When I started as managing editor of Education Next in January 2019, the conventional wisdom was that education reform had run out of gas, or at least stalled out. Much of the Democratic Party, or at least many of its leading politicians, had backed away from previous cautious support for charter schools. Much of the Republican Party, or at least many of its leading politicians, opposed the Common Core State Standards. And neither the Democrats nor the Republicans seemed particularly interested in pushing for once-promising ideas like merit pay for teachers or standardized-test-based accountability.

As I leave the job nearly five years later, the conventional wisdom on education is even grimmer. Republicans complain the schools have gone “woke,” prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion and social-emotional learning instead of reading and math. Democrats complain that Republicans are wasting precious education energy on counterproductive culture wars about transgender sports participation, critical race theory, and the content of school library books. And Republicans, Democrats, and independents alike bemoan the youth mental health crisis and the results of standardized tests showing, indisputably, that the Covid-19 pandemic and the reaction to it have significantly, maybe even catastrophically, set back student achievement.

I’ve got a different view of it. Discount it, perhaps, for my personality, which tends toward optimism, or maybe more precisely, provocative contrarianism. But what’s happened over the past five years has made me more hopeful than ever about the future of American education.

What’s so encouraging that most people are failing to focus on? Start with the U.S. Supreme Court, which in a series of rulings—American Legion v. American Humanist Association, Kennedy v. Bremerton, Espinoza v. Montana, and Carson v. Makin—has expanded the space for free exercise of religion in schools. These decisions open the way for many changes, including the establishment of religious charter schools; the nation’s first was initially approved in Oklahoma in June 2023. If you believe, as I do, that religion is, on balance, a force for community, humility, gratitude, kindness, civility, and dignity, then this is a positive and not yet fully appreciated development.

Then consider state legislatures, which have been expanding state tax-credit tuition scholarships (See “School Choice Advances in the States,” features, Fall 2021) and increasingly making Education Savings Accounts universally accessible (see “As Many More States Enact Education Savings Accounts, Implementation Challenges Abound,” features, and “2023 Is the Year of Universal Choice in Education Savings Accounts,” school life). If you believe, as I do, that parents are generally the best informed and situated to make education decisions involving their own children, these are significant and positive developments. People point out that these programs only affect a fraction of students in a fraction of states. But word spreads to the point where people with children are actually migrating to states, such as Florida, in part for the purpose of participating in the programs. Once the programs are established, eligibility and funding tend to expand rather than contract. As with religious charter schools, the potential of Education Savings Accounts is just beginning to be unleashed.

Finally, the culture wars at school boards and state boards of education may not be so entirely the dead-end distraction that the Acela Corridor education-policy sages imagine. Which is better—that the substance of what happens in schools is left entirely to technocrats and the teachers-union-dominated political structure? Or that parents pay attention to what is happening in school, and make their voices heard? Once the giant political force of parent involvement awakens from its slumber, it might well have effects not only on locker rooms and library books but also, constructively, on school safety, on teacher quality, and on broader issues related to the productivity of education spending.

It may seem pollyannaish to think of the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic in terms of expanded education choice and parental involvement rather than mainly in terms of years of lost learning. It may be true, too, that it’ll take decades before the positive effects outweigh the negatives. But another big thing I learned at Education Next is that it can take a long time to get a full picture of the effects of education policies. The chance of positive outcomes will be increased by the presence of this journal to report, clear-eyed, with empirical evidence on whether optimism turns out to be misplaced or, as I hope it is, genuinely warranted.

Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com. He was managing editor of Education Next from 2019 to 2023.

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

Stoll, I. (2023). What I Learned Editing Education Next: The education landscape may be in better shape than most “experts” think. Education Next, 23(4), 5.

Ten minutes after class starts, a student flings open the door, struts in, and yells, “What’s up, bitches?”

If this kind of conduct is familiar to you, you don’t need a primer on how behavior has become worse—much worse—since students returned to school post-pandemic. Chances are you’ve observed just what the data from the National Center for Education Statistics report: 84 percent of school leaders say student behavioral development has been negatively impacted. This is evident in a dramatic increase in classroom disruptions, ranging from student misconduct to acts of disrespect toward teachers and staff to the prohibited use of electronic devices.

Bad behavior “continues to escalate,” said Matt Cretsinger, director of special services for the Marshalltown Community School District in Iowa. “There are more behavioral needs than we’ve ever seen. . . . It’s a shock to teachers.”

Student behavior is “definitely worse” post-pandemic, said Mona Delahooke, a pediatric psychologist. “There are much heavier stress loads that teachers and students are carrying around.”

And it’s not as if discipline weren’t a problem pre-pandemic. “The numbers tell the story,” said student-behavior specialist Ross Greene. “We’re suspending kids like there’s no tomorrow; we’re giving detentions even more than that. We’re expelling to the tune of 100,000 students a year.” Greene added that corporal punishment is at 100,000 instances a year, restraint or seclusion is close to that, and school arrests tally more than 50,000 a year.

Through the nonprofit organization he founded in 2009, Lives in the Balance, Greene and his colleagues train schools in his Collaborative & Proactive Solutions model and advocate for the elimination of punitive, exclusionary disciplinary practices in schools and treatment facilities.

In a small but growing number of schools, teachers and administrators are drawing on Greene’s advice to change how they handle misbehavior. Pointing to hundreds of research studies that say students who respond poorly to problems and frustrations are lacking skills, these schools are actively looking to end punitive discipline, take the focus off student behavior, and train their staffs to recognize—and avoid—situations likely to cause bad behavior. If something is triggering outbursts from students—simply asking them to sit quietly at their desks or giving them a surprise quiz, for instance—teachers might be better off finding other ways to accomplish what is needed.

Not blaming children for their outbursts requires a paradigm shift that, according to some practitioners, is long overdue.

Stuart Ablon, the founder and director of Think:Kids in Massachusetts General Hospital’s department of psychiatry, said simply, “We must move away from thinking students do well if they want to, to students do well if they can.”

Delahooke has her own go-to phrase: “Children don’t throw tantrums; tantrums throw children.”

And Robert Sapolsky, a noted neuroendocrinology researcher and Stanford University professor, goes even further when he traces how various factors—ranging from neurons and hormones to evolution, culture, and history—factor into a person’s behaviors. “Biology is pretty much out of our control, and free will looks pretty suspect,” he said.

The Staying Power of Behaviorism

While these beliefs about student behavior and the growing number of schools adopting these disciplinary methods may seem new, leaders such as Ablon say they’ve been pushing this model for 30 years. And even though some schools are changing their practices, getting people to end their reliance on the punishments and rewards of behaviorism has proven difficult.

Behaviorism—the notion that behavior is shaped by conditioning via environmental stimuli (rewards and punishment)—was a popular theory in the early and mid-20th century. The irony, Ablon said, is that even when the idea was most in vogue, it was not effective. Punishment may put a stop to a certain behavior, but the effect is only temporary.

“It’s not only ineffective; it actually makes matters worse,” Ablon said.

A report that examined how discipline could alienate students from schools found that “when responses to student behavior fail to account for student perspectives and experiences, youths can experience feelings of alienation and disconnection.” Another study that looked specifically at why attempts to influence adolescent behavior often founder proposed the hypothesis “that traditional interventions fail when they do not align with adolescents’ enhanced desire to feel respected and be accorded status; however, interventions that do align with this desire can motivate internalized, positive behavior change.”

Part of the problem is that even when people agree that suspensions and other punishments aren’t working, they fall back on these patterns if they lack an alternative, according to Greene.

“The old mentality is dying hard,” Greene said. “People know a certain way of doing things. They have structures in place [that reinforce those practices]. You’ve got to replace what you’re doing with something; there can’t be a vacuum.”

“The research is pretty clear about what works and what doesn’t,” said Cretsinger. “There’s a significant delay between research and school practice.”

A 2021 study by the American Institutes for Research concluded that out-of-school suspensions for middle school students “actually had a negative effect on . . . students’ future behavioral incidents.” These students were also more likely to be suspended in the future, the study found.

While the study did not report the same effect for high school students, it did conclude that severely disciplining these older students “does not serve as a deterrent for future misbehavior.”

“Our educational system is in the dark ages when it comes to understanding behaviors,” said Delahooke. “That’s the bottom line.”

A Different Approach

That’s where this new strain of programs comes in. Greene is the originator of the Collaborative Problem Solving approach, but he now refers to his model as Collaborative & Proactive Solutions. The name change occurred when he left Massachusetts General Hospital. Since that time, the hospital has disseminated a variant of Greene’s original model under the name Collaborative Problem Solving without his consent. The hospital’s program is led by Greene’s former trainee, Ablon.

These programs began when their creators started looking at the causes of student misbehavior. Neuroscience “understands that humans are driven by a subconscious [need] to feel safe,” said Delahooke. “When we see big behavioral problems such as kids kicking, screaming, running around, those behaviors we’re viewing as stress responses, not attention-seeking.”

The causes of misbehavior, Greene said, stem from weaknesses in one of four areas: flexibility and adaptability, frustration tolerance, problem-solving skills, and emotion regulation. During the remote-learning days of Covid-19, children missed the opportunity to build on these developmental skills, which led to more behavior challenges when they returned to school.

But exactly how does this knowledge of behavioral dynamics translate to the classroom? Let’s return to the example that began this story. Ablon used this event—the student bursting into class late and making a disruptive comment—to demonstrate how a teacher could respond to an incident. Ablon said this example described a student who was having a hard time shifting from A to B as she changed classes.

He suggested that instead of handing out an office referral or other punishment, the teacher should run through a three-point checklist. First, the teacher should try to empathize with the student. “I know empathy is becoming an endangered species,” but if teachers can externalize the problem from the child, they won’t see the student as the problem, he said.

Because this student is obviously not ready to learn, try to find out why they feel the way they do by asking questions, he added. You can even tell the student, “I know there must be an important reason you’re not sitting down and doing your work. So it’s okay.”

And because you can’t reason with a disregulated student, Ablon coaches staff not to force a behavior change on the student but instead to share their own perspective only after they understand the student’s viewpoint. The third step is for the teacher to assess the problem and see if they can brainstorm a solution with the student. (This step might well require that another staff member—perhaps an instructional aide—be available to keep the rest of the class on task, advocates say.)

Ablon cautions specifically against having a teacher or other staff member use power or control, because that will likely re-traumatize the student. You must give the student control, but not sole responsibility, he added.

Greene was clear that while school staff’s attitude toward punishment needs to change, they won’t achieve positive results unless they have a new structure to follow. Even though a lot of schools consider their policies to be “trauma-informed,” he said, many of them are still doling out suspensions and other punishments.

“I know changes have taken place when some things [in schools] are missing,” Greene said. When disciplinary tactics such as office referrals and suspensions are greatly reduced, he believes, it means the school has structured itself so those outcomes aren’t the default methods anymore. In these cases, school officials are no longer focusing on the behavior of students but rather on identifying the expectations that children are having a hard time meeting, he noted. And they are engaging with students to solve those disconnects.

Ablon said he knows these methods are gaining acceptance, because when he talks with school officials, he doesn’t have to spend most of his time convincing them that a different mindset is necessary. “There’s not as much resistance to knowing behavior is skill, not will.”

But even with more schools adopting this mindset, he said, the new approach to discipline will not become mainstream unless schools of education incorporate the methods into teacher preparation. Only when that occurs will schools no longer need to retrain staff, Ablon added.

Teachers, for their part, often ask how they and other staff will be able to find the time to implement these one-on-one practices, especially when the rest of the class is sidelined as a teacher focuses on understanding a single student’s behavior.

Greene said he’s seen assistant principals volunteer to cover a class for a teacher, understanding that better-behaved students will ultimately decrease the amount of time the principal spends meeting with children who have acted out.

Ablon pointed out that if a student is struggling behaviorally, that individual is very likely disrupting the learning of others already. “If teachers can’t find time for a one-on-one conversation, which they often can’t, then there is a more significant systemic issue at that school.”

Schools Seeing Results

While accepting these concepts is a step forward, putting the theories into action takes work. Schools implementing any model that adheres to these basics will need at least a year to train staff, allow them to practice the methods, and provide coaching on their efforts.

And it is key that the school doesn’t overload initiatives, trying to implement multiple large programs at once, Ablon said. “These aren’t quick answers. It’s not a 45-minute session and now you have everything you need. It takes trial and error, real buy-in from leaders, and funding” for training teachers and adding staff to oversee classrooms while professional development takes place.

Even within a given school district, one school can have a vastly different experience from the others. That’s what happened with Woodbury Elementary School in Matt Cretsinger’s Iowa district. While all 10 of Marshalltown’s schools had access to Ablon’s program, Woodbury principal Anel Garza championed the approach and made sure it was followed in everything the school did, including day-to-day activities, staff meetings, and even parent-teacher conferences.

Woodbury is a rural, dual-language school where many of the students are new to the U.S., Cretsinger said. Over the course of two years, office referrals decreased by 36.5 percent, while students with two or more referrals dropped 49 percent. Restraints and seclusion nearly disappeared, with only two incidents in a school of 400. In the rest of the district, office referrals rose 143 percent during the same time, and Cretsinger said that in the district’s annual state-of-the-schools survey, Woodbury saw a 10-point increase in school safety and student emotional safety while every other school in Marshalltown posted lower scores than in previous years.

