News - Education Next http://www.educationnext.org/news/ A Journal of Opinion and Research About Education Policy Wed, 10 Jul 2024 14:12:56 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.5 https://i0.wp.com/www.educationnext.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/e-logo.png?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1 News - Education Next http://www.educationnext.org/news/ 32 32 181792879 The Hidden Role of K–12 Open-Enrollment Policies in U.S. Public Schools https://www.educationnext.org/the-hidden-role-of-k-12-open-enrollment-policies-in-u-s-public-schools/ Tue, 09 Jul 2024 09:01:31 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718429 Detailed data from three states shed light on opportunities and barriers

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Illustration of a family pushing a school in a shopping cart

Open enrollment in public schools is a form of school choice that allows students to attend schools other than the one assigned to them by their school district. Though often less visible than policies such as charter schools, vouchers, and education savings accounts, K–12 open enrollment is rising in popularity across the nation, and 73 percent of school parents support it. As of 2023, 43 states permit or mandate some degree of open enrollment, but only 16 states have strong open-enrollment laws. Since 2021, 10 states have significantly improved their open-enrollment laws. For example, Idaho’s new law requires all school districts to participate in open enrollment and also establishes better program transparency.

When it comes to open-enrollment data, however, researchers and policymakers are often left in the dark. Only 13 states are required by law to collect data on open enrollment, and only three states publish these figures regularly. As a result, little is known about a key policy that affects students and public schools nationwide.

There are two types of open enrollment: cross-district open enrollment allows students to attend schools outside their school district, while within-district open enrollment lets students attend schools outside their assigned zone but within their own school district. To understand the role these programs play in the school choice landscape, we obtained data from three states—Arizona, Florida, and Wisconsin—that host some of the most robust open-enrollment programs in the nation. Participation is strong; more than 450,000 students in these three states used open enrollment to attend public schools other than their assigned ones during the 2021–22 school year.

Both Arizona and Florida require all school districts to participate in both types of open enrollment if seats are available. Wisconsin only requires its school districts to participate in cross-district open enrollment. Taken together, the latest data from these states provide four key takeaways about open enrollment:

  • Open enrollment is one of the most common forms of school choice. On average, about one in 10 students in these states is using open enrollment to attend a school other than the one originally assigned to them.
  • Families tend to use cross-district open enrollment to transfer to higher-rated school districts when possible. In fact, 76 percent of students, on average, transferred to a school district rated as A or B in Florida and Arizona.
  • School districts routinely reject transfer applicants with disabilities.
  • Open enrollment is important to families in rural school districts, not only in cities. Wisconsin’s open-enrollment data showed that more than 52 percent of students using cross-district open enrollment used it to access school districts in rural areas or towns outside the state’s metropolitan areas.

Many students choose schools other than their residentially assigned one. Across the three states, nearly 177,000 students used cross-district open enrollment, while almost 273,000 used the within-district option to choose a different school (see Table 1).


Table 1: 2021–22 Open-Enrollment Participation in Arizona, Florida, and Wisconsin

State Total open-enrollment participants Number of cross-district transfers Number of within-district transfers Percentage of public school enrollment
Arizona 115,932 99,615 15,132 11
Florida 262,968 5,509 257,459 9
Wisconsin 71,489 71,489 NA 9

Note: Wisconsin’s open-enrollment data include students who transfer to online schools in other districts. The state doesn’t disaggregate these students from cross-district transfers who attend schools in person.

Sources: Florida Department of Education, Arizona Department of Education, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction


Open enrollment also makes up an important component of these states’ education marketplaces and is one of the most common methods of school selection. When compared with other school choice options in these states—such as charter schools or private school scholarships—open enrollment holds its own, accounting for approximately 36 percent of the 1.3 million students who used public funds to participate in school choice during the 2021–22 school year (see Figure 1).


Figure 1: Open Enrollment Is a Desired Choice Option

In Wisconsin, Arizona, and Florida, open enrollment holds a comparable share of students in the marketplace of school choice options.

Students using publicly funded school choice in 2021–22


And these numbers are increasing. According to the Florida Department of Education and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, open-enrollment participation increased by 4 percent and 3 percent respectively during the 2022–23 school year. (As of this writing, 2022–23 data from Arizona are not yet available.) Open-enrollment participation grew in these states even as more families used publicly funded scholarships to pay for private school tuition.

Students tend to transfer to more highly rated school districts. Earlier research in other states indicates that families turn to open enrollment for a variety of reasons. For example, studies published by the California Legislative Analyst’s Office in 2016 and 2021 found that students in that state used cross-district open enrollment to access specialized programming (such as Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses), to escape bullying, to shorten commutes, or to find a school that was a better fit. One consistent research finding is that students tend to transfer to higher-rated school districts when possible. For instance, in Texas, students were more likely to transfer to districts rated as A or B by state accountability rating systems and less likely to transfer to school districts labeled C, D, or F. Other research from Minnesota, Colorado, and Florida found that academic quality was an important factor in families’ decisions to use open enrollment.

The latest data show that these open-enrollment trends are also evident in Florida and Arizona (see Figure 2).


Figure 2: Students Leave Districts for Greener Pastures

Academic quality is a substantial factor in students transferring outside of their residential districts. In Arizona and Florida, most students move to districts ranked as A or B.

Cross-district transfers by district rating 2021–22


As Figure 2 shows, 80 percent of Arizona’s transfer students and 72 percent of Florida’s chose school districts rated as A or B. Overall, 67 percent of Arizona’s students and 91 percent of Florida’s attend A- or B-rated school districts. Open-enrollment transfers in these states generally avoided school districts rated lower than B.

Wisconsin doesn’t use a letter-grade system to rate its school districts. Instead, the Badger State rates them on a 100-point scale and assigns them to one of four categories: “significantly exceeds expectations,” “exceeds expectations,” “meets expectations,” and “meets few expectations.”

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction also reports more detailed and nuanced open-enrollment data than Florida and Arizona. Those two states show only how many students transfer into each district. Wisconsin, though, shows the number of students who transfer into and out of each school district, as well as the number who apply to transfer into and out of them. Districts with better ratings experienced net transfer gains, while lower-rated districts lost students on net, as shown in Figure 3.


Figure 3: Poorly Rated Wisconsin Districts Lose Students

School districts in Wisconsin rated as average or below average experienced a net loss of more than 54,000 students in the 2022–23 school year. Districts rated better than average or excellent enrolled 13,000 more students.

Wisconsin cross-district transfers by district ranking 2022–23


Despite receiving the lion’s share of transfers, Wisconsin school districts rated as “meets expectations” or lower experienced a net loss of more than 54,000 students. Higher-ranked districts, on the other hand, gained more students than they lost. School districts rated as “significantly exceeds expectations” or “exceeds expectations” increased their enrollments by more than 13,000 students during the 2022–23 school year.

In Wisconsin, the smaller number of transfers to the highest-rated school districts does not necessarily reflect a lack of applications. Not every transfer application is approved, because Wisconsin school districts can reject transfer applications for such reasons as insufficient capacity, a student’s disciplinary record, and insufficient special-education program capacity.

In fact, 43 percent of Wisconsin school districts rejected at least one out of five transfer applicants. The most common reason for rejection, cited more than 6,300 times, was insufficient capacity. However, definitions of maximum capacity can be capricious and vary by school district. This means that even if school districts have the physical space to accommodate transfer applicants, they can reject them, citing an arbitrary definition of capacity.

Transfer applicants with disabilities are often rejected. Similarly, more than 2,000 Wisconsin students were rejected because they had disabilities. Although federal law prohibits school districts from denying services to students with disabilities who live within their boundaries, they routinely reject transfer applications from students with disabilities at a higher rate than their peers without disabilities.

