As is typical for edtech hype, the initial burst of enthusiasm for artificial intelligence in education focused on student-facing applications. Products like IXL, Zearn, and Khan Academy’s chatbot Khanmigo could take on the heavy lifting and personalize instruction for every kid! Who needs tutors, or even teachers, when kids can learn from machines?

Thankfully, the real-life limits of AI instruction surfaced quickly, given how hard it is for non-humanoids to motivate children and teens to pay attention and persist through hard work for any length of time (for example, see “The 5 Percent Problem,” features, Fall 2024). The apps are still popular, but it’s not clear that AI will crowd out live human instruction anytime soon.

If AI can’t replace teachers, maybe it can help them get better at their jobs. Multiple companies are pairing AI with inexpensive, ubiquitous video technology to provide feedback to educators through asynchronous, offsite observation. It’s an appealing idea, especially given the promise and popularity of instructional coaching, as well as the challenge of scaling it effectively (see “Taking Teacher Coaching To Scale,” research, Fall 2018).

While these efforts seem tailor-made for teachers looking to improve, there are clear applications across the spectrum of effectiveness. Like bodycams worn by police, video recordings and attendant AI tools could open a window into every classroom, exposing poor performers to scrutiny and helping to keep bad behavior in check.

Apps for observations

Video-based observations are not new. The underlying, pre-AI idea is for teachers to record themselves providing instruction, choose some of their best samples, and upload those clips to a platform where an instructional coach or principal can watch and provide feedback. Indeed, this model was an important innovation of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project launched in 2009 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (see “Lights, Camera, Action!” What Next, Spring 2011).

Edthena is one company that has built out a coaching-via-video-feedback service. Its founder, Adam Geller, started as a science teacher in St. Louis before moving on to the national strategy team at Teach For America. At the time, the organization was looking for a way to provide more frequent feedback to its corps members, given growing evidence that the best professional learning comes from educators regularly reviewing, discussing, and critiquing instructional practice together. It’s hard for instructional coaches or principals to visit every teacher’s classroom with much frequency, but recorded lessons allow anyone to observe and deliver feedback anytime from anywhere. That gave Geller an idea, which he later turned into Edthena.

For more than a decade, Geller claims, his platform has narrowed the “feedback gap” dramatically. Research studies find that video coaching via Edthena can improve teacher retention, competence, and confidence. Still, it is a large investment in staff resources. After all, coaches or administrators must find time to watch the videos and offer feedback, and there are only so many hours in the day.

Enter AI. Edthena is now offering an “AI Coach” chatbot that offers teachers specific prompts as they privately watch recordings of their lessons. The chatbot is designed to help teachers view their practice relative to common professional goals and to develop action plans to improve.

To be sure, an AI coach is no replacement for human coaching. An analogy might be the growing number of mental health chatbots on the market, many of them based on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which can help patients reflect on their own thoughts and feelings and help them see things in a more constructive way. In the same way, Edthena’s AI Coach is helping teachers engage in “deep reflection about the classroom teaching,” Geller says. And because the AI tool is responding to teachers’ own self-evaluations, and not the lessons themselves, it’s relatively straightforward to train.

Gathering data for self-improvement

If Edthena is about “deep reflection,” then TeachFX is about hardcore data. The app captures audio recordings from the classroom and uses voice recognition AI to differentiate between teacher and student speech during lessons. Teachers receive visualizations of class time spent on teacher talk, student talk, group talk, and wait time to assess student engagement, as well as more sophisticated analyses of verbal exchanges during class. It’s like a Fitbit for instruction.

TeachFX founder Jamie Poskin, a former high school teacher, got the idea while interviewing a school principal as a Stanford University graduate student. They discussed the challenge of providing feedback to teachers, especially new ones. Recording lessons was intriguing, they agreed, but when could principals find the time to watch the videos? The principal wondered, what if AI could be trained to look for the indicators of good practice—the teacher “moves” that are universally applicable regardless of grade level or subject matter?

The first version of TeachFX focused on a single metric: teacher talk versus student talk, based on voluminous research evidence that the more kids talk during direct instruction, the more they tend to learn. And though classrooms can be cacophonous (especially elementary ones), the technology could readily distinguish between teacher and student voices. Not only were such analyses doable, according to internal company data, but also just turning on the TeachFX app helped teachers more than double the amount of student talk during class. According to the company, almost 80 percent of teachers in a typical implementation use the tool on a recurring basis.

Over time, as the technology has improved, the platform added more metrics aligned with evidence-based best practices. For example: What proportion of a teacher’s questions are open-ended? How long is she waiting for students to answer? A study by Dorottya Demszky and colleagues published in 2023 found that teachers receiving feedback from TeachFX increased their use of “focusing questions,” which prompt students to reflect on and explain their thinking, by 20 percent.

A role for AI in evaluation?

It’s one thing to use AI to provide constructive, no-stakes feedback to teachers about their instructional practice. But what about incorporating it into formal performance evaluations?

Nobody I talked to liked that idea.

Thomas Kane of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who ran the MET project, said, “AI could make it easier for teachers to get more frequent feedback, without the taint of a supervisory relationship.” But introduce that “supervisory relationship,” and you lose teachers’ willingness to give these technologies a try.

Indeed, neither company founder I spoke with was eager to see their tech used for teacher evaluations. As TeachFX’s Poskin told me, “You want teachers to learn and grow.” The more often teachers upload recordings to the platform, the better. Yet formal evaluations usually only happen every few years. They are the antithesis of constructive feedback.

That said, leaders of both companies welcome teachers’ deciding to use their recordings, or the data and “reflection logs” derived from them, in coaching sessions or formal evaluations. In all cases, the key is leaving those decisions to teachers and letting them keep control of the process and data.

To me, these apps sound like great tools for conscientious teachers eager to improve—as Geller and Poskin no doubt were. But it strikes me that teacher motivation to use them as intended must be an issue, just as it is for students. Teachers are crazy-busy, and apps like these are, ultimately, extra work.

To their credit, some districts provide incentives, such as counting the time teachers spend using the apps against professional learning requirements or allowing recordings to stand in for weekly classroom walkthroughs. Those are steps in the right direction—but we shouldn’t expect uptake to be universal. To me, it seems likely that the worst teachers, who arguably would have the most to gain, are the least likely to engage with these sorts of technologies.

From bodycams to classroom cams

I don’t think it would be crazy, then, for someone to develop a version of this idea that is less about helping well-meaning teachers get better, and more about holding the small number of ineffective teachers accountable. Our schools have long faced the “street-level bureaucrat” problem, coined by political scientist Michael Lipsky in 1969. The idea is that some government services depend so much on the judgment and discretion of people on the ground that it’s hard to evaluate their work or hold them accountable. Teaching is one of those fields; policing is another.

