In November 2023 we, at Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, released a new state-by-state ranking of the performance of charter school students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the Nation’s Report Card. The ranking is based on charter students’ scores on 24 NAEP tests of math and reading administered between 2009 and 2019. Ours is the first ranking of charter student performance on the same set of tests administered to samples of all students throughout the United States.

For the most part, the ranking has been well received. The head of the KIPP Foundation, the nation’s largest charter school network, says in one news report that the results “confirm our experience.” The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools comments that “the new data are ‘sobering in many respects,’ showing that charter schools in many places have ‘room to grow.’” And, of course, the ranking has been received enthusiastically by policymakers in states like Alaska, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma—all of which came in at the top end of the standings. Even middle- to bottom-ranking states have not chosen to criticize the ranking procedures—though one charter-school advocate who did not like the below-average placement of his home state, objected on the rather bizarre grounds that “[o]nly a randomly selected sample of … students take the NAEP test,” a denial of the reliability of an approach regularly employed by the U.S. Census Bureau.

But in a recent blog post, Matthew Ladner, executive editor of NextSteps, a publication of the school-choice advocacy group Step Up For Students, has expressed his own doubts about our findings. He says we failed to adjust for the share of charter students who are in special education programs or are English Language Learners, we relied on information that fluctuates from one test to the next, and that charter students should have been ranked on state proficiency tests instead of the NAEP.

These criticisms either are wrong, mislead, or fail to take into account what was said in the technical version of the paper published in the Journal of School Choice.

We take particular exception to the erroneous claims that we “were unable to control for the rates of special education and English Language Learner status” on the NAEP. Those charges, if true, would be serious. But as reported in the abridged version that appeared in Education Next, scores are adjusted “to take into account the age of the test-taker, parents’ education levels, gender, ethnicity, English proficiency, disability status, eligibility for free and reduced school lunch, student-reported access to books and computers at home, and location [emphasis added].” In the unabridged version, we inform readers that eligibility for special education and English Language Learner status is ascertained by NAEP from school administrative records.

Ladner misleads when he notes that math scores of Texas 8th grade charter students tested by NAEP fluctuated substantially between 2017 and 2019. Although that is certainly correct, it is the very reason we use information from multiple tests over an extended period. As we say in the technical paper, “By combining results from 24 tests over an 11-year period, the chances of obtaining reliable results are greatly enhanced.”

Ladner argues it would be preferable to use data from the Stanford Education Data Archives, or SEDA, a source that provides student performance on every state’s proficiency tests. We in fact report a ranking obtained from the SEDA data, which is calculated in a manner comparable to the one used to construct the PEPG ranking, in Table A.11 in the appendix to the paper available in the Journal of School Choice. That ranking correlates with the PEPG ranking at the 0.7 level, which suggests the two data sources yield broadly similar results. As we discuss in our article, however, the NAEP tests are preferable because they allow for a ranking of students’ scores on the same set of tests. Ranking states based on SEDA data requires the strong assumption that state tests may all be placed on the same scale. Also, state proficiency tests are high-stakes tests used to evaluate both charter schools and their teachers, providing incentives to manipulate test results. NAEP is a low-stakes test that is not used for student, teacher, or school evaluations. Lastly, SEDA excludes over 32 percent of all charter schools from its sample. By contrast, PEPG’s NAEP sample includes over 99 percent of all charter student observations in NAEP.

But Ladner would have us use the problematic SEDA test data because SEDA reports changes in student performance in each school district and charter school from one year to the next. That requires yet another assumption: that there is no change in the composition of a school cohort from one year to the next, a particularly strong assumption for a school of choice.

As we concluded in both versions of the paper, “the PEPG rankings are not the last word on charter-school quality.” We are hopeful that assessments of charter school quality will continue to improve in the coming years. But we can only make progress if criticism is accurate and straightforward.

Paul E. Peterson is a professor of government at Harvard University, director of its Program on Education Policy and Governance, and senior editor at Education Next. M. Danish Shakeel is professor and the director of the E. G. West Centre for Education Policy at the University of Buckingham, U.K.

Rankings and Results

The strongest academic performance from charter-school students is in No. 1-ranked Alaska, at 32 percent of a standard deviation above the average charter score nationwide, followed by Colorado and Massachusetts, then by New Hampshire, New York, Oklahoma, and New Jersey (see Figure 1). The lowest-ranked charter performance is in Hawaii, at 54 percent of a standard deviation below the national average, followed by Tennessee, Michigan, Oregon, and Pennsylvania.

Alaska’s high ranking for charter-school student achievement may seem surprising given its low ranking for NAEP performance by all public-school students. In a 2019 analysis by the Urban Institute, Alaska ranked at or near the bottom in both reading and math in grades 4 and 8. It is possible that results are skewed in some way by the challenge of controlling for Alaska’s distinctive indigenous population, which makes up about 20 percent of K–12 students. However, Stanford economist Caroline Hoxby found Alaska among the top three states in an analysis conducted on scores in 2003. Further, Alaska’s charter achievement ranks seventh when no adjustments are made for background characteristics. Charter student performance in Alaska seems to deserve its ranking in the top tier.

In looking at the five lowest-ranking states, Hawaii’s very poor performance is skewed downward by NAEP’s incorporation of indigenous Hawaiian population and other Pacific Islanders into the broad “Asian” category, a sizeable share of the charter student population (see “Does Hawaii Make the Case for Religious Charters?,” features, Winter 2024). If the analysis is limited to the years 2011 to 2019, indigenous Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders can be classified separately. When this is done for those years, Hawaii’s performance shifts to –35 percent of a standard deviation, and the state’s score resembles that of Tennessee.

We then estimate differences in test-score performance between students of various racial and ethnic groups in each state, while still adjusting for other background characteristics. States vary in the degree to which the performance of white charter students exceeds that of Black and Hispanic ones (see Figures 2 and 3). The gap between Black and white charter-school students’ test scores is more than a full standard deviation, or roughly equivalent to three-and-one-half years of learning, in D.C. and five states: Missouri, Wisconsin, Delaware, Michigan, and Maryland. By comparison, that gap is equivalent to about two-and-one-half years of learning in Oklahoma, Arizona, New York, Florida, and Illinois.

We find the largest score differences between white and Hispanic students in D.C., Pennsylvania, Delaware, Georgia, Idaho, and Massachusetts. States with the least divergence in white-Hispanic scores are Oklahoma, Louisiana, Illinois, Florida, and Ohio, where scores differ by roughly one to one-and-a-third years of learning.

Oklahoma and Florida have among the smallest disparities between white charter students and both Black and Hispanic charter students. By contrast, D.C. and Delaware have exceptionally large differences between those student groups. These differences may be a function of which students opt to enroll in charter schools or some other mechanism not captured by observed student characteristics. Or they may reflect divergent charter practices.

Comparison to Statewide Rankings

How closely do the PEPG state rankings mirror similar efforts to rank states based on student achievement across all public schools? We might expect strong correlations, as charter student performance could be affected by a state’s educational climate, including family and community support for schools and students as well as the talents and training of its teachers.

To explore this possibility, we calculate the relationship between PEPG rankings for charter students with state rankings made by the Urban Institute for student achievement at all public schools. Importantly, the comparison is for performance on the same tests for the same period, and the adjustments for family background characteristics are virtually identical.

The rankings for charters and for all public-school students are only modestly correlated (see Figure 4). Massachusetts, New Jersey, Colorado, and Florida have similarly high rankings on both. At the other end of the distribution, California sits at the 24th position in both standings. But the rankings for other states differ sharply. Texas, Pennsylvania, and Indiana are ranked 2, 10, and 12 on the Urban Institute list but land at 15, 31, and 20, respectively, in the PEPG ranking. Conversely, Oklahoma is ranked 6th and Utah is ranked 9th in the PEPG rankings, but these states rank 21st and 32nd, respectively, on the Urban Institute’s list. In short, charter-school performance is not simply a function of the educational environment of the state as a whole.

A Close Look at CREDO

Another state-level ranking of charter schools warrants detailed discussion. In a June 2023 report, the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University ranked 29 states by the academic performance of their charter schools from 2014 to 2019. This ranking is based on state test results and compares charter students’ performance, adjusted for prior-year test scores and student background characteristics, to that of students at nearby district schools. This average difference approach to assessing charter performance diverges significantly from the PEPG yardstick, which ranks states by the average level of charter performance, adjusted for student background.

CREDO rankings would nonetheless resemble the ones reported by PEPG if average student achievement were identical at all district schools throughout a state and the country as a whole. Since that is not the case, CREDO rankings are affected as much by scores at district schools as by scores at charters. This is not a mere hypothetical possibility. CREDO finds that test scores for Black students at charter schools showed they “had 35 days more growth in a school year in reading and 29 days in math” relative to comparable students in nearby district schools, and Hispanic students “grew an extra 30 days in reading and 19 additional days in math.”

Meanwhile, white charter students do no better in reading than white students at district schools, and they perform worse in math by 24 days of learning. CREDO also finds better outcomes for charter schools in cities than suburbs—test scores for students at urban charters showed 29 additional days of growth per year in reading and 28 additional days in math. Suburban charters did not perform significantly better than district schools in math but had “stronger growth in reading” amounting to 14 additional days of learning.

These findings could indicate that Black, Hispanic, and urban students attend higher-quality charter schools than those available to white and suburban students. But an alternative interpretation is more likely: White and suburban students have access to higher-quality district schools than those available to Blacks, Hispanics, and city residents. CREDO’s state ranking is useful in considering how the presence of charters affects the choices available to students in each state, but it does not order states by the performance levels of charter students, as the PEPG rankings do.

Impacts of Innovations

The specifics of each state’s charter law and regulations differ substantially, helping the charter sector live up to the “laboratory” principle. This sets the stage for a variety of comparisons looking at which aspects of charter school governance might contribute to student success.

For example, the type of agency granted the power to authorize charters ranges from the state board of education to local school districts to mayoral offices. Accountability requirements vary from tight, ongoing monitoring to nearly none. The saturation of the charter sector is similarly diverse—in states like Arizona, California, and Florida, 12 percent or more students attend a charter compared to 3 percent or less in Maryland, Mississippi, and New Hampshire. Charter funding differs as well, both among and within states, based on revenues and regulations set by federal, state, and local agencies and authorizers. In 2019, charter-school revenues per pupil ranged from $27,825 in D.C. to $6,890 in Oklahoma.

On some widely debated topics, we find little support for either side of the dialogue. For example, we find no higher levels of achievement in states with a larger percentage of public-school students attending charters. Nor do we find a correlation between charter student achievement and the age of the charter school, whether a state permits collective bargaining, or the level of per-pupil funding charter schools receive within a state.

We do find differences when looking at some of the innovative features of charter schools, including authorizing agencies, management structures, and whether schools have an academic or programmatic specialization.

For example, charter student performance varies with the type of authorizer that granted its charter. Students whose charter schools are authorized by a state education agency earn higher scores on NAEP than students whose schools were authorized by school districts and comparable local agencies. Compared to charter schools authorized by a state education agency, student achievement is 9 percent of a standard deviation lower at charter schools authorized by local education agencies like school districts, 10 percent lower at charter schools authorized by independent statewide agencies, 15 percent lower at schools authorized by non-education entities like a mayor’s office, and 19 percent lower at charter schools authorized by higher education institutions.

These results should not be interpreted as showing a causal connection between type of authorizer and student outcomes. Still, it might be noted that state education agencies have decades of experience at overseeing educational systems, an advantage not matched by any other type of authorizer. Local school districts do not authorize as effective charters as do state offices, but they outperform agencies that have had no prior experience in the field of education. Perhaps Helen Keller was right when she said, “Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened . . . and success achieved.”

We also find notable differences in student achievement between schools based on their management model. These fall into three categories: freestanding or standalone schools; schools run by nonprofit charter management organizations or networks like KIPP Foundation and BASIS Charter Schools; and schools run by for-profit education management organizations, such as Academia and ACCEL Schools.

Some 55 percent of the students in our sample attend freestanding, independent charter schools—the classic charter type, led by a small team, that is one of the thousand flowers expected to bloom. Another 23 percent of students attend charters that are part of nonprofit networks or management organizations, and 22 percent of the sample are at schools run by for-profit entities.

Compared to students at for-profit and freestanding, independent charters, students at charters that are part of a nonprofit network score 11 to 16 percent of a standard deviation higher on NAEP. This may be because networked charters benefit from an association with a larger entity, or perhaps because successful charters expand beyond a single school.

For-profit schools are arguably the most controversial component of the charter sector. Charter critic Diane Ravitch has argued that “our schools will not improve if we expect them to act like private, profit-seeking enterprises,” and in 2020, the Democratic Party platform proposed a ban on charter schools run by for-profit entities (see “Ban For-Profit Charters? Campaign issue collides with Covid-era classroom reality”, feature, Winter 2021).

Why do students at for-profit schools earn relatively lower scores on NAEP than at networked charters? For-profit organizations may launch charters where circumstances are more problematic, or they may find operations more challenging when faced with heavy political criticism and threats of closure and government regulation. Or possibly the profit motive is indeed inconsistent with higher student performance, as critics have alleged.

Our main purpose in ranking states by the performance of their charter students is to focus public and policymaker attention on the provision of high-quality schools, the purpose of charter legislation from its very beginning. Our second purpose is to supplement current state-level rankings of the charter-school environment and focus attention on outcomes, not simply state policies and procedures. Although previous rankings document the variety of environments in which charter schools operate, they do not report student achievement measured by a national test common to public schools across the country.

However, the PEPG rankings are not the last word on charter-school quality. We are not able to track year-by-year trends in charter quality within states, as the number of charter student test scores for any given year are too few for precise estimation. We have no information on student performance at virtual charters, as NAEP only monitors student performance at brick-and-mortar school sites. Also, these rankings are based on assessments of student performances in 4th and 8th grade, which excludes any insights as to charter contributions to early childhood and preschool education or high school or career and technical training programs. Finally, NAEP data are observational, not experimental, so causal inferences are not warranted.

It should also be kept in mind that these data are based upon an 11-year period ending in 2019, the eve of a pandemic that closed many charter and district schools for more than a year. Student performance was dramatically affected by the event, and charter enrollment appears to have increased substantially since then. The data reported here stand as a baseline against which future measurement of charter performance in the aftermath of that event may be compared—an especially important measure given the continued growth of the sector.

Paul E. Peterson is a professor of government at Harvard University, director of its Program on Education Policy and Governance, and senior editor at Education Next. M. Danish Shakeel is professor and the director of the E. G. West Centre for Education Policy at the University of Buckingham, U.K. An unabridged version of this paper has been published by the Journal of School Choice (2023).

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

Peterson, P.E., and Shakeel, M.D. (2024). The Nation’s Charter Report Card: First-ever state ranking of charter student performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Education Next, 24(1), 24-33.

