The federal government currently provides more than $150 billion each year to students and their families in the form of grants, loans, work-study funds, and tax credits to help make college more affordable. This sizable public investment in higher education has indeed made college attendance possible for a larger share of Americans. However, there is growing concern in Congress on both sides of the aisle over whether these funds are being used effectively to help students receive a high-quality education at an affordable price tag.

The vast majority of federal financial aid is distributed through a voucher system, with money following students to the eligible college of their choice. Both students and colleges must meet basic performance standards in order to receive funding. Students must make satisfactory academic progress, which colleges generally define as a 2.0 grade point average and completion of roughly two thirds of all credits attempted. Colleges must meet minimal quality thresholds, which include accreditation by a federally recognized agency and a student-loan default rate below 30 percent. While a large percentage of students (especially at community colleges) struggle to maintain academic eligibility for federal funding, very few colleges are eliminated by the institutional requirements.

Washington policymakers who are frustrated by these minimal accountability standards for colleges can turn to the laboratories of democracy—the states—for other ideas. One policy that has been adopted in nearly 40 states is performance-based funding, which ties at least a portion of state appropriations for public colleges to student outcomes such as degree or certificate completion. Should Congress also use degree completion as an accountability metric, including such a provision when reauthorizing the Higher Education Act? While the idea has promise, it also presents potential pitfalls.

An Effective Policy?

For an accountability system in higher education to be effective, three conditions must be met. First, tying funding to student outcomes must result in changing institutional behaviors toward practices and approaches that support positive outcomes. Second, colleges must be able to influence the outcome of interest, which would require reaching students by working with a large number of faculty and staff members who may not be directly affected or incentivized by the policy. Finally, the amount of money linked to student outcomes must be substantial enough to get colleges’ attention and change their actions.

When it comes to the possibility of tying federal or state funding to student completions, these conditions are met to varying extents. A number of qualitative studies have found that colleges subject to performance-based funding have boosted their data analytics and academic advising services in an effort to improve student success, which suggests that colleges are able to re-prioritize some resources with the aim of earning additional public funds. The second condition—the ability to influence the desired outcome—is trickier to meet, as students may have 40 different professors and interact with dozens of staff members over the course of a bachelor’s degree program, and it is difficult to identify those who were instrumental in getting the student to graduation. In regard to the final condition—the amount of funding in play—most states that have performance-based funding policies allocate only a relatively small portion of their higher-ed money (less than 10 percent of it) on the basis of outcomes. Throw in institutional provisions designed to mitigate year-to-year revenue fluctuations, plus the reality that state funding is only a small part of many colleges’ budgets, and many institutions ultimately have only 1 or 2 percent of their budget at stake in a given year.

Research examining the effectiveness of performance-based funding policies has generally found modest effects—both positive and negative—of linking state funding to the number of college completions. This trend of mixed effects holds across states, for both two-year and four-year colleges, and for varying shares of state funding tied to student outcomes. Some emerging evidence suggests that long-established state policies may be more effective than newly implemented ones, but more research is needed to fully understand how specific nuances of these policies are associated with student outcomes.

Unintended Consequences

One concern with any accountability system derives from Campbell’s Law, which states that, over time, any quantitative measure used for making decisions is likely to “distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor” and become less valuable. This means that if colleges discover ways to game performance metrics, at least some of any observed upturn in performance under an accountability system is likely not real improvement.

One potential effect of using degree completions as a federal accountability measure is that colleges may lower their standards to allow more students to graduate. A new working paper by Jeff Denning and his Brigham Young University colleagues suggests that a portion of the increase in college completion rates since 1990 may be attributable to lowered standards (but not to students switching to easier majors). Without seeing additional research, I am agnostic on the question of whether academic standards have fallen over time (I went to college in the mid-2000s and earned my share of Bs and Cs), but it is worth noting that the issue of graduation rates first became visible to the public in the late 1990s and early 2000s without being tied to funding for most colleges. Therefore, it is unclear whether linking a portion of funding to college completions will result in any additional lowering of standards beyond what has already happened.

In the community-college sector, another concern is that institutions may shift students from associate-degree programs to shorter-term certificate programs in an effort to increase completion rates. Even if the quality of the education provided does not change, it is easier to complete a one-year certificate program than a two-year associate degree, simply because the latter takes longer and requires more persistence. Several studies examining performance-based funding systems have found that colleges did respond with this tactic, and that is a concern, because longer-term degree programs tend to have a higher labor-market payoff than shorter-term programs. (On how certificates and degrees can work together, see “A Certificate, then a Degree,” what next.)

Colleges may also seek to recruit and enroll students whose success is virtually guaranteed, which threatens to exacerbate enrollment gaps by race/ethnicity and family income at selective colleges. (Most colleges admit more than 50 percent of applicants and are not considered selective.) Research has shown that performance-based funding systems have resulted in heightened admissions standards and reduced diversity at selective institutions, which has led more than 15 states to provide bonus funds for colleges when they graduate students from traditionally underserved populations.

Political Prognostications

The proportion of U.S. 25- to 34-year-olds holding a college degree has grown 25 percent over the past decade, to nearly 48 percent in 2019 (see Figure 1). That’s far short of the 60 percent goal set by the Obama administration in 2009, and much of the increase can be attributed to a rise in enrollment rates. Given the lackluster improvement in college completions, along with rising student-debt burdens, policymakers across the ideological spectrum are hesitant to give more money to colleges without tying at least a portion of it to student outcomes. While performance-based funding is often viewed as a policy favored by conservative legislators, deep-blue California adopted such a system in 2018, and New Jersey is in the process of developing one. Therefore, it seems likely that Congress will pair any increase in federal spending on student financial aid with some type of outcomes-based accountability system.

Still, I seriously doubt that Congress and the Department of Education would be willing to allow colleges with subpar completion rates to lose funding. State performance-based funding systems often protect colleges from such losses by using hold-harmless provisions or basing only new funds on student outcomes. The federal government also has a long history of waiving sanctions for low-performing institutions, especially those that are politically popular, such as community colleges and minority-serving institutions. The Department of Education under President Obama recalculated student-loan default rates at the eleventh hour of his administration, protecting federal aid eligibility for a number of colleges; and in 2017, Republican senator Mitch McConnell introduced a rider to protect a community college in his home state from default-rate sanctions.

The Obama administration’s failed effort to link federal funding to student outcomes shows the political difficulties of implementing a federal accountability system, even though most states already have such systems in place. In 2013 the administration proposed the Postsecondary Institution Ratings System, which would have tied federal funding to access, affordability, and completion outcomes. This plan was quietly abandoned in 2015, but it did result in an expanded College Scorecard that provides potential students with information on an institution’s student-loan debt, repayment rates, and earnings. The resulting focus on student-loan repayment has resulted in multiple proposals from both Democrats and Republicans to hold colleges accountable for a portion of loans that are not repaid, but none of these plans has received serious discussion in Congress.

Finally, I believe that divisions between Democrats and Republicans on this issue—which have only grown wider during the 2020 presidential campaign—will be a main stumbling block to reauthorization of a comprehensive Higher Education Act, which is not likely to happen until at least 2021. Issues such as income-driven student-loan repayment plans, campus free speech, and sexual-assault investigations have gotten more public attention, but differences over whether accountability policies should focus on for-profit colleges or cover all sectors equally are likely to doom reauthorization. This means that for the next few years, discussions about tying federal funding to student outcomes are likely to be no more than academic exercises.

This piece is part of the forum, “Should Congress Link Higher-Ed Funding To Graduation Rates?” For an alternate take, see “Congress Must Address Dismal Dropout Rates” by Lanae Erickson.

It’s a familiar story: a young, courageous (usually white male) entrepreneur drops out of college to pursue his dreams, only to become rich and successful beyond all expectation. Its implication, which has found some purchase in the popular imagination, is that it doesn’t matter if a person doesn’t finish college—in fact, he may be better-off following his heart song. Call it the Steve Jobs myth.

A close look at federal higher-education policy suggests that Congress too seems to subscribe to this myth—investing hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars to make sure all Americans can enter college and then acting as if it is irrelevant whether or not they finish it.

That is a huge problem, because completing a college degree, or failing to, is a major factor in determining whether a person will have an economically stable future. While it might have been possible a few decades ago to graduate from high school, enter the job market, and find a career that enabled one to earn a solid middle-class life, that path to success has been almost completely foreclosed by the changing nature of our 21st-century economy. Yet right now, a student who enrolls in higher education has about a fifty-fifty chance of graduating. Our society can no longer afford to overlook that fact—or act as if it is inevitable. Completion matters to students; it matters to taxpayers; and there is a lot that institutions and the government can do to address the nation’s dismal higher-education dropout rates. With stakes this high, we must stop being cowed by the naysayers on both the right and the left. It’s time to act.

Completion Matters to Students

The Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University estimates that two thirds of the jobs in the American economy will require postsecondary education or training by next year. While wages have stagnated for those without a degree or credential, college-degree holders have weathered the economic changes of the last two decades and seen their pay increase. Those with a four-year degree make an average of about $1,200 a week, while those who never finished college take home about two thirds that amount, reports the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. People with some college but no degree are twice as likely to live in poverty as their peers with bachelor’s degrees, and three times more likely to default on their student loans. By contrast, college graduates are 10 percentage points more likely to be participating in the labor force, and families headed by someone with a college degree are able to save 14 percent more than the families of those who never got to graduation. All in all, Georgetown researchers have projected that completing a college degree enables someone to earn about a million dollars more over a lifetime than someone with a high-school diploma. And it’s not just money: college graduates are also healthier and more civically engaged. Simply put: a college degree pays off.

Completion Matters to Taxpayers

With taxpayers funding $120 billion a year in loans and grants to provide every American a chance to enroll in higher education, the current dropout rates are also causing widespread harm. At Third Way, the center-left think tank where I work in Washington, D.C., we attempted to quantify this loss to taxpayers and society by means of a thought experiment. What would happen if college completion rates rose to the current high-school-graduation level—84 percent? Boosting completion for a single class of students would result in 1.3 million more college graduates, which would translate to:

• 107,400 more employees in the workforce
• 48,000 fewer people in poverty
• 28,000 fewer people living in households participating in Medicaid
• an increase in Social Security contributions of nearly $50 billion
• a lifetime increase of more than $90 billion in local, state, and federal tax revenue.

That’s enough to build more than 5,000 new elementary schools or nearly 23,000 miles of highway, all from just one year of better graduation rates.

Institutional Responsibility

If college completion is important, both for improving the lives of students and getting a return on taxpayers’ investment, why haven’t we prioritized improving these rates? The reason is that, in contrast to the way people view K–12 education, they tend to blame the individual student for dropping out of college. Picturing someone who enrolled in higher education but didn’t finish conjures up visions of a teenage party animal who didn’t take his or her studies seriously. Third Way recently conducted 10 focus groups with parents and students to find out who they think is at fault when a student doesn’t complete a degree. Participants uniformly pointed to the student. Yet we know that there are federally funded institutions of higher education that currently graduate less than 10 percent of the students who enter their doors (see Figure 2). And taxpayers gave $106 million last year to those schools alone. If an institution is failing to graduate 90 percent of its students, can the students be solely to blame? Surely that large a proportion of the school’s student body is not made up of lazy party animals who refused to study.

It’s true that some schools admit students who are contending with more challenges than others. Institutions that offer open access or serve higher proportions of historically underserved populations often struggle more to get their students to complete a degree program. However, study after study has shown that even institutions that serve similar student populations are getting wildly different outcomes, and some open-access schools are deriving great results while others are falling way short. That means the students aren’t the problem, and there’s no excuse for consistently failing to deliver. It is possible to do better.

The good news is that there are a variety of evidence-based interventions that are proven to raise graduation rates. One of them is the City University of New York’s Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, which provides low-income students with comprehensive support and an assigned counselor who sticks with a student throughout, all with the aim of helping students acquire an associate degree within three years. Another proven intervention involves giving small emergency-completion grants (averaging $900) to juniors and seniors in four-year programs who encounter an unexpected expense that could derail them. Through such mediations, some institutions have succeeded in graduating significantly higher proportions of their students. The CUNY program has doubled completion rates and provided taxpayers a $3 to $4 return on every dollar invested. The emergency-loan mechanism has helped Georgia State University boost its graduation rate to 54 percent from 32 percent over the last decade—and completely erase racial achievement gaps.

These schools didn’t improve their outcomes by changing the kinds of students they admit. They did it by placing priority on supporting the students they already enroll. And it worked.

Federal Policy Choices

Why don’t more institutions use these proven methods to increase their completion rates? The existing system gives them little to no incentive to do so. Despite the fact that institutional choices drive graduation rates, federal policy has focused almost entirely on access—allowing schools to cash checks when students walk through the door and never asking how many of those federally funded students complete their degrees. College completion matters to students and taxpayers, and it should matter in federal policy as well.

What can policymakers do? First, they can ensure that the accrediting agencies that function as the gatekeepers for federal funding are looking at student outcomes. If a school isn’t providing a real return on investment to students, and if most of its students are leaving without a degree, that school should not continue to be accredited. Second, in the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, Congress can mandate that if a school fails to graduate a specified percentage of its students within eight years, it will lose eligibility for federal grant and loan dollars. And third, the government can invest in the schools that actually do want to improve their outcomes, by funding the expansion of evidence-based programs to increase completion rates—particularly for low-income students and students of color. Together, these three simple steps would send a powerful message to the higher-education system: make sure that more students get the degree they need to set them up for success in the future.

Some have raised concerns that emphasizing completion through federal policy will cause colleges to become diploma mills that hand out degrees even to those who don’t earn them. But the policy ideas outlined here are a light touch and do not get anywhere close to over-correcting. If paired with other outcomes-focused reforms that look at indexes like post-enrollment earnings and loan repayment, they can help create a multiple-criteria system that ensures students and taxpayers are getting the value they deserve from colleges and universities.

Design matters, and certainly any federal policy around completion should be approached thoughtfully and paired with bulwarks against unintended consequences. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), for example, has suggested that we put in place a federal bottom line on completion together with a “maintenance of effort” provision requiring schools to remain consistent in the number of low-income students they enroll—to ensure we support real improvement, not higher completion rates that arise from tighter admission standards. Others have suggested using disaggregated data to measure not just completion on average but for specific kinds of students. Still others advocate for graduated sanctions, to avoid the problem of politicians swooping in to “save” every failing school with exemptions and excuses. Clearly, there are policy pitfalls here, as initial performance-funding models in some states have shown, but there are myriad ways to counter the possible downsides and still take action that will make a real difference for students.

The truth is that apathy toward completion at the federal level has created this problem, by incentivizing access only and ignoring the outcomes of students once they enroll. Recalibrating will ensure that we aren’t pushing more and more students to start college, take out loans, and then leave without the degree in hand that will enable them to get a good job and repay those loans. That is the worst-case scenario, and we can no longer afford to let our higher-education system leave students worse-off than when they started.

This piece is part of the forum, “Should Congress Link Higher-Ed Funding To Graduation Rates?” For an alternate take, see “Performance-Based Funding Produces Mixed Results” by Robert Kelchen.

After decades of slow growth, the share of young Americans completing college has increased to 48 percent in 2019, from 39 percent 10 years earlier. What accounts for the rise? Are more students clearing a meaningful bar for graduation, or are colleges and universities engaging in credential inflation and lowering their academic standards? This question could be central as Congress prepares to reauthorize the Higher Education Act—given the current interest in using degree completion as an accountability metric linked to the disbursement of federal funds. Are there problems in setting forth higher graduation rates as a federal goal? And more specifically, should policymakers embrace or reject the idea of linking funding to such outcomes in a new Higher Education Act?

In this forum, Lanae Erickson of the think tank Third Way lays out the case for using federal leverage and other means to get institutions to boost their completion rates. Robert Kelchen of Seton Hall University sees both promise and pitfalls in tying federal funding to such outcomes, even as he doubts that a new Higher Education Act is on the near horizon.

Performance-Based Funding Produces Mixed Results

by Robert Kelchen

 

 

 

 

Congress Must Address Dismal Dropout Rates

by Lanae Erickson

 

 

 

In this issue of the journal, Katharine M. Conn, Virginia S. Lovison, and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo report on how the Teach For America experience affects teacher-participants. Education Next editor Martin West discussed the article with the CEO of Teach For America, Elisa Villanueva Beard.

Martin West: How did your own experience as a TFA corps member affect your beliefs about education?

Elisa Villanueva Beard: I was a 1998 corps member, and I taught in Phoenix. My first day of teaching, right out of college, I had 36 first-graders walk into my door. I had 30 desks, I had no books, and I had no curriculum. And I quickly came to realize that my kids had no letter recognition, and they were part of a bilingual system that truly had no coherence throughout my elementary school. And my school just lacked the basics of what you would expect any child to have that is attending any school—a rigorous curriculum, a clear vision, a conducive learning environment.

One of my students, Jasmine, had these chronic headaches. And for a while I thought maybe she just was trying to get out of work, but what I came to realize is that she had horrific tooth pain because she had a mouth full of cavities. And when I started to ask the rest of my kids about dental hygiene practices, I came to realize my kids didn’t have the basics on dental hygiene, or didn’t have access to dental care. And that was the beginning of me becoming exposed to understanding that my kids are coming to school with so many unmet needs that are just basic needs that every child should have.

And this one afternoon in my first semester of teaching, a veteran teacher came into my classroom and, as we were chatting, she asked me why I worked so hard because she wanted to know if I realized that we were teaching the future prisoners of the state of Arizona, which was incredibly shocking, and obviously disturbing, but really just deepened my own courage of conviction, because that was the backdrop, but what I found is that my children, consistently, would rise to the occasion. They were excellent…

And so, I emerged from my experience really just inspired by my students and my families. I was pretty outraged about what was happening and how lots of a child’s access or opportunity is just driven by where she or he happens to be born and where he or she happens to go to school.

