Facing the typical challenges of urban schooling, including overcrowded schools, mediocre academic outcomes, and high dropout rates, the Los Angeles Unified School District has been at the epicenter of big-city education reform over the past decade. District leaders have successively tried new approaches to teacher evaluation, changes in school governance, and initiatives aimed at improving equity for the underserved. And yet, education reform in the City of Angels demonstrates the complexity and challenge of enacting and sustaining reform in a highly divided, politically charged urban context. Since the introduction of charter schools in the early 1990s, a few major reforms have taken hold. Others have made their splash and then dissipated like puddles in the desert.

The sheer size of the city’s sprawling school district, often described as a “behemoth,” can make it intractable. Greater Los Angeles is home to 13 million people, and the Los Angeles Unified School District rambles across 720 square miles, including 26 cities, with management divided into seven board districts and six regional offices. As the second-largest school district in the country, L.A. Unified in 2019–20 enrolled nearly 420,000 students, with an additional 138,000 students in the region attending charter schools (the highest charter-school enrollment of any school district in the country). The district commands an operating budget of nearly $7.8 billion and spends about $13,000 annually per pupil, comparable to the per-pupil expenditure of local charter schools.

Over three quarters of the district’s students come from low-income households, and the majority of students are Latinx or African American. On the National Assessment of Educational Progress, L.A. Unified saw significant increases in average student performance in math and English language arts from 2003 to 2017. Performance slipped in 2019, however (see Figure 1), and the district continues to struggle with substantial achievement gaps for African American, Latinx, and low-income students.

 

 

Key actors on the public-education scene fall into opposing camps, traditionalists and reformers, with both sides boasting broad political power and backing. School board positions, highly coveted, carry an annual salary of $125,000 for members with no outside employment, in contrast to most school boards across the country, whose members are typically unpaid volunteers. (In the large cities that do compensate board members, annual salaries are generally well below $50,000.) L.A.’s 2017 school-board election became the most expensive such campaign in U.S. history, with unions and charter-school supporters spending nearly $15 million to back candidates for two open seats. Significant outside investment in the campaign illustrated the trend toward the “nationalization” of school board elections across the country.

From 1980 to 2000, L.A. Unified saw substantial enrollment growth that led to school overcrowding. To address this situation, the city floated several bond measures from 1997–2005, which voters passed and which resulted in the construction of 131 new school campuses.

Recent conditions have now brought the city’s education system to a point of peril. The L.A. County birthrate has declined 15 percent since 2010. This drop, combined with the heightened cost of living in the city and increased enrollment in independent charter schools over this period, has contributed to a 20 percent decline in student enrollment in the district schools in the same time period (see Figure 2). Compounding these challenges are state policy changes that now require school districts to increase their contributions to the state teacher-retirement system. L.A. Unified leaders have forecast a budgetary shortfall of $500 million by 2020–21. Further, the district risks county takeover of its finances if it fails to maintain a reserve to meet its contract requirements.

 

 

In 2019, 32,000 L.A. Unified teachers and staff, joined by teachers from some charter schools, engaged in a six-day strike—the first such walkout in the district in 30 years—demanding higher pay, lower class sizes, more support personnel, and limits on charter growth. Much like the city itself, Los Angeles’s educational system is built upon a divided, shaky foundation, and the potential for a tectonic shift looms.

A look at the past 10 years of reform strategies in Los Angeles, and how education leaders enacted, implemented, and modified them over time, provides potential lessons for future efforts. In particular, three fault lines, or illustrative cases, highlight the divisions, coalitions, obstacles, and progress that characterize the decade’s reforms: the portfolio management model; multiple-measure educator evaluation; and efforts to promote equity. Together, these three examples illustrate the dynamics of change efforts amid a background of fiscal exigency and fiercely competing constituencies.

 

Portfolio Management

At least 18 major cities are currently deploying the portfolio management model, a governance reform intended to spur innovation and improvement. Under this model, the school district allows a diverse set of service providers to operate schools. District leaders observe the performance of various educational approaches and use what they learn to inform decisions about school models and operators. Districts take on a new role as “performance optimizer,” periodically removing the lowest-performing providers, as gauged by student outcomes, and expanding the operations of more-successful providers. The model engages the school district in building quality by growing and pruning the portfolio. This kind of “managed school choice,” advocates say, allows families to choose a school that fits their students’ needs and interests while also giving educators the autonomy to innovate.

In L.A., two decades of reform measures moved the district toward the portfolio model. Starting in the 1990s and continuing into the next decade, magnet schools greatly expanded and several semiautonomous school models arose, including site-based management, pilot schools, and “network partners.” The new models grant flexibility from particular elements of district policy or the collective bargaining agreement with the teachers union, or both. For example, modeled after the Boston pilot schools, L.A. Unified’s pilot model, with its “thin” collective-bargaining agreement, was widely touted as a promising alternative to charter schools. In 2007, the district and the union, United Teachers Los Angeles, agreed to this school model, which lifted some restrictions of district policy and the teachers union contract for a limited set of small schools. These pilot schools constituted a network that allowed families to name their preferred school. The pilot model had broad popular and political support, although the union and others pushed for limits on the number of pilot schools.

Another model, the network partner, arose in 2006 after then mayor Antonio Villaraigosa lost a bid to take over the district. The Los Angeles Superior Court ruled that such a transfer of authority violated the California constitution. Villaraigosa was allowed to take control of a small group of schools and use a governance arrangement that granted school-level autonomy over some aspects of operations but few provisions of the teachers union contract. In practice, many of these “autonomous” models had limited autonomy.

To more effectively manage this new portfolio of schools, L.A. Unified has repeatedly reorganized its management structure. For example, in 2012, then superintendent John Deasy divided the management of schools into regional offices, with one office designed to meet the needs of semiautonomous schools. This reorganization was intended to enhance supports to struggling schools by providing lower principal-to-supervisor ratios and by ensuring that supervisors were well versed in the autonomies granted to various school models. But this reshuffling, like many before it, was short-lived. When Deasy left office in 2014 and Ramón Cortines took over as interim superintendent, he reorganized the “behemoth” into six regional districts the following year. In 2018, current superintendent Austin Beutner floated a new proposal to once again reorganize school management into local “families” of schools. In response, one stakeholder wrote to the Los Angeles Times, “As a former teacher and administrator, retired after 35 years with L.A. [Unified], I can only say this latest plan to divide the district into 32 ‘networks’ certainly sounds
like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic—again.”

Meanwhile, charter schools had been taking hold in the city; in 1992, California became the second state in the nation to enact a law allowing charters. While many early “conversion” charters in Los Angeles remained affiliated with the district, most (225 of 275) are now independent schools that administer their own finances and management. Several high-profile charter management organizations arose in Los Angeles, including Green Dot, which gained national attention in 2008 for taking over a chronically low-performing comprehensive high school in the city. With the burgeoning of charter schools and their potential to compete with traditional schools for students, plus concerns about the availability of facilities, California voters passed an initiative in 2000, Proposition 39, which lowered the voting threshold for passing bond measures to support school-facilities improvement. The referendum also provided charter schools access to “reasonably equivalent” district facilities. Currently, 100 charters are using L.A. Unified facilities, with most co-locating, or sharing space, with district schools, a situation that has led to tensions and even lawsuits over the equitable distribution of space.

Much of the debate around charter schools in Los Angeles centers on the contention that they pull funding, facilities, and students (particularly more-advantaged students) away from traditional schools, contributing to L.A. Unified’s declining enrollment and fiscal problems and raising concerns about equitable access. Other worries include lack of transparency over who serves on charter-school boards and what private interests charters might promote. In an op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times just two weeks before the most recent teachers union strike, union president Alex Caputo-Pearl wrote, “This approach, drawn from Wall Street, is called the ‘portfolio’ model, and it has been criticized for having a negative effect on student equity and parent inclusion.”

While the share of students enrolled in independent charter schools has certainly increased (to 17 percent in 2015 from 11 percent in 2010), the overall number of students in traditional schools and independent charters has declined (by 36,441 students over the same period). A shortage of affordable housing in the region and changing demographics and birthrates have contributed to these enrollment changes. L.A.’s portfolio-model schools are divided into two main systems: charters that, while authorized primarily by the school board, operate quite independently; and the district’s directly overseen and managed collection of traditional and semiautonomous schools. Unlike cities with more-unified portfolio models, such as Denver, Los Angeles has no common enrollment system for these two groups of schools, and parents must navigate differing sets of procedures and timelines to enroll their children.

The Public School Choice Initiative

The 2009 Los Angeles Public School Choice Initiative, which formalized a portfolio approach in the district, illustrates the contentious politics of education reform in the city. The policy underwent many substantive modifications over the years because of shifting coalitions and other influences.

Citing the “chronic academic underperformance” of many district schools and demands from parents and communities for “a more active role” in “shaping and expanding the educational options,” the school board adopted a Public School Choice resolution in August 2009. Unlike a typical choice program under which parents are allowed to choose the school they would like their child to attend, this initiative provided the opportunity for community members and others to participate in developing school plans. The resolution invited teams of both internal and external players—such as teachers, administrators, charter operators, and nonprofits—to propose new models for turning around the district’s lowest-performing schools (“focus” schools) and for operating new “relief” schools designed to ease overcrowding.

Designed for gradual scale-up, Public School Choice involved several annual rounds. In each one, L.A. Unified chose a set of focus and relief schools for participation and then invited proposals to run them. Applicant teams submitted lengthy plans that covered topics from curriculum to school organization to professional development. In addition, applicants had to select one of a set of governance models that varied in the levels of autonomy schools would enjoy in regard to district policies, union contract provisions, and the use of resources. Models included traditional schools, independent charters, pilot schools (limited to 20 when the initiative began), as well as other semiautonomous internal models. After an extensive review process involving many players, including parents, the L.A. Unified school board selected the operators. In all, 42 schools (14 focus and 28 relief) participated in the first round; 28 (5 focus and 23 relief) in the second round; and 41 (19 focus and 22 relief) in the third round. By the fourth round of the initiative, all 20 schools were focus schools.

From its start, Public School Choice was a highly politicized initiative, catalyzing organizing by both the union and the charter-school community. In particular, as part of the proposal-review process, parents were invited to “vote” for their preferred operators and plans. This stage gave rise to electioneering, busing of parents to polls, and the spread of misinformation. In the first year, the demographics of families who voted and attended related meetings did not appear to match the characteristics of the student population, and the proportion of parents voting was relatively small. After many of the schools in the first cohort adopted the charter-school model, the teachers union increased its efforts to oppose the choice initiative, characterizing it as a “public school giveaway.” There were widespread suspicions about the nature of the selection process. The Los Angeles Times joined the public debate in September 2011, opining: “More than one management contract was awarded on the basis of political alliances. Charter schools were disappointingly unwilling to take on the tougher challenge of turning around failing schools; most of their applications were for the new, pretty campuses.”

Fissures widened as the initiative approached agreed-upon limits on the number of pilot schools that could participate. As the district entered negotiations with the union over lifting the pilot-school cap, a coalition of community organizations sprang up. The Don’t Hold Us Back coalition initiated a campaign in support of lifting the cap and instituting performance-based teacher evaluations. The coalition essentially represented several key interests of the school district, promoting this agenda through full-page newspaper advertisements and meetings with education leaders. The resulting new plan expanded the number of pilot schools and required all Public School Choice schools to operate under the collective bargaining agreement, which essentially excluded charter-school operators. But it also created a new semiautonomous school model that allowed any district school to select from a number of waivers to district policy. While autonomy was limited in key ways, this new model symbolized a move toward decentralization and represented a big win for the union, assuring additional autonomy for teachers while maintaining the union contract provisions. It also once again returned the district to a divided portfolio, with charter schools operating quite separately from district-managed schools.

Even before the board approved the Public School Choice resolution in 2009, Mayor Villaraigosa had used his political influence to support the election of a four-member board majority that favored decentralization and charter expansion. He also joined community members in a rally calling for the board to pass the resolution. Early in the implementation of the reform, the union was not well organized, but it quickly ramped up to become a major player. By the last round of competition, the enterprise involved only turnaround campuses, with no charter applicants, before the reform was placed “on hiatus.” While the Public School Choice schools still exist, the initiative did not continue past 2014.

Amid the turmoil surrounding Public School Choice, the initiative demonstrated mixed results. In turnaround schools, the reform did not produce clear improvements except perhaps in one cohort of schools, where the addition of enhanced start-up support and the use of “reconstitution” (that is, replacement of at least 50 percent of teaching staff) appeared to lead to student-learning gains. In relief schools, an analysis showed that schools saw negative effects on performance in their first year, followed by improved achievement in subsequent years.

In sum, while the portfolio management model, charter expansion, decentralization, and school autonomy are common reform strategies elsewhere, the political divisions in Los Angeles have hampered the progress of such reforms in that city. Fiscal pressures, limited facilities, and declining enrollment have only compounded these challenges.

Educator Evaluation

Recognizing the critical importance of teacher quality to student learning, districts and states across the country embraced human-capital reforms in the past decade—including efforts to institute fair and accurate teacher evaluations. Spurred by federal policy and incentives under the Obama administration, many states and districts have developed “multiple-measure” evaluation systems. Typically drawing upon three different measures of teacher effectiveness, these systems aim to improve the quality of teaching by providing educators with clear standards and information about successful classroom practices. The first evaluation measure often consists of at least two classroom observations, completed by a trained evaluator using a detailed rubric. A second measure, called “value-added modeling,” uses students’ performance trajectories on standardized tests to assess a teacher’s contribution to student academic performance. This yardstick, while objective, is controversial. Third, these systems often consider other measures of educators’ performance, such as teacher effectiveness as gauged by student surveys or contributions to the school outside of the classroom. Together, these data in theory inform administrators’ decisions on tailored professional development, retention, transfer, and assignment, with the ultimate goal of improving teaching and learning. Some evaluation systems also include incentives, such as bonus pay or promotions to leadership or mentoring roles.

In California, the Stull Act of 1971 (amended in 1999) stipulated that measures of student progress must be part of teacher evaluations, but for decades afterward, L.A.’s teacher-evaluation system lacked teeth: principals observed classroom instruction twice during a teacher’s “on” year, which occurred every five years for permanent teachers. Evaluators assessed teachers’ instruction across several criteria, resulting in an overall rating of “satisfactory” or “not satisfactory.” Under this system, critics noted, ratings were “widely seen as a rubber stamp, with 95 percent of the district’s 33,000 teachers rated as satisfactory. With all that apparently solid teaching going on, only 56 percent of students graduate from high school,” wrote Hillel Aron in 2011 in LA Weekly.

In 2010, the Los Angeles Times developed its own method of value-added analysis and published the ratings of all teachers in the district. The Times ratings caused a stir, with critics raising questions about the validity and fairness of this type of evaluation as well as concerns that publishing the data linked to teachers’ names might drag down teacher morale. Indeed, one teacher’s suicide was blamed on the public release of these ratings.

Educator Development and Support

In response to concerns over the implementation of Stull evaluations and a 2009 report from The New Teacher Project calling out L.A. Unified for “ineffective teacher evaluation and staffing systems,” the district moved to revamp its approach to teacher evaluations. Leadership convened a task force of researchers and policymakers to help develop priorities for reforming the evaluation system as well as the district’s teacher-retention and development efforts. In 2012, the district won a $16 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Teacher Incentive Fund to support L.A. Unified’s planned human-capital reforms, including a new multiple-measure evaluation system.

Initially, the evaluation system, now called Educator Development and Support: Teachers, included more frequent evaluation for all teachers, consisting of two annual classroom observations, plus value-added measurement (calculated differently from the Los Angeles Times measure), student feedback, and assessment of the teacher’s contributions to the school community. The system provided for enhanced professional development tailored to needs identified through the evaluation process. Under the Teacher Incentive Fund grant, the envisioned human capital-reforms also included the creation of a teacher career ladder that involved mentor and master teacher positions with associated stipends in high-needs schools (although these elements were never enacted).

On paper, the plan held great promise, but implementation presented serious challenges, even during the pilot phase in 2011–12. The teachers union strongly opposed the plan, objecting to the use of value-added measures as well as the proposed four tiers of teacher ratings—including “highly effective,” which would serve to identify outstanding teachers and thus pave the way for merit pay. The union also objected to the extra demands the evaluation process would place on teachers.

In 2011, frustrated by the district’s inability to implement evaluation as planned, parents and students sued the district, superintendent John Deasy, and the union, demanding a robust teacher-evaluation system that took student progress into account, per the Stull Act. The plaintiffs had the backing of EdVoice, a nonprofit funded by philanthropist Eli Broad and others. One former school-board member charged that the superintendent might be “collusive” with the plaintiffs, LA Weekly reported in November 2011. Deasy has denied involvement, though he testified during the case, Doe et al. v. Deasy et al., that L.A. Unified did not have a consistent process for considering student achievement in teacher evaluations. The Los Angeles Superior Court found the district in violation of the law and ordered it to start connecting teacher evaluations to student performance in some way, though the court did not prescribe specific policy changes.

This litigation strengthened the case for full implementation of the initial evaluation system, including its value-added metric and four tiers of teacher ratings. The union challenged these features with the California Public Employment Relations Board. Still, by 2015, the union and the district returned to the bargaining table. District officials agreed to shorten the evaluation rubric and to use a three-tier rating system. While the union would have preferred the two tiers that were in effect previously, Superintendent Cortines claimed that retaining them would mean L.A. Unified would lose $171 million in federal funding flexibility under the No Child Left Behind waiver it got as a member of a consortium of California districts. The new plan also left supervising principals in charge of teachers’ assessments and how to measure their contributions to student outcomes (that is, progress toward data-based objectives in lieu of value-added measures). Although it has been modified substantially over time, the revamped evaluation system has now been in place for seven years.

While the impacts of the scheme remain to be seen, research does shed light on some implementation challenges, particularly around the reliability of teacher-evaluation measures. Evidence from the pilot year indicated moderate correlations between L.A. Unified’s value-added measure and ratings by principals based on their classroom observations, but studies of the early years of implementation also demonstrated how such ratings differed across contexts even shortly after the evaluators received training in the new techniques. Research also showed that principals struggled to find enough time and staffing to complete the rigorous evaluation process, and there were problems using the mandated technology. Furthermore, recent research on the evaluation system has highlighted the importance of ongoing professional development to help evaluators understand and properly implement this reform. For example, L.A. Unified sought to bolster implementation by requiring principals’ supervisors to provide supportive coaching to their principals. A recent study indicates that, despite variation in the coaching strategies and styles used by principals who did the evaluations, those principals who believed they received high-quality coaching from their supervisors were more likely to report implementing the system more fully.