In the world of law enforcement, dash cams and bodycams have changed the equation by providing a clear record of police officers’ interactions with the public, for good or ill. No doubt this has spurred all manner of questions and challenges, such as when to release footage, how to interpret it, and what is admissible in court. Bodycam mandates have garnered some support along with serious concerns about privacy and reliability. But there’s little doubt that police brutality and misconduct face greater scrutiny now than in the past.

So why not bring the same line of thinking into public schools? Put cameras and microphones in every classroom. Turn them on and keep them on. Send the recordings to the cloud and let machine learning do its thing (with strict privacy and security protocols in place, of course). If AI already can differentiate between good and bad questions, surely it can tell principals or department chairs if a teacher starts instruction late and ends it early, or shows movies every Friday, or allows kids to roam the hallways, or makes no effort to stop them from cheating on tests. If such technology could stop the most egregious forms of bad teaching, it might provide a significant boost to student achievement.

Alas, given education politics, that will probably remain just one wonk’s dream. In the meantime, let’s use AI to help as many motivated teachers as possible go from good to great.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

This is the final article in a series on doing educational equity right. See the introductory post, as well as ones on school finance, student discipline, advanced education,  school closures, homework, grading and effective teaching.

For the past several months, I’ve been pumping out posts about “doing educational equity right.” Given that Eight is Enough, it’s time to wrap things up. Let’s conclude with a twist and look at three ways that schools are doing educational equity wrong:

1. By engaging in the soft bigotry of low expectations.
2. By tying teachers’ hands without good reason.
3. By acting like equity isn’t just an important thing, but the only thing.

 

Equity as an excuse for the soft bigotry of low expectations

A recurring theme of this series is how misguided it is for schools to lower expectations for students “because equity.” Of course, the schools and the elected officials, advocates, and journalists who embrace these practices don’t say they are expecting less from students, but that’s precisely what’s happening.

It’s most obvious in the world of advanced education, such as when districts refuse to let anyone take Algebra in middle school because not everyone is ready for Algebra in middle school. The backlash to this mindset is growing, thank goodness.

But other examples abound and unfortunately continue to be lauded in polite company. For instance, the notion that it’s inequitable and unfair to grade, or even assign, homework because some kids don’t have a quiet place to complete assignments away from school. Just examine this idea for a moment. Do we really believe that lots of American families are so dysfunctional that they can’t figure out a way to clear a space for their kids to do their math problems? Or that teenagers can’t find a place—a community library, the school library, even a McDonald’s—where they could get homework done? Why are we infantilizing kids and their parents like this?

Same goes with policies that allow students to turn in assignments late without penalty. Are we trying to teach kids to procrastinate? To teach them that real life doesn’t deal in accountability and consequences?

Or take school discipline. Plenty of well-meaning people who would never say “we can’t expect poor kids and kids of color to learn fractions—it’s just too hard” are more than happy to argue that we must accept all manner of student misbehavior because of poverty or systemic racism. Journalists might be the worst at this. Just last week, a major article from the Hechinger Report decried the use of suspensions and the like for “subjective infractions like defiance and disorderly conduct.” It’s one thing to be concerned about bias in meting out penalties for disruptive behavior. But as my colleague Daniel Buck wrote, in the real world of classrooms, this leads to paralysis from officials in the face of flagrant, over-the-top, disrespectful behavior by kids. And to misery for their teachers.

Permitting low-level defiance—defining deviancy down in this way—facilitates and fosters more severe misbehavior. If a student comes to learn that adults can be ignored and rules flaunted, behavior escalates. A balled piece of paper is thrown, a teacher asks the offender to move seats, but he refuses. The next day, he’s wandering around the classroom singing. The teacher asks him to sit, but he refuses. Eventually, he’s wandering the halls, telling teachers to “fuck off” if they ask him to return to class, so most don’t. Many other students have joined in the fun, and now there’s cacophony in the halls. Students in class question why they must listen to adults if they don’t want to when other kids get to flaunt the rules. Rowdy, unmonitored halls mean more chances for student conflict and fights.

Surely we can agree that all students, regardless of the challenges they face due to poverty or racism, should be expected to treat their teachers respectfully and comport themselves in a reasonable manner. Teachers in other nations would be aghast if told they had to accept this sort of treatment as part of the job. Indeed, I bet 99 percent of these kids’ parents would be alarmed, if not angry, to learn that their kids were being allowed to behave so atrociously in school.

“Defining deviancy down”—whether in academics, homework, grading, or behavior—will only let our students down. We should stop doing it.

 

Tying teachers’ hands

Another big mistake some equity advocates make is reducing teacher authority and autonomy for no good reason. To be sure, educators shouldn’t always have carte blanche to do whatever they like; bias is real and it’s one reason we’ve worked to get high, consistent academic standards in place and required teachers to follow them—ideally with the help of well-aligned, high-quality instructional materials. Again, to push back against the soft bigotry of low expectations.

But too often advocates force educators to teach with one or both hands tied behind their backs—refusing to let them use time-tested, effective practices because they conflict with recent preachings of the high church of educational equity.

For example, some districts don’t allow elementary teachers to group students by achievement levels when teaching reading or math, and many more have moved to “de-track” middle school and high school courses, getting rid of “on-level” courses and putting everyone into (wink-wink) “honors” ones. Now imagine you’re a seventh-grade teacher. If your class is typical, your students enter your classroom at achievement levels ranging from third through eleventh grades. So your helpful district-provided instructional coach suggests that you cope by “differentiating instruction.” You might as well ask them for some magic beans so you can grow a sky-high beanstalk while you’re at it. Certainly they’re guilty of magical thinking.

Most research finds that grouping students by achievement tends to help everyone learn more, especially if those groups are flexible and continuously re-mixed. But because progressive education dogma declares any form of grouping or “tracking” to be suspect, we make life dramatically harder for teachers and make learning dramatically less effective for kids.

There are plenty of other examples. Telling teachers they can’t send disruptive students to the office and making them engage in lengthy “restorative justice” circles instead. Mandating minimum grades of 50 percent even when kids don’t turn in research papers or show up for tests. Not letting teachers dock students for missed homework assignments or refusing to participate in class discussions.

Constrained teachers are disgruntled teachers—which is bad for everyone and bad for equity.

 

Is equity like winning—the only thing that counts?

Finally, some educators and advocates act as if equity were the one and only value in education worth pursuing. I think this comes from a good place; no doubt our system has a long and sordid history of mistreating poor kids and kids of color. A swing of the pendulum was long overdue, and erring in the direction of equity is no terrible crime. But policies and practices that ignore everything else—and everyone else—will prove harmful and unsustainable.

So what are the other values that matter—or should, in our universal public education system? I would put excellence at the top of the list. That means doing right by our high-achievers, who hold particularly great potential for solving our world’s problems and boosting our economy someday. But it also means striving for excellence in everything that schools do, from the basics of teaching and learning, to tutoring and counseling, to extra-curricular activities and more.

