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

Isenberg, E., Max, J., Gleason, P., and Deutsch, J. (2022). Estimating the “Effective Teaching Gap” – Students experience unequal outcomes, but mostly equal access to high-quality instruction. Education Next, 22(4), 60-65.

Four men stepped toward me as I stood, five feet tall, with a stack of books in my arms and papers in my hand, my back to a stage in a middle-school theater in Falls Church, Virginia, a western suburb of Washington, D.C.

“Are you trying to intimidate me?” I asked, watching the men inch closer to me, a Muslim single mother from India. “What is this?”

The men—all of them white—were official security personnel for our local school district, Fairfax County Public Schools—and their presence here felt to me like a show of force on the part of the school board, whose members were seated on an elevated dais in front of the stage. I had just stood before the mostly white school board members, speaker number nine in the public-participation portion of the board’s meeting on March 10, 2022.

In my comments, I had criticized the school board for its persistent efforts to change the admissions process at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. The school, ranked by U.S. News and World Report as the No. 1 high school in the country, had for years admitted students through a merit-based and race-blind process. But in December 2020, the Fairfax County Public Schools board and superintendent, despite the pleas of many parents, had adopted an admissions policy aimed at increasing the representation of certain racial and ethnic groups at “TJ,” as it is known.

The new process eliminated the admissions test, guaranteed seats for 1.5 percent of each middle school’s 8th-grade class, and considered factors such as attendance at a middle school previously underrepresented at TJ. The aim was to increase the number of Black and Hispanic students in the student body; that aim was achieved, but only with a dramatic reduction in the number of Asian American students admitted. For the Class of 2025, assembled under the new standards, Asian students made up 54 percent of admitted students, in contrast to 73 percent of students admitted to the Class of 2024 under the old rules.

On February 25, 2022, a federal judge had ruled that the new admissions policy was illegal, unfair, and discriminatory against Asian students. But not long after the ruling was announced, the Fairfax school board said that it would challenge the decision. We parents had come to the school board meeting to protest the new admissions process.

Suddenly, the immigrant mothers in the first rows of the audience broke out in a chant against the school board. “Racist!” shouted Suparna Dutta, an immigrant mother from India. “Racist!” yelled Norma Margulies, an immigrant from Peru. “Racist!” declared Ying Julia McCaskill, an immigrant from China.

From the back, Robert Rigby, Jr., a Latin teacher who was a member of the local teachers union, yelled “Stunt!” Nearby, Vanessa Hall, a mother who had just started a pro-school-board group with leaders of Fairfax Democrats, joined Rigby’s counter-heckling. A few rows away, Marianne Burke, the local leader of Fairfax Indivisible, an arm of the national progressive organization Indivisible, cheered them on.

As the security officials circled me, the mothers continued to chant, “Racist! Racist! Racist!” Suddenly the board chair, Stella Pekarsky, called a 15-minute recess, and the board members, superintendent, and other officials hurried off stage and out of sight.

Almost seven decades ago, in 1956, white officials in Virginia tried to keep Black students out of certain schools. Now, white officials, hoping to increase the representation of Black and Hispanic students in our most advanced school, were limiting the enrollment of Asian students. In the early 20th century, politician Harry Byrd, the governor of Virginia and later a U.S. senator, led a Democratic Party political machine, the “Byrd Machine,” that dominated Virginia politics for much of the century. In the 1950s, Byrd, an avowed white separatist, led a campaign called the “massive resistance” to oppose the racial integration of public schools. A Richmond law firm, Hunton & Williams, represented the school board in the case of Dorothy E. Davis v. the County School Board of Prince Edward County, Virginia. It became one of the five cases grouped together in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, the 1954 case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled racial segregation in schools violated the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees equal protection under the law.

Today, the firm is Hunton Andrews Kurth, with annual revenues of about $830 million. One of its clients is the Fairfax County School Board. But this time, the discrimination is not against Black students. This time, the law firm and school board are defending a policy that denies seats to Asian students. (Representatives of Hunton Andrews Kurth did not respond to my requests for comment.)

As the mothers rained charges of “Racist!” on the school board at the March 10 meeting, the board’s chief counsel, John Foster, left his seat in a section on the side of the theater for senior staff and scurried onto the stage. Along with the board members and the superintendent, Scott Brabrand, Foster disappeared backstage.

The showdown at that meeting was the climax of a long, painful battle these parents had been waging for almost two years.

A Principal’s “Call to Action”

Over the past 10 years, the school board has made various changes to the admissions process at TJ in an attempt to build a student body that reflects the racial and ethnic population in the county. These efforts have sparked controversy, but none has yielded many more Black and Hispanic students at the school. In the summer of 2020, as racial tensions heated up around the country, the topic of TJ’s racial and ethnic makeup surfaced once again.

On ­­­­Sunday evening, June 7, 2020, 13 days after George Floyd’s murder, Principal Ann Bonitatibus wrote a “call to action” to the students and families of Thomas Jefferson High School. Bonitatibus, who is white, implored TJ’s students and parents to “think of privileges” they might hold “that others may not.” She proposed getting rid of the school’s Colonial mascot, which she called a “symbol that perpetuated racism.” And she pointed out the “equity gap” in TJ admissions, noting that the school then enrolled 32 Black students and 47 Hispanic students—a proportion that did not “reflect the racial composition” of Fairfax County schools. Asian American students made up 70 percent of the student body while they comprised 20 percent of students in the county.

I implore you to think about your own journey and discovery of race and economic advantage in America. My parents never had to teach me about what it means to be white. I never had to worry that someone would look at the color of my skin and think I either may not be smart enough to learn or I should be exceedingly smart in a certain subject. No one has surveilled me in a store while shopping, or locked their cars or front doors out of fear when seeing me in their neighborhood. While I did not come from a family with economic means, the color of my skin has given me privileges that others do not have. Please think of privileges you hold that others may not.

With that email, the principal unwittingly launched a local parents’ movement that would over the next two years help elect a governor and motivate parents nationwide to speak up.

Some people might view efforts to change the TJ admissions process as a way to help disadvantaged students, but we see them as deliberate moves to reduce the number of Asian American students at the school. And the changes proposed in 2020 seemed inspired not just by the strong representation of Asian American students at TJ, but by outright anti-Asian sentiment. Some of the private communications among the board members lend credence to this view.

At home in Fairfax, Virginia, Suparna Dutta read the email. She recalled the difficult journey her father had made in 1947, fleeing war in modern-day Bangladesh with just the clothes on his back as India freed itself from British rule. The 13 colonies that had led the American Revolution against the British had been an inspiration to India’s freedom fighters, and her father had grown up in a village called Hamankardi, walking miles to school. Dutta had arrived in the United States on India’s Independence Day, August 15, 1993, as a graduate student in environmental engineering in Knoxville, Tennessee, with a bag of lentils and $250 borrowed from her father. After falling in love with a colleague at work, she settled in Virginia, quietly raising their daughter and son, a rising sophomore at TJ in the summer of 2020. She had never spoken at a school board meeting or gotten involved in politics. That was about to change.

Across town in McLean, Virginia, another TJ mother, Yuyan Zhou, read the principal’s email. She had survived the brutal Cultural Revolution of her youth, from 1966 through 1976, when Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Tse-Tung waged a bloody purge of the nation’s intellectuals, weaponizing an army of youth into a paramilitary movement called the Red Guard. Children would turn in their parents, teachers, and other adults for questioning Mao’s ideas. One day when Zhou was a girl, her teacher told her to stand in class and, in a moment of public shaming, ordered her to remove her red scarf—a symbol of her status in the Young Pioneers, a youth branch of the Chinese Communist Party. In 1989, Zhou stood in Tiananmen Square, demonstrating against China’s oppressive regime. The next year, she immigrated to the United States.

A member of the TJ Parent Teacher Student Association for eight years, Zhou had organized Lunar New Year celebrations attended by the principal. She was about to get a lot more involved as the parent of two TJ alumni.

The next morning, another TJ mother, Helen Miller, penned a letter to Bonitatibus, telling the principal, “After not sleeping at all last night, I’m hopping mad!!”

The mothers had no idea what was happening behind the scenes.

Hopping Mad

On June 1, 2020, the Fairfax County school district issued a public report on the students admitted to the TJ Class of 2024. In the section on the ethnicity of accepted students, the entry for the number of Black students read “**TS,” which meant “too small for reporting (TS),” a footnote explained. The footnote went on to say: “Those numbers have been included with the Multiracial/Other category. This category [TS] includes students who numbered 10 or fewer.”

On June 7, the day the TJ principal sent her letter to students and parents, a local Democratic leader, Lowell Feld, published an article on his blog, Blue Virginia, which features “Virginia politics from a progressive and Democratic perspective.”

Feld’s blog-post headline read: “As People Across America Protest Racial Inequity, #1 Public High School in the Country (“TJ” in Fairfax, VA) Just Admitted ZERO African Americans.”

The Washington Post’s education reporter, Hannah Natanson, a graduate of Harvard University and the private and pricey Georgetown Day School, tweeted out the false information.

Harry Jackson, a local father who was the first Black student from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, admitted to the U.S. Naval Academy, knew personally the headline was wrong. His son had just been admitted to the TJ Class of 2025, one of six Black students accepted.

Later that day, Blue Virginia published an interview with Atif Qarni, the Virginia education secretary, in which Qarni urged readers to “check out” the language in the 2020 state budget bill aimed at increasing student and staff diversity at the state’s 19 magnet schools, known as Governor’s Schools. A Marine Corps veteran, Qarni was a former social studies teacher who lost two bids for the state legislature.

At 8:19 a.m. the next day, Democratic state senator Scott Surovell wrote to school board member Karen Corbett Sanders, also a Democrat, raising the issue of TJ admissions. “I saw the TJ admissions numbers,” he began. And then he said that the state budget passed that spring contained language requiring each Governor’s School to submit a report to the governor describing its “diversity goals” by October 1 of each year.

He wrote: “I was curious where TJ was on this given that public meetings are required and there is a 10/1 deadline.”

Surovell had taken more than a “curious” interest in TJ. He had been trying to gut the TJ admissions process for years, even arguing that Governor’s Schools should be shut down “if they are unable to adopt more equitable admissions policies.” He told me, “The policies I advocate for benefit everyone. . . . I am not trying to keep anyone out of Thomas Jefferson.” However, in 2018, at his invitation, a retired teacher from Rachel Carson Middle School in Fairfax County Public Schools testified in the Virginia Senate that “certain communities” were “ravenous” about pushing their children to achieve in academics and extracurriculars and that she had taught “many kids who came here from India specifically to attend Carson and TJ.” She asserted that “the parents come here, however they come here, put the kids in Carson—pipeline to TJ.”

Hours after Surovell sent his email to Corbett Sanders, she responded: “Please be assured that I am as angry and disappointed in these numbers as you are.”

Corbett Sanders had just gotten off the phone with superintendent Brabrand and had also had conversations with education secretary Qarni.

A small group of TJ alumni, alumni parents, and activists, including Burke, the leader of Fairfax Indivisible, and Hall, the counter-heckler, circulated the false information about “ZERO” Black admissions to TJ. That summer, some of these parents and alumni spoke at school board meetings to argue that merit-based admissions tests were “racist” and that anyone who promoted them was a racist and a “segregationist.” That summer, alumni activists registered their organization, TJ Alumni Action Group, as a 501(c)4 political lobbying organization. They weaponized the false news of the admissions numbers to push for admissions changes, including a call to “Occupy TJ” and even dismantle the school completely. (When I asked Burke and Hall for comment, Burke did not respond and Hall wrote that she was blocking my email address.)

In the days following the TJ principal’s email, we “hopping mad” parents started talking to each other. The next week, I testified for the first time to my school board, warning them that our school faced a race war fomented by our principal and a few activist alumni. That same night, Dutta spoke to the school board, also for the first time, so nervous she couldn’t figure out how to turn on her camera.

