Charter schools have gained a substantial following in Louisiana, where 148 charters now serve more than 80,000 students. That amounts to nearly 1 in 9 students attending a charter school in the Pelican State. But charters have also attracted opposition from many school districts and teachers. In 2014, some of these opponents banded together and turned to the courts, claiming that state-authorized charter schools are not public schools under Louisiana’s constitution and therefore are not eligible to receive state funding. The end result was a decisive victory for charter schools.

Charter schools in Louisiana are authorized primarily by either a local school board or the state board of education. Either way, charters receive a portion of per-pupil funding from both the state and the local district. Local school boards are often opposed to charter schools and may refuse to authorize them. Thus, allowing the state to authorize charters provides a way to circumvent local resistance.

The plaintiffs in Iberville v. Louisiana included the Iberville Parish School Board and several teachers unions, including the state’s largest, the Louisiana Association of Educators. They challenged the constitutionality of state-authorized charter schools, basing their case on a clause in the state constitution that requires the state board of education to “annually develop and adopt a formula which shall be used to determine the cost of a minimum foundation program of education in all public elementary and secondary schools as well as to equitably allocate the funds to parish and city school systems.” The plaintiffs contended that the clause implied that only parish and city schools could receive funding from the state education fund.

The plaintiffs’ first foray into the courts did not go well for them. A state district court rejected their reading of the Louisiana constitution, saying that the education-funding clause required the state board to set funding levels for all public schools and to equitably distribute funds for parish and city schools, but it did not forbid the creation of other kinds of public schools. On appeal, however, the plaintiffs were successful. In a three-to-two decision, a five-judge panel ruled that the state-authorized charter schools were “not public schools in the sense of the Louisiana Constitution.” The court relied on a previous decision by the state supreme court, which held that so-called foundation funds could not be diverted to non-public schools. But that case, Louisiana Federation of Teachers v. State, centered on a voucher program that gave parents foundation money they could use toward private-school tuition. The difference between the two forms of school choice would prove fatal to the plaintiffs’ case in Iberville.

The state appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court, which in March issued a five-to-two decision overturning the appellate court. The majority said that the appellate panel had misunderstood the supreme court’s precedents and misread the state constitution. The justices pointed out that the court had never interpreted the constitution to forbid allocations to non-city or non-parish schools. As well, they maintained that the most sensible reading of the constitution was the one adopted by the trial court. Were they to adopt the plaintiffs’ preferred interpretation, other types of long-standing public schools such as the lab schools at Louisiana State University and Southern University would need to be defunded. The fact that those schools already existed when the education-funding clause was added to the constitution indicated that the provision was not intended to define public schools as just parish and city schools.

The Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools praised the court for “putting students first, and empowering parents.” Judge Jefferson D. Hughes III, a Republican elected to the court in 2012, agreed that the goal of funding charters through the formula was “laudable” but nevertheless dissented from the decision, saying, “shortcuts around the Constitution . . . are inimical to democracy and are not cool.”

Despite Hughes’s dissent, the decision constituted a clear win for charter schools. But charter advocates should be prepared for similar legal challenges around the country. Many players in the K–12 arena continue to believe that school choice is not cool, and the legal hook they found to attack charter schools in Louisiana might well succeed elsewhere.

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.

With the cost of college soaring and the national six-year completion rate below 60 percent, the federal government’s support for higher education is facing heightened scrutiny. What kind of regulation and accountability should Congress impose on what might be termed the world’s largest voucher program—Washington’s hefty funding of Pell grants and subsidized loans? As legislators turn their attention to revising the Higher Education Act, are current levels of regulation sufficient and appropriate, or is there perhaps too much paperwork, bureaucracy, and compliance? What can be learned from the Obama administration’s efforts to hold underperforming programs to account?

In this forum we hear from Michael B. Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute and an executive editor of Education Next, with Alana Dunagan, a research fellow at the Christensen Institute, and from Kevin Carey, vice president for education policy and knowledge management at New America.

 

Change the Rules to Unleash Innovation
By Michael B. Horn and Alana Dunagan

 

 

 

 

Strong Hand of Regulation Protects Students
By Kevin Carey

Every year the federal government spends more than $100 billion on higher education, mainly in the form of grants and subsidized loans to students. The historical purpose of this spending has been to broaden access to higher education. Without federal subsidy, students from low-income backgrounds in particular would struggle to afford higher education. They would lose out on the personal and economic benefits that accrue from higher levels of educational attainment, and society would miss out on their potential contributions.

Although federal spending on higher education has expanded access, it has also had an unintended effect. Federal funds are available on a pay-for-enrollment basis: as long as students are enrolled in an eligible degree or certificate program, they can receive a Pell grant or apply for a loan. This practice allows students to enroll in programs with low course-completion and graduation rates. Funding is not tied directly to a program’s track record of placing students into good jobs, and inevitably, some students end up with debt that they struggle to repay. With pay-for-enrollment, the government ends up investing taxpayer dollars in programs with a low return, whether measured by loans repaid or by social benefit. On top of this, recent evidence suggests that federal spending has partially fueled the annual tuition increases that in recent decades have become endemic at colleges and universities. For instance, David Lucca of the Federal Reserve Bank and his colleagues examined the connection between the expansion of student-loan credit and the rise in college tuition from 2000 to 2012. They found a “pass-through effect on tuition of [increases] in subsidized maximums of about 60 cents on the dollar for subsidized federal loans” and smaller effects for unsubsidized loans.

Absent fiscal incentives, lawmakers and regulators have historically relied on complex, clunky, and mostly input-laden definitions and rules to try to lure good behavior out of higher-education providers. The current Higher Education Act (HEA), for example, spells out 10 standards for college accreditors to monitor, only one of which pertains to outcomes. This strategy has failed on two counts. First, although aggressive regulation in the Obama years may have forced a handful of for-profit schools out of business, the federal government’s historical policy-and-regulatory approach has not raised the quality of the higher-education sector as a whole. Instead, the incentives have, by and large, encouraged schools to imitate each other rather than striving to improve continually and according to their own goals. Second, an input-driven approach in which the resources and processes of higher-education providers are tightly controlled is, by definition, stifling to innovation, because it limits how programs may deliver their services. The result has been too much regulation and, at the same time, far too little accountability.

Regulation and Accountability

The House of Representatives has produced a draft reauthorization of the Higher Education Act called the Promoting Real Opportunity, Success, and Prosperity through Education Reform (PROSPER) Act. PROSPER’s authors tout it as promoting innovation because it eliminates some of HEA’s regulations intended as consumer protections, including the gainful-employment provision that the Obama administration used to hold career training programs accountable if their students graduated with debt they couldn’t afford, and the 90/10 rule, requiring for-profit schools to raise at least 10 percent of their revenue from non-federal sources. The draft bill also does away with cumbersome and ineffective input-based definitions such as the “regular and substantive interaction” clause. This provision was established to prevent fraud by ensuring that students in distance-education programs eligible for federal financial aid have sufficient interaction with faculty, but it has had the unintended consequence of bedeviling online and competency-based education providers by limiting innovative and streamlined staffing models that take advantage of new technologies.

The proposals in PROSPER have drawn understandable pushback. Innovation often advances the state of the art, but innovation at the expense of student protection could also be a great deal for charlatans, whose abusive practices could hurt students and taxpayers. The tradeoff between innovation and student protection is a false one, however. Regulated properly, innovation in higher education can create tremendous benefits for students. And innovators focused on creating value for students and society have an incentive to operate within a regulatory context that discourages the proliferation of charlatans. In other words, the right focus is not on whether there should be more or less regulation but on the kind of regulation.