Wisconsin Watch reported in 2023 that “schools rejected about 40 percent of applications” from students with disabilities, “with lack of special education space as the most common reason for the denials. By comparison, school districts rejected only 14 percent of applications from students without disabilities.” This scenario is not unique to Wisconsin. Reports from Arizona, Oklahoma, and Colorado indicate that similar disparities are common in other states.

Open enrollment is important to rural students and school districts. Students living in more densely populated areas are more likely to benefit from open enrollment than their peers living in small towns or rural areas. However, that does not mean that open enrollment isn’t important to rural school districts. A 2021 report by the California Legislative Analyst’s Office found that some small and rural school districts relied on open-enrollment transfer students to remain fiscally solvent. In other words, open enrollment can be a lifeline to school districts whose enrollments are declining.

By combining open-enrollment data provided by state education agencies with data from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) that classify school districts by location (city, suburb, town, and rural), it’s possible to examine open-enrollment participation by school-district locale. Together, these data provide insight into how different regions in these states are impacted by open enrollment (see Figure 4).


Figure 4: More Transfers to Rural Districts in Wisconsin Than Arizona and Florida

While city districts are most preferred among transfer students in Arizona and suburban districts are most favored in Florida, Wisconsin’s rural districts receive a higher proportion of students who take advantage of open enrollment.

Open-enrollment participation by locale 2021–22


Overall, these data showed that, in Arizona and Florida, most students used open enrollment to transfer to urban and suburban school districts. However, in Wisconsin, rural school districts attracted the second-largest share of transfer students when compared to other locales in the state. This is partly because Wisconsin’s school districts are generally smaller and more numerous, making them more accessible to out-of-district students than is the case in Arizona or Florida. Despite the state’s smaller size, Wisconsin has about twice as many school districts as Arizona and six times as many as Florida.

Across all three states, rural school districts bolstered their enrollments with more than 29,000 transfer students (see Figure 5). Rural school districts are further broken into three categories: Rural fringe districts are those nearest to both urbanized areas and towns; rural distant districts are farther from urbanized areas but are closer to towns; and rural remote districts are those farthest from both towns and urbanized areas.


Figure 5: Rural Districts on the Fringe of Cities and Towns Benefit from Transfers

While rural fringe districts in Wisconsin did not receive the most transfers, they experienced the largest net gain from open enrollment, receiving nearly 2,500 additional students.

Cross-district transfers to rural school districts 2021–22


Overall, rural fringe districts benefited more from open enrollment than other types of rural school districts. This makes sense because rural fringe school districts are the nearest non-urban transfer options for many suburban families.

Policy Implications

Policymakers have three key issues to consider as more students take advantage of open-enrollment opportunities.

First, traditional methods of school transportation, such as the large yellow school bus, are no longer efficient because many transfer students, especially rural ones, don’t live along designated bus routes. Getting to school is often a challenge for students using open enrollment because 44 states, including those discussed here, do not require the receiving school districts to provide transportation to cross-district transfer students. In some states, school districts can even stop other districts from transporting transfer students across district boundaries, often disproportionately affecting students from low-income families. While families and receiving school districts can establish designated bus pick-up locations just over district boundaries, this option is only available to students whose families can drive them to those locations.

These transportation challenges combined with long commutes mean that open-enrollment participation in rural areas or small towns will generally be lower than in urban and suburban districts. However, state policymakers can modify regulations that needlessly impede students from transferring. For instance, they can stop allowing school districts to prevent other districts from transporting transfer students across district boundaries.

State policymakers could also take note of Arizona’s recent transportation reforms, which let school districts use passenger vans that seat 11 to 15 people instead of the traditional yellow school bus. This sort of innovation can lower the costs of transporting small groups of transfer students. Such policies can be key to helping students access schooling options that are the right fit, even if they don’t live nearby.

Policymakers might also do well to reconsider how to fund capital projects. While local levies often paid for these projects in the past, school districts will have a harder time convincing local taxpayers to approve new bonds when their children don’t attend their residentially assigned school.

For instance, Arizona’s Queen Creek Unified School District has failed to gain voter approval for bond funding for three years in a row. In fact, only 40 percent of voters supported the bond in November 2023. Part of the reason the bond has failed is that many of the students living inside the district’s boundaries don’t attend the district’s schools, opting instead for charter schools or schools in other districts. In fact, nearly 20 percent of Queen Creek’s students came from other districts during the 2021–22 school year. This district’s situation isn’t atypical; 30 percent of Arizona students don’t attend public schools in their assigned district. This illustrates that policymakers in states with robust school choice policies need to rethink how capital projects are funded.

Finally, policymakers can hold school districts’ admissions practices to a higher standard by stopping them from rejecting transfer applicants with disabilities. Many school districts are quick to cap the number of transfer applicants with disabilities based on the program capacity of their special education courses, often citing insufficient staffing. However, this practice unfairly limits schooling options for students with disabilities. It also means that traditional public schools’ admittance procedures operate at a lower bar than public charter schools’ admittance procedures, which require that all applicants be admitted, assuming seats are available. Accordingly, policymakers could take a closer look at school districts’ admissions processes to ensure that district schools are open to all students.

In a Nutshell

Open enrollment is the most common form of school choice in Wisconsin and the second-most common in Arizona and Florida. Students tend to transfer to school districts with higher rankings. While open-enrollment participation is often concentrated in urban and suburban regions, it is also beneficial to students in rural areas or smaller towns. However, the playing field isn’t level for all students, because those with disabilities tend to be rejected at higher rates, and districts can and do reject applicants for dubious capacity reasons.

Wisconsin is currently the only state that fully shows how open-enrollment transfers affect school districts. If more states were to emulate that state’s transparent reporting practices, families could learn which districts are in high demand, gain more understanding of open-enrollment programs, and make informed decisions about this choice option.

Jude Schwalbach is a senior policy analyst at Reason Foundation.

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Supreme Confusion in Oklahoma https://www.educationnext.org/supreme-confusion-in-oklahoma-religious-charter-school-case/ Mon, 01 Jul 2024 09:00:07 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718474 Issues raised in state’s religious charter school case predestined to rise again

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A crucifix hangs on the wall of a library

The Oklahoma Supreme Court on June 25 delivered its eagerly anticipated decision on whether the state could authorize an explicitly religious charter school. The court said no, resolving for now the issue in Oklahoma. But its inscrutable reasoning on the First Amendment’s establishment and free exercise clauses indicate that the U.S. Supreme Court will have to take up the issue—in either this case or one that will inevitably arise in another state.

Following the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Carson v. Makin that excluding religious schools from Maine’s voucher program was unconstitutional, the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and Diocese of Tulsa applied to Oklahoma’s Charter School Board to establish St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. The board approved in a decision backed by state Attorney General John O’Connor, who cited the Supreme Court’s reasoning in the trilogy of Makin, Espinoza v. Montana (2020), and Trinity Lutheran v. Comer (2017) to justify his support. Oklahoma’s charter school law allowed other private organizations to operate charter schools, so preventing religious ones from doing so would violate the free exercise clause’s requirement that religious entities not be excluded from an “otherwise generally available public benefit.”

After 2022, however, a new attorney general, Gentner Drummond, assumed office. He promptly rejected his predecessor’s opinion and asked the board to rescind its approval. When it did not, Drummond asked the state Supreme Court to intervene. He argued that, among a parade of horribles that would result from the charter board’s action, allowing a Catholic charter school would require Oklahoma to fund a Muslim school or even “the blasphemous tenets of the Church of Satan.” In Drummond v. Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, a 6–2 majority of the court agreed.