And I think I started to just better understand the complexity of the problem, what’s happening outside of school, in communities where children are living in poverty, and what that means inside of classrooms and whole schools and districts, and the beginning of what it might take to do something about this, and really committed to being part of the solution, and determined to get to the day when, truly, every child does have access to a great education.

MW: The authors examine a series of questions about the sources of educational inequity in the United States. They conclude, “TFA participants are more likely to believe that societal issues, not differences in the actions or values of students from low-income backgrounds, exacerbate income-based differences in achievement.” Why do you think that’s the case?

EVB: I would say, very simply, because that is what you see. You know, you see it for yourself. We actually see this playing out with real people in real classrooms, with real children and families. And so, you really get in the middle of it. This proximity brings insight and understanding of the complex nature of the problem.

MW: Another finding is that the TFA experience doesn’t make corps members more cynical or pessimistic about the challenge of improving education. In fact, alums are more likely than non-participants to agree that it’s possible for all children to attain an excellent education, and less likely to agree that there’s only so much teachers can do to help low-income students succeed. That result must be gratifying, as one could easily imagine the differences going the other way.

EVB: It’s incredible to see that our folks are emerging from this with optimism and hope and a deep belief that the problem is solvable, which is the big objective here as folks enter the work. So much of it is really being able to be with your students and see what they’re capable of, and then doubling down and realizing that there has to be a path forward.

…When you see something, you can’t un-look at it. And you stick with it and do whatever you can to ensure that you do your part to contribute to ensuring all kids get what they deserve.

This is an edited excerpt from an episode of the EdNext Podcast.

It took until the third hour of the third Democratic presidential debate—the first of the 2020 cycle to gather all top-tier candidates on the same stage—for education policy to make an appearance. What ensued over the next 14 minutes in response to ABC correspondent Linsey Davis’s query about charter schools was a remarkable exercise in dodging the question.

Why were the candidates reluctant even to discuss one of the cornerstones of the last Democratic president’s education agenda? Results from 2019 Education Next survey, reported in this issue, provide a likely explanation.

Davis directed her question to entrepreneur Andrew Yang. Yang, as Davis reminded him, had once said that Democrats seeking to limit the growth of charter schools are “jumping into bed with teachers’ unions and doing kids a disservice.” Yet Yang did not mention charter schools in his response.

Neither did the five candidates who spoke subsequently. Pete Buttigieg, whose husband teaches at an Indiana private school, talked of the need to “Respect teachers the way we do soldiers and pay them more like the way we do doctors.” Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, and Joe Biden joined Buttigieg in calling for higher teacher pay. They touched on everything from universal preschool to debt relief for student borrowers—everything, that is, except the issue about which they’d been asked.

It fell to Julian Castro to remind his peers of the question, which he did in order to bust the “myth that charter schools are better than public schools.” His language obscured the fact that charter schools are public schools. While claiming not to be “categorically against charter schools,” he said that he “would require more transparency and accountability from them than is required right now.”

Only Cory Booker, whose deep involvement in a charter-heavy turnaround effort as Newark mayor leaves him little alternative, proved willing to offer a positive word. “We closed poor-performing charter schools,” said Booker, “but dagnabbit we expanded high-performing charter schools.” The results of this approach in Newark, he claimed, “speak for themselves.”

That Democratic candidates would rush at any chance to call for paying teachers more is no surprise. Our survey confirms that it is an issue that at once unites their base and has crossover appeal. Seventy two percent of Americans express support for increasing teacher pay in their state, including an overwhelming 83 percent of Democrats and fully 60 percent of Republicans. The conversation also served as an opportunity to curry favor with the teacher unions, which remain among the most potent forces in Democratic party politics.

Our data also reveal that support for charter schools is flagging among Democrats. Forty eight percent now oppose “the formation of charter schools,” with just 40 percent expressing support. That marks a stark reversal from 2016, the last year of Barack Obama’s presidency, when Democrats favored charter schools by a 45 percent to 33 percent margin.

Yet if Democrats are turning against charters, why aren’t the candidates leading the charge? Bernie Sanders has in fact called to end public funding for charter growth and a ban on “for-profit” charters. But the more common strategy, as illustrated on the debate stage in September, has been to avoid the topic altogether.

The answer may lie in the breakdown of our survey results within the Democratic Party. It shows that the decline in support for charter schools has been driven entirely by white Democrats. While a plurality of white Democrats supported charters in 2016, they now oppose charters by a 57 percent to 33 percent margin. Black Democrats, in contrast, support charters by a 55 percent to 29 percent margin. The balance of support among Democrats who identify as Hispanic is narrower but still positive, at 47 percent to 42 percent.

In short, while candidates who vocally criticize charter schools may find favor with the white progressive left, they would risk alienating black and Hispanic voters, plenty of whom have seen their communities transformed by the expansion of high-quality charter schools in urban centers. And those voters comprise a large share of the Democratic electorate, especially once the contest moves on from Iowa and New Hampshire into more racially diverse territory. The safer course of action, the candidates seem to have decided, is to remain silent.

That may be low risk as a political tactic. The downside, though, is that if any of these candidates do find themselves in the White House, they won’t have prepared the ground if they do decide to push to advance charter schools. A Democratic president, once in office, would have the option of seeking political cover and validation from predecessors like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, all charter school proponents. That option, though, exists now, too.

— Martin R. West

There’s plenty of high-profile concern and handwringing about college debt in the United States, with some aspiring presidential candidates offering dueling proposals to cancel all $1.5 trillion in outstanding student-loan obligations. But the far bigger problem affecting college-goers in America is a completion crisis. Far too many students who attend college do not graduate.

More than 40 percent of all first-time, full-time college students in the United States fail to graduate from four-year programs within six years. If they are in the top income quartile, they are more likely to graduate—the rate is 62 percent. But that still means more than one third of relatively well-off students do not graduate. And it is worse for individuals in the bottom income quartile. The graduation rate for these students is a catastrophic 13 percent.

The U.S. education system has made progress in getting more students through the enrollment door. But students are stumbling in frightening numbers on the path to a college degree. One promising strategy to combat the completion crisis is to flip the script and make sure students earn a meaningful, job-ready certificate in the first semester or year of college. This gives them immediate value in the labor market—and, counterintuitively perhaps, a greater likelihood of eventually earning a degree.

The danger of no degree

As Beth Akers and Matt Chingos document in their book Game of Loans, the students who rack up extremely high debt loads also tend to be those who finish school and earn a degree—often for graduate school—which skews the average debt-per-student statistic. These students are also typically able to pay off their higher loans given their higher earnings.

Meanwhile, non-completers not only lose out on the benefits of a college degree but also face increased debt without increased earnings. Students who don’t complete college tend to have relatively small amounts of outstanding debt. Yet they struggle the most to pay it back, as they lose out on most of the wage premium that comes from a degree.

The potential damage is widespread: one in six adult Americans carries student debt, and non-completers have a threefold higher risk of default. On average, seven years after leaving college, 74 percent of completers have paid down some of their principal, while nearly half of non-completers owe more than they did upon leaving college.

Helping students earn certificates upfront offers a promising path to address the dropout rate. Postsecondary institutions offer these credentials of student educational attainment in a growing variety of subjects, which run the gamut from auto mechanics to unmanned aircraft systems to finance. Although community colleges have long offered such programs, name-brand institutions also have gotten involved: the extension program at the University of California, Los Angeles, for example, provides certificates in subjects like cybersecurity and interior design,
and delivers some of its programs through an app.

Such credentials have grown significantly in recent years. Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce found the number of credentials awarded annually amounts to more than one million—more than a threefold increase since 1994. And last year, Credential Engine reported that nearly 67,000 programs in the United States grant credentials.

Their ultimate value, however, is not yet known. A number of studies have found that certificates have uncertain and uneven value in the labor market. In a working report for the Community College Research Center, Thomas Bailey and Clive R. Belfield found that certificates appeared to have a meaningful return, on average. But further analysis revealed several other important conclusions.

First, the positive returns from certificates lasted only a few years. Second, certificates in health-care fields appeared to drive most of the positive benefits. And third, because the value from certificates was relatively short-term, it was important to use them to acquire additional credentials. The additional credentials that held value were typically assets like a traditional bachelor’s degree, not other certificates.

 

Elements OF a Certificate-First Approach • First Means First: Certificate coursework is offered right away to provide immediate job value and help students persist to degree completion. • Modular Design: Certificate credits match seamlessly with degree requirements to ensure work remains bachelors focused. • Labor Market-Focused: First-year courses provide students with freestanding, marketable skills that lead to employability.

 

A certificate-first approach

That’s an important finding given the hype around credentials, which takes two basic forms. Some advocates and institutions laud credentials for their potential to displace traditional degrees, whereas others consider them a valuable complement to a traditional degree.

BYU-Pathway Worldwide, an online program that is a part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints higher-education system, is finding something else. Certificates aren’t a replacement for or merely a complement to a degree, but rather a central component of a degree that can help students persist to completion. BYU-Pathway Worldwide (where one of the authors of this piece serves as president) and BYU-Idaho have undertaken an initiative in which certificates are used as a sub-component of a degree. The programs are showing that certificates used in this manner can play a critical role in helping students both boost their earnings and ultimately complete a degree. Offering students a credential for a portion of their learning in a degree program may be the most promising intervention to tackle the college-completion crisis.

At BYU-Pathway Worldwide, for example, students who finish a cluster of certificate courses can receive a credential upfront, while still on their way to a college degree. Among those students, the percentage of freshmen who returned for their sophomore year increased by more than 20 percentage points, to 86 percent from 65 percent. That was a significantly bigger bang for the buck compared to other strategies aimed at improving retention, such as traditional financial aid and mentoring programs.

The basic logic is that students see an immediate payoff to their work in the marketplace, which helps them recognize the value of their studies and engenders affinity to their institution. Because students often must take time off from school for a variety of reasons, since they now have a clear, market-validated credential from the school, they have significantly more faith in the value of re-enrolling and working hard to complete a degree. Their self-confidence and sense of agency also increase dramatically.

It sounds like common sense. But for this approach to work, there are a few important design rules to get right.

Most degree programs begin with a series of general-education courses. Although they provide a foundation for critical thinking and future learning, these courses—which can range from algebra to English composition—can also tend to feel less relevant to many first-generation students, who hope their education will bring increased earnings. Moreover, the learning gained from general education is not immediately valuable in the labor market and can be lost if a student drops out.

A certificate-first approach flips this on its head. In other words, first means first. Rather than start with general-education courses, a college must intentionally move certain courses that have clear relevance and benefit in the labor market to the beginning of a student’s experience. This means that the certificate must be more than simple prerequisites but should have immediate freestanding value in the marketplace.

It does not mean that certificate-first is anti‒general education or anti‒bachelor’s degree: it is simply a re-sequencing of value into the first year of college. This embeds the certificate in a clear path toward a bachelor’s education, but also means that students who choose to pause or end their studies before obtaining a degree will have at least one valuable credential.

For example, at BYU-Pathway World-wide and BYU-Idaho, the teams took the applied technology degree and flipped it on its head. Instead of starting with general education or even prerequisite courses, the degree now begins with coursework in database architecture, Web front-end development, or computer support that immediately results in a marketable certificate. The general-education courses are still required to earn the degree, but they come later in the sequence.

Importantly, the certificate that a student earns must serve as a nested path to a degree. It must fit through a modular design into something larger—modularity that drives increased retention and certificate option value.

Conclusion

What is so exciting about this finding is how relatively simple the solution is. Although college faculty will undoubtedly wonder if flipping the sequence of general-education and degree-specific courses would work for students, doing so does not require a dramatic restructuring of a school in terms of cost, time, or modality. Moreover, it may well increase the probability that students complete the degree in the first place.

Although there are multiple ways to implement a certificate-first approach across the first year of college, it is a design that could be implemented across a range of educational settings and institutions. A certificate-first degree structure can accelerate the value of higher education even as it helps more students earn their degree—a compelling way to cut into the college-completion crisis.

Clark G. Gilbert is president of BYU-Pathway Worldwide and former president of BYU-Idaho. Michael B. Horn is cofounder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation and an executive editor at Education Next.

One of the best education stories in years played out on live TV. As cameras rolled, Miami-Dade Superintendent Alberto Carvalho weighed, in public, whether to leave his 10-year, district-transforming job in Miami to become the chancellor in New York City. The drama that ensued captivated Miami.

Kids cried. Parents gasped. The school board called an emergency meeting. When Carvalho arrived, as always in the crispest of dark suits, a packed chamber gave him a standing ovation. Over the course of four hours, the crowd begged and begged and begged some more. A student asked for a hug. Business leaders said please don’t go. Some sang, “Please Don’t Go,” by Miami disco kings KC & The Sunshine Band. One school board member said she hoped the superintendent “will continue to love us enough to stay with us.” Another said bus drivers, custodians and cafeteria workers all “told me to tell you to stay.”

Even Luther Campbell, aka Uncle Luke of local rap legends 2 Live Crew, made a stirring pitch: “This man here brought dignity back to that seat. So whatever is going on in this system that is pushing this man out, y’all need to straighten it out.” For good measure, Campbell channeled the Category 5 hurricane of community pride that Carvalho has unleashed across one of America’s most distinctive melting pots: “Mr. Carvalho, if you do decide to leave here, you got all our blessing. But ain’t no place like Miami,” he said, as Carvalho cracked a smile. “New York ain’t got nothin’ on us.”

In the end, Carvalho said the “emotional tug” was too great. He would stay.

In New York, the mayor fumed. In Miami, the people cheered.

For anybody keeping tabs on public education in America, #TheCarvalhoShow of 2018, as it became known on Twitter, was surreal. A whole city just went all out to persuade its superintendent to stay? How could any urban superintendent, forever navigating the tangles of factions and fiefdoms, have this much support? From the car line and the classroom? From the “establishment” and “reformers”? From the luxury suites and the street?

Call it Carvalho’s choice. Instead of resisting the inevitable forces of choice and customization that are re-shaping public education, Carvalho and Miami-Dade chose to harness them. As the superintendent said to choice advocates this year, he and his district saw the “tsunami of choice” coming. They realized it was too powerful to avoid—and too brimming with opportunity not to embrace.

Today, nearly three quarters of Miami-Dade students are enrolled in choice programs. That makes Miami-Dade the most choice-rich district in arguably the most choice-rich state. Parents and teachers who live in Miami-Dade now access more than 500 non-district schools that didn’t exist or weren’t accessible 20 years ago, and everybody knows even more options are on the way. In Florida, innovation and disruption now bubble up from every direction. In Miami-Dade, it’s surging from a particularly aggressive charter school company, from proud little private schools, and from off-the-grid homeschooling moms.

It’s also surging from the district itself. “Bring it,” Carvalho said at iPrep Academy, a school of choice he designed. This year, 3,355 students applied for 112 open seats at iPrep. “We’re unapologetic,” he said, “about our desire to dominate choice.” Under Carvalho’s leadership, Miami-Dade has created an expanding portfolio of district choice—magnet schools, career academies, international programs—that is unrivaled in Florida and perhaps anywhere else in the country.

This plan wasn’t imposed from afar. It was hatched at home. And the district has methodically, if not gleefully, executed it. Carvalho’s popularity stems from his district’s ability to direct its own vision for change, and to document sustained progress. Its programming is dynamic. Its achievement is rising. Its stakeholders are remarkably unified. Success has led to more buy-in and more resources, which in turn has ramped up potential for more success.

Will it last? Ever more parents are demanding public education be ever more tailored to their kids’ needs, with ever more providers to choose from. Carvalho may be one of the best superintendents in America. But can anybody really surf a tsunami?

 

Miami-Dade County is big. It’s the size of Delaware. Take away the swampy parts teeming with alligators and pythons, and it’s still a palmy, concretized, iguana-ridden expanse as big as Rhode Island. The nation’s fifth-biggest school district encompasses all of that. It has 476 schools. It has 37,830 employees. In 2018-19, it had 350,456 students, with 80 percent in district-run schools and 20 percent in charter schools. For perspective, consider that 350,456 students is more than the district enrollments of Denver, Washington, D.C., Detroit, New Orleans, Boston, and San Antonio combined.

But big isn’t bumbling. Miami-Dade County Public Schools is racking up academic accolades the way the Miami Hurricanes used to rack up Division I football championships. It’s doing this in a state with some of the lowest per-pupil spending in America, in a state that is itself an academic standout.

To be sure, no big district in America is near the promised land. Every rising trend line has caveats and complications, and surficial analyses may obscure the stubborn gaps and trade-offs and unconscionable numbers of still-struggling kids. As Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute wrote last year: “time and again, sensible people embrace nifty reforms, hot new superintendents, and ‘miracle’ school systems. However, they later “realize that the packaging was a whole lot better than the product. Even two decades into the ‘accountability era,’ it’s far too easy for snake-oil peddlers to trumpet a few numbers and insist that a given school, district, or supe has ‘cracked the code.’ ”

Miami-Dade needs the kind of hard audit that only multiple auditors, from multiple vantage points, can deliver.

In the meantime, this is fair: Over the past decade, Miami-Dade County Public Schools has moved the needle on a range of academic indicators. It’s that relative success that brought President Barack Obama and Governor Jeb Bush to Miami in 2011, in those halcyon days when “education reform” flirted with bipartisanship. It’s those relative gains that led to the district winning the Broad Prize in 2012, and the College Board Advanced Placement District of the Year in 2014. It’s that relative progress that led to Carvalho being named Florida Superintendent of the Year in 2013, National Superintendent of the Year in 2014, a McGraw Prize winner in 2016, and National Urban Superintendent of the Year in 2018.

The numbers suggest Miami-Dade is punching above its weight.

In 2018, the state awarded the district an “A” grade for the first time. School grades are primarily based on proficiency and progress on state tests, with extra weight given to progress of the lowest-performing students. Of the state’s 14 biggest districts (those with 60,000-plus students), only three joined Miami-Dade as “A” districts that year. Miami-Dade also ranks No. 1 among Florida’s biggest districts in enrollment of students of color (93 percent, with 71 percent Hispanic and 20 percent black); No. 4 in percentage eligible for free- and reduced-price lunch (66 percent); and No. 1 in English language learners (20 percent).