Based on the last several decades of federal higher-education and K–12 policy, we know that input-based regulation is both stifling to innovation and ineffective at bolstering student outcomes. Eliminating rules for the sake of driving innovation without developing a new outcomes-based regulatory approach, however, risks further lowering the individual and societal returns on higher education. The reason is that federal aid has created a third-party-payer market in which college costs are obscured for students paying through financial aid. Conservatives who oppose any regulation of higher-education providers by Uncle Sam and who believe in an unconstrained free market are ignoring the lessons from the rise of poor-quality for-profit providers over the previous decade and the fact that no free market operates with money lenders that do not assess the creditworthiness of the people and projects to which they are lending. So long as federal dollars follow students to institutions in a third-party-payer market, it stands to reason that the federal government should have a role in evaluating which institutions are eligible for how much aid. (This arrangement is different in subtle but important ways from one in which individuals would receive government-funded, lifelong education savings accounts up front with far more dollars than Pell provides and in which they themselves could also invest.)

Funding mechanisms should ultimately reward programs that achieve a strong return on investment and defund programs that don’t work, an approach that could spur innovation in ways that benefit both students and society.

Competency-Based Education

One model that illustrates both the challenges of the current funding approach and the promise of a new one is competency-based education (CBE), which assesses student progress based on demonstrated mastery of content and skills rather than on time spent (or credit hours earned) in school. CBE has the potential to lower costs, enhance learning, and align higher education to workforce needs. In recent years, CBE has been on the rise as lawmakers have promoted it and regulators have authorized several providers to operate CBE programs.

These programs are currently a square peg in a round hole, however, as they seek to operate within a framework designed for time-based arrangements. Gaining approval to operate a CBE program is a lengthy endeavor; getting access to federal financial aid takes even longer. This has limited the growth of the CBE universe. Although hundreds of institutions are developing CBE programs, or considering doing so, only a handful are actively operating CBE models eligible for federal aid.

The PROSPER Act strips away many of the rules and definitions that constrain CBE programs. The Washington-based think tank New America has described this approach as “too much too fast,” writing that “while CBE has significant potential to help students complete their degrees on their own (faster or slower) schedules, opening the floodgates too quickly presents a huge risk, to students and to the field.” The risk is that a lack of rules governing CBE programs—in combination with nearly unlimited federal financial-aid dollars and low transparency around learning or long-term outcomes—attracts a rush of low-quality providers. That isn’t innovation. It’s rent seeking.

Although these fears are well placed, strategies to regulate CBE providers by tightly defining what qualifies as a competency-based model are misguided. For example, New America has recommended creating a statutory definition for CBE that maintains the requirement for regular and substantive interaction between faculty and students, but modifies it for the CBE context. This kind of policy, while well intended, would sharply curb innovation at the expense of students. Witness the unintended regulatory hurdles that have ensnared Western Governors University, a high-quality online CBE provider with an innovative staffing model, in legal wrangling with the Department of Education’s inspector general over whether students were experiencing regular and substantive interaction with faculty.

Lawmakers should choose a different path. Instead of using a pay-for-enrollment model and a long list of rules and definitions, regulators could focus on making students’ postgraduation outcomes transparent for all programs and on realigning federal aid to a pay-for-outcomes model. This approach could take a variety of forms, and Congress could use the Experimental Sites Initiative, which waives certain regulations for colleges and universities running experimental programs, to test a variety of schemes and investigate their various impacts and unintended consequences. Currently, there is a dearth of research on the impact of different financial-aid mechanisms on student outcomes.

For example, Congress could authorize risk sharing, whereby colleges would have to repay some financial-aid dollars if students default on their loans. This trial could comprise a set of experiments that test the effects of varying percentages of risk on the college’s part. Congress could also experiment with income-share agreements—arrangements in which students pay back a set percentage of their future income for a limited period of time—in which, through a similar risk-sharing mechanism, some college revenues would be contingent on a student’s future earnings. To illustrate how this might work: If a program was eligible for $50,000 in federal financial aid to educate one student, it would receive only 75 percent of that sum up front. When the student graduated, she would begin paying back the federal government a certain percentage of her salary—perhaps 10 percent over a set number of years. Once the student had paid the government $50,000, the institution would receive the remaining 25 percent of the federal money. Congress could also make funds more available to providers that produce relatively strong outcomes, which would create more liquidity for programs that deliver a higher return for students and would naturally guide students toward them. This last step would move beyond the current gainful-employment rule—which was an important first move toward outcome-based accountability—because access to funding wouldn’t be based on whether a program cleared an arbitrary debt-to-income ratio of its graduates but on the performance of a program relative to that of other schools and on actual market conditions.

All of these funding models would provide incentives for colleges to ensure that their programs are adequately preparing students to succeed in today’s labor market. Transparency around outcomes broken out by demographic segment and information about why students attended those institutions would make it possible for students to make college decisions based on the results.

Using outcomes to create guardrails against waste, fraud, and abuse would be more effective than complex federal definitions of what qualifies as competency-based or online education. The authors of the next HEA reauthorization cannot reasonably be expected to create definitions that will remain relevant through the next decade of technological change and business-model evolution. Focusing on outcomes instead will allow higher-education providers to innovate.

Where to Start

This type of regulatory approach could be applied broadly across higher education to beneficial effect. But one can anticipate that traditional institutions will fight and try to water down these new regulatory attempts. For political reasons, innovative programs must therefore serve as the guinea pigs for such policies—doing so would be in their own self-interest and would also advance higher education overall. In exchange for the freedom to operate as they see fit (that is, with waivers from input-based regulations) and still receive federal financial aid, innovative programs would be funded based on their outcomes—which is how functioning consumer and business markets ultimately operate. Providers that innovate and deliver outcomes tend to grow, while those that innovate but don’t deliver will fade. Over time, as innovative providers gain market share and serve more students, and as we learn which outcomes-based funding mechanisms work best with the fewest unintended consequences, the policies can be extended to more of the postsecondary market.

With the pending reauthorization of the HEA, policymakers have an opportunity to craft a framework that unleashes innovators and stimulates them to focus on creating value for students and society. The key, though, isn’t to debate whether there is too little or too much regulation but to concentrate on paying innovators for outcomes instead of constraining them by regulating inputs.

This is part of the forum, “Rethinking the Rules on Federal Higher-Ed Spending.” For an alternate take, see “Strong Hand of Regulation Protects Students ,” by Kevin Carey.

Lawmakers charged with writing a new Higher Education Act (HEA) face a dilemma. Innovation in the higher-ed marketplace is badly needed to improve student learning and break the relentless cycle of increasing cost that puts college out of reach for many families. But innovation can also create new opportunities for bad actors to exploit students and taxpayers.

The conversation about managing that tension should start with the lessons of the Obama administration, which tried to create consumer protections for vulnerable college students and was proven right about everything that matters most.

The Obama efforts began during the earliest days of the administration and continued until the final hours before Donald Trump’s inauguration. Under Obama, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) created new regulations interpreting the long-established “gainful employment” clause of the federal Higher Education Act, which requires job-preparation programs to succeed in preparing people for jobs in order to receive federal financial aid.

Recognizing that it was far beyond the capacity or proper role of the federal government to directly assess tens of thousands of individual programs, the department chose to rely instead on evidence from the labor market to gauge quality. Rather than measuring inputs and processes, the regulations focused exclusively on student outcomes. If too many graduates of a given program couldn’t make enough money to pay back their loans—not just in one year, but for several in a row—the rules assumed that the job preparation had fallen short, the tuition was too high, or both. Federal aid would be cut off. This was, among other things, a straightforward matter of sound lending policy, since the federal government makes or guarantees the large majority of all student loans.