The post-pandemic generation—to be dubbed, perhaps, the Coronials—wrestles with fears, emotional distress, and social isolation. Bullying, chronic absenteeism, dropping out, drug use, shoplifting, and even suicide are on the rise. Device-staring replaces people-watching. Independence, energy, and entrepreneurship seem in scarce supply. With the social world shaking beneath their feet, district school teachers and leaders are easing academic standards, recruiting social workers, and emphasizing social and emotional learning.

Few public educators are openly asking for divine help, but that, too, could change. The Texas legislature is considering legislation that would allow local districts to recruit chaplains to “provide support, services, and programs for students” in public schools. A charter authorizer in Oklahoma has given the go-ahead for opening an online Catholic charter school in 2024, invoking the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, in Carson v. Makin, that government funds may not be denied to religious entities if granted to secular ones. Still, the Sooner State is not the soonest to consider allowing religious instruction at a charter school. That honor belongs to Hawaii, where charter schools are seeking connections to the gods deeply embedded in Hawaiian culture and tradition.

This may come as a surprise to observers of Hawaii’s political alignments. Just as Hawaiian skies glow with a luminous blue (aouli), and its enveloping ocean gleams a darker hue (kai uli), state politics display a blue so deep we have yet to learn the equivalent Hawaiian word. Yet many public charter schools in the state are explicitly religious. For more than two decades, students at Hawaiian-focused schools have offered chants and prayers to the pantheon of gods who rule over skies, seas, and earth, including to the volcanic god, Pelehonuamea (“she who shapes the sacred land”), popularly known as Madam Pele.

Prayers begin the school day as part of protocol, a series of songs (mele), chants (oli), prayers (pule), and homilies (‘ōlelo no‘eau) reminiscent of morning chapel or classroom prayers at a Catholic or Evangelical Protestant school. Upon arrival, students declare their readiness to learn by requesting teacher permission to enter their classrooms. Embarrassed tardy students must chant a similar request before the assembled community.

On the occasion we visited one immersion charter school on the island of Hawaii—also known as the Big Island—boys and girls, neatly divided from one another, chanted their pule while standing perfectly erect, à la George W. Bush. (At the wish of the immersion schools we visited, we are not identifying the schools by name.) A class of 4th graders visiting from Maui, a bit less correct in posture, faced them at the door of the school throughout the 20-minute protocol, complete with chanted oli, ukulele-accompanied mele, and˛ōlelo delivered by faculty, students, and the school director on the importance of learning one’s heritage. The protocol was chanted in Hawaiian, as the curriculum at immersion charter schools is conveyed entirely in the indigenous tongue, even though nearly everyone on the islands speaks conventional English. That was the required language of instruction from the end of the 19th century, when the U.S. asserted its control over the islands, until 1986.

Gods make their presence felt on the Big Island, an isle so young it keeps growing. In late 2022, Mauna Loa erupted, pouring molten lava down the mountain for 16 miles, coming within striking distance of Saddle Road, the major thoroughfare between the island’s leeward and windward sides. In January 2023, Madam Pele’s home, Halema‘uma‘u, spewed fountains of lava 160 feet high, reminding everyone that in 2018 the volcano had poured forth a profusion of ‘a‘ā (stony lava) and pāhoehoe (smooth lava) that destroyed rain forests, roads, homes, and the Kua O Ka Lā charter school. Most recently, nearly 100 people lost their lives to wildfire on Maui’s dry side.

But why are students at charter schools reciting traditional prayers in Hawaiian? How did immersion charters emerge? How do their character-building practices, with their morning protocols, shape school culture and functioning? How do they survive in a state governed by a political party better known for its advocacy of strict separation between church and state?

We do not have all the answers. But one of us has studied and worked closely with the charter schools since they were founded. The other brings a mainland perspective enriched by brief visits to two charter schools that immerse students in the Hawaiian language and two that instruct students in English but are nonetheless infused with indigenous cultural traditions.

Hawaiian Renaissance

At the time when the earth became hot
At the time when the heavens turned about
At the time when the sun was darkened . . .
The intense darkness, the deep darkness
Darkness of the sun, darkness of the night
Nothing but night

So begins Kumulipo, the revered Hawaiian creation chant. “Nothing but night” expresses well the state of Hawaiian culture in 1970, about three-quarters of a century after Queen Lili‘uokalani surrendered her sacred lands to pro-American insurgents and the islands were annexed by the United States. To assimilate and acculturate a multiethnic population of Japanese, Chinese, and European immigrants, the government required that schools teach standard English, and the islands became celebrated as an integrationist nirvana. But the indigenous population paid a high price when asked to give up its language, the incubator and transmitter of so much of its cultural heritage. Attached to the land but resistant to work in the cane fields, native Hawaiians were pushed to the periphery, trailing all other ethnic groups in income, education, health, and longevity.

Then came the Hawaiian Renaissance of the late 20th century, when the indigenous population and its advocates acquired greater political influence. Protestors succeeded in convincing the U.S. Navy to give up the island of Kaho‘olawe, which the military once used for bombing and nuclear testing exercises. Farmers refused to make way for a large development in the Waiahole-Waikane valley in Oahu. Traditional Hawaiian songs and legends found their way into mainstream popular music. The law banning instruction in Hawaiian was repealed, and the language was finally offered in some of the islands’ public schools, typically as an additional subject for those who were interested. It was at immersion charter schools that the movement reached its fullest expression.

Immersion

Immersion has a different meaning in Hawaii than it does at most bilingual charter schools on the mainland. At the latter, immersion consists of dual instruction in both English and the native tongue spoken at home by recently arrived newcomers. In Hawaii, immersion means instruction conducted only in the Hawaiian language, which is seldom spoken at home. The goal is not to open the door to the mainstream language but to sustain a heritage that has been pushed to the periphery.

One may wonder whether such immersion programs prepare young people for life and work in an English-speaking society, but as a tool for cultural preservation, the strategy has many advantages. Both immersion schools we visited are enjoying rising enrollments, with hundreds of students pressing the school’s physical capacities, substantial waiting lists, strong leadership, and a stable teaching staff. You cannot teach a new language without high expectations and devoted teaching. And students benefit doubly from the instruction in Hawaiian, since learning another language can also enhance comprehension of the structure underpinning one’s original tongue.

Clearly, the immersion schools have an élan that other charter schools might hope to emulate. Administrators say that only one or two new teachers leave each year. A senior at one of the schools told us that his teachers, “except for the new ones,” have been there since he matriculated in preschool. New teachers are needed as the schools expand, of course, and at one of the schools, a few senior teachers have left to take positions at Kamehameha, a private, multi-campus school that serves children of Hawaiian descent (see sidebar). Others have accepted leadership positions at immersion charters on other islands.

Principals say the earlier a student begins at an immersion school, the better. Hawaii’s charter law lets the schools give enrollment preference to younger students, and parents of older applicants are counseled that language learning is more difficult beyond a certain age. Neither immersion school typically admits a child beyond the age of seven, though an exception was made for a passionate young person desperate to retrieve his heritage language.

For the school, the advantage of early recruitment can hardly be overstated. The child quickly adapts to school culture, parents connect to teachers, the dress code is accepted, and students learn early the practice of “talking story,” the Hawaiian way of conversing thoughtfully and showing mutual respect when issues arise. Our student guide at one school said, “I feel sorry for the kids who can’t come here.”

At both immersion schools we visited, we observed especially large preschool classes. The tiny tots at one school chanted and listened to the visiting 4th graders from Maui with as much composure as could be expected of preschoolers. A few knew the chants well, and the rest followed along. The worst error was committed by one of your authors, who, until corrected, lined up on the female visitors’ side of the room.

Our student guide said that children never receive explicit instruction in the chants they perform. Rather, they follow teachers and other students until they master the language and gradually come to understand the chants’ meanings. According to a faculty member in the Hawaiian Studies program at the University of Hawaii at Hilo—an immersion program itself—immersion students have a fluency with the Hawaiian language well beyond that of students who learn it as a second language at an English-speaking school; but, having learned by rote, immersion students are more likely to make grammatical errors.

Families of students at immersion charter schools show their commitment by arranging for their child’s transportation, purchasing the school uniform, and covering costs for extracurricular activities. Still, not all parents are devotees of the Hawaiian Renaissance. Some families calculate that an immersion experience in elementary school enhances chances for acceptance at Kamehameha, which gives priority to those with demonstrated cultural awareness. Others simply prefer the immersion schools’ emphasis on community and character building.

Are immersion students learning the skills needed to survive and prosper in contemporary society? We are told that most graduates go on to college. And Shawn Kana‘iaupuni, a sociologist who is now director of planning at Kamehameha Schools in Honolulu, reports that, despite low performance upon entry, students at Hawaiian-focused schools showed greater progress on state standardized tests administered between 2003 and 2006 than comparable students at the state’s traditional public schools. Whether that edge still exists cannot be ascertained by looking at state testing data. Many parents ask that their child not be tested, and administrators, aware that performance on standardized tests is not one of the schools’ strong points, do not seem inclined to press the point.

A few parents seek exceptions to other rules. One parent explained that her boy no longer wanted to participate in protocol. “That’s fine,” said the principal, “there is no need to participate in protocol. This is a school of choice. There are plenty of other schools your child may attend.” The boy decided to stay. He was not eager to attend a school administered by the Hawai‘i State Department of Education.

The Department of Education

Those who think school districts and local school boards should be abolished will find Hawaii the paradise travel agents claim it to be. The governor appoints the one and only board of education that governs the Department of Education, or DOE, which in turn operates all traditional public schools from its headquarters in Honolulu. The board also appoints the state’s one and only charter school authorizer. Currently, Hawaii has 37 charter schools serving about 12,000 students, or approximately 7 percent of the state’s public-school enrollment.

The DOE has a collective bargaining agreement with the Hawaii State Teachers Association, which represents all DOE and charter-school teachers. In both sectors, teachers are licensed by the state and compensated according to a single salary and benefit schedule. The DOE assigns teachers to the schools it operates, but charter schools may recruit their own teaching staff. Teachers at DOE schools can switch to a charter school and remain at the same level on the salary schedule. If they choose to return to a DOE school, they also stay at the same level.

Charters do not necessarily receive the same per-pupil funding levels as DOE schools, because the state legislature determines a lump-sum allocation for all charters, and the money is distributed among charters on a per-pupil basis. Charters face a particular lack of funding for transportation, special education, other ancillary activities, and, of greatest import, land acquisition and capital expenditure.

DOE schools in the town of Hilo (population about 45,000) are large, impersonal, featureless, pale-yellow brick structures apparently built with Pacific winds and storms foremost in mind. By comparison, the charter schools we visited resembled tents in a forest.

The Hawaiian Renaissance has barely touched DOE’s educational mission. Since its founding, DOE’s principal goal has been the integration of a multiplicity of cultures under an English-only umbrella. Small Hawaiian-focused programs were initiated within DOE in response to Renaissance pressures, but when given the opportunity to separate themselves from DOE into charter schools, these programs chose autonomy and flexibility over stable physical facilities.

For its part, DOE was pleased to see them depart.

Sacred Land

Charters across the United States struggle to find adequate facilities for their schools, but the competition for space is even more intense on an island in the middle of the ocean. Nothing illustrates this point better than the fate of Kua O Ka Lā, a non-immersion charter school serving indigenous families in a rural area near Hilo. In 2002 the school’s founders leased 600 acres of oceanfront property owned by the Bishop estate (see sidebar). Students studied its rainforest vegetation, lava soil, and geothermally warmed ponds, which were on occasion used as swimming holes. Kua O Ka Lā had clearly found the right place for a Hawaiian-focused school. Its enrollment grew to 282 students during the school’s first 16 years.

Then, in 2018, Pelehonuamea lost her temper. The volcanic forces that had warmed the ponds destroyed both Kua O Ka Lā and the home of one of its principal benefactors. The school turned to the Hilo Boy’s and Girl’s Club for temporary space, making it possible to finish the school year. But the challenge of finding a permanent space forced a shutdown of the high school and a permanent shift to online learning for the middle school. “It was very hard to find a space for 282 kids at the time,” Susie Osborne, the school’s founder and development director, told the Hawaii Tribune-Herald. “When we lost our campus in Puna to the eruption, we had some transitional sites, but settled at the Nani Mau Botanical Gardens.”

One of the immersion schools we visited offered classes within a DOE building when it first began a small program of instruction in the indigenous language, but after receiving a charter it was pressed to shift to its own facility. After a prolonged battle, it left DOE in 2013 for quarters that a Tribune-Herald reporter found abysmally primitive:

[The school] has few permanent classrooms and many of the meeting and teaching spaces lack walls of any sort. Sometimes they are sheltered by nothing but a tent-like canopy. At stormy moments teachers put class on hold as students crowd into the few sheltered spaces to avoid getting drenched.

Today, facilities for the 222 students at the school have at least tent flaps for all classrooms except for the roof-only stage used for morning protocol and hula dancing, but everyone has learned to forgo socks so their feet dry quickly. Your authors did not “avoid getting drenched” on the day we stopped by.

We could observe only the exterior of Ke Ana La‘ahana, the second non-immersion charter we visited, because on the day of our visit the school held classes in a nearby park where local Hawaiian practitioners taught the school’s 37 students the basics of knot-tying, taro preparation, hula dancing, and star tracking.

The other immersion school, well-funded and with close to 600 students from elementary through high school, has an intensively used campus. The high school officially remains part of the DOE, where it had begun as an immersion program, and its students still play on DOE sports teams. An administrator avows that DOE team instructors welcome immersion students, as they are more coachable. However, high school classes are located on a separate campus that also houses the elementary and middle charter school, making for ever-increasing density as enrollment has accelerated. Our student guide recalled playing on once-open spaces now built over with preschool units. High school classes are held in the gymnasium.

Religious Charters?

In sum, Hawaiian immersion schools make a case for religious practices at school—or at least for charters that emphasize community, character, and commitment rather than academic accomplishment alone. Whether or not the practices are truly religious is open to interpretation. An employee at an immersion school on the island of Kauai filed a complaint in 2015 with the Hawaii Civil Rights Commission, claiming a violation of the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution. Though the complaint has captured little attention, some school administrators prefer to avoid further controversy by emphasizing the strictly cultural aspects of the morning protocol. As one of them said, “There are cultural rituals built into these performances, but they should not be considered religious or compared to practices of prayer.” But in the words of the executive director of the Hawaii Charter Schools Commission, “The line isn’t always so clear. . . . If you are doing a chant that talks about the spirit and how to live, at what point would it cross the line to where it becomes prayer?”

However the spiritual practice is understood, many Hawaiian families are willing to sacrifice other educational amenities to have their child attend a school that emphasizes character development by recalling the gods and traditions of their ancestors. Despite crowded classrooms, despite modest playground space and minimal sports facilities, despite inadequate school budgets, despite family-dependent transportation, enrollments at the two immersion schools we visited continue to rise. Those instances do not seem exceptional. The growth of charter schools is posing such a challenge to DOE that the department constrains charters from exceeding their enrollment projections in any given year by more than 10 percent. If DOE is the Goliath that its reputation suggests, then Hawaiian charters must be Davids with slingshots.

