In the United States, 9 percent of K–12 students attend private schools, but in low- and middle-income countries, private schools account for 20 percent of all primary enrollment and are rapidly gaining ground. In Pakistan, the number of private schools rose to more than 70,000 by 2015, up from 3,000 in 1982; by 2015, these schools educated 34 percent of Pakistani children enrolled in primary schools. In contrast to private schools in the United States, Pakistan’s are highly affordable, and the majority are secular.

This growth in private schooling comes at a unique moment in global education: low-income countries have managed to substantially increase enrollments at all levels of schooling, but they have yet to improve what children learn. For instance, the unprecedented speed at which primary (and now secondary and college) enrollment has risen in low-income countries dwarfs the historical experience of today’s rich countries. Yet, in countries such as India and Pakistan, when children are tested at the end of 3rd grade, one-third of them cannot subtract two-digit numbers, less than a sixth can read a simple sentence in English, and less than half can read a simple sentence in the vernacular language, Urdu. Across low-income countries, test scores are so low that the situation has been dubbed a global learning crisis by organizations such as the World Bank and UNESCO.

The growth in private schools, coming at the same time as the shift in focus from enrollment to learning, has polarized the education community in low- and middle-income countries. Some people favor heavily regulating or even shutting down private schools, based on the belief that they provide substandard education to children of parents who are unable to assess the quality of schools; others believe that private schools should be encouraged and indeed subsidized through the public purse because they provide a valuable option in places with failing public schools. Missing from this debate is a detailed empirical picture of what the growth of private schools means for education markets more broadly. How does the rise in private schooling affect demand for schools in both the private and public sectors, and how do schools respond to any changing demand? Does more competition increase quality? Should governments maintain their focus on improving the quality of public schools, alleviate constraints on private alternatives—or perhaps do both?

Learning from the LEAPS Project

Research from the Learning and Education Achievement in Pakistan Schools project, or LEAPS, sheds light on these questions and holds implications for public policy in Pakistan and around the globe. To understand how the growth of private schools was transforming the education landscape in low-income countries, in 2003 I teamed up with Tahir Andrabi of Pomona College and Asim Ijaz Khwaja of Harvard University to launch the LEAPS project, a study of all the schools in 112 villages in the province of Punjab. The province has more than 100,000 schools, of which 60,000 were private in 2015. (By comparison, the state of California, with the largest public-education system in the United States, has about 10,000 public schools.) The villages in the LEAPS project were selected from those that had at least one private school in 2003; these villages are larger and somewhat wealthier than the average village in Punjab, which in turn has the lowest poverty rate of all Pakistani provinces. At the time the project began, about 60 percent to 70 percent of the province’s rural population lived in villages with at least one private school. Between 2003 and 2011, the LEAPS team tracked more than 800 schools in these villages, interviewed more than 1,000 principals and 2,000 teachers, and tested more than 70,000 children to gauge their foundational skills in literacy and numeracy.

The high concentration of private and public schools in Punjab Province has transformed education markets there. Figure 1 shows a village in the LEAPS sample. It took me (and two young children) 15 minutes to traverse the village, yet it has five private and two public schools. Data gathered by the LEAPS team show that in 2003, the average fee for private schools in rural Punjab was equivalent to about $1.50 a month, or less than the price of a cup of tea every day. The number of schools in the village portrayed here is typical of the sample—in fact, the average LEAPS village in 2003 had 678 households and 8.2 schools, of which 3 were private.

The proliferation of private schools in Punjab has enabled such considerable school choice that, once we account for urban areas, some 90 percent of children in the province now live in neighborhoods and villages like the one illustrated in Figure 1. Such “schooling markets” are not just a Pakistani or South Asian phenomenon. Schooling environments in Latin America and parts of Sub-Saharan Africa also offer extensive variety for local families.

One question widely examined by education researchers is whether children in private schools learn more than those in public schools. Is there a private-school “premium” that can be measured in terms of test results or other metrics? One impediment to answering that question is that children enrolled in private schools are not randomly drawn from the local population, and researchers often cannot convincingly correct for this selection problem. In my view, though, a larger obstacle is that the concept of an “average” private-school premium is elusive when families can choose from multiple public and private schools and the quality of schools differs vastly within both sectors. Comparing a high-performing public school to a low-performing private school will yield a very different result than comparing a high-performing private school to a low-performing public school.

The LEAPS research team looked at this question in a study published in 2023. We defined school value-added as the gain in test scores in Urdu, math, and English that a randomly selected child would experience when enrolled in a specific school. The team found that the value-added variation among schools was so large that, compounded over the primary school years, the average difference between the best- and the worst-performing school in the same village was comparable to the difference in test scores between low- and high-income countries.

Figure 2 shows what this variation implies for estimates of private-school effectiveness. Each vertical line in the figure represents one of the 112 LEAPS villages. Schools in each village are arranged on the line according to their school value-added, with public schools indicated by red triangles and private schools by black dots. The red band tracks the average quality of public schools in the villages, from weakest to strongest, and the gray band shows the average quality of private schools in the villages. The private schools are, on average, more successful in raising test scores than their public-sector counterparts. As is clear, however, every village has private and public schools of varying quality, and the measure of any “private-school premium” depends entirely on which specific schools are being compared. In fact, the study shows that the causal impact of private schooling on annual test scores can range from –0.08 to +0.39 standard deviations. The low end of this range represents the average loss across all villages when children move from the best-performing public school to the worst-performing private school in the same village. The upper end represents the average gain across all villages when children move from the worst-performing public school to the best-performing private school, again within the same village.

Parents’ Choices

The relevant question, then, is not whether private schools are more effective. The questions are: How well are parents equipped to discern quality in a school—public or private—and choose the best one for their children? And can policy decisions affect these choices?

As to the first question, the team found that parents choosing private schools appear to recognize and reward high quality. Consequently, in the LEAPS villages, private schools with higher value-added are able to charge higher fees and see their market share increase over time. In contrast, parents choosing public schools either have a harder time gauging the school’s value-added or are less quality-sensitive in their choices. This is particularly concerning in the case of students enrolled in very poorly performing public schools where after five years of schooling they may not be able to read simple words or add two single-digit numbers.

Given that parents who opt for public schools appear to be less sensitive to quality, one reform instrument often supported by policymakers is the school voucher, whereby public money follows the child to the family’s school of choice. The idea is that making private schools “free” for families will allow children to leave poorly performing public schools in favor of higher-quality private schools. This strategy assumes that parents, when choosing among schools, place significant weight on the cost of the school, manifest in its fees. What’s more, one may reasonably expect that such “fee sensitivity” will be higher in low-income countries and among low-income families. Yet a 2022 analysis of the LEAPS villages showed that a 10 percent decline in private-school fees increased private-school enrollment by 2.7 percent for girls and 1 percent for boys. From these data we estimated that even a subsidy that made private schools totally free would  decrease public-school enrollment by only 12.7 and 5.3 percentage points for girls and boys, respectively. This implies that most of the subsidy, rather than going to children who are leaving public schools, would be captured by children who would have enrolled in private schools even without the tuition aid. Further, most of the children induced to change schools under the policy may come from high- rather than low-performing public schools, limiting any test-score gains one might expect.

