Chester Finn, president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a frequent Education Next contributor, likes to recount a story from his time working as a senior official at the U.S. Department of Education under education secretary William Bennett. In 1987, after telling a Chicago journalist that the city’s schools were the worst in the nation, Bennett summoned Finn to his office and asked if he was right. “Well, Chicago has some competition from Newark and St. Louis and Detroit,” Finn replied. “But you weren’t wrong.” Coming well before the advent of widespread statewide testing, much less state- and district-level participation in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, Bennett’s claim seems to have survived contemporaneous efforts at fact-checking.

I often reflected on that exchange during my time working for Senator Lamar Alexander, who was then ranking member of the Senate education committee. In speeches, Alexander had a habit of referring to U.S. history and civics as “our worst subject.”

“Is that right?” he’d occasionally ask when preparing his remarks. Well, I couldn’t say that it was wrong.

According to NAEP, only 14 percent of 8th graders nationwide scored proficient in U.S. history in 2022, while just 22 percent reached that benchmark in civics—both notably lower than the 27 percent and 31 percent who demonstrated proficiency in math and reading, respectively. One might fairly wonder whether the National Assessment Governing Board has set expectations too high in U.S. history and civics, but a glance at item-level results gives ample cause for concern. Just one in three students, for example, could correctly match each of our three branches of government to its core function—a task one in six would get right by answering at random. Whether or not these are our worst subjects, we clearly have a problem.

In this issue, Yale law professor Justin Driver proposes a new way to teach civics that he calls “student-centered civics education” (see “Building Better Citizens Begins in the Classroom,” features). The approach “foregrounds the major Supreme Court decisions that have shaped the everyday lives of students across the nation”—decisions concerning student speech, corporal punishment, religious expression, and more. Its adoption, he argues, would frame students as “active participants in shaping our constitutional order” while also providing a jumping-off point to explore “more-abstract concepts that undergird civic knowledge.”

Driver’s proposal may not appeal to all readers. Some may find it too centered on judicially defined rights, perhaps at the expense of the concomitant responsibilities inherent in citizenship. Others may find its emphasis on student activism too resonant of so-called “action civics,” an approach that often downplays the importance of basic knowledge of how our government operates.

Driver, for his part, would “welcome such disagreements . . . because their existence would indicate that civic education is being actively debated in venues where such debates remain all too rare.” So would I—and I hope his piece provokes ample conversation.

Still, improving civic education will take more than curricular reform. It will also require more and better data on the results produced by competing approaches.

Since Secretary Bennett opined on Chicago’s national standing, our ability to compare student achievement in math and reading across states and school districts has been transformed. Every two years, the NAEP program provides a new set of results for all 50 states and 26 urban school districts—a monitoring system that, though imperfect, enables us to broadly gauge their success (or lack thereof) in developing student literacy and numeracy skills.

In U.S. history and civics, by contrast, NAEP provides a single national data point about every four years. While the program will in 2030 permit states to test enough students in civics to produce state-level results, recent history suggests that fewer than a dozen will embrace that opportunity. Requiring all of them to do so would take Congressional action.

The first record I can find of Senator Alexander using the phrase “our worst subject” is in the title of a 2005 subcommittee hearing on a bill requiring states to participate separately in the NAEP U.S. history and civics tests. Nearly two decades later, we have little reason to believe that his judgment was incorrect. Now would be an apt time for Congress to give civics assessment another look.

— Martin R. West

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

West, M.R. (2024). Tackling “Our Worst Subject” Requires New Approaches—and Better Data. Education Next, 24(3), 5.

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.

In a stereotypical image of a high-school debate tournament, straight-A students compete to see which renowned prep school team comes out on top. Increasingly, this is no longer the case: in recent decades, nonprofit organizations have been working to expand access to debate in public school systems that serve large concentrations of low-income students and students of color. More than 10,000 students from 20 cities participated in debate tournaments last year, according to the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues.

That includes the Boston Debate League, which was founded in 2005 to “develop critical thinkers ready for college, career, and engagement with the world around them.” The league supports teachers to launch and coach debate teams and runs monthly after-school debates for middle- and high-school students, among other initiatives (see “Making the Case for Student Debate Leagues,” features). While the immediate virtues of debate are easy to spot—teenagers research real-world topics, practice public speaking, and use evidence in support of their arguments—we wanted to know whether that translates into better academic achievement and attainment. Does participation in formal debate programs improve student outcomes?

First, we look at individual debaters’ reading and math test scores over time and compare students to themselves in years when they do and do not participate in debate. When students are on a debate team, their reading scores improve by 13 percent of a standard deviation, or about two-thirds of a typical year of learning. We find the biggest gains are for students with the lowest elementary-school test scores and reflect improvements in literacy skills related to critical thinking and reading comprehension. The impacts on math scores are minimal.

We also examine how debate affects high-school graduation and postsecondary enrollment by comparing debaters to similar peers who attended schools that did not offer debate. We find positive impacts on graduation and postsecondary enrollment, mainly driven by increased enrollment in four-year colleges. Debaters are 17 percent more likely to graduate high school within five years and 29 percent more likely to enroll in a postsecondary institution.

While many reading interventions target younger students, our results reveal a high-impact strategy to boost literacy skills and post-secondary outcomes for teenagers—particularly those whose low test scores and socioeconomic status typically pose high barriers to college success. Our results provide policymakers with a rare promising strategy for reducing inequality in reading achievement, analytical thinking skills, and educational attainment during students’ high-school years.

Potential Benefits of Policy Debate

Policy debate is an interscholastic, competitive, extracurricular activity for which teams of students engage in structured argumentation about public policy issues. Participants focus on a single topic for an entire academic year, such as arms sales, criminal-justice reform, or immigration policy, and work in two-person teams to research and develop policy proposals and arguments that support them. In tournaments, teams take on affirmative or negative positions, present their proposals, and cross-examine one another in a fast-moving sequence lasting 75 to 90 minutes. Policy debate students rely on their knowledge, effective use of evidence, ability to speak persuasively, and how well they can think on their feet.

Why might we expect all of this to pay off academically? First, successful debaters construct and deliver compelling arguments that are well-supported by both reasoning and evidence. In addition, the research aspect of policy debate includes reading and interpreting advanced non-fiction texts and social science research, while competitive debating includes quickly reading, analyzing, and refuting unfamiliar texts that opponents submit as evidence. Debaters are trained to consider both the content and relative credibility and objectivity of source materials. These skills are assessed on state reading tests and support advanced coursework in high school, including writing papers and participating in class discussions.

Debate also may provide a mechanism for motivating academic engagement. Rather than passively listening to an adult deliver a lecture, debaters are at the front of the room, creatively engaging with content they have mastered. The topics are directly related to high-interest current events and invite students to pair academic work with questioning authority, by recommending what the government should and should not do. And because timed tournament play moves quickly, is designed to engage the audience, and involves competition with other schools, debate teams and leagues can energize a school population as a whole, much like interscholastic sports. These events call on an array of softer skills, such as time management, independent organization, and teamwork. Competition also exposes students to a college-going culture, as tournaments are often held on college campuses and judged by current or former college-level debaters.

Assessing Impacts in Boston

Our study focuses on the Boston Debate League, which supports 40 school-based teams in public middle and high schools in Boston, Chelsea, and Somerville, MA. We look at 10 years of individual students’ league participation data, from 2007–08 to 2016–17, and match that with demographic and academic-achievement data from the Boston Public Schools. We also use data from the National Student Clearinghouse, which shows students’ high school graduation status, postsecondary enrollment status, and whether they enrolled in a two-year, four-year, public, or private institution.

Our sample includes 3,515 students who ever participated in a debate team. These students attend schools that serve disproportionate shares of low-income families and where students’ average elementary-school reading and math scores are more than one-quarter of a standard deviation lower than schools not in the league. Some 82 percent of students at debate schools qualify for free or reduced-price school lunch and 36 percent are English language learners compared to 68 percent and 26 percent of students, respectively, at non-debate schools. The group of debaters we study is 42 percent Black, 39 percent Hispanic, 9 percent white, and 8 percent Asian. The typical debater began in the ninth grade, and a large majority only participated for a single academic year. Twenty eight percent participated in middle school.

Debaters are a self-selected group—the team is a voluntary, after-school activity, and tournaments are held offsite on evenings and weekends. We examine baseline characteristics of debaters and students at debate schools who never join a team and find notable differences. Debaters have higher elementary-school reading scores, better attendance rates, and are less likely to receive special-education services than their classmates who choose not to join the team. They also are more likely to be female, Black, and economically disadvantaged.

Because of these non-trivial contrasts and the opt-in nature of the teams, it is likely that debaters and their non-debating classmates differ from one another in ways unrelated to debate. Therefore, for part of our analysis, we look to another group of students to serve as a comparison group: students attending schools that were not in the league and therefore could not choose whether to join a team. These students are more similar to debaters in terms of baseline test scores and are likely non-debaters because the program was not available to them.

Effects on Academic Performance

First, to assess the impact of debate on academics, we compare debaters to themselves over time. Our analysis looks at individual students’ test scores, attendance, and suspension records to test whether performance is different in years when students did and did not participate in debate.

Debaters earn higher scores on reading tests in the years when they participate in debate, and those benefits increase the longer students spend on the debate team (see Figure 1). Among all students who ever debated in school—who spend an average of 1.4 years on the team—reading scores increase by 13 percent of a standard deviation in the years they participate. Scores for students who spend just one year on the team increase by 10 percent of a standard deviation compared to 14 percent for students who spend four years on the team. Among the very small group of students who start in middle school and debate for five years, reading scores are 36 percent of a standard deviation higher.

In math, we do not find strong evidence that debate has a positive impact, although we see no evidence of harm. However, the math results do provide another insight: the much smaller math impacts relative to reading gives us confidence that our reading impact estimates are not simply an artifact of selection.

We also investigate which literacy skill gains drive the increase in debaters’ reading scores by looking at which test items exhibit the biggest differences in student performance. We compare performance on “language” items, which test grammar, vocabulary, and punctuation knowledge, with performance on “reading” tasks, which focus on comprehension and analysis, such as identifying the main idea of a passage or supporting evidence for a claim. The positive impacts for debaters are nearly twice as large in more sophisticated reading tasks, at 10 percent of a standard deviation, than in language, at 6 percent of a standard deviation.

Interestingly, although debaters are generally higher performing than students in the same schools who never join debate, our analysis shows that the largest gains from debate are among students who had the lowest reading scores at the start of sixth grade (see Figure 2). When they participate on a debate team, students who were in the bottom quartile in elementary-school reading experience gains of 24 percent of a standard deviation compared to 10 percent of a standard deviation for students with the best elementary-school performance.

Finally, we also assess the impacts of debate participation on student attendance and behavior, as measured by how many days students are suspended from school. Overall, students have slightly better attendance in years they participate in debate, with an increase of 1.7 percent in days present. The impact on suspensions is minimal. However, in looking at the small group of students who start in middle school and spend five years on a debate team, we find the number of days present grows by 4 percent and the number of days suspended falls by about one-fifth.

Most likely, these comparisons produce conservative estimates of the impacts of debate because every student in our sample has participated at least once. Even after a student leaves a debate team, they may carry those experiences and learning gains with them for some unknown length of time. Therefore, our comparison between participating and non-participating years may understate the true impact of debate participation on academic achievement, since our non-participant group includes students who have already benefitted from debate.

On the other hand, these estimates may camouflage other factors contributing to the impacts of debate, such as students choosing a high school in order to join the debate team. Therefore, we also analyze our data by excluding students who debate for multiple years and by excluding students who started debate in grade 9. We do not see meaningful changes to our results, indicating that our preferred estimates capture the impact of debate participation itself.

Effects on Graduation and College Enrollment

To study the impacts of policy debate on students’ postsecondary outcomes, we use a different comparison group: demographically similar students at schools that do not offer debate. We find that debate has substantial effects on both high-school graduation and college enrollment (see Figure 3). Some 80 percent of debaters graduate high school in five years compared to 68 percent of non-debaters, an increase of 17 percent. In addition, 53 percent of debaters enroll in a postsecondary institution within two years of their expected high-school graduation date compared to 41 percent of non-debaters, an increase of 29 percent. As with the impacts on academic outcomes, we find large differences when comparing debaters by their baseline reading performance at the start of middle school. Debaters with low elementary-school reading scores experience the greatest gains in post-secondary outcomes: they are 25 percent more likely to graduate high school in five years and 55 percent more likely to enroll in a postsecondary institution, based on gains of 16.4 and 20.5 percentage points, respectively.

