Paul Peterson: The tentative title of your forthcoming book is The Lost Decade. We had school closures for a year or two. Why do you say a “lost decade”?

Steven Wilson: I would point to a change in what schools in the reform movement are driving toward. For a long time, the essence of urban charters in the KIPP mold was to do whatever it takes to advance student achievement—to attend to what was called the 101 percent solution, because there’s no silver bullet for raising achievement. Internally, the test for every decision in the network or the school was “Does this advance student achievement?”

But now, that has really changed, as what I would call social-justice education has begun to substitute for the focus on an academic education. The new test of decisions is to make them as anti-racist as possible. So, in the largest sense, academics are less of a focus, and the new focus is on social justice.

You mentioned that everything was done with student achievement in mind. At Ascend Learning and other schools like it, what were you doing to maximize student learning?

The essence is an operating system that was much more favorable to student achievement than district schools. That operating system is the charter bargain. In starting a charter school, you have a degree of authority and autonomy to do things that really matter, like being able to hire and fire the faculty of your choice, being able to choose the curriculum that works best, control your budget—all things which principals in traditional, large urban schools have relatively little control over. The charter bargain was this fundamental change in the operating system on which we could build good schools.

But then you need an effective program, and that was a much more rigorous curriculum, enormous attention to who was in the classroom, an outsized investment in teacher professional development, a degree of internal accountability, frequent assessment, unalloyed conviction that testing matters and is our guide to whether students are actually learning—all of those things.

These schools, beginning with KIPP, put a focus on having an orderly, engaging classroom where students can achieve a little bit of academic success reliably every period. And those little successes add up academically, but also in terms of student motivation and commitment to the learning project. Those were some of the big drivers.

Given the success story, why is there a change developing within this very sector? Is it being forced upon them by some kind of external pressures, or is this coming from within the charter sector?

No, it’s not coming from within so much as from new employees. If we think back to 2008 when Teach for America was at its peak of popularity, 11% of the graduating class of Yale applied. Teach for America was thought of as a very sexy, exciting thing to do. Well, that changed. It began with a change in the culture on campus, a turning away from a liberal education. There was a new progressive left that emerged that was wary of traditional liberal arts commitments. The idea of exposing students to multiple competing points of view to have them spar with different ideas shifted.

Now, the focus was on eradicating racism, which was identified as the cause of the disparities in educational outcomes. That’s a very different premise. In the previous premise, the cause of the disparities that everybody laments and views as intolerable is that they’re getting a bad quality education. The new school of thought was that the cause of the disparities was racism. This gathered further steam, of course, with the murder of George Floyd and the racial reckoning, when the ideas of Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo took on enormous force, both on campus and in these networks. And those ideas are in very substantial tension with the traditional commitments of no-excuses schooling.

Allegedly racist dimensions included things that we would take as absolutely ordinary, if not admirable: the notion of excellence, urgency, objectivity—all those things were now deemed to be symptoms of white supremacy culture.

I’m aware of this argument, and I know that it’s being articulated on college campuses. But how does it penetrate into charter schools?

It penetrates very deeply. This list of supposed characteristics of white supremacist culture are in circulation, both in elite higher ed institutions like Harvard, but also in community colleges. In New York City, educators were trained in that very same dictate. So it’s very pervasive. And when you introduce that into these kinds of high-performing school networks, you can imagine it introduced a tremendous amount of rancor, because long-standing staff members did not conceive of themselves as racist. They had extraordinary results in their own classrooms, in the schools that they ran as principals, but suddenly they were being called out as effectively racist.

I want to be careful. Equity is a very, very good thing. But that’s what we all thought we were doing. We were advancing equity by offering children an exceptional education. And the results were stunning. KIPP students who attended both a KIPP middle school and a KIPP high school were achieving four-year college graduation rates just about equal to white non-disadvantaged students. Really a remarkable record.

Is there evidence that these schools have in fact become not as effective? Do we see anything in terms of student achievement that suggests this is all that harmful?

What we are beginning to see anecdotally is that very high-flying, no-excuses schools are starting to turn in results that have often plummeted to the level of the surrounding district. You might say, “Well, they had closures; there was Covid.” But why would they have fallen so much more than the school systems that they compete with? Both institutions suffered from school closures and the other pandemic effects.

