Blog - Education Next http://www.educationnext.org/ednext-blog/ A Journal of Opinion and Research About Education Policy Mon, 08 Jul 2024 10:24:15 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.5 https://i0.wp.com/www.educationnext.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/e-logo.png?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1 Blog - Education Next http://www.educationnext.org/ednext-blog/ 32 32 181792879 What If Boys Like the “Wrong” Kind of History? https://www.educationnext.org/what-if-boys-like-the-wrong-kind-of-history/ Mon, 08 Jul 2024 09:01:15 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718278 Great Battles for Boys: a delightfully countercultural book series

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A child looks at a row of little green toy soldiers

An Amazon box was on the porch the other day. (I get sent a lot of books. It’s a cool perk.) I pulled out five colorful, oversized paperbacks. Great Battles for Boys: The Korean War. Great Battles for Boys: The American Revolution. Great Battles for Boys: WW2 in Europe. And two more. I found the titles delightfully countercultural.

I mean, who writes about military strategy today? Who unabashedly markets stuff to boys? The books, all published between 2014 and 2022, are authored by history teacher Joe Giorello. They all run about 150 to 250 pages with straightforward text, anecdotes, pictures, maps, and suggestions for further reading.

Having never heard of the series, I was curious how these books were faring in the larger world. The answer? Very well. On Amazon, at the time of this writing, Giorello’s volume on WWII in Europe ranked #2 in “Children’s American History of 1900s.” His volume on the Civil War was #1 in “Children’s American Civil War Era History Books.” His book on the Revolutionary War was #1 in “Children’s American Revolution History.” There are thousands of enthusiastic, five-star reviews.

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And yet, like I said, I’d never heard of Giorello. I couldn’t find a single mention of him when I searched School Library Journal, Education Week, the National Council for the Social Studies, or the National Council for History Education. As best I can tell, he’s self-published. The stories are interesting, but the narrative is pretty rote, with no gimmickry or multimedia pizzazz. It’s just workmanlike, accessible history. For instance, the chapter on “The Battle of Britain” in WW2 in Europe begins:

By June 1940, Germany had achieved a victory in Norway, but the win came at a steep cost. The battle had damaged or sunk over half of Germany’s warships.

This loss was crucial. Hitler desperately wanted to conquer Great Britain, but with half his fleet out of commission, the German navy was no match for the powerful British Royal Navy.

Hitler decided he would conquer Britain by air.

So, what’s going on? Why have these books been such a silent success? The most salient explanation may be the frank, unapologetic decision to offer books about “great battles for boys” in an era when that’s largely absent from classrooms. This may simply be the kind of history that a lot of boys are eager to read about. Of course, even penning that sentence can feel remarkably risqué nowadays, which may be a big part of the problem.

It got me thinking. My elementary-age kids have brought home or been assigned a number of children’s books on history. Most are focused intently on social and cultural history. I’ll be honest. Even as someone who’s always been an avid reader, I find a lot of that stuff pretty tedious. As a kid, I found books about the Battle of Midway or D-Day vastly more interesting than grim tales of teen angst, and I don’t think that makes me unusual. Moreover, it surprises no one (except the occasional ideologue) to learn that girls generally appear more interested in fiction than boys—or that boys tend to prefer reading about sports, war, comedy, and science fiction, while girls favor narratives about friendship, animals, and romance.

Today, when I peruse classroom libraries, recommended book lists, or stuff like the summer reading suggestions from the American Library Association, I don’t see much that seems calculated to appeal to boys.

One reason that boys read less than girls may be that we’re not introducing them to the kinds of books they may like. There was a time when schools really did devote too much time to generals and famous battles, but we’ve massively overcorrected. Indeed, I find that too many “diverse, inclusive” reading lists feature authors who may vary by race and gender but overwhelmingly tend to write introspective, therapeutic tales that read like an adaptation of an especially heavy-handed afterschool special.


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Now, my point is not that kids should read this rather than that. Schools should be exposing all students to more fiction and nonfiction, with varied topics and themes. If that requires assigning more reading, well, good.

Then there are the well-meaning educators and advocates who approach book selection as an extension of social and emotional learning. Heck, while writing this column, I got an email promoting the nonprofit I Would Rather Be Reading, which uses “trauma responsive literacy support and social-emotional learning to help children.” I’m sure it’s a lovely organization, but I’d be shocked if any of the books in question feature stoic virtues or manly courage. After all, the therapy/SEL set has worked assiduously to define traditional masculinity as “toxic.” And all this can alienate kids who find the therapy-talk unduly precious or rife with adult pathologies.

I hear from plenty of educators who say they’re reluctant to talk about the needs of boys for fear of being labeled reactionary. But more boys might develop a taste for reading if they encountered more of the kinds of books they’d like to read. I’d take more seriously those who talk about inclusive reading lists if their passion extended to the well-being of those students bored by social justice-themed tracts and if they truly seemed more invested in turning every kid into an avid reader, which requires a diverse mix of books available—including those about “great battles for boys.”

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”

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Brookings Misleads Readers Again in Arizona ESA Rebuttal https://www.educationnext.org/brookings-misleads-readers-again-in-arizona-esa-rebuttal/ Thu, 27 Jun 2024 09:00:10 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718449 Selective categorizing of participants clouds who benefits from distinct programs

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Photo of a bus driving down a desert highway

Earlier this month I exposed the critical flaw in a recent Brookings Institution report that purported to show that Arizona families participating in the state’s K–12 education savings accounts (ESA) policy are disproportionately wealthy.

The Brookings researchers had failed to consider Arizona’s popular and longstanding tax-credit scholarship (TCS) policy, which works in tandem with Arizona’s ESA policy and disproportionately benefits low-income families. Considering the two policies together paints a very different picture of who benefits from education choice policies in Arizona.

The researchers, Jon Valant and Nicholas Zerbino, responded to my and several other critiques or contrary analyses, which they dismiss as “baseless, misleading, or just kind of odd.” Others can defend their own work, but their response to my critique is entirely unpersuasive. Once again, they fail to provide readers with key information they need to understand how Arizona’s ESA and TCS programs operate.

As I noted previously, low-income families can receive tax-credit scholarships that cover a greater amount of tuition than the typical ESA. Since the TCS and ESA programs work in tandem, and participation in one precludes participation in the other, it’s impossible to study their effects in isolation.

The Brookings researchers concede that the TCS programs exist alongside the ESA, and implicitly they concede that their omission would compromise their analysis if the TCS programs were substantial enough. But they argue that the TCS programs “are small relative to a large-and-growing universal ESA program” (emphasis in the original). They also observe that “most TCS dollars are going to recipients above 185% of the federal poverty level—the threshold for reduced-price lunch eligibility.” To illustrate this point, they provide this handy—but misleading—chart:

Figure 3
Source: Brookings.edu

The Brookings researchers then conclude that my critique doesn’t “point to context that meaningfully changes the interpretation of our data.”

But their presentation of the data misleads readers in two ways. First, it inappropriately separates the TCS programs (which function as one program), and second, it does not distinguish spending on students with special needs (which is almost entirely in the ESA program). These misrepresentations make the TCS programs look smaller relative to the ESA than they really are for those whose children are not in need of special education.

Comparing Arizona’s education savings accounts and tax-credit scholarships

To demonstrate the relative sizes of the ESA and TCS programs, the Brookings researchers present data on their relative funding. At first glance, that is an odd choice, as the most relevant comparison would be ESA and TCS recipients. However, given that students may receive multiple scholarships, it’s not entirely clear how many scholarship recipients there are, so the programs’ relative funding might seem like a reasonable proxy.

