Reader, Come Home:
The Reading Brain in a Digital World
by Maryanne Wolf
Harper/HarperCollins, 2018, $24.99;
272 pages.

As reviewed by Doug Lemov

As you read this—on the subway or the porch, perhaps at your desk between meetings—reading as we know it is engaged in an epic battle it has all but lost.

You are the reason.

No matter where you are, Device is there with you, stowed in your pocket, at your behest, chirping away pleasantly. Check in with a colleague or the kids? Play Candy Crush? Find a baseball score? All while in line at Target or sitting through the 10 a.m. strategy meeting? Of course, Master. It would be my pleasure.

Suddenly Device must always be with you. You check it 150 to 200 times a day, studies tell us. You switch media sources (for instance, from Web browser to email) 27 times an hour. Your average duration of sustained focus on any digital task is just over two minutes.

Clever Device! Once it was the servant; now it is the master.

Poor Dickens. Poor Toni Morrison. They cannot compete with that. So we read less and less. But more importantly, we read differently. This is the subject of Maryanne Wolf’s profound new book, Reader, Come Home.

On the digital screen we read fleetingly, flittingly. Our brains have what scientists call “novelty bias.” We are predisposed to attend to new information; from an evolutionary perspective, what’s new, bright, and flashing could contain survival information. It gets priority. Reading on screens sets up a cycle of expectation and gratification. We are repeatedly distracted by whatever pops up, rewarded for each distraction with a tiny surge of dopamine. This attraction to “the new” crowds out reflection, creative association, critical analysis, empathy—the keys to what Wolf calls the “deep reading process.” We read in a constant state of partial attention. And, Wolf points out, this is as much cause as effect. Human beings developed the capacity to read relatively recently, over the past 5,000 years or so. The brain has no reading center. Rather, when we learn to read, we call upon multiple areas of the brain, exhibiting a cognitive quality known as neuroplasticity.

There is no single way a brain becomes “rewired,” explains Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist and director of UCLA’s Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice. The process happens differently, depending on how we read. Readers of Chinese (an ideographic language) rewire differently from those who read Spanish (a logographic one). Individuals also vary in how they rewire, based in part on how and what they read. The study of those who rewire differently because of dyslexia drew Wolf to the science of reading in the first place.

We made ourselves modern via a collective rewiring when writing and later print emerged and spread across vast strata of society not so long ago. Reading taught us to sustain and logically develop ideas, to enter the minds and perspectives of others through their words. As societies, we became less impulsive, violent, and irrational. Wolf quotes Nicolo Machiavelli reflecting on how he lost himself in a book, conducting an inner dialogue with the author and reading for four hours without interruption. When was the last time you did that?

“The long developmental process of learning to read deeply and well . . . rewired the brain, which transformed the nature of human thought,” Wolf writes.

Now there is a new transformation taking place. Skittish, distracted readers rewire differently from thoughtful and meditative ones, and so they—and the collective “we”—come to think differently, to develop different architecture for thinking. Through disuse, we are losing what Wolf calls “cognitive patience,” and thus the ability to immerse ourselves fully in books.

Wolf herself discovered this when she returned to a touchstone of her youth—Herman Hesse’s Magister Ludi—and found it mostly unreadable. She could not sustain the concentration the novel required. In just a few years it had all but slipped beyond her grasp.

It’s not all bad news. “Unlike in the past,” Wolf notes, “we possess both the science and the technology to identify potential changes in how we read and thus how we think before such changes are fully entrenched in the population and accepted without our comprehension of the consequences.” In her book she describes re-disciplining herself to find a way back into Magister Ludi. On the third reading of the novel, it comes again to resemble the book she knew.

That story is compelling, as is Wolf’s writing, which is buoyed by encyclopedic knowledge of cognitive science and of literature, laced with insight, and infused with a rare mix of science and artistry. As I read, I found myself pausing often, epiphany by epiphany, thinking, scribbling margin notes—in short, dwelling briefly in the fading world of deep reading she describes. That’s the good news.

The bad news lies in the chapters that are intended to offer hope. Wolf notes that digital culture has its benefits, but we must find a way to balance the positives of digital reading with the negatives, to manage the process.

She finds solace, for example, in the cognitive gifts that bilingualism bestows upon children. Couldn’t we teach young people to be digital and print bilingual? I read hopefully at first but with increasing despondency. Learning Spanish does not degrade one’s capacity in English. Mastering more than one language strengthens our verbal and cognitive abilities, while constantly consuming information via digital media can impair our facility to read deeply.

Wolf imagines that schools will form the vanguard in the quest to develop digital-print bilingual readers. They will teach “counter-skills” and “digital wisdom”—disciplined, self-aware switching between print and screen. But this would require schools to buck popular trends. Most schools today embrace technology reflexively. Many have stopped issuing print textbooks and offer only digital versions, despite the research on how poorly students read and remember digital content. SMART Boards survive even the tightest budgets. Many schools provide every student with a laptop, thus necessitating that every assignment will be completed with Device nearby, contrary to some parents’ efforts to restrict their children’s access to screens during homework and reading.

It is true that schools are one of the few places that could ensure time and space for deep reading, sustained and meditative. But this would require a changed vision: school as a place apart as much as a place connected; school as bastion against technology as much as acolyte; school as a place that shapes rather than merely accepts social norms. Not easy work, in other words, nor work most schools seem willing to do.

Still, it could happen in isolated places. Imagine schools of choice that intentionally isolate students from technology at strategic times during the learning process. If France can ban cell phones from all schools, as it recently did, it’s plausible that a few islands could emerge here and there in our country. It’s hard to imagine at scale, though.

So some may find Wolf’s optimism reassuring, but as a parent and educator I did not. One night, I awoke and imagined the book as an object in some science-fiction novel—The Last Book, written in a society where there would soon be no one left to read it. Reader, Come Home is an important, impeccably researched book possessed of just one flaw—its Reader.

Doug Lemov is a managing director at Uncommon Schools, and the author of Teach Like a Champion, a study of high-performing urban teachers and their methods, as well as Reading Reconsidered.

As this issue of Education Next goes to press, a teacher strike in Oakland is entering its fourth day. Less than two months into 2019, Oakland Unified is already the third major school district to experience an extended work stoppage, after similar conflicts closed schools for a week in Los Angeles and three days in Denver. This new spate of activism follows on the heels of a series of statewide walkouts in early 2018, when teachers in six states took to the streets to demand better pay and more school spending—not to mention the first-ever strike in the nation’s charter-school sector, which shuttered the Chicago-based Acero charter network for several days in December.

The turmoil is at once a departure—LA’s teachers hadn’t walked out in 30 years, Denver’s in 25—and utterly predictable; it also may presage a new era of conflict. With the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus decision barring public-sector unions from collecting representation fees from non-members, unions are more eager than ever to display their power to prospective dues payers. At oral argument in the case, the attorney for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees even warned of an “untold specter of labor unrest throughout the country” if the court were to rule against the union, as it nonetheless did.

And then there’s the money: American teachers’ take-home pay has been flat for a quarter century and, on average, remains lower after adjusting for inflation than before the Great Recession. In most places that’s not because we’re investing less in teacher compensation; it’s because more and more of that spending is paying for pension and other benefits for teachers long since retired (see “Health Care for Life,” features, Winter 2019). But young teachers, who have seen their wages stagnate even as their benefits are cut, have good reason to cry foul. The fact that their unions have aggravated the problem by fighting sensible benefit reform will not make the prospect of striking any less attractive.

As tension mounts, those making the case for raising teacher pay can find fresh ammunition in research presented in this issue by Eric Hanushek, Marc Piopiunik, and Simon Wiederhold (see “Do Smarter Teachers Make Smarter Students?,” research). Looking across more than 30 countries, the three economists demonstrate that students achieve at higher levels where teachers have stronger literacy and numeracy skills—and that it is countries that pay teachers more relative to other college graduates that tend to succeed in recruiting highly skilled teachers. They also show that, when measured against comparable college graduates in the same country, U.S. teachers’ wages rank near the bottom internationally, lagging those of other bachelor’s-degree holders by as much as 22 percent. It is little wonder that teaching talent is often hard to find.

As the economists are quick to point out, however, there’s no guarantee that boosting teacher pay here would yield a more capable teaching work force. That outcome would hinge on policymakers ensuring that “higher salaries go to more effective teachers”—the ones districts should want to recruit and retain. And whether a substantial pay hike is feasible likely turns on the extent to which districts can find savings elsewhere, for example, by allowing class sizes to creep up or reducing the ranks of non-teaching staff.

From this perspective, the negotiations in Denver and Los Angeles were discouraging. In Denver, negotiations broke down over a modest district proposal that would better align teachers’ pay with their effectiveness by giving master’s degrees less weight in compensation decisions. In LA, the union demanded not just better pay but also tighter restrictions on class size and the hiring of additional non-teaching staff. In both settings and in Oakland, union leaders called for new limits on the growth of charter schools, thereby threatening the sector that has the greatest flexibility to experiment with new forms of teacher compensation and to recruit and retain effective teachers while pushing out those who are not. In West Virginia, a two-day teacher walkout last week was enough to convince the legislature to withdraw a bill that would have for the first time allowed for the creation of charter schools in the state.

Amid a record-long economic expansion, and with wages finally rising elsewhere in the economy, the time is ripe for a hard look at how much American teachers are paid; the unions are right to put the issue on the bargaining table. Yet it will require strong leadership on the other side of the table to ensure that any increments in pay are used to make teaching a more professional, performance-sensitive occupation. If current events are any indication, that may entail enduring an uptick in the number of strikes.

Martin R. West, professor of education at Harvard University, is editor-in-chief of Education Next.

Student achievement varies widely across developed countries, but the source of these differences is not well understood. One obvious candidate, and a major focus of research and policy discussions both in the United States and abroad, is teacher quality.

Research and common sense tell us good teachers can have a tremendous impact on their students’ learning. But what, exactly, makes some teachers more effective than others? Some analysts have pointed to teachers’ own scholastic performance as a key predictor, citing as examples teacher-recruitment practices in countries where students do unusually well on international tests. One oft-cited statistic notes that high-scoring Singapore, Finland, and Korea recruit their teacher corps exclusively from the top third of their academic cohorts in college; by contrast, in the U.S., just 23 percent of new teachers come from the top third of their graduating class.

Can we provide systematic evidence that teachers’ cognitive skills matter for student achievement? Do smarter teachers make for smarter students? And if so, how might we recruit teachers with stronger cognitive skills in the U.S.?

To investigate these questions, we look at whether differences in the cognitive skills of teachers can help explain differences in student performance across developed countries. We consider data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), an association of 36 largely developed countries that has assessed nationally representative samples of both adults and students in reading and math. We use these data to estimate the effects of teacher cognitive skills on student achievement across 31 OECD countries.

We find that teachers’ cognitive skills differ widely among nations—and that these differences matter greatly for students’ success in school. An increase of one standard deviation in teacher cognitive skills is associated with an increase of 10 to 15 percent of a standard deviation in student performance. This implies that as much as one quarter of the gaps in average student performance across the countries in our study would be closed if each of them were to raise their teachers’ cognitive skills to the level of those in the highest-ranked country, Finland.

We also investigate two explanations for why teachers in some countries are smarter than in others: differences in job opportunities for women and in teachers’ salaries compared to those of other professions. We find that teachers have lower cognitive skills, on average, in countries with greater non-teaching job opportunities for women in high-skill occupations and where teaching pays relatively less than other professions. These findings have clear implications for policy debates here in the U.S., where teachers earn some 20 percent less than comparable college graduates.

The importance of teacher quality

While many factors influence student success, the most convincing research has focused on differences in learning gains made by students assigned to different teachers. Studies of teachers’ contributions to student reading and math achievement consistently find variations in “value-added” that far exceed the impact of any other school-based factor.

These studies are unhelpful in explaining international differences in student achievement, however: they focus primarily on the U.S. and have not identified correlates of teacher value-added that can be measured consistently across countries. Such differences are a major concern for the United States, where policymakers are searching for strategies to shore up the country’s economic competitiveness. American students score rather unimpressively on the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which measures high-school students’ skills in math, reading, and science every three years. On the most recent PISA math assessment in 2015, for example, American teenagers ranked 40th, well below most major Asian and European countries.

Importantly, research conducted within the U.S. and in other settings has shown that common measures of teacher qualifications such as advanced degrees, experience levels, and professional preparation are not consistently related to classroom effectiveness. The story differs for research on teacher cognitive skills and salaries, however, in ways that motivate our analysis in this article.

Prior studies of teacher cognitive skills, largely from within the U.S., provide some evidence of positive impacts on student achievement. These studies have relied on small and idiosyncratic data sets, and their results are not entirely uniform. Nonetheless, compared to alternative measures of teacher quality, test scores are most consistently related to student outcomes.

The relevant evidence on teacher salaries is different. While studies conducted within specific countries tend to find that salaries are unrelated to effectiveness, the limited available cross-country evidence suggests that students perform better where teachers are better paid. These divergent results suggest that salary levels may have important ramifications for the quality of the overall pool of potential teachers—even if the distribution of salaries within a country is not a good index of effectiveness.

Measuring teacher cognitive skills

To measure teacher cognitive skills, we use data from the OECD’s Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) survey in 2012 and 2015, which tested the literacy and numeracy skills of more than 215,000 randomly selected adults age 16–65 in 33 countries. We focus on the 6,402 test-takers in 31 countries (those where we also have information on student achievement) who reported their occupation as “primary school teacher,” “secondary school teacher,” or “other teacher.” The number of teachers tested ranges from 106 in Chile to 834 in Canada, with 207 per country on average. We use the median literacy and numeracy scores of the teachers tested in each country as our measures of teachers’ cognitive skills.

These data reveal vast differences in teacher cognitive skills across countries. Figure 1 compares median teacher numeracy and literacy skills in each country to the skills of all employed adults in different educational groups within Canada, the country with the largest PIAAC sample. Teachers in Turkey and Chile score well below Canadian adults with only a vocational post-secondary degree, while teachers in Italy, Russia, and Israel perform at the level of vocationally educated Canadians. At the other end of the spectrum, the skills of teachers in Japan and Finland are higher than those of Canadians with a master’s or doctoral degree. Teachers in the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden have skill levels similar to Canadians with a bachelor’s degree.

Teachers in the United States perform worse than the average teacher sample-wide in numeracy, with a median score of 284 points out of a possible 500, compared to the sample-wide average of 292 points. In literacy, they perform slightly better than average, with a median score of 301 points compared to the sample-wide average of 295 points. While teacher literacy skills are higher than numeracy skills in some countries (including the U.S.), the reverse is true in others—a pattern we will return to below when examining the consequences of differences in teacher skills across subjects.

These differences in teacher cognitive skills reflect both where teachers are drawn from within each country’s skill distribution and where a country’s overall cognitive-skill level falls in the world distribution. While median teacher cognitive skills are close to the median skills of college graduates in most countries, teachers perform better than the median college graduate in countries like Finland, Singapore, Ireland, and Chile, and perform worse than the median college graduate in others, such as Austria, Denmark, the Slovak Republic, and Poland.

However, teachers from relatively lower parts of the distribution may have greater cognitive skills than their peers abroad if their home country’s skill level is higher overall. For example, math teachers in Chile and Finland are drawn from similarly high levels of their overall distributions of college graduates, yet Chilean teachers score at the bottom of all 31countries while Finnish teachers score at the top. Teachers from the Slovak Republic are drawn from the lowest point in the country skill distribution of the 31 countries, yet have teachers in the middle of the international skill distribution of teachers.

Measuring student achievement

Our data on student achievement come from PISA in 2009 and 2012, which tested the math and reading skills of more than a half million 15-year-old students in nationally representative samples in more than 60 countries, including 31 of the countries participating in PIACC. We use those two PISA cycles because participating students would have been taught by the teacher cohorts tested in 2012 and 2015 in PIAAC.

