How can we improve academic achievement and college attainment for disadvantaged students? To address this question, education researchers typically assess the impact of various interventions on all students whose family income falls under the limit for free or reduced-price school lunch—a broad category that fails to account for the effects of ethnicity and class in combination, as well as the considerable differences in economic and cultural resources among lower-income families in the United States.

This includes an earlier study co-authored by one of us, which used a randomized control trial to evaluate a school-voucher intervention in New York City and found modest positive impacts on college enrollment of African American and Hispanic American students (see “The Impact of School Vouchers on College Enrollment,” research, Spring 2013). That study, like many others, did not explore whether the program’s effects differed based on varying levels of disadvantage. We return here to the New York City voucher program to do just that.

Our study looks at the impact of using a voucher on college enrollments and on degree attainment. We also estimate effects of just being offered a voucher, even if it is not used to enroll in a private school. Our data now cover a span of 21 years, which allows us to record college enrollment and attainment up to seven years after a student’s anticipated date of high-school graduation and observe students’ college-going behavior even if their education was interrupted.

We find large differences in impacts between moderately and severely disadvantaged students. An offer of a voucher has no detectable benefit for severely disadvantaged students—minority students from either extremely low-income households or whose mothers did not enroll in college. However, for minority students who are either from a moderately low-income household or whose mother has attended college, being offered a voucher increases college-enrollment rates by about 15 percent and four-year degree attainment by about 50 percent. Those impacts are even larger if students actually use the voucher to enroll in a private school: enrollment at any college increases by up to 30 percent and four-year degree attainment increases by nearly 70 percent.

The voucher intervention we study did have its intended effects—but only for students from disadvantaged families that nonetheless had a certain amount of material and cultural capital. Our findings point to the limitations of half-tuition vouchers to promote college enrollment and graduation among the least-advantaged students, as well as their potential value for those with access to greater fiscal and cultural resources.

Unpacking “Disadvantage”

Evaluations of education interventions seldom account for differences among students in terms of their relative disadvantage. But other branches of research have drawn more nuanced distinctions.

For example, a number of sociologists and anthropologists have drawn contrasts between moderately disadvantaged and more severely deprived groups. In a classic study, William Julius Wilson emphasized the “social isolation” of deeply impoverished, racially segregated neighborhoods, where quality schools, suitable marriage partners, and “exposure to informal mainstream social networks and conventional role models” are in short supply. He theorized that programs designed to promote equality of opportunity that have positive impacts on the moderately disadvantaged may have little or no impact on “the truly disadvantaged.”

Consistent with this theory, quantitative research has documented sizeable differentials in educational attainment between those who are moderately and severely disadvantaged. For example, Martha Bailey and Susan Dynarski find important differences in the college-enrollment practices of students from the poorest families and those who are less so. Only 29 percent of high-school students born between 1979 and 1982 who lived in households in the lowest quartile of the distribution enrolled in college. But for students in the second-lowest quartile, the rate of college enrollment was 47 percent. The difference was starker still in those students’ college graduation rates: 9 percent among those in the lowest quartile versus 21 percent among those in the second quartile.

Meanwhile, qualitative research has deepened our understanding of the cultural and material challenges of those who are truly disadvantaged by both ethnic and class isolation. In his influential 1969 book examining an inner-city neighborhood in Washington, D.C., ethnographer Ulf Hannerz distinguishes between residents he labels “mainstreamers” and “street families.” The former, he says, are “stable working-class people” who “conform most closely to mainstream American assumptions about the ‘normal’ life.” By contrast, “street families” experience periodic unemployment and rely on government transfers.

Like Wilson, some sociologists focus on the structural effects of neighborhoods on the educational attainment and social mobility of the two groups. For example, John Kasarda has shown how the lack of private transport in large cities limits the access of the isolated urban poor to employment and other opportunities distant from the immediate neighborhood. But anthropologists note that poor neighborhoods contain diverse populations, and culture is not easily reduced to structural factors. The truly disadvantaged do not need to concentrate in specific places to lack cultural and material resources.

Despite the range of deprivation to be found among those perceived to be disadvantaged, researchers typically use participation in the National School Lunch Program as their poverty indicator, a blunt measure. Students are eligible for free or reduced-price meals at school if their household income is as much as 185 percent of the federal poverty line. In 1997, when the voucher program we study here launched, 37 percent of U.S. students received subsidized lunches. The income limit for free lunch was set at $16,874 for a family of three and $20,280 for a family of four, or $27,518 and $33,072 in 2020 dollars. Since then, Congress has allowed entire school districts to provide free meals to all students without collecting individual income-based applications if at least 40 percent of enrolled students receive other subsidized services, such as food stamps. By 2015, some 52 percent of U.S. students were eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches. When over half the student population are defined as poor, the definition of poverty is a very generous one.

In short, eligibility for participation in the school-lunch program does not provide a precise indicator of the population that Wilson characterized as truly disadvantaged. Yet a good deal of education research uses it as the sole indicator of socioeconomic status.

Revisiting a School-Choice Study

School-choice programs also define the eligible population in fairly broad terms that include not only those who are truly disadvantaged but also those who are only moderately disadvantaged. But to be effective, the exercise of choice would seem to require at least a certain amount of economic and cultural resources. Parents must have the time and energy to select the appropriate setting for their child, and the family may be expected to cover the cost of school uniforms, educational materials, and travel to and from the school. Beyond material considerations, schools may have rules for behavior with which students must comply if they are to remain in the school and demanding expectations for family involvement.

Yet evaluations of school-choice interventions typically ignore important differences in family capacities. Estimates of program impacts are typically made for the entire participating population or for all members of specific ethnic groups. This was the case in the earlier study of the New York City voucher program, to which we now turn.

In 1996, when New York City public schools did not open on time, the archdiocese responsible for the city’s Catholic schools offered to accept the public school’s one thousand “worst” students. The chancellor of the city’s school system rejected the proposal, but Mayor Rudy Giuliani embraced it, setting off a political firestorm over the proper boundaries between church and state. In the midst of this controversy, the nonprofit School Choice Scholarships Foundation was formed to provide private-school scholarships to any participating secular or religious private school in New York City. The foundation announced in February of 1997 that it would provide half-tuition scholarships for at least three years to 1,000 eligible elementary-school students. The scholarships were worth up to $1,400 per child per year and were for students entering grades 1 to 5 who qualified for free or reduced-price school lunch. Some 85 percent of the scholarships were reserved for students attending schools that had average reading and math scores below the citywide median on state tests.

More than 20,000 students applied. A sample of voucher applicants participated in an in-person eligibility screening, during which students took basic-skills tests in reading and math and the accompanying adult completed a questionnaire asking them about the child’s current school and the family’s demographic background. The vouchers were awarded by lottery in May 1997 and recipients entered private schools in the 1997–98 school year. Although the initial voucher offer was limited to three years, the scholarships were later extended to the end of 8th grade for students who had remained continuously in participating private schools.

Our analysis includes 2,634 students: a “treatment” group of 1,356 who received an offer of a voucher and a “control” group of 1,278 students who did not. The treatment and control groups have similar overall characteristics. Forty-two percent of the treatment group and 41 percent of the control group are African American, and 42 percent of the treatment group and 47 percent of the control group are Hispanic American. About one third of both groups report having an absent father.

To identify students deprived by both ethnicity and socioeconomic background, we restrict our analysis to students who are identified as a member of a minority group — that is, if the accompanying adult at the information verification session said that the ethnicity of the mother is either African American or Hispanic American. We then distinguish between “moderate” and “severe” disadvantage based on whether a minority student’s mother has any education beyond a high-school diploma. That decision is informed by research about first-generation college students, who are less likely to complete a degree. Among students offered a voucher, about 55 percent are at moderate disadvantage because their mothers have at least some college education; the other 45 percent are at severe disadvantage because their mothers did not go beyond high school, including 17 percent whose mothers dropped out.

We also look across levels of family income among minority students to distinguish between moderate and severe disadvantage. Some 49 percent of students live in households we consider “extremely low income” because they earn less than $13,067 a year (in 2020 dollars). That is half of the poverty line for a family of four and the level the U.S. Department of Agriculture uses to indicate “severe poverty.” We consider the other 51 percent of the treatment group, whose households earn at least $13,068 annually, to be “moderately low income,” including 10 percent whose households earn $32,670 or more.

With data from the National Student Clearinghouse on college outcomes as of 2017, we are able to compare college enrollment and degree attainment between the treatment and control groups after at least seven years of every student’s anticipated high-school graduation date. We are thus able to detect enrollment and degree acquisitions even if progress by students is delayed for an additional four years beyond what was observed in the prior study of this program. During the intervening period, enrollments at four-year institutions in the study sample increased to 29 percent from 26 percent and the four-year graduation rate increased to 16 percent from 10 percent, a 60 percent increase.

Results

Our analysis considers enrollment and degree attainment at both two-year and four-year schools. We look at the impact of the voucher program in two ways: the effect of being offered a voucher, whether or not it was ever used, and the effect of actually using the voucher to attend a private school for some period of time. About 78 percent of students who were offered $1,400 tuition vouchers actually used them for at least some period of time.

Impacts of a Voucher Offer. In looking at the entire treatment group, the offer of a voucher did not have a significant impact on students enrolling in or graduating from college. However, when looking separately at students who are at moderate or severe disadvantage, we find different impacts depending on student ethnicity, mother’s education, and household income. Minority students whose mothers have some college education are 8 percentage points more likely to enroll in any college if a voucher was offered, but those whose mothers did not progress beyond high school are about 4 percentage points less likely to enroll if offered a voucher (see Figure 1). In looking at degree attainment, we find a difference of 9 percentage points. Minority students with college-educated mothers are 7 percentage points more likely to graduate if offered a voucher—both for any college and four-year colleges. But we find that would-be first-generation minority students, those whose mothers did not attend college, are about 2 percentage points less likely to graduate—an impact that is not significantly different from zero.

We also observe a difference of 11 percentage points in rates of college enrollment among minority students who are at either moderate or severe economic disadvantage. Among minority students from moderately low-income households, the offer of a voucher boosts college enrollment by 8 percentage points and degree attainment by 5 percentage points. But the offer of a voucher does not have a positive impact on minority students from the lowest-income households, who are 3 percentage points less likely to enroll in college and no more likely to earn a degree than those in the control group. The voucher offer seems to have a noticeable impact on college enrollment and degree attainment for students who are only moderately disadvantaged by income, but no significant effect on students with severe income constraints.

For the most part, we do not observe differential effects on enrollment or degree completion at two-year colleges by either mothers’ education or household income. Apparently, the effects of the voucher offer on moderately advantaged students is to increase the overall percentage of college enrollments and to shift college choice from pursuit of a two-year degree to that of a four-year degree.

Impacts on Using a Voucher to Attend Private School. Children at moderate disadvantage, based either on their mother’s level of education or household income, are not significantly more likely than their less-advantaged peers to use a voucher to attend private school for at least some period of time. But the effects of the use of that voucher vary considerably by degree of deprivation.