The last stat should be underlined. Standardized tests in Florida are administered in English only, and the state has, so far, successfully resisted every effort to change that.

The district is outpacing its Florida peers in progress, too. In 2008, Miami-Dade students were below the state average in performance on annual statewide reading tests in all eight tested grades; among the 14 biggest districts, students’ scores were near the bottom in seven of the eight. This year, average scores for Miami-Dade students ranked in the top three of Florida’s biggest districts in six out of eight tested grades.

The data looks even better disaggregated. In math and reading, black and Hispanic students in Miami-Dade score above the state averages for black and Hispanic students in nearly every tested grade. Scores for Miami’s black students are in the top five among big districts in most categories. Hispanic students rank in the top two in most categories. Low-income students from Miami, meanwhile, are No. 1 in three of six tested grades in math, and seven of eight in reading.

This looks good. This also needs context. In 2019, only 46 percent of low-income 10th graders in Miami-Dade passed a statewide test in reading. But looking across Florida, that low-sounding pass rate is still six percentage points above the state average, and best in class among the 14 biggest districts.

Miami-Dade’s outcomes on the National Assessment for Educational Progress are more mixed. In 2016, the Urban Institute demographically recalibrated the 2015 scores for the 23 districts then participating in the Trial Urban District Assessment, a testing program for a group of city districts, all of which have large shares of students who are black or Hispanic or from low-income families. Miami-Dade came in at No. 5. It outperformed its demographics, but not as much as Boston, Dallas, and many other districts.

The Urban Institute has not yet updated its analysis to include the 2017 exam. Fourth graders in Miami-Dade continued to make strong gains between 2015 and 2017, and now rank No. 1 among their urban peers in reading, with 42 percent scoring proficient or above, and No. 2 in math, with 45 percent scoring proficient or above. Over the past decade, they’ve shown some of the biggest gains in both subjects.

The opposite is true for Miami-Dade eighth graders. Their scores were flat between 2009 and 2017, and among urban districts, they’ve shown some of the least progress.

Clearly, work remains.

 

Clearly, though, Carvalho has earned wide latitude to keep at it.

Eight months after his decision to stay, 71 percent of Miami-Dade voters approved a four-year property tax increase that will reward district teachers with more than $200 million a year in additional pay—meaning annual supplements of $7,000 to $8,000 for teachers with median salaries of $46,000. This was a vote of confidence in the district by voters who had been burned by past tax referenda. It was a second thumbs-up for Carvalho. In 2012, he successfully led a $1.2 billion bond referendum to upgrade district facilities and technology.

The district’s latest tax-hike pitch quickly followed news of its “A” grade. The campaign strategy was simple: Leverage the credibility earned from a decade’s worth of progress. Our teachers are delivering, the superintendent told voters. They deserve to be rewarded.

An incredible personal story is part of Carvalho’s appeal. He grew up in Portugal, the son of a custodian and seamstress. Six kids in a one-room apartment with no running water and no electricity. Carvalho, 54, was the first in his family to graduate from high school, and he left for America as an “unaccompanied minor” who spoke no English. He washed dishes. Worked construction. Lived in a U-haul that reeked of paint. As a waiter, he met former U.S. Rep. E. Clay Shaw, who encouraged him to go to college. He did, earning a bachelor’s degree in biology in 1990. Today, he speaks Portuguese, English, Spanish and French—and is one of America’s most decorated superintendents. There’s no mistaking how deeply this resonates in a community where half of all residents are foreign born, and more than 70 percent speak a language other than English at home.

In Miami-Dade, Carvalho began his career teaching physics, and, at one point, served as the district’s chief communications officer. He’s keen on momentum and narrative. He often lists his district’s challenges in bullet points, then punctuates them with a variation on these words:

That sounds like mission impossible. But we turned it into mission inevitable.

Nobody thought that when the school board hired Carvalho in 2008.

The Great Recession was in full effect. State funding was shrinking. Board members were bickering, even as the state was threatening to take over nine low-performing schools. Earlier in the year, the district had cut more than $200 million, but still did not have a balanced budget.

Relations were rocky with the local branch of the American Federation of Teachers, the United Teachers of Dade. Just before Carvalho’s appointment, the district reneged on promised raises. A ticked-off union distributed fliers showing school board members flushing cash down the toilet. The union had hundreds of teachers protest in front of the administration building (at one point forming a conga line), and it brought bars of soap to a board meeting to encourage administrators to “come clean” about mismanagement.

As 2009 dawned, news got worse: Miami-Dade was now among eight districts being monitored by the state because its financial reserves had shrunk to dangerously low levels. It was the only one that wasn’t tiny and rural. In desperation, the administration told schools it wanted a 20 percent cut of fundraisers, which would bring in $5 million to ease the crunch. Fundraisers—as in bake sales and car washes and kids selling candy bars. The Miami Herald called it a “plan to raid schools’ piggy banks.” Parents rebelled, and in response, Carvalho did something he’s rarely had to do since: retreat.

In summer 2009, Carvalho presented, and the board approved, a balanced $4.8 billion budget that was $700 million smaller than the prior year’s. With help from federal stimulus funds, it raised reserves to $56.5 million, avoided layoffs and secured a small raise for teachers. The 2010 budget was slimmer still—and sent 200 district administrators back to classrooms. The superintendent also began replacing hundreds of principals, and re-assigning hundreds of low-performing teachers.

By fall 2010, the clouds had parted. The superintendent could focus on the real challenge.

 

 

In the span of a generation, school choice became the new normal in Florida.

Thirty years ago, about 10 percent of K-12 students in Florida attended private schools. A handful attended magnet schools. The rest attended assigned district schools—either neighborhood schools assigned by zip code, or far-flung schools assigned for compliance with court-ordered de-segregation.

Today, 45 percent of Florida students in K-12 attend something other than their assigned schools. Charter schools are part of the mix. So are private schools that can be accessed with choice scholarships. So is an ever-growing array of district options.

This wave didn’t just happen.

In 1996, the Florida Legislature passed a law allowing creation of charter schools. The first opened that fall in Miami’s Liberty City community. Two decades later, Florida had 295,814 students in 655 charter schools—and one of the largest charter sectors in America.

In 1997, the Legislature created the Florida Virtual School to ramp up online learning. It started with 77 students and five courses. Today, it serves more than 200,000 students a year.

In 1999, the Legislature created the McKay Scholarship, a state-funded private school voucher for students with disabilities. In 2018-19, it served 30,695 students in 1,525 private schools.

In 2001, the Legislature created the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship for low-income students. As of June 2019, it was serving 104,091 students in 1,825 private schools. In students and funding, it is the largest private school choice program in the U.S.

By the time Carvalho became superintendent in 2008, these ripples were fast merging into something bigger. As fate would have it, the waves rolling into Miami-Dade were that much stronger.

 

The headquarters for Fernando Zulueta’s company is a nondescript, two-story house in South Miami with terra cotta shingles and sprinkler stains. No signs bear the company name.

Academica, a privately-held for-profit company, manages 165 schools in five states and the District of Columbia, including 122 in Florida. According to Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, whose research on charter school performance is widely respected, the company’s core networks consistently make solid gains over district schools. Yet the company is remarkably off the radar. So is Zulueta. He hasn’t done many newspaper interviews in recent years. There aren’t many photos of him floating around. One of the few, which ran with a critical Miami Herald series in 2011 (and was taken paparazzi style), shows him in the Bahamas, wearing shades and holding a glass of champagne.

Forget first impressions. Zulueta, 60, is cerebral and methodical. He, like the superintendent, has a classic South Florida immigrant story. And if Academica is less than fully focused on improving student outcomes—an impression the Herald series and other reports may have left on some—Zulueta has a funny way of showing it. He has a stack of charts at his fingertips, comparing Academica schools with district schools and other charters. At a national charter schools conference, he noted how few high-poverty schools are academically top tier and deemed it “disgusting.”

Like Carvalho, Zulueta had a relatively modest start in Florida. His father was a banker in Cuba. When Castro came to power, Zulueta’s father fled with his family to Florida and eventually took a job as a truck driver, delivering art supplies before becoming a bookkeeper. Zulueta trained as an accountant and lawyer at the University of Miami and then became a developer, building starter homes on what undeveloped land was left in South Florida.

In the mid-1990s, his company was building a community just north of the Miami-Dade County line that didn’t have a nearby public school to serve it. The new charter school law offered an opportunity to create one. The company won approval in 1996. Somerset Academy opened in 1997. But before it opened, parents far from the school began applying in droves. “I was taken aback by this,” Zulueta said. “Why would you want to go to a school that hasn’t even opened?”

The light bulb flickered on. In 1999, Academica was born.

 

“We are now working in an educational environment that is driven by choice. I believe that is a good thing. We need to actually be engaged in that choice movement. So if you do not ride that wave, you will succumb to it. I choose not to.”

Carvalho made those comments in 2012, in response to a reporter’s question. A year later, a gaggle of TV news crews followed him on the first day of school, as he talked up scores of new district choice programs. A year after that, with another 50-plus choice programs on the district menu, Carvalho added some wow to his metaphor:

“Rather than complain about the incoming tsunami of choice, we’re going to ride it.”

In 2010, as the district was emerging from its economic malaise, 35 percent of its students were enrolled in district-run choice programs. By 2018-19, it was 61 percent. This percentage does not include charter and private schools. Add in those sectors, and the percentage of Miami-Dade students enrolled in choice programs rises to 69 percent and 74 percent, respectively.

“ACADEMIC EXCELLENCE!” reads the banner on the Facebook page of Miami-Dade County Public Schools. “ONE SIZE FITS NONE!”

The district has embraced what many public education traditionalists won’t. The Florida School Boards Association, for example, was a lead plaintiff in a 2014 lawsuit that ultimately failed to have the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship declared unconstitutional. Superintendents in some Florida districts continue to persuade their boards to deny charter applications on shaky ground, knowing the denials will be overturned. Under a charter law that has no cap on new schools and allows schools to appeal application rejections to the state Board of Education, the continued growth of charters in Florida seems secure.

“I was not going to do what a lot of my colleagues did” about the fast-growing school choice movement, “which is, ‘Let’s hope and pray it doesn’t hit us,’” Cavalho said in an interview in April. The expansion of choice “materialized exactly as we predicted. But rather than being a spectator, or a victim of it, we were an active participant in it.”

“We” includes the Miami-Dade school board. It bought into this acceleration of district choice quietly but fully, and, despite changing membership over the years, consistently. Even before Carvalho’s arrival, some board members had been pushing for expansion of choice into far-flung corners of Miami-Dade. But as parental demand for non-district options intensified, so did the district’s desire not to be outdone. This response has generated little push back. The issue of choice—be it charters, vouchers or district options—has rarely surfaced in school board elections over the past decade. Throughout the district, choice has become accepted as the way it is.

“With or without competition, people are driven to be the best,” Martin Karp, a Miami-Dade school board member since 2004, said in an interview. “But you can’t discount the competition and what it brings. It’s wise to learn from others, and for others to learn from us.”

Miami-Dade didn’t merely adapt. The changes under Carvalho say so much more about him, the district, the possibilities for public education. They suggest school districts can rise to the occasion in the era of choice and customization, and, perhaps not only evolve, but lead. Even the best districts can never be all things to all students, but, perhaps, they can be more things to more students.

Perhaps they can also be more efficient. Miami-Dade operates in a state that ranks No. 44 in per-pupil spending. It has supplemented state-set funding by tapping local sources. But even then, its success would seem to suggest that sustained academic progress is possible even in a relatively low-spending state, even with declining enrollment. Over the past decade, enrollment in Miami-Dade district schools has dropped to 281,969 from 321,279 as tens of thousands have enrolled in charter and private schools. Yet Miami-Dade keeps notching superlatives and expanding its programming.

Traditionalists aren’t the only ones who think something special is happening. “If you do not evolve, if you do not produce, you get left behind,” said former state Rep. Ralph Arza, a former teacher and football coach in the Miami-Dade district who now directs governmental relations at the Florida Charter School Alliance. Carvalho “has sold his district on that.”

“He’s not complaining about Uber,” Arza said. “He be-came Uber.”

 

 

A half century ago, Fernando Zulueta’s mom helped found a small Catholic pre-school in Little Havana that grew into a little network called Centro Mater. Thirty years later, the director of an offshoot in Hialeah Gardens ran into Zulueta and said, “Your mom told me you started a charter school.”

The director was worried. Some Centro Mater students went on to excel in district schools, but many did not. Could Zulueta help him start a charter? Zulueta was hesitant. He had a business to run. But in 1998, he established Mater Academy, Academica’s first charter in Miami-Dade.

Today, there are about 60 charters affiliated with Academica in Miami-Dade, serving 35,000 students. That’s half the sector. Academica is the biggest reason charters now enroll 68,452 students in the county, and 20 percent of all public school students, up from 23,871 students and 7 percent in 2008-09.

Academica’s core networks are Somerset, Mater, Doral and Pinecrest. Its affiliates tend to have a few things in common: student uniforms, parent contracts committing to 30 volunteer hours a year, and atypical grade configurations like K-8. By design, Zulueta said, they look and feel like private schools, and accountability for results is a given. “We wake up scared every day,” said Zulueta, who has three children in Academica schools, “that if we don’t do a great job, the parents will turn around and leave.”

Academica is a full-service manager: accounting, compliance, human resources, strategic planning, accreditation support, legal affairs. The company does it all.

The analysis from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes suggests it does it well. The 2017 report found students in all four major Academica networks were making modest to large gains over similar students in district schools. The Doral network, which includes schools in Florida and Nevada, showed the biggest gains—the equivalent of 142 additional days of learning in math each year, and 57 in reading. Those outcomes are better than more celebrated charter networks of comparable size, like Achievement First and Democracy Prep.

It’s not clear how much of Miami-Dade’s academic progress is due to its charter sector, and how much the charter sector’s success is due to Academica.

As a whole, charter students in Miami-Dade perform better than district students on state tests in math and reading, and on three of four core tests by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. However, student populations differ at different school types, and a serious analysis, controlling for demographics, is overdue.

In the meantime, Academica continues to expand.

It secured a license to operate a private post-secondary program in 2011 and today, Doral College serves students attending Academica charters who want a head start on higher education. Most classes are online, and tuition is free for families, with costs covered by the state funding Academica receives for its high-school programs. In 2018-19, according to company figures, Doral College enrolled 1,711 students.

 

As options grew, kids moved.

Rated as a “C” by the state for most of the past decade, Richmond Heights Middle School, 14 miles southwest of downtown Miami, served fewer and fewer students until it was less than half full. In many districts, this would be a problem. In Miami-Dade, this was an opportunity. The district drilled into surveys asking what students and parents wanted; looked at districtwide application numbers to see what programs were in demand; considered what potential partnerships and resources were available.

In 2014, it opened BioTECH High, co-located inside the middle school.

To do it, the district secured a $10.1 million federal magnet schools grant. It strengthened an existing partnership with Zoo Miami. It forged new partnerships with Everglades National Park and Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden. The response? BioTECH High began with 110 students. Last year it had 400. Now it’s drawing 600 applications a year for 200 slots, including the occasional applicant from out of state. One student gets up at 4 a.m. to catch three buses and a train to make it to school by 7:20 a.m.

Meanwhile, Richmond Heights Middle has improved its state grade to a B.

From the district side, nothing better tells the story of Miami-Dade’s transformation than magnet mania.

In 2010, the district had 41,251 students in magnet schools, 11.9 percent of total enrollment. In 2018-19, it had 72,194 students in 114 magnets, fully 1 in 5. These aren’t the magnets of old, created to spur integration. These are theme-based vehicles for relevance, engagement, ownership, achievement. Dozens of them have earned national honors, including designations as National Blue Ribbon Schools, merit awards from Magnet Schools of America, and high rankings on the annual list of best high schools from U.S. News & World Report.

STEM? How quaint. Miami-Dade’s science magnets include BEAT (Bio-Medical Environmental Agricultural Technology), BEAM (Biomedical Environmental and Medical), STIR (Science Technology and Investigative Research) and COAST (Ocean Academy of Science & Technology). Its arts magnets include schools focused on film, interior design, and fashion design. Its health magnets include programs in veterinary science, pre-medicine, and sports medicine. Business magnets? Take your pick: Banking, financial technology, digital marketing, international business, or global trade and logistics.

There’s a magnet for aviation, for architecture, for construction design. For legal studies, multimedia entertainment technology, homeland security. There’s iPrep, iCode, iMed. There’s a single-gender 6-12 school for young women, and another for young men. There are separate international studies magnets with immersion in Spanish, French, Italian, Haitian-Creole, German. The list goes on.

The district’s embrace of choice has allowed it to do more than expand programming. It’s also mitigated the wrenching community pain that often comes when districts close schools. One former neighborhood school, Mays Community Middle School, is now the Arthur & Polly Mays 6-12 Conservatory of the Arts. Another, Miami Edison Middle School, became iTech@Thomas A. Edison Education Center. “Bittersweet” is how the Miami Times, Miami’s century-old black newspaper, called the conversion of the latter in 2014. But “bittersweet” is better than “slash and burn.”

Some Miami-Dade magnets have entrance requirements. Many don’t provide transportation. Students and parents are flocking to them anyways.

BioTECH does not have entrance requirements, and its share of low-income students at 62.7 percent is on par with the district average. Its students are expected to publish a scientific paper by the time they graduate. More than half of their teachers are working scientists. Their lab equipment is college caliber. Some are studying the intestinal flora of spider monkeys to develop diets that make captive monkeys less prone to stomach problems. Some are evaluating the potential of plants, like bok choy, to be sustainable sources of vitamins on space voyages.

“Rigorous but relevant hands-on research,” said Principal Daniel Mateo, 37, a chemist turned educator. “That’s the name of the game here.”

Mateo himself was a school choice pioneer. He initially attended high school a block from his house, but then enrolled in a dual enrollment school the district developed with Miami-Dade College. It was newer, and smaller, and the students had to start their own traditions, from yearbook to prom. They did. And loved it.