A commitment to excellence need not conflict with a drive for equity. Indeed, as I wrote last year, excellence is not the enemy of equity. It’s mediocrity that is the enemy of equity as well as excellence. So we must raise the alarm when “equitable practices” promote mediocrity instead.

Another important value is efficiency. Even America’s relatively well-funded public education system doesn’t have unlimited resources. Trade-offs are inescapable. But we’ll be more likely to land on effective approaches if we look for practices that promote equity and excellence and efficiency. When it comes to discipline and student behavior, for example, it’s not enough to come up with strategies that might be ideal for the disruptive kids. We also must protect the learning environment of their peers and consider the demands on teachers’ limited time.

So it is with the difficult issue of under-enrolled schools. Equity advocates may want districts to avoid closing schools with high proportions of poor kids and kids of color. But if those are the schools with dwindling student populations, such an outcome may be unavoidable—again, because excellence (getting kids into better schools) and efficiency (not wasting money on tiny campuses) matter, too.

Equity advocates shouldn’t be myopic. Balancing their impulse for fairness with concerns for excellence and efficiency will make it more, not less, likely that they will achieve their goals.

 

* * *

I don’t want to end on a sour note. These many months (and words) spent digging into educational equity make me optimistic that common ground can be found, even on contentious issues. If we assume positive intent, look for practical answers, and avoid getting hung up on culture-war fights over language, we can move beyond the squabbles and toward solutions. Let’s do educational equity right—and let’s do it now!

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

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

This is the eighth in a series on doing educational equity right. See the introductory post, as well as ones on school finance, student discipline, advanced education,  school closures, homework and grading.

One of the ironclad beliefs among education reformers back in the day was the certainty that the achievement gap was caused, at least in part, by a teacher-quality gap. As articulated in the Education Trust’s landmark 1998 white paper Good Teaching Matters, by any measure you could come up with, the most qualified teachers were in the most-affluent schools, while the least qualified worked in the highest-poverty ones. This, more than anything else, is what we meant by “under-resourced” schools and was the result of our inequitable funding system, combined with HR systems and collective bargaining agreements that put the preferences of adults over the needs of kids—especially low-income students and students of color.

It wasn’t hard to figure out what caused this gap. The richest districts had more money and, therefore, could pay their teachers more. Even within districts, experienced teachers had first dibs on open positions. So when teachers retired, these veterans would claim open spots at the more affluent schools, where the job was perceived as easier, while the high-poverty schools were left to hire rookies.

Over the past twenty-five years, a growing body of research has complicated the picture.

Most significantly, we have learned that the attributes of teacher quality we could measure back then, like certification status or even years of experience, are weak proxies for effectiveness. There are some relationships between those markers and student outcomes, but they tend to be small and rather weak. One study estimated that 97 percent of what makes a teacher great is not measured by those sorts of inputs.

Another challenge is that the whole notion of an “effective teacher” might be shaky. It appears from some studies that teachers who are quite effective in some schools are less effective in others. The same thing goes when it comes to teaching students of different races. Lots of research has found that, all else being equal, Black teachers are more effective with Black students than their White counterparts are.

Perhaps all of this is why at least one reputable study found that the teacher effectiveness gap essentially does not exist, at least if we’re defining effectiveness as the ability to consistently boost student achievement.

Furthermore, our definition of teacher effectiveness is constrained by our ability to measure it. Most studies look at teachers’ impact on students’ growth in reading and math scores in grades three through eight. What about teachers that don’t teach reading and math? Or teach in kindergarten through second grade, or in high school? A few studies look at teachers’ impact on students’ grades, behavior, or graduation rates (after they leave their classrooms), but translating those studies into actionable data about millions of teachers is a nut we have yet to crack. So we don’t have an easy way to tell, for example, whether high-poverty schools have systematically lower quality social studies or art or music or PE teachers than more-affluent schools do. To figure that out, you would need a comprehensive and sophisticated teacher evaluation system.

None of this means we should despair. It is possible to attack the question of teacher effectiveness head-on and make sure that poor kids and kids of color get their fair share of the best instructors. Mostly, it means following the footsteps of Washington, D.C., where the IMPACT system has been designed to do exactly that. At its center is a set of sophisticated evaluations of teachers and their instruction—the type that went out of fashion after Race to the Top–era reforms mostly crashed and burned

Perhaps the best part of IMPACT is that it has been tweaked and improved over time. The district and its expert advisors identified the problem with judging teachers in very different schools against one another, an approach that originally disadvantaged teachers in the highest-poverty schools, as it made them look less effective than they really were. They fixed that problem while also maintaining high standards around instructional expectations, both in core subjects and beyond.

It’s not perfect, but IMPACT is miles ahead of anyone else’s evaluation system, and had a clear, positive effect on teacher effectiveness and diversity and student outcomes.

So for folks out there who say they are committed to educational equity and closing teacher effectiveness gaps, I would say: If you’re serious, you need to follow DCPS and put something like IMPACT in place in your district, as well. Otherwise, you are just virtue signaling.

The problem, of course, is that the politics of achieving such a bold reform are extremely difficult. The unions are dead set against it, as it’s their job to protect all their members, including mediocre and ineffective teachers. Unions also tend to be controlled by older teachers, who don’t want to be told that they need to leave their cushy jobs in the most affluent schools and go teach somewhere else. Not to mention that moving the best teachers to the poorest schools is not going to go over well with rich (and powerful) parents.

In the absence of something like IMPACT, then, we might have to settle for a half step in the right direction. Namely: Let the market do its magic. In this case, I refer to the labor market. Districts could pay teachers significantly more to teach in their toughest schools, as Houston is doing under state-appointed superintendent Mike Miles, while also making sure that the high-poverty schools have money in their budgets to pay for those more expensive teachers. Over time, as vacancies come up at such schools, we should expect to see great teachers migrate towards those campuses, at least if the extra pay is significant enough. We may not be able to measure those teachers’ effectiveness without an IMPACT-style system, at least not beyond teachers of reading and math in grades three through eight, but common sense would tell us that smart teachers are going to follow the money.

Which is not to say it’s easy to find the funding to dramatically boost teacher salaries in our neediest schools. But whether we are on the left, right, or center, we need to acknowledge that such efforts are what it takes to accomplish true educational equity. It’s time for all of us to put our money where our mouths are.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

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

This is the seventh in a series on doing educational equity right. See the introductory post, as well as ones on school finance, student discipline, advanced education,  school closures and homework.

Student grading is one of those issues that has an enormous impact on kids and schools, yet for years it remained almost completely under the radar. Barely discussed in teacher preparation programs, rarely a topic in professional development sessions, there must have been an assumption that there was nothing much to it or that everyone knew how to do it well.

Thanks to a few intrepid advocates, including Joe Feldman and Douglas Reeves, the issue is a sleeper no more. As these and other analysts and commentators correctly observe, how we grade student work is one of the most important ways that we communicate expectations to youngsters, as well as relay critical information to parents, institutions of higher education, and potential employers. Yet as these folks explain, traditional grading practices can be riddled with bias, including racial bias. Hence the drive for “equitable grading,” which seeks to squeeze this bias out of the system.