Most of the programs that had bad debt-to-earnings ratios were run by for-profit colleges. The industry immediately cried foul at the new rules. Millions of dollars were spent on lobbyists in Washington. Lawsuits were filed and fought. The rules were torn up and laboriously revised. Bills were introduced in Congress to prohibit ED from ever so regulating again. Throughout years of conflict, industry representatives insisted that the gainful-employment regulations were “arbitrary,” “biased,” “a bad-faith attempt to cut off access to education,” “ideological,” “irrational,” “unlawful,” and so forth.

But real-world events proved them wrong.

When the rules were first proposed, ED released estimates of how programs would eventually be rated. The regulations applied to for-profit colleges as well as thousands of job-focused programs at community colleges and other public and nonprofit institutions.

Not all colleges fared equally in this preview from ED. Many failing programs were clustered in a small group of publicly traded corporations, including Corinthian Colleges, the Career Education Corporation, the Education Management Corporation, and ITT Tech. Other well-known for-profits, like the University of Phoenix, were relatively unscathed.

Over the next half decade, while the gainful-employment regulations were held up in court, the for-profit sector was beset by a series of scandals, failures, and bankruptcies. Many of them were concentrated among the same group of institutions—including Corinthian Colleges, the Career Education Corporation, the Education Management Corporation, and ITT Tech. The University of Phoenix and others remained open for business.

In other words, the programs that the Obama higher-education accountability system identified as very bad were, in fact, just that. The process revealed a high degree of correlation between educational incompetence, financial mismanagement, and fraud.

To be clear, the lesson here is not that the free market took care of the problem. The very bad programs only persisted as long as they did because they were able to gull naive consumers and stay afloat on a sea of taxpayer dollars. The industry’s anti-accountability obstruction resulted in hundreds of thousands of vulnerable students wasting years of their lives while accumulating unmanageable debt that the Trump administration now refuses to write off. Billions of additional public dollars were squandered.

In fairness, it is a challenge for colleges to gather accurate information about how much their alumni earn. Only the federal government can systematically amass that information, by matching data from its student financial-aid system with IRS income records. Once the final list of failing programs was released, most colleges didn’t try to reform them in order to prevent eventual sanctions. They just shut the programs down.

In other words, the regulations worked just as intended. The Department of Education, as the steward of taxpayer dollars and protector of consumer interests, applied a simple, transparent, common-sense test of quality, using unique federal data. Individual colleges determined for themselves how to respond, free from advice or interference by federal bureaucrats. If the gainful-employment standards are kept in place, investors will become wary of pumping money into shoddy, marketing-driven programs, fearing that the funding spigot will be shut off before they reap their profits.

What lessons can we learn from the experience of the last nine years? And how should that wisdom be applied to the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act?

To start, the old, pre-Obama higher-education accountability system, which relied on accreditation as a guarantee of quality, will not suffice. Every one of the failing, bankrupt for-profits that have scarred the collegiate landscape over the last decade remained accredited until the day they shut their doors. Peer review through the accreditation process may be a good way to support continuous improvement. It is a terrible way to prevent fraud. The higher-education market runs largely on federal subsidies in the form of grants and loans to students—many of them naive consumers. Absent the strong hand of government regulation, we have a recipe for large-scale exploitation.

And while the problem of bad programs is concentrated among for-profit colleges, it is not exclusive to them. It turns out that even Harvard University was running a small program in the performing arts with an alarming debt-to-earnings ratio. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) chairman Lamar Alexander’s staff recently released a report calling this “a telling example of how [the gainful-employment] rule has had unintended results.” Not so. What the Harvard example tells us is that well-designed accountability systems don’t exclude exalted institutions. Once Harvard was notified of the troubling program results, it suspended enrollment so it could revamp its approach to student aid. This is how accountability systems are supposed to work.

The limitations of the statutory authority granted by the gainful-employment language meant that ED couldn’t regulate public and nonprofit programs that aren’t explicitly job-focused. But that’s not an argument against accountability. It’s an argument for expanding accountability to include programs at all colleges and universities.

Like any other industry trying to protect a sweet combination of massive public subsidies and minuscule public obligations, colleges and universities like to argue that they’re burdened by too much paperwork, bureaucracy, and compliance. There is no credible evidence to support this claim. Meanwhile, the industry’s defenders in Congress are trying to hobble ED’s ability to gather baseline information about which colleges and programs are helping students learn, graduate, and pay back loans. Displaying the disregard for empiricism, public interest, and common sense that we have come to expect from the Trump administration, education secretary Betsy DeVos is actively working to tear down the Obama-era accountability system.

The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has introduced a new version of the Higher Education Act (Promoting Real Opportunity, Success, and Prosperity through Education Reform, or PROSPER) that would eliminate the gainful-employment provision and not replace it with any comparably strong regulations. It would also ax the “90/10” rule, which currently requires colleges to raise a minimum of 10 percent of their revenues from sources other than federal financial aid and thereby uses market outcomes as a proxy for quality.

Eliminating these provisions weakens the foundation of consumer protection on which innovation-promoting policies must rest. At New America, we have long championed ideas like competency-based education and other approaches that move past traditional, “seat time” measures of learning. I devoted an entire book, The End of College, to exploring how radical new higher-education models can upend the status quo. But the promise of future technology-driven innovation can’t blind us to the present-day risk of unscrupulous actors exploiting new rules to fleece the system.

The history of the gainful-employment regulation shows that it’s possible to create a broad, outcomes-driven accountability system that is agnostic toward the education model an institution uses—and thus, is hospitable to innovation—while protecting vulnerable consumers from predation. Congress should aggressively work to create room for many new kinds of college education while ensuring that every college, new or old, traditional or yet-to-be-invented, is held accountable for results.

This is part of the forum, “Rethinking the Rules on Federal Higher-Ed Spending.” For an alternate take, see “Change the Rules to Unleash Innovation,” by Michael B. Horn and Alana Dunagan.

Given the recent rhetoric of education reform’s critics, one might be forgiven for thinking that American private schools are at the peak of their influence. In a video produced by the Network on Education Policy, scholar-turned-activist Diane Ravitch claims that the “privatization movement—charters and vouchers—is moving forward full speed ahead, defunding public schools, using test scores to say public schools aren’t good enough. The question before us is how can we stop this steamroller that’s destroying the public sector, that wants to privatize everything, that wants to turn us from citizens into consumers.” Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, warns her members of “corporate lobbyists who are working to privatize and defund public education, and cloaking their efforts as school ‘choice.’” National Education Association leader Lily Eskelsen Garcia has gone so far as to label education secretary Betsy DeVos “the queen of for-profit privatization of public education.”

Yet the facts about private-school enrollment, meticulously documented by Richard Murnane and colleagues in this issue (see “Who Goes to Private School?” research), tell a quite different story. The share of American students in grades K–8 attending private schools peaked at 15 percent in the late 1950s and has fallen more or less continuously since, reaching less than 9 percent in 2015. An even smaller share of students—just over 7 percent—now attends a private high school. Even if, like Ravitch, one views public charter schools as instruments of privatization, the share of students attending alternatives to the schools managed by their local school district has remained roughly stable over time.

That’s not to say that proponents of private-school choice have had no success. The advocacy organization EdChoice reports that 15 states now have school-voucher programs, and 18 offer tax-credit-funded scholarships. But the number of students attending private schools with assistance through these programs remains minuscule, at slightly more than 450,000 nationwide. The best efforts of the so-called privatizers have done no more than moderate the private sector’s decline.

What’s behind the drop in private-school enrollment? One factor has been turmoil in the Catholic-school sector, where a decline in the number of clergy willing to provide low-cost labor and the spate of sexual-abuse scandals have resulted in the widespread closure of schools that once provided a broadly affordable private option. Meanwhile, tuitions at both religious and nonsectarian private schools have climbed steeply. With middle-class incomes comparatively stagnant, a growing number of families find themselves priced out of the private-school marketplace. In fact, enrollment in private elementary schools has remained stable among families at the 90th percentile of the income distribution while falling sharply among those at the middle. As a result, the gap in private-school enrollment shares between high- and middle-income families widened from 5.5 percentage points in 1968 to 9.3 percentage points in 2013.