“We’re not letting kids off expectations,” Cretsinger said. “We’re trying to figure out why it’s difficult to meet a goal rather than assuming and applying a consequence. The hardest thing for educators is to stop assuming. We’re trying to let [students] share their concerns before we share ours.”

Cretsinger said when staff pushes back on these theories, pointing out that they all grew up without this system, and they turned out fine, he challenges them.

“Did we really turn out all right?” he asks, pointing to today’s substance-abuse statistics and rampant mental health problems.

Even though the elementary school started showing results after one semester of using Ablon’s program, Cretsinger said there are still naysayers and principals from other schools in the district that have not bought in the way Woodbury did.

Teacher Resistance

Michael J. Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, said he’s not surprised some teachers have pushed back against these programs, because discipline and classroom management have long topped the list of reasons teachers give for leaving the profession. “It’s particularly frustrating if you feel principals don’t have your back,” he said.

Petrilli said that while he thought this system could work if implemented perfectly, in a typical school with typical leaders and teachers, “it’s not hard to imagine this doesn’t get implemented well and leads to greater frustration among teachers. . . . If you do this and it goes wrong, then that’s a big problem.

“If your goal is to better serve kids who are being disruptive, I totally get that, but what are the consequences for their peers in terms of learning time, feeling safe, and school culture? I have empathy [for children who are acting out], but you’ve got to worry about the other 24 kids, too.”

And what do teachers unions think of this potential sea change in classroom practice? While the National Education Association supports the implementation of various behavioral programs, Harry Lawson Jr., the organization’s director of human and civil rights, said union members have complained that schools don’t offer them the proper training to make this kind of shift.

“It creates another level of frustration [that teachers] are being asked to do one other thing,” he said. “It can often feel as though there’s no longer a way for me as an adult to hold a student accountable. . . . We still exist in a punishment-driven society. [Some teachers feel] if there’s a behavior, there should be accountability.”

Brian Joffe, the director of children’s programs for the School Superintendents Association, said that handling student misbehavior is “not that far off from parenting,” so it’s not surprising that while some teachers favor collaboration and positive environments, others “lean more toward respect and order.”

“What they’ve leaned on in the past—that lever is being taken away,” he said. “They wonder, ‘What will I do in the next situation?’”

In Massachusetts, at the Academic Center for Transition in Worcester, program coordinator Thomas Lindgren said he faced “a lot” of pushback from staff and even students when he implemented Ablon’s system. The center is a therapeutic school that serves K–5 students who are struggling with social skills, emotion regulation, and meeting expectations.

From 2018–19 to this current school year, the school’s suspensions went from 55 to zero, Lindgren said. Restraints dropped from 98 to 2, and office referrals plunged from 4,036 to 580.

“I lost a couple of staff people because of this switch,” he said, but emphasized the measurable success his school has had with the program. Students seem happier, he added, and the school climate is calmer.

Skill, Not Will

Lindgren touched on an aspect of behavior management that isn’t frequently mentioned: that rewards can cause students as much stress as punishments. The center’s old system included a program that praised students for reaching certain goals. But he discovered misbehavior increased when the results were announced, because students were so anxious about the outcomes. He eliminated the praise program.

He also said the school does still have some adult-imposed restrictions on students, for actions such as fighting.

He summed up the changes under Ablon’s program simply. “The old way didn’t work. The new way does.”

While his experience at the Massachusetts school can be considered anecdotal, many studies show that addressing and building students’ social-emotional skills can result in better academic performance, fewer disruptive behaviors, and less emotional distress.

Recent studies have tried to zero in on exactly how students’ emotions affect their behavior. Although this work is still being defined, researchers are hoping to understand better how various teaching methods trigger reactions from children and how these reactions may improve or impair their ability to learn.

There’s even a belief that monitoring a student’s electrodermal activity (sweat glands) in real time may offer an early warning signal of an upcoming outburst. Delahooke said she knew a student who was harming other students, but officials hypothesized that it wasn’t intentional misbehavior. They got permission to fit the student with a wristband that measured his electrodermal activity, which is a good indicator of nervous system arousal. The wristband reported the student’s stress levels to a cellphone, and it showed that 50 to 90 seconds before every outburst, the student was in a stress response, suggesting that he wasn’t purposely choosing to engage in these bad behaviors. She said the school changed his individualized education plan to allow an aide to intervene before he acted out, taking him for a walk or asking him what he needed when his levels rose.

While acknowledging that schools aren’t going to outfit children with expensive wristbands, Delahooke said educators don’t need this fancy equipment. They can tell students’ stress levels by paying attention to their facial features, the tone of their voice, or even how fast a child is moving.

Asked if he was hopeful that this momentum toward less discipline and more understanding could continue, Ablon said he was, because of one specific example from past practice.

“We’ve done this before, with learning disabilities. We used to misattribute kids who were struggling to read and having a hard time decoding words until we understood dyslexia,” he said. It took schools a long time to shift people’s understandings and create methods to help these students instead of punishing them. “This is the same exact thing, just with behavior. If a student is struggling to read, teachers don’t take it personally. Those kids aren’t lazy; they lack skills. This is the same thing. These students lag in skills like problem-solving, flexibility, and problem tolerance.”

Wayne D’Orio is an award-winning education editor and writer.

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

D’Orio, W. (2023). To Fix Students’ Bad Behavior, Stop Punishing Them: Collaborative methods for handling misconduct make their way to the classroom. Education Next, 23(4), 50-55.

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

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

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

The Death of Public School: How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America
by Cara Fitzpatrick
Basic Books, 2023, $32; 384 pages.

As reviewed by Jay P. Greene

Cara Fitzpatrick’s new book does not deliver on the promise of its title, for it doesn’t describe the death of public schools or even show that they have a nasty cough. Instead, this volume by a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist recounts a history of the school-choice movement in which public education remains very much alive and well.

That history briefly includes arguments about whether the definition of public education necessarily includes direct government operation of schools or simply entails public funding for schools run either by the government or by private or nonprofit organizations. Arguments over what constitutes public education are as old as public education itself and have not been associated solely with the rise of school choice. The existence of competing understandings of what is essential to public education no more indicates the death of public schools than differing views about the filibuster, judicial review, or other non-majoritarian aspects of representative democracy signal the death of the republic. Robust debates over the appropriate structure of our civic institutions are a sign of their vitality, not their imminent demise.

Thankfully, The Death of Public School immediately retreats from its alarmist title. In fact, the first sentence of the book is “Public education in America is in jeopardy,” which couldn’t be the case if it were already dead. And the first sentence of the next chapter is “Public education was in danger,” continuing the de-escalation of rhetoric by switching to past tense. By the last chapter of the book, public education is no longer even moribund but merely in flux: “The line drawn between public and private education in America for more than a hundred years had blurred, with millions of tax dollars flowing each year to educate students outside the traditional public school system.”

According to the U.S. Department of Education’s Digest of Education Statistics, more than 90 percent of all K–12 students in 2019 were enrolled in a public school, up slightly from 1995. Even if you embrace the unconventional definition of public schools as excluding charter schools, the share of students enrolled in “traditional public school” only drops to 85 percent, still quite large and thriving. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, public education received an average of $17,013 per pupil in 2019–20, which, even after adjusting for inflation, is more than double the allotment per pupil four decades earlier in 1979–80. Total public-education revenue now exceeds $871 billion, which certainly puts into perspective the “millions of tax dollars flowing each year to educate students outside the traditional public school system.”

The continued dominance of traditional public education does not make a history of the school-choice movement unimportant or suggest that the remarkable growth in choice over the last few decades might not significantly alter the nature of public education in the future. It does, however, make the hyperventilating tone in Fitzpatrick’s book a distraction from what is otherwise a useful history. The unwarranted alarmism about the threat to public education posed by school choice also reveals a clear bias that distorts Fitzpatrick’s narrative in both what it chooses to emphasize and how it interprets events.

Having lived through and directly experienced much of the school-choice history described in the book, I found Fitzpatrick’s account to be accurate and well written, even if the interpretation of events was often distorted. Reading this book is a little like watching your favorite baseball team on TV with broadcast announcers from the other team. You get to see the game, and the play-by-play is not filled with lies; it is just spun in an irritating way that could only please fans of the other team. Effective journalists and historians learn how to write like national announcers for baseball games, avoiding commentary that rallies the fans of one team while annoying the fans of the other. Fitzpatrick is more Harry Caray than Joe Buck.

Fitzpatrick’s favoritism toward her team is evident throughout the volume. About a third of the book is devoted to trying to connect the idea of school choice to the effort to maintain segregation after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision ended the practice. There were several proposals in Southern states to close public schools and replace the public-education system with one based on school choice, typically with racial restrictions embedded into the choice law, as a mechanism for avoiding desegregation requirements. Fitzpatrick accurately chronicles those plans in detail. But she dismisses the arguments by school-choice advocates, particularly Milton Friedman, that unfettered choice would facilitate integration, writing: “Friedman’s view, however, seemed either naïve or willfully ignorant of the racial oppression in the South.”

Whether private-school choice promotes segregation or integration is an empirical question that social scientists have been examining for decades. The bulk of that evidence suggests that Friedman was neither naïve nor willfully ignorant in predicting that choice would reduce segregation by allowing people to cross racially segregated housing patterns and school boundaries voluntarily to attend more-integrated schools. A 2016 report by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, for instance, analyzed 10 studies that used “valid empirical methods to examine school choice and racial segregation in schools.” The foundation reported that nine of the studies “find school choice moves students into less racially segregated classrooms. The remaining study finds school choice has no visible effect on racial segregation. None finds choice increases racial segregation.” Fitzpatrick makes no mention of this research in the book.

Fitzpatrick does describe in passing how private schools offered integration during the same period that public schools were segregated by law, but she does not consider how this undermines her contention that choice was primarily segregationist: “Some Catholic schools in the South, including in parts of Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, had started to integrate their schools both before and after the Brown ruling.” Elsewhere in the book she notes that “lawmakers in Louisiana, for instance, excluded parochial schools from its voucher program because they were desegregated” [emphasis in the original]. The state was seeking to tailor choice to maintain segregation. If the lawmakers had not limited the voucher program to secular private schools, it might well have had a desegregating effect. Again, Friedman’s argument was neither naïve nor willfully ignorant.

When discussing the origins of school choice in Milwaukee, however, Fitzpatrick seems to abandon her negative opinion of segregation. She describes how state Representative Polly Williams wanted “a school district run by Black people for Black children,” and that “she had taken the idea from Howard Fuller, a civil rights activist and her former classmate,” who had co-written a “manifesto” that had “proposed an all-Black district.” Derrick Bell, who is described by Fitzpatrick as a “civil rights activist and law professor at Harvard”—but not as an originator of Critical Race Theory—“penned an op-ed in favor of the plan in the Milwaukee Journal.” As they realized the constitutional and practical difficulties with pursuing a separate, all-Black school district, Fuller and Williams joined forces with Republican Governor Tommy Thompson to see if they could achieve their goals through school choice. When Thompson sought to expand the choice program beyond secular private schools, Williams felt betrayed by the “unholy alliance” she had forged, because the inclusion of religious schools lessened the program’s focus on Milwaukee’s Black students. Fitzpatrick clearly sympathizes with Williams, who felt the choice program had abandoned her goal to “have schools in our community that are run by and controlled by people that look like me.”

Fitzpatrick describes white Southerners hoping to preserve racially separate schools as “hateful” and seeking to “defend the indefensible,” ultimately by embracing a restricted school-choice strategy. Those advocating for racially separate schools in Milwaukee are described as “civil rights activists” who were seeking “the power and money to address chronic problems of low academic achievement,” ultimately settling upon a restricted school-choice strategy to achieve their “social justice mission.” It is unclear why she treats these cases so differently and is unwilling to condemn both.

The book also devotes a lot of attention to the court cases raised by school-choice programs and the legal arguments made by each side. Once again, she acts like the baseball announcer for one team in describing the main attorneys for each side. Clint Bolick, who defended school-choice programs in several pivotal cases, is not portrayed as negatively as a Southern segregationist, but he is described as a rascal who didn’t necessarily play fair in order to win. She writes, “Bolick often waded into emotional arguments” and packed courtrooms with button-wearing supporters to sway the judges. But she describes Bob Chanin, the teachers union attorney who often challenged those programs, as shunning these unseemly tricks and preferring “to stick to the law.”

Yet Fitzpatrick recounts Chanin telling the Wisconsin Supreme Court, as it was trying to decide whether school choice ran afoul of constitutional prohibitions on state establishment of religion, that the problems of urban education “cannot be resolved by schemes that skim off 5,000 or 10,000 or even 15,000 students from highly motivated families and leave behind 85,000 or 90,000 other students. . . . Every child, not just a chosen few thousand, is entitled to a quality education.” But this was just an aberration for Chanin, Fitzpatrick explains, noting that he “had committed most of his professional life to defending public school teachers and, by extension, he felt, America’s public schools, had finally had enough.” The announcer for Chanin’s team was explaining that he was just brushing back the batter who was crowding the plate, not trying to bean him.