Their reasoning had an inauspicious start. It held that the charter school violated Article II Section 5 of Oklahoma’s state constitution, which reads: “No public money or property shall ever be appropriated, applied, donated, or used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion, or for the use, benefit, or support of any priest, preacher, minister, or other religious teacher or dignitary, or sectarian institution as such.” This is also known as the state’s Blaine Amendment. But the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ruled Blaine Amendments unconstitutional in Comer and Espinoza.

The court then pointed out that the state’s charter school law also requires that charter schools be nonsectarian. But no one disagreed with that. The issue was whether that requirement violates the U.S. Constitution. The court also held that the school would be a “state actor” and therefore subject to the same requirements as traditional public schools. Whether that matters though hinges on whether the First Amendment is implicated. It is on this topic that the opinion becomes difficult to reconcile with recent Supreme Court decisions.

On the establishment clause, the court cited the Supreme Court’s 1947 ruling in Everson v. Board of Education that the government cannot pass laws “which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another.” This citation was peculiar since it is this “no aid” line of reasoning that led to the infamous “Lemon test” the Supreme Court killed and buried in Kennedy v. Bremerton (2022). The court held in that case that the establishment clause must instead “be interpreted by ‘reference to historical practices and understandings’.” This “history and tradition test” emphasizes how those closest to a clause’s enactment understood its meaning.

It is not at all clear from the famously strained opinion in Everson—the court cited Thomas Jefferson as an authority on the clause’s meaning when he had nothing to do with its writing or ratification—that the decision could fit with the history and tradition test. It is possible that it could, but the Oklahoma Supreme Court did not even reference the new test. Instead, it briefly mentioned Bremerton and then cited an earlier series of cases involving school prayer that could well end up being circumscribed. Even if the prayer cases end up not being curtailed, they raise completely different questions because charter schools are, by definition, schools of choice. No one would ever be compelled to participate in a charter school’s religious activities.

Even more puzzling was the court’s free exercise clause analysis. The majority argued that the Makin, Espinoza, and Comer trilogy did not apply because they involved private entities, and this case involved the “State’s creation and funding of a new religious institution.” Their reasoning, however, ignored the fact that most charter schools are operated by private corporations. That these corporations, and indeed any corporation, cannot exist without a state charter does not mean that they are state actors. Simply being authorized to operate by the state is not the same thing as being created by the state.

One could imagine, and certainly would have hoped for, a more clearly reasoned decision, but the Oklahoma court did not provide it. Even if no appeal is made in this case or if the Supreme Court declines to hear one, the thorny issues that the majority elided will come up again and need to be resolved.

In short, this decision represents at most the opening salvo on religious charter schools, not the final word.

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

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Next-Gen Classroom Observations, Powered by AI https://www.educationnext.org/next-gen-classroom-observations-powered-by-ai/ Wed, 26 Jun 2024 09:00:30 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718437 Let’s go to the videotape to improve instruction and classroom practice

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Photo of a teacher writing on a white board while being filmed on a phone
The use of video recordings in classrooms to improve teacher performance is nothing new. But the advent of artificial intelligence could add a helpful evaluative tool for teachers, measuring instructional practice relative to common professional goals with chatbot feedback.

As is typical for edtech hype, the initial burst of enthusiasm for artificial intelligence in education focused on student-facing applications. Products like IXL, Zearn, and Khan Academy’s chatbot Khanmigo could take on the heavy lifting and personalize instruction for every kid! Who needs tutors, or even teachers, when kids can learn from machines?

Thankfully, the real-life limits of AI instruction surfaced quickly, given how hard it is for non-humanoids to motivate children and teens to pay attention and persist through hard work for any length of time (for example, see “The 5 Percent Problem,” features, Fall 2024). The apps are still popular, but it’s not clear that AI will crowd out live human instruction anytime soon.

If AI can’t replace teachers, maybe it can help them get better at their jobs. Multiple companies are pairing AI with inexpensive, ubiquitous video technology to provide feedback to educators through asynchronous, offsite observation. It’s an appealing idea, especially given the promise and popularity of instructional coaching, as well as the challenge of scaling it effectively (see “Taking Teacher Coaching To Scale,” research, Fall 2018).

While these efforts seem tailor-made for teachers looking to improve, there are clear applications across the spectrum of effectiveness. Like bodycams worn by police, video recordings and attendant AI tools could open a window into every classroom, exposing poor performers to scrutiny and helping to keep bad behavior in check.

Apps for observations

Video-based observations are not new. The underlying, pre-AI idea is for teachers to record themselves providing instruction, choose some of their best samples, and upload those clips to a platform where an instructional coach or principal can watch and provide feedback. Indeed, this model was an important innovation of the Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project launched in 2009 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (see “Lights, Camera, Action!What Next, Spring 2011).

Edthena is one company that has built out a coaching-via-video-feedback service. Its founder, Adam Geller, started as a science teacher in St. Louis before moving on to the national strategy team at Teach For America. At the time, the organization was looking for a way to provide more frequent feedback to its corps members, given growing evidence that the best professional learning comes from educators regularly reviewing, discussing, and critiquing instructional practice together. It’s hard for instructional coaches or principals to visit every teacher’s classroom with much frequency, but recorded lessons allow anyone to observe and deliver feedback anytime from anywhere. That gave Geller an idea, which he later turned into Edthena.

For more than a decade, Geller claims, his platform has narrowed the “feedback gap” dramatically. Research studies find that video coaching via Edthena can improve teacher retention, competence, and confidence. Still, it is a large investment in staff resources. After all, coaches or administrators must find time to watch the videos and offer feedback, and there are only so many hours in the day.

Enter AI. Edthena is now offering an “AI Coach” chatbot that offers teachers specific prompts as they privately watch recordings of their lessons. The chatbot is designed to help teachers view their practice relative to common professional goals and to develop action plans to improve.

To be sure, an AI coach is no replacement for human coaching. An analogy might be the growing number of mental health chatbots on the market, many of them based on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which can help patients reflect on their own thoughts and feelings and help them see things in a more constructive way. In the same way, Edthena’s AI Coach is helping teachers engage in “deep reflection about the classroom teaching,” Geller says. And because the AI tool is responding to teachers’ own self-evaluations, and not the lessons themselves, it’s relatively straightforward to train.

Gathering data for self-improvement

If Edthena is about “deep reflection,” then TeachFX is about hardcore data. The app captures audio recordings from the classroom and uses voice recognition AI to differentiate between teacher and student speech during lessons. Teachers receive visualizations of class time spent on teacher talk, student talk, group talk, and wait time to assess student engagement, as well as more sophisticated analyses of verbal exchanges during class. It’s like a Fitbit for instruction.

TeachFX founder Jamie Poskin, a former high school teacher, got the idea while interviewing a school principal as a Stanford University graduate student. They discussed the challenge of providing feedback to teachers, especially new ones. Recording lessons was intriguing, they agreed, but when could principals find the time to watch the videos? The principal wondered, what if AI could be trained to look for the indicators of good practice—the teacher “moves” that are universally applicable regardless of grade level or subject matter?

The first version of TeachFX focused on a single metric: teacher talk versus student talk, based on voluminous research evidence that the more kids talk during direct instruction, the more they tend to learn. And though classrooms can be cacophonous (especially elementary ones), the technology could readily distinguish between teacher and student voices. Not only were such analyses doable, according to internal company data, but also just turning on the TeachFX app helped teachers more than double the amount of student talk during class. According to the company, almost 80 percent of teachers in a typical implementation use the tool on a recurring basis.