For minority students whose mothers have some college education, using a voucher to attend private school boosts their enrollment rates at any college by 11 percentage points—a 21 percent increase (see Figure 2). For minority students whose households are moderately low-income, voucher use boosts enrollment by 15 percentage points. Moderately disadvantaged minority students who use vouchers also are more likely to earn a college degree. We find an impact of 10 percentage points on degree attainment both for students whose mothers have some college education and for students from moderately low-income households.

We underscore the especially notable impact on moderately disadvantaged students earning four-year degrees. Minority students at moderate disadvantage who use a voucher are 10 percentage points more likely to go on to earn a four-year college degree than those in the control group. Given the relatively low levels of college enrollment and degree attainment by disadvantaged students, this represents an increase of almost 70 percent.

In contrast, voucher use did not have a statistically significant effect on either college enrollment or degree completion for severely disadvantaged students. The difference in the impact of voucher use on minority students whose mothers did and did not attend college is 17 percentage points for enrollment and 12 percentage points for degree completion. The difference in the impact of voucher use on minority students from extremely and moderately low-income families is 19 percentage points for college enrollment and 10 percentage points for degree completion.

Discussion

As with the earlier study, our analysis finds little impact from the offer of a voucher when looking at the entire sample. But with data from four additional years, as well as by looking for differences in effects between moderately and more severely disadvantaged students, we find important differences. The voucher intervention has sizeable, positive impacts for students who, while still disadvantaged by most definitions, have more cultural and financial resources at home. This resembles conclusions drawn by qualitative research, which suggest that students and families often find it difficult to take advantage of school-choice opportunities unless their cultural and material resources have reached a certain minimum.

These results raise policy questions about voucher size. The New York City vouchers covered only half the costs of private-school tuition and were capped at $1,400. That amount seems unlikely to be helpful for the most disadvantaged families, who were unlikely to be able to pay the balance of the bill.

In addition, the significant moderating effects of mothers’ levels of education suggest that cultural factors may be at work. As numerous studies have shown, social and cultural capital are crucial for educational attainment. Nurturing social networks and institutions that enable parents to participate fully in voucher programs may be necessary to reap the benefits they provide. Schools, too, need to tend to the cultural needs of students and families if they wish to serve them effectively. In the presence of gaps in financial and cultural capital, school choice may do little to alleviate inequalities within the low-income community, as the most disadvantaged families remain in less effective educational institutions. This has evoked criticism, such as Diane Ravitch’s assertion that schools of choice “will leave regular public schools with the most difficult students to educate, thus creating a two-tier system of widening inequality.” But other commentators, such as Robert Pondiscio, say there is little reason why “low-income families of color should not have the ability to send their children to school with the children of other parents who are equally engaged, committed or ambitious for their children, [as that] is what affluent parents do.”

Whatever the merits of these alternative judgments, the results reported here suggest that the opportunity to attend a private school does not provide uniform benefits to disadvantaged students. Students whose households are in the most dire economic distress, and those whose mothers did not graduate or progress beyond high school, do not experience the same substantial, positive impacts as their less-disadvantaged peers. The New York City voucher program may have enhanced the educational opportunities for some low-income students, but the tools, policies, and institutions needed to ensure all students, including the “truly disadvantaged,” can realize their academic potential remain elusive.

Albert Cheng is assistant professor in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas College of Education and Health Professions. Paul E. Peterson, professor of government at Harvard University, directs the Program on Education Policy and Governance and is senior editor of Education Next. This article is adapted from a study published in Sociology of Education.

This article appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Cheng, A. and Peterson, P.E. (2021). School Choice and “The Truly Disadvantaged”: Vouchers boost college going, but not for students in greatest need. Education Next, 21(3), 52-58.

Let’s Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education
by Jonathan Marks
Princeton University Press, 2021, $27.95; 228 pages.<

As reviewed by J. Grant Addison

In Let’s Be Reasonable, Jonathan Marks argues that higher education should rededicate itself to the project of liberal education. Taking his cue from John Locke, Marks describes the aim of liberal education as creating a certain type of person: that is, a reasonable one. “Reason,” as opposed to syllogism or simple debate, is both a habit of mind and a standard to hold while pursuing truth. “Our way of talking captures the sense, still alive in us despite the resolute unseriousness of public speech, that reason is not only an authority but also the kind of authority that is an honor to obey and a disgrace to betray, the sense that there’s such a thing as conduct unbecoming a reasoner,” he writes. Through study of great books and guided engagement with an academic community, liberal education seeks to “answer the question of what we are and what the best way of life is.”

Producing graduates who are devoted to reason, Marks laments, has become “at best an intermittent concern” for higher education, even at those colleges and universities that are proud to market their “liberal education” offerings. His goal is to sway those inside of the academy to adopt a more principled vision for higher learning, but his defense of liberal education is also intended as a defense of colleges and universities themselves. As indicated by the book’s title, Marks, a conservative who is a professor of politics at Ursinus College, is also aiming his argument specifically at other conservatives, many of whom he fears have written off colleges and universities entirely as factories of leftist indoctrination. He writes from the perspective that higher education’s story is poorly told, and he rejects right-wing fatalism about colleges and universities.

His apologia for an intentional liberal education focused on molding reasonable citizens is welcome, and often stirring. Marks bolsters his argument with insights from Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alexis de Tocqueville, and others, and he frames much of his case for higher education’s potential in constructive “conversation” with previous critiques such as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, and Jonathan Rauch’s Kindly Inquisitors.

He opens the book by differentiating his understanding of a liberal education—one that produces reasonable people—from the bland, diffuse label that is casually tossed around by so-called liberal arts colleges and academic associations that are otherwise unable to state with clarity what the true aim of liberal education is. “Adjectives, like integrative, interdisciplinary, interconnected, entrepreneurial, twenty-first century, complex, dynamic, and problem-solving, are distributed among brochures as if at random to make it appear that something buzzy is going on,” he gently mocks. Marks then moves on to talking about academe’s critics, on both the right and the left, from within higher education and from without, and why he feels they are both wrong.

The real meat of the book comes in Chapters 3 and 4, where Marks thoroughly presents his case for a liberal education dedicated to reasonableness and then the process and importance of shaping students with this aim. Here Marks is at his best, putting on his professor’s hat to dip in and out of historical background and offer up discussion of political theory in an engaging, almost lecture-like style. The chapter-length look into the current generation of college students, which uses a mix of survey data, expert analysis, and anecdata, provides a useful note of humility for those of us engaged in such discussions about higher education. “We professors know less than we think we know about our students,” he admits.

Given the political and ideological polarization that has engulfed higher education and all discussion of it over the past decade, it is heartening to read a case made in optimism. Yet Let’s Be Reasonable often undersells legitimate criticisms that can be levied at colleges and universities even as it ignores more serious, structural impediments to his vision of academic renewal. Indeed, in the book’s final chapter Marks offers a lengthy analysis of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, or BDS, movement against Israel as a case study of problematic left-wing campus activism and the need for reason. The organized campaign of viewpoint discrimination and personal harassment he describes paints a picture far closer to the right-wing critique of leftist colleges and universities than Marks allows.

While I have no reason to doubt Marks’s non-combative experience as a conservative professor, survey data consistently reveal that a sizable portion of conservative students and faculty members feel some form of hostility from their peers because of their ideological or political views. Among right-leaning academics in the United States and Canada, 70 percent of respondents said they experienced a “hostile departmental climate” because of their views, according to a survey released in March 2021 by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.

At times, this hostility to heterodoxy in academe can calcify until disagreement is foreclosed and open inquiry is sacrificed to the party line. In fall 2020, for example, the American Educational Research Association and the National Academy of Education issued a “Joint Statement in Support of Anti-Racist Education,” endorsed by 16 scientific societies, which instructed that researchers “must stand against the notion that systemic racism does not exist.” Case closed, debate over.

Largely absent from Marks’s case is discussion of the permanent and ever-expanding administrative bureaucracy on college and university campuses. In Chapter 1, Marks recounts how, in 2015, administrators at Harvard University gave out “Holiday Placemats for Social Justice” to serve as crib sheets for undergraduates who might want to browbeat their less-woke family members over the holidays. Marks points out that several Harvard undergraduates openly criticized the move, anecdata he uses to make the argument that not all college students fit the caricature of coddled “crybullies.” All well and good; he’s right about that. What he overlooks, though, is that the placemat project was administrator-driven.

For all the ink spilled about potential indoctrination by leftist professors (largely a specious claim), it is administrators and campus bureaucrats who make up the most ideologically biased group in academe—a group that makes major decisions related to collegiate life and campus mores. As my former American Enterprise Institute colleague Samuel J. Abrams found from conducting a survey of about 900 “student-facing” administrators, “liberal staff members outnumber their conservative counterparts by the astonishing ratio of 12-to-one.” It is most often these campus mandarins, particularly those in positions related to offices of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” who interfere with the academic enterprise and threaten the idea of liberal education.

Also missing from Marks’s defense of liberal education is a real acknowledgment of the labor-market realities underpinning our higher-education system. Unfortunately, higher education has become for a great many Americans principally a toll—a credential that must be purchased to become eligible for higher-paying employment. A recommitment to liberal education with a core curriculum that focuses largely on the “Great Books” would be a worthy recalibration for many colleges, but need it be the pathway for all of them? Perhaps a more effective move would be to reestablish institutional diversity and differentiate between liberal arts colleges, research universities, and vocational programs while making it easier for students to acquire the skills and credentials they need to progress more quickly (and cheaply) to the workforce.

In the end, Marks’s case for a reason-oriented liberal education is likely altogether too reasonable a goal to accomplish. But, as he writes in his preface, “there are worse things to do than to go down swinging.”

J. Grant Addison is deputy editor of the Washington Examiner Magazine.

This article appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Addison, J.G. (2021). A More Principled Vision for Higher Learning: Jonathan Marks urges a recommitment to reason. Education Next, 21(3), 72-75.

How much face time do students and teachers need to keep pace with expectations for learning? It’s an urgent question during a pandemic that has kept many students out of school buildings for more than a year. The importance of school attendance has divided communities across the country, as they weigh the potential risks of in-person instruction with those of prolonged separation from the school environment.

We can find at least some answers in the experiences of schools that have adopted four-day school weeks, typically as a cost-cutting move. I studied the academic performance of nearly 700,000 students in Oregon, where more than 100 schools in school districts facing budget shortfalls and attendance problems opted to cut instructional time instead of raising taxes or laying off teachers. My study looks at student test scores in reading and math over a 15-year period to see what happens when schools switch to a four-day week.

I find clear negative consequences for student learning when schools adopt four-day schedules. Although many schools start class earlier or end later during the four days they are in session, overall weekly time in school decreases by three to four hours. My analysis finds that, as a result of those reductions, math scores decrease by 6 percent of a standard deviation and reading scores decrease by 4 percent of a standard deviation. These impacts are comparable to those associated with other cost-saving measures, such as increasing class sizes and cutting student-support programs.

When a local community can or should open school buildings during a pandemic is a political decision, and whether schools can effectively educate students with live remote instruction is an open question. But the impact of decreased instructional time on student learning is not. These results show that when students receive less than a full-time school schedule, learning slows.