But then Fitzpatrick recounts that, during the U.S. Supreme Court arguments, “Chanin also told the justices the Ohio Supreme Court had ruled that the state wasn’t funding its public school system fairly, which disadvantaged students living in poorer school districts. He suggested that the state could look at funding as a solution for Cleveland.” Again, Chanin was making emotional policy arguments not directly related to the legal issues of whether these programs violated constitutional prohibition on state establishment of religion, just as Fitzpatrick accused Bolick of doing. It’s not clear that Bolick was any less focused on the law in dispute than Chanin. Maybe Bolick was just better at advocating for his clients than Chanin, which might help account for his greater success.

Despite all the useful detail on the role choice played in efforts to evade desegregation and the later court cases over more respectable uses of school choice, there are some notable gaps in Fitzpatrick’s narrative. For example, she includes almost nothing on the anti-Catholic origin and purpose of Blaine Amendments adopted by many states that prohibited the use of public funds in religious schools and were often used by the teachers unions’ attorneys and political allies to block school-choice programs. There is little discussion of how “the system of common school for everyone” that she believes is endangered by school choice is largely a myth that almost never really existed. By Fitzpatrick’s own account, public schools in the South were clearly not “common schools for everyone” for most of their history. Catholics being forced to read the King James Bible in their public school might also question the idea of public education as “common schools for everyone.”

The best way to read The Death of Public School is to do the book-reading equivalent of turning the sound off on the game announcer’s commentary. You can still watch all of the at-bats and enjoy the game. And if the broadcast’s choice of camera angles misses a few things, you can supplement by watching the highlights on another channel. It’s still the baseball game, even if it is irritating, distorted, and incomplete.

Jay P. Greene is a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

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

Greene, J.P. (2023). Enjoy the Game, but Turn Down the Sound: Useful history of school choice exaggerates threat to public education. Education Next, 23(4), 68-70.

During the latter half of the 20th Century, the early blooms of spring were also a signal to the nation’s teenagers: it’s time to find a job. About half of all Americans between 16 and 19 years old spent part of their summer break bagging groceries or slinging ice cream until the early 2000s. Then, the youth employment rate fell sharply and stayed low for the next two decades and through the Covid-19 pandemic. Teenage employment has since rebounded, with about one in three young people employed in July 2023.

Black and Hispanic teens are less likely to be employed than white students, both during the summer and the school year. They also are less likely to graduate high school, enroll in college, and earn a degree. The sort of community-based learning that teenagers’ jobs can impart, such as gaining employable skills and learning to meet professional expectations for responsibility, punctuality, and collaboration, has attracted the interest of policymakers looking to improve outcomes for at-risk students.

How do early workplace experiences affect academic outcomes? We provide experimental evidence from the Boston Summer Youth Employment Program, which has matched high-school students from low-income neighborhoods with summer jobs since the early 1980s. For much of that time, students were enrolled in the program via random lottery to work in local city agencies, businesses, and nonprofits, as seasonal workers in parks, day camps, and other local organizations. By matching academic records with teenagers who are and are not offered the chance to take part, we estimate the program’s causal impact on high school graduation rates, grades, and attendance.

We find broad benefits for students selected by the program lottery. Students who receive job offers are 7 percent more likely to graduate high school on time and 22 percent less likely to drop out within a year of the program. We also find that students’ school attendance and grade-point averages improve, as do their work habits, soft skills, and aspirations to attend college. In looking at the program’s costs, the evidence suggests that its long-term benefits outweigh its costs by more than 2 to 1.

A Summer Jobs Lottery in Boston

The Boston Summer Youth Employment Program began in the 1980s and now connects about 10,000 young people with jobs at roughly 900 local employers each summer. It is part of the city’s workforce development efforts and is intended to connect young people with meaningful job opportunities that offer professional experience, resume fodder, and a paycheck.

The six-week program is available to all Boston city residents aged 14 to 24 who apply through local nonprofits or other intermediaries. Participants are paid the Massachusetts minimum wage (currently $15 per hour) and work up to 25 hours per week in either a subsidized position (e.g., with a local community-based organization or city agency) or a job with a private-sector employer. The program also offers 20 hours of job-readiness training, which includes an evaluation of learning strengths and interests; practical instruction in resume preparation, job-searching, and interviewing; and opportunities to develop soft skills like time management, effective communication, persistence, and conflict resolution. In 2015, the program cost about $2,000 per participant—including $600 in administrative expenses and $1,400 in wages earned—or approximately $10 million total from municipal, state, and private funding.

Our study focuses on Action for Boston Community Development, a large and established nonprofit that works in all of Boston’s 18 neighborhoods and serves a predominately young, school-aged, and low-income population. Prior to the pandemic, the organization used a computerized lottery system to select applicants to participate in the summer jobs program based on ID numbers and the number of available slots, which is determined by the amount of funding each year. This system effectively assigned the offer to participate at random.

We focus on the summer of 2015, when 4,235 young people applied. We match applicant names with data from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to review the demographic and academic characteristics of youth who were and were not offered a program spot and to track and compare their outcomes over time. About 80 percent of applicants, or 3,372, were in grades 8–11 when they applied.

The average applicant was between 15 and 16 years old. About 53 percent were Black, 32 percent were identified as mixed race or “other,” 9 percent were white, and 6 percent were Asian. About 54 percent were female. Seven percent identified as having limited English ability, 7 percent reported being homeless, and upwards of 18 percent reported receiving cash public assistance in some form. Nearly 10 percent had switched schools during the academic year, and 15 percent attended a charter school. Applicants’ mean grade-point averages were 1.9, and nearly 30 percent were chronically absent from school. More than a quarter of applicants had failed a class.

Job offers were randomly granted to 28 percent of applicants, or 1,186 young people. The other 3,049 applicants did not receive an offer. We look at the demographics and academic performance of youth in these two groups and find no substantial differences—not surprising given that offers were awarded by a lottery. However, workforce participation rates were starkly different in the months that followed: 83.6 percent of lottery winners accepted the summer job offer, while just 28.2 percent of applicants who were not offered a job through the lottery worked between July and September, data from the Massachusetts Division of Unemployment Assistance shows.

We compare school outcomes for students who were and were not offered a summer job during the four-year period after the summer of 2015. We focus on the full group of 1,186 students who were offered a job rather than the 990 teenagers who accepted the placement and participated to measure the impact of receiving an offer. In many cases, that is the policy-relevant estimate, because while program administrators can offer an intervention, they cannot control who agrees to take part.

We theorize that the Boston summer-jobs program could have both direct and indirect effects on graduation. The program could directly increase career and academic aspirations that motivate students to graduate on time. It also could have two potential indirect effects that positively influence graduation. First, it is designed to develop good work habits like showing up on time, which could help students improve their school attendance and the likelihood of high-school graduation. Second, it provides youth with an opportunity to practice existing skills on the job and develop new ones, which may lead to better course performance and, ultimately, increase the probability of graduating.

Therefore, our primary outcomes of interest during the four-year post-intervention period are high-school graduation and dropout rates. We also examine more proximate outcomes that serve as potential mediators for longer-term effects: school attendance, course performance, and standardized test scores. Because offers are distributed by a random lottery, we obtain causal estimates simply by comparing the average outcomes of lottery winners and losers. Finally, we look at exploratory mechanisms from our survey data, which describes changes in students’ aspirations, work habits, and soft skills. We also look at effects by subgroups of students.

Impacts on Graduation, Attendance, and Academic Performance

Students who win the lottery and are offered a summer job are more likely to graduate high school on time and less likely to drop out compared to students who are not offered a job. Some 67.8 percent of students offered a summer job graduate high school on time compared to 63.4 percent of students who don’t receive an offer, a difference of 4.4 percentage points, or 7 percent (see Figure 1). In addition, dropout rates are higher among students who are not offered a summer job compared to those who are: 12.7 percent drop out within four years compared to 10.1 percent of lottery winners. Most of that difference occurs within the first year of participating in the program, when the dropout rate is 10.7 percent for students without job offers compared to 8.8 percent for students offered a summer job—a difference of 1.9 percentage points, or 22 percent.

We next examine outcomes that could help to explain the program’s impact on high-school graduation. In looking at attendance in the year after the program lottery, we see that students with job offers attended 3.4 additional school days compared to students who were not offered a summer job. This difference is due mainly to their having fewer unexcused absences during the next school year. Students offered a summer job are truant 2.1 fewer days compared to students not offered a summer job, suggesting a behavioral shift.

In fact, the overall difference in absenteeism is driven largely by lottery winners maintaining their attendance rates from the previous school year while attendance for non-winners falls. Since school attendance rates typically decline as youth age, this suggests that the summer jobs program could contribute to higher graduation rates by preventing chronic absenteeism. Indeed, we look at the relationship between these outcomes and find better attendance is positively correlated with a greater likelihood of graduating from high school.

In terms of academic achievement, we find a small positive impact on overall grade-point averages for lottery winners in the first year but no impact on course failures. Grade-point averages are 6.8 percent higher for students offered jobs than for students not offered jobs in the first year after the program. While the difference is relatively modest, with a grade-point average of 1.94 for lottery winners compared to 1.75 for non-winners, further analysis indicates that this small increase in course performance contributes significantly to boosting on-time high-school graduation. However, we find that the program’s effect on grade-point average disappears by the second year.

We also look at impacts across different groups of students and find outsized impacts on school attendance and academic performance. The positive impact from a job offer on school attendance is three times as great for males, applicants of legal dropout age, and students who were chronically absent before applying to the lottery. For students of legal dropout age, the program’s boost in grade-point average is also three times as large as that for younger youth. The program also appears to increase the likelihood of high-school graduation more for students with limited English proficiency and low socioeconomic status. However, the results for those students are less precise as the subgroups are relatively small.

Shifts in Attitudes and Aspirations

What might be driving the reduction in chronic absenteeism and subsequent increase in on-time high-school graduation rates? To learn more about students’ experiences and behaviors, we worked with Boston city officials and the Action for Boston Community Development to administer a survey that included questions related to job readiness, post-secondary aspirations, work habits, and socio-emotional learning. This survey was completed by 1,327 participants, split equally between students who participated in the program and students who were not offered a summer job. While response rates differed between these groups, given a lack of data and evidence on potential reasons why a summer jobs program boosts important school-based outcomes months and years later, we feel that there are still some key insights to be gained. While the first part of our analysis establishes causal impacts, the goal here is to provide a glimpse into how the program achieves those outcomes.

After working a summer job, students experience significant improvements across a variety of short-term behaviors and skills that could plausibly contribute to the improvements in school outcomes our causal estimates show. For example, 67.7 percent of students who participated in the jobs program report having gained a mentor over the summer compared to 52.4 percent of students who were not offered a spot. They also are significantly more likely to report having developed good work habits, such as being on time and keeping a schedule, as well as essential soft skills, such as managing emotions and asking for help. Notably, 11.4 percent of program participants report that they are saving for college tuition compared to 7.1 percent of applicants who were not offered a spot—an indication that the participants are not only exposed to experiences that might boost academic aspirations but are also motivated to act on those ambitions.

An Annual Opportunity

To our knowledge, this is the first study to document an improvement in high-school dropout and graduation rates associated with a summer jobs program. Young people who were randomly selected to receive a job offer are 7 percent more likely to graduate high school on time compared to students who do not receive an offer—an impact that is similar in size to the gap in on-time graduation rates between economically disadvantaged students and their wealthier peers in the Boston Public Schools. Within the first year of the program, students with job offers are 22 percent less likely to drop out of school than students who were not offered a job. These effect sizes are meaningful in terms of closing achievement and attainment gaps. They also are on par with low-cost educational interventions, such as reminding parents about the importance of attending school.

When assessing the value of any program, benefits should be considered relative to their costs. By some estimates, each new high-school graduate confers a net benefit to taxpayers of roughly $127,000 over the graduate’s lifetime. In 2015, the Boston Summer Youth Employment Program cost roughly $2,000 per participant, resulting in a total cost of about $2.4 million for the 1,200 youth who were offered jobs that summer through the nonprofit we study. We find that the program increases the likelihood of high-school graduation by 4 percentage points, which would yield an additional 48 graduates. Over their lifetimes, these graduates would collectively confer a benefit of $6 million—for a benefit-to-cost ratio of more than 2 to 1.

While these positive impacts are notable, they are likely not the only benefits. Students who participate in a supervised and development-oriented summer jobs program gain new experiences and professional connections that may yield additional advantages in terms of future employment, career pathways, or postsecondary education. Insights from survey data show students seem to benefit from mentorship and developing work habits and soft skills that promote success in a variety of settings, including high school. Finally, summer jobs programs also can help families at or near the poverty line by providing income to young people. Our survey found that half of participants use their earnings to help pay one or more household bills, and one in five report saving for college tuition.

While most students and families often look forward to summer vacations, seasonal jobs programs present a clear opportunity to benefit young people and their families, particularly those from low-income neighborhoods with few job opportunities nearby. Supervised work experiences improve high-school graduation rates and boost students’ employability, work habits, and family finances. With clear and positive benefits that last beyond the summer, seasonal youth jobs programs have an important role to play in the landscape of extracurricular activities.

Alicia Sasser Modestino is associate professor of economics and the research director for the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University. Richard Paulsen is assistant professor of economics at Bloomsburg University.

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

Modestino, A.S., and Paulsen, R. (2023). Year-Round Benefits from Summer Jobs: How work programs impact student outcomes. Education Next, 23(4), 60-65.