As Steven Eide reports (see “Private Colleges in Peril,” features), similar trends may be threatening the private colleges that have long been a mainstay of higher education in the U.S. These institutions continue to enroll some 30 percent of American undergraduates, but the combination of financial pressures, demographic trends, and growing competition from public institutions aided by “free tuition” programs has caused a recent spate of closures—and led many observers to predict that more disruption is on the horizon.

These developments, Eide notes, raise the question: “What kind of higher-education system do we want? One that’s composed mainly of elite schools for top students and public universities for everyone else? Or a system that offers a variety of choices, in both the public and private spheres, for all kinds of students?”

Murnane and colleagues’ analysis suggests that we have effectively answered that question for our K–12 school system, with private schools increasingly reserved for an elite defined not by students’ abilities but by their families’ ability to pay. Advocates for school choice seek to equalize access to private options, enabling more low- and middle-income families to seek out alternatives to what’s on offer from their local school district. One can reasonably debate whether their preferred measures will enhance or undermine equity in American education. But as we engage in that debate, let’s make sure that we do so with a sound understanding of the facts on the ground.

– Martin R. West

Martin R. West is the editor-in-chief of Education Next. This letter introduces the Fall 2018 issue of the journal.

The importance of individual teachers has emerged in sharp focus over the past decade, with compelling evidence that teachers have large effects on a range of student outcomes. Wide variability in teacher effectiveness, both across and within schools, highlights the persistent challenge of providing students with access to high-quality teachers. However, traditional efforts to increase teacher quality through professional development (PD) have been largely ineffective. That may be changing, as a new form of PD, teacher coaching, has emerged to disrupt the PD industry.

Historically, PD has been dominated by daylong seminars that took teachers out of the classroom and delivered the same tips and tricks to an entire department, grade level, or school. But as research has found, these programs to have little or no effect on teacher quality. Some training has shifted to a customized, smaller-scale approach: instructional coaching, whereby an expert mentor works one-to-one with teachers to provide a steady stream of feedback and suggest new techniques based on frequent classroom observations. By the 2015‒16 school year, 27 percent of public K‒12 schools reported having a reading coach on staff, 18 percent had a math coach, and 24 percent had a general instructional coach, according to the National Teacher and Principal Survey.

Researchers have studied individualized coaching programs for decades, but only began to evaluate their effects using randomized control trials in the last dozen years. We set out to examine what this growing literature now says about the efficacy of teacher coaching as a development tool. Does one-to-one coaching help teachers get better? If so, how powerful a strategy might this be to improve teacher practice and student outcomes?

Our analysis of results from across 60 studies found that coaching works. With coaching, the quality of teachers’ instruction improves by as much as—or more than—the difference in effectiveness between a novice and a teacher with five to 10 years of experience, a more positive estimated effect than traditional PD and most other school-based interventions. However, larger coaching programs are less effective than smaller ones, raising questions about whether coaching can be brought to scale in a way that preserves its impact.

Teacher Development Gets Personal

Public school systems in the United States spend billions of dollars annually on PD to help teachers meet the diverse needs of their students—with limited results. Most PD remains of the “sit and get” variety: one-off workshops delivered to large groups, with little obvious connection to the needs of individual teachers or classrooms. Rigorous studies find that PD programs more often than not fail to produce systematic changes in teachers’ instructional practice, much less improvements in student achievement, especially when implemented at scale.

Yet expectations for teachers have grown in recent years, as states have adopted new college- and career-ready standards and as education agencies increasingly emphasize the importance of balancing expert content delivery with nurturing the social-emotional skills that are also important for students’ lifelong success. Taken together, teachers’ expected roles range from content expert, curriculum developer, and pedagogue, to social worker, psychologist, mentor, and motivator. Every teacher has dimensions of this interrelated skill set on which they can improve—a complex and dynamic reality reflected in the one-to-one coaching model, which seeks to align the support provided to individual teachers to their unique challenges and needs.

Most teacher-coaching programs share several key features, but no one set of features defines all coaching models. In our review of the literature, we encountered multiple, sometimes conflicting, definitions of teacher coaching. Some envision coaching as a form of implementation support to ensure that new teaching practices or teaching materials—often introduced in an initial group training session—are executed with fidelity. Others see coaching as a tool that enables teachers to learn and apply new pedagogical practices to support student learning. The role of the coach may be performed by a range of personnel, including administrators, master teachers, curriculum designers, external experts, and other classroom teachers.

Synthesizing this body of theoretical work, we characterize coaching as an observation and feedback cycle in which coaches model research-based practices and work with teachers to incorporate these practices into their classrooms. In contrast to traditional PD, coaching is intended to be individualized, time-intensive, sustained over the course of a semester or year, context-specific, and focused on discrete skills. Coaches engage in a sustained professional dialogue with teachers focused on developing skills to enhance their classroom practice; ideally, the specific skills targeted for development differ based on individual teacher needs.

Examining the Teacher Coaching Literature

As researchers, we have worked to develop and evaluate several coaching programs, including the MATCH Teacher Coaching program operated by the eponymous Boston charter-management organization and the Mathematical Quality of Instruction Coaching program developed by Heather Hill and colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The results of these studies were encouraging, particularly with respect to the degree to which the programs generated noticeable changes in teachers’ practice. Yet studies of discrete programs cannot, on their own, speak to the efficacy of coaching as a new model for teacher professional development. To address that broader question, we sought to synthesize results across the full body of research on instructional coaching programs.

We conducted a meta-analysis of the literature on coaching by collecting, coding, and analyzing the findings across all rigorous evaluations of teacher coaching in developed countries published through 2017. This first enabled us to estimate the average effect of all coaching programs—or at least all those that have been subjected to rigorous evaluation—on teacher practice and student achievement. We also used the same information to determine whether coaching programs with certain characteristics produce stronger results.

A meta-analysis is only as good as the underlying studies it aggregates. Ours includes only randomized controlled trials and quasi-experimental research designs that could credibly isolate the effect of coaching. We further restricted our review to studies that focus on two key outcome measures that we see as critical components in the theory of action linking coaching to increased student skill: measures of teachers’ instructional practice as rated by outside observers and direct measures of student achievement on standardized assessments.

In total, we identified 60 studies on teacher coaching that met these requirements. It is remarkable that such a rich set of empirical research has emerged over the last decade given that a landmark review in 2007 looking at all research on teacher PD found only nine studies that supported causal inferences.

In order to draw comparisons and synthesize the studies’ findings, we rescaled their results to effect size units that measure the change in outcomes due to the coaching program in standard deviations—that is, relative to how much the relevant outcome varies across the teachers or students in the study sample. We also coded studies to track unique elements of the coaching models such as their size, their focus on content or teaching skill, whether they are paired with workshops or curriculum materials, and whether they were delivered in person or via videoconference platforms.

Does Teacher Coaching Work?

Teacher coaching has large positive effects on both instructional practice and student achievement (see Figure 1). On average, coaching improves the quality of teachers’ instruction and its effects on student achievement by 0.49 standard deviations and 0.18 standard deviations, respectively. For both outcomes, the magnitude of the effect of coaching is comparable to or exceeds the largest published estimates of the difference in performance between a novice teacher and an experienced veteran. Our estimates of the effectiveness of teacher coaching as assessed on these two outcome measures also compare favorably when contrasted with the larger body of literature on teacher PD, as well as most other school-based interventions.