Research has also highlighted the influence of the teacher evaluation and support system on related educational practice in L.A. Unified. In one analysis, Katharine O. Strunk and colleagues found that teachers who received low ratings under this system were more likely to exit the district than those with higher ratings. While the reform did not lead individual teachers to improve their performance (as gauged by value-added measures), the overall quality of the teacher workforce may have improved and become more consistent.

Promoting Equity

Los Angeles is one of the most diverse cities in the world, with L.A. Unified serving students who speak 93 different languages. Nonetheless, the district has struggled with de facto segregation in its schools, mirroring the city’s stark residential segregation. Over the past 50 years, the district has continually endeavored to address inequities in opportunities and outcomes for its diverse student body. In 1977, in response to court-mandated desegregation, the district started a magnet program and attempted to implement mandatory busing of students. Recent years have seen broader efforts to promote integration and equitable access to a high-quality education across the district.

For example, over the past decade, district leadership has sought to address a range of equity concerns related to discipline policies, fairer access to resources, and a more-balanced distribution of budget-induced teacher and staff layoffs. Advocates have urged district administrators to give explicit attention to issues of race and poverty and to rectify inequities in various policies and practices.

In 2013, Superintendent Deasy and the school board decided to ban student suspensions for “willful defiance” after it became apparent that school officials were disproportionately meting out suspensions or expulsions to African American students and those with disabilities for this vaguely defined category of infraction. L.A. was the first district in the state to make this move, which resulted in “a 75 percent drop in suspensions across all categories and a narrowing of racial disparities among students who are suspended,” according to the journalism website EdSource. In September 2019, the governor signed a law extending the statewide prohibition on such suspensions to grade 8; the previous ban had applied only to grades K–3. The state has also renewed efforts to adopt restorative justice and other programs that use less-punitive forms of discipline.

Also in 2013, the state of California adopted a new school-finance system that provides additional funding for English-language learners, children in foster care, and low-income students. Despite this shift, several organizations have challenged L.A. Unified on its implementation of the new state policy and the way it allocates funds to schools. In a 2015 lawsuit, settled in 2017, the American Civil Liberties Union claimed that the district had misdirected state money away from the high-needs students for whom it was intended. In 2018, the Equity Alliance for LA’s Kids, a coalition of community groups and civil rights organizations, partnered with the school board president on a resolution, which the board approved, requiring the district to consider a broader range of factors in redistributing funding to promote equity. For example, rather than allocating additional funds based only on the portion of students in foster care or the number of those eligible for reduced-price lunch, this new “equity 2.0” formula would consider a collection of factors—such as asthma rates and the prevalence of gun violence—seen as indexes of community health.

On another front, the legal case Reed v. State of California illustrates a judicial remedy that addressed a different equity issue—the fair distribution of teacher layoffs. In 2010, the ACLU led a class-action suit against the State of California and L.A. Unified, alleging that teacher layoffs disproportionately affected three middle schools serving low-income students of color. The court ordered an injunction against further layoffs in these schools, which laid the groundwork for a settlement. The initial settlement, which protected 45 schools from disproportionate layoffs, was met with resistance from the union, which was concerned that this action would lead to further challenges to the “last-in, first-out” seniority-based layoffs dictated by state law. Many stakeholders, including union leaders, expressed surprise that the number of protected schools had grown dramatically from what was in the original injunction.

In response to pressure from the union, which argued that the settlement had breached teacher rights, a subsequent agreement was negotiated in 2014 between the union, the district, and the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, a nonprofit that manages 18 L.A. Unified schools. This settlement identified 37 schools that would receive additional support in managing high levels of teacher turnover (for example, through hiring assistant principals, counselors, and support staff; providing additional professional development; recruiting mentor teachers; and offering a bonus to retain principals).

Ultimately, this case resulted in an effective but inefficient means of reforming layoff procedures in the district. That is, while the lawsuit accomplished its initial aims of protecting teachers in the three originally named schools, its settlement involved prolonged negotiation and did little to influence established state law around last-in, first-out.

Several researchers have used the Reed settlements to examine the influence of layoffs on the stability of the teaching workforce, particularly in schools serving low-income students of color. They have demonstrated how merely receiving a layoff notice increased the likelihood that teachers would leave their schools, even if their position was eventually retained. One rigorous analysis showed that the Reed settlement dramatically reduced the extent to which low-income students of color were disproportionately affected in the schools included in the settlement, in terms of the likelihood of students having a teacher laid off.

This case set the stage for broader statewide litigation in Vergara v. California, in which the initial decision struck down the state’s teacher-evaluation and tenure laws. Filed in 2012 on behalf of nine students, the suit alleged that California statutes governing teacher tenure, layoff, and dismissal procedures violated the state constitution and denied equal protection to students, as ineffective teachers were retained and disproportionately assigned to low-income students of color. Former superintendent John Deasy was a key witness in the case, testifying in support of the plaintiffs and advancing arguments similar to those used in the Reed case. While the initial ruling in 2014 supported the plaintiffs, a state appellate court reversed this decision in 2016, ruling that the challenged statutes did not violate the California constitution. The state supreme court declined to review the case. Although the final ruling supported the status quo, the initial ruling inspired copycat lawsuits in Connecticut, New York, and Minnesota that similarly challenged teacher-tenure laws and seniority job protections.

Rupture: The 2019 Strike

In January 2019, Los Angeles was rocked by its first teachers union strike in 30 years. Union teachers across the district and at two independent charter schools took to the picket lines for six days demanding smaller class sizes, more funding for support staff, and higher pay. This strike was two years in the making and represented the culmination of growing tensions between the district and the union—tensions building from the reform experiences described above. The contested issues included charter-school expansion and growth of the portfolio model, as well as perceived inadequate human-capital support and funding inequities. Some 98 percent of district teachers voted in favor of the strike, which also drew national support, with well-known leaders from the American Federation of Teachers showing up at the demonstrations. John Rogers of UCLA notes that, increasingly, teacher organizing has included broader issues affecting schools and communities. In L.A., striking teachers sought smaller class sizes, increased nursing and counseling staff, and the establishment of more “community schools,” in addition to salary hikes. A January 2019 article in The Atlantic described the strike as an example of the long history of student and teacher organizing for school reform in the city, and tied the solidarity of teachers and students to the fact that L.A. Unified employs a much higher proportion of Latinx teachers (43 percent) than other urban districts in California.

The context of the strike was complex. L.A. Unified faces a deficit of $500 million in 2020–21, along with looming insolvency. In part, these financial troubles stem from a change in state policy requiring doubled contribution rates to support an underfunded retirement system, with the largest increase coming from districts. Saddled with this burden and the financial pressures of declining enrollment, L.A. Unified was in a poor position to meet the union’s demands. In the end, the union and the district negotiated a 6 percent teacher pay raise, and promised nursing staff at each campus, additional counselors and librarians, and smaller class sizes. In hopes of mitigating these financial pressures, the union, charter proponent and philanthropist Eli Broad, and several businesses backed a measure to enact a new parcel tax—a real estate tax, usually in the form of a flat fee, used in California—to support the schools. The measure, which would have needed the support of two thirds of voters to pass, failed to garner even a majority.

The negotiations resulted in several symbolic actions, including putting a resolution before the school board to call for Governor Gavin Newsom and the legislature to enact a cap on charter schools, whose growth the union blames for the district’s dwindling enrollment. The board passed this resolution by a vote of five to one. At the state level, a task force was convened and the legislature and governor enacted several changes to state charter law—including some that were intended to limit growth, such as providing district authorizers discretion to deny new charter schools if their creation would harm the finances of the local school district.

Surveying the Landscape

These cases—fault lines and ruptures—reveal the unique landscape of education reform in Los Angeles. It is a city with many active political players—including not only the union, the district, and education advocates, but also the media and active local philanthropies. These various players have used a number of venues to push their interests, including local board elections, internal policies, state legislation and ballot initiatives, and the courts. There remain stark divisions, where the interests of the district, unions, charter schools, and community groups are often at odds. Nonetheless, significant reforms have survived in this complex ecology.

One central question remains: why has it been so challenging to implement and sustain education reform in Los Angeles? In this complex landscape, the players are constantly shifting to advance often-opposing interests. While many large cities face similar tensions and power struggles, Los Angeles is especially challenged by its extraordinary size, unremitting financial woes, and leadership churn: the city has had five school superintendents in the past decade alone. With these changes in leadership came new agendas and alliances, and the dismantling of prior reforms. The stresses of falling enrollment and deficit funding have heightened tensions around a wide range of reform efforts. Many see reforms such as charter schools as intensifying the threat to a system where teachers and other constituencies have a great deal at stake.

Some critics of education reform maintain that reform efforts, particularly charter conversions and choice more generally, often play out in low-income communities of color and that they privilege other voices and interests over those in the community. Some argue as well that such reforms tend to reflect the preferences of philanthropies, often led by white men, who espouse educational and ideological approaches for children of color, such as promoting strict discipline, that may not reflect the needs or interests of those communities. Others contend that growing competition among the city’s schools incentivizes them to cherry-pick among prospective students, choosing to enroll those with more home supports, higher achievement, fewer special needs, and fewer discipline problems. The size and complexity of L.A. Unified and its policies also disadvantage families with fewer social networks and lower incomes, further exacerbating stratification. For example, entry into one of the district’s sought-after magnet programs requires substantial knowledge and time to navigate a complex points-based admissions system. Even if a family manages to steer its way through such systems, limited transportation across this massive city can prevent true choice. While some recent reforms have targeted equity concerns, these matters will require much more attention if the city has any hope of providing all of its communities with access to great schools.

Will the shaky ground of this educational landscape hold, or endure more cracks and fractures? There is both potential and vulnerability in this unstable environment. As new state charter legislation takes effect and as enrollment continues to drop, will the number of charter schools in the city decline? What will leaders do to turn around or replace chronically low-performing schools? Public support for the recent teachers union strike and the emboldened advocacy of coalitions fighting for equity may portend deepening political divisions—or hold the possibility for repairing differences and collaborating toward common goals. The next decade of education reform may rely upon efforts to shore up the stability of the district’s leadership and fiscal conditions. The district will certainly need such resources if its leaders and educators hope to effect changes that will transform the schools and ultimately benefit the city’s children.

Susan Bush-Mecenas is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Northwestern University School of Education and Social Policy. Julie A. Marsh is a professor of education policy at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education and a faculty director of Policy Analysis for California Education. For a list of references for this feature, visit www.educationnext.org.

For millions of students at American colleges, freshman year starts off with an unpleasant surprise: despite graduating high school, students find themselves assigned to remedial classes in math or English, which they must pay for and pass before being allowed into college-level courses. Given that many of these students never complete a certificate or degree, advocates have begun to refer to remediation as a “bridge to nowhere.” Thus, policymakers looking to increase postsecondary enrollment and completion have put their focus on lessening the delays created by remedial course requirements.

The problem is especially acute in Tennessee, where in 2013, only one in three adults had more than a high-school diploma and two in three incoming college freshmen at local community colleges were placed in remedial classes. That year, the state launched the “Drive to 55” initiative, with the goal of increasing the number of adults with postsecondary credentials to 55 percent by 2025. It is a priority widely shared by policymakers across the country, with 41 other states working toward similarly ambitious graduation goals.

Studying Tennessee’s experience is uniquely valuable because it gives us a chance to compare two different alternatives to traditional remediation policies. First, the state began allowing students to complete their remedial math requirements while they were still in high school. Under the Seamless Alignment and Integrated Learning Support (SAILS) program, students designated as needing remediation based on their junior-year ACT math scores can enroll in an online remedial course during their senior year. Although held in high-school classrooms and staffed by high-school instructors, the course is modeled on the remedial course offered in community colleges in Tennessee, and students who complete it are exempt from math remediation when they enroll at one of the state’s 13 community colleges.

Then, in 2015, Tennessee began allowing students to take remedial-math courses concurrently with college-level math. Many other states, including Texas, California, and Massachusetts, have begun to experiment with similar “co-requisite” remediation policies. Although co-requisite remediation no longer delays students’ entry into college-level courses, such courses could still hamper students’ ability to take other college-level, credit-bearing courses. Moreover, completing remediation concurrently with college-level courses could be more or less effective than doing so beforehand, depending upon whether students fully retain the material between the time they complete remediation and enroll in college classes. The key question is whether SAILS or co-requisite remediation can prepare students for college-level work with less delay or displacement than prerequisite remediation.

Waves of remediation

In order to learn about both alternatives to prerequisite remediation, we look at changes in outcomes for three different waves of high schools that introduced the SAILS program between 2013 through 2016, and compare them with outcomes at high schools that never had the program. In the first year of the program’s implementation, when completing SAILS allowed students to forgo prerequisite remediation, we measure the impact of eliminating the delay of prerequisite college remediation. In the second and third years, after the co-requisite policy was in effect, we again measure the effect of SAILS participation, this time measuring the effect of eliminating co-requisite requirements.

Under the prerequisite policy, we find that participating in SAILS boosted enrollment in college courses during the first year of college and allowed students to earn a modest 4.6 additional college credits by the end of their second year, or about one and a half classes. However, we learn that the program also did not improve students’ math skills on the math ACT test, nor did it improve their chances of passing college-level courses by the end of their second year.

Once the co-requisite policy was in place, however, we find that SAILS participation no longer had an impact on the number of college credits completed—implying that the co-requisite courses were just as effective as SAILS in reducing the delay associated with remediation and that they were not crowding out other college-level courses. Moreover, we see evidence that students in the co-requisite courses were more likely to pass their college-level math course work than the SAILS graduates—implying that “just-in-time” or concurrent postsecondary remediation may be a more effective way to help students pass college math than remediation during high school.

Our findings suggest that both high school–based remediation like SAILS and co-requisite remediation have advantages over prerequisite college remediation. Both allow students to get a faster start and complete more credits within the first two years. In addition, co-requisite remediation also may be more successful than high-school remediation in helping students to pass their college-level math classes, by eliminating the time lag between remediation and the demands of college courses.

However, our findings also suggest that the role of remedial course requirements as a cause of low completion rates has been overstated. Prerequisite remediation is neither the major cause of low completion (as many of its critics have argued) nor a major solution for students with weak math skills—we find no effect of SAILS participation on the math achievement of remediation-eligible students in high school, relative to the typical high-school math course. Whenever it is delivered, remediation does little to undo the negative consequences of entering one’s senior year in high school with weak math skills.

Replacing pre-requisite remediation with SAILS or co-requisite remediation may help students complete an additional class or two, but that will do little to help Tennesee or other states meet ambitious goals for postsecondary degree completion. To improve students’ chances of completing a certificate or degree, institutions and policymakers will have to clear other barriers to college success, such as by providing more financial aid, better college advising, and clearer course pathways to a degree.

Keeping Tennessee’s promise

Nationwide, just one third of community-college students referred to remedial course work graduate within six years. Given alarmingly low graduation rates, states are increasingly focused on college remediation policies as a way to increase degree completion. Federal data show that in 2011, 29 percent of students at four-year public institutions and 41 percent at public two-year schools were required to take remedial English or math. One analysis found that students spend $1.3 billion on remedial college course work annually.

Unlike most other states, Tennessee notifies students of their remediation status while they are still in high school, based on their 11th-grade ACT math test scores. The first full wave of SAILS high schools launched in 2013–14, gradually expanding over time so that by the 2018–19 school year, over 10,000 students in 271 high schools were enrolled.

The SAILS course is self-paced, with students progressing through the material on their own schedule, either over one semester or across the whole school year depending on their school’s course schedule. The course material is delivered entirely through a computer-based platform, including videos, homework problems, and assessments. Most of the work is completed in class, although students have the option of working outside of class as well. Students progress through the course content at their own pace. Although teachers occasionally provide direct instruction, their primary role is to monitor progress through the online modules and provide guidance when students are stuck. Over the life of the program so far, more than 60,000 students have passed a SAILS course—89 percent of all those who enrolled.

As the SAILS program was expanding, Tennessee became the first state in the country to offer free community college for recent high-school graduates, beginning with the class of 2014–15. The Tennessee Promise scholarship covers tuition and fees at community and technical colleges and at a small number of public and private four-year institutions offering associate degrees.

Also in fall 2015, Tennessee’s community colleges transitioned from a policy of prerequisite remediation to a co-requisite policy. In other words, rather than completing remedial course work before enrolling in for-credit classes, students were able to enroll in a remedial course simultaneously with their college-level course. Like SAILS, the new remediation policy was intended to allow students to enroll in college-level course work directly. However, while SAILS allows students to avoid remedial course taking entirely in college, potentially freeing up time to take other classes, the new co-requisite policy still required students to spend time in a remedial section, potentially crowding out other course options.

Data and method

To conduct our analysis, we gathered data for students who were seniors in Tennessee public high schools between 2010–11 and 2015–16, including high-school enrollment, demographic characteristics, student and school participation details from the SAILS program, junior-year ACT scores, postsecondary enrollment, community-college course grades, and college degree completion.

In 2015–16, we also administered a posttest and survey to a sample of approximately 16,000 seniors at 119 high schools that were implementing SAILS, and collected complete responses from approximately 61 percent of students in the targeted classes. (We did not target seniors enrolled in either Advanced Placement or early high school math courses, such as geometry, who were therefore likely to be far above or below the ACT remedial cutoff.) The 50-minute, 35-item posttest was an abbreviated version of their 11th-grade ACT math test. Students completed it at the end of their senior-year math course either in November 2015 or April 2016, and it was then scored by ACT. During the last five minutes of the posttest, students completed a 15-item student survey on topics such as perceptions of their math courses, attitudes toward math, and postsecondary aspirations.

To measure the impact of SAILS participation on progress in college, we examine outcomes for various waves of high schools in the year they began implementing SAILS, and compare those to outcomes at schools that never implemented the program. Depending on the specific years under study, the comparison group was exposed to either prerequisite or co-requisite remediation.