One alternative to trying to move children out of poorly performing public schools is to focus on improving those schools. A LEAPS experiment that my co-authors and I published in 2023 evaluated a program that allocated grants to public schools in villages randomly chosen from the LEAPS sample. We found that, four years after the program started, test scores were 0.2 standard deviations higher in public schools in villages that received funds than in public schools in villages that did not. In addition, we observed an “education multiplier” effect: test scores were also 0.2 standard deviations higher in private schools located in grant-receiving villages. This effect echoes an economic phenomenon that often occurs in industry—that is, when low-quality firms improve, higher-quality firms tend to increase their quality even further to protect their market share. In the LEAPS villages, the private schools that improved were those that faced greater competition, either by being physically closer to a public school or by being located in a village where public schools were of relatively high quality at the start of the program. The same was true of private schools in villages where the grants to the public schools were larger.

The education multiplier effect increases the cost-effectiveness of the grant program by 85 percent, putting it among the top ranks of education interventions in low-income countries that have been subject to formal evaluation. But beyond that, accounting for private-school responses also changed the optimal targeting of the policy. For instance, our analysis shows that if policymakers consider test-score increases in public schools only, a policy that divides resources equally across villages also maximizes test-score gains; there is apparently no trade-off between equity and effectiveness. Once private-school responses are considered, however, equal division of resources exacerbates existing inequalities in learning among villages. This implies that a government that values equity should distribute more resources to villages with poorly performing public schools.

Implications for Policymaking

With 90 percent of Pakistani children living in neighborhoods with multiple public and private schools, the days when government could formulate policies that affected only public schools are long gone. The same is true of many other low-income countries where parents also have significant school choice, ranging from Chile to India. Every policy will have an impact on both public and private schools, even if a policy only targets public schools. Policymakers can choose to ignore these additional effects, but to do so is to miscalculate the policy’s full impact. Our studies are still too premature to help factor parental and private-school responses into the design of policy. A key insight from the LEAPS research is that there is significant variation among schools in terms of performance and among parents in terms of their preferences for quality. A policy to improve public schools can lead to an education multiplier effect in one context but cause private schools to exit in another. A broad understanding of the dynamics of education markets, such as parents placing a very heavy weight on physical distance to school in their choices, can shed some light on this variation. Yet the data requirements to make detailed predictions about how policies will play out in specific settings may be too onerous, at least for now.

How then to proceed? Three broad principles are emerging from the LEAPS project.

First, there is little evidence that parents choosing to send their children to private schools in low-income countries are being fooled or hoodwinked into receiving a substandard education. On the contrary, the parents choosing private schools seem to be more informed and better able to reward school quality. The bigger problem is the substantial population of children enrolled in very low-performing public schools, even when there are better public schools nearby. Unfortunately, policies that seek to move children from public to private schools by means of vouchers may end up spending a lot of money on children who were already going to private schools. What’s more, the test-score gains from such policies may be limited if most of the children who do switch from a public to a private school come from higher-performing public schools. Indeed, a 2022 study by Mauricio Romero and Abhijeet Singh showed that both of these dynamics play out in India’s Right to Education Act, which established one of the world’s largest voucher schemes. Subsidizing private schools in a way that consistently improves test scores by moving children out of low-performing public schools remains an elusive goal.

If we cannot move children out of low-performing public schools, the alternative is to improve those schools. The second principle, then, is that governments should maintain a focus on improving the quality of public schools. Results of the first generation of efforts to do so in low-income countries were mixed at best, but studies of newer reform efforts that emphasize improved pedagogy, incentives, teacher recruitment and training, and school grants are all showing positive results. A 2021 study by Alex Eble and colleagues, for instance, showed dramatic improvements in test scores in The Gambia with an intervention that used a variety of strategies: hiring teachers on temporary contracts, making changes in pedagogy, monitoring teachers, and giving them regular feedback. Again, the benefits of these policies may extend beyond the public schools they target. In schooling markets, the education multiplier effect will create positive knock-on effects for private schools.

Third, leaders should consider an entirely different class of policies. These are policies that do not privilege either the public or private sector but acknowledge that both parents and schools face constraints and that alleviating these constraints can lead to significant improvements in both sectors, regardless of the preferences of parents or the cost structures of schools.

Studies by the LEAPS team present two examples of such policies. In the first, the team provided parents and schools with information on the performance of all schools in a village—public and private—through school “report cards.” We found that this intervention improved test scores in both public and private schools and decreased private-school fees. The policy, in this case, pays for itself and has been recognized as a global “great buy” by a team of education experts.

As a second example, in 2020 the LEAPS team provided grants to private schools, but in some villages, we gave the grant money to a single school and in others to all private schools in the village. We found that in the first scenario, the school used the money to upgrade infrastructure and expand enrollment but with no resulting improvement in test scores. However, when all the private schools in a village received a grant, schools expanded enrollment and increased student test scores. These schools anticipated that simultaneous capacity improvements by all the private schools would lead to a price war, driving profits to zero, so they focused largely on test-score improvements to maintain profit margins. In both scenarios, the combination of boosted enrollment and higher fees increased the schools’ profits. These increases were large enough that, had the schools taken the money in the form of loans, they would have been able to repay them at interest rates of 20 to 25 percent or more. Finally, the schools improved even though the grant terms did not explicitly require them to—showing that the market generated the incentives for improvement without additional monitoring and testing by external parties, which in Pakistan has proven to be both costly and difficult.

These interventions leverage the fact that many children in Pakistan and around the globe now live in neighborhoods with multiple public and private schools. In these environments, progress relies on alleviating broader constraints in the education market rather than focusing on specific schools or school types. Moving beyond “public versus private,” we now need policies that support schooling markets, not schools—the entire ecosystem, not just one species.

Jishnu Das is a distinguished professor of public policy at the McCourt School of Public Policy and the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, India.

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

Das, J. (2023). No School Stands Alone: How market dynamics affect the performance of public and private schools. Education Next, 23(3), 32-38.

Public K–12 education in the United States is distinctively a local affair: school districts are governed by local boards of education, composed of lay members typically elected in non-partisan elections. These boards have decision-making power over hundreds of billions of public dollars and oversee complex agencies that, in addition to preparing a community’s children for the future, can be the biggest employer in town. Yet we know very little about what factors influence a board’s governance and impact, including the professional backgrounds of elected members.

One profession would seem to have particularly relevant effects: educators. Organizations like the National Education Association and Leadership for Educational Equity, the political arm of Teach for America, are training and supporting their educator members and alumni to run for elected offices. What might be the impacts of such efforts on school board elections, district governance, and student outcomes?

Research focused on boards of directors, which play a similar role in the corporate world, has found that adding members with more industry expertise increases a firm’s value. It stands to reason that electing educators to school boards could have similarly beneficial effects. For example, former classroom teachers or school leaders with firsthand knowledge of common challenges could theoretically make better decisions about teachers’ working conditions and positively influence student performance.

On the other hand, 70 percent of U.S. teachers are members of teachers unions. This raises the possibility that educators serving on school boards could be influenced not only by expertise but also allegiance to union priorities. That could theoretically influence collective bargaining, which is one of the major responsibilities of a school board. Union allegiance could shift bargaining agreements toward union goals, such as increasing teacher salaries or limiting charter-school growth, which may not necessarily benefit students.

We investigate these possibilities in California. State election rules randomize the order of candidates’ names on the ballot, which allows us to estimate the causal effects of an educator serving on a school board. By looking at randomized ballot order, candidate filings, election records, and school district data, we provide the first evidence on how the composition of local school boards affects district resource allocation and student performance.

