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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you explain what you mean by “authority”?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adam Tyner is national research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He is the co-author of the recent policy brief Think Again: Does “equitable” grading benefit students?

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

Tyner, A. (2024). How Not to Assess the Situation: Grading and testing have gone astray, but eliminating student performance measures is the wrong prescription. Education Next, 24(2), 70-71.

Educators and researchers have been fighting the reading wars for the last century, with battles see-sawing literacy instruction in American schools from phonics to whole language and, most recently, back to phonics again. Policymakers have entered the fray, after more than a quarter-century of stagnant reading scores in the United States. Over the last decade, 32 states and the District of Columbia have adopted new “science of reading” laws that require schools to use curricula and instructional techniques that are deemed “evidence-based.”

Such reading programs include direct instruction in phonics and reading comprehension skills, such as finding the main idea of a paragraph, and efforts to accelerate learning tend to double down on more of the same skill-building practice. But research increasingly points to another critical aspect of literacy: the role of student knowledge. For example, prior research by two of us found that a young child’s knowledge of the social and physical world is a strong predictor of their academic success in elementary school. And advocates for knowledge-based education often cite the so-called “baseball study” where students reading a passage about baseball who knew about the sport were far better at understanding and summarizing the story than students who didn’t, regardless of their general reading skills.

Knowledge-building reading curricula are rooted in these insights, and use materials and activities based on a sequence of integrated science and social studies topics, texts, and vocabulary. Yet the potential value of this approach is often an afterthought in state and district efforts to strengthen reading instruction, and the benefits to students of combining evidence-based curriculum with systematic efforts to build student knowledge have yet to be rigorously documented.

We conduct the first-ever experimental study of this topic, based on randomized kindergarten-enrollment lotteries in nine Colorado charter schools that use an interdisciplinary knowledge-based curriculum called Core Knowledge. To assess the long-term impact of experiencing a knowledge-building curriulum on student learning, we compares performance on statewide tests in grades 3–6 between kindergarten lottery winners who attended a Core Knowledge charter school with lottery losers who could not enroll.

We find that winning an enrollment lottery and enrolling in a Core Knowledge charter school boosted long-term reading achievement in 3rd to 6th grade by 16 percentile points, as compared to comparable applicants who did not win their enrollment lottery. The size of this gain is approximately equivalent to the difference between the mediocre performance of U.S. 13-year-olds on the 2016 Progress in International Reading Literacy Study and that of top-scoring countries like Singapore and Finland. Our results are also notable in their contrast with other studies of reading interventions, which typically find small, short-term effects.

Students and teachers in many public elementary schools spend up to two hours each day on reading instruction. While the component skills of literacy are critical to student development and learning, our findings point to a missed opportunity to accelerate literacy by building knowledge at the same time. Skill building and knowledge accumulation are separate but complementary cognitive processes, and while the adage “skill begets skill” may be true, a fuller description of cognitive development could be “skill begets skill, knowledge begets knowledge, and skill combined with knowledge begets them both.”

Kindergarten Lotteries for “Core Knowledge” Charters

The Core Knowledge curriculum was created in the 1980s by E.D. Hirsch, Jr., a researcher and advocate of knowledge-building education. Its content and activities follow a planned sequence of the knowledge and skills students should accumulate and master in grades K–8 in all academic subjects and the arts. This “knowledge-based schooling” approach is rooted in the belief that a common base of shared knowledge is foundational for not just individual students’ reading comprehension abilities but also for our ability as a society to communicate and promote equal opportunity. An estimated 1,700 schools across the U.S. use the curriculum today, including more than 50 in Colorado.

To assess the impact of the Core Knowledge curriculum on student achievement, we look at nine oversubscribed Colorado charter schools that all use the curriculum, had been open for at least four years, and held random enrollment lotteries to register kindergarten students in either or both of the 2009–10 and 2010–11 school years. Our study includes 14 separate lotteries with 2,310 students, almost all of whom are from high- or middle-income families.

These families generally have a range of schooling options, including private schools, other charter schools, and public schools outside their district under Colorado’s open-enrollment law. About one in five students in our sample applied to multiple charter lotteries—usually two instead of one. Some 41 percent won at least one lottery, and 47 percent of winners enrolled in that school. In all, 475 lottery winners went on to attend a Core Knowledge charter, while 1,356 students did not win the lottery and attended school elsewhere. In analyzing the effects of attending a Core Knowledge charter, we take into account the fact that not all lottery winners actually enrolled.

Attrition and Family Choice

We base our analysis on the performance of lottery applicants on the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARRC) reading and math tests in grades 3, 4, 5, and 6, as well as the 5th-grade science PARRC test. By looking at these scores, we can compare the performance of students who did and did not experience a knowledge-building curriculum over up to seven years of their schooling.

However, roughly 36 percent of students in our sample did not complete all scheduled PARCC tests through grade 6, and the attrition rate for students who did not win the enrollment lottery is 5 percentage points higher than for lottery winners. Detailed student data reveals three major factors at play. First, some students stop participating in Colorado’s PARCC testing because they move out of state, transfer to a different school, or are homeschooled. A second group of students don’t have test-score data because they are exempted as language learners or special-education students. Third, other students are off-track with their expected kindergarten cohort in later years because of delayed kindergarten entry (“redshirting”) or due to having skipped or repeated a grade.

To ensure that this attrition does not skew our results, we exclude from our analysis both the four lotteries with the highest rates of differential attrition between lottery winners and losers and the youngest applicants, who are more likely to be redshirted by their parents regardless of their lottery outcome. We also adjust our results for students’ gender, race or ethnicity, and eligibility for a free or reduced-price school lunch to ensure that any demographic differences between lottery winners and losers do not introduce bias.

Accelerated Achievement

We find positive long-term effects on reading performance for students who are randomly selected by a kindergarten enrollment lottery and attend a Core Knowledge charter school. Across grades 3–6, these students score 47 percent of a standard deviation higher in reading than comparable lottery applicants who did not have a chance to enroll. This is equivalent to a gain of 16 percentile points for a typical student (see Figure 1). Students who attend a Core Knowledge charter also make outsized gains in science of 30 percent of a standard deviation, which is equivalent to a gain of 10 percentile points. Effects in math are positive, at about 16 percent of a standard deviation, but fall short of statistical significance.

The effects are slightly larger for female students than males (see Figure 2). In reading, female Core Knowledge charter students score 50 percent of a standard deviation higher compared to 44 percent for males, for a gain 17 of percentile points compared to 15 percentile points for males. Females gain about 12 percentile points in science and 9 percentile points in math, while males gain 6 percentile points in science and experience no gains in math. We also look at effects by student grade level and find no upward or downward trend, suggesting the effects may have stabilized by 4th grade (see Figure 3).

While prior non-experimental research has documented stronger reading performance among students who already have knowledge about a topic, our analysis shows positive long-term impacts in reading from systematically building student knowledge over time. In our view, these results suggest that the “procedural skills” approach that has dominated reading comprehension instruction over the last 30 years in public schools is less effective than a “knowledge-based” approach that teaches skills and also is designed to build a body of knowledge as the main mechanism for increasing comprehension.

These findings also build on the body of evidence linking students’ levels of general knowledge to achievement in reading, science, and math. Research also shows that levels of general knowledge are strongly correlated with socio-economic status and parental levels of education. However, unlike these factors, knowledge is malleable through curricular choices. The intervention we study, where students experience seven years of a knowledge-building curriculum, appears to set off a long-term, compounding process whereby improved reading comprehension leads to increased knowledge, and increased knowledge leads to even better comprehension.

A Call to Build Knowledge About “Knowledge”

In addition to informing current-day decision-making, we believe these results should inspire a new research and policy agenda to measure and track students’ knowledge development and understand the mechanisms involved in knowledge-building curricula. The effects our study finds are similar in pattern and magnitude to earlier non-experimental evidence, which suggests that gains in students’ general knowledge could have a larger effect on future achievement than similar gains in more widely studied non-cognitive domains, such as executive function, visual-spatial and fine motor skills, and social and emotional development.

The potential benefits of knowledge-building curricula could be far-reaching. The compounding process our analysis reveals would occur not only in reading, but also across all subjects to the extent that they depend primarily on reading comprehension for learning. Moreover, these achievement gains across all subjects would likely extend into future years, as increased comprehension in one year leads to increased knowledge and comprehension in the next, and so on. We believe that these curricula could also increase students’ educational attainment and future labor market success.

However, elevating student knowledge to a more central place and higher priority in research and policy will require a significant conceptual shift—the term “building knowledge” does not readily trigger a conceptual map linking the intervention to higher achievement, unlike common interventions like reducing class size, extending the school day, and raising teacher pay.

Well-designed measures of student knowledge should be considered as an important addition to other national measures for students in elementary grades. To be sure, they will carry an additional challenge. Any definition and measures of “general knowledge” will need both scientific validity and political viability at a moment when attempts to ban library books and shape course content are on the rise. Attempting to define what all public-school students should know will undoubtably trigger debates and a variety of viewpoints. However, the evidence points to building knowledge as a critical foundation of student literacy with potentially lifelong effects. The benefits of skillful reading and broad knowledge should be a shared starting point, from which a stronger approach to reading instruction can grow.

David Grissmer is research professor in the School of Education & Human Development at the University of Virginia, where Richard Buddin is education consultant, Jamie DeCoster and Tanya Evans are research assistant professors, and Chris S. Hulleman is research professor. Thomas G. White is a former senior researcher at the School of Education & Human Development. Daniel T. Willingham is professor of psychology at the University of Virginia. Chelsea A.K. Duran is a postdoctoral fellow at the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. Mark Berends is professor at the University of Notre Dame. William M. Murrah is associate professor at Auburn University.

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

Grissmer, D., Buddin, R., Berends, M., White, T.G., Willingham, D.T., DeCoster, J., Duran, C.A.K., Hulleman, C.S., Murrah, W.M., and Evans, T. (2024). How Building Knowledge Boosts Literacy and Learning: First causal study finds outsized impacts at “Core Knowledge” schools. Education Next, 24(2), 52-57.

In the fall of 1945, when my father was not quite eight years old, his teacher told my grandmother that he was failing 2nd grade. My father doesn’t remember her reasons, or maybe my grandmother never told him, but the teacher felt he wasn’t ready for 2nd-grade work.

“If he’s not succeeding in 2nd grade,” my grandmother suggested, “why not try him in 3rd?” And she found a tutor, a retired teacher from a different school.

For seven weeks, my father met for an hour a day with the tutor, who gave him homework after each session. The tutor’s charge was to make sure my father mastered the curriculum, not just for 2nd grade but for enough of 3rd grade that he could slip into a 3rd-grade classroom in January 1946, a year early, without needing further help.

But the tutor overdid it. Not only did my father encounter nothing in 3rd grade she hadn’t taught him, but he coasted through 4th and 5th grade as well.

Around 1960, while shopping at Filene’s Basement in downtown Boston, my grandmother ran into an old neighbor—a mom who’d moved away when my grandmother was seeking a tutor to help her son escape from 2nd grade. After bragging about her own family, the neighbor asked if my father was all right.

“He’s fine!” said my grandmother triumphantly. “He’s at Oxford, on a Rhodes Scholarship.”

Stories like this give the impression that tutors can work miracles. For centuries after Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great, certain fortunate individuals—including Albert Einstein, Felix Mendelssohn, Agatha Christie, and practically every British monarch before Charles III—were educated partly or entirely by private tutors and family members. While no scholar regrets the spread of mass schooling, many suspect that the instruction students receive from a teacher in a large classroom can never match the personalized instruction that comes from a tutor focused only on their individual needs.

