio State University.

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

Kogan, V. (2022). Locally Elected School Boards Are Failing: Pandemic stress-tested school governance, revealing many flaws. Education Next, 22(3), 8-13.

The closure of nearly every public school in the United States last spring, in the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic, was clearly going to disrupt student learning. However, despite speculation about the likely magnitude and distribution of these impacts, we still know very little about the actual impact of school closures and other Covid-related disruptions.

A number of private testing companies that provide diagnostic assessments to school districts have released their own estimates of learning losses, but these have a number of limitations. Experts have raised concerns about possible cheating when children take the exams from home, and a substantial number of students—disproportionately disadvantaged—did not take them at all this past fall. These limitations imply that available estimates may understate Covid-related learning losses.

In a new report, we analyze results from the fall administration of Ohio’s Third-Grade English Language Arts (ELA) assessment to address these limitations and document how the pandemic has affected student learning in our state. Unlike most state exams, which usually take place in the spring, this test is given several times per year and thus provides an early glimpse of how Ohio students are faring. Despite the disruptions caused by Covid-19, more than 80 percent of current Ohio third graders showed up to take the test, which districts administered on site and under the supervision of proctors in late October and early November of 2020. To (partially) address the problem of missing test scores for the remaining 20 percent of students, we used detailed student records—including information about their performance on reading diagnostics administered one year prior, when students were in second grade—to impute missing scores and to control for differences between students tested this past fall and those tested in the fall of 2019.

The results show that the achievement of third-graders declined significantly between fall 2019 and fall 2020. Widely used national benchmarks suggest that reading scores typically grow by about 0.6 standard deviations between second and third grade. We estimate that Ohio scores were down 0.228 standard deviations on average this year, suggesting that the achievement decline equates to about one third of a year’s worth of learning. The decline was more pronounced among economically disadvantaged children, and it was especially large for Black students. Indeed, Black students’ scores fell by 50 percent more than those of their White classmates–approximately half a year’s worth of learning.

Changes in Ohio third-grade ELA scores from fall 2019 to fall 2020, by race

Note: These achievement effects are calculated by imputing missing scaled scores and estimating regressions that control for students’ characteristics when they were in second grade.

Ohio Governor Mike DeWine let individual school districts decide how to reopen this past fall, with about one third of students coming back for in-person instruction, one third participating in some form of “hybrid” instruction, and one third participating in fully remote instruction. Declines in achievement were 50 percent greater among students whose districts started the year with fully remote instruction, as compared to students in districts with fully in-person learning. Achievement declines for students in districts with hybrid instruction was halfway between the two. These differences across modes of learning remain even after accounting for Covid health impacts (number of positive tests, hospitalization rate, and deaths per 100,000 population for the county in which each district is located) and unemployment shocks.

Changes in Ohio third-grade ELA scores from fall 2019 to fall 2020, by mode of instruction

Note: These achievement effects are calculated by imputing missing scaled scores and estimating regressions that control for students’ characteristics when they were in second grade. Mode of instruction in fall 2020 is determined based on weekly district reports for the period Sept. 10 through Nov. 5. Some districts with fully in-person instruction still provided virtual learning options for families.

It is important to reiterate that school closure is not the only reason student achievement took a hit during the pandemic. In addition to the challenge of adjusting to new and unfamiliar modes of instruction, some children also had loved ones fall seriously ill or even die due to complications from the virus. Many families have also faced financial hardships as unemployment reached record levels. Indeed, we find evidence that rising unemployment contributed to the drop in student performance, with larger test score declines in the parts of the state that experienced the sharpest job losses. Overall, our preliminary calculations show that test scores declined by 0.02 standard deviations for every percentage point increase in unemployment in the county where students resided, suggest that Covid-related unemployment explains approximately one-third of the decrease in average test scores statewide.

Our estimates are limited to just one grade and subject, so we caution against extrapolating our findings too broadly. Nevertheless, the differences in impacts across student groups is undeniable. Research suggests that racial achievement gaps, after narrowing in the 1970s and 1980s, have plateaued in recent decades. Covid appears to be expanding these gaps, reversing our progress.

National political leaders have already invested many billions of dollars to help local school districts purchase personal protective equipment and implement mitigation strategies needed to reopen schools. But bringing kids back to the classroom full-time is only the first step. It is important that we begin planning remediation efforts to help students make up lost ground, with special emphasis on student subgroups and schools that the pandemic affected the most.

Vladimir Kogan is associate professor in The Ohio State University’s Department of Political Science and (by courtesy) the John Glenn College of Public Affairs. Stéphane Lavertu is professor in The Ohio State University’s John Glenn College of Public Affairs..