However, it doesn’t make sense to break the scholarship programs into the separate categories Brookings employs. When a family applies for a scholarship from a scholarship organization in Arizona, they can receive funding from all four programs if they meet the eligibility criteria. Indeed, having spoken with dozens of Arizona scholarship families, I can attest that they often don’t even realize that there are technically four different programs. All they know is that the scholarship organizations ask them for certain information (e.g., household income, whether their child had previously attended a public school, and their foster care or disability status), and that, after verifying that information, they receive a scholarship. Rather than being represented by four separate bars in a chart, the TCS funds should be combined into a single, much higher bar to portray its magnitude accurately.

Moreover, the ESA funding data are heavily affected by spending on students with special needs, who account for 18% of ESA students and 41% of ESA funding. Whereas the median ESA student receives about $7,400 annually, students with special needs can receive considerably higher funding, depending on the funding weight accorded to their disability under Arizona law. According to the Arizona Department of Education’s quarter 2 ESA report for 2024, 6,261 ESA students with disabilities received more than $30,000 each. Given that they can receive so much more money from the ESA, nearly all the families of students with special needs use the ESA instead of the TCS.

Brookings failed to account for how families of students with special needs cluster in the ESA program, just as they had failed to account for how low-income families cluster in the TCS program.

If students with special needs are considered separately, and the three TCS policies that aren’t limited to students with special needs are combined, then the ESA program is spending about $434 million for students without disabilities, compared with $200 million of tax-credit scholarship funding, as shown in Figure 1. (Note that “Lexie’s Law for Disabled and Displaced Students” also serves foster students who do not have special needs, but I have separated the entire tax credit from the other three since it is impossible to tell how much money is going to students in each category, though it is likely that the vast majority goes to students without special needs.)

Figure 1

Figure 1: Allocation of funds from private school choice programs in Arizona for non-disabled students

Sources: Arizona Department of Education and Arizona Department of Revenue’s School Tuition Organization Income Tax Credits 2023 annual report.

In other words, contrary to the Brookings researchers’ portrayal, the TCS program is not “small” relative to the ESA.

Tax-Credit Scholarships disproportionately benefit low- and middle-income families

The Brookings chart only distinguishes between TCS funding on students from families earning above and below 185% of the federal poverty level. About a third of Arizona families with school-aged children fall below that level. However, the Arizona Department of Revenue also reports how much funding goes to families earning between 185% and 342.25% of the federal poverty level, which is the eligibility threshold for Arizona’s corporate-funded TCS program. About a third of Arizona families fall in that category as well.

In other words, Brookings is comparing the bottom third of families against the top two. But what if we looked at the three categories separately? In that case, as shown in Figure 2, it becomes clear that low- and middle-income families disproportionately benefit from Arizona’s TCS program relative to higher-income families.

Figure 2

Figure 2: Arizona Income Distribution, Tax-Credit Scholarship Recipients and Statewide

Sources: Arizona Department of Revenue’s School Tuition Organization Income Tax Credits 2023 annual report; U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey (2022).

According to the U.S. Census, 32% of Arizona families with school-aged children earn less than 185% of the federal poverty level, and scholarship families in that income range receive 42% of TCS funding. Likewise, those earning between 185% and 342% of the federal poverty level represent 33% of Arizona families with school-aged children but 35% of TCS funding. Meanwhile, 35% of Arizona families earn more than 342% of the federal poverty level, but they receive only 23% of TCS funding.

Brookings characterizes this distribution by stating that “most TCS dollars are going to recipients above 185% of the federal poverty level.” One could also say that most TCS dollars are going to low- and middle-income families, and that low-income families disproportionately benefit the most. Readers can decide which statement more accurately captures the reality of who benefits from tax-credit scholarships in Arizona.

As I stated before, it’s impossible to assess whether Arizona’s education choice policies are “addressing inequities in school access,” as Brookings sought to do, without including Arizona’s popular and longstanding tax-credit scholarship policy in the analysis. Brookings has failed to present any compelling arguments or data to justify their omission.

Jason Bedrick is a Research Fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.

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Has a Glitchy Chatbot Taken Over a Major Education Research Organization? https://www.educationnext.org/has-a-glitchy-chatbot-taken-over-a-major-education-research-organization/ Mon, 24 Jun 2024 09:02:59 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718411 An extensive preview of AERA’s 2025 national conference suggests so

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Illustration

Earlier this year, I shared my fear that a glitchy chatbot had seized control of a major education research journal. The editors’ torrent of inhuman gibberish made it hard to imagine that real people were still pulling the strings.

Well, recently, I got a worrisome signal that this same shady AI (or one of its cousins) had seized the presidency of the American Education Research Association (AERA), an outfit that bills itself as the world’s largest organization of education researchers. I know this is a bold claim, so I dusted off my modified Turing Test and interrogated the (very) extensive description of the presidential program. By pulling verbatim takes, we’ll try to determine whether the prose reads like the product of humans . . . or glitchy AI. (To quote Dave Barry, “I’m not making this up.” Really.)

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Rick: Let’s get a baseline here. Where can people find education researchers?

AERA Presidential Program (APP): “We conduct our work in a variety of settings, including universities, community colleges, schools, school districts, professional preparation programs, museums, libraries, think tanks, advocacy and community organizations, philanthropies, and in legislative or governmental contexts.”

Rick: Wow, that’s impressive! Is there anything that all these people have in common?

APP: “Our engagement with the field binds us together as producers, consumers, sensemakers, and implementers of research.”

Rick: You’ve sketched out a theme for next year’s AERA meeting. Can you describe it?

APP: “The 2025 AERA Annual Meeting provides rich opportunity to reflect on the monumental challenges and transformations we have undergone due to the Covid-19 pandemic and ongoing social and environmental crises; to reflect on the history of efforts to repair educational inequality through law, policy, practice, and pedagogy; to consider opportunities for research to inform remedies; and ultimately, be a part of holistic repair for those who have suffered harm, loss, and trauma.”

Rick: I’m sorry, but I’m not sure I actually followed that. Can you perhaps boil it down?

APP: . . .

Rick: Okay. Well, moving on, you mention the notion of “remedy.” How have schools fared on that count?

APP: “In education, too often the notion of remedy has been misunderstood to require remedial approaches to teaching and learning, mis-locating deficits in individual learners, schools, and school systems instead of critically examining our institutions, social processes, politics, and policies, and our own research approaches that produce hierarchies of knowledge and epistemological silos.”

Rick: It doesn’t sound like reading, writing, math, or content knowledge are a major concern.  When it comes to education research, what are the most pressing issues?

APP: “Students and their families are contending with ongoing health issues, new and existing forms of disability, housing insecurity, food insecurity, climate crises, and income insecurity. Meanwhile, education institutions are facing fiscal cliffs, born of declining enrollments and rising costs, and are struggling with teacher, staff, and school leader shortages, burnout, and insufficient staffing for school psychologists and counselors for the students who remain.”

Rick: What should education researchers be focused on?

APP: “The collective research expertise in our field is needed to confront racism and ethnic discrimination, violent extremism, political repression and polarization, climate change, science denial, deepening racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and linguistic segregation and inequality, and the ongoing loss and trauma related to the Covid-19 pandemic. The 2020 police murder of George Floyd and attacks on Latine/a/x people and Asian Americans, coupled with ongoing anti-immigrant policies, forced too-often delayed conversations about the ongoing role of race, anti-Black racism, ethnic discrimination, and anti-immigrant sentiments, power, and violence.”

Rick: That’s a lot to take on. What do education researchers need to know in order to be effective?

APP: “The concept of repair, when joined with remedy, implies the responsibility to right what is wrong. It enhances the possibility of acknowledging the full scope of harms, to understand how educational inequalities are interconnected with social, health, and political injustice, and to imagine multisector and multifaceted approaches to the education of young people, college students, and graduate students and to the professional preparation of teachers, school leaders, mental health providers, medical providers, and lawyers.”