The two English-speaking charter schools we visited that focus on the Hawaiian heritage are both suffering from enrollment declines, struggle to find adequate space, and have no guarantee of survival. From these two cases we do not conclude that an English-speaking approach is not viable. One non-immersion charter school in a nearby community is prospering. And Kua O Ka Lā’s survival despite volcanic destruction is testament to the personal courage and commitment of its founders. But the cohesiveness of the immersion schools, with their religious overtones, stands out.

To thrive on the mainland, religious charters will need to connect to the cultures and traditions of the populations they serve. They could do worse than to consider adopting a protocol as a way of unifying their community, strengthening ties to parents, and providing social and emotional support to what seems to be an increasingly distressed generation of children and adolescents. The successful immersion schools we visited were all led by talented and resourceful leaders of Hawaiian descent, some of them trained at Kamehameha and others at university-based Hawaiian language programs. Mainland educators could copy this model by drawing from the deep wells of their own religious and cultural traditions.

Sustaining tradition need not mean excessive attention to its ugly side. In Hawaii, many traditional practices are beset by questionable origins. Careful historians and anthropologists tell us that the indigenous caste system was so rigid no commoner could become a member of the nobility (ali‘i), that kapu (traditional norms and rules of conduct) required prostration by commoners before ali‘i, and that incest within the ruling elite was as pervasive on the Pacific islands as in ancient Egypt. We heard no such stories during our visit. Instead, Hawaiian-focused schools concentrate on the ancestral crossing of the Pacific Ocean in small boats with nothing more than the stars for guidance, the Hawaiian practice of “talking story” as a tool for tolerating differences and reaching compromises, and the beauty of traditional chants and dances. Mainland American schools might also recognize that children thrive on knowing the best, not just the worst, about their past.

Identity schools are almost by definition not statistically representative of the general population. We asked our hosts whether they were concerned that their schools might be ethnically segregated. “We are open to all that apply,” replied one. “We are socially diverse but not ethnically balanced,” another conceded. On the mainland, too, charters might better foster genuine equality of opportunity by developing strong identities with student traditions than by striving only for racial balance.

Finally, Hawaii highlights a fundamental defect in state charter policy: the too-frequent denial of state funding for land acquisition and capital costs. Schools need a stable place in which to build identities. Place is not an extraneous afterthought for a school, as if it were an accountant’s office that can simply shift files from one building to the next. Only a few charters have generous benefactors who can acquire land and construct buildings on their behalf. On the mainland, as in Hawaii, the lack of capital funding has left too many charters without adequate space for physical fitness programs, general assemblies, or even appropriately appointed classrooms. A number of small federal programs facilitate charter access to financial markets at reduced rates, but those funds are hardly sufficient to support the needs of 7,000 charter schools serving more than three million students.

Despite the challenges, immersion charters are prospering. A young professor explains why: “A language is a dialogue with the environment. . . . Being able to know . . . [a] couple dozen words for different types of rain that Hawaiian has, that English doesn’t . . . that’s something that’s . . . really meaningful to experience.” As the creation myth foretold:

Born was Expected-day, a female
Born was Midnight, born First-light
Opening-wide was their youngest
These were those who gave birth
The little ones, the older ones
Ever increasing in number

Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University as well as a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Nina Buchanan is professor emerita at the University of Hawaii Hilo.

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

Peterson, P.E., and Buchanan, N. (2024). Does Hawaii Make the Case for Religious Charters? Immersion charter schools in the Aloha State infuse native language, culture, and tradition. Education Next, 24(1), 16-23.

The Covid-19 pandemic prompted the largest disruption to American education in living memory. At the onset of the crisis in spring 2020, nearly every K–12 school, public and private, closed its doors. At the start of the next school year (see “Pandemic Parent Survey Finds Perverse Pattern,” features, Spring 2021), the decision to reopen for in-person instruction or to continue operating remotely varied widely among regions of the country, across school sectors—traditional district, charter, and private—and even from school to school in a given community. By the end of the 2020–21 academic year, most K–12 students were back in their classrooms (see “Parent Poll Reveals Support for Covid Safety Measures,” features, Winter 2022), but the emergence of new variants of the virus and strict quarantine rules continued to disrupt the day-to-day business of teaching and learning well into the 2021–22 school year.

Many observers and pundits opined that the great disruption could usher in an era of sweeping changes to the American education system. Would families flee the public sector in droves? Would homeschooling emerge as a viable option for many more children? Or would the crisis prompt greater investments in public education, increasing spending and expanding the publicly funded K–12 infrastructure downward in age to pre-kindergarten and upward to community college?

The pandemic also revealed that the partisan differences that define much of contemporary American politics run even deeper than many imagined, as opinions on Covid-related public-health measures—school closures, vaccines, face masks, and more—became inextricably tied to one’s political identity. Would the politics of education in the United States, with its long history of fractious but not necessarily partisan disagreements, be swept into the broader current of perpetual conflict between Democrats and Republicans? Did the last few years mark a great pivot point, signaling the emergence of two distinct, and distinctly partisan, views of how best to serve students?

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The results of the 16th annual Education Next survey, conducted in May 2022 with a nationally representative sample of 1,784 American adults (see the methodology sidebar for more details), complicate many of these grand prognostications. While last year’s survey revealed sharp changes in support for a variety of education reforms (see “Hunger for Stability Quells Appetite for Change,” features, Winter 2022), public opinion on most issues has since rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. There are, however, some important exceptions to this pattern. Americans’ perceptions of local school quality have declined since 2019, and support for homeschooling has risen over the course of the pandemic. Public enthusiasm for universal pre-K has increased dramatically, and support for higher teacher salaries is at its highest level in the survey’s history.

The Education Next survey also tells a more complex and nuanced story about the shifting relationship between political partisanship and public opinion on education issues. First, attitudes toward a series of longstanding debates are increasingly organized around political-party identification. Using Education Next survey data from 2007 to 2022, we reveal that the average difference in opinion between the two major parties has grown larger on many of the items we have tracked over the years. Second, we are witnessing the emergence of new issues that reflect exceptionally large partisan splits. Over the past two years, we have introduced questions about schools’ responses to the pandemic and recent debates about how to teach about the role of race in America’s past and present. In contrast to many of the education-policy topics that we have explored in prior iterations of the survey, respondents’ positions on these issues appear to map more directly to their partisan identities. However, there are notable exceptions to both patterns, resisting a simple narrative. Although rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans have diverged over time in their attitudes toward charter schools, members of the two parties continue to converge in their attitudes toward annual standardized testing. While the pandemic ushered in intense partisan disagreement over the benefits of face masks in schools, it enhanced bipartisan interest in the option for high school students to take some classes online. To say that the politics of education is increasingly partisan is not to say that it is exclusively partisan.

Public Opinion During the Pandemic

The Education Next survey found that certain school reforms, such as various forms of school choice, lost some favor at the peak of the pandemic but subsequently bounced back in the public’s esteem. Other concepts, such as mandatory standardized testing, have maintained favorability throughout. A majority of respondents now support increasing teacher salaries, even when they are told the average earnings of teachers in their state.

Perceptions of school quality. Despite the unprecedented disruptions to K–12 education, public evaluations of local and national school quality remained robust at the height of the Covid-19 crisis. In spring 2020, when schools across the country closed at the onset of the pandemic, 58% of Americans gave their local public schools a grade of an A or a B—only 2 percentage points down from the recent high of 60% in 2019, a statistically insignificant difference. Furthermore, 30% of Americans gave an A or a B grade to the public schools nationwide, the largest proportion recorded in the history of our survey. Two years later, as the pandemic and its attendant challenges persist, the public’s perceptions of school quality have slipped below pre-pandemic levels. Today, 52% of Americans give their local public schools an A or a B grade, and 22% give all schools nationwide a similarly high mark (see Figure 1).

School reform. Coinciding with these declines in confidence in the schools, support for various school reforms has ticked up from a pandemic low. Last year, we reported decreased public enthusiasm for a range of issues that spanned the ideological spectrum. Support for various forms of school choice dropped, as did support for free tuition to public colleges and universities. We concluded then that the public was still reeling from the enormous shock of the efforts to mitigate the spread of the virus and that the appetite for policy change of any kind was muted. As the public school system returns to a semblance of its former self, we are seeing public opinion on a variety of issues also returning to its pre-pandemic contours.

For example, support for charter schools ticked back up to 45% after lows of 39% in 2017 and 41% in 2021. Similarly, support for both universal vouchers (50%) and vouchers for low-income families (48%) has recovered from its 2021 levels (45% and 43%, respectively). Meanwhile, scholarships for low-income families funded by tax credits, which had 55% support in 2017 and 56% support a year ago, now enjoy the backing of 61% of Americans. On the opposite end of the political spectrum, support for making all public four-year and two-year colleges free to attend leapt back to 61% (from 43% in 2021) and 66% (from 60% in 2021), respectively.

Public enthusiasm for another pair of school choice reforms has also grown. Fifty-four percent of Americans favor allowing parents to homeschool their children, compared to 45% in 2017. Similarly, 47% of Americans now support education savings accounts—government-provided funds that can be used on educational expenses for families that choose not to send their child to a public school—compared to 37% in 2017.

Free preschool; online courses in high school. Back in 2014, we asked about government-funded universal pre-kindergarten (54% in favor) as well as government-funded pre-kindergarten for low-income families (62% in favor). Since then, support for both policies has risen: 71% of respondents back universal pre-K in 2022, and 72% support pre-K for low-income families.

A sizable majority of respondents (65%) say they would be willing to have a child of their own go through high school taking some academic courses online, although that support has declined from a high of 71% in spring 2020. The 2022 favorability rating, though, still represents a noteworthy increase from 2013, when 56% of respondents indicated their willingness to have their child take online high school classes.

Standardized testing.Throughout the pandemic, public support for annual standardized testing remained strong. In 2019, 74% of survey takers supported a federal requirement that all students be tested in math and reading each year in grades 3 to 8 and once in high school. Support for this requirement held steady at 71% and 72% in 2021 and 2022.

Social and emotional learning. The public’s opinions on the relative emphasis schools should place on academic performance has shifted sharply. In 2019, when asked how much schools should focus on students’ academic performance versus their social and emotional wellbeing, the public supported a 66% to 34% split in favor of academic performance. In 2021, as the pandemic continued to disrupt regular school operations, Americans divided almost evenly down the middle, with 52% preferring academic performance and 48% favoring social and emotional wellbeing. As some version of normalcy returns for most Americans, views on this question in 2022 have bounced back to 65%, nearly their pre-pandemic levels.

Education spending and teachers unions. Each year, we conduct a pair of survey experiments in which some respondents are randomly assigned generic questions intended to gauge their attitudes toward education spending in general and teacher salaries in particular, while other respondents, before answering the same questions, are randomly assigned to receive information about average per-pupil expenditures in their districts or average teacher salaries in their states. As seen in previous years, support for increased spending in general and support for higher teacher pay declines among respondents who receive information about current expenditures: to 48% from 59% with respect to overall spending and to 60% from 72% with respect to teacher salaries. In surveys before 2019, informing respondents of actual spending and salaries typically shifted support for boosting these spending categories from a majority to a minority position. Since 2019, however, support for increased teacher salaries—even when respondents are informed of actual compensation levels—has exceeded the majority threshold and is now at the highest level observed since our first survey in 2007. In contrast, positive evaluations of teachers unions remain unchanged since 2019 (43% in 2022). Much like public opinion regarding various reforms, attitudes toward increased spending and salaries and toward teachers unions dipped in 2021 but have since rebounded.

Specialized magnet schools. This year, we also asked two new questions about specialized public high schools for high-performing students, such as Stuyvesant High School in New York City or Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Northern Virginia, whose admissions policies have attracted considerable attention and debate (see Figure 2). A majority (55%) support specialized public high schools, with 27% opposed and 17% expressing no opinion. Fully 62% of Americans think a test should be one factor among many in admissions decisions in places with such high schools. Only 17% think a test should be the sole factor, and a mere 7% think tests should play no role in the admissions process.

Mask mandates; teaching about racism. We also asked respondents for their opinions on two recent controversies: face mask mandates in schools to mitigate the spread of Covid-19 and the heightened attention in K–12 classrooms to racism as a part of the historical and contemporary American experience (see Figure 3). Neither support for (45%) nor opposition to (35%) face masks commands a majority, with the remainder taking a neutral position. Attitudes toward teaching about racism are also broadly distributed. A plurality of 39% thinks their local public schools are placing about the right amount of emphasis on slavery, racism, and other challenges faced by Black people in the United States. However, 35% of Americans think their local public schools place too little emphasis on these issues, while 27% think there is currently too much emphasis placed on them.

Both topics are subject to exceptionally large partisan disagreements. About 65% of Democrats support face mask mandates in schools, with 15% opposed. Among Republicans, the breakdown is essentially the reverse: 19% in support and 63% opposed. With respect to teaching about racism in the classroom, there is no meaningful distinction between the proportions of Democrats (37%) and Republicans (39%) who are content with their local schools’ current approach. The partisan difference appears when we consider those who are displeased with the status quo. Fully 54% of Democrats think their local schools are placing too little emphasis on racial matters, compared to 10% of Republicans. Meanwhile, 51% of Republicans think there is currently too much emphasis on racial matters, compared to 9% of Democrats.

Partisanship and Public Opinion over Time

While the divides between Democrats and Republicans on face masks and teaching about racism are eye-popping, they do not shed light on whether public opinion on education issues is growing more partisan in general or if these new issues are an exception to the rule. The Education Next survey offers a unique opportunity to explore the extent to which partisan differences have changed over time. We have a long tradition of repeating questions each year—with some items going all the way back to our inaugural survey in 2007—to track rising or falling public sentiment. We frequently pull from our polling archive to contextualize the current year’s results, and we described the long-term trends in detail in 2016 to mark the poll’s 10th anniversary (see “Ten-Year Trends in Public Opinion,” features, Winter 2017”). This year, we leverage this wealth of longitudinal public-opinion data to understand the evolving role of partisanship in the public’s attitudes toward education.

There are 15 survey items that have appeared in identical or near-identical forms over the course of at least 10 years. In Figure 4, we plot the absolute value of the partisan gap (the difference in support between Democrats and Republicans or the analogous difference for survey items that do not inquire about respondents’ support or opposition) for each item over time. We then fit a linear trend (the dotted line) to capture the average yearly rate of change in the partisan gap. The value m in the upper-left corner of each plot displays the slope of each line. This approach allows us to observe which issues have grown more partisan over time, which issues have held steady in this regard, and which issues have become less partisan.