Cutting Costs by Canceling (Some) Class

The earliest known use of a four-day school week dates back to the 1930s in South Dakota. Today, most four-day schools are in the rural North and West. Their numbers have increased dramatically over the past two decades, from 257 schools in 1999 to more than 1,600 in 2019. Half of all U.S. states have at least one four-day district or school (see Figure 1).

Many school districts offer remedial or enrichment services on the day off, while others effectively create a three-day weekend for all students. When I studied the activities of 552 four-day school districts that provided information about the off day, about half were fully closed to students and staff on the off day. About 30 percent offered either remedial or enrichment programming to students, ranging from teacher office hours to field trips to very structured off-day programs. About one-quarter of the districts that did not offer student programs on the off day provided teacher professional development.

Nationwide, U.S. schools with four-day schedules offer an average of 148 school days, well below the 175–180 average typically provided under a traditional five-day schedule. Many districts lengthen each school day in order to meet their state’s minimum requirements for instructional hours. Four-day schools average seven hours and 45 minutes of instruction each day, while five-day schools have shorter days that average six hours and 54 minutes. The end result is a loss of three to four hours of instructional time each week.

Most often, four-day schedules are adopted in response to a budget crunch, with communities opting to cut back on school hours rather than lay off teachers or let class sizes grow. However, in some cases, districts have made the switch to cut down on commuting time and cite improved teacher retention and student attendance as the main rationales. Regardless, the cost savings are relatively small. In a recent paper, I found a reduction of 1 to 2 percent in per-pupil operating expenses at districts that switched to a four-day schedule.

What happens when districts decrease the amount of time students spend in school? School attendance has a major influence on multiple dimensions of child development and family life. Schools provide academic instruction, which promotes knowledge and skill accumulation, and they influence social-emotional development as well. Students also gain access to school meals and physical education on campus, which may promote their overall health and well-being. And for some students, school can be a safe haven from instability, adult-sized responsibilities, or other challenges at home.

Less time in school also can pose stark challenges for families. The lack of school on a weekday is difficult for working parents, as the pandemic experiences of families and broad exodus of women from the workforce have made clear. A 2019 study found that four-day school weeks were associated with declines in workforce participation for women overall, but not for men or single mothers. In addition, children without supervision on the off day may engage in unproductive or risky behaviors—a 2018 study in Colorado found that juvenile crime jumped by almost 20 percent when schools switched to four-day weeks. Other studies have found greater marijuana use and a higher prevalence of bullying and sexual activity among students attending schools with four-day weeks.

A shorter week may also change the quality of some school-level educational inputs. If, for example, teachers generally find the schedule appealing, as a 2018 study of Missouri teachers found, districts could attract a larger and potentially higher-quality pool of candidates and be more likely to retain talented staff. But the longer school day and potential loss of weekly subject-specific instructional time could also present instructional challenges. If teachers do not use the longer school day effectively or modify their courses to align with the new composition of instructional time, student learning may decline.

Assessing Impact in Oregon

In this study, I examine the impact of four-day school weeks on academic achievement in math and reading. My analysis focuses on students in Oregon, where approximately one in 10 schools follow such a schedule. I explore three main questions: How does the four-day school week affect student achievement? How large are the achievement returns to instructional time—both overall and in specific subjects? And how effective is the four-day school week as a cost-savings approach?

To answer these questions, I look at performance on annual statewide tests in Oregon for 690,804 students in grades 3 through 8, from 2004–05 to 2018–19. The student-level data also includes characteristics such as sex, race, free-and reduced-price lunch eligibility status, English as a second language program participation, and special education or gifted status. I also look at student absences and the percentage of days missed due to disciplinary incidents.

The total number of Oregon schools with a four-day school week increased from 108 in 2005 to a peak of 156 in 2014, before falling to 137 by 2019. For both four- and five-day schools, I calculate weekly time in class based on the start and end time of the school day, adjusting for early dismissals. Based on this data collection, 80 percent of the schools have identifiable weekly time in school information.

Overall, students in four-day schools have lower standardized math and reading test scores compared to students in five-day schools. In math, about 61 percent of students at four-day schools pass annual tests compared to about 65 percent at five-day schools. In reading, about 68 percent of four-day students pass compared to about 71 percent at five-day schools. These differences amount to about 7 to 10 more students passing annual tests at the average-size school.

There are some other key differences between four-day and five-day schools that could be contributing to the differences observed in achievement, however. Four-day schools have larger shares of low-income students, at 57 percent compared to 50 percent at five-day schools. White students make up 79 percent of enrollment at four-day schools and 65 percent of enrollment in five-day schools. Because they are predominately rural, four-day schools also have much smaller average student enrollments, at 578 students compared to 3,817 students at five-day schools.

Results

Impact on test scores. The clear differences between four-day and five-day schools suggest that simply comparing their achievement levels may not provide an accurate picture of the effect of the schedule change alone. To provide a better view, I look at how the achievement of students in specific districts changes when they shift from a five-day to a four-day week and compare those changes to contemporaneous trends in achievement of other districts that did not make the change.

Students earn lower math and reading scores on standardized tests after their schools switch to a four-day schedule. Overall, average math scores decrease by 5.9 percent of a standard deviation in math as a result of the switch to the four-day school week, while reading scores decrease by 4.2 percent of a standard deviation. That is nearly one-third the size of the impact of having a larger class size, and equal to losing 40 minutes of reading instruction and about an hour of math instruction each week.

I also look at how the schedule change affected performance of student groups. Math scores for special-education students improve by 2.6 percent of a standard deviation after switching to a four-day week; reading scores do not change. For English learners, reading scores fall by 4.1 percent of a standard deviation, but math scores held steady. One potential explanation for these findings is that while individualized education plans may help special education students supplement math instruction at home, weekend learning loss may be exacerbated for English learners if English is not the primary language spoken in their home environment.

In considering students by age group, I find that negative math achievement effects are most prominent in 7th and 8th grades. The negative reading achievement effects are more consistent across grades than math, but the largest negative impacts are also found in 8th grade. One potential explanation for these larger negative impacts in later grades may be that parents have more difficulty helping students with more advanced math and reading coursework at home. The earlier start times at four-day schools may also negatively impact adolescent students, leading to larger negative achievement effects in these later grades (see “Rise and Shine,” research, Summer 2019).

I also track student test scores over time to better understand how switching to a four-day schedule affects achievement. There is a noticeable drop in test scores immediately after a school switches to a four-day schedule: in the year of implementation, math scores decline by 6.8 percent of a standard deviation and reading scores decline by 3.7 percent of a standard deviation.

After that initial dip, test-score performance tends to improve in subsequent years. This suggests that achievement losses ameliorate a few years after adoption of the four-day school week, but tells little of whether this is a feature of all four-day school week adoption (for example, students becoming more acclimated to the new school schedule) or driven by transitory four-day schools returning to the five-day schedule. I examine both possibilities and find that the lasting impacts of the four-day week are minimal for schools that eventually switch back to a five-day schedule. By contrast, the negative impacts for schools that permanently adopt four-day weeks appear to increase in magnitude in each subsequent year (see Figure 2). Four years after switching to a four-day week, students’ math scores fall by 8.8 percent of a standard deviation and reading scores fall 10.4 percent of a standard deviations compared to the year before adoption.

For a nation concerned about the long-lasting impact of school closures during a pandemic, these results should be reassuring. They suggest that briefly limiting students’ time in school, in this case through a four-day school week, may result in a short-term negative achievement shock for students, but has no lasting detrimental impacts on their achievement. Continuing shorter school schedules, however, could have lasting negative effects.

Returns to time in school. A shift to a four-day week typically produces sudden changes in the amount of instructional time students receive both overall and in specific subjects. The size of these time changes can vary, however, based on a local district’s schedule and whether it opts to offer remedial or enrichment services on the day off. This makes it possible to use the changes as a natural experiment to study how differences in instructional time influence student learning.

I find that changes in the total amount of time that schools are open to students do affect student achievement, helping to explain why students attending some four-day schools experience larger negative impacts than others. In particular, a one-hour increase in weekly time in school increases math achievement by about 1.8 percent of a standard deviation. The effects on reading are smaller, at 0.8 percent of a standard deviation.

A more interesting metric to examine, however, is subject-specific instructional time. Earlier studies by Victor Lavy and by Maria Cattaneo, Chantal Oggenfuss, and Stefan Wolter have found that a one-hour increase in weekly subject-specific instructional time boosts achievement in that subject by 6.0 percent of a standard deviation, but this is an average figure across all subjects. I used survey data on the allocation of time to different subjects in Oregon schools to calculate the returns to instructional time separately for math and reading. These calculations suggest that increasing weekly instructional time in math by one hour boosts achievement by 11.5 percent of a standard deviation. A one-hour increase in weekly reading instruction improves reading achievement by 2.5 percent of a standard deviation. We would therefore expect the learning lost due to a reduction in instructional time to be greater in math than in reading, a pattern that is evident in emerging research on American students’ achievement in the wake of the pandemic.

Cost savings. Do the cost savings from switching to a four-day school week provide a sufficient tradeoff for these losses in student achievement? Many cost-cutting interventions are associated with declines in student achievement, and a recent study by C. Kirabo Jackson, Cora Wigger, and Heyu Xiong found a $1,000 reduction in per-pupil spending reduces average test scores in math and reading by 3.9 percent of a standard deviation (see “The Costs of Cutting School Spending,” research, Fall 2020).

The average savings from switching to a four-day school week in Oregon are $350 per student, or about a 2 percent reduction in expenditures. Based on my achievement results, I find that cutting costs by $1,000 per pupil through shrinking the school-week schedule yields an achievement loss of between 10 percent and 19 percent of a standard deviation. By comparison, other research has found that when schools cut $1,000 in spending through increasing class sizes, achievement falls by 12 percent of a standard deviation. Spending cuts achieved through closing schools are associated with declines of up to 20 percent of a standard deviation. In short, this trade-off is in line with or better than some other cost-cutting interventions, but worse than what would be expected from a reduction in general expenditures.

A Cautionary Tale

A four-day school week that reduces instructional time has a negative and statistically significant impact on student learning. Evidence from 15 years of test scores across Oregon show that student achievement drops when schools switch to a four-day schedule, and that those negative trends continue so long as five-day schedules are not restored. These detrimental achievement effects appear largely driven by reductions in weekly time in school, which decreases by three to four hours.

As a cost-cutting move, adopting a four-day school week is comparable to other program cuts and presents a viable option for financially-troubled school districts to consider. But switching to a four-day schedule is likely to have implications beyond just cost savings and achievement. School attendance is an important opportunity for students’ development overall, and it provides a safe daytime activity that benefits working parents. Diminished exposure to school-based counseling and health services, school meal programs, and other supports could also negatively affect child physical health and social-emotional development. Less time in school may mean more time for risky behaviors or exposure to unsafe conditions at home or in the community. Thus, it is critical for future research to examine these outcomes before making determinations regarding the overall efficacy of this school schedule.