So far so good. Yet like so many things in today’s K–12 world, “equitable grading” has often been implemented piecemeal, bringing along with it all manner of unintended consequences, the most important of which is lowered standards.

A new white paper by my colleagues Meredith Coffey and Adam Tyner, part of our “Think Again” series, unpacks all this. Here’s a useful table from their paper that illustrates the scope of what we’re talking about:

Table 1: Equity-oriented grading policies

So how can school districts “do educational equity right” when it comes to grading? To address concerns about bias while keeping standards high? Let’s return to this series’ three big rules:

• When aiming for equity, we should level up instead of leveling down.
• We should focus on closing gaps between affluent students and their disadvantaged peers, not between high-achieving students and their lower-achieving peers.
• We should focus equity initiatives primarily on class, not race.

Grading practices that level up instead of leveling down

This is the heart of the matter. As we discussed in our homework post, student effort is key to student learning. Especially as kids get older, they cannot master challenging material by osmosis. They have to put in the work—do the practice math problems, write and re-write and re-write the research paper, study for their history and science tests. And regardless of what you might have read by Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Alfie Kohn, most adolescents are not going to choose to spend extra time and effort on schoolwork because of their intrinsic love of learning.

Tough grading practices, then, are essential to motivating students to work harder. Indeed, several research studies, including a Seth Gershenson paper published by Fordham, demonstrate that teachers who are tougher graders have a clear positive impact on learning, even after their students leave their classrooms. That goes for students from all racial subgroups and those in high-poverty schools. If we’re making it easier for students to get A’s and B’s, that’s a problem.

Yet there’s no doubt that we’re making it easier. The evidence on grade inflation continues to pile up. Like so many negative trends in U.S. schools, this phenomenon started before the pandemic, but the Covid era made it markedly worse. That’s partly because schools understandably relaxed standards while kids were Zoom-schooling, but it’s also the case that the push for “equity” in grading gained steam after the racial reckoning of 2020.

Now we’re in a situation wherein elite colleges can’t rely on student grades to send clear signals because almost everyone applying for admission gets straight A’s. On the other end of the academic spectrum, our high school graduation rate is higher than ever, in part because standards for graduation—which are of course tied to getting passing grades in required courses—are lower than ever (yay?).

What this all means is that we need to take a critical eye to any grading practices that have the effect of lowering standards—even if their advocates didn’t intend them to. In that bucket I’d include the “50 percent rule”—mandating that teachers give no lower than a 50 percent on any test or assignment, even those that kids don’t turn in. For obvious reasons (at least obvious to anyone who has met a teenager or ever been one), some kids will adapt to this system and put in less work. Likewise with bans on grading homework, even for completion. Like many of us, kids need someone to hold them accountable for doing what’s in their own long-term self-interest. And that means hitting the books, doing their homework, and getting feedback on whether they did it well. Same with banning penalties for late work, or even cheating.

That leaves plenty of other grading reforms that are still worth embracing—those that are focused on maintaining high standards while reducing bias—as we’ll discuss below.

Grading reforms and high versus low achievers

One of the major arguments for practices like the 50 percent rule is that giving a kid a zero on a big assignment will tank their grade and encourage them to give up. That’s certainly a possibility. Zero is indeed a long distance from 60 percent, the traditional minimum score for a passing grade, and it very well might be mathematically impossible for a student to make up enough ground to pass a course if they are staring at a goose egg.

But these across-the-board rules don’t just impact the lowest-achieving students—those kids at risk of not passing their courses. They impact everybody—including the strivers and grinders. And those high achievers will adapt their behavior to the new policies, too. If they build up a high-enough A early in the quarter, they know they can bomb some later quizzes or skip some assignments and still get what they need for their transcripts. So they put in less work. That’s not good! (And please keep in mind, plenty of these high achievers are students from disadvantaged backgrounds, so it’s not good for equity either.)

A better approach, then, is to return authority to teachers over their grading practices so they can offer grace to students on a case-by-case basis. If students bomb a big assignment or test early in the quarter, their teachers can make it clear to them that, if they get their act together and do better on future assessments, those zeroes will be adjusted upward. That’s a much better solution than schoolwide or districtwide rules that apply to everyone.

What about bias?

Now for some grading reforms that are well worth supporting: those that indicate higher expectations and work to reduce bias. The bias piece is important; whether it’s because of students’ socioeconomic backgrounds, or race, or the intersection of the two, it’s not hard to see how unintentional bias can creep into the grading process. On the one hand, a teacher might go a little easier on a kid knowing the hardships he or she is facing at home—the soft bigotry of low expectations. Alternatively, a teacher might anticipate lower-quality work from a student given their zip code or appearance—or just their performance on previous assignments.

Thus, various forms of blind grading are to be commended. They could involve electronic grading systems whereby teachers don’t see the students’ name until after they’ve completed their evaluations, or mechanisms whereby teachers grade papers and tests from other teachers’ students. Regardless, those doing the grading benefit from clear rubrics, ideally those that enforce a tough standard for what it takes to be considered A-level work. These sorts of approaches are, of course, at the heart of the Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate programs and how they evaluate student exams.

Let’s be clear though: We shouldn’t expect blind grading or similar techniques to eliminate disparities in student grades by race or ethnicity. As long as we have achievement gaps—and sadly, they remain quite large—we are going to see GPA gaps, as well.

* * *

The “grading reformers” have performed an important service by surfacing this issue as a critical topic. It’s nuts that for decades we largely just expected teachers to figure out grading on their own and put so little effort into making sure that grade expectations were consistent across schools or districts—or even classrooms!

But some grading reforms are better than others. Educational leaders: Be discerning. Empower your teachers. By all means work to eliminate bias. But make sure that, whatever you do, you keep expectations high.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

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

This is the sixth in a series on doing educational equity right. See the introductory post, as well as ones on school finance, student discipline, advanced education, and school closures.

The casual observer might be surprised that there’s much controversy about homework. A common sense, man-on-the-street view would be straightforward: Teachers should assign homework, and students should do it. After all, practice makes perfect, and kids can’t learn without exerting effort.

But alas, in this domain, as in others, there is indeed robust debate (and not just among bellyaching students). Some of it springs from “hothouse” schools in upper-middle-class suburbs where parents fret that too much homework is stressing out their sons and daughters. Some of it stems from scholars, who have questioned whether homework actually boosts learning. But much of it comes from concerns about “the homework gap”—the longstanding finding that kids from low-income households spend significantly less time on homework than their more advantaged peers. And therefore, some argue, we should limit homework or eliminate it altogether.

Figure 1. The high school homework gap: Average hours spent doing homework, by student poverty level, 2019

Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Parent and Family Involvement in Education Survey of the National Household Education Surveys. (This table was prepared April 2021.) Note: Poor children are those whose family incomes were below the Census Bureau’s poverty threshold in the year prior to data collection. Near-poor children are those whose family incomes ranged from the poverty threshold to 199 percent of the poverty threshold. Nonpoor children are those whose family incomes were at or above 200 percent of the poverty threshold.