Student performance in math and reading also varies widely across the countries in our sample, with especially pronounced differences in math. Students in top-performing Singapore scored 70 points above the sample-wide average of 498—the equivalent of nearly two school years. U.S. students scored well below that average at 484. In reading, Singapore students again earned the highest score of 534 compared to 445 for Chile, the lowest-scoring country in our sample. The U.S. score of 498 was not statistically different from the average of 497—leaving American students roughly one school year behind students in Singapore.

Linking teacher and student skills

How do these differences in student achievement relate to international differences in teachers’ cognitive skills? We use two different approaches to address this question. In both, we measure teacher cognitive skills only at the country level, in part because our data do not let us link students to their actual teachers but also to avoid bias due to factors such as parents choosing better schools and teachers for their children.

We first examine the association between median teacher cognitive skills and individual students’ performance across the 31 countries in our sample. That is, we ask whether students perform better on the PISA math and reading tests when their country’s teachers have stronger numeracy and literacy skills, respectively. In making these comparisons, we control for a wide range of other factors that could influence students’ performance. These factors include the skill levels of all adults age 25–65 as measured by PIACC; student characteristics such as age, gender, and migrant status; family background characteristics such as parents’ education levels and the number of books in the home; school characteristics such as enrollment size and instructional time in math and reading; and the average per-pupil spending and school starting age in each country. Importantly, we also control for a measure of the cognitive skills of the parents of PISA test-takers, as estimated based on the relationship between demographic characteristics and cognitive skills among parents tested in PIACC.

Despite these adjustments, however, the relationship between teacher skills and student achievement we estimate in our first approach could still reflect differences between countries that are more difficult to measure. Countries that emphasize the importance of a good education, for example, may have both teachers with high cognitive skills and parents who do more to support their children’s education in the home.

To address this concern, our second approach exploits the fact that both students and teachers were tested in two subjects and asks whether differences in teacher cognitive skills between numeracy and literacy are systematically related to differences in student performance between math and reading. In other words, do students perform relatively better in math (compared to reading) in countries where teachers have relatively higher numeracy skills? By focusing on comparisons within the same country, this approach eliminates the influence of any differences across countries that affect student achievement similarly in both subjects.

The only lingering concern is the possibility of unmeasured differences between countries that are subject-specific. For example, the results of our second approach would be biased if parents in societies where teachers have strong numeracy skills place more value on supporting their children in math than in reading. We provide evidence that such factors are unlikely to be important below.

Cross-country comparisons

Our first approach reveals a strong relationship between teacher cognitive skills and student achievement across countries. We estimate that increasing teacher numeracy skills by one standard deviation increases student performance by nearly 15 percent of a standard deviation on the PISA math test. Our estimate of the effect of increasing teacher literacy skills on students’ reading performance is slightly smaller, at 10 percent of a standard deviation, but the difference in magnitude across the two subjects is not statistically significant. Further analysis shows that the impact of teacher skills is somewhat larger for girls than for boys and for low-income students compared to wealthier students, particularly in reading.

As expected, a country’s cognitive skill level of all adults (age 25–65) is also strongly correlated with student performance. However, when controlling for teacher cognitive skills, the estimates for adult skills substantially decrease in size and lose statistical significance. In other words, the relationship between teacher cognitive skills and student performance is not driven by overall skill levels in the country; it is what teachers know that matters.

How much does it matter? To gauge the magnitude of our estimates, we simulate the improvements in student performance if each country brought its teachers up to the cognitive-skill level of Finnish teachers, the highest-skilled teachers in our sample. In math, U.S. students would improve by roughly one third of a standard deviation, and students in lowest-ranked Turkey and Chile would improve by more than half of a standard deviation. Overall, we estimate that bringing teachers in each country to the Finnish level would reduce the dispersion of country-level PISA scores by about one quarter, reducing the standard deviation of scores from 29 to 22 points in math and from 22 to 16 points in reading.

Improvements of this size may not be realistic in the short run for many countries, however. To match the cognitive skills of Finnish teachers, Turkey would have to draw its median teacher from the 97th percentile of the college numeracy distribution instead of the 53rd percentile. The U.S. would need to recruit its median math teacher from the 74th percentile instead of the current 47th percentile, and its median reading teacher from the 71st percentile instead of the 51st.

It is also important to note that the teacher-skill estimates do not capture the effect of a single school year with a talented teacher but rather reflect the cumulative effect of teacher cognitive skills on student performance through age 15. Thus, these projections are long-run impacts that presume that the quality of students’ teachers across the first 10 grades would improve to the level of Finland.

Within-country comparisons

While teacher cognitive skills are significantly related to student performance in both math and reading, it remains possible that this association is driven by unobserved differences across countries. Therefore, we now exploit only within-country variation to provide even more rigorous evidence on the effect of teacher cognitive skills on student performance.

The overall story is easy to see in a simple graphic: differences in teacher cognitive skills between numeracy and literacy are systematically related to differences in student performance between the same two subjects (see Figure 2). Remarkably, the magnitude of the relationship is very similar to that observed in the cross-country analysis: an increase of teacher cognitive skills of one standard deviation is estimated to improve student achievement by 11 percent of a standard deviation.

Our confidence in this result is strengthened by various “placebo” tests, all of which indicate that our estimates reflect the impact of teacher cognitive skills and not just those of the broader society.

In the first placebo test, we replace teacher cognitive skills with the cognitive-skill level of workers in 14 other occupations, including managers, scientists and engineers, health professionals, business professionals, clerks, sales workers, and service workers. If our results for teachers were really just the result of countries differentially valuing numeracy or literacy, we would expect to find an “effect” of these other workers’ skills on student test scores as well. Instead, we find there is no occupation other than teaching whose skill level is systematically related to student performance.

In a second placebo test, we replace teacher skills by the skill level of a randomly chosen sample of adults matched by age, gender, and educational attainment to the teacher sample in each country. We then draw 100 samples of matched “teacher twins” and compare their estimated student impacts. None of the 100 samples of teacher twins produces larger impacts than teachers.

We also investigate cross-subject effects, that is, the effect of teachers’ numeracy skills on student reading performance and the effect of teacher literacy skills on student math performance. If it is subject-matter skills that are important, as we have assumed in our within-country analysis, then teacher skills in one subject should be only weakly related—if at all—to student performance in the other subject.

Consistent with this logic, we find that teacher numeracy skills have a substantially larger association with student math performance than with reading performance. Similarly, teacher literacy skills are more important for student reading performance than for math performance. The most convincing evidence comes from simultaneously including teacher numeracy and literacy skills. Here, teacher skills in either subject affect only student performance in the same subject.

Creating a smarter teacher workforce

International differences in teacher cognitive skills reflect both where teachers are drawn from in each country’s skill distribution as well as the overall skill level of each country’s population—and policies to improve teacher skills could in theory focus on either of these dimensions. While improving the cognitive skills of the entire population is a valuable goal, it has been widely discussed elsewhere. In contrast, the determinants of where teachers are drawn from the overall skill distribution of a country’s population has received little attention. Our international data enable us to investigate how external forces and policy choices affect the part of the overall skill distribution from which countries recruit their teachers.

We examine two major factors. First, how has teaching been affected by competition from other occupations that demand high skills? In most countries, women historically have been segregated into a constrained set of occupations, one of which is teaching, and teaching remains a female-dominated occupation worldwide. Across the 23 countries used in the analysis below (where we exclude Turkey and all post-Communist countries due to their distinctive labor-market histories), more than two thirds (69 percent) of teachers are female, ranging from 59 percent in Japan to 79 percent in Austria. At the same time, women previously were much more concentrated in teaching than they are today, and the extent of this change varies across countries.

To compare women’s access to high-skill occupations across countries and over time, we compute the proportion of female teachers relative to the number of females in all high-skill occupations in three cohorts of adults defined by their birth years. We define what counts as a high-skill occupation empirically for each country, based on the average years of schooling among males working in each job category.

For both numeracy and literacy, we find that teacher cognitive skills are higher in countries where more females work in teaching relative to other high-skill occupations. The size of these relationships is quite substantial. For example, across all 23 countries in the sample, the share of women in high-skill occupations who are teachers decreases from 29 percent in the oldest age cohort (born in years 1946–1960) to 22 percent in the youngest cohort (born 1976–1990), reflecting the increased availability of alternative job opportunities for women over time. Our results imply that this change is associated with a decline in teacher numeracy skills of one quarter of a standard deviation. Another benchmark comes from comparing the share of women in high-skill occupations who are teachers across countries, which ranges from 18 percent in the U.S. to 38 percent in Singapore. Our estimates suggest that if the employment choices of U.S. women were as constrained as those in Singapore, the numeracy skills of U.S. teachers would be nearly three quarters of a standard deviation higher, lifting them to just above the international average.

While these results shed light on one important explanation for differences in teacher cognitive skills, restricting job opportunities for women is hardly an appealing strategy to improve teacher quality. Our second analysis, therefore, focuses on the impact of teacher pay on teachers’ cognitive skills.

To investigate the salary-skills relationship across countries, we first estimate whether teachers are paid a positive or negative wage premium compared to other college graduates with the same gender, work experience, and literacy and numeracy skills. We find a wide range of wage premiums, ranging from a positive 45 percent in Ireland to a negative 22 percent in the United States and Sweden (see Figure 3). This means that American teachers are paid 22 percent less than comparably experienced and skilled college graduates doing other jobs.

We then assess how these pay premiums relate to the position of teachers in a country’s skill distribution, and we find that countries that pay teachers more also tend to draw their teachers from higher parts of the college skill distribution. In terms of magnitude, a higher teacher wage premium of 10 percentage points is associated with an increase in teacher skills of about one tenth of a standard deviation for a given level of college graduates’ skills. Those pay choices appear to carry through to student performance in the classroom (see Figure 4). In countries where teachers are better paid, students achieve higher levels.

Implications

Our findings have broad application for American policymakers aiming to build a better teaching workforce. Prior research conducted within the U.S. has highlighted the importance of teacher quality for student achievement. But while such work provides useful information about relative learning gains among current teachers, it does not indicate what would be possible if the teacher corps were drawn from a different pool of candidates. Rather than assessing the relative talent of our current workforce, our study of teachers in 31 countries suggests what might be possible if the pool of potential teachers in the U.S. resembled those in the most successful education systems in the world.

To be sure, our work does not speak definitively to the sources of individual teacher talent. But we find that differences in teacher cognitive skills across countries are strongly associated with international differences in student performance. An increase in teacher cognitive skills of one standard deviation is associated with an increase in student performance of as much as 15 percent of a standard deviation in the PISA test.

Our international data also allow us to investigate how external forces and policy choices affect the skills of the teaching force and ultimately, student outcomes. We find that cross-country differences in women’s access to high-skill occupations and in wage premiums paid to teachers (given their gender, work experience, and cognitive skills) are directly related to teacher cognitive skills in a country. Teachers’ wage premiums are also highly correlated with student achievement across countries.

These results speak to the potential value of increasing teacher pay but must be interpreted with care. In particular, we have not provided causal estimates of how the quality of teachers would change if teacher salaries in the U.S. were raised. Increasing teacher salaries would undoubtedly expand the pool of potential teachers and help to reduce teacher turnover. Our evidence does not, however, indicate that more talented teachers would be hired out of the enlarged pool, nor does it indicate that the teachers induced to stay in the profession would be the most effective. Thus, while making it clear that a more skilled teaching force is generally found in countries with higher relative salaries, policymakers will need to do more than raise teacher pay across the board to ensure positive results. They must ensure that higher salaries go to more effective teachers.

Eric A. Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Marc Piopiunik is an economist at the ifo Center for the Economics of Education at the CESifo Group. Simon Wiederhold is professor at the Catholic University, Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. This article is based on “The Value of Smarter Teachers: International Evidence on Teacher Cognitive Skills and Student Performance,” which is forthcoming in the Journal of Human Resources.

The Coddling of the American Mind:
How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure
by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
Penguin, 2018, $28; 338 pages.

As reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

In spite of egalitarian talk issuing from professors and administrators, college is one of the most stratified enclaves on earth. In recent times, however, an inversion has taken place. It’s not the chaired professors and deans who wield the most intimidation, but the lowly young ones, the undergraduates, particularly if they are members of disadvantaged groups.

Recently at my campus, for instance, a law professor sparked a complaint from students after he mentioned the N-word in class, even though the point he made was entirely academic and the comment occurred during a discussion of hate speech. A few indignant students held a rally, the professor apologized, and the president insisted, “The use of this—or any racial slur—in our community is unacceptable.” But, of course, students at Emory University and every other campus hear the N-word all the time in the music they play. Those usages, however, originate with the students, so college officials don’t think they have any right to intervene.

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt have named such timorous overprotectiveness “the coddling of the American mind.” Their book by that title follows an article they wrote for the Atlantic Monthly in August 2015, which argued that colleges and universities encourage young Americans to “exaggerate danger, use dichotomous (or binary) thinking, amplify their first emotional responses, and engage in a number of other cognitive distortions.” It proved to be one of the most-read and -discussed essays in the magazine’s history. President Barack Obama cited it in a speech on the necessity of “different points of view.” The two authors—Lukianoff, head of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, which defends students and faculty against infringements on free speech, and Haidt, an NYU sociologist who has urged more viewpoint diversity on campus—clearly had touched a nerve in the body politic. Their book elaborates on the phenomenon of coddling on campus and reveals its terrible consequences.

In the authors’ view, students didn’t seize the power they now hold; it was handed to them by campus leaders who have been conditioned by therapeutic culture and a “bureaucracy of safety.” The freshmen and sophomores who manage to get controversial speakers disinvited, professors removed from classes, and administrators fired didn’t earn their place through acquisition of higher knowledge and advanced skills. Instead, they were told by their elders, particularly those of an identity-politics cast, that they were already equipped with what they need to act: their feelings, their pain, and their fear.

The idea of trauma exemplifies the “concept creep” that has turned sophomores suffering the ordinary trials of young adulthood into the equivalent of medical outpatients, the authors note. The word used to apply only to physical damage, as in “head trauma.” But in the 1980s, psychologists extended trauma to any form of “significant distress,” and they raised a subjective standard as the test of it. A controversial speaker, a syllabus with readings about war, a professor who is an avowed religious conservative: they are to be judged by the feelings they arouse, not the ideas and evidence they present.

People on campus behave accordingly. At Brown University, for instance, when a debate was staged between one person who declared the United States a rape culture and one person who denied it, students whose trauma responses were “triggered” by the latter debater had the option of visiting a safe space “equipped with cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets, and a video of frolicking puppies.”

The subjective standard of what constitutes significant distress is especially damaging when people suffer the “cognitive distortions” mentioned above. When a student finds the very presence of the philosophy scholar Christina Hoff Sommers on the other side of campus terrifying and outrageous, reasoned discussion is impossible. Lukianoff and Haidt analyze such thought distortions through the lens of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which they use as a diagnostic framework. Common cognitive distortions include “emotional reasoning” (when feelings guide one’s judgment of reality), “negative filtering” (highlighting bad experiences, downplaying good ones), and “blaming” (refusing to take responsibility for one’s circumstances). Lukianoff, we are told, has suffered for years from depression, a disorder marked by cognitive distortions, and CBT has helped him through it. He sees similar traits in students who complain of “microaggressions” and draw over-the-top descriptions of adversaries, for instance, terming a campus visitor who argues for traditional gender roles as someone who pushes “violent ideologies that kill our black and brown (trans) sisters,” as one Williams College protester said.

These distressed souls have created a “call-out culture” behind the ivied walls, a place of surveillance and offense taking that stifles free speech and rewards emotionalism. Two chapters, respectively titled “Intimidation and Violence” and “Witch Hunts,” illustrate how this calling-out process works—the identification of a miscreant, the recruitment of protesters, amplification on social media, confrontations, ultimatums delivered to school leaders, and, sometimes, arson and direct physical threats. One wonders how students grinding through organic chemistry, watching slides of Renaissance art, and sneaking beer into dorm rooms have become so partisan and hysterical.