Rick: Are there examples of where the education community has made a positive difference?

APP: “Many education researchers, working with advocates, organizations, policy makers, and educators, have advanced promising work on reparations and on restorative justice pedagogies and practices. Similarly, some local teachers unions have incorporated school and community well-being elements into their collective bargaining.”


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Rick: Huh. Doesn’t sound like education researchers have had a lot of success. Given that, do you think they’re really up to this ambitious role you’ve sketched?

APP: . . .

Rick: Fair enough. I’m guessing you don’t like school choice. Given that, just out of curiosity, what’s the most impenetrable way you might say, “They keep passing voucher laws”?

APP: “Neoliberal logics pushing for the privatization of public education are successfully informing the adoption of voucher programs that are further destabilizing public education.”

Rick: Okay, last question. Can you offer a pithy call to action for next year’s AERA?

APP: “The 2025 meeting theme calls us to consider how we can work across disciplinary, epistemological, and methodological orientations to forge deeper connections in our field that can speak to the challenges we face in education and in our imperfect multiracial democracy.”

It’s got to be AI, right? The punch-list rambling, disinterest in actual learning, rote invocation of ideological tropes, and fascination with oppression are so tritely optimized that it feels artificial. And yet, reading back through this transcript, it bothers me that I can’t confidently distinguish autopilot AI from earnest edu-babble. Perhaps my AI fears are overblown. After all, I guess it’s possible that this detached unintelligibility and politicized liturgy are just the mundane culmination of what gets practiced daily in ed school corridors and conferences.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”

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Campus Protests Don’t Undermine the College Mission https://www.educationnext.org/campus-protests-dont-undermine-the-college-mission/ Fri, 21 Jun 2024 09:20:20 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718400 Public civil discourse should be encouraged at universities, but context matters

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Photo of a young woman demonstrating at a protest

“Campus Thuggery Is No Way to Cultivate Citizens.” Hear, hear! We couldn’t agree more with this statement from Rick Hess in a recent Education Next blog post. So we were surprised to see Hess describe an essay we wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education as a “defense” of “campus disorder.” In our essay—written in part in response to a prior Hess piece—what we actually defended was the right of students to participate in peaceful protests. We also argued that preparing students to be engaged citizens has been central to the mission of higher education for more than a century, and that political activism can help students develop important citizenship skills.

Hess describes us as “chaos apologists” who “appear oddly indifferent to the value of what happens in their classrooms.” This is a case of mistaken identity, a misapprehension that fails to take into account one of our essay’s most consequential points: There is no single, unifying set of rules for campus speech. Different regulations and norms apply in different campus contexts.

As professors at a small liberal arts college, we are deeply committed to teaching. The classroom is the nerve center of campus life. It’s a space devoted to the dissemination of knowledge and the development of critical thinking skills. As such, shouting, personal attacks and political sloganeering have no place in the classroom. Civil discourse is the name of the game. And the game is governed by the rules of academic freedom where expertise, evidence, and reason should prevail over gut feelings and grandstanding.

The quad, however, is more akin to a public square than to a seminar room. (It really is a public square at public universities where the First Amendment pertains.) We must tolerate a much wider range of speech on the campus green than in the classroom. Some of it will be misinformed, intemperate, or offensive, especially when it comes to student protests. It isn’t possible to stake out a public position on highly contentious issues such as Israel-Palestine without causing a stir and ticking people off. But that’s a price college leaders must be willing to pay if they are genuinely committed to free expression. As the Chicago Principles explain, “concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.”

Hess has a hard time imagining how protesting students can draw attention to their cause while also following basic ground rules. He seems to believe that allowing room for passion and provocation inexorably leads to chaos, disorder, and illiberalism. His characterization of the Gaza protest movement is one-sided and unrelentingly bleak. “As practiced today,” Hess writes, “campus protests feature a lot of appetite, id, and ego.” He goes on:

[T]hey’re histrionic affairs rather than considered ones. They’re about spectacle rather than contemplation. Indeed, they seem calculated to stymie reasoned discourse and serious inquiry, which makes them rather a poor fit for serious institutions of higher education.

“Historically,” Hess concludes, “learning to be a part of a masked, faceless mob has been a recipe not for cultivating democrats but for producing jack-booted thugs.”

Have we seen adolescent histrionics at some of the student protests? Yes. Protesters are college students after all. Have there been deplorable, antisemitic outbursts? Yes. And they should be taken seriously and publicly condemned. What about broken windows and other property damage? In a handful of cases, yes. And the perpetrators should be punished, accordingly.

But the vast majority of demonstrations have been peaceful. To the extent that protests have been marred by violence, almost all of it has been inflicted by police (as was the case at UT Austin, Indiana University, City College of New York, Dartmouth, and many other schools) and by counter-protesters (as was the case at UCLA). The heavy-handed responses on the part of college leaders have been shameful. Too many administrators have been too quick to abandon dialogue and negotiation in favor of riot police, pepper spray, rubber bullets and zip ties.

Students can and have made their presence known—through marches, demonstrations, and encampments—without disrupting essential college operations. On almost all of the campuses where there have been pro-Palestinian protests, dorms, cafeterias, libraries, and academic buildings have remained open and accessible. Classrooms have not been overtaken by unruly mobs. Students have done all the usual academic things: attending classes, writing papers, and taking exams. On May 23, hundreds of students walked out of Harvard’s commencement. They chanted, waved Palestinian flags, expressed their views, and were gone after a matter of minutes. They didn’t shout anyone down or derail the ceremony.

A few weeks ago, students on our own campus set up an encampment on the lawn next to the college chapel. It has drawn attention but has not interfered with the daily work of the college. One of us (Amna) has visited the encampment several times with her young children and can attest to the peaceful, welcoming atmosphere. Along with the tents and the placards, there is a mini-library with books about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Students have organized teach-ins and engaged in respectful dialogue with critics from inside and outside the college. They have not only educated themselves about the Middle East but have also learned a great deal about higher education, from what trustees do to how endowments are managed. They are taking the knowledge from this crash course in navigating institutional bureaucracies to try and make a difference in the world. Whether you agree with their politics, students are practicing the kinds of citizenship skills that are essential to democratic life.

Hess appears to believe that student activism is incompatible with the academic mission of colleges and universities. But this position disregards the fact that classrooms and quads are distinctive spaces governed by different rules. Classrooms are sites of learning and inquiry where civil discourse and evidence-based argumentation take precedence. They hold pride of place on campuses, and their basic integrity should be fiercely protected. Campus greens, in contrast, are public spaces where speech is not subject to the same constraints. Here, students can learn how to join the civic arena, which for better or worse, is often fraught and contentious.

Citizenship in the United States is a big tent that requires lots of different skills in different contexts. Political protest is just one of its many aspects. There’s a time for listening, discussion and considered deliberation. There’s also a time when the “fierce urgency of now,” in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s memorable words, calls for “direct action” like marches and sit-ins.

As long as protesters are not targeting classroom instruction and directly hampering the learning of their peers, their actions are squarely within the realm of exercising their civic rights. If colleges and universities are to remain true to their dual mission of training thinkers and citizens, the space for non-violent political activism on campus must be protected. As legal scholars John Inazu and Bert Neuborne have noted, “the freedom to assemble peaceably remains integral to what Justice Robert Jackson once called ‘the right to differ.’” If there is one place where “the right to differ” should be protected, it’s institutions of higher education, where disagreement and debate ought to be the coin of the realm.

Amna Khalid is an associate professor of history at Carleton College. Jeffrey Aaron Snyder is an associate professor in the department of educational studies at Carleton College.