You won’t be surprised that I disagree. That certainly is no way to “do educational equity right.” Instead of leveling down, Harrison Bergeron style, we should level up. Our goal when it comes to homework should be to get more students to do more of it—at least the valuable, productive kind, which loads of research studies demonstrate is related to increased academic achievement.

And that means addressing the barriers that some low-income students face when it comes to doing homework—either at home or at school.

The most obvious one relates to technology. Though the “digital divide” has largely been closed, low-income families are still less likely to have high-speed internet access in their homes. And while schools dramatically ramped up their one-to-one laptop initiatives during the pandemic, there are still locales where not all students have access to workable devices. As reported by Education Week, a recent Pew survey found that 22 percent of U.S. teens said they often or sometimes have to do their homework on a cellphone, 12 percent said that “at least sometimes” they are unable to complete homework assignments because they do not have reliable access to a computer or internet connection, and 6 percent said they have to use public Wi-Fi to do their homework “at least sometimes” because they don’t have an internet connection at home. To the extent that schools are assigning homework that must be done online, that’s an issue.

Low-income students are also less likely to report having a quiet place to do homework, not surprising given that their homes tend to be smaller and that they often are tasked with taking care of younger siblings. Their parents may also be less capable of helping with homework, given that, within lower-income families, parents and other caregivers are much more likely to have dropped out of high school themselves.

But the answer to these challenges can’t be simply to throw up our hands and say it’s unfair to assign homework to kids from low-income families, so we just won’t assign any homework to anyone. It’s to overcome the challenges!

That entails addressing the technology gaps, such as by providing laptops or Chromebooks to all students, as well as Wi-Fi hotspots. An even better approach might be to make such technology available at the school, by keeping media centers open and staffed before school, after school, and on the weekends. That turns “homework” into “out of class work”—but the benefits are the same. The marginal costs of keeping public school facilities open longer are minimal, but the benefits could be substantial.

If that creates new challenges—for example, providing transportation to students for these “extended learning time” opportunities—then study halls and the like could be built into the regular school day itself. Just make the day longer and adjust the transportation schedule accordingly. Or team up with other community organizations that could provide homework help and quiet environments, from public libraries to Boys & Girls Clubs to churches.

None of this is rocket science. Indeed, KIPP charter schools have been doing versions of this for a quarter century—including giving students their teachers’ cell-phone numbers so they can get help with homework at night. That’s because KIPP and other great high-poverty schools have always felt a sense of urgency around helping their students catch up to their more affluent peers. And they’ve always known that means working harder and longer—not just to close the homework gap, but to reverse it.

I know what some might be saying: Getting traditional public schools to do things like this is going to be hard. Chromebooks and Wi-Fi hotspots cost money. So does keeping school libraries open after school or on weekends. Not all teachers will be crazy about giving kids access to their phone numbers.

All true. But if we care about doing educational equity right, we need to call the bluff of those who want to lower expectations for students’ work and effort “because equity.” Those so-called advocates need to do some of their own homework—and penance—as well.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

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

This is the fifth in a series on doing educational equity right. See the introductory post, as well as ones on school finance, student discipline, and advanced education.

At the center of the modern framing around “educational equity” is the reality of racial and class disparities in virtually every aspect of the American school system. The “good stuff” disproportionately flows to White, Asian, and rich students (school funding, advanced education, high-quality career-tech opportunities) while the “bad stuff” disproportionately goes to Black, Hispanic, and poor students (exclusionary discipline, grade retention, special education identification).

One theme of this series on doing educational equity right is that we should work harder and smarter to make sure that more of the good stuff does indeed flow to Black, Hispanic, and poor students—by, for example, making our school funding system more progressive and using universal screening to identify more such students who could benefit from advanced education. I’ve also urged that we work harder and smarter to make sure less of the bad stuff goes to them, by, for example, finding alternatives to suspensions and expulsions while also reducing disorder in the classroom.

But another theme we must tackle is that sometimes what is seen as “bad stuff” isn’t actually so bad. Discipline is one example. To be sure, loads of studies link out-of-school suspensions with negative outcomes for affected students. We should declare that practice ineffective. But disciplining students can still be a good thing if it results in better behavior—in helping students learn how to comport themselves in a classroom setting, setting them up for future success, while (of course) also helping create classroom environments in which teachers can function and other needy kids can successfully learn.

Likewise with special-education placement. The conventional wisdom is that Black students are overidentified for special ed, and that label comes with stigma and lower expectations. That’s certainly been true at some times and places. But newer research indicates that Black students are actually underrepresented, at least in some special-ed categories such as “specific learning disabilities.” Were these students to be identified correctly and early, they would be eligible (legally entitled, really) to receive services to address their learning needs. Seen this way, being identified as a student with a disability isn’t necessarily “bad.”

Same with retaining students, especially those who reach the end of third grade but still can’t read (a topic we’ll cover in the weeks ahead). If mandatory retention policies mean that these students finally get the interventions they need (and should have had), research indicates that a second year of third grade can be a valuable investment.

It is in that spirit that we now tackle school closures—not the temporary pandemic-era variety but the permanent shuttering of under-enrolled school facilities. Here, too, the conventional wisdom is that closures are bad—and that’s surely how parents and community members see them. Nobody wants to hear that the school board (or charter authorizer) is going to close “their” school, especially when the “they” always seem to be Black, brown, and poor neighborhoods.

So it’s little surprise that district leaders facing school closure decisions are under pressure to proceed equitably. Fair enough. But what should that mean? And what if school closures, though painful, can be made to be good—for students, at least? Let’s dig in.

America has too many school buildings, and some will need to close

This issue has been all over the media of late. In short: Our schools are facing a dramatic enrollment decline driven mostly by the post-Great Recession Baby Bust, but also Trump- and pandemic-era declines in immigration. Some traditional public schools also lost students to charter or private schools during the Covid crisis, and not all came back. And some urban systems lost families to the suburbs (or to more distant environs) as the rise of remote work made urban living less attractive.

The recent surge across the southern border is blurring the picture a bit, but most school systems face long-term enrollment declines of ten percent or more—not surprising given that the number of babies born in the U.S. in a given year has dropped more than 15 percent since its 2007 high. In some districts it will be much worse—experts are predicting a decline of 30 percent for LAUSD!

I haven’t seen any demographers asserting that America’s birth rate is likely to bounce back anytime soon, if ever. In fact, as is the case for most of the developed world, it’s still heading down. Nor does there appear to be a national appetite for a large increase in immigration. All of which is to say that, outside of a handful of high-growth communities, districts must come to terms with shrinking enrollment for the foreseeable future. And that means closing schools.