Policymakers in several states are pushing back against the four-day school week, which suggests they are aware of some of its negative ramifications. In Oklahoma, for example, a new state law sets minimum quality standards for school districts to implement or continue a four-day schedule, which advocates estimate more than 90 percent of current four-day districts will not be able to meet. In New Mexico, where four-day weeks are popular but under pressure, public debate has included concerns about the experiences of low-income, working families.

Still, it seems likely that four-day weeks may well continue to grow in popularity, even if cost savings is not the motivating factor. The economic trends as we emerge from a prolonged global pandemic are not yet certain, and immediate budget cuts at schools appear unlikely in the wake of the $170 billion in federal education aid under the 2021 American Rescue Plan. But teachers, students, and families also have now experienced radically different learning schedules due to school closures and broad adoption of hybrid schedules, which mimic the part-time nature of the four-day school week. That may stoke interest in a four-day schedule and put pressure on local school boards to consider it. These findings suggest that they proceed with caution.

They also point the way to an expanded research agenda regarding four-day schools: not only how reduced attendance and instructional time affect academics, but the impact of what students are doing on their extra day “off.” If students and educators want to explore school calendars outside of the typical five-day-a-week schedule, we need to know how to structure flex time to enhance and extend in-school learning. Otherwise, we risk compounding the learning losses students have already sustained in the wake of Covid-19.

Paul N. Thompson is associate professor of economics at Oregon State University and a research affiliate at the Institute for Labor Economics.

This article appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Thompson, P.N. (2021). The Shrinking School Week: Effects of a four-day schedule on student achievement. Education Next, 21(3), 60-67.

This article appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Education Next. (2021). “Reopening Hesitancy” Threatens Fall 2021. Education Next, 21(3), 75-76.

Making College Pay: An Economist Explains How to Make a Smart Bet on Higher Education
by Beth Akers
Crown, 2021, $25; 176 pages.

The Price You Pay for College: An Entirely New Road Map for the Biggest Financial Decision Your Family Will Ever Make
by Ron Lieber
HarperCollins, 2021, $27.99; 368 pages.

As reviewed by Christopher Avery

In a typical year, more than 2 million recent U.S. high-school graduates begin college in the fall. Students and families, in taking the huge financial leap into the college market, face both uncertainty and risk. Since the vast majority of students receive at least some merit- or need-based aid, it isn’t possible to identify the actual price for a given four-year college without gaining admission to that institution and completing an arduous financial-aid process. Further, while decades of evidence demonstrate that, in general, a college degree increases an individual’s earning power, the choice to go to college still involves financial risk. That’s because many people enroll but do not complete a degree and because one’s future wages are highly uncertain in any case.

Two new books, Making College Pay by Beth Akers and The Price You Pay for College by Ron Lieber, aim to orient families to a view of college as a financial investment and to help them make better decisions as a result. Both authors have been studying this subject for years, and their expertise shines through in the information and insights they present.

The strength of Making College Pay is its concise focus. The text is short, and Akers explicitly notes in her conclusion that she has not taken on the questions of “where to go, what to study, how much to pay.” Instead, she provides a framework based on specific principles: know what you want from college, consider cost-benefit tradeoffs, and account for risk. She also identifies several best practices in paying for college. Akers counsels that borrowing for college can be prudent, especially at the below-market rates offered by government loans, and that students should be realistic about the likely future earnings corresponding to each college and choice of major. The author does readers a great service by clearly highlighting and explaining these fundamental points.

The last third of Making College Pay shifts abruptly away from this straightforward approach to argue that further investing precepts should apply to higher education. One chapter directs families to consider novel loan arrangements to manage the risk of borrowing for college—not only income-based repayment, which is now available to all borrowers taking federal loans, but also insurance policies that would offer payouts for students who do not complete a college degree in a certain amount of time. She also describes income-based repayment plans offered by colleges. The following chapter argues for unbundling college services in the way one might choose to pay à la carte for individual television channels rather than purchasing a standard cable service package, so that students could, for example, choose to live on campus, paying full price for housing, yet take courses remotely, at a reduced price.

These suggestions are largely fantastical. Private insurance policies related to degree completion are rarely, if ever, available, and few colleges offer the conditional loan-repayment programs that Akers espouses. Similarly, while Akers is enamored of à la carte or “pay-as-you-go” college pricing, she is only able to reference a single entrepreneurial effort (which failed) in this direction.

The Price You Pay for College is decidedly more ambitious in scope. As a longtime personal-finance columnist, Lieber is perplexed by the failure of high-priced colleges to clearly communicate their value proposition. “In all of my attempts at information gathering on campuses or on college websites,” he writes, “not once did I find a pamphlet that read ‘This is why this place is worth $50,000 extra each year.’ Trust me, I looked far and wide. Most colleges and universities, no matter the type, don’t seem to want to address this in a qualitative way, let alone a quantitative one.” The book addresses this concern, in part, by attempting a comprehensive introduction to the college experience. Each of the 35 entertaining chapters introduces a fundamental topic, complete with references to and sophisticated interpretation of cutting-edge academic research. I found the chapters on the importance of faculty mentorship and independent study projects and the discussion of the growing need for on-campus mental-health services especially useful. Readers who aren’t drawn to these topics will undoubtedly find value in other chapters.

One organizing principle of The Price You Pay for College is that it empowers parents to gather information by asking incisive questions. “The thing that families need in this process and that all too many lack is a reportorial mindset and a consumerist approach,” Lieber writes. “Where is the information that I need that may not be easy to find?” Many chapters provide detailed lists of questions to ask colleges that one’s child is considering. Some of the questions are unusually specific (for example, queries about the details of the tenure process or the percentage of alumni couples among graduates), and some are quite confrontational. Lieber writes: “It’s worth asking any school that demands random assignment [of freshman roommates] why it puts some students into that spot. Cite the studies and ask them to defend their oppositional approach. It’s also worth asking schools that allow roommate requests just how little diversity exists within those pairings and how it defends that result.”

Lieber seems to believe wholeheartedly that gathering this information will bring peace of mind. “Hope comes from knowing what to ask,” he writes, but I doubt that his approach is a panacea. Taking the book’s prescriptions seriously would leave me as a parent feeling irresponsible for not having the energy and wherewithal to ask all these questions, as well as stressed and bewildered by the prospect of having to make sense of the responses.

On two fronts, Lieber’s book falls short of its stated goal of providing an “entirely new road map” for choosing and paying for college. First, it neglects to situate saving for college in the broader context of saving for retirement. In his New York Times guide “How to Win at Retirement Savings,” Lieber argues forcefully for the power of compound interest and the importance of saving from an early age, but he makes little attempt to cover that ground in this book. Similarly, his 2015 article “Why It Makes Good Sense to Save for College Now” provides the crystalline insight that “not saving also puts your family at risk of picking the college that is the best financial choice and not the one that has the best shot at helping your child thrive,” yet his presentation of “The Big Financial Plan” in The Price You Pay for College is much less decisive.

A second and more essential problem with this book is that it overemphasizes the perspective of parents. College embodies an important transition in adolescent development. Parents take responsibility for educational choices for their small children, but when those children become adults, they are expected to make their own decisions, such as where to live and which jobs to pursue. Lieber’s anecdotes are most compelling when they describe collaboration between children and parents, balancing students’ college preferences against the limited finances of the family. But by explicitly orienting the book to parents and framing the central question as “how can you be sure that you’re picking the right school and spending the right amount?” Lieber presumes that the power of the checkbook is paramount and misses the opportunity to offer a vision in which high-school students and their parents work together to navigate the college landscape.

I suggest an alternate approach centered in the interests and goals of applicants rather than the financial concerns of parents. Lieber laments the lack of an “algorithm to measure value,” but his quest for a “clear formula for what to pay” is misguided. Because each person has unique characteristics, the value of attending a particular college necessarily differs from one student to the next. This realization suggests that prospective students rather than their parents should take the lead in researching colleges, comparing their strengths and weaknesses based on the students’ own interests and character traits. Lieber wisely advises that students sit in on classes as part of a college visit and stay overnight if possible. Students could build on these suggestions at home, first by cooperating with parents to make a list of colleges that are both appealing and within financial reach. They could then use the colleges’ websites to craft scenarios for course sequences and find clubs and activities of interest, and then ask current students about the robustness of those activities on their campus. The more concrete the picture of one’s likely daily experience—and how that experience might differ across colleges—the easier it should be for students and parents to assess the virtues of more- and less-expensive college options.

Despite the angst inherent in the college-application process, from worries about getting admitted to concerns about how much to pay, most college graduates report happiness with their college experience and with their lives more generally. With these happy facts in mind, I recommend that applicants and their families aim for Lieber’s attitude of hope about one’s college prospects while being mindful of the risks Akers emphasizes in her book.

Christopher Avery is the Roy E. Larsen Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

This article appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Avery, C. (2021). Advice and Caution on Investing in a College Education: An economist and a financial journalist offer their strategies. Education Next, 21(3), 69-70.

The tragic killing of Daunte Wright at the hands of a Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, police officer, even as former Minneapolis officer Derek Chauvin stood trial nearby for the murder of George Floyd, has led to renewed calls for federal legislation aimed at reducing police violence. Efforts to enact such legislation stalled in Congress during the waning months of the Trump administration last year. Among activists’ top priorities at that time, however, was the elimination of “qualified immunity,” the legal doctrine that often shields police officers and other government officials—including educators—from financial liability for violating citizens’ civil rights.

In this issue’s cover story, Yale law professor Justin Driver examines the origins of qualified immunity and the case for reform, with special attention to the implications for K–12 education (see “Schooling Qualified Immunity,” features). Readers may be surprised to learn that cases involving teachers, principals, and school board members have been central to the doctrine’s evolution. Most notable was a 1975 Supreme Court case involving the suspension of three Arkansas students for spiking the punch at a high school social. It was in that case that the court first articulated the standard that plaintiffs cannot overcome the shield of qualified immunity unless they demonstrate that the government official in question violated “clearly established constitutional rights.”

As Driver reports, this narrow standard has transformed qualified immunity from a sensible protection for officials carrying out their public duties in good faith into something approaching blanket immunity from legal accountability. If plaintiffs cannot identify a binding precedent involving a government official who violated the Constitution in a nearly identical manner to their own circumstances, they are doomed to lose. This standard has shielded educators who have engaged in “heinous conduct that, properly understood, contravenes clearly established law,” Driver writes. Courts have even granted immunity to educators who have strip-searched students to look for minor contraband, simply because there was no previous case in which someone had infringed on a student’s rights in precisely the same way.

In June 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers both signed onto a letter calling on Congress to enact police reform. Among their demands was to “end the qualified immunity doctrine which prevents police from being held legally accountable when they break the law.” A bill that passed the House of Representatives last summer, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, would have done just that by eliminating qualified immunity as a defense from liability for police officers only. A second bill introduced in both chambers, the Ending Qualified Immunity Act, would have curbed the defense for all government officials, including educators.