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Career and Technical Education Clears New Pathways to Opportunity https://www.educationnext.org/career-and-technical-education-clears-new-pathways-to-opportunity/ Thu, 20 Jun 2024 09:00:15 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718392 A student’s post-secondary options need not be binary

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Two students working under the hood of a car

Many Americans, including the last wave of Gen Z-ers now entering high schools, want schools to offer more education and training options for young people like career and technical education, or CTE. They broadly agree that the K–12 goal of “college for all” over the last several decades has not served all students well. It should be replaced with “opportunity pluralism,” or the recognition that a college degree is one of many pathways to post-secondary success.

School-based CTE programs (there are also programs for adults) typically prepare middle and high school students for a range of high-wage, high-skill, and high-demand careers. These include fields like advanced manufacturing, health sciences, and information technology which often do not require a two- or four-year college degree. CTE programs award students recognized credentials like industry certifications and licenses. Some programs also provide continuing opportunities for individuals to sequence credentials so that they can pursue associate and bachelor’s degrees if they choose.

CTE Today

The federal role in today’s CTE began in 1917 with the Smith-Hughes National Vocational Education Act. In 2006, what had been called vocational education in the Smith-Hughes Act was rebranded career and technical education in the Carl. D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act. Federal funding for CTE in 2023 exceeded $1.462 billion.

Current-day CTE is unlike the vocational education of old that placed students into different tracks based mostly on family background. That sorting process often carried racial, ethnic, and class biases. While middle- and upper-class white students enrolled in academic, college-preparatory classes, immigrants, low-income youth, and students of color typically enrolled in low-level academic and vocational training. As Jeannie Oakes and her colleagues at the RAND Corporation found in their influential 1992 report, “Educational Matchmaking,” educators often characterized vocational programs as dumping grounds for students thought to be incapable of doing academic work.

CTE rejects this biased presorting. It combines academic coursework with technical and career skills for middle and high school students that offer pathways to jobs and further post-secondary education, training, and credentials. The coursework of CTE programs is a structured progression that builds knowledge and skills for good jobs. They immerse young people in education, training, and work by connecting them with local employers through experiences like internships and apprenticeships. These programs often include support services like job placement assistance after graduation. They also build social capital: strong relationships between participants and adult mentors.

Advance CTE has worked with stakeholders to create the National Career Clusters Framework, which organizes academic and technical knowledge and skills into a coherent sequence and pathways. The Framework is being revised but currently has 16 Career Clusters representing 79 Career Pathways. It is used in some form by all U.S. states and territories to organize CTE programs at the state and local levels.

Nearly all public school districts (98 percent) offer CTE programs to high school students, with about three-fourths offering CTE courses that earn dual credit from both high schools and postsecondary institutions. More than eight out of ten (85 percent) high school students earn at least one CTE credit, with technology courses being the most popular. Some 11 percent of high school teachers teach CTE as their primary assignment; almost two-thirds of them (61 percent) have ten or more years of teaching experience.

More than one-third (37 percent) of 9th grade students have a CTE concentration, meaning they are earning two or more credits in at least one CTE program of study. This concentration is associated with higher levels of student engagement, increased graduation rates, and reduced dropout rates. Those with a concentration in CTE also are more likely to be employed full time and have higher median annual earnings eight years after graduation.

The American Public on Pathways to Success

CTE pathways to success align with what the American public, including young people, want from schools. A recent Purpose of Education Index survey reports that of 57 educational priorities among the American public, getting kids ready for college had dropped from its pre-pandemic rank of 10th to the 47th priority today. Other surveys report similar findings: a 2023 Wall Street Journal–NORC poll found that 56 percent of Americans do not think a degree is worth the cost, up from 47 percent in 2017 and 40 percent in 2013. Skepticism today is strongest among those 18 to 34 years old and those with college degrees. The Index also reports that Americans’ top priority for students is “developing practical skills” (such as managing personal finances and the ability to do basic reading, writing, and arithmetic), with only one in four (26 percent) thinking schools currently do this.

Gen Z—those born between the mid-1990s and the early 2010s—agrees. Around half (51 percent) of Gen Z high schoolers plan to pursue a degree, down more than ten percentage points pre-pandemic and 20 points since shortly after Covid began. Gen Z middle schoolers are even less likely to say they plan to go to college. Moreover, Gen Z high schoolers aspire to continuous learning on the job and throughout life. Two-thirds (65 percent), for example, believe education after high school is necessary and prefer options like online courses, boot camps, internships, and apprenticeships. More than half (53 percent) want formal learning opportunities throughout life. Only a third of these students say their ideal learning occurs simply through coursework.

Gen Z high schoolers have a practical mindset. They want academic knowledge but also want to learn life skills like financial literacy, communication, and problem-solving, which they say are overlooked in classrooms. Nearly eight in ten (78 percent) believe it important to develop these skills before they graduate so they are better prepared to choose career paths. They also have an entrepreneurial spirit—a third want to start their own business.

Pathways in Action  

CTE programs are one way to respond to this opinion shift. These programs can be created from the top down or the bottom up. “Top-down” programs include those created by governors and legislators from both political parties. Delaware Pathways, for example, was started by Democratic Governor Jack Markell, while Tennessee’s Drive to 55 Alliance is an initiative of Republican Governor Bill Haslam. Similar programs exist in states as politically diverse states as California, Colorado, Indiana, and Texas.

“Bottom-up” CTE programs are developed by local stakeholders like K–12 schools, employers, and civic partners. Examples include 3DE Schools in Atlanta; YouthForce NOLA in New Orleans; and Washington, D.C.’s CityWorks D.C. Cristo Rey is an effort comprising 38 Catholic high schools in 24 states. Other organizations like Pathways to Prosperity Network, P-Tech Schools, and Linked Learning Alliance form regional or local partnerships that provide advice and practical assistance to those creating pathways programs.

A teacher and three students using a copy machine
Cristo Rey, a network of Catholic high schools in 24 states, includes “bottom-up” CTE instruction to train its students in practical life skills. Here, students at Cristo Rey San Antonio learn how to operate a copy machine.

Successful programs have five features, which I have detailed in another piece for Education Next: (1) an academic curriculum linked with labor-market needs that awards participants an employer-recognized credential; (2) work experience with mentors; (3) advisors to help participants navigate the program; (4) a written civic compact among K–12 schools, employers, and other partners; and (5) policies and regulations that support the program.

Many of these programs award credentials that certify the successful completion of a specific course of instruction. These individual credentials can be sequenced as building blocks or stackable credentials that can be combined over time and lead to an associate or bachelor’s college degree if that is what an individual chooses to do. Credential Engine identifies 1,076,358 unique U.S. credentials in 18 categories delivered through traditional institutions like secondary and post-secondary education but also including other types of non- and for-profit training organizations and Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs. U.S. spending on training and education programs by educational institutions, employers, federal grant programs, states, and the military is estimated to be $2.133 trillion.

While credentials are not of equal quality, many do add value and yield significant benefits for those who earn them. Studies by RAND and the Brookings Institution show how individuals (especially low-income students) who stack credentials (particularly in health and business) are more likely to be employed and earn more than those who do not stack credentials. And there are organizations like the American Institutes for Research CTE Research Network that focus on measuring the impact of CTE programs on student outcomes. Other organizations have conducted case studies that examine state CTE programs as varied as those found in Arkansas, ColoradoConnecticut, Massachusetts, Ohio, and Texas. Additionally, studies like one conducted by economist Ann Huff Stevens of the University of Texas at Austin analyze CTE programs provided by public institutions like community colleges, for-profit organizations, and safety net or federal employment and training.

A Fordham Institute synthesis of this growing body of research identifies five benefits that come from participating in CTE programs: (1) they are not a path away from college, since students taking these courses are just as likely as peers to attend college; (2) they increase graduation rates; (3) they improve college outcomes, especially for women and disadvantaged students; (4) they boost students’ incomes; and (5) they enhance other skills like perseverance and self-efficacy.