The evidence on closures

Do students suffer when their schools are closed—either for low performance, as occasionally happened in the No Child Left Behind era, or for under-enrollment? This is a question that has been studied extensively over the past few decades, and the somewhat exasperating answer is: It depends. Specifically, it depends on whether the affected students land in higher-performing schools. If so, they tend to do better, at least in the long run. If not, they do worse. (That’s the case for charter school closures, as well.)

There’s also better-than-expected news for affected communities. While local residents understandably worry that a shuttered school will signal (continued) decline in their neighborhood, at least one study in Philadelphia found that crime, especially violent crime, declined significantly when high schools with high rates of student misbehavior and low academic performance were closed.

Closing schools equitably

So what should the equity-minded school board member or superintendent do, in the face of this challenging and fraught situation?

Rather than promise that school closures won’t disproportionately affect low-income communities or communities of color, promise that all affected students will have access to higher-performing schools.

In other words, promise that, by closing schools, students will be better off than they are now, especially low-income students and students of color.

No doubt, keeping that promise will take considerable effort. It will mean:

1. Identifying the right schools to close—generally meaning the lowest performing ones, those whose students are achieving at extremely low levels and aren’t making much progress from year to year.
2. Ensuring an adequate number of seats in higher-performing schools nearby [1], while working out any transition or transportation logistics that might keep students from accessing them. That might include enrollment preferences for displaced students, including in nearby charter schools.
3. Communicating effectively (and promptly) with students, families, educators, and the community, both about the process of identifying schools for closure and about how to ensure that students enroll in higher-performing schools. Tim Daly has lots of great suggestions on this front.

Closing schools is a wrenching process but ensuring that our most disadvantaged students land in more effective environments than they attend today is more than a silver lining. It should be the overriding goal, one that can narrow achievement gaps if done right. That’s real equity.

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1. For sure, this could be a HUGE lift if wide swaths of districts are full of nothing but extremely low-performing schools. But even if the not-closed schools are only marginally better than the closed ones, students should still benefit.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

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

This is the fourth in a series on doing educational equity right. See the introductory post, as well as ones on school finance and student discipline.

On my more optimistic days, I think that finding a durable consensus around advanced education—gifted-and-talented programs in elementary schools, advanced courses in middle and high schools, etc.—should be relatively easy. It even fits on a (mega) bumper sticker. “Advanced education: Don’t end it, mend it, and extend it to many more students.”

In other words, if the problem is that gifted-and-talented programs and access to advanced courses have been inequitable in the past—as they surely have been in most places—the solution is not to get rid of them, as some on the far left propose, but to open them up to many more students, especially those from underrepresented groups. Indeed, that’s a decent summary of the recommendations from the National Working Group on Advanced Education, which those of us at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute were honored to convene last year.

But I know that the ideological battles are much sharper than this obvious compromise might let on. Indeed, advanced education is at the heart of the culture wars still raging around DEI, “wokeism,” and the very nature of “merit” in our knowledge-based capitalist economy.

The view from the left

Among many progressives we can detect much skepticism about the very nature of academic “giftedness.” Partly that’s because of the problematic history of the gifted-and-talented movement, linked as it was with some terrible ideologues, including people espousing eugenics and white supremacy. Nor does it help that in some communities, White parents used entrance into gifted-and-talented programs as a way to shield their children from school desegregation efforts.

But even if we’ve moved past all that, it remains a fact that Black, Hispanic, and low-income students are significantly underrepresented in gifted-and-talented programs and advanced courses. If “talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not,” as a favored slogan goes, clearly these programs must be at odds with opportunity. High achievement is not about “merit,” then, so much as it’s about privilege.

The view from the right

Meanwhile, many of us conservatives tend to take an absolutist position when it comes to merit and achievement. We insist that considering someone’s racial or class identity is (or certainly should be) irrelevant whether we’re talking about selection into gifted-and-talented programs at age five or entrance to selective universities at age eighteen. Everyone should be judged as individuals, and if we see disparities by race or class, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles. We shouldn’t be surprised that children with two well-educated parents do better in school and on achievement tests than those growing up in unstable single-parent homes. Furthermore, it’s not schools’ job to level the economic playing field, but to help every student fulfill their God-given potential. The more kids learn, the more our future economy will grow, and the more secure our nation will be.

Bridging the divide

It’s looking as if the two extremes are quite far apart. Is high academic achievement a sign of merit or privilege? Are kids of color underrepresented in gifted programs and advanced courses because of differences in wealth and family structure or because of exclusion and discrimination?

Let’s see if the three rules that have guided our discussion during this series are helpful here, too:

1. When aiming for equity, we should level up instead of leveling down.
2. We should focus on closing gaps between affluent students and their disadvantaged peers, not between high-achieving students and their lower-achieving peers.
3. We should focus equity initiatives primarily on class, not race.

Rule number one is easy to apply here. Eliminating gifted-and-talented programs, advanced courses, and other forms of “tracking” is clearly an example of leveling down. It’s the Harrison Bergeron strategy of kneecapping talented kids, supposedly for the good of the whole. It’s not only morally repugnant, but politically unsustainable.

To level up instead of down, we need to embrace acceleration for kids who are well over on the right side of the achievement distribution, while also erring on the side of inclusion. One of the best ways of doing so is using so-called “local norms.” That means selecting, say, the top 10 percent of students in every elementary school and inviting them into gifted-and-talented programs and acceleration opportunities, rather than the top 10 percent of students in the whole district or the whole state. That would ensure that students at every school in America, including high-poverty schools, would gain access to such opportunities—and boost the number of low-income kids and kids of color who end up participating. Schools and districts should also avoid selection factors that can introduce racial or socioeconomic bias, such as mandatory recommendations from teachers or parents. Instead, “universal screening” should identify all students who could benefit from greater challenge, who should be placed into advanced learning as the default.

Rules number one and two also mean making sure that the students who don’t get into gifted-and-talented programs or advanced courses are also held to reasonably high standards. The detracking people weren’t wrong that the old remedial tracks were tracks to nowhere and hotbeds of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” We surely don’t want to go back to that. Nor should placement into a track or ability group be set in stone; the spirit of “universal screening” for advanced learning opportunities only works if we keep doing it rather than think of it as “one and done.”

Our rule number three—focus primarily on class instead of race when seeking to do educational equity right—is probably the most challenging here. While it’s true that controlling for socioeconomic factors significantly reduces the “excellence gaps” among races, it doesn’t completely eliminate them. That was one finding of a recent study by my colleagues Adam Tyner and Meredith Coffey. What’s particularly perplexing is the low percentage of Black students who are achieving at the highest levels on standardized tests—even Black students from high-SES families.

Figure 1. Excellence gaps by race/ethnicity persist within student socioeconomic groups, as measured by the mother’s education level.