These findings may come as a surprise given researchers’ general inability to identify characteristics that differentiate highly effective from ineffective teachers. However, one exception to the disappointingly weak relationships between teachers’ skill and their observable characteristics like certification, licensure, or even content knowledge is the quality of teachers’ classroom practice. Teachers with strong behavior-management skills and the ability to deliver cognitively demanding, error-free content produce substantively and substantially larger student-achievement gains than other teachers without these skills. It should perhaps not be a surprise, then, that teacher coaching is able to improve student outcomes because of the interventions’ specific attention to teachers’ core classroom practices.

Even so, our analyses suggest that noticeably improving student achievement likely requires large improvements in teachers’ instructional practice; the observed improvement in instructional practice due to coaching is significantly larger than the resulting impact on student outcomes (see Figure 2). This may explain why other PD programs such as generalized workshops, which may produce more moderate improvements on intermediate outcomes such as teacher knowledge or classroom practice, do not have similar effects on student outcomes.

Teacher coaching is a rare model of PD that has been shown to improve teacher practice to the degree required to impact student-achievement outcomes. However, even here, relatively large improvements for teachers turn into much more moderate gains for students.

Taking Coaching to Scale

Although these findings demonstrate the potential of coaching as a development tool, questions remain about the features of effective coaching programs and the feasibility of providing coaching more broadly. Do schools have enough expert teachers who can serve as coaches across content areas? If not, where might schools find coaches? Will PD budgets support the relatively high costs of implementing coaching with fidelity?

Our analysis of the relationship between various program characteristics and their impacts is able to address some of these questions. Surprisingly, we find little evidence that coaching “dosage”—that is, the number of times teachers and coaches meet—is associated with the effectiveness of a given coaching program. We interpret this descriptive finding to mean that, when comparing across coaching programs, quality matters more than quantity. Coaching models that build in frequent observation and feedback cycles are not uniformly better; other program elements such as coach quality matter, too. We speculate, however, that for an individual coaching program of fixed quality, it is likely better to have more coaching cycles, not fewer.

Further, we find little difference in the effectiveness of coaching programs delivered online versus face to face. This suggests that schools that lack in-house coaches are still able to implement coaching programs through the use of digital video recorders to capture instruction and online videoconferencing to interact with coaches. Although this technology is not cheap, the cost of these tools has dropped rapidly in recent years, and the technology could support both teacher PD and evaluation efforts.

These findings show the potential feasibility of expanding teacher coaching across schools and districts, but other results show how difficult maintaining program fidelity may be. Looking at the size of coaching programs, we find that the average effectiveness of the coaching program declines as the number of teachers involved increases, suggesting the difficulty of successfully taking such programs to scale. Our analyses of both instruction and achievement depict a clear negative relationship between program size and program effects, consistent with a theory of diminishing effects as programs are scaled up.

We see similar patterns when we test more formally for evidence of potential scale-up implementation challenges by comparing effect sizes between two types of studies: those with fewer than 100 teachers and those with 100 teachers or more (see Figure 3). The average effects in larger studies are only one-third to one-half as large as large as those found in smaller studies. Additional analyses confirm that these differential results are not driven by a pattern in which studies of smaller coaching programs with small or no effects are less likely to be published because of their limited precision.

Key Considerations for Scaling Up

In our view, the growing body of research on teacher coaching provides strong evidence of its effectiveness as a development tool. However, our meta-analysis also raises difficult questions about whether and how to implement coaching programs at scale. Several factors likely contribute to the diminishing returns to coaching as the size of programs increases, including coach quality, financial constraints, standardization, and teacher engagement and school climate.

Coach quality: A fundamental challenge to scaling up coaching programs is finding enough expert coaches able to deliver these services. After all, coaches are the intervention. Most of the studies we examine had only a handful of coaches, many of whom were key program staff or even program developers. Scaling up from a small corps of coaches to a large staff requires new systems for recruiting, selecting, and training coaches. These systems are still largely underdeveloped in most contexts. Research that seeks to understand the characteristics and skills of effective coaches (such as teaching/coaching experience, content knowledge, and rapport with teachers) can aid in the development of these systems.

Financial constraints: Teacher coaching is a relatively expensive form of PD due to the large personnel costs of hiring coaches who meet with teachers on a regular basis. There are very few economies of scale available when the primary intervention is one-to-one interaction. Efforts to scale up coaching often lead to programmatic changes to cut costs, such as having coaches meet less frequently with each teacher or even coaching teachers in small groups. While we do not have definitive evidence on the effect of these adaptations, we suspect that they may decrease the efficacy of coaching as a PD tool.

Standardization: Scaling up coaching can require building more formal sets of systems and structures to ensure program fidelity, which may have the unintended consequence of constraining a coach’s ability to tailor her approach to the individual needs of each teacher. Because coaching is by definition differentiated, we see a need for program developers to think critically about how they can implement organizational structures and systems that provide scaffolded supports to individual coaches without restricting their judgment and flexibility.

Teacher engagement and school climate: Bringing coaching to scale likely would include a prescriptive approach, requiring teachers who may be hesitant or resistant to engage in the coaching process to take part. This may be understandable given an expanded emphasis on linking scores from classroom observation rubrics to high-stakes job decisions. However, coaching is unlikely to be successful without teachers’ openness to feedback and willingness to adapt their practice. Here, school leaders have a key role to play in creating a culture of trust and respect among administrators and staff in order to ease teachers’ concerns and increase their willingness to actively engage.

Looking Ahead

We see real potential for coaching programs to innovate and address many of these challenges. As an inherently customizable intervention, coaching may be well suited to meeting a variety of teacher-development needs. For example, new technologies are powering distance or virtual programs, which draw on coaches from afar to provide specialized development to teachers in small and rural districts who may not ordinarily be partnered with instructional experts in their specific grades and subject areas. Coaching also is being paired with computer-simulation-based student teaching, which allows teachers to teach a lesson, receive feedback, and immediately try it again. Finally, emerging peer coaching models present a promising approach to creating observation and feedback cycles that leverage expertise within a school building, by pairing up teachers with different strengths and weaknesses to observe each other’s practice and provide suggestions.

As researchers and practitioners continue to develop and refine coaching programs, we encourage them to consider the delicate balance between efficiency and efficacy. Coaching in all forms is a resource-intensive intervention that requires fairly sizable investments, both in terms of money and staff. Expanding coaching will require policymakers and administrators to engage in critical conversations about how current expenditures on PD could be used more effectively. For example, one approach may be to reallocate some PD spending to provide high-cost but effective PD programs like coaching to schools or teachers most in need of support, rather than uniformly providing less-effective and less-expensive traditional PD for all schools and teachers.

Ultimately, strengthening the teacher workforce will require improving the classroom performance of individual teachers. Given the decades of investment in traditional PD for relatively small returns, policymakers and educators should support innovation in this sector. Coaching can provide a flexible blueprint for these efforts, but questions remain about the factors and local contexts that can influence its effectiveness. It remains to be seen whether coaching is best implemented as smaller-scale targeted programs tailored to local contexts, or if it can be taken to scale in a high-quality and cost-effective way.

Matthew A. Kraft is an associate professor of education and economics at Brown University. David Blazar is an assistant professor of education policy and economics at the University of Maryland, College Park. The full meta-analysis on which this article is based is available at the Review of Educational Research.

The model of special education known as inclusion, or mainstreaming, has become more prevalent over the past 10 years, and today, more than 60 percent of all students with disabilities (SWDs) spend 80 percent or more of their school day in regular classrooms, alongside their non-disabled peers (see Figure 1). This is not the full inclusion favored by some disability advocates, wherein all SWDs would be educated in inclusive classrooms all day; however, many supporters celebrate the increasing acceptance of differently abled students in general education as an opportunity to improve the academic and long-term trajectories of these traditionally underserved learners. In theory, inclusion provides SWDs with access to the grade-level curriculum and the same educational opportunities as their peers.