Driver points out that there are good reasons to think separately about police officers and educators when it comes to qualified immunity. Unlike the daily work of police officers, teachers’ responsibilities are not “inherently imbued with legality and constitutionality.” A teacher’s infringement of her student’s rights is far less likely to lead to the loss of life. Finally, the constitutional case law that applies to police is well developed, while the law pertaining to teachers is sparse—and riddled with thorny questions about, for example, the precise scope of students’ free-speech rights both within and beyond school settings (see “What Teachers Spy in Homes over Zoom Winds Up in Court,” legal beat).

With Congress so far failing to act on calls to overhaul qualified immunity, some states are taking matters into their own hands. In April 2021, for example, the New Mexico legislature passed a law authorizing citizens to sue government employers under their state constitution if a state or local worker violates their rights. The measure applies equally to police departments and school districts, and it bans the use of qualified immunity as a defense. Nick Sibilla of the Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm that testified in favor of the law, notes that the legislation’s supporters spanned the ideological spectrum, from the liberal American Civil Liberties Union to the conservative Americans for Prosperity.

The impulse for sweeping reform is understandable, but there may be some benefit to delaying at the federal level to observe the effects, if any, of the state legal changes. Will these laws translate into measurably improved police or teacher behavior? Or will they just mean more expensive insurance premiums for local governments (that is, the taxpayers) and larger paydays for plaintiffs’ lawyers? Like so many matters related to education policy, these are empirical questions to which experience will provide better answers.

Martin West

This article appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

West, M.R. (2021). The Tarnished Shield of Qualified Immunity. Education Next, 21(3), 5.

This article appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Marcus, J. (2021). A Test for the Test Makers: College Board and ACT move to grow and diversify as the pandemic fuels test-optional admissions trend. Education Next, 21(3), 42-50.

“Bad old OPSB.”

When I started working as an education reporter in New Orleans in late 2012, I heard that phrase time and time again. The city was then seven years into the post-Katrina education revolution that wrested control of the public schools from the seven-member Orleans Parish School Board. Unheard-of academic gains followed the city’s switch to a near-universal charter-school system, yet returning to failure always felt as close as the next hurricane. Give OPSB power again, people said, and the schools would slide right back where they started.

School-board candidates who wanted the district to resume its old role and who railed against charters, calling them privatized education benefiting billionaires, lost in election after election, including in fall 2020. But as schools shuffled students back and forth between in-person and virtual schooling, amid a resurgence in Covid-19 cases and revitalized calls for racial justice, something unexpected happened. After 15 years of hemming in the district, people started wanting it to do more.

Dramatic Turnaround

Academically and financially bankrupt, under federal investigation, at best ineffectual and at worst corrupt, the pre-2005 New Orleans school district was the worst in Louisiana. Almost half of its 66,000 students attended a school that earned less than 50 points on the state’s 200-point report card. Only 54 percent graduated from high school. Many people fled: enrollment fell by 15,000 students in the 10 years before Hurricane Katrina.

Teachers struggled to do what they could, driven by passion for the work or, in some cases, just the steady paycheck. Some people tried to attack the problem from a new angle. A few groups started charter schools, gaining the freedom to hire, fire, and teach as they wanted. At the same time, Louisiana created the Recovery School District to take over and charter out struggling schools. But there was no sign that any major power shift loomed. When the 2005–06 school year began, the Recovery School District controlled only a handful of schools. Then, during the last week of August 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit.

With hundreds of thousands of residents evacuated and campuses flooded with up to 12 feet of water, the school board abandoned ship. It said there was no way to reopen schools that academic year. The Orleans Parish School Board laid off more than 7,000 employees, sending pink slips to mailboxes that had been literally washed away. But the school closures opened up an opportunity for change. The Recovery School District seized four fifths of the city’s schools, and most of the schools remaining under the OPSB’s auspices went charter as well. The city eliminated traditional student assignment by home address and instituted universal school choice, allowing any student to apply to any school.

It was one of the biggest transformations in U.S. education, arguably surpassing even the 25-year state takeover in Newark: there, at least the buildings stayed mostly the same, whereas the decrepit New Orleans campuses took such a hit in the storm and flood that FEMA allotted $1.8 billion to rebuild.

Support poured in: foundation money, federal grants, eager young teachers. Many schools never reopened, including the New Orleans Free School, a place where students got written evaluations instead of grades and called teachers by their first names. Logan Crowe, a teacher there, described the school as “alternative before the word ‘alternative’ meant prison.” Orleans Free started privately on the ground floor of a commune, then fought to keep its creative approach going once it joined the district. After it closed, Crowe signed on as assistant principal at Alice Harte Elementary and then became principal and CEO of the Recovery District’s Andrew H. Wilson Charter, in a newly renovated building. “Orleans Parish schools needed to change,” Crowe said, looking back now. “And I think a lot of them did.”

Charters stayed in business only if they met academic benchmarks and attracted enough students. And, indeed, scores shot up. The city saw a “stretch of improvement I’ve still never seen anywhere else,” said Doug Harris, director of the Education Research Alliance for New Orleans at Tulane University. Those results were real, his team concluded—not the result of changed demographics, largescale cheating, teaching to the test, or increased funding. “I thought, this can’t be right. There must be something else going on here that we’re not seeing. But we just couldn’t find anything like that,” Harris said.

Where was the Orleans Parish School Board in all this? Squabbling over crumbs. In combative meetings, the members fought over who would be superintendent. They disparaged the Recovery School District charters and the children in them. They fought with RSD over the FEMA rebuilding plan. Two Orleans Parish School Board members went to prison, five years apart, on federal conspiracy charges.

Successful Recovery charters had the option to return to Orleans Parish oversight and declined, fearing it would damage their gains.

Finally, 10 years after Katrina, the school board hired Henderson Lewis Jr. as superintendent and fell in line behind him. Lewis was a new kind of superintendent, low on charisma, not a king, but a manager who had taught in the Recovery system and embraced the so-called portfolio model. In fact, he chartered out the district’s final traditional schools. The school board began passing policies similar to the Recovery School District’s—for instance, requiring all its charters to join the computerized common-enrollment system when the schools’ contracts were renewed. School board meetings became normal, even boring.

In spring 2016, Lewis and Patrick Dobard, superintendent of the Recovery District, went before the Louisiana legislature and asked lawmakers to reverse the post-Katrina takeover. They said that OPSB would run like the Recovery system, giving wide latitude to the charters—that parents and students wouldn’t even notice the difference. It would be a new kind of decentralized district, one that would regulate, not rule. They promised that OPSB would not screw it up.

“We are ready,” Lewis said.

Even a supporter of the reunification bill, New Orleans State Representative Walt Leger, sounded less than enthusiastic. “There are many people, parents and others, who are not thrilled about schools returning to the Orleans Parish School Board,” he said, but “at some point, whether we like it or not, the schools need to be returned to the local authority, and now is as good a time as any, in my opinion, to get started on that process.” The legislature approved the end of the takeover, with a two-year runway. In 2018, the district reunified. (A handful of state-authorized charters that had never been part of Orleans Parish remain under the oversight of the state’s board of elementary and secondary education.)

To herald the new era, the district rebranded the system as NOLA Public Schools. For about two years, things ran pretty smoothly, with the usual fretting over test scores and charter renewals. Then Covid-19 hit, intensifying the underlying problems. The district stepped forward to coordinate the response. And the people I interviewed for this article began wanting the district to wield more power again, to step up and create a vision and a road map for a city whose schools truly flourished.

In November 2020, for the first time since before Katrina, all seven school board seats were contested. Three members won re-election: Ethan Ashley, John Brown Sr., and Nolan Marshall Jr. They were joined by newcomers Katie Baudouin, Olin Parker, J. C. Romero, and Carlos Zervigon. All have or have had children in New Orleans public schools.

Among the unsuccessful candidates, Kayonna Armstrong favored returning to a system of schools directly run by the school board, Chanel Payne called for a moratorium on charters, and Antoinette Williams supported direct-run schools along with independent charters. All of the winning candidates favored maintaining the all-charter model.

Olin Parker left his job running charter schools for the State of Louisiana to run for the school board seat. “I saw the limits of what you can do from the state government side,” he said. “I think OPSB still has a huge role to play.”

In 2018, that would have sounded faintly ridiculous or a little threatening. Not anymore.

Still a Long Way to Go

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, academic improvement had stalled in New Orleans. In fact, it “pretty much plateaued around 2013,” Harris said (though he also suggested that “you could reframe ‘stagnation’ as ‘maintained improvement.’”) As of 2017, 16 percent of the city’s 16- to 24-year-olds were neither in school nor working, according to the Opportunity Index. At last count, one third of students attended schools rated D or F by the state. At most New Orleans high schools, the class of 2020, whose entire academic career took place in the post-Katrina system, averaged less than a 17.5 out of a possible 36 on the ACT. That’s too low to get a student admitted to either of the city’s four-year public universities.

The mediocre scores are no secret. “We all say the same thing: We’ve come a long way, but there’s so much to be done,” said Caroline Roemer, director of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools.

What’s more, Harris’s Education Research Alliance found that most of the academic improvement happened when a new charter group took over a school. Even though the school board lets students stay at their school when management changes, takeovers are grueling for all involved. Teachers often lose their jobs or leave; students have to acclimate to changes in school operations and culture; parents have to deal with a new set of administrators, and everyone has to live with the fear that the takeover won’t help, because sometimes they don’t. Joseph Craig Charter is on its third manager in 15 years, and 42 Charter School is on its fourth. Also, takeovers don’t happen very often now, unlike in the early years of Recovery School District operation. Only one of the city’s charters is changing hands during the summer of 2021: Crocker, moving to its third manager.

The shortage of good schools puts pressure on parents. Newly elected board member Katie Baudouin said she began thinking about running for the office during the tension of waiting for her older child’s results on OneApp, the computerized common application that matches students with seats. Though the system allows preferences for siblings and children who live near a school, for most families it’s a game of roulette, with bad odds for the most popular schools. The parents of 830 four-year-olds applied for A-rated Hynes Charter’s 55 open kindergarten seats for fall 2019, and almost 2,500 rising 9th graders sought 262 spots at A-rated Warren Easton, the district reported. Many parents told Tulane’s Cowen Institute that they didn’t like the OneApp common-enrollment system, but most said that was because they didn’t get the school they wanted. A large number of families continue to opt out of the public system altogether: one quarter of New Orleans children currently attend private school, according to the Cowen Institute.

While the Orleans Parish School Board is officially back in charge, its ability to remedy a school’s ills is very limited. That’s because the state legislation that restored local control also prohibited the district from doing much of the work that districts traditionally do—including exercising authority over charter schools’ “programming, instruction, curriculum, materials and texts, yearly school calendars and daily schedules, hiring and firing of personnel, employee performance management and evaluation, terms and conditions of employment, teacher or administrator certification, salaries and benefits, retirement, collective bargaining, budgeting, purchasing, procurement, and contracting for services other than capital repairs and facilities construction.” If student test scores start slipping, solutions are up to the charter manager.

In an all-charter system, “the role of the board becomes selecting operators and determining what kind of schools we want to have and who’s going to run them,” Harris said. “They’re always grappling at the margins.”