Let’s turn to the future. You say in the tentative subtitle of your book “returning to the fight for school reform.” Returning sounds optimistic. You are saying we can return?

Yes. It will take time to turn back to a focus on excellent academics. A lot of people of all kinds of ideological predispositions are beginning to question what has happened. We can say all children, not just the privileged, should have a super engaging liberal arts education where they grapple with different ideas, competing ideas, other cultures—that is the most stimulating place you could possibly be. That’s the classroom you want to be in. We can absolutely return to that. And that is, I think, what we need to do.

This is an edited excerpt from an Education Exchange podcast.

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

Education Next. (2024). Why Some Charters Care Less About Learning. Education Next, 24(3), 83-84.

Paul Peterson: We know that academic honesty matters, but why does it matter? What is the reason people care a lot about plagiarism?

James Hankins: The research university exists inside an ethical framework, which is tied to a structure of incentives. You cannot really conduct modern scientific or scholarly research without preserving that ethical frame. What that consists of is rewarding those who have made discoveries in proportion to their merit and the importance of the discovery, and also making sure that people get credit for what they’ve done and not take credit for things they haven’t done.

The university in modern times has always been ferocious in trying to suppress plagiarism, and we do it most for our own students and graduate students. But it should apply to everyone in the university. In a way, it’s more important for it to apply to the leaders of the university. You have to set an example.

I’ve seen a lot of manuscripts that were copied by monks. Without their copying, we wouldn’t have access to the wisdom of those who wrote in the distant past. Wasn’t copying actually a very honored scholarly practice for many centuries?

Yes, indeed. I once had a plagiarism case, and the witness was someone who understood very well pre-modern understandings of where academic credit should go. He protested against the plagiarism proceeding on exactly the grounds you mentioned, saying that, “Well, if the ancients did it, it’s okay for us to do it as well,” and didn’t I know that “ancient historians constantly copied from each other and they didn’t put quotation marks?”

Well, this is all very true. In the article, I talked about the medieval university and its understanding of intellectual originality, which was about essentially the use of authorities. They always understood that their job was to interpret authorities.

Can you explain what you mean by “authority”?

In the medieval university, there’s civil law and canon law. The authorities of the civil law are basically jurists of previous generations who had been regarded as having successfully resolved cases with wisdom and fairness. In the canon law, the law of the Church, they had wise statements, sententiae, which were taken from the works of Christian authors, usually church fathers or councils. They were also considered to be authoritative. The job of the medieval professor was to harmonize all these sententiae and come up with a decision that was fair.

This is still done to some extent. Law schools are, in a way, more medieval than the rest of the university. But we don’t do this as much anymore. We still read texts and interpret them, and we still respect and admire. But the research project of the modern university is something that’s quite recent. There’s a different ethos, a different ethical structure that surrounds the modern research university which has to be respected if the university is going to retain its prestige.

Is there any moment when there was a sensational case of plagiarism which really established that rule in the modern university?

Well, there have been numerous controversies about who gets credit for what. The famous case in the 17th century was calculus, because both Newton and Leibniz claimed to be its inventors. That perhaps was not so important as credit would be today, but there are many cases where people have contested where the ideas come from. It is important in the sense that the individuals and the institutions they represent gain prestige. If they’re stealing prestige from other institutions, then they’re getting, as they say in the military, stolen honor. If you were taking credit for someone else’s achievements, you’re going to get graduate students, you’re going to get honors, you’re going to get prizes. And if those turn out to be fake, your achievements turn out to be fake. An awful lot of resources have been wasted and a lot of individuals who would hope to study with a person of high competence have been deluded.

Harvard’s gone through a difficult time the past six months. What do you think is the way forward?

One of the reasons we came to this point was that the university governing bodies were undervaluing the requirements and the ethical framework of the research university and overvaluing political activism and statements about politics in the choice of presidents and other high officials. The university is going to have to recover its commitment to research in order to preserve its academic prestige and the value of its degrees.

One of the things you learn in history is that things can collapse very quickly. Harvard has been the premier university in the country since the Second World War, but things can collapse. I would hate to see this wonderful university with its incredibly generous alumni and many distinguished people losing prestige because of short-sighted actions from our governing boards. The governing boards have to stop trying to turn the university into a training school for political activism and stop trying to send out political messages in their choice of officers.