In Neal Stephenson’s 1995 science fiction novel, The Diamond Age, readers meet Nell, a young girl who comes into possession of a highly advanced book, The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. The book is not the usual static collection of texts and images but a deeply immersive tool that can converse with the reader, answer questions, and personalize its content, all in service of educating and motivating a young girl to be a strong, independent individual.

Such a device, even after the introduction of the Internet and tablet computers, has remained in the realm of science fiction—until now. Artificial intelligence, or AI, took a giant leap forward with the introduction in November 2022 of ChatGPT, an AI technology capable of producing remarkably creative responses and sophisticated analysis through human-like dialogue. It has triggered a wave of innovation, some of which suggests we might be on the brink of an era of interactive, super-intelligent tools not unlike the book Stephenson dreamed up for Nell.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, calls artificial intelligence “more profound than fire or electricity or anything we have done in the past.” Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn and current partner at Greylock Partners, says, “The power to make positive change in the world is about to get the biggest boost it’s ever had.” And Bill Gates has said that “this new wave of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone.”

Over the last year, developers have released a dizzying array of AI tools that can generate text, images, music, and video with no need for complicated coding but simply in response to instructions given in natural language. These technologies are rapidly improving, and developers are introducing capabilities that would have been considered science fiction just a few years ago. AI is also raising pressing ethical questions around bias, appropriate use, and plagiarism.

In the realm of education, this technology will influence how students learn, how teachers work, and ultimately how we structure our education system. Some educators and leaders look forward to these changes with great enthusiasm. Sal Kahn, founder of Khan Academy, went so far as to say in a TED talk that AI has the potential to effect “probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen.” But others warn that AI will enable the spread of misinformation, facilitate cheating in school and college, kill whatever vestiges of individual privacy remain, and cause massive job loss. The challenge is to harness the positive potential while avoiding or mitigating the harm.

What Is Generative AI?

Artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science that focuses on creating software capable of mimicking behaviors and processes we would consider “intelligent” if exhibited by humans, including reasoning, learning, problem-solving, and exercising creativity. AI systems can be applied to an extensive range of tasks, including language translation, image recognition, navigating autonomous vehicles, detecting and treating cancer, and, in the case of generative AI, producing content and knowledge rather than simply searching for and retrieving it.

“Foundation models” in generative AI are systems trained on a large dataset to learn a broad base of knowledge that can then be adapted to a range of different, more specific purposes. This learning method is self-supervised, meaning the model learns by finding patterns and relationships in the data it is trained on.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are foundation models that have been trained on a vast amount of text data. For example, the training data for OpenAI’s GPT model consisted of web content, books, Wikipedia articles, news articles, social media posts, code snippets, and more. OpenAI’s GPT-3 models underwent training on a staggering 300 billion “tokens” or word pieces, using more than 175 billion parameters to shape the model’s behavior—nearly 100 times more data than the company’s GPT-2 model had.

By doing this analysis across billions of sentences, LLM models develop a statistical understanding of language: how words and phrases are usually combined, what topics are typically discussed together, and what tone or style is appropriate in different contexts. That allows it to generate human-like text and perform a wide range of tasks, such as writing articles, answering questions, or analyzing unstructured data.

LLMs include OpenAI’s GPT-4, Google’s PaLM, and Meta’s LLaMA. These LLMs serve as “foundations” for AI applications. ChatGPT is built on GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, while Bard uses Google’s Pathways Language Model 2 (PaLM 2) as its foundation.

Some of the best-known applications are:

ChatGPT 3.5. The free version of ChatGPT released by OpenAI in November 2022. It was trained on data only up to 2021, and while it is very fast, it is prone to inaccuracies.

ChatGPT 4.0. The newest version of ChatGPT, which is more powerful and accurate than ChatGPT 3.5 but also slower, and it requires a paid account. It also has extended capabilities through plug-ins that give it the ability to interface with content from websites, perform more sophisticated mathematical functions, and access other services. A new Code Interpreter feature gives ChatGPT the ability to analyze data, create charts, solve math problems, edit files, and even develop hypotheses to explain data trends.

Microsoft Bing Chat. An iteration of Microsoft’s Bing search engine that is enhanced with OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology. It can browse websites and offers source citations with its results.

Google Bard. Google’s AI generates text, translates languages, writes different kinds of creative content, and writes and debugs code in more than 20 different programming languages. The tone and style of Bard’s replies can be finetuned to be simple, long, short, professional, or casual. Bard also leverages Google Lens to analyze images uploaded with prompts.

Anthropic Claude 2. A chatbot that can generate text, summarize content, and perform other tasks, Claude 2 can analyze texts of roughly 75,000 words—about the length of The Great Gatsby—and generate responses of more than 3,000 words. The model was built using a set of principles that serve as a sort of “constitution” for AI systems, with the aim of making them more helpful, honest, and harmless.

These AI systems have been improving at a remarkable pace, including in how well they perform on assessments of human knowledge. OpenAI’s GPT-3.5, which was released in March 2022, only managed to score in the 10th percentile on the bar exam, but GPT-4.0, introduced a year later, made a significant leap, scoring in the 90th percentile. What makes these feats especially impressive is that OpenAI did not specifically train the system to take these exams; the AI was able to come up with the correct answers on its own. Similarly, Google’s medical AI model substantially improved its performance on a U.S. Medical Licensing Examination practice test, with its accuracy rate jumping to 85 percent in March 2021 from 33 percent in December 2020.

These two examples prompt one to ask: if AI continues to improve so rapidly, what will these systems be able to achieve in the next few years? What’s more, new studies challenge the assumption that AI-generated responses are stale or sterile. In the case of Google’s AI model, physicians preferred the AI’s long-form answers to those written by their fellow doctors, and nonmedical study participants rated the AI answers as more helpful. Another study found that participants preferred a medical chatbot’s responses over those of a physician and rated them significantly higher, not just for quality but also for empathy. What will happen when “empathetic” AI is used in education?

Other studies have looked at the reasoning capabilities of these models. Microsoft researchers suggest that newer systems “exhibit more general intelligence than previous AI models” and are coming “strikingly close to human-level performance.” While some observers question those conclusions, the AI systems display an increasing ability to generate coherent and contextually appropriate responses, make connections between different pieces of information, and engage in reasoning processes such as inference, deduction, and analogy.

Despite their prodigious capabilities, these systems are not without flaws. At times, they churn out information that might sound convincing but is irrelevant, illogical, or entirely false—an anomaly known as “hallucination.” The execution of certain mathematical operations presents another area of difficulty for AI. And while these systems can generate well-crafted and realistic text, understanding why the model made specific decisions or predictions can be challenging.

The Importance of Well-Designed Prompts

Using generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude 2 is relatively simple. One has only to type in a request or a task (called a prompt), and the AI generates a response. Properly constructed prompts are essential for getting useful results from generative AI tools. You can ask generative AI to analyze text, find patterns in data, compare opposing arguments, and summarize an article in different ways (see sidebar for examples of AI prompts).

One challenge is that, after using search engines for years, people have been preconditioned to phrase questions in a certain way. A search engine is something like a helpful librarian who takes a specific question and points you to the most relevant sources for possible answers. The search engine (or librarian) doesn’t create anything new but efficiently retrieves what’s already there.

Generative AI is more akin to a competent intern. You give a generative AI tool instructions through prompts, as you would to an intern, asking it to complete a task and produce a product. The AI interprets your instructions, thinks about the best way to carry them out, and produces something original or performs a task to fulfill your directive. The results aren’t pre-made or stored somewhere—they’re produced on the fly, based on the information the intern (generative AI) has been trained on. The output often depends on the precision and clarity of the instructions (prompts) you provide. A vague or poorly defined prompt might lead the AI to produce less relevant results. The more context and direction you give it, the better the result will be. What’s more, the capabilities of these AI systems are being enhanced through the introduction of versatile plug-ins that equip them to browse websites, analyze data files, or access other services. Think of this as giving your intern access to a group of experts to help accomplish your tasks.

One strategy in using a generative AI tool is first to tell it what kind of expert or persona you want it to “be.” Ask it to be an expert management consultant, a skilled teacher, a writing tutor, or a copy editor, and then give it a task.

Prompts can also be constructed to get these AI systems to perform complex and multi-step operations. For example, let’s say a teacher wants to create an adaptive tutoring program—for any subject, any grade, in any language—that customizes the examples for students based on their interests. She wants each lesson to culminate in a short-response or multiple-choice quiz. If the student answers the questions correctly, the AI tutor should move on to the next lesson. If the student responds incorrectly, the AI should explain the concept again, but using simpler language.

Previously, designing this kind of interactive system would have required a relatively sophisticated and expensive software program. With ChatGPT, however, just giving those instructions in a prompt delivers a serviceable tutoring system. It isn’t perfect, but remember that it was built virtually for free, with just a few lines of English language as a command. And nothing in the education market today has the capability to generate almost limitless examples to connect the lesson concept to students’ interests.

Chained prompts can also help focus AI systems. For example, an educator can prompt a generative AI system first to read a practice guide from the What Works Clearinghouse and summarize its recommendations. Then, in a follow-up prompt, the teacher can ask the AI to develop a set of classroom activities based on what it just read. By curating the source material and using the right prompts, the educator can anchor the generated responses in evidence and high-quality research.

However, much like fledgling interns learning the ropes in a new environment, AI does commit occasional errors. Such fallibility, while inevitable, underlines the critical importance of maintaining rigorous oversight of AI’s output. Monitoring not only acts as a crucial checkpoint for accuracy but also becomes a vital source of real-time feedback for the system. It’s through this iterative refinement process that an AI system, over time, can significantly minimize its error rate and increase its efficacy.

Uses of AI in Education

In May 2023, the U.S. Department of Education released a report titled Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Teaching and Learning: Insights and Recommendations. The department had conducted listening sessions in 2022 with more than 700 people, including educators and parents, to gauge their views on AI. The report noted that “constituents believe that action is required now in order to get ahead of the expected increase of AI in education technology—and they want to roll up their sleeves and start working together.” People expressed anxiety about “future potential risks” with AI but also felt that “AI may enable achieving educational priorities in better ways, at scale, and with lower costs.”

AI could serve—or is already serving—in several teaching-and-learning roles:

Instructional assistants. AI’s ability to conduct human-like conversations opens up possibilities for adaptive tutoring or instructional assistants that can help explain difficult concepts to students. AI-based feedback systems can offer constructive critiques on student writing, which can help students fine-tune their writing skills. Some research also suggests certain kinds of prompts can help children generate more fruitful questions about learning. AI models might also support customized learning for students with disabilities and provide translation for English language learners.

Teaching assistants. AI might tackle some of the administrative tasks that keep teachers from investing more time with their peers or students. Early uses include automated routine tasks such as drafting lesson plans, creating differentiated materials, designing worksheets, developing quizzes, and exploring ways of explaining complicated academic materials. AI can also provide educators with recommendations to meet student needs and help teachers reflect, plan, and improve their practice.

Parent assistants. Parents can use AI to generate letters requesting individualized education plan (IEP) services or to ask that a child be evaluated for gifted and talented programs. For parents choosing a school for their child, AI could serve as an administrative assistant, mapping out school options within driving distance of home, generating application timelines, compiling contact information, and the like. Generative AI can even create bedtime stories with evolving plots tailored to a child’s interests.

Administrator assistants. Using generative AI, school administrators can draft various communications, including materials for parents, newsletters, and other community-engagement documents. AI systems can also help with the difficult tasks of organizing class or bus schedules, and they can analyze complex data to identify patterns or needs. ChatGPT can perform sophisticated sentiment analysis that could be useful for measuring school-climate and other survey data.

Though the potential is great, most teachers have yet to use these tools. A Morning Consult and EdChoice poll found that while 60 percent say they’ve heard about ChatGPT, only 14 percent have used it in their free time, and just 13 percent have used it at school. It’s likely that most teachers and students will engage with generative AI not through the platforms themselves but rather through AI capabilities embedded in software. Instructional providers such as Khan Academy, Varsity Tutors, and DuoLingo are experimenting with GPT-4-powered tutors that are trained on datasets specific to these organizations to provide individualized learning support that has additional guardrails to help protect students and enhance the experience for teachers.

Google’s Project Tailwind is experimenting with an AI notebook that can analyze student notes and then develop study questions or provide tutoring support through a chat interface. These features could soon be available on Google Classroom, potentially reaching over half of all U.S. classrooms. Brisk Teaching is one of the first companies to build a portfolio of AI services designed specifically for teachers—differentiating content, drafting lesson plans, providing student feedback, and serving as an AI assistant to streamline workflow among different apps and tools.

Providers of curriculum and instruction materials might also include AI assistants for instant help and tutoring tailored to the companies’ products. One example is the edX Xpert, a ChatGPT-based learning assistant on the edX platform. It offers immediate, customized academic and customer support for online learners worldwide.

Regardless of the ways AI is used in classrooms, the fundamental task of policymakers and education leaders is to ensure that the technology is serving sound instructional practice. As Vicki Phillips, CEO of the National Center on Education and the Economy, wrote, “We should not only think about how technology can assist teachers and learners in improving what they’re doing now, but what it means for ensuring that new ways of teaching and learning flourish alongside the applications of AI.”