However, OPSB can help all schools to address the problems that hurt students across the board, former Recovery superintendent Dobard said, such as inadequate preschool services and high teacher turnover.

These efforts have begun in a small way. The previous board decided to use tax dollars to improve teacher recruitment and retention across the system and to train school staff to help traumatized children. Many school board candidates, successful and not, promised to focus on students’ mental health. “It’s no secret that there is a lot of trauma in our school system,” board member Parker said.

Data from the city’s Institute of Women and Ethnic Studies back that up. Among 2,800 middle- and high-school students the institute surveyed over several years, 27 percent said they had been exposed to violence against a parent or sibling; 12 percent said they had considered suicide; and 46 percent said they had experienced the murder of someone close to them. Even before Covid-19 knocked parents out of work, Louisiana considered 84 percent of the city’s public-school students to be “economically disadvantaged,” a category that includes those who are eligible for a range of public benefits as well as students who are homeless, in state custody, or not fluent in English.

Jamar McKneely, head of the InspireNOLA charter group, is one of many charter leaders who focused for years on addressing problems within school walls. He’s now talking about tackling poverty and homelessness directly. He’s been in education long enough that he’s now seeing the children of his original students. Too often, those parents haven’t managed to fulfill their dreams, he said.

“We have too many Black and brown families who are below the poverty line. The incarceration rate is still too high. When I look at the homeless rates, they’re still too high. That shows that not just from an academic standpoint, but from a social-economic standpoint, there’s still a lot of work to do that I would love to see this board start to tackle,” McKneely said. OPSB “can’t just be a board focusing strictly on academics.”

Among those societal problems, one stands out as the biggest, or perhaps the most foundational. The city is experiencing two pandemics, board member Ethan Ashley said: Covid-19 and “the pandemic of systemic racism.”

Although New Orleans takes pride in its long history of gens de couleur libres—free people of color—generations of racial discrimination have resulted in persistent poverty and lack of progress.

The school system also has a history of racial inequality and unfairness. During the Jim Crow era, the all-white OPSB invested in white campuses while squeezing Black children into shabby buildings for part-day shifts. In 1948, 1,000 students attended Sylvanie Williams Elementary, where only two classrooms had electric light, according to historian Walter Stern’s 2018 book Race and Education in New Orleans.

After four brave African American girls enrolled at two white schools in 1960, what resulted was not integration but white flight. In 2005, 7 percent of the student body was white, and 9 in 10 of those white students attended the top-ranked schools, most of which had entrance requirements. Fourteen years later, white students made up 9 percent of the student body, and 8 in 10 attended schools rated A or B, according to data from the Louisiana Department of Education. Four percent of white children, but 41 percent of Black children, went to a D or F school. Like the city itself, the school population is significantly less Black now, but the difference is due to increased Hispanic enrollment, which has risen to 11 percent from 1 percent.

In addition, the people standing in front of and behind those students don’t reflect the students’ diversity. As an employer, the pre-Katrina district was the backbone of the Black middle class; indeed, some critics have charged that a goal of the state takeover was to disempower African Americans. Now a bare majority of teachers and principals are Black; fewer than 4 in 10 charter groups have a Black CEO; and 14 percent of charter groups have both a Black CEO and a Black-majority board, according to Black Education for New Orleans.

Being taught by a proportionally diverse group of educators can make a difference for Black children. Cultural competence “is different from rapping a math lesson,” said Adrinda Kelly, the director of Black Education for New Orleans. Studies show a range of benefits for students of color whose teachers look like them, from fairer discipline to higher test scores and greater enrollment in gifted classes. In a survey by Doug Harris’s group, New Orleans students rated their teachers lower on quality than the national average. Half the Black respondents thought their teachers showed concern for their well-being or valued their ideas.

Some organizations are working on diversifying the teaching corps. Black Education for New Orleans coaches educators at Black-governed schools and offers professional development for Black teachers. New Schools for New Orleans runs a teacher residency with Xavier, the nation’s only historically Black Catholic university.

The school board is acting on this issue as well. The previous board hired Beloved Community, a Black-led anti-racist education consultancy, to carry out a districtwide racial-equity audit that addresses both the central office and individual schools. All seven of the current board members have pledged to carry out Beloved Community’s recommendations and to create incentives for schools to improve racial equity. Board member Ashley said he is excited about the audit, which he calls “historic.”

Vision and Community

Facing these challenges, charter schools in New Orleans need OPSB now as they haven’t before. Charter leaders such as FirstLine Schools CEO Sabrina Pence and charter fans such as former Louisiana state education superintendent John White are asking for leadership from the board, but a different kind of leadership this time—not with the iron fist wielded by bad old OPSB, but through a new focus on collaboration, inspiration, and vision.

For progress to resume, the schools are going to need money. School funding depends on sales and hospitality taxes, and oil and gas revenue, all of which are suffering. “The financial picture is kind of grim,” said Pence. FirstLine’s founders opened the city’s first charter school in 1998; the network now runs five schools.

“We’re going to have to ask for help from our elected officials to effectively bring home the bacon,” board member Ashley said.

Charters also need flexibility in academic standards. Currently, charter renewal relies almost entirely on a school’s performance score, which derives from students’ standardized test scores, graduation rates, and the amount of advanced coursework a school offers. In New Orleans as in the rest of the nation, children are losing ground because of the pandemic’s educational and personal disruptions, and charter authorizers will need to take that context into account.

No one used to talk about accountability more than former state chief White, who lives in New Orleans with his young family. But now he’s talking about the need to take a broader view. “We’re going to have a lot of kids with a lot of challenges at home who need to learn to read and who haven’t been consistently in school,” he said. “How do we define recovery? What is it that schools should be focused on?”

Pence agreed. The old model doesn’t work right now, she said. And the solution can’t be top-down. “The community has ideas about what a good school is beyond academics,” and they want input, she said.

Logan Crowe couldn’t agree more. The school he ran, Andrew H. Wilson, lost its charter in 2015 over low performance, and InspireNOLA took it over. Several jobs later, Crowe has returned to his roots with The NET’s new alternative middle school. (The network’s name stands for “meeting Needs, raising Expectations, Training for life.”) Most New Orleans schools are similar to one another, and not everyone fits their mold, he said. “I think that’s shut a lot of people out,” he said. “There need to be more choices for students and families who just want something different.”

Though the hallmark of charter schools is autonomy and competition—and Pence, for one, still wants to run her own bus routes—an all-charter district can’t be each out for its own, said InspireNOLA’s McKneely. “We have to start looking at this from a systematic standpoint, not just one organization. I think if we do that more, then holistically our city will fare a whole lot better.”

Charter groups have been working together and with the district for several years now, first to develop the common-enrollment system, then to work out the details of the reunified district, and now to coordinate services during the pandemic. The work done during the crisis illustrates an especially public and effective model for cooperation. The initial ramp-up for remote teaching and learning “was definitely a collective process,” McKneely said, involving many, many conference calls. The district led the push for technology, swiftly acquiring 10,000 laptops and 8,000 hotspots, which charters distributed to needy students, according to a district press release. Charters worked with their own meal providers to get food to families, and the district ran interference to ensure that the schools would be reimbursed through the federal lunch program. Lewis and the previous board kept up with the latest Covid-19 information from the city and healthcare systems, and set reopening timelines and basic safety guidelines with the charter leaders’ consent. For the first time, almost all the city’s charters agreed to a common school calendar and made a unified decision about whether to hold classes virtually or in-person. It might not be a coincidence that parents’ goodwill toward the school system has gone up, according to an October 2020 poll by the Cowen Institute.

“They just hit it out of the ballpark,” said the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools’ Caroline Roemer of the transition to distance learning. “So many districts failed to do the basics.”

The school board can’t force this kind of collaboration, because legally it doesn’t have much muscle. But the board can persuade. It can advise. It can convene meetings to search for solutions. “You’re not forcing people. You’re bringing them together,” White said.

The fear of what happens if OPSB doesn’t act has begun to overshadow anxiety about what could happen if it does act. “The city, as with all cities, needs leadership right now,” White said. “These are real challenges. They require collective solutions and collaboration . . . [and] really, only the superintendent and the school board are empowered to facilitate that sort of solution at that scale.”

“I would like to see them really create a bold vision that would carry us beyond the progress that has been made the past 15 years. And it’s time for it now,” McKneely said. He added a thought that would once have been anathema for a charter CEO: in a pandemic or a hurricane, “some of us still believe that there’s nothing wrong at certain times for the superintendent of Orleans, who has been appointed by the board, [to] make some decisions that are critical to the wellbeing of the whole system.”

“There’s a real opportunity for building and setting the vision for the next five years, for the city. That’s got to be the main priority,” Pence said. “Strong community engagement is critical so that people really have deep confidence in what that system looks like.”

The elected, local school board is “accountable to the community,” she added. “And having a path forward that is charted out [and] that has had wide engagement I think could be a huge, huge win.”

Can big, bad old OPSB, now in charge of shiny NOLA Public Schools, live up to those hopes?

Superintendent Lewis said yes, and that the Covid-19 response showed it. “We’re able to bring people along,” he said—to convene a school community around common problems, build relationships, and help with resources. “The last thing I want to say is, ‘My role is regulation and authorization, I’m just going to sit back and wait till you fail.’”

Board President Ashley agreed with Lewis’ assessment. The new board is “up to the task,” he said. “But it’s not going to be easy.”

Danielle Dreilinger is an education journalist based in New Orleans and the author of The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live (May 2021).

This article appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Dreilinger, D. (2021). What’s Next in New Orleans: The Louisiana city has the most unusual school system in America. But can the new board of a radically decentralized district handle the latest challenges? Education Next, 21(3), 32-40.

On the morning of March 19, 2007, I entered the grand courtroom of the U.S. Supreme Court and eagerly slipped into one of the worst seats in the house. My spot—far from center stage and with a view obstructed by enormous marble columns—was located in the section reserved for the justices’ law clerks so they could see, or at least hear, legal history being made. I had the privilege of serving that year as a clerk for Justice Stephen Breyer, assisting with tasks such as drafting written opinions and evaluating the merits of potential cases. I was particularly excited to hear the oral argument in that morning’s case because it involved a beguiling set of facts and marked the first time in nearly two decades that the Supreme Court would resolve a dispute involving students’ freedom of speech.

The case was formally titled Morse v. Frederick, but we law clerks called it by its nickname: BONG HiTS 4 JESUS. A 12th-grader in Juneau, Alaska, named Joseph Frederick had produced that odd, and oddly capitalized, slogan on a 14-foot-long banner that he unfurled across the street from his public school during a parade that teachers had permitted students to attend. When principal Deborah Morse saw the banner, she marched across the street, snatched the sign from Frederick’s hands, and later suspended him for 10 days, asserting that the sign ran afoul of the school’s rule against advocating the use of illegal drugs. So, as Frederick’s attorney, Douglas Mertz, strode to the lectern to make his argument before the court, I expected that the justices would immediately pelt him with a barrage of First Amendment questions: If the principal’s actions violated the First Amendment, might students around the nation start unfurling banners in the middle of algebra class? Should she and other educators have special authority to censor student speech regarding drugs, as everyone knows “bong hits” refers to marijuana? Given that Frederick was technically off campus when he displayed the banner, should the relatively restrictive judicial decisions governing student speech even apply to this case?