Can you give examples of universities that have fallen pretty far from the pinnacle they once had achieved?

There’s what’s called the first-mover phenomenon in universities where the oldest universities are still the leading universities. The University of Paris, which was founded in 1215, University of Bologna, which was founded around 1190—they are still top universities. And so is Oxford, so is Cambridge, both founded in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. There are a lot of German universities, which were founded in the 14th century, that have gone up and down. Harvard, as a research university, only has really existed since the early 20th century and only tried to be a dominant university in the country since maybe the 1920s and ’30s, and it wasn’t at that point necessarily the top university.

I’m more worried about the reputation of research universities as a whole in this country. When they start taking sides in politics, it means that the other side in politics automatically regards them as politically motivated. That’s not a good thing.

But I don’t think it’s true. Most of the research of my colleagues in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences is not politically motivated. The ends or the purposes might be shaped by political beliefs, but the research is almost all sound as far as I’m concerned. So it doesn’t deserve to lose esteem, but if the university does become a partisan institution, and it’s heading for that, then it’s going to lose public support.

This is an edited excerpt from an Education Exchange podcast. Hear it in full at educationnext.org.

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

Education Next. (2024). Recovering the Ideals of the University. Education Next, 24(2), 75-76.

It was a Friday afternoon toward the end of the school year, and the 8th-grade English class I taught had finished their required coursework weeks earlier. So, I took them outside. What could go wrong? In this neighborhood, a lot could and did.

My students spread out across the fenced-in playground. Some huddled under the shaded play structures to talk with friends. Despite the heat, a few chased each other around in their school uniforms. A handful of boys ran football routes in the limited space. I was tense.

Three young teens—a boy and two girls—were walking along the sidewalk across the street. One of my own students beckoned them over. Apparently, not everyone got along. I learned later that the young man was in a rival gang and had insulted other students’ deceased relatives on social media. The boys who had been playing football now stood sentinel a few yards back, motionless.

Another of my students encouraged our visitors to move along. The young man shot back, “Who’s going to make me?” One of his female acquaintances spit on my student, and pandemonium broke out. Five administrators ran out to the playground as half of my students started climbing the fence while the rest tried to hold their friends back. They knew, as I did, that a fight would probably lead to injuries and even arrests.

Because of the neighborhood my students lived in, they could not be children for even 10 minutes. They couldn’t have a few moments of blissful, carefree play that so many others take for granted.

In my years teaching the same grade at an affluent private school, we always spent extra time outside the last week of school. It made my English teacher’s heart go pitter-pat to see students rocking on a swing with Animal Farm in hand or whispering the passages together in circles at the top of the slide. Always, with a few minutes left, I let them play tag. Soon-to-be high schoolers, they let loose their remaining childishness on the playground.

There are endless comparisons between rich schools and poor schools. Popular Hollywood movies depict urban schools in disrepair: broken desks, moldering ceilings, tattered textbooks. Students scorn their classwork. Lazy teachers watch YouTube and only intervene if the rowdiness grows to excess.

These portrayals didn’t match my experience. My private school had drafty windows. Many students there did the bare minimum to appease their parents. And while the teachers were well meaning, the hard-working ones knew which of their colleagues were duds. Conversely, my urban school had brand new books, and many of my students had the academic chops to gain admission to an Ivy League school. The teachers in the two schools were similar, the buildings were similar, the students were similar. The context around them made the difference.

One year at the urban school, in the week leading up to Christmas break, I asked one of my students if he was going to skip the last day, as many of his classmates did. He shook his head no. It was out of the question. When I asked why, his response was simple: “My neighborhood is too dangerous. I don’t like being home alone.”

This 8th grader was six foot one. A stranger might have mistaken him for a recent high school graduate. But he was still a kid, one who was scared to be home alone, and not because imaginary monsters lurked in the dark. The troublemakers he feared posed a real threat.

As a polemicist, I might be expected to end this column with a “So what? What kind of policy will solve this problem? What instructional intervention could counter these realities? What effect does a childhood spent in fight-or-flight mode do to the human body and psyche?” But I’m struggling.