Challenges and Risks

Along with these potential benefits come some difficult challenges and risks the education community must navigate:

Student cheating. Students might use AI to solve homework problems or take quizzes. AI-generated essays threaten to undermine learning as well as the college-entrance process. Aside from the ethical issues involved in such cheating, students who use AI to do their work for them may not be learning the content and skills they need.

Bias in AI algorithms. AI systems learn from the data they are trained on. If this data contains biases, those biases can be learned and perpetuated by the AI system. For example, if the data include student-performance information that’s biased toward one ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic segment, the AI system could learn to favor students from that group. Less cited but still important are potential biases around political ideology and possibly even pedagogical philosophy that may generate responses not aligned to a community’s values.

Privacy concerns. When students or educators interact with generative-AI tools, their conversations and personal information might be stored and analyzed, posing a risk to their privacy. With public AI systems, educators should refrain from inputting or exposing sensitive details about themselves, their colleagues, or their students, including but not limited to private communications, personally identifiable information, health records, academic performance, emotional well-being, and financial information.

Decreased social connection. There is a risk that more time spent using AI systems will come at the cost of less student interaction with both educators and classmates. Children may also begin turning to these conversational AI systems in place of their friends. As a result, AI could intensify and worsen the public health crisis of loneliness, isolation, and lack of connection identified by the U.S. Surgeon General.

Overreliance on technology. Both teachers and students face the risk of becoming overly reliant on AI-driven technology. For students, this could stifle learning, especially the development of critical thinking. This challenge extends to educators as well. While AI can expedite lesson-plan generation, speed does not equate to quality. Teachers may be tempted to accept the initial AI-generated content rather than devote time to reviewing and refining it for optimal educational value.

Equity issues. Not all students have equal access to computer devices and the Internet. That imbalance could accelerate a widening of the achievement gap between students from different socioeconomic backgrounds.

Many of these risks are not new or unique to AI. Schools banned calculators and cellphones when these devices were first introduced, largely over concerns related to cheating. Privacy concerns around educational technology have led lawmakers to introduce hundreds of bills in state legislatures, and there are growing tensions between new technologies and existing federal privacy laws. The concerns over bias are understandable, but similar scrutiny is also warranted for existing content and materials that rarely, if ever, undergo review for racial or political bias.

In light of these challenges, the Department of Education has stressed the importance of keeping “humans in the loop” when using AI, particularly when the output might be used to inform a decision. As the department encouraged in its 2023 report, teachers, learners, and others need to retain their agency. AI cannot “replace a teacher, a guardian, or an education leader as the custodian of their students’ learning,” the report stressed.

Policy Challenges with AI

Policymakers are grappling with several questions related to AI as they seek to strike a balance between supporting innovation and protecting the public interest (see sidebar). The speed of innovation in AI is outpacing many policymakers’ understanding, let alone their ability to develop a consensus on the best ways to minimize the potential harms from AI while maximizing the benefits. The Department of Education’s 2023 report describes the risks and opportunities posed by AI, but its recommendations amount to guidance at best. The White House released a Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights, but it, too, is more an aspirational statement than a governing document. Congress is drafting legislation related to AI, which will help generate needed debate, but the path to the president’s desk for signature is murky at best.

It is up to policymakers to establish clearer rules of the road and create a framework that provides consumer protections, builds public trust in AI systems, and establishes the regulatory certainty companies need for their product road maps. Considering the potential for AI to affect our economy, national security, and broader society, there is no time to waste.

Why AI Is Different

It is wise to be skeptical of new technologies that claim to revolutionize learning. In the past, prognosticators have promised that television, the computer, and the Internet, in turn, would transform education. Unfortunately, the heralded revolutions fell short of expectations. 

There are some early signs, though, that this technological wave might be different in the benefits it brings to students, teachers, and parents. Previous technologies democratized access to content and resources, but AI is democratizing a kind of machine intelligence that can be used to perform a myriad of tasks. Moreover, these capabilities are open and affordable—nearly anyone with an Internet connection and a phone now has access to an intelligent assistant. 

Generative AI models keep getting more powerful and are improving rapidly. The capabilities of these systems months or years from now will far exceed their current capacity. Their capabilities are also expanding through integration with other expert systems. Take math, for example. GPT-3.5 had some difficulties with certain basic mathematical concepts, but GPT-4 made significant improvement. Now, the incorporation of the Wolfram plug-in has nearly erased the remaining limitations. 

It’s reasonable to anticipate that these systems will become more potent, more accessible, and more affordable in the years ahead. The question, then, is how to use these emerging capabilities responsibly to improve teaching and learning. 

The paradox of AI may lie in its potential to enhance the human, interpersonal element in education. Aaron Levie, CEO of Box, a Cloud-based content-management company, believes that AI will ultimately help us attend more quickly to those important tasks “that only a human can do.” Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, similarly asserts that “successful schools are inevitably the product of the relationships between adults and students. When technology ignores that, it’s bound to disappoint. But when it’s designed to offer more coaching, free up time for meaningful teacher-student interaction, or offer students more personalized feedback, technology can make a significant, positive difference.” 

Technology does not revolutionize education; humans do. It is humans who create the systems and institutions that educate children, and it is the leaders of those systems who decide which tools to use and how to use them. Until those institutions modernize to accommodate the new possibilities of these technologies, we should expect incremental improvements at best. As Joel Rose, CEO of New Classrooms Innovation Partners, noted, “The most urgent need is for new and existing organizations to redesign the student experience in ways that take full advantage of AI’s capabilities.”

While past technologies have not lived up to hyped expectations, AI is not merely a continuation of the past; it is a leap into a new era of machine intelligence that we are only beginning to grasp. While the immediate implementation of these systems is imperfect, the swift pace of improvement holds promising prospects. The responsibility rests with human intervention—with educators, policymakers, and parents to incorporate this technology thoughtfully in a manner that optimally benefits teachers and learners. Our collective ambition should not focus solely or primarily on averting potential risks but rather on articulating a vision of the role AI should play in teaching and learning—a game plan that leverages the best of these technologies while preserving the best of human relationships.

John Bailey is a strategic adviser to entrepreneurs, policymakers, investors, and philanthropists and is a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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

Bailey, J. (2023). AI in Education: The leap into a new era of machine intelligence carries risks and challenges, but also plenty of promise. Education Next, 23(4), 28-35.

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

The year was 2014, and Doug Tuthill remembers taking a call from a top state lawmaker just after the Florida legislature had authorized its first education savings accounts—the type of state-funded school-choice program that is now fast rising to prominence around the country.

“The speaker called and said, ‘You have two months to implement it, and unfortunately, we didn’t allocate any administrative funding,’” recalled Tuthill, who since 2008 has been president of Step Up for Students, Florida’s leading private-school-scholarship organization. “That was my first experience of thinking about, okay, how do I do this?”

Tuthill wondered the same thing again in April of this year. That’s when Governor Ron DeSantis signed an overhaul of Florida’s complicated school-choice landscape to place a greater emphasis on education savings accounts, or ESAs.

By restructuring programs and lifting eligibility limits, the new law shifted the state’s choice priorities. Instead of mainly providing lower-income families and children with disabilities with private-school scholarships, the new system offers universal eligibility for the more expansive and parent-driven ESA option.

With the state relying mainly on the nonprofit Step Up for Students to run its school choice programs, Tuthill immediately began bracing for the number of Florida students with ESAs to rocket from some 70,000 during the 2022–23 academic year to five times that number just a few months later.

“What I’m looking at now is how to scale,” Tuthill said. “The most interesting part of the ESA discussion really isn’t being talked about, which is putting in place the infrastructure to be able to scale these things up.”

Implementation Woes

In his quest to construct a large, workable, and accountable ESA program quickly, Tuthill has plenty of company. As growing numbers of states, mostly Republican-led, embrace ESAs to support private schooling and parent choice, program managers around the country face similarly complex challenges.

Like Florida, the states of Arkansas, Iowa, and Utah have all enacted laws this year that would open ESAs—sometimes after a multiyear phase-in—to most if not all school-age children in their states. Those four followed Arizona and West Virginia, which started implementing similar universal programs in 2022.

That wave plus other legislative action in 2023 brought to 13 the number of states with one or more education savings account programs funded directly from state revenues. In addition, Missouri has an operating ESA program paid for through tax credits.

Amid this growth, controversies have flared over ESA implementation—most notably but not exclusively in Arizona.

Whether states jumping on the ESA bandwagon are prepared for the challenges that await them remains unclear. Lawmakers sometimes underestimate the practical obstacles to launching and growing ESA programs.

For example, the tension between ease of use for families and accountability for the governance of taxpayer funds resists simple solutions. The problem of defining—and policing—questionable expenses by families may spark both administrative confusion and contentious political debate. And scaling up programs that were manageable when smaller poses a major challenge—not only for administrators, but also for the public they serve.

In a bid to help states navigate this territory, the advocacy organization ExcelinEd has produced a detailed ESA implementation guide and convened a national network of ESA administrators to share best practices and lessons learned.

“I don’t think anyone administratively or on the vendor side has completely mastered this yet,” said Ben DeGrow, who supervises the network as a school-choice policy director at ExcelinEd. “It’s exciting to see more people getting into this space because we’re learning from each other. But we’re still on the learning curve.”

Managing Program Complexity

As ESA programs spread and expand, no state’s program looks exactly like another—and each may look different than it did the year before. Even programs that seem similar on the surface are more complex and distinctive than they appear to policymakers or the public.

“The reality is that each of these programs is unique” because “every state has its own laws,” said Joseph Connor, the founder and CEO of Odyssey, a company created to administer ESAs and education “microgrant” programs. “Every state has its own set of parents and vendors who are going to want their own thing. It’s one of the most complex programs that a state can run.”

Rather than simply subsidizing the cost of sending children to private schools—as vouchers and tax-credit scholarships tend to do—ESAs are typically structured to give families greater latitude in spending the state money deposited into their accounts.

Details on allowable education expenses vary. ESAs usually let families not only pay for private school but also purchase an array of other products and services: curriculum materials, tutoring, textbooks, therapy, enrichment classes, sports equipment, school supplies, and more.

This flexibility makes the program attractive to homeschoolers, but it can be hard for administrators to draw clear-cut boundaries between genuine education expenses and recreational or general family use.

Officials who implement ESA programs face multiple responsibilities, such as marketing to parents, determining their eligibility, and orienting them to the program. Other crucial duties include defining and communicating what qualifies as allowable expenses, developing systems for disbursing funds, and supplying technical assistance to families and service providers.

Building processes that attend to these details and stand up to scrutiny—without unduly burdening users—is a challenge that can make or break a program.

“There’s a lot of moving parts,” said Robert Enlow, the president of EdChoice, a research organization that tracks and advocates for ESAs and other K–12 options beyond district-run public schools. “It’s exciting, and there’s a lot of opportunity, but it’s a lot of hard work.”

Striking a Balance

A common tension in states with ESA programs is the trade-off between convenience for parents on the one hand and accountability for public tax dollars on the other. Advocates say states can strike the right balance, with some supporters arguing that states should err on the side of flexibility.

“The underlying theory is we have to trust families and parents to make those decisions and try not to bring down the hand of government until and unless there’s obvious evidence of fraud,” said Garrett Ballengee, the executive director of the Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy, a think tank that champions that state’s ESA program. “And I think that’s probably the right approach to it. Going too far on the rules and regulations side kind of corrupts the original intent.”

In states with ESA programs, officials may not be required to collect, categorize, and report on how exactly families are using their dollars. “We don’t report out as a matter of course on how much people spend on tutoring versus technology, for instance,” said Kathryn Marker, who runs the division of the North Carolina State Education Assistance Authority that administers that state’s ESA program. “We’re not required to report that.”

For those who oppose ESAs, the lack of such reporting requirements counts among the many strikes against the accounts. “There are no regulations or set of requirements or guardrails that can make these programs a good idea or a good public policy,” said Jessica Levin, the director of Public Funds Public Schools, an advocacy campaign affiliated with the Education Law Center that opposes government funding for private schooling and has mounted legal challenges to state ESA programs.

Levin sees as problematic that ESA programs “generally have very little to no requirements in the realm of transparency and accountability for the use of the public funds.” She decried a lack of data on exactly who is using the money, what they’re spending it on, how much misuse has been detected, and what the consequences of any misuse have been. The reports that have come out about questionable use of ESA funds, she said, are “extremely concerning.”

Pizza Ovens, Kayaks, Chicken Coops

In Arizona, the questionable spending of ESA funds has long been a contentious issue. For example, the program came under fire in 2018 after a state auditor reported $700,000 in improper spending, most of which had not been recovered. ESA supporters pointed out that the reported misspending represented only about 1 percent of the then $62 million program—but critics were not mollified.

As Arizona transitioned in 2022–23 from an ESA program limited to certain student subgroups to universal eligibility, the problematic use of funds drew national attention.

With headlines fueling perceptions of parent purchases that were only tenuously tied to education, Christine Accurso, the Arizona Department of Education’s ESA director, has moved on several fronts to improve administration. For example, the program has published lists of allowable and “disallowable” expenditures (see sidebar below).

In a March memo to the state board of education, Accurso noted that under the prior administration, the department had approved ESA spending on everything from pools, greenhouses, garden sheds, and grills to chicken coops, kayaks, baby grand pianos, pizza ovens, and large trampolines.