To measure the impact of SAILS on students’ math achievement and attitudes toward math, we compare outcomes for students just above and below the math remediation cutoff, the latter of whom were referred to the SAILS course. Because high-school students in Tennessee are required to take four years of math, we are measuring the effect of SAILS relative to a typical senior-year math class.

 

Prerequisite and co-requisite course work

In our first analysis, we look at the impacts of SAILS on student outcomes in the first year of the program, when students with ACT scores below 19 were subject to prerequisite remedial requirements. We find that the SAILS program led to a decline of 60 percentage points in the proportion of community-college entrants taking remedial math during their first year in college (see Figure 1). In other words, SAILS succeeded in shifting the locus of remediation from college back to high school for 60 percent of remediation-recommended community-college students.

In addition, we find that students in SAILS high schools were more likely to take and pass college-level math classes during their first and second years in community college. In their first year, SAILS participants saw a boost of 29 percentage points in college-math enrollment and an increase of 13 percentage points in passing college math. SAILS participation also resulted in a small increase of 4.6 credits in the number of college credits accumulated by the end of the second year. But we find no statistically significant impact of SAILS on certificate or degree completion within two years. Within two years of enrolling, just 6 percent of remediation-recommended students had completed an associate degree (with or without SAILS); another 4 percent of entrants completed a certificate program during that time.

After the co-requisite policy was implemented in 2014–15, our analysis shows a similar shift in remediation from college to high school; SAILS participants were about 57 percentage points less likely to enroll in remediation during their first year in college. However, we no longer see a positive impact on the proportion of students taking or passing college math during their first year—in fact, the estimates are negative. Likewise, the estimated impacts on college credits completed by the end of the second year of college is not significantly different from zero.

Taken together, our findings across both years confirm that prerequisite course requirements do slow students’ progress in college. Recall that, when the prerequisite remedial requirement was still in place, the SAILS program allowed students to complete an additional 4.6 credits by the end of their second year—basically the time students would have spent in remedial courses had they not taken them in high school via SAILS. This advantage disappeared after the co-requisite remediation policy was introduced, suggesting that co-requisite policies do not seem to displace college-level courses. By completing their remediation in high school rather than at the same time as their college-level classes, SAILS participants no longer enjoyed any benefit in terms of completed college credits by the end of their second year. Indeed, there is some evidence that they were worse off, being less likely to successfully pass the college-level math course than those taking the co-requisite course.

Impacts on math performance and perceptions

Our findings above suggest that prerequisite remedial math requirements do represent a sort of “time tax” on students, and that replacing them with high-school or co-requisite remediation allows students to make faster progress. But does the time spent on remedial courses benefit struggling students by improving their math skills?

There is surprisingly little evidence on whether college remediation actually improves students’ math skills. The primary reason has been lack of data: while most students are assigned to remediation based on a single test score, they complete remediation by passing the remedial course, not by retaking the test. Colleges rarely collect posttest data for participants, and even less often do they gather such data for a comparison group, which is difficult to do for college students who can drop out at any time.

Because the SAILS course was (and is) offered in high school, where it is easier to track down and administer assessments to students, we had a unique opportunity to measure impacts of the SAILS course on math achievement and attitudes toward math. To do so, we focus on those students who were immediately above and below the cutoff for remediation on the 11th-grade ACT test, administering a posttest and survey to high-school seniors in 119 SAILS-participating schools in 2015–16. We find no differences in students’ scores on the posttest for those above and below the threshold, implying that students in SAILS classes improved no more (or less) than students who did not take SAILS during their senior year of high school. Even after asking program staff to identify the subset of ACT test items most aligned with the SAILS course, we still find no difference.

We also find no significant differences in students’ postsecondary college plans (see Figure 2). However, we do estimate that SAILS participation generated more positive feelings about math: participants were nearly 16 percentage points more likely to perceive that their math course content would be useful in their careers, 25 percentage points more likely to report that they felt prepared for college math, and 15 percentage points more likely to say that they were interested in math. The impact on student perception of being better prepared for college math was particularly large for black students. Despite this perception, we do not observe an impact on posttest scores or see a disproportionate increase in college-math enrollment, math passage, or accumulated credits among black students.

 

Looking beyond remediation

In recent years, Tennessee has implemented two major reforms to its remediation policies: the SAILS program, which allows students to complete their math remediation during the senior year in high school; and a statewide co-requisite remediation policy, which allows students to complete their remedial course work concurrently with college course work. Our results suggest that both have been effective in opening the doors to college-level course work, increasing the proportion of remediation-recommended students taking college-level math in their first year at community college by roughly 30 percentage points. We find some evidence that co-requisite remediation has been somewhat more effective in helping students to pass their college-math requirements than high-school remediation, implying that there may be some benefit to reducing the time lag between remediation and college course work.

However, our evidence suggests that the SAILS course does not improve students’ math achievement or boost their likelihood of passing college math once they take the course. Of the additional students who are able to take college-level math as a result of SAILS, only about half have passed.

Allowing students to complete remediation in high school (with a program such as SAILS) or allowing students to enroll in college and remedial math concurrently (with a co-requisite remediation policy) will lead to modest increases in credit completion by the end of students’ second year in college. However, remediation is neither a major cause of low completion nor a solution for students who emerge from high school with weak math skills. Achieving significant improvements in the number of Tennesseans with a postsecondary credential will require identifying and clearing other barriers to college completion and not simply reducing the time cost of remediation. For instance, students may be having trouble navigating their way toward a degree, struggling to understand their course requirements or switching between majors.

A review of remedial-education reform efforts in recent years, for example, found that programs with comprehensive, integrated, and long-lasting student supports have produced the largest increases in college success outcomes. Other research has found that programs that offer students comprehensive advising, tutoring, and financial support, such as the City University of New York’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, have positive impacts on degree completion. Other institutions, such as Georgia State University, encourage students to choose “meta-majors,” broad areas of interest with common course requirements and themed freshman learning communities; university data show that students in these groups earn better grades and are more likely to return sophomore year.

Our findings also suggest a more thorough rethinking of the content and delivery of remediation. For instance, it could be that the senior year in high school is too late to start. Earlier efforts have been shown to have positive effects on student achievement—for example, in Chicago Public Schools, a double-period algebra course in the 9th grade had positive effects on students’ algebra grades, credits earned in high school, test scores, and rates of high school graduation and college enrollment (see “A Double Dose of Algebra,” research, Winter 2013).

It is also possible that the self-paced, online course used in Tennessee is not well matched to the needs of low-achieving students. A growing body of work from college and high-school settings has found that students with lower levels of academic preparation perform less well in online courses than with traditional instruction. Online credit-recovery classes for struggling high-school students may be delivered poorly (see “A Digital Path to a Diploma,” features, Winter 2020). If states cannot find a model of remediation that actually increases students’ success in math, the next step will be to evaluate the consequences of eliminating remediation requirements for more students. In a study at the City University of New York, for example, researchers found that students who qualified for remedial course work but were instead placed in a college-level statistics class with extra support did far better than their counterparts in the remedial class (see “Reforming Remediation,” research, Spring 2017).

Many students are emerging from high school without the skills traditionally expected for college-level course work. In order to reach ambitious goals for increasing degree completion among their residents, many states are rethinking their remediation requirements. Our analysis shows that boosting degree completion will require a more effective model of math remediation—either in high school or college—or the elimination of other barriers to completion, such as inadequate advising or the level of math required in gateway college courses.

Thomas Kane is the Walter H. Gale Professor of Education and faculty director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University. Angela Boatman is an associate professor of higher education at Boston College. Whitney Kozakowski is a PhD candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a fellow at the Center for Education Policy Research. Christopher Bennett is a PhD candidate at the Peabody College of Education and Human Development at Vanderbilt University. Rachel Hitch is the director of program management at Meteor Learning, and Dana Weisenfeld is a research analyst at the Center for Education Policy Research.

When my mother passed away at the ripe old age of 90, several years ago, my brothers and I had the bittersweet task of emptying out the home she and my father had lived in for well over half a century, and where we grew up. We took various keepsakes and mementoes. I made a beeline for the books and magazines. While leafing through, I realized how much my picture of America had been formed by them and the tempered but patriotic history they conveyed. They reflected the middlebrow culture of mid-twentieth century America, which carried many of my generation through the turmoil of social change, war, and political crisis. And they reminded me of the need for robust history and civic education today.

The first collection of books I recovered was from when I was quite young. It was the Landmark series of histories for young people, conceived by Bennett Cerf of Random House and launched in 1948 with books by topnotch novelists like Dorothy Canfield Fisher, C. S. Forester, and Robert Penn Warren, and war correspondents like William L. Shirer, Quentin Reynolds, and Richard Tregaskis. It eventually ran to some 180 volumes and covered not just American history but everything from the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the United Nations in war and peace. Although mainly out of print, they retain some appeal to homeschooling parents and are easy to find in used bookstores.

Next I found my old copy of Kenneth Roberts’ historical novel about the American retreat from Canada in 1776 and the Saratoga campaign of 1777, Rabble in Arms. In it, Roberts turned my 12-year-old historical consciousness upside down by making Benedict Arnold out to be a hero, by showing how Arnold’s military skill accounted for the deferral of one British invasion of the northern United States and the defeat of another. Roberts described in terms more vivid than all but the best historians what it was like to fight a lake battle in upstate New York in late autumn, be inoculated against smallpox, and deal with the stupidities of legislative politics. Like his contemporaries Walter Edmonds (Drums Along the Mohawk) and Esther Forbes (Johnny Tremain), he made the colonial and revolutionary past live.

And then I discovered old copies of American Heritage magazine going back to the early 1960’s. Once a minor publication by the American Association for State and Local History, it was relaunched in 1954 as a handsome, 120-page hardcover magazine. The October 1961 issue was fairly typical. At the top of the masthead stood editorial director Joseph J. Thorndike, who after a stint at Time had been recruited to be the managing editor of Life. The senior editor was Bruce Catton, the prolific popular historian of the Civil War; the managing editor was Eric Larrabee, who later wrote one of the most thorough and accessible studies of Franklin Roosevelt as commander in chief. Assistant and associate editors included Richard Ketchum and Stephen Sears, excellent historians of the American Revolution and the Civil War. Authors in that issue included Hugh MacLennan, a prize-winning professor of English at McGill University writing about Canadian voyageurs; Mark Schorer, a University of California, Berkeley professor and biographer of Sinclair Lewis on the writing of Main Street; and John Lukacs, one of the most original historians of twentieth-century Europe writing about George Bancroft, one of the fathers of American history. It wasn’t fluff.

There was a progression here for a young person fascinated by the past and able to engage it at a number of levels, one which unquestionably played a role in shaping my attitudes, and not only mine, to politics. These were works of patriotic history, celebrating the American past and American heroes. They did not, nor did they need to, gloss over the stains and horrors. The heroes could be southern senators standing up to the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920’s or Chief Joseph leading his small tribe in a fight against the United States Army in the 1870s. And the tales could include accounts of political corruption, ambiguous loyalties, and mayhem—patriotic history does not have to conceal any of that, nor need it ignore the ambiguities of the past. But the key was that this was my history, to own and to celebrate, even though my grandparents were immigrants.

A shared story

Particularly for Americans, patriotic history is a kind of glue for an extraordinarily diverse republic. Lincoln used a patriotic version of the nation’s revolutionary past and founding generation to hold the Union together and provide meaning and redemptive hope after the slaughter of hundreds of thousands during the Civil War. The Gettysburg Address, after all, begins by recalling the Declaration of Independence and defining the meaning of the Revolution. And Lincoln in turn became a figure to inspire succeeding generations.

Yet patriotic history is more suspect these days than it was when I was its young student, 50 years ago. In 2014, Kenneth Pomeranz, completing his term as leader of the American Historical Association, chose as the topic of his presidential address, “Histories for a Less National Age.” While grudgingly conceding that nations or states remain important because they have armies, and acknowledging that historians might do some limited good by teaching about the United States, he generally welcomed the shift to spatially and temporally broader history, sweeping across continents and centuries. It is striking that just as he gave that address the forces of nationalism—in Russia, China, western Europe, and most definitely the United States—gave a set of roars that indicated that they were very far from dead. It was an instructive error for an historian to make.

George Orwell famously observed in 1945 that nationalism is “the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects,” whereas patriotism is “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world.” In practice, however, modern academic historians, who are wary of nationalism for reasons good and bad, often conflate it with patriotism. And this is where some of the great divide between contemporary academic history and patriotic history has opened up. When the academy questions the very utility of national history, by necessity it undermines the possibility of patriotic history as well.

Civic education requires students engage with their history—not only to know whence conventions, principles, and laws have come, but also to develop an attachment to them. And civic education is also inextricably interwoven with patriotism, without which commitment to the values that make free government possible will not exist. Civic education depends not only on an understanding of fundamental processes and institutions (for example, why there is a Supreme Court, or why only Congress gets to raise taxes or declare war) but on a commitment to those processes and institutions, and on some kind of admiration for the country that created them and the men and women who have shaped and lived within them. In a crisis, it is not enough to know how the walls were constructed and the plumbing laid out in the house that Madison, Washington, and Lincoln built. One has to think that the architects did remarkable work, that as their legatees we need to preserve the building even if we modernize it, and that it is a precious edifice like none other.

The triangular relationship among civic education, historical knowledge, and patriotism seems in our day to be broken. Survey after survey delivers dismal verdicts about what Americans know about the government under which they live. For example, in a recent survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, just two out of five respondents could identify the three branches of government and one out of five could not identify any branch of government. Nearly half thought that illegal immigrants have no rights under the Constitution. Another survey indicated that only one third of Americans would pass a U.S. citizenship test.

The issue appears not to be a lack of civics courses per se, which are required in the vast majority of states. Rather, the issue seems to be the unmooring of civics from history, and in particular history in the curriculum at colleges and universities where the high school teachers of tomorrow are trained.

In a blistering article in the national security-oriented online publication, War on the Rocks, my colleagues at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Francis Gavin and Hal Brands declare that the historical profession is “committing slow-motion suicide.” Able historians themselves, they point to studies showing a decline of 30 percent in history majors at U.S. institutions of higher education in the last 10 years alone—the steepest enrollment slide of any of the humanities. The brunt of their critique is that the discipline of history has walked away from some of the subfields that matter most to the shaping of engaged citizens—politics, statecraft, and war. Meanwhile, fellow historians Fredrik Logevall and Kenneth Osgood have found similar patterns in hiring in the profession; in looking at H-Net, the leading website for academic jobs in history, they found a grand total of 15 advertisements in 10 years for tenure-track junior historians specializing in American political history.

Members of the historical profession might, with reason, push back on this bleak picture, noting the robust health of organizations like the Society for Military History. But the truth remains that traditional forms of history—political, diplomatic, and military—have been increasingly pushed to the margins of the field; that departments of history have shrunk rapidly because students vote with their feet; and that churning out fewer history majors (who in turn are likely to be the future history teachers in middle and high schools) bodes poorly for the future of civic education. If, moreover, those fewer students who remain are themselves only barely familiar with the kinds of history that appeal to young people and can form them as citizens, the cycle becomes a vicious one. If the nuts and bolts of American political and military history are not taught in universities, the chances that they will be passed to a younger generation yet diminishes.

Beyond the academy

It is not the case that Americans in general have fallen out of love with their own past. Large numbers visit battlefields and museums—a million a year to Gettysburg, more than that many to Mount Vernon, almost three quarters of a million to the National World War II Museum, and six-digit numbers even to more remote sites. Popular historians do well—David McCullough and Ron Chernow have repeatedly written best-selling historical biographies. On the whole, historical television series may not quite draw the 14 million viewers that Ken Burns’ 1990 Civil Wars series did, but they have done respectably enough. John Adams, for example, attracted something like 2.5 million viewers.

The problem lies not in lack of interest, but in a tension between the academic historical community and both the reading public and popular writers. It is not enough to have best-selling books or television series about the American past, though those are welcome: there is a need for a general awareness of that past that has to be spread indirectly through college and university education and thence to middle and high schools. And while the history of the academy has to be somewhat different than the history of Netflix or the airport bookstand, they cannot be too far apart.

That gap has not always existed. It was possible, for example, for Allan Nevins, an enormously prolific writer about the Civil War and a biographer of Charles Fremont, John D. Rockefeller, and Henry Ford, to be a tenured professor at Columbia and president of the American Historical Association—without a doctorate degree in history. That would be unthinkable today. Yet a contemporary of Nevins who did have a doctorate, Harvard University’s Samuel Eliot Morison, was similarly popular, similarly prolific, and similarly influential.

The Morisons and Nevins of the previous century believed that they had a duty to illuminate the American past for their fellow citizens. They could be nuanced and critical while respecting the patriotic uses of history.

In current times, the weight in the academic historical profession has been, for some time, hostile to that and to anything that smacked of such an approach, making the case against such story telling with a purpose. In a critical review of David McCullough’s biography of John Adams, historian Sean Wilentz of Princeton University lashed not only the author but what he described as the American Heritage style, “brilliant in its detail, evocative in its storytelling, but crushingly sentimental and vacuous,” which he believed had infected Ken Burns’ Civil War docu-series as well. Wilentz celebrated as an alternative Bernard DeVoto, a once well-known popular historian whose work painted a critical, fuller picture of the past and remains well worth reading.

These wars have continued. When in 2011 Harvard historian Jill Lepore published a book on the original Tea Party and its resonance today, she was taken to task by the dean of early American historians, Gordon S. Wood. “Americans seem to have a special need for these authentic historical figures in the here and now. It is very easy for academic historians to mock this special need, and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, as a staff writer for The New Yorker, is an expert at mocking,” Wood deplored this disposition.

After criticizing Lepore for her contemptuous tone toward a political movement that she despised (the Tea Party), Wood argued that societies need memory and a useful and a purposeful past—in other words, heritage. Modern critical historical writing, he said, seeks simply to establish what happened. It is “all head and no heart,” Wood wrote, and citing his own teacher, Bernard Bailyn, argued that it was important to understand that such history could not meet a society’s needs, and something else is required.

This is the nub of the matter. Even if the academy generated more historians (like Wood, Wilentz, and Lepore, for example) who can write compellingly and lucidly for lay audiences, and even if they turned their attention to politics of the kind that citizens need and average readers find interesting, there is bound to be a tension between the outlook of the modern analytic historian and that of the patriotic historian.