We ask schools to do so much already. On top of providing basic academic instruction, they serve as community centers, day care providers, athletic trainers, food suppliers, mental health institutions, basic medical facilities, summer camps, and more. Whenever some new societal problem comes along—from single-parent households to childhood obesity—politicians and the rest of us tend to look toward schools, hoping that they’ll deal with it.

What’s more, we like to blame every societal failure on schools. Why are people rude? Because we don’t teach virtues anymore. Why is there so much debt? No one shows kids how to budget and do their taxes. Who caused the disparities in reading achievement? Know-nothing teachers, of course.

Ultimately, though, schools can only accomplish so much. More than 50 years ago, the sociologist James Coleman, in the groundbreaking Coleman Report, came to a simple conclusion: “Schools bring little influence to bear on a child’s achievement that is independent of his background and general social context.” Subsequent work reveals that conclusion to be vastly overstated, but it captures an important truth (see “What Matters for Student Achievement,” features, Spring 2016). Family structure, peer influence, classroom disorder, and other such factors can confound the best laid schemes of mice, men, and education technocrats.

Almost every one of my urban students wanted to graduate from high school, get a good job, and raise a stable family, but so much in their life was working against them. That context shut them off from even this simple privilege of affluence: enjoying a few minutes of carefree play on a playground.

Daniel Buck is a former English teacher, policy associate at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, and author of the book What Is Wrong with Our Schools?

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

Buck, D. (2024). Privilege on the Playground. Education Next, 24(1), 87-88.

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

Education Next. (2023). 2023 Is the Year of Universal Choice in Education Savings Accounts: “We better get doing our job of implementing well,” says EdChoice’s Enlow. Education Next, 23(4), 75-76.

Our family recently encountered a life-changing event: a move. We spent 16 years in our previous home, and in the summer of 2022, we moved across town. In Portland, Oregon, where we live, elementary school assignment is mainly on the basis of a student’s residence, so the new house also meant a new school for our two kids, who are in 2nd and 4th grade.

Although we’ve only been part of the new school community for seven months, I have already noticed huge differences between the two schools. Online rankings from various comparison websites labeled the new school as significantly better. Precisely what that looks like for students and parents became clear and concrete over time.

The first big difference I noticed was within the new neighborhood. Our previous school was located in a highly impoverished area. Sadly, that factor brought a lot of crime. Shoplifting, drug-use, and violence were regular occurrences near our old home. Sirens blaring were daily background noise. A walk to the store meant likely exposure to people using drugs or fighting. Unfortunately, many of the homeless people that we encountered were aggressive. This lack of safety was the number one reason for our move.

Our new neighborhood is incredibly safe and quiet. The only noises we hear are neighbors chatting and dogs barking. Our neighbors and nearby residents seem happy, healthy, and involved in their community. Our new neighborhood has many more resources and a higher average income than our previous neighborhood.

One difference I’ve noticed within the school is the level of involvement from the school community and Parent Teacher Association. I work as a “classroom lead” for my son’s classroom, helping the teacher with family communication, school fundraising, and general coordination on classroom matters. So I’m constantly asking for donations, chaperones, and volunteers. I was shocked the first time I asked for chaperones for a field trip. I asked for five, and within minutes I had seven. It was the same when I asked for donations toward the teacher’s Christmas gift. Within a few days, I had $325! Every time I ask for anything for the school or classroom, the goal is met and exceeded immediately.

Our old school struggled with donations and fundraising. The volunteers and chaperones came in smaller numbers. This makes sense, because the neighborhood had a lower average income. Caregivers weren’t as available for volunteer and chaperone opportunities, because many of them had to work.

Another difference I found was that our old school tended to offer free financial and language resources, while our new school offers classes, events, and materials at a cost. I remember many events at our old school that would involve handing out art sets, food, and other items to families, and the school would put together a family night and provide a dinner and entertainment for free. This school year, we were floored that at the Halloween carnival, our new school charged admission and sold concessions. I think this is a good difference. The impoverished school shouldn’t charge admission to low-income families, and it seems fair to me that a school in a middle-class neighborhood would charge admission.