Over time, as the technology has improved, the platform added more metrics aligned with evidence-based best practices. For example: What proportion of a teacher’s questions are open-ended? How long is she waiting for students to answer? A study by Dorottya Demszky and colleagues published in 2023 found that teachers receiving feedback from TeachFX increased their use of “focusing questions,” which prompt students to reflect on and explain their thinking, by 20 percent.

A role for AI in evaluation?

It’s one thing to use AI to provide constructive, no-stakes feedback to teachers about their instructional practice. But what about incorporating it into formal performance evaluations?

Nobody I talked to liked that idea.

Thomas Kane of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who ran the MET project, said, “AI could make it easier for teachers to get more frequent feedback, without the taint of a supervisory relationship.” But introduce that “supervisory relationship,” and you lose teachers’ willingness to give these technologies a try.

Indeed, neither company founder I spoke with was eager to see their tech used for teacher evaluations. As TeachFX’s Poskin told me, “You want teachers to learn and grow.” The more often teachers upload recordings to the platform, the better. Yet formal evaluations usually only happen every few years. They are the antithesis of constructive feedback.

That said, leaders of both companies welcome teachers’ deciding to use their recordings, or the data and “reflection logs” derived from them, in coaching sessions or formal evaluations. In all cases, the key is leaving those decisions to teachers and letting them keep control of the process and data.

To me, these apps sound like great tools for conscientious teachers eager to improve—as Geller and Poskin no doubt were. But it strikes me that teacher motivation to use them as intended must be an issue, just as it is for students. Teachers are crazy-busy, and apps like these are, ultimately, extra work.

To their credit, some districts provide incentives, such as counting the time teachers spend using the apps against professional learning requirements or allowing recordings to stand in for weekly classroom walkthroughs. Those are steps in the right direction—but we shouldn’t expect uptake to be universal. To me, it seems likely that the worst teachers, who arguably would have the most to gain, are the least likely to engage with these sorts of technologies.

From bodycams to classroom cams

I don’t think it would be crazy, then, for someone to develop a version of this idea that is less about helping well-meaning teachers get better, and more about holding the small number of ineffective teachers accountable. Our schools have long faced the “street-level bureaucrat” problem, coined by political scientist Michael Lipsky in 1969. The idea is that some government services depend so much on the judgment and discretion of people on the ground that it’s hard to evaluate their work or hold them accountable. Teaching is one of those fields; policing is another.

In the world of law enforcement, dash cams and bodycams have changed the equation by providing a clear record of police officers’ interactions with the public, for good or ill. No doubt this has spurred all manner of questions and challenges, such as when to release footage, how to interpret it, and what is admissible in court. Bodycam mandates have garnered some support along with serious concerns about privacy and reliability. But there’s little doubt that police brutality and misconduct face greater scrutiny now than in the past.

So why not bring the same line of thinking into public schools? Put cameras and microphones in every classroom. Turn them on and keep them on. Send the recordings to the cloud and let machine learning do its thing (with strict privacy and security protocols in place, of course). If AI already can differentiate between good and bad questions, surely it can tell principals or department chairs if a teacher starts instruction late and ends it early, or shows movies every Friday, or allows kids to roam the hallways, or makes no effort to stop them from cheating on tests. If such technology could stop the most egregious forms of bad teaching, it might provide a significant boost to student achievement.

Alas, given education politics, that will probably remain just one wonk’s dream. In the meantime, let’s use AI to help as many motivated teachers as possible go from good to great.

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.

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Tackling “Our Worst Subject” Requires New Approaches—and Better Data https://www.educationnext.org/tackling-our-worst-subject-requires-new-approaches-and-better-data-history-civics/ Tue, 18 Jun 2024 09:00:19 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718182 Infrequent national testing in history and civics, limited state results hamper progress

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Image of an American flag on a pole with frayed ends

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Martin R. West

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

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

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Why Some Charters Care Less About Learning https://www.educationnext.org/why-some-charters-care-less-about-learning/ Thu, 13 Jun 2024 09:09:33 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718167 Urban charter schools have shifted their mission from excellence to social justice

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Education Next senior editor Paul E. Peterson recently spoke with Steven Wilson, senior fellow at the Center on Reinventing Public Education and a founder of the Ascend Learning charter-school network, about how some urban charters have changed their educational mission.

Paul Peterson: The tentative title of your forthcoming book is The Lost Decade. We had school closures for a year or two. Why do you say a “lost decade”?

Steven Wilson: I would point to a change in what schools in the reform movement are driving toward. For a long time, the essence of urban charters in the KIPP mold was to do whatever it takes to advance student achievement—to attend to what was called the 101 percent solution, because there’s no silver bullet for raising achievement. Internally, the test for every decision in the network or the school was “Does this advance student achievement?”

But now, that has really changed, as what I would call social-justice education has begun to substitute for the focus on an academic education. The new test of decisions is to make them as anti-racist as possible. So, in the largest sense, academics are less of a focus, and the new focus is on social justice.

Photo of Steven Wilson
Steven Wilson

You mentioned that everything was done with student achievement in mind. At Ascend Learning and other schools like it, what were you doing to maximize student learning?

The essence is an operating system that was much more favorable to student achievement than district schools. That operating system is the charter bargain. In starting a charter school, you have a degree of authority and autonomy to do things that really matter, like being able to hire and fire the faculty of your choice, being able to choose the curriculum that works best, control your budget—all things which principals in traditional, large urban schools have relatively little control over. The charter bargain was this fundamental change in the operating system on which we could build good schools.

But then you need an effective program, and that was a much more rigorous curriculum, enormous attention to who was in the classroom, an outsized investment in teacher professional development, a degree of internal accountability, frequent assessment, unalloyed conviction that testing matters and is our guide to whether students are actually learning—all of those things.

These schools, beginning with KIPP, put a focus on having an orderly, engaging classroom where students can achieve a little bit of academic success reliably every period. And those little successes add up academically, but also in terms of student motivation and commitment to the learning project. Those were some of the big drivers.

Given the success story, why is there a change developing within this very sector? Is it being forced upon them by some kind of external pressures, or is this coming from within the charter sector?

No, it’s not coming from within so much as from new employees. If we think back to 2008 when Teach for America was at its peak of popularity, 11% of the graduating class of Yale applied. Teach for America was thought of as a very sexy, exciting thing to do. Well, that changed. It began with a change in the culture on campus, a turning away from a liberal education. There was a new progressive left that emerged that was wary of traditional liberal arts commitments. The idea of exposing students to multiple competing points of view to have them spar with different ideas shifted.

Now, the focus was on eradicating racism, which was identified as the cause of the disparities in educational outcomes. That’s a very different premise. In the previous premise, the cause of the disparities that everybody laments and views as intolerable is that they’re getting a bad quality education. The new school of thought was that the cause of the disparities was racism. This gathered further steam, of course, with the murder of George Floyd and the racial reckoning, when the ideas of Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo took on enormous force, both on campus and in these networks. And those ideas are in very substantial tension with the traditional commitments of no-excuses schooling.

Allegedly racist dimensions included things that we would take as absolutely ordinary, if not admirable: the notion of excellence, urgency, objectivity—all those things were now deemed to be symptoms of white supremacy culture.

I’m aware of this argument, and I know that it’s being articulated on college campuses. But how does it penetrate into charter schools?

It penetrates very deeply. This list of supposed characteristics of white supremacist culture are in circulation, both in elite higher ed institutions like Harvard, but also in community colleges. In New York City, educators were trained in that very same dictate. So it’s very pervasive. And when you introduce that into these kinds of high-performing school networks, you can imagine it introduced a tremendous amount of rancor, because long-standing staff members did not conceive of themselves as racist. They had extraordinary results in their own classrooms, in the schools that they ran as principals, but suddenly they were being called out as effectively racist.