Note that this approach does not provide evidence for or against the influence of a related—and often conflated—phenomenon: partisan polarization. Polarization refers to the extent to which people have adopted more extreme views relative to more centrist or moderate views (that is, a shift of opinion toward the poles at the expense of the middle). Growing partisan gaps could be the result of heightened polarization if Democrats and Republicans are systematically shifting from moderate positions (such as “neither support nor oppose” for many of the survey items) toward firm positions of support or opposition. However, growing partisan gaps could also be the result of greater internal consistency in each party (that is, rank-and-file Democrats increasingly expressing views that align with the conventional Democratic position, and likewise for Republicans), even if there is no greater tendency toward more extreme positions. The latter phenomenon is often referred to as partisan sorting.

The difference is not just academic. In the case of polarization, the potential middle ground is truly vanishing. In the case of sorting, the opportunity for compromise and consensus remains, but there may be strong institutional barriers to achieving it. Because our analysis here does not distinguish between the two, we argue only that public opinion on education is growing increasingly partisan.

Teachers and their unions. The biggest shifts in partisanship show up on the survey items that inquire about teachers and their unions. Democrats tend to be more supportive of higher salaries for teachers and typically view teachers unions more favorably than their Republican counterparts do. The partisan gap on teacher salaries has increased substantially over time. In the version of the question in which respondents are told the average teacher salaries in their states, the gap has increased by about 1 percentage point annually. In the version of the question without salary data, the gap has increased by about 0.9 percentage points per year.

Attitudes toward teachers unions have diverged even more dramatically. The partisan gap on views of teachers unions has seen a yearly increase of about 1.4 percentage points on average. In 2022, the difference between Democrats and Republicans in positive evaluations of teachers unions is nearly 40 percentage points (see Figure 5). As we consider the role of partisanship in relation to many of the longstanding debates in the politics of education, the largest changes appear to revolve around Democrats’ and Republicans’ shifting attitudes toward teachers, how much they ought to be compensated, and how much influence they ought to have over schools.

National academic standards. The political battle over the Common Core State Standards peaked as the Obama administration came to a close and the 2016 presidential election campaign began in earnest. Although support for the standards declined across the board as they encountered political resistance, Democrats remain more supportive of the Common Core than Republicans. However, the intensity displayed in debates over this issue—as exhibited by the large partisan gaps in the 2014, 2015, and 2016 iterations of the survey—was consistently more muted when we asked a question that did not mention the Common Core “brand” but simply referred to K–12 academic standards that were the same across states.

We can observe the same dynamic from a different perspective by examining the changing partisan gaps for the two versions of this question. In 2012 and 2013, before the standards became entangled in national politics, the partisan gap in support for the Common Core was only a few percentage points wide. However, over the next few years, this gap increased by about 0.9 percentage points annually. By contrast, the partisan gap for the generic question about national standards started smaller and only increased by about 0.2 percentage points per year.

Education spending. Our analysis also reveals moderate increases in partisanship for questions about overall education spending (which Democrats are more likely to want increased) and charter schools (which garner more support among Republicans). On the version of the education-spending question in which respondents are told average per-pupil expenditures in their local school districts, the partisan gap has increased by about 0.6 percentage points per year. On the version of the question that does not supply this information, the partisan gap has increased by a similar rate of about 0.7 percentage points per year.

Charter schools. The partisan gap on charter schools is growing slightly faster: about 0.8 percentage points annually. This conspicuous increase is unique among the various school-choice initiatives we have tracked over the years. However, support for the general concept of school choice is highly divisive, with 60% of Republicans, but only 41% of Democrats, expressing a favorable position.

Opinion on school quality. The public’s perceptions of school quality in their own communities and nationwide are also more partisan than they were in the first few years of the Education Next survey. Historically, the proportions of Democrats and Republicans who award their local public schools a grade of an A or a B have differed little or not at all. However, respondents’ assessments of their local schools have diverged along party lines by about 0.2 percentage points per year on average, with most of that change concentrated in the last two years as Republicans evaluated their local schools less positively than their Democratic counterparts.

By contrast, views of schools nationwide have shown larger differences along party lines over the years, with a slightly higher proportion of Democrats giving the nation’s schools an A or a B grade. The national assessments have diverged by about 0.3 percentage points per year on average. Although the annual shifts are modest, they reveal a growing role for partisanship over time in the public’s evaluations of the public school system.

Stability and convergence. Not every longstanding debate is increasingly shaped by partisanship. The partisan gap on annual testing—which has the support of more than 70% of both Democrats and Republicans—has actually been decreasing by about 0.3 percentage points per year on average. We also observe slight reductions in the partisan gaps on tax credit scholarships (0.2 percentage points per year) and universal vouchers (0.1 percentage points per year), as well as trivial increases in the partisan gaps on online classes in high school (0.1 percentage points per year) and low-income vouchers (0.1 percentage points per year).

In short, although partisanship may be playing an increasingly important role in public opinion on many education issues, this dynamic is not universal. With respect to attitudes toward online learning and some forms of school choice, the differences between Democrats and Republicans remain largely unchanged over the last decade. Attitudes toward annual testing have even begun to converge.

Newer topics. For some issues examined in our survey we have fewer historical data points, and the current magnitude of the partisan gap varies considerably among these issues. We observe relatively modest differences between Democrats and Republicans in their support for specialized high schools (4 percentage points), education savings accounts (6 percentage points), and how much schools should focus on students’ academic performance versus their social and emotional well-being (an 8-percentage-point difference in the average value assigned to academic performance). On the other end of the spectrum, we see potent partisan disagreements in support for face-mask mandates in schools (46 percentage points), free public four-year and two-year college (44 and 40 percentage points, respectively), teaching about racism in K–12 classrooms (a 42-percentage-point difference in the proportion indicating that local schools currently put “too much” emphasis on the issue), teachers’ right to strike (36 percentage points), low-income pre-K (36 percentage points), and universal pre-K (32 percentage points). Many of these issues are relatively new to the mainstream political agenda in the United States, suggesting that some elements of the contemporary debate have shifted toward territory that may be less amenable to the cross-party consensus building that has characterized education policymaking over the last few decades.

Conclusions

After holding steady during the last two disruptive and difficult years, the public’s perceptions of school quality—both close to home and around the country—have declined slightly. This shift has corresponded with an uptick in support for a variety of reforms that may have lost some of their luster during the pandemic as communities struggled to maintain even the status quo. As the country anxiously seeks to put the worst of the crisis behind it, public opinion on many of these proposed initiatives has reverted back to form.

But not everything is as it used to be. New issues have moved to the forefront of the education-policy debate, garnering unusually partisan reactions. Among the issues that have hardened the political battle lines are:

• the role of teachers unions
• Covid-19 mitigation measures
• efforts to expand the range of fully publicly funded education downward to pre-K and upward to college
• the form and content of K–12 instruction regarding race and racism

The rising role of partisanship in education politics is not merely a function of the recent emergence of exceptionally politicized issues. The public’s attitudes toward many longstanding education debates have also grown gradually but undeniably more partisan over the last two decades. There are exceptions to this pattern, and, as a whole, the field of education still appears to be riven by smaller partisan divides than many other domains of public policy and debate. However, despite the education-policy community’s long history of trying to keep political pressures at arm’s length, public opinion on education issues seems to be increasingly drawn into the powerful current of partisanship in contemporary American politics.

David M. Houston is assistant professor of education policy at George Mason University. Paul E. Peterson is Henry Lee Shattuck professor of government at Harvard University, director of Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG), and senior editor of Education Next. Martin R. West, the academic dean and Henry Lee Shattuck professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is deputy director of PEPG and editor-in-chief of Education Next.

 

More from the 2022 Education Next Survey: “Parental Anxieties over Student Learning Dissipate as Schools Relax Anti-Covid Measures“

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

Houston, D.M., Peterson, P.E., and West, M.R. (2023). Partisan Rifts Widen, Perceptions of School Quality Decline: Results from the 2022 Education Next survey of public opinion. Education Next, 23(1), 8-19.

“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach,” commented former Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe, a Democrat, while seeking a return to office in 2021. His Republican opponent, Glenn Youngkin, wove McAuliffe’s remark into a campaign that was making education its centerpiece. When Youngkin defeated McAuliffe in an upset, many pundits declared parent activism to be a deciding factor.

Virginia was hardly the only place where controversies over parent rights boiled over in the past year. Activists fed up with school closures, masking policies, and curricular choices interrupted school-board meetings around the nation. The National School Boards Association complained about threats directed at board members, provoking an investigation by the U.S. Attorney General. Three school-board members in San Francisco were defeated in a recall election after voting to rename Abraham Lincoln High School and eliminate the exam requirement for admission to prestigious Lowell High School (see “School Board Shakeup in San Francisco,” features, Fall 2022).

The parental protests, together with school responses to the Covid pandemic, acquired a partisan edge. Republican and Democratic governors regularly disagreed about the necessity of mask wearing, social distancing, and vaccinations for the young. The districts that kept school doors closed longest were usually located in Democratic-leaning places the media labels blue. The 18 states that enacted school-choice legislation in 2021 and 2022 are mostly tinted red, or Republican-leaning (see “School Choice Advances in the States,” features, Fall 2021).

How have American parents at large responded to these conflicts? Have measures designed to slow the Covid pandemic antagonized them? Have progressive attempts to introduce concepts rooted in Critical Race Theory into school curricula weakened parental attachments to district schools? Are more parents fleeing to alternative forms of schooling? Have education policy and practice become more partisan? We asked about these matters in the Education Next survey administered online to a nationally representative sample of parents of school-age children in May 2022 (for survey details, see methodology sidebar in our companion essay, “Partisan Rifts Widen, Perceptions of School Quality Decline,” features).

Our findings are mixed. On one hand, parents’ distress about their children’s academic and social-emotional wellbeing subsided sharply in spring 2022 from the heights reached in fall 2021, when many schools closed classrooms and shifted to online learning. For example, the percentage of children who have parents who say they are “very satisfied” with the instruction and activities provided by their child’s school increased to 48% from 31% between fall 2020 and spring 2022. We also find that parents of nearly two thirds of all schoolchildren are satisfied with their school’s approach to teaching about slavery, race, and racism. On the other hand, the percentage of parents giving their local schools a grade of A or B declined to 59% in 2022 from 64% in 2020. During this same period, the percentage of parents choosing an alternative to the traditional public school increased, and parents expressed higher levels of satisfaction with their child’s school if their student was attending a private or charter school rather than a district school.

Partisanship is fully apparent when parents report on their children’s behaviors, school policies, and their assessments of how measures taken by schools to combat Covid are affecting their children’s academic and social wellbeing. Children of Democratic parents in states that Joe Biden won in the 2020 election are more than twice as likely to be vaccinated than children of Republicans in states won by Donald Trump. Similarly, children in blue states were more likely than those in red states to be told they must wear a mask during the 2021–22 school year. According to their parents, children of Republicans were more likely than those of Democrats to have suffered, rather than benefitted, both academically and socially, from measures taken by schools to combat Covid. Children in blue states are more likely to attend a school where parents view fighting and bullying as a problem than those in red states. Republican parents are more likely to complain about how their child’s school approaches the topics of slavery and racism if they live in a blue state than a red state. The reverse is true for Democrats.

Signs of restlessness on the part of some families notwithstanding, the overall picture shows less change than media reports portray. A wholesale mass exodus from traditional public schools has not occurred. And despite partisan differences in responses to Covid, the parents of children in states both blue and red report less anxiety about their children’s academic and social progress than was the case two years earlier.

Student Enrollment by School Sector

“Where are the students? For a second straight year, school enrollment is dropping.”

“Declining enrollment clobbers California’s schools.”

“Enrollment Declines Haunt School Districts.”

These headlines from national and statewide news media are not misleading. The U.S. Department of Education, which releases enrollment data two to three years after events have occurred, says a decline of 1.6 million traditional-public-school and public-charter-school students occurred between fall 2019 and fall 2020. Burbio, an organization that tracks districts that account for 90% of all enrollments and on a faster timeline, reports that “nationally, middle school (grades 6–8) shows a 2.2% decline for 2021/22 versus 2020/21.”

Several factors are contributing to enrollment decline. The U.S. birth rate fell between 2014 and 2019, though a growth in immigrant families partially offsets that trend. Some parents kept preschool, kindergarten, and 1st-grade children at home when infection fears were rampant and school buildings were closed. A larger than typical share of adolescents dropped out when schools went digital and job opportunities proliferated.

Even among students who remained in school, the traditional public sector lost ground. Our polling data indicate that district-operated schools lost 4% of student enrollments to other types of schooling between 2020 and 2022. In spring 2020, 81% of schoolchildren were said by their parents to be enrolled in district schools. In November 2020, at the pandemic’s height, that percentage had tumbled to 72%. This 9-percentage-point drop might partly have been the result of actual sector shifts, but it is also likely that some parents were uncertain of how best to classify their child’s school when teaching was online. For whatever reason, the district share bounced back to 77% by the time of Education Next’s spring 2021 poll, when most district schools had resumed in-person instruction. Now, our current survey shows no further change in district enrollment as of spring 2022, leaving the district share 4 percentage points below what it had been two years earlier (see Figure 1). If that percentage is accurate, it means that nearly 2 million students have shifted from traditional public schools to alternative school arrangements.

All three of the alternatives to district schools—charter, private, and homeschool—appear to have gained from the shift away from the district school. The private-school share ticked up to 10% in 2022, as compared to 8% in spring 2020. The charter-school share climbed to 7% from 5% over the same period, while the homeschooling share edged upward to 7% from the surprisingly high 6% level registered in 2020, which itself had constituted a doubling of the 3% share in 2016 reported by the U.S. Department of Education. These percentages are all subject to survey error, but consistency over Education Next’s three most recent surveys, coupled with reports of enrollment declines from state and district agencies, as well as growth signals from the private, charter, and homeschooling sectors, suggest that a modest but significant shift is occurring in the choices families are making about the schools they want their children to attend. Still, there is no indication of wholesale abandonment of the traditional public school.

Parent Satisfaction and Assessment of Learning Loss

Some of the public rhetoric would have one think otherwise. “Now, there’s a new interest group—parents. They are never going to unsee what they saw in 2020 and 2021, and they’re going to fight to make sure they never feel powerless when it comes to their children’s education again,” opines Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children. Across the country, parent organizations are fighting to improve educational opportunities and outcomes for low-income students (see “Beyond Bake Sales,” features, Fall 2022). Former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, in her 2022 book Hostages No More, asserts that the “visionaries who have fought [the] fight [for education freedom] have gained potent new allies: the millions of American parents who are fed up with being considered nuisances and dismissed by the public school establishment.” It is true that, at the height of the pandemic, parental anxiety about their children’s education had intensified. But apprehension receded substantially by spring 2022.

Parents’ concerns likely diminished in part because schools relaxed policies designed to minimize Covid spread. Although parents of nearly 80% of children said they were required to wear masks at some point during the 2021–22 school year, by May 2022, only 11% of children were required to do so, according to their parents.