CTE and Career Education

K–12 students often do not receive information from their schools on programs like CTE that offer practical pathways to careers and opportunity. A Morning Consult poll reports that less than half of Gen Z high schoolers say they had enough information to decide the best career or education pathway for them after high school. And two-thirds of high schoolers and graduates say they would have benefited from more career exploration in middle or high school. This gap between what students want and need and what schools provide in career preparation has consequences. Students often struggle in the transition from school to work and receive lower wages when they enter the workforce. It’s high time schools strategically invested in career education.

An effective CTE pathways agenda requires a thorough career education program with a  goal of instilling career aspirations in students and the opportunity to acquire the knowledge, skills, and relationships they need to reach their potential by the end of high school. The international 38-member Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has documented program models that integrate a young person’s school life with increasing levels of knowledge and employment options organized by three categories: exposure, exploration, and experience.

  • Exposure activities introduce students to jobs and careers. These begin in preschool and include reading books or telling stories about jobs and careers and visits from those who work in different jobs. Exposure also entails age-appropriate, outside-the-school experiences like workplace visits as young people move through school.
  • Exploration activities allow students to explore work by engaging them in volunteer work, job shadowing, resume development, and practice job interviews. These activities typically begin in middle school and continue through high school.
  • Experience activities include work-based learning where young people engage in sustained and supervised projects and mentorships like internships and apprenticeships. These opportunities are an options multiplier, creating bridges to other opportunities that lead to full-time jobs, more education, or both.

There are other useful frameworks. Colorado’s work-based learning continuum uses an approach for middle and high schools organized by workplace activities: learning about work, learning through work, and learning at work. These approaches help young people develop new knowledge and skills, social and professional networks, and the capacity to navigate pathways that turn ambitions into reality. They can be combined with platforms like YouScience that use artificial intelligence to create assessments that help young people discover personal strengths and aptitudes and match them to potential careers.

Such career education programs have many benefits. OECD examined the link between young people’s participation in career-preparation activities and adult career outcomes in eight countries. They report that there is “evidence that secondary school students who explore, experience and think about their futures in work frequently encounter lower levels of unemployment, receive higher wages and are happier in their careers as adults.” These programs also nurture the technical and material aspects of success and its relational dimensions: social networks for young people, mentoring relationships, and professional networks that help them throughout life.

Consider the United States Youth Development Study, which followed those born in the mid-1970s to age 30. It finds a positive relationship between those who worked part-time at ages 14 and 15 in internships and apprenticeships and those likely to agree at age 30 that they hold a job they want. It seems almost undeniable that greater exposure to the workplace better equips students to prepare for the type of career that suits them.

Career education also deepens young people’s knowledge of the culture of work and fosters their capacity to aspire to, create, and navigate the work pathways that make a reality of their ambitions. It also helps them develop an occupational identity and vocational self, which gives them a better sense of their values and abilities. On a practical level, CTE creates faster and cheaper pathways to jobs and careers. Finally, career education fosters local civic engagement from employers and other community partners by cultivating the connections and bonds essential to innovation, economic dynamism, and a flourishing local civil society.

A Governing Agenda

K–12 education debates are often cast as a culture war between left and right, a story that divides Americans based on what we expect from schools. This story is mostly wrong and creates a false either-or narrative. In contrast, “opportunity pluralism” offers a both-and narrative, where CTE and other career pathways programs are discussed in the same breath as college preparation.

But broad agreement does not imply implementation uniformity. The give-and-take of negotiating legislation and regulatory proposals will produce diverse programs and priorities, or implementation pluralism. That’s all for the better as we test new approaches and tailor them to community needs and use states and local communities as “laboratories of democracy.”

Opportunity pluralism can provide policymakers across the political spectrum with a commonsense governing agenda that reorients the goals of K–12 public education. It’s a program led by civic pluralists who seek to nurture civil society by building different career pathways programs for young people. Taken together, it suggests a sea change in education—one that has the potential to allow students to flourish and reach their potential at the same time as we ease our seemingly intractable political divides.

Bruno V. Manno is senior advisor at the Progressive Policy Institute and a former U.S. Assistance Secretary of Education for Policy.

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Don’t Stop Reading to Your Kids https://www.educationnext.org/dont-stop-reading-to-your-kids/ Mon, 17 Jun 2024 09:00:32 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718276 Even when they're avidly reading on their own

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Family of four reading together on a couch

I’ve always been a reader. When my kids were born, I looked forward to sharing books I’ve loved with them. Of course, what we read to little kids are mostly, well, little-kid books—not the books we love. And, by the time kids are in school and (hopefully) reading on their own, it’s easy for parents to be sidelined. This is all playing out against a precipitous plunge in the amount of time we spend reading for fun.

So today, I want to talk about reading to our kids. My kids are 10 and seven now, and I still have a fine time reading to them. Right now, we’re well along in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The great thing is they like it as much as I do—at least they’ll pester me to read during breakfast, before dinner, or at bedtime. It’s awesome.

It’s also not that common. A 2019 survey reported that one-fifth of kids aged nine to 11 are read to regularly. And even that feels like an overestimate. Because while we may not have great data on this, I’ve spent years quietly tallying the friendly (but quizzical) reactions we get when I’m seen quietly reading to the kids in public. There are genial questions and the kinds of huzzahs you’d expect for doing something actually remarkable. It doesn’t feel like a one-in-five deal.

And that’s a shame. There are few things I’m certain about when it comes to education. But one is that it’d be good if many more parents and kids thought it normal to grab their book-of-the-moment to read when heading out for a family dinner or a long family car ride. For much of human history, the rite of telling or reading stories was a familiar source of bonding and connectedness. But it’s not today.

Photo of Rick Hess with text "Old School with Rick Hess"

Obviously, most kids can read to themselves by the time they’re eight or nine. Given that, it can feel pointless for parents to read to them. Kids may also perceive a sit-down read-aloud as infantilizing or intrusive. (Do you really expect me to sit here and concentrate on this story for fifteen minutes?) And, of course, the tyranny of devices means that many kids (and parents) don’t spend a lot of time reading books, a pursuit that can feel old-fashioned when there are e-games to play and social media accounts to scroll through.

I get all of this. I do. But family reading has a lot of perks that aren’t always fully understood.

For starters, part of the appeal of gaming and social media is that they’re dynamic, interactive, and social. Reading a paperback can feel like a primitive, slow-mo, 1.0 version of self-amusement compared to the hopped-up options available. Meanwhile, hearing a story read aloud requires kids to listen and focus—this can all seem very old school. But what can get overlooked is that reading to kids adds that interactive, social dimension. Kids interrupt, ask questions, and chatter about who’s the villain and what might happen next. It makes reading feel warmer and more connective.

I’m also struck by how much kids miss when they read on their own. This was something I felt intensely back when I taught high school social studies. In various units, I’d give my high schoolers four-page snippets from Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Frantz Fanon, Federalist 10, the Declaration of Independence, or the like. I’d wander around the room, quietly asking questions, and they’d assure me that they were getting it. Then we’d discuss the readings as a class, and it was obvious that 95 percent of them had no clue what they’d just read. So, we’d then take a day as a whole group to reread it closely, clause by clause, until they actually got it.

My kids will blast through books (Magic Treehouse or City Spies or Phantom Tollbooth or Great Brain or whatever), and it’s frequently clear they’ve absorbed little, skimmed unfamiliar vocabulary, or missed a big chunk of the story. Turning pages is not the same as reading. But reading together builds in a chance to rephrase, emphasize, and help the cool stuff land—so they’re not just churning through pages.