In a 1984 essay, Benjamin Bloom, an educational psychologist at the University of Chicago, asserted that tutoring offered “the best learning conditions we can devise.” Tutors, Bloom claimed, could raise student achievement by two full standard deviations—or, in statistical parlance, two “sigmas.” In Bloom’s view, this extraordinary effect proved that most students were capable of much greater learning than they typically achieved, but most of their potential went untapped because it was impractical to assign an individual tutor to every student. The major challenge facing education, Bloom argued, was to devise more economical interventions that could approach the benefits of tutoring.

Bloom’s article, “The 2 Sigma Problem,” quickly became a classic. Within two years of its publication, other scholars were citing it weekly—50 times a year—and it has only grown in influence over the decades. In the past 10 years, the article has been cited more than 2,000 times (see Figure 1).

The influence of Bloom’s two-sigma essay reached well beyond the scholarly literature. As the computing and telecommunication revolutions advanced, visionaries repeatedly highlighted the potential of technology to answer Bloom’s challenge. Starting in the 1980s, researchers and technologists developed and eventually brought to market “cognitive computer tutors,” which Albert Corbett at Carnegie Mellon University claimed in 2001 were “solving the two sigma problem.” In the 2010s, improvements in two-way video conferencing let students see human tutors at off hours and remote locations, bringing the dream of universal access closer—though there were still simply not enough tutors to go around.

Then, in late 2022, startling improvements in artificial intelligence offered students a way to converse with software in flexible, informal language, without requiring a human tutor on the other end of a phone or video connection. Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, highlighted this promise in a May 2023 TedX talk, “The Two Sigma Solution,” which promoted the launch of his AI-driven Khanmigo tutoring software.

Enthusiasm for tutoring has burgeoned since the Covid-19 pandemic. More than two years after schools reopened, average reading scores are still 0.1 standard deviations lower, and math scores are 0.2 standard deviations lower, on average, than they would be if schools had never closed. The persistence of pandemic learning loss can make it look like an insurmountable problem, yet the losses are just a fraction of the two-sigma effect that Bloom claimed tutoring could produce. Could just a little bit of tutoring catch kids up, or even help them get ahead?

Are Two-Sigma Effects Realistic?

But how realistic is it to expect any kind of tutoring—human or AI—to improve student achievement by two standard deviations?

Two sigmas is an enormous effect size. As Bloom explained, a two-sigma improvement would take a student from the 50th to the 98th percentile of the achievement distribution. If a tutor could raise, say, SAT scores by that amount, they could turn an average student into a potential Rhodes Scholar.

Two sigmas is more than twice the average test score gap between children who are poor enough to get free school lunches and children who pay full price. If tutors could raise poor children’s test scores by that much, they could not only close the achievement gap but reverse it—taking poor children from lagging far behind their better-off peers to jumping far ahead.

Two sigmas also represents an enormous amount of learning, especially for older students. It represents more than a year’s learning in early elementary school—and something like five years’ learning in middle and high school.

It all sounds great, but if it also sounds a little farfetched to you, you’re not alone. In 2020, Matthew Kraft at Brown University suggested that Bloom’s claim “helped to anchor education researchers’ expectations for unrealistically large effect sizes.” Kraft’s review found that most educational interventions produce effects of 0.1 standard deviations or less. Tutoring can be much more effective than that but rarely approaches two standard deviations.

A 1982 meta-analysis by Peter Cohen, James Kulik, and Chen-Lin Kulik—published two years before Bloom’s essay but cited only half as often—reported that the average effect of tutoring was about 0.33 standard deviations, or 13 percentile points. Among 65 tutoring studies reviewed by the authors, only one (a randomized 1972 dissertation study that tutored 32 students) reported a two-sigma effect. More recently, a 2020 meta-analysis of randomized studies by Andre Nickow, Philip Oreopoulos, and Vincent Quan found that the average effect of tutoring was 0.37 standard deviations, or 14 percentile points—“impressive,” as the authors wrote, but far from two sigmas. Among 96 tutoring studies the authors reviewed, none produced a two-sigma effect.

So where did Bloom get the idea that the characteristic benefit of tutoring was two standard deviations? Was there anything behind Bloom’s two-sigma claim in 1984? Why are we still repeating it 40 years later?

What evidence did Bloom have?

Bloom’s Figure 1—reproduced in Khan’s TEDx talk, among many other places—ostensibly showed the distribution of post-test scores for students who received tutoring, comparing them to students who received conventional whole-group instruction and to students who received a version of what Bloom called “mastery learning,” which combined whole-group instruction with individualized feedback. But the graph was only illustrative—hand-drawn in a smooth, stylized fashion to show what a two-sigma effect might look like. It wasn’t fit to actual data.

Later in the essay, Bloom’s Table 1 compared the effects of different educational interventions. Tutoring appeared at the top of the list, with an effect of 2.00 standard deviations. Below tutoring, the table listed reinforcement learning (1.20 standard deviations), mastery learning (1.00 standard deviation) and a variety of other effects that seem startlingly large by modern standards.

Where did Bloom get these large, curiously round estimates? He claimed that he had adapted them from a paper summarizing early meta-analyses published a month earlier by Herb Walberg, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. But Walberg’s and Bloom’s tables do not entirely agree (see Table 1). Although several of Bloom’s estimates lined up with Walberg’s, at least when rounded, most of the effects in Bloom’s table did not appear in Walberg’s, and most of the effects in Walberg’s table did not appear in Bloom’s. And the two professors definitely did not agree on the effect of tutoring.

Walberg didn’t put tutoring at the top of his list, and he estimated tutoring’s effect to be 0.40 standard deviations—close to the average effects reported in meta-analyses. Bloom did repeat Walberg’s estimate of 0.40 standard deviations, but he described it somewhat narrowly as the effect of “peer and cross-age remedial tutoring.” Walberg’s estimate wasn’t so circumscribed; he described it simply as the effect of tutoring.

Bloom relied on two students

Why did Bloom relabel Walberg’s tutoring effect of 0.40, and where did Bloom get his own estimate of 2.00? It seems Bloom was placing his faith in the dissertation studies of two of his PhD students, Joanne Anania and Arthur J. Burke. Both Anania and Burke reported two-sigma effects when comparing tutoring to whole-group classroom instruction—and substantial effects, though not as large, from mastery learning.

Because Anania and Burke provided essentially all the empirical evidence that backed Bloom’s claim of two-sigma tutoring, it’s a little shocking that Bloom didn’t credit them as coauthors. Bloom did cite his students’ dissertations, but if Burke and Anania had been coauthors on an instant classic like “The 2 Sigma Problem,” they might have gotten jobs that provided the resources to conduct further research on tutoring and mastery learning. Instead, Anania published a journal version of her dissertation research, which has been cited just 77 times to date. She taught at three universities in the Chicago area, where she specialized in reading, children’s literature, and adult literacy. Her 2012 obituary doesn’t mention her work on tutoring. Burke never published his dissertation research—or anything else on tutoring. Years later, he published half a dozen reports for the Northwest Regional Laboratory on suspension, expulsion, and graduation—not tutoring.

Bloom also did little work on tutoring after 1984. His next and last major project was an edited book titled Developing Talent in Young People. Published in 1985, the book relied on interviews with accomplished adults to reconstruct how they had developed their talents for music, sculpture, athletics, mathematics, or science. Bloom, who wrote only the introduction, summarized his two-sigma claim in a single paragraph that did not mention Anania or Burke. Bloom retired in 1991 and died in 1999.

It’s a little odd, isn’t it? If these three individuals—two of them just starting their research careers—really discovered a way to raise students’ test scores by two standard deviations, why didn’t they do more with it? Why didn’t they conduct more research? Why didn’t they start a tutoring company?

The two-sigma effect wasn’t just from tutoring

Did Anania and Burke really find two-sigma effects of tutoring? I must admit I was feeling skeptical when I printed out their dissertations. Few 40-year-old education findings hold up well, and student work, half of it unpublished, whose effects have never been replicated, seemed especially unpromising.

To my surprise, though, I found a lot to like in Anania’s and Burke’s dissertations. Both students ran small but nicely designed experiments to test the effect of a thoughtful educational intervention. They randomly assigned 4th, 5th, and 8th graders to receive whole-class instruction, mastery learning, or tutoring. The 4th and 5th graders learned probability; the 8th graders learned cartography. On a post-test given at the end of the three-week experiment, the tutored group really did outscore the whole-class group by two standard deviations on average.

But the tests that students took were very specific. And the tutoring intervention involved a lot more than just tutoring.

Students took a narrow test. Burke and Anania chose the topics of probability and cartography for a specific reason—because those topics were unfamiliar to participating students. There is nothing wrong with choosing an unfamiliar topic; experiments in the science of learning commonly do so. But it’s easier to produce a large effect when students are starting from zero. Cohen, Kulik, and Kulik’s 1982 meta-analysis reported that tutoring effects averaged 0.84 standard deviations when measured on narrow tests developed by the study authors, versus just 0.27 standard deviations when measured on broader standardized tests. In 2020, Matt Kraft reported that effects of educational interventions generally—not just tutoring—are about twice as large when they are evaluated based on narrow as opposed to broad tests.

While Anania’s and Burke’s intervention did achieve two-sigma effects on tests of the material covered in their three-week experiment, it is doubtful that they could achieve similar effects on a broad test like the SAT, which measures years of accumulated skills and knowledge, or on the state math and reading tests that so many parents and teachers have worried about since the pandemic.

Certainly not in three weeks.

Tutored students received extra testing and feedback. Burke’s and Anania’s two-sigma intervention did involve tutoring, but it also had other features. Perhaps the most important was that tutored students received extra testing and feedback. At the end of each unit, all students took a quiz, but any tutored student who scored below 80 percent (in Anania’s study) or 90 percent (in Burke’s) received feedback and correction on concepts that they had missed. Then the tutored students took a second quiz with new questions—a quiz that students in the whole-class condition never received. If the tutored students still scored below 80 or 90 percent, they got more feedback and another quiz.

Bloom acknowledged that his students’ experiments included extra quizzes and feedback, but he asserted that “the need for corrective work under tutoring is very small.” That assertion was incorrect. Clearly the tutored students benefited substantially from feedback and retesting (see Figure 2). For example, in week one of Anania’s experiment, tutored students scored 11 percentage points higher on the retest than they did on the initial test. In week two, tutored students scored 20 percentage points higher on the retest than on the initial test, and in week three, they scored 30 percentage points higher on the retest than on the initial test.

These boosts to performance, and their benefits for longer-term learning, are examples of the testing effect—an effect that, though widely appreciated in cognitive psychology today, was less appreciated in the 1980s. Students learn from testing and retesting, especially if they receive corrective feedback that focuses on processes and concepts instead of simply being told whether they are right or wrong. Burke’s and Anania’s tutors were trained on how to provide effective feedback. Indeed, Burke wrote, “perhaps the most important part of the tutors’ training was learning to manage feedback and correction effectively.” The feedback and retesting also provided tutored students with more instructional time than the students receiving whole-class instruction—about an hour more per week, according to Burke.

How much of the two-sigma effect did the extra testing and feedback explain? About half. You can tell because, in addition to the tutored and whole-class groups, there was a third group of students who engaged in “mastery learning,” which did not include tutoring but did include feedback and testing after whole-class instruction. On a post-test given at the end of the three-week experiment, the mastery-learning students scored about 1.1 standard deviations higher than the students who received whole-class instruction. That’s just a bit larger than the effects of 0.73 to 0.96 standard deviations reported by meta-analyses that have estimated the effects of testing and feedback on narrow tests.