We also find big increases in the share of students enrolling in four-year institutions after graduating high school, with the largest gains for students with the lowest elementary-school reading scores (see Figure 4). Overall, debaters are 38 percent more likely to enroll in a four-year school and 28 percent more likely to enroll in a two-year school, based on gains of 12 and 4 percentage points, respectively. Students in the lowest quartile are 16 percentage points more likely to enroll in a four-year college after graduation compared to 9 percentage points for students with the highest baselines scores.

Policy Implications for Policy Debate

Most reading interventions are focused on the early elementary years, and third grade reading proficiency is viewed as a bellwether for success in adulthood. But what about the nine years of school that follow? We find substantial positive impacts for teenage students, the majority of whom are low-income students of color, when they participate in a competitive high-school policy debate team. Debaters make outsized progress in mastering sophisticated literacy skills and are more likely to graduate high school and enroll in college—and the biggest gains are among the students the farthest behind at the end of fifth grade. It’s never too late to accelerate student progress.

The average improvement in debaters’ reading scores is comparable to two-thirds of a year of learning and about 20 percent of the gap in 8th-grade reading between students who do and do not qualify for subsidized school lunch. Prior research has uncovered few interventions that generate literacy impacts of this magnitude for secondary school students.

Further, the positive impacts on reading scores from participating in debate are twice as large for students with the lowest baseline levels of proficiency than for students with average scores, and we find a similar pattern of results for postsecondary outcomes. Debate programs therefore have the potential to reduce educational inequality by accelerating improvement most dramatically for the students who struggle most.

These programs also are inexpensive relative to other interventions. For example, the current per-pupil cost of the Boston Debate League is about $1,360 compared to about $2,800­ for high-dosage tutoring, such as the well-regarded Match Education program. Prior research has found that students’ reading performance improves by 15­ percent to 25 percent of a standard deviation after tutoring. Therefore, policy debate programs appear to generate up to double the impact on reading test scores per dollar compared to state-of-the-art high-dosage tutoring.

Our study is not without limitations. Only a small subset of Boston students, all of them volunteers, participate in debate, and we can’t speak to what would happen if students were required to join. We also can’t fully rule out the possibility that some or all of the estimated effects on postsecondary outcomes are driven by selection bias, particularly because the postsecondary impact estimates are quite large.

However, our finding that the gains in reading scores are concentrated on analytical thinking competencies rather than foundational language rules and conventions strengthens our confidence that our results reflect the impact of debate participation, not some other unobserved factor. This finding also suggests that policy debate develops students’ critical thinking skills, another goal for which evidence-based strategies are in short supply. Future research should probe this finding further with better measures of critical thinking, argumentation skills, and other competencies needed for academic and civic participation such as social perspective taking, media literacy, the ability to distinguish fact from opinion, and engagement with the policy process.

Beyond highlighting the value of formal debate programs, we believe these findings also have implications for classroom instruction. A handful of organizations, including the Boston Debate League, have developed and implemented professional development programs to help teachers infuse debate pedagogy into regular classrooms. Often called “debate-centered instruction,” the goal is to give more students the opportunity to benefit from debate-like learning opportunities, not just those who can choose to take part in an intensive out-of-school program. The potential for such instruction to accelerate reading development, particularly for students far behind grade level, is an important subject for future research. While our study demonstrates exciting results for extracurricular debate participants, there may be even greater dividends to incorporating some of these practices into regular classroom-based instruction, to reach all students.

Beth E. Schueler is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia. Katherine E. Larned is a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

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

Schueler, B.E., and Larned, K.E. (2024). Resolved: Debate Programs Boost Literacy and College Enrollment: How debaters become better students. Education Next, 24(3), 52-59.

On a Friday in February, the ingredients for fluffernutters—peanut butter, marshmallow fluff, and sliced bread—are set out on a table during debate practice at Boston Green Academy. The teachers know that food is a draw for the high school students—as is a chance to learn from a college student with debate experience just befor­­e their weekend competition.

“Because it’s tournament day, we’re going to do something extra fun to warm up your brains,” said Jared Aimone, a sophomore at Boston College who volunteers with the debate team at this grade 6–12 charter school in the Brighton neighborhood of Boston. “You’ve noticed in rounds that you can’t write as fast as people talk. I’m going to play a song, and you try to write down everything that you hear—and the only person that has to be able to read what you write is you.”

As Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” plays, students listen closely and scribble all the items they catch from the rapid-fire lyrics. The winner lists 55, but everyone gets a candy bar for trying. Aimone, 20, explains how shorthand and using arrows to track the flow of affirmative and negative points during a debate can give competitors an edge.

Effective notetaking, critical thinking, and public speaking are among the skills that students can improve through participating in debate—an activity that research shows can boost academic performance. A new study by Beth Schueler of the University of Virginia and Katherine Larned of Harvard found that students who participated in policy debate as an extracurricular activity in Boston Public Schools tended to do better in middle school, high school, and beyond as compared to non-debating peers.

Debating had a positive impact on English language arts scores—equivalent to two-thirds of a year of typical 9th-grade learning. The improvement in performance was largest for the lowest-achieving students. Debate participation also translated into increased high-school graduation rates and enrollment in four-year colleges and universities.

Involving students in policy debate is one of the most impactful academic interventions for secondary school students, according to the study, which between 2007 and 2017 followed about 3,500 students who were part of the Boston Debate League (BDL). The nonprofit supports debate teams in Boston Public Schools, which have a large concentration of low-income students of color and don’t have the resources to field debate teams on their own. BDL is one of 20 urban debate leagues in the United States, located in such cities as Miami, Chicago, and New York.

Inclusive Debate Culture

The Boston program, which has novice, junior varsity, and varsity divisions, plus teams that debate in Spanish, is designed to be welcoming to all. Some participants are not native English speakers, some have special needs, and many are not on grade level academically.

“Our goal is to be inclusive to all because we believe debate is for everyone,” said Roger Nix, director of the after-school debate program at BDL, noting that only about 10 percent of students seek out the activity on their own, so there is a big push to educate and recruit. “A lot of people have this big fear about what debate is, and we try to demystify that. It’s a chance to learn more about issues that are important in the world, share your opinions, and actually have people listen to you and give you feedback.”

The league creates an easy on-ramp. There is no cost to students, and those with jobs or other activities can participate as they are able. It’s one of the few spaces where students from different grades can interact in an extracurricular academic club. There is positive peer pressure, with upper-class students encouraging younger students. The small-team structure allows students to receive attention from a caring adult coach in a nurturing environment.

Debate “has the potential to transform students, their school communities, and the wider community,” said Kim Willingham, the executive director of BDL, which started in 2005 and serves about 700 students each year in its after-school debate program. “Once you’re a debater, I think you approach everything differently. You listen to learn, not necessarily to respond. I think it makes you more compassionate.”

New Possibilities

Near Boston Common and the Massachusetts Statehouse, teenagers stream into the Suffolk University Law School building on Friday afternoon for the last high school tournament of the regular debate season. With its massive columns and marble atrium, the building has an academic feel, which suits BDL’s strategy of exposing kids to college environments and inspiring them to attend one day—for many, becoming the first in their families to do so.

Students find a connection to the larger community beyond their neighborhoods when they join about 170 others from across the city for the two-day competition. They are dressed casually in jeans and pajama bottoms, and some wear matching hooded sweatshirts printed with the name of their school’s debate team. Just past the check-in table, there are pans of rice, beans, and chicken for an early supper. Providing free food throughout the event is another way BDL tries to remove barriers to participation and promote camaraderie.

Students chat with one another as they find seats in a large room with a table bearing trophies to be distributed at the conclusion of the competition the following afternoon. Over the din of teenage conversation, the event kicks off with a recognition of graduating seniors from each of the 22 high schools represented. Brandon Ren, winner of the $1,000 Senior Speaker contest, approaches the podium to give a testimonial about the impact of debate, while the crowd applauds and shouts, “We love you, Brandon!”

Brandon tells the audience that, as a first-generation son of Chinese immigrants, he was raised to believe good kids stayed quiet and didn’t challenge the status quo. He says he joined debate in 7th grade and that the experience taught him to think in new ways, expand his vocabulary, articulate complex ideas, and formulate persuasive arguments.

“The Boston Debate League became my sanctuary. A place where I could express myself freely, engage in spirited dialogue, and discover a strength in my convictions,” says Brandon, an 18-year-old senior at Boston Latin Academy in Dorchester, the city’s largest neighborhood. “With each debate round I found my voice growing stronger, my confidence going higher, and my fears diminishing. . . . No longer confined by the shackles of silence, I seize every opportunity to speak my truth and advocate for change.”

Learning through Competition

Once the schedule is posted, Brandon and fellow debaters scatter throughout the law building for the first round of the tournament. They joke around as they enter the classrooms but become serious once the debates begin. They compete in teams of two, with each session typically lasting 60 to 90 minutes. Every student gives an eight-minute opening speech, followed by three minutes of cross-examination, and a five-minute closing argument.

This form of debate focuses on one resolution for an entire season: this year’s topic concerns income inequality. Depending on the division, the students present information either from packets provided by the league or from their own research. They deepen their knowledge and perspectives on a range of federal economic policies, because they are required to argue both sides of the cases.

Varsity debaters Taygen Richards and Sybille Delice from Prospect Hill Academy Charter School, located across the Charles River in Cambridge, read from their laptops research they gathered about a plan to address income inequality: reparations for slavery. In this division, competitors try to squeeze in as much information as possible in their allotted time, which means mastering speed talking and attentive listening.

Sybille’s voice crescendos as she makes her argument in favor of compensating descendants of enslaved Black Americans for their ancestors’ forced labor, for Jim Crow segregation, and for discriminatory practices that Sybille emphasizes have “robbed” them of the opportunity to build wealth. When the judge’s timer beeps, she stops mid-sentence. The questioning begins immediately.

The opposing team asks who will get reparations, and if there is a point when someone isn’t “Black enough” to qualify.

Not missing a beat, Taygen responds, “There is no such thing as not being Black enough. They are still a descendant. . . . If in their bloodline they have been affected by slavery in some way, they are considered a minority community in terms of race and being a person of color. They would get reparations.”

Taygen, who is African American, said that during such intense moments in a competition, it’s hard not to get emotional. “One side of my head was like, ‘No, they did not just say that.’ And the other side was, ‘Keep talking,’” said the 17-year-old junior whose three years in debate have taught her to stay focused and choose her words carefully. “No matter where you go in your life, you need to speak in a way that people will hear you . . . asserting yourself professionally,” said Taygen, who would like to study sociology and cognitive science in college.

Sybille, also 17, said she’s improved her communication skills through debate, which she thinks will be useful in her chosen career field of biology. “A lot of people think that scientists are just in a lab,” she said, “but you have to talk about your research in an effective way—and debate has helped me with that.”

Students are developing critical thinking skills in debate, said BDL’s Willingham. “They’re learning how to question themselves, question the world, question other people’s perspectives—and to consider the evidence,” she said, adding the process is steeped in “really thoughtful, compelling arguments.”

Feedback and Encouragement

In another classroom, Kamdyn Sweeting and Surayah Campbell compete in the novice division. The pace is slower here, as students flip through three-ring binders with laminated pages of prepared arguments to make their case for “baby bonds,” a proposed government policy that would provide children with a publicly funded trust account at birth. The coach gave star-shaped helium balloons to the seniors at the tournament, and Kamdyn has his attached to his purple hair. He and Surayah are new to debate this year as seniors at Neighborhood House Charter School in Dorchester, and both are college bound.

“I sought out debate because I’m so nervous. I stutter a lot, so it helps me get over that,” Surayah said. “I’m actually really scared every time I come to a tournament, but I like to see the fruits of my labor. It just reminds me that if I put my mind to something, I can do it.”

Ellen McCoy, the debate coach at Neighborhood House, said many kids have anxiety about public speaking, but Surayah and Kamdyn overcame it through hard work. “That fear fueled them to be hyper prepared. They would spend hours on scripting their constructive arguments,” she said. “During their cross-examinations, they used to be a little hesitant. You could barely hear them speak. Now they’re a lot more confident and assertive.” The pair was surprised to win a fifth-place medal at their first tournament; that encouraged them to stick with the club for the rest of the season, Surayah said.

“I tell students, ‘You’re going to have to learn to feel comfortable with public speaking,’” McCoy said. “‘Would you rather struggle now, in high school—or in college or on the job, when there’s more at stake?’ The struggle is inevitable, but I would prefer to be the one to help them through it.”

Meeting peers from across Boston at the tournaments helps seniors confront any insecurities they may have about their capabilities and fitting in after high school. “I definitely notice a self-esteem boost after they hang with other students,” McCoy said. “They are able to hold their own, and that carries over to them feeling more prepared entering college.”