Our analysis finds no impact on student achievement from an educator serving on a school board; neither average test scores nor high-school graduation rates improve. However, outcomes relevant to union priorities advance. Relative to a district without an educator on the school board, charter-school enrollment declines and the number of charter schools shrinks by about one school on average during an elected educator’s four-year board term.

In addition, each educator elected to a board leads to an increase of approximately 2 percent in teacher pay, while non-instructional salaries remain flat. Benefits spending is stable, while the share of district spending on ancillary services and capital outlays shrinks. We also find that educators are 40 percent more likely than non-educators to report being endorsed by teachers unions.

Despite raising teachers’ salaries, electing an educator to a school board does not translate into improved outcomes for students and has negative impacts on charter schools. We believe this shows that school boards are an important causal channel through which teachers unions can exert influence.

Electing Educators in California

Nationwide, nearly 90,000 members serve on about 14,000 local school boards. These boards have several general responsibilities, which include strategic planning for the district, curricular decisions, community engagement, budgeting, hiring senior administrators, and implementing federal and state programs and court orders. In addition, in nearly all states, school boards determine contracts for instructional staff through collective-bargaining agreements with teachers unions. These negotiations set salary schedules, benefits, work hours, and school calendars. Local school boards also set attendance zone boundaries and, in about three dozen states, authorize and monitor charter schools. In 2020–21, local education agencies accounted for 90 percent of all charter-school authorizers in the U.S. and enrolled 48 percent of the nation’s charter-school students.

While typical in most respects, school district governance in California has several unique characteristics. First, teachers unions are especially influential: 90 percent of California teachers are full voting union members. Second, school boards effectively do not have the power to tax. Under Proposition 13, property-tax collections are capped at 1 percent of assessed value, and assessments are adjusted only when a property is sold. Finally, charter authorization is overwhelmingly a local issue, with about 87 percent of California charters authorized by local school districts. Los Angeles Unified School District is the single biggest local authorizer in the U.S. and enrolls 4 percent of all charter-school students nationwide.

Our analysis is based on records from the California Elections Data Archive for all contested school board elections from 1996 to 2005. The data include each candidate’s vote share, ballot position, electoral outcome, and occupational background. We identify as educators candidates who describe their primary occupation or profession as a teacher, educator, principal, superintendent, or school administrator. Educators account for 16 percent of all 14,150 candidates in contested races and 19 percent of all 7,268 winners during this period.

Almost all school-board members serve four-year terms with staggered contests occurring every two years. The average tenure is seven years, and the average school board has five members. We use candidate-level records to construct yearly measures of school-board composition in each district, including the share of members who are educators. On the average school board, educators account for 18 percent of members. We link school-board rosters with district-level characteristics and charter-school campus and enrollment counts from the federal Common Core of Data, as well as negotiated salary schedules and district finance information from the state Department of Education. To look at impacts on student outcomes, we include average test scores in elementary and middle schools along with high-school graduation rates, also from the state education department.

Investigating Educator Impacts

To estimate the causal effects of an educator being elected to a school board, we need to compare two sets of circumstances: what happens after an elected educator joins the board and what would have happened if the educator had not won. While the effects could appear immediately and persist over time, it is also possible that they only become apparent in the longer run. Our approach therefore must examine the profile of effects over time.

The key challenge we face in making these comparisons is that the school districts that elect educators likely differ from those that do not—and these other differences could be responsible for any policy outcomes that change after an educator’s election. To overcome this challenge, we take advantage of the fact that, under California law, the order in which candidates for elected office appear on the ballot is randomly determined. Our data confirm that candidates who have the good fortune of being listed first on the ballot gain an advantage of 10.3 percentage points of the votes cast in their election. When an educator is listed first, this advantage translates into a 2.3 percentage point increase in the share of the board’s members who are educators. In short, the random assignment of an educator to the top of a ballot will shift a board’s composition.

Armed with this insight, we compare the policy choices of districts where educators are and are not listed first to isolate the causal effects of adding an educator to a school board on student outcomes, district spending, and charter schools. We first look at elementary- and middle-school scores on reading and math tests, as well as high-school graduation rates, and find no impacts.

We then consider teachers’ working conditions and find limited evidence of effects on service days, benefits, or class size. However, when an educator is elected to a school board, teachers’ salaries increase by 2 percent more than they would have otherwise four years after election. These increases apply across the board, for teachers at all levels of education and experience.

Because California school boards cannot raise the tax rate, boards decrease spending on building repairs and services like professional development in order to pay teachers more (see Figure 1). Four years after an educator is elected, a school board has increased the share of spending on certified salaries by 1.3 percentage points and decreased spending on capital outlays and services by 0.6 and 0.7 percentage points, respectively. We do not find evidence for impacts on superintendents’ salaries.

In looking at effects on charter schools, the share of district students enrolled in charters declines by three percentage points (see Figure 2). By the end of an elected educator’s four-year term, there are 1.3 fewer charter schools in the district. In a state with an active charter sector serving at least one out of every 10 public-school students, these are sizeable impacts.

What if a school board includes multiple educators? That could shift the identity of the median board “voter” for a given issue and influence board decisions through deliberations and agenda-setting. To examine these possibilities, we estimate the effects of electing an educator to a school board if it already has a sitting member who is an educator. Our results suggest that this is of limited importance. There are slightly larger negative effects on charter school enrollment, but these are not statistically significant.

We also investigate whether electing an educator to a school board has consequences for subsequent elections and find evidence that it does. In this analysis, we look again at the effect of ballot order. An educator being listed first increases the number of elected educators in that election by 13 percent but decreases the number of elected educators by 9 percent in the next election. Interestingly, educators are no less likely to run in these subsequent elections; those who do run are just less likely to win. The long-term causal effects of electing an additional educator would be even larger in the absence of this electoral dynamic.

The Influence of Teachers Unions

Our findings suggest that educators’ professional expertise on boards does not translate into improvements in student learning. The results are consistent with a rent-seeking framework, in which representation of union interests predicts higher teachers’ salaries and potentially negative effects on student performance. Our own data reveal that educators are 40 percent more likely than non-educators to be endorsed by a teachers union. School board member survey data also indicate a strong positive association between professional experience in education and alignment with union priorities.

We conclude that school boards may be an important causal mechanism for the influence of teachers unions on local education, which points to several avenues for future research. Our ballot-order-based strategy provides a new approach to inferring how the characteristics of candidates causally affect outcomes. A valuable next step would be to analyze candidate-level records of union endorsement. This would facilitate separating out the influence of educators on education production from their possible alignment with teachers unions. Likewise, shifting from aggregate school-level to administrative student records would enable disentangling impacts on student sorting from their effects on education quality. Future work should also focus on broader dimensions of students’ skills and behavior, such as social-emotional attributes and civic engagement.

In summary, the election of an educator to a local school board shifts spending priorities on K–12 public schools, which collectively cost about $800 billion in federal, state, and local tax dollars a year. Yet voter turnout in school-board elections is typically between 5 and 10 percent. While more research is needed, voters don’t need to wait. Our results show just how much these races matter.

Ying Shi is assistant professor at Syracuse University and John G. Singleton is assistant professor at the University of Rochester.

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

Shi, Y., and Singleton, J.D. (2023). Putting Teachers on the Ballot: Raises for teachers, fewer charters when educators join the school board. Education Next, 23(3), 56-60.