“We cannot justify, to an auditor, noneducational use of taxpayer funds,” Accurso wrote. “If we were to continue with such a policy, we would be sanctioned by the auditor, the program would fall into disrepute, and Arizona’s role both within the state and as the first in the nation and example to the rest of the country, would be ruined.”

A strong school-choice supporter who used an ESA herself as a parent, Accurso successfully campaigned against a ballot referendum drive in 2022 aimed at blocking the ESA program expansion. Afterward she won an appointment by State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne to run Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account program.

A Model—or a Cautionary Tale?

Since Accurso took office in January, the department’s rulemaking and enforcement efforts have sparked sharp criticism from both opponents who want the ESA expansion repealed and families who use and support the program.

Save Our Schools Arizona, which advocates for public schools and opposes the 2022 ESA program expansion, argues that ongoing disputes over implementing the broader program prove it has become, as the organization’s executive director, Beth Lewis, puts it, “too big to succeed.”

Lewis said that the program is “wide open” for fraud. “It is interesting to watch my taxpayer dollars be used to build a garden in everybody’s backyard, when my public school can’t afford one,” she said. “It’s just this unspoken rule of, if you see it in a public school, then it’s approvable.”

Other states should view Arizona’s move to universal eligibility not as a model but as a cautionary tale, Lewis argues. She sees evidence of that happening in states such as Arkansas and Iowa, where newly passed laws call for incremental, multiyear expansions before getting to universal eligibility.

“I think they looked at Arizona and saw that this is a complete disaster and is not serving families well,” Lewis said. “There’s no way to ensure transparency. And they said, ‘Well, at the very least, we need to phase this in.’”

School-choice advocates tend to defend Arizona and see its uneven expansion process as par for the course when states try something different to promote educational freedom.

“We’re not trying to create something that’s easy to administer,” said Heritage Foundation education policy scholar Jonathan Butcher. “We’re not doing this for the department of education; we’re doing this for the families.” Still, he added, “Arizona’s story offers a lot of dos and don’ts.”

Flashpoint: Approving Expenses

Figuring out how to define allowable expenses and police ESA spending is one key challenge for which Arizona’s story may prove instructive to other states.

In 2019, Arizona contracted with the company ClassWallet to facilitate ESA transactions on its online spending-management portal. ClassWallet is also used by ESA programs in Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, and North Carolina.

ClassWallet stresses that its role is not to set the rules for what constitutes acceptable expenses. “We are 100 percent not the arbiter of any programmatic decisions whatsoever,” said CEO Jamie Rosenberg. “We are simply a technology that is configured by the client.”

Regarding allowable expenses, Accurso advises families that “as long as it’s typically known as an educational item, you’re going to purchase those with no problem. If there’s something that’s not typically known as an educational item, then all they have to do is send us the curriculum with the materials list on it that shows that those items are needed.”

The Arizona Department of Education is, in theory, charged with approving all purchases using ESA funds, but Accurso said she inherited a backlog of more than 170,000 unapproved expense orders, more than 50,000 of which had no receipts attached or such scanty receipts that her staff must call vendors to verify purchases item by item.

Until ClassWallet came in, families primarily accessed ESA funds through prepaid debit cards. Accurso favors halting that practice, and shortly after taking office she announced that, in the interest of curbing misspending, no new cards would be issued. Still, amid strong advocacy from parents opposed to ending debit cards, the department has allowed families who already had such cards to keep them.

“The administrative burden of a prepaid debit card is huge,” Accurso said. Minimizing misuse becomes harder “when a parent can swipe the debit card and the money is out the door with no accountability until the receipts are received.”

Such a process became untenable after the program swelled, Accurso said. A “tsunami” of new applicants hit after expansion to universal eligibility in late September 2022, she noted. The number of Arizona ESAs rose to more than 60,000 by mid-June 2023 from 13,000 the previous September, and Accurso expects another wave to hit in 2023–24.

While ClassWallet allows for debit cards, its platform was basically designed to replace them. “Among our clients, Arizona is the only client that uses our debit-card feature,” Rosenberg said. The company’s “digital wallet,” he added, offers guardrails and compliance mechanisms that a debit-card system lacks.

Parents in Arizona have more than one way to access ESA funds. They can use their ESA digital wallet to shop on ClassWallet’s online “marketplace” for products from an array of vendors, including giant retailers such as Amazon or Staples and education companies such as Scholastic or Lakeshore Learning.

Families can also directly pay vendors and education-service providers that have registered to be part of the ClassWallet portal. Such payments may go for tuition, private school expenses, tutors, paraprofessionals, school uniforms, and more. To use vendors or providers that are not on the ClassWallet portal, parents may pay out-of-pocket and then submit the receipts and any required documentation for reimbursement.

Families Want Flexibility

Some of the Arizona program’s new spending-accountability measures had been on the books before but were not enforced, Accurso said. “A lot of people who’ve been in the program for a long time are pushing back, very upset” that rules are now being applied, because parents “never had to do these things before,” she said.

Among those pushing back is Jenny Clark, the founding CEO of Love Your School, an Arizona nonprofit launched to help families navigate school options. In 2022, Clark won gubernatorial appointment to the state board of education. While fiercely supportive of the ESA program, she does see opportunity for improving the way the program is administered.

“The program is working very well for families who are utilizing those dollars for traditional school options, whether that’s a micro school or a private school—things that are pretty easy and require less transactions,” said Clark, a mother of five. “For families like myself—I have some kids in private school and then I have other kids that are home educated—we’re customizing and building out for them a very unique and curated education. That requires a lot of different purchases, and it requires a lot of flexibility with our ESA.”

After Accurso came out against issuing new debit cards, the department was flooded with email messages and state board testimony from parents who shared Clark’s view that the cards—about 16,000 of which are in circulation—are “very, very important for us to navigate the program successfully.”

Clark says it is valuable for parents to push the bounds of allowable expenses and to appeal rejections to the state board. She wants Arizona to take a broad-minded approach to what qualifies as educational and hopes other states will do the same.

“Policymakers need to understand that the utilization of these programs is going to be directly related to allowable expenses,” she said. “We don’t want to set so many barriers that we make the program difficult to use for the people that need it the most.”

Smaller, Targeted Programs

When asked which ESA programs should serve as models, national school-choice advocates tend to point to programs that are smaller and more targeted than the broad programs that are operating or being launched in states such as Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, and Utah.

Two smaller ESA programs are those in New Hampshire, which is focused on children from low- and moderate-income families, and North Carolina, which serves children with disabilities.

Besides being targeted rather than universal, both programs are run by entities with years of experience operating other school-choice programs for their states. Neither uses prepaid debit cards. And despite growing rapidly in recent years, each serves between 3,100 and 3,300 students.

“We’re lucky in New Hampshire because our program is small,” said Kate Baker Demers, executive director of Children’s Scholarship Fund New Hampshire, which runs the state’s Education Freedom Accounts program. “My team can put human eyes on everything. It’s not unwieldy in any way.”

In North Carolina, staff at the State Education Assistance Authority, which has long disbursed financial aid for higher education, personally approve ESA expenses via the ClassWallet platform.

“If there’s been an error, it’s not on the families’ part. We are pre-approving 100 percent before it’s spent,” said Marker of the North Carolina authority. “I can’t say we will never, ever have a misuse of funds, but we’ve got a pretty tight process.”

Although New Hampshire’s Demers said that “implementers in other states are calling and asking me for advice,” she does not have easy answers for those looking to scale up a spending-management system like hers to much larger programs.

Marker agrees, but said she is nonetheless trying to prepare should lawmakers expand the program. “If North Carolina wants to do that, we will try to do it with excellence,” she said. “It’s just prudent to look at our technology, look at our staffing model. We’re watching what’s happening around the country, and we’ll try to be ready.”

Getting the Technology Right

Some school-choice advocates are heartened by growth in companies working to automate and streamline various aspects of operating ESA programs. Besides applying lessons from other school-choice mechanisms such as tax-credit scholarships, vendors are eyeing government programs in sectors including health care, food assistance, and natural-disaster aid. Some also are adopting financial technology practices used in products such as Venmo or Zelle.

“Expansive ESAs represent a new sector, and the technological demands are constantly increasing,” said Mark Duran, co-founder and CEO of Student First Technologies, which is working to build on its experience with tax-credit scholarships and microgrant programs to win more ESA contracts.

Duran said his company is trying to anticipate future needs, in part by augmenting its ESA platform with artificial-intelligence and machine-learning features to systemize and automate expense verification.

“I wouldn’t say anybody, including us, has completely figured out an ESA solution. Nobody’s doing it perfectly yet,” Duran said. “If you’ve built your tech right, you can reuse different elements, but it has to be modular in the sense that you have to be able to customize it on a state-to-state basis.”

In Florida, Tuthill learned that lesson firsthand when Step Up for Students agreed to power West Virginia’s ESA program rollout in 2022. Halted midstream by a court injunction that was ultimately lifted, implementation of the program consumed so much time that Tuthill says he’s now more cautious about customizing his platform for other states—especially in light of the big changes underway in his home state.

Tuthill says the Step Up for Students platform, Education Market Assistant (EMA), has about “20 different apps” working behind the scenes. “I’ve got artificial intelligence partners. I’ve got software development partners,” he said.

Increasing the level of automation will be vital, given the Florida program’s impending growth, as Tuthill sees it, and working out the kinks must be a priority.

“States are calling us continuously,” Tuthill said. “I have to get to the point where I can scale in Florida but also be able to cut and paste my infrastructure in Florida and use it in other states.”

ESA Pitfalls

Many supporters of school choice urge close attention to infrastructure and lessons learned in places such as Florida and Arizona. But not everyone is convinced that applying those lessons will be enough to ensure that the latest iteration of school choice won’t end up as another failed fad.

In a piece explaining why he is wary of universal education savings accounts, veteran analyst Chester E. Finn Jr. said he expects ESAs to face woes afflicting other school-choice programs. Those include parents who make dubious education decisions, shoddy startup schools, and “the education version of waste, fraud, and abuse.”

Finn, a distinguished senior fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, noted that universal ESA programs carry risks: windfalls for well-off parents who could afford to pay for private schools on their own; entrepreneurs’ setting up new schools in wealthy areas and ignoring poorer ones; “and the use of ESA dollars by parents to purchase things with, at best, a hazy relationship to K–12 education—tickets to amusement parks, trampolines, and such. It doesn’t take many such extravagances to put a cloud over the whole policy.”

Other choice supporters see such fears as overblown. Enlow of EdChoice said he gets “really frustrated” by predictions of negative publicity eroding support for ESAs.

“I keep hearing this kind of panic about a bad story,” Enlow said. “There have been bad stories in Florida, but they’ve expanded their programs. I don’t want to make policy based on someone’s worry about a bad story.”

Arizona, to be sure, has seen its share of such stories. “People are not happy,” said Lewis of Save Our Schools Arizona, which portrays ESAs as thinly disguised vouchers that divert money from underfunded public schools and invite profiteering. “They don’t like the idea of people using taxpayer dollars to buy chicken coops and trampolines and gardens and home gyms and all of this stuff that could be justified as an educational expense.”

Similarly, she questions families’ use of ESA funds for “zoo trips and bounce memberships” when “most of our public-school students only get to go on field trips every few years. It is a very cavalier statement to say public schools do it all the time, so I should get to do it.”

Jason Bedrick, a research fellow in the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, regards comparisons to public school purchases as fair play. From theme-park tickets to backyard sports equipment, he said, “all of these things are things that public schools are buying.”

“Go to SeaWorld, and you’ll see a whole bunch of school buses out front. What do you think those school buses are from? Those are called public-school field trips. And you’ll see the same thing at other aquariums and museums and even amusement parks,” Bedrick said. “Kayaks, trampolines, you will find these in public-school athletic programs.”

What’s Ultimately at Stake

The differences that divide Lewis and Bedrick will undoubtedly persist as states move forward with their visions of ESAs for all. Policy debates over public funding for education—and how much say parents should have over how that money is spent—will remain unsettled for the foreseeable future.

It is possible, of course, that the positions on ESAs that taxpayers and their elected representatives ultimately embrace will not be determined by how well administrators carry out their tasks of turning policy into practice.

But in Florida, where Doug Tuthill is working to carry out the wishes of policymakers for a dramatic ESA expansion, that’s not how the situation feels. There, the stakes of getting implementation right couldn’t seem higher.

“For me, the holy grail is: if you can’t scale it, it’s not really going to do anything. So, the question is, can you build an infrastructure that creates a public education system that’s built around customization?” Tuthill said. “That’s really what this is about. It’s about how do we move from a one-size-fits-all, industrial model of education to a much more decentralized, customized model, but do it in a way that continues to serve the public good? It’s a fascinating, fascinating issue. But the infrastructure to scale it is really where you’re going to win or lose.”

Caroline Hendrie is an independent journalist based in Maryland.

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

Hendrie, C. (2023). As Many More States Enact Education Savings Accounts, Implementation Challenges Abound: ESAs increase choice for families but leave administrators asking: Are pizza ovens, pianos permitted expenses? Education Next, 23(4), 8-16.

The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America
by Adrian Johns
The University of Chicago Press, 2023, $32.50; 504 pages.