If feedback and retesting accounted for 1.1 of Bloom’s two sigmas, that leaves 0.9 sigmas that we can chalk up to tutoring. That’s not too far from the 0.84 sigmas that the Cohen, Kulik, and Kulik meta-analysis reports for tutoring’s effect on narrow tests.

Tutors received extra training. Extra testing and feedback might have been the most important extra in Anania’s and Burke’s tutoring intervention, but it wasn’t the only extra.

Anania’s and Burke’s tutors also received training, coaching, and practice that other instructors in their experiments did not receive. Burke mentioned training tutors to provide effective feedback, but tutors were also trained “to develop skill in providing instructional cues . . . to summarize frequently, to take a step-by-step approach, and to provide sufficient examples for each new concept. . . . To encourage each student’s active participation, tutors were trained to ask leading questions, to elicit additional responses from the students, and to ask students for alternative examples or answers”—all examples of active, inquiry-based learning and retrieval practice. Finally, “tutors were urged to be appropriately generous with praise and encouragement whenever a student made progress. The purpose of this training was to help the tutor make learning a rewarding experience for each student.”

Although previous tutoring studies had not found larger effects if tutors were trained, the training these tutors received may have been exceptional. Anania and Burke could have isolated the effect of training if they had offered it to some of the instructors in the whole-class or mastery-learning group. Unfortunately, they didn’t do that, so we can’t tell how much of their tutoring effect was due to tutor training.

Tutoring was comprehensive. Many public and private programs offer tutoring as a supplement to classroom instruction. Students attend class with everyone else and then follow up with a tutor afterwards. But the tutoring in Burke’s and Anania’s experiments wasn’t like that. Tutoring didn’t supplement classroom instruction; tutoring replaced classroom instruction. Tutored students received all instruction from their tutors; they didn’t attend class at all. That’s important because, according to Cohen, Kulik, and Kulik’s meta-analysis, tutoring is about 50 percent more effective when it replaces rather than substitutes for classroom instruction.

It’s great, of course, that Burke’s and Anania’s students received the most effective form of tutoring. But it also means that it wasn’t the kind of tutoring that students commonly receive in an after-school or pull-out program.

All That Glitters

My father may have had a two-sigma tutor in 1945. His tutor couldn’t foresee Anania’s and Burke’s experiments, 40 years in the future, but her approach had several components in common with theirs. She met with her student frequently. She was goal-oriented, striving to ensure that my father mastered the 2nd- and 3rd-grade curricula rather than just putting in time. She didn’t yoke herself to the pace of classroom instruction but moved ahead as quickly as she thought my father could handle. And she checked his comprehension regularly—not with quizzes but with short homework assignments, which she checked and corrected to explain his mistakes.

But not all tutoring is like that, and some of what passes for tutoring today is much worse than what my father received in 1945.

In the fall of 2020, I learned that my 5th grader’s math scores had declined during the pandemic. I knew that they hadn’t been learning much math, but the fact that their skills had gone backward was a bit of a shock.

To prepare them for what would come next, I told them the story about my father’s 2nd-grade tutor.

“Grandpa got tutored every day for seven weeks?” they asked me. “That seems excessive.”

“You think so?” I asked.

“Yeah—it’s 47 hours!”

“Come again?” I asked.

They reached for a calculator.

Once a week I drove them to a for-profit tutoring center at a nearby strip mall. It was a great time to be in the tutoring business, but this center wasn’t doing great things with the opportunity. My child sat with four other children, filling out worksheets while a lone tutor sat nearby—available for questions, but mostly doing her own college homework and exchanging text messages with her friends. One day my child told me that they had spent the whole hour just multiplying different numbers by eight. They received no homework. From a cognitive-science perspective, I was pretty sure that practicing a single micro-skill for an hour once a week was not optimal. The whole system seemed designed not to catch kids up, but to keep parents coming back and paying for sessions.

Unfortunately, overpriced and perfunctory tutoring is common. In an evaluation of private tutoring services purchased for disadvantaged students by four large school districts in 2008–2012, Carolyn Heinrich and her colleagues found that, even though districts paid $1,100 to $2,000 per eligible student (40 percent more in current dollars), students got only half an hour each week with a tutor, on average. Because districts were paying per student instead of per tutor, most tutors worked with several children at once, providing little individualized instruction, even for children with special needs or limited English. Students met with tutors outside of regular school hours, and student engagement and attendance were patchy.

Only one district—Chicago—saw positive impacts of tutoring, and those impacts averaged just 0.06 standard deviations, or 2 percentile points.

My grandmother would never have stood for that.

After these results were published, some of Chicago’s most disadvantaged high schools started working with a new provider, Saga Education. Compared to the tutoring services that Heinrich and her colleagues evaluated, Saga’s approach was much more structured and intense. Tutors were trained for 100 hours before starting the school year. They worked with just two students at a time. Tutoring was scheduled like a regular class, so that students met with their tutor for 45 minutes a day, and the way the tutor handled that time was highly regimented. Each tutoring session began with warmup problems, continued with tutoring tailored to each student’s needs, and ended with a short quiz.

The cost of Saga tutoring—$3,500 to $4,300 per student per year—was higher than the programs that Heinrich and her colleagues had evaluated, but the results were much better. According to a 2021 evaluation by Jonathan Guryan and his colleagues, Saga tutoring raised math scores by 0.16 to 0.37 standard deviations. The effect was “sizable,” the authors concluded—it wasn’t two sigmas, but it doubled or even tripled students’ annual gains in math.

Is Two-Sigma Tutoring Real?

The idea that tutoring consistently raises achievement by two standard deviations is exaggerated and oversimplified. The benefits of tutoring depend on how much individualized instruction and feedback students get, how much they practice the tutored skills, and on the type of test used to measure tutoring’s effects. Tutoring effects, as estimated by rigorous evaluations, have ranged from two full standard deviations down to zero or worse. About one-third of a standard deviation seems to be the typical effect of an intense, well-designed program evaluated against broad tests.

The two-sigma effects obtained in the 1980s by Anania and Burke were real and remarkable, but they were obtained on a narrow, specialized test, and they weren’t obtained by tutoring alone. Instead, Anania and Burke mixed a potent cocktail of interventions that included tutoring; training and coaching in effective instructional practices; extra time; and frequent testing, feedback, and retesting.

In short, Bloom’s two-sigma claim had some basis in fact, but it also contained elements of fiction.

Like some science fiction, though, Bloom’s claim has inspired a great deal of real progress in research and technology. Modern cognitive tutoring software, such as ASSISTments or MATHia, was inspired in part by Bloom’s challenge, although what tutoring software exploits even more is the feedback and retesting required for mastery learning. Video tutoring makes human tutors more accessible, and new chatbots have the potential to make AI tutoring almost as personal, engaging, and responsive. Chatbots are also far more available and less expensive than human tutors. Khanmigo, for example, costs $9 a month, or $99 per year.

My own experience suggests that the large language models that undergird AI tutoring, by themselves, quickly get lost when trying to teach common math concepts like the Pythagorean theorem. But combining chatbots’ natural language capabilities with a reliable formal knowledge base—such as a cognitive tutor, a math engine, or an open-source textbook—offers substantial promise.

There is also the question of how well students will engage with a chatbot. Since chatbots aren’t human, it is easy to imagine that students won’t take them seriously—that they won’t feel as accountable to them as my father felt to his tutor and his mother. Yet students do engage and even open up to chatbots, perhaps because they know they won’t be judged. The most popular chatbots among young people are ones that simulate psychotherapy. How different is tutoring, really?

It seems rash, though, to promise two-sigma effects from AI when human tutoring has rarely produced such large effects, and no evidence on the effects of chatbot tutoring has yet been published. Over-promising can lead to disappointment, and reaching for impossible goals can breed questionable educational practices. There are already both human and AI services that will do students’ homework for them, as well as more well-intentioned but still “overly helpful” tutors who help students complete assignments without fully understanding what they’re doing. Such tutors may raise students’ grades in the short term, but in the long run they cheat students of the benefits of learning for themselves.

In the early going, it would be sensible simply to aim for effects that approximate the benefits of well-designed human tutoring. Producing benefits of one-third of a standard deviation would be a huge triumph if it could be done at low cost, on a large scale, and on a broad test—all without requiring an army of human tutors, some of whom may not be that invested in the job. Effects of one-third of a standard deviation probably won’t be achieved just by setting chatbots loose in the classroom but might be within reach if we skillfully integrate the new chatbots with resources and strategies from the science of learning. Once effects of one-third of a standard deviation have been produced and verified, we should be able to improve on them through continuous, incremental A/B testing—slowly turning science fiction into science fact.

Paul von Hippel is a professor and associate dean for research in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin.

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

von Hippel, P.T. (2024). Two-Sigma Tutoring: Separating Science Fiction from Science Fact. Education Next, 24(2), 22-31.

Over the past 12 years, the U.S. Supreme Court has significantly buttressed the rights of religious organizations to control how they govern themselves and to not be excluded from public programs simply because they are religious. The court’s Free Exercise Clause decisions have declared that religious institutions have substantial autonomy in deciding whom to hire (and fire) under the “ministerial exception,” that they cannot be barred from participating in adoption programs because of government nondiscrimination policies, and that they cannot be deprived of otherwise available benefits because of their religious beliefs and practices. Considering these doctrinal developments, one would think that states would be careful about religiously based discrimination. But as two recent lawsuits from Colorado show, one would be wrong.

In 2022, the Colorado legislature passed one of Governor Jared Polis’s signature initiatives: a universal preschool program. The program, which went into effect in 2023, provides up to 15 hours of state-funded tuition at participating preschools, including private providers. However, the Colorado Department of Early Childhood required all preschools wishing to participate in the program to sign a “program service agreement” forbidding discrimination based on “gender, race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, citizenship status, education, disability, socio-economic status, or any other identity” and prohibiting “deliberately misusing an individual’s preferred name, form of address, or gender-related pronoun.” This led a coalition of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish organizations to request an exemption from the nondiscrimination requirements, since the rules would compel these organizations to abandon their religiously based policies regarding sexual orientation and gender identity. Lisa Roy, the agency’s executive director, denied their request, contending that the anti-discrimination provisions were mandated by state law.

Two lawsuits immediately followed. The Darren Patterson Christian Academy in Buena Vista sued in June 2023, followed in August by the St. Mary Catholic Parish, the St. Bernadette Catholic Parish, the Archdiocese of Denver, and two Catholic parents. Both suits are likely to succeed.

Darren Patterson was granted a preliminary injunction in October 2023 by federal Judge Daniel Domenico, a Trump appointee, based on several constitutional claims. The school first argued that the state’s policy would interfere with its right to hire only teachers who share its Christian faith. Under the Supreme Court’s ministerial exception doctrine, outlined in Hosanna Tabor v. EEOC (2012) and Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru (2020), the school is entitled to hire only teachers who agree with their statement of faith. The school also argued that, under Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000) and Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston (1995), the First Amendment protects its right as an expressive association not to be forced to associate with those who disagree with their views. What’s more, the school claimed that the program was not neutral toward religion, since it allowed exemptions for other reasons in order to insure a “mixed delivery system”—that is, one that includes a variety of preschool providers. Moreover, the school contended, the state policy would violate 303 Creative, LLC v. Ennis from the Supreme Court’s last term, which held that “the government may not compel a person to speak its own preferred messages.”