Our group wanted to learn from other parents who had fought the battle over admissions to selective public schools. The parents in New York City were battle-hardened. On June 21, 2020, parents in Fairfax County had their first Zoom call with New York City parent activists. On that call we met Chien Kwok, who is a graduate of Brooklyn Technical High School, one of New York City’s specialized high schools that use a standardized admissions test. He is also cofounder of PLACE NYC—Parent Leaders for Accelerated Curriculum Education in New York City—an organization of mostly Asian immigrant parents. Their efforts started as a private Facebook group that has grown to 2,800 members.

“Be unapologetic,” he said on the Zoom call. “Do not be shamed.”

On June 24, Qarni convened a task force, which included the TJ principal, to examine diversity issues at the Governor’s Schools. He later told The Associated Press that he wanted to eliminate the entrance exam and develop an admissions process that would consider an applicant’s socioeconomic status. (Qarni didn’t respond to my requests for comment on this story.)

Across the country, this dynamic was repeating itself. George Floyd’s killing at the hands of police had sparked a national soul-searching on race. School superintendents, principals, teachers, and board officials were sending missives like Bonitatibus’s, focusing on social justice, race, and racism, while parents, inexperienced in school board politics, were worrying about when the pandemic shutdowns would end and their kids could return to school.

In an August 2020 article, Associated Press reporter Matthew Barakat mentioned the launch of our new organization, Coalition for TJ. That same day, a TJ alumna, Makya Renée Little, then-president of the TJ Alumni Action Group, purchased the domain names coalitionforTJ.org and .com and redirected the domain names to the website of her group. She is now running as a Democratic candidate for the Virginia House of Delegates. (Little and the TJ Alumni Action Group did not respond to requests for comment.)

New Admissions Policy

The Fairfax County events unfolded in the context of nationwide tension over test-based admissions and Black representation at elite schools (see “Exam School Admissions Come under Pressure amid Pandemic,” features, Spring 2021). The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case of alleged anti-Asian discrimination in admissions by Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In New York City, parents continually wage campaigns to keep merit-based admissions at Stuyvesant High School and in the city’s advanced academic programs. In 2021, the Boston school board installed zip code quotas that reduced the number of Asian students at Boston Latin School and two other select-admissions schools. That year, the San Francisco school board replaced merit-based admissions to Lowell High School with a lottery, reducing the number of Asians admitted and inspiring the recent recall of three school board members (see “School Board Shakeup in San Francisco,” features, Summer 2022) and a subsequent return to merit-based admissions.

School board officials, state politicians, and local activists launched a campaign to change admissions to TJ with one clear goal: to increase the number of Black and Hispanic students—even if it meant discriminating against Asian applicants. Our families and students were on the wrong side of brown for the new “equity” warriors.

In a September 2020 Zoom session with students and parents from TJ and the Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School, education secretary Qarni said, “It’s illegal or frowned upon when an athlete uses performance-enhancing drugs to get a leg up. So, when you have a standardized achievement test and you have the luxury of getting a lot of help with tutoring services, and you come from a more well-resourced family, you have a leg up.”

Members of the mostly white school board, the education secretary, and activists called the Coalition for TJ members and TJ students “toxic,” “racist,” and even “white supremacist,” as I later testified to the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties subcommittee of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.

At a virtual town hall on October 7, 2020, Superintendent Brabrand laid out his plans for a new admissions process at TJ. He said he wanted to eliminate the entrance exam, which he characterized as “pay to play,” though he gave no evidence for his allegation that families spent up to $15,000 on test preparation for their kids.

Meanwhile, Asian Americans were being targeted with brutal violence across the country, from New York City to San Francisco.

Despite our protests, in December 2020, the board scrapped TJ’s race-blind, merit-based admissions process and put its new one in place. Henceforth the school would do a “holistic review” of “students whose applications demonstrate enhanced merit” and then offer seats to the 550 “highest-evaluated students.” Admissions criteria would include GPA; a problem-solving essay; “experience factors,” such as whether the applicant was economically disadvantaged, an English language learner, or a special-education student; and a “student portrait sheet” through which applicants would be asked to show they have certain attributes and “21st Century Skills” such as leadership, effective communication skills, problem-solving abilities, creativity, and other qualities. Each public middle school would be guaranteed a number of seats “equal to 1.5% of that school’s 8th grade student population,” presuming that at least that many students apply from a given school.

When I asked school district administrators and officials for comment for this article, Ellen Kennedy, deputy division counsel at Fairfax County Public Schools, wrote in an email to the editors of Education Next: “We find it highly unusual that we are being asked for ‘comment’ on allegations that the writer is simultaneously advancing in active litigation against us. Ms. Nomani is the co-founder and primary spokesperson of a group that has been in litigation with the School Board since early 2021 regarding the Thomas Jefferson High School admissions policy that is the subject of this piece.”

Kennedy wrote that the new admissions policy is “race-blind and gender-blind, and applications are anonymized such that evaluators do not know even the name of any applicants.” She added that my comments about the policy were “inflammatory,” “out of context,” or “disproved,” or that they “remain sharply contested.”

She added: “The policy promotes broader access to the school by guaranteeing seats for the highest-evaluated applicants from every public middle school in the five counties that send students to TJ and taking into account whether the student is economically disadvantaged, an English Language Learner, or has an Individualized Education Plan” for special education services.

Although the new admissions protocols didn’t mention race, the net effect was to increase the number of students from every major racial and ethnic group at the school except Asians, whose numbers fell.

In Fall 2020, board chair Stella Pekarsky wrote in a text message to her fellow board member Abrar Omeish: “The Asians hate us.”

That’s what we had become to them. “The Asians.”

Parents warned board officials they would go down in history for perpetuating the same kind of systemic discrimination condemned in Brown v. Board of Education. The board was sending a perverse message: hard work, study, parental involvement, and discipline aren’t necessarily rewarded and may be trumped by other values. Members of our coalition disagree with this perspective. We believe these values and practices are bedrock foundations for well-functioning schools, well-functioning societies, and well-functioning children.

Pekarsky said in another Fall 2020 text to Omeish that the new admissions process would “kick ou[t] Asians.”

Omeish responded that “there has been an anti asian feel underlying some of this, hate to say it lol.”

She continued: “They’re discriminated against in this process too.”

The Race for Governor

In September 2020, our parent group held protests at the school and voiced our concerns to the school board, the state legislature, and the office of education secretary Qarni. We coordinated with local parents who had organized another new group, Open FCPS, to persuade the school board to open the schools after the pandemic shutdowns.

One morning, as a group of our Coalition for TJ parents, including Dutta, readied to speak to Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, we got bad news. Northam was canceling the meeting. In challenging authority, many of our parents have had to overcome cultural barriers, and their activism came from a place of moral courage. We have faced disparaging references to us as “Asian tiger moms,” and one day I thought: let us embrace our sacred duty as “mama bears” and “papa bears.” Our new moniker was born.

In spring 2021, as Democratic and Republican candidates canvassed to win their parties’ nominations for governor and lieutenant governor, our parents organized debates. None of the Democratic candidates appeared. Coalition for TJ parents asked Terry McAuliffe’s campaign for a meeting. One of his staffers told a coalition member that the campaign had a suggested contribution of $20,000 for a one-hour virtual visit. Our group balked. (Neither Northam nor McAuliffe responded to my request for comment on this story.)

Meanwhile, Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin met with parents, expressing his support for merit-based admissions at TJ. When Youngkin won the Republican nomination, Dutta raised her hand to volunteer to lead an Educators for Youngkin Coalition. She organized webinars, knocked on doors, and introduced the candidate to a crowd of about 500 cheering supporters at his closing campaign stop in Fairfax County.

Past midnight on election night, in Chantilly, Virginia, local parents converged on the Westfields Marriott for the Youngkin campaign’s official watch party. In the ballroom, a DJ pumped out Huey Lewis and the News’ 1985 hit song “The Power of Love” as Dutta grinned from ear to ear. Political commentators declared Youngkin the winner. A cheer broke out.

In the Marriott ballroom, Dutta embraced friends. I did a television interview with Laura Ingraham of Fox News about the parents’ movements. I was wearing medical scrubs to which I’d added the inscription: “Mama Bear Movement.”

Later, Dutta stood in front of the stage, shoulder to shoulder with other parents who felt the school board and school and state education officials had dismissed them since June 2020. She and this new movement of “hopping mad” mama and papa bears had defeated the Woke Army at the ballot box.

“I’m so happy,” she said, grinning.

That week, Democratic political consultant James Carville said “wokeism” had led to the Democratic defeat in Virginia.

Courtroom Showdown

The court battle was still unsettled. Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian public-interest law firm, had filed a lawsuit on behalf of Coalition for TJ families, seeking equal protection under the 14th amendment—the same protection that Black families sought in Brown v. Board of Education.

On Friday, February 25, 2022, at 2:50 p.m., Erin Wilcox, an attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, leading the legal fight, wrote a quick email to the parents of Coalition for TJ.

“WE WON!!”

At home, Suparna Dutta got the news and responded, incredulous: “What? We won?!”

Indeed, we had won.

In a 31-page ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Claude Hilton ruled that Fairfax County school officials violated the law when they changed admissions requirements at TJ in a manner that reduced the number of Asian American students admitted. Hilton granted the coalition’s motion for summary judgment, giving us a win in the case.

Hilton ruled that the school board, the admissions director, the principal, and the superintendent had installed a system that was “racially motivated” and discriminatory against Asians.

He said “the Board defaulted to a system that treats applicants unequally in hopes of engineering a particular racial outcome.”

The judge said the new admissions process amounted to racial balancing and that racial balancing for its own sake was unconstitutional and illegal.

That Sunday afternoon, Dutta hosted a lunch on her back deck to celebrate our victory. We were South Asian and Chinese. Muslim and Hindu. Mothers and fathers. We represented families who are Asian, Black, Hispanic, and multiracial—from more than 30 different countries.

We had been up against, strangely enough, some of our country’s biggest civil-rights organizations. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund said it was “appalled” at the judge’s decision. These groups use social media hashtags like #StopAsianHate, but they turn a blind eye to anti-Asian discrimination in school admissions.

If the legal and moral ramifications of these policies are not enough to deter their advocates, perhaps the politics will be. In San Francisco, in Virginia’s Fairfax and Loudoun counties, and in dozens of places in between, parents—many of them Asian and immigrant—are forging a movement.

After the successful recall of the three San Francisco school board members on February 15, Democratic consultant David Axelrod, a top White House aide to President Obama, said, “Parents should absolutely be involved in the schools their kids attend. Politicians absolutely should not!” And just a few days before Hilton’s ruling, on February 22, 2022, Michael Bloomberg, former New York City mayor and a contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, warned that Democrats are “headed for a wipeout” in the midterm elections this November if the party does not make an “immediate course correction” that prioritizes quality education over “political correctness” and fighting “culture wars.” Anyone tempted to dismiss Axelrod or Bloomberg as older white men trying to protect the status quo may want to consider that plenty of Asian, immigrant, Black, and Hispanic parents feel the same way.

On the day our mama bears and papa bears gathered on Dutta’s back deck to celebrate Judge Hilton’s decision, I pulled out from my bag a silk scarf I had been saving for Yuyan Zhou ever since she shared with me her childhood story of having her red scarf removed.

We thanked her for everything she has done not only for our country’s Asian American children but for all children, because in equality, all of society progresses. As I tied the scarf over her shoulders, tears of joy fell from Zhou’s eyes.

The next week, Dutta and Ying Julia McCaskill drove together to meet Virginia Department of Education officials in Richmond. The next day, they met with the state’s new attorney general, Jason Miyares.

That night, the women headed to the Fairfax County school board meeting, joining up with Norma Margulies, Yuyan Zhou, and other parents.

They exchanged stories and assembled inside the middle-school theater for the board meeting.

When I stepped forward to speak, the other mothers sat behind me. “You are the new face of racism,” I told the school board, as a mother held a sign calling the school board the “new ‘massive resistance.’”

That was when the security guards surrounded me and our mothers stood their ground.

The next morning, the lawyers for Hunton Andrews Kurth went to court to ask Judge Hilton to issue a stay on his ruling, pending the school board’s appeal. The judge said no.