The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, has emerged in recent years as a nationally significant political figure and a possible Republican presidential contender in part on the basis of his record in K–12 education. What has he actually accomplished in Florida? Are his tactics there worth emulating elsewhere, or would they best be avoided? William Mattox, the director of the Marshall Center for Educational Options at the James Madison Institute in Tallahassee, Florida, who is a registered independent, offers a more positive assessment, while Cathy Young, a fellow at the Cato Institute who also writes for The Bulwark, Newsday, and Reason, is more cautious about what DeSantis has done.

DeSantis defends values while expanding choice to de-escalate the stakes
By William Mattox

DeSantis fights a counterproductive culture war in Florida’s schools
By Cathy Young

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

Mattox, W., and Young, C. (2023). Is Ron DeSantis’s Education Record Anything to Emulate? Education Next, 23(3), 62-71.

This is part of the forum, “Is Ron DeSantis’s Education Record Anything to Emulate?” For an alternate take, see “DeSantis fights a counterproductive culture war in Florida’s schools” by Cathy Young.

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

Mattox, W., and Young, C. (2023). Is Ron DeSantis’s Education Record Anything to Emulate? Education Next, 23(3), 62-71.

This is part of the forum, “Is Ron DeSantis’s Education Record Anything to Emulate?” For an alternate take, see “DeSantis defends values while expanding choice to de-escalate the stakes” by William Mattox.

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

Mattox, W., and Young, C. (2023). Is Ron DeSantis’s Education Record Anything to Emulate? Education Next, 23(3), 62-71.

Our family recently encountered a life-changing event: a move. We spent 16 years in our previous home, and in the summer of 2022, we moved across town. In Portland, Oregon, where we live, elementary school assignment is mainly on the basis of a student’s residence, so the new house also meant a new school for our two kids, who are in 2nd and 4th grade.

Although we’ve only been part of the new school community for seven months, I have already noticed huge differences between the two schools. Online rankings from various comparison websites labeled the new school as significantly better. Precisely what that looks like for students and parents became clear and concrete over time.

The first big difference I noticed was within the new neighborhood. Our previous school was located in a highly impoverished area. Sadly, that factor brought a lot of crime. Shoplifting, drug-use, and violence were regular occurrences near our old home. Sirens blaring were daily background noise. A walk to the store meant likely exposure to people using drugs or fighting. Unfortunately, many of the homeless people that we encountered were aggressive. This lack of safety was the number one reason for our move.

Our new neighborhood is incredibly safe and quiet. The only noises we hear are neighbors chatting and dogs barking. Our neighbors and nearby residents seem happy, healthy, and involved in their community. Our new neighborhood has many more resources and a higher average income than our previous neighborhood.

One difference I’ve noticed within the school is the level of involvement from the school community and Parent Teacher Association. I work as a “classroom lead” for my son’s classroom, helping the teacher with family communication, school fundraising, and general coordination on classroom matters. So I’m constantly asking for donations, chaperones, and volunteers. I was shocked the first time I asked for chaperones for a field trip. I asked for five, and within minutes I had seven. It was the same when I asked for donations toward the teacher’s Christmas gift. Within a few days, I had $325! Every time I ask for anything for the school or classroom, the goal is met and exceeded immediately.

Our old school struggled with donations and fundraising. The volunteers and chaperones came in smaller numbers. This makes sense, because the neighborhood had a lower average income. Caregivers weren’t as available for volunteer and chaperone opportunities, because many of them had to work.

Another difference I found was that our old school tended to offer free financial and language resources, while our new school offers classes, events, and materials at a cost. I remember many events at our old school that would involve handing out art sets, food, and other items to families, and the school would put together a family night and provide a dinner and entertainment for free. This school year, we were floored that at the Halloween carnival, our new school charged admission and sold concessions. I think this is a good difference. The impoverished school shouldn’t charge admission to low-income families, and it seems fair to me that a school in a middle-class neighborhood would charge admission.

The biggest difference I have found between the two schools sits between the classroom walls: behavior. Our old school, where I worked as an instructional assistant, had some shocking statistics on behavior referrals last year. I remember sitting through a staff meeting looking over slides, and the number of incidents was just heartbreaking. A lot of kids would leave the classroom, destroy educational materials, and get into physical altercations. My son would get frustrated on a regular basis because these disruptions affected his learning. He would simply have to sit and wait while a student disrupted a lesson because there weren’t behavior specialists to assist. I brought this concern to his new teacher at his new school and he simply said, “I think Atticus is in for a pleasant surprise, because those things very rarely happen here.” Seven months later, my son hasn’t reported an incident yet. If there are behavior problems, they are dealt with swiftly and out of the classroom.

Resources are one big difference between a low-ranking and high-ranking school. Is the school properly staffed? Is the staff being continually educated? Does the neighborhood have financial resources? Is the school community active? The per-pupil spending at the old school, at nearly $22,000 a year, was actually considerably more than at the new school, which spends about $16,000 a year, so “resources” can mean a lot more than just how much money the government spends on operating a school.

My family managed to afford the move to the more expensive neighborhood and the higher-ranked school only after a couple of small inheritances and years of savings. If more people could see firsthand the differences between the two schools, though, maybe there’d be increased political support for allowing students access to safer, better-resourced schools in ways that don’t require a family to move across town.

Stephanie McCoy is a writer and mom in Oregon.

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

McCoy, S. (2023). School Number 500 to School Number 50: What’s the Difference? Education Next, 23(3), 80.

A Nation at Thought: Restoring Wisdom in America’s Schools
by David M. Steiner
Rowman & Littlefield, 2023, $80, 225 pages.

As reviewed by Matthew Levey

In the four decades since A Nation at Risk warned that American schools were failing, we’ve increased education spending, tried to improve curriculum and teacher training, unleashed market forces, attended to the “whole child,” and imitated Finland—among other efforts. Yet millions of K–12 students still read, write, and add as poorly as ever.

David Steiner, former head of Hunter College’s School of Education and later state education commissioner of New York, has seen it all, and now he offers his approach. As his book’s title signals, he believes the fundamental challenge is that high school students are not asked to think deeply enough.

Based on his family history—which he elides—his concern is not surprising. David Steiner is not only an education scholar and administrator but also the son of George Steiner, one of the 20th century’s most revered literary critics and scholars of language. George Steiner was an unapologetic elitist. When he was six, his father taught him to read the Iliad. In Greek.

The apple fell right under the tree. David Steiner grew up in Cambridge, England, attended Oxford and Harvard, and went on to a career in academia, the arts, and education leadership. The state of K–12 education is grim, he tells us. But, borrowing from John Webster, one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known contemporaries, Steiner declares, “Look you, the stars still shine!” By “thinking further,” we can help children realize the pursuit of happiness promised them in the Declaration of Independence. We must ground education firmly in ethical reflection, aesthetic sensibility, and academic learning, Steiner tells the reader. “All three are crucial in forging a fulfilling life.”

Steiner believes every child can rise to the highest heights, if only leaders and educators aim higher. Schools should impart eudaimonia, “the shared and universal telos of human existence,” he writes. Guided by Aristotle, students should be taught to steer themselves, using reason. “In contrast to previous failed efforts at teaching explicit ‘rudimentary ethical systems,’” Steiner argues,

we need to reconsider ethical behavior from the ground up. Aristotle is especially helpful here because he directly links eudaimonia (human flourishing) and ethics. He also argues that it is our ability to employ reason guided by virtue that is indispensable to a well-lived life.