As reviewed by Natalie Wexler

If you’ve been following the debates on the “science of reading” over the past several years, prepare to be surprised when you delve into Adrian Johns’s recent book on the subject.

In its current incarnation, the term “science of reading” is primarily used to refer to a substantial body of research showing that many children—perhaps most—are likely to experience reading difficulties unless they receive systematic instruction in phonics and other foundational reading skills in the early years of schooling. Those who advocate that approach are on one side of the debate.

On the other side are the proponents of “balanced literacy,” the currently dominant approach to reading instruction in the United States. The educators and literacy gurus who lead that movement acknowledge that phonics is important, but they maintain that it’s generally sufficient to teach bits of phonics as the need arises—perhaps when a child is stuck on a particular word—while also encouraging children to use pictures and context clues to guess at words.

That stance is a modification of the one taken by the philosophical predecessor of the balanced literacy movement, known as “whole language,” which swept the country in the latter part of the 20th century. Whole language maintained that children learn to read by grasping whole words rather than sounding them out using individual letters. Science-of-reading proponents say that the balanced-literacy school’s approach to phonics doesn’t align with science any more than whole language did.

The revelation in Johns’s book is that throughout most of the 20th century the contemporaneous science of reading was firmly on the side of whole language. Johns, a professor of intellectual history at the University of Chicago, spends almost the entirety of his 500-page book on that era. For a reader whose understanding of the subject has been formed in the recent past, the result is a topsy-turvy, Alice-in-Wonderland experience.

Johns begins his account with the 19th-century American psychologist James McKeen Cattell. Like many of his peers, Cattell engaged in precise measurements of physical reactions and often used himself as an experimental subject. Initially, that led him to attempt to read and write under the influence of various substances—hashish, alcohol, cannabis, morphine—and assess, as best he could, the results.

But it was another aspect of his research that had a lasting influence: he invented a device that limited a reader to viewing just one character at a time to ascertain the shortest time in which people could identify characters correctly. His experiments led him to conclude that readers perceived whole words—or even complete sentences—more quickly than individual characters. Later researchers repeatedly confirmed that finding.

Cattell’s device was the granddaddy of a slew of similar contraptions—the kinetoscope, the ophthalmograph, and, most notably, the eye-movement recorder and the tachistoscope—that, judging from the illustrations in the book, resembled medieval torture instruments. The objective, through about the 1960s, was the precise measurement of eye movements with the goal of increasing reading speed.

Johns does his best to make the minutiae of these painstaking experiments engaging, but it’s an uphill battle. He quotes William James as remarking of these studies—many of which were conducted in Germany—that they could only have arisen in “a land where they did not know what it means to be bored.”

And the question, as Johns eventually acknowledges, is whether this research made much difference. To the extent that scientists focused on improving the reading ability of the populace—which then, as now, was a cause for great concern—the assumption seems to have been that a faster reader was necessarily a better one. The focus was on training readers to move their eyes more quickly, leading to the “speed reading” boom of the mid-20th century. While some researchers still measure eye movements, merely increasing reading speed is no longer the goal.

On the other hand, the scientific consensus that readers grasped whole words rather than individual characters made a huge difference to reading instruction—and not a positive one. By the 1930s, Johns writes, “it was simply impossible to buy elementary books that were not written on the whole-word principle.” One prominent reading scientist, William S. Gray, was the moving force behind the Dick and Jane readers, the best-known embodiment of the “look-say” method, which predated whole language. Children who could memorize sentences like “Run, Spot, run” were thought to be learning to read.

Johns takes us on journeys down many and various byways. We learn, for example, that researchers applied what they knew about pattern recognition to help World War II pilots identify distant aircraft and avoid crash landings. We get a tale about how in the late 1930s, fading movie diva Gloria Swanson hatched a plan to develop a “luminous paint” by recruiting European inventors who were being persecuted by the Nazis. But readers may wonder what this information is doing in a book about the science related to reading.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot about the science of reading that Johns leaves out of his account—including applied science having to do with reading instruction. He mentions that Jeanne Chall’s famous survey of reading pedagogy research, published in 1967 as Learning to Read: The Great Debate, found that the consensus of some 30 experimental studies “was overwhelmingly in favor of including at least some phonics instruction.” But Johns doesn’t describe any of those studies or the researchers who conducted them. Similarly, when discussing Rudolf Flesch’s 1955 bombshell Why Johnny Can’t Read, Johns ignores the experimental studies cited there that—according to Flesch—demonstrate the superiority of phonics instruction.

This is a significant omission. The studies done by Cattell and his successors were, according to reading researcher Timothy Shanahan, accurate and reliable basic research: adult readers do recognize words more quickly than letters. The mistake was to conclude that children should therefore be taught to read by memorizing whole words. “Studies quite consistently have found decoding instruction to be advantageous,” Shanahan notes in his paper “What Constitutes a Science of Reading Instruction?”

Johns acknowledges that point only obliquely, remarking toward the end of the book that he is not questioning “the current consensus that a ‘decoding’ model is the preferred basis for teaching early readers.” To the extent that he discusses recent science-of-reading research—much of it focused on brain imaging—he seems skeptical. Neuroscience, he observes, “rarely has much to suggest about how to teach.” True, but Johns could have said the same about the basic research of the past that he spent the previous 400 pages detailing.

Johns’s skepticism about current reading research stems from his intuition that reading is about much more than decoding. Reading, he observes, “is a variegated and dynamic practice, not reducible to one basic and unchanging perceptual skill.” Indeed it is, but Johns has omitted from his account another hugely significant yet far more complex aspect of reading: comprehension.

In a way, that omission isn’t surprising, given that in current usage the “science of reading” often denotes only studies of decoding. But, as with his omission of experimental studies of phonics instruction, Johns’s failure to include any of the extensive research on reading comprehension renders his history seriously incomplete. That research, which includes studies on the roles of knowledge and metacognitive strategies in the reading process, began as far back as the 1970s.

Still, The Science of Reading is a thorough summary of at least part of the science of reading, if not all of it. It’s also a useful reminder that science can change radically over time.

Natalie Wexler is an education writer and author of The Knowledge Gap: The Hidden Cause of America’s Broken Education System—And How to Fix It.

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

Wexler, N. (2023). The Evolving Science of How We Read: Survey has lots about eye-movement measurement, less about comprehension. Education Next, 23(4), 66-67.

The Politics of “Parents’ Rights”

The scope and scale of the Great Unbundling have been fueled and shaped by a sharp rise in parents’ asserting their “rights” to directly control discrete elements of their children’s education. Increasingly, parents are claiming the right to opt out of individual components of a school’s curriculum and substitute learning materials that are aligned with their values, while keeping their children enrolled in school.

Controversies over critical race theory, evolution, sex education, gender identity, testing and grading, and other topics have driven parents to demand changes in their schools’ programs or exclude their children from them. In the 2022 survey of the American School District Panel, a standing group of school district and charter management organization leaders, 51 percent of respondents reported that parent or community polarization around controversial topics was interfering with their ability to educate students. School districts have been overwhelmed with Freedom of Information requests related to curriculum content, and school boards have fielded communications from a variety of parent advocacy groups.

The first stirrings of the parents’ rights movement predate Covid, and the phenomenon was founded in legal and political motivations rather than the pandemic. In 2021 and 2022, gubernatorial races in Virginia, Florida, and Arkansas as well as local schoolboard elections elsewhere became major battlegrounds for parental-rights warfare. Depending on one’s point of view, the parents’ agenda was cast either as an attempt to roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts or as a drive to defeat a “woke” education agenda in favor of traditional values. Conservative schoolboard candidates in several major districts gained majorities in last fall’s elections with the support of parents’ rights groups such as Moms for Liberty, an organization based in Florida.

In many ways, the politics of parents’ rights can be viewed as an outgrowth of the hyper-partisan culture wars that are playing out in our national civic dialogue. However, it is also a reflection of a growing value-pluralism among parents, who differ widely in which narratives and experiences they want to see reflected in their children’s education.

State Legislative Response

State policymakers, apparently recognizing the power of the Great Unbundling, have responded with major changes in proposed school-choice legislation. Legislatures across the country have moved quickly away from “whole-school” choice legislation (charters, vouchers, and tax credits) and toward “unbundled” choice legislation in the form of the universal Education Savings Account, or ESA. While there are many state-to-state permutations in such legislation, an ESA is essentially an annual flexible-spending allocation for each eligible child based on a percentage of a state’s per-pupil expenditure—as high as 97.5 percent in states such as Florida, Arizona, and West Virginia. ESAs are a powerful tool for parents in unbundling and customizing their children’s schooling.

The growth in ESA programs has given more parents opportunities to unbundle their children’s education by providing them with the financial means to customize educational experiences based on their own values and perceived needs. The universal-access provisions of this funding stream mean that lower-income families now have access to the benefits of unbundling that were previously available only to affluent families.

The past year alone has seen a decisive shift in state legislatures away from vouchers, scholarships, and tax credits to pay for tuition at private schools and toward ESAs that allow parents to purchase discrete services from multiple education providers. The scorecard for the 2023 legislative session across states is striking (see Table 2).

State ESA programs enacted over the past few years have dramatically expanded the number of students eligible to participate in the ESAs as compared to earlier versions. At first, ESAs were mostly targeted at narrow populations such as special needs students, children in failing schools, or those from lower-income families. More recently, ESA programs have increasingly expanded participation to all students, and the accounts are professionally managed, as Health Savings Accounts (HSA) are.

For example, West Virginia and Arizona passed universal ESA programs in 2022, while Iowa and Utah expanded eligibility to every child in 2023. In West Virginia, 93 percent of the state’s 295,000 public school students are eligible to participate. In contrast, New Hampshire’s program, adopted several years earlier, was keyed solely to families with incomes up to 300 percent above the poverty level, which means only 31 percent of children statewide are eligible.

Scott Jensen, former speaker of the Wisconsin State Assembly and now an executive at the American Federation for Children, has seen firsthand the legislative impact of parent demand for unbundled schooling. “For more than two decades, school choice advocates like me have had to work hard to explain the benefits of choice programs to parents,” Jensen said. “For the past two years, we have been running as fast as we can just to keep up with parents demanding a greater say over every aspect of their children’s education.”

As a result of the increased number of state programs and their universal participation guidelines, ESAs are undergoing explosive growth in student participation that is expected to mushroom further as more states join the ESA trend. The high participation rates in the “early adopter” states may well induce more states to create ESA programs, driving greater levels of participation in the unbundling movement in the coming years (see Figure 1).

School District Response

The Great Unbundling’s volatile combination of parent desperation and parental-rights politics has sent a shockwave radiating across the school district landscape, challenging many core tenets of the traditional K–12 school model. As unbundling gains energy and influence, we believe that it has the potential to drive schools and districts to deliver much more individualized structuring of the schooling experience, reflecting greater degrees of flexibility and personalization.

The unbundling premise holds intuitive appeal, since each family can customize their child’s education, choosing from an array of program providers. That degree of flexibility holds the prospect of improving publicly funded education while also addressing preferences based on values, needs, and interests. If parents could opt out of some programs offered by their public school in favor of programs provided elsewhere, the competition over supplying the most effective robotics or language or math course could raise quality, elevate best practices, drive innovation, and stretch the boundaries of the school day.

Imagine local public schools offering à la carte services to students in private schools, charter schools, and homeschools, allowing them to play on athletic teams, participate in extracurriculars and the arts, take AP classes, and partake of other academic offerings and afterschool programs. Every school might not be great in everything, but each school would need to be good in something to attract a market niche and survive. Time-pressed parents would need unbundling to be convenient, easy, and accessible; we don’t believe this can happen equitably for all students and their families without the participation of public schools.

Unfortunately, the dominant response to date from most school-district leaders and institutional stakeholders—including the National School Boards Association and the American Association of School Superintendents—has largely been to push back on unbundling and the parents’ rights movement, discrediting them on moral or policy grounds while offering training to school leaders on the proactive management of controversies.

District leaders point to the annual PDK Poll of the Public’s Attitudes Toward the Public Schools, which continues to suggest that most parents are quite happy with their child’s local public school. These leaders say that the finding casts the ESA-enabled unbundling trend, despite its growth, as a niche phenomenon. They also point out that the expertise and resources of district-operated schools far exceed the capacity of the market of nonpublic providers in many critical areas, such as special education and teaching English as a second language (ESL)—programs that generally require significant resources.

As schools and districts face increasing parent demands for customized schooling models, they will be called on to serve as both enablers and gatekeepers of the unbundling phenomenon in their local communities. It remains to be seen if their operations will have the agility, robustness, and competitiveness needed to participate in unbundling; however, we know that districts do respond to funding requirements, enrollment decline, and changes in state policy.

Reconciling Choice and Equity

The traditional American “common school model” has been central to the structure of our K–12 school systems since the 19th century. From a 2023 policy perspective, a fundamental question is whether (and how) this well-established model can adapt to an unbundling phenomenon driven by the intensification of value pluralism.

Should we consider unbundling as simply a more atomized version of school choice, one that allows parents to choose discrete programs for their children, rather than a single-school option, based on their personal values and perceived needs? That is, is it a natural extension of the charter school and voucher movements of the past 30 years? Or should we consider the Great Unbundling as a fraying of the common school model that has been a pillar of the American education system for more 150 years? Does the à la carte nature of unbundling move us away from a collective national character in favor of individual liberty? Does any public-policy avenue exist to accommodate both and avoid a disruptive fight for control of public education?