Mertz opened by observing: “This is a case about free speech. It is not a case about drugs.”

Before he could continue, though, Chief Justice John Roberts jumped in with a retort—one that has significance today not just for lawyers, but also for activists, politicians, and educators across the nation. “It’s a case about money,” Roberts chided. “Your client wants money from the principal personally for her actions in this case.” Mertz insisted that Frederick’s primary concern was vindicating students’ free expression, not any modest financial gain that might flow from a determination that the principal violated his client’s constitutional rights. Roberts further pressed Mertz on this monetary question: “[T]here’s a broader issue of whether principals and teachers around the country have to fear that they’re going to have to pay out of their personal pocket whenever they take actions . . . that they think are necessary to promote the school’s educational mission.”

Although Roberts never directly uttered the words “qualified immunity” during oral argument, his questioning of Mertz unmistakably invoked that doctrine. Qualified immunity is a legal principle that can insulate public employees from financial liability, even if the officials have been found to violate someone’s constitutional rights. In Frederick, the court found that principal Morse’s actions did not violate the Constitution, so the qualified-immunity question in that case largely faded in the written opinions.

Today, though, the once relatively arcane concept of qualified immunity has burst to the fore of public discussion, largely because of an increased focus on police misbehavior. Scholars and citizens alike have condemned the courts’ frequent use of qualified immunity to inoculate police officers from money damages in high-profile cases involving police violence. The exercise of qualified immunity, detractors emphasize, poses a nearly insurmountable obstacle for individuals and their families seeking financial compensation for police wrongdoing. Accordingly, a wide-ranging chorus of critics has demanded an end to qualified immunity.

Public discussion of qualified immunity most often examines the concept as applied to law enforcement, but other government officials can also invoke the protection. Indeed, judicial opinions involving teachers, principals, and schoolboard officials have played a central role in shaping qualified-immunity doctrine. A closer examination of these often overlooked school decisions deepens our understanding of the doctrine’s history and can help us contemplate its future. Viewing qualified immunity through the schooling prism suggests, as critics routinely assert in the policing context, that courts are too lenient in granting qualified immunity to educators. But the schooling prism also offers potent arguments against the wholesale elimination of qualified immunity for educators, regardless of whether the protection is eradicated for police officers.

When Does Qualified Immunity Apply?

The Supreme Court introduced the qualified-immunity doctrine in a case involving police officers in the late 1960s. In that case, police officers arrested a group of civil-rights protestors in Mississippi, citing a state anti-loitering law. The Supreme Court later deemed the statute unconstitutional, but it also determined the officers should not be held liable for enforcing a law they presumed valid. Although this case centered on police officers, it did not take long for the court to make clear that other government employees could avail themselves of the defense. In 1975, the court issued an opinion formally granting qualified immunity to educators in Wood v. Strickland, a momentous decision that arose from a delicious set of facts. Peggy Strickland, Virginia Crain, and Jo Wahl—three 10th-grade students at a small public high school in Arkansas—were tasked with providing refreshments at a mother-daughter event for the Future Homemakers of America club. The girls decided to purchase some Right Time malt liquor to spike the punch for the future homemakers and their mothers. The students added such a miniscule amount of malt liquor to the punch, however, that the resulting concoction neither tasted of alcohol nor could have intoxicated even the thirstiest eventgoer. Still, word of the stunt eventually trickled out, and the school board suspended the offending students for the remainder of the semester. A federal appellate court found that the suspensions violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.

The case made its way to the Supreme Court, which determined that schoolboard officials could in some instances avail themselves of qualified immunity. Writing for the court, Justice Byron White held that an educator could not be found liable for financial damages unless “he knew or reasonably should have known that the action he took . . . would violate the constitutional rights of the student affected, or if he took the action with the malicious intention to cause a deprivation of constitutional rights . . . to the student.” White continued, in language that would loom large over time, that damages would be assessed only if the educator acted with “such disregard of the student’s clearly established constitutional rights that his action cannot reasonably be characterized as being in good faith.”

Over time, the court abandoned Strickland’s subjective standard requiring jurists to decide whether a defendant had acted with good faith or, instead, “malicious intention.” But key phrases from Strickland have endured. The modern era’s leading case involving qualified immunity—Harlow v. Fitzgerald (1982)—unmistakably built upon the language introduced in Strickland, as Harlow instructs that plaintiffs cannot overcome qualified immunity unless they demonstrate that government officials “violate[d] clearly established . . . constitutional rights.” Since 1982, the Supreme Court has offered varying formulations for determining who may successfully invoke qualified immunity. In perhaps the broadest definition, the court in 1986 stated that qualified immunity shielded “all [government officials] but the plainly incompetent” from liability.

Yet today, the court’s basic test in deciding whether to apply the doctrine continues to be: did the government official in question transgress the Constitution in a way that had been “clearly established” by prior judicial decisions? If precedents have not clearly established the constitutional right in question, then government officials can successfully invoke qualified immunity, even if the court determines that their conduct violated the Constitution. In practice, courts typically require the plaintiff to identify binding precedents featuring government officials who have been found to violate the Constitution in a manner that is almost indistinguishable from the plaintiff’s own conditions.

This notion—that plaintiffs must present identical factual scenarios from past case law to demonstrate that an offense violates a “clearly established” right—is profoundly flawed. In 1990, Judge Richard A. Posner, perhaps the most celebrated legal mind of his generation, pressed this point memorably:

It begins to seem as if to survive a motion to dismiss a suit on grounds of [qualified] immunity the plaintiff must be able to point to a previous case that differs only trivially from his case. But this cannot be right. The easiest cases don’t even arise. There has never been a . . . case accusing welfare officials of selling foster children into slavery; it does not follow that if such a case arose, the officials would be immune from damages liability because no previous case had found liability in those circumstances.

Although jurists sometimes quote Judge Posner’s language, they too seldom embrace his logic.

Too Much Qualified Immunity?

Indeed, the judiciary has been excessively willing to grant immunity to educators, even in the face of heinous conduct that, properly understood, contravenes clearly established law. In one notorious decision from 1997, a federal appellate court afforded immunity to school officials who strip-searched two 2nd-grade girls in Talladega, Alabama. The search occurred in an (ultimately futile) effort to locate seven dollars that had supposedly gone missing from a teacher’s purse. In 1985, long before these odious events transpired, the Supreme Court articulated the governing standard for determining when educators violate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches in a case titled New Jersey v. T.L.O. Student searches complied with the Fourth Amendment, the court found in T.L.O., only “when the measures adopted are reasonably related to the objectives of the search and not excessively intrusive in light of the age and sex of the student and the nature of the infraction.” The Talladega misadventure would plainly seem to fail this test, as requiring students to remove their undergarments is intensely invasive and the alleged infraction was trifling. Nevertheless, in Jenkins v. Talladega City Board of Education, the federal court deemed T.L.O.’s “broadly-worded phrases” as providing insufficiently “detailed guidance” to notify educators that they could not demand their young charges to expose their naked bodies in an attempt to recover a paltry sum of stolen money. Other federal appellate courts have also permitted educators to use qualified immunity to shield themselves in lawsuits arising from their, at best, wrongheaded strip searches of pupils.

The Supreme Court has also too readily invoked qualified immunity in education law cases. One example is the 2009 case Safford Unified School District v. Redding. The case arose after school officials in a tiny Arizona town subjected an 8th-grade honors student, Savana Redding, to a strip search for contraband. Redding was suspected of possessing nothing more potent than prescription-strength ibuprofen tablets, a substance banned by the school’s zero-tolerance drug policy. No one ever suggested that Redding had secreted painkillers in her underwear, but when a backpack search turned up nothing, two school officials instructed Redding to remove her clothing and to shift her undergarments in ways that exposed her breasts and pelvic area. This humiliating search failed to locate ibuprofen—or any other contraband. The Supreme Court ruled that the strip search had violated Redding’s Fourth Amendment rights because the substance in question was neither particularly potent nor likely to be located in her undergarments. Yet the court also found that Safford’s school officials had not violated clearly established law and were therefore entitled to qualified immunity. In a powerful dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens lambasted the court’s immunity holding, writing, “This is, in essence, a case in which clearly established law meets clearly outrageous conduct.”

Questioning Qualified Immunity

Although the Supreme Court introduced the concept of qualified immunity more than five decades ago, some justices—from across the ideological spectrum—have recently begun questioning its continued validity. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s leading liberal, and the archconservative Justice Clarence Thomas have both written separate opinions challenging qualified immunity. Thus far, however, Sotomayor and Thomas seem to have gained little traction with their colleagues on this issue. In June 2020, the court rejected nine separate petitions that would have teed up reconsideration of qualified immunity. Since only four of nine justices must agree to have the court address a legal question, it seems unlikely that advocates will soon be able to cobble together five votes to renounce qualified immunity. The court’s hesitation to cast aside such a longstanding practice reflects its extensive line of qualified-immunity opinions and its frequent adherence to the traditional principle of stare decisis—the Latin phrase meaning “to stand by things decided.”

It is possible, though, that Congress, rather than the Supreme Court, will act to alter the scope of qualified immunity, or perhaps even eliminate the practice. A legislative solution is possible, scholars hold, because qualified immunity stems from interpreting a congressional statute (42 U.S.C. § 1983)—not a constitutional provision. Prompted by the May 2020 killing of George Floyd at the hands of police in Minneapolis, Congress members have floated a few different proposals. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, introduced by Representative Karen Bass, Democrat of California, and recently passed by the House of Representatives, seeks to end qualified immunity for police officers. That measure would permit other government officials—including educators—to continue invoking the practice. But a broader proposal, titled the Ending Qualified Immunity Act, would eradicate the defense for all government officials. That sweeping proposal, introduced in June 2020, found backers in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, including Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who were both then running for the Democratic presidential nomination. While political gridlock makes it extremely difficult to enact legislation in the modern era, it seems probable that Congress will entertain renewed calls for addressing qualified immunity at some point during the Biden administration. Lawmakers proposing such legislation would do well to consider whether they aim to curb the defense only for law enforcement officers or for all government officials, who include not just educators, but a wide range of civil servants.

Retaining Protection for Educators?

Even if qualified immunity is jettisoned for police officers, should the doctrine still apply to other public officials? Proponents of abolishing qualified immunity for all officials should consider three main arguments that could be marshaled for retaining the practice in schools. First, unlike the work of police officers, the primary responsibilities of teachers are not inherently imbued with legality and constitutionality. Honoring citizens’ Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights is central to a police officer’s work, or at least it should be. While constitutional issues certainly arise in the school environment, many teachers go their entire careers without confronting firsthand a close question involving students’ rights. Stephen Breyer voiced a version of this argument in his Frederick concurring opinion, where he advocated resolving the case solely by granting principal Morse qualified immunity and avoiding the First Amendment question entirely. “Teachers are neither lawyers nor police officers,” Breyer reasoned, “and the law should not demand that they fully understand the intricacies of our . . . jurisprudence.” My own practical experience corroborates Breyer’s argument. Following my college graduation, when I was working toward a master’s degree in teaching, I student-taught civics and U.S. history at a high school in Durham, North Carolina. I heard many topics broached in discussions among teachers that year, but I cannot recall a single conversation addressing students’ constitutional rights, and I am confident that the term “qualified immunity” was never bruited about the faculty lounge.