Steiner asks us to “imagine a student in front of a Rothko painting.” The student struggles because “there is no immediately accessible ‘meaning.’” She wants to walk on. “Aware of this reaction, the teacher prompts the student to stop, to encounter, to keep looking, making the student hyper-aware of what is going on in the visual encounter.” A high school run in accord with this vision would be a wonder to behold.

Steiner knows “raising educational outcomes will almost certainly lead to more students being overqualified for the jobs they will occupy.” Nonetheless, he writes, “a higher level of education is desirable because it represents an absolute good.” The thought reminds me of playwright Garson Kanin’s line, engraved on the sidewalk leading to the main branch of the New York Public Library: “I want everybody to be smart. As smart as they can be. A world full of ignorant people is too dangerous to live in.” Observing our current politics, many readers will agree with Steiner.

Steiner acknowledges that we have to ameliorate several problems with K–5 schooling before we can tackle his lofty goals for learning. Because phonics is not taught consistently, despite growing awareness of its foundational importance, students struggle to read fluently when they begin to encounter more-sophisticated books. Because curricula vary from classroom to classroom, students don’t build background knowledge from a set of common texts. Because advances in cognitive psychology are not incorporated into teacher-training programs, teachers are less effective than they could be.

The author recognizes that myriad “shiny distractions” like grit, growth mindset, and social-emotional learning further impede progress toward his vision. He worries that the public-education system’s “conflicted and fragmentary aims and disparate educational tools” make realizing his ideals “next to impossible.” Regardless, he says, “the most pressing problem in American K–12 education is that the teaching of academic knowledge in our middle schools, and still more so in our high schools, leaves students bored, undermotivated, and often unable to move beyond the most basic levels of understanding.”

If Steiner had supported this inspiring vision with the wisdom he has gained from experience, it would have strengthened the book. He curiously avoids recounting lessons he learned as dean of an education school and then education commissioner of one of the nation’s largest states. His support for Hunter College’s alternative teacher-certification program, developed in partnership with leading charter-school networks, garnered headlines and criticism. Did teachers certified under this program prove more effective than their traditionally certified peers? Does he think we should change the way teachers are certified in general? I agree that “policymakers and parents cannot give up pressing for . . . educational changes across the entire spectrum of public schools,” but Steiner provides few insights from his career as to how these reformers can be more successful at improving student outcomes.

A second challenge is that many parents don’t share Steiner’s aspirations for their children. They’re not philistines, but they define success differently—perhaps in terms of athletic achievement or working in a part-time job. Like it or not, the number of parents concerned that their high school graduate doesn’t understand Kant’s deontological ethics is small. American school governance tolerates such dissent, as we’ve seen in recent debates over how to teach about race, gender, and even the Holocaust. Sharing any lessons he learned about the compromises democracy demands would have enriched Steiner’s book.

Independently run schools like the one Steiner attended as a child can pursue academically demanding approaches because they do not serve all students. The closest public-school analogues in America are charter schools. Steiner knows of Success Academy, the largest charter network in New York, which makes no excuses for students or staff who don’t aim high. He cites charter schools’ academic achievements and popularity among Black families but doesn’t comment on whether Success or other charters could help realize his vision.

Finally, Steiner discounts the impact of curriculum reforms of the last decades. He praises the Common Core State Standards because they “insist on the importance of teaching decoding skills in early education” but then decries as “drastically reductive” standards that call for students to “analyze” and “determine” points of view or central ideas of a text. He concurs with E. D. Hirsch that “building a storehouse of knowledge is indispensable” to becoming a fluent reader but later calls Hirsch’s “overarching claim about the importance of background knowledge . . . flawed.” Steiner agrees that, to change society, students need to acquire the language and knowledge “of those protecting the status quo.” But Hirsch’s approach is too transactional for Steiner, producing “impoverished” English and history classes. Hirsch doesn’t demand enough of teachers, in Steiner’s view. Steiner wants students “to develop a more sophisticated experience of reading, and at an earlier age.” As a guide, he offers an excerpt from Book 10 of Plato’s Republic.

I share Steiner’s wish, but, having used Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum—which Steiner promulgated as exemplary—I can say teachers are still learning how best to teach reading; few are ready to follow the guidance of ancient philosophers. Hirsch’s transactional approach may not lift us to Steiner’s Platonic ideal, but it strikes me as a predicate step, and one that we do poorly, if at all, in most schools.

A system of school choice that allows sympathetic leaders to put Steiner’s vision into action and attract families might realize his admirable and beautiful ideals to some degree. That was my intention with the International Charter School, which I founded in Brooklyn 10 years ago. The Great Hearts network does similar work, at a larger scale, in Arizona, Texas, and Louisiana. Classical Charter in the Bronx is a third example. The school system imagined in A Nation at Thought would be a light unto nations, a city upon a hill, inspiring to us all. Alas, despite his decades of experience, Steiner includes little concrete advice on how schools might realize this inspiring dream.

Matthew Levey headed the International Charter School and writes on K–12 education.

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

Levey, M. (2023). Think Deep, Aim High: A grand vision of American education, with scant practical advice. Education Next, 23(3), 72-73.

The Teachers: A Year Inside America’s Most Vulnerable, Important Profession
by Alexandra Robbins
Dutton, 2023, $29; 384 pages.

As reviewed by Daniel Buck

Almost every American has gone to school, so teaching is a familiar profession. But attending school gives us as much insight into the job of teaching as riding in an airplane tells us about piloting.

In The Teachers, investigative reporter Alexandra Robbins attempts to demystify the profession by following the lives of three teachers over the course of a year. As a teacher myself, I found moments in the book humorously accurate. However, as Robbins moves from discussing the day-to-day teaching experience into larger political debates, her book becomes heavy on rhetoric and anecdote while lacking in investigative rigor. Her narrow point of view is shared by many decisionmakers in American education, and it influences policy in ways that waste taxpayer money and hamper student learning.

First, the positives: A few of the book’s themes ring particularly true. For example, perhaps the most stressful aspect of a teacher’s job is classroom management. For at least a decade, the trend in school discipline has been toward leniency, which has made behavior ever worse and classroom management harder. Robbins writes that, in one of her focal teacher’s schools, “disciplinary issues were on the rise because the principal didn’t hold people accountable for them.” One teacher lamented that many faddish disciplinary approaches that seemed humane, such as “trauma-informed pedagogy,” often amount to little more than zero consequences for poor behavior.

A handful of other examples stand out: the incompetent district trainer who provides no real training but instead merely hands a teacher a list of web links and then smiles, blinking in confusion at the teacher’s disappointment; students getting up to sharpen a pencil or blow their nose in a brilliant display of work avoidance; the student who has selective mutism, though no one has informed the teacher of it.

But that ends my list of the book’s merits. The discussion of pandemic policies is perhaps the most galling example of Robbins’s unwillingness to engage seriously in complex education debates. She complains that “as school systems in many areas of the country” remained closed for in-person instruction, “sentiment toward teachers nose-dived among certain vehemently one-track-minded parents.” Meanwhile, Betsy DeVos and other politicians evinced a “clear indifference to people’s lives.”