Volunteer judges, including attorneys and BDL alumni, are assigned to oversee the debates. It’s a safe place to receive constructive criticism, says Alison Eggers, chair of the BDL board. “The emphasis is on civil discourse, so it takes on a different quality than what we sometimes see in the media these days,” she said. “After the round, students get comments on their ballots that they can read and reflect on with their coaches and their teams, giving them layers of feedback.”

Moselle Burke, 25, joined debate at the invitation of his middle-school English teacher and competed for six years, advancing to the national debate circuit. Regularly volunteering at tournaments, he assesses the needs of each debater and tries to give actionable suggestions.

“As a judge, I want to make sure that I am rewarding students for the really clever, creative, and intense work that they’ve done to learn about an argument or a policy topic,” Burke said. “And I want to make sure that the things that I tell debaters they can improve on are focused on developing the skills that I think debate should actually cultivate.”

Now an accountant in Boston, Burke said debate influences the way he makes sense of information, interprets arguments, understands evidence, and articulates his positions. Receiving feedback from opponents and judges during a competition teaches students how to think about their own presentations critically without being too harsh on themselves, he added.

In contrast to a classroom where one teacher may grade the work of 25 students, the debate setting is overseen by judges who listen to students in small groups. “[Students] get written and verbal feedback for every debate that is individualized to them and their arguments to help them make direct improvements—and that happens four times in every tournament, 16 times in a year,” Nix said. “They are probably getting more feedback about their work in debate tournaments than a whole year of English class.”

Coaching with Care and Support

Midway through the tournament, coaches meet to share updates and advice. Nix begins with news of final events of the season, including a roller-skating party for students who are considered “engaged debaters.” They can earn hours toward that designation by attending practices and tournaments; high school students can serve as volunteer judges.

To recruit and retain student debaters, BDL partners with schools to give coaches a modest stipend and a budget to cover food, transportation, swag, and field trips.

Boston Green Academy has had an active debate team for more than a decade, thanks to support from BDL. “The world of debate does not usually reflect the community we serve,” said Head of School Matt Holzer. “We particularly seek out those who are not academic all-stars but who like to argue. We find it’s a very productive outlet. They become strong advocates and leaders who move our school in the right direction.”

Unlike a sports team, which typically expects players to attend every practice and game, BDL recognizes that many of their kids can’t make that kind of commitment. Some have jobs or take care of siblings and will try debate for a year. Others, like Brandon Ren, make it to high levels of competition and travel with the support of BDL. During the summer of 2023, he attended the Dartmouth Debate Institute, and, in April 2024, he participated in the Urban Debate National Championship at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Brandon and his debate partner, Alana Laforest, 16, a sophomore at Boston Latin, placed 11th among 37 teams.

Because policy debate is an extracurricular activity—an activity of choice—kids who get involved tend to develop a sense of ownership in the club.

“It’s all about community—social and emotional support,” said Anastasia Kolokithas, co-coach of one of BDL’s Debate en Español teams at Everett High School in Everett, a northern suburb of Boston. Many of the issues touch on social justice and economics, she said, which, along with the small-group dynamic, fosters personal connections. Students “learn about how these topics affect their own lives, their family’s lives, and that opens a lot of avenues,” Kolokithas said.

At Boston Green, just three girls attend a February middle school practice—but the students said they like the individual attention they get from their two coaches, Jodi Then and Emily Garven. Just as the mock debate on universal basic income is about to begin, Then offers some advice: “Be really energetic. Let’s try to have more oomph in what we say.” After the rehearsal, Garven gives 7th grader Violet Kaney notes on her delivery: “I loved how at the end of sentences you would look up at the judge and emphasize those words. And it does make a big impact,” she said. “On your presentation, rather than reading everything as fast as you can, it’s more effective to find the most important pieces of information and slow down slightly.”

Transferable Skills and Knowledge

Debaters learn to advocate for themselves in the classroom, in college, and in the workplace, said BDL’s Willingham.

“We are really intentional about meeting them where they are,” she said. “We scaffold and provide evidence in ways that are accessible. . . . Sometimes it’s through debate that they learn, ‘Oh, I too can thrive.’ And that transfers into how they approach learning.”

Surayah and Kamdyn, the pair from Neighborhood House, said debate experience has had tangible payoffs. Surayah said she’s become a better writer, which has helped in her college application essays and acceptance to 13 schools as of April. Kamdyn said it’s improved his research skills. An added bonus: the two get extra credit in their Advanced Placement Language and Composition class for participating in debate.

For heritage language speakers (who speak Spanish at home with their families), being part of Debate en Español can improve their fluency and be empowering. Debating in Spanish in a more formal setting also exposes them to more academic vocabulary, Kolokithas said.

Violet Kaney from Boston Green said learning all the economic terms in this year’s policy-debate packet has helped her in school. She’s noticed that kids in debate, including her, are more likely to volunteer to read aloud in class, because they want to get practice with public speaking. Violet said that it was at summer debate camp, which BDL offers for free to students from its participating schools, where she talked to a teacher about becoming an attorney.

“Once you join something where you are really passionate, it helps you figure out who you want to be when you’re older,” said Violet, 13, who is interested in a career as a public defense lawyer. “I feel like it would be such an honor to help people who are struggling.”

When students’ debate positions are critiqued, they are forced to think quickly—answering cross-examination questions they haven’t seen in advance. BDL’s Nix said that this skill of thinking on one’s feet can translate into test taking. Through debate, students gain the self-confidence to tackle a challenging essay question even if they aren’t certain of the answer.

Christian Swift, a freshman at Fenway High School in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, said he likes the competitive aspect of debate and is committed to continuing because of the friends he’s made on the team. The background knowledge he’s learned from debate has been useful in school. “I feel like I’m more aware of issues,” he said. “Homelessness is a problem, for example. But thanks to debate, I know why it’s a problem and how the problem could be fixed.”

Reflecting with Peers

On the Monday following the weekend tournament, students in grades 6 to 12 gather for debate practice after school at Boston Latin Academy. They grab candy and granola bars from a box as they enter the classroom, charged with extra energy since they’ve learned that school will be closed tomorrow for a snow day.

It’s a day of celebration for the high school team, which had several top finishers in the competition. Students and coaches applaud enthusiastically as these competitors are recognized. One of them is Brandon, who received his team’s Legacy Award for leadership.

“It’s a pretty big deal and well-earned,” said Tristen Grannum, the middle school debate coach. “He not only leads the club, he makes sure everybody is at their best before tournaments and learns how to navigate the debate world.”

Peer leadership is a key element of the BDL model. Teams elect captains, such as Brandon, and students are encouraged to be out front with recruiting. Policy debate is an extra academic commitment and can seem boring to some, Brandon said, but the team element makes it fun.

“I’m proud of how the students support each other,” said Tyler Kirk, the Boston Latin high school debate coach. “The older students are really excited to help out the younger, novice students—passing on how it works.”

Today’s practice is all about reviewing the judges’ ballots from the tournament. In his small group, Brandon listens to freshmen junior-varsity debater Adriana Carvajal, 14, and her partner, Rinji Sherpa, 15, explain their frustration in one round when their opponents failed to provide a card beforehand that cited outside evidence. Brandon advises them to firmly, but tactfully, bring that to the attention of a judge in the future.

Kirk chimes in: “Did you give them the best news about the judging situation? Since this was their last JV tournament, next year when they’re on varsity, those judges are the best.”

Adriana says: “I’m not doing varsity!”

Kirk: “You can do it. You can definitely do it. It’s going to be great.”

Adriana asks Brandon about the time commitment of varsity, what’s involved in doing original research, and his goals after high school. Brandon does not plan to continue competing in college but does want to stay connected to his high school team and BDL as a volunteer alumni judge. “I can help coach all of you guys next year going into varsity—just not in person,” said Brandon, who may offer debate tutoring sessions online.

After a few more minutes of back-and-forth, Adriana softens her stance: “I think I’ll try varsity, just more toward the end of next season.”

While Adriana admits she’s still a little scared, she said that she was persuaded by hearing about what it takes to move up a division from someone who has been there.

“I’ve come out of my shell,” Adriana said. “I have my coaches and my other peers. I know what I’m doing more and how everything works. I feel more confident about next year.”

Caralee Adams is a freelance journalist in Bethesda, Maryland, writing on education, business, technology, health, and parenting topics for multiple outlets.

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

Adams, C. (2024). Making the Case for Student Debate Leagues: Boston youths hone skills in public speaking, critical thinking, and communication. Education Next, 24(3), 32-39.

Every December, in a practice that dates back decades, the chief justice of the United States releases a year-end report on the federal judiciary. Despite the New Year’s Eve timing of these reports, they typically elicit less celebration than somnolence. As one veteran journalist who covers the Supreme Court noted with considerable understatement, “The year-end report is usually devoid of anything controversial.”

In 2019, however, with the United States deep in the grip of political polarization, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. issued a year-end report that proved arresting. That unusual document explored the judiciary’s myriad connections to civic education. “By virtue of their judicial responsibilities, judges are necessarily engaged in civic education,” Roberts wrote. “When judges render their judgments through written opinions that explain their reasoning, they advance public understanding of the law.” The Supreme Court’s iconic decision invalidating school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, Roberts noted, could be viewed through this prism. Chief Justice Earl Warren saw to it that the 1954 opinion would be concise enough—at just 13 pages—to be reprinted in newspapers around the nation. Brown, Roberts wrote, exemplifies “the power of a judicial decision as a teaching tool,” as it provided “every citizen [an opportunity to] understand the Court’s rationale.” Roberts delivered a sobering assessment of the nation’s disregard for democratic ideals and the attendant decline of civic education. “[W]e have come to take democracy for granted,” Roberts lamented, “and civic education has fallen by the wayside.”

Since Roberts issued this cri de coeur in 2019, concerns about democracy and civic education have only intensified. Most prominently, the atrocities committed at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, represented the starkest repudiation of democracy on American soil in decades. One scholar termed that day “a Sputnik moment for an ambitious revival of civics instruction.” As divisions over race, gender, and immigration have deepened, controversies involving civic education have become a salient, persistent topic of national controversy. Five years ago, the New York Times released its 1619 Project, which emphasized the nation’s deep connections to race-based chattel slavery and the ongoing legacy of that odious institution. In response, President Donald Trump formed the 1776 Commission with an eye toward attacking and displacing the 1619 Project’s slavery-based narrative.

These competing projects have been amply debated, and I have no interest in rehearsing those discussions here. I do, however, want to press two observations. First, the 1619 Project and the 1776 Report both portrayed themselves as tools of civic education. Each contemplated how schools could implement the animating ideas of the respective projects, and various educators across the nation have done just that. Second, the competing reports, which dispute the nation’s true origins, embody the profound polarization that afflicts American society. Our two dominant political tribes appear perilously close to singing in unison: “You say 1619. I say 1776. Let’s call the whole thing off.”

It sometimes seems that agreeing to disagree (often angrily) is the only thing that Blue America and Red America can settle on. Yet the nation would be well served by attempting to identify some common ground on the question of civic education. Rather than fighting exclusively about what should not be taught in the nation’s public schools, why not contemplate approaches to civic education that might garner widespread support?

Even in our intensely divided era, there is broad, bipartisan agreement that the current state of civic education is lacking. Not long ago, Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat from Delaware, and Senator John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, co-sponsored a bill called the “Civics Secures Democracy Act.” That measure, if enacted, would appropriate roughly $6 billion over the course of six years to foster education in civics and history. Supreme Court justices from across the ideological spectrum have also joined forces on this cause. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Sonia Sotomayor, who often disagree in high-profile cases, have made joint appearances touting the need to deepen student comprehension of our basic civic structures. On such occasions, Gorsuch has asserted that the state of civic education poses a national security crisis and noted that political and cultural polarization forms an important part of the crisis: “How can the democracy function if we can’t talk to one another, and if we can’t disagree, kindly, with respect for one another’s differences and different points of view?” For her part, Sotomayor has also dedicated significant time to promoting iCivics, an organization founded and formerly chaired by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, which seeks to capitalize on youngsters’ fascination with video games to spark their interest in learning about government.

Concerns regarding civic education are well founded; the state of civic comprehension in the United States is—in a word—grim. National Assessment of Educational Progress civics exams conducted in 2022 revealed that less than 25 percent of American 8th graders demonstrated proficiency in the subject. Fewer than one-third of the students could identify why the Founders adopted the Declaration of Independence. The civic knowledge of adults is also lacking. In 2016, one survey determined that only about one in four Americans could name all three branches of government.

