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

Denning, J.T., Eide, E.R., Mumford, K.J., Patterson, R.W., Warnick, M. (2022). Lower Bars, Higher College GPAs: How grade inflation is boosting college graduation rates. Education Next, 22(1), 56-62.

In a Historic House museum in Newton, Massachusetts, nine children seated at three tables configured in a U-shape are each working on their own online lesson. After their 25-minute “Pomodoro” cycle—a time-management technique designed to optimize one’s ability to focus on a specific task—they break for a variety of outdoor recreational activities, from badminton to Bananagrams.

The children are enrolled in KaiPod Learning, a program that offers small-group learning pods with access to virtual schools, in-person tutoring and support, and a variety of student-driven enrichment activities. The day I visited, many, but not all, of the students planned to join a yoga session in the afternoon.

KaiPod is among the startup pods that emerged from the height of the pandemic and that have so far survived.

In the summer of 2020, the frenzy around learning pods—also called microschools and pandemic pods—was high. As described in “The Rapid Rise of Pandemic Pods” (What Next, Winter 2021), families—including mine—were frenetically assembling or joining them out of a desire to preserve some in-person support, community, and normalcy in an otherwise abnormal year.

At the same time, equity concerns and parent shaming ran rampant. Educators, researchers, and the media worried about who would have access to these pods and whether low-income families would be left out of them.

A year later, the scene looks different. While the Delta variant has kept plans changing, people seem more interested in a return to in-person schooling. The conversation around pods hasn’t vanished, but it has quieted. Many families, including my own, pulled out of their pods last year because they found them unsustainable for any number of reasons.

And yet many pods that have an institutional structure behind them, rather than being fully parent-run, have survived. They are finding their niches and growing. Despite fears that pods would benefit only people in prosperous suburbs such as Newton, some of the most robust pod experiments have taken place in school districts disproportionately serving low-income and minority students. According to the Center for Reinventing Public Education, which collected information on 372 different learning pods during the pandemic, 36 percent of the largest urban school districts operated or sponsored learning pods during the pandemic, for example, with the majority of these focused on explicitly serving the most vulnerable students. According to CRPE, nearly 39 percent of these pods operated throughout the 2020–21 year. Only 12 percent definitively closed; it was unclear what happened to the remainder.

Some districts are seeking to continue to make use of pods to create alternative schooling arrangements that better support those children who need it the most. It’s worth monitoring to see if something more durable persists from this movement as the nation moves through a third year of interrupted schooling. Case studies from Cleveland and Boston, as well as DeKalb County in Georgia, Edgecombe County in North Carolina, and Guilford County in North Carolina, help give a deeper sense of how the pods performed and what they may facilitate in the years ahead.

Cleveland

When Cleveland declared in July of 2020 that the school year would begin remotely, community organizations—including the Cleveland Foundation, MyCom, Say Yes Cleveland, and the United Way of Cleveland—sprang into action alongside the Cleveland Municipal School District. As documented in a report, “Building Community-based Academic Learning Pods for Cleveland’s Children,” the organizations worked to open 24 pods that served 808 of Cleveland’s most vulnerable students, all but 32 of whom were enrolled in kindergarten through 8th grade. The funds were largely from philanthropic sources, although federal CARES Act funds also supported the effort.

The top reason for which parents and guardians reported enrolling students in the pods was educational support, followed by needing safe care while they worked. For some students, the pods served as an option of last resort, without which they would not have been able to attend classes online, despite the district’s distribution of computers and internet hotspots. This is because many students lived exclusively with their grandparents, who were unable to help them log on. Students in grades K–5 were particularly in need of such assistance. Other students were challenged by homelessness or utilities that were disconnected at home. Attendance at the pods was relatively high at 75 percent overall and 85 percent among the K–5 students.

Students and parents were overwhelmingly satisfied with the pod experience, with 98 percent of parents expressing appreciation. At the same time, 55 percent of parents said the pods didn’t meet students’ academic needs, but it’s hard to know how that compares to expectations or the counterfactual of what students’ academic experience would have been without the pods. Academic data from the pods hasn’t been released yet to shed light on this topic, but there are a few preliminary bright spots. The district’s data, for example, showed that the pod students logged into the district’s learning-management system more and completed more assignments than the non-pod students. Judy Willard, one of the staff members at one of the pods, reported that students were on track with their academic learning despite many having started the year 65 lessons behind.

The pods in Cleveland are not in operation for this 2021–22 school year, but the district is exploring using a pod-like structure to facilitate student-led peer-tutoring efforts.

Boston

In Boston, as in Cleveland, a group of community organizations—the YMCA of Greater Boston, Latinos for Education, Inquilinos Boricuas en Acción, and the BASE—came together through philanthropic funding to stand up 12 pods that enrolled over 165 students, 82 percent of whom identified as Black or Latinx. Eleven of the pods were in person for K–8 students, and one was virtual for high school students.

The organizations had been coordinating prior to Covid to reimagine schooling to close the opportunity gap for Boston students of color. When they launched their pods in September 2020, they had four principal goals: to offer a safe and supportive environment; create a daily structure to help students stay on track; demonstrate the benefits of students working with Black and Latinx staff; and set up a broader infrastructure to support students.

Bellwether Education, an education consultancy, studied and advised the intervention relative to those goals. There were positives and negatives. Attendance was lower than expected, and Bellwether’s forthcoming report doesn’t provide quantitative academic outcomes. On the other hand, with 95 percent of the staff identifying as Black or Latinx and 100 percent holding previous educational experience, 76 percent of parents said their child’s connection was stronger with the pod staff than with their regular school teacher. Ninety-two percent of parents further reported that they were informed by staff about their child’s day. This kind of family engagement could be a harbinger of greater academic connection and progress, although it’s hard to know given the limited data released so far.

Given the lack of a virtual schooling option in Boston for the 2021–22 school year, the pods are not continuing, but the leaders of the community organizations are seeking to find novel ways to partner with the local schools to continue providing the full set of child supports that, based on the survey data, parents appreciated.

The Future of Pods

Unlike Boston and Cleveland, some districts are actively continuing their pods.

Along with TNTP, a nonprofit education consultancy, CRPE created more in-depth partnerships with six school districts to try to create something more lasting and transformational out of the pods movement. DeKalb County School District in Georgia, for example, is using the pods to reinvent alternative schools. Alternative schools, which serve students who have dropped out or transferred from traditional schools, have historically struggled to show the value they add for students.

Edgecombe County Public Schools in North Carolina launched learning hubs last fall to help students connect to online classes and get in-person support. District leaders discovered that families valued increased flexibility around where and when learning happened, so they worked with students and teachers to design a “spoke-and-hub model.” Long-term, the district hopes this model will offer a new approach to school that builds stronger connections between school and community. In this more hybrid future of schooling, students would enroll in a brick-and-mortar or virtual school for the “hub” of their experience and then elementary and middle school students will join “spokes”—or interest-based groups—for the other time. High school students will receive tutor-like support and work at paid positions or internships.

Guildford County Public Schools, also in North Carolina, is looking to craft school days in which high school students learn for three hours in person and then have more flexible time out of school to engage in a variety of activities, including completing assignments, working, or receiving tutoring or other enrichment opportunities. The district envisions this as part of a greater overhaul of their high schools that weren’t serving many students effectively, even before Covid.

It seems unlikely that pods will be a dominant force in American schooling anytime soon. They will likely fade in influence relative to the 2020–21 school year. Yet many parents and district leaders remain intrigued by the possibilities pods create—enough so that this option will persist in some localities as one schooling choice in a broader set. Indeed, Tyton Partners, an education advisory firm, estimates that 1.5 million children are enrolled in microschools this fall. Based on the reported parent satisfaction, the pods seeded in some of these localities may continue to grow.

Michael Horn is an executive editor of Education Next, co-founder of and a distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and senior strategist at Guild Education.

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

Horn, M.B. (2022). Some Pods Will Outlast the Pandemic: Students, parents say they appreciate the support. Education Next, 22(1), 84-86.

Advocates for taxpayer-funded school-choice programs cite the potential of market competition to spur educational improvement and promote equity for low-income students. When public schools don’t have to compete for students, the reasoning goes, they have less of an incentive to enhance their performance. Students whose communities don’t guarantee access to a high-performing public school are unfairly shortchanged if their families can’t afford to pay for a better alternative. Meanwhile, school-choice critics lament the exodus of talent and resources from public schools, which they argue such programs necessarily cause.

We often read about the launches and participation in publicly funded voucher or scholarship programs, which use tax dollars to help low-income students attend private schools. Most research on these programs examines their effects on voucher recipients, but that is only part of the story—and arguably not the most important part. What we really want to know is how market pressure affects the performance of local public schools over the long run. As a private-school choice program grows, how does increased competition affect educational outcomes for public-school students who don’t use scholarships or vouchers?

We examine these questions based on a rich dataset from the state of Florida, where a tax-credit scholarship program for low-income students has been operating since 2002. During that time, the number of participating students has grown sevenfold to nearly 110,000 as of 2017–18, or 4 percent of total K–12 school enrollment in the state. We construct an index of competitive pressure to measure the degree of market competition each student’s school faced prior to the program’s start. Our analysis then looks at whether non-scholarship students experience negative effects, either in terms of their scores on reading and math tests or their rates of absenteeism and suspensions, based on this pre-program market pressure and the expansion of the program over time.

Instead, we find broad and growing benefits for students at local public schools as the school-choice program scales up. In particular, students who attend neighborhood schools with higher levels of market competition have lower rates of suspensions and absences and higher test scores in reading and math. And while our analysis reveals gains for virtually all students, we find that those most positively affected are students with the greatest barriers to school success, including those with low family incomes and less-educated mothers.

Learning from Florida’s Long-Lasting Scholarship Program

Twenty years ago, then-Governor Jeb Bush signed a groundbreaking new tax credit into Florida law. The 2001 initiative, soon renamed the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, provides dollar-for-dollar tax credits to corporations that contribute to nonprofit Scholarship Funding Organizations. These organizations then distribute funds to low-income students to help cover the costs of private-school tuition and transportation. Because the funds are not directly collected through tax dollars, the resources students receive are conventionally described as scholarships, not vouchers. But in reality, the program operates much like a voucher program would.

In 2002–03, the first year of operation, the program spent $50 million to fund annual scholarships of up to $3,500 for 15,585 students whose household incomes were no greater than 185 percent of the federal poverty line (or $33,485 for a family of four at that time). The program has expanded over the years and now awards scholarships worth $6,815 a year, on average, to students with household incomes up to 260 percent of the federal poverty line, or $68,900 for a family of four.

We look at the program’s first 16 years, ending our analysis with the 2016–17 school year. Our data include students’ test scores, absences, and suspensions, as well as race, ethnicity, and whether they qualify for free or reduced-price school lunch. We restrict our sample to the 81 percent of enrolled students who were born in Florida, some 1.2 million in all, for whom we also have detailed birth-records data. That includes measures of families’ socioeconomic status at the time of the student’s birth, neonatal outcomes such as birth weight, and characteristics of the student’s mother at birth, including age, race, ethnicity, whether she was born in the United States, marital status, years of education, and whether Medicaid paid for hospital care.

We focus our analysis on students attending public schools in grades 3 through 8 during those years, because standardized test scores are most consistently available for this set of grades. Our main cognitive outcomes are scores on annual high-stakes standardized state tests in reading and math. While we include results on reading tests from the entire study period, the math results are from 2002–03 to 2013–14, after which accelerated math students could opt to take more advanced exams. We also calculate averaged mathematics and reading test scores for each student for those school years.

Uniquely, our analysis also explores the effects of competitive pressure on student behavior, including school discipline and truancy. We consider whether a student has ever been suspended in a given school year as well as the share of days that a student is reported absent, less the number of days suspended. Higher rates of separation from school, either due to absences or discipline-related suspensions, are associated with a higher risk of failing to graduate and being involved in the criminal-justice system in adulthood, making this an important predictor of student success (see “Proving the School-to-Prison Pipeline,” research, fall 2021). We observe suspension and absenteeism rates through the 2011–12 school year.

Calculating Competition

Building on our earlier work on the same program (see “Does Competition Improve Public Schools?” research, winter 2011), we use five measures to capture the degree of competitive pressure that each school is likely to face based on the pre-program presence of private schools within a five-mile radius. These are: density, distance, diversity, slots, and churches. We calculate these measures individually and then use those values to construct a single composite “Competitive Pressure Index” measure. We then divide schools into two groups based on whether they face more or less competition than the median school and compare the effects of the program’s expansion on student outcomes within each group. This enables us to determine whether the program’s expansion matters more in places where schools faced a lot of competitive pressure than in places where schools faced relatively little.

The “Density” measure is based on the number of private schools serving the same grade range within a five-mile radius—for example, for a public elementary school, this measure would include the number of nearby private schools that also serve grades K–5. The “Distance” measure captures the distance between each public school and the nearest private competitor serving the same grade range. The “Diversity” measure is based on the number of different religious denominational categories represented among nearby private schools. The “Slots” measure captures the number of private-school students served in the same grade range within a five-mile radius divided by the number of grades served. The “Churches” measure is based on the number of houses of worship nearby. This measure captures two potential contributors to private-school enrollment: the religiosity of the community, which is associated with demand for private religious education, and the availability of building space where private schools may co-locate.

Our calculations are based on data from 2000, the last year before the tax-credit scholarship program was announced. We opt to measure competitive pressure based on the pre-program landscape to avoid conflating the effects of increased competition with other school-quality factors that might influence outcomes. Each student is then assigned a school-level competition value based on the school attended in first grade. This addresses the concern that, if students move between public schools based on their perception of school quality, our estimates would capture more than just market competition.

We look at the demographics and performance of schools that are exposed to more or less than the median degree of pre-program competition and find substantial differences. At schools facing less competitive pressure, white students account for 68 percent of enrollment compared to 37 percent at schools with more competition. Schools facing less competition also enroll smaller shares of low-income students, with 67 percent of students ever qualifying for free or reduced-price school lunch compared to 76 percent of students at schools facing more competition. At schools with more competitive pressure, average test scores are 10.8 percent of a standard deviation lower in reading and 9.1 percent of a standard deviation lower in math than at schools facing less competition. These differences underscore the importance of using the changes in student outcomes that occurred within schools as the program expanded in order to discern the causal effects of competitive pressure, independent from selection effects.

Results

Our analysis finds consistent evidence that, as the scholarship program scaled up, academic and behavioral outcomes improved for students attending traditional public schools. More specifically, we find that students attending schools with more competitive pressure made larger gains as program enrollment grew statewide than did students at schools with less market competition. This difference was more pronounced for low-income students than their wealthier peers, suggesting that students eligible for the program benefited most from the increased competition it created.

In looking at schools initially facing more market pressure, we find that a 10 percent increase in the number of students using scholarships to attend non-public schools increases reading scores by 0.7 percent of a standard deviation and math scores by 0.3 percent of a standard deviation, as compared to schools facing less competition. At the same time, the share of students being suspended each school year declines by 0.13 percentage points, or 0.9 percent of the statewide average of 13.7 percent. In addition, the proportion of days that students were absent falls as well, by 0.03 percentage points, or 0.6 percent of the statewide average of 5 percent.