In Robbins’s telling, advocates of returning to in-person learning sooner rather than later were motivated solely by indifference and bad faith—not by a concern for student learning, or for students’ mental well-being, or for the strain placed on working parents, or by the evidence early on that schools weren’t super-spreader sites. Robbins sticks by her analysis even as it becomes clear that school closures obliterated two decades of learning gains and worsened a downward trend in adolescent mental health.

Moving on to other political debates, Robbins peddles caricatures of dissatisfied parents and conservative critiques.

Consider her analysis of the “parents’ rights” movement. She laments that “parents’ mistreatment of teachers has accompanied an increasingly pronounced ‘us-versus-them’ mentality.” A few pages later, though, she asserts that the mass connectivity enabled by social media has turned parents into “monsters indeed.” Rather than investigating why parents have grown antagonistic and trust in public education has reached historic lows, she villainizes the parents’ movement, reinforcing the us-versus-them mentality.

Regarding Florida’s 2022 law limiting public-school instruction on sexual content—and similar legislation introduced in other states—she writes that the policies “put LGBTQ teachers in a really difficult situation where they’re forced, essentially, to disguise their identity or the status of their relationships in order to fend off running afoul of these bills.” Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act (dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” law by detractors) does not limit teachers’ ability to discuss their identity with students. What’s more, when Americans were presented with the real goals of Governor Ron DeSantis’s bill—prohibiting instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity until 4th grade—a majority of them, including 55 percent of Democrats, supported the bill. The popularity of the legislation, and the reasons for it, get nary a consideration from Robbins.

In discussing the critical race theory debate, she defines CRT as an academic framework “which is not taught in K–12 schools.” She sees conservative outrage over CRT as merely a false narrative that “politicians and activists intent on galvanizing parents co-opted.” This story line, she avers, became a stand-in for reactionary activists to oppose “teaching about racism, equity, identity, and oppression.”

Opposing CRT, however, does not necessarily equate to wanting a ban on teaching about the middle passage or American segregation. My students learn the history of Jim Crow; they read Frederick Douglass’s autobiography; we discuss America’s founding sin. Informed opponents of CRT take issue with the ideas of its founding scholars, including Richard Delgado, who said that “critical race theory questions the very foundations of the liberal order, including equality theory, legal reasoning, enlightenment rationalism, and neutral principles of constitutional law.”

Ultimately, what astounds me most about this book is just how frequently Robbins vilifies the very teachers she claims to defend. The three main characters in the book are flawed, certainly, but they are portrayed as caring, dedicated professionals. More often than not, their greatest antagonists are other teachers: incompetent airheads on field trips, gossiping shrews, and lazy do-nothings. At times, the implicit message of the book seems to be that there are a few teachers who still care, and everyone else hates children.

The pandemic created, or at least exposed, real strains in the relationship between parents and teachers. That relationship is now dysfunctional in many ways. This book tries to explain what it’s like to be on the teacher’s side of that equation, and at times it succeeds (even if it portrays many teachers unsympathetically). But, like a marriage counselor who shows empathy for only one party in the dispute, Robbins presents a one-sided take, painting a caricature of conservative parents rather than seeking to understand them.

Many of the parental concerns mischaracterized in this book touch on real, meaningful debates. How should we fund schools? What ought children to learn? Who controls curricula? These are not questions that can be brushed aside, suggesting that anyone who raises them merely opposes education. The Teachers might work better as part of a series that includes The Students, The Parents, and The Taxpayers—all equal stakeholders in public education. On its own, the book tells only part of the story, and if policymakers and the press focus on it at the exclusion of the other actors, they’ll be making a costly mistake.

I love the teaching profession. I love the education sector. I love both the theory and practice of helping children learn. I love the political debates around schools. Unfortunately, if people read this book uncritically, they will walk away with a diminished understanding of the field. Teaching is an honorable profession, and this book does it no honors.

Daniel Buck is a teacher, senior visiting fellow at the Fordham Institute, and author of the book What Is Wrong with Our Schools?

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

Buck, D. (2023). A Distorted Lens on the Teaching Profession. Education Next, 23(3), 74-75.

From their earliest years, children use art for learning and self-expression. Preschoolers draw, paint, and build to understand and depict their surroundings. They learn their letters by singing the alphabet song. And they immerse themselves in stories to learn about their natural and social worlds, from books read by caregivers and during dress-up and imaginative play.

Yet the arts maintain a precarious position in K–12 public education. After a steady increase throughout the middle of the 20th century, arts education has been in decline since the 1980s. In a 2012 national survey, roughly half of public-school teachers reported declines in instructional time and resources for art and music over the previous decade, while only about one in 10 reported similar declines for reading or math. Teachers attributed the declines to test-score pressures, budget cuts, or both.

These trends have been most pronounced for students of color, who are more likely than white students to attend under-resourced schools and about half as likely to experience any arts education, on average. In a survey by the National Endowment for the Arts, the percentage of Black adults reporting any arts education during childhood fell by nearly half in 2008 compared to 1982, to 26 percent from 51 percent. Hispanics experienced similar declines to 28 percent from 47 percent, while the share of white adults who experienced arts education remained relatively flat, at around 58 percent.

How are these changes affecting American students? To begin with, an education without the arts is insufficient and fails to provide what federal education law defines as a “well-rounded education.” The arts have intrinsic value as a foundational form of human expression, providing ways of learning and experiencing different perspectives on the human condition. Moreover, theory and emerging research suggest arts education may have positive effects on student behavior, school engagement, and social-emotional development, all of which contribute to success in school.

We investigate the causal effects of arts education by looking at the Arts Access Initiative in Houston, which brings teaching artists, performances, and workshops to under-resourced public elementary and middle schools from the city’s ballet, symphony, and fine-arts museum, among many others. Our analysis compares schools that were enrolled by a random lottery to schools that applied to participate but were not chosen, in the first large-scale randomized control trial of an arts education program in an authentic school setting.

We find that arts learning has positive effects on empathy, school engagement, student discipline, and writing achievement. Students’ emotional and cognitive empathy increase by 7.2 percent and 3.9 percent of a standard deviation, respectively. At schools with expanded arts education, students are 20.7 percent less likely to have a disciplinary infraction. School engagement increases by 8 percent of a standard deviation. Arts learning improves writing test scores by 13 percent of a standard deviation but does not have significant effects on reading, math, or science test scores. The positive effects are especially pronounced among English language learners, whose writing scores improve by 27 percent of a standard deviation. These results demonstrate that the arts positively affect meaningful educational outcomes and can inform strategies to restore and retain arts education in under-resourced schools.

Art for More Than Art’s Sake

The benefits of arts education are rich in theory and testimony, but little rigorous evidence supports most claims. In a recent report co-written by one of us (Brian Kisida), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences took stock of the many theories and claims surrounding arts education and identified several areas of educational benefits that are supported by research. First, there is the primary claim that learning about the arts is good for its own sake, both because the arts are a fundamental mode of human expression and because familiarity with the arts helps students acquire cultural capital. In addition, there are intrinsic benefits to learning about and engaging with the arts. These include broadening students’ understanding of other cultures and history, supporting their social-emotional development and interpersonal skills, and providing opportunities for career exploration and creativity.