In this essay, I aim to amplify and expand on Chief Justice Roberts’s call to connect the judiciary to civic education. I seek to promote an approach that I label “student-centered civic education”—an approach that could find bipartisan support. This method places the historic struggles for students’ constitutional rights front and center in the curriculum. It foregrounds the major Supreme Court decisions that have shaped the everyday lives of students across the nation, but it also uses these decisions as a springboard for discussing the broader issues, arguments, and student activism that fueled those controversies. It is simultaneously retrospective and prospective—teaching students about the hard-fought constitutional struggles that young people waged yesteryear and encouraging them to evaluate critically the contours of their rights in the context of tomorrow’s civic society. A student-centered approach to civic education thus frames students as active participants in shaping our constitutional order and positions them to become engaged, stewards of our democracy.

Scintillating Questions

The student-centered approach examines the relationships between the people and their government in a way that is tangibly connected to the daily lives of adolescents. High school students tend to view abstract constitutional concepts—such as federalism or the separation of powers—as disconnected from the things that matter most to them. But highlighting constitutional conflicts involving students and the limitations that judicial opinions have placed on school authority hits home for young people. The nation’s 50 million public school students, like most people, will gravitate toward subject matter that immediately informs their own lives.

Cases involving the constitutional rights of students will captivate them as no other civic-education topic can. Should schools be able to force students who participate in extracurricular activities to provide urine samples for drug testing? Should school officials be able to punish students by striking them repeatedly with a two-foot-long wooden paddle? Should they be able to strip-search students in an effort to locate contraband ibuprofen tablets? Should schools be able to exclude unauthorized immigrants? Should schools be able to suspend a cheerleader from the junior-varsity squad for an entire year because she posted a vulgarity on social media—off-campus on a weekend afternoon—to vent her frustration about failing to make varsity? Should high school football coaches be allowed to kneel down in prayer at midfield following games, or do such rituals religiously coerce players? These are among the scintillating questions presented by actual Supreme Court opinions involving constitutional rights in schools. These questions, I submit, would engage even the most jaded of students.

The student-centered approach also drives home the point that young people have made invaluable contributions to our current constitutional order. Sometimes students perceive civic affairs as the exclusive domain of adults. But when students today read about teenagers John Tinker and Mary Beth Tinker wearing black armbands to school in the 1960s over the objections of school authorities in Des Moines, Iowa, they understand that constitutional rights do not materialize out of thin air. The Tinkers dared to protest the Vietnam War on school grounds, endured suspensions, and waged a four-year court battle to make students’ First Amendment rights a reality. Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District demonstrates that young people of prior generations have successfully stood up for constitutional rights and played a pivotal role in creating modern American society. And today’s students may realize that they, too, have an indispensable role to play in bequeathing a constitutional tradition to subsequent generations.

Student-centered civic education also helps young Americans gain deeper understanding and respect for constitutional values at a time when some of those values have come under assault. It is no secret, for example, that many young people today harbor grave skepticism about the First Amendment’s utility. Free expression, critics maintain, is used as either a shield to protect the powerful or a cudgel to bash the powerless. But if students learned early on how young people have harnessed the power of free speech in schools—including not just Tinker’s protection of antiwar speech but other judicial precedents such as one vindicating the ability of civil rights activists in Mississippi to promote racial equality—they would see how the First Amendment often protects minority opinion and protest.

The nation’s universities have in recent years witnessed numerous high-profile conflagrations where students have evinced precious little respect for free speech. Commentators have expressed alarm that our institutions of higher education—where intellectual exchange on contentious topics is supposed to be prized—appear to hold free speech in such low esteem. Too few of those commentators have noted, though, that college students may well disregard freedom of expression partly because they did not meaningfully encounter the concept in elementary or secondary school. Cultivating respect for free-speech values should not be delayed until college. That process needs to start long before then, something that a student-centered civic education would prioritize.

The topics presented in a student-centered civic-education curriculum lend themselves to active debate among students about their constitutional rights in school. After students learn the basics of, say, free speech in schools, teachers should offer novel factual scenarios in mock hearings designed to test the limits of permissible student speech, assigning half of the class to act as lawyers for the student and the other half to act as lawyers for the school board. These mock disputes would encourage students to disagree with each other’s constitutional views respectfully and thereby aid our ailing democratic experiment. If students do not begin learning how to disagree with their peers in the relatively safe school context, disagreements in non-school settings will increasingly escalate into the ad hominem attacks that have become a disconcerting staple of both our politics and our broader culture. Teachers could take this exercise a step further by assigning students to defend a legal position that runs counter to the students’ own viewpoints, requiring them to articulate the most compelling arguments on the other side and helping them to develop empathy for people who disagree with them.

Some of the most significant Supreme Court opinions assessing students’ constitutional rights have emphasized the role of public schools in developing citizens. Students could explore this theme in their coursework. In Brown, for instance, Warren declared that “education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. . . . It is the very foundation of good citizenship.” In 1972, when assessing an objection to a compulsory education law, the court wrote that “education is necessary to prepare citizens to participate effectively and intelligently in our open political system if we are to preserve freedom and independence.” In 2021, Justice Stephen Breyer’s opinion for the court in Mahanoy Area School District v. B.L., a case involving off-campus student speech, noted that public schools themselves have an interest in protecting students’ free expression because doing so preserves our democratic order. “America’s public schools are the nurseries of democracy,” Breyer contended. “Our representative democracy only works if we protect the marketplace of ideas.”

The Supreme Court has also embraced a special responsibility for safeguarding constitutional rights in the school context, lest students draw baleful lessons about citizenship. Justice Robert Jackson powerfully expressed this point in 1943, when he led the court’s invalidation of a state measure that required students to salute the American flag in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette. “That [public schools] are educating the young for citizenship is reason for scrupulous protection of Constitutional freedoms of the individual,” Jackson wrote, “if we are not to strangle the free mind at its source and teach youth to discount important principles of our government as mere platitudes.”

In exploring the court’s conceptualization of public schools as institutions that form citizens, students should understand that justices hold divergent views on what citizenship entails, particularly for young people in school settings. Some justices have embraced a robust conception of citizenship for students, suggesting that schools ought to permit wide-ranging, spirited debates on contentious questions. Writing for the court in Tinker, Justice Abe Fortas espoused this robust notion of citizenship. “Any word spoken, in class, in the lunchroom, or on the campus, that deviates from the views of another person may start an argument or cause a disturbance,” Fortas stated. “But our Constitution says we must take this risk, and our history says that it is . . . this kind of openness . . . that is the basis of our national strength and of the independence and vigor of Americans who grow up and live in this relatively permissive, often disputatious, society.”

Other Supreme Court justices have offered a far thinner conception of citizenship for students. They hold that schools should not host freewheeling debates but should instead concentrate on imposing order and discipline on students. Call this competing notion “Report Card Citizenship,” with a nod toward the grade for behavior that some elementary schools once meted out. Justice Hugo Black, dissenting in Tinker, wrote that “school discipline . . . is an integral and important part of training our children to be good citizens—to be better citizens.”

The thin conception of citizenship has seen its stock fluctuate dramatically in Supreme Court opinions since Black’s dissent in Tinker. During the 1980s, the court at times seemed to endorse Report Card Citizenship. In assessing a school district’s ability to punish a high school student for a lewd speech at a school assembly, the court emphasized the school’s duty to “inculcate the habits and manners of civility” and to “teach by example the shared values of a civilized social order.” But the court’s most recent decision involving student speech rebuked Report Card Citizenship. Breyer’s opinion for the court in Mahanoy, like Fortas’s in Tinker, reasoned that schools cannot, without harming our democracy, act as roving censors who punish students for dissident speech. Pupils in student-centered civic-education courses should be encouraged to evaluate critically these competing conceptions of citizenship.

Additional Benefits

As teachers and students together learn about students’ constitutional rights, their awareness will likely help prevent schools from committing certain violations of those rights. A teacher who leads a classroom discussion on Barnette, for instance, will be unlikely to suspend students for refusing to salute the American flag. Such conflicts are distressingly common in American schools, even though Barnette repudiated mandatory flag salutes more than eight decades ago.

Teachers of a student-centered civic curriculum would, moreover, not only help to honor constitutional rights within their own classrooms, but they could also become invaluable resources for an entire school. It seems improbable that busy math and science teachers are going to educate themselves on the minutiae of the Supreme Court’s doctrine governing schools. Yet, when algebra and chemistry teachers confront scenarios touching upon students’ constitutional rights, civics instructors could provide guidance to their colleagues about constitutional protections. These same “in-house experts” could also serve as sounding boards for school administrators contemplating thorny constitutional questions, as it is often impractical to seek advice from school-board attorneys during a hectic school day. These informal consultations could well help increase respect for students’ constitutional rights within the school.

If schools commit fewer violations of students’ rights, they will also mitigate a significant source of political polarization. The nation’s public schools have become a battleground of the modern culture wars, and the media often highlight instances where school authorities have overstepped their constitutional authority. But media organizations have differing views on which violations to highlight, depending on whether these outlets lean left or right. The consumers of these varied, highly clickable reports are left to conclude that the nation’s public schools are systemically attacking their most cherished values, thereby intensifying the partisan divide.

Consider two recent high-profile constitutional controversies that arose when public schools erroneously abridged students’ First Amendment rights—the first involving speech associated with liberals and the second involving speech associated with conservatives. In 2021, two Black elementary school students in Ardmore, Oklahoma, wore T-shirts reading: “Black Lives Matter.” For this seemingly innocuous action, the students were ejected from their classrooms and forced to sit in an administrative office until the end of the day. One school official justified these disciplinary actions by stating that political statements would no longer be permitted at school. The district superintendent suggested that the policy pertained to statements from across the political spectrum: “I don’t want my kids wearing MAGA hats or Trump shirts to school either, because it just creates, in this emotionally charged environment, anxiety and issues that I don’t want our kids to deal with.” After this controversy appeared in the New York Times, the school district updated its policy to prohibit clothing “items [displaying] social or political content.”

The second controversy arose when a high school senior in Franklinton, Louisiana, had his school parking space painted with a portrait of Trump. School policy permitted seniors, for a modest fee, to decorate their spaces, and although the policy prohibited designs that included vulgar language or another student’s name, it did not forbid political statements. Nevertheless, school officials painted over the image, deeming it excessively political. A federal district court judge overrode the school’s decision, holding that it violated Tinker’s foundational protection for student speech. As one might predict, the case received no mention in the New York Times but was trumpeted by Fox News.

These dueling episodes and their attendant coverage—played to quite distinct, but nonetheless equally outraged audiences—further political polarization.

Going Further

Studying judicial opinions involving students’ constitutional rights would ideally lay the groundwork for exploring more-abstract concepts that undergird civic knowledge. For example, classroom discussion of Barnette’s prohibition on compulsory flag salutes in school sets up debate on the government’s ability to instill patriotism and to prohibit speech that is regarded as antipatriotic. Students could then consider state and federal legislative efforts to prohibit burning the American flag and the two Supreme Court decisions that invalidated such efforts. Teachers could use that discussion to illustrate concepts such as federalism, separation of powers, congressional authority, and executive authority. Similarly, a classroom discussion about Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier—which held that educators can typically regulate articles appearing in school newspapers without violating the First Amendment—invites a conversation about the media’s central role in maintaining democracy. In addition, analyzing San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez—which declined to invalidate dramatically unequal school-financing schemes—could spur reflection on how well a nation that extols equal opportunity for all lives up to that lofty ideal. Relatedly, Zelman v. Simmons-Harris—which upheld the constitutionality of governments offering students vouchers to attend private, religious schools—opens up a discussion about the Establishment Clause, economic theory, and the desirability of public-private partnerships.

A Presidential Commission?

How can proponents of robust civic education initiate the kind of widespread reform that I have sketched here? One vehicle of change could be a presidential commission on civic education. Many readers may counter that the road to inaction is paved with presidential commissions, and sometimes such criticisms are merited. Yet presidential commissions and their ilk can on occasion crystalize the public’s attention. For example, the renowned report A Nation at Risk served as a significant focal point for education reformers throughout much of the 1980s.

Numerous private, public, and philanthropic organizations have examined civic education over the years, but these pursuits too often happen in intellectual silos. While these efforts have value on their own, we need—especially today—to find a way to bring them together. A presidential commission examining civic education could provide an excellent occasion for such an assemblage, enabling communities to understand better which approaches work well and which do not. A commission that embraces student-centered civic education should include model lesson plans in an appendix to its report, distilling relevant Supreme Court opinions into portions that are easily digestible for students, offering hypothetical scenarios involving students that are designed to test the limits of those opinions, and providing concrete advice to teachers on how they might spur students to engage with those topics. The commission’s resource materials would ideally provide one-stop shopping for teachers focusing on civic education. Of course, the commission would in no sense aim to mandate that public schools adopt a particular approach. Instead, building on the abundant existing resources in this domain, the commission would devise a model that teachers and local school districts could adopt and adapt. The hope is that school districts and teachers from very different parts of the country would want to implement the framework because it would focus on the relevant topic of students’ constitutional rights and encourage students to actively and critically evaluate the content of those rights.