Unfortunately, research has yielded only weak evidence that inclusion confers benefits on SWDs. Studies that report better academic and behavioral outcomes for SWDs who are taught in a general-education setting suffer from methodological flaws. Even less evidence suggests that general-education teachers are adequately prepared to meet the unique academic and behavioral needs of SWDs. Further, studies of inclusion seem to assume that SWDs are educated in a vacuum; that is, they fail to examine the experiences of non-disabled classmates.

In this article, I explore policies and existing research on inclusion to describe what we know, what we don’t, and how current knowledge should inform decisions about where to educate SWDs. An underlying theme of this discussion is that inclusion influences not only SWDs but also their peers and teachers. The interplay between and among these three groups suggests areas of research that can inform future discussion about inclusion and how it can work well for all stakeholders.

The Least-Restrictive Environment 

Inclusion did not become the widespread practice it is today because of a robust evidence base that supports its effectiveness. Rather, it is prevalent because of federal laws that establish special rights for SWDs and their parents. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), first signed into law in 1975 as the Education for all Handicapped Children Act, mandates that SWDs receive a free appropriate public education (FAPE) in the least-restrictive environment (LRE) possible. A student’s FAPE and LRE are established through a team process that produces an Individualized Education Program (IEP). After a school identifies a student with a disability, it convenes an IEP team meeting. This team typically consists of the student’s parents or guardians; special- and general-education teachers with knowledge of the student; school staff members who can interpret the results of evaluations; other service providers; and, in many cases, the student. At this meeting, the team identifies annual goals for the student. These individualized goals determine what constitutes an “appropriate education” for that particular student.

Once the goals are in place, the IEP team discusses the instruction, related services, and accommodations the student requires to meet the goals. During this stage of the IEP process, the team decides where the student will receive services—for example, in a regular classroom; in a regular classroom with the support of a paraprofessional or special-education teacher, or perhaps with additional support in a resource room or pullout setting; or in a self-contained special-education classroom. IDEA requires that students be educated in regular classrooms unless their academic and behavioral needs cannot be met in that setting even with the use of supplemental aids and services.

Consider the following two examples. A 1st-grade student with a speech or language impairment might require one hour of speech therapy a week from a speech/language pathologist to improve his enunciation. His IEP team may also decide that he needs accommodations in the classroom, as his impairment influences his reading fluency. Apart from his weekly speech therapy, the student would attend a general-education class with the occasional accommodation for his reading skills. Removing this student from the regular classroom because of an enunciation problem would be inappropriate: the student can likely make progress there with the suitable supplemental services and accommodations.

Contrast this student with a 5th-grade student receiving special-education services for a specific learning disability who is struggling with sounding out words while his non-disabled peers are focused on reading comprehension. Because this student has such significant educational needs, the IEP team would likely decide that he should receive some of his reading instruction outside of the regular classroom.

These examples illustrate the individualized nature of placement decisions. The IEP team determines where a child will be educated based on the services the student needs and where those services can practicably be delivered. But IDEA explicitly states that most SWDs should be taught in the general-education classroom, and IEP team members may be unduly influenced by this requirement. For example, IDEA requires that states report to Congress each year the percentage of the school day that SWDs spend in general-education classrooms, in addition to other indicators such as dropout rates, SWDs’ participation in assessments, their proficiency rates on these tests, and suspension and expulsion rates. The Department of Education compiles these data in an annual report to Congress and uses the information to determine if a state is in compliance with IDEA. In this publication, data related to the setting in which SWDs are educated are disaggregated by state, yet the data regarding student academic outcomes are not. The reports therefore appear to assess the extent to which students are receiving an appropriate education by the location in which they are served.

There is little federal guidance on whether schools can consider students’ classmates and teachers in their decisions about where SWDs are educated, further complicating placement judgments. IDEA only briefly addresses the needs of non-disabled classmates: schools are required to consider the use of positive behavioral interventions when an SWD’s behavior affects his classmates’ learning. Beyond this mention of peers, federal policies pay scant attention to the interplay between SWDs, their classmates, and general-education teachers. Special-education case law includes conflicting opinions as to whether placement decisions can be based on how a student might influence their classmates. What is clear is that placement is to be an individualized decision determined by the needs of each student with a disability, but it seems unlikely that a student will derive appropriate benefit from the prescribed services if his placement causes disruption or detriment to his peers and teachers.

Access to the Curriculum

A key assumption of IDEA is that including SWDs in the regular classroom will expose them to grade-level, general-education curriculum. Yet exposure may not result in progress in that curriculum. Research suggests that many SWDs will not be able to advance along grade-level academic standards with the instruction typically provided in regular classrooms, even with accommodations and supports. For example, a recent study by Lynn Fuchs and colleagues compared the size of the math achievement gap between students with or at risk for learning disabilities and their non-disabled peers. SWDs were randomly assigned to two groups. In the first one, students with or at risk for disabilities received intensive fractions instruction, exemplifying special-education techniques, while those in the second group were exposed to fractions instruction in the regular classroom with accommodations based on the principles of Universal Design for Learning (that is, instruction that includes multiple means for students to express what they know). The math achievement gap between students with or at risk for disabilities and without disabilities in the regular classroom setting was twice as large as the gap in the first group (see Figure 2).

It is a mistake to equate the setting in which a student is educated (that is, the general-education classroom) with the actual progress a student is making. Such an assumption ignores the fact that students are found eligible for special-education services precisely because they are failing to progress in general education. Placement data may suggest that SWDs are being exposed to the general-education curriculum, but achievement data suggest that they are not actually learning the curriculum: SWDs placed in general-education classrooms continue to lag dramatically behind their peers. A recent meta-analysis that I conducted with my colleagues Doug Fuchs and Joe Wehby estimated that SWDs score about 1.2 standard deviations below their non-disabled peers in reading, a gap that translates to more than three years of academic growth. Achievement gaps between SWDs and their peers are similarly large in math. Though federal laws stress the importance of educating SWDs in the regular classroom, there is no good evidence that placement there improves the outcomes of these students.

Inclusion and Student Outcomes

That’s not to say that researchers have not examined the issue. Many studies have compared SWDs who are educated in inclusive settings to those who are educated in special-education settings, generally finding that the former have better academic, social, and long-term outcomes. For example, data from the Special Education Elementary Longitudinal Study conducted from 2000 to 2006 show that SWDs who spent 75 percent or more of their school day in inclusive settings scored higher in reading comprehension and math than those who spent 25 percent or less of their day in such settings. These results fueled the push to move more SWDs into general-education classrooms.

More-recent work also finds that SWDs educated in general-education settings have better outcomes. Roddy Theobald and colleagues observed that high-school students with disabilities in Washington State who spent more time in general-education settings had higher reading scores than their peers who had less time in such settings, even after taking into account differences in prior achievement and a wide range of student characteristics. They were also more likely to graduate on time and enroll in college than students educated in more-restrictive settings. Laura Schifter has reported similar results regarding graduation for students in Massachusetts: SWDs educated in general-education classrooms have higher probabilities of graduating than their peers who were educated in more-isolated settings. These recent studies and others have led many to conclude that inclusion benefits SWDs.

Unfortunately, this determination ignores a major limitation of the current research base: the failure to account for selection bias. Students with higher academic abilities or fewer behavioral challenges are more likely to be placed in inclusive settings, while their peers who may have the same disability label but greater learning or behavioral needs are placed in special-education settings. The consistent finding that SWDs have better outcomes when educated in general-education settings likely reflects this bias. Even in studies that account for students’ prior levels of academic achievement, the researchers may not capture all the aspects of a student, such as his behavior, that can influence both the setting in which he is placed and his future outcomes. A student’s educational placement is an IEP team decision and may be based on a host of factors not included in the administrative data sets to which researchers typically have access. This makes estimating the true causal effect of inclusion on student outcomes nearly impossible.