We see a similar pattern if we set aside program enrollment numbers and simply look at how the effects of initial levels of competitive pressure changed year by year as the program grew. Our analysis shows that reading and math scores at schools in markets with more competitive pressure increase by about 14.5 percent of a standard deviation by 2014, as compared to schools facing less competition (see Figure 1). By this time, the tax-credit scholarship program had quadrupled in size to about 60,000 voucher students. We also see growing improvements in student behavior at schools in higher-pressure markets as the program expanded, with statistically significant declines in suspensions starting in 2006 and in absences starting in 2009.

But schools in higher- and lower-competition environments did not have the same starting line—schools facing more competitive pressure experienced greater improvements but also tended to start with poorer outcomes. At the dawn of the program’s launch, schools with more market competition had reading and math scores that were 12.6 percent and 10.2 percent of a standard deviation lower than scores at schools with less competition (although absence and suspension rates were closely comparable). Our evidence suggests that increased competition contributed to a narrowing of this achievement gap.

We also investigate effects by student socioeconomic status, based on whether students have ever received free or reduced-price school lunch. While we find larger positive impacts for low-income students, there are positive impacts for affluent students as well. This is of note, since, though affluent children were not eligible for the program, its expansion is associated with improvements for this group in more competitive landscapes nonetheless. This suggests that the benefits of competitive pressure are diffuse and extend to children who local public schools do not stand to lose when tax-credit scholarships are available.

We also look at results according to the level of education of students’ mothers. As with income level, we find larger positive impacts among students whose mothers did not progress beyond high school compared to those whose mothers graduated from college. We then consider these factors in combination, along with other details such as whether Medicaid paid for the hospital bill at birth and the median income of the mother’s zip code at birth. We divide students into deciles based on their relative level of socioeconomic advantage to see whether the impacts of expanded competitive pressure differ along this spectrum of resources. While the effects are strongest for students in the bottom six deciles, students in every decile except the very top decile benefit from more competition. Notably, even students in the top decile do not suffer educational losses as a result of program expansion. Taken together, these patterns of results suggest that scholarship expansion may work partly through stimulating competition in schools that serve lower-income neighborhoods, through intensifying neighborhood schools’ focus on better serving their low-income students, or a combination of both.

Alternative Explanations

So far, we have suggested that the improvements we have documented are due to public schools’ responses to the increased competitive pressure they face as a result of the scholarship program’s expansion. But could the improvements in fact be driven by other factors? For instance, growth of the program could change the composition of students remaining in the public schools that face the most competition. It could also reduce class sizes in these schools if many children withdraw.

First, we consider the possibility that our results are due to changes in patterns of enrollment in different schools. For instance, if students who leave public schools to use the scholarship program tend to be lower-achieving on average, then the loss of those peers could leave behind a group that is, on the whole, more likely to earn higher scores on standardized tests. Such compositional changes could produce test-score improvements even if schools make no new efforts in response to the competitive pressure caused by vouchers.

To investigate this, we look at whether schools facing increased competitive pressure would have higher predicted test scores and improved discipline, all else equal, based solely on changes in the background characteristics of the students enrolled. We calculate indexed values of those outcomes predicted in each school and year, given only student background data. If we see that schools with more competition also have student cohorts with greater predicted scores and better discipline enrolled over time, this would provide evidence that changes in student composition, rather than any efforts by schools, may explain the effects we documented above. We do see some hints of this pattern; however, the differences are generally statistically insignificant and too small in magnitude to explain much of the effects.

We then turn to the potential effects on public schools based on changes in class size associated with increases in competitive pressure. However, in considering the likely impact of class size on our results, we find that the coefficients are simply too small to explain away much of the cognitive or behavioral effects. Our estimates imply that schools would experience a reduction in class size per 10 percent expansion of the program of less than 0.1 students, which would translate into an improvement in test scores scarcely different from zero. Thus, class-size changes would explain only a small portion of the observed effects of program expansion.

Evidence of a Rising Tide

School-choice programs have been growing in the United States and worldwide over the past two decades, and thus there is considerable interest in how these policies affect students remaining in public schools. Although we now have relatively comprehensive knowledge on the immediate short-term effects of the introduction of such programs, our understanding of their effects as they scale up is virtually nonexistent. Here, we aim to provide new evidence using data from Florida where, over the course of 16 years, participation in a tax-credit scholarship program increased nearly seven-fold.

We look at the market landscape of local public schools, based on the availability of nearby private-school options, to compare the effects of the scholarship program’s expansion on students whose schools face more and less market competition. We find consistent evidence that as more students use scholarships to attend private schools, students in public schools most likely to experience heightened competition due to the program see positive effects. Students at schools that face greater levels of market competition exhibited greater gains in reading and math tests compared to students attending public schools with less competitive pressure.

While these impacts are somewhat smaller than we might expect given the growth of the program, it’s important to note that our comparisons are among students whose schools are theoretically more or less affected by market competition—not among students whose schools were and were not affected at all by the presence of a scholarship or voucher program. As a result, these differences are likely conservative estimates of the true impacts of the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program on non-participating students. We further find that program expansion and increased market pressure are associated with positive behavioral outcomes among non-scholarship students, which have not been well-explored in prior research on the effects of competition from voucher programs or charter schools.

Finally, we note that the public-school students who are most positively affected come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, which is the set of students that schools would potentially lose to competing private schools under a scholarship or voucher program. However, in most cases smaller effects remain statistically significant, even for students who are very unlikely to qualify for scholarships themselves. This suggests that benefits may come partially through generalized school improvements rather than through improvements targeted solely at eligible students. That raises an interesting question about the overall impact of more recently expanded taxpayer-supported school-choice programs, which also include students from middle-income families. Our findings from this long-lasting early program show that in Florida, at least, it seems that a rising tide of competition has lifted many boats.

David N. Figlio is Orrington Lunt Professor and Dean of the Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Cassandra M.D. Hart is associate professor of education policy at University of California, Davis. Krzysztof Karbownik is assistant professor at Emory University.

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

Figlio, D.N., Hart, C.M.D., Karbownik, K. (2022). The Ripple Effect: How private-school choice programs boost competition and benefit public-school students. Education Next, 22(1), 48-54.

Eric Hanushek, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a longtime Education Next contributor, is the 2021 recipient of the Yidan Foundation Prize for Education Research. The prize honors Hanushek’s work linking the fields of economics and education and comes with an award equivalent to nearly $4 million, half for research and half for the recipient. Andreas Schleicher, chair of the Yidan Prize committee, noted that Hanushek has made a wide range of education policy areas amenable to rigorous economic analysis, thereby connecting better learning outcomes to long-run economic and social progress. Education Next’s senior editor, Paul Peterson, recently spoke with Hanushek.

Paul Peterson: As an early pioneer in the economics of education, how do you assess the progress the field has made? Is the quality of the research today better than it was when you began?

Eric Hanushek: The quality has improved enormously, not just in the use of economics in education research, but in education research overall. Much of this is related to having better data about student outcomes and linking that data both to what goes on in schools and to household and family factors, and also linking performance data to subsequent gains in the labor market and national economy. With the
data that have become available, we have seen enormous progress in research—research that’s overturned a lot of strongly held beliefs.

If the quality of research has improved—the data, the analysis—does education research have a bigger policy impact today?

I think so, but this is where politics comes in. There are lots of forces pushing to resist any change in education, and people bemoan the fact that legislatures don’t devote more attention to education issues. But, in fact, the results of education don’t appear until many years after kids leave school, so politicians seem to be able to write it off. I think that started to change during the pandemic. With the widespread school closures and hybrid instruction, parents have become more attuned to what’s going on in the schools.

In the developing world, at least the focus has changed. I’m proud of the influence I had in changing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in education. Starting in 1990, the goals of the UN and the World Bank said that all kids should get at least a lower secondary school education—but they never said anything about the quality of that education. So there was more education provided around the world but not much sign that people were learning a lot more. In 2015, the agencies added a quality element to those goals, and I think it is helping to focus attention on what students are learning in many countries.

Andreas Schleicher, as head of the Program on Individual Student Assessment, has played an important role in that regard. By administering the PISA in the developing world, not just developed countries, he’s highlighted the very low level of educational achievement in so many developing nations.

The differences across the world are astounding. And I believe the only way we’ll have economic development in some parts of the world is to improve the schools. We can invest in bridges and improve the infrastructure, but that won’t have a long-term development effect unless we can improve the skills of the people. And that’s a matter of schooling.

There are places where we have already seen the results of improved schools. East Asia is the obvious example, where education has dramatically changed the character of those places in the last 50 years. After the Korean War, the average education level of Korean parents was about two years. Now Korea is one of the most educated societies in the world, and you see the results in their industry and their ability to interact globally in ways countries that have not emphasized education haven’t been able to do. China has made some dramatic strides in education. Along the developed East Coast they have created top-notch schools, and that’s leading to the development of science and engineering that is making the country a world force.

Turning to the Yidan award, I understand that you plan to use the research money for a project in Africa. There’s no place that could benefit more from your emphasis on school quality and raising the level of human capital. What’s your agenda?

I want to try to find ways to take research and evaluation and apply it in sub-Saharan Africa through the kind of work I’ve been doing elsewhere—trying to understand the patterns of student outcomes and the quality of schools. Africa, Latin America, and South Asia stand out as being way behind the developed world. The World Bank and other development agencies have focused on trying to improve schools, but in many places, it hasn’t happened. The idea I’m pursuing is that you need local people who have the skills to evaluate and read data and research and analysis, and then try to transform that knowledge into policy.

I plan to develop a fellowship program that would give local people in Africa a yearlong crash course in evaluation methods, research, and policy development, so they can go back to their countries and start to introduce modern, rigorous thinking into education policy. It’s akin to what you and I are doing in the States with the Hoover Education Success Initiative, taking what we know from research about good education policies and disseminating it, with the goal of affecting the policymaking process in states and localities.

How would you quantify the impact of the Covid pandemic on the learning of this generation of Americans?

I’ve done estimates with Ludger Woessmann of the University of Munich. Looking at the school closures from March 2020 through that summer, we estimated that students would earn, on average, 3 percent less income throughout their lifetimes. That was based on the assumption that schools would return to their old quality state in September 2020. But in many places, the closures continued, relying on hybrid learning that just wasn’t as effective as in-person schooling. We now estimate that if the 2021–22 school year returns us to the schools we had in 2019, the average student will lose 6 to 9 percent of their lifetime earnings.

That will also have a huge impact on the U.S. economy. I would estimate that the GDP will be 3 to 4 percent lower than it would have been without the pandemic. If we could improve the schools, we could hope to ameliorate some of those economic losses.

The Biden and Trump administrations have dedicated a total of more than a trillion additional dollars to education over the next three years. Won’t that massive infusion of resources make a difference?

This touches on a debate in the economics of education. If you just drop a lot more money on the schools, will achievement go up? In effect, we’re now getting a natural experiment that can shed light on that. I worry that many school systems, finding themselves awash in money, will just increase teacher salaries. Then two or three years from now, when the federal money goes away, they’ll find that they can’t afford those teachers. So that money could actually make schools worse off in the long run. On the other hand, if schools use the funds to enhance the abilities of their teachers, to provide technology to expand the reach of their most effective teachers, and to allow them to individualize instruction, it could make schools better. The current discussion doesn’t make me very sanguine about the possibilities, but perhaps it will be better.

The latest information is that school enrollments are down, especially in big cities. Juniors and seniors are not coming back to school, and many young kids aren’t coming to school either. There are a lot of kids—probably concentrated among disadvantaged groups—who are not getting any education at all.

Absolutely. And this group will end up much worse at the end of their schooling career, and it will follow them throughout their time in the labor market. It’s also going to follow the United States, because our workforce will be less skilled, less qualified. That has ramifications for the growth rate of the GDP and incomes in the future. We’re going to be noticeably worse off and poorer unless we can find ways to improve the quality of schools.

Many states are thinking of abandoning the accountability systems that were in place. When do you think we will return to accountability and regain the ability to track what is happening in our schools?

It’s worrisome, because teachers unions and others have opposed having any accountability for some time, and many have used the pandemic as an excuse to justify doing away with tests. In March 2020, for instance, the Massachusetts Teachers Association argued for permanently eliminating the accountability tests in the state as a response to the pandemic. People are now promoting the idea elsewhere, saying maybe we don’t need the testing—but how can you improve schools if you don’t know where you are and whether you’re getting better or not?

This is an edited excerpt from an Education Exchange podcast, which can be heard at educationnext.org.

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

Education Next. (2022). “The Only Way We’ll Have Economic Development in Some Parts of the World Is to Improve the Schools”: Yidan Prize winner Eric Hanushek on human capital. Education Next, 22(1), 87-88.

The full extent of Covid-19’s impact on student learning remains unknown, in part because the pandemic disrupted not just schooling but also the assessment systems used to monitor student progress. Annual tests were cancelled in all states in spring 2020. In school districts where diagnostic testing continued, large numbers of students did not participate. Of those who did, many took the tests from their homes, raising questions about comparability to prior years. Parents certainly do have a sense that progress has slowed; 57 percent of the parents in the Education Next survey of public opinion reported that students were learning less during the pandemic (see “Parent Poll Reveals Support for School Covid-Safety Measures Despite Vaccine Hesitancy, Partisan Polarization,” features).

In my role as a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the NAEP testing program, the challenges of gathering data on student learning at the very time when it is most needed became clear in our deliberations over the course of the pandemic. Was it prudent to send more than a thousand program staff on planes to schools across the country to administer NAEP tests? Would they find students in schools when they arrived? These considerations and others led us, reluctantly, to postpone the administration of the biannual NAEP tests scheduled for spring 2021.

Yet, as that opportunity to gauge the pandemic’s impact closed, we realized that another had opened. Just before the onset of Covid-19, in January 2020, the NAEP Long-Term Trend math and reading tests had been administered to nationally representative samples of 9- and 13-year-olds. The testing of 17-year-olds, however, slated to launch in March, was abruptly postponed. Our board initially planned to test those older students in early 2022, but over time, we began to question how useful their results would be. Since the Long-Term Trend test had not been administered for nearly a decade, it would have limited ability to speak to changes over the past two years.

In our August 2021 board meeting, my colleagues unanimously approved a motion I authored to revise the assessment schedule to test 9-year-olds rather than 17-year-olds in January 2022. In other words, we will test the same population of students we tested on the eve of the pandemic exactly two years later. Because that population is defined based on students’ age rather than their grade level, the results will not be blurred by any increases in the share of students repeating a grade due to the disruption of their schooling.