Searching for inspiration

Patriotic history involves, for example, heroes. Most academic historians who write biography (not the most popular genre in universities) specialize in the study of clay feet. Hence David Herbert Donald’s biography of Lincoln depicts a president stumbling from decision to decision and yet somehow presiding over a triumphant Union. Doris Kearns Goodwin—a popular historian—gives a much more sympathetic account in Team of Rivals. Perhaps because she had had closer connections to the world of actual politics, her book is the more popular, and more admiring, one. One may even think it is in some ways the more essentially accurate portrait.

Americans need history that educates and informs, but also one that inspires. If, for example, one gives equal weight to John F. Kennedy’s sordid sexual behavior and the soaring rhetoric of his inaugural speech; if one concentrates as much on the personal peccadilloes, inconsistencies, and mixed motives of the Founders as on the marvel that is the Constitution that they created; if the shameful relocation of American citizens of Japanese ancestry to concentration camps gets more play than the D-Day landings or Battle of Midway, history cannot serve that inspirational function. And then, in a crisis, you are stuck, because you have no great figures to remember, no memory of great challenges overcome, no examples of persistence and struggle to embrace.

A notable recent work of scholarship, Richard White’s account of Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, The Republic for Which it Stands, is something of a warning. It is a volume in the excellent series produced by the Oxford History of the United States, which also includes James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (on the Civil War) and Wood’s Empire of Liberty (on the early republic). Like the other volumes, it is lucid and masterly in its scholarship. But its relentless depiction of an irredeemably sordid past, blotted by the oppression of the African American population of the South, massacre of Indians, despoiling of the environment, horrors of tenement life, and political cupidity, leaves the reader thinking that perhaps the only good thing to be said about the United States during this period is that by contrast, it makes today’s America look good. One could write a history that acknowledges all those things—yet somehow also celebrates the great works of literature and engineering from Mark Twain to the Brooklyn Bridge, or the extraordinary political achievement of the reunification of a country that had experienced four years of unremitting bloodshed, or the heroism (quiet in one case, noisy in the other) of Booker T. Washington and a young Theodore Roosevelt.

Wood recognized in his review of Lepore’s book about the Tea Party that the two forms of history—critical and patriotic—can only coexist, but rarely if ever coincide. Some particularly gifted historians can pull it off, such as David Hackett Fischer, in his magnificent books Paul Revere’s Ride and Washington’s Crossing. But for the most part, the two forms of history have different purposes and tap different skills and sensibilities. The challenge is the management of their coexistence, and in particular the recognition by scholars that both are necessary.

Popular and patriotic historians may grumble at reviews of their work by their academic colleagues but in truth, pay them little heed. For academic historians, however, the sentiments can be more acidic. Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, put it sharply in a guarded defense of Ken Burns: “It’s called sour grapes. Put simply, Burns has managed to engage a huge public audience. And that makes him suspect among members of our guild, who write almost entirely for each other. We pretend we don’t envy his fame and fortune, but of course we do. We’re like high-school kids who don’t get asked to the prom, then say they never wanted to go in the first place.”

Zimmerman had begun his career as a high-school social studies teacher, closer to the real needs of the American public for historical education. He noted that writing for lay audiences often counts against a young historian and deplored the guild mentality of a history profession that too often looks down on public engagement. In so doing, he made a point that cannot be put too forcefully. Unless history departments, and university administrators behind them, begin to weight public engagement as a useful academic function, they are likely to pull their discipline further into bitter irrelevance.

A reversal of this trend is not inconceivable, particularly for those faculty members who have tenure, but also have to deal with tight-fisted college administrations in an era when higher education itself is being turned upside down, and when it is becoming harder to sustain departments that do not pay their way with student seats in classrooms. History departments’ disdain over the last few decades for both popular history and the historians who engage the American public may not survive provosts unwilling to hire more expensive professors teaching fewer courses to fewer students.

Moreover, the educational establishment itself has, on occasion, changed its approach to history. After a series of critiques, the College Board revised its course framework for Advanced Placement History. “AP United States History,” in its 2017 version, is both sophisticated and sober, but offers plenty of opportunities to explore learning objectives like “explain how ideas about democracy, freedom, and individualism found expression in the development of cultural values, political institutions, and American identity.”

And then there is politics itself. In 2016, the political tide turned. Instead of a desperately unhappy conservative opposition to a liberal president turning to history for inspiration and consolation and meeting the scorn of liberal history professors, it was the liberals who found themselves looking for a usable past. They saw a president they believed to be a potential tyrant, and a Republican party that seemed to be mastering the legislative and judicial branches of government. They now needed the heroes and the inspiring moments from the past to convince themselves that the country could get through difficult times.

Interestingly enough, it was Jill Lepore who found herself doing in a different way what she had disparaged the Tea Party movement doing. In 2018 she published an ambitious and engrossing one-volume history of the United States, These Truths. It is filled with patriotic sentiment. “The United States rests on a dedication to equality, which is chiefly a moral idea, rooted in Christianity, but it rests too, on a dedication to inquiry, fearless and unflinching,” she writes. The book concludes with the old metaphors of the ship of state in a storm, with Americans called upon to fell majestic pines and “hew timbers of cedar and oak into planks” to rebuild the ship. Depending on one’s literary tastes, the language is either florid or evocative, but it was clear that in the profound crisis Lepore saw in the Trump presidency, history had to come to the rescue. Possibly without recognizing it, she too had become a patriotic historian.

 

History’s road ahead

What, then is to be done?

We can begin by recognizing that although America’s renewed focus on STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education for K-12 has had some beneficial effects, it is vital to pay heed to supposedly softer subjects—history foremost among them. Evidence suggests that recent focus on STEM as well as on standardized tests in reading and math (and therefore preparing for tests) has come at the expense of civics, social studies, and history. Educational reformers should realize that the time may have come to rein in the obsession with formal testing and to restore some balance to curricula.

While little can be done in the short run about what has happened to history as a discipline, or how history teachers are trained in universities, there is a lot that can be done in summer workshops or through creative forms of part-time education, particularly online. If many conventional universities do not offer adequate instruction in history for teachers, entrepreneurially minded competitors can do so, and with national reach by virtue of online education. All of these are opportunities for creative grant giving and philanthropy.

The federal government’s role is one to be approached with care. Part of the strength of the traditional American educational system has been that it has been decentralized and competitive, and one can argue that attempts to create standardized tests and standards do as much damage as good. Moreover, particularly in the field of history, the temptations for ideological fiddling are too great to make conservatives, in particular, feel comfortable. But there are two areas in which there is good to be done.

The first is through the National Endowment for the Humanities, which has sponsored historical work to include workshops for teachers as well as original productions of videos and the like. The second, and even more important, is the role of the Federal government in properly funding and sustaining national historic sites to include battlefields, monuments, and historical homes, but also the Library of Congress and National Archives with their magnificent collections of historical documents. These offer many opportunities for the millions of Americans who are interested in engaging their past to do so.

There is also a role for entrepreneurship and philanthropy to play. For example, organizations can support bringing back some of the older material discussed at the beginning of this paper and creating new sources of such work. Further, they might expand opportunities for students to learn history through experiences outside of the classroom. While patriotic history may be imbibed inside a school, it can also be found by singing along to the Hamilton score (see “Hamilton Goes to High School,” features, Summer 2017), while camping on the Lewis and Clark trail, watching Ken Burns’ The Civil War, or even by finding ways to get into the hands of a curious 12-year-old a novel that she or he will never forget. Any good teacher, at any level, knows that the key to success lies in multiple ways in to a young person’s consciousness. “Material things, things that move, living things, human actions and account of human action, will win the attention better than anything that is more abstract,” William James wrote in Talks to Teachers.

There is no more natural subject of fascination than history, particularly the history of one’s own country, and particularly if that country is the United States. The decline of patriotic history is a severe problem for civic education—but fortunately, there are many ways of mitigating and even reversing it.

Patriotic history is a sensitive topic. It can take false and even dangerous forms. The Lost Cause narrative of the Civil War, for example, masked the reality of slavery as the central cause of the bloodiest conflict in American history. But if done well, as many historians, museum designers, and custodians of national parks, public, semi-public, and private institutions have shown, it can both educate and inspire. And it is, in any case, inescapable. Without civics, our political institutions are reduced to valueless mechanisms. Without history, there is no civic education, and without civic education there are no citizens. Without citizens, there is no free republic. The stakes, in other words, could not be higher.

Eliot Cohen is the Dean of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book, How to Educate an American, published by Templeton Press.

Sixteen years ago, Education Next published a research article providing the first hard evidence that students learn more from teachers who are more demanding when handing out student grades (see “The Gentleman’s A,” research, Spring 2004). Using data on elementary school students in Alachua County, Florida, which includes the city of Gainesville, Maurice Lucas and David Figlio identified the toughest teachers by comparing students’ course grades to their performance on end-of-year state tests. Their analysis revealed that all students—and especially high-achievers—benefit academically from high grading standards.

I wrote then in this space that the findings reminded me of my high school calculus teacher, Dr. Richard Brockhaus:

In my high school, rumor had it that Richard Brockhaus was the toughest grader in the state. Others disagreed. They insisted it was the whole country.

When as a senior I finally braved his Advanced Placement calculus course, Dr. B did nothing to dispel these rumors. For all my efforts, it seemed that I could not live up to his expectations. My grade for the fall semester remains the only C on my academic record.

Dr. B was not wholly devoid of sympathy. A relentless encourager, he constantly reminded us that the material we were trying to learn was “not rocket science.” Thus motivated, I managed to improve my grade modestly in the spring.

When we arrived in May to take the course’s final exam, to our surprise we found a TV perched awkwardly on Dr. B’s desk. In lieu of taking an exam, we would be watching Stand and Deliver, the film documenting Jaime Escalante’s success in teaching AP calculus to disadvantaged students in East Los Angeles. Apparently our work had met his expectations after all.

Still, those of us who had struggled through the course had little idea of what to expect as we headed into the official AP exam later that month. As it turned out, the College Board’s questions were among the easiest we had encountered all year. Dr. B had taught “to the test” and well beyond it; every member of our class passed with flying colors.

In this issue, Education Next presents another article examining the effects of grading standards on student performance—this time among older students. Using data from Algebra I classes in North Carolina, Seth Gershenson finds, as he puts it, “not only do students learn more from tougher teachers, but they also do better in math classes up to two years later” (see, “End the Easy A,” features). The benefits of higher grading standards accrue to all students, regardless of their academic preparation, offsetting concerns that tough graders may discourage or demotivate low achievers. More often than not, it seems, students rise to the challenge.

Reading Gershenson’s article, my thoughts turned again to Dr. Brockhaus—but now with the added perspective that comes from having awarded a fair share of grades myself. Back in 2004, still in graduate school, I had plenty of experience responding to grading standards but little experience setting them. More than a decade of teaching undergraduate and graduate students has made me keenly aware of the challenges of maintaining high standards for student work when all the incentives push in the opposite direction.

As Success Academy Charter Schools founder Eva Moskowitz puts it, “When teachers give high grades for mediocre work, no one asks any questions and they can carry on as before. When they give more realistic grades, they have an obligation to follow up with detailed feedback, more support, and better instruction.” In high schools, the forces placing downward pressure on standards include complaints from students and parents looking for an edge in the ever more competitive admissions process at elite colleges.

It is no surprise, then, that grade inflation pervades American high schools. Data from the College Board reveal that student grade point averages have climbed steadily over the past 20 years, particularly in wealthier districts and schools, even as SAT scores and other indicators of high school students’ academic accomplishment have remained flat or declined.

Seeing this pattern only increases my respect for individual educators like Dr. Brockhaus who, over a long career, bucked the trend toward lower standards—even as it reveals the difficulty of acting on the evidence from Gershenson’s study, and the study by Lucas and Figlio that preceded it. The challenge is convincing school leaders, teachers, and parents that doling out easy As does students no favors. Perhaps the next 16 years will see more progress on that front than the past 16.

— Martin R. West

Grade inflation is pervasive in American high schools. Over the past 20 years, grade point averages have soared while SAT scores and other measures of academic performance have held stable or fallen. As a result, supposedly “good” grades have become unreliable markers of knowledge and skills.

Is rampant grade inflation cause for concern? On the one hand, students who receive favorable marks despite struggling to master academic content may be encouraged in their studies; surely, many teachers who are generous in assigning grades have this logic in mind. On the other hand, grade inflation may be yet another manifestation of the “soft bigotry of low expectations” that President George W. Bush famously warned about. When students who have not mastered the material receive passing marks, they may become complacent and fail to reach their full potential.

How teachers’ grading standards affect student success is an empirical question—one that I address here in a new study of roughly 350,000 North Carolina students taking Algebra I between 2006 and 2016. I first measure the grading standards of individual Algebra I teachers in the state by comparing the course grades they assigned their students to those students’ scores on a standardized end-of-course exam. I then ask whether students did better or worse than expected when they were assigned to a more-demanding teacher.

My results confirm that “everyone gets a gold star” is not a victimless mentality. Not only do students learn more from tougher teachers, but they also do better in math classes up to two years later. The size of these effects is on the order of replacing an average teacher with one near the top of her game.

Exactly how higher grading standards lead to greater student success is not clear, and there may be multiple, overlapping factors at play. What is clear, however, is that inflated grades lead to a host of unintended consequences, and that teachers’ grading standards are malleable. This presents a clear opportunity to act, to guard against the “easy A” and work together to enforce higher grading standards.

Parents faced with stressed-out children and an increasingly competitive college-admissions process may resist calls for more-rigorous grading. Educators and school leaders may be tempted to satisfy them, which is part of how the grade-inflation problem was created to begin with. But policymakers and other decisionmakers would deserve a genuine A if they reminded parents, principals, and teachers that they aren’t doing students any favors by depriving them of appropriate academic challenges or an accurate picture of their knowledge, skills, and abilities.

A question of standards

There is surprisingly little empirical evidence to back up the intuitive idea that high grading standards boost student learning. The best evidence to date comes from a study of elementary-school students in Florida (see “The Gentleman’s A,” research, spring 2004), in which Maurice Lucas and David Figlio found that students whose classroom teachers had high grading standards did better in math and reading, and that those effects were largest for high-achieving students. They also found that parents spent significantly more time at home helping children with a tougher-grading teacher, suggesting that the effect of high grading standards operates partly through increased parental involvement.

This research dovetails with prior evidence from Julian Betts and Jeff Grogger, who used data from a nationally representative sample of 10th graders to show that higher school-level grading standards, defined as schools’ average gap between GPAs and standardized test scores, boost student achievement. Both studies found that the effects of grading standards on achievement are positive for all students and largest for high achievers. However, Betts and Grogger also found that black and Hispanic students attending a high school with higher grading standards were less likely to graduate, suggesting that higher standards could have adverse consequences for traditionally disadvantaged subgroups.

Indeed, the same high grading standards might improve some students’ outcomes while harming those of others. For example, consider two classmates whose teacher has high grading standards and who both receive a C on their mid-semester report cards. If the students have different temperaments or innate ability levels, one student might be invigorated to improve her study habits while the other takes this same information as a signal that the subject is too difficult for her and further disengages from school.

The analysis I describe below builds on this prior research first by investigating how the grading standards of a high-school math teacher affect content mastery, as measured by performance on the end-of-course Algebra I exam. I also examine whether a teacher’s grading standards affect students’ performance in subsequent math courses and the students’ likelihood of graduating from high school. I explore whether the effects of grading standards vary for students from different demographic groups and with the type of school students attend. Finally, having shown that teachers’ grading standards matter, I look to see what school and teacher characteristics are associated with having higher standards.

Data and method

I focus on Algebra I teachers and students for both practical and theoretical reasons. From a practical standpoint, Algebra I was continuously required for high-school graduation in North Carolina throughout the study period of 2006‒16, subject to an end-of-course standardized test, and uniformly identified in students’ transcript data. From a theoretical standpoint, math is the subject most affected by teachers and other schooling inputs, perhaps because parents and other household members are less likely to help students with their math work. If teachers’ grading practices matter for student learning, math is where we’d expect to see it.

The first order of business is to define and measure teachers’ grading standards. I focus on Algebra I classrooms that had a single teacher for the entire academic year, resulting in a group of about 8,000 Algebra I teachers who taught about 350,000 8th- and 9th-grade students.

Having both course grades and end-of-course exam scores allows me to define teachers’ grading standards in an intuitive way. For each teacher in the state, I compute the average exam score of every one of her students who received a grade of B in the course. For example, suppose that the average test score of the students who received a B from Ms. Apple was 80 points, while the average test score of students who received a B from Ms. Banana was 90 points. This implies that Ms. Banana has higher grading standards than Ms. Apple, because Ms. Banana’s students learned more to earn their Bs. We can then sort teachers by this measure and designate the bottom 25 percent as the easiest graders, the top 25 percent as the toughest graders, and so on.

The next challenge is to isolate the causal effect of teachers’ grading standards on student outcomes. Because students are not randomly assigned to teachers, we might worry that concerned parents or principals ensure that certain children are assigned to teachers with high grading standards. If so, we’d be unable to distinguish the effect of having a teacher with high grading standards from the effect of those involved parents and principals.

I control for such confounding factors in my analysis first by adjusting for the students’ demographic characteristics and their performance on the previous year’s end-of-grade standardized test. I also adjust for the demographics and past performance of all of the teachers’ current students, as a student’s classmates might influence both the teachers’ behavior and the student’s outcomes. And finally, to guard against concerns that school culture, district policies, or principal effects drive both teacher grading standards and student outcomes, I limit my comparisons to students of teachers with higher and lower standards who are taking Algebra I in the same school, in the same grade, in the same year.

A related concern is that teachers with strict grading standards may differ from teachers with lax grading standards in other ways, too. If so, we’d again be unable to differentiate the effect of grading standards from the effects of these other differences. I attempt to address this concern by adjusting for other observed teacher characteristics that are known to influence student test scores, such as teaching experience and the selectivity of their undergraduate institution.

Even so, it remains possible that teachers who are tough graders share other attributes or classroom practices in common that influence their students’ success. Strictly speaking, my analysis isolates the effects of having a teacher with high grading standards rather than the effects of high grading standards per se. This distinction is important to keep in mind when interpreting the results.