I want to be careful. Equity is a very, very good thing. But that’s what we all thought we were doing. We were advancing equity by offering children an exceptional education. And the results were stunning. KIPP students who attended both a KIPP middle school and a KIPP high school were achieving four-year college graduation rates just about equal to white non-disadvantaged students. Really a remarkable record.

Is there evidence that these schools have in fact become not as effective? Do we see anything in terms of student achievement that suggests this is all that harmful?

What we are beginning to see anecdotally is that very high-flying, no-excuses schools are starting to turn in results that have often plummeted to the level of the surrounding district. You might say, “Well, they had closures; there was Covid.” But why would they have fallen so much more than the school systems that they compete with? Both institutions suffered from school closures and the other pandemic effects.

Let’s turn to the future. You say in the tentative subtitle of your book “returning to the fight for school reform.” Returning sounds optimistic. You are saying we can return?

Yes. It will take time to turn back to a focus on excellent academics. A lot of people of all kinds of ideological predispositions are beginning to question what has happened. We can say all children, not just the privileged, should have a super engaging liberal arts education where they grapple with different ideas, competing ideas, other cultures—that is the most stimulating place you could possibly be. That’s the classroom you want to be in. We can absolutely return to that. And that is, I think, what we need to do.

This is an edited excerpt from an Education Exchange podcast.

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

Education Next. (2024). Why Some Charters Care Less About Learning. Education Next, 24(3), 83-84.

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Most Innovation Efforts Won’t Transform K–12 Education https://www.educationnext.org/most-innovation-efforts-wont-transform-k-12-education/ Wed, 05 Jun 2024 09:00:12 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718304 Here’s what leaders should do instead

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Students study green crabs up close in New London, Connecticut, with the New England Science and Sailing Foundation’s travel program.
Families’ desire for unconventional learning experiences can nudge school leaders toward more innovative educational offerings, like New England Science and Sailing Foundation’s field programs in Connecticut.

Calls to transform U.S. K–12 schools grow more pressing each day. Yet the complex web of relationships and expectations that shape most schools—referred to in innovation theory as their value networks—create formidable barriers to change. These networks, which for public schools typically include families, unions, higher education, and state and federal agencies, dictate what schools must prioritize to keep seats filled, funds flowing, and doors open. But those priorities simultaneously make innovation a challenge. The schools of the future that our society needs won’t come from transforming our existing schools. They’ll have to come through launching new versions of schooling from new value networks.

 

The mechanisms of value network resistance

The most innovative approaches to schooling aren’t compatible with the processes and priorities of conventional schooling. At the frontier of innovation, new models are pioneering practices such as mastery-based learning, self-paced blended learning, learning through projects and real-world experiences rather than coursework, and modular learning ecosystems. These practices challenge many of the basic assumptions of conventional schooling: that grade levels should be based on age, that schools should be open 180 days a year, that credit for learning should accrue on a semester-based calendar, that learning happens primarily in classrooms through teacher-directed instruction, and that test scores determine potential. In short, the most transformative new models of schooling entail a massive reevaluation of how schools operate, how teachers teach, and the priorities schools pursue.

Unfortunately, efforts to rethink the basic assumptions of conventional education consistently fail in established schools because strong forces within those schools’ value networks generate pushback.

Most parents made it through conventional schooling themselves—so when they consider what’s best for their kids, the devil they know is better than the one they don’t. Most kids have learned to “get by” in conventional schools—so they don’t want the rules changed on them mid-game. Most teachers, administrators, and staff have spent years to decades honing their expertise within the conventional system—so, for very rational reasons, they favor efforts to improve that system over efforts to reinvent it. Teacher preparation programs see most of their graduates taking jobs at conventional schools—so their programs center on preparation for conventional settings. Most policymakers and education reformers have spent significant political capital trying to improve conventional schools—so they aren’t ready to call their efforts a loss.

All of these groups will voice support for K–12 innovation. But when innovation means upending conventional practices and rethinking core priorities, nominal supporters become sources of resistance.

 

The role of value networks in fostering innovation

When education thought leaders talk about new models of schooling, they often focus on the influence of visionary leaders, engaging programs, or a guiding philosophy. But look deeper and you’ll find that successful new models of schooling emerge from distinctive value networks.

In 2010, Nathan Gorsch was an assistant principal at a conventional high school in Northeast Colorado Springs. By most standard metrics—academics, graduation rates, athletics, etc.—the school where he worked was successful. But he’d noticed that many learners were significantly disengaged as they went through the day-to-day of school. Eager for an opportunity to create something different, Gorsch became convinced that he couldn’t effect change from within the conventional school where he worked. Instead, in 2014 he became the principal of the district’s online school—a program serving students and families who wanted or needed something unconventional.

Gorsch then pitched to his superintendent the idea of growing that school into a blended-learning program focused on learner engagement. With the district’s support, he and a small team of teachers took advantage of the flexibility afforded to an online school and launched a pilot in 2015. That program evolved and grew over time, honing its ability to support students’ success with its flexible online curriculum while expanding its interest-based in-person electives. Today, Village High School has approximately as many students on its waiting list as it has on its roster.

Around the same time that Gorsch was launching his pilot in Colorado, educators in Massachusetts were on the verge of creating another unconventional program. At that time, Rachel Babcock and Josh Charpentier led alternative education within Plymouth Public Schools. After a careful look at their track record at getting students on a path to academic and life success, they faced a stark reality. A large proportion of their students were slipping through the cracks. While wrestling with this problem, they concluded, as Babcock notes, that rethinking their approach to meeting the needs of their students “was really hard to do in a district where they’re always trying to apply the same policies to every student.”

With the support of their district, Babcock and Charpentier went on to create Map Academy, a charter school that leverages competency-based progression, asynchronous instruction, and blended learning to tailor education to students’ individual needs. The model is a lifeline for students whose lives don’t conform to the rigid schedules, calendars, and due dates of conventional schools. It’s also a model that creates more bandwidth for educators to build relationships with their students. Today, Map operates at maximum capacity, with many students on a waiting list.

Photo of Village High School
Nathan Gorsch’s observation that some conventional high school students were not engaged in their coursework prompted him to start a more engaging blended-learning experiment that eventually evolved into Village High School in Colorado Springs.

The shape of new value networks

As we’ve studied programs like Village High School and Map Academy at the Clayton Christensen Institute, we’ve identified key value network features that give rise to unconventional models of schooling.

First, new models of schooling need to start with a clean slate. Realistically, established schools don’t change their value networks because a school’s value network is the lifeblood of that school: the families who volunteer and vote, the teachers who keep classrooms humming, and the state agencies that set the rules and provide the funding. No rational leader of a conventional school is going to dismiss the existing value network and try to build a new one. Doing so will either cripple the school or get the leader fired. It’s only in very rare instances—often in small school systems facing poignant failure—that a whole value network shifts on its own. Hence, you need to create a new school that can assemble a new value network from the ground up.

Second, new models need to start off serving what I refer to as “frontier” students and families. In some cases, these are students who have dropped out of conventional schooling because their lives don’t conform to its norms, rules, and expectations. They may need flexibility in scheduling or pacing—such as students with major medical challenges, students who struggle with school social dynamics, or students pursuing intensive interests outside of school. Some are in families that have a very different notion of what schooling should be—often valuing small learning communities, self-directed projects, family-centered education, entrepreneurship, or travel over conventional coursework. In all cases, these students are looking for something different, not something better. They willingly give up sports programs, honors and AP tracks, traditional electives and extracurriculars, and the campus social scene to get an education they want or need.