The picture that emerges from this unconventional NAEP assessment will necessarily be incomplete. It will be limited to students aged 9. (Budget limitations precluded also testing 13-year-olds.) It will speak only to math and reading skills. It will provide data for the nation as a whole but not for specific states or school districts. Over time, other NAEP tests will help to address some of these gaps. In the meantime, we are pleased that the Nation’s Report Card will provide the first high-quality, nationally representative evidence on just how much additional work needs to be done to help students catch up.

Martin West

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

West, M.R. (2022). Nation’s Report Card to Shine Spotlight on Pandemic-Related Learning Loss: Governing Board responds to testing schedule disruptions with a plan. Education Next, 22(1), 5.

Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning
by Audrey Watters
2021, MIT Press, $34.95; 328 pages.

As reviewed by Michael B. Horn

For nearly a decade, Audrey Watters has cast herself as a snarky and skeptical writer about education technology. From theories of personalized learning to new education-technology companies, Watters attempts to cut down the hype and to dash hopes.

In her writings, she frequently covers the history of education, and argues that many of the ideas behind education technology and innovation are neither new nor good.

Her new book, Teaching Machines: The History of Personalized Learning, rests on these two pillars. The book presents two compelling microhistories of teaching machines sandwiched between a preface and a conclusion that attempt unsuccessfully to use those histories to contextualize—and cast doubt upon—personalized learning and today’s efforts to deploy new technology in that effort. Her big objection to personalized learning and education technology is that the two inevitably entail a crude behaviorist approach to instruction that deprives students and teachers of freedom.

Although the teaching machine is most associated with Harvard psychology professor B. F. Skinner, Watters takes the reader back to the era of President Calvin Coolidge and Ohio State Professor Sidney Pressey’s efforts to build and commercialize an “Automatic Teacher”—a machine that would allow students to answer questions, receive feedback, and, at the switch of a lever, progress only after they correctly answered the question.

Pressey’s background was in the field of standardized intelligence testing, which had become popular at the time. Although he knew much about standardized tests and textbooks, “the manufacturing of a piece of scientific equipment was something quite different,” Watters writes.

Watters presents a lengthy description of Pressey’s foibles and frustrations in commercializing his invention. It’s a history that foreshadows Skinner’s experience, and Watters makes sure the reader doesn’t miss the echoes by pointing out that would-be innovators such as Skinner ignored the past and seemed to believe that, in Watters’s words, “Surely this time, things would be different.”

Indeed, Skinner’s dramatic and futile efforts to commercialize a teaching machine weren’t much different from Pressey’s. Watters captures everything from Skinner’s behaviorist philosophy to his tone-deaf dealings with former Harvard President James Bryant Conant, as he tries to convince Conant that his teaching machine will fix American education in the wake of Sputnik. Readers also learn of Skinner’s emotional and highly erratic dealings with the Rheem Manufacturing Company, with which he had signed an agreement to produce his machine.

At times the narrative delves too deeply, in my estimation, into the minutiae and details of primary sources. Yet overall, Watters uses these sources well, and her sharp writing propels the story forward.

What Watters paints ultimately is less a story of Skinner’s device failing in the commercial marketplace for educational reasons and more a tale of flawed business models and missteps in production.

This distinction is at the root of the book’s problems, which start with its subtitle, “The History of Personalized Learning.” A book that fully covered this topic would focus not just on the history of the teaching machine—something more education innovators would do well to understand—but also on many other personalized techniques and approaches, from tutoring to Montessori education. Watters does helpfully explain why she doesn’t tackle computer-based and online education and keeps her primary focus on the era of teaching machines, but equating the movement to personalize learning with machine technology is reductionist.

The history that Watters presents is solid, but her commentary around it is at times flawed. For instance, she misunderstands why many people call traditional schools the “factory model” of education. Yes, many of the features of American education that critics often compare to factories were in fact imported from the Prussian education system. However, as David Tyack and Larry Cuban demonstrate in their timeless volume Tinkering Toward Utopia, the push to incorporate standardized testing into American schools and the use of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s principles of scientific management there were clearly inspired by America’s factories, which themselves were seen as the latest in technology. Watters acknowledges this movement but still castigates those who would call them factory-model schools.

What’s more, her extensive discussion of behaviorism could use more grounding, as her analogies break down in several places. One of her critiques of behaviorism is that it doesn’t work well. Yet she writes about how these techniques are used at Google to create personalization for individuals. It’s hard to argue that Google hasn’t been successful in this pursuit. So if personalization works in the realm of the consumer internet, as at Google, and if that success is based at least in part on behaviorism, then this would suggest that behaviorism works—which is at odds with part of the story Watters tries to tell.

She would still argue that this sort of personalization based on behaviorism is bad because it limits freedom, but research on creativity suggests that in order to be creative, one must first build knowledge and understand the rules of a domain before one can begin usefully breaking rules—particularly in adjacent or orthogonal fields. That would suggest, then, that behaviorism, while not a complete education theory, would serve certain learning purposes such as building knowledge. This, in turn, would allow for the use of skills like critical thinking and creativity.

With that said, there are significant reasons to doubt the direct transferability of behaviorism to education from the consumer internet world—which renders some of Watters’s analogies less useful. Nudges, for example, have a mixed track record in education (see “Nudging and Shoving Students Toward Success,” features, Spring 2021). Civitas Learning, a student-success company based on predictive analytics that Watters references, has largely failed, because its algorithm struggled to be useful as it scaled. At least one challenge with using artificial intelligence in education is that any mistakes an algorithm makes can derail a student’s learning and self-efficacy, whereas on the consumer internet a mistaken recommendation from Amazon or Netflix has little downside, at least for an individual customer. But these aren’t the challenges that Watters raises. Indeed, her dislike of behaviorism because of its limits on freedom leads her to recast Seymour Papert, known as a pioneer of constructionist learning, as a behaviorist.

This suggests that Watters is primarily just ranting against the use of any and all digital education technology. That sort of protest seems akin to sitting on top of a moving train and yelling stop.

Watters doesn’t get into the topic of how some of the competitors to Skinner’s teaching machine have fared. In fact, some of today’s technologies that she belittles have seen massive adoption. Khan Academy, a foil she writes about in the book, has over 100 million users—in dramatic contrast to Skinner’s experience. Age of Learning, the maker of the popular ABCmouse app and website, serves more than 50 million children. Indeed, the digitization of America’s schooling curriculum is well underway and has likely accelerated since the pandemic. Even longtime education publishers like McGraw-Hill, for example, are majority digital, not print, companies now. Whether they are successfully personalizing learning is a different question.

In her conclusion, Watters writes that the adoption of technology in education has ebbed and flowed over time; it’s “not a short-lived fad but rather a recurring trend.” This portion of the book is, in many ways, a statement of her professional career as a critic protesting technology as a detriment to individuals’ freedom. Watters cites the Freedom Schools that arose from the 1964 civil-rights project Freedom Summer as “a network of alternative education centers that offered the kind of teaching and learning that the public school system of Mississippi had refused to provide its Black population.” She goes on to say, “If we reject teaching machines and technologies of behavioral control in education, we certainly won’t be the first to do so. . . . From the history of refusal, we can see when students and teachers and communities protested attempts to engineer them, into either enlightenment or submission. From the alternatives they imagined and built—most notably, perhaps, the Freedom Schools, we can glean ways to construct and share knowledge that depend on humans rather than machines, liberating us from the efficient control of the ‘Skinner box.’ These practices privilege the much messier forms of teaching and learning, forms that are necessarily grounded in freedom and dignity.”

It is all fascinating history. But contrary to the author’s contention, the historical examples stop well short of demonstrating that today’s innovative practices will impede freedom rather than advancing it.

Michael B. Horn is executive editor of Education Next, co-founder of and distinguished fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, and senior strategist at Guild Education.

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

Horn, M.B. (2022). The Quest for an “Automatic Teacher”: A compelling narrative marred by flawed commentary. Education Next, 22(1), 82-83.

Both race in the classroom and the New York Times’s 1619 Project have been the subject of recent state legislative efforts, heated debate, and extensive press coverage, both at Education Next (see, for example, “Critical Race Theory Collides with the Law,” legal beat, Fall 2021, and “The 1619 Project Enters American Classrooms,” features, Fall 2020) and elsewhere. The post-George Floyd racial reckoning and the new Juneteenth federal holiday have roused attention toward teaching the history of slavery in America. As part of our continuing coverage of these issues, we asked some of the nation’s foremost scholars and practitioners to respond to the prompt, “How should K–12 schools teach about slavery in America? What pitfalls should teachers and textbooks avoid? What facts and concepts should they stress? Are schools generally doing a good or bad job of this now?”

The forum contributors are:

• Allen C. Guelzo, who is director of the James Madison Program Initiative on Politics and Statesmanship and senior research scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.
• Daina Ramey Berry, who is Oliver H. Radkey Regents Professor of History and chairperson of the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin.
• David W. Blight, who is Sterling Professor of American History at Yale University and who wrote the introductory essay for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s 2019 report Teaching Hard History: Slavery, which he draws upon here.
• Ian V. Rowe, who is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a senior visiting fellow at the Woodson Center.
• Adrienne Stang, who is director of social studies for the Cambridge, Massachusetts, public schools, and Danielle Allen, who is James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and a candidate for governor of Massachusetts.
• Robert Maranto, who is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, and who from 2015–20 served on the Fayetteville School Board.

Their answers in some cases reached past the prompt to even higher-level questions about the purpose, or purposes, of history or social-studies education: To explode complacency among students and to “introduce them to the human condition, the drama, the travail of love and hate, and of exploitation and survival in history,” as David W. Blight puts it? To offer students “empowering narratives of personal and collective agency,” as Adrienne Stang and Danielle Allen put it? Or to “inspire a reverence for liberty and the American experiment,” as Ian Rowe says? The contentiousness around the questions about “how” and “what” in slavery education may well be related in part to the horrors of the underlying story and to the remnants of Civil War rifts. Perhaps too, though, the debates point to unresolved questions, or at least multiple answers, about the “why.”

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Teaching “the Antislavery Project”

By Allen C. Guelzo, Princeton University

In 2018, Harvard’s Donald Yacovone published in the Chronicle of Higher Education a review of 3,000 American-history textbooks stretching back into the 19th century. He was looking particularly for how these textbooks handled the subject of slavery—and was appalled (though not entirely surprised) that they depicted slavery as a benign institution where “untutored” blacks could “enjoy picnics, barbecues, singing, and dancing.” My own schooling, in the 1960s, mainly ignored the topic; the innovative American studies program I enjoyed at my public high school in Pennsylvania began with the Articles of Confederation and the Constitutional Convention and got to the Civil War in four weeks without a sideways glance at slavery.

We have preferred to diminish slavery because of the uneasiness with which it sits beside our founding propositions about equality and liberty, and for the price we fear we might have to pay for exhuming it for full pedagogical display. But I would suggest that neither anxiety is really justified, and we can best begin to understand that by looking at the early decades of the Confederation and the Constitution.

We should begin by helping students understand that the American economy of the 18th century—and the work people did in it—was barely emerging from the Middle Ages. As Robert J. Gordon documents in The Rise and Fall of American Growth, this was a world where 50 pounds of wood or coal had to be split or toted every day for every household, where 50 gallons of water had to be hauled every day from pumps or springs for washing or cooking, and where forced labor of varying kinds was the general solution. Servitude—in the form of redemptioners, inmates, convicts, slaves—pervaded societies; in colonial America, as many as 60 percent of people between the ages of 15 and 24 were servants, and even independent skilled artisans worked for patrons rather than customers. Legally, servants were “free,” unlike slaves, but only under very restrictive circumstances. Practically, the line between servants and slaves was thin, almost to the point of invisibility, except for the factor of race. Forced labor, in short, was the “normal” condition of most people in the Atlantic world on the eve of the American Revolution.

All this, however, was undergoing a major shift in the decades of the Confederation and the new Constitution. Between 1750 and 1850, service in America yielded to independence, patronage evaporated, and (as Alexis de Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America) “everyone works to live” and assumed that “work is a necessary, natural and honest condition of humanity.” And with these changes, slavery likewise lost the sense of being a normal or inevitable condition; hence, the rise for the first time of an abolition movement. The Constitution is a silent reflection of this change, simply because the Constitution contains no provisions for the regulation of labor apart from a single ambiguous direction that “No person held to service or labour in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labour, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labour may be due” (article 4, section 2) and the delegation of authority to Congress to terminate the “importation” of “persons” beginning in 1808 (article 1, section 9).

Although it is possible to view other provisions of the Constitution as implying a legitimatization of slavery, the document sedulously refuses to use the terms slave or slavery. As Roger Sherman, who sat in the Constitutional Convention for Connecticut, insisted, the Constitution must make no concession “acknowledging men to be property.” And this refusal to grant legal countenance to slavery was how subsequent generations understood the Constitution’s intent. It gave substance to what James Oakes has called “the Antislavery Project” and inspired abolitionist leaders, from Frederick Douglass to William Henry Seward, who insisted that the Constitution established freedom as the national norm. Abraham Lincoln believed, in 1860, that “this mode of alluding to slaves and slavery, instead of speaking of them, was employed on purpose to exclude from the Constitution the idea that there could be property in man.” Even Southern slaveholders squirmed to admit that, as one of them wrote in 1857, “without the need of infringing the letter of a single article of the Constitution . . . Negro slavery may be thus abolished, either directly or indirectly, gradually or immediately.”

We ignore slavery, and its catalog of horrors, only when we are careless or deceitful. At the same time, we should not lose sight of how the American founding coincided with a vast reconception of the meaning of work and labor, a reconception that signaled the beginning of the end of the varied forms of forced labor, from service to slavery, and that the Founders’ generation had already glimpsed, however distantly. It will be the task of today’s students not only to grasp the significance of that revolution but also to remain vigilant against the various modern forms in which forced labor seeks to regain a position in our world.

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“Wake Up the Sleeper”

By David W. Blight, Yale University

In his longform masterpiece of an autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Frederick Douglass, the former slave turned internationally famed orator and writer, draws his reader in with a remembrance of a child’s question: “Why am I a slave? Why are some people slaves, and others masters?”

“Why am I a slave?” is an existential question that anticipates many others in human history. Why am I poor? Why is he so rich, and she only his servant or chattel? Why am I feared or hated for my religion, my race, my sexuality, the accident of my birth in this valley or on that side of the river or this side of the railroad tracks? Why am I a refugee with no home? Why does my neighborhood seem to determine my life chances? Or, indeed, why did those people write a constitution in the 1780s, or forge such a model higher-education system, or a reform movement for women’s equality? Douglass’s immortal story of his slave youth represents so many others, universally, over the ages. And don’t we want youth to ask this question why, and then provide them with knowledge out of which to forge answers?

Asking how to teach about slavery is a little like asking why we teach at all. We teach this subject because it is there, and it is so important. How can we not teach about this deeply human and American story and so many others like it? We do so not to forge a negative cast of mind in young people, but to introduce them to the human condition, the drama, the travail of love and hate, and of exploitation and survival in history. We teach them about American slavery because we have learned that this story helped shape the United States in fundamental ways, as personal experience and in the formation of the American nation, as well as its reformation in the wake of the Civil War and emancipation. Listening to Douglass ask, “Why am I a slave?” is similar to how we, nationally, are now asking, “Why is it that Reconstruction seems never to be over?” Out of conflict—“divisive issues” as some have branded it—comes great historical change, as we have learned over and again.