However, 44% of children still had not received a Covid vaccination by that time, according to their parents. The percentage who remained unvaccinated ranged from a high of 58% for children in kindergarten through 2nd grade, to 48% for those in 3rd through 5th grade, to 40% for those in middle school, down to 31% for high school students.

Differences in vaccination rates also varied with the political coloration of the child’s home state. Only 36% of students who have Republican parents and live in a red state had been vaccinated, as compared to 47% of those with Republican parents in a blue state, 63% of those with Democratic parents in a red state, and 77% of those with Democratic parents in a blue state (see Figure 2). The difference between a typical Republican in a red state and a typical Democrat in a blue state is greater than two-to-one.

Mask mandates also varied dramatically by partisanship: 34% of students whose parents are Republicans and live in red states were never required to mask up in the 2021–22 school year, as compared to 20% of those in blue states, 21% of those with Democratic parents living in red states, and 5% of those with Democratic parents living in blue states. However, mask mandates declined rapidly by the end of the school year nationwide. Only 14% of children of blue-state Democrats and 2% of children of red-state Republicans were said by their parents to be attending a school that still had a mask mandate as of May.

The relaxation of Covid measures coincided with a marked improvement in parents’ assessments of their children’s wellbeing. In November 2020, Education Next polling data revealed widespread parental worries about the learning loss, social isolation, emotional distress, and physical inactivity induced by school closures, online learning programs, and other measures designed to prevent Covid spread. By spring 2022, however, parental distress had subsided. At this time, only 30% of parents said they thought their child was learning “somewhat” or “a lot” less because of the pandemic, down from 60% in the fall of 2020 (see Figure 3). Similarly, the percentage of parents who thought the measures in place to prevent Covid spread were adversely affecting their child’s academic knowledge and skills fell to 24% in spring 2022 from 36% in fall 2020 (see Figure 4). In 2022, the parents of only 9% of students say they are not confident their child will “catch up” from Covid-related learning loss within a year or two; the parents of the rest either are confident the child will catch up (49% of students) or perceive no learning loss in the first place (43% of students).

Along these same lines, the percentage of students whose parents say Covid-mitigation measures are adversely affecting their child’s social relationships fell to 33% in 2022 from 51% in 2020. Parent perceptions of negative effects on emotional wellbeing fell to 31% of students from 41% over the same period. For physical fitness, the drop was to 26% from 44% of students.

When asked for a more general assessment, parents of 48% of students say in 2022 they are “very satisfied” with the instruction and activities provided at their child’s school, as compared to just 31% in late 2020. The percentage “somewhat” or “very” dissatisfied with the child’s schooling shrank to 11% from 23%.

Even so, Republicans remain considerably less sanguine than Democrats about the ongoing effects of measures taken by schools to fight Covid. Forty-four percent of the children of Democratic parents are said to have benefitted academically from these measures during the 2021–22 school year, and only 18% are said to have suffered from them. But among the children of Republican parents, only 24% are said to have benefitted, and 33% are said to have suffered. A similar pattern obtains for social relationships, emotional wellbeing, and physical fitness in blue states and red states alike. These partisan differences of opinion are especially striking given that the places where large numbers of Republicans reside tended to have less-aggressive mitigation measures in place. In short, the political orientations of parents shaped their assessments of the effects of school measures taken to mitigate Covid on their own children’s academic, social, emotional, and physical wellbeing.

Parent Perceptions by School Sector

Although parental anxiety about potential learning loss during the pandemic declined across the board over the past year, their residual concern varies with the type of school their children attend. Parents of 26% of district children say their children’s academic skills were adversely affected by anti-Covid measures, as compared to parents of 19% of children in private schools and of 15% in charter schools. According to parents, only 14% of private-school children were learning less because of the pandemic during the 2021–22 school year, as compared to 27% of children attending charter schools and 33% of children in the district sector. Small percentages of children have parents who do not think their child will catch up—10% of those at district schools, 5% at charters, and an even smaller percentage at private schools. Children of parents reporting negative effects on their social relationships range from a high of 35% for those in district schools to 29% and 28% for those attending private and charter schools, respectively. A similar pattern appeared when we inquired about the impact of anti-Covid measures on their child’s emotional wellbeing—33%, 29%, and 24% across the three sectors (ordered in the same way). Negative impacts on physical fitness are indicated by parents of 27% of district children, 23% of those in private schools, and 25% of those in charters.

Mask requirements also varied by sector. Only 19% of children in district schools were not required to wear a mask at any point during the school year, but 33% of those in private schools and 26% attending charter schools avoided that requirement. District schools had more-stringent mask requirements, even though they had higher vaccination rates than private schools. Parents report that 59% of district and charter students were vaccinated, but only 48% of those in private school were.

Bullying and Fighting in Schools

With many educators reporting an uptick in violence within schools as in-person instruction resumed, we also asked parents about their experiences with their own children’s schools. The parents of 40% of students say “fighting or bullying” was a problem at the child’s school in 2022, while the parents of 9% say it was a “serious” problem. Children living in blue states are more likely than those in red states to have parents who express concerns about fighting and bullying at school. According to parents, 43% of blue-state children face this problem, as compared to 35% of red-state children. This pattern is similar for children of both Republican and Democratic parents.

The parents of Black and Hispanic students are more likely than those of white students to view fighting and bullying as a problem in their child’s school. For 45% of Hispanic students and 44% of Black students, parents report fighting and bullying as a problem at their school, as compared to 37% of white students. For 16% of Black students, parents report that bullying and fighting are a “serious” problem, a rate nearly twice as high as those for Hispanic and white students.

There are also large differences across school sectors in the perception of fighting and bullying as problems. The parents of only 18% of private-school students report that they are problems, as compared to 30% of charter-school students and 43% of district students.

Instruction on Race

Allegations that Critical Race Theory had leapt from the academy into K–12 curricula stirred considerable controversy during the Virginia gubernatorial race, and many school districts across the country are reconsidering their approaches to teaching about slavery and race relations. To see what parents think, we asked them the following question:

“Some parents think their child’s school places too little emphasis on slavery, racism, and other challenges faced by Black people in the United States. Other parents think their child’s school places too much emphasis on these topics. What is your opinion?”

Most parents seem to be satisfied with the approach taken by their local school: The parents of 64% of children say their school gives “about the right amount” of emphasis to the topic. However, the parents of 25% of students think the topic is given “too little” emphasis and the parents of 11% of students think it is emphasized “too much.” The parents of half of Black students think the topic needs more attention, a view shared by parents of only 25% of Hispanic students and 17% of white students. An even larger difference was between students with Democratic parents and students with Republican parents; 37% of the Democratic parents think this topic is emphasized too little, while 19% of the Republican parents think it is given too much attention.

Parents with children in private schools are more likely than others to believe their child’s school has struck the right balance in this area. The parents of 76% of private-school students report that their child’s school places about the right amount of emphasis on this topic, as compared to 58% and 63% in the charter and district sectors, respectively. The parents of the 42% of charter-school students who are dissatisfied with their school’s approach are evenly split between those wanting more and those wanting less emphasis on this topic. As for district students, the parents of 26% want to see greater emphasis, while the parents of 11% want less.

Parental Support for School Choice

Over the past two years, at least 18 states enacted new laws introducing or expanding school-choice options, including relaxation of constraints on charter-school expansion and new and more-expansive tax-credit-funded scholarship and education-savings-account programs. These legislative shifts are echoed by certain shifts in parental opinion. Support for scholarships for low-income children funded by tax credits edged upward by 7 percentage points between 2019 and 2022 to reach 66% of parents. Education savings accounts, too, gained some ground. We inquired about education savings accounts by asking parents whether they favored state policies that provide parents who do not send their children to public school “with money they can spend only for educational expenses, such as private school tuition, tutoring and transportation.” The proportion of parents favoring the policy increased from 45% to 51% between 2017 and 2022. During this same period, support for charter schools rose from 44% to 51% and backing for a universal private-school voucher program increased from 52% to 57%. However, the gains for charters and vouchers predate the onset of the pandemic. When we asked parents whether they favor “school choice” in general (rather than any specific program), a 52% majority said they do and only 29% said they do not, with the remainder not taking a position either way.

In short, no major shifts in parental opinion with respect to school choice have occurred since the onset of the pandemic. Although tax credits and education savings accounts have gained traction, opinion with respect to charters and vouchers, the more familiar forms of school choice, remain much as they had been before Covid. Even in an age of pandemics and political unrest, change comes slowly in American education.

Conclusions

By spring 2022, schools in America had returned, for the most part, to normal practices. Schools were generally open for in-person learning, and masks were usually left at home. Parent satisfaction with schools had risen; parents were less fearful that their children were suffering learning loss. They were less concerned about how Covid-mitigation measures were affecting their children’s social relationships, emotional wellbeing, and physical fitness. They expressed satisfaction with the amount of attention schools were giving to the contentious issues of slavery, race, and racism.

Yet the educational system’s response to the pandemic had left a mark. School districts appear to have lost 4% of their share of K–12 enrollment—a sizable decline. Each of the other school sectors has been less severely disrupted by anti-Covid measures, and, perhaps for this reason, each gained a slightly larger slice of the enrollment pie. Public support for school-choice measures, especially tax-credit-funded scholarships and education savings accounts, increased modestly, though charter schools and vouchers registered no such gains. In other words, gradual change in education has taken place, and partisanship colored parental reaction to Covid measures in various ways, but changes in parental views about the schooling of their children have been nowhere near as dramatic as protagonists in the public debate over the American school would have one believe.

 

Paul E. Peterson is Henry Lee Shattuck Profes­sor of Government at Harvard University, director of Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG), and senior editor of Education Next. David M. Houston is assistant professor of education policy at George Mason University. Martin R. West, Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, is deputy director of PEPG and editor-in-chief of Education Next.

More from the 2022 Education Next Survey: “Partisan Rifts Widen, Perceptions of School Quality Decline: Results of the 2022 Education Next Survey of Public Opinion“

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

Peterson, P.E., Houston, D.M., and West, M.R. (2023). Parental Anxieties over Student Learning Dissipate as Schools Relax Anti-Covid Measures: But parent reports indicate some shift away from district schools to private, charter, and homeschooling alternatives. Education Next, 23(1), 20-27.

Has the achievement of U.S. students improved over the past half century? Have gaps between racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups widened or narrowed?

These and similar questions provoke near-constant conversation. But answers are uncertain, partly because research to date has yielded inconsistent findings. Here we bring together information from every nationally representative testing program consistently administered in the United States over the past 50 years to document trends in student achievement from 1971 to 2017, the last year for which detailed information is currently available.

Contrary to what you may have heard, average student achievement has been increasing for half a century. Across 7 million tests taken by U.S. students born between 1954 and 2007, math scores have grown by 95 percent of a standard deviation, or nearly four years’ worth of learning. Reading scores have grown by 20 percent of a standard deviation during that time, nearly one year’s worth of learning.

When we examine differences by student race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, longstanding assumptions about educational inequality start to falter. Black, Hispanic, and Asian students are improving far more quickly than their white classmates in elementary, middle, and high school. In elementary school, for example, reading scores for white students have grown by 9 percent of a standard deviation each decade, compared to 28 percent for Asian students, 19 percent for Black students, and 13 percent for Hispanic students. Students from low socioeconomic backgrounds also are progressing more quickly than their more advantaged peers in elementary and middle school. And for the most part, growth rates have remained steady throughout the past five decades.

Conventional wisdom downplays student progress and laments increasing achievement gaps between the have and have-nots. But as of 2017, steady growth was evident in reading and especially in math. While the seismic disruptions to young people’s development and education due to the Covid-19 pandemic have placed schools and communities in distress, the successes of the past may give educators confidence that today’s challenges can be overcome.

Bypassing Conventional Wisdom

Scholars and public intellectuals from all sides of the political spectrum have consistently made the opposite case. Dating back to 1983’s A Nation at Risk, debate over the state of public education in the United States often has portrayed schools as failing and American students as falling behind. Books like 2009’s The Dumbest Generation and 1994’s The Decline of Intelligence in America argued that young people were so entranced by technology that they failed to develop basic knowledge and skills.

Public understanding of inequality also has assumed that racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic gaps in student achievement are universal and growing. In 2011, research by Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon appeared to show a widening of the socioeconomic achievement gap over the past 70 years. In 2012, conservative Charles Murray argued that “the United States is stuck with a . . . growing lower class that is able to care for itself only sporadically and inconsistently” even as the “new upper class has continued to prosper as the dollar value of [its] talents . . . has continued to grow.” In 2015, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam wrote “rich Americans and poor Americans are living, learning, and raising children in increasingly separate and unequal worlds.” More recently, critiques by organizations like Black Lives Matter have identified racial inequality both inside and outside the classroom as a defining characteristic of American life.

But no study of student achievement over time has brought all the relevant data together in a systematic manner and assessed how these assumed trends are playing out. Our analysis does just that.

Our data consist of more than 7 million student test scores on 160 intertemporally linked math and reading tests administered to nationally representative samples of U.S. student cohorts born between 1954 and 2007 (see “Put to the Test“). By “intertemporally linked,” we mean that researchers in each of the testing programs have designed their tests to be comparable over time, by doing things such as repeating some of the same questions across different waves.

We estimate trends separately by testing program, subject, and grade level and report the median rather than average result to avoid giving undue importance to outliers, much as consensus projections of future economic growth typically use the median of predictions made by alternative economic models. We report changes in student achievement over time in standard deviation units. This statistic is best understood by noting that average performance differences between 4th- and 8th-grade students on the same test are roughly one standard deviation. Accordingly, we interpret a difference of 25 percent of a standard deviation as equivalent to one year of learning.

Achievement and the Flynn Effect

The surveys show a much steeper rise in math than reading performance (see Figure 1). In math, overall student performance rose by 19 percent of a standard deviation per decade, or 95 percent of a standard deviation over the course of 50 years—nearly four additional years’ worth of learning. In reading, however, the gains are only 4 percent of a standard deviation per decade, or 20 percent of a standard deviation over the same period.

The difference between the two subjects is puzzling. Mathematical knowledge and reasoning skills in the U.S. teaching force has long been a matter of concern. And mainstream math instruction in U.S. schools generally is considered inadequate relative to other developed countries, despite recent attempts to focus on developing mathematical understanding. Why is math achievement accelerating far more quickly than reading?

The answer, we believe, is found in recent research on human intelligence. Not long ago, intelligence quotient, or IQ, was considered a genetically determined constant that shifted only over the course of eons, as more intellectually and physically fit homo sapiens survived and procreated at higher rates. Then in the mid-1980s, James Flynn, a New Zealand political scientist, examined raw IQ data and found that scores were increasing by 3 points, or about 21 percent of a standard deviation, per decade. Though Flynn’s work was initially dismissed as an over-interpretation of limited information, his finding was replicated by many others.