Third, new school models need autonomy from the policies, administrative hierarchies, and metrics that state agencies and districts set up for conventional schools. This is why many innovative new school models today—such as Acton Academies, Wildflower Schools, KaiPod Learning, and Colossal Academy—operate in the private microschooling space, where most policies created for conventional schools don’t apply.

Within public education, charter schooling can be an avenue to gain autonomy from district policies and administrative structures. Realistically, though, any charter school that must prove to its state and its authorizer that it offers a high-quality version of conventional schooling is still locked into a conventional value network. But some charter schools can find exemptions from the state policies created for conventional schools by being classified as alternative schools or virtual schools.

Similarly, school districts can often secure degrees of autonomy from conventional value networks by creating virtual schools, hybrid homeschools, alternative schools, or career and technical education (CTE) programs. States often give these categories of schools different rules to follow, waiving conventional seat time and attendance requirements and allowing alternative metrics of success. Nonetheless, these schools and programs must also have district-level autonomy over decisions about budgeting, curriculum, scheduling, staffing, and success metrics.

 

Stakeholder roles in building new value networks

Our research on innovative schools also brings to light the roles that various education stakeholders can play in creating the value networks where new models of schooling will emerge and expand.

At districts, efforts to transform education should center on launching skunkworks programs. These will not be shiny new magnet schools. Rather, they will be virtual schools, alternative schools, hybrid homeschooling programs, or CTE programs. Their aim will be to develop new approaches for serving frontier students. Unfortunately, effective district leaders who are highly attuned to the priorities of their district’s overall value networks tend to focus their time and energy on conventional schools and treat their virtual, alternative, and CTE programs as mere stop-gaps. For districts to become vehicles for reinventing schooling, more leaders will need to adopt a dual transformation approach—maintaining and improving their conventional schools while simultaneously putting resources and energy into launching and evolving unconventional models of schooling. Additionally, they will need to allow these models to scale as they attract more students and educators—potentially taking over wings of their conventional campuses—rather than capping their growth or trying to fold them into conventional schools.

State leaders can create favorable funding and policy contexts to support new value networks. As mentioned earlier, new models of schooling spring up in many states under the policies created for virtual schooling, alternative education, independent study, and career and technical education. Yet far too often, these policies still keep unconventional schools tied to conventional practices—for example, by mandating on-site instructional minutes or requiring credit hours as the currency for gauging learning. Instead of dictating the resources schools must use and the processes they must follow, states should work with these new models of schooling to set quality standards aligned with the outcomes they aim to deliver for frontier students. The freedoms afforded by education savings accounts (ESAs) present an another way to encourage new value networks. To be clear, not all students using ESA dollars will be “frontier” learners, and not all schools accepting ESA funding will break the conventional mold. But ESAs do create conditions where new models of schooling such as private microschools can emerge.

Private philanthropies could become a major catalyst for the value networks that support new models of schooling. First, they could make more grants to schools and programs created specifically for serving frontier students. Second, they can rethink their metrics for success to give more weight to the alternative value propositions that unconventional schools offer. Third, they could spur the growth of new models of schooling by incentivizing them to evolve into attractive options for mainstream students.

If entrepreneurs want to help transform education, they need to be judicious about where they get their investment dollars and their sources of revenue. Many entrepreneurs sell their investors on a story of how their cutting-edge products or services will disrupt conventional schooling. Yet when those investors then expect a clear and rapid path to growth, they steer the startups they fund toward the known and measurable market—selling turnkey products and services to conventional schools. Inevitably, choosing to play in the conventional value network shapes the company more than the company reshapes schooling. Only companies with funders that can patiently and enthusiastically serve the small and nascent value networks of nonconventional schools have the potential to help transform education.

For educators and parents frustrated with conventional schooling, it might be time to push your district to launch the kind of program described above. If that path proves untenable, you might be able to find what you’re looking for in a virtual charter school or regional alternative school. If neither of these paths offer worthwhile options, it might be time to join the private microschooling movement and appeal to your state to create an education savings account program to fund the private options you’re looking for.

 

Inventing the future of K–12 schooling

Reform and innovation within existing schools is important. But in the end, that work can only lead to marginal improvements in those schools, not the dramatic transformation of schooling needed for our rapidly changing world. If we really want to reimagine or reinvent education, we need a parallel approach. We need to build new schools and programs with their own distinct value networks. With the right support, these unconventional options will evolve over time to become attractive alternatives to conventional schooling for a growing number of students, families, and educators.

The schools of the future that American society has long sought are here today. They just live in niches and pockets at the edges of the K–12 landscape. For these schooling options to grow, evolve, and become compelling mainstream alternatives to conventional schooling, we need more administrators, policymakers, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, educators, and parents to escape the gravitational pull of conventional education and its value network. It’s time to establish the value networks that can foster new models of education.

Thomas Arnett is a senior research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute.

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Making the Case for Student Debate Leagues https://www.educationnext.org/making-case-for-student-debate-leagues-boston/ Tue, 04 Jun 2024 09:00:07 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718194 Boston youths hone skills in public speaking, critical thinking, and communication

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Debate judges Yerim Lee, Sharon Lee, and Andrew Abrego take notes as students from Josiah Quincy Upper School and Neighborhood House Charter School square off in a championship qualifying debate in Boston.
Debate judges Yerim Lee, Sharon Lee, and Andrew Abrego take notes as students from Josiah Quincy Upper School and Neighborhood House Charter School square off in a championship qualifying debate in Boston.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Policy debate teams are guided by coaches who are often debate league alumni, experienced college debaters, or both. Students from Boston Green Academy, with coaches Elise Green and Erica Watson, listen to mentor Jared Aimone share note-taking tips at debate practice.
Policy debate teams are guided by coaches who are often debate league alumni, experienced college debaters, or both. Students from Boston Green Academy, with coaches Elise Green and Erica Watson, listen to mentor Jared Aimone share note-taking tips at debate practice.

Inclusive Debate Culture

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

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

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

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

Boston Latin Academy student Rinji Sherpa delivers a speech while teammate Adriana Carvajal finds evidence to support his arguments during a live debate.
Boston Latin Academy student Rinji Sherpa delivers a speech while teammate Adriana Carvajal finds evidence to support his arguments during a live debate.

New Possibilities

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

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

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

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

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

Aisha Mohamed, a novice-level debater with Josiah Quincy Upper School, delivers her opening speech at the tournament, reading from prepared evidence.
Aisha Mohamed, a novice-level debater with Josiah Quincy Upper School, delivers her opening speech at the tournament, reading from prepared evidence.

Learning through Competition

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BDL includes a Spanish-only division called Debate en Español. Everett High School, north of Boston, fields a Spanish-language team coached by Ruth Cardona-Suarez. Students Thalia Patino Molano and Tiffany Marquina Acosta were later crowned city champions.
BDL includes a Spanish-only division called Debate en Español. Everett High School, north of Boston, fields a Spanish-language team coached by Ruth Cardona-Suarez. Students Thalia Patino Molano and Tiffany Marquina Acosta were later crowned city champions.

Feedback and Encouragement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coaching with Care and Support

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Senior Brandon Ren and sophomore Alana Laforest of Boston Latin Academy earned top speaker awards. Brandon plans to attend UMass Amherst next fall.
Senior Brandon Ren and sophomore Alana Laforest of Boston Latin Academy earned top speaker awards. Brandon plans to attend UMass Amherst next fall.