Slavery is not an aberration in the American past; it is at the heart of our history, a main event, a central foundational story. Slavery is also ancient; it has existed in all cultures and in all times. Slavery has always tended to evolve in circumstances of an abundance of land or resources along with a scarcity and demand for labor. It still exists today in myriad forms the world struggles to fight. The difference in the 21st century is that, in most countries, virtually all forms of trafficking and enslavement are illegal. For the two and a half centuries in which American slavery evolved, slavery operated largely as a thoroughly legal practice, buttressed by local law and in degrees by the U.S. Constitution.

In America, our preferred, deep national narratives tend to teach our young that, despite our problems in the past, we have been a nation of freedom-loving, inclusive people, accepting the immigrant into a land of multiethnic diversity. Our diversity has made us strong; that cannot be denied. But that “composite nation,” as Frederick Douglass called it in the 1870s—a dream and sometimes a reality—emerged from generations of what can best be called tyranny. When one studies slavery long enough, in the words of the great scholar David Brion Davis, “we come to realize that tyranny is a central theme of American history, that racial exploitation and racial conflict have been part of the DNA of American culture.” Freedom and tyranny, wrapped in the same historical bundle, feeding upon and making one another, had by the late 18th century created a remarkably original nation dedicated to Thomas Jefferson’s idea of the “truths” of natural rights, popular sovereignty, the right of revolution, and human equality, but also built as an edifice designed to protect and expand chattel slavery. Americans do not always like to face the contradictions in their past, but in so many ways, we are our contradictions, and we have to face them.

The biggest obstacle to teaching slavery effectively in America is the abiding American need to conceive of and understand our history as “progress,” as the story of a people and a nation that always sought the improvement of mankind, the advancement of liberty and justice, the broadening of pursuits of happiness for all. While there are many real threads to this story—about immigration, about our creeds and ideologies, and about race and emancipation and civil rights, there is also the broad, untidy underside.

The point is not to teach American history as a chronicle of shame and oppression. Far from it. The point is to tell American history as a story of real human beings, of power, of vast economic and geographical expansion, of great achievements as well as great dispossession, of human brutality and human reform. That goal can never be achieved without understanding the meanings and legacies of slavery.

The American writer James Baldwin was determined in season and out to make Americans face the pasts they preferred to ignore. In a 1962 essay, he said that the problem with the way Americans generally approach their past is that “words are mostly used to cover the sleeper, not to wake him up.” Exploding such complacency and teaching a real and informed history is the essential function of education. And we are always interested in keeping our students awake.

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Understanding the “Many Degrees” of American Slavery

By Daina Ramey Berry, University of Texas at Austin

“I would rather die the death of the righteous than be a slave.”
—Stephen Pembroke

Stephen Pembroke attempted to liberate himself from a Maryland plantation in the 1850s with his teenaged sons, Robert and Jacob. Unfortunately, they were captured, chained, starved, separated, and sold. Stephen Pembroke eventually made it to freedom with the help of his brother. Speaking about his experiences, he said that slavery had “many degrees.” He spent 50 years enslaved, witnessing and experiencing “rigid and wicked,” “moderate,” and benevolent forms of captivity. Once freed, Pembroke had one request: “I would now like to have my sons out.” Unfortunately, his sons never attained their freedom.

Understanding the history of slavery through “many degrees” is an important lesson for those of us who teach this history today. By relying on the testimonies of the enslaved and the records of enslavers, we have an opportunity to learn about the degrees of slavery and freedom. Pembroke and countless others who lived through this institution have much to offer us. “The slave never knows when he is to be seized and scourged,” he continued, noting that his father was sold five times.

The best way to learn and teach this history with young people is to begin by studying the historical record from a variety of perspectives. However, with the latest political attacks on teaching accurate history in the United States—many launched through incorrect definitions of critical race theory—it’s important to take stock of how we are teaching students about slavery and identify areas that need improvement.

Contemporary Debates

Recent debates and proposed legislation confirm that our understanding of American slavery varies. Some educators did not learn about the institution in their academic training and may find it hard to imagine teaching it to their own elementary and high school students. Some may present misguided and insensitive classroom activities and exercises, such as one lesson at a Wisconsin middle school that asked students how they would punish an insubordinate slave. The politicization of history further complicates this knowledge gap, particularly pertaining to the importance of specific dates. For most trained historians, dates are important, but debates about their significance move us further away from the history that we ought to know. One example is the recent dispute over the dates marking America’s beginnings. Some, like Nikole Hannah-Jones, argue for the significance of 1619, the year the first Africans arrived in the colonies. Others claim 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, as the most important starting point for American history. Both dates overlook the early arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the 16th century and limit our opportunity to learn deeper and more inclusive histories. How can we teach a history that encompasses the experiences of enslaved people like Pembroke, who preferred death to slavery? The answer is simple: through an exploration of multiple perspectives, regions, work settings, and experiences using primary-source documents.

Slavery has been an integral part of global and American history. It was primarily an economic institution that had a hefty political and social impact on American society, particularly the lives and families of the enslaved as well as enslavers. In teaching this history, we must avoid objectifying enslaved people and reducing them to passive victims. They were human beings with incredibly strong wills who survived 12- to 18-hour workdays, yet still created and maintained family connections despite the constant threat of separation and sale. It is important to see enslaved people as individuals who rebelled and resisted at every stage of their experience—from the moment they were kidnapped and enslaved to their trans-Atlantic voyages to organized rebellions and individual acts of suicide, infanticide, or escape. Enslaved people also found strength in their families and communities and found moments of joy to cope with their pain. Their enslavers were also human and not a monolithic group. Some struggled with their enslaving practices, while others thrived and prospered. They had large plantations in rural areas as well as small- to middle-sized holdings in industrial or domestic settings. We must be prepared to teach the diversity of experiences during slavery.

Myths of Slavery

The vacuum created by our public-school teaching has been filled by many myths about slavery. Much of what we know has been taught exclusively from the perspective of enslavers and with the view that it was a Southern, plantation-based, cotton-producing enterprise. But slavery existed in all 13 colonies (the partial exception was the colony of Georgia, which had a ban on slavery for the first 20 years of its existence). As the system matured, enslaved people labored in a variety of settings large and small; urban and rural; industrial and agricultural; as well as at universities and in city municipalities. They produced cotton, of course, but they also produced sugar, rice, indigo, and wheat. Slave labor was used to build our U.S. Capitol and many state capitols around the country. An accurate study of slavery would emphasize the differences between the experiences of those enslaved on a farm in Mississippi and those forced to work in a shipyard in New York City.

Debunking the myths of slavery is a starting point. Understanding that slavery was a billion-dollar industry that impacted every aspect of the global economy and was not limited to the South is yet another place to begin our lessons. Many financial repercussions reverberate today through corporations and industries that were built on the wealth generated during slavery. In private settings, families have created intergenerational wealth from money earned during the era of slavery. The political impact of slavery is usually reduced to its role in the Civil War, but students also must learn that the framing of the U.S. Constitution included debates about slavery, and one of the legacies of slavery involves the creation of our modern criminal (in)justice system.

Educational Resources

Developers of traditional resources such as textbooks are making strides in incorporating the history of slavery into their new editions. However, there are few textbooks approved by school boards that present the subject in a well-rounded, thoughtful way. In fact, one middle-school textbook does not mention African Americans until it gets beyond the American Revolution and then discusses only the enslaved. This kind of treatment of the subject does not fully reflect the lived experience. Many teachers, correctly, rely on original documents. The best documents available are right under our noses on websites and in libraries. For example, first-person narratives are easily accessible via the Library of Congress website, as are the historical laws governing the institution of slavery, including slave codes and compromises.

We can learn more about slavery by looking to those who experienced and enforced it. Narratives such as Pembroke’s and countless others paint an accurate and vivid picture for students, as do plantation records that offer details about the exploitation and management of the enslaved. Until standardized testing, state standards, school boards, and curriculum fully incorporate the complex history of slavery, we will miss the history of “righteous slaves” and their “many degrees” of slavery that Pembroke shared and so many others tried to teach us.

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Truth and Empowerment

A framework for teaching about enslavement

By Adrienne Stang, Cambridge Public Schools, and Danielle Allen, Harvard University

Teachers of U.S. history should aspire to engage students in history and civic learning that honestly represents the wrongs of our national past, without pulling us into cynicism—and that is equally truthful about our country’s accomplishments, without pivoting to adulation. In the case of the history of enslavement, this requires teachers and learners to make meaning together. Students enter discussions about enslavement from a wide range of starting points in terms of both historical content (or lack thereof) and emotional responses. Our hope for learners is that they will come to understand the past, including the whys and hows of people who did wrong to others, and how those who were wronged and their allies resisted oppressive structures. We recommend instruction that focuses on the agency and voices of those who were enslaved as fundamental to achieving that understanding and to ensuring that even hard histories can become sources of hope in the present.

To support 5th-grade teachers in this critical work, we developed lessons on enslavement built on the pedagogical tool of “co-processing.”  Co-processing captures the experience of children learning and making meaning of new information with the support of a caring classroom teacher or other empathic adult. When learning about enslavement and other difficult histories, the teacher begins by providing learners the opportunity to share what they know and how they feel. The educator validates students’ feelings and provides opportunities for students to question their ideas, when appropriate, and to deepen their knowledge through historical inquiry. Throughout the unit, teachers support students in building on prior knowledge and clarifying misconceptions. Ultimately, the teacher supports students in converting a variety of starting points into usable narratives that are truthful and empowering.

From the start of this process, teachers and learners understand that they will be learning, thinking, feeling, and evaluating together. Teachers explain that they will be doing this in relation to troubling historical material that may raise complicated emotions. Several lessons are structured around Glenn Singleton’s Courageous Conversations Compass for conversations about race. Singleton’s compass has four points—emotional, intellectual, moral, and relational—and reminds us that people process information about racism in different ways. Students will gravitate toward different compass points, and skillful teachers will help students explore all four elements as they learn about the history of enslavement.

In teaching about the realities of enslavement, we emphasize primary sources written by people who were enslaved themselves, including Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass. This approach underscores the humanity and individuality of enslaved African Americans and offers students empowering narratives of personal and collective agency.

After students learn the history of enslavement, they study the antebellum abolition movement by comparing and contrasting the life experiences of different abolitionists. This investigation helps students understand that abolitionists included men and women from different races and social classes. Some were born into enslavement; others were born free. They included politicians, public speakers, writers, and conductors on the Underground Railroad. Many worked for other causes, such as women’s rights. Many risked their lives to end enslavement. Abolitionists of varying backgrounds formed alliances to help bring an end to enslavement in the United States.

In teaching these lessons, the pitfalls are many. We seek to avoid victim-centered narratives of African American history without exculpating enslavers or sugarcoating the horrors of enslavement. Teachers must balance the brutality of enslavement with the developmental needs of their students; too much exposure to violence for younger learners is problematic, and we recommend avoiding images of the violence of enslavement prior to 8th grade. Also, the relation of past to present is an ever-present area of inquiry. Students learning about enslavement will typically make connections to anti-Black racism today. Teachers can support students in analyzing these connections when teaching about current events. Teachers will need to be attentive to the dynamics of their classroom community, including the racial dynamics. By sharing their own feelings about learning about the histories of enslavement, teachers can create a space where all students feel safe enough to share their experiences and feelings. Teachers will often need substantial professional development to become comfortable and competent in modeling this sensitive engagement with our hard histories of race and racism.

The story of racism in the United States did not end when the 13th Amendment abolished enslavement. It continued through the Jim Crow era and the terrorism of lynching. It is critical that the study of enslavement connects to our present-day realities, including the violent murder of George Floyd and too many others, as well as racial disparities in incarceration and health care. Singleton’s “relational” compass point asks us to reflect on what we will do with our knowledge. Exploring this question allows students not only to understand our shared history, but also to wrestle with what we should do now. By co-processing the difficult histories of enslavement and racism, classmates can build trust, civic friendship, and agency. Truthful and empowering history and civic learning should go hand in hand.

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Inspire a Reverence for Liberty by Teaching the Full Story of American Slavery

By Ian V. Rowe, American Enterprise Institute, the Woodson Center

On September 12, 1962, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the request of the New York Civil War Commission at the Centennial Celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation. In his remarks in New York City, King emphasized that the document that started the long process of ridding America of slavery was actually inspired by the core principle of equality embedded in the country’s founding document: “The Declaration of Independence proclaimed to a world, organized politically and spiritually around the concept of the inequality of man, that the dignity of human personality was inherent in man as a living being,” King said. “The Emancipation Proclamation was the offspring of the Declaration of Independence. It was a constructive use of the force of law to uproot a social order which sought to separate liberty from a segment of humanity.”

What King so eloquently revealed was that slavery, far from being a particular American atrocity, was an accepted, grotesque feature at the center of a world ordered around the normalcy of human bondage. Yet it was America’s Enlightenment principles that allowed it to “uproot a social order” and liberate millions of enslaved people in recognition of their inherent and individual human dignity.

As educators debate how best to teach K–12 students about slavery today, it is important to see its barbaric adoption in the United States as a dispiriting but common “oppressor versus oppressed” element of the human condition worldwide and to emphasize as uncommon America’s post-abolition march toward becoming a multiethnic society with an unprecedented combination of size, peacefulness, and prosperity. It is now accepted that America’s founders laid out inspiring ideals around life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness but also committed the original sin of not allowing all human beings the right to fully live up to those same ideals.

Yet despite that inherent contradiction, America has made steady progress dismantling laws that imposed a racial hierarchy. Educators today are trying to figure out how to portray slavery in America as an example of state-sanctioned oppression and one that is central to our history. Their challenge is to do that effectively while also celebrating how our nation’s enduring principles have provided the world an indispensable model of how formerly enslaved people came to regularly produce some of the country’s most influential leaders in virtually every facet of American life.

In 2020, I was proud to help found 1776 Unites, a project of the Woodson Center. Led by primarily Black activists, educators, and scholars, 1776 Unites acknowledges that “racial discrimination exists—and works towards diminishing it. But we dissent from contemporary groupthink and rhetoric about race, class, and American history that defames our national heritage, divides our people, and instills helplessness among those who already hold within themselves the grit and resilience to better their lot in life.”

1776 Unites has developed free K–12 lesson plans based on the 10 “Woodson Principles” of competence, integrity, transparency, resilience, witness, innovation, inspiration, agency, access, and grace. The curriculum offers lessons on Black excellence in the face of unimaginable adversity. Among such examples were the nearly 5,000 Rosenwald Schools built during the Jim Crow era that educated more than 700,000 Black children throughout 14 southern states. These 1776 Unites lessons are now used by educators in all 50 states in private, charter, district, and parochial schools, after-school programs, home schools, and prison ministries.