“Give people what they want,” Mateo said. “That’s the secret sauce.”

 

 

District headquarters. Room 916. 8:30 a.m. Last February, dozens of principals and top district administrators packed into this conference room for a quarterly ritual called DATA/COM. They small talked until 8:49 a.m., when Carvalho made his entrance and bee-lined to the head of the table. The quiet was immediate. After a joke about how happy hour would start early today—as soon as DATA/COM was over—Carvalho called the first principal to a seat at the other end of the table—directly in front of him.

It’s obvious from outside the Miami-Dade district that choice is a defining feature.

It’s obvious from the inside that so is data-driven urgency.

The next four hours were intense. Each principal got two minutes to note which trend lines are headed in the right direction, which are not, and what interventions and supports were being deployed to change that. Behind the superintendent, a digital timer ticked down next to a screen that displayed a dashboard of data for each school.

Carvalho cheered on progress and clearly relayed expectations. “You have a lofty goal of a B this year,” he said to one principal. “Are you going to meet it?” “Yes sir,” the principal said. “The data shows we will.”

If hype about Miami-Dade has fogged its challenges, that dissipates at DATA/COM. One principal noted his school already had 477 students who’d missed 11 or more days. Yet it was also clear in Room 916 that the district is in a rush to meet those challenges. Boasted one top administrator, “We’re not an aircraft carrier … we’re a jet ski.”

At DATA/COM, issues are identified, quickly. Remedies are proposed, quickly. If need be, direction is given, quickly, for processes and protocols to be short circuited, quickly.

One principal told the superintendent she had a cosmetology and hair styling teacher who was stalling on certification. “This is a really hairy issue,” Carvalho joked. The room erupted. A half second for levity. Then, dead serious, “If she’s not certified or certifiable, she needs to go.” But, the principal continued, finding a replacement is difficult given district policy that requires multiple years of field experience, no matter how talented the applicant. Carvalho ordered a policy tweak. Another principal noted little progress with reading proficiency rates at his school, with 52 days left in the school year. The group agreed in this case, it’s time, not talent. On the spot, Carvalho ordered the school day extended for the rest of the year.

DATA/COM is aimed at the most “fragile” schools, and goes hand-in-hand with the work of the district’s Education Transformation Office.

The 65-person office provides intensive instructional support to scores of schools—86 in 2018-19. Many are subject to state requirements for low-performing schools. But the office identifies a broader range in need, gives them help beyond what the state requires, and takes pride in rapid response.

Does it work? The district’s graduation rate has risen sharply to 85.4 percent, but a decade after Carvalho’s appointment remains below the state average of 86.1 percent. An impressive rise in elementary school scores isn’t getting the same traction in middle school. Seventeen Miami-Dade schools, 16 of them predominantly black, sit on the state’s list of 300 lowest performing elementary schools. Another remains on the shorter, more troubling list of persistently low-performing schools. It, too, is predominantly black.

At the same time, Miami-Dade has not had an “F” school in three years. Twenty years ago, it had 26.

Back at the meeting, a principal told Carvalho one especially effective teacher in a key subject area was on maternity leave, and another was on long-term medical leave. Carvalho began his response with a riff on context: The district has 140 openings out of 20,000 teaching positions. That’s down from 300 to 350 in past years. That compares favorably to other big districts in Florida. Still …

“Let’s build a reserve army,” he said. Let’s employ talented teachers, perhaps recent retirees, who’d be willing to work short term. Let’s figure out how to find them. How to best structure the contracts. How to square it with the union. “Let’s see it Monday morning,” he said to his Cabinet.

It was Friday.

No, he continued, before the awkward pause could root. End of next week will work.

 

Long before dawn bathes the palms in soft light, thousands of workers stream from neighborhoods in Little Havana where modest homes are tucked in tight as pastelitos in a Cuban bakery. In the thick of this working-class hum is a private school with Cuban roots that was once harassed by Fidel Castro. He couldn’t kill La Progresiva Presybterian. Now it’s thriving more than ever.

The Miami-Dade district has hundreds of reasons beyond most districts to try and move like a jet ski. La Progresiva and 400 other private schools are among them.

Miami-Dade County had 75,994 students attending 612 private schools in 2017-18, a rate of 17.6 percent. That was the fourth-highest rate among Florida’s 67 districts, and No. 1 among the big districts. At least 41 percent of those students used state scholarship programs to help pay tuition, with some 26,272 using the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship, five times as many as when Carvalho became superintendent. They attended 441 private schools, up from 156 a decade ago.

La Progresiva is led by a former district teacher. Melissa Rego grew up four blocks away, the child of Cuban immigrants, a bank teller and a car mechanic. When she became principal a decade ago, the school had 162 students in grades K-12. Last year it had 672, all using tax credit scholarships.

The director who hired Rego told her to do whatever it takes to propel the school to its potential. So the woman with 1,000 facial gestures behind horn-rimmed glasses became Inspirer-in-Chief. Over and over, she reminds the children of cooks and waitresses and gas station attendants: “You have the ability to do this. We’re going to equip you. You have a future. But you have to grind.”

In many states, it’s big news when lawmakers consider a single school choice bill. In Florida, lawmakers consider a dozen or more every year. In 2014, they created the Gardiner Scholarship for students with special needs. In 2018, they created the Hope Scholarship for bullying victims. This year, they created a voucher that expands income eligibility into the middle class.

Clearly, parents are hungry for options. Increasingly, teachers are too.

Rego, 42, graduated from public school in Miami, got a full ride to Miami-Dade College, and earned a bachelor’s from the University of Miami. Her teaching career began 18 years ago. She started as a sub, working with emotionally disturbed students, then taught four years at a career academy high school. At the invitation of a friend who had become a principal, she headed to an Academica-affiliated charter.

The charter was serving 600 students in a movie theater. The intended building wasn’t completed on time, so teachers and school leaders had to wing it. That they did, successfully, helped Rego understand the power of choice. Students, parents and teachers all chose to be there. All worked harder to make their choice work. They were, Rego said, “invested.”

Rego raised expectations at La Progresiva, making college a fundamental goal. The students looking sharp in green, white, and khaki are descendants of Cubans, Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, Dominicans. Many didn’t fare well in district schools. But at La Progresiva, something allows them to gain momentum. Maybe it’s more nurturing. Maybe it’s more flexibility. Maybe it’s the reminders, from the placards in the front office to weekly chapel, that there’s a shared moral code.

Whatever it is draws teachers, too. Forty percent of La Progresiva’s teachers worked in district schools. Many, like Rego, would make more money there. “But you know what?” she said. “I’m happier here.”

 

 

As president of the Urban League of Greater Miami for 55 years, T. Willard Fair has worked with 10 Miami-Dade superintendents. As former chair of the Florida Board of Education, he’s worked with scores more. Carvalho, Fair said, is “the best I’ve seen anywhere.” Fair said many in Miami-Dade’s black communities feel the same. When he and Carvalho walk down the street in Liberty City, people stop their cars so they can run up and shake Carvalho’s hand. “Not my hand,” Fair said for emphasis. “His hand.”

Fair’s endorsement is telling. Carvalho has bridged “establishment” and “reform” tribes in Miami like no one else. Fair and Bush co-founded that first charter school in Liberty City. Yet it’s easy to find choice-and-accountability stalwarts like Fair who are Carvalho fans. When it appeared Carvalho was headed to New York, Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers praised him. But so did John Kirtley, a longtime leader at the American Federation for Children, a prominent school-choice advocacy group.

The district’s relationship with the teachers union is also telling. As Carvalho repaired the fiscal mess he inherited, he eased tensions with United Teachers of Dade. He avoided laying off teachers, found a way to secure a small raise in 2009, and put annual raises back on track by 2012. At the same time, his administration used a clause in the collective bargaining agreement to re-assign 400 low-performing teachers and, with union cooperation, become the first district in Florida to tap federal Race to the Top funds for merit pay. The union president at the time said Carvalho “might be the best superintendent in the nation.”

Fast forward to 2018, when voters agreed to convert a modest property tax hike into a major teacher pay hike. If Carvalho didn’t get a honeymoon at the beginning of his tenure, he’s getting one now.

In relations with Tallahassee, Carvalho has walked a tight rope. On one hand, he has not hesitated to be critical about the state’s reliance on standardized testing, about state education funding, and about its dictates on teacher evaluations.

On the other hand, he never attacks the operating system as a whole.

Carvalho has not fought the state’s expansion of choice. In fact, he helped persuade the school board to approve a KIPP charter in Liberty City. Among charter advocates, Miami-Dade has a reputation for fairness with authorization and oversight.

Carvalho has not opposed the state’s basic approach to regulatory accountability, either. Instead of resisting, he has focused on meeting the state’s definition of success. In 2017, when Miami-Dade recorded no “F” schools for the first time, Carvalho called a press conference. “Second only to the day I became superintendent, this is my proudest moment,” he said. “Nothing beats being able to say that failure has been eliminated in Miami-Dade.”

 

Thirteen of the top 20 high schools in Florida, according to U.S. News & World Report, are in Miami-Dade.

All 13 are schools of choice.

Ten are magnets. Three are charters. Two of the charters are affiliated with Academica.

Education rankings must be taken with many grains of salt. But the U.S. News list synchs with other evidence that’s hard to ignore—about the degree to which choice is mainstream in Miami-Dade, about the high caliber of many choice schools, about the tsunami that is looking an awful lot like a rising tide.

To be sure, the evolving landscape isn’t entirely peaceful. A feud over the tax hike continues to simmer. The district maintained the money was for the district only. But the charters fought that, given the massive disadvantage it imposes on recruiting and retaining teachers. During the legislative session that ended in May, charter-friendly lawmakers passed a measure that requires districts to share proceeds proportionally from future referenda, and Governor Ron DeSantis signed it into law. But the new law isn’t retroactive.

Rising tensions between the district and charters would be unfortunate, and distracting.

In 2016, Education Cities and Great-Schools released their Education Equality Index, which sought to spotlight cities where low-income students are most likely to attend schools with small achievement gaps, or none at all. Two big cities in Miami-Dade—Hialeah and Miami—finished No. 1 and No. 3. Given the research
on the competitive effects of choice, this shouldn’t be a
surprise. Studies have found positive impacts on district achievement from charter schools, from private school scholarships, from other district options.

The Education Equality Index identified 10 Hialeah schools and 10 Miami schools with the smallest gaps. In Miami, six were charters, including four managed by Academica; and two were magnets, including iPrep, the school designed by Carvalho. In Hialeah, one was a traditional public school, one was a magnet, and the other eight were charters, including seven run by Academica.

All seven were Mater schools, that little network that sprouted in Little Havana.

 

Carvalho isn’t alone on the big wave.

The superintendent once called iPrep, now 10 years old, “my signature school.”It has bean bags, treadmills, Macs, and funky colors. Some rooms have comfy sofas. There’s a room with high tables and a ping pong table. All of it feels, as intended, more like a college than a preK-12 public school with 860 students. “I wanted to build something totally against the grain of public education at the time,” Carvalho said.

Twenty miles away, Ana Garcia is building something totally against the grain now.

“Guys! Choo-choo formation!” At Garcia’s command, a loose knot of people near the turnstiles at Zoo Miami—three adults, five students—put their hands on the back shoulders of the person in front of them and merged into something less locomotive than caterpillar. Sixteen feet proceeded on a motley ramble. Over the next few hours, Garcia, another former teacher from the Miami-Dade district, subtly steered her students toward the goals in their personalized education plans.

Garcia put special focus on three students with autism, including her 9-year-old, Kevin. It’s education savings accounts that make Garcia’s home education cluster—and perhaps, someday, a never-ending array of other clusters—possible. Without them, the parents who’ve entrusted Garcia with their kids would be limited to schools that, despite the best intentions, didn’t work for them.

In the shadow of America’s fifth-biggest district, new forms of educational life are emerging. Florida now boasts the largest education savings account program in the nation, with 11,276 students using them, including 1,469 in Miami-Dade. That doesn’t sound like many. But 20 years ago, there weren’t many students in Miami-Dade charter schools, either.

With iPrep, Carvalho surfed to the edge. He created a boundary-busting school where students learn in their space, at their pace. iPrep students supplement traditional courses with Khan Academy, Florida Virtual School, dual enrollment. For many students, it rocks. iPrep is perpetually A-rated. And Carvalho has sought ways to expand it, by “franchising” it into other district schools. This was, and is, ahead of its time. But given the pace of technological change, Carvalho knows it won’t be much longer.

“Ten to 20 years from now, how will we be teaching kids in America? In Miami-Dade? I think the most honest answer to that question is, we don’t know,” he said. “You have to anticipate a dramatic shift, perhaps the most powerful shift we’ve seen in education in the history of mankind. … Where, when, how, and by whom kids will be taught, will be very different than the reality today.”

Garcia loved teaching in the district. But over a decade, the passion ebbed. For her and for Kevin, it didn’t work. In 2014, after 12 years as a middle school English teacher and curriculum specialist, she called it quits.

Without fanfare, she surfed to the edge, too. She envisions a micro-school, flexible enough to serve home education students, including Kevin and others with special needs. She hasn’t figured out all the details yet. But she’s sure that if she doesn’t, somebody else will.

 

In Miami-Dade, nobody corners the market on good ideas in public education.

Superintendent Carvalho deserves credit for boldly transforming his district. Florida’s redefined public education system gives more entities more power to create more options, and more parents more power to choose them or not. Miami-Dade did not run from this new system. It embraced it, dug deeper, delivered more, even as the education landscape around it became one of the most dynamic and diverse in America. The result is a far different district than existed a decade ago. There is a buzz about Miami-Dade. There is pride in its accomplishments, unity across potential divides, optimism about what’s ahead.

At the same time, the district’s rise didn’t just happen. A long list of providers brought their models and approaches and enthusiasm into a system that gave them the freedom to take a shot. Going forward, more providers will emerge, and more parents will become more demanding. In many cities, this level of competition and customization in public education is still abstract. In Miami, it’s real. The next great innovations are on their way, but who can say from where? Maybe it’ll be the resourceful home-school mom or the talented district teacher. Maybe it’ll be the feisty private school principal, or the hard-charging charter network. Maybe it’ll be the superintendent who shocks everybody, again, by paddling out to the next big wave instead of waiting for it to crash.

Chances are, it’ll be all of the above. And others we can’t yet imagine.

Ron Matus is director of policy and public affairs at Step Up For Students and a former state education reporter for the Tampa Bay Times.

“Lead a life of impact . . . change starts with you.”

These are the pitches to aspiring corps members of Teach for America, the prominent alternate-route teacher-preparation program that trains promising college graduates to lead classrooms in high-need schools throughout the United States. And since its inception in 1990, many alumni of Teach for America, or TFA, have heeded the organization’s call to action. Former TFA teachers are ubiquitous at all levels of education policy and practice nationwide, from leading state departments of education to running for local office in hundreds of jurisdictions, as well as founding schools, charter networks, education startups, and consultancies dedicated to educational improvement and reform.

The organization also has attracted a backlash as its alumni’s influence and footprint have grown, with critics worrying publicly that TFA represents a specific and potentially suspect point of view on how to help schools improve. But does the experience of teaching in low-income schools through TFA affect individuals’ views on education policy and reform? And if so, how?

We surveyed TFA applicants for the 2007–15 cohorts to find out. Our survey targeted the set of applicants who had advanced to the competitive program’s final round of admissions, whom we separated into two groups based on their final scores during the selection process: individuals who scored just above the cutoff point used to admit candidates and participated in the program, and those who just missed the cutoff, were not admitted, and did not participate in TFA. The idea is that since candidates on either side of the admissions cutoff are likely to hold similar incoming beliefs, this approach allows for a rigorous, non-biased estimation of the impact of TFA participation itself. We then compared each group’s responses on a variety of questions regarding inequity, the teaching profession, and strategies for educational improvement. The differences were notable.

TFA participants are more likely to believe larger societal inequities perpetuate income-based differences in educational outcomes and favor investments in elevating the prestige of the teaching profession, early childhood education, and school-based wraparound services to address them. However, they are no more likely than non-participants to believe that certain politically charged policy levers—including school-choice policies, Common Core standards, teacher merit pay, and teachers unions—can effectively reduce inequity. On the whole, they believe it is possible to provide all children with access to a high-quality education, and that part of the solution is within the grasp of effective teachers. On average, relative to non-participants, the corps of TFA teachers and alumni with classroom experience in some of the most struggling schools in the country appear to be more optimistic that the challenge of educational inequity can be overcome—though not necessarily along the lines that either reformers or critics might have predicted.

Preparing to lead in the classroom—and beyond

Since its launch in 1990, Teach for America has fielded more than 680,000 applications and trained 68,000 teachers, who have taught more than 10 million American schoolchildren. This national-service program launched with a two-pronged theory of change: in the short term, TFA teachers are to effect positive change in the classroom during their two years of service; in the longer term, TFA strives to have a systemic impact by influencing the values and future careers of those who participate.

The program differs from other teacher-preparation providers in its selectivity, duration, and organizational mission. TFA recruits primarily high-achieving college seniors to serve as teachers for two years in low-income schools. Applicants undergo a rigorous selection process, with an acceptance rate of roughly 12 percent, currently comprising two rounds: an online application and a daylong in-person interview. Our analysis includes only applicants who advance to the interview stage. Per TFA’s selection criteria, these are applicants with a strong academic track record, demonstrated leadership skills, and a commitment to service.

Once accepted, TFA participants are assigned to one of roughly 50 regions nationwide; their subjects and grade levels vary. After summer training, TFA teachers lead classrooms in high-need schools. In the average TFA placement school during our study years, 80 percent of students were eligible for free or reduced-price lunch and 90 percent of students identified as racial or ethnic minorities. Participants receive ongoing training and support from both the organization and local higher-education institutions during their two-year commitment.

Such alternative hands-on training programs, which quickly place teachers in the classroom, are in contrast to traditional programs, in which years of college or graduate-school coursework culminate in a classroom teaching experience. The “alternative” approaches have grown in popularity and now account for 30 percent of the 26,000 teacher-preparation programs in the United States, such as those run by The New Teacher Project, the YES Prep charter network, and the Relay Graduate School of Education. While the annual enrollment for each of these programs is not publicly available, our back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest there are collectively at least as many alumni of these TFA-like programs as there are alumni of TFA itself, if not more.

However, teaching through TFA may be a different experience than teaching through other alternative pathways, in part because of its robust alumni network and explicit goal of influencing education from both inside and outside the classroom. A spinoff organization, Leadership for Educational Equity, encourages and supports alumni looking to run for office or gain decisionmaking power in their communities through board appointments or other public-service roles, for example. In sum, TFA alumni are supported with alumni programming and networks that aim to position them to influence politics and policy through various leadership roles: in classrooms and schools, in state legislatures and departments of education, in startups and charter networks, and in unions (see “Alumni With Influence”). Our study is the first large-scale empirical investigation of how participation shapes alumni views on education policy.

 

Data and Methods

To assess these attitudes, we asked applicants who advanced to the final stage of the TFA admissions process between 2007 and 2013 to take part in an online survey, which launched in 2015. All of the TFA participants within these application cycles would have finished their TFA assignment at the time of the study. Of that group of 91,752 unique individuals, 27 percent started the survey and 21 percent completed it, yielding complete responses from 19,332 people.

The survey contained a wide range of questions on educational inequity and reform. In particular, we asked individuals to: share their beliefs on why there are income-based differences in educational outcomes; assess the promise of politically charged educational initiatives, including charter schools, vouchers, preschool, standardized testing, and teachers unions; and share their views on the extent to which we could reasonably expect teachers to help students improve under challenging circumstances. For example, survey participants were asked to rate their agreement on a scale of 1 to 5 with statements like, “In the U.S. today, students from low-income backgrounds have the same educational opportunities as students from high-income backgrounds.”

We then link those responses with TFA administrative data, including demographic information and scores they were assigned at the end of the selection process. Critically, a final-stage applicant’s chances of being offered a spot in the program depend heavily on whether his or her selection score is above a specific numerical cutoff that varies from year to year and is known to neither applicants nor the program staff. The vast majority of those with a score above that cutoff receive an offer, while only a fraction of those scoring below it do. As a result, the probability that an applicant ends up teaching through TFA also jumps sharply at that cutoff: those who score just above the admissions cutoff are 30 percentage points more likely to participate in TFA than those who score just below (see Figure 1).

It is this feature of the selection process that makes it possible for us to estimate the causal effect of TFA participation on the education policy preferences of applicants. In particular, we can compare the attitudes of applicants who scored just above the selection cutoff with those who scored just below it. When making this comparison, we take into account that not everyone scoring above the cutoff actually taught with TFA, while some scoring below the cutoff did. Because the actual difference in participation rates across the cutoff was 30 percentage points, this amounts to multiplying the differences between the two groups of applicants by a factor of roughly three.

Results

Overall, we find that TFA participants are more likely than comparable non-participants to believe that societal issues, not differences in the actions or values of students from low-income backgrounds, exacerbate income-based differences in academic achievement (see Figure 2). Relative to non-participants, TFA participants are about 10 percentage points more likely to disagree with the statements that “poor families do not value education as much as richer families”; that “poor students have low motivation or will to learn”; and that “the amount a student can learn is primarily related to the student’s family background.” Rather, TFA participants attribute income-based differences in academic achievement to larger societal inequities; for example, they were 8.5 percentage points more likely to agree that “systemic injustices perpetuate inequity throughout society.” Further, we find that relative to similar non-participants, TFA participants are more likely to believe in the potential of teachers to engender positive change and are more optimistic that the income-based educational opportunity gap is a solvable problem.

With respect to current policies designed to reduce educational inequities, we find TFA participation does not change individuals’ views on several highly politicized reforms. For example, we observe no difference between participants and non-participants in terms of support for unions, Common Core curriculum standards, performance pay for teachers, and allocating school funding based on student need (see Figure 3). However, an important exception is that TFA participation appears to decrease support for school choice. TFA participants are 12 percentage points less likely to support the “expansion of high-quality charter schools” and 11 percentage points less likely to support vouchers to allow low-income children to attend private schools, compared to similar non-participants.

Interestingly, TFA participants are less critical of standardized testing than non-participants: though a majority of both groups agree “we should reduce dependence on standardized testing,” participants are 8 percentage points less likely to agree with the statement than non-participants. In addition, we find evidence that TFA increases optimism about teachers’ ability to foster and support student learning, regardless of student background (see Figure 4). Specifically, TFA participants are more likely to express confidence in students’ and teachers’ potential: they are 8 percentage points more likely to agree that student intelligence is “capable of changing a great deal”; 8 percentage points more likely to agree that “if teachers try really hard they can get through to even the most difficult or unmotivated students”; and 7 percentage points less likely to agree that “in poor communities, there really is very little a teacher can do to ensure that most of his/her students achieve at a high level.”

These findings are at odds with what we might expect to observe if participating in TFA left teachers feeling jaded, and suggest that participating in TFA increases optimism about the role of teachers in reducing income-based differences in academic achievement. Consistent with this view, TFA participants are 11 percentage points more likely to agree that “it is possible for all children in the U.S. to have the opportunity to attain an excellent education” and 6 percentage points more likely to support policies that elevate the prestige of the teaching profession. They also are more likely to support investments in wraparound services. Specifically, TFA participants are 7 percentage points more likely to support the broadening and improving of wraparound services, such as counseling and nutrition support.

Are these opinions really a function of teaching through TFA, or do they result from merely being admitted to the program? We further analyze our data in order to isolate the effect of the TFA teaching experience itself on alumni views.

First, we use the same cutoff-based research design to study the effects of being admitted to TFA, regardless of whether those who were admitted actually participated. If it is TFA participation, rather than admission, that causes shifts in participants’ views, we would expect this analysis to reveal smaller effects across the board. That is exactly what we find. Second, we focus only on applicants who were admitted to TFA and directly compare the views of those who did and did not participate. In making these comparisons, we adjust for observable differences in the demographic and educational backgrounds of individuals in the two groups, including their age, gender, college grade-point average, socioeconomic status, and religiosity. We detect statistically significant differences in the views of participants and non-participants across 15 of our 19 outcomes that are broadly consistent with the differences we documented above when we compared applicants who were barely admitted to those who were barely rejected. On the whole, this suggests that experience in the classroom through TFA, not just admission, shapes individuals’ views on education.

Conclusion

To our knowledge, our study is the first to examine how the experience of teaching through TFA in underserved communities shapes individuals’ views on educational inequity and reform. Because TFA teachers work in exactly the type of schools where educational disparities between low- and high-income children are most prominent, these teachers hold important perspectives on what causes, and can close, inequality in academic achievement.

In a separate analysis, our survey data also reveal how teaching through TFA affects participants’ understanding of economic fairness. We find that TFA teachers, who all have the social and economic advantages of being high-achieving college-educated adults, are more able to see through the lens of the disadvantaged as a result of their TFA experience. They take on attitudes that are closer to those of the economic “have-nots” in the United States regarding a perceived lack of fairness of the social and political status quo, and tend to maintain these attitudes over time.

After nearly three decades, the impacts of this national civilian-service program’s focus on education are far-reaching, with alumni leading state education departments in Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Rhode Island; founding prominent charter school networks like the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), IDEA Public Schools, and YES Prep Public Schools; and working to develop education and other policy as elected officials in states like Colorado and Nebraska. These alumni hardly share identical points of view. Our research makes clear, however, that the kinds of experiences they had with TFA do influence beliefs about inequity and the tools by which to advance change.

The next step is to examine whether these attitudinal and belief shifts translate to behavioral changes, such as being more likely to vote and be active in civic life. It remains to be seen whether the perception that there is greater social injustice translates to greater activism on a broader scale, as well as efforts to build a sturdier economic and social ladder for disadvantaged individuals to climb.

Katharine M. Conn is senior research scientist at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at Columbia University; Virginia S. Lovison is a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education; and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo is an assistant professor of political science and public policy at University of California, Berkeley.

 

Alumni with Influence Former Teach for America corps members hold prominent leadership roles in education, public policy, and advocacy organizations. Jeff Riley, Class of 1993 Former school principal and receiver-superintendent of Lawrence, Mass., Public Schools. Current Role: Massachusetts Commissioner of Elementary & Secondary Education.         Penny Schwinn, Class of 2004 Former member of the Sacramento Board of Education and founder of the Capitol Collegiate Academy charter school. Current Role: Tennessee State Education Commissioner.         Tony Vargas, Class of 2007 Former member of the Omaha Public Schools Board of Education. Current role: Nebraska State Senator, District 7.         John White, Class of 1999 Former deputy chancellor of the NYC Department of Education, former superintendent of the Louisiana Recovery School District. Current Role: Louisiana State Superintendent of Education.         Brittany Packnett, Class of 2007 Former executive director, TFAin St. Louis. Current role: Activist and co-founder of Campaign Zero.         Jason Kamras, Class of 1996 Longtime teacher in District of Columbia Public Schools. 2005 National Teacher of the Year. Current Role: Superintendent of Richmond, Va., Public Schools.         Angelica Infante-Green, Class of 1994 Former superintendent of instruction in New York State. Current Role: Rhode Island Commissioner of Education.         Alex Caputo-Pearl, Class of 1990 Longtime teacher at Compton High School in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Current Role: President of United Teachers of Los Angeles.         Photo credits from top to bottom: New Bedford Public Schools, Tennessee Department of Education, AP Photo/Nat Harnik, Advocate staff photo by Bill Feig, Courtesy Brittany Packnett, Dean Hoffmeyer/Richmond Times-Dispatch, Jonathan Wiggs/The Boston Globe via Getty Images, Al Seib/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images.

In 2018, the high-school graduation rate in Newburgh, New York, climbed to 78 percent, up from 66 percent just five years earlier. It was happy news for the tough-minded city about an hour’s drive north of Manhattan, known more in recent decades for its high rates of violent crime than the stately homes that line its parks and thoroughfares. About two thirds of the school district’s 12,000 students are from low-income families, and nearly one in six are English language learners. Connecting more students to diplomas and productive postsecondary work or study was a critical goal for the district and the city as a whole.

Central to this success was Newburgh’s use of online credit-recovery classes.

For decades, high-school students who failed a required class were presented with two unappealing options: either repeat the course next year or during summer school. But in recent years, online credit recovery has emerged as a third way. Students who fail a course can enroll in a computer-based version of the class without waiting, quickly progress through required material, earn the missing credits, and, in some cases, improve their grade-point average. When implemented well, online credit-recovery classes can be a lifeline to struggling students, providing personalized learning experiences and a path to graduation. But these classes also may be vulnerable to abuse—not only by students keen to post a positive outcome, but also by schools and districts eager to raise high-school graduation rates.

That was apparently the case in Newburgh, where an investigation by the local district attorney’s office uncovered myriad abuses by educators that artificially inflated student performance, including changing grades, giving students unlimited opportunities to take identical tests and quizzes, and awarding credits to students who did not actually attend class. In response, the district has stopped offering online credit-recovery classes and launched its own investigation into the practice.

However, “we understand instructional technology is not going anywhere,” Superintendent Roberto Padilla recently said during a local school-board meeting. “We need to give students opportunities, not take them away, but we need to partner with organizations that meet our needs. We’ll be looking for programs that provide tighter structures.”

What actually happens during online credit-recovery courses? A look at recent headlines reveals reasons for concern. The flexibility of online credit-recovery programs can help educators meet students’ diverse needs, but it may also hamper efforts to ensure that coursework is rigorous. That may undermine students’ longer-term success.

An enticing solution 

Between 2011 and 2017, the U.S. graduation rate rose to an all-time high of 85 percent from 79 percent. During that same period, average math and reading test scores on college-entrance exams and the National Assessment of Educational Progress remained flat. If more U.S. students are graduating but these same students on average are not showing increased academic achievement, something else must explain the phenomenon. Either the bar to graduate high school has been lowered, or schools are providing more supports in order to help more students meet the standard. How does the rapid rise of online credit-recovery programs fit into the picture?

The concept of credit recovery is not new: high-school students have long had the opportunity to retake a failed course. But in length and format, those makeup classes weren’t dramatically different from the initial course. That has changed in the past decade, as online programs taught with varying levels of adult supervision have proliferated and, in many cases, replaced the traditional model of credit recovery.

That change is largely attributable to the confluence of two forces, said John Watson, the founder of Evergreen Education Group, an education research and consulting company focused on digital learning. First, federal legislation starting with the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 set clear incentives for high schools to boost graduation rates, because they faced punishing consequences if their rates were too low. In allowing struggling students to quickly make up courses, online credit recovery emerged as one enticing tool to keep more students on the path to graduation. Current law under the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 established some flexibility on that measure but also requires intervention at schools with graduation rates below 67 percent. The pressure to improve graduation rates seems unlikely to lessen anytime soon.

Second, through programs like the ConnectED initiative, federal agencies and private companies made a multibillion-dollar investment to improve broadband access and technology in schools and libraries nationwide. A vast and lucrative education-technology market emerged, offering digital products and programs that promised to provide students with more personalized instruction. At the same time, educators were exploring new types of lessons that did the same, trading top-down, lockstep curricula for more flexible models that could meet the changing needs of individual students from day to day.

Online credit-recovery programs have ridden the crest of all these trends, combining personalized learning and digital tools in response to a nationwide call to increase high-school graduation rates. Today, some 89 percent of high schools nationwide offer at least one credit-recovery course, and as many as 15 percent of all students take such a class, according to a U.S. Department of Education survey of school leaders in the 2014–15 school year. Such coursework is more prevalent at schools serving larger numbers of low-income students than those in wealthier communities (see Figure 1). The formats of those courses differ: 71 percent of schools offer courses online, 46 percent support blended courses that combine direct instruction with online work, and 42 percent provide traditional in-person classroom instruction.

 

“The horse is out of the barn”

Despite the widespread use of credit-recovery programs, remarkably little is known about how schools adopt and implement them and whether students are actually benefiting from their use. In 2015, the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences conducted a research review but was “unable to draw any research-based conclusions about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of credit recovery programs.” In the 2019 “Building a Grad Nation” report, researchers from Civic and the Johns Hopkins School of Education wrote that “given the lack of comprehensive knowledge on the rigor of the most widely adopted credit recovery programs, it is difficult to understand the true impact of these courses.”

Among researchers’ greatest concerns is that online credit-recovery courses lack rigor and are easy for students or educators to exploit. “We don’t know a lot about the rigor and what we do know seems to indicate that the rigor isn’t all that stringent,” said Matthew Atwell, a researcher at Civic who coauthored the report.

In a recent study, researchers Carolyn J. Heinrich and Jennifer Darling-Aduana examined online courses in the Milwaukee Public Schools. They found that by the 2016–17 school year, 40 percent of graduating seniors had completed at least one online course, the majority of which were taken for the purpose of credit recovery. The study found positive effects for online students on the number of credits earned and whether they graduated high school and enrolled in college. However, in a related study, they found mostly negative associations between online course taking and students’ math and reading test scores. The results suggest that “on average, online course-taking is not . . . reflecting real learning, and some students may even be set back in their learning,” the authors wrote.

Through classroom observations and interviews with students and teachers, the study uncovered several potential explanations for the uneven learning gains, such as disengaged students using Google to copy and paste answers to assignments and limited interaction between students and teachers. “If the students were already struggling in a traditional classroom, most likely they’re going to need more help, not less,” Heinrich said in an interview.

A 2016 study by the American Institutes for Research compared student performance in online and in-person credit-recovery classes for Algebra I among a group of 1,200 high-school freshmen in Chicago. Two thirds of online students passed the class, compared to three quarters of in-person students. Online students also were more likely to describe the course as “difficult” and scored lower on an end-of-course test than students assigned to a traditional face-to-face classroom. However, their longer-term outcomes were similar: they earned comparable grades in subsequent math classes, and about 47 percent of students from each group earned their diplomas on time.

“For most kids that fail courses, who are probably at risk in a number of different ways . . . an online course, in the absence of really phenomenal technological advances, is probably not enough to help them regain content that they haven’t gotten,” Jessica Heppen, the study’s lead author, said in an interview. “So I do have a lot of concerns about the widespread use of online courses for credit recovery with so many unanswered questions.”

Still, Heppen acknowledged that online credit recovery, now used in most high schools, is unlikely to go away soon. “I always say, ‘the horse is out of the barn.’ This is happening anyway and so I don’t think there’s a way to kind of pull back on it, but I do think it makes sense to exercise some caution and to think about individual kids and their needs.”

 

A booming market

Most online credit-recovery courses are developed, maintained, and sold to districts by private for-profit companies. Two of the largest vendors are Apex Learning, which is used in nearly 2,000 school districts, and Edgenuity, in 8 of the nation’s 10 largest districts. Districts typically pay about $250 for each student who accesses the online courses, though costs vary significantly among vendors based on the size of the district.

The process by which districts vet potential providers of online courses varies. In some cases, districts form committees to review the online courses. In other instances, the process is much less formal. For example, Houston Independent School District “had several students from across the district try out different courses across different platforms,” said Maria Bonilla, the district’s virtual-instruction program manager. “The students selected Apex as the one they preferred over the other ones.”

Other districts essentially take a trial-and-error approach, contracting with a company until concerns about rigor, quality, or cost prompt them to go shopping for a new provider. In Memphis, Tennessee, Shelby County Schools has gone through three or four vendors since 2008, according to Vinson Thompson, the director of online learning.

Such informality extends to the regulatory level as well: on the whole, state leaders have set few standards for online credit-recovery companies to meet. An analysis last year from the Education Commission of the States found that “relatively few states have adopted state-level credit-recovery policies, including definitions of and mechanisms for regulating credit recovery.” And a Slate investigation in 2017 found that “while many state education departments have started to review online education providers, few bar districts from using companies that don’t meet their standards.”

With minimal state guidelines and a limited research base, many districts choosing among online course providers are left to rely on the information provided by the companies themselves. That can be a problem for districts that don’t know what to look for, said Christine Voelker, the K–12 program director for Quality Matters, a nonprofit organization that reviews online courses.

“There are providers who have marketing teams and they’re good at what they do,” she said. “They might have flashy content, and things that will wow you and things that are very much eye candy. If you’re not knowledgeable about what you are looking for, you’re going to fall into that trap of saying, ‘this is a really cool-looking course,’ but it might not be hitting those learning objectives that you want your students to hit.”

Indeed, reviewing some of the vendors’ marketing materials reveals claims that, at best, lack context, and at worst, appear designed to mislead. One promotional video on Edgenuity’s website touts a graduation rate that “nearly quadrupled” at Dearborn Magnet High School in Michigan in the four years that its courses were implemented. Not mentioned is the fact that Dearborn Magnet is a small alternative school that graduates fewer than 10 students each year. Or that the graduation rate has since swung wildly up and down even as the school continues to use Edgenuity.

“For that particular school, that was something to celebrate,” said Deborah Rayow, a vice president of Edgenuity, when asked about Dearborn Magnet. While the company’s website does feature independent research studies of some of its other digital products, those focused on its credit-recovery programs were conducted internally and often provide little explanation of methodology.

 

Implementation matters

The vendor chosen by school districts is just one of several factors that affect students’ experiences in online credit-recovery courses. How teachers interact with and support online credit-recovery courses has major effects on student success, as do district and state policies that dictate the grading and oversight of such classes.

Indeed, the resources that schools put in place to support online learning may have a much greater impact on students’ success than the particular vendor a school chooses.  For starters, teachers need technical training on how to use the online platform. They need to have strategies to keep kids engaged and ensure students are actually doing the work instead of using an Internet search engine to look up and copy the answers. And schools need to keep class sizes manageable so that teachers can provide individualized feedback and support. In the Milwaukee study, for example, researchers observed teachers struggling to manage large groups of students, saw scant substantive interaction between teachers and students, and noted that students were frequently distracted by their cell phones or other websites.

John Watson of the Evergreen Education Group said in most cases, the biggest determining factor is the quality of the student-teacher relationship.

There is also tremendous variation in what district and state credit-recovery policies, standards, and regulations look like—if they exist at all. That makes it nearly impossible to know just what instruction looks like in practice from high school to high school. Some programs are condensed face-to-face classes, others are completely online, and still others are “blended,” in which students work in a computer lab with support from a certified teacher. In some districts, courses are graded on a pass/fail basis, while in others students can earn scores up to 100 percent. Some districts cap the number of credit-recovery courses a student can time at one time, while others don’t. Some districts require students take paper-and-pencil assessments proctored by a teacher, while others allow testing to be completed at home on a computer. Some online classes are used to make up parts of a course, while others are designed as a wholesale replacement.

This variation is by design. One of the main appeals of credit-recovery programs is their flexibility and adaptability. Particularly when using online platforms, students can move through the course at their own pace and can skip large sections if they do well enough on a pre-assessment. Teachers and administrators are typically given wide latitude in deciding, for example, how many attempts students are given to pass a quiz and what score is needed to pass.

But this key strength can present a vulnerability. Credit recovery, including online programs, has been at the center of several scandals in recent years.

In Newburgh, a former teacher and coach lodged complaints with the local district attorney’s office and state education department in 2017, alleging massive problems with chronic absenteeism and manipulation of student-athlete records at the district’s high school, the Newburgh Free Academy. A resultant investigation culminated in a damning 89-page report by a grand jury that a local judge released to the public in April 2019, detailing major misuse by district staff of two software programs: Apex, the online credit-recovery course software, and Infinite Campus, which was used to track attendance.

In precise detail, the report documented the ways teachers and administrators at district high schools misused the Apex credit-recovery software to boost graduation rates artificially. The grand jury found that between 2016 and 2018, dozens of teachers overseeing the program made a total of more than 1,000 grade overrides to scored assessments. One teacher had altered students’ grades 325 times and some grades had been changed nearly five months after a test was taken. Students were allowed an unlimited number of opportunities to retake tests and quizzes. In a large number of cases, students had completed the online courses in an “unusually short” amount of time: one student completed the course in 18 minutes. And dozens of students earned course credit despite not meeting attendance requirements.

By design, Apex can be customized by educators, just as they customize traditional classroom instruction to fit student needs, according to Apex Learning’s chief executive officer, Cheryl Vedoe. She said that “almost every feature” of an online program can be turned on or off by the course administrator.

“When they’re teaching the traditional material, teachers every day make those judgment calls, when they’re grading student work and they’re giving students the opportunity to make things up,” she said. “You know, teachers as professionals do that every day with a more traditional curriculum.”

The Newburgh report, however, stated that testimony from teachers “revealed blind administration of a program of learning that ultimately served as a disservice to the students most in need of it . . . but which nonetheless serve the Newburgh Free Academy’s interests in increased graduation rates. The motivation to continue to operate the program in such a way is therefore clear.”

A spokesperson for the Newburgh school district declined to comment for this story, citing an ongoing investigation by the New York State Education Department. But the district has shared details of its response through public meetings, including a detailed presentation in April that notes it suspended its use of Apex and is designing a “second chance” evening school for students who need credit-recovery options.

“So much we don’t know”

It’s important not to conflate the abuse of credit recovery that occurred in Newburgh with well-intentioned efforts that may or may not actually help students. But the Newburgh example demonstrates the many ways online credit-recovery programs may function without academic integrity and ultimately undermine, rather than support, learning.

In recent years, dispatches from North Carolina, Florida, San Diego, and Washington, D.C.—to name a few—have described programs operated with little oversight and few safeguards to ensure students are being properly graded and awarded credit. Some states are starting to take action: the North Carolina State Board of Education, for example, is requiring all districts to develop clear policies for credit recovery.

Tougher still is the question of academic quality. The proliferation of online credit recovery is a logical development given the incentives that are baked in to current education policies. The era of accountability that No Child Left Behind ushered in—and that the Every Student Succeeds Act has continued to a lesser extent—placed tremendous pressure on districts to raise graduation rates, or face consequences. At the same time, states have mostly failed to put in place the kind of oversight and regulations that would ensure rigor and quality are not sacrificed in the pursuit of higher graduation rates. The result is that states are incentivizing districts to boost graduation rates while placing a great deal of trust in districts and private vendors to preserve rigor and quality in the process.

There are potential tools to ensure rigor that states and districts could explore. Three states, for example, require students to pass an objective, external exam to recover credit for a course: Georgia, Louisiana, and New York. But most leave it to districts to set policies around vetting, adopting, and implementing credit-recovery courses.

States also could expand their use of end-of-course exams, which require students to show they have mastered certain knowledge and skills in required subjects. While far from universal, such exams have been used in 32 states and the District of Columbia since they first appeared in the 1990s, and are intended to serve as an external yardstick for specific coursework, helping to set and uphold academic standards.

An August 2019 study by Adam Tyner and Matthew Larsen found end-of-course exams generally positively correlated with high-school graduation rates. The exams “can be deployed without ‘stakes’ but with their results publicly reported so as to tamp down on grade inflation or abuse of credit-recovery programs,” the authors wrote.

It’s likely that many school districts are using credit recovery thoughtfully, with the necessary supports and resources in place to maximize student success and hold students accountable for their learning. But without additional information about how these programs are being adopted and implemented, “there’s just so much we don’t know,” Atwell, the Civic researcher, said.

As for the software companies, they say there’s only so much they can do. Edgenuity and other vendors can’t dictate the use of their materials “any more than a publisher of a textbook could,” said Rayow.

“I think anyone who has been in school has been in classes where textbooks were used for good and where textbooks were used for not so good,” she said. “The same is true for digital education.”

David Loewenberg is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.

With the 2020 presidential election campaign now underway, education-policy proposals previously at the edge of the political debate are entering the mainstream. On the Republican side, the Trump administration has intensified its campaign for school choice. U.S. education secretary Betsy DeVos is asking Congress to enact $5 billion in tax credits annually to encourage donations to state-approved organizations providing scholarships that, if the state allows, could be used to attend private schools. Meanwhile, several Democratic candidates are calling for tuition-free college, an idea proposed in 2016 by Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont but rejected that year by the nominees of both political parties. Democratic candidates are also promising dramatic increases to the federal fiscal commitment to K–12 education. Responding to recent teacher strikes for higher pay, Senator Kamala Harris of California proposes federal funding of a $13,500 average pay raise for teachers over their current annual salaries—at an estimated cost to taxpayers of $315 billion over 10 years. Not to be outdone, former vice president Joe Biden has called for a tripling of federal funding for schools serving the economically disadvantaged.

The tenor of these provocative ideas is resonating with the American public. Support for increasing teacher pay is higher now than at any point since 2008, and a majority of the public favors more federal funding for local schools. Free college commands the support of three in five Americans. Support for school vouchers has shifted upward, and tax-credit scholarships along the lines proposed by the current administration now command the support of a sizable majority of adults.

These are just a few of the findings of the 13th annual Education Next survey of public opinion, administered in May 2019. The poll’s nationally representative sample of 3,046 adults includes an oversampling of teachers, African Americans, and those who identify themselves as Hispanic. (All estimates of results are adjusted for non-response and oversampling of specific populations. See methods sidebar for further details.) This year, for the first time, we also surveyed a sample of 415 high-school students and their parents (see sidebar, “What Do Students Think about Education Policy?”).

On several issues, our analysis teases out nuances in public opinion by asking variations of questions to randomly selected segments of survey participants. We divided respondents at random into two or more segments and asked each group a different version of the same general question. For example, we told half of the respondents—but not the other half—how much the average teacher in their state is paid before asking whether salaries should increase, decrease, or remain about the same. By comparing the differences in the opinions of the two groups, we are able to estimate the extent to which relevant information influences public thinking on teacher pay.

In this essay, we report and interpret the poll’s major findings. Detailed results are available here. Following are the survey’s top-10 findings:

1. Vouchers and tax credits. The percentage of American adults favoring vouchers that help low-income students cover the cost of private-school tuition has risen to 49% in 2019 from 37% in 2016, and support for tax credits for donations to organizations that give scholarships to low-income students has edged upward to 58% from 53% over this same time period.

2. Charters. Public support for charter schools has climbed back to 48% from a low of 39% in 2017. Sixty-one percent of Republicans currently espouse charter schools, but only 40% of Democrats do. Only 33% of white Democrats favor charters, though 55% of African American Democrats and 47% of Hispanic Democrats back them.

3. Teacher pay. Support for teacher pay hikes is now higher than at any point since 2008. Among those provided information about current salary levels in their state, 56% say teacher salaries should rise—a 20-percentage-point jump over the approval level seen just two years ago. Among those not provided this information, 72% say salaries should increase, 5 percentage points higher than in 2018.

4. Spending. Public support for higher levels of school spending has also grown over the past two years. Among those not told current levels of expenditure, 62% think K–12 spending should increase, 8 percentage points higher than in 2017. Although only 50% of those told current levels favor an increase, that level still constitutes an increase of 11 percentage points over 2017.

5. Federal, state, and local spending. The public is more supportive of K–12 expenditure by the federal government than by state and local governments. Two thirds of those informed of the share currently contributed by the federal government say it should foot more of the bill. But only 36% of those told how much the local district contributes think districts should ramp up their expenditures. Half thought the state should contribute more, once they were informed of current levels.

6. Common Core. Support for the Common Core State Standards is rebounding. Overall, 50% of Americans endorse use of the standards in their state, up from 41% two years ago. The resurgence in support is strongest among Republicans, leaping to 46% from 32% over the past two years.

7. Opinion on local schools. More Americans have a positive view of their local public schools than at any point since 2007. Today, 60% of respondents give their local public schools a grade of A or B, a 9-percentage-point rise over last year.

8. Free college. Sixty percent of Americans endorse the idea of making public four-year colleges free, and even more (69%) want free public two-year colleges. Democrats are especially supportive of the concept (79% approval for four-year and 85% for two-year). Only 35% of Republicans back free tuition for four-year colleges and 47% favor the policy for two-year colleges.

9. Opinion on colleges. Americans think more highly of U.S. public four-year colleges and universities than of K–12 schools. More than twice as many Americans grade public four-year institutions nationwide with an A or B (58%) than hand out the high marks to K–12 schools (24%). The nation’s private four-year colleges and universities draw even higher esteem, with 66% of the general public rating them with grades of A or B. The share of Republicans who grade public four-year colleges across the country with these top marks is 17 percentage points lower than for Democrats, at 49% and 66%, respectively.

The public is even more generous in its evaluation of higher-education institutions in their own state. Seventy-six percent of respondents grade public four-year colleges in their state with an A or B. Similarly, 79% grade private four-year colleges in their state with these top marks.

10. Student perspectives. Students have a lower opinion of their schools than do their parents. Seventy percent of parents give their local public schools an A or B grade, and a vast majority of 82% assign their child’s high school those top marks. Among students, these proportions drop by 15 percentage points for the local public schools and 13 percentage points for their own high school. However, students are less likely than parents to think that schools should take additional security measures. Seventy-seven percent of parents, but only 63% of their children, would install metal detectors at every school. Similarly, 81% of parents, but only 73% of their high-school students, would screen all students for severe emotional distress.

 

School Choice in the Trump Era

Though school choice was but a minor issue in the 2016 election, the Trump administration has sought to give it center stage in the national political debate over education. When the president nominated Betsy DeVos, chair of a pro–school choice advocacy group, as education secretary, her confirmation divided the Senate so evenly the vice president had to break the tie with a vote in her favor. DeVos has nonetheless become one of the longest-serving members of Trump’s cabinet and, far from retreating on the issue of school choice, she is backing a bill that would provide a federal tax credit for donations to organizations providing scholarships for private-school tuition or other state-approved educational expenses. DeVos says the law, if enacted, would give “hundreds of thousands of students across the country the power to find the right fit for their education.” The new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives makes it clear no such law will win a majority on their watch. Nor has the Republican-controlled Senate taken action on DeVos’s proposed school-choice legislation.

Has DeVos’s steadfast support for educational choice had an impact outside the Beltway? Have Democratic leaders succeeded in swaying public opinion against choice programs? Or, has opinion simply polarized along party lines?

To explore these questions, we looked at trends in public opinion between 2016 and 2019 on four school-choice policies: 1) targeted vouchers limited to students from low-income families; 2) universal vouchers for all families; 3) tax credits for contributors to organizations that give scholarships to low-income families; and 4) charter schools. We find, somewhat to our surprise, that public opinion about several school-choice policies has shifted closer to the views held by Betsy DeVos. But on one topic—charter schools—we see polarization along party lines (see Figure 1).

Targeted vouchers. The program to which DeVos devoted so much of her public life before becoming secretary is the least popular of the four school-choice programs. In 2016, a near majority of the public opposed “a proposal [to] give low-income families with children in public schools a wider choice, by allowing them to enroll their children in private schools instead, with government helping to pay the tuition.” Forty-eight percent said they were against targeted vouchers, and only 37% favored them. The remainder took a neutral position, saying they neither supported nor opposed the policy. A year later, approval for targeted vouchers rose to 43%, a 6-percentage-point bump. Now, in 2019, a near majority (49%) of respondents say they favor vouchers for low-income families, with just 41% expressing disapproval. On balance, support for targeted vouchers has gained 12 percentage points over the past four years, while opposition has gone down by 7 percentage points.

Both Republicans and Democrats are more in favor of targeted vouchers than they were three years ago. In 2016, a majority (54%) of Republicans opposed low-income vouchers, and less than a third (31%) liked the idea. By 2019, Republican approbation has jumped 13 percentage points upward to 44%, while opposition has fallen by 4 percentage points to 50%. The trend is the same for Democrats. Even in 2016, Democrats were more favorably disposed to targeted vouchers than Republicans, dividing between 42% in support and 43% opposed. Rank-and-file Democratic support for vouchers in 2018 rose to 47%, though opposition remained at 41%. Now, in 2019, Democratic approval for low-income vouchers has climbed to 52%, with disapproval receding to 37%. In short, criticism by Democratic elites has not stopped grassroots support from increasing by 10 percentage points and opposition from declining by 6 percentage points since 2016.

Universal vouchers. Although no state has ever implemented a universal voucher plan, the drift in public opinion in favor of such vouchers resembles that for targeted ones. In 2016, the public was equally divided over “a proposal [to] give all families with children in public schools a wider choice, by allowing them to enroll their children in private schools instead, with government helping to pay the tuition.” Forty-five percent of the adult population expressed support, with 44% opposed. A year later the level of support did not change significantly, but disapproval shrank to 37%. By 2018, a clear majority of 54% in favor of universal vouchers had emerged, with disapproval falling to 31%. The shift upward in approval has remained steady in 2019, with 55% in favor, though disapproval has returned to its 2017 level. Over the four years, the side endorsing universal vouchers has grown by 10 percentage points, while opposition has slipped 7 percentage points.

Republicans are more likely to back vouchers for all than those reserved for the poor. Even in 2016, 41% of Republicans liked the idea of universal vouchers, though 49% did not. With the Trump administration promoting the voucher concept, the mood shifted sharply in favor of universal vouchers in 2017 by a 54% to 33% margin. Now, in 2019, approval for such vouchers among Republicans has risen to 61%, with a third opposed. The change between 2016 and 2019 constitutes a 20-percentage-point shift upward in the level of Republican support for vouchers for all students. Democrats also like the idea of universal vouchers, but their opinions haven’t changed much since 2016. That year, Democrats backed the policy proposal by a 49% to 39% margin; in 2019, support has risen just slightly to 52%, with 40% against. In short, universal vouchers have gained in popularity among Republicans without losing ground among Democrats.

Tax credits. Tax credits for “individual and corporate donations that pay for scholarships to help low-income parents send their children to private schools” constitute the most popular of the school-choice programs, perhaps explaining why DeVos has built on this model for her proposed Education Freedom Scholarships legislation. Tax credits do not require any direct government outlay, and proponents can make the case to state legislatures that they save dollars for state taxpayers, as the cost of the scholarships permitted in many states is more than offset by the decrease in state aid to local districts. In Florida, a tax-credit initiative survived constitutional scrutiny when a voucher program did not, and, in Illinois, a deep-blue state, a tax-credit bill was signed into law in 2018.

These tax-credit success stories are rooted in continuing and bipartisan support among the public. Back in 2016, the concept commanded a 53% to 29% approval majority, with 18% taking a neutral position. Not much changed a year later, but in 2018 support edged up to 57%, with opposition slipping slightly to 26%. That level of endorsement has held steady in 2019 (58% to 26%). Even in an era of polarization, tax credits retain bipartisan favor. Sixty-five percent of Republicans like the idea, as compared to 49% in 2016. But the increase in Republican approval has not engendered polarization. In 2016, a 57% majority among Democrats favored the idea. That percentage has not changed materially in any subsequent year.

Nor does the public seem to care whether it is the state government that offers the tax credit, as in 18 current state programs, or if it is the federal government, as DeVos proposes. We learned this by asking half of the respondents a version of the question that said the credits would be offered by the feds. This version elicited a level of support—57%—that is statistically similar to what we observe when the federal government is not mentioned.

 

Charter schools. Charter schools are a small but increasingly entrenched part of the K–12 education system. Forty-four states and the District of Columbia have passed laws granting various entities—typically nonprofit organizations, government agencies, or universities—the power to authorize the formation of a charter school, and today charters serve about 6% of all students, not far behind the 10% share attending private schools. As judged by learning gains on state tests, a sizable number of charter schools are performing no better and possibly worse than neighboring public schools. Still, parental demand for charter schools is outstripping supply in many parts of the country. Some charters are generating impressive results, particularly in urban areas, and quite a few rank among the best schools in the country.

Still, the political environment for charters is shifting. For more than two decades after the first charter school opened its doors in Minnesota in 1992, charters seemed to be the one choice initiative backed by Democrats and Republicans alike. President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, oversaw the creation of a federal program to support charter-school growth, and his Republican successor, George W. Bush, sought to increase its funding. The Democratic administration of Barack Obama subsequently included charter expansion in its Race to the Top initiative.

In the 2016 election cycle, though, charter policy became an increasingly partisan issue. As a candidate, Democrat Hillary Clinton expressed doubts about whether charter schools serve the most disadvantaged students. In Massachusetts, teachers unions launched a vociferous campaign against charters and defeated a referendum that would have lifted a cap on the number of such schools in the state. In Chicago, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, unions have since secured agreements committing school boards to limit charter-school growth. The NAACP has called for a moratorium on charter schools.

Many candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 are adding their voices to the anti-charter campaign. Joe Biden, once a supporter of charters, now says “the bottom line is [that charters] siphon off money for our public schools, which are already in enough trouble.” Bernie Sanders has called for a halt to federal funding of charters. Even Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, who welcomed charters to Newark when he was the city’s mayor, now takes an anti-charter stance: “I look at some of the charter laws that are written around this country,” he says, “and I find them really offensive. . . . They’re about raiding public education and hurting public schools, and that’s something . . . I will fight against.”

In the early days of the Trump administration, forceful attacks on charters seemed to influence public thinking. When respondents were asked in 2017 whether they favored the “formation of charter schools, which are publicly funded but are not managed by the local school board,” only 39% backed them, which was 12 percentage points lower than in 2016. Opposition had risen to 36% from 28% the year before. Charter support recovered modestly to 44% in 2018, with 35% opposed.

This year, support for charters has climbed back to 48%, essentially the same level as in 2016. However, disapproval, at 39%, remains as high as it was in 2017, with fewer people taking a neutral position. In sum, the potential collapse of public approval for charters that had appeared imminent in 2017 has not occurred, but opposition has solidified among a significant minority.

There are also signs of partisan polarization. On one side, Republicans are as committed as ever to charter schools. In 2016, 60% of party adherents backed charters. In 2017, as overall support for charters dipped, Republicans backed charters by a ratio of 47% to 30%. In 2018, Republican approval shifted back up to 57%, with just 27% in opposition. In 2019, the margin has widened, with 61% of Republicans backing charters while opposition remains at 27%.

Simultaneously, Democrats have backed away from charter schools. When Barack Obama held office in 2016, Democrats backed charters by a 45% to 33% margin. Those numbers nearly reversed themselves after the battles over the DeVos nomination, with just 34% of Democrats in favor and 41% against. By 2018, a plurality (42%) of the party’s adherents said they opposed the “formation of charters,” while just 36% were in favor. Democrats now oppose charters by a ratio of 48% to 40%.

Overall, the partisan divide in support for charter schools has widened to 21 percentage points from 15 percentage points between 2016 and 2019.

Knowledge of charter schools. Despite the spiraling controversy over charter schools, most Americans show a lack of full understanding about what they are and the policies that govern them, and people are no better informed in 2019 than they were seven years ago (see Figure 2). In 2012, our survey asked respondents if charters were allowed to charge tuition. Only 24% correctly said they could not; 32% answered incorrectly; and 44% admitted they did not know. The 2019 responses to that question are similar: only 26% give the right answer, 29% give the wrong answer, and 43% say they do not know. We also asked whether charters are allowed to hold religious services (they cannot). Only 22% give the right answer to this question in 2019, the same share that responded correctly in 2012.

We also asked respondents whether there is a charter school within their local school district. Twenty-eight percent say that they do not know. For the rest of the poll participants, Tyler Simko, research fellow at Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, checked the responses against data on charter-school locations. As it turns out, many more people say they either “think” or “know” there is a charter school in their local district than is in fact the case. Only 40% of those who say they “know” a charter school is in their district are right. Only 31% of those who “think” their district has a charter school are correct. Those who do not think their home district includes a charter are more often right, with only 12% responding incorrectly. Less than 10% of those who “know” their district has no charter school are wrong.

Despite the high frequency of guessing on that question, people are somewhat more likely to approve of charters if one or more is in fact present in their local district. Fifty-three percent of those residing in places with charter schools favor the idea and only 35% oppose it, as compared to a margin of 47% support to 40% opposition among those living elsewhere. Of course, it is not clear what the causal relationship is here—whether charter schools tend to locate in more-receptive communities or these schools radiate a positive influence on local public opinion.

Divisions among Democrats. School choice divides the Democratic Party coalition along racial and ethnic lines (see Figure 3). Democrats who identify as African American approve of targeted vouchers, universal vouchers, and charter schools at 70%, 64%, and 55%, respectively. Among Hispanic Democrats, support for the three policies registers at 67%, 60%, and 47%. Meanwhile, just 40% of non-Hispanic white Democrats support targeted vouchers, 46% approve of universal vouchers, and 33% endorse charter schools.

 

Teacher Pay and Personnel Policies

The year 2019 has been one of continued activism on the part of teachers seeking to make the case for better pay and working conditions—and against reforms such as charter schools and merit pay. After a rash of statewide strikes and walkouts shuttered schools in six states in spring 2018, this year has seen protracted strikes in Los Angeles, Oakland, and Denver, as well as the nation’s first-ever strike against a charter management organization. Teachers in each of these settings managed to secure healthy bumps in pay and other concessions, such as restrictions on class size and the hiring of additional non-teaching staff.

But how have these efforts played in the court of public opinion? Do Americans approve of teachers’ ongoing push for better pay? Have they become more sympathetic to those demands in the past year? How have their views of teachers unions changed over time? And do teachers and the public see eye to eye on matters such as tenure and merit pay? This year’s survey provided an opportunity to check the thermometer on each of these issues.

Teacher salaries. We asked all survey respondents whether they thought that salaries for public-school teachers in their home state should increase, decrease, or stay about the same. As in past years, before asking this question we first told a random half of respondents what teachers in their state actually earn. Among those provided this information, 56% say teacher salaries should increase—a 7-percentage-point jump over last year (see Figure 4). Forty percent of “informed” respondents say teacher salaries in their state should remain about the same, while just 5% say they should decrease.

This boost in support for a teacher pay increase comes on the heels of a 13-percentage-point jump that occurred between 2017 and 2018. As a result, support for increasing teacher compensation is now higher than at any point since 2008, when we first surveyed the public on the issue. That year, when we fielded our survey at the peak of the housing bubble and just prior to the financial crisis, marked the only other time in which a majority of poll respondents expressed support for increasing teacher pay when told actual teacher salaries.

More Democrats than Republicans favor increasing teacher salaries, but approval jumped in 2019 among members of both political parties. Support rose to 64% this year from 59% in 2018 among Democrats, and to 43% from 38% among Republicans. Meanwhile, teachers are even more convinced about the merits of increasing their own salaries, with 76% of them registering support.

Among those who are not first informed of what teachers currently earn, a larger proportion of the public favors increasing teacher salaries. Seventy-two percent of this segment say that salaries should increase, 25% say they should remain the same, and 3% say they should decrease. These numbers also reflect an uptick in support over 2018, in this case by 5 percentage points. The higher level of endorsement for boosting teacher salaries among the “uninformed” respondents reflects the fact that most Americans believe that teachers are underpaid and earn far less than they actually do. When asked to estimate average teacher salaries in their state, respondents’ average guess came in at $41,987—30% less than the actual average of $59,581 among our sample of educators.

Teachers unions and the right to strike. The public has also grown more sanguine about the influence teachers unions have on the nation’s public schools (see Figure 5). When asked whether they think the effects of unions are “generally positive” or “generally negative,” 43% of those polled offer a positive assessment and 34% give a negative one. The share opting for positive has risen 6 percentage points since 2018 and 13 percentage points since 2015. That year, just 30% of the public said positive while 40% said negative. The division of opinion over teachers unions falls sharply along partisan lines, with 57% of Democrats, but just 26% of Republicans, selecting positive. Teachers, meanwhile, think that unions have a positive impact by an overwhelming 60% to 26% margin.

Nor has the disruption caused by recent teacher strikes diminished the public’s support for the teachers’ right to take this action. While laws prohibiting teacher strikes are on the books in a majority of states, 54% of the public favors “public school teachers having the right to strike,” and just 32% opposes it; both figures are essentially unchanged over the past year. There is again a strong partisan divide on this issue, however, with 68% of Democrats and just 36% of Republicans in favor. A hefty share of teachers—68%—also support the right to strike; just 24% oppose it.

Merit pay. While Americans have grown more supportive of teacher pay raises, they continue to disagree with teachers over the criteria and methods that determine their compensation. This year, we used two different formats when asking whether part of teachers’ pay should be based on “how much their students learn.” A random half of respondents were asked the basic question, as in previous years of the poll. The other half answered a modified question that also listed a battery of other potential determinants of teachers’ pay. Both versions reveal more support than opposition from the public for paying teachers based in part on student learning. Approval is substantially higher, however, when respondents consider such merit pay alongside other forms of differentiated compensation.

When the question is posed in its traditional form, 47% of the public expresses support for merit pay and 40% is opposed. At 53%, approval for merit pay is higher among Republicans than among Democrats. Democrats are evenly split, with 43% in favor and 44% opposed. Among teachers, however, just 20% favor merit pay and as many as 74% are against it.

The second format of the question used the same language to ask whether part of teachers’ pay should be based on the following factors:

• whether they teach subjects with teacher shortages, like math and science

• whether they teach in schools with many disadvantaged students

• evaluations by their principals

• evaluations by their fellow teachers

• how many years they have been teaching

• whether they have a master’s degree
All of these options were shown when respondents were asked to register their opinion of each, with the items randomly ordered to defuse any tendency on the part of respondents to offer more (or less) support for those presented first.

When the question is asked this way, 72% of respondents express support for merit pay—24 percentage points higher than when the question is asked in isolation (see Figure 6). The public apparently finds the concept more attractive when it is considered in the context of other options for determining teachers’ salaries. Approval among teachers jumps as well, to 42%, though a 51% majority remain opposed.

A majority of respondents also favor five other options for determining pay: experience (74%), principal evaluations (66%), master’s degrees (66%), subject area shortages (65%), and student disadvantage (60%). Basing teacher pay in part on evaluations by their peers draws somewhat weaker support—49%—but that still exceeds the 35% who are opposed.

Teachers express more-selective views on the various options for determining their compensation. Only 33% of teachers endorse peer evaluations, with 57% opposed—the only option to generate more resistance than merit pay. A majority of teachers express support for basing pay in part on student disadvantage (73%), principal evaluations (57%), and subject-area shortages (55%). But far larger majorities express approval for the traditional determinants of teacher pay: experience (89%) and master’s degrees (80%). Teachers may be open to experimentation with alternatives, but they clearly remain most comfortable with the status quo.

Tenure. Teachers also disagree with the broader public on the merits of teacher tenure. A clear plurality of the public—49%—opposes the practice, with 37% in favor, while teachers, as might be expected, strongly approve of tenure—59% to 34%. It is possible that support for tenure among teachers is softening, however. Opposition to the practice rose by 10 percentage points over the past year, while support dipped by 3 percentage points.

 

Federalism and School Spending

The appropriate role of the federal government in K–12 education has long been a contentious issue. The Trump administration has called for only the most minimal boosts in federal funding. By contrast, candidates seeking the Democratic nomination for president are calling for massive increases. Joe Biden wants to triple the amount of money the federal government spends on the education of low-income children. Kamala Harris wants to spend $315 billion over 10 years to boost teacher salaries, and Bernie Sanders is willing to spend whatever it takes to boost minimum teacher salaries to $60,000 a year.

Although the price tag is larger than in the past, the debate between Republicans and Democrats is an old one. Democratic president John F. Kennedy was unable to persuade Congress to enact a general grant-in-aid to local school districts. It was his successor, Lyndon Johnson, also a Democrat, who crafted a compromise targeting federal dollars to schools with low-income students. Democrat Jimmy Carter kept his campaign commitment to create a federal department of education, but Congress prevented his Republican successor, Ronald Reagan, from keeping his promise to abolish it. Republican George W. Bush defied expectations by constructing a broad bipartisan coalition that passed No Child Left Behind, a law that boosted spending and demanded that states test students annually and sanction schools based on the results. But the partisan divide re-emerged as a Republican Congress won a partial retreat from a large federal role with the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 under Barack Obama, a Democrat.

Despite these twists and turns, the share of fiscal costs covered by federal grants has been surprisingly stable since the Carter administration. The level has wavered over the years, but it has never wandered far from 10% of total funding, with the rest coming from state and local school districts, which chip in roughly equal amounts. In 2016, the most recent year for which information is available, the federal share was 8% nationwide. State and local tiers of government each contributed 46% of the total cost.

Despite the consistency of these proportions over time, public perceptions of the federal share are wildly inaccurate (see Figure 7). When we asked respondents “what percent of funding for public schools in your local school district currently comes from each level of government,” people assign an average of 28% to the federal government, more than three times the actual amount. Meanwhile, the public underestimates the local contribution, positing 34%. The public also miscalculates the size of the state contribution by 9 percentage points, thinking it just 37%.

After respondents estimated the share of school spending contributed by each level of government, we asked them a series of questions on whether school spending in their local district should increase, and from which tier(s) of government. When asked whether “government funding for public schools in your districts should increase,” 62% of respondents said that it should. As in past years’ polls, information on what is currently being spent per child in the local district, which we provided to a random half of respondents, dampens enthusiasm for an increase, as only 50% of the informed respondents call for more spending. Even so, support for a boost in funding has jumped since 2017 by 8 percentage points and 11 percentage points, respectively, among uninformed and informed respondents.

In a second poll experiment, all respondents were told current spending levels in their local district. Half were also told the share of that spending coming from each tier of government, while the other half were not. We then asked both groups whether federal funding, state funding, and local funding for their district should increase.

Among those not given the true fiscal breakdown, 60% say the federal government should spend more on their local schools. Sixty percent also think the state should pony up more cash. Only when it comes to local taxes is the public stingy. Just 46% say the local district should spend more.

Spending preferences differ when the public is informed of the funding proportions, however (see Figure 8). Two thirds of those told how little the federal government contributes to K–12 education say it should foot more of the bill, a share that is 7 percentage points higher than among the uninformed. In other words, there appears to be a broad consensus that the federal fiscal role should expand.

Conversely, when the public learns that the local tier contributes 46% of the cost, only 36% of respondents feel an increase is warranted, representing a 9-percentage-point drop relative to the uninformed. Unless a local school district can make a strong case for more resources, it is likely to find stiff resistance from local taxpayers. Similarly, support for increasing state spending falls from 60% among the uninformed to 50% among those informed that the state was already contributing, on average, 46% of the cost.

Sharp disparities in spending preferences emerge along party lines, perhaps a reflection of long-standing differences in views on the appropriate federal role in education. Among the uninformed, 73% of Democrats, but only 43% of Republicans, favor more federal spending on schools, a 30-percentage-point difference. These margins attenuate by 7 percentage points among those who learn how little the federal government contributes to the cost of K–12 education in their district.

Yet partisan differences may be driven as much by spending preferences as by differing views concerning the role of each tier of government. Among those not told about the share contributed by each level, 55% of Democrats, but only 33% of Republicans, think local districts should spend more. Among those told how much local districts already contribute, partisan differences drop by 4 percentage points, but 43% of Democrats still favor more funding, compared to 25% of Republicans.

The story is much the same for state expenditures. Sixty-nine percent of uninformed Democrats, but only 50% of uninformed Republicans, think the state should spend more. When respondents are told the current state share, support for more funding declines among both groups by about the same percentage. Fifty-eight percent of informed Democrats want the state to spend more, but only 40% of Republicans do.

In sum, the public is not aware of how little the federal government contributes to the costs of K–12 public education. In general, people are in favor of spending more on the schools, but Democrats, as compared to Republicans, prefer a funding hike from all tiers of government. Candidates for the Democratic nomination know their audience when pitching for steep increases in federal support. But when informed about the large fiscal role already played by state and local governments, both Republicans and Democrats are less likely to favor digging deeper into the till. Apparently, the public is more cautious about local dollars coming from local taxes than about money arriving from Washington.