So, why isn’t family reading more common, especially among parents who lament the amount of time their kids spend on screens or wish their kids had more affinity for reading? It’s a great question.

I mentioned the awkwardness of reading to kids who are fully capable of reading on their own. Parents may even fret that reading aloud will slow a child’s development as a reader and convince themselves that, if a kid can read alone, they should. But reading a book and hearing a book are different things. They develop the brain in different ways. They’re both good. Why choose? When my oldest turned seven or so, there was a stretch when he asked if he could read by himself at bedtime. I said that he reads a lot, which is great, but that bedtime was for family reading. He complained a bit and then forgot about it.

Look, if you’re not used to reading aloud, it can initially seem off-putting to wade through paragraphs of exposition or to struggle with accents or intonation. (I’m famously awful at accents and impressions.) Sometimes, I’ll read a sentence, realize I phrased it wrong or articulated it clunkily, and have to back up. But the audience is remarkably forgiving.


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Some parents say they don’t have the time for this sort of thing. That’s fair. But I also know plenty of families who spend evenings all at home together, just on various devices. If that’s the deal, it’s not really about the time. It’s about priorities and routines.

It can also seem daunting to find a book that suits kids of different ages and interests. I get that. My youngest dug Narnia but tuned out as we slogged through Susan Cooper’s slow-moving, five-book Dark Is Rising series. At a certain point, I just finished reading the last couple books with my oldest while my wife and youngest read separately. There’s a crapshoot element. But reading to your kids over time builds momentum. Even if they are skeptical about a book at the beginning, there’s something special about the experience of reading together.

Now, I’d never suggest that family reading should displace kids’ reading alone. But it can be a gateway for kids who aren’t readers and a fun change of pace for those who are. If making enough time for personal reading and family reading means curtailing the time kids spend on devices or watching Netflix . . . well, good. Avid readers tend to think of reading as a solitary act. That’s certainly been my experience. And that’s great. We all need our escapes. But that view of reading can make books feel like a solitary respite rather than a shared escape. And there’s no reason they need to be one or the other. They can be both.

Will there be a point at which I stop reading to my kids? Sure. But for now, my 10-year-old is still wholly on board. I’m hoping that’ll still be true in a year or two. We’ll see. I’ll tell you this, though: I’m glad I haven’t stopped yet.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”

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I Watched the Parenting on Young Sheldon . . . and Did the Exact Opposite https://www.educationnext.org/i-watched-the-parenting-on-young-sheldon-and-did-the-exact-opposite/ Thu, 13 Jun 2024 09:10:30 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718380 A New York mother of three took a cue from the sitcom for how not to parent a gifted child

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Family of five in a park
The author and her family in Central Park

The Big Bang Theory premiered September 2007. My husband has a nuclear engineering degree from MIT. Our younger son, then four, was a budding scientist. (Sample conversation: Him: Can’t come out of the bath. Working on surface tension and light refraction. Me: You mean splashing?)

We tuned in to the pilot. We liked it well enough to keep watching. However, as inevitably happens with Chuck Lorre shows, the humor quickly became mean-spirited, the characters nasty, the plots cliched.

When Young Sheldon debuted 10 years later, though, it seemed different enough in spirit that we gave it a shot.

By that time, we had a 14-year-old son who’d been begging us to let him drop out of school since 3rd grade. He said he was bored. He said he wasn’t learning anything. He said he could do a better job educating himself.

We struck a deal. He would stay in school, behave himself in class, and, once he graduated 8th grade, he could go straight to college.

There were definitely ups and downs over the intervening five years. Instances like his teacher calling to report he got an uncharacteristic D on a geography test. “I don’t think it’s a learning issue,” the teacher began.

“Oh, it’s a learning issue,” I snapped. “He didn’t learn the material.”

My son informed me he didn’t study for the test because he found geography pointless. I informed him that this wasn’t keeping with our bargain.

There were also report cards with the note: His need to question everything the teacher says can become tiresome.

A sample exchange:

Teacher: Think of “is” as an equal sign.

Him: No. Because if you say, “A rose is red,” then the color red is an aspect of the rose, but if you say, “Red is a rose,” a rose is not an aspect of the color red.

He managed to graduate 8th grade. He’d kept his promise. I was determined to keep mine.

We agreed one of New York’s city colleges would be fine. But, as it turned out, CUNY won’t let applicants take its placement test without a high school diploma. Over 50 percent of teens who graduate NYC high schools with a diploma can’t pass the CUNY placement test—but passing the placement test won’t get you a high school diploma!

With the plan for him to attend an affordable school and live at home proving impossible, we adjusted our parameters and visited Simon’s Rock, an early college in Massachusetts. Though it was by no stretch of the imagination affordable, it claimed to meet all financial need via scholarships.

To make the day trip happen, my husband and I took off work. Because neither of us drive, my brother volunteered to chauffeur us, which required him taking time off work, too. I arranged for my daughter to go to a friend’s house after school and for my oldest son to pick her up from there in the evening.

While none of us were impressed with Simon’s Rock’s academics, we still allowed our son to apply. He was ecstatic to get in. Then came the price tag. They wanted four times what we were paying for our oldest to attend an Ivy League university. So much for “meeting all financial need.”

My son was devastated. He was furious. He was belligerent.

Seeing him so upset, I was severely tempted to find some way for him to go. We’d borrow the money.

This is where Young Sheldon came in. That show’s narrative never matched The Big Bang Theory’s. Adult Sheldon maintained no one in his family understood his genius or supported him.

Yet, in seven seasons of the spin-off, we watched Sheldon’s mother, father, and grandmother go out of their way to drive him to his university classes. His dad flew with him to Caltech. His mom went with him to Germany. Sheldon was incredibly supported by his family—which he never appreciated.

What stopped me from giving in to my son over early college was watching Mary perennially giving in to Sheldon—and the entitled, self-absorbed monster that turned him into. One who didn’t even notice the sacrifices other people were making for him, because he simply accepted it as his rightful due.

Still image from the sitcom Young Sheldon
As a mother, Mary Cooper (Zoe Perry) consistently gives in to the needs and demands of gifted son Sheldon (Iain Armitage), often at the expense of daughter Missy (Raegan Revord).

So we told our son he’d be attending Stuyvesant, NYC’s top public high school. At the end of freshman year, he asked again to be allowed to drop out.

We didn’t let him.

The reasons were, once again, connected to Young Sheldon. I didn’t want to give my son the sense he was better than the people around him. Stuyvesant is a school for NYC’s highest performing students. If it was good enough for them, it was good enough for him (and his father and his brother, too). The last thing I wanted was a boy who, like young Sheldon, thinks he’s smarter than everyone around him and that this gives him license to belittle them. A kid like that grows into an adult who mocks his friend for “only” having a master’s degree (even though said friend is also an astronaut) and dismisses entire areas of study, like geology, as not real science.

So my son returned for sophomore year. And then the pandemic hit. Now when he said he wasn’t learning anything and showed the level of work that was being asked of him, I was forced to agree.

So could he drop out and educate himself now?

Yes. But on one condition. Again, thanks to Young Sheldon.

I told my son he could drop out and homeschool himself. But he would do all the work himself. He would research homeschooling law himself, and file the paperwork himself, and select his classes himself, and arrange to take his Advanced Placement tests (and, later, his high school equivalency) himself. I would not lift a finger to help.

This was because, on Young Sheldon, I saw what happened when a mother put one child’s needs above all others.

I watched Missy explain that while her dad and older brother Georgie have football in common, and her mom and Meemaw are always “fussing over Sheldon,” Missy is left on her own. I seethed when, during a trip to Houston so Sheldon could debate math with a NASA scientist, Missy’s pleas to stop at an ostrich farm are ignored. And I was driven to tears as Missy’s cries for attention, to the point of running away from home, are dismissed and punished, while Sheldon’s horrible behavior is excused and even rewarded.