Forming a commission on civic education could be a sound political idea for a second term of President Joe Biden. In one of his first official moves in January 2021, Biden swiftly rescinded the 1776 Commission Report. The historian Michael Kazin then argued in the New York Times: “Now that the 1776 Commission is deprived of federal authority, its influence will wane more quickly than that of the president who established it.” But just as Trump continues to cast a long shadow over American politics and culture, the 1776 Commission’s Report has not vanished, as its content can easily be accessed via the Internet. Closing our eyes will not, moreover, magically make it disappear. Instead, Biden should assemble a civically minded group from a range of ideological perspectives to offer an affirmative vision of civic education—one that highlights the struggle for students’ constitutional rights. If the president seeks to dislodge the 1776 Report from our intellectual landscape, he must offer his own conception of civic education, and he should frame it, as Gorsuch did, as promoting a vital national security interest.

Prominent Republicans have not shied away from discussing civic education. In May 2020, Steve Bannon, former adviser to President Trump, offered a remarkable statement about future political struggles: “The path to save the nation is very simple—it’s going to go through the school boards.” In the aftermath of the 2020 election, it seems that some right-wing Republicans have embraced what might be termed the “Bannon Playbook” by focusing on education issues. Perhaps the foremost tactic in this political strategy has sought to transform and distort Critical Race Theory into an intellectual bogeyman. Leading figures in the Democratic Party have too often remained silent on these high-profile cultural questions. But it is incumbent upon Democrats, I believe, to provide their own notions of civic education. As the old adage runs, “If you don’t define yourself, someone else will do it for you.”

President Biden has emphasized his desire to locate common ground with Republicans when possible—without sacrificing his core principles. Focusing on students’ constitutional rights as articulated by the Supreme Court—a struggle that dates back to the first half of the 20th century—would enable Biden’s commission to minimize some of the polarizing disputes that have proved insoluble during recent debates. Many Americans understand the profound need to address missing, limited, or ineffective civic education as a way of bolstering our nation’s foundational commitments. In 2018, for instance, one national survey found that the most popular approach to fortifying American democracy was a policy aimed at “ensur[ing] that schools make civic education a bigger part of the curriculum.” To underscore that the commission is truly dedicated to locating commonality on civic education for Americans of different political stripes, Biden should make sure to tap high-profile people associated with the Republican Party to serve. Indeed, he could even consider selecting Chief Justice Roberts to chair, or co-chair, the civic-education commission. If the chief justice should decline, Biden could nonetheless identify Roberts’s year-end report from 2019 as an important inspiration for the group and even title the commission after a passage that Roberts wrote. Near the very end of his report, Roberts stated: “Civic education, like all education, is a continuing enterprise and conversation.” Biden’s Presidential Commission on the Civic Enterprise has a nice ring to it, suggesting that civic education is a collaborative, difficult undertaking that demands considerable effort.

The ideas that I have outlined here are sure to generate disagreement. Some readers may contend that “students’ constitutional rights” is a contradiction in terms. Justice Clarence Thomas has espoused precisely that view regarding student speech, and teachers adopting the student-centered model of civic education should have their own students confront it. Other readers may maintain that the president ought not tread on ground that rightly belongs to states and localities. Still others may find that student-centered civic education places too much attention on judges, courts, and rights at the expense of other material. For my own part, I welcome such disagreements—and many others besides—because their existence would indicate that civic education is being actively debated in venues where such debates remain all too rare.

Firsthand Experience

My interest in promoting the student-centered model of civic education is not purely theoretical; it is informed by my own experience. On graduating from college in 1997, long before I dreamed of becoming a law professor, I enrolled in a one-year teacher-certification program at Duke University. As part of that program, I had the privilege of teaching a civic-education class to 9th graders at a public school in Durham, North Carolina. I recall witnessing the students—some of whom had displayed minimal interest in analyzing the differences among the three branches of government—come alive when we turned our attention to Tinker. I believe that the students engaged with Tinker deeply because they viewed themselves—at long last—as having some skin in the game. They felt they had genuine expertise about the regulation of students in schools.

Some two decades later, after I joined the faculty at Yale Law School in 2019, I became the faculty adviser for a long-standing program that places law-school students in New Haven’s public schools to teach a student-centered civic-education course. In a small but meaningful way, this program helps bridge the wide chasm that all too often separates elite, cloistered Yale from gritty, under-resourced New Haven. The redoubtable, committed Yale Law students who participate in the program do virtually all of the work, including preparing their students for a citywide oral-argument competition that occurs on Yale’s campus.

I find that visiting those classrooms and seeing student-centered civic education in action is always an inspiring experience. During my first year at Yale, I remember driving early one morning across town to a New Haven public school—one with a virtually all Black and Latino student population, a majority of whom are eligible for free lunch. After passing through the school’s metal detectors, I found my way to the correct classroom, where I witnessed students diligently preparing for their upcoming oral arguments. The students sounded very much like young lawyers, using shorthand for case names to claim that the Supreme Court’s precedents either required (or foreclosed) finding that a hypothetical principal violated a hypothetical student’s First Amendment rights. These students plainly viewed themselves as the subjects of law, not the objects of law, and felt legally and civically empowered. As the students began filing out after class, I overheard one young Black woman say quietly to a classmate, “I want to be a judge when I grow up.” It is my fervent hope that expanding the student-centered model in our schools will inspire more young people around the country to embrace such civically minded ambitions.

Justin Driver is the Robert R. Slaughter Professor of Law at Yale Law School and the author of The Schoolhouse Gate. This essay is drawn from an article that will appear in a NOMOS volume titled Civic Education in Polarized Times, to be published by New York University Press.

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

Driver, J. (2024). Building Better Citizens Begins in the Classroom: For civics to matter again, students must actively engage with their own constitutional rights. Education Next, 24(3), 22-31.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hiding in Plain Sight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding the Next Sold a Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Americans with more education vote at higher rates. In the 2020 presidential election, 77 percent of eligible voters who had attended or graduated from college and 90 percent with post-graduate studies cast a ballot compared to 54 percent of voters with only a high-school diploma and 36 percent of dropouts. These trends in turnout rates have persisted for more than three decades, suggesting a link between years of schooling and voting. But does achieving higher levels of education cause citizens to show up and vote on election day? Or do education and voting simply go hand-in-hand, because some other variable contributes to them both?

The research to date is mixed. Some studies have found evidence of a causal relationship, while others have not. The available data also tell us little about why and how education increases voting.

We take on these questions by looking at the educational trajectories and adult voting records of students who attend charter schools in Boston. We focus on Boston because prior research has found that students who attend a city charter are more likely to pass high-school exit exams, have higher test scores, and are more likely to attend a four-year college than their non-charter peers. Further, because Boston charters are oversubscribed and enroll students based on random admissions lotteries, we can compare charter students, who receive more education, with similar students who did not win a lottery and therefore receive less education. If education is a causal factor in voting, we’d expect to find that the students who experience these academic gains are also more likely to vote as adults.

That is, in fact, what we find—but only for girls. We look at the voting records of charter and non-charter students and find substantial differences. While similar shares of charter and non-charter students are registered to vote by age 21, charter-school students are slightly more likely to vote in any election and substantially more likely to vote in the first presidential election for which they are eligible. Specifically, 41 percent of all charter-school students vote in their first presidential election compared to 35 percent of students who did not attend a charter, an increase of 17 percent.

When we look more closely at the data, we see that the charter effect is a female phenomenon. Female high-school students are 11 percentage points more likely to vote in adulthood if they attended a charter school, while the impact for males is nil. We investigate multiple explanations for these differences and find that increased civic participation is likely due to gains in noncognitive attributes like grit and self-control, which we measure by looking at student behaviors, such as school attendance and taking the SAT.

These findings are in line with widening gender gaps in educational attainment and political participation. In 2020, 82 percent of eligible women voted in the presidential election compared to 73 percent of eligible men. Meanwhile, in 2021 some 39 percent of women ages 25 and older had a bachelor’s degree compared to 37 percent of men, and males currently account for just 42 percent of all students at four-year colleges. Our research sheds new light on these patterns and points to a critical question for future study. What can schools do to enhance non-cognitive skills development in boys, and what intervention could boost civic participation in young men after graduation?

Academic Success at Boston Charter Schools

Charter schools are public schools, funded with public money, but managed by private organizations. In Massachusetts, the state board of elementary and secondary education authorizes charter schools for five-year terms, and for-profit charter operators are not permitted. State law caps the share of district funds that can be used for charter tuition, with limited flexibility. If a school cannot enroll all interested students, they conduct a random admissions lottery, enroll the winners, and place students who did not win on a waitlist. For the 2023-24 school year, some 76 charter schools statewide enrolled about 46,000 students, and 66 of those schools had waitlists with another 21,270 unique students.

Boston has the highest concentration of charter schools in the state. Most use policies associated with the “No Excuses” charter school movement: longer school days and years, a focus on academic achievement and behavior management, in-school tutoring, frequent teacher feedback, and data-driven instruction. Prior research has found that attending a Boston charter school for one year boosts student scores on standardized tests by about one-third of a standard deviation in math and one-fifth of a standard deviation in reading. These findings are generally in line with studies of similar charter schools in Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, New York City, Newark, New Orleans, and the national non-profit KIPP network.

Our study looks at the voting behavior of young adults who applied to a randomized admissions lottery for a Boston charter high school. We include all charter middle and high schools that kept lottery records and enrolled students who were at least 18 by the 2016 general election. In all, that includes 12 charter schools and 9,562 lottery applicants who were scheduled to graduate between 2006 to 2017. The applicant pool is 58 percent Black, 27 percent Hispanic, and 10 percent white. About 20 percent receive special-education services and 74 percent qualify for free or reduced-price school lunch. Females account for 52 percent of applicants.

Through the lotteries, about two-thirds of applicants are offered a charter seat. This creates a natural experiment that we use to explore the potential causal link between charter-school attendance, which boosts academic scores and access to college, and voting. We use state education and voting records to compare academic outcomes and election turnout for students who are and are not offered a charter seat and adjust our estimates based on who actually attends a charter school. We do not include siblings of current students or other applicants who receive lottery preferences. Of course, not all students offered seats attend the charter; however, state data show that applicants who win the lottery are 46 percentage points more likely to attend a charter during their time in Massachusetts public schools. We also see that boys and girls are equally as likely to enroll in a charter school if offered a seat.

Linking Learning with Voting

First, we benchmark the impact of charter attendance on academic outcomes against results from prior research. As in other analyses, we find that students who enroll in a charter school experience large gains in AP test-taking and scores, SAT scores, and four-year college enrollment. On state tests, scores increase by about half of a standard deviation in math and one-third of a standard deviation in reading two years after winning an admissions lottery. Charter students take longer to graduate high school, with a decline of 9 percentage points in the four-year graduation rate, but there are no statistically significant differences in five- or six-year high school graduation rates. Boston charters boost enrollment in four-year colleges by 7.2 percentage points.

We then investigate whether these educational gains extend beyond the classroom to civic participation. We find no impact on voter registration—about 78 percent of students in both groups are registered to vote by age 21, with about 45 percent of students registered by their 19th birthday. However, we do find differences in voter turnout. We focus on the first possible presidential election after students turn 18 to leave less time for them to leave Massachusetts or the region, and thus our sample. Additionally, the first possible presidential election is the election closest to the charter school treatment, which we believe is most likely to show the influence of attendance.

Charter-school students are more likely to vote than non-charter students, with the biggest difference in the first presidential election in which they are eligible to vote (see Figure 1). Some 41 percent of charter students vote in the first presidential election after they turn 18 compared to 35 percent of non-charter students, a difference of 17 percent. Charter students are also more likely to vote in any presidential election, with turnout at 65 percent compared to 61 percent for non-charter students. In looking at all opportunities to vote, including off-cycle elections where turnout is generally very low, we find a difference of 3 percentage points, with 67 percent of charter students voting compared to 64 percent of non-charter students, though the difference is not statistically significant.