Transferable Skills and Knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflecting with Peers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Fun Fact: Young Sheldon Provides Insight into Parenting Bright Children https://www.educationnext.org/fun-fact-young-sheldon-provides-insight-into-parenting-bright-children-gifted-education/ Thu, 30 May 2024 09:00:00 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718288 Ending its run on CBS, the heartwarming family sitcom gave a window into gifted education

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Iain Armitage portrayed young Sheldon Cooper for seven seasons, a role originally popularized by Jim Parsons on the sitcom The Big Bang Theory (2007–19).
Iain Armitage portrayed young Sheldon Cooper for seven seasons, a role originally popularized by Jim Parsons on the sitcom The Big Bang Theory (2007–19).

The best part about writing an essay on the TV series Young Sheldon was that it gave me the excuse to say “I’m working!” whenever anyone walked into the family room. It’s a dream assignment for an academic who is also a huge pop-culture junkie. “Bazinga” indeed!

However, the worst part was that the show ran for seven seasons and 141 episodes when the finale aired on May 16, a longevity of which I was blissfully unaware when accepting the invitation. That made for a lot of streaming over the past couple months, about 65 hours’ worth. (To prove I watched them all: Roadhouse, “He has a learner’s permit and his own phone line,” Joy of Painting, “Wow, this 27-inch TV is huge,” 90210). Our Young Sheldon would never have made such a miscalculation.

The Boy Genius

The main character is Sheldon Cooper, a character first introduced during the sitcom The Big Bang Theory (2007–19). As an adult, Sheldon is a theoretical physicist at Caltech. The actor Jim Parsons plays Sheldon on TBBT and narrates Young Sheldon (often unreliably). Iain Armitage plays the younger Sheldon.

As an adult, Sheldon often mockingly jokes about his family’s (and everyone else’s) lack of intellect. But TBBT ends with him expressing genuine appreciation for his family and friends’ support. Young Sheldon attempts to present how that appreciation developed.

The show takes us back to his childhood in the small town of Medford in East Texas, a few hours outside of Dallas. Sheldon lives with his dad, George, a high school football coach; his mom, Mary, a homemaker who initially works part-time at her church; Georgie, Sheldon’s older brother; and Missy, Sheldon’s twin sister. Sheldon’s maternal grandmother, Meemaw (played masterfully by Annie Potts), lives a couple houses down the street.

As the series opens in 1989, Sheldon is starting high school as a nine-year-old, which is awkward for Georgie, who is also starting 9th grade. Over the course of the series, Sheldon graduates early from high school, graduates early from a local university, and by the end is about to depart for graduate school at the age of 14.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the popularity of both shows, which were among the 10 highest-rated programs for most of their combined 19 seasons. It’s not hard to see why: sharp writing, good character development, first-rate acting, and clever use of celebrity cameos and featured players all make for a fun viewing experience. The major themes are also highly relatable, ranging from family dynamics and friendships to the tensions between science and religion and between academics and athletics.

I had not been a regular viewer of Young Sheldon or The Big Bang Theory. I enjoyed TBBT but only dipped in and out during its last seasons. I surely missed lots of inside jokes that regular viewers of both shows appreciated. And although I have pages and pages of notes, I will stick to my assigned task: exploring whether Young Sheldon accurately portrays the issues faced by advanced students and their families.

What the Show Gets Right

Young Sheldon captures many of the characteristics and experiences of highly advanced children. Sheldon has very high expectations for his academic performance and struggles with failure (getting a “poor grade,” a spectacularly unsuccessful college project, ignoring sage advice from his professors on applying to summer programs). He tends to be full of himself and doesn’t react well to perceived slights. He abhors group work (as do his college classmates!), and he goes out of his way to avoid boredom. He is more than a little obsessive-compulsive. Sheldon loves his family, if often struggling to show it. His frenemy Paige, another young genius, rebels against the high expectations of others, struggles with her parents’ divorce, and admits to pretending not to be smart in order to be more popular. These are not atypical traits of many smart people—among both children and adults!

I loved that the writers resisted pathologizing Sheldon’s weirdness. Other shows with genius characters tend to succumb to the temptation to depict them as being on the spectrum or having debilitating personality disorders. But that is not Sheldon Lee Cooper. Sure, he is odd and different, but how could someone highly intelligent not appear weird to most other people? I’m reminded of a reception at an academic conference where I noticed a friend standing off by himself. I asked if he was OK. He replied that he was doing great, noting with a sweep of his hand, “It’s great to be in a room where I’m not the quirkiest person.”

A good example of how the writers treat his weirdness is an exchange with Mr. Lundy, the drama teacher. Sheldon declares a passion for acting, despite never having attempted it. The teacher says, “Well, I like that confidence,” to which Sheldon replies, “Thanks, most people find it off-putting.”

That exchange takes on added importance when it becomes clear that Sheldon actually is a good singer and dancer, requiring little practice. But as he prepares to star in the school musical, his anxiety prevents him from taking the stage. That doesn’t make him a freak; it makes him human. He knows what he’s like and how people view him. He just doesn’t care most of the time. Mr. Lundy observes, “You’re an odd little boy, but you make it work” (S1, Ep16). It’s worth noting that Sheldon reacts by nodding in appreciation.

Over time Sheldon becomes humbler in different contexts and gradually more self-aware. He’s helped along by his family, like when Meemaw notes, “It’s great to have knowledge, but you don’t have to show it off all the time” (S4, Ep2). In those situations, Sheldon is mildly taken aback but tends to learn from them. Especially in later seasons, he is often shown to be adaptable, shivering in revulsion during—but tolerating—situations that would have made him flee screaming (literally!) at the beginning of the series. The older Sheldon cares more and adjusts to each person’s expectations—not always successfully, but he makes the effort.

One of my favorite scenes in the series is when he asks one of his professors, the perpetually annoyed Dr. Linkletter, to help him understand sarcasm (S6, Ep15). It plays like a modern version of “Who’s on first?”, with Sheldon struggling to figure out which comments are sincere and which are sarcastic. (Everything Dr. Linkletter says is dripping with sarcasm.) Sheldon gets that sarcasm exists, he knows he struggles to pick up on it, and he tries to learn how to be sarcastic. He’s just not good at it. And that’s OK! We all have our struggles, and I enjoyed seeing the portrayal of a super-smart child that resists making him into either a superhero or super-weirdo.

One Thing That Didn’t Work . . . and One that Hit Close to Home

One unrealistic development was the school district’s willingness to accelerate Sheldon from elementary school to high school, then to let him graduate early to enter college. Such grade skipping is a radical, if sometimes necessary, intervention. I liked how the decisions at various points reflected reasonable parent concerns (Is he emotionally ready for this? Are we?). But let’s be frank: How many districts are willing to entertain such big steps and to openly facilitate them? Very few, in my experience.

The show actually reinforces this point throughout its run. In each season, there is at least one situation in which Sheldon’s parents wrestle with a major decision about their son’s future. The entire first season is about whether Sheldon can adjust to high school as a nine-year-old, with Mary especially concerned about him making friends and being safe. The family struggles with the decision to graduate high school early, start college early, and go overseas for a summer physics program. In real life, the lack of public-school or low-cost services for advanced students forces families to make difficult decisions with little preparation and few resources. If Sheldon’s K–12 educators had not been so oddly willing to radically accelerate him, the family’s education struggles would have been even more severe. Why do we make advanced education so hard for American families?