The biggest difference I have found between the two schools sits between the classroom walls: behavior. Our old school, where I worked as an instructional assistant, had some shocking statistics on behavior referrals last year. I remember sitting through a staff meeting looking over slides, and the number of incidents was just heartbreaking. A lot of kids would leave the classroom, destroy educational materials, and get into physical altercations. My son would get frustrated on a regular basis because these disruptions affected his learning. He would simply have to sit and wait while a student disrupted a lesson because there weren’t behavior specialists to assist. I brought this concern to his new teacher at his new school and he simply said, “I think Atticus is in for a pleasant surprise, because those things very rarely happen here.” Seven months later, my son hasn’t reported an incident yet. If there are behavior problems, they are dealt with swiftly and out of the classroom.

Resources are one big difference between a low-ranking and high-ranking school. Is the school properly staffed? Is the staff being continually educated? Does the neighborhood have financial resources? Is the school community active? The per-pupil spending at the old school, at nearly $22,000 a year, was actually considerably more than at the new school, which spends about $16,000 a year, so “resources” can mean a lot more than just how much money the government spends on operating a school.

My family managed to afford the move to the more expensive neighborhood and the higher-ranked school only after a couple of small inheritances and years of savings. If more people could see firsthand the differences between the two schools, though, maybe there’d be increased political support for allowing students access to safer, better-resourced schools in ways that don’t require a family to move across town.

Stephanie McCoy is a writer and mom in Oregon.

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

McCoy, S. (2023). School Number 500 to School Number 50: What’s the Difference? Education Next, 23(3), 80.

For the first time since the 1990s, in nearly every state, fourth graders and eighth graders who took the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam lost ground in math. Leading researchers have stipulated that low-income students may have lost up to 22 weeks of learning instruction. The surrounding rhetoric indicates that even with learning recovery efforts, we may have lost a generation of math learners.

While these sobering statistics have provided a long overdue wake-up call, kids have been struggling in math for decades. Even before the pandemic, the United States ranked 37th in math out of 77 countries that participated in the latest Programme for International Student Assessment. The pandemic has only intensified the need to ensure U.S. students deeply understand math.

As the CEO and co-founder of Zearn, I’ve spent the past decade working alongside educators and researchers studying real-time data on building math understanding. What I know for sure is that every kid can learn math and that we can take steps to create a numerate society. Among the key steps to doing that:

Create learning experiences that equip students to make sense of math.

As a sixth grader in Buffalo, New York, I was in the advanced math class. I remember math as flipping to the next chapter and seeing a brand-new thing that I was going to learn. With each new chapter, I memorized a list of often disconnected procedures.

My memory reflects what international rankings, like PISA, have shown: the traditional American approach to math is not a formula for deep understanding. U.S. students tend to learn by memorization and employ tricks rather than developing true understanding. Across the board, students who characterize themselves as memorizers score lowest on the PISA exam. By contrast, kids outside of the U.S. performed better on PISA because they are more than an inch deep in their math understanding. When teachers present math as a progression of a few big ideas, it leads to deeper understanding.

One of the most proven approaches to do this is the Concrete to Pictorial to Abstract framework. This teaches kids to understand math concepts in an intuitive and tangible way and helps them to see how they can apply their knowledge to real-world problems.

For instance, rather than tell students to memorize that 3 x 0 = 0 or N x 0 = 0 or anything times zero is zero, we start with the concrete. We take out three plates. If the three plates have one cookie each, then we have three cookies or 3 x 1 = 3. If the three plates have two cookies each, then we have six cookies or 3 x 2 = 6.

If we, however, have three plates and zero cookies on each plate, then we have zero cookies, so 3 x 0 = 0. Similarly, if we had 20 plates with zero cookies on them, then that is zero cookies too. It then becomes clear to kids why N x 0 = 0. It’s not a rule to memorize. It’s an idea to understand.

This is how the Concrete to Pictorial to Abstract framework provides students with a deeper understanding. The framework also gives students an anchor when they don’t know how to start or solve a problem. Students who learn this way will look at equations and try to turn them into pictures or stories they can concretely understand. Ultimately, that helps them to tackle any problem.

Accelerate the math learning of every student.

During a short period of time in my childhood, I was very sick and missed a lot of school. When I returned, teachers would try to work with me on every concept I had missed. This was challenging, but we’re talking about weeks of unfinished learning.

Today’s teachers have an unprecedented task of addressing more than two years of disrupted learning, and they simply do not have enough time to go back and reteach everything.

The great news is they don’t have to. A better way forward exists.