We also look at voting by student subgroups and find that female charter students experience outsized gains (see Figure 2). In terms of voting in the first possible presidential election, the charter impact is 11 percentage points for girls and zero for boys. We also find meaningful effects for other student subgroups. Voting increases by 7.5 percentage points for students who receive free or reduced-price school lunch, 12.1 percentage points for English language learners, and 11.3 percentage points for students who earn relatively higher scores on state tests.

“Soft Skills” and the Ballot Box

Our findings show that charter schools boost academic outcomes and civic participation. That raises a second question: how? What aspects of education contribute to students’ likelihood to vote as adults?

We look at five possible explanations of why education may increase voting: development of cognitive skills, civic skills, social networks, the degree to which charter attendance politicizes students, and noncognitive skills. Our finding of a gender gap in voting allows us to identify proxies for these mechanisms and test the impact of each one. If the gender gap we find in voting is also present on a proxy measure, that mechanism is the most likely to explain increased civic participation among female charter school graduates.

For example, to assess whether increased cognitive skills help explain why citizens with more education are more likely to vote, we compare the impact of charter attendance on average test scores in reading and math for the males and females in our sample. Both genders experience the same large increase in math scores, while the positive impact in reading is slightly bigger for males. Since these impacts do not mirror the female-only effect of attending a charter school on voting, cognitive skill development does not appear to influence civic participation. More knowledge doesn’t necessarily beget more voting.

We conduct similar analyses of proxies for the other four mechanisms and find evidence that development in one area appears to explain charters’ impact on voting: noncognitive skills. While our data do not include a direct measure of noncognitive skills, such as a survey-based measure of self-control or grit, we use high-school attendance and taking the SAT as a proxies, since they are related to persistence and follow-through. This approach builds on prior research and captures some of the attitudes and behaviors students would draw on in order to vote, as voting in the U.S. often involves navigating sign-up processes, planning ahead, and following through.

Overall, students at charter schools attend 12 additional days of school from grades 9-12 compared to non-charter students. However, this effect is driven entirely by girls. Female charter students attend 22 additional days of school compared to non-charter females, while charter males do not attend school more regularly than their non-charter counterparts. We find similar, but not statistically significant, differences in SAT taking: charter females are 8 percentage points more likely to take the SAT than non-charter females, while the effect of charter attendance for males is just 2 percentage points.

This evidence cannot prove that stronger noncognitive skills cause a boost in voting. But taken together, we see that charters appear to shift noncognitive skills more for girls than boys, and that these differences align with the observed pattern in voting gains. Further, the gender gap in noncognitive skill gains we observe is consistent with prior research. Studies have shown that girls enter kindergarten with greater noncognitive skills than boys, maintain their advantage through elementary school, and have greater self-discipline than boys in 8th grade. Other research has found that these differences explain 40 percent of the gender gap in college attendance. There is also research showing that girls may gain more noncognitive skills from educational interventions, and that conscientiousness and emotional stability increase voter turnout for women, but not men. Thus, girls—perhaps because of socialization—are more likely to turn gains in noncognitive skills into voting.

Although our study finds the main beneficiaries of civic gains are young women, education’s contribution to voting need not operate solely through girls. Interventions that increase noncognitive skills for boys may have similar effects, though we do not observe them in this context. It is also possible that U.S. schools, and charter schools specifically, are set up in such a way that they particularly develop the skills of girls but not boys. Research to date has mainly focused on the overall impact of noncognitive skill development through social and emotional learning programs or documented longstanding gender gaps in this arena. Interventions that boost noncognitive skill development and other lagging outcomes in boys (see “Give Boys an Extra Year of School,” reviews, Spring 2023) or school curricula that specifically target civic engagement (see “A Life Lesson in Civics,” research, Summer 2019) are areas ripe for further study.

Sarah R. Cohodes is associate professor at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. James J. Feigenbaum is assistant professor at Boston University.

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

Cohodes, S.R., and Feigenbaum, J.J. (2024). Why Education Increases Voting: Evidence from Boston charter schools. Education Next, 24(3), 60-65.

In October 2023, the University of Austin finally received permission to call itself a university.

The start-up private college dedicated to the “fearless pursuit of truth” launched its effort in November 2021. Nearly two years later, the school received initial authorization from the Texas state agency tasked with oversight of higher education. That means the University of Austin, or UATX, may finally use the “university” label and begin recruiting students. But that green light is just the first step. It will be years before UATX enjoys full approval from the various regulatory entities it must satisfy.

UATX seeks to offer a brighter vision of what higher education can be. Its leaders see many deep problems at today’s top colleges: rigid pedagogical models, administrative bloat, excessive costs, and a retreat from the principles of free expression. Rather than wait for the university establishment to fix itself, its backers figure, why not start an entirely new school? (See “Can the New University of Austin Revive the Culture of Inquiry in Higher Education?,” features).

Whether UATX will succeed in that ambitious mission remains to be seen; as of this writing, the university has not yet enrolled any degree-seeking students. But if higher education is to change, competitive pressure will be needed. UATX offers a dose of optimism that some are willing to challenge the status quo. But its case also illustrates the monumental obstacles to starting a new university in 21st century America.

UATX has over $200 million in philanthropic funding and dozens of famous names behind it. Yet even with those formidable resources, the process of gaining regulatory approval from states, accreditors, and the federal government has been a time-consuming and expensive saga. Aspiring universities with fewer resources might find it impossible.

Barriers to entry into higher education mean that incumbent institutions face less competitive pressure than they might in a truly open market. It’s not difficult to see how rising tuitions result. Entry barriers also limit innovation by denying outsiders opportunities to try out new ideas for effectively preparing students to thrive in society and participate in our democracy. Almost all college students today attend schools that have existed for decades and have changed little about the way they do business. These institutions may adapt too slowly to the challenges of tomorrow.

Shaking Up Higher Education

The University of Austin’s 2021 launch announcement declared that “we can’t wait for universities to fix themselves.” The response: start a new one.

UATX president Pano Kanelos, formerly president of St. John’s College in Maryland, laments that “many universities no longer have an incentive to create an environment where intellectual dissent is protected and fashionable opinions are scrutinized.” Kanelos cites polls of college students who report they feel uncomfortable saying what they believe and surveys of academics eager to discipline colleagues engaged in wrongthink.

But the academy’s problems are not limited to the recession of free speech and intellectual debate, according to Kanelos. Administrative bloat and an amenities arms race have contributed to unchecked tuition hikes, leading to the student debt crisis. And all that revenue often doesn’t succeed in getting students across the finish line. Nearly 40 percent of students who start college do not earn a degree within six years.

Several high-profile figures have lent their names to the UATX effort, including historian Niall Ferguson, writer Bari Weiss, entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale, Harvard “happiness” professor Arthur Brooks, economists Deirdre McCloskey and Tyler Cowen, cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, and economist and former Harvard president Larry Summers. (Disclosure: Lonsdale is on the board of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, where I am a senior fellow.) Though Kanelos doesn’t say it, the involvement of these individuals is likely to help UATX compete for students with America’s most prestigious universities.

But competing with the Ivy League doesn’t mean becoming like the Ivy League. UATX has already laid out the model for its bachelor’s degree, which diverges from the traditional college experience in key ways.

During their freshman and sophomore years, UATX students will read “foundational” texts in small-group seminars and lectures. The junior and senior years, by contrast, will see students develop specialized knowledge, working directly with established scholars in their chosen area of concentration. Students will also produce a “Polaris Project,” which provost Jacob Howland describes as “a four-year educational through-line that calls on students to build, create, or discover something that serves the human good.”

Kanelos also hopes to dispense with some of the sacred cows of higher education. UATX will not require faculty to hold doctorates, nor will professors earn tenure. Many criticize academia’s professor-for-life model on the grounds that it means instructors have little real-world experience. And the school’s tenure-free policy hasn’t dissuaded potential professors; UATX has already received about 1,000 applications from prospective faculty members for 15 to 20 initial positions. Many are attracted by the unique pedagogical model at UATX and the chance to escape censorious environments at their current universities.

The school will enroll its first undergraduate class of 100 freshmen in fall 2024 (applications are currently being accepted on a rolling basis). The school will launch with just one undergraduate degree—a B.A. in liberal studies—but students may choose from three “concentrations” in STEM, the social sciences, and the humanities.

Sticker-price tuition at UATX is set at $32,500—a steep figure, but far lower than most elite private universities. Moreover, the inaugural class at UATX won’t have to pay it; the first hundred students will receive four-year full-tuition scholarships, on the logic that the school is not yet accredited and thus students are taking a risk on a new and unproven institution. The school has not yet determined tuition rates and financial aid policies for future classes, though it has plans to incorporate need-based grants.

The First Step: State Authorization

Colleges and universities in the United States are overseen by three entities known as the regulatory triad: authorization agencies run by state governments; membership-based private, nonprofit organizations called accreditors; and the U.S. Department of Education.

State authorization is the first point of entry for new institutions seeking to become universities. Even if a school has no interest in accreditation or federal funding from the Department of Education, it still must have approval from the state government in order to recruit or enroll students. Usually, an entity cannot even call itself a university unless it has state authorization. The University of Austin went by the moniker “UATX” before Texas’s state authorizer, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB), greenlighted the school in October 2023.

States typically have one or two agencies overseeing “traditional” institutions of higher education—that is, not-for-profit schools that grant degrees (as opposed to certificates). Research from the American Enterprise Institute looks at the extensive documentation that state authorizers require from aspiring colleges. Most states require schools to submit the curriculum vitae of faculty, blueprints and floor plans of campus buildings, and lists of classroom equipment. Sometimes there are explicit requirements attached to this documentation—Mississippi, for instance, requires each classroom to have a minimum of 600 square feet of floor space—but, more often than not, whether the school’s plans pass muster is left to the discretion of the individual authorizer. Many authorizers, including THECB, require schools to have a “reasonable” or “sufficient” ratio of faculty to students—but these terms are usually left undefined.

In practice, this means that state authorizers usually evaluate aspiring schools on how similar they are to existing colleges. But new entrants to a market often want to innovate, and they will sometimes depart from the standard model to reduce costs or increase efficiency. A new school might view requirements that faculty hold terminal degrees as outdated or counterproductive—but such a policy might also attract increased scrutiny from the state authorizer.

Indeed, state authorizers’ tend to approve institutions that not only look similar to existing colleges—but often are existing colleges. This is true in Texas as well as nationally. According to federal data, many of the “new” colleges that have formed in Texas in the last quarter century are new campuses of existing systems like the University of Texas or Texas A&M University, along with a handful of specialized institutions such as divinity schools.

But there is arguably no recent precedent for a large, independent, degree-granting nonprofit institution such as the University of Austin, at least not in Texas. Michael Shires, chief of staff and vice president of strategic initiatives at UATX, says it has been 60 to 70 years since the Lone Star State approved a new institution in the same category as UATX. (THECB, which formed 59 years ago, was not able to confirm or deny that timeline.)

Many state governments, Shires told me, “have layered a lot of new rules and regulations on top of the law” since the last time they chartered a new nonprofit university. “One of the challenges we had was finding paths and interpreting the code with all these new layers on top of it for us to be able to launch a new institution.” The chapter of the Texas state code governing state authorization is 80,000 words long.

The University of Austin’s initial application to THECB was 1,200 pages long, plus 700 to 800 pages of supporting documentation. After the school filed its application, the first response from THECB “was a request to break our application into smaller pieces, because their computers couldn’t open this massive 1,200-page document with all the graphics and tables that were in it,” says Shires. “We had to break it into six pieces so that they could actually open the files.”

The timeline for state authorization can be frustratingly long, as UATX discovered firsthand. The school officially launched in November 2021, submitted its application for authorization in December 2022, and received approval in October 2023. That amounts to a 10-month official process for authorization, on top of more than a year of preparation. Nationally, initial approval timelines can vary, but 10 months is not atypical.

Many states also have caps on the number of institutions or programs they will authorize per year. UATX, for instance, was only allowed to launch with a single degree program.

Shires emphasizes that the state of Texas was a “partner” through the authorization process. But it was still drawn out, “and time equals money,” he says. “That’s one of the really big lessons about starting new universities. It’s a very expensive process.”

Texas was at least open to the idea of a new university. Many other states are indifferent to new colleges at best, and the state authorization system is an afterthought. According to researcher Molly Hall-Martin, some states have just one full-time staff member devoted to authorizing new colleges and universities. In the median state, funding for the state authorizer amounts to just 0.04 percent of total state support for higher education. Many institutions quietly complain that they receive little help from state governments in navigating the authorization process and that authorizers are unresponsive to their questions.