An aspect of Sheldon’s schooling that feels very accurate is the reaction of his high school teachers to both his presence and early departure for college. The teachers’ feelings are exaggerated and played for laughs—and Sheldon’s behavior toward them is highly offensive—but those scenes didn’t sit well with me. When I was an elementary school teacher, we had a couple extremely smart students, and the comments in the teachers’ lounge about them were often mocking and lacking in empathy. The students were not that weird; compared to Sheldon and Paige, they were quite normal! But they were just different enough—and just smart enough—that sometimes they were treated like aliens. The exasperated attitude of Sheldon’s teachers (both in high school and at college!) was a sharp reminder that most educators have little to no training in advanced education or the needs of advanced students. This lack of preparation often leads to confusion and miscommunication among educators, students, and parents. Why do we make advanced education so hard for American educators?

At its heart, Young Sheldon was a show about the Cooper family: Missy (Raegan Revord), Mary (Zoe Perry), George (Lance Barber), Sheldon (Iain Armitage), Meemaw (Annie Potts), Georgie (Montana Jordan), and Mandy (Emily Osment).
At its heart, Young Sheldon was a show about the Cooper family: Missy (Raegan Revord), Mary (Zoe Perry), George (Lance Barber), Sheldon (Iain Armitage), Meemaw (Annie Potts), Georgie (Montana Jordan), and Mandy (Emily Osment).

Hot Take: The Show Should Be Called The Cooper Family

In full disclosure, I didn’t like the show initially. Working through the first few episodes, the repetitive plots and stereotypical characters felt like caricatures. A lot of the “insights” in those early episodes started to feel like “laugh at the nerd” or “pity the awkward genius” tropes that make it hard for me to sit through other shows with very smart characters.

But something changes in the middle of that first season. The focus shifts from the travails of an annoying genius to the adventures of a family with lots of quirky members, one of whom happens to be quite smart. That’s when the series starts to click and become both multidimensional and more entertaining.

Parenting a highly precocious child is rarely easy, and the show does a good job noting the many frustrations faced by the children themselves, their parents, their siblings, their educators, and even members of their community (like Pastor Jeff). Sibling jealousy! Protecting your child from being exploited! The sacrifices a family makes for the benefit of one child! These are all common concerns in families with advanced students.

With the shift to family dynamics, fully realized by the middle of season four, the standard sitcom formula (this thing happens, and here’s how people react) becomes more complex. Scenarios still occasionally center on Sheldon, but plot lines increasingly address how Sheldon reacts to the problems of others. That is, it becomes a fuller portrait of how families actually work. Missy’s teenage struggles bother Sheldon, and he and the other family members struggle to be supportive. His parents’ relationship issues bug him and his siblings, but they can’t figure out how to react, or if they should react at all. Sheldon’s superior intelligence does not give him special insights into these common problems because he has never experienced them before. That feels accurate to me, too.

Not that Sheldon’s parents always get it right. They often hold him to lower standards than he holds for himself. An early attempt to send him to a boarding school for advanced students falls apart far too soon, yet he shows that he can handle attending college. He has opportunities to attend Caltech and other top-tier universities on free rides, yet his parents prefer that he study at the fictional East Texas Tech. In part because they don’t understand his abilities, and in part because they overestimate his social and emotional fragility, they make several important decisions that are rather ill-advised. As a parent of bright children, this resonates. The academic in me always advises people to “let them fly!” while the parent in me is thinking, “but not too far, too fast!” This essential tension is depicted with compassion throughout the series.

In the End, It’s All about Wisdom

Much of the show can be summarized by this comment about Sheldon in Season 2: “How can he be so smart and so clueless at the same time?” This is a common observation about highly talented children, and it reflects the difference between intelligence and wisdom. A child may be intellectually brilliant, but their lack of experience often slaps them on the head as they barrel through life.

From a psychological perspective, this is to be expected. Parents have decades of hard-earned wisdom that children simply do not have. As the series progresses, Sheldon’s family, friends, and mentors help him gain the context and experiences that gradually make one wise. They also do it for Georgie and Missy—and Meemaw often does it for George and Mary—which makes sense.

I am going to miss the Cooper family, and not just because I spent nearly every day with them over the past two months. Young Sheldon provides an accurate depiction of the struggles of a bright child and the family dynamics that impact and are impacted by that child. It also reminds us that a key goal of parenting and families is to help each other become wiser about interacting with the world. It’s hard to imagine a television show that depicts this more accurately, and with such heart.

Jonathan Plucker is a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education and a past-president of the National Association for Gifted Children. He appreciates the feedback of Amalia Pompe, Kathleen Plucker, and the editors on an earlier version of this essay.

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Building Better Citizens Begins in the Classroom https://www.educationnext.org/building-better-citizens-begins-in-the-classroom/ Tue, 28 May 2024 09:01:42 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718099 For civics to matter again, students must actively engage with their own constitutional rights

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Illustration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, has been called “a sputnik moment for an ambitious revival of civics instruction.”
The storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, has been called “a sputnik moment for an ambitious revival of civics instruction.”

Scintillating Questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Former Bremerton High School assistant football coach Joe Kennedy takes a knee in front of the U.S. Supreme Court after his legal case, Kennedy vs. Bremerton School District, was argued before the court on April 25, 2022 in Washington, DC.
Joseph Kennedy, a high school football coach who lost his job for repeatedly praying at midfield following games, kneels in prayer in front of the United States Supreme Court building in Washington, D.C. The court found in favor of Kennedy’s free-exercise rights in 2022.

Additional Benefits

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

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

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

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

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

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

Siblings Mary Beth Tinker and John Tinker protested the Vietnam War in 1965 by wearing black armbands at their Iowa school, a free-speech challenge that went to the Supreme Court.
Siblings Mary Beth Tinker and John Tinker protested the Vietnam War in 1965 by wearing black armbands at their Iowa school, a free-speech challenge that went to the Supreme Court.

Going Further

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

A Presidential Commission?

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

When three brothers from Ardmore, Oklahoma, wore Black Lives Matter shirts to school in 2021, two were disciplined for displaying “political statements.”
When three brothers from Ardmore, Oklahoma, wore Black Lives Matter shirts to school in 2021, two were disciplined for displaying “political statements.”

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

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

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

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

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

Chief Justice John Roberts’s 2019 report on the federal judiciary noted judges’ unique role in promoting civic education but lamented how citizens now “take democracy for granted.”
Chief Justice John Roberts’s 2019 report on the federal judiciary noted judges’ unique role in promoting civic education but lamented how citizens now “take democracy for granted.”

Firsthand Experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How to Be the Next Emily Hanford https://www.educationnext.org/how-to-be-the-next-emily-hanford/ Tue, 21 May 2024 05:01:52 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718023 Journalism has driven a generational shift in how reading is taught. Similar stories are waiting to be told.

The post How to Be the Next Emily Hanford appeared first on Education Next.

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The journalism of Emily Hanford brought widespread attention to a regressive shift in how reading is taught and has helped turn the tide back to evidence- based instruction.
The journalism of Emily Hanford brought widespread attention to a regressive shift in how reading is taught and has helped turn the tide back to evidence- based instruction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hiding in Plain Sight

Cover of "Why Johnny Can't Read and what you can do about it" by Rudolf Flesch
Flesch’s 1955 book was an early salvo in the U.S. “reading wars,” critiquing the look-say method.

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

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

Cover of "A Nation At Risk"
The seminal 1983 report revealed the functional illiteracy of millions of Americans.

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

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

Poster of "Waiting for Superman"
When the problems of education attain popular notoriety, as with the film Waiting for Superman, poor teaching is often unquestioningly identified as the culprit.

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

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

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

Illustration
The impact of Hanford’s reporting can be attributed in part to the classroom access that allowed her to observe instructional practices. Journalists may find other stories from such observations.

Finding the Next Sold a Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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