Lukianoff and Haidt identify several contributing factors, including political tensions in America; the proliferation of media, which creates echo chambers; a “national wave of adolescent anxiety and depression”; overprotective parents caught up in “safetyism”; campus officials who encourage dependency (“If anything goes wrong, tell us”); and social-justice activism.

All inarguable factors, as are the antidotes the authors suggest in the final sections, titled “Wiser Kids,” “Wiser Universities,” and “Wiser Societies.” Yes, kids need more free time and less screen time, schools should cultivate “productive disagreement,” and societies should renounce identity politics. And, the authors assert, coddling sets students up for future failure, teaching youths all the wrong ways to handle disputes that they will encounter when they graduate and enter workplaces and the public square. Super-sensitive souls who expect deferential treatment don’t work and play well with others.

That alone—the post-graduation outcomes for snowflake youths—makes the authors’ campaign against coddling a noble and necessary project. But when I hear students heckling a college president as he pleads with them, or watch a 20-year-old shrieking at a professor on the quad, and listen to deans respond with tepid bureaucratese, the authors’ analyses come off as insufficient.

Something deeper and more sinister is happening here, and it has a decidedly political aspect, for the vast majority of protests come from youth on the left, not the right. Lukianoff and Haidt, both moderate liberals, aim to judge impartially, but that makes them hesitate to peer into the dark wellsprings of those intemperate young progressives. They spotlight alt-right figures, but tread too lightly over the totalitarian impulses of undergraduate leftists. They mention Black Lives Matter four times in the book, but without acknowledging the vociferous tribalism that’s communicated on the organization’s website.

This is, in fact, a weak spot of liberal critiques of contemporary extremism. They recognize irrationality on the right, but treat irrationality on the left as an aberration. Liberals like to occupy the middle, and to judge Right and Left with fairness and balance. But in higher education one finds only a handful of amateur provocateurs on the alt-right, the ones who scratch “Black lives don’t matter” on dorm walls and wait for the institution to work itself into a frenzy of self-criticism and indignation. Meanwhile, student-justice warriors are ever on the lookout for outspoken conservatives, deans run orientation sessions on “privilege,” bias-response teams pounce on an insensitive Halloween costume, and activists suppress research with findings that cross progressive axioms.

It seems clear that coddling has promoted this climate, but student soldiers of the Left like where they are. They believe in their illiberal mission; it intoxicates them, and college leaders haven’t the courage to resist. And the sensible recommendations of Lukianoff and Haidt won’t impress them.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

When confronted with the horror of school shootings, we face a dilemma. Naturally, we are deeply troubled by such incidents. The tragedies are so sad and profound—for the families, the schools, the surrounding communities, and the nation as a whole—that it is difficult to ignore these events as statistical white noise. Yet from a rational perspective, we need to recognize that schools, on the whole, are extremely safe places for young people. A joint report from the National Center for Education Statistics and the U.S. Department of Education concluded that children and youth were 87 times more likely to die by murder or suicide outside of school than in it (see Figures 1 and 2).

How do we weigh our awareness of the overall safe character of U.S. schools against the compelling desire to prevent more school shootings if at all possible? How do we find balance between these two perspectives? In our view, achieving such a balance means taking rational and effective actions to prevent school shootings while also being cautious not to sacrifice educational goals or the school climate for the sake of exaggerated safety concerns.

One approach that risks sacrificing these values is an overemphasis on “target hardening,” which focuses primarily on safety and security technologies. Mass shootings have prompted the target hardening of schools through the expansion of technologies such as metal detectors and surveillance cameras, the deployment of school resource officers (SROs), and the implementation of lockdown procedures and “run-hide-fight” training. These measures are intended to diminish fear and build a collective sense of safety among students and teachers. They also are thought to provide a level of administrative control and a consistent monitoring of student behavior.

In recent decades, these practices have become increasingly popular, particularly in public schools. For instance, the share of public schools employing security professionals rose considerably between 2005–06 and 2015–16, increasing from 42 percent to 57 percent having security staff; from 36 percent to 48 percent having law enforcement officers; and from 32 percent to 42 percent having SROs. Perhaps even more telling, security cameras were present in only 19.4 percent of public schools in 1999–2000 but were installed in more than 80 percent of such schools by 2015–16 (see Figure 3). Likewise, practices such as locking or monitoring doors and using metal detectors have also seen modest increases during these same time periods. Metal detector checks are more common in city schools and in those serving many students of color and low-income students.

While target hardening overall is more widespread in urban public schools, research suggests that parents in suburban schools also embrace the implementation of security measures. Suburban parents readily accept target hardening as a sign that schools are taking violence seriously and are adopting measures to protect the physical and mental well-being of their children.

Regardless of location, school and district leaders are under pressure to adopt target-hardening strategies as a means to protect against violence. Serious incidents, such as school shootings, are highly publicized. The media frequently and intensively cover these events, leaving disturbing images fresh in the minds of parents, who then understandably feel that schools have become unsafe spaces for their children and argue to administrators that more must be done to protect them. Additionally, school communities turn to target hardening to safeguard against potential litigation that could stem from a perception that a school is “unsafe.” Layering a school with various security technologies and providing security training for staff allows administrators and policymakers to point to concrete steps they have taken to safeguard buildings.

In 2018, the high-profile school shootings in Parkland, Florida, and Santa Fe, Texas, prompted political action. In March, President Trump asked secretary of education Betsy DeVos to chair a newly formed Federal Commission on School Safety. The commission released its report in December, recommending a greater focus on target hardening; additional armed and trained staff in schools; and enhanced mental health services, among other measures. As expected, the commission mostly ignored the topic of access to firearms, even the question of age restrictions, which the administration had encouraged the panel to consider. The commission also recommended a reversal of the Obama administration’s guidelines on school discipline, which prohibited schools from meting out student punishments disproportionately by race.

Further political response to school shootings was evident in a number of referenda approved by voters in November 2018, providing funds to enhance school safety and improve mental-health services for students. In Indiana, the Indianapolis Public Schools ($52 million) and the Noblesville School District ($50 million) will use these newly approved funds to augment school-safety features and provide better mental-health support for students. Voters approved a similar ballot referendum in Cook County, Illinois ($69 million), where funds will be used for security upgrades and other improvements to buildings. The safety measures will focus on enhanced security for school entrances, improved lighting, and upgraded security cameras. New Jersey voters also gave the nod to a referendum ($500 million) that included funding for safety upgrades across K–12 schools, though it is unclear how much of the funding will be dedicated to school security. Finally, in Miami-Dade County ($232 million per year over five years), voters passed a measure aimed at teacher raises and hiring more school resource officers. Each year, 10 to 20 percent of the money will be allocated for schools to boost safety and security features.

Essential Questions

While target hardening is an increasingly prevalent response to school shootings, it brings up a number of questions and concerns. First, what kind of impacts do security practices and technologies have on the learning environment? What messages do such practices send to students about their schools? To be sure, some students might feel safer and calmer in hardened environments, but it is equally plausible that intensive security procedures send the message that schools are unsafe, fearful places, thus adding an element of stress to the learning environment. Indeed, some evidence suggests that security technology such as surveillance cameras and metal detectors sends different messages, depending on the student population. For example, research indicates that African American students perceive school security practices as being implemented less fairly than their white peers do. The question, then, of how to get the messaging right when it comes to security practices, if it can be “right,” deserves serious consideration.

Another important question is: to what extent and in what ways do teachers and other school personnel reinterpret their roles and responsibilities in a target-hardened school? Some security practices—the use of armed officers and metal detectors, for example—set the stage for a different way of thinking about students. A hardened environment frames children and youth not as learners but as potential threats to be policed, controlled, and, in some sense, feared. This is particularly true when it comes to the ultimate target-hardening strategy: arming teachers themselves. How might armed teachers think differently about their roles and relationships with students?

Finally, we need to think more about the array of ethical questions that security practices present. To what extent, for example, should student expression be monitored? Should schools hire private companies to track students’ threatening statements and other activity on social media? And to what extent do we owe students a degree of privacy? These ethical questions expose possible conflict between security practices and the civic goals of schools. We want students to learn how to act autonomously and responsibly. Is this educational aim compatible, though, with an environment where we closely monitor and police every student statement and action? Or should we try instead to construct spaces for student freedom, space for students to practice acting with moral responsibility and according to their own reasons?

We do not have all the answers to any of these questions, but we do have a body of research indicating that some school security measures are correlated with undesirable, and sometimes harmful, outcomes for students, staff, and the school environment. It’s important to emphasize the correlational nature of this research and note that it does not demonstrate a causal relationship, but the results do raise red flags about the target-hardening approach. For instance, researchers have found that students and staff in schools that employ various security measures report experiencing higher levels of fear. Students say they feel less safe in schools with visible security measures, a finding that would indicate a potential challenge to the learning environment. Researchers have noted similar findings for schools that employ SROs: students report a greater sense of fear over their safety; a more disruptive or disordered school environment; and a greater likelihood of being arrested.

The possibility that security technology adversely affects school environments is most troublesome in urban schools, where school security technologies are adopted with greater frequency. The zero-tolerance discipline policies that arose in the 1990s, partly in response to the school shootings of that decade, led to widespread use of suspension and expulsion—a phenomenon that many researchers believe has had a demonstrably negative impact, particularly on students of color. 

The unfavorable outcomes associated with target hardening are further correlated with lower levels of community involvement and a weaker sense of trust within schools. Studies have found that parents are less likely to become formally involved (for instance, by volunteering in the classroom or chaperoning field trips) in schools that incorporate security technologies. Student participation in extracurricular activities is also lower within schools utilizing security measures. Further, the use of target-hardening strategies is associated with less student trust in teachers and administrators. The troubling connections also extend to measures of student academic success. Visible school-security technologies, particularly in high schools in lower-income communities, are associated with decreased educational attainment and aspirations.

As noted above, there is no evidence that the presence of security technologies causes a negative school environment. But even in schools where the undesirable environment precedes and prompts the adoption of the security practices, we cannot be sure that the target hardening is not making the school climate worse.

These red flags would be less worrisome, of course, if we could point to demonstrable gains in student safety through the target-hardening approach, but few studies have addressed this connection. Randy Borum of the University of South Florida and his colleagues, in a systematic review of the literature, conclude, “Using surveillance systems, metal detectors, and access control devices, school administrators have made numerous attempts to enhance safety, although there is little empirical research available to evaluate these practices.”

Sensible Measures

What, then, is a sensible approach to school safety and security? The prevention of school shootings is not a complete mystery: we have many examples of school shootings that have been averted. One commonality among many of them is that students and families communicated with the school about their security concerns; they felt they could approach the school if they suspected a student was troubled and threatening, and the school would respond appropriately. In Ripon, Wisconsin, a student reported to school authorities another student’s intention to shoot eight specific students. In Hilliard, Ohio, a student overheard a classmate discussing detailed plans to execute a school shooting and immediately reported it to the SRO—the plans included a diagram of the attack, a listing of the necessary weapons, and a recruitment plan to draw in other students. In Frederick County, Maryland, a father reported to school authorities that his daughter was planning to attack a school, and authorities later discovered the girl had acquired a shotgun and made detailed plans. In all of these cases, it seems that serious incidents were avoided—by means of open communication between schools, students, parents, and community members.

As school leaders think about how they can harden schools against attack, therefore, they should also consider how they can further develop relationships of trust that allow for this open and honest communication. The greatest benefit of this trust-building approach over target hardening is that its “side effects” are likely to support the educational mission of schools rather than disrupt it. The target-hardening approach sends messages of fear, insecurity, and mistrust, and as we’ve seen, there is some reason to suspect that this has a negative impact on the educational mission. An approach that emphasizes schools as communities that listen, build trust, and provide open channels of communication, in contrast, is likely to benefit the educational mission. Scholars have noted that trust is one of the core elements, not only of safe schools but also of effective schools. Safety and success go hand in hand.

One productive convergence of the trust-building and target-hardening approaches is seen in the use of threat-assessment teams, a promising trend in school security. Threat assessment has been recommended by the FBI, the Secret Service, and the Department of Education. Under this approach, teams of school personnel, law enforcement officers, and members of other relevant professions, such as social workers, systematically assess threatening student behavior to determine the nature and severity of the threat. This screening method differs from “profiling” because it is based on a student’s own threatening behavior, not a generic outline of social background and personality traits. Threat assessment, which is designed to distinguish between serious and non-serious threats, helps authorities avoid both overreacting and under-reacting. Thus, it reduces the need for automatic long-term suspension or expulsion for threatening behavior. The threat-assessment strategy formalizes the communication that should already exist within a good school, using a team-based approach not only to identify threats but also to determine what troubled students might need in terms of help and support. This is a type of security practice that seems to contribute to the educational mission of schools rather than work against it.

Educators should also think about how the school climate and culture contribute to the possibility of school shootings and then work to change those contributing factors. Reading detailed accounts of school shootings provides some clues about what schools could be doing differently. In the early 1990s, the sociologist Katherine Newman led a team of researchers in an exhaustive sociological study of school shootings since 1970. Their report shone a light on the perennial social competition among teens in the school environment, which she termed the “status tournament of adolescence.” Some school practices intensify this competition. Think of the prominence of sports in American schools, with the tryouts, rankings, and sorting that go along with it. Think, too, of the teenage fixation on popularity and the common practice of anointing “kings” and “queens” at proms and homecoming dances. School shooters often report feeling like the losers of these status tournaments, and this disappointment sometimes turns to anger against the school environment, as was apparently so in the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado (1999), East Carter High School in Kentucky (1993), and Westside Middle School in Arkansas (1998). Instead of fostering competition, schools might look for ways to increase students’ sense of belonging. If the past is any guide, such efforts could help make for safer schools.

We do not mean to imply that target hardening is never the appropriate response to school shootings. In some situations, such practices may indeed be necessary. What is crucial is that schools remain aware of the potential negative impact of such practices and weigh them closely against the educational mission. At the same time, educators should embrace the idea that school safety is first and foremost a matter of school community: an issue of the trust and communication that exists, and of the sense of belonging that schools can foster to counteract the status tournament of adolescence. The practices that work in one school may not work in another. School and community leaders should take a careful look at their own school environment and decide on methods that could create not only a secure setting, but also a caring one. Instead of simply hardening schools against attack, educators should focus on building school environments characterized by mutual trust, active listening, respect for student voices and expression, cooperativeness, and caring relationships with and among students. These measures not only make schools safer, they also make schools better.

Bryan R. Warnick is professor and associate dean in the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University. Ryan Kapa is a postdoctoral researcher in the Center on Education and Training for Employment at The Ohio State University.

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that language in democracies is characterized by almost limitless malleability. Democracies turn the concrete into the abstract, and as a result, words become like boxes “with a false bottom”: what you take out can be entirely different from what you put in.

There is hardly a better illustration of this linguistic magic trick than “adequacy” litigation—lawsuits that press the government to provide additional funding for schools. Adequacy advocates have successfully invoked the education clauses of state constitutions, not only to secure billions of dollars in additional school spending but also to lay claim to an array of new rights, for instance, that every student is entitled to have “sufficient grounding in the arts . . . to appreciate his or her cultural and historical heritage,” as the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled in 1989 in Rose v. Council for Better Education, the nation’s first adequacy lawsuit.

Recently, litigants in Minnesota have extended the logic of adequacy and claimed that their state’s education clause contains a right to be educated in a racially and socioeconomically integrated setting. The state’s education clause compels the legislature to “establish a general and uniform system of public schools” and to fund them so as to “secure a thorough and efficient system of public schools throughout the state.”

In 2015, seven families and a nonprofit organization sued the state, alleging a range of constitutional violations, including the state government’s refusal to change the boundaries of the Minneapolis and Saint Paul school districts; creating charter schools; and inequitably distributing resources. Because the Minneapolis and Saint Paul school systems enroll a disproportionately high number of minority and low-income students, the plaintiffs claim that the districts’ boundaries violate the uniformity requirement of the constitution. They contend that since many charter schools in the Twin Cities are racially homogeneous, they too violate that clause. And, as expected in an adequacy suit, the plaintiffs contend that the lower academic performance of students in Minneapolis and Saint Paul is attributable to insufficient funding and thus requires more state spending. However, the primary remedy sought in the case, Cruz-Guzman v. State of Minnesota, is a metropolitan-wide busing plan much like the one struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1974 in Milliken v. Bradley. Dan Shulman, the plaintiffs’ attorney in Cruz-Guzman, advocates for this solution because “if the entire seven-county area is part of a remedy, there won’t be white flight. Where are they going to go?”