In terms of academic outcomes, there has been little causal research to date examining how arts education in school settings affects academic achievement. Some research has found that integrating arts experiences with instruction can boost student interest and content knowledge, such as by pairing a history unit with a live theater performance about the topic, particularly for English language learners and students with low test scores. Other studies focusing on arts education through field trips have found increases in students’ empathy and tolerance of others, as well as improvements in school measures like attendance and behavior—outcomes that contribute substantially to long-term success. For example, students’ attendance and disciplinary records are better predictors of their eventual on-time graduation and college enrollment than their grades (see “The Full Measure of a Teacher,” research, Winter 2019). And students who attend schools that improve social-emotional development have fewer absences and disciplinary infractions and are more likely to graduate and persist in a four-year college (see “Linking Social-Emotional Learning to Long-Term Success,” research, Winter 2021).

In many areas, school districts have formed broad-based coalitions with arts and community partners to restore and expand in-school arts education. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 42 percent of U.S. public schools partner or collaborate with cultural or community organizations, 31 percent with individual artists, 29 percent with museums, and 26 percent with performing arts centers. These arrangements take various forms, such as in-school teaching-artist residencies, workshops for students and teachers, professional artist performances, and after-school programs.

Our analysis focuses on one such program, the Houston Arts Access Initiative. The initiative was created by the Houston Independent School District, city government leaders, and local arts institutions and philanthropists with the goal of equitably advancing student access to the arts. It began in 2013 with a district-wide campus inventory of arts educational offerings, which found that 29 percent of K–8 schools had no full-time arts specialist, and 39 percent had either one or zero arts partnerships with community arts organizations. Meanwhile, 98 percent of surveyed principals and teachers agreed that “students benefit from access to the arts in school.”

The initiative focused on expanding arts education in schools with the fewest resources and raised funds to support expanded partnerships with local arts organizations. School participation was voluntary, but principals had to commit to spending between $1 and $10 per student on the program, with foundation support and in-kind donations from cultural institutions contributing a dollar-for-dollar match. During the first two years of the program, 60 eligible schools applied, and 42 were enrolled through a random lottery. More than 50 local arts organizations provided a diverse array of programs, including theater (54 percent), music (18 percent), visual arts (16 percent), and dance (12 percent). Nearly two-thirds of schools had either teaching artist residencies or on-campus performances during the school day, while about one in four schools went on field trips and one in 10 offered arts education after school.

The mission of the Arts Access Initiative was familiar to the participating organizations, virtually all of which already had well-articulated educational philosophies and had been providing educational services. These organizations also had designed their programs to be culturally representative and meet the needs of underserved students. Arts offerings included classical music and fine art, as well as African dance and drumming, Asian dance, Aztec dance, Brazilian music and dance, Chinese art, Mexican folklórico, hip-hop music and dance, and Hispanic literature.

In addition to touting their programs’ impact on students’ social-emotional development, many organizations also had made deliberate efforts to align their work to state educational standards or content from tested subjects. For example, Writers in the Schools described its workshops as aligned to state tests and core content, while the Mercury Chamber Orchestra offered workshops that integrated science with classical music “to introduce the science of Galileo, Sir Isaac Newton, and Einstein,” or civics by “hearing the favorite tunes of Ben Franklin… while learning about democracy and the people who helped create our nation.”

Assessing the Impact of Art in School

We designed our study to identify the causal impact of community-based arts partnerships and programs in school, including whether a substantial increase in arts education improves student engagement and academic achievement. The study’s central feature is the random assignment of eligible applicant schools to participate (or not) in the initiative. This approach ensures—and our data confirm—that participating and non-participating schools are similar based on their grade levels, student demographics, preexisting arts resources, and percentages of students earning scores of at least “proficient” on statewide math and reading assessments. These schools also had equivalent numbers of school-community partnerships before the initiative began: an average of 2.80 partnerships at schools that did not take part compared to 2.76 at participating schools. After the program, participating schools gained 7.10 more partnerships, and students experienced 5.03 more arts educational experiences over the course of a school year compared to students at non-participating schools.

Our analysis is based on data from 2016–17 and 2017–18 for 15,886 students in grades 3 through 8. These students attended 42 schools, 36 of which were elementary schools. In all, 86 percent of students in the sample qualified for free or reduced-price school lunch, and 33 percent were English language learners. In terms of race and ethnicity, 68 percent of students identified as Hispanic, 25 percent as Black, and 3 percent as white.

We consider individual student attendance and enrollment records, disciplinary records, and test scores on the State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness (STAAR), which include reading and math tests in grades 3 through 8, writing tests in grades 4 and 7, and science tests in grades 5 and 8. In addition, we conducted an original survey in 2017–18. We successfully collected and linked outcome survey data to the district’s administrative data for 10,066 eligible 3rd–8th grade students (79 percent), and 7,640 eligible 4th–8th grade students (78 percent of the sample with prior year test scores). We use the latter sample when examining test-score outcomes so that we can control for any minor differences in students’ academic achievement before the start of the intervention.

The survey items are intended to capture levels of college aspirations, opinions about the value of the arts, indicators of social-emotional learning, and school engagement. The baseline survey was administered at the beginning of the fall semester (late September through early October) and the outcome survey at the end of the school year (late April through May).

We group student responses to create measures of school engagement and empathy. Our school engagement measure captures how students rate their agreement with statements like, “School work is interesting” and “This school is a happy place for me to be.” Our emotional empathy measure is based on a single survey item: “I want to help people who are treated badly.” Our cognitive empathy measure assesses the degree to which students can understand and learn from someone else’s perspective, through survey items like, “I can learn about my classmates by listening to them talk about works of art.” and “Works of art… help me understand what life was like in another time or place.” Students’ college aspirations were captured by a single item (“I plan to go to college”) and are indicated by a binary measure of whether students strongly agreed or not.

Results

Increasing students’ arts educational experiences has positive effects on student discipline, writing achievement, school engagement, and empathy. At participating schools, 13.8 percent of students received disciplinary infractions compared to 17.4 percent at non-participating schools—a difference of 20.1 percent. Students’ writing scores are 13 percent of a standard deviation higher than at similar schools with less arts education. School engagement increases by 8 percent of a standard deviation, and students’ emotional and cognitive empathy grow by 7.2 percent and 3.9 percent of a standard deviation, respectively (see Figure 1).

Our analysis does not find effects on students’ math, reading, or science achievement, contrary to popular claims that arts education has a transfer effect on other subjects. However, the positive effects on writing achievement on statewide standardized tests are noteworthy. Many of the arts programs offered opportunities for self-expression and reflection, and some included student writing exercises, either through a specific focus on literary arts or arts-integrated writing activities. The STAAR writing test features open-response expository essays to assess composition skills as well as multiple-choice items on mechanical skills. When we disaggregate student scores on this assessment, we find significant increases on both sections. But the effects are twice as large for the written compositions than for the mechanics sections, at 18 percent and 9 percent of a standard deviation, respectively. This finding aligns with the theory that participation in arts experiences improves students’ ability to express themselves and articulate their own ideas.

The positive effects on students’ writing achievement are especially large for English language learners, whose scores increase by 27.1 percent of a standard deviation overall (see Figure 2). For elementary-school English language learners, the effect is 34.8 percent of a standard deviation. English language learners also experience greater-than-average gains in school engagement, at 14.3 percent of a standard deviation, and emotional empathy, at 15.7 percent of a standard deviation. They are 6.5 percentage points more likely to plan to attend college, despite the fact that the program did not increase college aspirations significantly for students overall.