But the battle was not over. The Fairfax County School Board retained the Obama administration’s former solicitor general, Donald Verrilli, to argue its appeal. In April, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the board could keep its new admissions process in place while its appeal moved through the courts. On April 25, the U.S. Supreme Court refused the coalition’s plea to overturn that decision. For the Class of 2026, chosen under the new criteria, approximately 60 percent of TJ’s admission offers went to Asian students, 21 percent to white students, 8 percent to Hispanic students, and 6 percent to Black students.

The Supreme Court’s order was only a temporary reprieve for the Fairfax County schools and others that have turned away from merit-based admissions. The pendulum may well swing again after the court decides on the Harvard University and University of North Carolina cases, which it is scheduled to hear this fall. We are scheduled to argue our case before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals this fall, and we will take our case to the Supreme Court if we lose.

As the coalition said in a statement following the Supreme Court’s April 25 ruling, “our struggle for justice is not over. We are not at all dissuaded.”

Two years after speaking to our school board for the first time, Suparna Dutta missed a phone call. It was from Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin. She connected with him the next day, and he shared some big news not only for her but for all of our parent advocates. He would soon be naming Dutta to the Virginia Board of Education.

The announcement of her appointment went out on June 30. The original “hopping mad” mother, Helen Miller, wrote to Dutta: “Such excellent news!!! Congratulations, Suparna!! Thanks for being the voice for us all! Well deserved!”

Asra Q. Nomani is a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, cofounder of Coalition for TJ, and senior fellow in the practice of journalism at Independent Women’s Network, a national advocacy group. She can be reached at asra@asranomani.com or @AsraNomani on Twitter.

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

Nomani, A.Q. (2022). How “Mama Bears” Won a Court Victory—and Helped Elect a Governor—in Virginia: Immigrant parents from Asia fight discrimination in admissions at a top high school. Education Next, 22(4), 18-27.

It is hard to recall—or even to imagine—a stretch of time before the past three years when the news emanating from American public schools was more dispiriting. Day after day, it seems, researchers or government agencies release new test score data showing an unprecedented decline in students’ basic skills over the course of the pandemic. The surgeon general warns of a national crisis of youth mental health that predates Covid-19 and grew worse while schools were closed. School districts struggle to retain superintendents and to staff classrooms amid the “great resignation.” New and troubling details emerge about local law enforcement’s response to the May 24 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

These developments rightly command our attention but are not the entire story. As M. Danish Shakeel and Education Next senior editor Paul Peterson report in this issue’s cover story (see “A Half-Century of Student Progress Nationwide,” research), a different and more hopeful picture emerges when one looks at student performance over the very long haul. Shakeel and Peterson step back from the daily headlines to examine how students have fared on more than 7 million math and reading tests administered to nationally representative samples of U.S. students born between 1954 and 2007. These data represent the “recorded history” of American students’ achievement through 2017. The story they tell defies conventional narratives of an education system in decline.

On the contrary, Shakeel and Peterson find that the achievement of the average American student has climbed steadily since large-scale assessment began in the early 1970s. The gains have been largest in math and for students in elementary school, but they are noteworthy in both subjects and for students of all ages. What’s more, test scores have, over this half century, inched closer together across lines of race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status.

These findings echo those of the late James Flynn, a New Zealand scholar who famously documented rapid growth in raw IQ test scores worldwide over the course of the 20th century. Indeed, Shakeel and Peterson posit that the progress they document is attributable in part to the same factors psychologists believe explain the Flynn Effect: improved nutrition and reduced exposure to contagious diseases and other environmental risks, particularly in the womb and in early childhood. This would help to explain why American students’ gains have been more pronounced in math, which depends more than reading achievement on the cognitive abilities most susceptible to environmental influence.

Yet schools and school reform have clearly played a role in propelling students forward. Schools are the primary site where most students develop core academic skills assessed by standardized tests. Indeed, when schools closed their doors in March 2020, test scores fell. We also have good evidence that reform measures such as school desegregation and test-based accountability helped achievement grow and move closer to racial and ethnic parity over the period Shakeel and Peterson study.

There is, alas, no guarantee that the upward trends Shakeel and Peterson document will continue. Performance on the National Assessment of Educa-tional Progress—one of the tests they examine—had been stagnant for nearly a decade even prior to the pandemic. Results due out later this summer will disclose just how large a setback Covid-19 caused (see “Nation’s Report Card to Shine Spotlight on Pandemic-Related Learning Loss,” editor’s letter, Winter 2022). And the challenges facing American students and schools as we haltingly emerge from the pandemic era are all too real.

It may be, though, that educators, knowing that progress is possible, will feel more encouraged as they respond to those urgent challenges. As Shakeel and Peterson put it, “While the seismic disruptions to young people’s development and education due to the Covid-19 pandemic have placed schools and communities in distress, the successes of the past may give educators confidence that today’s challenges can be overcome.” Let’s hope they are right.

—Martin R. West

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

West, M.R. (2022). Progress Is Possible. Education Next, 22(4), 5.

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

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

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

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

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

Bypassing Conventional Wisdom

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

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

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

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

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

Achievement and the Flynn Effect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The PISA Exception

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

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

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

Results by Social Group

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recent History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After successive school years disrupted by shutdowns, isolation, and mass experiments in remote teaching, educators returned to school in Fall 2021 to find that our classrooms and students had changed.

In the first days of the return, perhaps, we didn’t see the full scope of the changes. Yes, most of us knew that there would be yawning academic gaps. Most of us understood then what the data have since clearly borne out: despite often heroic efforts by teachers to deliver remote instruction, the pandemic had caused a massive setback in learning and academic progress. The costs had been levied most heavily on those who could least afford it, and it would take months, if not years, to make up the lost time.

But at least we were all together again, even if we were all wearing masks. We were on the road back to regular life.

As the days passed, though, a troubling reality emerged.

The students who came back to us had spent long periods away from peers, activities, and social interactions. For many young people—and their teachers—the weeks and months of isolation had been difficult emotionally and psychologically. Some had lost loved ones. Many more had endured months in a house or apartment with nearly everything they valued—sports or drama or music, not to mention moments of sitting informally among friends and laughing—having suddenly evaporated from their lives. Even students who had escaped the worst of the pandemic were out of practice when it came to the expectations, courtesies, and give-and-take of everyday life. Perhaps as a result of this, their social skills had declined.

Our students looked the same—or at least we presumed they did behind the masks—but some seemed troubled and distant. Some struggled to concentrate and follow directions. They were easily frustrated and quick to give up. Many students simply didn’t know how to get along. The media was suddenly full of stories of discipline problems, chronic disruptions due to student distractibility, lack of interest, and misbehavior in the classroom, and historic levels of student absences. In schools where no one had ever had to think about how to deal with a fight, they burst into the open like brush fires after a drought. It didn’t help that many schools were short-staffed, with leaders struggling just to get classes covered and buses on the road.

The first post-pandemic year may well have been harder than the radically disrupted 18 months of rolling lockdowns and remote learning that preceded it. The jarring disruptions related to Covid-19 aren’t the whole story, however. What has happened to our students isn’t just the impact of a protracted, once-in-a-generation adverse event, but the combined effects of several large-scale, ground-shifting trends that predate the pandemic and have reshaped the fabric of young people’s lives. As we look forward, their combined effects should cause us to think beyond short-term recovery and to reconsider how we design schools and schooling.

An Internet Epidemic

The pandemic occurred amid a broader epidemic. Long before Covid-19, the psychologist Jean Twenge had found spiraling levels of depression, anxiety, and isolation among teens. “I had been studying mental health and social behavior for decades and I had never seen anything like it,” Twenge wrote in her 2017 book iGen.

This historic downturn in the well-being of young people coincided almost exactly with the dramatic rise of the smartphone and social media. More specifically, it coincided with the moment when they both became universal and being disconnected or an infrequent user was no longer viable.

As a parent, I experienced this firsthand. Even before the pandemic, I was desperately trying to manage my own children’s device usage, wary of how the time they spent on their phones was increasing while the time they spent reading and doing, well, almost everything else was decreasing. We wanted to limit social media as much as possible. But when friends plan where to meet up via Instagram messenger or some other platform, and when the key information for every soccer game—where, when, which uniform—is communicated via group chat, there is no choice but to join.

Research by Twenge and others found that teenagers’ media use roughly doubled between 2006 and 2016 across gender, race, and class. In competition against the smartphone, the book, the idea of reading, lost significant ground. By 2016, just 16 percent of 12th-grade students read a book or magazine daily. As recently as 1995, 41 percent did. Meanwhile, social media was on the rise. By 2016, about three-quarters of teenagers reported using social media almost every day (see Figure 1).

Those trends have only accelerated. A 2019 study by Common Sense Media reported that 84 percent of American teenagers own a smartphone. Parents are raising a generation that is both more connected and more disconnected than any before.

“The smartphone brought about a planetary rewiring of human interaction. As smartphones became common, they transformed peer relationships, family relationships and the texture of daily life for everyone—even those who don’t own a phone or don’t have an Instagram account,” Twenge and co-author Jonathan Haidt wrote in the New York Times in 2021. “It’s harder to strike up a casual conversation in the cafeteria or after class when everyone is staring down at a phone. It’s harder to have a deep conversation when each party is interrupted randomly by buzzing, vibrating notifications.” They quote the psychologist Sherry Turkle who notes that we are now “forever elsewhere.”

The average 12th grader in 2016, Twenge pointed out in iGen, went out with friends less often than the average 8th grader 10 years before. American teenagers were also less likely to date, drive a car, or have a job. “The roller rink, the basketball court, the town pool, the local necking spot—they’ve all been replaced by virtual spaces accessed through apps and the web,” Twenge wrote in The Atlantic. These virtual meetups are universally associated with less happiness for young people. “Those who spend an above-average amount of time with their friends in person are 20 percent less likely to say they’re unhappy than those who hang out for a below-average amount of time,” she wrote.

And that was long before Tik Tok and the latest round of social media platforms carefully designed to ensure obsession and the lingering anxiety that you really ought to be checking your phone; before the optimization of apps like Snapchat, with posts designed to disappear as soon as they are seen and therefore undiscoverable to an adult coming to a young person’s room to see what is amiss.

Pandemic Effects

Then in March 2020, virtually everything that might have competed with smartphones suddenly disappeared. A recent Common Sense Media study found that children’s daily entertainment usage of screens grew by 17 percent between 2019 and 2021—more than it had grown during the four years prior (see Figure 2). Overall, daily entertainment screen use in 2021 increased to 5.5 hours among tweens ages 8 to 12 and to more than 8.5 hours among teens ages 13 to 18, on average. These trends were even more pronounced for students from low-income families, whose parents were most likely to have to work in person and have fewer resources to spend on alternatives to screens.

At the levels of use that are now common, smartphones are catastrophic to the well-being of young people. As Twenge wrote, “The more time teenagers spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression. . . It’s not an exaggeration to describe [this generation] as being on the brink of the worst mental-health crisis in decades.”

Indeed, the data also show spikes in teenagers’ mental-health problems during the pandemic, when just 47 percent of students reported feeling connected to the adults and peers in their schools. Some 44 percent of high-school students reported feeling sad or persistently hopeless in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control. School factors had a significant effect on this data. Students who said they felt “connected to adults and peers” at school were almost 60 percent less likely to report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness than those who did not—some 35 percent of connected students felt that way, compared with 55 percent who did not feel connected to school. The socioemotional distress students are experiencing is as much a product of the cellphone epidemic as it is a product of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In addition, all of that time on screens—even without social media—degrades attention and concentration skills, making it harder to focus fully on any task and to maintain that focus. This is not a small thing. Attention is central to every learning task and the quality of attention paid by learners shapes the outcome of learning endeavors. The more rigorous the task, the more it requires what experts call selective or directed attention. To learn well, you must be able to maintain self-discipline about where you direct your attention.