In 2015, Jakob Pietschnig and Martin Voracek conducted a meta-analysis of 271 studies of IQ, involving 4 million people in 31 countries around the world over the course of more than a century. As Flynn did, they found growth in overall IQ scores. But they also distinguished between types of intelligence. This included crystallized knowledge, or the ability to synthesize and interpret observed relationships in the environment, which is rooted in facts, knowledge, and skills that can be recalled as needed. And it included fluid reasoning, or the ability to analyze abstract relationships, which is associated with recognizing patterns and applying logic to novel situations. In industrialized societies, for a period similar to the one covered by our study, they found that fluid reasoning grew by 15 percent of a standard deviation per decade compared to 3 percent for crystallized knowledge. This difference resembles what we observe in the achievement data: growth of 19 percent of a standard deviation per decade for math and 4 percent for reading.

That the growth rates for the two types of achievement and IQ parallel one another may be more than a coincidence. Reading draws heavily on crystallized knowledge of the observable world, and skillful readers can give meaning to words that denote features of their physical and social environment. In math, this type of knowledge is necessary to understand symbols such as 1, 2, and 3 or +, -, and =, but analyzing and manipulating relationships among symbols is more a function of fluid reasoning. Several studies have shown math performance to be more strongly associated than reading performance with higher levels of fluid reasoning. In addition, a longitudinal study of preschool children found emergent school vocabulary to be associated with gains in verbal intelligence, a form of crystallized knowledge, but not with gains in fluid reasoning.

In the meta-analysis, Pietschnig and Voracek point to the factors that affect brain development as the most likely explanation for differential growth in these types of intelligence. Studies in neurobiology and brain imaging have found that when environmental factors like nutrition, infections, air pollution, or lead poisoning damage the brain’s prefrontal cortex, it affects fluid reasoning, but not crystallized knowledge. The negative impact on brain development of, for example, growing up amid famine or war would appear to have the biggest impact on fluid reasoning intelligence, used for math, rather than crystalized knowledge, used for reading.

Over the past 100 years, mothers and babies from all social backgrounds across the world have enjoyed increasingly higher quality nutrition and less exposure to contagious diseases and other environmental risks. Pietschnig and Voracek find substantial growth in fluid reasoning and less growth in crystallized knowledge on every continent, with particularly large gains in Asia and Africa. If students’ performance on math tests depends more on fluid reasoning than crystallized knowledge, then the greater progress in math than reading may be due to environmental conditions when the brain is most malleable—in early childhood, or even before students are born.

The PISA Exception

The main exception to this pattern comes from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) given since 2000 to high-school students at age 15. On this test, and only on this test, both the overall trend and the math-reading comparison are the reverse of what we observe on all the other surveys. U.S. student performance declines over time, with steeper drops in math scores than in reading. In math, scores decline by 10 percent of a standard deviation per decade; in reading, they fall by 2 percent of a standard deviation per decade. This stands in sharp contradiction to student performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). There, we see large gains of 27 percent of a standard deviation per decade in math among middle-school students, who take the test in 8th grade. In addition, student performance improves by 19 percent of a standard deviation per decade on another math exam, the Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS). How can PISA obtain results so dramatically different from what other tests show? Is the PISA exam fundamentally flawed? Or is it measuring something different?

We cannot account for all differences among tests, but in our opinion, PISA math is as much a reading test as a math test. The goal of PISA is to measure a person’s preparation for life at age 15. It does not ask test-takers to merely solve mathematical problems, as do NAEP and TIMSS, but instead provides opportunities to apply mathematical skills to real-world situations. A 2018 analysis found that “more than two-thirds of the PISA mathematics items are independent of both mathematical results (theorems) and formulas.” A 2001 review found that 97 percent of PISA math items deal with real-life situations compared to only 48 percent of items in NAEP and 44 percent in TIMSS. Another analysis comparing the exams found that PISA questions often have more text, including extraneous information students should ignore, than NAEP questions. In addition, a 2009 study found “there is a very high correlation between PISA mathematics and PISA reading scores” and that “The overlap between document reading (e.g., graphs, charts, and tables) and data interpretation in mathematics becomes blurred.”

We do not pretend to know which testing program is administering the best exam. But we are quite certain that PISA is administering a decidedly different kind of math test, one that requires much more crystallized knowledge than other math tests.

Results by Social Group

Every test in our study shows a forward stride toward equality in student performance across race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic lines over the past half century (see Figure 2). The median rate of progress made by the average Black student exceeds that of the average white student by about 10 percent of a standard deviation per decade in both reading and math. Over 50 years, that amounts to about two years’ worth of learning, or about half the original learning gap between white and Black students. The disproportionate gains are largest for students in elementary school. They persist in middle school and, in diminished form, through the end of high school.

We don’t think this is due to outsized improvements in nutrition and medical care for Black children, because the gains are as great in reading as in math. It could be due to educationally beneficial changes in family income, parental education, and family size within the Black community. Other factors may also be at play, such as school desegregation, civil rights laws, early interventions like Head Start and other preschool programs, and compensatory education for low-income students. Regardless, the equity story is clearly positive, if still incomplete.

Hispanic student performance in math is similar: a steeper upward trend as compared to white students. However, gains in reading by Hispanic students, though still greater than the progress made by white students, are less pronounced than the math gains. This may be due to language barriers; about 78 percent of English language learners in the U.S. are Hispanic.

Overall, Asian students are making the most rapid gains in both subjects. Asian students have advanced by nearly two more years’ worth of learning in math and three more years’ worth of learning in reading than white students.

We also compare trends by socioeconomic status by building an index based on student reports of parents’ education as well as the number of possessions in the home. We compare achievement made by students coming from households in the top 25 percent and lowest 25 percent of the socioeconomic distribution. For all students, the achievement gap based on socioeconomic status closes by 3 percent of a standard deviation per decade in both reading and math.

The biggest gains occur in elementary school, where the gap closes over the 50-year period by 1.5 years’ worth of learning in math and three years’ worth in reading (see Figure 3). The differences shrink in middle school and are reversed in high school, where rates of progress by students in the top 25 percent modestly exceed those of students with the lowest socioeconomic status. The increase in the gap among the oldest students is 3 percent of a standard deviation per decade in math and 4 percent in reading.

In looking at low- and high-socioeconomic students within racial and ethnic groups, we see similar patterns for Black students in both subjects and for Hispanic students in math: achievement differences by socioeconomic background closing when students are tested at a younger age, but widening when students are tested toward the end of high school. Among Asian students, low-socioeconomic students continue to make greater progress than high-socioeconomic students in both subjects at all age levels.

What about income-based gaps in student achievement? In a widely circulated 2011 study, Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon found the income-achievement gap had increased dramatically over the past half century and more. However, the data upon which this claim rests are fragile, in that he relies for his conclusion upon results from disparate tests that are not linked and therefore are not necessarily comparable. To see whether trends from linked surveys support Reardon’s findings, we explore trends in achievement by the number and type of possessions students report as being in their homes, a plausible indicator of family income.

Overall, the evidence points in a direction opposite to Reardon’s findings, and results are qualitatively similar to the ones observed when estimated by the socioeconomic index. We find disproportionately larger gains for students in the lowest income quartile in both math and reading at younger ages. The difference is 5 percent of a standard deviation per decade in math and 6 percent in reading. However, we find that among students tested at the end of high school, the students from the highest quartile of the income distribution make greater progress than those from the lowest quartile by 6 percent of a standard deviation in math and 9 percent of a standard deviation in reading.

In sum, inferences about whether the size of the income gap, or the socioeconomic gap more generally, has increased or decreased depend largely on whether one places greater weight on tests administered to students in earlier grades or on trends for students tested as they reach the end of high school. For some, the high-school trend is most relevant, as it measures performance as students are finishing their schooling. For others, it is the least informative trend, as it could be subject to error if some older students are taking standardized tests less seriously in recent years or if rising graduation rates have broadened the pool of older students participating in the test.

But it is worth mentioning again that PISA stands out as an exception. It is the only test that shows much larger gains for U.S. high-school students from families in the lowest socioeconomic quartile than for those in the highest one. In math, the performance of the most advantaged 15-year-old students slid each decade by no less than 20 percent of a standard deviation in math and 14 percent in reading. Meanwhile, students in the bottom quartile showed notable gains of 4 percent of a standard deviation in math and 15 percent in reading. That amounts to closing the socioeconomic achievement gap by a full year’s worth of learning each passing decade. If PISA is to be believed, we are well on the way to equality of achievement outcomes.

Recent History

Critical assessments of America’s schools have a long history. But criticism grew sharper after the passage of the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, which required annual testing and score reporting and set deadlines for improvement. In the past two decades, public opinion has been split widely between those who say the law enhanced student achievement and those who claim it made matters worse.

We split the sample into students born before and after 1990 to determine whether gains in median test scores were greater or lesser after the law was passed. Reading scores grew by 8 percent of a standard deviation more per decade among students born between 1991 and 2007 compared to students born between 1954 and 1990. In math, scores of more recent test-takers grew by 8 percent of a standard deviation per decade less than their predecessors.

Why would progress in math have slowed when progress in reading speeded up? The first half of the question is more easily explained than the second half. Trends in math achievement, as we have seen, are sensitive to changes in fluid reasoning ability. Factors that drive broad growth of that type of intelligence, such as better nutrition and decreased vulnerability to environmental contaminants, may have been changing more rapidly 30, 40, and 50 years ago compared to the past two decades. But why, then, have reading scores climbed more quickly? Did schools operating under No Child Left Behind have a more positive impact on reading performances? Or are families more capable of helping their children to read? Or both? Our data cannot say.

Recently, school closings in response to the Covid-19 pandemic seem to have had a negative impact on learning for an entire generation of students and exacerbated achievement gaps. This recalls similar educational setbacks from school closures during wars and strikes, reduced instructional time due to budget cuts (see “The Shrinking School Week,” research, Summer 2021), and broad absenteeism during weather events (see “In Defense of Snow Days,” research, Summer 2015). Indeed, Pietschnig and Voracek detect a slowdown in intellectual growth during World War II, a likely byproduct of both school closures and worldwide disruptions of economic and social progress.

But on the whole, families and schools both appear to have played a key role in reducing achievement gaps by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status over time. They also may have facilitated more rapid gains in reading among students born after 1990. Parental educational attainment and family incomes, both of which are strong correlates of student achievement, have risen in this more recent period. In addition, school reforms—desegregation, accountability measures, more equitable financing, improved services for students learning English, and school choice—have had their greatest impact on more recent cohorts of students.

Still, a research focus on families and schools may distract attention away from broader social forces that could be at least as important. For example, diminished progress in math for those born later than 1990 could be due to a decline in returns from improved health and nutrition in advanced industrialized societies. In addition, the greater gains of students at an early age and the recent flattening of growth in math performance all suggest that broader social, economic, and physical environments are no less important than schools and families. It is reasonable to infer from our research that policies benefiting children from the very beginning of life could have as much impact on academic achievement, especially in math, as focused interventions attempted when students are older.

Paul E. Peterson is a professor and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

M. Danish Shakeel is a professor and director of the E. G. West Centre for Education Policy at University of Buckingham, U. K. This essay is drawn from an article just released by Educational Psychology Review.

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

Shakeel, M.D., and Peterson, P.E. (2022). A Half Century of Student Progress Nationwide: First comprehensive analysis finds broad gains in test scores, with larger gains for students of color than white students. Education Next, 22(4), 50-58.

For more, please see “The Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2023.”

Confessions of a School Reformer
by Larry Cuban
Harvard Education Press, 2021, $36; 275 pages.

As reviewed by Paul E. Peterson

“They’re not good,” the head of a Fortune 500 company lamented about U.S. schools not long ago. “Students learn little, education gaps are widening, and not much can be done about it.” Pressed on the matter, he relaxed. “It’s not a serious matter. Our universities are excellent, and we can import the talent we need—though we do need to worry about social peace.” Sadly, his public comments (which I’m paraphrasing here) neatly summarize private conversations heard when business and civic leaders gather. A few years back, a prominent U.S. senator whispered much the same to me as we entered a dining room together.

Larry Cuban, a former public-schools superintendent turned urban historian, confesses to hold much the same view. Students are not learning much at school, and achievement gaps are widening, but schools should not be blamed, as they cannot be changed. Not that it counts for much, except for persistent racial and socioeconomic inequalities. The emeritus Stanford professor acknowledges that he has “pulled back from his Progressive roots as a reform-driven educator.” Like the businessman, he has “tempered the unvarnished optimism I had initially about the power of schools.” Cuban differs from the chief executive only when assigning blame for contemporary conditions.

Cuban accepts the inevitable in avuncular tones in this quasi-memoir. Born the son of Jewish immigrants in a working-class neighborhood of Pittsburgh, he was at a young age infected with polio, which left him with a modest limp. At school, he found little to inspire him. From his “early years at Minersville” he “can recall no particular teacher or lessons.” He got his first high school “A” in his 10th-grade history class from a teacher who taught “from the textbook, lectured, held periodic whole-group discussions, and gave quizzes.” Still, he enjoyed sports in high school and loved his close-knit B’nai B’rith boys club. At college, he found organic chemistry his “undoing” and “drifted into” the University of Pittsburgh’s school of education. Upon graduation, he climbed the male education ladder from teaching in an all-Black school in Cleveland to administration to doctoral studies to a “federally funded teacher-training project” as a part-time “master teacher” and supervisor of “four Peace Corps volunteers.” Before long, he was working for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, then won a fellowship to the Stanford School of Education, where he earned his doctoral degree and met his lifelong teacher and friend, historian David Tyack. With Cuban’s D.C. connections, he secured the superintendency of the Arlington, Virginia, school system. When the school board fell into Republican hands, he quit the position, only to return to Stanford to climb to the top of the academic ladder. Best of all, his marriage to Barbara Joan Smith proved fecund and happy. “Life was good for the Cubans,” he says. And he gives us no reason to doubt him on that score.

Given his climb from the bottom to the top of the education ladder, one might expect Cuban to recall his life and times with the same celebratory flourish Harvard education historian Patricia Graham brings to her 2005 work, Schooling America. For her, the story of the 20th-century school is one of immigrant assimilation, racial integration, and the struggle for excellence. Though she acknowledges faults and dissonances in the American education system, she also heralds its accomplishments. Like Graham, Cuban divides the 20th century into thirds, but his trilogy could be titled immigrants manufactured into compliant workers; minorities resegregated after Brown; and accountability rules stifled learning. In other words, the tale updates two earlier pessimistic histories, Michael Katz’s The Irony of School Reform and David Tyack’s One Best System.

Corporations drive the action, in Cuban’s view. “The actions of business and civic leaders . . . show the permeability of tax-supported public schools . . . to major economic, social and cultural currents.” These actors build age-graded classrooms, insist on vocational education, allow resegregation, require standardized tests, and institute career and technical education. The unfortunate educator is caught in the nexus. As superintendent, Cuban is helpless when “Virginia business leaders adopted” the notion that “state mandated standards will improve high schools’ academic performance.”