These findings reinforce earlier research showing the benefits of using arts-learning techniques to deliver core content to English language learners, including increases in written and oral language skills and student engagement and decreases in absences. Researchers have suggested that arts learning increases verbal interactions between students and teachers and offers multiple pathways to connect with educational content. Moreover, the arts programs in Houston tended to have a strong emphasis on art from a diverse array of cultures, which may be especially engaging for students whose first language is not English.

Our analysis also finds notable differences in the experiences of elementary and middle-school students. Writing achievement improves by 19.7 percent of a standard deviation for elementary-school students compared to 5 percent of a standard deviation for middle-schoolers. There is no improvement in school discipline at elementary schools, whereas middle-school students are 6.8 percentage points less likely to experience an infraction. We find opposite trends in school engagement: it grows by 21 percent of a standard deviation for elementary-school students but declines by 12.5 percent of a standard deviation among middle-school students. We see a similar split in students’ college aspirations: an increase of 5.2 percent at elementary schools and a decrease of 4.6 percent in middle schools.

One possible explanation is the implementation of the program, which was primarily focused on elementary schools. Programming in middle schools tended to be more piecemeal, one-off experiences, whereas elementary schools were more likely to opt for artist residencies where teaching-artists provided arts instruction to entire grades on a weekly or semi-weekly basis for a semester or full school year. As a result, smaller proportions of middle-school students participated in arts programming, and those that did were exposed to a diluted dosage—limitations that may have compromised students’ enjoyment or engagement with the arts. It could also be the case that younger students are more receptive to arts education experiences, since educational interventions tend to have greater effects in early years.

A Well-Rounded Education

Our investigation, the first large-scale randomized control trial of an arts education program implemented in an authentic school setting, finds significant and policy-relevant benefits for students across a diverse array of elementary and middle schools in the nation’s 7th largest school district. When young people engage with the arts, they gain unique opportunities for self-discovery, social development, and community connections. When arts education is part of the school day, students experience greater school engagement, fewer disciplinary infractions, enhanced social-emotional development, and stronger academic achievement in writing. Arts education is a promising option for policymakers interested in improving social-emotional learning outcomes and student behavior.

Our study is not without limitations. Our results may not be generalizable to schools where leaders are not dedicated to supporting the arts. The results also may not translate easily to communities without sufficient arts resources and institutions. The findings also reflect the severely deficient arts resources that participating schools had at the outset of the program. A similar program in schools with higher initial levels of arts resources may not produce the same effects.

Still, our analysis provides evidence that arts education can support student success above and beyond its intrinsic benefits. We also show that expanding arts education does not harm student achievement on standardized tests—and actually benefits writing performance. As education policymakers seek reforms that improve school engagement, school climate, and other social-emotional and behavioral outcomes to restore student progress and mental health after pandemic-related disruptions, they should weigh the opportunity costs when arts education is decreased or eliminated.

Daniel H. Bowen is associate professor at Texas A&M University. Brian Kisida is associate professor at the University of Missouri. They co-direct the Arts, Humanities & Civic Engagement Lab, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

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

Bowen, D.H., and Kisida, B. (2023). The Fine Art of School Engagement: How expanding arts education affects learning, behavior, and social-emotional growth. Education Next, 23(3), 48-54.

American education reform in the 2010s centered largely on changing how teachers are evaluated and paid. Through Race to the Top and its state waiver program, the Obama administration successfully prodded 44 states to adopt new evaluation systems based, in part, on objective measures of student achievement. These states committed, at least on paper, to using teachers’ evaluation ratings for personnel decisions ranging from who receives tenure to who gets a bonus. In the meantime, a turbo-charged federal Teacher Incentive Fund program encouraged school districts to link educators’ compensation to their performance.

It is tempting to look back at that era and conclude that teacher-pay reform has failed—that we should move on to other strategies. Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress stagnated over the course of the decade, with gaps increasing between higher- and lower-performing students. A 2023 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper on the impact of state teacher-evaluation policies reports “precisely estimated null effects.” Policymakers, it seems, had already made the same estimation, for few are paying attention now to evaluation-and-pay reform.

Yet closer inspection uncovers a different story. Despite incorporating test-score evidence, the new state evaluation systems still failed at their most basic task of distinguishing the most- and least-effective educators. As Matt Kraft and Allison Gilmour report, the share of teachers rated ineffective in most settings barely budged—perhaps because the principals doing the rating knew they couldn’t fire low performers or even differentiate pay. Genuinely new approaches to evaluating teachers haven’t failed; they haven’t been widely tried.

Moreover, a growing body of evidence suggests that teacher evaluation-and-pay reform, when it is taken seriously and implemented well, produces gains. Education Next has previously reported on the consequences of the IMPACT evaluation-and-pay system implemented in Washington, D.C. under Michelle Rhee and her successor, Kaya Henderson (see “A Lasting Impact,” research, Fall 2017). In short, strong teachers improved their performance, ineffective teachers left the district, and student performance rose.

In this issue, Yale economist Barbara Biasi provides complementary evidence on the potential of performance-based pay based on Act 10, a 2011 Wisconsin law that limited the scope of collective bargaining to base pay (see “Wisconsin’s Act 10, Flexible Pay, and the Impact on Teacher Labor Markets,” features). As Biasi notes, this “allowed school districts to set pay more flexibly and without unions’ consent, in principle detaching compensation from seniority and credentials.” Act 10 also capped annual growth in base pay at the rate of inflation and required educators to pay more toward health care and pension costs. If you think that teachers should be paid both more and differently than they are now, Act 10 is not for you. But the law did give Wisconsin school districts unprecedented flexibility in setting teachers’ pay.

Not all districts took advantage. About half continued to use traditional step-and-lane salary schedules based on experience and graduate degrees. The other half, however, abandoned step-and-lane schedules and, in effect, allowed individual teachers to negotiate their pay. This natural experiment unfolded gradually across the state, due to differences in when pre-Act 10 collective-bargaining agreements expired, enabling Biasi to study the law’s effects.

She reports that, in districts adopting flexible-pay systems, teachers who were more effective in raising students’ test scores started to earn more than their peers—despite the fact that Wisconsin school districts at the time did not calculate value-added scores. (Apparently, administrators don’t need an algorithmic statewide teacher-evaluation system to identify their best performers.) These districts saw more weak teachers depart and experienced an influx of effective teachers, many of them poached from districts that stuck with seniority-based pay. Incumbent teachers in flexible-pay districts likewise improved their performance, and student achievement rose.

Act 10 did have unintended consequences. Districts serving poor students were less likely to adopt flexible pay systems. As a result, the personnel churn the law generated likely reduced these students’ access to effective teachers. A gender pay-gap emerged, as women proved less likely than male teachers to negotiate with male principals for higher salaries. The cap on growth in base pay may have kept districts from paying Wisconsin teachers more at a time when that would have been helpful.

Still, Biasi’s careful and creative research adds to the evidence that altering how teachers are evaluated and paid remains a powerful lever for improving student outcomes. It suggests that the Obama administration’s teacher-evaluation reform fell short at least in part because it wasn’t accompanied by a loosening of collective-bargaining restrictions. Act 10 reveals the value of first giving districts the flexibility needed to use what they already know about who their strongest performers are. States seeking to draw the right lessons from the past decade’s disappointments would do well to keep that in mind.

— Martin R. West

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

West, M.R. (2023). Think Reforming Teacher Pay Doesn’t Work? Think Again. Education Next, 23(3), 5.