While Domenico said Darren Patterson was likely to succeed on all these claims, the school’s strongest argument was clearly grounded in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer (2017), Espinoza v. Montana (2020), and Carson v. Makin (2022). Collectively, this trilogy forbids the government from excluding religious believers from otherwise available benefits solely because of their beliefs. The state, as Espinoza held, does not have to “subsidize private education,” but once it does, “it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.” To do otherwise constitutes unconstitutional discrimination under the Free Exercise Clause. Whatever happens with the other claims as the case makes its way through the courts, it is difficult to see how the state’s policy can overcome this one.

The lawsuit by the Catholic plaintiffs largely mirrors the free-exercise claims made by Darren Patterson. In particular, they point out that “the Archdiocese’s consistent position has been that those who teach in its schools and participate in its faith communities must be open to and supportive of the Catholic Church’s teachings,” including those on “the human person and sexual identity.” Under the state’s policy, it is clear that the Catholic schools’ participation is forbidden, but their exclusion, once again, would appear to contradict the court’s reasoning in Comer, Espinoza, and Makin. Before the case went to trial in January 2024, district-court Judge John Kane ruled that the schools were separate legal entities and that they, along with the parents, could allege harm as plaintiffs—though he dismissed the Archdiocese for lack of standing. Kane is a Carter appointee with a politically eclectic record who is likely less inclined to agree with the plaintiffs’ claims. During the trial, for instance, he referenced Pope Francis’s allegedly evolving positions on sexual ethics but then acknowledged that it was inappropriate for him to question the “authenticity” of the plaintiffs’ beliefs, an equivocation the plaintiffs probably did not find reassuring.

These cases likely foreshadow future conflicts over school choice in Colorado and nationally and will give some indication of how the Supreme Court’s decisions related to religious practice and speech will be applied by lower courts. Colorado has long been a leader in the charter-school movement. The outcomes of these cases could inspire charter-school advocates to test whether the court’s decisions require the state to allow the creation of religious charter schools as Oklahoma has now done. Following the court’s decision in Makin, it was obvious that blue states would try to use nondiscrimination policy to justify excluding religious providers. If Colorado is told it cannot forbid religious preschools on grounds of nondiscrimination, then one can certainly expect religious groups to challenge Colorado’s current law, which requires that charter schools be “nonsectarian” and “nonreligious.” Discrimination cuts both ways.

Joshua Dunn is executive director of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Institute of American Civics at the Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs.

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

Dunn, J. (2024). School Choice for Me but Not for Thee. Education Next, 24(2), 6-7.

David Steiner is executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy.

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

Steiner, D. (2024). Successes and Setbacks in Shaker Heights: A town struggles to maintain racial equity in the face of persistent gaps in student outcomes. Education Next, 24(2), 66-67.

Since its founding 34 years ago, Teach For America has prepared nearly 70,000 recent college graduates and career-changers to teach in high-poverty schools across the United States. The selective program recruits mission-driven applicants, with annual admissions rates as low as 12 percent. Unlike traditional teacher-preparation programs, it places “corps members” in short-staffed public schools after an intensive summer seminar, before they are fully certified to teach, and provides additional support and training during a two-year stint in the classroom.

The program, which is part of Americorps and known broadly as TFA, has been both successful and controversial. Its theory of action is that bringing highly educated, mission-motivated “future leaders” into public schools in low-income communities will positively impact student learning, influence professionals to commit themselves to the issue of educational equity, and give educational equity a firmer foothold in the nation’s agenda. Prior research has found encouraging evidence on all counts. TFA teachers perform as well or better than their most likely alternative during their first two years in the classroom, and compelling quasi-experimental evidence suggests participating in TFA shapes alumni’s worldviews. As one example, TFA participants are more likely to view student achievement gaps as a symptom of systemic social injustices rather than a symptom of individual choices or behaviors (see “How Teach For America Affects Beliefs About Education,” research, Winter 2020). In addition, TFA alumni are well represented in state departments of education and have founded some of the nation’s largest charter-school networks (see “Creating a Core of Change Agents,” feature, Summer 2011).

The program remains controversial, however. TFA teachers are usually new to education, and critics worry that the program provides students who arguably have the greatest need for excellent instruction with the least-prepared novice teachers. In addition, TFA teachers commit to just two years in the classroom. In general, teachers improve rapidly during their first five years, which means that TFA teachers are scheduled to move on before they fully get the hang of the job.

These concerns, and the evidence base to date, overlook TFA teachers who continue teaching for five years or more. To learn how these teachers perform over the longer term, I look at estimates of value-added, or the estimated contribution to students’ test scores, of TFA teachers in New York City between 2012 and 2019, when about 25 percent remained teaching after year five. I compare that to the same estimates of non-TFA teachers working in TFA-participating schools, 43 percent of whom taught for at least five years.

TFA alumni who choose to keep teaching improve more rapidly over the first five years of their career than non-TFA teachers. The average TFA teacher who stays in the classroom for five years or more improves at more than double the rate of non-TFA teachers, at 13 percent of a standard deviation by year six compared to 6.3 percent of a standard deviation.

I then explore the question of whether regular turnover within the TFA workforce neutralizes or offsets these effects. To examine this issue, I compare student performance under two hypothetical scenarios: a district policy to continually hire TFA teachers to replace exiting corps members, or a district policy to never hire any TFA teachers at all. My results show a district policy of continuous TFA hiring would boost student achievement by an estimated 5 percent of a standard deviation relative to a policy of no TFA hiring. So long as exiting TFA teachers are replaced by new TFA recruits, student achievement will be higher, on average, than if the district did not hire any TFA corps members.

To be clear, hiring is complex, and teachers’ projected effects on student achievement should not be the only criterion driving staffing decisions. This research addresses a singular concern—that high turnover among TFA teachers drives down student achievement over the long run. Overall, I find that the data does not substantiate this concern, given the rapid rate at which TFA teachers improve on the job.

Assessing an Alternative Teacher Pipeline

TFA was launched in 1990 and rooted in founder Wendy Kopp’s undergraduate senior thesis at Princeton University. The thesis called for the creation of a new public-service program to train college seniors who did not major in education to teach in high-poverty schools for two years, building on a wave of new alternative-route certification laws that had been adopted in 20 states. From TFA’s earliest cohort of 489 recruits, the non-profit has expanded to 50 cities and regions nationwide. Over that same time, the share of U.S. teachers trained through alternative-certification programs has grown to nearly one in five. By 2023, every state except Alaska, Oregon, and Wyoming had adopted an alternative-route certification law.

Kopp was inspired by the recruiters from investment banks and consulting firms, who aggressively scouted talent and offered promising students an impressive launching pad after graduation. TFA recruiters used a similar approach, and the program quickly became a sought-after post-collegiate option; in 2011, fully 18 percent of Harvard’s graduating class applied. The competitive nature of the short-term program and demographics of its idealistic, highly educated corps members, who were predominantly wealthy and white at that time, attracted skepticism and critiques. Over the last decade, the organization has shifted its recruitment and training practices to achieve a more diverse corps of educators whose background or ethnicity matches that of their students. Today, about 60 percent of TFA corps members are Black, Indigenous, or people of color, compared to 20 percent of all U.S. teachers. In addition, 45 percent of TFA corps members are first-generation college graduates.

Another important change is the growing number of TFA alumni who have continued to work in the classroom—nearly one in four, or 14,600 teachers nationwide. To fully understand the impact of TFA on student learning, we need to assess the performance of these alumni over the longer term.

The New York City Department of Education, the nation’s largest school district, has hired nearly 6,000 TFA corps members since 1990. My analysis is based on New York City public schools that hired both TFA and non-TFA teachers between 2012–13 and 2018–19. These schools tend to have relatively lower standardized test scores, greater shares of students of color, and more students from low-income families. On average, student performance is 36 percent of a standard deviation below the citywide mean.

The data include teacher salary data, which I use to identify teachers’ years of experience. Because the district does not maintain the same data for charter-school teachers, those teaching at charters are excluded from this analysis. I further restrict the sample to teachers working in grades and subjects participating in state tests: grades 4 through 8 in math and English Language Arts. In all, my analysis includes 308 TFA teachers and approximately 40,000 non-TFA teachers.

I first look at retention rates. Overall, first-year TFA teachers are more likely than non-TFA teachers working in similar schools to keep teaching a second year, but less likely to remain in the classroom by year five (see Figure 1). About 88 percent of first-year TFA teachers persist to a second year compared to 82 percent of non-TFA teachers. However, non-TFA teachers are retained at higher rates in years three and beyond. Over the study period, 43 percent of non-TFA teachers kept teaching for five years or more, compared to 25 percent of TFA teachers.

Impacts on Student Performance

To estimate returns to experience for TFA and non-TFA teachers, I use a measure of value-added, or how much their students improve on annual tests in math and reading relative to expectations based on the students’ prior achievement and demographic characteristics. My calculations control for teacher and student characteristics and assume a “steady state” of the world, with no major changes in overall teacher supply or average teacher performance over time.

First, I look at teachers’ initial performance and find no average difference in first-year performance for TFA and non-TFA teachers. Then I look at teacher value-added by years of experience. Over the first five years of their careers, TFA teachers improve by 13 percent of a standard deviation compared to 6.3 percent for non-TFA teachers (see Figure 2). In particular, between their first and second year in the classroom, TFA teachers improve by 6.1 percent of a standard deviation, more than twice the rate of non-TFA teachers at 2.8 percent of a standard deviation. Non-TFA teachers catch up somewhat in year three, but TFA teachers continue to improve more quickly in the subsequent early-career years.

What do these results imply regarding the effects of TFA hiring on the teaching workforce over time? Because of their higher turnover rates, TFA teachers are about 1.5 times more likely to be in their first year of teaching than non-TFA teachers and only half as likely to have five years of experience or more. Nevertheless, I find that hiring continually hiring TFA teachers to replace exiting corps members, as compared to hiring non-TFA teachers, would increase student achievement by an estimated 5 percent of a standard deviation. This estimate assumes a constant turnover rate after year five and, consistent with my findings, assumes no average difference in performance for TFA and non-TFA teachers in year one.

This analysis may well understate the advantages for schools of relying on TFA. Given the staffing challenges common at schools that hire from the program, it could be the case that the best alternative to a TFA teacher is not the average first-year traditionally trained teacher, but rather a long-term substitute or a college graduate with an emergency certification who may or may not have any training in education or in the subject they teach. In that case, TFA teachers could perform better in year one than these likely alternatives and the estimates reported here would understate the true benefits of TFA hiring for student achievement.

Changing Demographics

While prior research has shown that TFA teachers perform as well or better than their most-likely alternative during their first two years in the classroom, my analysis additionally suggests that TFA teachers who continue teaching beyond year two continue to outperform their non-TFA counterparts after five years in the classroom.

This is a somewhat different result than that of a 2007 study of TFA teachers in New York City, which did not find meaningful differences in performance between teachers based on their certification status or preparation path. It also showed TFA teachers underperforming traditionally certified teachers in their first year before quickly catching up (see “Photo Finish,” research, Winter 2007). I find no difference between TFA and non-TFA teachers in year one, and faster performance gains for TFA teachers in years two through five. What could account for this difference?

One plausible explanation could be changes in TFA’s recruiting, workforce, and organizational strategy from its earliest days. These evolved dramatically between the two study periods to include an explicit focus on corps-member diversity. The TFA teacher workforce of the late 1990s and early 2000s skewed young, wealthy, and white; in New York City, TFA teachers were 82 percent white, and the median age was 23. By contrast, as of 2014, one-third of TFA teachers identified as first-generation college graduates, one-half as teachers of color, and 43 percent as growing up with a low household income. Research points to this increase in representation and instruction by teachers with backgrounds similar to their students as a powerful learning accelerator for students of color (see “What We Know About Teacher Race and Student Outcomes,” feature, Winter 2024).