Effects on student achievement

To simplify the analysis, I sort teachers into four evenly sized groups based on their grading standards, where group 1 has the lowest standards and group 4 has the highest standards. Teachers with the highest standards increase student test scores by a whopping 17 percent of a standard deviation compared to their counterparts in the bottom quartile (see Figure 1). To put this difference in perspective, consider that it amounts to a little more than six months of learning. It is also larger than the impact of a dozen student absences or replacing an average teacher with a teacher whose students consistently outperform expectations. Teachers whose grading standards are in the middle are not as successful in raising student achievement as their tougher peers, but they are significantly more effective than teachers with the lowest grading standards.

I also find that teachers with high grading standards improve their students’ subsequent performance in other math classes up to two years later. In looking at students’ performance on end-of-course exams in geometry and Algebra II, students whose Algebra I teachers had the highest grading standards consistently experience higher achievement in subsequent math exams: 7 percent of a standard deviation in geometry and 9 percent of a standard deviation in Algebra II (see Figure 2). Again, these effects translate into meaningful differences of about 2.5 and 3.2 months of learning, respectively. Since these tests are in somewhat different subjects and are taken one and two years later, it is not surprising that the effects on these longer-range outcomes are smaller than the same-year Algebra I effects.

I then explore whether grading standards affect longer-run measures of educational attainment—specifically, high school completion and college intentions. These outcomes are measured three to four years after taking Algebra I in the 8th or 9th grade. I find no effect on high school completion, perhaps because students who take Algebra I early or on time are already unlikely to drop out.

However, I do find some suggestive evidence that stricter grading standards increase students’ intent to attend a four-year college or university after high school. Specifically, teachers with above-median grading standards appear to increase students’ stated college intent by about 1 percentage point, or 2.4 percent. This result falls short of conventional levels of statistical significance, but it suggests that exposure to higher grading standards may change students’ attitudes toward school outside of mathematics classrooms and performance. At a minimum, it casts doubt on concerns that higher grading standards could discourage students from pursuing higher education.

Finally, I look at how teachers’ grading standards affect the performance of students from various demographic groups and at different types of schools. In both cases, higher grading standards appear to be universally beneficial.

I find that the 75 percent of teachers with the strictest grading standards significantly improve the learning outcomes of all subgroups of students defined in terms of race, gender, economic disadvantage, and prior math achievement (see Figure 3). On the whole, having a teacher with higher grading standards improves achievement by about 10 percent of a test-score standard deviation, which amounts to about 3.6 months of learning. These effects are similar in size for each subgroup: the effect ranges from about 8 percent to 10 percent of a test-score standard deviation. The fact that all student subgroups benefit from exposure to higher grading standards should alleviate any concern that some students, especially low performers, may be harmed by strict standards.

Similarly, teachers with higher grading standards benefit students in all types of schools: middle and high schools; suburban, urban, and rural schools; and schools that predominantly enroll economically advantaged and economically disadvantaged students. Students attending suburban schools benefit somewhat more from higher grading standards, with an effect of 12 percent compared to 7 percent for urban schools. This is the only difference that is statistically significant. Otherwise, I find that high standards are equally beneficial in all school types.

Which teachers and schools have higher standards?

My findings so far provide compelling evidence that having high grading standards is an important attribute of effective teachers, but what leads some teachers to have higher standards than others? Comparing the characteristics of teachers with higher and lower standards reveals a range of factors both before and during teachers’ careers that may influence their approach to grading.

First, teachers’ own educations appear to influence how rigorously they grade their students’ work. Teachers who attended selective undergraduate institutions and teachers who have completed advanced degrees both tend to have higher grading standards.

I compare the average grading standards of teachers who did and did not earn their undergraduate degrees from institutions rated as “most” or “highly” selective by Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges. The difference is sizable: the average grading standards of teachers who attended selective colleges are 50 percent higher than those of teachers who earned their undergraduate degrees from less-selective schools. I find an even larger difference when comparing teachers with a graduate degree to those without: the average grading standards of teachers who have earned a graduate degree are more than twice as high as the grading standards of teachers without a graduate degree. Together, these results suggest that experiences in more-challenging academic environments may promote higher standards.

Second, my analysis shows that grading standards adjust based on teacher experience and school settings—findings relevant to policymakers and school leaders considering grading-standard interventions or policy changes.

In looking at teacher experience, I see that as years on the job increase, grading standards increase as well. On average, teachers’ grading standards grow more rigorous the longer they remain in the profession, particularly during their first 15 years. Grading standards tend to be higher in middle schools, suburban schools, and schools serving more advantaged students.

I then look at teachers’ grading standards by school type. Unlike my analysis of student performance, this is necessarily a descriptive exercise; teachers are not randomly assigned to schools and school-level factors might influence student test scores. First, I compare middle schools to high schools, since students in the sample took Algebra I in either the 8th or 9th grade, and school cultures likely vary considerably between middle and high schools. Grading standards are markedly higher in middle schools, on average.

A second analysis compares schools with higher rates of student poverty to schools with more affluent students. Once again, there is a dramatic difference, with significantly higher standards in the more advantaged schools. Finally, in looking at school types by location, I find grading standards are highest in suburban schools and lowest in rural schools.

Implications

These findings are a call to action. Students assigned to teachers with the lowest standards do far worse on an end-of-course exam than their peers with tougher teachers, and continue to underperform those students one and two years later. We know that teachers’ grading standards are an important component to their students’ success, and we have started to identify the characteristics of teachers associated with higher standards—including those that can be influenced through training or experience. Three main lessons stand out.

First, education leaders at all levels can acknowledge that grade inflation is the path of least resistance and that it takes active measures to uphold high standards. As Success Academy Charter Schools founder Eva Moskowitz has put it,

When teachers give high grades for mediocre work, no one asks any questions and they can carry on as before. When they give more realistic grades, they have an obligation to follow up with detailed feedback, more support, and better instruction. It’s not surprising then that most—often unconsciously—opt for the first course of action.

By monitoring grading practices and ensuring that teachers are not pervasively awarding “easy As,” leaders can promote higher standards and the positive effects they have on student learning. This effort can include leaders of schools, districts, states, and schools of education, especially since newer teachers tend to have the lowest standards.

Some teacher-training programs are already onboard. For example, Teach for America’s summer institute includes a module explicitly dedicated to the power and importance of holding high expectations for all students, in which fellows discuss the importance of viewing students as individuals and not as members of a particular demographic group. Similarly, the teacher professional-development program Great Expectations emphasizes the importance of having high expectations for all students.

Second, teachers’ grading standards can serve as a useful measure of effectiveness to schools and districts when offering professional-development opportunities and deciding which teachers to retain and promote. Observable markers of effective teaching are in short supply. Grading-standard measures of the sort I use in this analysis can allow schools and districts to identify and retain teachers who implement high standards. These same measures also may help schools and districts to provide opportunities and resources for improvement to teachers with low standards.

Finally, it is incumbent on policymakers, researchers, and education leaders to make clear the damaging consequences of both low grading standards and grade inflation. Inflated grades can lead to a sense of complacency that prevents students from reaching their full potential and prevent parents from understanding what challenges their children face and holding them accountable for their performance. Moreover, socioeconomic gaps in this type of grade inflation can contribute to analogous gaps in students’ educational outcomes.

Of course, changing both policy and practice is easier said than done. As researchers continue to enhance our understanding of why and how grading standards matter, practitioners can ensure “high standards” are a more common part of teaching culture through improved training and professional development. There is much work to be done.

Seth Gershenson is an associate professor at the School of Public Affairs at American University. This essay is adapted from the report “Great Expectations: The Impact of Rigorous Grading Practices on Student Achievement,” published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

More from Education Next on the topic of grading:

• “In Fight Against Grade Inflation, Those Rare Tough Teachers Are Champions,” by Martin R. West, Spring 2020

• “The Gentleman’s A: New evidence on the effects of grade inflation,” by Maurice E. Lucas and David Figlio, Spring 2004

Maximizing the potential of all students is the stated goal of many schools. When some students have specialized needs, however, the best way forward isn’t always clear.

Consider students whose unique learning needs entitle them to special-education services or those who are English language learners. Schools invest significant time, resources, and attention in serving these populations, and federal and state governments pay for targeted services for these groups. This funding design assumes that additional education spending for special-education students and English learners should be focused on specific supports for only those students, such as specially trained teachers, curriculum, and counselors, instead of balanced between specialized supports and more general investments in overall school quality. Is that the most effective approach?

Nationwide, special-education students and English learners account for a significant share of total enrollment: federal data from 2016 show 14 percent of all students receive special-education services, and nearly 10 percent are English learners. Those shares are even larger in most U.S. cities, which tend to include large numbers of new immigrants and other students with specialized needs. Those students experience major gaps in achievement compared to their typical peers; on the most recent reading test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, for example, just 12 percent of special-education students and 9 percent of English learners scored proficient, compared to 38 percent of students without those classifications. Students with specialized needs exist in significant numbers and generally show low levels of academic achievement. Little causal evidence exists for how to improve the educational trajectories of these students.

To understand the tradeoffs between investments in targeted supports versus investments in overall school quality, I look at public schools in Boston, where about 50 percent of students are classified as either special education or English learners and 17 percent of students attend charter schools. Boston charter schools spend 44 percent less on special-education services per student than traditional public schools do but implement education practices that positively affect all students, such as data-driven instruction, high academic expectations, increased instructional time, and intensive tutoring. The city’s mix of school types presents a unique opportunity to look at how reduced access to targeted services and exposure to high-quality general-education practices affect the achievement of students with specialized needs, because students who apply to charter schools are admitted by lotteries and therefore randomly assigned to one of the two models.

I find that charter enrollment at least doubles the likelihood that a student designated as special education or an English learner at the time of the admissions lottery loses this classification and, subsequently, access to specialized services. Yet charter enrollment also generates large achievement gains for students classified at the time of the lottery—similar to the gains made by their general-education charter classmates.

Classified students who enroll in charters are far more likely to meet a key high-school graduation requirement, become eligible for a state merit scholarship, and take an AP exam, for example. Students classified as special education at the time of the lottery are more than twice as likely to score 1200 or higher on the SAT than their counterparts at traditional public schools. English learners who enroll in charters are twice as likely to enroll in a four-year college.

I investigate what explains these academic gains and find suggestive evidence that removing classifications has a small positive effect on student test performance. The academic gains appear to be driven not by the classification change but instead by the general-education practices implemented at charter schools.

To be sure, targeted services for students with specialized needs can make a major difference in helping overcome specific barriers to learning. But my findings highlight the importance of the overall school environment as well. Combined, the findings show that it is feasible for many students with specialized needs to make large academic gains in a high-quality general-education program without access to specialized services. Districts and schools deciding how to invest their resources may find that an increased focus on overall school quality can improve outcomes for all.

Background

The special-education classification process begins when a parent, teacher, or school staff member requests that a student be evaluated by learning specialists or other experts to set individualized learning goals and determine which supports are needed to achieve them. If the student is entitled to specialized services, school staff must develop an Individualized Education Program that details the supports the student will receive. Special-education students with a wide variety of needs are given a broad array of services in general and specialized settings. These services may include preferential seating and extra time on tests in regular-education classrooms and participation in separate classrooms for students with disabilities. Schools are
required to re-evaluate students’ classification and level of services every three years.

Classification for English learners is different; while federal law provides a common definition, it’s up to states to determine how to identify eligible students. In Massachusetts, public schools survey parents of new students to identify those whose primary language at home is not English. Once identified, these students take an English proficiency exam, and based on the results, a licensed teacher or administrator awards the classification and determines what services the student will receive. English learners are re-assessed each year, with the goal of achieving fluency and no longer qualifying for extra support. By contrast, the goal of special-education plans is not obsolescence but for the student to reach individualized benchmarks in academic and life skills.

The financial and accountability incentives for these classifications work in opposite directions and affect charters more than they do traditional public schools. The school funding formula in Massachusetts does not include special-education enrollment in an effort to discourage over-classification. For the same reason, federal special-education grants do not consider the number of classified students. For English learners, the state distributes federal funding to pay for specialized services, but it is not always sufficient. A Massachusetts state court in 2015 found the state formula did not provide enough funding to meet the costs of educating English learners and recommended an additional $2,361 for each student, for example. Smaller school districts and charter schools face larger disincentives for classifying students; without the benefit of economies of scale, it is more challenging for small schools to provide specialized services.

Accountability measures encourage schools to classify students properly regardless of the financial implications. Massachusetts inspects how schools identify and serve special-education students and English learners, and its accountability system considers the outcomes of these groups in addition to overall student performance. In addition, charter schools must undergo a rigorous review process by the state every three to five years in order to retain their charter, so these incentives may affect them more acutely than they do traditional public schools.

There are other relevant differences between district and charter schools in Boston. District schools have more experienced, more licensed, and higher-paid teachers and spend about $1,700 more per pupil relative to local charter schools. However, educational practices are markedly different in the charter sector. More than half of Boston charters have a longer school year and more than 95 percent have a longer school day compared to traditional district schools. Tutoring programs exist in all Boston charters, and about one third require tutoring for all students. Boston charters also commonly use practices that include setting high academic and behavior expectations, selective teacher hiring, frequent testing and teacher feedback, and data-driven instruction. Prior research has shown that this mix of practices has a strong positive relationship with charter effectiveness and yields positive effects when implemented in traditional public schools or schools converted to a charter model. However, little is known about the effect of these practices or charter schools on special-education students and English learners specifically.

Who applies to charter schools?

To study the effect of charter attendance on outcomes for students classified as special education or English learners, I look at comprehensive state education data for about 18,000 students who participated in the admissions lotteries of 30 charter elementary, middle, and high schools in Boston from the 2003–04 to 2014‒15 school years. Altogether, these schools account for the vast majority of the city’s charter sector—approximately 90 percent of enrollment in 2012‒13.

I focus on students who were classified as either special education or English learners at the time of the admissions lottery, as a student’s needs and status can change over time. For special-education students, I look at students’ special-education status, disability type, and level of classroom inclusion. For English learners, I look at students’ status, native language, and test scores on the annual English proficiency exam. I categorize students’ English proficiency as beginning, intermediate, or advanced based on their exam scores and the state guidelines for services.

Special-education students and English learners were well represented in the Boston charter-school lotteries (see Figure 1). About 19 percent of lottery applicants had a special-education status at the time they applied compared to 23 percent of Boston students overall. Similarly, about 26 percent of lottery applicants were classified as English learners compared to 23 percent of Boston students overall. On average, charter applicants had slightly higher test scores compared to Boston students overall. Applicants and non-applicants also had broadly similar demographic characteristics. These similarities hold true when looking at the overall applicant pool as well as when looking solely at special-education students and English learners.

The students who apply to charters represented a range of needs. Special-education students from substantially separate classrooms were slightly underrepresented in Boston charter lotteries, while students from partial-inclusion classrooms were slightly overrepresented. English learners of all levels of proficiency were more prevalent in charter lotteries than in Boston Public Schools overall.

For students who receive an offer to enroll, going to a charter school has two major effects: first, an increased likelihood of having their specialized classification removed, and second, exposure to the charter school environment. These could have complementary or opposing impacts. The high academic and strict behavior standards common at Boston charters could leave these students behind, or the students could meet the higher expectations. In addition, students could thrive in a more inclusive classroom environment or fall behind without the specialized services they previously received.

Below, I examine how charter enrollment affects rates of classification, and how charter attendance affects the academic outcomes of students classified as needing specialized services at the time of the admissions lottery. To the best of my knowledge, no prior causal evidence exists for special-education classification removal.

Effects on classification

Students designated as special education at the time of the charter admissions lottery are far more likely to lose that status and be placed in a more inclusive classroom if they enroll at a charter school than if they enroll at a traditional public school. Similarly, English learners are also far less likely to be classified as such when they enter a charter school compared to attending a traditional public school. Both classification rate changes reflect differences in how charter schools categorize students, not gains in learning.

Students with a special-education status at the time of the lottery are 12 percentage points more likely to have their classification removed upon enrolling in a charter; in the fall after the admissions lottery, 77 percent of students at charters retain their special-education status compared to 89 percent of students at traditional public schools (see Figure 2). This includes students with more severe disabilities: applicants who had been educated in substantially separate classrooms the prior year are 17 percentage points less likely to keep their special-education status upon enrolling in a charter school compared to at a traditional public school. Among students new to the district (who therefore were not yet evaluated for specialized needs), close to zero are classified as special-education students at charters compared to 1.4 percent at traditional public schools.

Charters also move students who were classified as special education at the time of the lottery to more inclusive classrooms more often than traditional public schools do, giving students more time in general-education settings and less time receiving services outside of mainstream classrooms. Across all ranges of need, students who enroll at a charter school are 27 percentage points more likely to be educated in inclusive classrooms than are students at traditional public schools. Special-education students from substantially separate classrooms are 38 percentage points more likely to be placed in more inclusive classrooms or to have their classification removed entirely. The classification and inclusion effects are consistent across grade levels and persist for two years.

For students designated as English learners at the time of the lottery, charters remove that status 32 percentage points more often than traditional public schools do; in the fall after the admissions lottery, 51 percent of students at charters retain their classification compared to 83 percent at traditional public schools. Most of that difference is in shifts in status among students with intermediate and advanced English proficiency; those with beginning English proficiency rarely have their classification removed at the time of enrollment. Overall, traditional public schools designate 64 percent of non-native English speakers as English learners, compared to 38 percent of non-native English speakers classified in charter schools.

These shifts occur in different ways. Individual schools determine English learner status for their students, based on how they interpret student performance on the English proficiency exam. Therefore, lower classification rates at charters likely reflect different preferences and interpretations of the exam. However, Massachusetts, which mandates screening of incoming students for English learner status, does not require schools to assess all newly enrolled students for special-education needs. Rather, the speed and fidelity with which student records are transferred between traditional district and charter schools likely plays a major role in special-education classification changes.

Most charters learn of student classifications from voluntary parental reporting before school records are received, and some families may choose not to disclose a child’s special-education status. A survey conducted by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education as a result of this analysis found that the most common reason for classification removal was parents declining to report a designation. Possible reasons parents might decline to report include fear of stigma, not agreeing with or wanting the designation, not knowing that they should notify the school, and not understanding their child’s status or entitlements. In addition, charter schools’ preference for high levels of inclusion for special-education students, often cited in their publicly available annual reports, likely also contributes to these changes.