We’re not the first ones to uncover this finding—far from it. Indeed, decades of scholarship have examined the relative underperformance of Black students in affluent communities, such as Shaker Heights, Ohio, outside Cleveland. This was also the subject of a recent book by the Washington Post’s Laura Meckler. Perhaps it’s a statistical artifact—maybe Black students in such neighborhoods are more disadvantaged economically than they appear via rudimentary data. But there’s reason to suspect that it goes deeper. One prominent theory—which, no, hasn’t been debunked—is the “acting White” phenomenon, born out of the aftermath of desegregation, in which some Black students fear paying a social price for excelling academically. Creating a “culture of high achievement,” as many of the best charter schools do, may be the most promising way to meet the challenge, though in integrated schools, it might be hard to do so entirely via race-neutral means.

* * *

I think it’s fair to say that the right is naturally more comfortable with meritocracy in general, and advanced education in particular, than the left is. If we conservatives want our fellow citizens across the ideological spectrum to embrace advanced learning, too, we need to take their equity concerns seriously. That means working harder and smarter than we have in the past to ensure that gifted-and-talented programs and advanced courses are not the exclusive province of affluent students, most of them White or Asian. We don’t have to embrace the whole DEI ideology or eliminate entrance standards to gifted programs or advanced courses to acknowledge that our advanced learning opportunities could and should be more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. Say it with me: Don’t end it, mend it, and extend it!

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

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

This is the third in a series on doing educational equity right. See the introductory post and part two on school finance.

If school funding is the issue around which it’s easiest to find common ground across left and right, school discipline might be the hardest.

That shouldn’t be surprising, given how divisive our country’s debate has been on the related issue of criminal justice and law enforcement. Whether it’s violent crime on the streets or mayhem in the hallways, conservatives are going to focus first and foremost on law and order, while liberals will be concerned primarily with fairness and equal treatment.

Nor do folks on right and left view racial disparities in arrests and incarceration—and suspensions and expulsions—the same way. For many on the left, such disparities are clear evidence of racial discrimination and injustice. Conservatives, however, view it as far more complicated, starting with the need to understand whether there are differences in actual behavior. If individuals from certain groups are more likely to commit murder, they will be more likely to be locked up for violent crime. If individuals from certain groups actually get into more school fights, they will more often be suspended or expelled—even if justice is meted out to individuals perfectly fairly and without bias .

So how can we try to bridge these vast ideological divides? Let’s go back to my three rules:

1. When aiming for equity, we should level up instead of leveling down.
2. We should focus on closing gaps between affluent students and their disadvantaged peers, not between high-achieving students and their lower-achieving peers.
3. We should focus equity initiatives primarily on class, not race.

The first rule is by far the most important, yet rarely gets discussed as part of the school discipline debate. And that’s because most of our arguments are about how adults should respond to student misbehavior. Should teachers send kids to the principal’s office? Should principals suspend kids, and for which kinds of infractions? Should school-board policy ever include expulsions, and what safeguards should be in place? How to make all of this less racially biased?

But those decisions are downstream from student behavior itself. And the first goal of any student discipline policy should be to help students behave better—to “level up.” In other words, we should reject the “soft bigotry of low expectations” when it comes to students’ comportment in classrooms, hallways, and the cafeteria, just as we reject it when it comes to our beliefs around what “certain kids” can learn.

We should avoid at all costs, then, any policies that indicate to kids that they can get away with bad behavior—cussing out their teachers; bullying their peers; interrupting instruction; much less engaging in violence. And we should focus instead on schoolwide approaches to helping students meet high behavioral standards.

To be clear, I don’t have in mind the old-school “no excuses” fetishes around matching socks, tucked-in shirts, and silent hallways, but standards of behavior that we’d expect to see in any well-run, joyful, learning-focused school.

That means modeling good behavior for students; holding them accountable for infractions; working proactively with families when there are bigger issues; and supporting teachers when they try to hold the line.

Now let’s bring in rule number two. In this context, it means paying just as much attention to well-behaving students as to their misbehaving peers. That’s one of the purposes of office referrals and suspensions—to “put out” the misbehaving kids so that their peers can return to learning (or, in the context of hallways and lunchrooms, to feeling safe). And that’s critical! We know from several high-quality studies that misbehaving students can wreak havoc on their peers—both in terms of making their behavior worse, and in driving down student achievement. Given that high-poverty schools struggle the most with disciplinary challenges, keeping disruptive students in classrooms only widens the achievement gap. Such policies also drive teachers crazy—and drive many of them out of the profession, or at least out of high-poverty schools.

Yet even discipline hawks—I admit to being one—must admit that suspending or expelling students from school is extremely problematic. A growing body of evidence demonstrates that these practices have troubling consequences for the students subjected to them, even after controlling for underlying factors that might have contributed to students’ misbehavior in the first place. And it doesn’t take a Ph.D. to understand why that might be. Many misbehaving kids are coming from broken homes and/or dangerous communities. Making them spend days or months on the streets, away from opportunities to learn, is hardly going to do them any favors.

What we need, then, are well-designed interventions for misbehaving students—especially chronic and violent offenders—that help them learn to improve their behavior, keep them learning academically, and protect their peers from further disruption along the way. That’s a tall order, but a number of schools and districts are experimenting with various approaches, from much-improved versions of in-school suspensions to “alternative placements”—other schools that kids attend for short to medium periods before returning to their home campuses.

None of that is easy, and like everything in education, this will only work if we get the details right. That means a lot of trial and error and continuous improvement. But do you know what will make that even harder? Viewing any effort to address student misbehavior as racially tainted.

Which brings us to rule three: focusing primarily on students’ socioeconomic status instead of race. Now, as I wrote in my introductory post, we can’t ignore race entirely. American education has a long and sordid history of discriminating against kids of color, especially Black children, including the use of suspensions and expulsions in racially biased ways. The Office for Civil Rights has a clear and compelling mandate to step in when schools or districts treat individual kids differently on the basis of their race (or other protected categories). Conservatives need to acknowledge as much.

But liberals need to be willing to embrace the complexity of this issue. Yes, Black students are suspended or expelled at disproportionate rates. But if we control for class, we see that most of those disparities disappear. That’s because kids growing up in poverty are much more likely to experience all manner of challenges that make it more likely for them to misbehave in school—and that’s true whether we’re talking about White, Black, or Brown students. Kids without a father in the home are more likely to get in trouble at school. Kids from dangerous neighborhoods are more likely to get in trouble at school. Kids dealing with lead poisoning are more likely to get in trouble at school. Kids who are victims of abuse or neglect are more likely to get in trouble at school.

In every case, these situations are tragic—as is the fact that Black students in America are three times as likely as their White peers to live in poverty, and six times as likely to live in deep poverty. Thus, it’s just a matter of basic math that Black students on average will be more likely to misbehave in school than their peers—not because they are Black, but because they are suffering the ill effects of poverty.

But guess what: The (few) studies that have been able to control for underlying student behavior find that the racial gaps in punishment shrink to almost nothing. Not zero—indicating that some racial bias remains and must be addressed. But it’s very much on the margins, not the center of the story.