TFA and other alternative-certification programs have grown rapidly over the past three decades. There are now more than 200 alternative providers, which prepare about one in five newly hired U.S. public-school teachers. While these teachers have higher rates of turnover after they are hired, they also are dramatically more racially diverse than teachers trained in traditional college-based programs. A review by the Center for American Progress found that in 2018–19, aspiring Black and Latino teachers accounted for 37 percent of all graduates of alternative-route programs based outside universities, compared to 17 percent at traditional teacher-preparation degree programs.

TFA, though a smaller provider, has influenced the national conversation about who should teach American students and how best to prepare those recruits. After several years of shrinking its workforce, the organization grew its corps members by 40 percent this year and is planning to grow by another 25 percent next year, with “an exceptional and diverse cohort” of 2,000 new teachers nationwide. A ripe area for future research is to examine whether improvements in the performance of the TFA workforce since the early 2000s continue and if they are a direct result of the organization’s efforts to recruit teachers who more closely resemble the students they serve.

Virginia S. Lovison is an Associate Director of Research & Policy at Deloitte Access Economics and a former postdoctoral research associate at the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University. This analysis is the author’s own, independent of Deloitte Access Economics.

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

Lovison, V.S. (2024). Teach For America’s Fast Path to the Classroom Accelerates Performance Over the Longer Haul. Education Next, 24(2), 46-51.

In 1988, Xerox CEO David Kearns co-authored a book titled Winning the Brain Race: A Bold Plan to Make Our Schools Competitive. Three years later, Kearns became deputy secretary of education under President George H. W. Bush. Three years after that, IBM CEO Lou Gerstner co-authored Reinventing Education: Entrepreneurship in America’s Public Schools, a book summarizing and synthesizing promising programs and practices developed by schools that had received innovation grants from RJR Nabisco. In 1996, Gerstner hosted the National Governor’s Association (NGA) at IBM’s headquarters in New York for an education summit where 43 governors, each accompanied by a CEO from their home states, discussed K–12 education standards. A direct outgrowth of that gathering was the creation of Achieve, a joint education reform project of the NGA and corporate executives, which Gerstner co-chaired until 2002. In 2003, Gerstner established and chaired the Teaching Commission, composed of education and business leaders, which published the report Teaching at Risk: A Call to Action.

Viewed through the prism of 2024, this brief retrospective on the engagement of two prominent CEOs in national K–12 education improvement and reform feels like a dim memory from a distant past. This is not to say there aren’t CEOs today who care deeply about education quality and equity, especially when it comes to career readiness. As just one example, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, has been a committed advocate and supporter of career pathways and work-based learning through the company’s New Skills for Youth initiative. But there are few if any voices from the C-suite who have committed their own time and their company’s brand and resources to the broad-based challenges that continue to confront our public school system.

The K–12 education challenges we face today and their implications for the long-term health of the economy are just as important as they were 40 years ago, maybe even more so. Yet corporate leaders are largely missing in action, and the silence is deafening.

To be sure, wealthy entrepreneurs and investors played an outsized role in the education reform movement of the 1990s and early 2000s, but mostly through their personal philanthropy and the resources of their family foundations, not their corporations. People such as Bill Gates, Mike Bloomberg, Eli Broad, Michael Dell, John Walton, Mark Zuckerberg, John Doerr, and Julian Robertson mobilized billions of dollars to support national and local initiatives such as small high schools, charter schools, academic standards, digital learning, alternative pathways to teaching, and performance-based compensation.

Many of these investments have had a meaningful and lasting positive impact, but others were false starts or dead ends, and some drew significant blowback from teachers unions and civil rights activists. Although these funders remain engaged in improving public education, they have generally lowered their profiles, re-evaluated their strategies, and narrowed their focus.

Era of Engagement

In the aftermath of the 1983 report A Nation at Risk, business leadership was not just a hallmark of the national education-policy landscape; it was also a crucial driver of state and local school reforms. In my home state of Massachusetts, Jack Rennie, CEO of Pacer Systems, formed the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education. At first, MBAE set out to highlight the low levels of achievement and improvement in the commonwealth’s public schools, especially in low-income urban neighborhoods, and to develop a set of policy recommendations based on effective practices from across the country and around the world, culminating in a 1991 report titled Every Child a Winner.

But Rennie didn’t just write a report. He organized his peers from around the state, in collaboration with other CEO-led organizations, such as the Massachusetts Business Roundtable and Associated Industries of Massachusetts, along with major employers such as State Street Bank and Raytheon, to launch a relentless campaign to pass what became the Education Reform Act of 1993. Equally important, Rennie kept the organization alive after the law’s passage to ensure the legislature and administration followed through on their commitments to develop state standards, student assessments, and school accountability systems, and to increase overall state funding, especially to the commonwealth’s highest-need communities.

Preceding MBAE, but with a more local focus, was the Boston Private Industry Council. Originally established to implement federal job-training programs, the Council soon became a forum for broader business engagement with the Boston Public Schools, ultimately leading to the signing of the Boston Compact in 1982, through the leadership of State Street chairman Bill Edgerly. The Compact, which committed local businesses to hiring more of Boston’s public school students and graduates in exchange for improvements in education quality, gave the city’s business leaders a seat at the table in setting and implementing district priorities. Ten years later, Edgerly walked the halls of the Massachusetts State House to ensure that a charter school provision was included in the landmark Education Reform Act.

Similar stories of active and effective engagement by key business leaders in public education were not uncommon in the not-too-distant past. A 1998 study from the National Education Goals Panel, a presidential advisory body, highlighted the impact of the business community on the strong learning gains in Texas and North Carolina, which posted the nation’s biggest increases in NAEP scores between 1990 and 1997. The study found that rising academic achievement in both states was tied to their systems of standards-based accountability, combined with a relaxation of many state mandates and the transfer of more decisionmaking to the school level. Crucial to the adoption and implementation of these reforms was support from business leaders.

“In both states the business community played a critical role in developing the strategic plan for reform, forging compromises whenever possible with the education interests, and passing the necessary legislation,” wrote authors David Grissmer and Ann Flanagan in the panel’s report. The sector’s influence stemmed from the efforts of “a handful of businessmen in each state who devoted considerable time and energy to learning the education issues, forming relationships with key stakeholders and remain[ing] involved over long time periods.”

The active involvement of business in education policymaking during the 1980s and ’90s was a revival from an earlier age. The mid- to late-1960s and the 1970s saw a precipitous withdrawal, but before then, business leaders were seen as key stakeholders in the public education system at all levels, working to increase overall education attainment and develop vocational programs as well as serving on and often leading local school boards. Business engagement intensified during the Cold War, as post-Sputnik America placed new urgency on strengthening the overall quality of public schools, and especially science education.

With the onset of school desegregation and other broad cultural shifts, however, business leaders began to revisit their cost-benefit calculations and concluded that the risk of political controversy outweighed the potential for positive effect. According to a 1991 study from the Committee for Economic Development, “over a period of only a few years business’s influence was eclipsed, and its representatives were less and less prominent in the deliberations about local educational policy and rarely involved in the development of important new state and federal educational roles.”

The retreat from education didn’t last, however, as rapid technological change and growing global competition, especially from Japan, put the shortcomings of public schools back onto the front pages of the business magazines. Concerns about competitiveness re-engaged business leaders, which in turn got the attention of politicians. When the idea for creating a blue-ribbon commission on education was first surfaced within the Reagan administration in 1981, the White House reportedly wanted no part of it. But by the time A Nation at Risk was issued two years later, with its dire warning that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people,” the president was fully on board.

“Knowledge, learning, information, and skilled intelligence are the new raw materials of international commerce,” the report asserted. “If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system.”

Retreat from Public Involvement

Forty years later, the nature and extent of global competition has only increased, now with China (a geopolitical adversary) rather than Japan (an ally) as the leading challenger to American dominance. Similarly, the pace of technological change and diffusion has only accelerated, and the centrality of knowledge-based workers to the innovation that drives economic growth and wealth creation is beyond dispute. Equally important, the ongoing Baby Boomer retirement wave and growing diversity of the American workforce has sharpened the business case for closing persistent achievement and attainment gaps.

At the same time, in the wake of Covid-19 the country is facing an unprecedented education crisis that has produced the most precipitous decline in academic achievement we’ve ever seen, which is likely to reverberate throughout the economy for years to come.

And yet, with all of these factors threatening the long-term health of the American economy, today’s business leaders tend to shy away from public involvement in the core challenges of K–12 education. The causes of this disengagement vary from company to company and place to place, but some patterns have emerged.

One factor is simply generational change in corner offices. The cohort of senior executives who were involved in the early days of the current education-reform movement retired years ago, and the memory of pre-reform conditions is gone with them. As a result, today’s business leaders have little understanding of what K–12 education would look like if the basic architecture of standards-based reform were to fade away.

Compounding the problem is the consolidation and globalization of many industries that previously had a stronger local presence and a concomitant dependence on a local workforce. Companies whose histories and identities had once been deeply rooted in a state or region now have headquarters in other parts of the country or in different countries altogether. The banking industry, which has traditionally played a leading role in business-government relations at a state and local level, has been especially affected by this trend, resulting in a 70 percent reduction in the number of independent banks since 1990.

CEOs who had once been pillars of communities where they had grown up and raised their families have been replaced by senior vice presidents and general managers who are recent arrivals, without the relationships or long-term commitments that motivate and enable effective public engagement. Equally important, as managers of subsidiaries or divisions, the current generation of local business leaders may simply lack the authority to act on their own.

This consolidation has not produced a new generation of respected national business leaders who have credibility with the American public, the way earlier CEOs like Kearns and Gerstner did. Americans have always had a love-hate relationship with corporate executives, but as the “commanding heights” of industry have shifted from hardware and manufacturing to software and social media, the average citizen has taken an increasingly jaundiced view of their good intentions. According to a recent Gallup poll gauging Americans’ confidence in institutions, only 14 percent of the public has “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in big business, down about half since the beginning of this century and lower than all other institutions except the U.S. Congress.

Another reason that K–12 education has drifted down the list of priorities for business leaders is that there is no compelling and actionable policy agenda around which they can coalesce and mobilize. This is in part a result of past success. The foundations of education reform that the business community embraced in the 1980s and ’90s are largely still in place, even though they may be under threat or fraying around the edges. Advocating for programs or practices that have the potential to improve student outcomes is a less comfortable role for business leaders to play, since they typically believe the details of teaching and learning should be left to the experts and educators.

The other side of the coin is the frustration that many executives feel at the slow pace of change and improvement. Some of the major recommendations from A Nation at Risk and subsequently from the business community—such as longer school days and school years, merit-based pay for teachers, and certifications in high-demand STEM fields—have not been implemented at any meaningful scale. The reforms that have been adopted, such as common academic standards, statewide student assessments, and school accountability systems, are widely perceived to have not moved the needle, even though a closer look at the data suggests they have had a significant positive effect.

According to Tom Kane, professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and director of the Center for Education Policy Research, standards-based education reform has produced achievement and equity gains that may amount to “the most important social policy success of the last half century.” Still, the results have not met the unrealistic expectations of many reform advocates, funders, and policymakers.

The perception of underwhelming progress has led some wealthy business leaders to shift their personal attention more toward expanding parental choice, through mechanisms such as charter schools and vouchers, rather than investing more time and resources with school districts, often out of a growing skepticism that significant systemic change is even possible. These outside-the-system strategies are seen as having a more immediate and sustainable impact on student outcomes, especially in low-income urban communities, with the potential to generate productive competitive pressure over time on neighboring school districts.