The trial court declined to dismiss the suit, but an appellate court ruled in 2017 that the case raised a political question inappropriate for judicial resolution and, therefore, had to be dismissed. In July 2018, in a 4–2 opinion, the Minnesota Supreme Court overturned that ruling, asserting that judicial intervention was indeed allowable and sending the case back to the trial court. Officially, the court denied any intent to engage in policymaking, stating that “specific determinations of educational policy are matters for the Legislature.” However, it also said, “It does not follow that the judiciary cannot adjudicate whether the Legislature has satisfied its constitutional duty under the Education Clause,” and “some level of qualitative assessment is necessary to determine whether the State is meeting its obligation to provide an adequate education.” In a footnote, the court added, “It is self-evident that a segregated system of public schools is not ‘general,’ ‘uniform,’ ‘thorough,’ or ‘efficient.’”

Despite this nod of support for the plaintiffs, one doubts that the court would actually engage in a wholesale redrawing of school-district maps in Minnesota. When the federal courts did that in Detroit, the backlash helped George Wallace win the Michigan Democratic presidential primary in 1972. As well, many African American leaders within the charter-school movement oppose the lawsuit. After the state supreme court’s decision, Charvez Russell, the African American director of Minneapolis’s Friendship Academy of the Arts, which is 96 percent minority, criticized the suit, saying, “The truth is, an environment like Friendship Academy serves students of color much better, which is why parents choose us.” Thus, if this lawsuit goes anywhere, it will likely morph into a traditional adequacy lawsuit, with the state supreme court demanding more spending and the state legislature complying to some degree. Judicial mapmaking faded away in the 1970s, and this lawsuit probably won’t bring it back.

Joshua Dunn is professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Government and the Individual at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs.

The city of Rochester in southeastern Minnesota is home to just 120,000 residents, but it draws upwards of one million visitors a year. Most of them come to seek medical care at the Mayo Clinic, which employs 34,000 people and anchors the city’s remarkably stable economy.

City leaders have a plan to double Rochester’s population over the next two decades. Ground is being broken on hotels, condo developments, and upscale facilities designed to draw patients and new residents alike. Developers from Abu Dhabi have begun work on the centerpiece of this activity: a million-square-foot mixed-use complex that will open onto the serpentine banks of the Zumbro River.

This unusual level of prosperity is a boon for job seekers, especially those with specialized training, but one segment of Rochester’s populace has been locked out of the economic boom: hundreds of adults who are immigrants or refugees, who didn’t graduate from high school, or who for some other reason lack basic job skills.

The solution devised by local leaders? Transform the local school district’s adult basic education (ABE) program into a gateway to higher education and employment. Typically, ABE programs offer classes in English, basic academics and job skills, and preparation for taking the GED or U.S. citizenship exams. Often poorly staffed and wedged into makeshift facilities, the programs rarely bestow bragging rights on the institutions that run them.

But five years ago, educators in Rochester forged a partnership between Rochester Public Schools and the Rochester Community and Technical College (RCTC) that enables adults to simultaneously learn English, learn to read if they lack that ability, and acquire credentials for living-wage jobs. Dubbed Bridges to Careers, the free program keeps its students enrolled until they have mastered the community college’s entry-level coursework and earned a first-rung job certification—usually as a certified nursing assistant, personal care assistant, or administrative clinical assistant. Participants have earned hundreds of industry certifications in health care and other fields.

The approach very quickly puts a financial floor under adults who are struggling to master high-school-level material—and who are often breadwinners. It has dramatically reduced the number of students who need expensive remedial classes in community colleges, which in turn has boosted the number of adult students who stay in college long enough to earn better job credentials.

In 2017, the Ash Center at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government chose the program, then known as Pathways to College and Careers, as a finalist for its Innovations in American Government award. The effort, the award judges said, provides a model for realizing the potential of ABE.

“[We] were deeply impressed by the rate that participants not only completed their training, but at how many were able to obtain related employment in the healthcare industry,” wrote Christina Marchand, a senior associate director at the Ash Center. “It is a real success story that we feel could be replicated by healthcare and hospital employers and adult education and community colleges across the country.”

Broad Potential

Adult learners aren’t the only ones whose lack of preparation poses hurdles to decent jobs and higher education. Many recent high-school graduates enter community college only to find that they need to take one or more remedial courses—classes in basic subjects designed to equip students for college-level work. The proliferation of such compensatory courses—also known as developmental classes—has come under critical scrutiny of late, as community colleges have faced pressure to help more students earn post-secondary degrees.

Overall, the track record of two-year community colleges is less than stellar. Only about 25 percent of students in such programs graduate within three years, and that figure is far lower for the 50 percent of students who are required to take one or more remedial courses before they start earning credits. Many of these institutions are experimenting with eliminating remedial classes, instead enrolling under-prepared students in entry-level college classes—and pouring on support to help them succeed (see “Reforming Remediation,” research, Spring 2017).

On the K–12 level, some efforts are underway to reduce the number of students who are under-prepared when they enter community college. After a study by the Colorado Community College System found that less than 5 percent of students who started in remedial classes would complete a college degree, the state pushed to have students take the tests that determine whether they will need remediation as early as 8th grade, while there was still time for them to acquire missing skills in high school.

In California, the state uses 11th graders’ results on its annual statewide assessments to provide students with a college-readiness index in math and English. Students whose scores indicate that they might need remedial work in college thus have a chance to improve their skills during their senior year of high school or the summer before starting college.

What sets the Rochester Bridges program apart are the cooperation and coordination between the local school district and the community college. In effect, the district has adopted the college’s standards, both for what is taught to ABE students and for who teaches it. And the program embraces the fact that while some students will meet those standards quickly, others may need time before something—persistence, lots of repetition, or perhaps a significant jump in English language proficiency—leads to mastery.

Rochester’s approach, which is known in the field as integrated education and training, is starting to take hold in other parts of the country. And state and federal governments alike are now trying to encourage this way of attacking an entrenched problem: the economic immobility of myriad U.S. residents who lack qualifications for in-demand jobs. Four years ago, as the Minnesota partnership was starting to see early successes, Congress passed the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, a major, bipartisan overhaul of the nation’s primary job-skills legislation. The law contains a number of provisions designed specifically to promote integrated approaches like Rochester’s, and to push education policymakers and workforce-development advocates to collect common data and use that information to achieve better results. As they wrestle with the challenges of ensuring students graduate ready for college or a 21st-century workplace, adult educators and K–12 leaders might do well to embrace this new model.

Evolution of Adult Education

The notion that an educated citizenry is essential both to democracy and to a healthy economy is as old as the republic. At Valley Forge, General George Washington recruited chaplains to teach Continental troops to read. During the Civil War, the Union Army organized literacy instruction for thousands of freed slaves.

As early as the 1800s, some states offered publicly funded adult-education classes to help wave after wave of immigrants learn English and acquire basic skills, in hopes of further expanding the nation’s economy. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Works Projects Administration and other training efforts were key to rebuilding economic strength.

But it wasn’t until the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, a linchpin of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s signature War on Poverty initiative, that the federal Adult Basic Education program was established and funds were directed to states to expand efforts to reach illiterate and unskilled adults as well as high school dropouts.

“For the one million young men and women who are out of school and who are out of work, this program will permit us to take them off the streets, put them into work training programs, to prepare them for productive lives, not wasted lives,” Johnson said. “It will help those small businessmen who live on the borderline of poverty. It will help the unemployed heads of families maintain their skills and learn new skills.”

Today, many ABE programs, like Rochester’s, are run by the local K–12 school district, but academic courses and career training are frequently lumped together with offerings as disparate as driver’s ed, recreational community-education classes, and preschool. Teachers are often part time, classrooms ad hoc, and data on outcomes rudimentary.

And, even more than K–12 and higher education, the workforce-preparation sector has historically involved an array of often-competing interest groups, including business, labor unions, nonprofit organizations, colleges and universities, and advocates for people with disabilities. Federal oversight has been divided between two departments—Education and Labor—without coordinated attention paid to outcomes.

In short, adult education hasn’t grown up.

“Adult education in the ’50s was about getting people to an 8th-grade level,” says Judy Mortrude, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Postsecondary and Economic Success, part of the nonprofit Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), based in the nation’s capital. “But that was enough [then], and it’s not enough anymore.”

Even as the economy has shifted toward technology, health care, and other sectors that demand workers with refined skills, the number of educationally under-prepared adults has burgeoned. According to 2017 census data, 27 percent of adults in the United States ages 25 and older have only a high school diploma. And 26.5 million adults in that age bracket—12 percent of them—lack even that (see Figure 1). Language barriers also pose huge obstacles. More than 12 million people commanded only rudimentary English skills, or none at all, in 2016.

More than half—57 percent—of low-skilled adults ages 16–65 are men. One third are white, but the majority are Hispanic (39 percent) or black (21 percent). Forty percent of these workers are foreign-born, and nearly 60 percent earn less than $16,000 a year, a startling statistic given that 77 percent of them are parents. In 2017, the median adult with a high school diploma earned about 33 percent more than the median adult without one (see Figure 2).

Yet in 2010, the most recent year for which both fiscal and enrollment data are available, only two million students enrolled in adult education. The states invested $1.6 billion in the enterprise, with the federal government kicking in $617 million (see Figure 3). U.S. Department of Education data show that few ABE students go on to college. Only about a third of those who say they intend to pursue post-secondary education actually do.

Much in the same way that shifts in the economy have driven policymakers to put pressure on the K–12 system to ensure that in particular disadvantaged students graduate from high school prepared for college or the workforce, ABE has come under scrutiny in recent years, albeit with far less attention from the public.

A 2013 survey by the international Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) showed that U.S. adult skill levels had remained stagnant for more than two decades. Among the working-age population, defined as ages 16 to 65, 14 percent have low literacy, 23 percent low numeracy and 62 percent poor digital problem-solving skills.

The following year, as noted above, Congress passed a streamlined overhaul of the nation’s major employment law, renaming it the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act. It was a largely overlooked bipartisan measure with ample support: only three senators and six House members dissented on the vote.

Title II of that law, dubbed the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act and administered by the Department of Education, provides grants to states to support efforts to give adults the skills necessary for employment and post-secondary education. This portion of the law now requires the collection of national data on program outcomes, and it offers incentives for states to fund programs that blend basic education and job-skills training.

A major backer of the legislative overhaul, Democratic senator Patty Murray of Washington, turned to evidence from a Washington State demonstration project to shape the federal act, which contains a number of levers to promote the integrated education and training approach.

In 2005, the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges identified a career-ready tipping point: students who started in adult basic education or a GED program and acquired a year’s worth of credits and a job credential earned an annual average of $8,500 more than students who completed fewer than 10 college credits.

Unlike many other states, Washington provides ABE through its community colleges, where, at the time of the research, just 30 percent of adult basic education students went on to college-level courses and only 13 percent of students who started in English as a Second Language programs went on to earn any college credits. A mere 4 to 6 percent of either group earned at least a year’s worth of college credits or received a certificate or degree within five years.

Motivated in part by an influx of non-English speakers, the state asked 10 community colleges to create teams of English as a Second Language, ABE, and vocational-skills teachers to work cooperatively in the same classrooms, simultaneously teaching language and job skills.

In a working paper released in 2010, researchers at the Community College Research Center of Columbia University’s Teachers College found that students enrolled in a demonstration project using the integrated approach in 2006–07 and 2007–08 were 7.5 percentage points more likely to earn a certificate within three years than those not exposed to the approach. More important, they were 10 percentage points more likely to earn some college credit.

The Rochester Story

In 2007, the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation launched Shifting Gears, an initiative to push for changes in policy related to education and job-skills training in six midwestern states, including Minnesota. The foundation invested $17.2 million in creating “bridge” programs that paired ABE with a post-secondary job-skills program. As an offshoot of the program that Minnesota developed under Shifting Gears, in 2010 the Rochester Public Schools used a state grant to forge a partnership with a local community college to train adult students in several in-demand trades.  

As discussions between the schools and the college unfolded, leaders of the school district’s ABE program were shocked to learn that when their students moved on to the community college, many needed to retake high-school-level classes in reading, writing, and math. It was humbling for the ABE administrators, but the shift in understanding enabled the frank discussion that needed to take place.

“Like everyone else, we thought if you have a high school diploma or GED, that’s enough, we wash our hands of you,” says Julie Nigon, who helped create the Bridges to Careers program and recently retired from her roles as head of the Rochester Public Schools Adult and Family Literacy Program and program manager at the district’s ABE facility, the Hawthorne Education Center. “If you pat yourself on the back in June and you don’t know that in September it’s falling apart, you’re not succeeding.”

At a cost of almost $800 each at the community college and carrying no credits, the remedial classes presented a particular barrier for adult students, who frequently have families and no ability to support them while getting a job certification.

For its part, the community college knew where its students were getting stuck. For example, the college considers freshman composition a “gateway” course into college-level academics that is a strong predictor of whether a student will graduate. Only 31 percent of students who take three or more developmental reading and writing classes pass freshman composition.

Unpalatable truths on the table, administrators from both programs sat down to figure out how to bridge the chasm. One of the first things they agreed on was that ABE staff with the same credentials as RCTC faculty could teach “articulated” classes—courses that met both basic-education and community-college standards—to ABE students.

Students arrive in ABE with widely varying deficits, ranging from a language barrier to missing academic skills. Some may advance quickly, while others will need more intensive help.

“If you are in developmental reading, you can be sitting next to someone who is also needing remediation but is at a whole different level or has a particular need like phonemic awareness or decoding,” says Nigon. “We’d much rather have people take it here [in ABE], for free, where it’s no big deal if it’s clear you need more time.”

Virtually all ABE students have already experienced hardship, she continues. “We don’t need them to have another failure in their lives,” says Nigon. “I very quickly realized that telling people they are ready when they are not is a lie.”

The effect of Rochester’s Bridges program was immediate, according to Nigon. Of the integrated-program students who took the ABE developmental classes between May 2014 and August 2016, almost 94 percent completed two semesters in the Bridges program, finished job training, or continued on for more.

As the Rochester effort grew, the Mayo Clinic, which operates the Mayo Clinic School of Health Sciences, formally joined the effort with funding and guidance, as did the local United Way and the nonprofit Workforce Development, Inc., among others. Representatives of all of the groups meet monthly to troubleshoot and address new hurdles, as when they decided to hire a “career navigator” to help students address the struggles that can knock adult learners off track, such as daycare or transportation issues.

Even as students taste success, administrators must continue to defend their high standards from well-intended suggestions from people within the system. For instance, after some ABE staff saw the level of English-language literacy required to take Hawthorne’s certified nursing assistant classes, they pushed to have the courses taught in Spanish.

Because Mayo treats patients from all over the world, knowing Spanish is certainly an asset for those Bridges participants who are bilingual. But program leaders were firm, Nigon says, since graduates must be ready to work in English-speaking environments.

“If they’re working in a nursing home and not able to read and write in English, very quickly it’s going to catch up with them,” she says. “If you care for someone in a nursing home, you have to be able to communicate with them.”

Given the new federal law’s mandate to collect uniform, shareable data on program performance, Nigon and her colleagues have been working on quantifying their results, but they have had a hard time of it. To that end, the community college is building a website that will consolidate data going forward; to finance the effort, the college is using its share of the $10,000 the partnership received as a Harvard innovation award finalist.

What program administrators already know about program outcomes is that since 2013, Mayo had hired 166 Bridges participants, 77 percent of them members of racial or ethnic minorities. Fifty-one other health-care or long-term-care providers had also hired participants. As of February 2017, the Bridges program was on track to equip nearly 300 previously underemployed adults for health-care jobs. Eighty-six percent have found training-related jobs with benefits. Two thirds are low-income people of color.