One study does improve on these others in regard to selection bias. In 2002, Eric Hanushek and colleagues used Texas students whose special-education classification changed over time to examine the influence of special-education classification (as determined by a student having an IEP) and educational setting on students’ math outcomes. The researchers first compared the students’ progress in school years when they had an IEP to their progress when they did not have an IEP, allowing each student to serve as his or her own control. They found that students scored higher on state math assessments when they had an IEP than when they did not. This result suggests that special-education services may benefit the students who receive them. When the researchers examined SWDs’ math achievement by the setting in which they were educated, however, they found that SWDs performed neither better nor worse in regular classrooms than in special-education settings. While this study design is stronger than that of the research discussed above, its results only extend to students who took the regular state assessment and whose special-education eligibility changed over time, thus excluding students with more-significant disabilities. The one clear takeaway is that accounting for unmeasured differences between students who are placed in different types of settings can influence estimates of the association between general-education placement and student outcomes.

In sum, ample correlational evidence confirms that SWDs have better academic and social outcomes when they spend more time in general-education classrooms. But our ability to draw conclusions from these studies is limited, because it is likely that SWDs who would be expected to have better academic and social outcomes are more often included in general-education classrooms than their peers with more-intensive needs.

Inclusion and Peer Outcomes

A key component of inclusion is that SWDs are educated with their peers who do not have disabilities, yet little research has examined whether and how SWDs’ outcomes are influenced by their peers—and vice versa. The scarcity of research in this area is surprising, as research on peer effects in general education shows that students’ classmates shape their educational experiences. Particularly concerning are findings that students’ academic and behavioral outcomes are influenced by classmates who exhibit challenging behaviors. For example, Scott Carrell and Mark Hoekstra found that an increase in the percentage of students’ classmates who had experienced domestic violence—a variable highly correlated with children’s behavior—negatively affected students’ academic outcomes and increased their behavioral problems (see “Domino Effect,” research, Summer 2009). Further, exposure to a peer who was more likely to exhibit challenging behavior led students to complete less schooling and earn less as adults. These findings are relevant to the topic of inclusion because SWDs have a higher probability of exhibiting challenging behavior than their peers without disabilities.

Most students without disabilities have at least two SWDs in their classes, but few studies have examined whether SWDs affect their classmates. Early studies that addressed peer effects in inclusive classrooms using older data did not identify any negative academic consequences of inclusion for students without disabilities. However, more-recent research based on the U.S. Department of Education’s Early Childhood Longitudinal Studies (ECLS) has identified some worrisome findings, particularly related to the inclusion of students with an emotional/behavioral disorder (EBD).

These recent studies have examined both academic and social outcomes of students without disabilities in inclusive classrooms. In a 2009 study, Jason Fletcher found that having a classmate with an EBD was associated with a 0.09 standard-deviation decrease in students’ math scores and a 0.13 standard-deviation decrease in students’ reading scores. In 2016, Michael Gottfried and colleagues reported that students without disabilities who had a classmate with an EBD were 1.42 times more likely to be chronically absent than those who did not have such a classmate. A 2014 study by Gottfried found that students without disabilities were rated by teachers as having more behavior problems, lower levels of self-control, and lower interpersonal skills when they were in classrooms with SWDs, not just students with an EBD.

These studies, like those relating inclusion to SWDs’ outcomes, are correlational and must be interpreted with caution. Yet they improve on prior work by limiting comparisons to students attending the same school. This approach allows the researchers to rule out the possibility that their results reflect differences in the characteristics of schools that make greater use of the inclusion model. These studies do not account for the sorting of students within schools based on unobserved characteristics, such as if students who exhibit more problem behavior owing to a change in their home life in a specific school year are grouped in classes with more SWDs. However, this type of sorting seems less likely than the sorting of higher-achieving SWDs into inclusive classrooms, which is a natural byproduct of the IEP process. Though this body of work is small and just emerging, the findings underline the importance of examining whether and how the inclusion of SWDs in general-education classrooms may change the environment in ways that affect their peers.

Inclusion and Teachers

Teachers are likely a key element in the successful inclusion of SWDs, but again few studies have investigated how general-education teachers are influenced by the presence of SWDs. An older body of research examined the attitudes of general-education teachers toward having SWDs in their classrooms. These studies reported that general educators were accepting of SWDs in their classrooms under certain conditions—for example, if additional supports were provided to the teacher and if the SWDs did not exhibit disruptive behavior. Yet both surveys and qualitative studies found that general-education teachers often do not have training, or feel they have the proper skills, to meet the academic and behavioral needs of SWDs while also teaching their non-disabled peers.

Two recent studies have aimed to assess the experiences of general educators with SWDs in their classrooms. These works are, again, correlational and not causal. Using an administrative data set from North Carolina, I estimated the association between the percentage of SWDs in teachers’ classes and the rate of teacher turnover, as defined by changing schools or leaving teaching in the state. I found that the probability of turnover increased as the percentage of SWDs in teachers’ classes went up if the teacher was not certified in special education, after controlling for differences in student, teacher, and school characteristics. This increase was especially pronounced when teachers had students with an EBD in their classrooms (see Figure 3). All else being equal, teachers with classes in which 20 percent of students had an EBD were 2.15 percentage points more likely to leave their school or teaching than teachers who had students with disabilities in their classes, but none with an EBD. I also found that the teachers who, based on other characteristics, were most likely to change schools or leave teaching were actually the least likely to have SWDs. This suggests that schools are not assigning SWDs to teachers who are more likely to leave and attenuates concerns that the relationship between the presence of students with an EBD and turnover is an artifact of selection bias.

Teachers might also be changing their instruction in undesirable ways when they have SWDs in their classrooms. North Cooc recently examined the amount of time teachers of inclusive classrooms reported that they spent on instruction, using data from an international survey of teachers. He found that teachers reported that they spent less time on instruction and more time on classroom management when their classes contained more SWDs. The association between instructional time and having SWDs in the classroom nearly disappeared once Cooc accounted for the number of students in teachers’ classes that exhibited disruptive behavior.

These studies provide preliminary evidence that the presence of SWDs affects teachers in ways that could negatively influence the teachers themselves with regard to turnover, the outcomes of SWDs, and their peers without disabilities. Clearly, more research is needed to understand how teachers address the needs of SWDs in their classrooms and how inclusion changes the demands placed on educators with potentially negative consequences for all students.

Research on general-education teachers and their role in educating students with and without disabilities is particularly important given that general-education teachers are the primary educators for both of these populations. Jim Dewey and colleagues reported in 2017 that the number of special-education teachers declined more than 17 percent between 2005 and 2012; the number of students with special needs also decreased, but by only 4 percent. The student-to-teacher ratio in special education is now greater than the overall student-to-teacher ratio, suggesting that SWDs spend more time with general educators than with special educators. Even SWDs with the most significant needs, such as students with intellectual disabilities or autism, are often instructed by teachers without special-education certification. Since general educators are largely responsible for teaching SWDs, it is critical that we understand their role in teaching all students if we hope to improve outcomes for all.

An Ecological Perspective

Overall, what is known about inclusion from research is quite limited in the context of such a widespread practice. SWDs appear to have better outcomes when educated in inclusive settings, yet studies of the association between setting and outcomes do not account for important differences between the SWDs placed in inclusive classrooms and those who are taught in special-education settings. Students without disabilities have lower academic and behavioral outcomes when they are taught in classrooms that include SWDs, particularly students with an EBD. General-education teachers may welcome SWDs into their classrooms, but they spend more time on classroom management and less on instruction and are more likely to leave teaching when SWDs are present. This limited body of correlational research may not provide many conclusions about inclusion, but it does suggest a framework for future research and policy decisions.