“Public faith that schools can reshape or alter society . . . is unfounded,” he maintains. School districts are “nested within larger socioeconomic, political and caste-like structures (e.g., market-driven society focused on individual action, economic inequalities, racist structures), all of which hem . . . in what superintendents . . . [can] do.” Further, he notes, schools are but a small part of a bigger picture. “Less than 20 percent of a child’s and teenager’s waking time” is spent inside a schoolhouse. “Eighty percent of their time is spent in the home, neighborhood, and religious institutions with families, friends, and others.” For Cuban, the only solution is to alter “the larger societal inequalities in wealth distribution, employment insecurity, the lack of adequate housing for large swaths of American families, and the persistent ebb and flow of racism.”

But if 80 percent of a young person’s time is spent outside school, and if home, neighborhood, and religious institutions are the center of the action, then family strengthening and family control over schooling might offer the best ways out of the current morass. Cuban ignores this possibility, mentioning school choice only in passing. He does note that “nearly half of all students” in the District of Columbia now attend charter schools, but he fails to mention that D.C. schools have improved more rapidly than those of any state in the country, saying instead that it “remains contested” as to whether D.C. students’ academic performance has improved.

Cuban does not say outright that schools do not matter and can’t be changed, but his core message is essentially that. It captures well the mood of today’s business and educational elites. Corporate executives and leading philanthropists turn to other concerns. Urban superintendents wander from one school district to the next without believing they can make much of a difference. Schools are closed to stem the spread of a virus that, unlike polio, poses only small risks to young people. Unions call strikes when teachers are asked to return to school. School boards worry more about adults than children. Activists pursue narrow agendas. Faulty schools become a partisan parlor game, not a national concern. Learning falls over a cliff.

Paul E. Peterson, senior editor of Education Next, is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University.

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

Peterson, P.E. (2023). A Pessimistic View of Public-School Reform: In urban historian Larry Cuban’s view, corporations drive the action. Education Next, 23(1), 82-83.

Hostages No More: The Fight for Education Freedom and the Future of the American Child
by Betsy DeVos
Center Street, 2022, $29; 304 pages.

As reviewed by Paul E. Peterson

With much the same characters and plot lines as The Brothers Karamazov, though absent its gripping prose, Hostages No More evokes memories of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s masterwork on good and evil. Former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos admits she does not have “a way with words,” but larger-than-life forces and personalities propel themselves straight through the vanilla writing and overwhelm Horatio Alger-style vignettes about families who chose their schools.

The author plays the part of Alexei, known in the diminutive as Alyosha, the innocent, 20-year-old novice preparing for the monastery. Betsy DeVos, née Elisabeth Prince, the daughter of a prosperous but workaholic entrepreneur, was born into a Dutch Calvinist family in Holland, Michigan, the City of Churches, and, it is said, the social capital of the world. Imbibing family and community traditions, she and her husband, Richard, seem to live by the same principles John Wesley, the English evangelist, expounded: “Earn all you can. Save all you can. Give all you can.” The DeVoses’ philanthropic endeavors concentrate on expanding school choice for those who cannot afford the cost of private schooling themselves. For them, the one sentence that counted in Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican convention was the one that committed him to rescuing “kids from failing schools by helping their parents send them to a safe school of their choice.”

After accepting the call to serve in Trump’s cabinet, DeVos found herself working for a modern-day Dmitri, the frenzied, lascivious, self-absorbed oldest Karamazov brother, the one prepared to leap into hell, “heels up,” to recover what he thought was his rightful patrimony. Her connection to the narcissistic president was distant at best. She and Richard had backed Governor Jeb Bush for the Republican nomination, and it was Bush who first approached DeVos with the idea of serving as education secretary. Very likely, Vice President Mike Pence arranged the appointment.

That background provided little claim on the presidential ear. When skirmishes occurred inside the Trump administration, DeVos typically found herself on the losing side. On when and how to revise Obama’s guidelines on the use of boys’ and girls’ toilets, DeVos urged deliberation, but Attorney General Jeff Sessions insisted on an immediate policy reversal. The secretary took her cause to the Oval Office—and lost. Next, she was forced to “hire political loyalists with no qualifications to work at the Department of Education in roles that we did not want or need to fill.” A near breaking point occurred, she writes, when “a woman was killed during white supremacist rioting in Charlottesville, Virginia.” After the president said there were “good people on both sides,” DeVos writes, she “seriously considered whether I could continue serving in the Trump administration.” She nonetheless remained on the job.

DeVos finally succeeded in getting the president to back school choice by inserting a short sentence about the topic, though not a full paragraph, into his State of the Union Address. But when the administration formed a coronavirus task force that included representatives from across the government, “Education was nowhere on the list,” she writes. Toward the end of Trump’s term, DeVos made a last-gasp effort to insert school-choice provisions into a Covid relief bill, but she received no help from a boss now concerned only about his patrimony.

Our modern-day Dmitri nonetheless praised DeVos for replacing Obama’s sexual-harassment guidelines with balanced regulations that protected both the accuser and the accused. The president strongly favored protections for the innocent, he told her; after all, he himself had been falsely accused of such behavior.

No one approached their Senate confirmation with more ingenuousness than Betsy DeVos. Among the first of Trump nominees to testify before a Senate committee, she had to prepare quickly. Or not prepare, as it turned out. We are told that Trump’s young acolytes from the campaign trail seemed to know little about education and even less than about confirmation politics. Nor was DeVos quick enough to ask her own team of advisers for help.

Suddenly, she encountered a force no less resourceful than Ivan, the second of the Karamazov brothers, who personifies cool, calculated, brilliant, atheistic evil. Just as Ivan tells Alyosha the story of the “The Grand Inquisitor” to destroy Alyosha’s faith, so teachers unions drove the questioning and the media optics at the confirmation hearings to kill the nomination of a school-choice advocate. “The notion that the Senate is responsible for confirming the secretary of education is really only true on paper,” DeVos says. “In reality . . . it’s the teacher unions that control the process.”

Unready for a well-designed “gotcha” strategy at the confirmation hearings, DeVos hesitated, stumbled, and repeatedly said that the topic in question was a state and local matter. As negative press mounted, two Republican senators joined all the Democrats in voting against the DeVos nomination, forcing the vice president to cast a tie-breaking vote in her favor. DeVos saves her ire for two of her cross-examiners: the cool, brilliant former Cambridge, Massachusetts, professor, who once favored vouchers, and the enthusiastic former Newark mayor, once a leading force in the charter school movement. Both were fashioning presidential campaigns. Selling out a cause for political ambition is not what DeVos is about.

The union campaign against DeVos marched on as if led by Ivan the Terrible. They opposed her every proposal, criticized her every statement, attacked her personally whenever an occasion allowed. With one exception: early on, DeVos accepted an invitation to visit a public school chosen by Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. The only stipulation was that Weingarten return the favor by visiting a school picked by the secretary. The first event, in rural Ohio, went pleasantly enough, but the second never happened. For union leaders, sophisticated calculation takes precedence over common courtesy.

As Fall 2020 neared and the risks of Covid to students and teachers receded, unions seemed prepared to help reopen schools for in-person instruction, but the president stupidly tweeted, “The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election. . . May cut off funding if not open.” To which Weingarten replied: “Our teachers were ready to go back as long as it was safe. Then Trump and DeVos played their political bull****.” The author rightly comments: “How did the president’s words change . . . the safety of teachers? . . . It was the political struggle, not children, that mattered most.”

The memoirs also introduce a contemporary equivalent of Alyosha’s illegitimate half-brother, the shrewd, reeking epileptic, Smerdyakov. DeVos met this force when she decided to begin her reign by visiting Jefferson Middle School, a public school in the nation’s capital. “DC officials had leaked word of my visit to the unions,” she tells us. “Dozens of protesters [chanted] . . .  ‘Dump DeVos!’ ‘Go Back,’ and other insults.” The scene repeated itself whenever the secretary spoke at schools and colleges across the country. When she visited Harvard, I witnessed long lines of protesters—students, union lackeys, Cambridge radicals—waiting for a chance to browbeat her. Shouts and screeches rang through the auditorium. The audience waved vulgar, insulting oversize signs and placards. As DeVos received a rising number of death threats, the Secret Service decided she needed the protection of federal marshals.

Hostages No More, like The Brothers K, stops rather than concludes. But both books have a climax. Dmitri is convicted of patricide and receives a 10-year prison sentence, though we know Smerdyakov did the dirty deed. In DeVos’s epilogue, we are told about modern-day Smerdyakovs storming the nation’s capital on January 6, 2021, cheered on by a Dmitri desperate to keep his patrimony. DeVos urges the vice president and her fellow cabinet members to find the president disabled and thus no longer able to perform the duties of his office. A calm vice president advises against the idea, and the secretary resigns her position.

Yet both stories end on an affirmative note. Despite hatred, murder, false convictions, and the best an atheist can offer, Alyosha remains true to his faith and enters the monastery.  Similarly, DeVos holds fast to her integrity and principles. School choice advances farther than any had anticipated before she took office. It is now firmly established as Republican Party doctrine. More state legislatures are enacting choice programs than ever before. Charter school enrollments are continuing to grow. Homeschooling is on the rise. Betsy DeVos could come to be seen as the most successful of all U.S. secretaries of education. The ending to Hostages No More is yet to be written.

Paul E. Peterson, senior editor of Education Next, is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University.

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

Peterson, P.E. (2022). Education Secretary Betsy DeVos Emerges as a Modern Alyosha: School choice advances farther than any had anticipated. Education Next, 22(4), 72-74.

History is happening this moment. A country is defining itself. Authentic, inspiring patriotism is surging through the Ukrainian people. Whatever happens next, President Volodymyr Zelensky personifies patriotism, honor, courage, dedication. If Ukraine survives as an independent nation, as the U. S. Secretary of State promises, 2022 will ring for decades, probably centuries, as Ukraine’s greatest historical moment.

Now we know why civics is best taught as history.  Civics is not about learning to write a letter to the editor or registering to vote. Nothing wrong about that, but civics, fundamentally, is learning one’s history as a country—just how it came to be, why it is as it is, and what makes it worthy.

There is no need for history to be slurpy or untruthful.  Defining moments are riveting, stirring, thrilling, passionate, definitive. When Zelensky appears before the U. S. Congress—if only virtually—we feel compelled to listen:  “I see no sense in life if it cannot stop the deaths.”

This is a teaching moment, a time for the American history instructor to remind students that when John Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence, he and his fellow Patriots understood then, like Ukrainian leaders know today, the concept that “We must all hang together or surely we will hang separately.”

High school and college students might even be encouraged to read Kevin Weddle’s absorbing account of The Compleat Victory: Saratoga and the American Revolution just released, ironically enough, by Oxford University Press.   

The parallels between Saratoga and the Ukrainian war burst from every page. King George III readily accepts General John Burgoyne’s sweepingly confident war plan:  Shoot down the St. Lawrence river, cross Lake Champlain, capture Fort Ticonderoga, and, with Loyalist help, drive to Albany, sail down the Hudson River and meet Sir William Howe’s army coming up from New York City. Nothing could be easier—other than, perhaps, watching Ukrainian morale implode once Russian tanks pour down highways into Kyiv.

Burgoyne—and Putin—were absolutely correct, at least in the beginning. Just as Crimea was acquired with barely a Western whimper in 2014, so Ticonderoga fell with hardly a British casualty, in early July, 1777.   The quick and easy victories stirred great confidence—indeed, extreme over-confidence—both inside the Kremlin and, two centuries ago, inside the Queen’s House now known as Buckingham Palace.  Certain of victory, Burgoyne, instead of securing his base, dashed forward through a dense, ravine-ridden, Vermontian-infested forest.

In wartime, leadership and command count for much. Unfortunately for King George, he had passed over experienced military commanders in favor of an ambitious court favorite pitching a battle plan. Putin is no less poorly served. He has picked his top military personnel with political loyalty, not military competence, foremost in mind.

When tanks strike ditches and potholes, or horse-drawn carriages haul cannon up mountainsides, grand strategies turn into logistics. Distant from Montreal, desperate for supplies, Burgoyne dispatched a contingent to forage as far as Bennington, Vermont, only to be surrounded by an aroused Patriot militia.  Wounded soldiers, not feed for horses, were his reward. The size of the Patriot forces increases daily even as Loyalists disappear and attrition takes its toll on British soldiers.

The Patriots are not perfect. The general in charge, Horatio Gates, subsequently proves to be the coward many suspected all along. Benedict Arnold rallies the troops at critical moments but later turns traitor. Among the militia, the New York-New England divide nearly proves fatal. The increasingly skillful strategist, George Washington, holds the continental army together but barely keeps his job.

Yet the surrender of a British army at Saratoga provokes rising opposition in Parliament, triggers French entry into the war, and entrenches patriotism across the colonies. And, today, heroic Ukrainian defense efforts have stirred self-indulgent Europeans and Americans to reassess their true obligations to the defense of democracy.

Although Saratoga is the beginning of the end, a signed peace agreement recognizing the United States of America does not come for another six years.  Time moves faster in the 21^st than in the 18^th Century, but one should rather pray for than expect a quick solution to the current war.

In the meantime, democratic patriotism is deepening. The Ukrainians are teaching us. Our civic lessons are being learned on the ground, in real life. Our schools and our students can profit by attending to the moment. One does not need to manufacture history to teach patriotism; one only needs to explain that history has not come to an end.

Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University, director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, and senior editor of Education Next. He is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

As folk wisdom has it, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. And research shows that children are generally shaped more by life at home than by studies at school. College enrollment, for instance, is better predicted by family-background characteristics than the amount of money a school district spends on a child’s education. Some parents have a specific vision for their child’s schooling that leads them to keep it entirely under their own direction. Even Horace Mann, the father of the American public school, who favored compulsory schooling for others, had his own children educated at home.

Homeschooling is generally understood to mean that a child’s education takes place exclusively at home—but homeschooling is a continuum, not an all-or-nothing choice. In a sense, everyone is “home-schooled,” and the ways that families combine learning at home with attending school are many. Parents may decide to home-school one year but not the next. They may teach some subjects at home but send their child to school for others, or they may teach all subjects at home but enroll their child in a school’s sports or drama programs. Especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, the concept of homeschooling has become ambiguous, as parents mix home, school, and online instruction, adjusting often to the twists and turns of school closures and public health concerns.

Improving public understanding of the growing and changing nature of homeschooling was the purpose of a virtual conference hosted in spring 2021 by the Program on Education Policy and Governance at the Harvard Kennedy School. The conference examined issues in homeschooling through multiple lenses, including research, expert analysis, and the experiences of parents. The event drew more than 2,000 registrants, many of them home-schooling parents. Their participation made clear that homeschoolers today constitute a diverse group of families with many different educational objectives, making it difficult to generalize about the practice. The conference did not uncover convincing evidence that homeschooling is preferable to public or private schools in terms of children’s academic outcomes and social experiences, but neither did it find credible evidence that homeschooling is a worse option. Whether homeschooling does or does not deliver for families seems to depend on individual needs and the reasons that families adopt the practice.