That wasn’t going to happen at my house. Thanks to Young Sheldon, I went out of my way to make sure it wasn’t only my son’s triumphs which were celebrated. I insisted he attend his sister’s gymnastics meets and, when she competed internationally, that we watch the livestream of her opening ceremony. (Did we see her in the throng of thousands? No, we did not. But that wasn’t the point.) Her accomplishments were no less valuable than his.

Last month, Jonathan Plucker wrote about the sitcom “Young Sheldon Provides Insight into Parenting Bright Children.” I couldn’t agree more. But for me, the show proved a blueprint for everything not to do.

I didn’t want a son who acted like young Sheldon Cooper. I most certainly didn’t want one who grew up to behave like adult Sheldon. Even in the last episode, Jim Parsons’s cameo demonstrated that Sheldon still spoke condescendingly to his wife, had no interest in supporting his children’s passions, and mocked people whom he called his friends.

If looking at everything Mary Cooper did when raising Sheldon and doing the opposite was what it took for me to raise the anti-Sheldon, then so be it.

But how could I argue with Sheldon’s success, some might ask? He went to Caltech! Doesn’t that make putting up with his abhorrent personality worth it?

If that’s what we’re using as a metric, then my son also got into Caltech—but chose to go elsewhere. There’s definitely more than one way to parent a bright child. I chose to go the anti-Young Sheldon route.

Alina Adams is the author of Getting Into NYC Kindergarten and Getting Into NYC High School. Her website, NYCSchoolSecrets.com, asserts that we can’t have true school choice until everybody knows all their choices—and how to get them.

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Modernizing Access to Education Data Could Improve Student Learning https://www.educationnext.org/modernizing-access-to-education-data-could-improve-student-learning/ Wed, 12 Jun 2024 09:13:06 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718353 For AI to maximize its benefit to education, it needs a diet of quality data that national statistics can provide

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Illustration of a laptop with pages flying out of the screen

As the artificial intelligence revolution unfolds around us, many education researchers and practitioners believe that AI will soon lead to highly personalized interventions, such as intelligent tutors. In theory, these tools should more precisely respond to students’ needs and engage them with more relevant learning materials, leading to improved educational progress. But AI application development relies on large, high-quality data sets—a standard that too often is unmet, since generative AI models are mostly trained on publicly available data that are opaque, lack documentation, and are likely biased.

The Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the independent science agency in the U.S. Department of Education that I led through March of this year, sits on lots of data that can and should be used to advance our understanding of student learning. This is especially true of IES’s statistical unit, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which administers the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

Through its assessments, the NAEP program has amassed vast amounts of high-quality data on what students know and can do. (Around half a million students take the 4th and 8th grade reading and math assessments every other year; tests in other grades and subjects occur less frequently.) NAEP data are particularly valuable for AI training purposes since NAEP assessments are all nationally representative (ensuring that data don’t reflect only a limited segment of the population). Further, the data are “labeled,” meaning the assessments have already been scored by experienced human graders and often include detailed information about the concept being tested. During the last five years, well over $700 million in federal revenue from American taxpayers has been spent (more than $100 million on question development alone) to create this treasure trove of data. It includes hundreds of thousands of student essays, math exercises, and answers to civics tests. This large data set can help researchers, policymakers, parents, and teachers improve student learning and performance using the power of AI.

But this is not happening at the pace it should. Getting access to data for research purposes through NCES is currently far too difficult. Cumbersome application procedures, bureaucratic hurdles, and slow processes plague researchers and organizations alike. For example, one team of highly qualified researchers from Vanderbilt University sought access to three NAEP math datasets for almost a year, facing frustrating administrative inefficiencies like lost paperwork and a refusal to accept e-signatures that required the team to mail documents to multiple people before their application for the data could even be submitted.

These issues are due to legacy security policies meant to protect paper records and data stored on compact discs (remember those?). This is not the world we live in today.

Many government agencies, IES included, now provide secure, remote access to confidential datasets. The Administrative Data Research Facility (ADRF) created by the Coleridge Initiative is a secure research platform that eases access to sensitive confidential microdata. It provides a model of how data can be protected while facilitating access to contemporary cloud infrastructure for improved collaboration, access to shared computing resources, and other benefits. This virtual enclave now allows safe access to NAEP and other student data from IES. State education and workforce agencies, post-secondary institutions, and non-profits also make use of this facility.

Despite this innovation, there is a bottleneck in getting remote access to IES data. Applicants must fill out antiquated forms that refer to “anti-virus software,” locked file cabinets, Internet-disconnected computers, and other items that were clearly created in a very different era of data storage and research. It’s time to remove these archaic barriers and get NCES and NAEP data out faster to facilitate AI development for educational purposes.

The first task is a concerted effort to modernize the current secure-data application process, making it easier for researchers and developers to obtain the data they need for their projects. A new proposal request system is needed to process online applications instead of relying on paper submission through the mail. Digital submissions would support more automated reviews, finding and fixing low-level errors like a missing signature. This would in turn allow the trained and highly paid staff who review applications to focus on more substantive issues. Furthermore, it would accommodate the prevalence of remote work and multi-institutional collaborations by enabling e-signatures and collaboration in an online rather than physical space.

In the long term, increasing access will also mean widening the lens on permissible uses of NCES data. NCES appropriately focuses on high-quality data products that support statistical uses of student data, avoiding enforcement, surveillance, or marketing uses. More broadly, IES and its centers primarily work with universities and non-profit organizations. However, many organizations in the private sector, especially tech firms, are interested in using the data for AI-related purposes. Our current system rarely allows for this, in part due to privacy concerns about student data, but equally prohibitive is a bureaucratic culture that looks askance at commercial enterprises. Yet statistical uses can align with training and analytic uses, and there are many privacy-enhancing technologies in development and deployment in other agencies from which IES and NCES can learn.

Clearly, these changes must be consistent with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which governs access to education data. And, just as clearly, IES and NCES must protect the privacy of student data within that law. But none of these proposed updates to the process for accessing data affect the protections in place in existing (archaic) systems. More broadly, FERPA has all too often acted as a brake on needed changes to ways in which valuable data can be used. IES must lead an effort to better balance the concern for protecting student privacy against the reality that the nation also needs breakthroughs that only access to bias-free and representative data of the sort generated by NAEP can provide.

Mark Schneider was the Director of the Institute for Education Science from 2018 through March 2024.

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When Education Entrepreneurs Face-Plant https://www.educationnext.org/when-education-entrepreneurs-face-plant/ Mon, 10 Jun 2024 16:02:05 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718271 There’s a big difference between running a program and changing public policy

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Illustration

Over the years, I’ve had versions of the same conversation with lots of education CEOs, advocates, and entrepreneurs. They’ll explain that they’ve got a good product or program and are trying to go big (promote legislation, launch a national initiative, or what-have-you), but they’re frustrated to suddenly find themselves sucked into distracting “culture wars.”

I usually get called when there’s been unexpected blowback and the questioner wants to know, “How do I get these people to focus on the good work we’re doing rather than on that other stuff?”

For instance, I had a call the other day with someone running a social and emotional learning program. He told me that their program has done well in red and blue states. “It’s not political,” he explained. “It’s about durable, in-demand skills. It addresses shared concerns. So we’ve been able to avoid a lot of the posturing.”

Photo of Rick Hess with text "Old School with Rick Hess"

But his organization recently got active in a push for legislation and funding, and he was wondering why he was now catching flak. As he put it, “We’re already in a bunch of red states. We’ve got a track record. Why are they suddenly up in arms?”