To conclude, here’s how we might find common ground around this most vexing issue:

1. Put real effort and resources into helping students meet high behavioral expectations.
2. Develop alternatives to out-of-school suspensions and expulsions that address the needs of chronically or violently misbehaving students, while protecting the sanctity of the classroom for their teachers and peers.
3. When working to root out racial bias in exclusionary discipline, control for differences in student misbehavior, or, if that proves impossible, at least control for students’ socioeconomic status.

The way to “make school discipline more equitable” isn’t by letting kids get away with misbehavior, but by helping all kids, from every group, learn to behave well. We might never fully achieve that lofty objective, but we’ll be a better country if we try.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

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

Gladly, as my colleague Adam Tyner argued in Fordham’s Think Again series last year, America’s current approach to school funding is dramatically more progressive than it used to be, and almost everywhere it already hits the mark in terms of equalizing resources across rich and poor schools. That’s a big change from the days of the “savage inequalities” that Jonathan Kozol wrote so persuasively about.

The next frontier, as Adam argues, is making our system even more progressive than it already is. If folks on the left want to have any chance to get conservatives to support that agenda, they need to pay attention to my rules number two and number three. Namely, greater progressivity in funding should be based on students’ socioeconomic status—not their achievement level and not their race.

After all, as I wrote last time, there’s no valid moral argument for focusing on low-achieving low-income kids over high-achieving low-income students. Both groups are poor, both groups come to school with disadvantages that are likely to keep them from achieving their full potential, and both groups rely on the K–12 system to help them be all they can be.

Likewise, it’s hard to argue that we should spend more dollars on schools serving middle-class Black or Hispanic students than on schools serving low-income White or Asian kids.

Focusing on students’ socioeconomic status, on the other hand, makes sense morally, politically, and educationally. Simply put, we know it costs more money to help low-income students achieve their full academic potential.

Some of that is because addressing the needs of disadvantaged kids costs real money—think of additional mental health supports for kids who have experienced trauma, for example.

But, as Adam argues, the primary reason that we need to spend more on low-income students is because of teacher labor markets. On average, teachers are less willing to teach in high-poverty schools. Maybe they don’t want to drive to low-income neighborhoods, or they fear that such schools will face greater behavioral challenges, or they just know that kids experiencing disadvantage need teachers willing to work harder and smarter in order to help them succeed. When we pay teachers the same regardless of which school they work in—the practice of the vast majority of districts in America—we end up in a situation in which high-poverty schools have lower-quality teachers, on average, than affluent ones.

There are a couple of ways to fix that, both of which involve spending significantly more money in high-poverty schools. One is to ensure, through state and local funding formulas, that high-poverty schools receive lots more revenue, so they can afford to pay their teachers more. Another way is for districts to adopt a Dallas-style or D.C.-style teacher pay initiative, in which highly-effective teachers are provided significantly larger salaries in order to teach in the highest-poverty schools—and ineffective teachers in those schools are transferred elsewhere or, ideally, out of the profession.

Now let’s be real: Many of us on the right are not crazy about increasing spending for traditional public schools. Many, if not most, such schools have a long history of squandering much of the money that taxpayers have thrown at them (see the federal ESSER funds, for example). And we can point to examples, especially from high-spending, high-tax states like New York and New Jersey, where a boatload of money hasn’t fixed dysfunctional school systems.

We view this kind of spending skeptically because we know that powerful unions tend to ensure that any extra money gets soaked up by more generous teacher contracts. Rather than targeting funding to high-need schools or to teachers willing to work in them, unions push for across-the-board raises, Cadillac-style benefits packages, and retiree health care, all of which is great for their members but largely unrelated to what’s best for kids.

So to get conservatives on board, progressives need to embrace initiatives that come with a quid pro quo. Once state policy has leveled up school funding between rich and poor districts, additional money for low-income schools should come in the form of competitive grants tied to significant reforms. If districts want more money, they should agree to (and get their unions to agree to) initiatives to recruit and retain highly effective teachers in their neediest schools via differential pay—and convince their ineffective teachers in those schools to find another line of work.

What progressives shouldn’t do is focus the school funding debate around race, as the media tends to do, or aim to allocate extra money for low-achieving students, rather than low-income kids, as Governor Newsom is doing.

If folks on the left are willing to push the unions to accept serious reforms in return for more money, those of us on the right will be willing to redistribute resources in the cause of greater equity. Sounds like a win-win to me.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

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

As one of my favorite Substackers, Noah Smith, writes about San Francisco’s attempt to ban high-achieving students from taking algebra until the ninth grade:

When you think about the idea of creating equity by restricting access to advanced math classes, it’s pretty much impossible to avoid the conclusion that the idea is to make all kids equal by making them equally unable to learn.

This is obviously terrible for the high-achieving students who don’t get to live up to their full potential, as well as for low-achievers subjected to the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” It’s a version of “equity” that we should all reject out of hand.

Indeed, as I argued recently, we should avoid pitting equity versus excellence. Whether the goal is to narrow achievement gaps, diversify gifted and talented programs, or reduce bias in grading, the strategy should always involve raising the bar, not lowering it.

2. Focus on closing gaps between affluent students and their disadvantaged peers, not between high-achieving students and their lower-achieving peers. While most economically disadvantaged students are relatively low-performing academically, due to the challenges of growing up in poverty, thankfully not all are. And if we create policies that encourage schools to prioritize the needs of low-achievers over high-achievers (like this one), we create a double-disadvantage for high achieving, low-income (HALO) students. There’s no moral justification for doing so, nor is there a good argument from a societal level either, given that these HALO kids are the ones with the best opportunity to use great schools (and selective colleges) to pole-vault into the middle class and above and into our leading professions.

For sure, it’s critical to raise the achievement and other outcomes of our lowest-performing students. But not at the expense of their higher-achieving peers.

3. Focus equity initiatives primarily on class, not race. Let me be clear: Anti-discrimination efforts must continue to be race-conscious, in line with longstanding civil rights laws. But when we switch our focus from ensuring fair treatment to giving disadvantaged students a boost, we should be cautious about defining disadvantage on racial grounds. On school funding, for example, it’s easy to justify sending extra dollars to high-poverty schools, but much harder to justify additional funding to upper-middle class Black schools. And given that the vast majority of the racial disparities in education are correlated with (if not caused by) socio-economic disparities, we can largely work towards racial equity via class-conscious but race-neutral approaches.

I understand that such an approach won’t satisfy all advocates on the left, but it will garner greater support from the center and the right.

In future posts, I’ll address how to apply these rules to debates around school funding, accountability systems, advanced education, school discipline, career and technical education, and grading reform.

We’ll explore: What would it mean to level up, not level down? For all economically-disadvantaged students, including high-achievers? With a primary focus on class, not race? In other words: How can we do equity right?

Stay tuned!

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

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

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

Petrilli, M. (2024). How to Unpack an Ideological Suitcase. Education Next, 24(2), 5.