A hopeful and upwardly mobile future for Americans of all races must be built on a shared understanding of our past that is accurate and expansive, not falsely embellished and narrowly selective (a serious flaw of the New York Times’s 1619 Project). Educators must be encouraged to impart a more complete telling of the Black American experience, one that offers an empowering alternative to curricula that emphasize racial subjugation almost to the exclusion of Black resilience.

As King said on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation: “If our nation had done nothing more in its whole history than to create just two documents, its contribution to civilization would be imperishable. The first of these documents is the Declaration of Independence and the other is that which we are here to honor tonight, the Emancipation Proclamation. All tyrants, past, present, and future, are powerless to bury the truths in these declarations, no matter how extensive their legions, how vast their power, and how malignant their evil.”

Those who seek to teach a sanitized version of history to achieve some false sense of patriotic education do our country and students a disservice, and, ironically, so do those who cherry-pick the most egregiously cruel acts to weave together a narrative of a permanent American malignancy of racism. It is through exposing “all the truths in these declarations” that we can best teach about U.S. slavery in K–12 schools, and, as a dividend, perhaps we will also inspire a reverence for liberty and the American experiment.

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Confronting the New Lost Cause by Teaching Slavery in Context

By Robert Maranto, University of Arkansas

We cannot take the politics out of public schools, because decisions about what to teach and what to leave out are inherently political. Social-studies curricula seem the most political of all, since they lack the precision of math and combine history with heritage.

Though often wedded together, history and heritage differ. Like all tribes, the people of the United States have a shared heritage, the legends inspiring us to continue our nation. In contrast, the field of history is a Western invention seeking to portray what happened, warts and all. Heritage is Mason Weems’s myth that young George Washington confessed to chopping down the cherry tree because he couldn’t tell a lie. Arguably, history with a bit of heritage is Washington’s evolving discomfort with and eventual rejection of slavery.

These definitions matter, because the United States is a multicultural democracy where heritage influences the histories schools teach. As Jonathan Zimmerman observes in his classic Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools, in the 1920s, Italians and Norwegians fought over whether Christopher Columbus or Leif Eriksson discovered America. Germans burnished their American credentials by inserting the historically unimportant but identifiably German Molly Pitcher into school textbooks; African Americans added Crispus Attucks. Marginalized groups thus married into the American heritage taught in schools.

In contrast, the early-20th-century Southern white activists promulgating the Lost Cause myths undermined both history and American heritage, creating a new Southern heritage through Southern schoolbooks whitewashing the Confederate cause. As Zimmerman details, the United Daughters of the Confederacy held student-essay contests defending slavery. One award winner portrayed slavery as “the happiest time of the negroes’ existence.” Zimmerman writes that “Confederate groups often challenged the entire concept of objectivity in history” by insisting that their lived experience offered unique insights that Northern scholars with their so-called objective historical methods could never uncover.

This should all sound familiar today. After suffering their own Appomattox with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Marxists became the new Confederates, supplanting scholarship with lived experience, stories, and now tweets. As Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay detail in Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody, in recent decades academic (and now journalistic) leftists replaced class politics with identity politics, retreating into postmodern rejection of universal truths. Accordingly, it would be a mistake in teaching about slavery to rely too much on tendentious sources such as the New York Times’s 1619 Project.

Some assert that American schools ignore slavery. This statement was probably accurate—in 1970. My children, one a high school senior and the other a recent graduate, agreed that our Arkansas public schools covered slavery and Jim Crow between six and eight times in 12 grades—far more than they covered the founding of the United States, the Constitution, or World War II; indeed, the latter made an appearance only once, or twice, counting a Holocaust unit. My kids also observed, however, that their schools’ treatment of slavery, like their coverage of history overall, was superficial. As one of my children put it, “They teach you slavery is bad, but not much else.” (This may characterize Arkansas standards generally. A recent Fordham Institute report rated them as “mediocre,” observing that, “strangely,” the topic of secession is not addressed in the state’s Arkansas history standard and that “the lack of direct references to slavery” in that standard was “notable.”) To the degree that our local teachers covered slavery, it was primarily through political history, as a key cause of the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, and the Civil War, suggesting that state standards may bear little relation to what happens in class. Relatedly, Jim Crow is taught primarily through a matter of local interest, the integration of Little Rock Central. In fairness, as the Fordham Institute report makes clear, coverage of slavery and of history generally lacks depth in most states, not just in the South.

So what is to be done? You can’t beat something with nothing, so on the elementary level, schools might adopt the relatively specific Core Knowledge curricula, developed by E. D. Hirsch, in which knowledge builds on knowledge. To a far greater degree than is true of typical curricular approaches from education consultants, Core Knowledge focuses less on amorphous “skills” and more on facts, which provides the foundation for more knowledge and for interpretations. As Hirsch writes in The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them, psychological research shows that “the ability to learn something new depends on an ability to accommodate the new thing to the already known.” The more we already know, the easier it is to learn new information; hence better curricula can help. Teacher quality also matters. On the secondary level, where I do fieldwork, educators joke that every social-studies teacher has the same first name—“Coach”—suggesting the need to hire knowledgeable teachers, not those for whom teaching is a secondary priority and whose main expertise is athletics. Meanwhile, when educators teach about the owning of human beings, as indeed they should, they should teach within the context that slavery was not uniquely American but has existed in countries with every major religious tradition and on every inhabited continent. (Core Knowledge does this.) When teachers cover slavery, they should include discussions of which countries ended slavery, when, and why, perhaps using visual aids such as maps to help convey the information.

Educators could also make the broader point that nearly every country once had (and that some still have) slavery, but only America can claim the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the reconstruction of Europe and Japan after World War II, and an indispensable role in defeating the twin evils of fascism and communism. It is these uniquely American contributions that should define our nation for today’s schoolchildren and tomorrow’s citizens.

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

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

Guelzo, A., Ramey Berry, D., Blight, D.W., Rowe, I.A., Stang, A., Allen, Maranto, R. (2022). Teaching about Slavery: “Asking how to teach about slavery is a little like asking why we teach at all” Education Next, 22(1), 64-74.

Sludge: What Stops Us from Getting Things Done and What to Do about It
by Cass R. Sunstein
2021, MIT Press, $41.99; 168 pages.

As reviewed by Philip K. Howard

No one likes bureaucracy. Indeed, every winning presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter has promised to overhaul it. Yet bureaucracy keeps growing. To teachers, principals, and others frustrated by red tape, it can only be good news that distinguished law professor Cass Sunstein champions the cause of “radical simplification” in his short new book, Sludge: What Stops Us from Getting Things Done and What to Do about It. In his earlier book Nudge (co-authored with economist Richard Thaler), Sunstein looked at how legal structures and other “choice architecture” can steer people toward responsible choices—for example, making workers opt out rather than opt in to retirement plans. Nudge championed positive incentives. In Sludge, Sunstein takes aim at the negative aspects of legal structures.

Sludge is intended to be a clarion call to clean out the time-wasting red tape that bogs people down in many work settings, including in schools: “In education, there is far too much sludge, and it hurts students, teachers, and parents alike,” he writes. Sunstein sees sludge as a grab bag of “paperwork requirements, waiting time, reporting requirements, clearance processes, and the like.” The examples provided suggest a broad range of categories and motivations. For example, reporting requirements are imposed because public officials “need to know how programs are working.” Other mandates are aimed at “program integrity,” in an effort to deter fraud and waste. Occupational-licensing requirements for barbers, manicurists, and other specialists are notoriously imposed as barriers to deter new competitors.

Sunstein sees the main cost of red tape as diversion of time, a diversion he rightly sees as not only inefficient put also an affront to the dignity of teachers and others. An excellent recent essay by Annie Lowrey in The Atlantic, “The Time Tax,” similarly focuses on how red tape forces people to spend time on mindless compliance. Indeed, surveys of teachers consistently find that that they feel overwhelmed by bureaucratic compliance. One informal recent study found that, on average, teachers work more than 50 hours per week, but only half of that time is spent in front of students. Fifteen hours were devoted to tasks such as administrative compliance, including reporting requirements. The inefficiency doesn’t stop there. All these reports by teachers need to be read and studied—hence the exponential growth in the number of school administrators. As Ira Stoll wrote for this publication last fall using Department of Education data, school district administrative staff grew 75 percent between 2000 and 2017, and the number of principals and assistant principals grew 33 percent. The number of teachers grew less than 8 percent.

Bureaucratic controls are far more harmful, in my view, than the diversion of time and resources. For example, bureaucratic mandates skew decisions in ways that make it almost impossible to run schools sensibly. Here are some of the constraints:

• Maintaining order in a classroom is difficult when teachers and principals have the burden of “due process” hearings to remove disruptive students.
• The performance aspect of teaching—drawing on personality and variety to hold student attention—is difficult when teachers are shackled to rigid course plans and required to “teach to the test.”
• Balancing the needs of all students when allocating time and resources is almost impossible under absolute special-education mandates and processes. Many school districts spend about 25 percent of their budgets on special education for about 14 percent of students.
• Building a school culture with energy, innovation, and pride is difficult when teachers know there’s no accountability for job performance. As a former National Teacher of the Year from Alabama put it, “On a daily basis, I see teachers who start classes late, chatting on their cell phones while they eat breakfast in front of the students. . . . There are even a few classes where I have yet to see any instruction taking place. . . . I finally had to look myself in the mirror and say out loud—‘There are educators who do not care!’”

No one designed this system. Sunstein’s instincts are correct that all these constraints, requirements, and forms accumulated like sediment in a harbor. Each new report and reform generally gets added to all the requirements from prior years. Collective-bargaining agreements reflect a similar additive process, with ever-tighter shackles on school administrators. At this point, the cumulative effect of all these bureaucratic requirements is crushing. Perfect compliance is not only overwhelming, but impossible.

Sunstein’s call for “sludge audits” is an important first step. America’s schools are long overdue for a spring cleaning. But why hasn’t this happened before? Sunstein doesn’t address why past efforts at reform—for example, the Paperwork Reduction Act (1980) or Al Gore’s ambitious reinventing government initiative (1993–2000)—had so little impact.

The sludge has remained not mainly because of negligent public management, in my view, but because of an unspoken precept of modern operating philosophy: distrust of authority. All the paperwork is a pathetic effort to “make sure” educators are doing their jobs properly. The due process hearings will “make sure” no student or teacher is treated unfairly. Giving special-education students an absolute right to whatever they need will “make sure” they are not ignored. Multi-hundred-page collective-bargaining agreements will “make sure” no principal ever treats a teacher unfairly.

The modern obsession with avoiding bad choices is the Miracle-Gro for sludge. Good sense, spontaneity, indeed almost all life, has been suffocated out of schools. Conversely, put any successful school under a microscope, and you will find leadership that takes authority by ignoring or repudiating most of what Sunstein calls sludge. At one successful public school, the principal told me she meticulously kept fictional records of compliance so teachers could focus on teaching.

Sunstein presumes that the solution involves deregulation: “Elimination of sludge is not always included in the category of deregulation. It should be.” I don’t agree. Most red tape comes not from goals of regulation—say, overseeing effective schools, avoiding arbitrary discipline, and so forth—but an almost obsessive compulsion to micromanage those goals.

For example, consider all the reporting requirements. Does this diversion of time and resources to filling out forms serve a useful purpose? Mostly not. Its purpose is mainly to build a record proving that teachers and the school did their jobs properly. File cabinets stuffed with identical forms checking boxes are not an effective way to evaluate either quality or compliance. What’s needed is to scrap the dense rulebooks and detailed requirements, which are “inputs,” and instead hold officials accountable for outcomes, as measured by their performance in meeting public goals and governing principles.

How would a simpler system work? Let the educators in a school focus on the learning, socialization, and health of their students. Replace red tape with accountability for results. But “results” in education is far more nuanced than what can be demonstrated by hard metrics such as test scores. Instead of obsessing over test results, give outside evaluators the responsibility of periodically inspecting and reporting on how the school is doing, including aspects of a school that are impossible to evaluate with quantitative metrics, such as school culture. A similar approach can be used to safeguard against abuses of authority. A site-based parent-teacher committee could review complaints of unfair discipline, for example, without forcing educators to endure a legal gauntlet each time a student misbehaves.

The modern mind is trained to think that any authority comes with a license for abuse. Red tape proliferated mainly because we’re unwilling to give people the authority to take responsibility. What if . . . the teacher is unfair to a student? What if . . . the principal decides to serve only Twinkies at lunch? What’s needed is not trust in any particular person, however, but trust in a framework of authority where every decision can be reviewed by someone else.

An unbroken chain of accountability is key. Teachers can’t be liberated from sludge until they can be accountable. Principals can’t be liberated to manage teachers until there’s an oversight mechanism to hold principals accountable. Red tape turned into a jungle because, without accountability, the only tools for control are ever-denser rules and rights.

How can we escape from this awful snarl of sludge and legal kudzu? Who would actually conduct “sludge audits” and implement change? Sunstein calls for the president to order “a reduction in paperwork burdens and . . . federal agencies to reduce sludge.” Such an order, I think, would have only marginal impact. Insiders will never make needed changes, because they are creatures of the jungle and are unlikely to embrace a philosophical shift from bureaucratic controls to accountability based on human judgment at every level of the education hierarchy.

One common characteristic of most successful schools is that teachers and principals feel free to act on their best judgment—not trudge through sludge all day long. One way to encourage schools to embrace this approach is to give parents free choice on where to send their children. Most parents will pick successful schools. This form of accountability will leave bad schools to wither.

But reducing sludge at scale will require a structural overhaul that slashes through the bureaucratic jungle. Why shouldn’t public schools have similar freedoms as charter schools? One way to move public debate in this direction is to delegate simplification to outside “spring cleaning commissions.” Just as base-closing commissions undertake the politically difficult job of recommending which military bases to shutter, the president or a governor could appoint nonpartisan experts and citizens to propose simplified frameworks that re-empower educators by liberating them from bureaucratic quicksand—including empowering administrators to hold teachers and others accountable. The sticking point, as noted, will be accountability. Ultimately, as I have argued elsewhere, the stranglehold of teachers unions will need to be dislodged by constitutional rulings holding that collective-bargaining agreements have preempted democratic governance. But first we must reset the public narrative—teachers and parents must understand that accountability is essential because it’s the precondition to empowerment.

Red tape and sludge are symptoms of an anti-human governing philosophy. Pruning the jungle will be, at best, a temporary solution. The cure to what Sunstein rightly decries is, in the end, human responsibility. Let people roll up their sleeves. Let other people judge how they do. Restore responsibility and accountability, and there’s little need for the paralytic tangle of forms, thick rulebooks, and legal proceedings. In Sludge, Sunstein shines a light in the bureaucratic darkness, and, by calling for “sludge audits,” adds his moral authority to the growing demand to clear out the bureaucratic underbrush.

Philip K. Howard is founder of the Campaign for Common Good. His latest book is Try Common Sense. Follow him on Twitter: @PhilipKHoward.