Effects on academic performance

Once students enroll, charter school attendance has large positive effects on a host of educational outcomes, from test scores to enrollment in college.

After a year at a charter school, students who were designated as English learners or special-education students at the time of the admissions lottery do far better on state tests: their scores increase by 0.26 standard deviations in math and 0.21 in reading. English learners’ scores increase by 0.33 standard deviations in math and by 0.24 in reading. As a result, one year of charter attendance narrows the achievement gap between English learners and their typical, non-classified counterparts in Boston Public Schools by 84 percent in math and 39 percent in reading. For special-education students, charter enrollment decreases the achievement gap by 30 percent in math and 20 percent in reading. The gains continue through the second year at a similar rate: in math, the effect nearly doubles for special-education students and grows by 1.6 times for English learners. In the third year, the effects stabilize and students maintain their progress, but their rate of growth that year is comparable to students in traditional public schools.

The annual English proficiency exam—which schools use to re-evaluate English learners’ classification and services—also suggests that charter schools improve non-native speakers’ English skills. Students at charter schools perform similarly or significantly better compared to district school students, even though only those students with very limited English skills tend to keep the classification that requires they take the proficiency exam after enrolling. In all, charter students are 28 percentage points less likely to take the proficiency exam. Those charter students who do take the test perform about the same as students at district schools.

Charters also have positive effects on longer-term educational outcomes (see Figure 3). Students are more likely to reach proficiency on 10th-grade math and reading exams, a state graduation requirement, with an increase of 24 percentage points in the likeliness of passing the tests for special-education students and an increase of 37 percentage points for English learners. They are more likely to take at least one Advanced Placement class, with increases of 31 percentage points for special-education students and 28 percentage points for English learners. Charters also boost the likelihood that students will become eligible for a state-run merit college scholarship program awarded based on 10th-grade state test scores by 11 percentage points for special-education students and 29 percentage points for English learners. In addition, charter attendance nearly doubles the likelihood that students designated as English learners at the time of the lottery enroll in a four-year college. The estimated effect of charter attendance on college enrollment for special-education students is also positive, but falls short of statistical significance.

However, charter enrollment lowers students’ likelihood of graduating high school within four years by 30 percentage points for special-education students and 18 percentage points for English learners. This is surprising given the gains in reaching the proficiency graduation requirement, though prior research suggests that students could take longer to graduate from charters because they need additional time to meet rigorous graduation requirements or choose to save money by remaining in high school for an additional year rather than taking remedial course work in college. There is no significant difference between the five-year graduation rates at charter and traditional district schools, in support of this theory. Most students classified as special education or English learners at the time of the charter lottery who do not graduate high school in five years appear to transfer to other schools rather than dropping out. Because certain high-need special-education students qualify for transitional education and support services through their 21st year if they remain enrolled in school, this could be a positive trend.

The impact of inclusion

Students with specialized needs who enroll in charters attend schools with markedly different characteristics than those who apply and do not receive lottery offers, and those differences are correlated with positive effects on test scores. Do these academic gains stem from those general charter-school characteristics that affect all attendees? Or do they stem from the removal of specialized classifications and increased inclusion that students experience at charter schools? Legal requirements and best practices operate under the assumption that designated students require specialized and often separate services and accommodations to succeed. But could classification removal and increased inclusion actually help some special-education students and English learners succeed?

To explore these questions, I look separately at the cohorts of students designated as special education and English learners who applied to each charter school in each year. I then examine whether the schools that re-classified more of these students and, in the case of special-education students, increased their inclusion, produced stronger or weaker effects on test scores. This analysis provides no evidence that re-classification has negative effects on students’ academic progress, while also suggesting that it is the general charter-school environment that drives the bulk of the gains.

Among both special-education students and English learners, groups of charter-school applicants with higher rates of re-classification experienced modestly larger gains in test scores. These test-score effects also have a weak positive relationship with increased inclusion of special-education students.

The nature of these correlations—weak but positive—suggests that classification removal and increased inclusion contribute positively to student growth but cannot fully explain charters’ test-score gains. Therefore, other school practices, such as high expectations, data-driven instruction, more instructional time, and high-intensity tutoring, play an important role.

Conclusion

Critics argue that charter schools underserve special-education students and English learners because they enroll fewer of these students and might lack the economies of scale to provide separate classrooms and other intensive resources. At first glance, these criticisms would seem to apply in Boston. A look at the charter enrollment numbers shows lower representation of special-education students and English learners overall, and particularly among those with higher levels of need. However, my research reveals that students with these classifications apply to Boston charter schools at similar rates, but their status and level of inclusion are more likely to change in charters—giving the appearance that the Boston charters do not serve these students. It would be a mistake to infer from these statistics that charter schools are doing a poor job of serving students with special needs.

This analysis shows that charter schools that accelerate achievement among general-education students can also do so for students classified as special education or English learners. More generally, it demonstrates that schools can boost the academic outcomes of special-needs students without traditional specialized services. Since the study has nearly full coverage of an entire city’s charter sector across all grade levels, it overcomes a common criticism that lottery-based charter-school studies are flawed because the set of schools that elect to share data might differ from the rest of a city’s charters.

Enrolling in a Boston charter school amounts to a dual treatment for classified students: first, their classifications are removed at a higher rate than at traditional public schools and they join more inclusive classrooms, and second, they are exposed to a charter environment featuring practices like increased instructional time, high expectations, and data-driven instruction. These practices are positively correlated with overall charter-school effectiveness as well as charter effectiveness at serving special-education and English-learner students. The frequent use of tutoring, for example, enables charters to identify and provide support to any struggling student, regardless of their status.

As a result, both special-education students and English learners experience substantial gains on standardized exams in math and English, English proficiency, and college preparation and enrollment. Attending a charter school substantially decreases gaps in achievement between these students and typical students in Boston’s traditional public schools. Further, I find no evidence that removing students’ classification or increasing their inclusion in typical classrooms decreases outcomes.

More research is needed to determine whether these positive effects are specific to Boston, where the charter sector is especially high-performing. But the finding that special-education students and English learners can make large academic gains without specialized services in a high-quality general-education program calls for greater attention to overall school practices anywhere, in addition to the current focus on specialized supports, to improve outcomes for all.

Elizabeth Setren is the Gunnar Myrdal Assistant Professor of Economics at Tufts University.

Carolina’s daughter was in 1st grade when her teachers made an upsetting discovery: she could neither read nor write.

The little girl had spent much of her kindergarten year in and out of the hospital, ill with what doctors finally diagnosed as a neurological disorder. She was promoted to the 1st grade, but after missing 35 days of kindergarten, she was hopelessly behind. Her teachers gave her mother two choices: the 6-year-old could repeat a grade, or a parent could accompany her to school to help her along.

Though she lacked any formal training to do so, Carolina agreed to join her daughter each day at the George F. Kelly Elementary School in Chelsea, a working-class city north of Boston.

“I stopped working,” said Carolina, a mother of five who was born in Guatemala, whose surname is being withheld to protect her daughter’s privacy. For three months, Carolina attended school from 8 to 11 a.m. “I learned how to teach her.”

For the next few years, Carolina’s daughter remained at the neighborhood school, where she was eventually diagnosed with several learning disabilities and qualified for tutoring and extra support. But as she approached middle school, doctors urged Carolina to consider sending her daughter to a specialized school for students with disabilities. There, the girl would be one of two or three students per class.

Instead, Carolina enrolled her daughter at nearby Excel Academy East Boston, a charter middle school that takes an inclusive approach to teaching special-education students.

“I wanted her to associate with other children,” she said.

There’s considerable public debate about charter schools and students with specialized needs, focused mainly on the extent to which charters enroll students who are classified to receive special-education services. A new study by Elizabeth Setren of Tufts University shows that critics, who often charge that charters do not serve as many special-education students as traditional public schools do, may not be asking the right questions (for more, see “A Charter Boost for Special-Ed Students and English Learners”). A school’s overall environment, not just access to specialized services, appears to be an important component to all students’ success.

Looking across the city of Boston, Setren compared the classifications and academic performance of charter-school students who were considered special-education students or English language learners at the time of their application with their peers in traditional public schools. Boston charters achieve better outcomes for those students than traditional public schools do, even though charter enrollment at least doubles the likelihood that students lose their classification and, as a result, access to specialized services. The types of educational approaches charters use—like data-driven instruction, more instructional time, and intensive tutoring—appear to benefit students with specialized needs just as they benefit their non-classified peers.

Presuming competence for special-ed students

Just after 7 a.m. on a cool morning in September, students clad in uniforms of khaki and navy blue began arriving at Excel Academy East Boston, forming an orderly line outside the building’s glass solarium. As the students in grades 5‒8 waited for the doors to open at 7:30, a fleet of yellow school buses arrived, carrying more of their classmates. The sound of airplanes taking off and landing could be heard from nearby Logan International Airport.

East Boston, known locally as Eastie, is a predominantly low-income immigrant neighborhood that sits between the airport and Boston Harbor. Some 53 percent of residents are Latino, according to Census Bureau data, and only about 69 percent of residents over the age of 25 have a high school diploma. It is also a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, and a magnet for real-estate developers drawn to water views.

The school, which opened in 2013, has 241 students—a fraction of the 1,374 enrolled across Excel Academy Charter School’s network of four schools, whose mission is to prepare students for success in high school and college. Excel Academy schools are focused on high academic expectations, rigorous instruction, comprehensive family and student support, and consistent classroom and school rules. Across the network, 79 percent of students are Latino and 19 percent are classified to receive special-education services. Many are from low-income families where English is not the primary language spoken at home, and the vast majority meet or exceed standards on statewide reading and math tests. In 2014, for example, 100 percent of the network’s 8th-grade students scored “proficient” or “advanced” on that year’s statewide test in reading.

Most of the network’s special-education students learn in general-education classrooms. In the 2017‒18 school year, 80 percent of special-education students were in “full inclusion” programs, spending most of their day alongside general-education students, compared to the state average of 64 percent. Nearly 5 percent of Excel’s special-education students were in “partial inclusion” programs compared to the state average of 15 percent; those students spend some of the school day in general-education classrooms and other parts in separate classes. The network also runs a substantially separate special-education program called ROSE, which serves 13 students.

Administrators say Excel operates under the assumption that most students can learn effectively in general classrooms, and that the structure it has in place—its small scale, robust teacher coaching, and clear and universal standards and expectations—contributes to students needing fewer separate supports. Relatively low student-to-teacher ratios mean students get more individual attention, for example.

And so while many students, like Carolina’s daughter, now in the 7th grade, maintain their special-education status, others do not.

“It’s not that a student comes to us and immediately loses a classification. It’s a longer arc,” said Sarah Kantrowitz, the network’s director of student supports.

“It’s not like your disability ever goes away,” she said. “It’s really about: Do you still qualify for special ed? Do you need specially designed instruction and accommodation or do you not?”

At the very least, Kantrowitz said she wants to get to know the child for herself. “My mindset around special education is to always presume competency and always operate with the least dangerous assumption, which is that we want to keep options open for kids,” she said.

Carolina, for instance, knows her daughter’s disorder means she will continue to face academic challenges. But she has opted to keep her in a general-education setting with supports because she believes that not doing so would damage her daughter’s self-esteem. “It is for her well-being,” she said.

Making connections for English learners

Charters have their critics, including in Massachusetts, where a 2015 effort to lift a cap on charter enrollment was defeated by voters. But Setren’s research suggests that Boston charter schools are fighting above their weight class.

She found that public charter schools in the city spent 44 percent less on special-education services than traditional public schools did, but achieved higher outcomes due to “a set of education practices that affect all students, including increased instructional time, high academic and behavioral expectations, high-intensity tutoring, data-driven instruction, and frequent teacher feedback.”

The study also looked at English language learners and found that one year of attendance at a charter school substantially helps them catch up to their typical peers: It narrowed a gap in academic achievement by 84 percent in math and 39 percent in reading, for example.

English learners are entitled to specialized instruction of up to 150 minutes daily, based on their performance on a language skills exam. To accommodate those requirements in an inclusive setting, Excel has a two-pronged approach that includes structural modifications (think: small-group learning) as well as curriculum changes (that is, alternative assignments). Modifications could involve parallel teaching by a learning specialist, strategic pairing of students, or previewing lessons to students. Curriculum adjustments include providing additional reference materials, modifying or offering alternative homework assignments, or providing students with extra time or tools to complete their work.

Both approaches are woven into the fabric of the school, where learning specialists’ offices are strategically located in the center of each hallway. “It’s physically in the middle,” said Samantha Butera, a 6th-grade learning specialist at Excel East Boston. Sometimes she co-teaches with general content teachers. Other times, she said, “I pull a few students into my ‘learning lab’ for the same lesson.”

Butera and others, though, know they can’t cut too much into class time or ask students to come early or stay late. Instead, Excel has a “drop everything and read” block each day when students can get extra literacy instruction or tutoring. Such structures are helpful to both English learners and special-education students.

Samantha Doig, who teaches 5th- and 6th-grade science, said that in consultation with learning specialists, she may preview a lesson for students who are either language learners or receive special-education services. Those students may also get reference sheets and diagrams to help them access the material. But exams are uniform for all students. “All students can and should be able to answer the question,” she said. “They may just need an extra tool to get there.”

At the school, a lower-level hallway is festooned with flags from nearly every country. An English as a Second Language classroom features posters of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor and civil rights activist César Chávez.

“People without experience working with English language learners think you just need to translate it into their language,” said Rachel Spencer, an English learner specialist and middle school department head.

Excel’s approach is more nuanced.

At the behest of one of its language specialists, the network replaced the term “English-language learner” with “emerging bilingual.” It also revamped progress reports to emphasize student growth.

By mid-September, Excel’s emerging-bilingual students had finished writing letters to their teachers to introduce themselves and articulate specific language goals. “One risk I am willing to take to achieve my goals is to raise my hand more,” read one.

Later that fall, sixth-grade students were reading Esperanza Rising, Pam Muñoz Ryan’s book about a 13-year-old girl who flees from Mexico to California and becomes a farm worker during the Great Depression. To facilitate their understanding, students read the story from a copy of the book that featured additional illustrations and reference notes.

Their teacher Lucero Castillo, a 6th grade English language specialist, said she spends a lot of her time reminding students that they are entitled to access a dictionary or reference materials. “You’re growing into your bilingualism,” she tells them. “Use your Spanish as a skill.”

She also encourages emerging bilingual students to draw on their heritage, not gloss over it.

“It’s about making those connections to help them access the materials,” she said.

Measuring progress for all

For Carolina and her daughter—now in her third year at Excel—the road hasn’t been easy.

Carolina struggles with English. Her daughter lives in fear of getting sick and falling behind again. Her neurological condition impacts her memory and makes reading and writing a challenge.

But the teen no longer feels like an outsider. And although her academic growth has been gradual, Carolina’s daughter is now able to complete homework assignments without help. That allows her mother to hold two part-time jobs, at Subway and at a local T-shirt shop. “I don’t have to be on top of her,” she said.

For many students with special needs, progress can be hard to measure. “Everybody’s measure of success may look different, so it’s hard to say, ‘Yes, they nailed it,’” said Kantrowitz, who said quantifying the success of an inclusion classroom is “messy” for that reason. “Trying to set a consistent benchmark is really hard.”

Doig, the science teacher, has imposed a daily test for herself. At the end of each class, she distributes “exit tickets” that post a broad question pertaining to her main learning objective for the day. In sharing their responses, students are acutely aware of their progress—and so is she. If 15 students in the class don’t answer the question correctly, she said, “is that on them or is that on me?”

Doig said she has the same expectations for all of her students; some just need additional scaffolding to get there. “Do they need a sentence starter? A diagram?” she asked. “All students can and should be able to make progress. All students can learn.”

In mid-September, Doig broke her class into groups, strategically mixing students with different learning styles and aptitudes. The groups then competed to answer a series of fill-in-the-blank questions to prepare them for their first science assessment the next day. “I’m setting them up to succeed,” she said. “If you don’t think all students can achieve, your students won’t achieve.”

E. B. Solomont is a Boston-based writer.

In the spring of 2015, Aleesia Johnson and Brandon Brown met for coffee. They both had new job offers.

Johnson was then a star principal at a local KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) charter school and had been asked by Lewis Ferebee, the new superintendent at Indianapolis Public Schools, to head up his innovation strategy. It was a critical role: the state legislature had just passed a law making it possible for school districts to partner with charter schools rather than fighting them. New hybrid schools, comprising an “innovation network,” would have the autonomy of charter schools but would operate in district buildings and serve neighborhood students, sometimes replacing the district’s schools that struggled the most. Ferebee had lobbied for the law and now wanted Johnson’s help to put it into action.

As for Brown, after three years of running Mayor Greg Ballard’s charter-school office, he’d been offered a job at The Mind Trust, an Indianapolis nonprofit focused on building school quality and access in the city. Ferebee and The Mind Trust’s then CEO David Harris had already struck a deal to work together on the innovation network schools idea.

If Johnson and Brown both took the jobs, they would be spending a lot of time together. Brown would be incubating the new schools that Johnson would oversee. Johnson remembers that they looked at each other that day and asked, “Are you gonna take the job?” “I don’t know. Are you gonna?”

Today, Johnson is superintendent of Indianapolis Public Schools and Brown is CEO of The Mind Trust. The city has 21 innovation schools serving one in four of its public-school students. Two new rigorous studies point to promising student-achievement gains. These autonomous district schools stand against a backdrop of a thriving public charter sector and a private-school voucher program that fill the gaps.

What made this all possible? Indianapolis is a story of good people, good politics, good local and state policy, and some small-town goodwill and good luck. The mayors led, state policy provided backbone, and civic leaders and philanthropies stepped up. They broke down institutional barriers in support of what most education-policy people will tell you is the unifying goal in the city: good choices for all families.

Mayors Lead the Way

In the late 1990s, Indianapolis faced a schooling crisis: the landlocked, post-industrial city suffered brain drain; as a result, its schools and students also suffered. There were 11 separate school districts and no citywide approach. (Since 1970, the metro area has had a consolidated city-and-county government that encompasses the city itself and 10 other Marion County communities that retain some autonomy but fall under the control of the Indianapolis government. More than 75 percent of Indianapolis Public Schools students are black, Hispanic, or multiracial, and about the same proportion qualify for free or reduced-price lunches. The other 10 communities are largely suburban in character and have more affluent populations.)

Bart Peterson, a Democratic candidate for mayor in 1999, saw education as a way to build consensus on economic development. People had been trying to fix the ailing public schools for a long time, and Peterson believed a catalyst from outside the system was needed.

At the time, Peterson says, education reform was a contentious issue. “People couldn’t sit in the same room with each other,” he remarks. He believed that charter schools could provide the common ground, since they offered independence to principals but were still fundamentally public schools.

Candidate Peterson hired a young lawyer named David Harris, who jumped in to craft an education agenda, reading up on charter schools and following developments in states like Minnesota, where Democrats were supporting innovation and experimentation with charter laws.

Peterson won, and in September 2000, he made his case for charters in a speech to Indianapolis-area school superintendents. The atmosphere in the room was tense, but Harris says that coming out early on this controversial issue allowed the administration to control the narrative: “After that speech, no article about charter schools was written without a quote from the mayor.”

State Policy

Republican legislators had tried to pass a charter bill for seven years but had been thwarted by a Democratic-controlled House. Republican state senator Teresa Lubbers, the bill’s main champion, says she thought hard about the details of the bill, such as who would authorize charters and how schools would be held accountable: “I never thought it should be easy to start a charter school,” says Lubbers, now Indiana’s commissioner for higher education. “It should be hard, because there had to be a compelling reason why, for the students’ sake. It was an experiment, after all.”

A provision in the law would empower mayors to authorize charter schools in their cities; the mayor of Indianapolis subsequently became the first such official in the country with that authority. Peterson’s backing of charters and his willingness to play a central role as an authorizer proved important to winning Democratic support for the bill.

Advocates also won key Democratic votes when Republicans agreed to rescind a mid-1990s law limiting collective-bargaining rights in the school system, a measure that had been backed by then mayor Stephen Goldsmith.

The charter school bill passed the Senate in April 2001 and was signed into law by Governor Frank O’Bannon, a Democrat and charter school supporter. Determined to create as many reform tools as possible, the state kept up the pressure. Over the next decade, under Governor Mitch Daniels and state schools chief Tony Bennett, state legislators passed a whole package of reform bills: launching a voucher initiative, expanding charters and giving them rights to unused district buildings, allowing virtual charters, and overhauling teacher accountability. A public-school-choice law allowed students to move from district to district and forced districts to start marketing and fighting to keep their students. According to the House education committee chair, Bob Behning, the state’s early commitment to providing student aid for its 30 private universities further helped establish choice as a normal way of operating.

State representative Todd Huston (at the time, Tony Bennett’s chief of staff) credits Governor Daniels for bringing state officials together around the charter school policy: “A lot of it was Mitch,” he says. “None of this works if you don’t have a committed governor.”

Innovation Network Schools

Huston was a key figure in the passage of several bills, including the innovation network schools bill that would eventually transform the Indianapolis schools. A former school-board member, he understood the challenges involved in transforming school systems. Like many Hoosier education reformers, he had read about, and was inspired by, Milwaukee’s education reforms.

During the first dozen years of the new millennium, competition from inter-district choice and charter schools, along with the threat of state takeover of poorly performing schools, created an urgent sense that change was needed in the Indianapolis Public Schools.

Mayor Peterson’s early commitment to charter schooling held fast throughout his two terms in office. David Harris, his aide-de-camp, created one of the nation’s leading authorizing offices. Bucking national trends, Harris’s office drew on outside expertise to help develop a stringent review-and-oversight process for mayor-sponsored schools. Peterson was actively involved. Harris recalls late-night meetings with the mayor to decide specific performance metrics to use for accountability, for example. Before long, Harris saw the need to create a strong pipeline of charter operators by recruiting new talent to Indy and incubating new schools. In 2006 Harris left the mayor’s office and created The Mind Trust ( see sidebar).

In 2007, Bart Peterson lost his reelection bid to Republican Greg Ballard in a major upset. A retired Marine Corps lieutenant colonel and plainspoken former businessman, Ballard took office in January 2008. Unexpectedly to some, Ballard chose not only to stay the course on his predecessor’s charter-school strategy but to take it further. In 2012, during his second term, he recruited a young Teach for America alumnus named Jason Kloth to serve as deputy mayor of education, and elevated the charter office to the Office of Education Innovation. It didn’t take long for Kloth to see that educational improvement in Indianapolis would require more than just an outside push.

At the time, the school system was caught in a downward spiral, with enrollment having fallen to about 30,000 students in the mid-2000s from more than 100,000 in 1969. This drastic drop resulted from a combination of factors: students enrolling in neighboring-city school districts, the rapid expansion of charter schools, and the city’s changing demographics (see Figure 1).

The city’s school superintendent at the time, Eugene White, had little credibility with state policymakers, and state superintendent Bennett was threatening to take over the city’s low-performing schools under the authority of a law passed in 2000.

In response to a request from Bennett, The Mind Trust put out a report in December 2011 calling for the elimination of elected school boards and the empowerment of educators at the local level. Though controversial, this “Opportunity Schools” plan laid out a vision for transforming the city’s schools and paved the way for the innovation schools law. At the same time, Stand for Children, an education advocacy nonprofit, was raising money to get reform-friendly school-board members elected, and much of the public debate centered on The Mind Trust’s proposal. Over the next two years, 2012 through 2014, a series of events would set a bold new district strategy in motion. A new board was elected in 2012 (the same year Mike Pence became governor) and the board quickly recruited a young new superintendent, Lewis Ferebee, to start in September 2013.

A Civic Triangle

Ferebee was unknown on the national scene and had never run a school system before. He had served as a school principal at Guilford County Schools in North Carolina and then as chief of staff at Durham Public Schools, where he led a successful school-turnaround effort. Ferebee came to Indy with an open mind and no preconceived change agenda.

Jason Kloth in the mayor’s office approached Ferebee with an idea to present to the state. Informed by The Mind Trust’s Opportunity Schools report and the experience of other cities with district-charter collaboration, Kloth had been developing a plan that could help the Indianapolis school system transform itself while also enabling local charter schools to become more sustainable. Charter market share exceeded 30 percent, but growth had stalled, primarily because of lack of access to facilities. Community members saw The Mind Trust as closely aligned with charters and antagonistic to the district. The narrative had to shift.

The Mind Trust brought school-board members and local civic leaders to New Orleans, which was implementing the portfolio model—characterized by broad school choice for families (based on a “portfolio” of charter and district-run schools), plus autonomy paired with accountability for educators. The Indianapolis leaders hoped to apply the concepts of school-level innovation and empowerment to create an approach tailored to Indiana.

Kloth and his colleagues developed a legislative proposal to give district schools full charter-like authority as called for in The Mind Trust report. Governor Pence liked it. Key legislators liked it. So did a politically diverse civic organization called the Lewis-Hubbard Group, which had originally convened to develop citywide facilities recommendations. While the idea came from Kloth in the mayor’s office and The Mind Trust, the mayor’s staff worked through the statehouse and with the school system, and Ferebee took the lead. “It was very powerful to have the superintendent lobbying for it,” Ballard says.

Ferebee, Harris, and Kloth formed what one observer called a civic triangle to focus on creating high-performing schools. They were acting out of an immense urgency to avoid state takeover: charter growth showed signs of slowing, the school board was looking for a strategy, and the community was calling out for change. Innovation network schools held promise for addressing this predicament.

A Pivotal Decision

Despite growing support for the innovation schools proposal, getting the bill passed in the legislature was no slam-dunk. Civic activists were still angry and mistrustful over The Mind Trust’s Opportunity Schools report, and the teachers union was strongly opposed: innovation schools would operate outside of the union contract. Even Indiana’s committed choice advocates weren’t a sure bet for support, as many were wary of attempts to bring charter schools under the district umbrella.

By all accounts, Ferebee’s backing made all the difference in the bill’s passage. He asked that its name be changed to align with a district initiative he had underway (originally the bill was called the Freedom to Teach Act), but otherwise he ran with it, meeting with legislators and local opponents and explaining how autonomy could improve district schools. He was only months into his new job.

“Ferebee wants what’s best for kids,” says Ken Britt, dean of Marian University, calling him “the quintessential gentleman.” “He’s gone on the record saying, ‘If we can’t serve this child well, what gives us the right to keep a child in a failing school?’ He put courage and political capital on the line.”

The Innovation Network Schools bill passed in the spring of 2014. Shortly thereafter, Ferebee and Harris agreed to work together to create a strong supply of new innovation schools through The Mind Trust. Philanthropies supported innovation network fellows. Brandon Brown from Mayor Ballard’s office was recruited to take on an important challenge: create a new function at The Mind Trust, working with the school system and developing school models that could succeed in the district context.

Ferebee knew he’d need someone to help him oversee the innovation schools program and rejigger his central office to fully support autonomous schools. He met a highly capable young KIPP principal who might fit the bill: Aleesia Johnson came onboard and handled the technical and political challenges of launching the new-schools initiative while also managing the internal dynamics and turf issues in the central office. One of her early decisions helped smooth the challenges of implementation. The law gave the district a turnaround strategy by allowing it to replace low-performing schools with charters. Johnson decided, however, to expand the initiative by also inviting good district schools to apply for innovation status, thereby giving effective district educators the same freedom and autonomy that charters enjoyed. This approach created a natural internal constituency for the innovation schools program and ensured that the “brand” would include high-performing district schools, not just new charter schools.

Mariama Shaheed Carson, a local teacher and principal, was one of the first to open an innovation network school. She had tried to start her dream dual-language charter school—the Global Preparatory Academy—in another Indianapolis district but was turned down. She applied for The Mind Trust fellowship and opened her school in partnership with the Indianapolis schools. Shaheed Carson’s school brought early credibility to the program and helped spur interest from other local educators. The Mind Trust and Stand for Children informed families about the law in a series of community forums that helped build grassroots political support.

New Life for New Schools

Nationally, many charter leaders dismiss the concept of district-charter collaboration as a waste of time. If charters can be successful on their own, some have argued, why not just invest in their continued expansion? Indianapolis shows why such collaborations, when done thoughtfully, can be a win for charters, for districts, and, most importantly, for families.

Without the Innovation Network Schools law, Indianapolis charter-school expansion might well have hit a wall. Growth was likely to slow as The Mind Trust struggled to find and finance new buildings for charter school operators in the city. And if other cities are predictive, public perception might have eroded to the point where people started to blame district financial woes on charter schools. The Innovation Network Schools law has allowed the city to tap a new pool of innovators and has enabled charters to get greater access to district-owned buildings by taking over the operation of low-performing schools.

At the same time, the schools brought a new level of credibility to education reform in Indy and blunted political pushback. David Harris, initially skeptical about collaboration with the district, notes, “Educators are often upset about the innovation schools but then meet the leaders and see they are credible and have a long history in IPS. Importantly, successful schools have converted to innovation status, choosing autonomy over union protections, and are some of the strongest advocates for the law.”

Aleesia Johnson took over as superintendent after Ferebee left in December 2018 to run the Washington, D.C., public schools. As a former charter-school leader, Johnson saw autonomy as an enabler for great educators. In order to spur innovation, she reasoned, the district needed to free those educators; it also needed to find ways to reset toxic dynamics in chronically low-performing schools. Today, one out of four Indianapolis public-school students is enrolled in an innovation school (see Figure 2), but Johnson does not have a prescribed vision for how many such schools will eventually open. She plans to leave it up to educators to ask for the conditions to innovate and will force those conditions only when low performance demands it. In that way, she reasons, the innovation schools will continue to be what educators want, not what they fear.

Gains in Student Learning

More than a third of all public-school students in Indianapolis now attend a charter school, and the vast majority of the charters are authorized and overseen by the mayor’s office. The Indiana Charter School Board oversees the rest. Twenty-one public schools operate as innovation network schools.

Compared to district-run schools across Indiana, Indianapolis charter schools serve a student population with more challenging academic needs, more students who identify as members of a racial minority, and fewer students for whom English is a second language or who qualify for special education and an Individualized Education Plan. These same trends hold at the local level (see Figure 3).

Promising new results from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, known as CREDO, show that in 2016–17, both charter schools and the new innovation network schools in Indianapolis had stronger reading and math gains than the city’s traditionally run schools (see Figure 4). The results were especially strong for black, Hispanic, low-income, and English language learner students. Compared to state averages, the results show more variation, with both innovation network schools and traditional public schools in the district showing weaker growth in math. The study, released in January 2019, compares each student’s gain to gains of similar students in district schools.

Another study conducted by researchers at Indiana University and released the same week as the CREDO study looked at elementary-school students who enrolled and stayed in Indianapolis charter schools sponsored by the mayor and found they outperformed their peers in all 11 Indianapolis school districts.

While Superintendent Johnson is pleased with the improvements in student performance, she cautions that early growth is to be expected in the innovation schools, given how low the scores were at baseline. She is looking to see sustained growth over time. She also notes that because the innovation schools label includes so many types of schools with different starting points and contexts, the trajectories of individual schools will provide more meaningful data than will performance averages.

Lessons Learned

The unique civic dynamics in Indy and the state of Indiana help explain why education reform in the city has been less contentious and more pragmatic than in many other places. Indianapolis is a small city where people know and like each other. Individuals may move to different organizations, but they stay committed to the mission. And then there is the “Hoosier Way,” a general belief that people should treat each other with respect and kindness.

Against this backdrop, leaders took a number of intentional steps to build and sustain political and technical supports for the expansion of choice. Some of the most important were:

Building trust and credibility. Several key charter advocates made it clear early on that expanding choice was not enough: quality was also paramount. The authorizer role was to establish and enforce clear quality standards. The Mind Trust’s role was to create the conditions that would ensure an ample number and variety of school options for families.

Focusing on quality and local authorizing would be best for students, these leaders believed, but it would also help build credibility. In the early days, nasty politics abounded. Superintendents were adamantly opposed to the mayor authorizing charters, but quality helped blunt their arguments.

Jason Kloth says many people initially thought there was a secret plan to take over the school district. But when the state, the school board, and the superintendent agreed to champion the Innovation Network Schools law, “we built trust and credibility,” he says. “It was the way we approached it: It wasn’t ‘let a thousand flowers bloom.’ Quality really mattered. People couldn’t say that we had a huge portfolio of mixed quality and were trying to blow things up. Credibility breeds trust. Quality builds trust.”

Continuity of smart and brave leadership. Leaders and advocates at every level strongly agree on what has driven progress in Indianapolis and what’s needed to move forward. A key factor in effecting change in the schools was the fact that four successive mayors, Democratic and Republican, maintained the same strategy over nearly two decades. And David Harris has been a constant throughout.

Peterson and Ballard credit Stephen Goldsmith, Peterson’s predecessor, with establishing a strong link between education and economic development in the city.

Peterson believed that charter schools “had the potential to save urban education,” he says. “My support was solely for policy reasons, not political, but it did not hurt me politically. In fact, it helped me.” Democrats denounced him on the policy but agreed with him on everything else, so it “didn’t hurt me with Democrats, and I won the support of reform-minded Republicans.”

When Ballard took the helm, he pushed the choice initiative forward and now cites the mayor’s office as modeling “the gold standard” for quality authorizing. “Less than 25 percent of those who apply get approved,” he notes.

As superintendent, Ferebee was, by all accounts, artful in building good relationships and inviting opponents to the table. Early in his tenure, he took time to look closely at the district budget; he found pots of money that he was able to repurpose toward supporting the innovation schools. This bought him a lot of goodwill among teachers and likely helped him keep innovation schools under the radar.

Local and national investments. Indianapolis, though small, has attracted significant local and national philanthropy over the years. The combined investments, estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, have supported talent recruitment, school incubation, community engagement, technical assistance for the district’s central-office transformation, and political advocacy for key policies.

Not long after the charter law passed in 2001, the Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation, an Indianapolis-based philanthropy, supported a “lead and seed” initiative to try to attract national charter-management organizations to the city. When the national organizations declined to come, the foundation shifted toward seed funding to start The Mind Trust and help the city grow its own charter schools. Also stepping in with support were the Lilly Endowment, the Casey Family Foundation, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation.

Highly cultivated, aligned supports. Through The Mind Trust, the city invested early on in talent and school incubation and other citywide supports, sparking rapid growth in charters and innovation schools. The Innovation Network Schools law allowed the city to “build a partnership that is advantageous for both district and charters,” in the words of Representative Huston, “but it doesn’t work without The Mind Trust.” Teach for America provided an essential talent pool, and that organization’s alumni now run half of the city’s innovation schools.

Unified front on choice. Over the years, Indiana policymakers and advocates have not gotten hung up over which kind of choice or regulation is “best.” Whether they prefer inter-district choice, charter schools, tax credit scholarships, vouchers, or innovation network schools, they have not let specific ideology undermine each other’s efforts. The overarching goal of “good choices for all” is the unifying mantra in Indy, and reform is not seen as a zero-sum game.

Commissioner Lubbers, who originated the state charter law, says it was more than a sense of civility and the “Hoosier Way” that created such harmony. Advocates for change also shared a true commitment to the power of choice. “There was the potential for charters and vouchers to be adversarial,” she says. “That didn’t really happen. People were brought together by the sense that students were being left behind.”

Civic leaders stepped up. The idea that a strong education sector is central to a vibrant city has motivated local leaders to push for change in Indy schools. As noted above, bipartisan mayoral leadership has been critical to effecting education reform—and right behind the mayors stood the city’s most-respected business, civic, and education leaders. The Mind Trust board includes some of the most influential people in the city, who backed Ferebee and helped him make his case for innovation network schools to the community. Civic advocacy was key in putting forth the mayors’ priorities.

State pressure and cover. A series of important state policy moves over the last two decades paved the way for a third-way approach in Indianapolis. In 2011, when the city schools were under the greatest threat of state takeover, new legislation created the voucher program and enabled charter school expansion. The year ended with The Mind Trust’s controversial report, and the groundwork was laid for the 2012 school-board elections. With the passage of the Innovation Network Schools law in 2014, leaders like Ferebee, an educator and a “gentleman” with no stake in the warring ideological camps, could pursue a new strategy.