“Directed attention is the ability to inhibit distractions and sustain attention and to shift attention appropriately,” Michael Manos, clinical director of the Center for Attention and Learning at Cleveland Clinic, recently told the Wall Street Journal. “If kids’ brains become accustomed to constant changes, the brain finds it difficult to adapt to a nondigital activity where things don’t move quite as fast.”

The Trouble with Task Switching

The problem with cellphones is that young people using them switch tasks every few seconds. Better put, young people practice switching tasks every few seconds, so they become more accustomed to states of half-attention, where they are ever more expectant of a new stimulus every few seconds. When students encounter a sentence or an idea that requires slow, focused analysis, their minds are already glancing around for something new and more entertaining.

Though all of us are at risk of this type of restlessness, young people are especially susceptible. The region of the brain that exerts impulse control and self-discipline, the prefrontal cortex, isn’t fully developed until age 25. Any time young people are on a screen, they are in an environment where they are habituated to states of low attention and constant task switching. In 2017, a study found that undergraduates, who are more cerebrally mature than K–12 students and therefore have stronger impulse control, “switched to a new task on average every 19 seconds when they were online.”

In addition, the brain rewires itself constantly based on to how it functions. This idea is known as neuroplasticity. The more time young people spend in constant half-attentive task switching, the harder it becomes for them to maintain the capacity for sustained periods of intense concentration. A brain habituated to being bombarded by constant stimuli rewires accordingly, losing impulse control. The mere presence of our phones socializes us to fracture our own attention. After a time, the distractedness is within us.

“If you want kids to pay attention, they need to practice paying attention,” is how Dr. John S. Hutton, a pediatrician and director of the Reading and Literacy Discovery Center at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, put it in a recent Wall Street Journal article.

There is, in other words, a clear post-pandemic imperative for schools. The first step in responding to the dual crisis of learning and well-being is to set and enforce cell-phone restrictions. An institution with the dual purpose of fostering students’ learning and well-being cannot ignore an intruder that actively erodes a young mind’s ability to focus and sustain attention and also magnifies anxiety, loneliness, and depression. Cellphones must be turned off and put away when students walk through school doors. Period.

But cellphone restrictions are only part of the equation. Schools themselves will also require rewiring.

How do we do that? The answer isn’t simple. My colleagues at Uncommon Schools Denarius Frazier, Hilary Lewis, and Darryl Williams, and I have written a book describing actions we think schools should consider. Here’s a road map of some of the things we think will be necessary.

Rewiring Classrooms for Connectedness

Extracurricular activities and social and emotional learning programs can be significant factors in shaping students’ experiences. But we should also recognize that the classroom is the single most important space when it comes to shaping students’ sense of connectedness to school. Out of a typical school day, at least five or six hours will be spent in classrooms—the overwhelming majority of students’ time. If classroom practices do little to instill a sense of belonging, students will feel a weak connection to the primary purpose of school.

But just as important, building classrooms to maximize belonging cannot come at the expense of academic achievement. We are in the midst of a learning crisis of historic proportions too. Students’ lack of progress in science, math, and reading, their reduced knowledge of history, their lessened exposure to the arts—these will have lifelong costs. Teaching needs to be better, not diluted. Classrooms need to maximize belonging and learning. It can’t be one or the other.

Happily, we think this is eminently possible. I’m thinking of a math class taught by my co-author Denarius Frazier, the principal of Uncommon Collegiate Charter High School in Brooklyn, N.Y. During a discussion about trigonometry, two dozen students engaged vigorously and energetically with one another. That is, until the beautiful moment when a student named Vanessa, who had been speaking authoritatively about her solution to the problem, suddenly realized that she had confused reciprocal and inverse functions—and that her solution is dead wrong.

Vanessa paused and glanced at her notes. “Um, I’d like to change my answer,” she said playfully, without a trace of self-consciousness. Then she laughed, and her classmates laughed with her. The moment was beautiful because it was lit by the warm glow of belonging. And that was not accidental.

Consider the image below: Vanessa is speaking as her classmates listen and offer affirming gazes. Their eyes are turned to Vanessa to show encouragement and support. Their expressions communicate psychological safety, reassurance, and belonging. In fact, it’s hard to put into words just how much their glances are communicating—and each one is a little different—but these wordless expressions are as critical to shaping the moment as Vanessa’s own character and humility. This interaction fosters and protects a space in which her bravery, humor, and openness can emerge. A space where she feels important.

How someone acts in a group setting is shaped as much by the audience and the social norms that the speaker perceives as it is by internal factors. And here those perceptions are not accidental. Frazier has socialized his students to “track”—or actively look at—the speaker and to endeavor to keep their body language and nonverbal cues positive. In Teach Like a Champion 3.0, I call that technique Habits of Attention. It is a small but critical aspect of how classrooms can maximize belonging and achievement.

Students also validated each other in other ways throughout the lesson. When a young woman named Folusho joined the discussion, she started by saying, “Ok, I agree with Vanessa…” So often, after a student speaks in class, no one other than the teacher responds or communicates that the statement was important. But when a peer’s comment begins, “I agree with…” it says implicitly that what my classmate just said is important. Such validation makes it more likely that students feel supported and successful, and that the speaker will contribute to the discussion again.

Again, this is not a coincidence. Frazier has taught his students to use phrases like that and weave their comments together, so their ideas are connected and those who have contributed feel the importance of their contributions. That technique is called Habits of Discussion. Along with Habits of Attention, it helps connect and validate students as they learn.

In addition, as Folusho was talking, her classmates began snapping their fingers. In Frazier’s classroom, that means “I agree” or “I support you.” It was a powerful dose of positive feedback at the precise moment when she, like almost anyone speaking aloud to a group of people, was most likely to momentarily wonder, “Am I making sense at all? Do I sound stupid?” Folusho suddenly got a supportive response—the snapping told her, “You’re doing great! You’re family. Let’s go!”

Again, that was deliberately woven into the fabric of the classroom. The technique, called Props, establishes procedures for students to recognize when their classmates are doing well and send affirming signals without disrupting class.

All three techniques show how a teacher like Frazier can intentionally establish a culture that reinforces both academic endeavor and a much stronger sense of belonging. And though it looks organic, there’s nothing natural about it. It’s a deliberate rewiring of social norms to maximize positive outcomes. Some skeptics label these sorts of techniques coercive or controlling, but it’s hard to watch Frazier and his students and hold on to those suspicions. Engineering the classroom to ensure positive peer-to-peer norms is about honoring young people and creating an environment that not only maximizes their learning but also their belonging—the pervading senses that school is for me and I am successful here. It’s a rewiring of the classroom that requires hard work and doggedness on the part of the teacher. But it is nothing less than students deserve.

Rewiring Schools for Belonging

Rewiring a school for belonging involves rethinking many of the things we do, such as extracurricular activities. Nashville Classical Charter School provides an example of how schools might do this. In 2021, school leaders were reconsidering how its programs could intentionally build a sense of connectedness and belonging among students. Head of School Charlie Friedman and his colleagues decided to dramatically expand after-school sports programs, to allow students to explore their identities, build relationships with trusted adults, and perform in front of a crowd.

Nashville Classical extended tryout periods, to maximize students’ opportunities feel like part of a team. Leaders also offered stipends for coaching and encouraged their best community builders to coach, by explicitly valuing expertise at culture building alongside expertise at the sport. The school engaged audiences by inviting families to vote on a mascot and created an engaging game-day experience with a cheerleading squad, songs, and chants. This attracted a substantial audience, so student-athletes could compete in front of more people and fans could build community through gathering and cheering together.

It’s important to have high-quality extracurriculars that aren’t based on years of prior experience. It’s hard for a student to decide in grade 8 that they would really like to be a part of the basketball team if they haven’t already spent years playing. But that’s not true of the debate team or the Spanish club. Those activities should be as well run as any others, rather than a lonely space with obligatory supervision where the connections are peripheral at best.

Schoolwide rituals are also important to fostering a sense of belonging. For example, Frazier’s school has a regular meeting circle where the entire school is present. Students are publicly honored for their academic excellence or for being positive members of the school community.

Character education and social and emotional learning programs can also play a role. But my advice is to build a few priorities into the fabric of the school rather than buy a program to use in an isolated manner. Positive character traits should be “caught, sought, and taught,” according to my co-author Hilary Lewis. Gratitude is a great example. When students make a habit of concretely expressing gratitude to other people in the school community, it confers mutual benefits. Expressions of gratitude make the recipients feel more connected while also confering status on the giver, because their appreciation is a thing worthy of sharing deliberately.

And, as Shawn Achor explains in his book The Happiness Advantage, expressing gratitude regularly has the effect of calling students’ attention to its presence. Repetitive thinking causes a “cognitive afterimage” where we continue to see whatever it is we’re thinking about, even when we’ve shifted focus. In other words, if you continually share and expect to be sharing examples of things you are grateful for, you start looking for them. You begin scanning the world for examples of good things to appreciate and notice more of the good that surrounds you. Gratitude is a well-being builder.

Open-ended opportunities to relax and connect outside of the classroom also foster connectedness and belonging. At Cardiff High School in Wales, for example, school leaders filled a common area with games that are easy to join. They added chess boards, card tables with decks of cards, and even a ping pong table to create opportunities for engaging, positive social interaction in between classes.

Saying No to Cellphones

These innovations can be powerful—but not on their own. The pull of smartphones and social media apps designed to distract is bound to undermine any expression of support, after-school sport, or card table. The single most important thing schools can do is to restrict cellphone access for large parts of the school day. This doesn’t mean banning phones, it just means setting rules. These can take different forms, like setting up cellphone lockers at the main entrance, requiring students to use cellphone-collection baskets at the classroom door, or limiting use to cellphone-approved zones in the school building. My personal preference is a simple policy: You can have your cellphone in your bag, but it must be turned off and cannot be visible during the school day. Not during lunch, not in the hall, not anywhere until after the last bell rings. If there’s an emergency and you need to contact your parents, you may use it in the main office. That’s it.

Schools must create blocks of time when students can work in a manner that allows them to rebuild their attentional skills and experience the full value of connected social interaction. They must also protect students’ opportunities to socialize with one another. Allowing students to use their phones as classroom tools (for quick research or as calculators, for example), or to leave them turned on (but with silent haptic notifications that distract nonetheless), or to turn them on during lunch or other learning breaks keeps them connected to their devices and disconnected from one another.

It won’t be easy, but it can be done. France has done it. The state of Victoria in Australia has done it. Some American public schools and districts have done it, in Missouri, Pennsylvania, Maine, and New York.

These bans are often followed by remarkable and instantaneous change. “It has transformed the school. Social time is spent talking to friends,” a teacher from Australia told my colleagues and me. “It is so nice walking around the yard seeing students actually interacting again, and no distractions during class,” said another.

The change, teachers told us, was quick—so long as you could get the adults to follow through. That is, if the rule was consistent and enforced, then students adapted quickly and were happy, even if they fought it at first. If the ban didn’t work, the problem was usually that some of the adults didn’t follow through. “Consistent enforcement from all = key,” one teacher explained in a note. “Can’t be ‘the cool teacher’.” The problem, of course, is that there’s a strong incentive to be “the cool teacher,” so schools must spend time making sure teachers understand the reasons for the rule and holding them accountable for supporting it.

School and district leaders should be prepared for doubts, skepticism, and pushback. We’ve seen this at the state level already. In 2019, lawmakers in four states proposed legislation to ban cellphones in school. But the bills, in Arizona, Maine, Maryland, and Utah, failed to advance. A rule that barred students from bringing cellphones into New York City public schools was ended in 2015, because then-Mayor Bill DeBlasio said “parents should be able to call or text their kids,” though individual schools may choose to limit phone access.

Two comments I often hear: “it’s an infringement on young people’s freedom” and “the role of schools is to teach young people to make better choices. We should talk to them about cell phones, not restrict them.”