In some cases, once a new college has authorization from the state government, the institution can stop there. But most of the time, colleges must take an additional step: accreditation. Recognition from an accreditor is required for federal funding, and graduate schools typically only accept students who have graduated from an accredited college. To be competitive, new schools need both federal funding and the assurance that their graduates will be eligible for grad school. Moreover, most state authorizers require schools to be accredited or on a path to accreditation as a condition of initial authorization. So, in practical terms, state authorization is only the first hurdle aspiring universities need to clear.

The Accreditation Headache

Accreditation is an odd system. The government has essentially outsourced to private organizations not only regulatory responsibility but also the role of gatekeeping access to taxpayer dollars.

Accreditors first formed in the 19th century as voluntary associations to help schools develop and share best practices. But over the years, both states and the federal government came to rely on accreditors to determine which colleges have the right to exist.

The federal government requires colleges to be accredited to access some of the more than $110 billion per year in grant and loan aid. While some colleges have managed to get by without federal funding, it’s hard for most to be competitive without it. But even setting aside the issue of federal aid, forgoing accreditation is not an option for most aspiring schools. Thirty-nine state governments, including Texas, require degree-granting colleges to have accreditation as a condition of authorization.

The University of Austin is not yet accredited. While the school received initial authorization from THECB in October 2023, Texas requires new schools to secure full accreditation from a recognized agency within eight years. UATX started the process of seeking accreditation this year. (The school has not yet disclosed which accreditors it is considering.) It hopes to have full accreditation, and become eligible for federal funding, in four to seven years.

“You need millions of dollars in your pocket to [receive] accreditation,” says Shires. “We have invested significantly in people who can navigate the accreditation process.” Shires himself is one of those people, having previously helped Pepperdine University in California launch its first online program. While UATX can afford the costs associated with accreditation, Shires notes that the resources being devoted to that process could otherwise be allotted to teaching.

Even long-established colleges must devote considerable resources to accreditation. Each accreditation cycle costs a college north of $300,000, estimates researcher PJ Woolston, now a vice chancellor at Indiana University. These expenses include direct costs such as membership dues, outlays for conducting a comprehensive self-study, and having to pay for accreditation-agency employees to visit and evaluate the campus. But the more significant component of these costs, according to Woolston, are the indirect expenses incurred from having faculty, administrators, staff, and students spend time on the accreditation process.

Accreditation and re-accreditation typically demand the involvement of dozens of these individuals, amounting to thousands of person-hours. “The cost in time is much more of a burden than the financial cost,” commented one college administrator Woolston surveyed. “There is a constant and looming presence of accreditation regarding much of what we do,” observed another.

Schools that lack the national profile and considerable resources of UATX will face a particularly steep climb. But for UATX, the biggest concern is that the requirements of accreditation could prevent the university from innovating to bring down costs and improve quality.

Shires says that accreditors tend to do a lot of benchmarking. “They ask, ‘What does your institution look like relative to everybody else?’” Accreditors may press UATX to make their college conform to the practices of similar schools: if a peer institution like Baylor University has X number of administrators in Office Y, then UATX might need to ensure it has the same number.

That approach does not dovetail with the UATX model. “We’re trying to look different than other institutions—to blow up the departmentalized administrative process and create a more coherent whole,” Shires notes. “It’s very important to us that we’re allowed to hold on to that mission, and that we’re not going to be expected to go out and match whatever Baylor or UT is doing.”

UATX’s policies on faculty present another possible conflict point with accreditors. The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, an accreditor which has historically overseen Texas universities, requires the applicant institution to justify “the qualifications of its faculty members” and implement “appropriate policies and procedures for preserving and protecting academic freedom.” Traditionally, universities have satisfied these obligations through terminal-degree requirements and tenure, but UATX plans to address them through other means. For instance, faculty members will have a central role in the school’s governance, giving them more power to preserve their intellectual freedom, even in the absence of tenure. An independent panel—an academic “supreme court” in the words of Niall Ferguson—will protect students and employees who believe their academic freedom has been violated. But UATX’s alternative policies in these areas could face heavy scrutiny from the school’s eventual accreditor.

It would be far easier, from a regulatory perspective, for UATX simply to do things the way they’ve traditionally been done. Most accreditation commissions, which decide whether to recognize new institutions, are stacked with representatives of colleges that are already accredited by those agencies. As a result, accreditation decisions are made with an eye toward what incumbent universities are already doing. Aspiring schools must effectively receive permission from their potential competitors in order to operate.

The burdens of accreditation might be justified if accreditors effectively enforced best practices that ensured student outcomes are satisfactory. But analyses have found that accreditors seldom discipline colleges for performing poorly on objective metrics such as graduation rates. They also countenance thousands of degree programs where students tend not to earn back the cost of tuition. It’s not clear that accreditation is effective at protecting students from low-quality higher education, even as it keeps new institutions out of the market.

Why We Need More Colleges

State authorization and accreditation represent steep barriers to entering the higher education market. Moreover, the market for traditional higher education is dominated by colleges and universities that have existed for decades, if not centuries. Among those attending nonprofit, degree-granting colleges, 98 percent of undergraduates go to a school that formed before 2000, according to federal databases. More than 90 percent attend a school that formed before 1980.

In 1990, there were 3,216 degree-granting, nonprofit colleges in the U.S. By 2021, that number had slipped down slightly to 3,208. But over the same three decades, the ranks of undergraduate students enrolled in those colleges increased from 11.8 million to 14.7 million, a rise of 25 percent.

Economic theory teaches us that a surge in demand for a product or service should induce more providers to enter the market, limiting long-run price increases. But the rise in demand for traditional higher education has not triggered an influx of new schools. Instead, students crowd into existing schools. Admissions rates have declined, and schools have gained more pricing power. The stunning rise in college tuition over the last three decades is in large part a byproduct of this constrained market.

It may seem odd to worry about barriers to entry in higher education, given that college enrollment is now declining and several colleges have closed their doors. One big reason for falling enrollment is disillusionment: a majority of Americans no longer believe a four-year college degree is worth the cost. A surge of new institutions, with cheaper models and a more reliable value proposition, could attract students back to college.

Existing schools have not increased capacity and programs to provide students with the types of education they want most. Students typically tell pollsters that they attend college to secure a better job and increase their wages. Consistent with these findings, the popularity of high-paying majors such as engineering and computer science has been increasing.

But schools have not expanded those majors enough to meet demand; instead, universities have restricted the number of students who can declare them. A study by economists Zachary Bleemer and Aashish Mehta reveals that among five high-earning majors (computer science, economics, finance, mechanical engineering, and nursing), three-quarters of departments at America’s top 25 public universities impose binding limits on the number of students who can choose the major. These restrictions are only becoming more common. Students shut out of those majors must choose less lucrative fields—and face a major salary penalty.

The problem even extends to community colleges. Economist Michel Grosz has shown that when local labor-market demand increases for a particular occupation, more students enroll at community colleges to train for that occupation. However, the schools themselves do not respond by adding course sections or faculty positions in the relevant discipline, and this failure to adapt constrains their capacity to meet students’ needs.

New colleges could theoretically satisfy student demand for education in fast-growing fields. Innovation often comes from outside the established players in a market. Magazines proclaimed Nokia’s bricklike cell phones the “most successful brand in history” until Apple came along with the world’s first smartphone. But in contrast to the freewheeling technology sector, the higher education market is virtually closed to new entrants who might shake things up. It will remain so unless policymakers tackle the sector’s formidable entry barriers.

A More Dynamic Market

Starting a new university takes the better part of a decade, sustained commitment from its founders, and anywhere from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. The supporters of UATX should be optimistic that the institution will succeed at becoming a full-fledged university. But genuine and lasting change in higher education will require competitive pressure from a plethora of new institutions, not just a handful.

At the same time, state authorizers do have a role to play in ensuring institutions adopt appropriate consumer protections so students don’t fall victim to scams—particularly if those institutions receive taxpayer money. Obligating schools to adopt tuition-refund policies and requiring that they contribute to funds that make students whole if a school closes—as many state authorizers currently do—are practices that should continue.

But other aspects of state authorization are ripe for reform. Scholars Andrew Kelly, Kevin James, and Rooney Columbus call on authorizers to move away from their “input-based” approach that assesses “whether [an educational] provider mimics traditional models with fidelity.” Instead, schools should supply basic documentation of their plans, demonstrate financial capacity, and agree to consumer protections. Beyond that, authorizers shouldn’t dictate how to be a college. After a school has been active for a few years, authorizers should consider its performance record when making reauthorization decisions.

State governments should also decouple state authorization from accreditation, the most burdensome aspect of higher-education regulation and the most hostile to innovation. An aspiring school that does not wish to seek accreditation or federal funding should still be allowed to exist. As noted earlier, when state authorizers require accreditation as a condition of authorization, they force fledgling universities to ask permission from their would-be competitors—a setup that is obviously a detriment to dynamism.

The standards for a school to tap into taxpayer funding should be somewhat higher than the standards for state authorization. But that doesn’t mean the federal government should continue relying on accreditors to gatekeep access to federal grants and loans. Congress should explore allowing unaccredited institutions with a strong track record of student outcomes to access federal funding, conditional on continued good performance.

The University of Austin’s founders believe that society cannot wait for higher education to solve its own problems. While their case illustrates the hope that disruption may improve the American college experience, it has also illuminated the artificial barriers that hold back competition in the higher education market.

UATX may well succeed. But one new university is not enough.

Preston Cooper is a senior fellow in higher education policy at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.

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

Cooper, P. (2024). A New Hope for Higher Education: Regulatory red tape has tangled the launch of the University of Austin, but motivated founders are cutting through it. Education Next, 24(3), 40-47.

Socrates, who said “All I know is that I know nothing,” is a role model for Pano Kanelos, president of the new University of Austin. Socrates never stopped asking questions, even when the Athenian elite charged him with impiety and corrupting the youth of the city-state.

“Socrates was very disagreeable,” says Michael Shellenberger, who will teach about politics, censorship, and free speech at the private university. “People hated him so much they decided he had to die.”

The University of Austin, which will admit its first class of 100 undergraduates in fall 2024, hopes to create a “pluralistic community” devoted to “argument and inquiry,” says Kanelos, a Shakespeare scholar who headed St. John’s College in Maryland, which is known for its “great books” curriculum.

“It’s easier to build something new” than to change existing institutions, says Shellenberger. The author of San Fransicko and Apocalypse Never, he started on “the extreme left” but became a “hard to classify” pro-nuclear environmentalist. “The moment is right,” he says.

One might say the moment is perfect. The rich have revolted: “Pissed-off billionaires” and miffed millionaires are pledging not to give any more money to Harvard, Penn, Dartmouth, and other elite universities. They’re urging wealthy friends to close their checkbooks, too.

While most of these disenchanted alumni hope to return their alma maters to their original academic mission, others want to start fresh. What if there were a new university with no DEI administrators, no tenured professors, no dorms named after “problematic” donors of yore, no baggage?

A “heterodox” group including historian Niall Ferguson, writer Bari Weiss, biologist Heather Heying, and entrepreneur Joe Lonsdale came up with the idea for a new kind of university during the pandemic. Among advisers and potential faculty are social psychologist Jonathan Haidt; economists Glenn Loury, Tyler Cowen, and Deirdre McCloskey; writer and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali; playwright David Mamet; columnist Sohrab Ahmari; writer and social critic Caitlin Flanagan; philosophers Peter Boghossian and Kathleen Stock; and legal scholar and activist Nadine Strossen.

Many on the left see the University of Austin as a reactionary political enterprise or perhaps The Revenge of the Canceled. “Everyone is trying to drag us into the culture war,” says Kanelos. He’s determined to resist. He doesn’t want to run an “anti-woke” university or establish a haven for conservatives or libertarians or Christians or . . . well, anyone.

University of Austin students, who will be chosen on the basis of test scores, grades, and a willingness to take a chance on something new, will not be offered intellectual comfort.

“True learning is uncomfortable,” says Shellenberger. “If you’re comfortable, you’re probably not learning.”

The University of Austin raised $230 million in two years from 2,600 donors, including 113 “founders” who gave “six- to eight-figure gifts,” according to Kanelos, putting the university’s developers way ahead of their fundraising goals.

Since the start of the Ivy donor revolt, “we’ve seen a shift in funding” from established universities to alternatives, says Kanelos. “Someone who gives us $10 million isn’t giving to their alma mater.”

Thanks to its donors, UATX will offer four tuition-free years to its “founding class” of 100 undergraduates. About 2,500 students have applied.

For subsequent classes, Kanelos hopes tuition will be $32,000—half of what Harvard charges.

He hopes to launch a lean, efficient, teaching-centric institution. There will be no leafy campus, no quad or bell tower, and, of course, no football team.

The new university is renting space in a historic downtown landmark, the Scarbrough Building, which once housed a department store.