Other skills pathways that Rochester’s ABE programs and RCTC have created together include training early-childhood educators, paraprofessionals to work in K–12 settings, and welders.

Data collection on program performance is complicated by the fact that Bridges participants often take advantage of multiple components of the ABE program. For instance, in 2018, 113 of Rochester’s nearly 2,000 adult students participated in Hawthorne’s healthcare training programs and 109 in a program that facilitates transitions to college. Twelve completed the new paraprofessional certification, 22 went on to enroll in a Mayo training program, and 66 transitioned to RCTC.

Since 2013, 228 Bridges participants have gone on to enroll in the community college, with 90 percent passing freshman composition and 58 percent earning one or more credentials. Fifty-three percent of the 97 Bridges participants who also were receiving state welfare-reform benefits were able to close their cases by moving into unsubsidized employment.

While Rochester has an outsize need for health-care workers, medical employees are in demand nearly everywhere, Nigon is quick to point out. Adult-training programs using the integrated education and training approach are responding: health-care tracks dominate integrated programs nationwide, with 51 percent of programs offering certified nursing assistant training, and most affording “stackable” credentials—industry-validated qualifications that allow workers to take a job and return to school later to build toward a higher credential.

The integrated approach isn’t cheap, but Nigon is hopeful that as data confirm that these programs are moving families into the middle class, their value will become clear. In the case of the Rochester Bridges partnership, the school system and RCTC each finance a portion, and the state also provides funding. In fact, state contributions toward all integrated education and training programs rose to $18 million in 2018. But that still leaves the Rochester team on a continual hunt for grant funding.

“Employers are some of the first to jump onboard” with funding, says Liza McFadden, a nonprofit consultant who until recently was the CEO of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy.

As for Congress, it now seems inclined to put some financial clout behind its legislation. According to the National Skills Coalition, from federal FY 2010 to FY 2015, funding for adult basic education activities that fall under Title II of the 2014 act actually declined, from $682 million to $569 million. But in June 2018, the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies passed a bipartisan funding bill for FY 2019 that would provide $642 million in funding for Title II grants to states—just $7 million shy of the 2014 law’s $649 million target.

The National Skills Coalition wants Congress to invest an additional $500 million to support career-pathways programs in the pending reauthorization of the Higher Education Act of 1965. Last overhauled in 2008, the legislation has been stalled for more than four years.

For fiscal year 2018, the Trump administration had requested a cut of $1.3 billion, or 39 percent, to the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act’s funding. The proposal would have shifted even more responsibility for funding to states, localities, and employers. Congress rejected the proposition.

“There’s been tremendous agreement on both sides of the aisle that we are not doing enough about credentialing,” says McFadden.

Pointing the Way

Will the availability of data help justify increased spending on integrated approaches in both the K–12 and ABE sectors? The Center for Postsecondary and Economic Success’s Mortrude, who worked for the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development when Rochester got its initial seed grant, is optimistic.

She notes that the 2014 law requires states to track and report progress on five outcomes of ABE programs: employment in the second and fourth quarters after a student exits a program; median earnings the second quarter after exit; credential attainment; skills gains; and effectiveness in serving employers.

Florida and California are often cited as states that are already gathering good data on adult learners. With a population of 40 million people, 17 percent of whom don’t have a high school diploma, California is spending $25 million in state funds to build a regional and state-level system that will synthesize uniform data on adult learners. Seventy-one regional consortia will use the information to develop and submit to the state three-year plans assessing the results of past adult-education efforts and identifying promising practices.

Because the performance indicators laid out in the new federal law are shared, institutions that haven’t collaborated in the past must begin talking, says Mortrude.

“Before, people only had wins after they left” an adult-education program, she says. “Now we have interim skills gains, so now we have ways of measuring whether people are making progress.”

In April 2017, the Center for Postsecondary and Economic Success published a survey that showed 42 percent of ABE providers had been engaged in integrated education and training for two or more years. Some 27 percent were just beginning to use the approach, 20 percent had not started, and 10 percent didn’t know.

“Adult education needs to change to keep up with the needs of the workforce,” says Sameer Gadkaree, senior program officer on the Joyce Foundation’s education and economic mobility team and the former associate vice chancellor for adult education with the City Colleges of Chicago. “What you see in Rochester is adult education making that shift.

“We’re nowhere close to done,” he continues. “It’s important for programs like those in Rochester to point the way.”

Based in Minneapolis, Beth Hawkins is a senior writer and national correspondent at The 74, a news site that covers education.

In October 2018, when Tom Boasberg stepped down as superintendent of Denver Public Schools (DPS) after 10 years on the job, he was no doubt frustrated to see his longtime critics rejoice. What likely disappointed him most, though, was that some of his strongest supporters abandoned him, too.

Boasberg’s opponents were happy to see him go because they think he “destroyed public education” in Denver by transforming the 92,000-student district in ways they disdain. Some of his once-strongest supporters lost confidence in his leadership because they don’t think he transformed it enough. And everyone seems to blame him for not closing the city’s wide and persistent achievement gap between middle-income, largely white students and lower-income and minority students.

Boasberg began his tenure by declaring Colorado’s largest district and its centralized, top-down model for providing public education fundamentally broken. In the years that followed, the superintendent and school board implemented a wide array of unconventional reforms aimed at transforming DPS from a closed school system into a dynamic system of schools.

When Boasberg first took the reins, it would have seemed wildly improbable that Denver would nearly erase its 25-point lag behind the state in average reading and language-arts proficiency, or that the Latino graduation rate would increase by 17 points, or that more than 65 new schools would open. But that’s exactly what happened.

In light of these changes, how did Boasberg acquire so many adversaries? The answer is not simple, but a more seminal question is, how did he manage to gather enough support to effect these radical changes in the first place? Boasberg was a centrist, and he built a coalition based on pragmatism and a shared belief that change was a long overdue moral imperative. At the height of the national bipartisan consensus on education reform, he was its standard bearer, and, for longer than anyone before him, he made his strategy work. His lengthy tenure and the changes he implemented demonstrate that traditional school districts and their elected boards are capable of reinventing themselves. His work in Denver is a rebuke to those who insist that traditional districts are the “one best way” to provide public education—but it is also a reminder of how difficult it is to build an alternative model.

A Different Kind of District

Boasberg first joined DPS in April 2007 as its chief operating officer (COO), hired by then superintendent Michael Bennet, a childhood friend. (Note: Parker Baxter, one of authors of this piece, worked for DPS under both Bennet and Boasberg, from 2008–11.)

The following month, the Rocky Mountain News painted a dire picture of the district: “A quarter of the city’s school-age children don’t attend Denver Public Schools. Among Anglo students, a quarter go to private schools. In some southwest Denver neighborhoods, half the kids go to suburban districts. Enrollment at independent charters has skyrocketed 300 percent in six years.”

District leaders were not angered by the report. In fact, they had partnered with the reporters to collect and analyze the data. Bennet and the school board publicly accepted responsibility for the state of the district and issued a call for radical change. Based in part on the report, they concluded that “operating an urban school district in the 21st century based on a century-old configuration will result in failure for too many children.”

They proceeded to outline a vision for a different kind of district, one that embraced choice and competition and empowered educators and schools by holding them accountable for results. Bennet and the board argued that the district needed to “function more like a partner [with educators], building capacity and leadership at the school level and serving as an incubator for innovation.”

Although Boasberg was not yet superintendent when the district published its “Vision for a 21st Century School District,” that vision set the course of his tenure.

An Education Outsider

Boasberg was named superintendent in January 2009, after Bennet was tapped to fill a U.S. Senate seat. Boasberg had played a key role in developing Bennet’s reform plan, and the school board decided to skip a national search.

Aside from Boasberg’s two years as COO of DPS, his only prior education experience was a brief stint as an English teacher in Hong Kong. An attorney by training, and skilled in operations and finance, he had worked on telecommunications policy at the Federal Communications Commission and then as an executive in the private sector. At the time, Boasberg’s supporters touted his outsider status as evidence that he would accelerate Bennet’s reforms.

Boasberg started by updating the strategic plan launched five years earlier. At the time, the Council of the Great City Schools called the Denver Plan “one of the most promising and comprehensive in the nation.”

Given his private-sector background, it is tempting to view Boasberg as just another “businessman” coming in to fix a broken school system. Although he based his reforms partly on private-sector concepts, he demonstrated a deep dedication to improving public education in Denver over his decade of service. And unlike some outsiders who try to impose business or military discipline on chaotic systems, he took office with an articulated theory of change and a mandate to implement it. Moreover, Boasberg was aiming for transformation, not simply tweaking around the edges. He intended to redesign Denver’s traditional city school system from the ground up.

In outlining his vision, Boasberg called on the district to “acknowledge that our culture historically has not been one consistently defined by high expectations, service, empowerment, and responsibility,” arguing that DPS, like districts nationwide, “has operated for generations as a monopoly and has suffered from a monopoly’s resistance to fundamental change, a lack of urgency and inflexibility that often puts the interests of the system and its adults over and above the needs of our students.”

The district would continue to fail its students, he asserted, especially its most vulnerable, unless it was willing to recommit to its fundamental purpose—educating students—by reimagining its function and redesigning its structure to meet contemporary demands. Boasberg proposed new organizing principles for the district: accountability, empowerment, choice, transparency, and equity.

Over the following decade, these concepts informed the controversial reforms he implemented, including new approaches to school and teacher evaluation, merit pay, and openness to charter and innovation schools (see sidebar). These reforms were not random. Each was part of a deliberate strategy launched by Bennet and implemented by Boasberg to redesign the city’s school district.

Transforming a School District

The original Denver Plan, introduced by Bennet in 2005, was the first vision statement in the district’s more than 100-year history. Although bold for its time, it was conventional compared to the revisions Boasberg led four years later. In 2010, Boasberg and the board made explicit their intention not only to continue Bennet’s controversial reforms but to accelerate them by coupling new organizing principles with a “theory of action” to guide the district’s work. Boasberg and the board framed the plan as an effort to “fundamentally chang[e] the culture and structure of public education” in Denver. They praised the progress made under Bennet but were brutal in condemning the district’s continued failings. If it hoped to make real progress for all students, they argued, the district didn’t need just a new way of thinking, but also a new way of acting.

Teacher quality. A core idea in Boasberg’s theory of action was that traditional districts disempower their most important assets—teachers and school leaders—by treating them like cogs in a compliance machine. Thus, Boasberg led a variety of policies aimed at setting clear performance expectations and using accountability to improve teacher and principal quality.

When Boasberg took office, DPS had already implemented a teacher pay-for-performance system called ProComp (Professional Compensation Plan). Developed in tandem with the teachers union, ProComp had been piloted, supported financially by voters, and was due for renewal when Boasberg became superintendent. At the time, it was one of the nation’s first and most comprehensive efforts to evaluate teacher quality and reward strong performance with higher pay.

Although ProComp did not revolutionize the district’s relationship with teachers, studies show it improved teacher satisfaction and retention. It also demonstrated the viability of compensating teachers using an alternative to the traditional step-and-ladder system.

Implementation of ProComp was rocky under Boasberg and was made more complex when the district, in response to a state mandate, designed a new and largely separate teacher-evaluation system, Leading Effective Academic Practice (LEAP), which triangulated teacher evaluations based on classroom observations, student academic-growth scores, and student evaluations. LEAP increased flexibility in how teachers were deployed and freed up time for strong teachers to support their peers’ development; it also expanded teacher-leadership opportunities.

LEAP and ProComp were operated in parallel when, in hindsight, they might have been more effective if merged into one system. Later studies show that teachers struggled to understand how they could earn more base pay and bonuses under these two systems. And despite evidence that the pay incentives available to teachers under ProComp had a significant impact on year-to-year retention, particularly in hard-to-staff positions and schools, Boasberg was never able to convince the union of the merits of the system.

Boasberg also focused on other less visible but significant aspects of the district’s approach to human capital—for example, through his decade-long fight for mutual-consent hiring between school leaders and teachers. For years, DPS had frequently engaged in “direct placement”—the practice of assigning a teacher to a new post, even over the objections of the teacher and principal. Even before he became superintendent, Boasberg zeroed in on the practice as inconsistent with a culture of empowerment and accountability. In 2010, he partnered with Colorado legislators to prohibit districts from placing teachers into schools without the mutual consent of the teacher and the principal. Since then, DPS led the state’s districts in ending forced placement, and it did so while successfully fighting a lawsuit by the teachers union to maintain the practice.

Choice and competition. Boasberg’s theory of action embraced competition from other school providers, cultivating entrepreneurial educators and encouraging choice for families. As COO in 2007, he led the creation of the Office of New Schools, which ultimately became the Portfolio Management Team, a reference to the portfolio district strategy pioneered by Paul T. Hill and colleagues at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE). Modeled on offices created under superintendents Joel Klein in New York and Arne Duncan in Chicago, the idea was to create a district team responsible for evaluating new-school proposals and overseeing new schools.

In 2008 DPS launched its first Call for New Quality Schools, a public invitation for school start-up proposals, whether charter or district-operated. Based on best practices for authorizing charter schools, the process developed by Boasberg evaluated applications on the strength of the proposal and the operator’s record of success, without regard to governance type. Charter and innovation schools have increased in number relative to traditional public schools (see Figure 1).

Since launching the annual call for new schools, the district has approved the opening of more than 75 new charter and district schools. Not all have succeeded, and some have yet to open, owing to lack of space, but many are now among the district’s best performers while serving the highest-need students. The Call for New Quality Schools fostered the growth of local charter-management organizations, such as DSST Public Schools, STRIVE Prep, Rocky Mountain Prep, and University Prep. Each started with a single school.

Accountability. In the 2010 Denver Plan, Boasberg noted that “traditionally, public school systems have promoted neither empowerment of education professionals nor accountability for students’ success.” Instead, he said, “we have created systems that value and enforce compliance over performance.” His theory of action placed emphasis on individual and collective responsibility for student outcomes.

Boasberg directed the development of a tool for assessing school quality—both district-operated and charter—and to inform decisions about closing, expanding, and replicating schools. The result was the School Performance Framework (SPF), a robust model focusing on student academic growth and achievement and employing multiple measures of performance.

Boasberg and the school board used the SPF to reshape the district through performance management. Although it is true that he became less willing to impose consequences on low-performing schools over time, whether in response to the larger politics of education reform, resistance from internal stakeholders, pushback from the local community, or the disruption that accountability requires, he nonetheless led radical interventions in dozens of schools.

Using evidence from the SPF, the board intervened in approximately 40 underperforming schools, requiring them to close, restart, or accept replacement by another operator. (As of 2018–19, the district comprises more than 200 schools. Approximately 150 of them are district-managed, 50 of which have special autonomy as Innovation Schools; and 60 schools are district-authorized charters.) DPS has not closed or replaced a district-operated school since 2016, and following the most recent board election in November 2017, it suspended its intervention policy. But last year, just before Boasberg left, the board approved a revised policy that requires more community input but maintains the intervention requirement for chronic underperformance.

Empowerment. Closely connected to Boasberg’s concern for accountability was his desire to empower school leaders and educators to inject innovation into the district.

He argued that “accountability without autonomy is compulsion” and that real accountability for student outcomes requires giving educators control over inputs. In 2008, Boasberg, as COO, worked with state legislators to enact the Innovation Schools Act. The law allows districts to free some district-operated schools from various rules and policies so they can operate (and innovate) more as charters do, wielding greater autonomy over their time, staff, and money. DPS has used the law to create new schools and as a turnaround strategy for troubled ones. According to some observers, Boasberg became more reluctant to relinquish control to schools over time, especially as the impact of such decisions on the district’s central office grew. Still, DPS today has more than 50 innovation schools and three innovation zones, enrolling a quarter of the district’s students.

Equity and excellence. One tenet of Boasberg’s theory of action underlies all the others. From the start, he framed the need to transform Denver’s schools as a matter of equity for students. His unconventional embrace of accountability, educator empowerment, school choice, and cooperative competition between traditional and charter schools was grounded in his view that the traditional approach is not only ineffective but also unjust.

Boasberg certainly did not end inequity in Denver’s schools, but the changes he implemented appear to have produced real improvements for the district’s diverse students.

A Focus on Outcomes

Rightly or wrongly, superintendents get much of the credit or blame for district performance. Upon Boasberg’s departure, DPS touted improvements under his leadership, including enrollment growth, improved graduation rates, a reversal from worst to first in student academic growth among major Colorado districts, a tripling of Advanced Placement activity, a dramatically reduced drop-out rate, and the opening of more than 65 new schools alongside turnaround or closure of more than 30 others. Boasberg himself has cited the growing numbers of Latino and black graduates as an especially meaningful accomplishment. Despite these measurable gains, his critics remain unconvinced of his success.

Was the growth in DPS enrollment purely a byproduct of Denver’s rapidly growing population? Some evidence suggests otherwise. In a state that embraces school choice, the market provides some clues as to changing demand. Since the 2008–09 school year, the number of students choosing to attend DPS from another district has grown at a faster rate than students opting out of DPS schools—though more students continue to choose other districts each year than choose to attend DPS schools from elsewhere. As for students opting out of the public system altogether, the number of children attending private schools located within DPS boundaries fell by more than 30 percent between 2009 and 2018, compared to only a 9.4 percent decline statewide (see Figure 2).

Measures of improvement in student performance must be evaluated in light of any changes to the district’s student composition over Boasberg’s tenure. Despite a remarkable DPS enrollment gain of more than 17,000 students, measures of racial, ethnic, and economic diversity are little changed. In 2018, as in 2009, a majority of DPS students were members of minority groups, though there has been a slight increase in white students (see Figure 3a). The share of Denver Public Schools students receiving free or reduced-price lunches has remained stable, while the share of English learners has increased slightly (see Figure 3b).

DPS experienced substantial improvement in the four-year graduation rate since the 2009–10 school year, when a new formula for graduation rates was adopted (see Figure 4). Latino students registered the greatest gains. The progress in graduation rates is mirrored by a declining drop-out rate. And finally, remediation rates—proxies for how prepared graduates are for higher education—also fell during Boasberg’s term, while the immediate college-going rate rose.

Improvements in the district’s academic performance were already taking place when Boasberg took the helm of DPS. Outside observers noted that between 2005 and 2010, DPS moved from worst in median student academic growth to join the top large districts in Colorado in achievement. Under Boasberg, the district has experienced faster-than-average growth in student achievement based on the state’s growth model but still lags state levels of proficiency, with worrisome gaps between student subgroups (see Figure 5).

On the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the organization A+ Colorado concluded that DPS students in 2017 performed roughly at the midpoint of large urban districts nationally, but with more dramatic achievement gaps along socioeconomic lines. Attributing changes in district performance to specific types of schools (traditional, innovation, or charter) is challenging. Education Research Strategies reports growth in ELA achievement for all types of DPS schools, but highlights an outsize contribution from charter schools. A+ Colorado found in May 2017 that the “schools with the largest gains in relative performance show that a variety of schools and educational programs have demonstrated improvement: from traditional district-run schools, to specialized programs, to charters and innovation schools.”

The Center Did Not Hold

Still today, some of Boasberg’s critics, committed to the monolithic system he sought to transform, are demanding that the district return to its old ways. The teachers union wants to jettison the district’s pay-for-performance system and revert to the traditional step-and-ladder salary scale. Some community groups want to abandon the common-enrollment system and go back to attendance boundaries. The union has called on the district to replace its multi-measure school performance framework with the state’s less rigorous version. And Boasberg’s most ardent adversaries don’t cherry-pick. They oppose all of the changes.

Why, though, do some who originally supported his approach also see his tenure as a failure (or at least nothing to celebrate)? The answer says a lot about Boasberg, but it says more about the state of bipartisan education reform.

When Boasberg became superintendent in 2009, a pro-reform Democrat was in the White House, Boasberg’s friend and predecessor was in the U.S. Senate, and Democrats for Education Reform was on the rise. His boldest reforms came in these early years, when his support among fellow reformers was strongest. He was able to implement radical changes by framing them in terms that were at once pragmatic and aspirational. Appealing to liberals’ sense of fairness, he confirmed their belief that the system was rigged against the least advantaged. By making transformation of the district a moral imperative—one necessary to right a historic and ongoing injustice—Boasberg managed a diverse coalition of support among civic and business leaders, community advocacy groups, and supporters of charter schools and choice. But the trajectory of his impact and influence in Denver tracks neatly with the fate of bipartisan education reform in Washington, D.C., and across the country. As the shared enthusiasm for standards, accountability, and choice began to fade, so too did Boasberg’s shine.

By his own admission, Boasberg is an introvert who lacks the charisma and political skills of his predecessor. Perhaps partly because of that, he may have been more willing to make decisions that could have ended his political career. This courage earned him a national reputation as a bold reformer and helped him secure the support of many advocates who had long attacked the district.

For a time, Boasberg seemed unstoppable. Ironically, he implemented many of his most aggressive reforms in his first four years in office while he had the support of only four of the board’s seven members. Boasberg eventually gained the support of the entire board when a slate of reform-friendly candidates replaced his three detractors in 2013. But by that time cracks had already begun to emerge in his coalition. With the board’s unanimous support, his advocates expected him to move their agenda along more aggressively. When he didn’t, he sealed his fate.

In the years that followed, even as Denver continued to rise in national prominence, many of Boasberg’s leading supporters grew frustrated as it became clear that he was content to let the district, as one onetime supporter complained, “coast on its past successes.”

In 2017, Boasberg lost the unanimous support of the board when two opponents of his reforms won seats. Also that year, he suffered a major setback when education and civil-rights advocates succeeded in pressuring the district to revise its controversial school-rating system after acknowledging the inclusion of measures advocates said masked low performance. In retrospect, that debacle may have caused the final crack in Boasberg’s fragile coalition. To opponents and supporters alike, it was proof that the district couldn’t be trusted.

In the end, even some of his strongest stalwarts turned against him. Theresa Peña, who served on the DPS board from 2003–11, and as chair for five years, had taken a lead role in the reforms. Yet in February 2018, she wrote a scathing column in the Denver Post declaring the district’s strategy a failure, arguing that no one—not “students, teachers, principals or community members”—was “better off as a result of the reforms put in place by the school board.” She asserted that “until and unless Boasberg and the Board of Education take concrete steps to fundamentally change the district to serve its students and schools, real progress will remain elusive.”

Two months later, Tony Lewis, CEO of the Denver-based Donnell-Kay Foundation and an early supporter of Boasberg, explicitly called for a change in leadership. Boasberg always had critics, but when their company grew to include some of his strongest supporters, his strategy of bold but calculated change became untenable. Boasberg and DPS board members maintain that his departure was a mutual decision. Whether he chose to leave or was in fact forced out, his departure was not likely the one he had imagined for himself.

Not everyone was happy to see Boasberg go. The advocacy group Chiefs for Change called him an “extraordinary leader who has dedicated his life to expanding opportunities for all of Denver’s children.” Michael Bennet praised Boasberg’s leadership in the Denver Post, urging residents to recognize the progress made under him and not to retreat from his reforms.

Boasberg, for his part, says he left the district “in a fundamentally different and better place.” He is not wrong, but after all the changes he spearheaded, Denver, like other urban districts, is still failing to provide quality educational opportunities to all its students, especially its most vulnerable and historically underserved. In our broken education debate, this is the great obstacle to progress: one side wants radical, transformational change and the other wants nearly none. In the space between them, incremental improvement may be the best we can hope for. It may be that Boasberg was wrong to settle on a middle way, or it may be that no middle path was ultimately sustainable.

Boasberg may be disappointed that his legacy is in doubt, but he was likely pleased when the board chose the candidate he himself had groomed to succeed him. In a normal world, deputy superintendent Susana Cordova, a Denver native, a Latina, a graduate of DPS, and a former district teacher and principal, would be an obvious choice for superintendent. But despite the endorsement of more than 100 district principals and administrators, Cordova was denounced by many of the same people who pushed for Boasberg’s ouster. The anti-Boasberg camp opposed Cordova because they viewed her as complicit in his efforts. Ironically, those who support that transformation but think Boasberg failed to lead it all the way oppose Cordova for the same reason.

“Getting There Is Hard”

Evaluating a superintendent’s tenure is complicated—and highly politicized. Whether you “like” a superintendent depends in part on what that leader does and whether those actions fit with your ideas—not just on whether positive changes ensue.

Superintendents are visible public officials who are expected to be responsible for the performance of their district. They play a prominent role in the public imagination and are courted and paid as if they matter. Yet the question of whether they actually do has been little studied.

Evaluating Tom Boasberg’s superintendency is particularly complex because he was not a traditional superintendent and the initiatives he pursued are not commonplace.

Nonetheless, even on the measures by which traditional superintendents are judged, Boasberg’s tenure was a success. He weathered four board elections and two bond approvals and attracted millions of dollars in philanthropy. He oversaw the closure of schools, the construction of new ones, and the renovation of old ones. And most significantly, there is clear evidence that educational outcomes for students—including the district’s most historically underserved students—improved under his leadership.

Few other cities in the United States have so thoroughly altered the way they govern and deliver public education. How effective were the reforms he wrought? The evidence is still limited, but the changes themselves—from student-based budgeting, to performance accountability, to shared campuses, to school choice, to innovation zones—will not easily be reversed.

The job of superintendent is notoriously difficult and has been since it was invented over a century ago. The role was created to lead the school districts of the industrial age, but it has not yet been reimagined to lead the districts of the future.

Tom Boasberg’s tenure provides a glimpse of that reimagined position. But just as he did not fully reinvent the Denver schools, he also did not fully reinvent his role. That will be up to those who follow.

As Boasberg said when he began his job: “We have a pretty clear idea of where we want to go—getting there is hard.”

Parker Baxter is scholar in residence at the University of Colorado Denver School of Public Affairs, where Todd Ely is associate professor and Paul Teske is dean and Distinguished Professor.

Higher education may be one of the most important channels through which people can attain improved life outcomes based on their merit rather than family background. If qualified students from lower-income families are underrepresented in higher education, there is potentially a failure not just in equity but in economic efficiency as well.

The question of which colleges and universities lag (or lead) in providing access for low-income students has become a frontline issue in national discussions of educational opportunity. Legislative initiatives such as the bipartisan ASPIRE Act proposed in the U.S. Senate in 2017 would rank institutions based on their percentage of low-income students and impose financial penalties on institutions below a certain ranking. The latest version of the U.S. News & World Report “Best Colleges” rankings includes measures of “social mobility.” Other news outlets like the New York Times and the  Washington Monthly have prominently published rankings of colleges based on representation of low-income students while taking editorial positions excoriating (or applauding) individual institutions based on such measures.

Unfortunately, these initiatives ignore a thorny measurement challenge, one that can turn good intentions into penalties for institutions that are actually succeeding in providing opportunities for low-income students and trigger rewards for institutions that are less successful than they might appear. What makes measurement challenging is that different institutions face students whose family income and preparation differ.

Suppose that the University of Maine and the University of Connecticut enroll all students from their respective states who fit their academic standards, as defined by receiving a score on a college admissions test that is within the range of most students currently enrolled. Based on the different populations of their states, the University of Maine would draw 22 percent of its students from families with incomes below $40,000, while the University of Connecticut would draw only 10 percent of its students from this income range. The University of Maine would be judged much more favorably by popular measures of “opportunity” and rewarded by proposed accountability systems, while the University of Connecticut would be penalized. However, those rewards and penalties could not result from their differential success in enrolling low-income students since, in the example, all relevant students enroll at each university, regardless of their incomes. The universities would be rewarded based on their circumstances, not their behavior or effort.

More generally, popular measures of “opportunity” confound differences in universities’ effort with differences in their circumstances. Specifically, while the measures mean to measure a university’s effort to enroll well-qualified low-income students, what they actually measure can largely reflect differences in the pools of students from whom the universities could plausibly draw. The popular measures include a university’s share of students who receive federal Pell grants (the “Pell Share”), the share whose family income is in the bottom 20 percent of the national family income distribution (the “Bottom Quintile” measure), and the Intergenerational Mobility (“IGM”) measure, which is based on the percentage of enrolled students whose families are in the bottom 20 percent but who themselves end up in the top 20 percent of the national income distribution.

Does a university that does well on these popular measures necessarily have more successful policies for recruiting low-income students than a university that does poorly on these measures? As we show in this analysis, the answer is no.

To be clear, we are not criticizing the intentions behind the efforts to measure the success of institutions in providing opportunities for low-income students. Rather, we are attempting to give higher-education leaders the understanding and tools needed to conduct self-evaluation that is likely to further those good intentions.

What This Analysis Does (and Does Not) Do 

Our analysis has two main aims. First, we provide a proof by contradiction. That is, we demonstrate that some universities slated for rewards based on the popular measures actually serve relatively few low-income students from their pool. The reverse is also true: some universities that are slated for penalties based on the popular measures actually serve disproportionately many low-income students from their pool. Thus, measurement matters greatly in this context: judging institutions using flawed measures is likely to produce unintended outcomes because they often give the wrong answer.

Second, we propose a sound measure of a university’s success in providing opportunities to low-income students. Specifically, we show how to construct a university’s “relevant pool”—the pool of students from which it could plausibly draw based on its academic mission and geographic location. We illustrate how to compare a university’s students to its relevant pool, and we demonstrate that such comparisons are highly informative—to show not just how the university serves low-income students but how it serves all students.

The Pell, Bottom Quintile, and IGM measures could be regarded as reasonable proxies for universities’ effort in recruiting low-income students if, when tested, they proved to be closely aligned with measures based on universities’ relevant pools. If they are not closely aligned, then they must be measuring something different from what is intended. Even worse—because “top performers” and  “bottom performers” receive most of the attention—is if the popular measures identify top performance as bottom performance and vice versa.

In addition to our two main aims, we discuss the IGM measure in a bit of detail because it is apparently misunderstood. We show that it shares the flaws of the Bottom Quintile measure but also has additional flaws that lead it to punish universities that face relevant pools with high levels of income equality. We conclude with a broad discussion of how universities can evaluate themselves in a sound manner that could allow them to improve on goals of providing opportunity.

Having said what we attempt, it is worth saying what we do not attempt. Although we suggest measures by which schools could judge whether they are accomplishing their missions, we do not seek to define those missions. These differ in terms of the backgrounds and preparation of the students served. For instance, Berea College states that its mission is: “To provide an educational opportunity for students of all races, primarily from Appalachia, who have great promise and limited economic resources.” This statement defines Berea’s relevant pool (all races, primarily Appalachian, of great promise) and its income representation goal (disproportionate emphasis on low-income students). The measure we propose would allow Berea to judge itself against its own mission, but we do not propose to impose a mission on Berea.

Precisely because we do not want to impose missions on universities, we use examples drawn from states’ most selective or “flagship” public universities for our proof by contradiction and our illustration of a sound way to measure opportunity. We use them because their key undergraduate mission and constraints are a matter of public record—largely to educate well-prepared students from their own state. Thus, we know approximately how they would define their relevant pools, and we can construct those pools with a fair degree of confidence. However, the measurement issues we confront apply just as much to non-flagship institutions that are more or less selective and public, nonprofit, or for-profit. Even universities like Harvard and Stanford, which claim to recruit students nationally, in fact have relevant pools that differ substantially owing to strong geographical skews.

Even though flagships’ missions and constraints are quite public and the pools we construct for them are grounded in empirical evidence about their behavior, we emphasize that our assumptions are meant only to facilitate illustration. They do not preclude a university specifying alternative parameters.

Furthermore, we do not attempt in this analysis to answer fundamental questions such as why students’ preparation varies with family background, why different institutions have curricula and resources designed to serve students with different levels of preparation, and why students often prefer more proximate institutions even when not constrained to attend them. These questions are of absorbing interest to us and other economists of higher education, but we stick here to a simpler question: Given the curricula offered by various institutions (which implicitly constrain the students for whom their offerings generate a high return), given the legal and market conditions under which institutions operate (which affect how attractive they are to out-of-state or otherwise distant students), and given the correlation between income and preparation, how can we measure an institution’s enrollment of students from across the income distribution?

Constructing the “Relevant Pool” 

As examples, we use the main campuses of the flagship universities of Connecticut (Storrs), Maine (Orono), Illinois (Urbana-Champaign), Montana (Missoula), New Mexico (Albuquerque), and Wisconsin (Madison). We chose these universities because their relevant pools are distinct in ways that affect measurement. Since the main contributions of this analysis are the proof by contradiction and demonstration that sound measures are possible, we needed to choose interesting universities, not average ones. Our aim is certainly not to rank all universities—indeed, we should refrain from doing so because it is a university’s responsibility (and not our right) to define its mission and, thereby, its relevant pool.

We employ measures from de-identified tax data and the population of SAT and ACT college-entrance test-takers from the high school class of 2008. These data, which we also used in the example above, enable us to construct each university’s relevant pool by including all students from the state whose scores on either college assessment put them in their flagship’s “core” preparation range. Universities report these score ranges—the 25th and 75th percentiles of their students’ scores—to the federal Department of Education and to college guides. While selective universities consider multiple indicators of preparation and most practice holistic admissions, these core ranges efficiently summarize institutions’ academic standards and are broadly comparable, more so than, for instance, grades.

The data in Figure 1 reveal just how much the relevant pool’s income distribution differs for each of these universities. The 20th, 40th, 60th, and 80th percentiles of each income distribution are marked to facilitate comparisons. For instance, compare the University of Connecticut and University of Maine distributions. Maine’s 20th percentile income is much lower than Connecticut’s 20th percentile income. In fact, Connecticut’s 20th percentile is approximately the same as Maine’s 40th percentile, and Connecticut’s 40th percentile is midway between Maine’s 60th and 80th percentiles.

The Illinois-Montana comparison of relevant pools generates similar insights. The 20th percentile for Illinois is higher than the 40th percentile for Montana, and the Illinois 40th percentile is between Montana’s 60th and 80th percentiles. Clearly, if one sets any low-income threshold based on a national distribution, as the Pell and Bottom Quintile measures do, a larger share of Maine’s or Montana’s relevant pool will fall below it. These comparisons illustrate how universities could be penalized for facing higher income distributions (Connecticut, Illinois) or rewarded for facing lower ones (Maine, Montana, New Mexico).

The University of Wisconsin’s relevant pool is interesting because the state of Wisconsin has a relatively equal income distribution. (Notice that although Wisconsin’s 40th, 60th, and 80th percentiles are well below those of Connecticut and Illinois, Wisconsin’s 20th percentile is about the same as theirs.) Wisconsin’s income equality translates into relatively few students with very low incomes by national standards. Thus, Wisconsin’s relatively equal income distribution—which is probably good for disadvantaged students—generates penalties for the university when it is evaluated on Bottom Quintile or Pell measures. Ironically, the university would look better if Wisconsin had more unequal incomes—as does California, for example. Policymakers probably do not mean to penalize universities for their pools’ income equality or reward them for inequality.

A Better Measuring Stick

Incorporating information on each university’s relevant pool addresses the measurement challenge. In the context of our examples, we examine how universities’ in-state enrolled students’ income distributions fit into the income distributions of their relevant pools.

Specifically, we divide the relevant pool into 5-percentile-wide bins and compute what percentage of each university’s in-state students fall into each (see Figure 2). If the university is enrolling prepared students of all incomes equally, each bin will contain 5 percent of students. We divide the bin’s percentage by 5 so that the number 1 is a useful marker on the “measuring stick.” For instance, if the height of the 21st to 25th percentile bin is 1, then the university’s representation of enrolled students from the 21st to 25th percentiles is exactly the same as their representation in the relevant pool. If the height is 1.5, the university’s representation of enrolled students is 50 percent greater than their representation in the relevant pool. If the height is 0.5, its representation is 50 percent lower.

Although 1 is a useful marker, it is just a marker—not a mission we impose on schools. For instance, Berea College and many other universities—public and private—that have a mission to serve disadvantaged students especially might want to see numbers above 1 for low-income students. A flagship university might be unconcerned if its numbers were lower than 1 for high-income students—especially if the school were aware that it offered opportunities to high-income students but that some chose to attend private universities with comparable curricula at their own expense (saving taxpayers’ money, thereby, for potential reallocation to needier students).

At each of the universities of Connecticut, Illinois, and Wisconsin, the height of the bars is consistently above 1 for enrolled students from low-income backgrounds—up through at least the 40th percentile of the relevant pool’s income distribution. In other words, these universities recruit low-income students sufficiently effectively that such students’ representation is disproportionately large. In contrast, the height of the bars is consistently below 1 for enrolled students from low-income backgrounds at the universities of Maine, Montana, and New Mexico, indicating that low-income students’ representation is disproportionately small.

At the universities of Connecticut, Illinois, and Wisconsin, the height of the bars for middle-income students is about 1, indicating that their representation is similar to their representation in the relevant pool. At the universities of Maine, Montana, and New Mexico, the height of the bars for middle-income students is consistently above 1, indicating that middle-income students’ representation is disproportionately large.

At all six universities, the height of the bars tends to be below 1 for high-income students. Although we cannot be sure, this is probably not due to the flagships’ failing to provide upper-income students with opportunities but, rather, those students choosing to attend private universities at their own expense.

These examples show key advantages of our method:

1. Unlike threshold-based metrics like the Pell, Bottom Quintile, and IGM measures, our method shows how each university is enrolling students across the whole of its relevant pool’s income distribution. This comprehensiveness allows observers to take in the entire picture or focus on whatever part of the income distribution interests them.

2. Our method provides a measuring stick but does not impose a mission on a university. A university can choose its own targets across the income distribution—which may include enrolling low-income students disproportionately.

3. Our method does not encourage perverse behavior such as neglecting students just above an arbitrary income threshold. This is unlike the popular measures that make such students—who may need substantial financial aid and encouragement—fail to count toward a university’s ranking. Moreover, when—as in proposed federal legislation—all universities face rewards and penalties based on the same threshold, there is increased likelihood of an “arms race” to enroll threshold-eligible students (for example, Pell students), exacerbating any tendency to focus aid on them at the expense of other modest-income students.

Two additional comments are in order. First, because the composition of a university’s applicants and relevant pool inevitably vary from year to year, its leaders might compromise academic standards if they try to achieve the same income representation targets every year. Indeed, a well-known result presented by Thomas Kane and Douglas Staiger in their research on K-12 accountability is that it is important to avoid over-interpretation of year-to-year changes, particularly for small schools (see “Randomly Accountable,” features, spring 2002). With that in mind, a university might want to set a more flexible target, such as by using moving averages.

Second, a university also might wish to assess the extent to which it has exhausted the pool of relevant students or—alternatively—“left some on the table.” It could do this by considering the raw number of students in each 5-percent income bin, rather than percentages, both in the school’s relevant pool and the students who enroll. By dividing the number of enrolled students by the number of relevant-pool students in each bin, school leaders could determine the university’s “utilization rate,” or the size of its class relative to its market, at all 20 levels of the applicable income distribution.

Suppose that the University of Wyoming were assessing whether it had exhausted its pool. Since it is the only baccalaureate-granting public university in a state that has only one (tiny) private baccalaureate-granting institution, it might look for utilization rates fairly close to one as indicating exhaustion. (A rate of 1 would be over-exhaustion because some Wyoming students attend out-of-state.)  In contrast, a utilization rate that would indicate exhaustion for the University of California-Berkeley or the University of California-Los Angeles would be well below 0.5. These two flagships share the same relevant pool and California, moreover, contains numerous other public and private institutions whose relevant pools overlap with the flagships’ pools. And this is before accounting for California students’ tendency to attend out-of-state schools.

Comparing Relevant-Pool and Threshold Rankings 

While threshold-based measures and rankings based on them are fundamentally flawed, it is nevertheless informative to compare such rankings with those based on universities’ relevant pools—if only to illustrate the magnitude of mis-measurement.

In order to do that, we ranked flagship universities in all 50 states on the shares of their enrolled students whose family incomes fell below the 20th and 40th percentiles of the relevant pool distribution. We then also ranked the universities using the two dominant threshold measures: the Pell Share and Bottom Quintile approach. Our ranking is such that 1 is the “best” at enrolling low-income students according to the measure being used, and 50 is the “worst.” Table 1 shows where the six universities featured in this analysis rank using different measures.

The University of Illinois is ranked 2nd on both of the relevant-pool-based measures. However, it ranked 36th on the Pell measure and 26th on the Bottom Quintile measure. Similarly, the universities of Connecticut and Wisconsin are among the several best on the relevant-pool-based measures. However, they are in the bottom 15 schools on the Pell and Bottom Quintile measures.

Despite the fact that low-income students are well represented in relation to the relevant pools at these three universities, policies based on the popular measures would punish them in various ways, either because the mean income of their relevant pools is high, their income distribution is relatively equal, or both.

The University of Montana is ranked 47th and 40th, respectively, on the first and second relevant-pool-based measures. However, it is ranked 3rd on the Pell measure and 7th on the Bottom Quintile measure. Similarly, the universities of Maine and New Mexico rank among the bottom 15 schools on the relevant-pool-based measures but rank in the top 5 on the Pell and Bottom Quintile measures. Therefore, despite their own states’ low-income students being underrepresented at these universities, policies based on the popular measures would reward the universities of Montana, Maine, and New Mexico because they face relevant pools with low incomes, relatively unequal income distributions, or both.

We selected six universities to demonstrate how measurement matters. To be sure, there are universities that would rank similarly regardless of whether we use the relevant pool, Pell, or Bottom Quintile measures. This is because some universities happen to have income-achievement distributions in their relevant pools that are very similar to the national distribution. But that’s no reason to endorse the Pell or Bottom Quintile measures. Observing that the measure does not affect some universities’ rankings much is akin to observing that it would not matter how we measured height if everyone were equally tall.

Measuring Mobility along with Opportunity

The increasingly popular Intergenerational Mobility (IGM) measure has received ample attention, including favorable coverage in the New York Times, and has been presented as a measure of the effect of universities on the economic success of low-income students. The IGM is calculated by multiplying a university’s Bottom Quintile measure by the estimated probability that the university’s students from the national bottom income quintile end up, as adults, in the national top quintile.

The IGM suffers from two problems. First, since two thirds of the variation in the IGM comes from variation in the Bottom Quintile measure, these measures share the same flaws. Second, the mobility measure rewards relevant pools with extreme income inequality and penalizes those where incomes are more equal.

Looking again at the University of Wisconsin, the state’s unusually equal income distribution means that it has comparatively few adults in both the bottom and the top national income quintiles. Thus, University of Wisconsin students who stay in the state are disproportionately unlikely to end up in the national top quintile, regardless of the income with which they grew up. The mobility measure penalizes the state’s income equality twice: once through the Bottom Quintile measure (since the state is too equal to have many people in the bottom quintile) and again through the mobility measure (since the state is too equal to have many people in the top quintile). It is no surprise that the University of Wisconsin ranks 22nd out of the 25 highly selective public colleges for which this measure is reported via the New York Times. Ironically, the University of Wisconsin would look better on the ranking if the state of Wisconsin had less equal incomes.

For universities in states that face unusually unequal distributions, the situation is reversed. For instance, the California flagships face a relevant pool with large percentages of students at both the very top and very bottom of the income distribution. Thus, the IGM and other popular measures “reward” them for their state’s income inequality.

Measurement Matters

It is precisely because selective universities can engage students in intense learning that they have the capacity to transform lives. Indeed, there would be little point in urging universities to offer opportunities to students of all backgrounds if those opportunities were not valuable. Thus, it would seem unwise to coerce universities to neglect their educational missions.

The mis-measurement of “opportunity” for low-income students, which is all too common in Pell Share, Bottom Quintile, and IGM measures, produces perverse incentives. As we have shown, differences in the income-achievement distributions of universities’ relevant pools can produce penalties and rewards that are not only unintended but even the inverse of what was intended. In addition, when encountering strong policy incentives or public pressure to improve on these flawed measures, institutions could respond in ways that undermine their missions, such as by enrolling less-prepared students who meet the Pell or Bottom Quintile threshold even when there are much better prepared students just above the threshold, or by substituting out-of-state students who meet the threshold for in-state students. A university that pursues the flawed measures, which confound its behavior with its circumstances, may find that the easiest way to attain a better ranking is to deviate substantially from its educational mission.

While the examples of this study illustrate the naiveté of applying national benchmarks to universities in vastly different circumstances, we have purposely avoided ranking all institutions because that would require us to assert the relevant pool—and thus the mission—of thousands of institutions of higher education in the United States. This is not our right. In contrast, it is not merely the right but the duty of the leaders and stakeholders of each university to define its mission and, thereby, its relevant pool. When they acquiesce to demands to use the popular measures simply because they are trendy, leaders and stakeholders forgo crucial conversations about mission and constraints. Deliberating actively and often on the university’s relevant pool is a prerequisite to assessing the extent to which a university is succeeding in attracting students from across the income distribution.

A university that used our proposed relevant-pool-based measure would not find a conflict between pursuing its mission and providing opportunities to students regardless of background. In prior research, we have shown that the institutions that moved earliest toward enrolling students based on merit rather than background find themselves to be the most influential and financially capable today. Moreover, because there are more high-achieving low-income students who could benefit by attending selective institutions than currently enroll, a university could probably gain from rigorous, data-driven self-examination—deciding what its relevant pool is, comparing its students to the pool, and drawing lessons for recruitment, admissions, and financial aid. If universities use methods that measure what is intended, they can further both equity and excellence simultaneously.

Caroline Hoxby is the Scott and Donya Bommer Professor in Economics at Stanford University and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution. Sarah Turner is University Professor of Economics and Education and Souder Family Professor at the University of Virginia. This article is drawn from “Measuring Opportunity in U.S. Education,” which is available as a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

When Arizona State University announced in 2015 that it would offer a freshman year’s worth of credit-bearing “massive open online courses” (MOOCs) for a fraction of the cost of its regular online and in-person classes, the news was met with both excitement and alarm.

Education reformers proclaimed the move groundbreaking, saying it would open up higher education to underserved populations at home and around the world. The program’s name reflected that ambition: Global Freshman Academy.

“This is truly revolutionary,” Anant Agarwal, CEO of the nonprofit MOOC provider edX, Arizona State’s partner in the deal, told the Washington Post at the time.

But some academics saw the new model as a threat to traditional colleges, warning that it would steal students from community colleges and regional public institutions and destroy the livelihood of faculty members.

“Education technology has just become weaponized,” wrote Jonathan Rees, a history professor at Colorado State University Pueblo, in a blog post. “Arizona State is now the first predator university.”

Three years on, both the hype and the hysteria seem overblown. Though the program has drawn large numbers of students, it’s been plagued by the same problems that have dogged MOOCs since their creation: low completion rates and a high percentage of learners who already have degrees. Of the 373,000 students who have enrolled, barely 2 percent of students (8,090) have completed a course with a grade of C or better, and under 22 percent of the completers (roughly 1,750 students) have received credit from Arizona State (ASU) for their work. Fewer than 150 have enrolled in the university as regular students.

These low completion rates do not surprise Paul J. LeBlanc, president of Southern New Hampshire University, which serves about 3,000 students on campus and more than 60,000 through its online division.

“Anytime you talk about free, you get large numbers at the top of the funnel, and small numbers at the bottom,” he said. Curious students sign up, and when their interest wanes, they drop out. “There’s no skin in the game.”

But Global Freshman Academy, which gives students the option of paying for academic credit after they successfully complete a course, was supposed to be different from most MOOC providers. The promise of low-cost credit—just $600 a course—was meant to be the carrot that would attract a less-educated student and drive up persistence rates. That hasn’t happened, at least not on the scale reformers predicted.

Though close to half (44 percent) of students who have sought credit have only a high school diploma, nearly a third of them have at least an associate’s degree, and almost a quarter have a bachelor’s degree or higher. While more than 60 percent of learners live abroad, U.S. residents constitute the vast majority of the students who have sought credit.

Philip Regier, dean for educational initiatives at ASU, blames the disappointing numbers on a lack of awareness of the program. “We don’t have hundreds of thousands of marketing dollars to spend on it,” he said. “Many, many people do not yet understand that it’s available to them.”

Although Global Freshman Academy and other programs that seek to unbundle freshman year, such as StraighterLine and Freshman Year for Free, have yet to become household names, the need for cheaper, more flexible pathways to a college credential is clear. A growing number of jobs today require postsecondary education: in 2017, 68 percent of individuals holding only a high-school diploma were employed, in contrast to 84 percent of those with at least a bachelor’s degree (see Figure 1). Yet more than half of Americans over the age of 25 lack even an associate’s degree, and in many underdeveloped countries, attainment rates are even lower. Often, adult learners don’t have the time or resources to enroll in a mainstream four-year college, or even a marginally cheaper online program.

Meanwhile, the cost of college continues to climb, and with it, student debt. Nationally, two out of every three seniors who graduated from public and nonprofit colleges in 2017 carried student debt averaging $28,650, according to the Institute for College Access and Success. These rising costs and debt burdens are making it harder for low-income and debt-averse young people to afford a degree, contributing to a growing skills gap.

To continue to serve as an engine of opportunity, the American higher-education industry will need to create more low-cost pathways that appeal to adult learners and low-income, first-generation students alike. But Global Freshman Academy and other innovative Web-based programs face obstacles to growth beyond the lack of public awareness.

Take cost. Unlike traditional colleges, these programs aren’t accredited, and therefore aren’t eligible to award federal student aid. That means that low-income students must pay out-of-pocket. While the programs cost far less than a four-year public institution, even a couple hundred dollars can put college out of reach for a poor student.

Programs such as Global Freshman Academy also provide fewer student supports than traditional campuses—supports that, studies show, bolster the likelihood of success for low-income and first-generation students. Adding more counselors and advisors would likely improve completion rates, but it would also force the programs to raise their tuition, pricing out more students.

To be truly transformative—and sustainable—Global Freshman Academy and its peers will have to tackle these daunting challenges.

Still, some signs indicate that such programs are already having an impact on the higher-ed landscape. By proving the feasibility of offering high-quality, low-cost, entry-level courses for credit, ASU is putting pressure on other institutions to follow suit.

And by treating the open courses the same as in-person ones on its transcripts, the university is enhancing the credibility of MOOC-based programs (or devaluing the traditional academic credit, depending on whom you ask).

Origins

Global Freshman Academy wasn’t the first to try to radically reduce the cost and risk of attending college online.

For nearly a decade, the for-profit company StraighterLine has offered a $99-a-month all-you-can-learn subscription and guaranteed credit at 130 partner colleges. The company also charges a fee of $59 per course, but all told, a student enrolled for nine months can get a year’s worth of credits for under $1,500, less than a third of what eight courses at Global Freshman Academy would cost.

Last year, StraighterLine enrolled more than 25,000 students in general-ed courses. More than 60 percent of its students complete a course, and most of them—90 percent—say they plan to transfer their credit to a college.

Like Global Freshman Academy, StraighterLine generated a lot of buzz when it launched in 2009, three years before the MOOC craze began. Fast Company named it one of the “10 most innovative companies in education,” and reformers hailed the company’s founder, Burck Smith, as a revolutionary.

But StraighterLine, like Global Freshman Academy, met with skepticism from academe. Early on, a handful of mainstream colleges that had agreed to award credit for StraighterLine courses backed out, leaving mostly for-profits and adult-serving institutions as partners. The dropouts said the agreement wasn’t boosting their enrollment and was cutting into revenue from their own online offerings.

Looking back, Smith attributes the initial attrition to a bias against for-profit education, and a “knee-jerk reaction” that an online, low-cost education “must be low quality.”

Back in 2009, it was “politically fraught” for colleges to fraternize with for-profit companies, Smith said. These days, the association doesn’t carry the same stigma.

“The national conversation has changed,” he said.

Today, the partner colleges provide a major pipeline, sending students to StraighterLine to knock out some prerequisites or prove themselves ready to enroll (or re-enroll) in college, Smith said. They’ll also refer students who are at risk of dropping out because they’ve exhausted their eligibility for federal aid or face scheduling challenges.

Smith has had less luck selling students on a full freshman year’s worth of courses. The company dropped its discounted “first-year bundle” a couple of years ago, after hardly anyone purchased the package. On average, students complete four courses, less than half of what the bundle covered.

Smith argues that even if there isn’t demand for a freshman-year package, there’s still a benefit to unbundling general education. In September, a running tally on the company’s website estimated that the courses have saved students and taxpayers close to $160 million in tuition and fees over the costs of comparable courses at a four-year public institution.

Smith won’t disclose how much money the company is making, but said he’s “fairly happy” with progress to date. The biggest constraint to future growth, as he sees it, is the company’s lack of access to federal financial aid.

“We are cheap, but we can’t compete with free,” he said.

The U.S. Department of Education (ED) is currently testing the idea of opening up federal coffers to online education programs such as Smith’s, but the experiment has gotten a slow start. Three years in, ED has approved only one partnership—between StraighterLine and Dallas County Community College District—and it is more traditional than StraighterLine’s regular offering. Classes are tied to the academic calendar, and students pay a flat fee of $174 per credit, rather than $99 per month. There’s no free trial.

Smith worries those differences could make the hybrid program less appealing—and ultimately less disruptive—than StraighterLine’s subscription model.

Still, he sees the pilot as a way to start chipping away at the federal ban on aid to so-called “non-institutional providers” and to “create some space for innovation” within the confines of current law.

Freshman Year for Free

But getting Congress to embrace new ways of educating people isn’t easy, as Steven B. Klinsky, the founder and CEO of the nonprofit Modern States, knows all too well. (Note: Klinsky chairs the advisory committee to the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, within which Education Next is housed.)

In 2012, at the height of the MOOC craze, Klinsky, a venture capitalist and philanthropist, decided the nation needed a new, innovation-focused accreditor that would recognize specific courses for credit. So he joined forces with a former ED official, David A. Bergeron, then at the Center for American Progress, and set about creating one.

The pair wrote articles promoting the plan, and walked the halls of the department and Congress, trying to get the government to recognize their new accreditor. They failed.

“Rather than keep knocking our heads against the wall, politically,” said Klinsky, he and Bergeron started looking for more practical ways to accomplish their goal of providing free courses for credit. Their solution: a set of courses, created by top faculty at prestigious colleges, that would prepare students to take the College Board’s Advanced Placement and College Level Examination Program (CLEP) exams. (The CLEP assesses college-level knowledge in 33 subject areas, with passing scores accepted for credit at more than 2,900 institutions.)

They called the new program Freshman Year for Free, and said it could reduce the cost of a traditional four-year degree by 25 percent. Klinsky even offered to cover the fees for the first 10,000 exams.

In its first year, more than 80,000 people signed up for the courses, and a little over 5,000 requested vouchers to take a CLEP exam (none took AP exams). The actual number of test-takers may be higher, since the military pays exam fees for its members, and some learners may have paid out-of-pocket.

The completers include home-schoolers like Sarah Schneider, who took time off after finishing high school and wanted to catch up with her peers. She took seven Modern States classes while attending Baton Rouge Community College, and passed every CLEP exam, shaving a year off her college career and saving herself thousands in tuition.

Schneider, who transferred to Louisiana State University last fall, said that when she saw the ad for Modern States, she thought it must be a scam. No one would give away college credit for free. But she was paying her own way through college, and decided to give it a shot. To her surprise, the courses were at least as good—or better—than her community college ones, she said.

“I would highly recommend it to anyone trying to get through school quickly or cheaply,” she said.

The average number of courses that students complete is 1.67, and so far, 38 students have taken enough to get a full freshman year for free. But it’s early still, and Klinsky, who has spent a “few million” on the project, argues that the charity has already justified its cost, saving students an estimated $5 to $10 million, based on a typical cost of $1,000 to $2,000 per online course.

Klinsky says he isn’t bothered by the fact that only 6 percent of learners have sought exam vouchers. As he sees it, Modern States is like a free public library, where learners can choose to browse or study a topic deeply.

“If you want to learn the material and not go for credit, that’s not a failure: you’re learning what you want to learn,” he said. “No one is wasting money on an uncompleted course, because they’re not paying money.”

Those who do succeed on the tests stand to benefit in other ways. Passing even a single CLEP exam, as compared with taking the exam but failing to receive credit, leads to a 17 percent (5.7-percentage-point) increase in associate’s degree completion for students attending community colleges, according to a recent study.

As Modern States enters its second year, Klinsky is trying to build state and philanthropic support for his idea. In June, he and former Florida governor Jeb Bush penned an opinion piece that urged governors to cover the costs of the exams, arguing that it would be the most cost-effective way for them to raise state attainment rates. Klinsky is also seeking donors to subsidize the exams going forward. CLEP exams cost $87 each; AP exams cost $94.

If no one volunteers, Klinsky said he will likely continue to cover the fees, adding that even if he doesn’t, $87 for three or more college credits would still be a bargain.

Kick-Starting College

Morgan Carver Richards, 33, was an expat living in Dubai and rearing three young children when she discovered Global Freshman Academy through a search for online programs. Her husband, a pilot for Emirates airline, had attended Arizona State, so she trusted the brand, she said.

But what really sold her on the program were its low price and its convenience. She could study from home while her kids slept or played, and her credits would transfer just as if she’d taken the classes in person.

She enrolled, took 12 credits, and then transferred into the online program when her family moved back to the States two years ago. When her youngest started kindergarten last fall, she finally started taking classes in person, at the main campus. She’s on track to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology this spring or summer, and hopes to earn a PhD from Arizona State afterward.

“I was able to kick-start my life,” she said.

Global Freshman Academy, at $200 per credit hour, costs significantly less than ASU Online, which charges undergraduates $520 to $728. It’s a steal compared to Arizona State (in Tempe), where out-of-state undergraduates pay nearly $30,000 in tuition and fees.

But it’s still expensive compared to community college, where annual in-district tuition and fees averaged $3,660 in 2018, according to the College Board. And students attending community colleges qualify for federal student aid, while students in Global Freshman Academy do not.

The out-of-pocket costs could be one reason a majority of completers aren’t pursuing credit for their work. It’s also possible that some students never intend to seek credit, and enroll only for their own edification.

But why are so many failing to complete the courses to begin with? That’s a tougher question to answer, experts say.

One theory is that students aren’t finishing because they have nothing at stake. Like MOOCs, Global Freshman Academy charges nothing upfront, so students lose nothing if they drop their courses. The only learners with “skin in the game” are those who have paid a $45 fee to take proctored exams and be considered for credit.

Or maybe students are dropping out because they aren’t getting the support they need to succeed. Studies consistently show that low-income and first-generation students—the target population of Global Freshman Academy—do better in face-to-face and hybrid classes than online-only ones.

Global Freshman Academy does offer some supports, including a technical help team and teaching assistants who can answer content-related questions. The program also provides students with personalized feedback on what they’ve learned and how much they’ve retained.

But at-risk undergraduates often need more than just technical or academic assistance; they also need emotional support and encouragement, said Phil Hill, co-publisher of the e-Literate blog.

Richards, who had taken only a couple of community-college courses before enrolling in Global Freshman Academy, said she adjusted easily to the technology behind the program. The only technical challenge occurred during one final exam, when her answers weren’t recorded and she couldn’t get credit for the course.

Still, she says she prefers learning in person, where she can interact one-on-one with her professors and peers.

“I benefit from being able to ask questions during lectures, and to sit down and have a face-to-face conversation if I’m struggling,” she said.

Grad School Online

The difference between undergraduate and graduate students may explain why students have performed better in MOOC-inspired master’s programs, such as Georgia Institute of Technology’s online master’s in computer science, than in Global Freshman Academy. Graduate students tend to be more mature, independent learners who “know what they want” and have the self-discipline and study skills to succeed online, Hill said.

Georgia Tech’s program, which was developed with another MOOC platform, Udacity, costs about a sixth of the price of an in-person degree, and has a retention rate of 60 percent. This year, 1 out of every 12 of the nation’s graduates with a master’s in computer science will come from the Georgia Tech online program.

Moreover, the program seems to be serving an older, domestic population of students who would not otherwise get master’s degrees, according to a recent analysis by researchers at Harvard University and Georgia Tech (see “An Elite Grad-School Program Goes Online,” research, Summer 2018).

Agarwal of edX views the recent embrace of “MicroMasters” programs as evidence that the MOOCs-for-credit concept is catching on in change-resistant academe. Such programs consist of online graduate-level courses that lead to a certificate in a professional career area, such as health-care administration, business fundamentals, and design thinking. More than 30 institutions, including prestigious ones such as Columbia University, have joined an edX consortium offering the credentials. All the edX MicroMasters allow students to apply the course credits toward a full master’s program.

Comparing Global Freshman Academy to these programs may not be entirely fair: after all, the Georgia Tech and MicroMasters students have invested money up front; Global Freshman Academy’s have not. Still, the success of Georgia Tech’s program raises questions about whether the model can have the same impact with a more at-risk, undergraduate population.

“There’s a bit of danger in the tech world of thinking if you just find the right technology, you will solve problems that are a lot deeper than technological problems,” said Joshua Goodman, an associate professor of public policy at Harvard and one of the researchers who studied Georgia Tech’s program. “The technology may remove some barriers, but not all.”

Zvi Galil, dean of Georgia Tech’s College of Computing, said undergraduates who study solely online miss out on the maturing, socializing, and networking that take place on campus. Still, he believes that delivering some freshmen-level courses online could shorten the time students spend in the classroom—and lower their costs. His university is experimenting with that approach now, with a few introductory computer-science courses. For now, the institution offers no tuition cut for students who choose the online option, but Galil hopes it will in the future.

Galil sees Arizona State’s efforts to dramatically lower the cost of freshman year as “in the same spirit as what we do.”

“Michael Crow is a visionary,” he said of ASU’s president.

Looking Forward

But is Crow’s vision sustainable? It costs Arizona State at least $100,000 to build each course offered through Global Freshman Academy. The university has developed 14 so far and plans to create a total of at least 25. To recoup that initial $2.5 million, the college would need to have 4,166 completers pay for credit.

Regier, a former accounting professor, said he’s confident that the program will prove a good investment for the university as more students discover it. He points out that the cost of running the program, once the courses are developed, is pretty low.

In an effort to grow its user base, the university is reaching out to school districts in major cities, including Chicago and Los Angeles. “We’re still in a maturation phase,” Regier said.

Still, experts say that if Global Freshman Academy is going to live up to its potential to democratize higher education, it will need to do more than just broaden the funnel; it will need to take a hard look at which students are succeeding, what it must do to recruit more of them, and how it can get more would-be dropouts to persist.

The question, said Louis Soares, chief learning and innovation officer at the American Council on Education, is, “Can you improve the results, and is there a plan to do so?”

Meanwhile, critics of the program continue to see it as a menace—if a slightly less scary one.

“It may not be a particularly effective weapon,” said Rees, the CSU Pueblo professor. “But at the same time, a lot of people may be wounded by it. . . . I worry about an all-MOOC education, making both better online and face-to-face programs no longer economically viable.”

But Jeffrey J. Selingo, who has written books on disruption in higher education, said programs like Global Freshman Academy will never displace traditional colleges and universities.

“The markets out there are huge, not only in the U.S., but around the world. You’re not going to be able to squeeze every high-school graduate through the same pathway that everyone traditionally followed,” Selingo said.

“To me, it’s not a threat; it’s an expansion.”

Kelly Field is a freelance journalist based in Boston who covers higher education.