The first response makes two assumptions: first, that there is no difference between young people and adults, and second, that there is no difference between the people who run a school—and therefore are responsible to stakeholders for outcomes—and the young people who attend the school. Both are mistaken. The purpose of a school is to give young people the knowledge and skills they require to lead successful lives. This always involves an exercise of social contract. We collectively give up something small as individuals and receive something valuable and rare in return as a group. It is impossible to run a school without this sort of give-and-take. Suggesting that we give students “freedom” to use cell phones whenever they want is trading valuable and enduring freedom that accrues later for a self-destructive indulgence in the present.

The argument that “schools should teach young people the skill of managing technology” is patently unrealistic. Schools are not designed to address, much less unravel, psychological dependence on portable supercomputers designed to disrupt and hold our attention. Teachers already have a daunting list of educational priorities. They are not trained counselors, and the school counselors on staff are in woefully short supply.

It’s magical thinking to propose that an epidemic that has doubled rates of mental health issues and changed every aspect of social interaction among millions of people is going to go away when a teacher says, “Guys, always use good judgment with your phones.” We’re not really wrestling with the problem if our response assumes that the average teacher, via a few pithy lessons, can battle a device that has addicted a generation into submission.

Restriction is a far better strategy. These efforts won’t be simple to execute, but the alternative is simply too damaging to students’ learning and well-being. Keep cellphones turned off and out of sight during the school day—and give students and educators a fighting chance to focus, reconnect, and build school cultures that nurture belonging and academic success.

Doug Lemov is founder of Teach Like a Champion and author of the Teach Like a Champion books. He is a co-author of the forthcoming book Reconnect, from which this essay is adapted. He was a managing director of Uncommon Schools, designing and implementing teacher training based on the study of high-performing teachers.

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

Lemov, D. (2022). Take Away Their Cellphones … So we can rewire schools for belonging and achievement. Education Next, 22(4), 8-16.

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

When Schools Work: Pluralist Politics and Institutional Reform in Los Angeles
by Bruce Fuller
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022, $39.95; 252 pages.

As reviewed by Caprice Young

As president of the Los Angeles Unified School District board from 2001 to 2003, I awoke most weekday mornings to scandalous headlines in the Los Angeles Times and a 5 a.m. call from the drivetime radio reporter looking for comments on the education horror show of the previous day. After two years of this routine, I concluded that the reporters got about 10 percent right and left out about 90 percent of what actually happened. In When Schools Work, Bruce Fuller’s review of the past 20 years of education reforms in L.A., the author gets about 90 percent right. Fuller makes a righteous effort to capture more than 150 years of history, uncovers fascinating recurring patterns, and ably depicts the wildly complex, kaleidoscopic landscape of evolving L.A. education politics.

Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, based his book on 15 years of fieldwork in Los Angeles. What he gets right is the rise of pluralism in L.A. education politics. Prior to 1999, the scene was a constant tug of war between the unions and the school-district bureaucracy. By Fuller’s telling, the landscape entering the 21st century also included community-based organizers, charter-school leaders, and the philanthropic elite. Each of these groups had internal and external allegiances defined by their level of confidence in the ability of L.A. Unified to “reform itself” in ways that would lead to greater student academic achievement and wellbeing. In several cases, the beginning of the century marked a revolution on the part of many former inside loyalists, like me, who ran out of patience and faith in the institution’s ability to overcome the undertow of adult special interests inside the system. Mayor Richard Riordan was referring to L.A. Unified when he (quoting Robin Williams) described the etymology of “politics” as “poli” meaning “many” and “tic[k]s” referring to “bloodsucking insects.”

During my first two years on the board (1999–2001), I met with fellow board members Genethia Hudley-Hayes (CEO of the L.A. Southern Christian Leadership Conference) and Mike Lansing (executive director of the San Pedro Boys & Girls Clubs) every other Tuesday at 7:30 a.m. in the Denny’s near L.A. Unified headquarters to devise ways to keep the board’s focus on fiscal stability, elementary reading, and building schools. Our strategy was simple: find the internal innovators who agreed with us and put enormous resources behind them. In September 1999, Hudley-Hayes, then board president, refused to sign the district budget until Superintendent Ruben Zacarias allowed his chief academic officer to bring a new phonics-based reading curricula to a board vote. When Zacarias complained that the $8 billion district couldn’t afford the $20 million required to train the first cadre of teachers, Riordan convinced the Packard Foundation and others to put up the funds. Community organizers packed the meeting with parents demanding that their children be taught to read using proven methods.

This is an example of what Fuller calls the “inside-outside strategy”: use outside resources and pressure to elevate internal innovation and policy execution.

By the following July, when we selected Roy Romer as our new superintendent, the early adopters of the reading program were already on base, ready for him to bring it home. Historic increases in elementary reading scores led the headlines during subsequent years.

Fuller next describes the difficult quest to implement in L.A. Unified high schools the “A–G curriculum” that students must complete if they hope to enroll in the University of California system. Moníca García, then school-board president, wrote the original resolution in 2001 when she was chief of staff to the then president. She fought hard to get the curriculum adopted.

During the early 2000s, the school board voted three times to require a shift away from courses like “Cash Registering” (yes, really) to a rigorous curriculum that showed respect for students’ intelligence and aspirations. Each time, the bureaucracy failed to act, and the disillusionment that arose among civic activists led to a massive drive to cultivate external constituencies that could stand up to the political strength of the bureaucrats and unions, whose livelihoods depended on defending the status quo.

As Fuller accurately tells the tale, accomplishing the curriculum change required intense community organizing and public protest from organizations like Inner City Struggle and the Community Coalition. The leaders of these groups didn’t just organize to get the new curriculum policy adopted; they continued to keep the pressure on so the implementation was deep, thorough, and effective. In 2005, the district began aligning its graduation requirements to the 15 A–G college-prep courses. The curriculum improvement has led to major increases in the graduation rate and the proportion of those graduating college-ready.

A third example of dramatic change in the district involved a massive school construction program. In 1999, classroom space was at a premium, and 330,000 of the district’s 740,000 students rode a bus for an average of 50 minutes to and from school. In addition, almost every middle and high school and more than 100 elementary schools were on a misnamed “year-round” calendar. “Year-round” in this context meant the buildings were used all year, but the students attended for the standard number of minutes, condensed into 163 days instead of the usual 180. Data showed that students in year-round schools and those with lengthy bus rides faired dramatically worse academically and had lower parent involvement when results were adjusted for demographics. In addition, the busing and overcrowding fell disproportionately on students in the higher-poverty areas in the center, south, and eastern parts of the district.

In 1999, Kathi Littmann, the district’s facilities director, proposed expanding the capital plan, which then called for 42 new schools evenly distributed geographically. Littmann recommended a plan for 130 new schools concentrated in the most-underserved neighborhoods. Between 1999 and 2005, the school board approved 4,400 parcel-takings by eminent domain, working closely with the city to advance-fund the housing authority so displaced residents could secure replacement housing—another example of the inside-outside strategy. Voters adopted more than $19.5 billion in construction bonds in a huge show of support for the schools. By 2017, the district had opened 137 new schools. What’s more, Fuller’s study documents that building those schools increased student achievement significantly. Apparently, teachers and students do up their game when they can operate in beautiful spaces with good lighting, air conditioning, adequate equipment, fiber-optic cables, playing fields, and science labs. Dramatically reduced commuting time and 17 more days of classes probably helped as well.

A fourth example of internal reformers partnering with outside reformers occurred in 2007, when Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa launched the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools after his failed attempt to assume control of the district. The school board ceded control of its lowest-performing schools to the nonprofit Partnership, which has grown to include 19 schools serving 13,700 students. Teachers at Partnership schools are unionized, but under a “thin” contract. The Partnership has reaped results, with its schools overall rising 18 percentile ranks in reading and 19 percentile ranks in math, and high schools as a group seeing even larger gains. The Partnership’s success rests on strong school leaders, highly effective teachers, and engaged and empowered communities, combined with strategic systems change. The board comprises a diverse mix of parents, educators, philanthropists, higher-education leaders, community-coalition champions, former government officials, and businesspeople. The organization exemplifies the multi-sector approach Fuller describes.

A fifth and final example illustrating Fuller’s inside-outside theory and the “invest in internal innovators” strategy is the creation of the Belmont Zone of Choice. Area Superintendent Richard Alonzo knew that the overcrowding in this central-west neighborhood was so intense that the new elementary schools the facilities plan called for would often be only a few blocks from each other. Managing catchment zones with that kind of concentration would be a nightmare. Working with Maria Castillas, a family-engagement nonprofit executive, Alonzo came up with the idea of having schools specialize in different programs and letting families choose. Castillas brought families to the board meetings to advocate not only for the Belmont Zone of Choice strategy, but also for the initial eminent-domain actions that were required. When property owners stood before the board to complain about their property being taken, neighborhood parents (many of them monolingual Spanish speakers) countered that the academic promise of the Belmont Zone was for the greater good. This community-supported effort led to the adoption and implementation of the Zone of Choice.

The five examples of change show that when stakeholders team up and the district leadership is properly motivated and resourced, schools improve. Between 2001 and 2017, 4th-grade reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress rose by the equivalent of a full school year of learning. Although large racial and ethnic achievement gaps persist, L.A. Unified was among the fastest-improving urban school systems in the nation over this stretch.

The successes Fuller recounts required both internal and external leadership. However, these changes weren’t fueled only by good ideas, advocacy, and money. They were also driven by fear. This is one of Fuller’s major points.

In 2005, the charter sector was adding small schools faster than the district was. Many Black and brown families gravitated toward charters that offered rigorous programs and got their students into college. In addition, philanthropists allied with charter leaders and community groups and invested big money in opening high-quality schools in the most overcrowded, most academically underserved neighborhoods. At the same time, traditional public schools in more affluent neighborhoods converted to charter status to gain control over their curriculum, governance, and budget, while remaining unionized.

This move toward charter schools coincided with a downturn in birth- and immigration-driven school enrollment. The 2000 facilities plan anticipated that, as the L.A. population grew, the housing market would continue to build units to meet demand. That didn’t happen. According to newhomesdirectory.com, the price of a 1,500-square-foot detached home in Los Angeles grew to $641,228 in 2017 and $1,089,554 in 2021 from $525,774 in 2007. Rents escalated as well, if not as steeply. Although Los Angeles County’s population had grown by 7 percent since 2000, people with children migrated out to eastern counties and lower-cost states, according to the California Department of Finance.

In 2000, when the district was overcrowded and enrollment was growing, charter schools were in their infancy. By 2010, L.A. Unified faced serious competition from the sector and responded by increasing the breadth and diversity of school programs and options within direct control of the district. As Fuller points out, many of the new programs were semiautonomous pilot schools, demanded by a social-justice-minded reform coalition within the United Teachers Los Angeles calling itself NewTLA. These small schools served a disproportionately high percentage of historically underserved students and, while their test scores did not outpace those of traditional schools, their graduation and college-going rates did, and students reported feeling a greater sense of appreciation and academic support from their teachers.

Over the duration of the study period, the Los Angeles teachers union became more hostile toward charter schools. After Governor Jerry Brown stepped down in 2019, state leadership shifted its stance as well. Calls to “level the playing field” no longer meant giving more autonomy to traditional public schools to help them compete; they now meant decreasing the autonomy of charter schools through re-regulation.

Meanwhile, after nearly two decades of steady growth, the district’s NAEP scores fell noticeably between 2017 and 2019—a development Fuller acknowledges but does not attempt to explain. Between 2017 and 2019, L.A. Unified had three different superintendents and a concomitant shuffling of administrators. Many internal innovators retired or otherwise left. A different mayor—one more focused on homelessness and climate change than education—occupied City Hall. The decline also coincided with the end of the dramatic increases in weighted per-pupil funding in recent years, which never filled the budget hole left from the $2.9 billion in cuts required during the 2008 recession and the increased operating expenses driven by the new schools. Moreover, a financial cliff may loom as pandemic relief dollars dry up and pension costs accelerate.

These setbacks raise questions about the district’s future, but they should not distract from the progress of its recent past. As Fuller details in data and narrative, between 2002 and 2017, the rise of organized students, families, and community leaders combined with targeted funding from philanthropists, competition from charters beyond the district’s control, and aggressive legal action from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Advancement Project provided motivation for the bureaucracy and political cover for elected officials to buck the status quo. Fuller writes, “This feisty network of contemporary pluralists has energized a new metropolitan politics. They have moved an institution once given up for dead in Los Angeles.”