Perhaps the most important factor driving the retreat of the business community has been the end of the spirit of bipartisanship that was the hallmark of education policy for almost 30 years, which had created a safe space for business leaders to stand. If George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy can join hands to pass the No Child Left Behind Act, then surely there’s little risk to a business in joining the team. Unfortunately, the era of good feelings didn’t last, with the last straw for many being the controversy surrounding Race to the Top and Common Core.

Things have since gone from bad to worse, with education not only dividing politicians along party lines but dividing friends and neighbors over issues such as remote learning, Covid vaccines, mask mandates, and culture wars related to race and gender identity. In some instances, these flashpoints have even created internal management challenges for corporate executives or generated protests and boycotts from otherwise loyal customers.

The bottom line is that most business leaders and business associations no longer believe the rewards of getting involved in K–12 education policy are worth the risk.

This does not mean that employers have walked away from education entirely. Instead, they have tended to focus on less-controversial aspects that have a greater direct impact on business or that speak to specific areas of expertise. For example, businesses have actively supported development of tech-enabled innovations in digital learning and have promoted expansion and improvement of project-based, hands-on STEM programs, including computer science, at all grade levels. They have also championed investments in vocational-technical high schools and the development of career pathways with work-based learning experiences and industry-recognized certifications. Most of these initiatives place a priority on so-called “durable skills,” an updated version of “21st century skills,” which concern nonacademic domains such as communication, problem solving, and teamwork.

Businesses have also shifted their attention to both ends of the K–12 spectrum by supporting increased funding for childcare and the strengthening of post-secondary or so-called “last mile” skill-based credential programs. The former addresses the growing needs of the post-Covid hybrid workforce, with many working parents in need of affordable day care. The latter aims to create a talent pipeline for specific high-demand occupations—neither of which has much impact on public schools.

These issues are worthy of attention from the business sector, and many of them align closely with the interests of individual businesses and the economy as a whole. Nevertheless, there is a risk that by avoiding direct engagement with the core of K–12 education, business leaders will just be doing damage control rather than supporting and sustaining the broad-based change and improvement that’s needed.

Even more problematic is the possibility that while employers are trying to work around the system’s weaknesses, the increasingly shaky support for standards-based reform that has held over the past several decades will crumble under fire from opponents.

Exhibit A is a pending union-led ballot initiative in Massachusetts that would eliminate the 10th-grade standardized exam from the state’s graduation requirements. Although the ballot question would not repeal all state testing requirements, it would be the first step in rolling back the standards-based accountability system that was enshrined in the 1993 Education Reform Act. If this proposal succeeds at the ballot box or in the legislature, the Massachusetts Teachers Association predicts “the 30-year experiment with test, punish and privatize will end.”

A similar movement is afoot in Oregon, where the state board of education has extended through 2029 its Covid-era suspension of statewide assessments as part of the high school graduation requirements. The legislature has further mandated that all families be informed of their right to withdraw their children from state testing, resulting in one-third of Oregon’s juniors opting out.

An Urgent Need

Notwithstanding these unsettling trends, the basic components of education reform remain popular with the general public. For example, over 70 percent of Americans still favor annual testing in reading and math, according to the 2022 Education Next opinion survey. But that support is becoming more uneven and more divided along partisan lines—which is to say, the pragmatic center is holding, but it’s tenuous.

At the same time, legislators and other policymakers who were “present at the creation” are now long gone, as is the institutional memory of what life was like pre-reform. Many newer public officials have heard little but the steady drumbeat of opposition, mainly from teachers unions and superintendents but also from critics on the right who were activated by the curriculum controversies during the Obama administration and who continue to be skeptical of government mandates.

Even many of the education and advocacy organizations that were established in the wake of the reform movement have faded into the background of public discourse, partly in response to the changing priorities of their philanthropic funders but also out of deference to those who have caricatured education reform as either another brick in the wall of structural racism or an obstacle to parents’ rights.

In other words, there is a mismatch between broad public opinion and the mobilized constituencies. Since it’s the advocates who walk the halls of power, show up at hearings, and hold signs on street corners, many elected officials hesitate to expend political capital defending a system they did not create.

Recently, reform-minded organizations have tried to revive the bipartisan consensus that characterized education policymaking until the last decade. The most notable example is the Building Bridges Initiative, which in 2023 produced an updated call to action titled A Generation at Risk. In addition, policy and advocacy organizations such as 50CAN, Education Reform Now, the PIE Network, the Fordham Institute, ExcelinEd, The Education Trust, and the National Parents Union are continuing to fight the good fight. Nevertheless, there is a large hole in the ecosystem that only the business community can fill.

More specifically, there is an urgent need for business leaders, CEOs in particular, to re-engage at the national and local level and reprioritize K–12 education, especially with regard to state policy. The first order of business will be to affirm the basic architecture of academic standards, statewide student assessments, and performance-based accountability, in order to prevent backsliding and a return to the pre-reform conditions described in A Nation at Risk. Essential to this defense is countering the popular narrative that standards-based reform has been a failure by pointing to the strong evidence of its efficacy and positive impact.

Equally important is expanding the business community’s programmatic focus beyond STEM and career-oriented education to include a broader set of scalable initiatives across the K–12 spectrum, including both district and charter schools, such as:

Addressing the post-Covid student absenteeism crisis through enforcement of attendance policies, effective communications with parents and the general public, and proactive strategies for re-engaging students.

Improving early literacy through the science of reading, including systematic phonics and vocabulary instruction, along with exposure to a broad base of content knowledge.

Accelerating learning gains and closing achievement gaps through high-dosage reading and math tutoring embedded in the school day.

Increasing post-secondary access and success through early college cohort pathways (more than just individual dual enrollment), focused on first-generation students.

Expanding and improving out-of-school time learning through academic “acceleration” programs during school vacations and intentional summer experiences that combine learning with fun, enrichment, and work.

Deepening and diversifying the pipeline of well-prepared teachers and school leaders.

Investing in innovation and research to drive evidence-based continuous improvement in our schools.

One of the lessons of the past several decades is that policy solutions by themselves are not enough to fuel continuous improvement and reduce disparities in achievement; changes in practice are also required, and business needs to have a seat at the table as one of the public education system’s key stakeholders and customers—not just as a cheerleader, but as a full partner.

I don’t mean to suggest that these are the simple answers to a complex problem or that these initiatives are easy to implement with fidelity and high-quality at large scale. But they are a place to start, with a strong body of evidence supporting their efficacy and growing interest and support on the part of educators, students, and families.

As an added benefit, by advocating for doing more of what’s working, business leaders may be able to revive a sense of optimism about what public schools can do—and give policymakers and parents something to talk about other than the cultural battles that have roiled legislatures and school boards across the country.

Re-engagement must include working collaboratively with local public schools and districts to add value in the classroom or the back office, not only to make a positive and practical contribution, but also to affirm good faith, because unfortunately, many educators view businesses with suspicion and assume some hidden agenda.

It also means getting involved in policymaking at the local level, through active engagement with municipal or county officials and school boards, to make sure they know that school quality matters to local businesses and that employers are prepared to publicly support education leaders or, if necessary, call them out.

But local efforts are not enough, because state governments control much of education policy and many resources. Critical to an effective state-level re-engagement is strengthening and expanding the network of state-based, business-led education coalitions, such as the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, Colorado Succeeds, and Tennessee SCORE, which not only cut across industry sectors but also work in close partnership with community-based organizations and parent groups.

Of course, collaboration is never easy, even among businesses in the same industry, let alone across a diverse regional economy. Throw in the added complexity of working with grassroots advocates and nonprofit organizations, and you can see why many corporate executives would prefer to focus on meeting next quarter’s earnings forecast. At the same time, collective action can provide safety in numbers to mitigate some of the risks while greatly improving the chances for success.

Although most of the action in education occurs in the states, there is a critical role for business leadership at the national level: to create a broader public agenda and narrative, mobilize resources, and help support and coordinate local initiatives. A new generation of leadership is needed to galvanize and guide executives around the country in making K–12 education a top priority in their own communities, just as David Kearns and Lou Gerstner did in the 1980s and ’90s.

Public education is not a business. It’s an inherently political institution whose educators and leaders have to play by a set of rules they don’t control and answer to multiple stakeholders, including elected officials, who often have sharply conflicting ideas and interests. Public education is not susceptible to quick changes in strategy or structure, let alone quick fixes. And it’s not for people who have thin skin or are looking for the thanks of a grateful nation.

All in all, the value proposition may not sound too good to business leaders. But at the end of the day, there may be no more important long-term contribution these men and women can make to their communities and the economy than to get involved, get organized, and get back into the K–12 arena.

James A. Peyser served as secretary of education for Massachusetts from 2015–2022 and as chairman of the state board of education from 1999–2006. He is currently a senior adviser with Bellwether and America Achieves.

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

Peyser, J.A. (2024). Bringing Business Leaders Back to School. Education Next, 24(2), 38-45.

For decades, the Democrats were “the party of education,” ringing up double-digit leads in polls asking Americans which major party they trusted most to handle education. During parts of the Clinton and Obama presidencies, that lead topped 30 points. Now, though, the Dems’ edge has shrunk to just a few points, with the occasional poll showing Republicans nosing ahead. Even so, an increasing share of voters have confidence in neither party when it comes to education.

What’s going on, and how should the parties respond? As we enter a hotly-contested election cycle, Education Next asked a few prominent thinkers to examine the dynamics behind the Democrats’ fall from grace and offer advice to the two parties on how they should shape their education agenda. On the left, Ruy Teixeira, author of The Emerging Democratic Majority and last year’s Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, sketches a path forward for Democrats. And on the right, Frederick Hess and Michael McShane, co-authors of the new book Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K–12, and College, explain what it’ll take for Republicans to seize the opportunity before them.

Republicans Have a Chance to Unite the Party on Education

By Frederick M. Hess and Michael Q. McShane

Voter trust in Democrats on education has plunged to the lowest level in memory, after years of school closures, critical race theory, gender radicalism, student-loan forgiveness, and campus craziness. Yet, in the face of brewing discontent—as the party of government, spending, teachers unions, and the faculty lounge—they find themselves mostly promising to subsidize an unhappy status quo. This gives the Right—unburdened by ties with unions, public bureaucracies, and the academy—a historic opportunity to defend shared values, empower students and families, and rethink outdated arrangements.

When push comes to shove, though, Republicans have struggled to offer practical solutions. Especially over the past decade, their agenda has mostly been a drumbeat of platitudes: school choice, free speech on campus, resisting wokeism, and keeping Washington out. More choice, less Washington is a sensible mantra, but a mantra isn’t enough.

The fact that the go-to promise for GOP presidential candidates is “abolishing the Department of Education”—a 44-year-old, detail-free pledge that’s proven an exercise in empty posturing—underscores how much more is needed. (Practically speaking, the department is a holding tank for tens of billions in Congressionally mandated federal programs. “Abolishing” it wouldn’t accomplish much unless those programs were also addressed.) The real question is how Republicans plan to approach student lending, early childhood, culture clashes, credentialing, and other concerns. More on all that in a moment.

First, though, let’s confront the elephant in the room: former president Donald Trump, who seems likely to head the GOP ticket in 2024. It’s no great revelation to note that Trump approaches policy as performance art—with views an inch deep and inconstant. Education policy under a second Trump administration would depend on appointees and on which side of the bed Trump woke up that morning. Moreover, even if Trump returns to the White House, his prior tenure made clear that his attention to education is likely to be sporadic and fleeting. This all makes it less useful to focus on the standard-bearer than on the standard.