 

Common Core and Testing

Common Core. After several years of vigorous debate, support for the Common Core State Standards is rebounding (see Figure 9). Overall, 50% of Americans endorse use of the standards in their state, continuing a climb in approval from its low point of 41% in 2017. The resurgence in support is strongest among Republicans, rising to 46% from 32% over the past two years. Even so, Republicans remain divided over the standards, with 47% opposing their adoption. Democrats, who since at least 2014 have consistently expressed higher levels of approval for the standards than Republicans have, hold steady at 52% in favor and 36% opposed. Today, the party gap is the smallest it has been since 2013, when there was almost no difference between Republicans and Democrats over the Common Core. After opening to a 20-percentage-point chasm by 2015, the difference between Democrats and Republicans stands at just 6 percentage points today.

Teacher opinion on the standards has remained steady over the past five years, lingering in the low 40s and sitting at 44% today. This is the first year of the survey in which Republican support exceeds teacher support, though the difference is not statistically significant.

Even as public approval rises and polarization decreases, the politics of the Common Core remain fraught. This is clear when we find that simply referring to the standards as “Common Core” depresses support. When a randomly selected subset of our participants answers a similar question that does not invoke the standards by name, support for the use of “standards for reading and math that are the same across the states” is 66% and there is virtually no difference between Democrats (66%) and Republicans (67%). Perhaps the supporters of common standards could harness this strong majority support by launching public-awareness campaigns and re-branding efforts.

Testing. Americans’ backing of federal testing mandates remains strong. Seventy-four percent support the federal government’s requirement that all students be tested in math and reading in 3rd through 8th grade and at least once in high school. Support is widespread, with similar majorities among most demographic or political groups, including parents, racial and ethnic minorities, Republicans and Democrats. Teachers are the exception. Only 46% of teachers agree the testing requirement should remain in place, with 49% opposed.

One of the critiques of testing is the amount of time it requires. To explore whether time commitments affect opinions of testing, we conducted an experiment in which a random subset of participants were told: “According to the most recent information available, students in grades 3–8 in large cities spend an average of about 8 hours of school time each year taking tests required by the federal government.” We draw these estimates of the time commitment from a 2014 report from the Council of the Great City Schools. Admittedly, the estimate refers specifically to “large cities” and captures only the time spent taking the exams, rather than also factoring in the time spent on test preparation; thus, this experiment provides only a limited test of how information about the time commitment affects support for testing. Nevertheless, the experiment reveals that exposure to even partial information about the time costs of testing can move opinion. Approval drops 10 percentage points among those told about the hours devoted to testing. For teachers, this information decreases backing by just 4 percentage points.

 

Free College

Calls to make public colleges tuition-free are on the rise. Bernie Sanders zeroed in on the issue in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, and now several contenders for the 2020 nomination are offering proposals of their own. At the same time, a number of states, such as Tennessee, have launched programs to make tuition free at public two-year community colleges, and others, such as New York, have waived in-state tuition at public four-year colleges and universities.

We asked survey respondents whether they favor or oppose making public colleges in the United States free to attend. Some participants were asked about two-year colleges while others were asked about four-year colleges. For both types of college, free tuition is a popular concept (see Figure 10). Sixty percent of Americans endorse the idea of making public four-year colleges free, and even more (69%) want free public two-year colleges. Democrats are especially supportive of the concept (79% approval for four-year and 85% for two-year). Republicans tend to oppose free tuition for four-year colleges (35% in support and 55% opposed) and are divided over free tuition for two-year colleges (47% in support and 47% opposed).

In today’s economy, it pays to get a college education. Workers with a postsecondary degree consistently earn more than high-school graduates do. Does being informed—or perhaps reminded—of the economic returns of college influence attitudes toward making college free? To answer this, we conducted an experiment in which some respondents were randomly chosen to receive information about the average annual earnings of two- or four-year degree holders. Respondents answering the two-year-college question were told that graduates of these schools earn $46,000 each year, on average, over the course of their working lives. Respondents who got the four-year-college question learned that graduates of these schools earn $61,400 annually, on average, over the course of their working lives. It was not obvious whether—or how—this information might shift opinions. On the one hand, learning the economic returns to a college education could prompt people to think that more Americans should have access to college so they can share in greater economic opportunities. On the other, learning what college-degree holders earn could prompt people to think those who benefit from a degree should bear the cost.

As it turns out, information about earnings has little effect on opinions about free college. Support for a free education at public two-year colleges falls slightly, from 69% to 65%, when people are told the average earnings of graduates of these schools. Approval of a free ride at public four-year colleges among informed respondents (62%) is statistically indistinguishable from the attitudes of those not given the earnings information (60%).

 

Immigration

The increasingly polarized national debate over immigration shows up in how Americans think about higher education. Poll respondents are evenly split over the question of whether undocumented immigrants who graduate from a U.S. high school should be eligible for in-state tuition at colleges here—44% support the idea, and 44% oppose it. The politicized nature of the issue is evident in the stark differences between Democrats and Republicans. Among Democrats, 63% favor in-state tuition for undocumented immigrants and 25% oppose it. Among Republicans, just 20% support the concept and 71% oppose it.

The partisan debate over immigration has less effect on attitudes about the language in which non-English-speaking students should be taught. Most people (62%) say children who are not proficient in English should be placed in English-only classrooms. Interestingly, the balance of opinion on this issue has shifted against English-based instruction since two years ago, when 68% supported English-only classrooms and 32% favored teaching in students’ native languages.

Only 38% say English learners should be placed in classrooms where instruction is in their native language. While there is a partisan gap on this question, too, the majorities of both Republicans (74%) and Democrats (54%) do favor English-only classrooms.

 

Grading Public Schools, Colleges, and Universities

More Americans have a positive view of their local public schools than at any point since the EdNext survey began asking about these perspectives in 2007. Today, 60% of respondents give their local public schools a grade of A or B. The 9-percentage-point rise in these grades compared to last year extends a climb that proceeded more slowly over the previous decade. Yet, respondents’ more-positive opinions do not extend to the public schools beyond their local communities. The 24% share of survey takers giving an A or B to the public schools in the nation as a whole remains much the same as it was a year ago. As a result, the gap between respondents’ evaluations of their local public schools and their assessments of public schools in general has widened to 36 points today from 20 percentage points about a decade ago.

This year, for the first time, we also asked respondents to grade institutions of higher education. A random half of respondents were asked about these institutions in the nation as a whole, while the other half were asked about those in their home state.

Despite growing concern about issues such as college affordability and a lack of ideological diversity on campus, Americans think more highly of U.S. public four-year colleges and universities than of the nation’s public elementary and secondary schools. More than twice as many survey respondents (58%) assign these postsecondary institutions an A or B. The nation’s private four-year colleges and universities draw even higher esteem, with 66% giving them A or B grades. Clearly, people think more highly of private institutions of higher education than of public institutions. However, they draw an even greater distinction between institutions in their own state and those “in the nation as a whole.” Overall, 76% of participants grade public four-year colleges in their state with an A or B, 18 percentage points higher than for public four-year colleges in the nation as a whole. Similarly, 79 percent give the top marks to private four-year colleges in their state, 13 percentage points higher than for such colleges elsewhere. In short, respondents rate public and private four-year colleges within their state equally well, and they view in-state public colleges more positively than private colleges nationally.

Republicans consistently judge colleges more stringently than Democrats do, but the size of this opinion gap depends on whether respondents are evaluating public or private institutions and whether they are assessing institutions within their own state or across the country. The share of Republicans who grade public four-year colleges across the country with an A or B is 17 percentage points lower than the proportion of Democrats. For in-state four-year public colleges, the share of Republicans giving out top marks is 8 percentage points lower than among Democrats. For private four-year colleges across the nation, the share is also 8 percentage points lower for Republicans. The political party adherents are closest when it comes to evaluating in-state private four-year colleges, with a differential of only 4 percentage points in granting A or B grades. Democrats and Republicans come closest to agreement when evaluating the quality of private colleges within their states and disagree most when evaluating public colleges nationwide.

Compared to Democrats, Republicans see bigger differences between public and private institutions both in their state and across the country. The share of Republicans handing out A or B grades to private colleges in their state is 5 percentage points higher than for public colleges in their state. When considering schools across the nation, the share of Republicans giving the top grades to private college is 13 percentage points higher than for public colleges. In contrast, Democrats see no difference between private and public colleges in their state, and the share giving A or B grades to private colleges across the country is only 4 percentage points higher than for public colleges across the country.

The survey also asked participants to grade three specific higher-education institutions in their state (referring to each institution by name):

• the flagship public four-year college

• the nearest non-flagship public four-year college

• the nearest two-year public community college

There is remarkable consistency among these evaluations. The shares of Americans giving these schools an A or B grade are 75% for flagship public four-year colleges, 70% for the nearest non-flagship public four-year college, and 69% for the nearest public two-year community college. The partisan gaps found in overall evaluations of in-state public four-year colleges manifest again with respect to specific schools—as the share of Democrats giving the top grades is 11 and 10 percentage points higher than the share of Republicans for flagships and non-flagships, respectively. However, there is no substantive difference between parties in their evaluations of community colleges.

Michael B. Henderson is assistant professor at Louisiana State University’s Manship School of Mass Communication and director of its Public Policy Research Lab. David M. Houston is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG). Paul E. Peterson, professor of government at Harvard University, directs PEPG and is senior editor of Education Next. Martin R. West, professor of education at Harvard University, is deputy director of PEPG and editor-in-chief of Education Next.

 

 

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What Do Students Think about Education Policy? The 2019 survey offers first-ever comparison of high-school students and their parents Older Americans have long been an organized political force, exerting their influence to defend Social Security, Medicare, and other benefits targeted to their age group. Many politicians and political actors have sought to mobilize the youngest age cohort in a similar fashion. Young voters became valuable allies to Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders in the 2008, 2012, and 2016 presidential campaigns. Many more candidates for the Democratic nomination are bidding for the youth vote in 2020. Progressive causes garner strong support from many of the most politically active members of the rising generation. On more than one college campus, student groups have successfully demanded that the names of slaveholders be scrubbed from buildings and statues of Confederate leaders be put into storage. Elsewhere, young activists have persuaded administrators to withdraw invitations to conservative speakers or drowned out their addresses with protests. Young women and men have demanded severe penalties for acts of sexual predation that college leaders once quietly ignored. Some contemporary commentators suggest that the youngest American cohort has taken a sharp turn to the left. However, the conventional wisdom among political scientists holds that children tend to take their political cues from their parents, resulting in more modest ideological differences from one generation to the next. In short, if you know the opinions of the parents, you often know what their children think as well. Do kids and parents see eye to eye on schools? To answer this question, we drew an additional sample of 415 high-school parents and asked them and their oldest child in high school the same battery of questions. In general, our findings are consistent with political scientists’ expectations. On over half of the survey items administered to parents and their children, no statistically significant differences in opinions are detected. For example, the two groups hold similar opinions on issues related to the compensation, evaluation, and rights of teachers. About 69% of both students and their parents support increased salaries for public-school teachers. Likewise, about 71% of both groups favor basing part of teachers’ salaries on how much their students learn. They are similarly supportive of basing teacher pay on evaluations by their fellow teachers (about 50% of both groups on average), whether they teach hard-to-staff subjects like math and science (60%), whether they teach in schools with many disadvantaged students (58%), and whether they have a master’s degree (72%). However, with respect to compensating teachers based on experience, parents (74%) are more supportive than their children (68%). A similar difference emerges over principal evaluations as a criterion, with 72% of parents and 60% of students in favor. Roughly half of both groups say that public-school teachers should have the right to strike; however, parents (35%) are more likely than students (25%) to say that they should not have that right. Neither group is particularly supportive of giving tenure to teachers (32%), though again, parents (49%) are more likely to express opposition than students (36%). The similarities between parents and students extend to other controversial issues. About 60% of both groups support universal vouchers. On immigration-related issues, students tend to share their parents’ views on whether speakers of other languages should initially be placed in English-only classrooms (63%) and on their support of in-state college tuition rates for undocumented immigrants (46%). There is also strong consistency regarding the student’s own academic coursework and postsecondary plans. Both groups think schools should focus more on students’ academic performance (recommending an average of 63% of schools’ total efforts) than on students’ social and emotional well-being (recommending 37%). Parents and students are both equally split on whether all students should be encouraged to take classes that prepare them for college or whether some students should be encouraged to take classes that prepare them to enter the workforce directly. Likewise, the groups are aligned on whether the student him/herself will in fact be prepared for college (84%) and the workforce (77%) upon high-school graduation. Moreover, about 68% of both groups want the student to attend a four-year university rather than choosing a two-year community college or another postsecondary option. Parents and students also give comparable evaluations of public and private postsecondary institutions in their state and in the nation as a whole. Given this broad consensus within families, it is interesting to drill down on those topics where parents and students do differ significantly. School safety is one such issue. Only about 40% of both parents and students are very or extremely confident that the student’s school provides sufficient security against a shooting attack—a troublingly low proportion but much higher than the 16% of the general population that expresses the same level of confidence about their local public schools. However, parents are more likely than students to think that schools should take additional protective measures. Seventy-seven percent of parents, but only 63% of their children, would install metal detectors at every school. Similarly, 81% of parents, but only 73% of the high-school students, would screen all students for severe emotional distress. Although both parents and students lack confidence in their school’s level of security, it seems students are less likely to think that interventions such as these would address their concerns. Parents and children also part ways when it comes to the quality of their local schools. Seventy percent of parents give their local public schools an A or B grade, and 82% assign their child’s high school those marks. Among students, these proportions drop by 15 percentage points for the local public schools and 13 percentage points for their own high school. These differences could reflect students’ more intimate knowledge of these schools, or they may simply reflect teenagers’ less than sanguine feelings toward schooling in general. On the other hand, while only 38% of parents give the nation’s public schools an A or B, this proportion rises by 8 percentage points among students. This suggests that students’ heightened scrutiny is reserved for the institutions they know best. When it comes to some hot-button political issues, students are, indeed, more likely to embrace a progressive view. They are less likely than their parents to approve of annual federal testing requirements (52% of students, 75% of parents), they are more supportive of increased government funding for local public schools (72% to 63%), and they are more likely to want four-year public colleges to be tuition-free (77% to 68%). However, students’ positions on these issues—less testing, more spending on their schools, and free tuition when they go to college—are plausibly attributable to self-interest rather than ideology. Self-interest may also explain why they are less supportive than their parents of the Common Core State Standards (35% versus 50%), an initiative aimed at boosting expectations for the rigor of student work. Overall, the differences between parents and their children lack a clear ideological pattern. In some cases, a higher share of students support the more-liberal policy option: students are less likely to favor charter schools (46% versus 56%), and they are more likely to support “federal policies that prevent schools from expelling or suspending black and Hispanic students at higher rates than other students” (37% versus 26%). By contrast, students are more likely than their parents to take the conventionally conservative position when asked whether high-school students should be taught in classes with those of similar abilities (63% versus 54%). In sum, students frequently share the views of their parents. The proverbial apple still falls pretty close to the tree. When their views diverge, students are less enthusiastic about their local schools, more likely to favor policies of special interest to the young (such as less testing, more school spending, and free college), and more liberal on charter schools and discriminatory disciplinary treatment of students of color. However, with the exception of charter schools, a majority of both parents and students hold the same position on all of these issues. The generation gap has not become a chasm. In adolescence, at least, the youngest Americans do not appear to differ much from those who preceded them.

 

 

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Methodology This is the 13th annual Education Next survey in a series that began in 2007. Results from all prior surveys are available at www.educationnext.org/edfacts. The main results presented here are based on a sample of 3,046 respondents, including a nationally representative, stratified sample of adults (age 18 and older) in the United States as well as representative oversamples of the following subgroups: teachers (667), African Americans (597), and Hispanics (648). Survey weights were employed to account for non-response and the oversampling of specific groups. Additionally, we surveyed a sample of 415 high-school parents as well as their oldest high-school child. Results for this group are reported separately in this essay. Respondents could elect to complete the survey in English or Spanish; 209 respondents chose to take the survey in Spanish. The survey was conducted from May 14 to May 25, 2019, by the polling firm Ipsos Public Affairs via its KnowledgePanel®. In its KnowledgePanel®, Ipsos Public Affairs maintains a nationally representative panel of adults (obtained via address-based sampling techniques) who agree to participate in a limited number of online surveys. We report separately on the opinions of the public, teachers, parents, African Americans, Hispanics, white respondents without a four-year college degree, white respondents with a four-year college degree, and self-identified Democrats and Republicans. We define Democrats and Republicans to include respondents who say that they “lean” toward one party or the other. In the 2019 EdNext survey sample, 54% of respondents identify as Democrats and 39% as Republicans; the remaining 7% identify as independent, undecided, or affiliated with another party. In general, survey responses based on larger numbers of observations are more precise, that is, less prone to sampling variance, than those based on groups with fewer numbers of observations. As a consequence, answers attributed to the national population are more precisely estimated than are those attributed to groups (teachers, African Americans, and Hispanics). The margin of error for binary responses given by the main sample in the EdNext survey is approximately 1.7 percentage points for questions on which opinion is evenly split. The specific number of respondents varies from question to question, owing to item non-response and to the fact that, for several survey questions, we randomly divided the sample into multiple groups in order to examine the effect of variations in the way questions were posed. The exact wording of each question is available at www.educationnext.org/edfacts. Percentages reported in the figures and online tables do not always sum to 100, as a result of rounding to the nearest percentage point. Information used in the experiments involving school-district spending and revenue were taken from the 2014–15 National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data’s Local Education Agency Finance Survey for fiscal year 2015, version 1a-final, the most recent available at the time the survey was prepared. Information used in the experiments involving state teacher salaries were drawn from the NCES Digest of Education Statistics, 2017 (Table 211.6), the most recent available at the time the survey was prepared.