Here is where I take issue with Fuller’s analysis. He defines the “education system” as the collection of traditional public schools directly controlled by the district. Accordingly, the data he uses to document the success of the reforms come primarily from those district schools. That definition lost its accuracy over the first 20 years of this century. He excludes the data of 160,000 students educated in charter schools overseen by the district, more than 5,000 students in charters governed by non-district authorizers, students in the shrinking private-school sector, the growing home-schooling movement, and the role of outside-of-school learning through technology and media. I appreciate Fuller’s historical account and his portrayal of the education landscape’s diverse political players and strategies. The next analysis needs to define and assess the city’s education system without marginalizing these other major players. From the perspective of families, students, and the economy, the system is no longer a command-and-control hierarchy. It is a vast ecosystem of interdependent players that requires a new breed of governance and collaboration. Today, this education ecosystem is diverse, robust, and facing the opportunity and challenge of a pandemic-influenced evolution. It has real challenges, but also potential and promise.

Caprice Young is a Fordham Institute board member and president of the Education Growth Group.

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

Young, C. (2022). Pluralistic Politics Lead to Improved Learning in L.A.Schools: Public-private efforts and motivated district leaders effect reform. Education Next, 22(4), 80-82.

God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion’s Surprising Impact on Academic Success
by Ilana M. Horwitz
Oxford University Press, 2022, $26.44; 254 pages.

As reviewed by David E. Campbell

Why do some young people thrive in school while others flounder? In her new book God, Grades, and Graduation: Religion’s Surprising Impact on Academic Success, Ilana Horwitz points to religion as one answer. Unlike previous studies, though, Horwitz is not examining whether a school is religious but whether the students are. For all the debate over the role of religion in the schools, Horwitz instead turns her attention to how religious belief and behavior outside of school can affect the success of students in school. Specifically, she draws on a wealth of data to make the case that working-class kids in particular are more likely to finish high school and attend college if they are “abiders”—that is, if they have strong religious beliefs and an active role in a religious community.

One mechanism behind religion’s educational impact on young people seems to be that a belief in God—particularly a God who actively intervenes in one’s life—can be a strong motivator to stay out of trouble. Another is reminiscent of James Coleman’s seminal work on education and community. Religious teens benefit from a supportive group of peers and adults who serve as “guardrails” to keep them on the path toward graduation, college, and gainful employment. In other words, they have social capital, which means they are in a personal network in which they learn social norms. Often, these norms include “middle-class” mores typically rewarded in the education system. Horwitz, a sociologist of religion and education who teaches at Tulane, argues that the Protestant DNA of America’s public-school system has left a legacy of three Rs: rules, routines, and regulations. “Abiders do well not because they are smarter or more capable. They get better grades because they are better at following the rules.” She calls this “religious restraint.” The effect of religious restraint even holds when controlling for the “usual suspects” known to affect educational attainment, including socioeconomic status, family structure, and gender. In fact, religion benefits boys the most.

Horowitz also demonstrates that religion’s impact on educational outcomes is most pronounced for working-class teens. As Robert Putnam has documented in Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis, most working-class kids do not have the same social capital available to those from professional-class families. But abiders do, as they have a network of peers and elders who serve as “airbags,” ready to activate in case of emergency. In this sense, religion restrains young people by keeping them on the straight and narrow path.

For adolescents who live in poverty, Horwitz shows that religion has little impact on educational outcomes, as they face too many other obstacles to academic success. It is a sobering indictment of the American Dream that even God cannot overcome the barriers imposed by economic inequality.

As for abiders whose parents are in the professional class, they, too, experience religious restraint, but in a different way. While religion propels working-class kids to greater educational achievement than they would otherwise reach, it serves to restrain professional-class teens from enrolling in the most-selective colleges. Instead of applying to elite schools, they are more likely to attend less-prestigious colleges close to home, which in turn leads to lower lifetime earnings. To an economist, such “undermatching” may be a negative consequence, but that is not how these young people see it. According to Horwitz, they are perfectly happy with their path in life, as they have given priority to God over mammon.

Given the rising tide of secularization in America, one might wonder if Horwitz is documenting a dying trend, like writing a book about the internal-combustion engine just as electric cars take off. Yet while the growth of secularism is a significant trend, religious Americans are in no danger of extinction. In fact, the turn away from religion has primarily been among moderately religious people not tightly enmeshed in a faith community, who—Horwitz shows—do not receive the benefits of religion that accrue to the more deeply committed. While growing, this group is currently about one in five Americans, roughly half the size of the highly religious population.

Horwitz does, however, identify another group of teens who succeed in school, not by doing what they are told, but by finding their own way. In a fascinating denouement, Horwitz contrasts abiders with atheists—a small but growing group. They, too, have an education advantage, but for a very different reason. It is not that they have learned the hidden curriculum of middle-class norms through a network of strong ties. Instead, they are self-directed, to the extent that they are often willing to defy those norms and forge a new path. Unlike abiders, when atheists apply to college, they aim for the most-selective schools, putting a priority on experiencing something new over the familiar. (There are relatively few atheists in Horwitz’s study sample, though, and she qualifies her conclusions accordingly.)

There is a potential negative consequence of a tightknit religious community that goes unmentioned in this book. The very same rule-following conformity that leads to a high-school diploma and college enrollment can also cause distress to those young people who do not conform to their religious community’s norms. LGBTQ teens, in particular, often struggle in a religious context. It is difficult to perform well in school if you are struggling to maintain your mental health. Nor are the challenges of LGBTQ youth the only potential negative consequence of faith-based conformity.

To be clear, Horwitz acknowledges the potential pitfalls of an education system that rewards rule following over independent thinking. As this important book is discussed and debated, commenters should remember that, while religion results in an education advantage for working-class teens, it is a particular kind of education that is well-suited for some occupations but not for others. Rule followers may thrive as Amazon drivers but are unlikely to come up with the idea for the next Amazon. It is also a kind of education that may be better at instilling rule following than at inspiring civil disobedience—or at teaching the critical thinking needed to determine when each is warranted, a skill crucial to sustaining a republican form of self-government.

This is a persuasive book, but I would have found it even more so if Horwitz had done more to “show her work.” Most of the book’s conclusions are supported with anecdotes and case studies. Few of the underlying quantitative data are presented, and, when they are, we are often left to trust the author’s judgment about what constitutes a large or meaningful effect. Again and again, I found myself wanting to see the evidence to judge for myself. I recognize that data can be an acquired taste, and not all readers will be interested in the details. But Horwitz’s fellow social scientists are all about the details. It is possible for books of social science to be both empirically persuasive and generally accessible, though examples of such crossbreeds are all too rare.

This quibble aside, Ilana Horwitz has produced a compelling, provocative study, which I hope will inspire still more work on the same subject. Much heat is generated by the debate over the role of religion in young people’s schools. God, Grades, and Graduation demonstrates the light that can come from studying the role of religion (or the lack thereof) in their lives.

David E. Campbell is the Packey J. Dee Professor of American Democracy at the University of Notre Dame.

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

Campbell, D.E. (2022). The Perks of Faith: How religious belief and behavior help students thrive in school. Education Next, 22(4), 78-79.

The challenges of urban education weren’t new to Lakisha Young. She’d grown up in San Francisco housing projects, joined the Teach for America corps in impoverished Compton, California, and spent more than a decade trying to attract talented teachers to high-needs schools, first for The New Teacher Project, then for the KIPP charter school network.

But when Young’s own daughter won one of 11 coveted seats in a charter school lottery in Oakland—out of more than 90 students who applied—she vowed to do more for the Black and Latino students and families the school district had been failing for generations.

So, late in 2016, Young left KIPP to launch The Oakland REACH, a network of Bay Area parents who fought and won a battle to give Oakland students affected by school closures and consolidations priority admission to other campuses. The fledgling organization has trained hundreds of parents historically shut out of school decisions to advocate for their children’s needs just as many affluent white families do routinely.

When Covid struck and schools closed, The Oakland REACH went further, launching an online Hub to provide underserved families with high-quality instruction and enrichment activities, technology training, and family liaisons to keep them informed about their children’s learning, among other projects. The Hub’s success drew plaudits from Oakland officials. But just as important, says Young, building the Hub forged a sense of agency among low-income parents and parents of color who often have been excluded from their children’s educational lives. She says it helped create “a sense that we don’t have to settle for inequitable learning.”

The pandemic has given rise to new, conservative parent organizations making headlines for turning traditionally sedate school board meetings into community punch-ups as they battle over mask mandates, vaccines, and how race, gender, and sexuality are discussed in schools. The potency of the conservative backlash by organizations like Moms for Liberty, founded in 2021 by three past and present local Florida school board members with ties to the state’s Republican party, and Parents Defending Education, a national organization launched the same year by Nicole Neily, a former manager of external relations at the libertarian Cato Institute, helped Republican Glenn Youngkin win last fall’s Virginia gubernatorial race on a “parents’ rights” platform and spurred Republican lawmakers in more than two dozen states to introduce legislation giving parents a greater say in local school curricula.

But while conservatives’ battles against Covid mandates and diversity efforts in schools have put them in the news, a different network of activist parent organizations in the mold of The Oakland REACH has been evolving largely under the media radar for nearly a decade, organizations with names like Atlanta Thrive, PAVE (for Parents Amplifying Voices in Education), The Memphis Lift, and the National Parents Union that represent a new voice in the fight to improve educational opportunities and outcomes for low-income students.

Propelled by the internet, the rise of video conferencing, social media, and millions of dollars in backing from foundations seeking to bring the voices of underrepresented families and communities into the work of school improvement, the organizations are pushing policymakers for stronger schools, resource equity and transparency, teacher quality and diversity, and more school options, among other reforms.

Many of the organizations have created non-profit governance structures. The groups may represent a more permanent change in the education landscape than single-cause or ad hoc parent advocates of the past—and a significant new force to contend with for superintendents, school board members, city council leaders, and state legislators.

A Shrinking PTA

For decades, parents worked with public schools largely through parent-teacher associations and parent-teacher organizations, predominantly white, suburban groups known mostly for fundraising campaigns and community events such as book fairs and family nights. With some notable exceptions, including the role of Black families in the struggle for school desegregation, parents of color and parents living in poverty have largely lacked organizations to amplify their voices in education—voices historically marginalized by public school officials.

Founded in 1897 as the National Congress of Mothers by Alice McLellan Birney and Phoebe Apperson Hearst, the mother of publisher William Randolph Hearst, the National Congress of Parents and Teachers, as the National PTA was long known, remains the largest child advocacy organization in the nation, with a long history of promoting issues ranging from child labor laws and juvenile-justice reforms to increased federal funding for education.

But membership in the National PTA and its state and local affiliates has shrunk by 75 percent, from a high of 12 million in 1966 to 3 million in 20,000 local chapters today—a decline driven, in part, by perceptions among parents and activists like Young in Oakland that it is too white in the face of a diversifying student population, too affluent, too cautious, too connected to the education establishment (particularly teacher unions) and diverts too much money away from local affiliates to the national organization. “The PTA does not take on the hard fights. They don’t say the hard things,” says Keri Rodrigues, the co-founder and president of the National Parents Union, which formed, in part, as a counterweight to teacher unions and other established voices in public education. Parents want something more than just “transactional relationships” with schools, she says.

Personal Journeys

Many of the new parent organizations that are pursuing educational quality and equity have been founded by women of color whose personal experiences have motivated them to push for greater parental voice in education. They include Maya Cadogan, a former charter school administrator who launched PAVE in 2016 to elevate the voices of public-school parents of color in Washington, D.C., The Oakland REACH’s Lakisha Young, The Atlanta Thrive’s co-founder Kimberley Dukes, and Sarah Carpenter, executive director of The Memphis Lift.

Rodrigues, a Somerville, Massachusetts, mother of five, struggled with public schools herself as a student (she didn’t finish high school and later earned a GED), only to find herself battling educators on behalf of her son Matthew, who has ADHD and is on the autism spectrum. After Matthew was frequently suspended as a kindergartner, Rodrigues concluded, “I have no power—I have no voice. I can’t even be heard as an equal stakeholder at this table for my own damn kid.” In November 2016, the longtime Democratic Party official and former labor organizer for the Service Employees International Union formed the Massachusetts Parents Union, which would eventually expand into the National Parents Union, now boasting some 500 affiliates in 50 states and Puerto Rico.

Khulia Pringle, a former educator like both Cadogan and Young, became a full-time parent advocate in 2017, after her daughter started acting out in high school, latched onto the wrong crowd, and began skipping classes. School officials transferred the teen from one campus to the next. “I just couldn’t do anything about it,” says Pringle, who today is the Midwest regional organizer for the National Parents Union.

Tougher Tactics

The organizations have taken a much more aggressive stance toward their work than local PTAs of the past. They’re more interested in ballot boxes, legislative agendas, and school district policies than bake sales, not hesitating to organize rallies, draft bill language, or, when allowed, lobby elected officials directly.

Speak UP United Parents, which formed in 2016 in response to what members called systemic failures in the Los Angeles Unified School District, organized as both a federal 501(c)(3) and a 501(c)(4) non-profit, making it easier to engage in political activities. With a $1 million budget, the group proved powerful in the 2017 LAUSD school board elections, helping unseat the board president and secure votes for former LAUSD teacher Nick Melvoin. The organization recruited influential community members, canvassed the neighborhood on Melvoin’s behalf, and operated a phone bank to turn out the vote. Melvoin is now the board’s vice president and part of a recent pro-charter majority. He’s also spoken out against the L.A. teacher union.

“Because we’ve got five years behind us,” Katie Braude, Speak UP’s founder and CEO, told us, “when Howard Blume of the Los Angeles Times wants to print parents’ perspective on things, he comes to us. And the fact that we are so vilified by the union, in my mind, is a marker of success. It means they care what we say.” (Speak UP hasn’t won every battle. It sent out more than a million text messages and placed more than 30,000 calls in support of a 2020 ballot initiative, Proposition 15, that would have allowed increased taxes on commercial properties, raising more money for public schools, including those in LAUSD. But the initiative failed.)

In Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Parents Union pushed to rewrite a $2.2 billion education funding package that it disliked because the legislation left key spending decisions up to districts without enough parental input. “We’re not just PowerPoints and T-shirts,” says Rodrigues.

Like Speak UP, National Parents Union is not afraid to take on teacher unions, traditional allies of the National PTA. A draft concept paper about the organization, sent to other groups for feedback, presented the National Parents Union as a “countervailing force” to the unions. Rodrigues says families of color can’t expect solutions on issues like social justice and closing the achievement gap to emerge from “policymakers who are majority white.” “Unless we’re actually hearing from the people closest to the pain,” she argues, “we are not going to be able to come up with viable solutions.”

Village of Wisdom, a Durham, N.C.-based parent empowerment organization founded in late 2014, has sought to do that by working with Black families to create a tool it calls Black Genius Planning, which helps teachers document Black students’ academic, social, and cultural strengths, as well as a school climate survey to assess whether schools are providing supportive learning environments for Black students. Parents introduce the materials to their children’s schools. Educator William Jackson, who founded the group, says, “When we started, nobody was saying ‘culturally affirming learning’ in the state. Now basically everybody talks about culturally affirming learning.”

National PTA President Anna King of Oklahoma acknowledges the criticism leveled at her organization. “Sometimes people don’t feel we are taking a firm enough stand” on issues, she said. It’s difficult for a membership organization representing parents with a wide range of perspectives and priorities to get consensus on many topics, she told us. To stay faithful to its motto, “every child. One voice,” the organization has focused on stances such as expanding kindergarten, improving school food, increasing arts education, and adding more school funding. It has endorsed charter schools, though, and recently published a position statement in support of “classrooms that celebrate diverse histories and cultures.” “Students should have an honest and fair understanding of how our nation’s history has unfolded,” King says. First Lady Jill Biden spoke to the group’s 125th anniversary convention in June 2022.

Powerful Catalysts

The twin forces of technology and Covid have proven to be powerful catalysts for the new parental organizing. Online learning during the pandemic turned kitchen tables into classrooms, giving parents unprecedented access to their children’s education, both what they learn and how they learn it. The same technology that brought teachers into students’ homes connected parents with each other, locally and nationally.

Speak UP, which started with just 12 people on the affluent West Side of Los Angeles, has since grown to nearly 5,000 members from across the city using Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to recruit. “We spent a lot of time training our parents in how to use Zoom,” CEO Braude says. “Suddenly, our online meetings drew hundreds of parents instead of 20 or 30 because people didn’t have to deal with traffic.” Speak UP now has subgroups for parents of Latino and Black students and has hired an outside company specializing in surveys and polling, which conducted a study examining the impact of racial bias on students of color.

National Parents Union has conducted online national Town Hall meetings for parents and online national parent polls throughout the pandemic, keeping pace with their members’ most pressing concerns. In January, the group sent an open letter to U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona asking the department to hold hearings to provide transparency and a plan for oversight for the more than $200 billion in federal resources allocated to America’s schools for Covid-19 mitigation strategies. The letter urged Cardona to take immediate steps to recommend that districts and schools, among other things, secure Covid-testing supplies for the February and April breaks, make summer instructional plans available to families no later than March 31, and create partnerships to provide safe drop-off spaces for students who would otherwise be unsupervised because their parents must work.

Philanthropy’s Role

National foundations have funded many of the new parent organizations working to improve educational opportunities for traditionally underserved students, often out of an interest in building out the demand side of school reform or in amplifying the voices of those closest to historically underserved Black and Latino students and students living in poverty. For several decades, many foundations worked in tandem with Republican and Democratic administrations in Washington and with state leaders to increase the supply of effective public schools, both by improving traditional school systems and by supporting the expansion of charter schools.

But by the time Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015—legislation that greatly diminished the accountability pressure on schools to improve initiated by the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002—there was a growing sense among reformers, including many in the philanthropic community, that it was necessary to increase the demand for more effective schools among public education’s consumers, particularly parents.

Many foundations also sought to give parents of color a larger voice in a key sector of American life, a commitment that intensified in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. In recent years, these foundations have spent millions of dollars to support new parent organizations.

In 2019, the Parent and Community Learning and Action Network, a partnership of five philanthropies spearheaded by Carnegie Corporation of New York, published a Funders’ Playbook: Tools for Thinking About Family and Community Engagement. Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Heising-Simons Foundation, Overdeck Family Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation joined Carnegie in the initiative. “Educational inequities are maintained and exacerbated when certain families have the resources and know-how to navigate, support, supplement, and shape their children’s educational experiences while other families do not,” the report stated. It cited a large body of research on the benefits of family and community engagement in education, including improved student learning outcomes. “In communities where parents are connected to each other and deeply engaged, public schools tend to be more effective,” Carnegie wrote in making a grant to the National Parents Union.

A 2016 survey of 74 foundations, commissioned by Carnegie, found that 60 percent said they made grants in family and community engagement, with a combined total investment estimated at $230 million. Of those that reported investing in this area, 45 percent said they had been doing so for less than five years. The largest share of that funding—42 percent—was spent on organizing and advocacy, or on developing family members as leaders who can advocate for issues of school-system improvement and reform. Forty-one percent was spent on grants to educate families on how to promote their own child’s learning and development.

New Profit, a Boston-based “venture philanthropy” that invests foundation, corporate, and individual funds in organizations that “advance equity and opportunity” in education and other sectors, has invested more than $10 million in parent organizations since 2014, including PAVE, says Shruti Sehra, the managing partner of the organization’s education portfolio. New Profit provides its grantees with organization-building support. It has brought representatives of parent organizations together to collaborate. And it has enlisted Black and Latino parents from PAVE and, more recently, RISE Colorado, to help vet potential education grantees.

New Profit has decided to double down on promoting voice for historically underrepresented parents as a key feature of the post-pandemic education landscape. It plans to launch a national multi-media campaign in support of a greater parental role in local education policymaking, Sehra says. “Parents are closer than ever before to what is happening to their children’s education,” she says, “and it’s wise to harness that expertise borne of proximity in service of students, not political advantage.”

Since 2015, the New Venture Fund in Washington, D.C., another organization that invests millions of dollars from scores of philanthropic donors (including, in recent years, more than half of the nation’s 50 largest foundations), has supported The Memphis Lift, Atlanta Thrive, Nashville PROPEL, and MindshiftED in San Antonio through an initiative called Organizer Zero, which provides training and technical support to community activists. During the 2020 presidential campaign, Organizer Zero, headed by former Houston Independent School District board member Natasha Kamrani, helped parent groups press for education reform as part of a Powerful Parent Movement.

MacKenzie Scott has made donations to Organizer Zero, The Oakland REACH, and The Memphis Lift in the past year as part of a multi-billion-dollar philanthropic effort to support “underrepresented people.” The Walton Family Foundation has been among the major individual foundation donors to the new generation of parent organizations. Since 2016, its grants to the organizations have included $1.1 million to The Memphis Lift, $800,000 to The Oakland REACH, $1.9 million to PAVE, and $1.8 million to the Massachusetts Parents Union, the predecessor of the National Parents Union.

The foundations supporting the new parent organizations don’t fit neatly into any ideological categories. The organizations themselves also aren’t easily politically pigeonholed; they frequently focus on racial justice and on strengthening traditional public-school systems.

In 2014, Bruce Reed, then president of the Broad Foundation and now deputy chief of staff to President Joe Biden, urged Peter Cunningham, a spokesman for U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan during the Obama Administration, to start an organization to recruit and train local activists and parents of color to “inform, inspire and organize their communities around education issues and hold decision-makers accountable for providing the learning opportunities children need to thrive.”

Cunningham launched the initiative, including a publishing platform for a blogging network of hundreds of parents, teachers, and other local activists in support of school reform, with $12 million in funding pledges from Broad, Walton, Bloomberg, and the Emerson Collective, the philanthropic enterprise of Laurene Powell Jobs. Since then, the nonprofit Education Post (now rebranded Brightbeam) has attracted additional funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, The City Fund, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Cunningham, who relinquished the organization’s leadership in 2018, says handing the megaphone to parents was intentional. “A think tank guy is one thing,” he told us. “A parent with a stake in the game is another.” The result has been much more cacophonous than he and his colleagues anticipated, he says, with Education Post contributors expressing widely varying opinions on issues ranging from charter schools to school discipline. “We’re not just trying to build a movement of likeminded people,” says Cunningham, now a member of the organization’s board. “We’re trying to see what parents want.”

PAVE identifies families’ priorities through annual “parent policy summits.” In 2017, they prioritized more after-school and summer-learning opportunities, along with more information on school performance and more funding for the city’s neediest schools. This year, with students struggling to rebound from the pandemic, mental health and additional learning opportunities were at the top of the PAVE parent list. The organization advocated for more social workers, psychologists, and behavioral support staff in Washington’s traditional and charter public schools, as well as for programs to reconnect students to their schools.

PAVE, which has a core of about 350 activists, many of them low-income parents of color, and has engaged as many as 5,000 D.C. parents, has shifted its focus from the school level to citywide policy, pressing its agenda with city council members, the mayor’s office, state education authorities, and leaders from the District of Columbia Public Schools and the charter sector. Working at the city level has been more efficient than trying to work in every school, Maya Cadogan says, and it has produced some significant victories, results beyond the reach of traditional PTAs.

PAVE parents selected “budget transparency” as a priority in 2018, for example, and drafted a series of strategies to make it easier to determine whether resources were flowing to the city’s neediest students. The following year, the city council changed financial reporting requirements in D.C.’s education budgets, using the PAVE principles as the bill’s foundation.

A New Normal

Disenchanted by their schools’ performance during the pandemic and forced to shoulder more of the burden of their children’s learning, many parents are unlikely to go back to a hands-off attitude toward public school. Nor do educators expect it. A 2021 national survey of parents, teachers, and principals by the nonprofit group Learning Heroes, which helps parents become effective education advocates for their children, found that 93 percent of parents said they would be just as or more involved in their child’s education this school year than last school year, when students were primarily learning at home.

More than half (53 percent) of principals and nearly half (48 percent) of teachers similarly said they expected to spend more time and effort on family engagement this school year than last. The problem, says Bibb Hubbard, Learning Heroes’ president, is that most states, districts, and schools don’t provide the expectations, structures, and supports necessary to make meaningful family engagement a reality.

The key to forging a stronger working relationship with parents on policy questions is winning their trust, says New Profit, the venture philanthropy, in “Systems Change and Parent Power,” a 2020 publication. Trust flows from treating parents, especially those from traditionally marginalized communities, as valuable assets, from listening to their priorities and making it easy for them to contribute, writes author Alex Cortez. That includes everything from having events in places and at times that are convenient for parents to providing free parking and childcare and hiring translators.

In addition to grounding family engagement in trusting relationships focused on student learning, Learning Heroes points to the importance of having senior school district leaders dedicated to working with families, to help ensure that systems are in place to prioritize family engagement.

In a new report, the organization holds up Baltimore City Public Schools as an example. The district’s recently revised family and community engagement policy, overseen by a cabinet-level administrator, requires that educators use a plan co-developed with parent leaders from across the city to improve family engagement practices in the city’s 162 schools. Among other things, teachers are expected to work with students and their families to fashion learning plans for each of the district’s nearly 80,000 students, including sharing data with families and seeking their reflections on what their children need post-pandemic.

In another instance, District of Columbia Public Schools has an Office of Family and Public Engagement that has worked in partnership with PAVE, including enlisting the parent organization’s support in disseminating information about a new system for rating public schools in the city. While external parent advocacy organizations will continue to put pressure on districts when they think it is necessary, smart district leaders are actively reaching out to families to engage their views as they develop district policies and practices, a strategy that can help forge stronger parental backing for district policies at the front end, while ensuring policies are more responsive to students and their parents.

“In my experience, the strongest district leaders invite a broad cross section of families into a process of cocreation that results in better district policies, reduces resistance, and supports sustainability over time,” says a partner at the Center for Innovation in Education, Doannie Tran, who focuses on family and community empowerment as a lever for systems change.

In the Burlington School District in Vermont, for example, incoming Superintendent Tom Flanagan launched a “radically inclusive” strategic planning process in August 2021, with support from Tran’s center. A coalition of some 40 students, families, community members, teachers, and administrators participated in the months-long planning process, which included conducting “empathy interviews” with some 75 members of the community about their experiences with the Burlington School District to help identify the district’s strengths and weaknesses.

The coalition and district leaders established five priorities, including “students, families, and staff will experience a sense of belonging and students and staff will feel their well-being is supported in our district.” And they selected performance metrics to report to the community annually.

For the belonging priority, as an example, the goals include 90 percent of students and staff reporting a sense of belonging in schools and a belief that schools are supporting their well-being. The coalition wants to close the well-being gap between students receiving special-education services and other students, increase the percentage of families who feel that they belong in the district, and reduce chronic absenteeism among students who qualify for free and reduced-price lunches. The Burlington school board approved the plan unanimously early in 2022 and is assembling a group of community members to review project plans regularly, provide feedback to district leadership, and communicate progress to the larger community.

In the same spirit, the Waltham Public Schools in Massachusetts included parents and community members in a Reopening Advisory Council it established to plan the restarting of the district’s schools last year. The task force convened weekly, established subcommittees, surveyed families multiple times, and regularly communicated with parents in writing and virtually.

The surge of parent activism is likely to persist. Social media has expanded communications dramatically and changed power dynamics, and parents have new, pandemic-sharpened expectations for their children’s learning. As Young of The Oakland REACH puts it: “We’re not interested in ‘going back to normal.’ We’re not interested in any ‘continuity of learning’ because the continuity of learning and ‘normal’ left our kids not being able to read.”

Given the emerging parent power in public education, school districts would seemingly be wise to embrace such convictions. Prioritizing more meaningful parental engagement stands to increase parents’ trust, reduce rancor, and provide local education leaders with valuable new insight into student needs, especially from low-income parents and parents of color who have long been relegated to public education’s periphery.

Thomas Toch is director of FutureEd, a Georgetown University think tank. Greg Toppo is a writer and author of The Game Believes In You: How Digital Play Can Make Our Kids Smarter. Jo Napolitano is a writer at The 74 and author of The School I Deserve: Six Young Refugees and Their Fight for Equality in America. This article is adapted from a FutureEd report.

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

Toch, T., Toppo, G, and Napolitano, J. (2022). Beyond Bake Sales: Parent activist groups, many led by women of color, emerge as a significant new force nationwide. Education Next, 22(4), 28-37.

In 2021, California set off a national debate on the future of K–12 math education when the state unveiled new guidelines for teaching the subject. The proposed curriculum framework, though non-binding, calls for schools to: offer data-science courses in addition to algebra, pre-calculus, and calculus; have students take algebra in 9th grade rather than 8th; and ask teachers to infuse social-justice concepts into math lessons.

Should U.S. K–12 math curriculum change—and if so, how? Should schools emphasize “deeper understanding” or drilling and memorization? Should they shift their emphasis toward data science and away from calculus? What are the tradeoffs and risks of these different approaches, and which path will best prepare students to thrive as citizens and as workers in our ever-changing economy? In this forum, University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt and his colleague Jeffrey Severts advance one perspective, while Boaz Barak, computer science professor at Harvard, and Adrian Mims of The Calculus Project offer another.

 

Every Student Needs 21st-Century Data-Literacy Skills
By Steven Levitt and Jeffrey Severts

 

 

 

Data Science Is No Panacea for High-School Math Education
By Boaz Barak and Adrian Mims

 

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

Levitt, S., Severts, J., Barak, B., and Mims, A. (2022). Rethinking Math Education: Educators differ on curriculum and methods. Education Next, 22(4), 66-71.

Most educators understand that school curricula must evolve as the world changes. Refusing to adapt would do a terrible disservice to students, leaving them poorly prepared for their futures. Striking the right balance is difficult, but our schools usually find a way to forge ahead, teaching more Spanish and less Latin, more Angelou and less Shelley.

But math instruction seems to resist this needed evolution. Math is viewed by some as an immutable revelation, as if Pythagoras himself chiseled the curriculum into stone tablets and brought them down from the mountaintop. Thou shalt teach synthetic division! Thou shalt master factoring higher degree polynomials!

Why this perception persists is a mystery. High school math instruction has changed before. The current gauntlet of algebra through calculus was set in the 1960s in response to Russia’s Sputnik. To win the Space Race and the Cold War, the United States needed more scientists and engineers, and a steady diet of quadratic equations and differentials was considered the best way to cultivate them. Before this abrupt shift, high school math had been evolving slowly to include algebra and Euclidean geometry, in response to changing admissions standards at selective universities. In 1926, only 10 of the 310 questions on the SAT were about math, and those questions were limited to arithmetic and basic algebra.

Today, we could be more confident in our current math curriculum if little had changed in the world since the 1960s. But that would be an absurd position to take, of course. Society has been transformed over the past six decades, and in ways that have dramatically affected how we use math in our lives. Nearly every one of us walks around with a powerful computer in our pocket, capable of making billions of calculations per second. Each day, we collectively generate enough data to fill five Libraries of Congress. And the Internet has disrupted almost everything, including our most trusted sources of information. We now must sort fact from fiction for ourselves. Do cosmetics cause cancer? Is Covid-19 a threat to a healthy 5-year-old? Was the last election stolen?

Our lives have been changed by this revolution in so many ways, including the way we work. Seven of the 10 fastest-growing jobs in America are related to data. And while most of those roles are highly technical, computing and data have seeped into everyone’s workplace. Auto mechanics used to turn wrenches. Now they plug cars into computers and interpret the results. Teachers used to give lectures and write on chalkboards. Now they record their lessons on YouTube and analyze their students’ test scores with sophisticated software. Can you imagine how often today’s children will be working with data when they come of age?

In this new world, how useful is the math we are currently teaching in our schools? To get some insight into this question, we conducted a small survey with several hundred Freakonomics podcast listeners. While this sample is far from representative, it’s fair to say the respondents are likely to be biased toward overestimating the value of today’s math, as Freakonomics fans tend to be a pretty geeky crowd. The unscientific results of our poll suggest that educators have much work to do on the current math curriculum. Only 2 percent of respondents report that they use trigonometry in their daily work, while 66 percent say they are constantly building spreadsheets—a tool that is rarely covered in today’s curricula. Furthermore, when asked what math topics they wish they had learned more about in high school, 64 percent named data analysis and interpretation while only 5 percent said geometry.

What should be done? Our proposal, which we call “Merge and Purge,” is simple. We believe the three years that schools currently dedicate to algebra and geometry could be easily distilled down to two, simply by doing away with 1) anachronistic, computation-heavy topics that are no longer relevant in the computer age and 2) elements that do not serve as critical building blocks to higher-level math. This would open up a year of new capacity that could be dedicated to data literacy, statistics, and other forms of applied math. Kids could learn how to analyze, interpret, and visualize data. We could teach them the difference between correlation and causation. And perhaps most importantly, we could help them understand the limits of data, so they would know when to be skeptical of data-based claims.

The true power of data emerges in applications. We recommend that the data-based math course be offered early in the math sequence, so students will have opportunities to integrate data analysis into their social science, humanities, and science courses.

Merge and Purge purposely avoids creating a separate data-math track that would lead to some students choosing the new path and others sticking to the traditional one. Neither students nor parents are well equipped to weigh the tradeoffs between, for example, data proficiency and calculus. If elite colleges maintain a calculus requirement, would a student who chose a data track be disqualifying herself from admission to such institutions? Moreover, every proposal for separate tracks that we have seen positions data science as the last step in a math sequence. As noted above, we believe that data skills should be taught earlier so they can be applied throughout the broader high-school curriculum.

Critics have accused reformers like us of wanting to make math instruction less rigorous, but nothing could be further from the truth. Data science, in many ways, demands more of students. Analyzing and interpreting data requires critical thinking, creativity, and a nuanced understanding of the context within which the data were generated. Furthermore, data science is probabilistic instead of deterministic, presenting challenges not unlike those encountered in the transition from classical to quantum physics.

While we believe that students have much to gain by becoming data literate, we recognize the challenges inherent in curriculum change. Teachers will need extensive professional development to acquire the requisite skills. Reaching consensus on which topics to purge from the curriculum will not be easy. And unlike some who support this change, we are skeptical of the claim that a focus on data literacy will dramatically improve the equity problems we have in education.

Still, data literacy will be a critical skill for living in the 21st century, so we must do all we can to ensure that every kid has the opportunity to acquire it. Some educators recognize this and are already making changes. Sal Khan, the innovator behind Khan Academy, has already adjusted the algebra-through-calculus lineup at his Lab School in Mountain View, California. Students there now spend an entire year learning data science. Forty school districts across the country are following Kahn’s lead, taking the first steps toward introducing data science into their curricula. Data Science for Everyone, a coalition of individuals and organizations launched by our team at the University of Chicago, advocates for policy reform and the expansion of K–12 data-science education. And a dozen states have begun the difficult work of modifying their guidelines and standards, making room for this modernized approach. Virginia is leading the way, with plans to approve a new data-science curriculum framework for implementation in 2023. It is our hope that developments such as these represent the start of a movement to advance data-science education so that every K–12 student in America is equipped with the data-literacy skills needed to succeed in our modern world.

This is part of the forum, “Rethinking Math Education. For an alternate take, see “Data Science Is No Panacea for High-School Math Education” by Boaz Barak and Adrian Mims.

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

Levitt, S., Severts, J., Barak, B., and Mims, A. (2022). Rethinking Math Education: Educators differ on curriculum and methods. Education Next, 22(4), 66-71.

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