Now, we’re not political prognosticators. As we write, there’s still a long-shot chance that former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley might somehow claim the nomination. But whatever happens in the primaries, Republicans need a more coherent, robust, and winning agenda. What does that agenda look like?

It starts with broadly shared values and translates those into actions that address kitchen-table concerns. The intriguing opportunity here is that education may be one of the few areas where the fierce split between Trump’s populists and Reaganite conservatives can be most readily bridged. Both camps are skeptical of teachers unions, the college cartel, and calls to supersize Washington’s role in education. Both support empowering parents, want schools to embrace notions like merit and hard work, and believe borrowers should repay federal student loans.

The familiar narrative of our culture clashes can be misleading: while the legacy media does its best to dance around the fact, the broad public tends to lean right on hot-button value debates.

According to a recent Gallup poll, two-thirds of Americans are “extremely” or “very” proud to be American. The call for schools to embrace the jaundiced, “America the ‘Slavocracy’” view of history sketched by far-left icons such as Ibram X. Kendi and Nikole Hannah-Jones resonates with only a small (if vocal) community of academic elites and blue-state agitators. More than 90 percent of Democrats and Republicans alike agree that “all students should learn about how the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution advanced freedom and equality” and that “throughout our history, Americans have made incredible achievements and ugly errors.” And, as University of Alabama political scientist George Hawley, author of Conservatism in a Divided America, has documented, Republican voters have grown steadily more supportive of racial and religious minorities since 2000.

While the media made hay over Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law (a moniker they created themselves), Florida voters supported it by a margin of 61 percent to 26 percent when polled on the actual substance of the bill (which barred discussion of gender and sexuality in a non-age-appropriate manner in K–3 classrooms). In addition, more than two-thirds of Americans think that student-athletes should play on the team that matches their biological sex. Republicans are on principled, popular ground when they fight to allow students to play on sports teams, use locker rooms, and sleep in dormitories that reflect their biological sex.

This broad agreement carries over to another area that Republicans should lean into: promoting excellence, rigor, and merit.

Talk about an easy sell. More than 80 percent of Americans say standardized tests such as the SAT and the ACT should factor into college admissions, and 94 percent think that hard work is important. Republicans should defend advanced instruction, gifted programs, hard work, and the importance of earned success. California recently approved new math standards that recommend postponing advanced math classes until high school, and Oregon has paused its requirement that students demonstrate literacy and numeracy to graduate. As these trends continue in blue states and cities, red state leaders should be highlighting the achievements of students in magnet schools and working to help more students access advanced coursework in high school.

Of course, Republicans struggled in 2022 and 2023 despite favorable conditions, especially in purple and blue states. They alienated suburban centrist voters with lousy candidates, a refusal to denounce Trump’s offenses and conspiracy-mongering, and a stance on abortion at odds with post-Dobbs public sentiment. In short, Republicans have shown themselves prone to fumbling away opportunities. Doing better will require shrugging off slogan-driven groupthink in favor of workable solutions to practical concerns.

There’s a world of difference, for instance, between arguing that pornographic books on gender identity don’t belong in middle school libraries and trying to bar high school seniors from reading Beloved. If Republicans don’t firmly draw that line, they’ll be successfully (and perhaps justifiably) tagged as “book banners.” The same distinction holds for critical race theory: it must be made clear that stopping schools from imposing race-based affinity groups or promoting DEI-inspired racial caricatures via worksheets on “white privilege” is not intended to stymie history teachers from delving into hard questions about race relations in America. Republicans must do a better job of appreciating and making these distinctions.

What to Do?

The reason we’ve focused first on “culture war” issues is that education is deeply entangled with questions of core values. (A reluctance to confront this, we think, helped undermine well-meaning reform efforts in recent decades.) But Republicans must translate shared values into appealing principles. We’d start with four principles that span the schism between populists and Reaganite conservatives and that have allowed Republican governors as ideologically and temperamentally diverse as Ohio’s Mike DeWine, Arkansas’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin, Iowa’s Kim Reynolds, and Florida’s Ron DeSantis to rack up big, popular successes:

Extend choice in K–12 education. The political case for parental choice has never been stronger. Especially after the pandemic, broad majorities of voters support an array of choice options. Yet the traditional case for school choice is limited by the fact that the lion’s share of parents like their own child’s school. The way to square this circle is by recognizing that even “satisfied” parents want more options, ranging from phonics-based reading instruction to a blend of home-based and in-school learning. Focus on maximizing options for all families (via education savings accounts, course access, charter schooling, and more), not on soundbites about blowing up “failing” local public-school systems.

Promote transparency. Parental empowerment requires equipping parents with choices—but these choices mean little without transparency. State reading and math tests are crucial, especially in an era of grade inflation and “grading for equity” that can make it hard to know how students are faring. Transparency also requires helping parents know what their child is being taught and by what name teachers are addressing them. (Today, simply trying to ascertain such things can subject parents to harassment and vilification.) Republicans should support policies that require parental notification and consent before schools administer intrusive surveys or transition a student’s gender identification in class.

Be the party of reading and math. After decades during which junk science and education-school ideologues shaped the nation’s approach to reading, support for research-based reading instruction is surging—with happy results. This has been driven by policymakers willing to take on education schools and their progressive dogma. A similar effort is needed in math, where the devotees of the newest “new math” argue that kids don’t need to know computation (see “California’s New Math Framework Doesn’t Add Up,” features, Fall 2023), correct answers don’t matter, and advanced math is racist. GOP governors should lean into these fights, demanding that schools, teacher training programs, and curriculum designers heed the science on reading and the fundamentals of math. In Washington, Republicans should make clear that federal funds will be directed to programs that actually work.

Broaden pathways to employment. There’s widespread enthusiasm for better, more useful career and technical education. This is fueled both by concerns about the cost of college and by the sense that college today is, for too many, less a source of opportunity than an expensive hurdle to employment. Today, even for jobs like manning a rental-car counter, employers routinely treat college degrees as an all-purpose hiring credential. This can be addressed by improving career and technical education and by reforming the legal and policy conditions that lead employers to put more weight on paper credentials than on knowledge, experience, and skills. While there are well-established legal perils when relying on other more-precise hiring tests, the courts have turned a blind eye when employers use degrees in that same fashion. This asymmetry has turned higher education from a potentially useful avenue to acquire valuable skills into a mandatory exercise in ticket-punching. Across the land, Republican governors and mayors should join the growing list of their peers who have removed degree requirements for many or most state jobs. In Washington, it’s worth revisiting statutes and regulations regarding the use of degrees and working with employer organizations to develop and validate hiring tests that will pass judicial muster.

Parents are profoundly practical people. They’re not interested in abstractions when it comes to their own kids. That’s why school choice took off in the wake of the pandemic; it was no longer a theoretical exercise but a response to maddening, overwhelming frustration. As noted earlier, education is an area where there are straightforward, principled ways to appeal to populists and traditionalists alike. We think that’s very much a consequence of practicality. For instance, the focus on excellence and transparency can address both populist frustration with politicization and traditionalist concerns about academic achievement. Expanding pathways to employment appeals both to traditionalists worried about workforce needs and populists eager to shrink the footprint of colleges they view as indoctrination factories.

Opportunity Knocks

This is only a start, of course. Republicans have been mostly playing defense on several issues where it’s time for them to get off their heels and take the lead.

Student-loan forgiveness was a bit of progressive dogma that candidate Joe Biden did not embrace during the campaign, but as president he promoted an illegal half-trillion-dollar giveaway to the advantaged and the affluent. Republicans have done well to call out this “solution” for what it is: an expensive way to fuel college price hikes, encourage students to take on more debt, and treat taxpayers like suckers.

At the same time, the underlying problem of college costs is real and absolutely needs to be addressed. State officials who fund and oversee public universities should step up. They should champion efforts to reduce staff, boost teaching loads, and accelerate time-to-degree (such as by exploring three-year bachelor’s degrees). They should tackle a stifling accreditation system that protects mediocre incumbents and imposes prohibitive costs on potential new alternatives. They should demand good data on the costs and student outcomes of various institutions and degree programs. Federal officials should insist that colleges tapping federal student loans have “skin in the game,” repaying taxpayers when their former students default.

During his much-admired tenure as president of Purdue University, former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels managed to freeze tuition for over a decade. It can be done.

In early childhood education, President Biden tried to spend $400 billion to promote universal pre-K in his Build Back Better push, and Republicans successfully blocked the effort. They were right to do so, as it was going to be a giveaway to the unions and early-education advocates. It would have driven up the cost of care, needlessly bureaucratized early education, and ultimately dropped kids into impersonal centers—in other words, it would have created a de facto additional grade of elementary school.

That said, parents are frustrated with their early-childhood options. Childcare is expensive. It can be of suspect quality. It can be hard to find providers that align with parental schedules. Working parents who’d like to be home with their young children find themselves compelled to put their kids into center-based care.

In a party looking to attract parents, one would think that Republicans would muster a meaningful counterproposal. They did not. But that doesn’t mean that they cannot.

Republicans can embrace choice-based policies such as education savings accounts in early childhood education; nurture a rich array of community and work-based arrangements; reduce regulatory burdens that stymie faith-based and low-cost providers; and ensure that funding doesn’t penalize families that choose “family, friend, or neighbor” care.

Then there’s the fraught relationship between the GOP and the individuals whom Americans look to for guidance on schooling: the nation’s teachers. It’s remarkable, if you think about it, that conservatives—who tend to energetically support front-line public employees such as cops and who have a natural antipathy for bureaucrats and red tape—have had so much trouble connecting with teachers. Like police officers, teachers are well-liked local public servants frustrated by bureaucracy and paperwork.

Republicans who have stood up for parents troubled by bureaucratic malaise, cultural adventurism, and unsafe schools should extend those same intuitions to the nation’s teachers. They should champion discipline policies that keep teachers safe and classrooms manageable. They should fight to downsize bloated bureaucracy and shift those dollars into classrooms and teacher pay. They should challenge expensive and onerous licensing regimes that keep qualified and talented teachers out of the classroom. And they should make clear that with parental rights come parental responsibilities, which means parents partnering with teachers to ensure that their kids are in school, respecting their teachers, getting a good night’s sleep, and doing their homework.

This is an opportunity for a divided Republican party to reassure Americans that it is the steward of shared values. As it becomes more of a working-class party, the GOP has ever less reason to defer to the cultural pieties of education elites and ever more cause to insist that early childhood and higher education be accessible, affordable, cost-effective, and attuned to workforce realities. Education is the path to economic opportunity and moral fulfillment, and it’s an issue with deep symbolic resonance in American life. The GOP can win over new constituencies while signaling that the party is serious about inclusion and opportunity.

Republicans should work to empower families, defend broadly shared values, emphasize achievement, and challenge self-serving cartels. They should also strive to ensure that early childhood education is accessible, affordable, and anchored in communities. If Republicans do so, we predict that their efforts will become a case study in doing well by doing good.

Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next. Michael Q. McShane is the director of national research at EdChoice. Their latest book is Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K–12, and College.

Democrats Should Focus on Education Issues that Matter to Voters

By Ruy Teixeira

Why are Democrats fumbling the issue of education, which they have dominated for many years? There are multiple reasons: they mishandled the Covid-related school closures, they are letting the culture wars distract from the core mission of schools, and they are downplaying the importance of merit and academic achievement. Before I discuss how the Dems could effect a turnaround, let’s dig deeper into these missteps and unfortunate trends.