Missteps and Challenges

Deep community engagement came late. The key actors in this story can be described as elites—and many of them are white men. It was not until recently that a more representative set of actors came to support reform and get deeply involved in these efforts. Inattention to community engagement was, by all accounts, The Mind Trust’s greatest misstep. It wasn’t until after the Opportunity Schools report that the organization invested in meaningful community engagement. Despite support from local newspapers’ editorial boards, the black community recoiled and many people saw The Mind Trust as a group of elitists writing plans to take over the local schools. According to Brandon Brown, “We needed to engage with people on the front end and build more internal team capacity for that engagement. You can’t ignore the community. Plans can’t exist in a vacuum.”

In 2013, The Mind Trust hired Kameelah Shaheed-Diallo to change its approach to community engagement, finding ways to more effectively listen to people and respond to their concerns. Shaheed-Diallo led many dozens of difficult meetings with opponents of The Mind Trust’s Opportunity Schools plan. David Harris says it was a challenging but critical process. Following nearly two years of targeted engagement, black leaders showed public support for the innovation network schools plan by attending the public event announcing the first participating schools.

Blind eye to existing talent, district leadership. For years, Indy education-reform advocates dismissed the idea of partnering with the Indianapolis school system, viewing it as hostile and defensive toward charter competition. But The Mind Trust leaders now see that they were naive to believe they could import all the talent needed to improve the city’s schools. They also realize now that they couldn’t expect charters to grow indefinitely without working with the district to tackle the barriers to such growth. Investing in district change strategies and relationship building proved necessary.

To be sure, the collaboration has hit some snags. Some schools complain of transportation logistics problems and other issues. But talented district educators who once lacked autonomy now have an avenue to start their dream schools, and the charter sector is reinvigorated. The Mind Trust has learned that investing in local talent pays off in many ways. Says Brown, “Once respected leaders experience the benefits of autonomy, they have conversations with their colleagues, which leads to more opportunities.” Seventy percent of The Mind Trust’s innovation network schools fellows are leaders of color, reflecting the city’s demographics and thus contributing to more community goodwill.

Inattention to special education and other supports. Indianapolis charter schools, which must provide their own special-education services, have sometimes struggled to meet the needs of all students. Some people allege that charter schools have “counseled out” students and, more broadly, that their lack of capacity simply causes families of children with disabilities not to consider them as viable options. About 14 percent of those enrolled in Indy charter schools are students with special needs, compared to 18 percent in the Indianapolis Public Schools. Too many charter schools in the city are good enough to be renewed but lack incentive and knowledge to continue to innovate for instructional improvements. Under the leadership of Brown and others, this is changing: a new special-education collaborative effort is underway to allow innovation network schools to access the district’s special-education services. The Mind Trust now provides curriculum audits to help schools identify gaps in instructional rigor. Still, these are both nascent efforts, and other citywide challenges loom for the increasingly decentralized school system, including transportation and facilities access.

The Work Ahead

Study results on innovation network schools prompt many in the city to say: “We’re doing well, but not well enough.” Continued sustained progress is the goal, but it is not assured. Reform advocates still hold a majority on the school board, but it is narrower than in 2012. Superintendent Johnson and her team must complete the difficult work of transforming central-office practices to support autonomous schools while also providing strong supports for the schools they manage directly. Schools that have made initial gains by improving their academic quality now must turn to tougher challenges that impede students’ learning, such as trauma, poverty, and opioid addiction. Marian University recently revamped its teachers’ college to focus on content experts, in-school training residencies for teachers, and more diversity to further fuel school improvement in the city; the need for this kind of retooling and rethinking will persist.

New statewide and local pressure on the schools to increase their focus on career pathways creates opportunities to help education leaders reimagine and rethink everything, but it also runs the risk of reinforcing tracking. Higher education commissioner Teresa Lubbers says, “We need to move students to where they want and need to be to have a meaningful life, within an economy that’s transforming all the time,” with many jobs changing and some being eliminated.

A $272 million tax referendum, led by Ferebee and backed by the Urban League and other civic organizations, passed in November 2018; the new funding will pay for teacher raises and capital improvements. (Some believe that the reformers’ decision to back the referendum rather than invest in board elections was a mistake and a reason that more union-backed school-board candidates won than were expected.)

Many state and local leaders are concerned that none of the other 10 school districts in metro Indianapolis have taken advantage of the Innovation Network Schools law. The state finance system allocates education dollars on a per-pupil basis, taking into account student-need factors such as poverty. As a result, school operators are more interested in opening in the city’s downtown core, where the money is, than in the outskirts. The policy is meant to concentrate funding in areas that most need new options, but students in the other districts have their own unmet needs. Poverty is increasingly shifting to the surrounding districts as the city revitalizes, and some wonder whether the changing demographics will eventually lead to a change in funding and more new schools opening in the other districts.

As the school system and its schools continue to evolve, so too must their supporting institutions. The Mind Trust has demonstrated its ability to do this by backing new designs for turnaround schools and others. By all accounts, the quality of incubation keeps getting better, but new challenges lie ahead as the organization tries to figure out how best to further school improvement without imposing on school autonomy and parent preferences. Momentum for attention to career-relevant learning and solutions for students with unique needs may give rise to new constituencies and new school designs.

Amar Patel, head of Teach for America Indianapolis, would like to see an organization like the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research provide third-party analysis by drilling down on the data and learning what’s working. He also notes that despite all the investment, the talent requirements in the Indianapolis schools are still “a bottomless pit.” Patel says Teach for America could place four to five times more people in the pipeline than they currently have.

State politics have shifted under the new state schools chief, Jennifer McCormick, who is perceived as hostile to reform. (McCormick will complete her term in December 2020 and will be Indiana’s last elected superintendent; beginning in 2021, the position will be appointed by the governor.) Without the aligned efforts of the governor and state superintendent, local reformers are counting on continued commitment from the legislature. Still, the success of reform efforts in the city to date demonstrates that strong local leadership is also an essential element for change.

Local politics are fragile, and school-board dynamics could create more hostility to reform. The mayor is up for reelection in a year. Aleesia Johnson believes this is a natural inflection point for Indianapolis. The mayors and the state set the conditions, she says, but now it is up to the community to make the most of it. Brandon Brown agrees: “How do you move from community engagement to community empowerment?” he asks.

The common refrain in Indianapolis is that the reform efforts to date have set important conditions but will not be enough to achieve excellence. Sustaining progress for students will require continued commitment from adults, says Jason Kloth. “We have the best public policy framework in the country. We are one of the best capitalized with local philanthropy. We have all of the institutions in place that people think are needed. . . . It took a long time to get people aligned. Now we need to genuinely and authentically implement.”

Robin Lake is director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at University of Washington Bothell. Shannon Murtagh, Erik Luk, and Roohi Sharma contributed analysis and data to this article.

 

The Mind Trust New-school incubation, talent recruitment “We saw relatively quickly that progress would always be limited without a focus on a human capital strategy,” says David Harris, the founding CEO of The Mind Trust. Like many industrial cities, Indianapolis had suffered from years of brain drain, as talented young people left for greater economic opportunity. To address this profound challenge, Harris recruited Teach for America and The New Teacher Project (now TNTP) to bring new teachers—and especially entrepreneurial leaders—to Indianapolis. The early strategy created Education Entrepreneur Fellowships to attract non-educators to the city. Fellows receive a $20,000 stipend plus full salary and benefits for two years to develop their idea for a new school or nonprofit. The Mind Trust moved quickly toward supporting teams rather than individuals through what became an intensive school-incubation process: designing, building, and launching new schools. The organization has helped create 12 new public charter schools and, in partnership with the school district, 17 innovation network schools. It has helped create nearly a dozen new nonprofit school-support organizations and placed more than 1,500 teachers in city schools. As the city’s needs have evolved, so has The Mind Trust. Community engagement activity has progressed from a “grasstops” strategy that engages respected civic leaders in education to a grassroots approach that focuses on building widespread support. The organization has partnered with the United Negro College Fund to provide bus tours for local residents that showcase effective practices in Indianapolis charter schools and to host community discussions. The Mind Trust has increasingly concentrated on instructional quality and professional development for existing schools. It also supports the school system through such initiatives as the creation of a unified enrollment system; Teach Indy (a collaboration between The Mind Trust, the schools, and the mayor’s office to recruit effective educators to the city); and a new effort to explore how charter schools can work with the school system on special education. More than $100 million in funding has underwritten these activities, and some of Indy’s most prominent business and civic leaders sit on the organization’s board.

The Common Core State Standards, released in 2010, were rapidly adopted by more than 40 states. Champions maintained that these rigorous standards would transform American education, but the initiative went on to encounter a bumpy path. A decade on, what are we to make of this ambitious effort? What kind of impact, if any, has it had on the quality of instruction and student learning—or is it too early to say?

In this forum, three experts present their views on these questions: Morgan Polikoff, associate professor at the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California; Michael J. Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and an executive editor at Education Next; and Tom Loveless, past director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution and former policy professor at Harvard.

 

Common Standards Aren’t Enough

By Morgan S. Polikoff

 

 

 

 

Stay the Course on National Standards

By Michael J. Petrilli

 

 

 

 

Common Core Has Not Worked

By Tom Loveless

The 10th anniversary of Common Core’s launch offers the opportunity to take stock of the impact these nearly national standards have had on student learning, as well as their future prospects. In my view, the standards movement in general, and Common Core in particular, have achieved all they’re going to at this point. The impacts from the policy are not nothing, but they’re definitely not enough to solve the problems of America’s K–12 public schools.

What’s more, I’m not optimistic that standards reforms are going to accomplish much more without some serious rethinking of the education-reform agenda. In short, unless policymakers go after the elephant in the room—the outrageously decentralized federalist structures that encourage mediocrity (especially for the most disadvantaged students) and thwart large-scale improvement efforts—they aren’t going to get much more out of Common Core or any other reform policy.

Impact on Achievement

The million-dollar question is: what impact has Common Core had on student achievement? This is not an easy question to answer, although recent evidence has shed some light on it. Two analyses—neither yet published, but both presented at academic conferences—used data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, to examine the impact of Common Core (or in one case, “college- and career-ready” standards more generally) on student achievement.

The first and most comprehensive study was conducted by researchers at the American Institutes for Research, which is affiliated with the Center on Standards, Alignment, Instruction, and Learning, or C-SAIL, a project that I co-lead. This investigation finds no effects of college- and career-ready standards on 4th-grade math or 8th-grade reading achievement but small negative effects on 4th-grade reading and 8th-grade math, as well as some differences across sub-scales in both subjects. Importantly, this was a study of general college- and career-ready standards, not specifically Common Core.

The second study, conducted at Vanderbilt University, focused just on Common Core and also on a shorter time horizon, and found the opposite—modest positive effects on achievement just a few years after adoption of the standards.

What can one gather from these findings? One conclusion seems clear: neither Common Core nor college- and career-ready standards have had big positive impacts on student achievement. There’s no way to read the existing studies, or even to eyeball NAEP trends, and conclude otherwise. Similarly, I feel confident in saying the standards have not substantially harmed achievement. It looks like the pattern is one of no effects to slightly negative effects.

The truth is we’ll probably never know the true causal impact of the standards on achievement, for a number of reasons. First, it’s difficult to define precisely when Common Core began. Was it the day a state adopted the standards? Or when it implemented a standards-aligned test? Or when teachers started using Common Core curriculum materials? Second, the states that adopted the standards may have differed in important ways from states that didn’t adopt them, making it difficult to tease out the discrete impacts of the standards. And third, while NAEP is the best outcome measure currently available, it’s severely flawed for this kind of study, because it’s not clear how well NAEP is aligned to either the Common Core standards or to other state standards. A drop in NAEP scores, for instance, could just be the result of content being moved to different grade levels within Common Core relative to prior standards (for example, content that was typically taught before grade 4 now being taught later). Even allowing for these caveats, the evidence at this point certainly indicates that the standards didn’t produce great positive effects. That’s an important finding.

Implementation Woes

To improvise on a well-known phrase from the political strategist James Carville, when it comes to education policies, “It’s the implementation, stupid.” Evidence from many different studies using multiple methods indicates that implementation of Common Core and other college- and career-ready standards has been weak.

One survey study from RAND found that teachers hold many misconceptions about what the standards are calling for. For instance, many teachers think the standards emphasize students reading at their own individual reading levels, when the standards actually call for students to read challenging grade-level texts. Another RAND study examined the change in teachers’ instruction over the course of the Common Core era and found no evidence that it was becoming more aligned with standards (and some evidence it was becoming less so).

In C-SAIL’s national study of Common Core implementation, we found a number of troubling trends. Teachers were teaching content that had been de-emphasized in the new standards at higher rates than content that had been emphasized. Rural teachers were less likely to cover standards-emphasized content than other teachers were. Teachers of students with disabilities lagged in implementation as well.

Are there implementation bright spots? Yes, there are some. By all accounts, Louisiana is a leader in standards implementation. State officials there have taken an aggressive stance on policy matters such as curriculum materials (all but requiring districts to adopt from a few selected, highly aligned materials) and teacher training (offering curriculum-oriented training at massive scale to teachers and leaders throughout the state). Survey evidence from RAND indeed suggests that teachers there understand the standards better and are implementing them more faithfully.

But in general, standards implementation remains anemic. Why has implementation been so difficult? The U.S. system of public education makes implementation of any policy, but especially one that targets the instructional core, close to impossible. Rather than seriously challenging the structures in the system that get in the way of large-scale instructional improvement, the standards movement accepted the system as it was and tried to work around the problem. It didn’t succeed, and there’s scant reason to think it will succeed in the future.

Staying Power

While it appears that Common Core has had little effect on student achievement, there are two related trends that bear mentioning. The first is that the standards have had remarkable staying power. A lot of states have renamed the standards or even “repealed” them—but in almost every state, what is in place now looks an awful lot like the Common Core as originally written. Even the standards-aligned tests developed by two federally funded consortia, while far from dominant, are still being used in 16 states.

This is all the more impressive given the relentless and sometimes absurd smear campaign levied against the standards from both the Right and the Left. While these efforts succeeded in weakening support for the standards, the 2019 Education Next poll found that public approval of the Common Core (and more general support for common standards) has rebounded after a large dip. People like the idea of common standards, and they’re not especially opposed to the Common Core brand.

The second is that the standards (and their meager track record) have led to renewed policy efforts around curriculum materials, which I view as much more promising. This new energy around curriculum has manifested itself in several ways. EdReports.org, an organization that compares and evaluates K–12 curricula, was an early mover, recognizing the serious need districts had for high-quality curriculum materials and the failures of the market to give them those resources. Louisiana has led on curriculum, but other states are moving to take a more assertive hand in evaluating materials and providing districts with better options. EngageNY.org, a New York State initiative that provides educators with tools and resources for effective, standards-aligned instruction, arose from the federal government’s Race to the Top competitive grant program and grew to become one of the most widely used sets of instructional materials in the nation. Funders are also recognizing the importance of curriculum and allocating their resources toward improving the ways curriculum materials are made, adopted, and used. I don’t believe that any of this would have happened without Common Core and the nearly national curriculum market it created.

What’s Next?

The fundamental issues that led to the standards movement in the first place haven’t changed. Schools are plagued by poor overall performance, enormous opportunity gaps and achievement gaps, weak instructional supervision, inadequate alignment among policy instruments, and multiple layers of bureaucracy sending teachers conflicting messages about classroom approaches. Standards-based reforms have been chipping away at this problem for 30 years now. It’s true that outcomes have risen considerably in that time, but all signs point to the conclusion that this particular strategy has run its course. And while average levels of performance have improved, there’s little to no evidence the standards movement has moved the needle on gaps.

It’s time for a new approach. Policymakers should not throw out the goal of improving teaching at scale. Therefore, they would be wise to retain the standards and assessments that are now in place. But if these leaders are serious about that goal, they will probably have to be much more aggressive.

What kinds of policies do I have in mind? First, these leaders could take curriculum more seriously than they have in the past. States could require the public schools to choose from among just a small number of curricular options. Teacher-education programs could train teachers in using those specific curricula, and the state could follow up by giving them ongoing training on those curricula. Teachers could be strongly discouraged, or even prevented, from cobbling together curricula from random, unregulated websites like Pinterest (or at the very least, states and districts could curate these kinds of materials). In exchange for this loss of control, teachers could be given more support to effectively implement their adopted materials—time to collaborate with teachers in their school, observe what’s working and what’s not, and make changes to improve implementation. But the Wild West days of every teacher and every school with their own curricula must come to an end.

A second question worth considering is whether the country really needs 10,000 school districts, 10,000 school boards, arbitrary and segregation-promoting district boundaries, and all the other structures that contribute to a fragmented education system. I am not advocating for a federal takeover of education, but rather for states—which have the constitutional authority and a vested interest in ensuring educational opportunity for all students—to examine how the organization of their education systems exacerbates their core problems. Every state is different, so the reforms may differ as well. The goal, though, should be the same—focusing all structures and systems on clearing out the policy clutter (especially those policies that further disadvantage the already disadvantaged) and directing all elements of the system toward supporting effective, scalable instruction.

But wait, you might say, local control is important, and kids are too different from one another for this kind of centralization to work! Actually, that’s not true. Kids are of course individuals, and individual children do differ from each other. But the variation in students (certainly in terms of achievement, but also in terms of social-emotional skills and other outcomes) lies mostly within classrooms (and certainly within schools and districts)—not between them. And even if one were to assume that there are large differences between classrooms, there’s no evidence that current structures do a good job of matching teaching and curriculum to student need. If that were so, schools would be producing better outcomes than they do.

But wait, you might say, the effectiveness of some schools of choice shows that decentralization is good and off-the-shelf curricula are bad. To the contrary: visit some KIPP or Success Academy charter schools and take a look at their approach to curriculum and to teacher control of it. They are not letting a thousand flowers bloom—they are adopting or creating high-quality materials and then supporting and expecting teachers to effectively implement them. These schools are indeed models in that regard.

As Common Core enters the next decade, education leaders have an opportunity to consider whether standards are going to save America from its educational woes. I don’t think they will. The Common Core standards have done as much as they can with the system that exists. So the choice presents itself: change the policy, or change the system. The system is the problem, and that is what needs fixing.

This piece is part of a forum, “A Decade On, Has Common Core Failed?” For alternate takes, please see “Stay the Course on National Standards” by Michael J. Petrilli, and “Common Core Has Not Worked” by Tom Loveless.