The second argument for retaining some qualified-immunity protection for educators is that teachers are far less likely than police officers to use lethal force against people in the course of executing their responsibilities. Even in the states that still permit educators to inflict corporal punishment on students, those actions are mild compared to the harms that can all too easily flow from police officers using their weapons. The teacher’s paddle is, in other words, a far cry from the officer’s gun.

Third, there are significant differences between the constitutional case law pertaining to police offers and the law that applies to educators. The judiciary has produced an ample body of constitutional opinions governing police conduct, resulting in a well-developed legal field, while the court opinions on students’ constitutional rights are quite sparse. This disparity in the number of precedents means that educators are much more likely than police officers to encounter legally novel situations in which the law contains legitimate ambiguity even for people who know the existing doctrine well. Affording educators the possibility of qualified immunity may thus be desirable in the face of comparatively widespread uncertainty regarding the constitutionality of their actions.

Yet at least one prominent argument advanced for reflexively conferring qualified immunity on educators should draw skepticism. Chief Justice Roberts’s emotional plea during oral argument in Frederick conjured up the deeply sympathetic image of principal Morse having to shoulder the expense of financial damages on her own. That image deserves little credence. An Alaskan statute dating back to the 1970s requires school boards throughout the state to indemnify school officials against legal costs incurred in the course of their official duties. Educator indemnification statutes like Alaska’s appear across the United States, meaning that school officials are seldom required to pay damages in the manner that Roberts posited. School districts typically purchase insurance policies for coverage in such instances. Of course, if enough school districts are forced to pay significant financial damages growing out of student lawsuits, their insurance premiums will eventually increase, and the additional charges will be drawn from already strapped education budgets. While that dynamic might be lamentable, it is far less disconcerting than individual teachers rifling through their couch cushions to scrounge up the required money themselves.

This article has largely treated the school setting and the police setting as distinct, but it is important to remember that uniformed police officers do appear in many public schools as “school resource officers,” or SROs. As long as the practice of qualified immunity continues, courts should be careful about permitting SROs to cloak themselves too easily with that doctrine. A few years ago, an SRO in New Mexico arrested a middle-school student for interrupting physical-education class by repeatedly belching. Rather than informing the belcher’s parents or giving him a stern lecture, the SRO handcuffed the 7th-grader and drove him in a police cruiser to juvenile detention. In 2016, Neil Gorsuch, then a federal appeals court judge, wrote an opinion that would have denied the SRO qualified immunity: “I would have thought [the existing judicial decisions] sufficient to alert any reasonable officer . . . that arresting a now compliant class clown for burping was going a step too far.” Unfortunately, though, Gorsuch’s comments arrived in a dissent, as his colleagues on the appellate court disagreed and granted the SRO’s invocation of qualified immunity. Let us hope that now-Justice Gorsuch enjoys better luck convincing his new colleagues at the Supreme Court to rein in the distressingly frequent excesses of qualified immunity.

Justin Driver is a professor at Yale Law School and the author of The Schoolhouse Gate: Public Education, the Supreme Court, and the Battle for the American Mind.

This article appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Driver, J. (2021). Schooling Qualified Immunity: Should educators be shielded from civil liability for violating students’ rights? Education Next, 21(3), 8-14.

Advocates of digital learning have long clamored for technology to play a central role in schools. Using technology, however, is not the goal in and of itself. Rather, it is a means to their ultimate end: remaking a public education system built for an industrial society, not the current knowledge-based one. In such a system, learning would be optimized for individual students to boost their enjoyment and academic progress in school.

The pandemic has ushered in a world of near-ubiquitous digital learning nearly overnight. It could have been an unexpected opportunity to create this future of learning, now. But the signs haven’t been all that positive or promising that much of a remake is underway. Parents, for example, report in the latest Education Next survey that although they are satisfied with their children’s schooling, there’s a lot less learning happening (see “Pandemic Parent Survey Finds Perverse Pattern,” features, Winter 2021). Indeed, a recent study of reading performance in Ohio suggests a decline in student achievement equal to about one-third of a year’s worth of learning for all students and half a year’s worth for Black students.

Rather than look for the silver lining in the sudden switch to technology-enabled learning over the past year, many educators have—perhaps understandably and predictably—squandered the opportunities for innovation. Even in ordinary times, schooling communities tend to favor stability over dramatic innovation, and that has apparently ruled the day yet again. But there are a few bright spots that can inspire hope for at least some tinkering toward utopia, even if there won’t be mass transformations of schools as we know them.

The Hope for Digital Learning

Schools weren’t built to optimize all students’ learning. They were built for many things—inculcating the values of the American democracy, sorting individuals, serving mass numbers of children in the most efficient way possible—but not for ensuring that all students learn. Instruction happens at fixed intervals, and progress is mostly based on seat time, not mastery. Students can skate by while missing large chunks of knowledge.

Many advocates of digital learning have hoped that technology could change that. Technology can personalize learning by helping to deliver just-right content and instruction at a productive pace so each student can fulfill their potential—which can bolster learning outcomes.

Advocates often point to the proven power of tutoring to make their case, such as Benjamin Bloom’s famous two sigma research, in which students in the 50th percentile were able to advance two standard deviations thanks to a tutoring intervention. That research has been revised to show much lower, but still impactful, results from tutoring.

Tutors create compelling outcomes because they ensure children are working at the right level of challenge. When they see a child doesn’t understand something, they can stop and state a concept in a different way or discover that a child’s misunderstanding stems from a gap in a more foundational concept. If, on the other hand, they notice a child already understands something, they can allow her to progress to a more challenging concept right away rather than grow bored. Tutors can ensure that learning is competency- or mastery-based, meaning that the outcome or goal of learning is fixed, and time is the variable. Students can spend as much or as little time as they need to master content.

This is not only more effective, but also more engaging. As Daniel Willingham frames it in his book Why Students Don’t Like School, “Working on problems that are of the right level of difficulty is rewarding, but working on problems that are too easy or too difficult is unpleasant.”

Tutors also can connect on social and emotional levels with a child to create a more motivating experience. Although technology doesn’t directly do that, it frees teachers up from whole-class content delivery and administrative tasks, which allows them to focus on developing deeper connections with each student one-on-one and in small groups.

Personalization also can support a more active learning experience, which research shows is superior to passive learning. When students are learning actively, they spend most of their class time engaging in activities, answering questions, or participating in discussions, not listening to a lecture or waiting for their peers to finish a whole-group activity. A meta-analysis of 225 studies looking at the impact of active learning on science, engineering, and math found it would raise average grades by a half a letter. By comparison, failure rates under lecturing increase by 55 percent over the rates observed under active learning.

The challenge has always been that offering a tutor for every child is prohibitively expensive. But digital-learning advocates have theorized that technology can make tutor-like experiences far more accessible. Connected devices and adaptive software can allow students to work at their right level on digital material, create more active-learning experiences, and allow teachers to focus on individual students’ misunderstandings and motivations rather than delivering one-size-fits-all lessons.

The Reality of Remote and Hybrid Learning

As districts rushed to move learning experiences online, however, they largely haven’t embraced these principles of personalization, active learning, mastery-based learning, and engagement and motivation. And while the industry of digital-learning developers and providers has exploded in the pandemic during the nation’s overnight pivot to remote learning, they are still playing a bit role.

Instead, the majority of teachers offering remote instruction have simply recreated the traditional school day online. According to a nationwide survey by the Clayton Christensen Institute, 42 percent of teachers say their daily hours of synchronous remote instruction resemble a conventional school day. The Education Next survey reports that the dominant model of remote schooling is whole-class learning, with 91 percent of students experiencing this modality several times a week compared to 35 percent who have one-on-one interactions with teachers.

Rather than taking advantage of the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in creating digital K–12 curricular products, teachers have been using materials they’ve created themselves, the Christensen Institute reports. The next-most-popular sources are commercial curriculum designed for classroom-based instruction and “various resources collated from online sources.” Only 3 percent of teachers reported using commercial curriculum intended for a virtual setting.

What’s more, while 19 percent of students learn in hybrid models—in which they are in school anywhere from one to five days a week and learn the other times remotely—a majority of schools haven’t added the potential for personalization that would accompany such a blended-learning model. Instead, schools are continuing to treat students as set cohorts and offering instruction based on cohort, not on current level of learning, according to the Christensen Institute. Relatively small tweaks, such as combining hybrid models with other models of blended learning to create varied activities and dynamic cohorts for students, could have an enormous payoff. Similarly, implementing competency-based learning would help districts assess where individual children are in their learning. That could make the job of catching students up next year far more efficient.

But most districts and states have stuck to running schools based on seat time and attendance. Even worse, some districts have asked teachers to teach in-person and remote students simultaneously, which has resulted in a clunky, passive-learning experience that broadcasts content to students and taxes teachers with more work.

Finally, one research insight from the field of online learning is that in-person interactions matter for most students to be successful. Students in full-time virtual schools typically need an involved parent, and students who take an online course do significantly better when there is an onsite mentor. Yet, according to the Christensen Institute, districts have largely eschewed supporting students with in-person supports through the use of learning pods, learning hubs, or innovative teacher configurations.

Silver Linings

Amidst this doom and gloom, there are glimmers of hope. Some 79 percent of teachers report having discovered new resources and practices that they plan to keep after the pandemic, according to the Christensen Institute survey. Nearly 40 percent report using technology to facilitate such innovative practices as individualized learning progressions, project-based learning, and mastery-based learning.

Some districts, like the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, are seeking to double down on their mastery-based and personalized-learning practices. They are fundamentally rethinking school structures and schedules and have embraced what may become a lasting innovation from pandemic-related school closures: learning pods (see “The Rapid Rise of Pandemic Pods,” what next, Winter 2021). These structures can promote engagement, academic progress, and equity.

“What we saw is, there may be a new way of engaging young people during and after school time using some kind of pods 2.0 iteration,” said Eric Gordon, the district’s chief executive officer.

The community is exploring using pods after the pandemic subsides to address a range of student needs. This could include creating supervised outlets for inquiry for students who are bored in class with material they have mastered already, helping students removed for disruptive behavior stay on track rather than be suspended, or even having student-run pods that allow students to act as tutors so others can catch up on lost learning time. These sorts of practices can support student choice and accelerate learning, and offer the sort of enhanced opportunities that well-resourced families typically provide.

“Suburban communities were forming pods on their own,” Gordon said. “Why shouldn’t my kids have those benefits?”

Michael Horn is cofounder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, senior partner at Entangled Solutions, and an executive editor of Education Next.

This article appeared in the Summer 2021 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Horn, M. (2021). Schools Squandered Virtual Learning: A timid response, with lessons for the future. Education Next, 21(3), 66-67.