Why? Well, when you’re selling a product or program, you’re pitching someone a solution. But when you’re promoting policies or engaging in advocacy, you’re offering something very different: an agenda, a worldview, a value-laden vision.

It’s the difference between setting up a free health clinic on the one hand and promoting a vision for reforming Medicaid on the other. It’s safe to say you won’t get many complaints about free, optional pediatric visits. But things get much more complicated when that friendly offer of assistance morphs into something bigger, more compulsory, and more intrusive.

You’ve now moved beyond talking about a product or service to what should be mandated, whether public funds should be spent, or how the rules should be written. Entering that fray can generate a lot of conflict and requires a lot of trust. It’s why skeptics or muckrakers who haven’t paid much attention before will (quite appropriately) start scrutinizing what you say, write, or tweet and who’s funding you.

It can be easy for those who’ve built terrific programs to drink their own Kool-Aid. Their success attracts plaudits and funding. They believe in their model, and they’re confident that they can help solve a problem “at scale.” The difficulty is that they very quickly leave behind the things they know and wade into areas where they’re no longer on firm ground.

That distinction is crucial. I’m not suggesting that their success is phony or that their expertise is fraudulent. I am saying that there’s a tendency to confuse one kind of expertise (running a discrete program) for a very different kind (changing rules, regulations, funding, and policy).

This kind of dynamic comes up all the time with reading and math programs. Entrepreneurs and CEOs will often explain, with much exasperation, that they don’t want to get caught up in the reading and math wars. They’ll denounce the politics of it all and say, “I just want to do what works. I don’t want to take sides.”

Okay. But those “sides” are almost inevitable when we move from an optional, discrete program to determining what standards, texts, curricula, or instructional methods will (or won’t) be mandatory for classrooms in a school or state. It doesn’t matter if you dislike “politics”—politics is just the label for how these (inevitable) disagreements play out.


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There aren’t easy answers here. After all, when promising models exist, I understand the inclination to want to extend their reach—even if the results often disappoint. (For one of the best treatments of this, even 30 years later, check out Richard Elmore’s classic 1996 article “Getting to Scale with Good Educational Practice.”)

For what it’s worth, here are two things to keep in mind.

First, those who’ve created successful models tend to soft-pedal the off-putting particulars in favor of language calculated to woo education insiders. But they often fail to appreciate how this same soft-shoe routine can alienate the many people who are skeptical of ed-school buzzwords and attracted to rigor, fueling pushback in red and purple states. And if the program does get adopted, it’s a denuded version that’s primed to disappoint. It’s vital to understand that tension and manage it from the get-go.

Second, recognize there are many kinds of expertise. Knowing how to run a program is different from knowing how education finance works or what it takes to adapt a program to new circumstances or how to navigate an unfamiliar political context. A successful program applied at scale calls for an honest-to-goodness “diversity” of skills, knowledge, relationships, and experience. This means finding ways to identify the requisite mix of expertise up front, then assembling a team that can cover all the bases, before you’ve stumbled hip-deep into the muck and mire.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”

The post When Education Entrepreneurs Face-Plant appeared first on Education Next.

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New U.S. Census Bureau Data Confirm Growth in Homeschooling Amid Pandemic https://www.educationnext.org/new-u-s-census-bureau-data-confirm-growth-in-homeschooling-amid-pandemic/ Mon, 10 Jun 2024 09:04:33 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718367 Survey shows growing interest in alternative education models that spans demographic categories

The post New U.S. Census Bureau Data Confirm Growth in Homeschooling Amid Pandemic appeared first on Education Next.

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A family works on schoolwork together at a kitchen table

The United States Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, an online survey designed to measure social and economic trends among U.S. households since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, offers new insight on educational trends across the country. In particular, recent data from the survey provide information on homeschool participation, its growth during the pandemic, and current homeschool estimates nationally and by state.

National and State-Level Trends

Survey data collected from September of 2022 through August of 2023 indicate that nearly 6 percent of all school-aged children nationwide were reported as homeschooled during the 2022–23 school year. This compares to 10 percent of students in private schools and 84 percent in public schools. With pre-pandemic estimates of the national homeschool population representing just 2.8 percent of students in 2019, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the Pulse figures signify growing interest in alternative schooling models.

There is considerable variation in homeschool participation across states. Alaska leads with 12.6 percent of children homeschooled, followed by Tennessee (9 percent) and West Virginia (8.9 percent). These higher rates may reflect differences in region, legislation on homeschooling, and attitudes toward alternative schooling. Conversely, Rhode Island (2.9 percent), Massachusetts (3.1 percent), and New York (3.2 percent) report the lowest homeschooling rates in the country.

Enrollment estimates from the Pulse Survey of the share of students enrolled in public and private schools are generally comparable to those from NCES and state education departments. Among the 35 states and the District of Columbia that currently report data on homeschooling families, however, the Pulse Survey data do reveal some differences. The regions with the greatest discrepancies in homeschool participation estimates were Tennessee, Washington, D.C., and Kansas. For example, in Tennessee the Household Pulse Survey estimates were 7.6 percentage points higher than those we estimated from NCES and Tennessee Department of Education data. The states with the lowest discrepancies were Maine (0.8 percentage points), Kentucky (0.7 percentage points), and Nebraska (0.4 percentage points). It is important to note that the most recent available data from NCES and the state education departments reflect student enrollment in the Fall of 2021, while the Household Pulse Survey data capture student enrollment “the school year that began in the Summer / Fall of 2022.” Regardless, these discrepancies underscore the need for high-quality, adaptive data collection methods to accurately capture our rapidly changing educational landscape.

Demographic Differences

The Pulse Survey also sheds light on the demographics of homeschooling families, providing valuable information that is often missing from the data reported by state education departments. For example, among respondents that reported having homeschooled students in their household, 19 percent of respondents were Hispanic or Latino, 60 percent were white, 12 percent were Black, 2 percent were Asian, and 7 percent were two or more or other races. These percentages are largely similar to the Census Bureau’s estimates of race and ethnicity of the general school-age population, indicating that the homeschooling population is racially diverse.

Education levels among homeschooling parents vary, with 27 percent holding a bachelor’s degree or higher, 33 percent having some college education, 29 percent having a high school diploma or GED, and 11 percent with less than high school. This educational profile is similar to that of public-school parents, among whom 29 percent report holding a bachelor’s degree and 9 percent less than high school. Additionally, income data reveals that homeschooling spans the economic spectrum. Although 28 percent of respondents did not report their income, 49 percent of homeschooling families who did reported earning less than $100,000 annually, while 23 percent said they earn more than $100,000. This counters the stereotype that homeschooling is predominantly a luxury for wealthier families. In fact, the reported income levels for respondents with homeschooled children are modestly lower, on average, than those of respondents with children in public schools.

Implications and the Path Forward

Findings from the Household Pulse Survey highlight the increasingly diverse nature of U.S. education. The increased interest in homeschooling appears to be part of a broader trend towards embracing non-traditional models of education, as families seek solutions that best fit their children’s needs. Because there are some discrepancies between estimates from the Household Pulse Survey and estimates based on NCES and state education department data, further analyses of these surveys and their accuracy are needed.

Even so, the Household Pulse Survey clearly offers the most detailed and up-to-date depiction of homeschooling across the country. As we navigate a changing educational landscape, understanding and supporting diverse educational choices with accurate data is crucial in fostering an inclusive and effective education system for all students. The Census Bureau has already begun releasing data from the most recent phase of the survey, which explores school enrollment for the 2023–24 school year. We plan to examine the data from that year once they have all been released, which is scheduled for early August.

Genevieve Smith is a research assistant at the Homeschool Research Lab at the Johns Hopkins School of Education. Angela R. Watson is an assistant professor at the Institute for Education Policy and director of the Homeschool Hub.

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