The school closures went on way too long. Democrats, far more than Republicans, worked to keep public schools closed during the Covid pandemic—longer than in other advanced countries and far longer than was justified by emerging scientific understanding of the virus and its effects. Pushed by their allies in the teachers unions, Democrats ignored the justified warnings that extended school closures would severely harm student learning and social development, especially for poorer children. The returns are now in, and it is clear that the warnings Democrats ignored were, if anything, too mild.

This was no minor error made by Democratic officials in the fog of pandemic confusion but a profound tragedy for millions of children that could have been avoided or at least substantially mitigated. To add to the shameful episode, parents in many communities around the country who wanted the schools reopened faster were frequently demonized by progressives as heartless, anti-science right-wingers who didn’t care about public health. The wounds from this still fester today.

Privileging politics over pedagogy. The culture wars rage on in the schools. Democrats argue that it is all the fault of the Right, who they say wishes to “ban books,” prevent children from learning about slavery, and subject gay and transgender-identifying children to bullying and worse. Progressive educators and school systems, on the other hand, simply stand for a modern, inclusive education that no decent, unprejudiced person should oppose.

This is disingenuous in the extreme. Over the last decade, and especially after the George Floyd summer of 2020, there has been a concerted effort by many school systems and educators to promote “anti-racist” education that goes way beyond benign pedagogical practices such as teaching about slavery, Jim Crow, the Tulsa Race Massacre, redlining, and so on. Instead, pedagogy itself is to be infused, from top to bottom and in every subject, with concepts drawn from the anti-racist playbook. As noted by sociologist Ilana Redstone, these concepts include the assertion that “[a]n unwillingness to recognize the full force of systemic racism as determining disparities between groups is a denial of the reality of racism today (and evidence of ignorance at best and racism at worst).” An army of diversity, equity, and inclusion consultants have stood at the ready to assist school systems in training their staff and teachers to implement this creed and incorporate it into their curricula.

This is politics, not pedagogy as traditionally and properly understood. It has little to do with what most parents want schools to do: develop their children’s academic skills and knowledge base so they can succeed in the world. Democrats have been hurt by their increasing identification with this ideological project rather than the traditional goals of public education.

Downgrading merit and educational achievement. Consistent with this ongoing politicization of educational practices, there has been a concomitant downgrading of academic merit and standard measures of educational achievement, especially standardized tests. In the name of fairness and “equity,” school systems in Democratic-controlled states and counties have taken steps to de-emphasize such measures as a means of evaluating students and controlling admissions to advanced courses, programs, and elite schools.

It hasn’t quite reached the “all shall have prizes” stage, but the message to aspiring students and parents who see educational achievement as their route to upward mobility and success in life is clear: students can no longer rely on hard work and objectively good academic performance to attain their goals (see “Your Neighborhood School Is a National Security Risk,” features, Winter 2024). Other priorities of the school system may take precedence, reducing the payoff from their performance. This does not sit well with most parents, who see it as public schools’ responsibility to encourage and reward their children’s talent and hard work. Democrats have been hurt by their diminishing association with what parents care about the most.

Getting Their Groove Back

In light of all this, is it possible for Democrats to regain their mojo on education during the 2024 election cycle? I think it is, though it will require changing their approach considerably from current practices. And it’s worth doing so. Even if education is not a central issue in the presidential contest, it is sure to loom large in many congressional, gubernatorial, and state legislative races.

Here’s how Democrats can decisively change their current image on education and rebuild their advantage on the issue.

Get ideology, whether from the Left or Right, out of schools. Voters are sick of the culture wars around schools. Overwhelmingly, they just want children to get a good education based on standard academic competencies, not instruction in a politically inflected worldview. Democrats must assure voters that the former is their number-one priority. Just as they oppose attempts from the Right to inject their ideology into schools by restricting critical discussion of American history and society, so they must also oppose efforts by those on the Left to impose their views on curricula and analysis of social issues. Neither is appropriate. The job of schools is to give students the tools to make informed judgments, not tell them what those judgments should be.

Articulating this point would signal to voters that Democratic politicians understand what the real priorities of schools should be. But they shouldn’t leave it at that. They should advocate the addition of something positive to schools—that is, to “teach kids what it means to be an American,” in the words of Albert Shanker, the pathbreaking president of the American Federation of Teachers in the late 20th century.

By doing so, Democrats could dissociate themselves from the jaundiced and divisive attitudes of many progressive activists and embrace instead an approach emphasizing what students have in common as Americans. As education scholar Richard Kahlenberg writes, civics instruction in public schools should embrace (or get back to) teaching

the core of the American Creed: the veneration of liberty and equality promised by the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. . . . The Declaration and Constitution provide, as the Fordham Institute notes, “a common framework for resolving our differences even as we respect them.” . . . In emphasizing America’s distinctive system of governance, students can appreciate a shared American identity focused on shared values that counters both right-wing white identity politics that sees only white Christians as “real Americans” and left-wing race essentialism that sees a person’s race, ethnicity, gender, and religion as far more important than what citizens have in common as Americans.

Maintain high achievement standards for all groups, even while seeking to close racial disparities. The Democrats have a merit problem, and that has infected their approach to schools and schooling. The traditional Democratic theory of the case ran like this: discrimination should be opposed and dismantled and resources provided to the disadvantaged so that everyone can fairly compete and achieve. Those who were meritorious would be rewarded; those who weren’t would not be.

Democrats have lost interest in the last part of their case, and that abandonment undermines their whole theory. Merit and objective measures of achievement are now viewed with suspicion as the outcomes of a hopelessly corrupt system, so rewards should instead be allocated on the basis of various criteria allegedly related to social justice. Instead of dismantling discrimination and providing assistance so that more people have the opportunity to acquire merit, the real solution is to worry less about merit and more about equal outcomes—“equity” in the parlance of our times.

But here’s what ordinary voters believe: “Racial achievement gaps are bad and we should seek to close them. However, they are not due just to racism, and standards of high achievement should be maintained for people of all races.” This statement was tested in a nationwide poll of more than 18,000 registered voters by RMG Research and elicited 74 percent agreement versus a mere 16 percent disagreement. In Wisconsin, the statement generated agreement by 91 percent of Republicans and 64 percent of Democrats.

Democratic politicians should fearlessly endorse this statement and assure voters that they are all about high standards, high achievement, and how they go together in successful schooling. Democrats should forthrightly oppose the watering down of academic standards in the name of equity and defend elite programs based on academic merit and rigorous tests. The latter is particularly important for reaching Asian voters and stopping the ongoing decline in their support for Democrats.

Provide more choice within the public school system. Public schools have been losing students lately to private schools and homeschooling, as misplaced priorities and academic failures in many public schools have some parents heading for the exits. That typically means they aren’t happy with the public school their child is assigned to. An obvious way to mitigate this problem is simply to give parents more choice of where they can send their child to school, through both more options within the local school system and a wider array of charter schools.

More choice is especially important for low-income parents whose children generally do not fare well when attending schools that lack a middle-class presence. This calls for a concerted effort to widen public school choice so that all low-income children have access to theme-based non-selective magnet schools, diverse-by-design charter schools, and other high-quality options that attract students across economic levels.

Democrats ignore parents’ interest in choice to their peril. Polling by Education Next shows support for choice options such as charter schools, universal vouchers, and vouchers for low-income families going up in recent years (see “Partisan Rifts Widen, Perceptions of School Quality Decline,” features, Winter 2023). This support is particularly strong among Hispanics, low-income households, and especially Blacks, who are the demographic group most interested in vouchers. If Democrats wish to counter GOP appeals to their most loyal constituency, they must convince these voters that their strong interest in more choice can be met within a reformed public school system.

Promote affirmative action by class, not race. In the wake of the June 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down race-conscious college admissions, Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison declared, “This is a devastating blow for racial justice and equality. . . . We condemn the Supreme Court’s decision to end these affirmative action policies and make it even more difficult for Americans to access higher education. While this decision is a setback . . . it is not the final word.”

This is exactly the wrong approach for Democrats to take. Rather than implicitly or explicitly pledging to resist the law of the land, they would be far wiser to use the decision as an opportunity to rebrand themselves as the party of America’s working class—the entire working class.

Start with the brutal fact that racial preferences are very unpopular. For instance, the spring 2023 SCOTUSPoll, sponsored by Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Texas, found 69 percent of the public agreeing that private colleges and universities should not be able to use race as a factor in admissions, compared to 31 percent who favored the practice. The same question about public colleges and universities elicited at 74–26 split. Pretty definitive.

Why is this? It’s very simple. Most voters, especially working-class voters, think racial preferences are not fair, and fairness is a fundamental part of their world outlook. They actually believe in Martin Luther King Jr.’s credo that people should “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” In a recent University of California Dornsife survey, this classic statement of colorblind equality was posed to respondents: “Our goal as a society should be to treat all people the same without regard to the color of their skin.” The sentiment elicited sky-high (92 percent) agreement from the public, despite the assaults on this idea from critical race theory and the likes of Ibram X. Kendi and large segments of the Democratic Left.

The way for Democrats to get back in touch with voters on this issue is clear: advocate replacing race-based affirmative action with class-based affirmative action, instead of overtly or covertly trying to preserve the former. Class-based affirmative action would boost proportionately more Black and Hispanic students than white ones, thereby making up at least part of the losses in Black and Hispanic representation that follow from eliminating race-based consideration.

But it would also boost some disadvantaged white students, and that would be a good thing, both substantively and politically. As President Barack Obama memorably put it in 2008: “I think that my daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged. . . . I think that we should take into account [in admissions] white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty.” In other words, a Black kid who grew up in a poor neighborhood in Baltimore and a white kid who grew up in a shattered working class neighborhood in Ohio are both more deserving of a boost than upper-middle-class kids of whatever race.

That would strike most working-class voters as eminently fair. It is especially fair in light of the breathtaking lack of economic diversity at elite schools. That’s why it’s important to think of class-based affirmative action as not just a substitute for a race-based system that would accomplish some of the same goals. It would be in and of itself a step toward pushing back against the incredible class bias of elite education. As David Leonhardt put it in his New York Times column:

Economic diversity matters for its own sake: The dearth of lower-income students at many elite colleges is a sign that educational opportunity has been constrained for Americans of all races. To put it another way, economic factors such as household wealth are not valuable merely because they are a potential proxy for race; they are also a telling measure of disadvantage in their own right.

This approach could turn affirmative action from an issue that divides the working class into one that potentially unites it. Given how Democrats have been hemorrhaging working-class voters, this change of focus seems like a wise course of action.

Restoring Strength

Taken together, the four steps outlined here could decisively change the current Democratic brand on education, which is steadily losing altitude, into one that would restore their historic strength on the issue. To be sure, taking these steps would require some political courage, risking the wrath of the progressive activists who have helped power their success in recent low turnout, off-year elections. But 2024 will be a far different electoral environment where the views of activists will be less important and those of ordinary voters more so. Democrats would be wise to place their bets on the latter by taking these steps and charting a new course.

Ruy Teixeira is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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

Hess, F.M., McShane, M.Q., and Teixeira, R. (2024). The Party of Education in 2024: Will it be the Democrats? The Republicans? Or neither? Education Next, 24(2), 58-65.

Vladimir Kogan is a professor in The Ohio State University’s Department of Political Science and (by courtesy) the John Glenn College of Public Affairs.

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

Kogan, V. (2024). Are Student Surveys the Right Tools for Evaluating Teacher Performance? Education Next, 24(2), 32-37.