In particular, this research highlights the importance of evaluating inclusion from an ecological perspective. Instead of focusing narrowly on the effects of inclusion on outcomes for SWDs, an ecological perspective would acknowledge that inclusion influences SWDs, their peers without disabilities, and general-education teachers, and should focus on the interactions between and among these three groups. SWDs may influence their peers, but this relationship likely goes both ways. If peer behavior changes in response to the inclusion of SWDs in the classroom, these changes likely influence teacher behavior. Without understanding how inclusion influences all three groups and the complex interactions among them, inclusion is unlikely to be successful for all those involved. The small body of literature that currently exists tends to examine the experiences of SWDs, their peers, and their teachers separately. Moving forward, researchers should focus more holistically on the classroom ecosystem in order to identify the conditions and supports necessary for inclusion to improve outcomes for all students. The results of these studies could be used to develop interventions that support teachers who work with SWDs in inclusive settings, to determine effective service-delivery models that enable all students to access the general curriculum, and to investigate ways that students of different ability levels can benefit from each other.

But considering inclusion from an ecological perspective is problematic in the context of current policy guidance and special-education case law. IDEA emphasizes the importance of making placement decisions based on the needs of an individual student, not the implications of the decision for their classmates or teachers. In its 2017 decision in Endrew F. v. Douglas County School District, the Supreme Court established a higher standard for determining the “educational benefit” a student is entitled to receive under IDEA. The new standard emphasizes the “unique circumstances” of the individual student, and it is likely that these “circumstances” could include the available teachers and the student’s classmates. For example, parents and school personnel deciding on where a student should receive individualized reading instruction may weigh the ability of the general-education teacher to provide this instruction in her classroom against the ability of a specially trained teacher to provide it in a pullout setting. IEP team deliberations might also include frank discussions of teachers’ skills at meeting the needs of all students in a classroom. Considering such factors means acknowledging the unique circumstances and constraints within a school and the reality that the education of SWDs is not context-free. In fact, a study I conducted with Gary Henry suggests that schools may already be making decisions about how best to educate SWDs based on the available resources in a school. We find that students with autism and intellectual disabilities are more likely to be grouped with other students with similar disabilities in smaller classes taught by special education–certified teachers. The legality of taking this ecological approach to placement decisions is questionable under current federal policy and requires clarification when Congress next revises IDEA.

In the meantime, policymakers and school personnel should keep in mind the limited evidence base suggesting that placing an SWD in a general-education classroom will result in the student making progress in the general-education curriculum. Special education is an amalgam of services, not a place. IDEA requires that SWDs receive educational services based on their individual needs. This means that decisions about where a student is educated should not be dictated by school, district, or state bureaucratic goals related to the percentage of SWDs that “should” be included in the general-education classroom for a fixed amount of time each day. Instead, decisions regarding placement in a general-education classroom, special-education classroom, or a mixture of settings should be determined by students’ individual needs. If a student is not making progress in an educational setting, the student is not accessing the curriculum. Oftentimes, students may need intensive and individualized instruction to make progress and gain access to the general-education curriculum. This level of instruction might not be possible if a student is taught exclusively in a general-education setting.

On a related note, policymakers should stop using location or setting as an indicator of access. Increasing the numbers of SWDs in regular classrooms does not necessarily result in improving their academic outcomes, and may unintentionally affect non-disabled peers and general-education teachers. When the numbers of SWDs in inclusive classrooms rises without a concomitant increase in their achievement, it could mean that schools are failing to make individualized decisions regarding placement. This conflicts with IDEA’s mandate and will not result in better outcomes for students.

Special education in the United States has long focused on improving SWDs’ access to neighborhood schools, general-education classrooms, and the general-education curriculum. Policies and practices have increasingly veered toward inclusion. However, these policies, and the research on their effects, have narrowly focused on SWDs’ outcomes without considering the confluence of factors that can affect a classroom. With inclusion as the dominant model in special education, it is imperative that researchers also focus on whether and how these students influence the experiences of their peers and their teachers in order to make schools effective for all children.

Allison F. Gilmour is assistant professor of special education at Temple University.

For the past half century, roughly one in 10 U.S. families has chosen to enroll their children in private school. The reasons behind these decisions are as individual as families themselves: some may perceive the quality of education to be better at a private school than their neighborhood school, some may wish to continue a family tradition or be motivated by religious beliefs, and others may seek specialized programs for a child with a particular interest or learning challenge.

The one factor uniting virtually all of these choices, scholarships aside, is the decision to pay tuition, which averaged $10,940 in 2011. Private schools historically ranged widely in their annual fees; many programs, such as those run by the Catholic Church, were designed to be broadly affordable and offered significant discounts for low-income families. However, the number of Catholic schools has fallen sharply in recent years, while the number of nonsectarian private schools has increased. At the same time, income inequality and residential and school segregation by income have grown.

How have these shifting trends affected private-school enrollment nationwide? Has expanding income inequality led to an increased concentration of affluent families at private schools? If so, has that fueled a broader increase in segregation at both public and private schools?

To explore these questions, we examine enrollment and family-income data from the past 50 years at Catholic, other religious, and nonsectarian private elementary schools (that is, schools serving grades K–8). Our analysis finds that private schools, like public schools, are increasingly segregated by income. In particular, the share of middle-income students attending private schools has declined by almost half, while the private-school enrollment rate of wealthy children has remained steady. Much of the decline among middle-income students is due to falling enrollment at Catholic schools, which have closed in droves in the past 20 years. Meanwhile, private-school enrollment among affluent students has shifted from religious to nonsectarian schools.

Tracking Trends in Private-School Enrollment

The share of U.S. school-age children attending private elementary schools peaked during the postwar boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s, reaching 15 percent in 1958. By the mid-1970s, it had fallen to 10 percent and remained quite steady for the rest of the 20th century. During the subsequent 15 years, it drifted downward slowly and was slightly less than 9 percent in 2015 (see Figure 1).

Those relatively steady numbers since the mid-1970s mask significant changes in the mix of school types that make up the private-school market, driven in particular by widespread closures of Catholic schools. In 1965, 89 percent of American children who attended a private elementary school were enrolled in a Catholic school; in 2013, the comparable figure was 42 percent. By contrast, the percentage of private elementary-school students who attended a non-Catholic religious school increased from 8 percent in 1965 to 40 percent in 2013. During this same period, the percentage of private elementary-school students enrolled in nonsectarian schools increased from 4 percent to 18 percent.

Has the family income mix of students attending each type of private school changed in recent decades? One reason it might have is that inequality in the incomes of American families, which held steady between 1945 and 1975, grew over subsequent decades. Looking at families with children in grades 1 to 8 between 1975 and 2010, the average income, net of inflation, among those in the 10th percentile declined by 11 percent. That of families with incomes in the middle, or 50th percentile, increased by 19 percent. That of relatively affluent families with incomes in the 90th percentile increased by 57 percent.

Methodology

To answer these questions, we assembled data on families’ incomes and elementary-school choices from the decennial census, Current Population Survey, U.S. Department of Education longitudinal surveys, and the National Household Education Survey, and combined them with information from the education department’s Private School Universe Survey and survey data from Phi Delta Kappan.

Some surveys, such as the census, asked respondents to report the individual income for each family member, while others asked parents to place their household income within a set range of dollar amounts. To obtain a common metric, we converted ordinal income categories into percentiles of the national distribution of incomes for families with children enrolled in grades 1 to 8. Our analysis includes incomes from the 1968–69 school year until 2013–14, which we refer to as 1968 and 2013. To remove the effects of inflation, we express all family incomes and private-school tuitions in 2015 dollars.

We do not have enough data points to precisely measure the private-school enrollment rates of families at each income level. For example, the number of families with incomes of exactly $50,000 is too small to calculate a reliable enrollment rate. