The number of undergraduates in the United States has increased by more than 30 percent since 2000, with two-year institutions absorbing the majority of new students. At the same time, outstanding student-loan debt has grown nationwide, reaching $1.4 trillion in 2018.

Many of those students are attending open-access community colleges, where tuition is relatively low, helped by substantial support from federal and state grant aid. Still, the remaining costs associated with college attendance—such as books and supplies and living expenses—may be important determinants of students’ success. For these students, the resources provided by student loans could mean the difference between working longer hours and having additional time to spend in class or on coursework.

Although the federal student-loan program exists to provide such resources, the growth in student loan debt is often described as a “crisis,” and many colleges and universities have implemented policies designed to reduce student borrowing. However, there is little rigorous evidence on the causal effect of loans on educational outcomes. As a result, it is not clear whether efforts to reduce borrowing will benefit or harm students.

We address this question through a randomized experiment at a large community college. Colleges that participate in the federal student-loan program must make loans available to all of their students, and the amount that each student can borrow is determined by his or her class standing and dependence on parental support. However, colleges have discretion over how much loan aid, if any, to list on students’ annual financial-aid award letters. Depending on the school’s approach, a letter might provide a loan “offer” equal to the maximum dollar amount a student could borrow, zero, or anything in between.

We designed our experiment to test whether the decision of the amount of loan aid to list—a choice being made every year by most community colleges—has meaningful effects on borrowing and student attainment. Specifically, our experiment varied whether students were offered a nonzero loan amount in their financial-aid award letters.

Our study provides the first rigorous evidence of the effect of loan offers on both borrowing and academic performance. We find that students whose aid letters offered nonzero loans were more likely to borrow, and those who borrowed did better in school. Students who received nonzero loan offers were 7 percentage points more likely to take out a loan (a 30 percent increase) and borrowed $280 more than students whose letters offered $0 in loans.

Students who borrowed as a result of receiving a nonzero loan offer earned 3.7 additional credits and raised their grade point averages (GPAs) by more than half a grade on a four-point scale, both representing increases of roughly 30 percent. One year after the intervention, borrowers were 11 percentage points more likely to have transferred to a four-year public institution. Based on these results and past research on the earnings gains from college persistence and attainment, we estimate that borrowers are likely to see an increase in their future earnings of at least $370 per year.

Leeway on Loan Offers

Most U.S. college students finance their education with a combination of scholarships, grants, paid employment, and loans. Student loans follow borrowers well into adulthood: some 37 percent of U.S. adults ages 18–29 carry student-loan debt, as do 22 percent of adults ages 30–44. The vast majority of student borrowing takes place through the federal government, which offers relatively low fixed-interest rates, loan-forgiveness options, and more flexible repayment terms than private banks do, in addition to grants and on-campus jobs for low-income students.

Students apply for these programs by filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which gathers information on family income, assets, and other family members’ college attendance. This information is fed through a complicated formula to calculate an Expected Family Contribution (EFC), which is the federal government’s measure of how much money a student (and her family) is able to pay for school.

All students who have completed a FAFSA, are enrolled at least part-time, and have not defaulted on federal loans in the past can take out an unsubsidized loan, which accrues interest while students are in school. Students whose FAFSA demonstrates financial need are eligible for subsidized loans; under those terms, the government pays the interest on the loan while the student is enrolled. In both cases, loan repayment does not begin until after the student leaves school or drops below half-time status.

Students who complete a FASFA receive annual financial-aid award letters, which are sent directly from colleges. These letters typically include the student’s EFC and the program-specific expected cost of attendance (that is, tuition and fees, books and supplies, and living expenses). In addition, the letter provides an estimate of the student’s net cost of attendance, based on the combination of scholarships, grants, loans, and work-study assistance the college is offering that particular student. Students who enroll in a sufficient number of credits automatically receive any offered grants, but must formally request student loans.

A college student’s class standing, dependency status, and unmet need determine the maximum amounts of subsidized and unsubsidized loans for which she is eligible. However, colleges have discretion to show the student a smaller amount in the financial-aid award letter. That is, a student whose EFC renders her eligible for a $5,500 federal loan may receive a letter that lists $5,500 in loans, some other dollar amount, or $0. Her eligibility does not change with the amount listed, but the information provided to her does.

Community colleges vary widely in whether and how they communicate information on loan eligibility to their potential students. We surveyed community colleges that participated in the federal loan program in 2014 and 2015 and found that more than half either offer all students $0 or do not offer students loans of any amount. Colleges might avoid making nonzero loan offers with the intention of protecting students from taking on too much student-loan debt or in an attempt to shield the college from the consequences that come with poor loan-repayment rates (including possible loss of their students’ eligibility for federal grants and loans). These schools have lower borrowing rates than schools that make nonzero loan offers to their students: on average, only 16 percent of students took out loans, compared to 29 percent at schools that offer loans. Students at both types of schools receive Pell Grants at comparable rates, suggesting that loan offers are not correlated with average student need.

Student loan-offer policies may contribute to the fact that students at community colleges are less likely to take out student loans than students at more selective four-year institutions, despite having greater unmet need. We find that in nationally representative 2012 data, 70 percent of community college students who applied for federal student aid faced a cost of attendance that exceeded their total resources (including grants, loans, work-study, and personal resources). Among four-year public and nonprofit undergraduates, 58 percent and 60 percent had unmet need. This may have important financial consequences; the same data reveal that low-income community college students were 33 percent more likely to use a credit card to pay for school and 7 percent more likely to work if they did not use federal student loans to cover their unmet financial need.

The Experiment

What impact, if any, does a nonzero loan offer have on student borrowing? While offers in financial aid letters do not alter students’ options, they could still affect student decisions. Loan offers could be misperceived as providing complete information about loan availability or they might be perceived as a recommendation and focus students’ attention on the offered amount.

We conducted an experiment during the 2015–16 academic year at a large community college that we call Community College A, or “CCA.” CCA’s average costs are in line with national averages, with in-district tuition and fees for 2014–15 of approximately $3,100 versus $3,249 nationwide. Financial aid is also similar: approximately 45 percent of CCA students received Pell Grant aid, and 25 percent received federal loans in 2013–14, compared to 41 and 19 percent of students, respectively, at the average community college.

Students at CCA have substantially lower completion rates and slightly worse labor-market outcomes than students at the average community college. Only 5 percent of those who started at CCA as full-time associate degree-seeking students completed a credential within three years, compared to 21 percent of beginning full-time community college students nationwide. Median earnings among federal aid recipients who were no longer enrolled 10 years after they started school are similar for CCA and community colleges nationwide, at approximately $28,000 and $30,253, respectively. And although past CCA borrowers have lower student-loan balances when entering repayment of approximately $4,200 versus $6,563 nationwide, they also have slightly less success repaying their loans.

In the experiment, all financial aid-eligible students were randomly separated into treatment and control groups, with each group of approximately 10,000 students receiving a different financial-aid award letter. Students in the loan-offer treatment group who were eligible to borrow received a loan offer of either $3,500 or $4,500 in their award letter. All loan-eligible students assigned to the control group received financial-aid letters that listed $0 loan offers. Letters with $0 loan offers were similar in form to those offered to millions of community college students each year.

Award letters also displayed available grant and work-study aid. Students who were not eligible for loan aid—either due to having reached their lifetime limit of federal loan aid or due to enrolling in too few credits—received letters that did not mention loans, regardless of their assignment to treatment or control groups. Students received award letters after applying for admission and financial aid, and approximately 84 percent received a letter before the start of the fall 2015 semester.

Loan offers did not affect students’ eligibility for federal loans or the requirement that students complete federal requirements to borrow. CCA clearly displayed information on student loan eligibility on its website, and all students who completed a FAFSA received information on their anticipated eligibility for Pell Grants and federal loans from the U.S. Department of Education. Students in both the loan-offer and control groups were also informed of their eligibility and the process for requesting a loan via email from CCA. Both versions of this email included lang- uage that could discourage borrowing, including an “Important Notice” of loan limits in the treatment-group email and encouragement to “borrow wisely” in the control-group email. All borrowers had to complete CCA’s electronic-loan request form and actively select a specific loan amount, and first-time borrowers were also required to complete federal entrance counseling and sign a legal agreement promising to repay the loan.

In loan-offer group letters, offered loan amounts depended on the student’s class standing: treatment-group freshmen received $3,500 loan offers and sophomores received $4,500 offers, the maximum amount that each group could potentially receive as a subsidized loan but less than the overall maximum students were allowed to borrow. Students with sufficient unmet need were offered the full amount as subsidized loans, while those with lower unmet need received a combination of subsidized and unsubsidized loan offers. Based on eligibility, nonzero loans were ultimately offered to 81 percent of the loan-offer group and to no students in the control group.

The Results

Effects on borrowing: Students in the loan-offer group were more likely to borrow compared to students in the control group (see Figure 1a). Some 30 percent of students in the loan-offer group borrowed, compared to 23 percent of students in the control group, a 30 percent difference. Students in the loan-offer group also took on more debt, on average. Loan-offer group members borrowed $1,374, on average, approximately $280 (26 percent) more than the $1,097 mean for control-group members (see Figure 1b).

We also examine the effects of receiving nonzero loan offers across student subgroups, including past experience with borrowing (any outstanding debt versus no outstanding debt), financial resources (Pell Grant-eligible versus ineligible), prior CCA enrollment (new versus returning), class standing (freshman versus sophomore status), and dependency status. Receiving a nonzero loan offer significantly increased the probability of borrowing and the amount borrowed for students in all subgroups.

Effects on attainment: Students in the loan-offer group also did better in school compared to students in the control group. Students in the loan-offer group attempted and earned more credits and had higher GPAs in the year of the experiment.

Simply comparing the outcomes for the loan-offer and control groups likely understates the effects of borrowing, because the experiment included students who were not eligible for loans (so the treatment could not have affected their borrowing), and not all eligible students borrowed. We thus report results that isolate the effect of the additional borrowing by scaling effects on academic outcomes by the effect on the number of students who borrowed.

Students who borrowed because they received a nonzero loan offer signed up for more classes and progressed further in school compared to students in the control group. They attempted 2.5 credits more than students in the control group, on average, and earned 3.7 credits more during the 2015–16 academic year (see Figure 2). They also earned significantly higher GPAs over the academic year, with a cumulative increase of more than half a point on a four-point scale—roughly the difference between a “B” and an “A-” grade. This suggests that borrowing helped students both afford more courses and do better in the courses they took.

In our experiment, borrowing did not have significant effects on the likelihood of earning a degree by the end of the 2015–16 academic year. This finding is not surprising given that most students in our sample were more than one year of full-time attendance away from completing their degree programs. Estimated effects on degree completion were positive but not statistically distinguishable from zero within the period of study.

The average loan-offer group student who borrowed because of the loan amount listed in their award letter took out a $4,000 loan. This suggests that an additional $1,000 in loans leads students to attempt 0.6 more credits, complete 0.9 more credits, and earn a GPA that is 0.16 higher.

We also estimate effects on educational attainment in the 2016–17 academic year, the year immediately after the experiment, based on data from the National Student Clearinghouse. We find that borrowers were 12 percentage points less likely to re-enroll in CCA that year, a decrease of 23 percent, which falls just short of statistical significance (see Figure 3). We find similarly sized positive impacts of borrowing on the probability of transferring into a bachelor’s degree program within a four-year public institution. Given the relatively low rate of transfers from CCA into four-year public institutions, the statistically significant increase of 11 percentage points in the probability of a transfer represents a remarkable 178 percent increase relative to the control group.

It will be several years before a follow-up analysis can be conducted after most students have completed their education. Long-run outcomes of interest would include degrees earned, wages, outstanding student loans and other debt, and student-loan repayment. Because of the amount of time that would need to pass before such an analysis, and the importance of our short-run results for millions of current college students, we conducted a cost-benefit analysis based on the benefits accruing within our sample period.

Weighing Costs and Benefits

To contextualize our findings, we compare the costs and benefits of nonzero loan offers from two perspectives: the lender, which in this case is the government, and the recipient of the loan, which is the student. We compare our estimates to those found in two other randomized controlled trials targeting community college students’ financial status and educational attainment.

At the City University of New York (CUNY), students in the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) were subject to a suite of requirements and received additional supports and financial assistance, costing an estimated $3,900 per student each year. Researchers at MDRC found that ASAP students earned 2.1 more credits per semester and were twice as likely to graduate within three years of program entry, suggesting an annual increase of 1.1 credits earned per $1,000 provided.

A different experiment was conducted at several community colleges nationwide: the Performance-Based Scholarship (PBS) intervention. Students were randomly assigned to be eligible to earn up to $1,500 per semester in incentive payments if they met specific academic goals, with the eligible populations and structure and size of incentives varied across experimental sites. Economists Lisa Barrow and Cecilia Rouse report that, at the most successful PBS site, treatment-group members earned significantly more credits than control-group members, with first-year impacts of approximately 1 additional credit per $1,000 of program expenditures.

Our estimated effect of 0.9 credits earned per $1,000 increase in loans is comparable to the magnitude of estimated effects per $1,000 spent by both the ASAP and PBS programs. It is important to note, however, that we have yet to observe CCA students for the length of time that it took for the ASAP program to produce significant increases in degree completion, which prevents us from comparing effects of borrowing to ASAP program expenditures on degree receipt.

On the other hand, in our setting, the additional $1,000 is loaned directly to the student rather than spent by the college, meaning that the long-run costs may be substantially lower, since loan aid is designed to be repaid. If we assume that 20 percent of the borrowers in our experiment will default on their loans, in line with the average three-year default rate for CCA, the federal government’s expected cost per $4,000 loan is $444. This suggests a cost-benefit ratio of 8.1 additional credits per $1,000.

Lending may be wise for the government. But does it benefit students in the longer run? We draw on existing research to determine the earnings effect on borrowers, and estimate they will earn $370 more per year, on average, based on taking out a $4,000 student loan. Assuming real earnings effects are constant over time, we conclude that the kind of additional borrowing induced by the loan offer letters is likely beneficial to most students.

Implications

Our study provides the first evidence of the causal effects of loans on student outcomes. Student debt, widely considered a burden, may help facilitate success for students, especially those who lack other resources that could be used to cover costs associated with college attendance.

We estimate that loan offers increase community college students’ educational attainment by substantially more per expected dollar of government spending than other interventions that have been evaluated with experiments. We cannot conclude that offering a loan will enhance the well-being of every student, but we project that the average borrower would benefit financially from taking on debt that is used to pay for necessary college costs. Borrowers earn more credits and get better grades, which can provide real, lasting economic benefits.

Our results suggest that offering loans can help more students succeed in school. Yet more than five million students attend U.S. colleges that do not offer loans in financial-aid award letters, and nearly one million more attend colleges that do not participate in the federal loan program. However well intended, efforts to discourage student borrowing may be hindering students’ progress rather than protecting their future. Policymakers, college leaders, and students weighing the risks of student-loan debt should keep this fuller picture in mind.

Benjamin M. Marx is assistant professor of economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Lesley J. Turner is assistant professor of economics at the University of Maryland.

On April 2, 2018, teachers in Oklahoma walked out of their classrooms to demand better pay and more school spending. Their nine-day strike, the first of its kind in Oklahoma since 1990, closed schools in some 200 districts and ended only after the legislature agreed to raise teachers’ pay by an average of $6,100, to be paid for by new consumption and fuel-production taxes. Oklahoma’s statewide strike was one of six that took place this spring. Martin West, editor-in-chief of Education Next, spoke with Eleanor Goetzinger, a veteran educator who participated in the Oklahoma strike.

Martin West: For you, what were the best moments of the strike?

Eleanor Goetzinger: I’ve worked in various education positions throughout Oklahoma. So when I went out there the second day, I saw teachers I’ve known and worked with over the past 23 years, and it was just like a reunion, all of us coming together in order to make Oklahoma a better place for children to learn. It was probably one of the most empowering experiences I’ve ever had in my life.

MW: The formal list of demands was extensive, encompassing issues beyond teacher pay. What were the most important issues at stake during the strike?

EG: Money, of course—money getting into the classrooms would be very nice. I’ve been in education for more than 20 years, and I cannot even remember the last time I saw a new textbook in our school system. Curriculum impacts instruction, and it’s a domino effect, so it basically comes down to academic achievement for children. It’s very frustrating, because class sizes are getting larger because they can’t hire more teachers, and teachers are basically hanging on by a thread, so it’s been very, very challenging.

MW: Were you happy with the resolution of the strike?

EG: It was actually bittersweet. We all knew that we wanted more textbooks and supplies that go directly for the children, especially those in inner-city schools. Teachers purchase so many things out of their own pockets. So the teachers are going to make more, but my educated guess is that they will be buying more for their classrooms, because the money is not coming from the legislature. It’s not coming through like we want it to.

MW: How much of the strike was motivated by grassroots sentiment, and how much depended on union organization and support?

EG: That’s a very good question. At the time of the teachers’ strike, my perspective was that it was definitely grassroots-related. Afterwards, though, I kind of felt like it was a way for the unions to sign on more teachers. I really felt, at the end, that the Oklahoma Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, and the Professional Oklahoma Educators [a nonunion organization of school employees] should have collaborated. We kind of felt like each union was driving its own agenda instead of getting together for the betterment of all the teachers. [Collaborating] would have been a lot more meaningful [than having] three entities with three agendas.

MW: During the strike, what kind of response did you get from community members?

EG: I would wear my Oklahoma educator T-shirt to the grocery store, and men would tip their hat, or women would nod at me out of gratitude for what I do. I heard a lot of stories of teachers wearing their shirts at a restaurant and [having] their bill paid. I think a lot of my fellow Oklahomans didn’t know how challenging it was in schools to meet the needs of children, [whether] in general education or special education. So to me as an educator, that was very reaffirming, because we usually don’t get that much support.

MW: One of the interesting things about the Oklahoma strike is that it was statewide rather than targeted at a particular district. How did the Oklahoma City Public Schools as an organization stand with respect to what you as employees were doing?

EG: They couldn’t have been better at dealing with this. I know several board members, I’ve talked to them, and they were very [supportive]. They were not pressuring the teachers to go back. We were really grateful for that, and it helped teacher morale.

This is an edited excerpt from an Education Next podcast.

Since the 1960s, teachers unions across the United States have used strikes or the threat of strikes to influence the terms of collective bargaining agreements with local school districts. In the spring of 2018, teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and elsewhere changed their tack, staging walkouts designed to secure salary hikes and increased school funding from state legislatures. Will teachers unions increasingly shift their focus away from local districts and toward state policymakers? And how will unions adapt, now that the U.S. Supreme Court’s Janus v. AFSCME decision has banned agency fees for teachers who decline to join?

Jeffrey R. Henig and Melissa Arnold Lyon of Columbia University’s Teachers College discuss possible union comeback strategies post-Janus, while Sarah F. Anzia of the University of California, Berkeley, foresees geographical differences in union tactics.

Adaptation Could Bring New Strength
by Jeffrey R. Henig and Melissa Arnold Lyon

 

 

 

 

Statewide Strikes Are a Shot Across the Bow
by Sarah F. Anzia

 

 

 

Once considered king of the ring, teachers unions have spent most of this century counterpunching and playing defense.

Political scientist Terry Moe has argued that teachers unions are by far “the most powerful groups in the politics of education.” But his assessment is based largely on unions’ advantages in local districts, where typically low voter turnout allows a mobilized and focused group like the teachers union to elect sympathetic school boards. Beginning in the 1980s, the growing roles of state and federal governments in public education took many decisions out of the unions’ favored venue. To be sure, teachers unions also have muscular presence in some states, but in others, especially in the South and Southwest, the unions have held little power in recent decades, and the growing dominance of conservative Republicans in state legislatures and statehouses was creating a hostile environment even before the U.S. Supreme Court landed its Janus jab to the jaw.

It’s ironic, then, that some of the most dramatic recent signs of teacher voice and vitality have occurred at the state level—and in places where one might expect the law, politics, and culture to be inhospitable. The Janus v. AFCSME decision takes to the national level a legal assault on unions manifest most recently in the states, through the passage of right-to-work (RTW) laws. These laws prohibit unions from collecting “agency fees” or “fair share fees” from non-members to help support the collective bargaining done on their behalf. Although most states that passed RTW laws did so in the 1940s and ’50s, a new wave of such legislation arose in the 2000s, beginning in Oklahoma in 2001 (see Figure 1). Indeed, seven states adopted new RTW laws after 2000, including West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Kentucky, all three of which experienced large-scale teacher walkouts in the spring of 2018. In Janus, the Supreme Court declared agency fees unconstitutional for public-employee unions.

It’s possible that the recent flurry of state-focused teacher protests will prove to be a short-lived spasm of resistance that doesn’t stem the steady and continuing decline of unions. But a number of factors hint at a different narrative, in which the unions adjust their strategies in ways that not only minimize damage but provide them with new energy, sense of purpose, and a stronger set of alliances. In this article we speculate about what the recent teacher actions might augur in terms of teachers-union strategies in the post-Janus era.

States as the Venue of Choice?

Do the recent strikes signal a broader shift to state-level activism? They might, but a careful look at the policy environments where the actions occurred suggests that these states are atypical, given their labor policy and state centralization. Table 1 describes the political and legal contexts for the six recent statewide teacher walkouts, and Table 2 compares these states to the rest of the country. The information presented shows that states experiencing walkouts have legal frameworks that are less friendly toward teachers unions. Only one of the six states with high-profile statewide strikes require collective bargaining, whereas more than two thirds of other states do. None of the states with strikes affirmatively permitted the collection of agency fees prior to Janus, whereas more than half of other states did. These six states have also traditionally had greater centralization of decisionmaking at the state level, which makes state-targeted activism a more rational choice. For example, two thirds of the states with walkouts had statewide teacher-salary schedules establishing minimum salaries for teachers based on certain qualifications, whereas only one fourth of the states not experiencing walkouts set salary schedules. This centralization may even help to explain why some of these walkouts had the support of local school-district management.

Americans love an underdog, and one reason these recent actions struck a popular chord is precisely that they emerged against all odds. News coverage was highly sympathetic, emphasizing that teachers in these states were working multiple jobs, receiving some of the lowest pay in the nation, bearing the brunt of budget reductions, and suffering financially as a result of cuts from five- to four-day school weeks. Often, the coverage depicted selfless teachers standing up for the sake of the kids. “I came to the Capitol not just for myself, not just for a raise, but for my students,” one teacher was quoted as saying. Another was described as using stickers to adorn her strike poster with the names of all her students: “I feel like I have to have a voice for these guys.” Notably, public-opinion surveys have shown robust public support for the teachers’ actions. The 2018 Education Next poll revealed a large jump in support for increasing teacher pay, particularly in states that experienced walkouts, and a strong majority favoring teachers’ right to strike (see “Public Support Climbs for Teacher Pay, School Expenditures, Charter Schools, and Universal Vouchers,” features, Winter 2019).

What are the implications of the walkouts for other states? In examining this question, there are at least two other factors worth considering. Both come into better focus when we compare the recent state actions with the Chicago teachers’ strike of 2012.

First, national unions may have played supporting roles in the recent actions, but what was prominent was the voice of teachers, not the voice of union leaders. Media and pundit accounts of the seven-day Chicago strike gave prominence to the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). With the union in the foreground, it was easy to paint the action as the work of an interest group defending members’ pocketbooks at the expense of students and their families. Whether unions are able and willing to adopt a more behind-the-scenes role in states where they have a structured presence is one question still to be answered.

Second, there is a racial dimension that may be important. Although the nation’s K–12 teacher workforce is still predominantly white (82 percent in 2012), the proportion who are teachers of color has increased, from 13 percent in 1988 to 18 percent in 2012. This trend is especially strong in inner cities: in 2014, 25 percent of inner-city teachers and 28 percent of new teachers were black or Hispanic, compared to 17 percent and 21 percent nationwide. Karen Lewis, the high-profile president of the CTU until she stepped down recently for health reasons, is black, and only half of Chicago Public Schools teachers and just over one third of the staff identify as white. In the large central-city school  systems where teachers unions are most active and visible, the composition of the teaching force can lead suburban and rural voters, and their elected representatives, to implicitly associate union politics with minority politics, and a variety of studies have shown that policies associated with minorities tend to be less generous and more vulnerable to political headwinds. Although it may be uncomfortable to discuss, the faces shown in the news during the walkouts were predominantly those of white teachers, and that portrayal may have made the protesters more sympathetic to audiences outside large cities, where residents do not tend to view systemic racism as an issue. Roughly half of suburban whites and 6 out of 10 rural whites reject the notion that whites have advantages that black Americans do not.

To the extent that race comes into play, teachers unions in large cities may face a tougher challenge winning over broad public support at the state level, where opponents can more easily mobilize racial resentments against urban teachers unions.

Winning Allies versus Rallying the Base

Just as political parties struggle to find a balance between wooing undecideds and appealing to their base, so too must teachers unions consider how much to focus on winning allies versus providing what their members expect and demand from them. The Janus decision complicates this challenge in at least two ways.

One has to do with relations with fellow interest groups such as other unions, civil- and immigrant-rights organizations, and the array of nonprofit and advocacy organizations that focus on the needs of children and families. Although these organizations share many values, they can differ on how they prioritize issues and where they choose to invest their money and political muscle. If Janus, as predicted, leaves teachers unions with lighter coffers, they may need external allies more than ever, but cementing those alliances may sometimes mean de-emphasizing the school- and teacher-specific issues that their members value highly.

The second complication has to do with likely changes in the composition of union ranks as teachers begin to drop their membership now that they are no longer required to pay agency fees if they leave. It is a safe assumption that today’s non-members will continue to opt out, but no one knows how many current members will quit. One can venture to say, however, that those who remain in the union will, on balance, be different from those who leave, in terms of how they view union activity. The teachers who are motivated primarily by their own personal well-being—salary hikes and attractive working conditions—might be expected to leave. The remaining core of members, though diminished, will therefore likely comprise those with deeper allegiance to the collective goals that unions have stood for.

But unions have stood for two different kinds of collective goals: education-specific ones that relate to improving the education system and the status of teachers generally, and those relating to general social betterment through strong government action. If their loyalty and fervor center on education-specific collective goals, core union members might consider their leaders’ alliance-building efforts to be a distraction from their primary concerns. On the other hand, if the loyalty and fervor of the remaining members are stoked more by goals relating to societal betterment through a muscular public sector, then tensions between union leaders and the rank and file could diminish with the exit of members who were ambivalent or reluctant enlistees to that cause.

The recent teacher actions may shed light here. Although they took place before the Janus decision, they happened in states where the legal status of unions and union membership resembles that which Janus promises to expand nationwide. Teachers in those states were not forced members of unions, but in spite of that—or perhaps because of it—they chose to link hands in a collective enterprise focused more obviously on system improvement than on personal benefit, and this helped account for the greater willingness of non-parents, politicians, and the media to treat them more as heroes than pocket-lining villains. That’s a reminder that a smaller but more collectively motivated core of members may facilitate strong actions, and that’s good news for the teachers unions.

On the other hand, the recent teacher walkouts were largely detached from broader social issues like poverty, social programs, health care, and inequality, and were primarily focused on the distribution of material resources—both to teachers and to schools in general. In culturally conservative states, keeping a focus on education, as these teachers did, could help teachers avoid ideological and partisan tripwires that could mobilize a backlash against their activism. However, that option may not be available in more liberal states and on the national political battlefield, where the need to work with allies and to fully motivate their more socially conscious members will inevitably draw teacher activists into more controversial positions.

Similarly, where education funding has been obviously and embarrassingly paltry compared to that of other states, teachers and their unions may find it easier to gain public support for increasing school spending, whereas teachers unions in high-spending states like New York may experience more pushback from third parties that hope to keep taxes low or consider current education spending levels to be adequate.

The bottom line is that teachers unions will have tactical options, even in unsupportive legal environments. And to the extent the action is being driven to the state level, the weighing of options and their likely success will vary from place to place and perhaps over time. But hyper-focus on how individual teachers will weigh the impacts on their pocketbooks can overlook the lessons from recent state walkouts: teachers, their allies, and the general public take positions also based on purposive goals and perceptions of what is fair and just. Money is an issue, but so are motivating hearts and shaping perceptions. By convincingly embracing a broader agenda, teachers unions may convert recent political and judicial setbacks into a more energized core and more extensive constituency, even if their formal membership shrinks.

This is part of a forum, “After the Teacher Walkouts.” For an alternate take, see “Statewide Strikes Are a Shot across the Bow,” by Sarah F. Anzia.

Teacher strikes and walkouts in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and elsewhere grabbed public attention last spring, but these wildfires of statewide activism are unlikely to spread far. In most states, teachers have unique and powerful advantages in local politics—advantages they’re unlikely to give up anytime soon—and they’re already active in state politics as well. It’s only in states that share certain key characteristics with West Virginia where the recent teacher walkouts might inspire more political action at the state level.

To understand what any interest group does, it’s important to “follow the interests.” What kinds of policies do its members care about? Which government or governments make the key decisions on those policies? In the case of teachers unions, the chief answer to the first question is: salaries, benefits, and working conditions such as class size and procedures for evaluating teachers. This isn’t to say that teachers don’t care about children and the quality of education; it’s simply that what unites teachers unions as organizations are teachers’ occupational interests. And the answer to the second question helps explain why teachers in Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and West Virginia targeted their state legislatures: all four have statewide teacher-salary schedules. Such a policy doesn’t necessarily mean that all teachers in a state are paid according to the exact same schedule—local districts can supplement the statewide amounts—but it does mean that the state government plays a major role in determining teacher salaries. It makes sense, then, that teachers in these places would direct their protests toward the state government.

But most states don’t have state-mandated teacher-salary schedules. Instead, it’s the local school boards that make the major decisions about salaries and other matters of interest to teachers, such as how much an individual employee pays toward health insurance premiums. And as long as local school districts are the key decisionmakers on the issues that most directly affect them, we can bet that teachers’ organizations will focus their efforts there. Nothing about recent events changed that.

Spheres of Influence

Just as important as where these issues are decided is how they are decided. And in most places, many decisions about teacher compensation and school operations are hammered out through collective bargaining, a process in which teachers union representatives are direct and equal participants alongside school-board representatives. This bargaining power affords a built-in avenue of influence that most teachers have at the local level but not at the state level—which leads to another reason that teachers in Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, North Carolina, and West Virginia targeted the state government: they are 5 of the 17 states that don’t require collective bargaining for teachers. In North Carolina, collective bargaining in public education is illegal.

Political realities also come into play here. As a general rule, the local political environment is more conducive to teacher influence than the statehouse is. State politics is crowded, with hundreds of interest groups vying for policymakers’ attention, and hundreds of actors holding a stake in taxing, spending, and regulation. Teachers have to contend with all of these potentially competing influences.

Local school-district politics tends to be quieter and much less crowded. School-board elections are notorious for their low voter turnout and scant media attention. And because school boards only make policy on a single issue—education—the only interest groups involved in the elections are those with a big stake in education policy. This can include a variety of groups, including businesses and parent-teacher associations. But the reality in many districts is that none of these other parties have as large and as direct a stake in local education policy as teachers unions. As Terry Moe of Stanford University has shown in his research, teachers unions are the most active interest groups in school-board elections in California, and they are strikingly successful in getting their preferred candidates elected (see “The Union Label on the Ballot Box,” features, Summer 2006). The payoffs of all this influence are huge, because it means that teachers unions are helping to elect the very people they bargain with. Teachers unions in states like California and New York aren’t going to give up this structural advantage just because of what happened in West Virginia.

This is not to say, however, that teachers in states like California and New York don’t also have interests in state policy. Of course they do: big ones. Teacher-tenure policies and charter-school caps are largely decided at the state level, as are most teachers’ pensions. And even though decisions about teacher salaries and health benefits are mainly made at the local level, the states contribute roughly half of the funding that pays for this compensation. The particulars vary, but state governments play a major role in deciding how much money local districts have to work with.

By “following the interests,” then, we should expect public-school teachers to be very active in state politics. And in most places, they are—and it’s nothing new. Teachers unions spend astronomical sums of money in state elections. Political scientists Clive Thomas and Ronald Hrebenar regularly interview experts to develop a ranking of the top-40 most influential interests in the 50 states, and they consistently find that state affiliates of the National Education Association vie for the first spot. Teachers unions don’t typically stage statewide walkouts, but that’s because they don’t have to. Strikes are costly, disruptive, and often illegal, and it’s never guaranteed that the public will side with the teachers once the schools are closed and the dispute is headline news. Why create all the commotion and uncertainty if you can influence policy without it? Often, the most powerful kind of political influence is exerted very quietly.

In most places in the United States, then, there isn’t much need for teachers to focus more on state politics. They already have a big presence there, and they have every reason to continue their efforts at the local level as well.

Power of Collective Action

So what happened in Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oklahoma, and West Virginia in the spring of 2018? Why the strikes?

Like any group of individuals with shared interests, teachers face a quandary when considering collective action. They stand to be better-off if they unite as a group to push for policies in their favor, but for the individual teacher, participating in those efforts is costly. It takes time and energy to lobby, protest, and strike. Forming an organization that will work on teachers’ behalf takes money—and that means charging dues. If someone can reap the benefits of the group’s political action without contributing to the effort, why bother contributing? Yet if every teacher were to think that way, no one would contribute, there would be no collective political action, and teachers as a group would be worse-off.

For most teachers and other government employees, the main solution to this classic problem arrived in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s—in the form of state laws that required collective bargaining (and sometimes also allowed agency fees). These “duty-to-bargain” laws gave government employees a critical incentive to organize into unions, because suddenly the payoffs for doing so were enormous, and because teachers who opted out of the union would often have to pay agency fees anyway. In the states where the laws were passed, the public sector unionized rapidly, and gave rise to strong teachers’ organizations, with both members and money providing clout.

But in states like Arizona and Kentucky, this never happened. Duty-to-bargain laws were not enacted. Local teachers unions can and do form in such places, and they do get involved in politics, but usually they command far fewer resources—in the form of money, membership numbers, and political muscle—than their counterparts in states where collective bargaining is mandatory. In recent years, Minnesota, New York, and Rhode Island have boasted teachers union membership rates of nearly 100 percent, but in Arizona, Kentucky, and North Carolina, only about 50 to 60 percent of teachers are union members.

So today, successful teacher organization at the state level is entirely unremarkable in most of the country. But what’s happened recently in the six strike-affected states actually is somewhat remarkable. Why were teachers there suddenly able to take collective action?

Part of the explanation surely has to do with the rise of social media and changes in the technology that supports organizing. In Oklahoma, for instance, grassroots organizations and unions relied on Facebook groups to get 30,000 teachers to rally at the state capitol—a feat that would have been much more difficult 20 years ago. But those are just the mechanics; the motive is far more important. The seeds of that motive were planted when the Great Recession of 2007–09 decimated state and local budgets, and education funding went down with them. To make matters worse, public pension costs have climbed dramatically (with advocacy on the part of public-sector unions playing a big role in those increases, as Terry Moe and I have shown) and are still rising, with no end in sight. Topping it all off, a number of Republican-led states, including Arizona, North Carolina, and Oklahoma, have enacted tax cuts.

All of these trends hurt public-education funding. And as researchers at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have shown, funding in a number of states hasn’t yet recovered from the recession. As of 2016, 19 states were still providing less per-pupil funding (inflation-adjusted) than they had in 2008. It’s probably not a coincidence that four
of the six states that had teacher walkouts this spring—Arizona, Oklahoma, Colorado, and North Carolina—were among those 19 (see Figure 1). And per-pupil spending in those states is also well below the national average. What has happened, then, is that those drops in education funding have proven significant enough to spur teachers into action in states where they have historically been only weakly organized.

It remains to be seen whether the recent strikes will result in sustained teacher organization in states like West Virginia. At a minimum, however, the statewide teacher strikes are a shot across the bow. Teachers do face a collective-action problem, and when they aren’t well organized, perhaps it’s easy for policymakers to dismiss them. But politically speaking, that’s a mistake, because their potential for strength is enormous. More than seven million people work for elementary and secondary public schools in the United States. School employees have a presence in every state legislator’s district, Republican or Democrat. They care intensely about school funding. Even if they’re not currently well organized, or haven’t been in the past, they will notice when their pension or health contributions go up dramatically, or when they haven’t gotten a raise in several years. It just may be enough to spur them into political action. And if that should happen, then thanks to their numbers and their ubiquitous presence, they stand to be a political force to be reckoned with.

So, not much will change in the states where teachers unions are already strong and highly active in both state and local politics. But in states with historically weaker unions, policymakers should pay attention—and the message to them is clear: you can only roll back education spending so much before you provoke a rebellion by the millions of people whose livelihoods depend on it.

This is part of a forum, “After the Teacher Walkouts.” For an alternate take, see “Adaptation Could Bring New Strength,” by Jeffrey R. Henig and Melissa Arnold Lyon.

Federal agencies have the authority to promulgate rules and regulations that carry the force of law, but first they must conduct a “notice and comment” process that allows stakeholders to weigh in on the proposed changes. Ambitious agencies have managed to skirt this requirement, however, simply by issuing “guidance” that they label as mere interpretation or clarification of established law.

For decades, the worst offender has been the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the Department of Education. During Barack Obama’s presidency, this practice reached its apex, as OCR issued a raft of “Dear Colleague” letters and guidance documents ostensibly clarifying the law on a range of issues affecting schools—sexual misconduct, racial disparities in discipline, school resources, transgender students, and the assignment of students to schools by race. In fact, these documents sidestepped the legal process and encouraged or mandated schools to pursue policies that neither Congress nor the courts had authorized.

When Donald J. Trump took office, his Education Department (ED) began to rescind these administrative dictates. Most recently, ED withdrew several pieces of guidance on using racial criteria to promote diversity in schools, including a 2011 document, jointly issued by OCR and the Department of Justice, that encouraged school districts to take race into account when assigning students. The repeal of that guidance provoked an outcry among progressives.

The 2011 guidance had its roots in the 2007 case Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, in which the U.S. Supreme Court voted 5 to 4 to strike down school-integration plans that two districts had voluntarily adopted. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, and Justice Anthony Kennedy penned a concurring opinion but noted in it that he would not go so far as the others in forbidding race-conscious policies. Justice Stephen Breyer offered the most comprehensive dissent. In response to the court’s decision, the George W. Bush administration advised schools to use race-neutral assignment policies. But in 2011, Obama’s OCR withdrew that guidance, replacing it with new advice predicated on Kennedy’s concurring opinion and Breyer’s dissent.

Trying to reconcile the two opinions was bound to fail, since Kennedy had written that Breyer’s argument “rest[ed] on . . . a misuse and mistaken interpretation of our precedents.” The core principle of Kennedy’s concurrence was that under no circumstances could school districts treat “each student in a different fashion solely on the basis of a systematic, individual typing by race.”

To be fair to OCR, Kennedy’s concurrence was opaque—but it wasn’t that opaque. He agreed that the school-integration plan in Seattle and the one in a companion case from Louisville went well beyond constitutional limits, but he also allowed that districts could, in restricted circumstances, engage in individual racial classifications to increase diversity. He added that school districts could take race into account only if they could show that they had a compelling interest in doing so. Promoting racial diversity could constitute such an interest if efforts toward integration were “narrowly tailored” and specifically grounded in a local district’s circumstances.

In its 2011 guidance, however, OCR encouraged school districts to use race in ways that would likely fall afoul of Kennedy’s concurrence. The document declared that “the Departments recognize, as has a majority of Justices on the Supreme Court, the compelling interest that K–12 schools have in obtaining the benefits that flow from achieving a diverse student body.” But in fact, OCR never defined the term “compelling interest.” Thus, any school district following the guidance risked going beyond what Parents Involved allowed—and put itself in legal jeopardy—if it could not show that local circumstances justified race-conscious policies. As well, OCR told districts that they could use race as a “plus factor” in assigning students to schools, as long as other “non-racial” considerations were also used. But they failed to explain how a racially based “plus factor” would not amount to “systematic, individual typing by race.”

With Kennedy’s retirement from the court, this whole question could be rendered moot. From all appearances, Trump’s court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, will prove even less sympathetic to assigning students by race than was his predecessor. And Kavanaugh seems highly wary of agency efforts to expand regulatory authority beyond statutory limits. Hence, the Trump administration’s decision likely just hastened the guidance’s death and spared any district unwise enough to follow it a lengthy legal battle.

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.

When students look back on their most important teachers, the social aspects of their education are often what they recall. Learning to set goals, take risks and responsibility, or simply believe in oneself are often fodder for fond thanks—alongside mastering pre-calculus, becoming a critical reader, or remembering the capital of Turkmenistan.

It’s a dynamic mix, one that captures the broad charge of a teacher: to teach students the skills they’ll need to be productive adults. But what, exactly, are these skills? And how can we determine which teachers are most effective in building them?

Test scores are often the best available measure of student progress, but they do not capture every skill needed in adulthood. A growing research base shows that non-cognitive (or socio-emotional) skills like adaptability, motivation, and self-restraint are key determinants of adult outcomes. Therefore, if we want to identify good teachers, we ought to look at how teachers affect their students’ development across a range of skills—both academic and non-cognitive.

A robust data set on 9th-grade students in North Carolina allows me to do just that. First, I create a measure of non-cognitive skills based on students’ behavior in high school, such as suspensions and on-time grade progression. I then calculate effectiveness ratings based on teachers’ impacts on both test scores and non-cognitive skills and look for connections between the two. Finally, I explore the extent to which measuring teacher impacts on behavior allows us to better identify those truly excellent educators who have long-lasting effects on their students.

I find that, while teachers have notable effects on both test scores and non-cognitive skills, their impact on non-cognitive skills is 10 times more predictive of students’ longer-term success in high school than their impact on test scores. We cannot identify the teachers who matter most by using test-score impacts alone, because many teachers who raise test scores do not improve non-cognitive skills, and vice versa.

These results provide hard evidence that measuring teachers’ impact through their students’ test scores captures only a fraction of their overall effect on student success. To fully assess teacher performance, policymakers should consider measures of a broad range of student skills, classroom observations, and responsiveness to feedback alongside effectiveness ratings based on test scores.

A Broad Notion of Teacher Effectiveness

Individual teacher effectiveness has become a major focus of school-improvement efforts over the last decade, driven in part by research showing that teachers who boost students’ test scores also affect their success as adults, including being more likely to go to college, have a job, and save for retirement (see “Great Teaching,” research, Summer 2012). Economists and policymakers have used students’ standardized test scores to develop measures of teacher performance, chiefly through a formula called value-added. Value-added models calculate individual teachers’ impacts on student learning by charting student progress against what they would ordinarily be expected to achieve, controlling for a host of factors. Teachers whose students consistently beat those odds are considered to have high value-added, while those whose students consistently don’t do as well as expected have low value-added.

At the same time, policymakers and educators are focused on the importance of student skills not captured by standardized tests, such as perseverance and collaborating with others, for longer-term adult outcomes. The 2015 federal Every Student Succeeds Act allows states to consider how well schools do at helping students create “learning mindsets,” or the non-cognitive skills and habits that are associated with positive outcomes in adulthood. In one major experiment in California, for example, a group of large districts is tracking progress in students’ non-cognitive skills as part of their reform efforts.

Is it possible to combine these two ideas by determining which individual teachers are most effective at helping students develop non-cognitive skills?

To examine this question, I look to North Carolina, which collects data on test scores and a range of student behavior. I use data on all public-school 9th-grade students between 2005 and 2012, including demographics, transcript data, test scores in grades 7 through 9, and codes linking scores to the teacher who administered the test. The data cover about 574,000 students in 872 high schools. I focus on the 93 percent of 9th-grade students who took classes in which teachers will also have traditional test score-based value-added ratings: English I and one of three math classes (algebra I, geometry, or algebra II).

I use these data to explore three major questions. First, how predictive is student behavior in 9th grade of later success in high school, compared to student test scores? Second, are teachers who are better at raising test scores also better at improving student behavior? And finally, what measure of teacher performance is more predictive of students’ long-term success: impacts on test scores, or impacts on non-cognitive skills?

The Predictive Power of Student Behavior

To explore the first question, I create a measure of students’ non-cognitive skills by using the information on their behavior available in the 9th-grade data, including the number of absences and suspensions, grade point average, and on-time progression to 10th grade. I refer to this weighted average as the “behavior index.” The basic logic of this approach is as follows: in the same way that one infers that a student who scores higher on tests likely has higher cognitive skills than a student who does not, one can infer that a student who acts out, skips class, and fails to hand in homework likely has lower non-cognitive skills than a student who does not. I also create a test-score index that is the average of 9th-grade math and English scores.

I then look at how both test scores and the behavior index are related to various measures of high-school success, using administrative data that follow students’ trajectories over time. The outcomes I consider include graduating high school on time, grade-point average at graduation, taking the SAT, and reported intentions to enroll in a four-year college. Roughly 82 percent of students graduated, 4 percent are recorded as having dropped out, and the rest either moved out of state or remained in school beyond their expected graduation year. Because I am interested in how changes in these skill measures predict long-run outcomes, I control for the student’s test scores and behavior in 8th grade. In addition, my analysis adjusts for differences in parental education, gender, and race/ethnicity.

My first set of results shows that a student’s behavior index is a much stronger predictor of future success than her test scores. Figure 1 plots the extent to which increasing test scores and the behavior index by one standard deviation, equivalent to moving a student’s score from the median to the 85th percentile on each measure, predicts improvements in various outcomes. A student whose 9th-grade behavior index is at the 85th percentile is a sizable 15.8 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school on time than a student with a median behavior index score. I find a weaker relationship with test scores: a student at the 85th percentile is only 1.9 percentage points more likely to graduate from high school than a student whose score is at the median. The behavior index is also a better predictor than 9th-grade test scores of high-school GPA and the likelihood that a student takes the SAT and plans to attend college.

While these patterns reveal that the behavior index is a good predictor of educational attainment, they are descriptive. They do not show that teachers impact these behavior, and they do not show that teacher impacts on these measures will translate into improved longer-run success. I next examine these more causal questions.

Applying Value-Added to Non-Cognitive Skills

The predictive power of the behavior index suggests that improving behavior could yield large benefits, but it leaves open the question of whether teachers who improve student behavior are different from teachers who improve test scores. This is important, because if teachers who are more effective at raising test scores are also more effective at improving behavior, then we will not improve our ability to identify teachers who improve long-run student outcomes by estimating teacher impacts on behavior. In contrast, if the group of teachers who are effective at improving test scores includes some who are above average, average, or even below average at improving behavior, then having non-cognitive effectiveness ratings will allow us to identify truly excellent teachers who may have the largest impact on longer-run outcomes by improving both test scores and behavior.

To assess this, I employ separate value-added models to evaluate the unique contribution of individual teachers to test scores and to the behavior index. I group teachers by their ability to improve behavior, and plot the distribution of test-score value-added among teachers in each group. If teachers who improve one skill are also those who improve the other, the average test-score value-added should be much higher in groups with higher behavior value-added, and there should be little overlap in the distribution of test-score value-added across the behavior value-added groups.

That’s not what the data show. Although teachers with higher behavior value-added tend to have somewhat higher test-score value-added, there is considerable overlap across groups (see Figure 2). That is, although teachers who are better at raising test scores tend to be better at raising the behavior index, on average, effectiveness along one dimension is a poor predictor of the other. For example, among the bottom third of teachers with the worst behavior value-added, nearly 40 percent are above average in test-score value-added. Similarly, among the top third of teachers with the best behavior value-added, only 58 percent of teachers are above average in test-score value-added. This reveals not only that many teachers who are excellent at improving one skill are poor at improving the other, but also that knowing a teacher’s impact on one skill provides little information on the teacher’s impact on the other.

Impacts on High-School Success

The patterns I have documented so far suggest that there could be considerable gains to using teacher impacts on both test scores and behavior to identify teachers who may improve longer-run outcomes. To assess this directly, I examine the extent to which the estimated value-added of a student’s teacher in 9th grade influenced his or her outcomes at the end of high school, such as graduating on time, taking the SAT, and planning to go to college. To avoid biases, I use a teacher’s value-added based on her impacts in other years as my measure of teacher effectiveness. I then estimate two impacts on students’ longer-run outcomes: the impact of having a teacher whose test-score value-added is one standard deviation higher than the median, and that of having a teacher whose behavior value-added is one standard deviation higher.

A teacher’s value-added to 9th-grade behavior is a much stronger predictor of her impacts on subsequent educational attainment than her impacts on 9th-grade test scores (see Figure 3). For example, having a teacher at the 85th percentile of test-score value-added would increase a student’s chances of graduating high school on time by about 0.12 percentage points compared to having an average teacher. In contrast, having a teacher at the 85th percentile of behavior value-added would increase high-school graduation by about 1.46 percentage points compared to having an average teacher.

In other words, the impact of teachers on behavior is about 10 times more predictive of whether they increase students’ high-school completion than their impacts on test scores. This basic pattern holds true for all of the longer-run outcomes examined, including plans to attend college. Remarkably, the causal estimates in Figure 3 are almost exactly what one might have expected from the descriptive patterns in Figure 1.

These results confirm an idea that many believe to be true but that has not been previously documented—that teacher effects on test scores capture only a fraction of their impact on their students. The fact that teacher impacts on behavior are much stronger predictors of their impact on longer-run outcomes than test-score impacts, and that teacher impacts on test scores and those on behavior are largely unrelated, means that the lion’s share of truly excellent teachers—those who improve long-run outcomes—will not be identified using test-score value-added alone.

To make this point more concretely, I look at another group of teachers: those in the top 10 percent based on their impacts on high-school graduation. I then look at whether these teachers are also in the top 10 percent based on their test-score value-added and their behavior value-added. Behavior value-added does a much better job of identifying those teachers that improve on-time graduation: 93 percent of teachers in the top 10 percent with respect to graduation are also in the top 10 percent of behavior value-added. Only 20 percent of these high-impact teachers are in the top 10 percent of test-score value-added.

At the other end of the performance spectrum, behavior value-added also is better at identifying teachers who are the worst at improving students’ chances of graduating high school on time. Among the bottom 10 percent of teachers with the lowest predicted impacts on high-school graduation, 89 percent are in the bottom 10 percent of behavior value-added and 32 percent are in the bottom 10 percent of test-score value-added.

Implications

Teachers are more than educational-outcome machines—they are leaders who can guide students toward a purposeful adulthood. This analysis provides the first hard evidence that such contributions to student progress are both measurable and consequential. That is not to say that test scores should not be used in evaluating teacher effectiveness. Test-score impacts are an important gauge of teacher effectiveness for the roughly one in five teachers who teach grade levels and subjects in which it is possible to construct test-based value-added ratings. Impacts on behavior are another critical measure for those teachers and for everyone else, and can serve as an additional source of information in a strong multiple-measures evaluation system, which could also include observations, student surveys, and evidence of responsiveness to feedback.

Using value-added modeling in this way can yield critical and novel information about teacher performance. Although the teacher characteristics available in the North Carolina data—years of teaching experience, full certification, teaching exams scores, regular licensing, and college selectivity (as measured by the 75th percentile of the SAT scores at the teacher’s college)—do predict effects on test scores, none are significantly related to effects on behavior. However, this does not preclude the use of more detailed information on teachers to better predict effects on a broad range of skills; with more research, schools and districts might learn which characteristics to look for in order to hire and nurture teachers who are likely to improve students’ non-cognitive skills.

Another potential application of this approach to measuring teacher effectiveness could be to provide incentives that districts could offer teachers to improve student behavior. However, because some of the behavior can be “improved” by changes in teachers’ practices that do not improve student skills, such as inflating grades and misreporting misconduct, attaching external stakes to measures of students’ non-cognitive skills may not be beneficial—at least not without addressing this “gameability” problem.

One possibility is to find measures of non-cognitive skills that are difficult to adjust unethically. For example, classroom observations and student and parent surveys may provide valuable information about student skills that are not measured by test scores and are less easily manipulated by teachers. Policymakers could attach incentives to both these measures of non-cognitive skills and test scores to promote better longer-run outcomes. Another approach is to provide teachers with incentives to improve the behavior of students in their classrooms the following year, when the teacher’s influence may still be present but the teacher can no longer manipulate the measurement of student behavior. Or, policymakers could identify teaching practices that improve behavior and provide incentives for teachers to engage in these practices. Such approaches have been used successfully to increase test scores (see “Can Teacher Evaluation Improve Teaching?” research, Fall 2012).

Teachers influence just the sort of non-cognitive skills that research shows boost students’ success through high school and beyond. And through value-added modeling, we can estimate individual impacts and unearth another piece of the teacher-performance puzzle. Although the policy path ahead is not immediately clear, the fact that teachers have impacts on a set of skills that predict longer-run success but are not captured by current evaluation methods is important. The findings suggest that any policy to identify effective teachers—whether for evaluation, targeted professional development, or de-selection—should seek to use teacher impacts on a broader set of outcomes than test scores alone.

C. Kirabo Jackson is professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University. This article is based on “What Do Test Scores Miss? The Importance of Teacher Effects on Non–Test Score Outcomes,” Journal of Political Economy, 2018, Vol. 126, No. 5.

This year’s meeting of the for-profit higher-education industry’s principal membership association was held at Walt Disney World—which, for the 1,000 people who attended, might have seemed the second most magical place on earth.

First place, at the moment, is Washington, D.C., where friends and allies have created a regulatory reprieve after years of scrutiny under the Obama administration for the for-profits, also known as proprietary or career schools. The Trump administration has softened or eliminated many of the rules that had targeted for-profits and brought down some of the sector’s biggest players, such as barring schools from the federal student-aid program if too many students failed to find gainful employment after graduation. And investigations into the schools’ misdeeds seem to have been shelved.

So the mood in the exhibit hall at “C-Q”—the annual meeting of Career Education Colleges and Universities (CECU)—was upbeat, even as it was tempered by anxieties of another kind. Enrollment is in free fall, thanks to an improving labor market and stepped-up competition from public community colleges. Nervous accreditors are cracking down. And states across the country are stepping up regulation and enforcement, taking over where federal agencies have left off.

The for-profits, which are often subjected to sneers and portrayed as unethical opportunists, may have a secret weapon: the ability to innovate and disrupt in a sector known for its glacial pace of change. They pioneered many of the tech-driven trends upending higher education, from distance learning to data-focused metrics of success. Now, their survival may rest on creating the next wave of innovation in a field that has decried their abuses while putting their discoveries to use.

So a surprising amount of the conversation in the corridors at C-Q was about strategies that would benefit students as much as the schools themselves, and questions that are as relevant to brand-name colleges and universities as their for-profit cousins. What can be done to bump up student persistence and graduation rates? How can job placement be independently verified? How can consumer perceptions and the schools’ reputations be altered? How can for-profits get students to not only enroll, but succeed?

Challenges under Obama

This century has been a dramatic era for the for-profit higher-education industry. Enrollment at the schools more than quadrupled between 2000 and 2010, from 403,000 to 1.7 million students nationwide (see Figure 1). But the sector was bruised and battered during years of clashes with the Obama administration, which sought to rein in abuses such as inflating job-placement rates and using high-pressure sales techniques to induce students to sign up. Trends including a declining pool of 18- to 24-year-olds and an improving labor market also affected enrollment, and the number of students at for-profit schools fell by 47 percent from its 2010 peak to 915,000 in the spring of 2018, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

The Obama-era regulatory crunch was both focused and aggressive. A special investigative unit at the federal Department of Education was tasked with ferreting out fraud at for-profit programs. The administration adopted the so-called “gainful employment” rule for career programs, the vast majority of which are for-profits, which barred programs from access to federal student aid if too many of their graduates were unable to pay back their loans. Students at for-profit institutions that were accused of fraud or that closed after student-aid dollars disappeared had their loans forgiven by the federal government. The combination of unflattering headlines and disappearing dollars led to a sudden decline in the number of for-profit institutions, which fell from 3,265 in 2015–16 to 2,899 in 2016–17.

The companies brought many of these problems on themselves, of course, often offering low-value online courses that sucked up federal financial aid. It was a ravenous model, said Bob Shireman, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation and former U.S. deputy undersecretary of education, which made the schools “so focused on profitability that they blinded themselves about whether a program was a good value designed in a way that it would lead to positive outcomes for students.”

In countless cases, it didn’t. An analysis by the U.S. Department of Education, which under Obama performed a test run of the gainful employment rule, found that graduates of nearly three in four programs offered at for-profit colleges wound up earning less than high school dropouts, on average. Those students who do manage to earn an associate’s degree finish with an average $23,590 of debt, while most graduates of public community colleges don’t borrow. While for-profit colleges enroll 9 percent of students, they account for 33 percent of all student loan defaults, according to the Institute for College Access and Success.

“The incentive of a for-profit is to get everyone they can possibly get to enroll—which means a student for whom online education will not likely be a constructive, positive, successful experience—a for-profit has a strong incentive to enroll them anyway,” said Shireman.

Survival in a Shrinking Sector

More than one in six for-profit colleges has disappeared from federal financial-aid programs since 2010. Two of the biggest, Corinthian Colleges, Inc., and ITT Technical Institute, imploded spectacularly and shut down almost overnight, stranding thousands of angry students. Corinthian was among the schools discovered to have faked its job-placement rates; it was sued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and fined by the U.S. Department of Education before ceasing operations. ITT was caught using high-pressure recruiting tactics, and had its accreditation and participation in financial-aid programs cancelled; it soon closed its doors, blaming a “regulatory assault.” Both companies declared bankruptcy.

Other major institutions have remained open, albeit under new and often more modest circumstances. The University of Phoenix, once the largest university in the world, has seen its enrollment fall by 76 percent since 2010 and was sold to private-equity investors. Strayer Education and Capella Education Company merged. DeVry, which paid the Federal Trade Commission $100 million to settle complaints it had falsified employment claims, changed its parent company’s name last year to Adtalem Global Education, Inc., and has gotten tentative government approval to transfer ownership to Cogswell Capital LLC, the parent company of Cogswell College, a for-profit school in California.

Several for-profits have transformed into nonprofits, or been combined with or sold to nonprofit institutions. The Art Institutes, which had shrunk from a high of 51 to 32 campuses, was sold in 2017 by Education Management Corporation to the Dream Center Foundation, a philanthropic group in Los Angeles. Earlier this year, Grand Canyon University converted from for-profit to nonprofit status. The nonprofit National University System has announced plans to acquire the for-profit Northcentral University. In March, Purdue University, the flagship public research institution in Indiana, bought for-profit Kaplan University to launch a new suite of online programs called Purdue Global. And in July, Bridgepoint Education got accreditor approval to merge its University of the Rockies with Ashford University. They, too, would become nonprofit.

New Sources of Scrutiny

The remaining for-profit schools may face less federal regulatory pressure under a friendly Trump administration, but states are stepping in to add new layers of oversight. Attorneys general from 18 states and the District of Columbia have sued to prevent the federal education department from changing rules meant to protect students who borrowed to attend Corinthian, ITT, and other institutions. Many states now require that for-profits set aside money to reimburse students if they close or are found to have committed fraud, according to the National Consumer Law Center. For-profit Career Education Corporation, which runs American InterContinental University and Colorado Technical University, is being investigated by 17 states and the District of Columbia over whether its recruitment and claims of graduate placement meet state consumer laws, even as federal investigations into the company have apparently ended. And new California regulations require for-profit colleges to keep their loan default rates under 15.5 percent to remain eligible for state financial aid, far below the federal threshold of 30 percent.

The for-profits also are facing a clampdown by their own accreditors. Like the schools, accreditors have been subject to scrutiny; the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools (ACICS), which had approved Corinthian and other failed for-profit institutions, was stripped of its federal recognition near the end of the Obama administration. ACICS has received a temporary stay from U.S. education secretary Betsy DeVos and is fighting for its status to be permanently reinstated, but its example has refocused the accreditors of other for-profit colleges on their consumer-protection roles, particularly in the areas of retention, graduation, and job placement.

“You guys get in trouble, we get in trouble. You have good success stories, we have good success stories,” Florence Tate, former executive director at the Accrediting Bureau of Health Education Schools, reminded those assembled in Orlando.

Change Agents

Two weeks after a graduate of the for-profit Aviation Institute of Maintenance (AIM) reports that he or she has found a job, a third-party contractor calls the employer to confirm it. That’s part of a surprisingly elaborate process meant to reassure accreditors and consumers that job-placement rates are real, and that students get employment in the fields for which the school prepared them.

“Student outcomes have become almost the defining role for some of the accreditors,” said Joel English, vice president of operations at AIM, a chain of 11 campuses that train students to repair airplane engines. “The accreditors that are left have really tightened things up. They got really strict and we had to get more strict and it’s been very meaningful for us.”

A small industry of companies has cropped up to provide this kind of independent verification of students’ job placements, such as CARS, MMI, CompliancePoint, and IntegriShield. Like auditors, they can have no other financial ties to the schools. Accreditors require that a statistically significant proportion—typically 25 percent—of records be checked, and only job placements in the field for which the student was trained count. A gig as a barista at Starbucks doesn’t count.

AIM’s reported employment rate, which fell from about 70 percent to about 50 percent when the third-party process was initially applied, is now back up to about 70 percent, the company says, suggesting that the reform is accomplishing more than just making the information more reliable, but also encouraging career offices to do a better job.

Public institutions and nonprofits, whose accreditors have generally not imposed such standards, don’t do anything remotely as elaborate. The rosy job-placement rates they give prospective students are often based on unscientific surveys of alumni—though the prospects aren’t told that—and can be wildly unreliable. The likeliest to answer: graduates with good jobs. (There are notable exceptions, including the public University of Texas System, which has teamed up with the U.S. Census Bureau to provide graduates’ typical earnings by major.) Several nonprofit law schools have been sued by their own students for allegedly fabricating job-placement rates; in one suit, the complainant alleged that the 80 percent of alumni reported as working included a graduate who was cleaning pools and another who was waiting tables.

“If [public and nonprofit institutions] had to do what we do for our accreditation, they would be closing left and right,” said English. “I have built my career services department bigger than it’s ever been.”

Old Problems, New Strategies

Retention is another major challenge, and it is particularly critical to for-profit colleges given the dramatic decline in their enrollments. They also have the farthest to go: more than 40 percent of students at for-profit schools quit after one year, compared to 20 percent of students at public and nonprofit institutions, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

Some for-profits are encouraging persistence by changing the ways that students pay for school. Strayer University has established what it calls its Graduation Fund, which gives students one free course to be taken in the last year of their degree for every three they pay for and successfully complete.

Since the program was started in 2013, retention has improved, according to Strayer: the school now has a 56 percent retention rate for new full-time students, and 32 percent for new part-time students. In addition, the six-year graduation rate has grown to 62 percent—slightly better than the 60 percent average at four-year schools of all types nationwide, and significantly higher than the average six-year graduation rate of 36 percent for older students—the for-profit schools’ core market.

“We wanted to attack two challenges at once: one, the affordability challenge, but also, the challenge of continuation,” said Strayer president Brian Jones. “What we’re seeing is students are continuing in those early terms where we often lost them in the past.”

Other for-profits offer subscription models—think Netflix—which let students pay a flat monthly fee and take as many or as few courses as they’d like. The faster they go, the cheaper their degrees. StraighterLine charges $99 a month plus $59 per course for proctoring, tutoring, and textbooks; New Charter University costs $796 per semester, including textbooks, for as many courses as a student can complete. Capella University’s FlexPath program charges a flat fee each quarter, ranging from $2,100 to $2,700 depending on the program, and allows students to complete as many courses as quickly as they can.

Other schools let prospective students take a trial course for free, which a survey by consulting firm Eduventures placed near the top of what prospective older students want. Capella offers a non-graded, non-credit-bearing sample class, while StraighterLine and several of its partner colleges have begun a pilot program under which students have to take and successfully complete a free credit-bearing course before they can enroll full-time.

A Disruptive Advantage

Unlike public and nonprofit schools—which benefit from public funding and their tax-free status—for-profits are forced to innovate in these types of ways, said Burck Smith, founder and CEO of StraighterLine “Nonprofits are really just for-profits, but with a pricing advantage,” Smith said. “That means the pressure on them as opposed to others who don’t have those subsidies is less than for others who have to innovate.”

To build business, for example, it was the for-profits that recognized the older learner market in the first place. As with many such advances, this didn’t entirely start with the for-profit schools—there were already small continuing-education and professional-studies programs at some colleges and universities. But it was the for-profit schools that saw the potential to grow, and built new, technologically advanced systems to serve those students.

That’s the ethos of disruption, said Peter Smith, a professor of innovative practices in higher education at the nonprofit University of Maryland University College, who worked at a for-profit and led two conventional nonprofit institutions. “What you have is, who sees the opportunity. Because if you’re a traditional college, you’re looking at 18-year-olds graduating from high school, and you’re getting a steadily expanding market. Nobody was looking at the birth rate. Along comes [University of Phoenix founder] John Sperling and he says, ‘Wait a minute, there’s this huge untapped market of people who need and can benefit from higher education. I’m going after them.'”

To do that, the for-profit schools invested in online education for delivery, found untapped pockets of aspiring students, and quickly grew. The trouble came when they focused on keeping up those high rates of growth, just as the immature online-delivery model showed a major weakness: nearly as many students who were flooding into online courses were streaming back out of them. That led to the hyper-aggressive recruiting techniques and false job-placement information that inspired the federal crackdown.

But it also inspired more constructive innovations. For-profit schools were among those that pioneered the expansive use of predictive analytics a decade ago, for example. American Public University System (APUS) began to track students’ participation on discussion boards, such as the average length of a response to a question, and conducted surveys to link that data to student performance. That meant it could target supports to boost individual student engagement, helping improve the school’s six-year graduation rate to 41 percent.

“The better your data, the better your ability to predict if a student is falling behind and intervene to assist them,” said Wally Boston, president and chief executive of APUS and its parent company, American Public Education, Inc.

Beyond the For-Profit Label

Despite these advances, for-profit higher-education providers seldom get noticed for their innovation, especially by their public and nonprofit counterparts, said Howard Lurie, principal analyst for online and continuing education at Eduventures. They’re more likely to be met by what Lurie calls “the for-profit sneer.”

“The sneer is probably well deserved, because there were some considerable and notable mistakes made by those schools in that sector,” Lurie said. “But I actually think we’re coming to a period of time when there’s a greater willingness by forward-thinking publics and private nonprofits to understand what the for-profit sector does well.”

Several of the major innovations brought forth by the for-profits, such as allowing students to start and pause their studies anytime they choose and awarding credit for professional experience, have taken root at traditional public and nonprofit colleges and universities. Some public and nonprofit colleges and universities have started collaborating with for-profits to develop new techniques, such as adaptive learning tools. And higher-education leaders—especially those who are responding to enrollment declines by serving the booming adult market—are recognizing and acknowledging their debt to for-profit innovation.

“It is fair to ask what have we been able learn from the for-profit innovators,” said Laurie Quinn, provost and chief academic officer of nonprofit Champlain College in Vermont, which runs a robust online division. “There are some considerable things,” most notably expanding the adult market and using sophisticated marketing.

Such leading-edge work continues: for-profits now are experimenting with nanodegrees (Udacity), guarantees to students and employers (Triangle Tech Group, coding boot camps), and modular sequential courses (several vocational institutions). This has led to a rare instance of a for-profit institution, Colorado Technical University (CTU), collaborating with a nonprofit one, the University of Central Florida (UCF). Together, they are studying the adaptive learning techniques that CTU has added to 150 of its courses and that UFC hopes to use to serve students who need extra help.

To be sure, acknowledged Constance Johnson, CTU’s chief academic officer and provost, there are some institutions that would shy away from collaborating with her institution.

“Ultimately, everyone’s goal is student completion,” she said. “There is certainly a lot more discussion about that now. I don’t hear as much ‘for-profit-versus-nonprofit’ now.”

Those comments were echoed by her counterpart at UCF, Charles Dziuban, who leads the university’s Research Initiative for Teaching Effectiveness. He noted “a commonality of purpose, for somewhat different kinds of reasons.”

These sorts of innovations are raising the for-profit sector’s profile in the foundation and research worlds as well. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has funded a study that includes New Charter, which puts course material and practice tests online for free and has opted not to offer financial-aid assistance, including the federal student-loan program, in order to save on administrative costs. The Gates Foundation is also examining practices at the for-profit APUS and the University of Phoenix, alongside publics and nonprofits, in a project focused on using data to study factors in student success.

Ignoring the “sneer” altogether, another view holds that the innovations in the for-profit sector lay bare the inertia that has historically slowed improvement at public and nonprofit schools. Consider these questions from Keith Zakarin, who founded and operated a for-profit college—Advanced Training Associates, in El Cajon, California, which was sold in 2015—and now represents such schools as an attorney:

“What incentive is there for the faculty to make sure that the skills they’re teaching lead to good outcomes? What incentive is there in faculty governance to change, including getting rid of crappy programs, getting rid of faculty who are unproductive? Where in the publics are the incentives to have departments whose only role in life is to find employment for their graduates?”

After years of across-the-board declines in enrollment, eroding public faith in the importance of a college degree, and daunting financial pressures, all institutions—for-profits and everyone else—are “going to have to innovate or fail.”

“Everyone is going to have to pivot,” Zakarin said. “And we’re better suited than many.”

Jon Marcus is higher-education editor at the Hechinger Report, a foundation-supported nonprofit based at Columbia University, and a North America correspondent for the (London) Times Higher Education magazine.

“A national disgrace.” That’s how Brett Kavanaugh chose to describe the process by which the United States Senate considered his nomination to the Supreme Court. By the time that process had concluded, there were few on either side of the debate who disagreed. As this issue of Education Next goes to press, a deeply divided Senate has just voted 50–48 to confirm Kavanaugh for the seat left vacant by Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement. The consequences for education are likely to be more far-reaching than anything else the Trump administration has done or will do during its time in office.

By securing a conservative majority on the court for the foreseeable future, Kavanaugh’s confirmation can be expected to accelerate ongoing shifts to the right in constitutional doctrine. In 2017, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Missouri could not bar a Lutheran preschool from participating in a reimbursement program for playground improvements. Multiple cases underway in federal and state courts could provide an opening for the court to extend that logic and rule that religious schools cannot be excluded from programs that aid families sending their children to private schools. Kavanaugh, who in a 2017 speech praised former Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s efforts to lower the wall of separation prior courts had erected between church and state, seems likely to welcome such an opportunity.

Or consider the topic of agency fees for public-sector unions, which were collected from employees who declined to join. In the Janus decision this past June, a 5–4 majority ruled that such fees violate the First Amendment rights of teachers and other government workers. A liberal majority on the court could have placed that precedent at risk. With Kavanaugh on the bench, the odds have increased that the court will instead go further in curtailing union power, perhaps by making it easier for workers to opt out of membership.

In addition, Kavanaugh’s confirmation has thrown cold water on nascent attempts to move the court’s doctrine in education cases in a progressive direction. Efforts to get the court to reconsider its 1973 Rodriguez decision, in which justices ruled that the Constitution does not include a right to education, or to place affirmative action in college admissions and K–12 school-assignment policies on a more solid legal foundation, might have gained traction with a liberal majority. Now, they seem far-fetched (see “Good Advice,” legal beat).

And what of the confirmation battle itself? Debate ultimately centered on Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony that Kavanaugh had assaulted her while both were in high school—an allegation that even President Trump initially deemed “credible” but ultimately was not corroborated before the Senate. Coincidentally, as the Senate Judiciary Committee heard testimony from both parties, education secretary Betsy DeVos’s team was finalizing draft regulations on how colleges receiving federal aid should investigate and adjudicate claims of sexual assault.

Under President Obama, the Department of Education issued guidance that expanded the definition of sexual harassment under Title IX and lowered the standard of proof required for students accused of harassment to be disciplined (see “Where Title IX Went Wrong,” book reviews). The move won praise from advocates for survivors of sexual assault, but was simultaneously criticized for limiting the due-process rights of the accused. Twenty-eight professors at Harvard Law School went so far as to publish an open letter opposing their university’s policy changes in response to the guidance.

Shortly after her own confirmation, DeVos vowed to start anew with a fresh set of regulations centered on two principles: “Every survivor of sexual misconduct must be taken seriously. Every student accused of sexual misconduct must know that guilt is not predetermined.”

Kavanaugh’s contentious path to confirmation seems likely to stiffen DeVos’s resolve to protect the rights of the accused, even as it heightens the controversy surrounding whether institutions fairly handle allegations of assault. The consensus on the left holds that allegations are underreported, improperly investigated, and widely disbelieved. Yet among conservatives, as Education Next executive editor Michael Petrilli recently told the Associated Press, “the sympathy right now is very strong with the concern that some men are wrongly accused.” It is no surprise that the lone Democratic senator to vote “Yes” to elevate Kavanaugh was Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who is running for reelection in a state that voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2016.

There is little doubt that Title IX needs another look, but let’s hope that those seeking to draw lessons from the Kavanaugh confirmation process do not stop there. Setting aside the alleged assault, the window the hearings provided on the hard-partying, sexual-conquest-claiming culture at elite private schools—and presumably many other schools nationwide—was beyond disturbing. As an alum of one of Georgetown Prep’s crosstown rivals, I found aspects of that picture all too familiar. If the battle over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination leads American high schools to ensure that fewer students find reason to “cringe” when they look back at their yearbooks—and, more importantly, at how they treated those around them—an otherwise disgraceful episode could yet have a positive legacy.

— Martin R. West

Any parent who has battled with a child over homework night after night has to wonder: Do those math worksheets and book reports really make a difference to a student’s long-term success? Or is homework just a headache—another distraction from family time and downtime, already diminished by the likes of music and dance lessons, sports practices, and part-time jobs?

Allison, a mother of two middle-school girls from an affluent Boston suburb, describes a frenetic afterschool scenario: “My girls do gymnastics a few days a week, so homework happens for my 6th grader after gymnastics, at 6:30 p.m. She doesn’t get to bed until 9. My 8th grader does her homework immediately after school, up until gymnastics. She eats dinner at 9:15 and then goes to bed, unless there is more homework to do, in which case she’ll get to bed around 10.” The girls miss out on sleep, and weeknight family dinners are tough to swing.

Parental concerns about their children’s homework loads are nothing new. Debates over the merits of homework—tasks that teachers ask students to complete during non-instructional time—have ebbed and flowed since the late 19th century, and today its value is again being scrutinized and weighed against possible negative impacts on family life and children’s well-being.

Are American students overburdened with homework? In some middle-class and affluent communities, where pressure on students to achieve can be fierce, yes. But in families of limited means, it’s often another story. Many low-income parents value homework as an important connection to the school and the curriculum—even as their children report receiving little homework. Overall, high-school students relate that they spend less than one hour per day on homework, on average, and only 42 percent say they do it five days per week. In one recent survey by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a minimal 13 percent of 17-year-olds said they had devoted more than two hours to homework the previous evening (see Figure 1).

Recent years have seen an increase in the amount of homework assigned to students in grades K–2, and critics point to research findings that, at the elementary-school level, homework does not appear to enhance children’s learning. Why, then, should we burden young children and their families with homework if there is no academic benefit to doing it? Indeed, perhaps it would be best, as some propose, to eliminate homework altogether, particularly in these early grades.

On the contrary, developmentally appropriate homework plays a critical role in the formation of positive learning beliefs and behaviors, including a belief in one’s academic ability, a deliberative and effortful approach to mastery, and higher expectations and aspirations for one’s future. It can prepare children to confront ever-more-complex tasks, develop resilience in the face of difficulty, and learn to embrace rather than shy away from challenge. In short, homework is a key vehicle through which we can help shape children into mature learners.

The Homework-Achievement Connection

A narrow focus on whether or not homework boosts grades and test scores in the short run thus ignores a broader purpose in education, the development of lifelong, confident learners. Still, the question looms: does homework enhance academic success? As the educational psychologist Lyn Corno wrote more than two decades ago, “homework is a complicated thing.” Most research on the homework-achievement connection is correlational, which precludes a definitive judgment on its academic benefits. Researchers rely on correlational research in this area of study given the difficulties of randomly assigning students to homework/no-homework conditions. While correlation does not imply causality, extensive research has established that at the middle- and high-school levels, homework completion is strongly and positively associated with high achievement. Very few studies have reported a negative correlation.

As noted above, findings on the homework-achievement connection at the elementary level are mixed. A small number of experimental studies have demonstrated that elementary-school students who receive homework achieve at higher levels than those who do not. These findings suggest a causal relationship, but they are limited in scope. Within the body of correlational research, some studies report a positive homework-achievement connection, some a negative relationship, and yet others show no relationship at all. Why the mixed findings? Researchers point to a number of possible factors, such as developmental issues related to how young children learn, different goals that teachers have for younger as compared to older students, and how researchers define homework.

Certainly, young children are still developing skills that enable them to focus on the material at hand and study efficiently. Teachers’ goals for their students are also quite different in elementary school as compared to secondary school. While teachers at both levels note the value of homework for reinforcing classroom content, those in the earlier grades are more likely to assign homework mainly to foster skills such as responsibility, perseverance, and the ability to manage distractions.

Most research examines homework generally. Might a focus on homework in a specific subject shed more light on the homework-achievement connection? A recent meta-analysis did just this by examining the relationship between math/science homework and achievement. Contrary to previous findings, researchers reported a stronger relationship between homework and achievement in the elementary grades than in middle school. As the study authors note, one explanation for this finding could be that in elementary school, teachers tend to assign more homework in math than in other subjects, while at the same time assigning shorter math tasks more frequently. In addition, the authors point out that parents tend to be more involved in younger children’s math homework and more skilled in elementary-level than middle-school math.

In sum, the relationship between homework and academic achievement in the elementary-school years is not yet established, but eliminating homework at this level would do children and their families a huge disservice: we know that children’s learning beliefs have a powerful impact on their academic outcomes, and that through homework, parents and teachers can have a profound influence on the development of positive beliefs.

How Much Is Appropriate?

Harris M. Cooper of Duke University, the leading researcher on homework, has examined decades of study on what we know about the relationship between homework and scholastic achievement. He has proposed the “10-minute rule,” suggesting that daily homework be limited to 10 minutes per grade level. Thus, a 1st grader would do 10 minutes each day and a 4th grader, 40 minutes. The National Parent Teacher Association and the National Education Association both endorse this guideline, but it is not clear whether the recommended allotments include time for reading, which most teachers want children to do daily.

For middle-school students, Cooper and colleagues report that 90 minutes per day of homework is optimal for enhancing academic achievement, and for high schoolers, the ideal range is 90 minutes to two and a half hours per day. Beyond this threshold, more homework does not contribute to learning. For students enrolled in demanding Advanced Placement or honors courses, however, homework is likely to require significantly more time, leading to concerns over students’ health and well-being.

Notwithstanding media reports of parents revolting against the practice of homework, the vast majority of parents say they are highly satisfied with their children’s homework loads. The National Household Education Surveys Program recently found that between 70 and 83 percent of parents believed that the amount of homework their children had was “about right,” a result that held true regardless of social class, race/ethnicity, community size, level of education, and whether English was spoken at home.

Learning Beliefs Are Consequential

As noted above, developmentally appropriate homework can help children cultivate positive beliefs about learning. Decades of research have established that these beliefs predict the types of tasks students choose to pursue, their persistence in the face of challenge, and their academic achievement. Broadly, learning beliefs fall under the banner of achievement motivation, which is a constellation of cognitive, behavioral, and affective factors, including: the way a person perceives his or her abilities, goal-setting skills, expectation of success, the value the individual places on learning, and self-regulating behavior such as time-management skills. Positive or adaptive beliefs about learning serve as emotional and psychological protective factors for children, especially when they encounter difficulties or failure.

Motivation researcher Carol Dweck of Stanford University posits that children with a “growth mindset”—those who believe that ability is malleable—approach learning very differently than those with a “fixed mindset”—kids who believe ability cannot change. Those with a growth mindset view effort as the key to mastery. They see mistakes as helpful, persist even in the face of failure, prefer challenging over easy tasks, and do better in school than their peers who have a fixed mindset. In contrast, children with a fixed mindset view effort and mistakes as implicit condemnations of their abilities. Such children succumb easily to learned helplessness in the face of difficulty, and they gravitate toward tasks they know they can handle rather than more challenging ones.

Of course, learning beliefs do not develop in a vacuum. Studies have demonstrated that parents and teachers play a significant role in the development of positive beliefs and behaviors, and that homework is a key tool they can use to foster motivation and academic achievement.

Parents’ Beliefs and Actions Matter

It is well established that parental involvement in their children’s education promotes achievement motivation and success in school. Parents are their children’s first teachers, and their achievement-related beliefs have a profound influence on children’s developing perceptions of their own abilities, as well as their views on the value of learning and education.

Parents affect their children’s learning through the messages they send about education, whether by expressing interest in school activities and experiences, attending school events, helping with homework when they can, or exposing children to intellectually enriching experiences. Most parents view such engagement as part and parcel of their role. They also believe that doing homework fosters responsibility and organizational skills, and that doing well on homework tasks contributes to learning, even if children experience frustration from time to time.

Many parents provide support by establishing homework routines, eliminating distractions, communicating expectations, helping children manage their time, providing reassuring messages, and encouraging kids to be aware of the conditions under which they do their best work. These supports help foster the development of self-regulation, which is critical to school success.

Self-regulation involves a number of skills, such as the ability to monitor one’s performance and adjust strategies as a result of feedback; to evaluate one’s interests and realistically perceive one’s aptitude; and to work on a task autonomously. It also means learning how to structure one’s environment so that it’s conducive to learning, by, for example, minimizing distractions. As children move into higher grades, these skills and strategies help them organize, plan, and learn independently. This is precisely where parents make a demonstrable difference in students’ attitudes and approaches to homework.

Especially in the early grades, homework gives parents the opportunity to cultivate beliefs and behaviors that foster efficient study skills and academic resilience. Indeed, across age groups, there is a strong and positive relationship between homework completion and a variety of self-regulatory processes. However, the quality of parental help matters. Sometimes, well-intentioned parents can unwittingly undermine the development of children’s positive learning beliefs and their achievement. Parents who maintain a positive outlook on homework and allow their children room to learn and struggle on their own, stepping in judiciously with informational feedback and hints, do their children a much better service than those who seek to control the learning process.

A recent study of 5th and 6th graders’ perceptions of their parents’ involvement with homework distinguished between supportive and intrusive help. The former included the belief that parents encouraged the children to try to find the right answer on their own before providing them with assistance, and when the child struggled, attempted to understand the source of the confusion. In contrast, the latter included the perception that parents provided unsolicited help, interfered when the children did their homework, and told them how to complete their assignments. Supportive help predicted higher achievement, while intrusive help was associated with lower achievement.

Parents’ attitudes and emotions during homework time can support the development of positive attitudes and approaches in their children, which in turn are predictive of higher achievement. Children are more likely to focus on self-improvement during homework time and do better in school when their parents are oriented toward mastery. In contrast, if parents focus on how well children are doing relative to peers, kids tend to adopt learning goals that allow them to avoid challenge.

Homework and Social Class

Social class is another important element in the homework dynamic. What is the homework experience like for families with limited time and resources? And what of affluent families, where resources are plenty but the pressures to succeed are great?

Etta Kralovec and John Buell, authors of The End of Homework, maintain that homework “punishes the poor,” because lower-income parents may not be as well educated as their affluent counterparts and thus not as well equipped to help with homework. Poorer families also have fewer financial resources to devote to home computers, tutoring, and academic enrichment. The stresses of poverty—and work schedules—may impinge, and immigrant parents may face language barriers and an unfamiliarity with the school system and teachers’ expectations.

Yet research shows that low-income parents who are unable to assist with homework are far from passive in their children’s learning, and they do help foster scholastic performance. In fact, parental help with homework is not a necessary component for school success.

Brown University’s Jin Li queried low-income Chinese American 9th graders’ perceptions of their parents’ engagement with their education. Students said their immigrant parents rarely engaged in activities that are known to foster academic achievement, such as monitoring homework, checking it for accuracy, or attending school meetings or events. Instead, parents of higher achievers built three social networks to support their children’s learning. They designated “anchor” helpers both inside and outside the family who provided assistance; identified peer models for their children to emulate; and enlisted the assistance of extended kin to guide their children’s educational socialization. In a related vein, a recent analysis of survey data showed that Asian and Latino 5th graders, relative to native-born peers, were more likely to turn to siblings than parents for homework help.

Further, research demonstrates that low-income parents, recognizing that they lack the time to be in the classroom or participate in school governance, view homework as a critical connection to their children’s experiences in school. One study found that mothers enjoyed the routine and predictability of homework and used it as a way to demonstrate to children how to plan their time. Mothers organized homework as a family activity, with siblings doing homework together and older children reading to younger ones. In this way, homework was perceived as a collective practice wherein siblings could model effective habits and learn from one another.

In another recent study, researchers examined mathematics achievement in low-income 8th-grade Asian and Latino students. Help with homework was an advantage their mothers could not provide. They could, however, furnish structure (for example, by setting aside quiet time for homework completion), and it was this structure that most predicted high achievement. As the authors note, “It is . . . important to help [low-income] parents realize that they can still help their children get good grades in mathematics and succeed in school even if they do not know how to provide direct assistance with their child’s mathematics homework.”

The homework narrative at the other end of the socioeconomic continuum is altogether different. Media reports abound with examples of students, mostly in high school, carrying three or more hours of homework per night, a burden that can impair learning, motivation, and well-being. In affluent communities, students often experience intense pressure to cultivate a high-achieving profile that will be attractive to elite colleges. Heavy homework loads have been linked to unhealthy symptoms such as heightened stress, anxiety, physical complaints, and sleep disturbances. Like Allison’s 6th grader mentioned earlier, many students can only tackle their homework after they do extracurricular activities, which are also seen as essential for the college résumé. Not surprisingly, many students in these communities are not deeply engaged in learning; rather, they speak of “doing school,” as Stanford researcher Denise Pope has described, going through the motions necessary to excel, and undermining their physical and mental health in the process.

Fortunately, some national intervention initiatives, such as Challenge Success (co-founded by Pope), are heightening awareness of these problems. Interventions aimed at restoring balance in students’ lives (in part, by reducing homework demands) have resulted in students reporting an increased sense of well-being, decreased stress and anxiety, and perceptions of greater support from teachers, with no decrease in achievement outcomes.

What is good for this small segment of students, however, is not necessarily good for the majority. As Jessica Lahey wrote in Motherlode, a New York Times parenting blog, “homework is a red herring” in the national conversation on education. “Some otherwise privileged children may have too much, but the real issue lies in places where there is too little. . . . We shouldn’t forget that.”

My colleagues and I analyzed interviews conducted with lower-income 9th graders (African American, Mexican American, and European American) from two Northern California high schools that at the time were among the lowest-achieving schools in the state. We found that these students consistently described receiving minimal homework—perhaps one or two worksheets or textbook pages, the occasional project, and 30 minutes of reading per night. Math was the only class in which they reported having homework each night. These students noted few consequences for not completing their homework.

Indeed, greatly reducing or eliminating homework would likely increase, not diminish, the achievement gap. As Harris M. Cooper has commented, those choosing to opt their children out of homework are operating from a place of advantage. Children in higher-income families benefit from many privileges, including exposure to a larger range of language at home that may align with the language of school, access to learning and cultural experiences, and many other forms of enrichment, such as tutoring and academic summer camps, all of which may be cost-prohibitive for lower-income families. But for the 21 percent of the school-age population who live in poverty—nearly 11 million students ages 5–17—homework is one tool that can help narrow the achievement gap.

Community and School Support

Often, community organizations and afterschool programs can step up to provide structure and services that students’ need to succeed at homework. For example, Boys and Girls and 4-H clubs offer volunteer tutors as well as access to computer technology that students may not have at home. Many schools provide homework clubs or integrate homework into the afterschool program.

Home-school partnerships have succeeded in engaging parents with homework and significantly improving their children’s academic achievement. For example, Joyce Epstein of Johns Hopkins University has developed the TIPS model (Teachers Involve Parents in Schoolwork), which embraces homework as an integral part of family time. TIPS is a teacher-designed interactive program in which children and a parent or family member each have a specific role in the homework scenario. For example, children might show the parent how to do a mathematics task on fractions, explaining their reasoning along the way and reviewing their thinking aloud if they are unsure.

Evaluations show that elementary and middle-school students in classrooms that have adopted TIPS complete more of their homework than do students in other classrooms. Both students and parent participants show more positive beliefs about learning mathematics, and TIPS students show significant gains in writing skills and report-card science grades, as well as higher mathematics scores on standardized tests.

Another study found that asking teachers to send text messages to parents about their children’s missing homework resulted in increased parental monitoring of homework, consequences for missed assignments, and greater participation in parent-child conferences. Teachers reported fewer missed assignments and greater student effort in coursework, and math grades and GPA significantly improved.

Homework Quality Matters

Teachers favor homework for a number of reasons. They believe it fosters a sense of responsibility and promotes academic achievement. They note that homework provides valuable review and practice for students while giving teachers feedback on areas where students may need more support. Finally, teachers value homework as a way to keep parents connected to the school and their children’s educational experiences.

While students, to say the least, may not always relish the idea of doing homework, by high school most come to believe there is a positive relationship between doing homework and doing well in school. Both higher and lower achievers lament “busywork” that doesn’t promote learning. They crave high-quality, challenging assignments—and it is this kind of homework that has been associated with higher achievement.

What constitutes high-quality homework? Assignments that are developmentally appropriate and meaningful and that promote self-efficacy and self-regulation. Meaningful homework is authentic, allowing students to engage in solving problems with real-world relevance. More specifically, homework tasks should make efficient use of student time and have a clear purpose connected to what they are learning. An artistic rendition of a period in history that would take hours to complete can become instead a diary entry in the voice of an individual from that era. By allowing a measure of choice and autonomy in homework, teachers foster in their students a sense of ownership, which bolsters their investment in the work.

High-quality homework also fosters students’ perceptions of their own competence by 1) focusing them on tasks they can accomplish without help; 2) differentiating tasks so as to allow struggling students to experience success; 3) providing suggested time frames rather than a fixed period of time in which a task should be completed; 4) delivering clearly and carefully explained directions; and 5) carefully modeling methods for attacking lengthy or complex tasks. Students whose teachers have trained them to adopt strategies such as goal setting, self-monitoring, and planning develop a number of personal assets—improved time management, increased self-efficacy, greater effort and interest, a desire for mastery, and a decrease in helplessness.

Excellence with Equity

Currently, the United States has the second-highest disparity between time spent on homework by students of low socioeconomic status and time spent by their more-affluent peers out of the 34 OECD-member nations participating in the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) (see Figure 2). Noting that PISA studies have consistently found that spending more time on math homework strongly correlates with higher academic achievement, the report’s authors suggest that the homework disparity may reflect lower teacher expectations for low-income students. If so, this is truly unfortunate. In and of itself, low socioeconomic status is not an impediment to academic achievement when appropriate parental, school, and community supports are deployed. As research makes clear, low-income parents support their children’s learning in varied ways, not all of which involve direct assistance with schoolwork. Teachers can orient students and parents toward beliefs that foster positive attitudes toward learning. Indeed, where homework is concerned, a commitment to excellence with equity is both worthwhile and attainable.

In affluent communities, parents, teachers, and school districts might consider reexamining the meaning of academic excellence and placing more emphasis on leading a balanced and well-rounded life. The homework debate in the United States has been dominated by concerns over the health and well-being of such advantaged students. As legitimate as these worries are, it’s important to avoid generalizing these children’s experiences to those with fewer family resources. Reducing or eliminating homework, though it may be desirable in some advantaged communities, would deprive poorer children of a crucial and empowering learning experience. It would also eradicate a fertile opportunity to help close the achievement gap.

Janine Bempechat is clinical professor of human development at the Boston University Wheelock College of Education and Human Development.

An unabridged version of this article is available here.