Homeschooling Growth

The interest drawn by the conference is striking in light of where homeschooling stood only a few decades ago. In the early 1970s, the education mainstream in the United States frowned upon the practice and considered it a fringe movement. At the time, it was estimated that about 10,000 to 15,000 children were being homeschooled nationally. Only three states explicitly allowed parents to home-school. Elsewhere, the removal of students from the schoolhouse could be treated as a criminal violation of the state’s compulsory-education law, and parents were sometimes jailed for that very reason.

To fight for the right to home-school, a coalition of home-schooling advocates coalesced in the 1980s. Over the next 10 years, they would radically change the legal framework and trajectory of homeschooling. The coalition included left-leaning acolytes of John Holt, a former elementary school teacher who became disillusioned with the oppressive routines and rigid structures that he felt characterized formal schooling. Holt coined the term “unschooling,” the practice of keeping children out of school and, instead of designing a specific home curriculum, giving them considerable freedom to decide what to learn and how to learn it. Holt’s approach was an extension of the educational philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th-century French philosopher who theorized that the best education was one determined solely by children themselves.

The largest element in the coalition of home-schooling advocates consisted of devout Christian families who bemoaned what they viewed as moral decay in public schools. Only by homeschooling, they held, could they ensure that their children would be educated in a manner consistent with their religious beliefs and values. In 1983, Michael Farris founded the Home School Legal Defense Association to protect homeschoolers from compulsory-education laws. Dues-paying members were promised free legal defense if a government body threatened parents with prosecution. This offer proved to be a powerful organizing tool, and the association now reports a membership of over 100,000. With the backing of an organized grassroots constituency, the association and other advocacy groups persuaded legislatures in all 50 states to craft a legal framework for those who wanted to educate their children at home. Once that legal context was in place, homeschooling took off. By the early 2000s, the number of homeschoolers had surpassed one million nationwide, according to the National Center for Educa-tion Statistics.

At the conference, Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute, a pro-homeschooling research organization, estimated the number of home-schooled children in 2019 at 3 million. Official estimates provided by the U.S. Department of Education prior to the pandemic hovered at 3 percent of all school-age children, which amounts to fewer than 2 million students. The difference between these estimates stems in part from the challenges of getting a full and accurate count of the number of children who are being educated primarily at home. Many school districts are not obligated to report to the state the number of home-schooled students in their district. Instead, the U.S. Department of Education bases its estimate on a questionnaire that it mails to a nationally representative sample of parents every few years. However, better than a third of those surveyed in 2019 did not return the questionnaire, which introduces the possibility of undercounting if home-schooling parents returned the questionnaire at lower rates than other parents. The U.S. Census Bureau, in a pilot survey administered after schools closed in response to the spread of Covid-19 in spring 2020, found that 5.4 percent of households with school-aged children had “at least one child [who was being] homeschooled.” The survey was repeated in early October 2020, when many schools remained closed, and found that the percentage had burgeoned to 11.1 percent.

Separately, the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance, in cooperation with Education Next, asked a representative sample of parents on three occasions over the course of the pandemic to identify the type of school their child attended—public, private, charter, or homeschool. The question resembled the one used by the U.S. Department of Education. The survey was conducted while many schools were closed to in-person learning—in May 2020, November 2020, and June 2021. According to the parents responding, 6 percent of the children were being home-schooled in May, 8 percent in November, and 9 percent the following June. Wondering whether these percentages were overestimates, the survey team asked those saying they were home-schooling in June 2021 to clarify by checking one of the following two items:

• Child is enrolled in a school with a physical location but is learning remotely at home
• Child is not enrolled in a school with a physical location

The researchers found that when they deducted from the home-schooling count all those who indicated the child was enrolled in a school, the share of students in the home-school sector in June 2021 fell from 9 percent to 6 percent. When their prior two estimates were adjusted downward accordingly, homeschooling was 4 percent in spring 2020 and 6 percent in fall 2020. The 6 percent estimate is twice the percentage estimated by the U.S. Department of Education in 2019 but only about half that estimated by the U.S. Census Bureau during the pandemic. Clearly, homeschooling is on the rise. Even cautious estimates indicate a doubling of the practice during the pandemic, and the actual shift could be greater.

Was the surge in homeschooling a temporary phenomenon induced by the pandemic, or will it become a permanent part of the education landscape? In a national poll conducted by EdChoice in 2021, 60 percent of parents held more favorable views toward homeschooling as a result of the pandemic. Market researchers are reporting significant, if unofficial, drops in school enrollments during the 2021–22 school year. Early reports say that some home-schooling newcomers are enjoying the flexibility, personalization, and efficient use of time that homeschooling allows. Families are also taking advantage of opportunities to combine homeschooling with part-time virtual learning, college coursework, neighborhood pods, and informal cooperatives, which are lessening the teaching demands on parents who home-school. But the 2021 Education Next survey revealed that many parents were finding education at home to be an exhausting undertaking and looked forward to a return to normal operations. Nearly a third reported they had “to reduce the number of hours [they] work[ed] in order to help with school work this year.” An even higher percentage said they had to rearrange their work schedule. A quarter of the 9 percent of those calling themselves homeschoolers said they did not plan to continue the practice.

Regulating Homeschooling

Homeschooling is now universally permitted in the United States, and the pandemic has likely solidified public acceptance of its practice. But some critics still call for regulatory safeguards to protect home-schooled children from abuse and to ensure they receive an adequate education. They point out that, among industrialized countries, the United States has the least-restrictive regulatory framework for homeschooling. Japan, Sweden, and Germany all but prohibit the practice, and many other European countries impose tight restrictions on it, such as requiring parents to hold educator certification or mandating that students take exams to demonstrate academic progress. In the United States, by contrast, 11 states do not require parents to notify authorities that they are home-schooling, according to the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, and many states that do require notification have few other restrictions. A small number of states mandate testing of home-schooled children or that certain subjects be taught by trained educators.

Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet, who elsewhere has called for a presumptive ban on homeschooling, argued at the conference that regulatory authorities should screen prospective home-schooling parents and perform regular home visits. She asserts that there is “a significant subset of [home-schooled] children suffering from abuse and neglect.” High-profile cases of a horrifying nature help to make her point. In 2018, one such instance captured the nation’s attention when two parents who claimed to be home-schooling in California were found guilty of abusing, torturing, and imprisoning their 13 children for several years. Proponents of broader restrictions on homeschooling claimed that the permissive regulatory framework for homeschooling in California was what allowed these parents’ heinous acts to go unseen for several years. Citing these instances, critics of homeschooling are asking for state intervention. For example, a law proposed to the Iowa legislature in 2019 would have required school districts to conduct “quarterly home visits to check on the health and safety of children . . . receiving . . . private instruction.”

The Home School Legal Defense Association vigorously—and usually successfully—opposes these kinds of laws. At the conference, Mike Donnelly, the organization’s senior legal counsel, argued that parents have a constitutional right to direct the education of their children. State courts have largely agreed with this principle, and the U.S. Supreme Court, though not ruling on compulsory-education laws in general, found in Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972) that compelling Amish children to attend school beyond the age of 14 violated the Free Exercise clause of the First Amendment to the Constitution.

Donnelly also said that mandating home visits by social workers or requiring that physicians sign off on home-schooled children’s well being would be intrusive and impractical and would violate the constitutional rights of home-schoolers. He rejected the idea that child abuse is more prevalent in home-school households than elsewhere, and said that, if it occurs, other laws protecting children from abuse come into play. Economist Angela Dills of Western Carolina University said she found no clear evidence of an increase in reported incidents of abuse in states that relaxed bans on homeschooling. Charol Shakeshaft, an expert on sexual abuse in schools, said that her research suggests “it is highly unlikely that there’s higher incidence of sexual abuse of kids in the home-schooling world than in the public-school world.”

Effects on Student Learning

Many critics of homeschooling are more worried about ineffective or misguided instruction than about child abuse. They maintain that homeschoolers should be required to use standard educational materials and that their children should have to take statewide tests to measure academic progress. But many home-schooling families do not trust government officials to decide what can and cannot be taught, viewing such regulations as antithetical to the purpose of homeschooling. So far, they have succeeded, with the help of the potent Home School Legal Defense Association, in forestalling efforts to regulate curricular content.

What does the research evidence say about the academic progress of homeschoolers? Speaking at the PEPG conference, Robert Kunzman of Indiana University, who has synthesized the literature on homeschooling, said the “the data are mixed and inconclusive.” Research is underdeveloped in part because scholars cannot directly compare representative homeschoolers with peers attending school. Random assignment of students to homeschooling would be infeasible, unethical, and likely illegal. Statistical studies that attempt to adjust for differences between the background of homeschoolers and other students are often flawed because homeschoolers differ from other students in ways not captured by standard demographic variables. These studies tend to find homeschoolers performing better in literacy than in math, perhaps indicating that parents are better equipped to teach in that domain. Jennifer Jolly and Christian Wilkens, in their conference presentation, reported that college students who have been home-schooled are as likely to persist in their postsecondary education as other students. Still, studies of exam performance and college persistence do not include homeschoolers who never take an exam or go to college, making it difficult to generalize to the home-schooling community as a whole. As Kunzman observed, the only thing one can conclude for certain is that the data are too limited to sustain any strong conclusions about home-schooling learning outcomes.

Homeschooling Diversification

Beneath the debate over academic performance lies suspicion of homeschoolers, both in the mainstream media and in the academic community. They are often portrayed as a homogeneous group of southern, rural, white families who adhere to fundamentalist religious and cultural values. Sarah Grady, the director of the U.S. Department of Education survey of homeschoolers, finds some support for this stereotype. Homeschooling is more prevalent in towns and rural areas than in cities and suburbs, present more often in the South and West than in the Northeast and Midwest, more likely to be practiced by those of lower-income backgrounds, more frequently found among white families than Black or Asian families, and more likely to occur in two-parent households with multiple children. These patterns are just tendencies, however, not extreme differences across social groups. The U.S. Department of Education surveys show that homeschooling can be found in all demographic groups. Better-educated parents are just as likely to home-school as less-educated ones, and Hispanic parents are nearly as likely to do so as white parents. Time is eroding the stereotypical face of the home-schooling family—as is the pandemic.

What’s more, families choose to home-school for a variety of reasons. Even though fostering religious and moral instruction remains a common rationale, many parents cite other motivations. Nearly one third of families home-school to support a child with special needs or mental-health challenges, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Other parents believe they have particularly gifted children who will prosper under more intensive academic instruction. Indeed, almost three quarters of home-schooling families cite dissatisfaction with academic instruction at schools as an important reason for their decision. Safety and bullying issues at schools are also frequently named as contributing factors. There are many niche areas as well. Parents of children who train intensively in the performing arts or athletics may opt for homeschooling because of the scheduling flexibility and personalization that it offers. Some Native American homeschoolers want to maintain ancestral language and traditions. And then there are the “unschoolers,” who take a different approach altogether.

Reasons for homeschooling are multiplying, but the biggest change in recent years is the way in which home education is being conducted. The availability of online content is revolutionizing the practice. Access to sophisticated instructional material lowers barriers that previously discouraged parents from homeschooling. A parent confident in her ability to teach grammar, spelling, and literature but not in her mastery of long division, algebra, and calculus can now ask her child to turn to Khan Academy or other free or low-cost instruction for help. Homeschoolers are increasingly teaming up as well. Home-school cooperatives, through which families pool expertise and resources to deliver instruction, have grown; 43 percent of homeschoolers participated in such groups in 2019, up from about one third in 2016, according to the U.S. Department of Education survey. Another trend is the use of hybrid models, in which home-schooled children also attend public and private schools or even local universities part-time.

Despite this diversity of home-schooling approaches, critics warn that many home-schooling families are insular, promoting religious fundamentalism, intolerance, and anti-democratic sentiments. Research casts considerable doubt on such claims. With few exceptions, studies find no systematic differences in the opportunities for social experience available to home-schooled children and public-school children. Any differences that do turn up are typically in the homeschoolers’ favor. Data from the U.S. Department of Education survey suggest that home-schooled children participate in an array of activities that involve interacting with other children and that they are more likely to go to libraries and museums and attend other cultural activities than their peers in public schools (see “Homeschool Happens Everywhere,” features, Fall 2020). Homeschooling may even strengthen familial bonds by ensuring a level of attentiveness from parents that fosters positive social development. It could also, as some have found, end up shielding children from negative peer or social influences that undermine healthy social development.

Homeschooled Adults

While there is little evidence that home-schooled children are worse off academically or socially in childhood, it’s possible that a lack of exposure to mainstream norms and institutions could make home-schooled children ill equipped to navigate higher education and careers as adults. According to Jolly and Wilkens, there is little evidence that home-schooled children end up doing poorly in life. College grades, persistence rates, and graduation rates are generally no different for those who were home-schooled than for those educated in other ways. Trends in employment and income for former homeschoolers also indicate that they tend to do as well as others. Adults who were home-schooled as children are as well integrated socially as their traditionally schooled counterparts, and they navigate their careers just as successfully.

Researchers nonetheless caution that studies of homeschooling are limited by the data available to them. As mentioned, states often do not have thorough records of the practice. Some home-schooling families are not keen to participate in studies and research surveys. Research findings may be biased because of non-participation by these families. Complicating matters further, it is difficult to generalize about homeschooling because it embodies a diversity of groups, rationales, and ways of carrying out home education. Few analyses draw distinctions among homeschoolers, often treating them as a uniform group despite substantial heterogeneity in the population. Claims about homeschooling should be tempered until we have more-complete data on this rapidly growing and changing practice.

The Future of Homeschooling

Our conference found no convincing evidence that homeschooling is either preferable to or worse than the education a student receives at a public or private school. The success of homeschooling seems to depend largely on the individual child and parents. If so, it may make sense to allow families to decide whether homeschooling is right for them.

It remains to be seen whether the growth of homeschooling experienced during the pandemic will persist. If homeschooling does hold onto its current share of the school-age population, homeschooling will have become the most rapidly growing educational sector at a time when charter-school growth has slowed and private-school enrollments are at risk of further decline. The meaning of homeschooling could also change dramatically in the coming years. It may be less of an either-or question, as homeschooling is combined with more-formal learning contexts, whether they be online experiences, neighborhood pods, cooperatives, or joint undertakings with public and private schools. Eric Wearne of Kennesaw State University says that “homeschooling is growing, but everyone should be prepared for it to look a lot stranger in the coming years.” If Wearne’s assessment is correct, homeschoolers, once thought of as traditionalists holding onto the past, may be an advance guard moving toward a new educational future.

Daniel Hamlin is assistant professor of educational leadership and policy studies at the University of Oklahoma. Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University, director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, and senior editor of Education Next.

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

Hamlin, D., and Peterson, P.E. (2022). Homeschooling Skyrocketed During the Pandemic, but What Does the Future Hold? Education Next, 22(2), 18-24.

For more, please see “The Top 20 Education Next Articles of 2023.”