Learning acceleration is a promising approach that focuses on teaching students lessons appropriate for their grade level, and reteaching only the skills and lessons from earlier grades that are necessary to understand the new content.

Imagine a seventh grade lesson on negative numbers. Part way through the lesson, a student – let’s call her Brianna – is confronted with this problem: 1.4 / 2 = ?

Brianna is stumped on operations with decimals, specifically division. She is supposed to be learning about negative numbers, a new idea, but she is stuck here.

In a traditional remediation approach, she would be stopped here, and she might not see negative numbers again for weeks or months. Because division of decimals is a fifth-grade concept, she would stop moving forward in and spend her time catching up on fifth-grade content.

Learning acceleration is a different way of helping Brianna. Instead of going back and doing an extensive review of decimal operations, she begins with what she knows: whole-number division (14 / 2=?). She is provided a short lesson that demonstrates how dividing decimals follows all the same rules as dividing whole numbers. Then she goes back to the negative number lesson.

The next few times she confronts decimal operations she needs these short lessons again in the context of her seventh-grade learning. After a little while, however, Brianna has caught up on decimal operations and all the while moved forward in her 7th grade learning of negative numbers.

Implement scalable and coherently connected, extra learning time.

Extra learning time – often in the form of tutoring – is something often only afforded to select students. My sixth-grade twin boys have been fortunate to receive extra support in areas they have needed more help.

Not everyone is so fortunate. To ensure all kids can catch up and move forward in math, we must implement extra learning time at scale. Moreover, this extra time must be coherently connected to what students are learning in core math time. It also must address any confusion on specific topics being taught. Absent this alignment, we are wasting students’ extra learning time.

Recently, one of my sons needed help with ratios, which he was learning in his math class. To promote understanding, his teacher used extended time to address his specific questions and present ratios in a different way. I am grateful that this extra learning time was dedicated to understanding ratios versus having him spend time on concepts he may not have fully mastered from prior grades.

Tennessee and Texas educational leaders have approached their statewide, high-impact tutoring programs in this manner.

Share real-time data to make ongoing, evidence-based improvements.

Data must be used better to continuously improve: to identify what is and isn’t working and to effectively communicate what needs to change to best support students’ learning. Leaders must employ data to drive decisions from selecting curricula and leveraging technology to determining how extra learning time is spent.

By sharing real-time data and partnering with experts from various fields, we can answer the most important questions about how kids come to understand the big ideas in math and apply them in real life. Progress in teaching and learning will not come from making a single, massive change overnight, but from many small, yet critical, evidence-based improvements along the way.

Math is imperative for individuals and for society. It has been critical to my success and my enjoyment as a learner. For this to be true for every kid, we must build a system that ensures numeracy for all. For every student to deeply understand and, dare I say, love learning math, every adult who touches students’ school experiences has a role to play.

Shalinee Sharma is CEO and co-founder of Zearn, a nonprofit educational organization behind the math learning platform used by 1 in 4 elementary-school and 1 million middle-school students nationwide.

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

Sharma, S. (2023). Numeracy for All: U.S. kids were struggling in math even before the pandemic. Here are four key ways to help students understand. Education Next, 23(2), 71-72.

When I recently decided to step down from leading Blackstone Valley Prep, an organization I cofounded and helped develop over 13 years, I was flooded with emotion. BVP is a highly acclaimed and intentionally diverse K–12 public charter-school network in Rhode Island that serves more than 2,200 students. To help process my thoughts and feelings about leaving, I turned to journaling, which helped shape an open letter to my school community.

Many people reached out to me about this letter and my upcoming departure. Several of them asked me to expand on a particular paragraph—my musings on mission:

Mission is everything. BVP needs to better articulate its mission to ensure that families know what they are signing up for and that BVP is delivering on the promise of that mission. BVP’s current mission is focused on college success, in large part because of a founding belief that college readiness is truly a path to accessing the American dream. Many people in the BVP community, however, want something else entirely. While that may be perfectly fine, BVP’s efforts should be to either find them a school that offers what it is that they are actually seeking, or BVP should revisit its mission and reinvent itself accordingly.

The importance of articulating a clear and ambitious mission seems obvious. Mission statements set the foundation for strategic plans and help guide the work of the staff. In a healthy organization, every employee should be able to look at their daily work and know that their time was spent in direct support of the mission.