Generation after generation, the American K–12 common school model, while imperfect, has shown itself to be remarkably resilient and adaptable in the face of dramatic cultural and societal changes. Racial integration came about in response to Brown v. Board of Education, girls’ opportunities expanded because of Title IX, ESL programming was developed in response to immigration, special education services were ramped up in response to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. All of these and more have driven school districts to change and adapt their operations (albeit insufficiently in many cases).

Since 1974, when historian David Tyack chronicled “the one best system” in his book of the same name, the common school model has made significant adaptations to larger policy changes: the standards movement of the 1990s, with every state adopting common standards and assessments; the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, requiring disaggregated student-performance data by subgroups, including racial and ethnic; the equity movement of the 2000s, driving an evolution from equality of opportunity toward equity of outcomes. However, while these policy initiatives were based on changes in function, the unbundling of education will require changes in the form of public education.

In theory, equitable academic achievement for all students can be fostered in an education system that accommodates differing family preferences and beliefs in a pluralistic society; state-adopted standards can be taught through multiple content and different venues. The Great Unbundling will demand adaptation of the common school model and our methods of funding it. But we believe that the unbundling of education services by public schools may offer the best hope for accommodating pluralism while simultaneously advancing the achievement of all students.

Policy Prescription

If the Great Unbundling is to succeed—that is, become a positive force rather than a divisive alternative or fad—the active participation of public education leaders at both the state and district levels is essential. Implementing broad-scale unbundling while also achieving equity needs the cooperation of the largest, most dominant segment of the schooling market: district-operated public schools.

As former urban school-district superintendents, we believe that choice and competition among schools in a robust education marketplace motivates everyone to improve. Both of us have succeeded in using market-based tools to help students close achievement gaps, so we know firsthand that school districts do have the ability to harness solutions that rely on both equity and choice to improve public education. While ESAs are a robust public-policy mechanism for the next generation of educational choice, an equitable, inclusive version of education customized by parents is only possible, in our view, through a menu of choices that include the programs, courses, and learning experiences offered by district-operated schools.

While logistical constraints abound, there are several policy tools readily available to state and district leaders to support the educational promise of the Great Unbundling. We offer the following policy prescription for education policy leaders who seek to embrace the energy and opportunities of unbundling while also staying committed to the principles of educational equity and academic achievement for all students.

State Policies

Protect participation of high-needs students. State ESA policies should be expanded to ensure families have access to the funding sources generated by their students’ participation in the ESA. Eligible funding sources should include those that are required by law and funded categorically through state and federal grants—special education, compensatory education mandated by Title 1 of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, services to English language learners, and the National School Lunch Program. The inclusion of these sources in the ESA funds made available to an individual family would eliminate the need to provide special “scholarships” or to “weight” ESA allotments by need. Access to these aggregated resources would enable the most underserved families to customize and improve other aspects of their child’s education.

Embrace partial enrollment. State school-finance formulas should be modified to include partial enrollment in public schools. Enrollment in school districts to access state funding should be cumulative, a sum of full-time and part-time enrollment in each school, like the current enrollment reporting of full-time students. This would enable students to participate in some classes or programs at their local public school and take advantage of offerings from private providers.

Control the quality of providers. States should create organizational mechanisms for ensuring the quality of service providers and enforcing performance standards. State approval of both nonprofit and for-profit education service providers would allow for some quality control over the marketplace. The active monitoring and accreditation of education service providers would enable states to create clearinghouses of approved vendors for families.

Modify state attendance laws to promote mastery, not seat time. The personalization inherent in unbundling requires flexibility of time and variation in individual student learning rates. Time and instruction must vary if mastery of standards is the constant; prescribed hours of classroom instruction, summer school, and afterschool tutoring may be necessary for some students to master the content in a given course. States should develop end-of-course exams and allow flexibility in how long individual students are given to master such courses, whenever and wherever they take them.

District Policies

Redefine enrollment, attendance, and participation. Districts need to adjust their operations to accommodate part-time attendance and program participation. Courses, programs, services, and other activities should be capitated, with tuition charges payable through the ESA by the parent holding the ESA grant. A truly universal ESA grant would award each student the amount needed to attend a public school full time. Students who opt for public school could seek an alternative to a course the district is offering or look for additional courses.

Determine the cost of all district offerings on a per-pupil basis. A school district will need to calculate a per-pupil cost for its courses, programs, and activities, based on the direct costs for personnel, materials, and related overhead. Conceptually, the sum of these costs should equal the annual per-pupil funding a family would receive through their ESA. Course and credit-hour tuition charges, which are widely used in colleges and other forms of post-secondary education, provide a model for capitation of individual courses and programs.

Use unbundling to increase market share and improve quality. According to parents’ responses to the 2022 Education Next survey of public opinion, enrollment in schools operated by public school districts declined by nearly two million students (or 4 percent) between 2020  and 2022. Unbundling offers school districts the opportunity to offset this enrollment loss by marketing discrete courses and programs to parents of homeschooled students and private-school parents as well as parents who become eligible for state-funded ESAs. Outreach to ESA families through regional enrollment service centers could expand the choice marketplace and provide public schools with more inclusive participation, enabling them to serve more students and broaden their base of support.

Unbundle the role of educators to help sustain them in teaching. The post-pandemic role of teachers and school administrators has become unmanageable, with teachers leaving the profession and school districts struggling to fill vacancies with high-quality candidates. Unbundling would allow schools to unpack the myriad tasks that are now bundled together and reassemble them in partnership with other providers in areas such as attendance, remediation, enrichment, mental health services, counseling, technology, and security. Unbundling programs and services would liberate teachers to focus their energies on their core role of instruction.

Future of Unbundling

The Great Unbundling creates enormous challenges and opportunities for K–12 school systems. While the policy debates of the past 30 years have focused on allowing families to choose from among schools, unbundling transcends this whole-school definition of choice to enable parents to atomize and customize the education of their children. Moving from a one-size-fits-all school model to a customized one has the potential to foster greater achievement and equity.

We expect that broad-based change toward an unbundled form of public education will be slow and incremental, with many policy kinks to work out. We anticipate administrative resistance and pushback from teachers unions as well as doctrinaire opposition from the institutional establishment to weakening the common school model. In short, unbundling will attract political opposition from all the groups typically in support of “the one best system” of batch learning and against market-driven choice and parental control.

Nevertheless, we believe that unbundling school choice would provide better benefits to all students over the long term, giving parents greater freedom than they have with whole-school choice alone. A system that allows families to opt in and out of specific school programs may prove to be less divisive than one in which stakeholders continually vie for political and policy control. The unbundling of K–12 education would also enable public schools—district-operated and charter—to serve more members of their community and be more inclusive across racial, ethnic, gender, income, and partisan lines.

At this point, no one knows how much demand there will be for unbundling, or if most parents will use their ESAs as they would a voucher—that is, to send their children to private school. In our view, this would be a missed opportunity. In a society that has become more diverse and pluralistic, a new generation of school choice is needed—one that moves beyond simple whole-school models of choice toward a robust system of unbundled education programs. Imagine a school system in which all parents—not just some—had the right to choose from among an array of services that meet their child’s interests and needs, consistent with their family’s values and circumstances.

Joseph Olchefske is an adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education and the former superintendent of Seattle Public Schools. Steven Adamowski is an instructor in the University of Connecticut’s Executive Leadership Program and the former superintendent of the Cincinnati and Hartford school systems.

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

Olchefske, J., and Adamowski, S. (2023). The Great Unbundling: Is the parents’ rights movement opening a new frontier in school choice? Education Next, 23(4), 18-26.

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

Immediately following the announcement of the Supreme Court’s decision outlawing the use of race in college admissions (see “High Court Decision in College Admissions Case Has K-12 Implications”), the Biden Administration released a U.S. Department of Education plan to “promote educational opportunity and diversity in colleges and universities.” It includes forthcoming guidance to higher education institutions on how to use still-lawful practices to promote diversity, particularly new “measures of adversity” that consider what applicants may have had to overcome. The department also will consider expanding data collections and transparency around admissions factors and convene an “educational opportunity” summit to bring colleges and universities together with students, advocates, and researchers to discuss a way forward.

That’s all well and good, but it’s worth noting what was left off the department’s laundry list: anything having to do with k-12 education. That’s a huge missed opportunity and one that the administration should urgently work to address. One of the most effective ways to boost college diversity is by building broader, more inclusive paths to educational excellence. And that work starts in kindergarten.

Imagine if, instead of or in addition to looking at adversity and other proxies for race, our nation dedicated itself to creating a more diverse pipeline of high-school graduates with the ability to do advanced-level work. Imagine a world where college admissions offices didn’t rely on loopholes and complicated backdoor policies to create diverse student populations. Imagine that the top high-school students in the United States were already racially and socioeconomically representative of our great nation—without the need for affirmative action of any kind.

A Stubborn Gap in “Excellence”

Sadly, we are a long way from that today. On virtually any measure, there’s an “excellence gap” among students coming out of 12th grade. Students reaching the highest levels of performance—whether measured by test scores, grade-point average, or the number of Advanced Placement courses—are more likely to be Asian or white than Latino or Black. This excellence gap means that white and Asian teenagers are disproportionately represented among the top 10 percent of U.S. students, while Latino and Black students are significantly underrepresented.

Closing this gap will not be easy. It is related to a complex mix of social and historical conditions, including the impact of centuries of systemic racism, sharp socioeconomic divides between racial groups, and big differences in school experiences, family structures, and parenting practices. But frankly, as a nation, we’ve never really given it the “old college try.” If we focused on what schools can do to recognize and nurture excellence in all students, instead of just trying to work around the gaps at the end of their high-school careers, we could make significant progress toward the inclusive college campuses we all want to see.

That’s the message from an important new report from the National Working Group on Advanced Education, an ideologically and racially diverse set of scholars, policymakers, and practitioners convened by the think tank that I lead. Its most important message: Rather than wait until kids are leaving high school to try to even the playing field, we must start in kindergarten to identify the most academically talented students of all races and backgrounds and give them the support they need to excel.

The working group makes three dozen recommendations for states, schools, districts, and charter networks, with specific opportunity-building actions that start in the earliest grades and continue through high school. It is a clear roadmap for building this wider, more diverse pipeline of advanced students.

The first step is called “frontloading,” a type of enrichment provided to young children before they are old enough to be assessed for advanced learning opportunities like gifted and talented programs. Because poor children tend to come to school with limited vocabulary and less knowledge about the world compared to their more affluent peers, they typically earn lower scores on most traditional academic assessments—even if they have the intellectual horsepower to take on rigorous academic work. High-quality enrichment programs can help young students build knowledge and vocabulary to improve their reading skills and get them on the path to success.

The next step is to use “universal screening” to find every single child who could benefit from enrichment, acceleration, and other advanced learning opportunities. Schools and districts can use valid and reliable assessments—such as IQ tests, diagnostic exams, or state achievement tests—to identify all kids with the potential to do advanced-level work. That’s a big change from how many school districts do things today, which is to ask parents or teachers to nominate children for their gifted programs (or later, Advanced Placement courses). It’s not hard to see how that approach can bring with it racial and socioeconomic biases. Affluent, college-educated parents tend to be more aware of these programs and know how to advocate for their kids. And classroom teachers, however fair-minded, might overlook some talented students because they don’t fit a stereotype of a high achiever.

Opportunity Starts in Elementary School

Once students are identified as highly capable, they need the programs and opportunities that can help them realize their potential. School-based programs that do this can take many forms, but most share several key features: They allow students to study and engage with academic materials more broadly and deeply than the typical class, including doing above-grade-level work. They allow students to skip an entire grade if that’s what a child needs and can handle. And once students get to middle and high school, they automatically are enrolled in honors and Advanced Placement classes. In other words, no more gatekeeping that tends to dissuade kids on the bubble from giving these tougher classes a shot.

Doing this work and doing it well will take leadership and commitment from district and charter network leaders. Educators will have to view greater equity in education as crucial—and not just for their lowest-achieving students, but also for their highest-achieving ones. They will have to reexamine how a student’s potential is measured, and when. And they will have to focus on supporting more students to excel, including by looking closely at how students are identified to participate in advanced coursework and enrichment programs. The absolute worst thing schools could do is to eliminate advanced learning opportunities, like gifted and talented programs or honors classes, which have disproportionate white and Asian enrollments that mirror the “excellence gap.” True equity demands that we mend, rather than end, such programs—and extend these opportunities to many more kids.

Universities might object that there’s not much they can do about k–12 educational practices. But that’s simply not true. Institutions of higher education can make sure that their schools of education prepare future teachers and school leaders to recognize and serve every student who can do advanced-level work, especially students from low-income families. And universities can lend their expertise and money to local school districts and charter networks that need assistance in putting these kinds of initiatives in place.

The Biden Administration should widen its action plan to include the k-12 system. Starting in kindergarten isn’t the fastest way to college diversity, but it is probably the sturdiest.

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

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

Petrilli, M.J. (2023). Building Diverse College Campuses Starts in Kindergarten: In the wake of the Students for Fair Admissions decision, an urgent call to take on the “excellence gap.” Education Next, 23(4),