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

Howard, P.K. (2022). A Light in the Bureaucratic Darkness: Can “sludge audits” or a presidential order ease the paperwork load? Education Next, 22(1), 76-78.

Calamities often disrupt the status quo. After the influenza pandemic that began during World War I and lasted two years, many Europeans turned to socialism, fascism, and Bolshevism. In the United States, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 followed by the Great Depression induced many people to reject laissez-faire capitalism in favor of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, with its social safety-net programs, public-works projects, and government regulations.

Yet not all such catastrophic events lead to an appetite for change. After World War I, Americans, unlike Europeans, longed for a return to what President Warren G. Harding termed “normalcy.” The immigration door slammed shut, isolationism raged, and popular fear of Communism led to the Red Scare.

The 15th annual Education Next survey investigates how Americans are responding to the worst pandemic since 1919. In the realm of education, a desire for sweeping reform might well be expected, given the pandemic’s particularly severe toll on K–12 schooling. While few children suffered serious illnesses, the effects of the pandemic on the nation’s youth were nonetheless dramatic. Schools across the country were shuttered for months, some for more than a year. State-mandated testing, a tool for holding schools accountable, was largely abandoned. Remote instruction, implemented under crisis conditions, failed to live up to the claims of virtual-learning enthusiasts. Learning loss was severe, especially among children from low-income families. According to parents, children’s friendships and social ties suffered. Even their physical fitness was put at risk. Obesity, drug abuse, mental health challenges, and teenage suicides appeared to be on the rise. In desperation, some parents shifted their children from district schools to private schools, homeschooling, and other options that provided more in-person learning.

In the political sphere, expectations for large-scale innovation are running high. Conservatives hope to restrict union power, reinstate test-based accountability, and expand school choice. Legislators in seven states have created new programs offering parents alternatives to the traditional system, making 2021 the most successful year on record for school-choice advocates (see “School Choice Advances in the States,” features, Fall 2021). Progressives are pushing for higher teacher pay, free college, and preschool for all.

What, then, is the state of public opinion as parents and school leaders nationwide transition back to in-person schooling? Is the public demanding innovation that can make up for educational losses over the past year? Or do people want a quiet return to the familiar?

This survey is a continuation of our long-standing annual poll of public attitudes on education issues. This year, we interviewed a nationally representative sample of 1,410 adults in late May and early June. Our survey repeats many questions asked in past surveys, making it possible to see how the pandemic has affected public opinion. As in previous years, the survey contains a number of experiments in which we split the sample into two or three groups at random and then ask each group a variation on the same question. These experiments allow us to gauge how different question wordings and the provision of additional information affect participants’ responses (see sidebar on survey methodology).

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Opinion Shifts

Our survey results should temper expectations for major shifts in any political direction—and perhaps post a warning to advocates of any stripe. At least when it comes to education policy, the U.S. public seems as determined to return to normalcy after Covid as it was after the flu pandemic a century ago. To find out, we compare public views on 15 policy questions in June 2021 with views on the same questions two years earlier—before anyone had heard of Covid-19 (see Figure 1). On 10 of the 15 items, support for the proposed policy declines by 5 percentage points or more—a statistically significant difference. Drops in support are evident regardless of whether the policy is backed by those on the right or those on the left. In one case—the idea of making four-year public colleges free to attend—the drop is as large as 17 percentage points. On four additional policy items, support levels fall, but the change is not statistically significant. On one item—in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants who graduate from a state high school—we find no change. On no policy item do we identify a positive shift in support between 2019 and 2021. We do show an increase in approval for universal preschool between 2014 and 2021, but in the absence of information on opinion in 2019, we are unable to say whether the upward jump took place before or during the pandemic.

While many of the policies we asked about already exist in pockets around the country, in most places they represent a change to the status quo. In the one case where the policy is now universal (maintaining the federal requirement that students take annual state tests), we do not observe a statistically significant change. The following illustrates the shifts in public opinion between 2019 and 2021 on policy items for which the same question was posed on both occasions.

Support for increasing school expenditures in respondent’s district

• Among respondents informed of current per-student expenditure level: Down 11 points (to 39% from 50%)
• Among those not informed of current per-student
  expenditure level: Down 5 points (to 57% from 62%)

Support for increasing teacher salaries in respondent’s state

• Among those informed of current average teacher
  salary in their state: Down 3 points (to 53% from 56%)
• Among those not informed of current average state
  salary: Down 5 points (to 67% from 72%)

Support for free or reduced-cost education

• Preschool programs for all four-year-olds (2014 to 2021): Up 13 points (to 67% from 54%); Caveat: Increase in support
  for universal preschool may have occurred prior to 2019.
• Free four-year public colleges: Down 17 points (to 43% from 60%)
• Making immigrants eligible for in-state tuition: No change (44%)

Support for school accountability measures

• Common Core Standards: Down 7 points (to 43%
  from 50%)
• Similar standards across states: Down 7 points
  (to 59% from 66%)
• Requiring testing in grades 3–8 and high school:
  Down 3 points (to 71% from 74%)
• Merit pay for teachers: Down 1 point (to 46% from 47%)

Support for school choice

• Charter schools: Down 7 points (to 41% from 48%)
• Universal school vouchers: Down 10 points (to 45%
  from 55%)
• School vouchers for low-income families only:
  Down 6 points (to 43% from 49%)
• Tax-credit scholarships: Down 2 points (to 56%
  from 58%)

In Short: The public seems tired of disruption, change, and uncertainty. Enthusiasm for most, perhaps all, policy innovations has waned. The shifts are not large enough to be statistically significant for some items: in-state tuition for immigrant children, higher salaries for teachers when the respondent is informed of current pay levels, testing students for accountability purposes, tax-credit scholarships, and merit pay. On other items, such as preschool education, the survey does not include information on the state of opinion in both 2019 and 2021, but we find no evidence of a surge in demand for change and reform. All in all, the public appears to be calling for a return to the status quo.

 

Grading Schools and Other Public Services

Public institutions came under severe stress in 2020. Schools switched from in-person to online instructional modes; post offices faced ever-increasing competition from digital messaging and private-delivery systems; demonstrators and police battled across the country in the wake of reported brutalities against Black people, including the horrific murder of George Floyd.

Public-sector unions did not escape harsh criticism during the course of these controversies. Teachers’ organizations were accused of placing educators’ safety ahead of students’ educational needs. Police unions were attacked for protecting officers accused of criminal abuses. Postal unions were criticized for inefficiencies in the mail-delivery system.

How has the public responded to these events and the controversies they have spawned? Do people think schools, police, and postal officials are doing the best they can? Or have they become more critical of the public entities they count on to provide basic services in every city and town? Does the public blame public-sector unions for hampering the effective and unbiased delivery of services?

To find out, we asked survey respondents to evaluate schools, police, and post offices on the same A-to-F scale traditionally used to evaluate student performance. We asked them to assess the performance of these institutions in both their local communities and the “nation as a whole.” Some questions are identical to those posed in 2008 and again in 2018, letting us see whether intervening events have altered people’s assessments. In 2021, we also asked respondents whether they think public-sector unions in these three realms are having a “generally positive” or a “generally negative” impact on the public services provided by the relevant public agency—a question we had previously posed only about teachers unions.

We find that the public holds both public agencies and their unions harmless for any deficiencies in service delivery that have occurred either as the result of the pandemic or of deteriorating race relations. For the most part, public evaluations are at least as positive in 2021 as they have been in the past. However, Black Americans have become more critical of the police force since 2008, even as their views of schools have greatly improved.

 

Public schools. The way American public schools have res-ponded to the Covid-19 pandemic has not yet had dramatic effects on what people think about their quality, either in their local communities or across the country. When asked to grade the quality of their local public schools, 55% of respondents give an A or a B (see Figure 2). This approval percentage falls about midway between the 2019 peak (near 60%) and the 51% who gave A or B grades in 2018. It is well above the 40% of respondents giving local schools these “honor roll” grades in 2008.

When asked to grade public schools across the country, survey participants are more critical. Twenty-three percent give an A or a B grade in spring 2021. That share is lower than the percentage giving these grades in spring 2020 (30%) but about the same as in 2018 (24%) and higher than in 2008 (20%).

 

Assessments of schools within ethnic groups have changed over time (see Figure 3). Among Black respondents, the percentage giving schools in their community an A or a B increased to 46% in 2021 from 24% in 2008, registering a jump of 22 percentage points. Among Hispanic respondents, the increase is to 60% from 39%, amounting to a rise of 21 percentage points. Among white respondents, the upward climb is to 57% from 44%, representing a smaller though still sizable increment of 13 percentage points. Black Americans remain more skeptical of local schools than either Hispanic or white Americans, though this difference across groups is considerably smaller in 2021 than it was 13 years ago.

When it comes to rating schools nationally, Hispanic Americans give out the highest marks. Forty-four percent say the nation’s schools deserve either an A or a B, up from 23% in 2008. That upward jump is not matched among either of the other two major ethnic groups, who continue to assign much lower grades to the nation’s schools. Twenty-four percent of Black respondents and 18% of white respondents are willing to put the nation’s schools on the honor roll.

In Short: We see some fluctuation in public assessments over the years, but evaluations of public schools in 2021 are very close to what they were a year ago and just prior to the pandemic.

Teachers unions. Teachers unions have been actively engaged in conversations about when and how to reopen schools. What impression have their actions left on the public’s views of teachers unions, both in the context of the pandemic and more generally? We asked respondents 1) if teachers unions made it easier or harder to open schools both in their own community and across the country, and 2) whether teachers unions had a “generally positive” or “generally negative” impact on schools.

With respect to the first question, the public seems reluctant to draw strong conclusions. A plurality of Americans (50%) say unions made it neither easier nor harder to reopen schools in their community. Perhaps the respondents in this group perceive unions as neutral in this context, or maybe they are simply unaware of what the unions did locally to help or hinder reopening. Still, just 15% of survey takers say that unions made it easier for local schools to reopen, while more than twice as many (35%) think they made it harder.

Opinion looks similar when we consider parents only: 34% indicate unions made it harder for local schools to reopen; 22% say they made it easier; and 45% report they made it neither easier nor harder. Perhaps surprisingly, teachers are most likely to say that unions hindered reopening efforts in their local communities. A plurality (43%) say unions made it harder for local schools to reopen, while 18% say they made it easier.

The public sees more evidence of union resistance to reopening when viewing their actions across the country. When asked about teachers-union activity nationwide, 48% of American adults think the unions made it harder for schools to reopen and 12% say they made it easier. Parental views are similar. As for teachers themselves, 41% report that unions made reopening more difficult across the nation, though 28% think the unions made it easier.

 

Although many Americans believe that teachers unions made it harder for the nation’s schools to reopen, overall impressions of unions’ effects on school quality have not changed by a significant amount. Respondents split almost evenly on this question. Thirty-five percent say unions have a positive effect on schools, and 37% say they have a negative effect, with the rest undecided. When asked a longer version of this question that includes arguments people often make for or against unions, these numbers are very similar: 37% positive, 35% negative (see Figure 4). Democrats’ views of teachers unions are more positive than those of Republicans (see Figure 5). Half of Democrats say teachers unions have a positive effect on school quality, and 20% say they have a negative effect. These numbers are nearly the reverse for Republicans. Fifty-eight percent of them think teachers unions have a negative effect, with 17% believing they have a positive effect.

In Short: A large share of parents and the public say unions neither hindered nor helped the reopening of local schools, with more teachers responding that unions made it more difficult for local schools to open. Both parents and the general public see teachers unions nationwide as complicating the task of reopening schools, but this has not noticeably altered views on how teachers unions influence school quality.

Postal service. As mentioned earlier, the 2021 poll asked survey participants to grade their local post office as well. Unlike the upward trend for schools between 2008 and 2021, the trend for the post office is slightly downward, from 70% in 2008 to 68% in 2018 and 65% in 2021.

In 2021 (but not in earlier years) we also asked respondents to evaluate the post office in the nation “as a whole.” Half of respondents give an A or a B to post offices across the country, 15 percentage points less than the share willing to award these honor-roll grades to the post office in their community. The national-local difference is less than half that for the grading of schools, where the margin between national and local assessments is 32 percentage points. It could be that the public receives less negative information about post offices than about schools nationwide, which could account for the smaller disparity in ratings of the postal service. But the smaller local-national gap might also reflect the generally more positive assessment of post offices than schools in both contexts. The percentages giving one of the top two grades to the community’s post office run 10 percentage points higher than for local public schools and 27 percentage points higher for postal than educational services nationwide.

Partisan differences in assessments of the post office are not as large as for the nation’s schools. Sixty-two percent of Republicans award an A or a B to local postal service, as compared to 68% of Democrats. For post offices across the country, the percentages are 46% and 54% for the two parties, respectively.

Postal-workers unions command modestly more respect among the American public than do teachers unions. A plurality (39%) say postal unions have a positive effect on the quality of postal service, while 29% say they have a negative effect.

Police. Despite the negative press coverage directed at police in recent years, evaluations of the “police force in your local community” improved somewhat between 2008 and 2021. The percentage giving an A or a B rose from 64% in 2008 to 69% in 2018 to 70% in 2021. For ratings of the police force nationwide, we are unable to make similar comparisons over time, but in 2021 we found a major gap of 26 percentage points in evaluations of the police, depending on whether the focus was on the local level or on the nation’s police. Seventy percent of Americans grade their local police force with an A or a B as compared to 44% giving these honor-roll grades to the “police force in the nation as a whole.” That is not dramatically different from the gap between assessments of local schools and schools across the country. But at both national and local levels, police receive higher evaluations than those given to schools. The share of the public giving one of the two top grades to local police is 15 percentage points higher than for local public schools and 21 percentage points higher for the police force nationwide than for schools nationwide. Yet police unions are less well respected than teachers organizations. A 40% plurality of the public thinks police unions have a negative effect on the quality of policing, while 30% believe they have a positive effect.

Further, sharp differences over policing have emerged across both ethnic and partisan divides. Among Black Americans, 48% give local police forces an A or a B grade, down from 55% in 2008. By comparison, 75% of white survey participants put police on the A–B honor roll, up from 67% in 2008. In other words, the racial divide with respect to the police increased by 15 percentage points. Meanwhile, Hispanic American evaluations of the police—73% of them give an A or a B—are little different from those of white Americans and are up 9 percentage points from their 2008 level of 64%.

The difference between Black and white respondents’ evaluations of local police (27 percentage points) is more than twice as large as the margin between their ratings of local public schools (10 percentage points). The discrepancies are even starker when considering opinions of police forces across the country. Just 15% of Black Americans award an A or a B grade to police forces nationwide, while 51% of white and 48% of Hispanic respondents do. By 9 percentage points, a smaller share of Black Americans give the nation’s police force one of the two high grades than do so for the nation’s schools, but a larger share of white Americans are willing to assign one of these honor-roll grades to the police than to the schools—by a margin of 26 percentage points. In a nutshell, Black Americans are more critical than others of the nation’s police, white Americans are more skeptical than others of the nation’s schools, and Hispanic Americans grant both schools and police quite similar evaluations, with 44% and 48% willing to award an A or a B to the nation’s schools and police forces, respectively.