Students will live downtown in shared apartments—they’ll do their own cooking—and shuttle to their classes. They’re expected to start their own clubs and activities.

While teaching will be face-to-face, most administrative and support jobs will be outsourced to a hub in Guatemala to keep costs down.

The University of Austin has provisional accreditation from the state of Texas, but it needed 1,800 pages of documents to start the accreditation cycle. In Texas, a would-be university must define its mission, submit a financial plan, and show that it can fulfill it. In addition, a new university must explain how it will assess its success, explain its governance plan, and describe its admissions criteria, facilities, and so on.

Until the university is fully accredited, which won’t happen until the first class graduates, students won’t be eligible for federal or state financial aid, such as Pell Grants for lower-income students. That makes it hard for a new university to recruit students—unless it has generous donors to fund financial aid.

The University of Austin will not admit students based on race, gender, or socioeconomic status. That sort of diversity is not a goal. The university wants “intellectual pluralism,” creativity, leadership, and “commitment to our principles” of inquiry, says Kanelos. And students must be prepared for academic rigor as shown by their high school grades, class rank, and test scores.

The University of Austin has tested its appeal by offering a summer program it calls Forbidden Courses—so named “because higher education has made it difficult to inquire openly into vexing questions with honesty and without fear of shame,” according to the UATX website. Kanelos says that the program has drawn young people with diverse ideas and backgrounds.

In their first two years, University of Austin undergraduates will take interdisciplinary “intellectual foundations” courses in philosophy, history, literature, quantitative reasoning, and science.

The program is not unlike the great-books curriculum at St. John’s, says Kanelos. But St. John’s is all great books for four years. In the second two years at the University of Austin, students will choose a focal area of study and work on “applying knowledge to solve broad-based problems.” He hopes students will work on projects with local think tanks, companies, and civic and governmental groups.

As the home of Texas’s flagship university, the state capitol, and a thriving tech sector, Austin offers a lot of learning opportunities.

If all goes well, UATX will enroll 200 students in the second year and will get to 1,000 students in four years, Kanelos says. “Then we’ll decide where to go from there.”

Small University, Big Impact?

The University of Austin can’t change the nation’s academic “monoculture” on its own, but it can be an “extraordinarily significant” first step, says Frederick Hess, education policy director at the American Enterprise Institute. “It proves what’s possible, plants a flag, and provides a welcoming, scholarly home for influential heterodox scholars.”

One of the founders, Niall Ferguson, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, explained in National Affairs how the new university’s constitution aims to protect freedom to learn and freedom to teach.

He proposed a tripartite division of powers with the university president as the executive, the board of trustees as the legislative branch, and an independent judicial panel appointed to protect academic freedom, free speech, and other rights.

Professors will not be offered tenure, Ferguson writes. “We believe this no longer protects academic freedom but merely creates perverse incentives. In many cases, it breeds conformism before the award of tenure and indolence after it.”

The University of Austin will have no faculty senate, he adds. “We do not believe the most skilled employees at an institution should play the part of legislature—a role that properly belongs to the board of trustees.”

In addition, the criteria for admission, graduation, hiring, and promotion are “strictly without regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, political affiliation, or religious faith.”

The university will not take positions on political issues, concludes Ferguson, who will join the faculty.

Fifteen to 20 professors will be selected from almost 1,000 applications, says Curtis Guilbot, the chief operations officer. “The quality of faculty applicants has been exceptional.”

Among the hires announced are economists Robert Topel and Kevin M. Murphy from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and Morgan Marietta, who resigned as chair of the political science department at the University of Texas at Arlington after he was told not to schedule events without prior approval (a discussion he led on Israel and Palestine was disrupted by pro-Palestinian demonstrators).

The University of Austin is not the only new academic venture in town. Elon Musk, who moved to Texas in 2020, plans to spend $100 million to create a K–12 school in Austin focused on math, science, and engineering and, eventually, start a university.

“He’s not giving the money to us,” said Kanelos in a December 2023 interview. “Just as well.” Kanelos no doubt suspects that it’s hard to stay independent when you get too close to a multi-billionaire.

A Difficult Undertaking

Starting a new college is a daunting enterprise. Just ask Stanley Fish, who was recently involved in launching Ralston College in Savannah. “It took about a decade of fundraising and planning and gift-giving,” Fish said in a Chronicle of Higher Education interview.

Ralston hopes to “inspire a movement of intellectual freedom and courage,” wrote Stephen Blackwood, the president, in a 2021 article in The Federalist. “Ralston does not seek to be the conservative David to the leftist Goliath. Our goal is education, not indoctrination.”

But so far, Ralston, which is seeking accreditation, offers only a one-year master’s in liberal arts.

The University of Austin has larger ambitions, more financial support, and excellent timing. The zeitgeist is a-changing. It’s likely to recruit students and faculty, teach courses, award degrees, and win accreditation. But will it be seen as a place of discussion, debate, and inquiry—or just “anti-woke?”

Joanne Jacobs is a freelance education writer and blogger (joannejacobs.com) based in California.

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

Jacobs, J. (2024). Can the New University of Austin Revive the Culture of Inquiry in Higher Education? Its founders seek to build a scholarly home for pluralism without creating a haven for the “anti-woke.” Education Next, 24(3), 48-51.

When it comes to digital technology, educators and school systems haven’t historically been fleet of foot. But artificial intelligence is partially bucking the trend. Many teachers are embracing it, even as school systems follow form and are moving slowly, or barely at all.

Among the myriad ways school systems can respond, there are two obvious poor choices. On one end of the spectrum, they could turn entirely away from AI—which districts like New York City, Los Angeles, and Seattle initially moved to do. On the other, they could rush to use AI for its own sake rather than for a clear educational purpose. There’s plenty of pressure to put AI in the classroom—both from vendors hawking AI products and superintendents wanting to show bold leadership. It would be all too easy for districts to jump on the AI trend and repeat the mistakes of the past. Remember fads like open classrooms in the 1970s and whole language in the 80s?

AI isn’t like CD-ROMs—it’s a rapidly evolving, transformational technology. School systems should act quickly but strategically to find a sensible, educationally sound path. The best policies will integrate AI with intentionality and help students and schools make progress over the long haul.

What’s the best way forward? Don’t focus on AI. Focus on the problems that matter—and see where AI can help.

Initially Adrift

District responses to AI have been all over the map, and many districts have lurched from one approach to another. Several big-city districts banned ChatGPT almost immediately after it was launched in November 2022. But months later, most had rolled back their bans and instead started to encourage the use of AI.

For example, Walla Walla Public Schools in Washington State initially banned ChatGPT. Then, the district repealed the policy and trained its teachers in how to use AI tools.

“[I was] a little bit red-faced, a little bit embarrassed that we had blocked [ChatGPT] in the spring,” Keith Ross, the district’s director of technology and information services, told a local-news outlet. “[It] really shed light that we need to not wait on this and get moving and find out how to supply the tool to the students.”

Recent surveys of teachers and administrators reveal similar contradictions. In an EdWeek Research Center survey conducted in late 2023, about one in five teachers said their district lacked clear policies regarding AI products, and the same share reported that students are not allowed to use it. That same survey also found that more than half of teachers believe that AI usage in school will grow next year.

A survey of district technology leaders by edtech company eSpark in November 2023 found that only 4 percent of districts had a formal, documented policy governing the use of AI. Thirty-nine percent of respondents said their districts were working on one, but 58 percent said their districts had yet to start developing such a policy. Meanwhile, 87 percent of district technology leaders reported they participated in a webinar or presentation about AI in schools in the past 6 months. Some 52 percent said their teachers were independently incorporating AI into their practice, but only 9 percent said they were doing something systematic with AI.

It’s no wonder why. The AI product landscape is teeming with new options for teachers to try, and few have been thoroughly evaluated by their districts. The barriers to entry to creating an AI education startup are extremely low right now—even if the sustainability and impact of such efforts are open questions. According to Reach Capital, a venture capital firm specializing in education companies, there were at least 280 education tools that “incorporate generative AI as a core engine of their product” as of September 2023. More are emerging every month, and many offer “freemium” access so that teachers can try them for free.

Along with ChatGPT, free AI tools for teachers like MagicSchool and Ethiqly have become integral to the daily work of Rachel Morey, who teaches English Language Arts at Walnut Creek Middle School in the suburbs of Erie, PA. She has used these programs to “brainstorm lesson plans, write tests, create worksheets, adapt texts to meet the needs of diverse learners,” she said, as well as to support students in writing essays and delivering feedback. One of the biggest appeals of AI, she said, is how it helps her save time.

Tools and Guidance Emerge

How can districts close the policy and practice gap? An important first step is safeguarding sensitive student and teacher data and ensuring that clear guidelines are in place regarding plagiarism and academic work. These are separate issues from how schools actually use AI and draw on sophisticated technological and legal expertise. Right now, rather than focusing on detailed specifics—which is almost impossible given how quickly AI is evolving—districts need to level-up and focus on key principles to help educators, students, and administrators use AI-powered products responsibly.

These are complex questions, but districts do not need to figure it all out on their own. In October 2023, the Consortium for School Networking, a professional association for school technology administrators, and the Council of the Great City Schools jointly published a “K–12 Generative AI Readiness Checklist.” The detailed questionnaire covers AI readiness from a half-dozen views, including leadership, data, operational, and legal readiness, and was developed in partnership with Amazon Web Services.

That same month, TeachAI published its “AI Guidance for Schools Toolkit.” The initiative was created by more than 60 individuals, governments, and organizations, including Code.org, ETS, the International Society for Technology in Education, Khan Academy, and the World Economic Forum. Its three-part framework for implementing AI in schools, which starts with guidance and policy to address the risks to learning that AI poses, notes that “the first step should be ensuring that AI use complies with existing security and privacy policies, providing guidance to students and staff on topics such as the opportunities and risks of AI, and clarifying responsible and prohibited uses of AI tools, especially uses that require human review and those related to academic integrity.”

States have gotten in the game as well. The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction, for example, released guidance that prods districts to “review current EdTech providers deploying generative AI to vet their safety, privacy, reliability, and efficacy, to determine if they are appropriate to be used for your school, and which users they will be open to based on their Terms of Service and school or district policies.” Ohio published a five-part AI Toolkit for school districts, which it created with the aiEDU nonprofit organization.

Principles to Design a Path to Progress

Despite the slow pace of district-level policies, it’s also reasonable to worry that districts may move too quickly and rush to use AI without intention, just to say they are doing something with it. According to Scott Muri, superintendent of Ector County Independent School District in Texas, “What’s missing from [several of the frameworks and conversations] around AI is the vision. What are we trying to do or achieve? Where are we going?”

As education thought leader Tom Vander Ark said, “Schools need to shift the primary question from ‘how do we do integrate AI into our school’ to ‘what does great learning look like and how can we use AI to support that? And what kind of work can students do with smart tools?’”

The Readiness Checklist framework thankfully starts there, as the first question asks, “Does the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) align to achieving your district’s mission, vision, goals, and values?” This isn’t a rhetorical question. The answer may be no.

The risks here are great. Far too often, districts base edtech questions on a search for technology for its own sake. School systems should not frame their efforts as an “AI initiative” unless the focus is how to prepare students for a world with AI or to make sure that schools know how to safeguard against its downsides. Instead, leaders should follow a tried-and-true design thinking process to successfully innovate and put AI to its best use.

That means starting with the problem the district needs to solve and the goal it seeks to achieve. Leaders should ask, is what they’ve identified a priority? Some problems relate to serving mainstream students in core subjects, while others arise because of gaps at the margins, such as not offering a particular elective. Both areas are worthy of innovation. But schools shouldn’t embrace a classroom technology unless it’s saving teachers time, extending their reach, or deepening their understanding of their students.

With the problem or goal identified, school systems then need to be specific about what success would look like. How would they know if they had made progress? What’s the measure they would use?

From there, the focus should be identifying the student and teacher experiences needed to make progress toward the goal. And only then should schools consider the physical and virtual setup to deliver those experiences. In other words, the “stuff”—the content, curriculum, analog and digital technologies, including those powered by AI—should come at the end of the process, not the beginning.

By considering a potential role for AI within this greater context, schools can avoid succumbing to a short-lived fad without sitting on their hands and watching the world pass them by. In these early years of our AI-powered futures, the goal should be measured investments that will stand the test of time.

Michael B. Horn is an executive editor of Education Next, co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and author of From Reopen to Reinvent.

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

Horn, M.B. (2024). AI Is Officially Here, There, Everywhere, and Nowhere: Districts playing catch-up can still adopt sound policies for artificial intelligence. Education Next, 24(3), 80-83.