The mission at Blackstone Valley Prep has been the same since 2010: to prepare every scholar for success in college and the world beyond. Each year since, I have led professional-development workshops with incoming staff where we reflect deeply on our mission statement. We discuss the words and phrases that resonate the most and the elements that might ring hollow to some. By the end of the session, everyone is expected to be able to recite the mission and be ready to explain it in their own words.

Over the years, every word in our mission statement has been affirmed by some and challenged by others. I have observed that the most celebrated word has been “every,” while the most polarizing word has been “college.”

I understand both sentiments. “Every” epitomizes aspiration. The idea that a school would aim to serve “almost every” or just “some” students is the antithesis of what we, as educators, are called to do. I cannot imagine walking into a classroom and celebrating a teacher who was doing an excellent job with “most” of the students while ignoring others. Even so, “every” has its detractors. Should every school seek to excel at teaching every field of study? Is every school equipped to serve every type of learner? If one school does not have the expertise or resources to serve a certain population, but another school nearby has both, why not match the learner with the better-equipped school? Are these not the very reasons that different types of schools exist? (Think Career and Technical Education schools or those that specialize in serving students with severe disabilities.)

“College” is also aspirational. The data on lifetime outcomes are clear: college graduates, on average, earn more, are more engaged in society, and live longer than those without postsecondary degrees. One of my greatest motivations in joining BVP was to address the not-so-soft “bigotry of low expectations” displayed by too many schools that counsel young people, especially low-income and BIPOC students, away from college.

My heart sinks whenever friends and colleagues recount that they told their own guidance counselors they wanted to attend a particular highly selective college only to be redirected to a less-distinguished institution. I myself had such an experience with a college counselor—I shared that I wanted to go to Prestigious University and was instead pointed to a small local college. That was all the motivation I needed. At that moment, I resolved to attend a school ranked at least as high as PU. For many students, however, that counselor downgrade is not a motivation but a permanent deflation. Yet, over the past several years at BVP, there have always been at least a few new teachers (every one of whom has at least a bachelor’s degree) who question whether college should be in our mission.

What is most perplexing to me, however, is that despite how clearly we communicate our mission, several young people each year tell us they have no desire to attend a two- or four-year college. I understand that a kindergartener may have little or no conception of college, but it baffles me that we have high school students who do not want college in their future. Why would students attend a high school that is focused on college—where classrooms are named for teachers’ college alma maters and which offers more than a dozen AP courses each year—if they have no desire to attend college?

At BVP, we are committed to serving the students who are in front of us, which may include counseling them on options such as non-degree pathways or careers in the military. But the question is, should every school be expected to serve everyone? Should a pre-nursing or pre-culinary high school serve students who have no desire to become nurses or chefs? Should a school designed for pregnant or parenting teens enroll students who are neither? And should BVP serve students who don’t want to go to college? If the answer to this last question is yes, should BVP change its mission accordingly?

As a strong believer in school choice, I am proud that BVP recently added a “high school transition counselor” who focuses on helping every 8th grader find their “best match” high school, including, for example, an acclaimed CTE school with specialized programs and an arts-themed school with a portfolio admissions process. What we are learning from this work is underscoring something we have known for a long time: no school is perfect for everyone, and there are not nearly enough great choices for our kids, especially those who live in certain zip codes. My greatest hope for the K–12 system is that we continue to attract and retain innovators, educators, and entrepreneurs who will do whatever it takes to ensure every child has a choice and an opportunity-filled life. I wish BVP well as it continues to wrestle with these crucial questions.

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

Chiappetta, J. (2023). Mission Is Everything: The most celebrated word has been “every.” The most polarizing? “College.” Education Next, 23(1), 83-84

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

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

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

Why are you leaving?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is that going to happen?

I think so.

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

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

Outside of being grandma, what are your future plans?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Education Next. (2022). Marcus Foster Raised Expectations for All Students: Historian John P. Spencer on one of the first Black superintendents of a large urban district. Education Next, 22(3), 79-80.

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

Education Next. (2022). “This Is the Civil-Rights Issue of Our Time” Philanthropist of the Year Bill Oberndorf explains a state-based strategy for advancing school choice. Education Next, 22(2), 79-80.