In Short: Schools receive lower evaluations than do either the police force or the post office—both when survey takers offer assessments of operations in their local community and when they size up these services on the national scene. But evaluations of local schools have improved substantially since 2008, while evaluations of the local police force have barely ticked upward, and assessments of local postal service have drifted downward. In all cases, survey participants are more likely to give higher grades to public services when asked about them in a local rather than a national context. Yet the size of the local-national gap is not uniform across services. For schools, the gap in 2021 is 32 percentage points, for police it is 26 points, and for post offices it is 14 points. This variation suggests that more is involved than the tendency to favor the familiar over the distant. Very likely, differences are a function of more-extensive negative media coverage given to the nation’s schools and police forces than to the postal service. It is also possible that people simply think the post office delivers higher-quality services than either the police or the schools do, though that theory does not account for the slip in public ratings of postal services since 2008.

Colleges and universities. We also asked survey participants to grade public and private colleges and universities in their state (not every local community has a college or university) and across the country. Both public and private colleges fare better than public K–12 schools. Seventy percent of respondents give public colleges and universities in their state an A or a B grade (15 percentage points higher than for local public K–12 schools), and 57% award one of these honor-roll grades to public colleges and universities across the country (34 percentage points higher than public K–12 schools). Americans rate private colleges in their state similarly to public colleges; 74% give private institutions an A or a B (19 percentage points higher than for local K–12 public schools). When evaluating higher education on the national scene, they tend to see private colleges as better than public colleges. Sixty-five percent give private institutions nationally an A or a B (42 percentage points higher than for public K–12 schools).

Partisan Divide

Survey participants are divided along party lines in both their assessments of educational institutions and their opinions about education policy. Republicans tend to be more critical of schools and colleges on the national level. They are also likelier to embrace merit pay for teachers, charter schools, and universal-voucher programs. Democrats are more favorably inclined than Republicans toward boosting school expenditure levels, lifting teacher salaries, and offering free preschool and college. Moreover, partisan differences on several (but not all) of these topics seem to be expanding.

Evaluating schools and colleges. In assessments of local K–12 schools, for instance, a new partisan gap has emerged. In 2019, 59% of Democrats said their community’s schools deserved either an A or a B, compared to 62% of Republicans. Two years later, 51% of Republicans award honor grades to their local schools while Democrats hold steady at 59%. Assessments of schools “in the nation as a whole” are not nearly as positive and are even more divided across party lines. In 2019, 20% of Republicans and 26% of Democrats gave America’s schools one of the two high grades. In 2021, those percentages are 17% and 28%, enlarging the partisan divide by 5 percentage points.

Public evaluations of four-year institutions of higher education are considerably more positive than views of elementary and secondary schools, but a partisan divide is nonetheless apparent. In 2019, 81% of Democrats but 73% of Republicans gave four-year colleges and universities within their state an A or a B. In 2021, that division deepens. Only 62% of Republicans, as compared to 77% of Democrats, are willing to assign in-state four-year colleges a top grade, widening the assessment gap by 7 percentage points over the two years. Evaluations of four-year colleges and universities in the nation as a whole reflect even greater partisanship, with 46% of Republicans but 67% of Democrats awarding them an A or a B. However, the size of the divide did not change significantly over the past two years.

Assessments of private colleges and universities are somewhat less partisan, but when respondents are asked about these institutions “in the nation as a whole” the differences between Republicans and Democrats widens. In 2021, 74% of Democrats but 56% of Republicans give the nation’s private colleges and universities a grade of A or B, a gap 10 points larger than in 2019. When survey takers are asked about private colleges within the state, partisan differences are smaller: 78% of Democrats and 70% of Republicans hand out one of the two highest grades, leaving the gap essentially unchanged from 2019.

In Short: Evaluations of both schools and colleges are more divided along party lines when respondents are asked about institutions “in the nation as a whole” rather than their local counterparts. Partisan differences are also more dramatic when the survey taker is asked to evaluate public colleges and universities as opposed to private ones.

 

Accountability measures. When it comes to the practice of testing students to hold schools accountable, rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans are in basic agreement. Seventy-two percent of adherents to both parties back the current federal law requiring statewide testing of students in grades 3 through 8 and again in high school. There is less consensus on the Common Core State Standards, however (se Figure 6). The Common Core undertaking was originally bipartisan, and Republican support continued in some quarters even after vigorous criticism by the Trump administration. In 2019, 46% of Republicans, only a few points less than the 52% of Democrats, said they favored the “Common Core, which are standards for reading and math that are the same across the states . . . to hold public schools accountable for their performance.” But now, in 2021, partisan differences are skyrocketing. Only 31% of Republicans, as compared to 54% of Democrats, “strongly” or “somewhat” support Common Core, a 23-percentage-point divide.

The Common Core question was posed to a random half of survey respondents. The other half were asked the same question with the words “Common Core” deleted. By dropping that phrase, we are able to ascertain whether respondents are reacting to the label or to the underlying idea of “standards for reading and math that are the same across the states.” When the question is phrased without reference to Common Core itself, we observe in 2021 higher levels of support and less of a divide between Democrats and Republicans: 62% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans express strong or somewhat strong support for the policy. That level of support is only modestly down from the 66% and 67% levels registered in 2019 on the part of Democrats and Republicans, respectively.

 

School choice. In Congress and state legislatures, school-choice policy typically evokes a strongly partisan response. Though neither party is completely united on all aspects of school-choice policy, Republican legislators are generally more likely to support choice legislation than are Democratic lawmakers. Among the public at large, the patterns are more complex. Republicans are, as expected, much more likely than Democrats to support charter schools; the tally is 52% to 33%, a difference that is about the same as it was just prior to the pandemic in 2019 and in prior years (see Figure 7). Republicans are also more likely than Democrats to support vouchers for all who wish to attend a private school, 50% to 44% (see Figure 8). But Democrats express more approval for vouchers for students from low-income families, 47% to 38%. Partisan differences have not changed significantly since 2019.

Opinions have shifted across party lines on one school-choice policy—state tax deductions for individual and corporate donations to foundations that give low-income students scholarships to attend private schools. Typically, such programs allow donors to deduct the full amount of their donation from their state tax bill. In 2021, legislatures in several states, including Indiana, Florida, Arkansas, Kansas, Iowa, and Nevada, either enacted or expanded a tax-credit scholarship program. In state legislatures, Republicans have been the most forceful advocates for such programs, yet Republican survey participants are less likely to endorse tax credits than the Democrats are. Among Democrats, support for the idea increased from 56% to 61% between 2019 and 2021, but among Republicans, backing declined from 65% to 53%. President Joe Biden, a Democrat, signed into law congressional bills expanding tax credits for families with children, which could help explain this surprising partisan reversal in partisanship on this topic. Whatever the cause, shifts in public opinion are quite the opposite of legislative trends in state capitals.

 

School spending. Respondents were split into two equally sized, randomly selected groups when asked about their views on school expenditures. One half was given no information about current spending while the other was told the level of per-student expenditures in the district in which they lived. In both groups, support for higher school spending fell between 2019 and 2021, but the downward shift did not significantly alter the partisanship gap (see Figure 9). Within the group given no information, Democrats continue to be 25 percentage points more in favor of increased spending in their local district than Republicans are (68% to 43%). Among those given information on per-student expenditures in their district, half the Democrats favor increased spending, down from 59% in 2019. Among Republicans in that group, 27% back more spending, down from 38% in 2019. In other words, information about current levels of spending reduces an inclination to spend more on schools among both Democrats and Republicans, and enthusiasm for spending has declined over the past two years, but partisan difference remains essentially unchanged from 2019.

To find out whether information had similar effects on opinions about teacher salaries, we again split the sample into two randomly selected groups. Among those not told average teacher salary levels in their state, support for teacher pay hikes remains nearly as high in 2021 as in 2019, with 78% of Democrats and 56% of Republicans favoring increases. When respondents are informed of current teacher salaries, Democratic support falls to 65%, and Republican approval to 37%, enlarging the partisan gap evident in 2019 by six percentage points.

 

Merit pay for teachers, in-state college tuition for immigrants, free college, and universal preschool. Partisan gaps have remained generally consistent in the level of support for merit-based pay for teachers, in-state tuition rates for undocumented immigrants, and free public college (both two-year and four-year). Fifty-three percent of Republicans but only 41% of Democrats support “basing part of the salaries of teachers on how much their students learn.” For Republicans and Democrats alike, the favorability level for this idea has not shifted since 2019. Nor has opinion by adherents to either party moved much between 2019 and 2021 on the question of “allowing undocumented immigrants to be eligible for the in-state college tuition rate” (21% among Republicans and 64% among Democrats in 2021).

Attitudes toward making all public two-year colleges free to attend have bifurcated somewhat: Republican support declined to 36% from 47%, while Democratic support saw a smaller drop to 80% from 85% (see Figure 10). Enthusiasm for “making all public four-year colleges in the United States free to attend,” by contrast, took a major tumble across the board. Among Democrats, the percentage favoring the policy dropped to 63% from 79% between 2019 and 2021; among Republicans, the decline was to 20% from 35%.

We also see large partisan differences on universal pre-kindergarten, for which we lack trend data between 2019 and 2021. Eighty-five percent of Democrats support government funding for all four-year-olds to attend preschool, compared to 44% of Republicans.

In Short: Partisan differences on education policy are as vivid as ever and, in some cases, appear to have intensified since the start of the pandemic. But the degree of partisanship varies with the issue. On topics such as school spending, teacher salaries, merit pay, Common Core, free college, and college tuition for undocumented immigrants, partisanship reigns. On student testing for school accountability and on school choice, partisanship is less intense among the rank-and-file members of the two political parties than among many representatives active in state legislatures and in Congress.

A New President’s Influence

The pandemic wasn’t the only new factor in the national political landscape over the last year. We also elected and inaugurated a new president. In prior surveys, Education Next has measured how much a president’s views sway public opinion by dividing the sample into two randomly chosen segments, only one of which is told the position the president has taken on the issue. By comparing the stances of those told the president’s position with the views of the uninformed group, we can estimate that president’s power to influence opinion on that issue. In 2009 and 2010, we gave a random half of survey participants Barack Obama’s positions on charter schools, merit-based pay for teachers, and a variety of other issues. In 2017 and 2020, they were told Donald Trump’s positions on many of the same issues. The results were remarkably consistent. Participants who shared a partisan identity with the president tended to become more supportive of policies that the president endorsed, while participants from the other party tended to become less supportive of those policies. The one partial exception was the first year of the Obama presidency, when this president, particularly popular at the time the survey was administered, seemed to influence opinion in the same direction across the political spectrum.

In this year’s poll, we repeat this experiment on presidential power by asking participants to indicate their support or opposition with respect to two issues on which President Joe Biden has taken a clear public stance. Although Biden has generally remained silent or ambivalent on many of the more controversial questions in education policy, preventing us from making direct comparisons with prior presidents on some issues, the administration has taken a strong position on two large contemporary issues: government funding for universal preschool and free tuition at public two-year colleges. To estimate the influence of the president, we assigned participants to two randomly chosen segments, only one of which was told Biden’s position on these two policy questions.

The impact of Biden’s endorsements is more muted than those of the two prior presidents, perhaps because Republicans and Democrats already disagree sharply about both preschool education and free community college. Among Democrats, support for government funding for preschool and community college is a robust 85% and 80%, respectively. But those percentages do not differ significantly between those informed of Biden’s views and those left uninformed. Perhaps Democrats already knew Biden’s position and therefore the information did not convey anything new to the survey respondents, or maybe the percentage favoring the policy is already so high that it is difficult to shift it higher. But it is also possible that Biden is not a particularly influential president with respect to public opinion—even among his own partisans.

The picture is much the same for Republicans, who are generally opposed to both policy proposals. Among Republicans, 44% favor universal preschool and 36% endorse the idea of free community colleges. Their views do not shift in a more negative direction once they have been told Biden’s position on the issue. Once again, it is possible that Republicans already know the president’s views, and the survey does not convey new information. In prior experiments, respondents to the survey were told presidential positions on certain issues—charter schools and merit pay for teachers—that matter a lot to activists but are relatively invisible to many Americans. Universal preschool and free community college may be more salient topics for the public in general.

Or it may be the case that Biden is a less polarizing president, or that partisanship is less potent in the post-pandemic era, though other survey data contradict that interpretation. In the end, we are unable to interpret definitely the difference between the impact of the Biden presidency and that of his predecessors.

In Short: Informing the public about President Biden’s position on the two education issues on which he has been most vocal—universal preschool and free community college—does not notably affect the balance of opinion or the already yawning partisan divide on those issues.

Rethinking School Board Elections

As a result of municipal reforms at the beginning of the 20th century, school board elections are often held “off-cycle”—that is, at a time other than the “on-cycle” elections in November of even-numbered years. Advocates of off-cycle elections argue that separating school board elections and general elections keeps politics out of education, potentially creating the conditions for more stable and expert-driven governance of schools. Critics of off-cycle elections contend that the unusual timing of school board elections results in low voter turnout, an unrepresentative electorate, and outsized influence of special interests.

We wanted to know what the American public thinks about the merits of off-cycle versus on-cycle school board elections. We divided our sample into three equally sized sections and asked the first group whether they think school board elections should be held on the same day as national elections or on a different day. Fully two-thirds support holding school board elections on the same day as national elections. When we offer a rationale for on-cycle elections (“Some people argue that holding school board elections on the same day as national elections would increase the number of people who turn out to vote for the school board”), the results are unchanged. When we offer a rationale for off-cycle elections (“Some people argue that holding school board elections on a different day than national elections helps keep politics out of education”), support for holding school board elections on the same day as national elections falls to 57%

In Short: Even among those who receive an argument in favor of off-cycle elections, a majority still supports on-cycle school board elections. School board election timing is the rare instance in this year’s survey where the public would seem to favor a departure from the status quo rather than a return to normalcy.

Michael B. Henderson is associate professor of political communication and director of the Public Policy Research Lab at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication. David M. Houston is assistant professor at the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University. Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University, director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, and senior editor of Education Next. Martin West is academic dean and Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and editor-in-chief of Education Next.

 

More from the 2021 Education Next Survey: “Parent Poll Reveals Support for School Covid-Safety Measures Despite Vaccine Hesitancy, Partisan Polarization“

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

Henderson, M.B., Houston, D.M., Peterson, P.E., West, M.R. (2022). Hunger for Stability Quells Appetite for Change: Results of the 2021 Education Next Survey of Public Opinion. Education Next, 22(1), 8-24.

The 15th annual Education Next survey, conducted in June 2021, yields a host of specific results that reveal one large fact about the current state of public opinion on American education: The public is cautious—extremely cautious. In the presence of a still-circulating Covid-19 virus, a large percentage of parents and the broader public want schools to take strong measures to keep children safe as they return to school. Yet many parents are not ready to risk the injection of a Covid vaccine into their child’s arm, even as government agencies testify to its safety and effectiveness.

In this article, we report on the 2021 follow-up survey to polls of parents of school-age children that we administered in May and November 2020, enabling us to track children’s schooling experiences over the course of the pandemic. In late May and June—at the tail end of what was surely the most unusual school year in our nation’s history—we interviewed a representative sample of 2,022 parents with children in kindergarten through 12th grade. Every parent then answered a series of questions about each of their children. We oversampled Black and Hispanic parents, as well as parents with children in private and charter schools, which allows us to make more-precise comparisons between racial and ethnic groups and between school sectors. In addition to reporting on their children’s schooling experiences, parents answered some of the questions included in our parallel survey of a nationally representative sample of adults, the results of which are discussed more fully in a companion article that also provides details on the methods for each survey (see “Hunger for Stability Quells Appetite for Change”).

Vaccine Hesitancy

We asked our nationally representative sample of parents whether they planned to have each of their school-age children vaccinated “when Covid-19 vaccines become available for children.” At the time we fielded our survey in early June, the Federal Drug Administration had recently approved the use of the vaccine for children aged 12–17, but not for those 11 and younger.

Parents of a bare majority of children under the age of 18 (51%) say they “probably” or “definitely” would have their child vaccinated (see Figure 1). The parents of another third (34%) say they “probably” or “definitely” would not. The parents of 15% of children say they don’t know. If these sentiments expressed in June 2021 remain stable, the road to universal vaccination will be bumpy.

Parental plans are influenced by the age of the child. Though the data aren’t yet definitive, some public health officials have said that younger children seem to be less likely than older ones to contract a Covid infection, and that if they do, they are less likely to have a serious illness. For children in elementary school, the percentage whose parents expect to have their child vaccinated is less than half (46% for the youngest grades, 47% for older elementary school students). Older children are also unlikely to be seriously affected by the virus, especially when compared to those over the age of 65. About 6 out of 10 high school students (59%) are slated by their parents to receive vaccinations; 52% of middle school children (grades 6 to 8) have a parent who reports such plans.

With one exception, the responses do not differ much by school sector: 52% of children at district schools are likely to get the vaccine, as compared to 60% at charter schools and 54% of those attending private schools. However, those who report home-schooling their children are more hesitant. Unless parents change their views, 32% of home-schooled children will probably or definitely be vaccinated. Hispanic parents’ openness to vaccination is slightly greater than that of Black or white parents. The percentage of children for whom parents plan vaccinations is 56% for Hispanic children, 49% for Black children, and 47% for white children.

The major divide on the issue of child vaccination falls along party lines. Despite the fact that the Covid-19 vaccines were developed and approved for use in adults under President Donald Trump, Republicans are far less likely than Democrats to say that they will have their children vaccinated. For children whose parent identified as a Republican, the parents of a majority (51%) report that they definitely or probably will not have their child vaccinated; the parents of 35% say that they definitely or probably will. For children whose parent identified as a Democrat, those percentages are flipped. The parents of 66% of children say they will have their child vaccinated, while the parents of 18% say they will not.

In Short: Parents of about a third of children think the risks of vaccination outweigh the benefits for children, and another 15% of parents are unsure. Vaccine hesitancy is more pronounced for parents of younger children. With the exception of home-schooled children, differences across school sectors are small. Differences by political party, however, are quite large. Those who view universal vaccination as a prerequisite to a full reopening of American schools and the broader economy appear to be facing a serious challenge—especially in red states.

Safety First: Masking and Distancing in Schools

Many parents support measures to protect their children from infection at school even though some of the protections—masking and social distancing—could interfere with the learning process. Nearly half (47%) of parents favor requiring students to wear masks when schools open in the fall, and about a third (35%) oppose the practice, with the rest taking a neutral position. The views of the broader public largely mirror those of parents, with 44% favoring mask wearing and 36% opposed (see Figure 2).

Parents are somewhat less supportive of social distancing at school, perhaps because they recognize that keeping children apart from one another is far from easy. Fewer than a third (32%) of parents think students should maintain a certain distance from one another, with 42% saying no such rule should be imposed; the rest say they are “not sure.” Among parents who support social distancing in schools, a slight majority of 54% say that students should be kept six feet apart, with 40% indicating that three feet or less would be appropriate. Once again, the views of the broader public on the issue of social distancing are very similar to those of parents (see Figure 3).

Parents also favor giving families the option of not sending their children to school this fall, in marked contrast to the historic practice of requiring in-school instruction unless a family is home-schooling. Nearly two thirds (64%) of parents say high school students should have the option of learning fully online, and nearly half (48%) say the same for elementary school students. The public as a whole is less enthusiastic about the prospect of permitting remote instruction, however, with 51% supporting a remote option for high school students and 41% endorsing that choice for elementary school students (see Figure 4).

Opinion on Covid-prevention measures divides sharply across party lines. Among Republicans, 21% approve of mask requirements, while 64% of Democrats do. When it comes to social distancing, nearly two thirds (66%) of Republicans oppose any minimum-distance mandate, as compared to 22% of Democrats. All high school students should have the option of learning online, according to 41% of Republicans and 60% of Democrats. The choice should be available for elementary school students, say 33% of Republicans, but 49% of Democrats.

A mask requirement is more popular in the minority community than among white adults. Sixty-nine percent of Black adults and 59% of Hispanic adults favor mandatory masking, but only 33% of white adults do. When it comes to social distancing at school, 51% of white adults say “no rule is needed,” but that position is taken by only 21% of Black adults and 32% of Hispanic adults. Conversely, 60% of Hispanic adults and 54% of Black adults favor providing students a remote-learning option, as compared to 46% of white adults.

In Short: The public remains fairly risk-averse about schools reopening. But caution is much more prevalent among Democrats than Republicans, showing once again how politicized the response to the pandemic has been. If school districts are responsive to social and political attitudes, one might expect school practices to vary widely across the country, depending on the racial and ethnic composition of the local populations and the partisan balance of power.

Parental Assessments

Parents report differences in the schooling situation between November 2020 and June 2021. By June, the parents of more than half (52%) of students say their child is going to school entirely in person rather than taking classes remotely (27%) or in a mix of the two formats (21%). Those percentages are the near reverse of those from November 2020, when 28% of children were going to school in person full time, 53% of them were attending school remotely, and the rest were learning in the hybrid format, according to their parents. March seemed to be the halfway point in the process of returning to in-person education. As of that month, 43% of students were said to be going to school fully in person, 35% were entirely remote, and 23% were experiencing a blend of both. In November 2020, parents reported a high incidence of adverse consequences for their children as a result of measures taken by schools to stem the spread of Covid-19. Children were suffering learning loss, impairment of academic instruction, social isolation, emotional distress, and inadequate physical exercise, parents said. Despite all of these reported problems, parents overwhelmingly indicated that they were satisfied with their children’s schools, suggesting that parents believed the schools were doing about as well as they could under the circumstances. Parents were more positive about a child’s experiences if the child was attending school in person rather than online and if the child was enrolled in a private rather than a district school.

Pandemic impacts. In our June 2021 survey, we asked parents several of the same questions about pandemic impacts that we also posed in November 2020. Parental responses to these questions are remarkably similar to those given earlier, despite the fact that disruption had continued for an additional eight months. What parents said about their children’s educational experience in November they continue to say the following June. Matters have not improved, according to parents, but neither have they worsened.

Despite the move toward in-person learning between November and June, parents’ assessments of Covid’s impacts on their children remain essentially unaltered. At the end of the school year, parents of 57% of the students say their child is learning somewhat or a lot less this school year than “they would have learned if there had not been a pandemic,” about the same as the 60% who gave this response the previous fall. The percentage of children perceived to be experiencing a somewhat negative or strongly negative impact on their “academic knowledge and skills” reached 39%, slightly (but not significantly) higher than earlier in the school year. Negative impacts on social relationships are observed for 49% of the children, hardly different from the 50% figure registered in November. The 41% of children for whom negative effects on emotional wellbeing are identified remains exactly the same in the two surveys. The percentage of children whose physical fitness has been adversely affected ticks downward from 45% to 42%, an insignificant change. Altogether, the data show parental assessments remain unchanged from November to the end of the school year.

One important shift among parents during the pandemic is their focus on some of the nonacademic aspects of schooling. Back in 2019, we asked survey takers to assign percentages to the amount that schools should “focus on academic performance versus student social and emotional wellbeing.” Among parents, the average response to “academic performance” was 62%, compared to 38% for “social and emotional wellbeing.” Two years later, parents now advocate for a 50–50 split between the two (see Figure 5). It appears that after a particularly challenging school year, parents are more attuned to schools’ potential contributions to students’ nonacademic needs.

One might think parents would become increasingly unhappy as the year progressed without seeing much improvement in their child’s academic, social, emotional, or physical wellbeing. But the percentage of children whose parents say they were “very satisfied” or “somewhat satisfied” with “the instruction and activities provided” by their child’s school increased slightly, from 73% to 78%. It appears that a large majority of parents continue to believe that their children’s schools are doing the best they can under extremely adverse circumstances.

In Short: Although parents continue to report severe negative impacts of school measures taken in response to the pandemic, especially for children not attending school in person, they still express satisfaction with their child’s school, even after a full year or more of disrupted education.

Sector enrollments. In another sign of return to normalcy, the size of each of the four school sectors—district, private, charter, and home-school—has largely returned to the level reported by parents in spring 2020. In November 2020, the size of the district sector appeared to be declining, as parents reported shifting to charter, private, and home-schooling options. That finding seems to have been a short-term aberration that might be related to parents’ uncertainty as to how to identify a child’s school sector during the pandemic, in the absence of in-person school attendance. Our survey data are subject to sampling error, which can be substantial when the sector is small, as are the private, charter, and home-schooling sectors, so all estimates remain somewhat uncertain. However, enrollment in the district sector, which comprises approximately 80% of all students, can be estimated within a 3-percent margin of error. And results for all four sectors show a consistent “return to normalcy” pattern.

Specifically, the share of students reported by parents to be attending schools in the district sector declined by 9 percentage points (to 72% from 81% of total enrollments) between spring and fall 2020. But by June 2021, the end of the school year, the percentage of students in the district sector climbed back up to 79%, not significantly different from the 81% level in spring 2020. Enrollments in the other sectors also returned to much the same levels reported in spring 2020: Private-sector enrollments rose to 11% from 8% of total enrollments between spring and fall 2020, but they returned to the 8% level by spring 2021. Charter enrollments, which had increased to 8% from 5% between spring and fall 2020, fell back to 6%; and the share of students whose parents say they are being schooled at home, which had increased to 8% from 6% of all enrollments between spring and fall 2020, returned to the 6% level in spring 2021.

These home-school estimates differ from the 3% calculated in 2019 by the U.S. Department of Education and the 11% estimated by the U.S. Bureau of the Census in 2020. Our figure of 6% is a “Goldilocks” estimate that falls in between those from the two government agencies. In our survey, when parents indicated that their child was being home-schooled, we offered them the chance to clarify their answer. Some indicated that their child is “enrolled in a school with a physical location but is learning remotely at home.” We did not categorize these students as being home-schooled, which may help explain the differences between the two federal estimates and our own.

In Short: The shares of children attending school in the district, charter, private, and homeschooling sectors showed little change between May 2020 and June 2021. The apparent migration away from the district to the other sectors observed in our November 2020 survey may have been in response to school disruptions in 2020 or to uncertainties that arose when parents were asked about their child’s school at a time when children were learning online from their home.

Sector differences. Differences in students’ experiences between the district, charter, and private-school sectors, however, persisted along much the same lines between November 2020 and June 2021. The percentage of children in private school who were said to be attending full-time in-person classes climbed to 79% by the end of the school year, from 60% in November. At district schools, that percentage rose to 50% from 24%; at charters, to 36% from 18%. The percentage of private-school students taught remotely declined to just 8% from an already low 18%. At district schools, the percentage receiving all instruction remotely fell to 28% from 57%; in the charter sector, it drops to 43% from 66%. In other words, in-person learning became increasingly common across all three sectors, but differences persisted: Students attending private schools came back to the school door more rapidly than students at either district or charter schools, as reported by parents in November, a difference that continued until spring. Also, children at charters were more likely to learn remotely than children at district schools in both November and June.

The greater incidence of in-person instruction in private schools as compared to district schools may account for sector differences in parental assessments of their children’s experiences. Thirty-eight percent of children attending private schools suffered learning losses, parents say in June, but that percentage rises to 60% if the child attended public school and 51% if the child was in a charter school (see Figure 6). Similarly, measures taken “to limit the spread of Covid-19” had a less adverse effect on students’ academic knowledge and skills for children attending private schools, parents say (see Figure 7). Of the private-school children, 23% are reported to have suffered somewhat or strongly negative effects from these measures, while the corresponding figure for those attending district schools is 42%. Parents indicate that 28% of students attending charter schools suffered negative impacts on their academic knowledge despite the relatively low incidence of in-person instruction. Either charter schools mounted a better remote educational experience or charter parents were more optimistic in their assessments.

The perceived differences across sectors of the effects of Covid-mitigation measures on social relationships were even greater. Parents report that these measures had negative impacts for 30% of the children in private school but for 52% of those in district schools and 43% of those in charter schools. The measures took their toll on the emotional wellbeing of 28% of children at private schools and 32% of those at charters, but 43% of those at district schools, parents say. When it comes to physical fitness, these percentages are 29%, 38%, and 44% for the three sectors, respectively.

Despite all these negatives, parents across all sectors register a high level of satisfaction with the instruction and activities provided by their child’s school during the pandemic year. No less than 76 percent of district-school children had an experience that caused their parents to feel somewhat or very satisfied, a percentage that rose to 92% and 81% for children attending private and charter schools, respectively.

In Short: According to their parents, a smaller share of children attending private schools, as compared to those attending district schools, are suffering adverse effects on their academic, social, emotional, and physical wellbeing as a result of school measures taken in response to the pandemic. The share of charter-school students reported by their parents to be suffering these effects falls somewhere in between those of children in the district and private-school sectors.

Michael B. Henderson is associate professor of political communication and director of the Public Policy Research Lab at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication. David M. Houston is assistant professor at the College of Education and Human Development at George Mason University. Paul E. Peterson is the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government at Harvard University, director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, and senior editor of Education Next. Martin West is academic dean and Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and editor-in-chief of Education Next.

More from the 2021 Education Next survey: “Hunger for Stability Quells Appetite for Change: Results of the 2021 Education Next Survey of Public Opinion“

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

Henderson, M.B., Houston, D.M., Peterson, P.E., West, M.R. (2022). Parent Poll Reveals Support for School Covid-Safety Measures Despite Vaccine Hesitancy, Partisan Polarization: Private-school parents report less learning loss, greater satisfaction with pandemic schooling. Education Next, 22(1), 26-36.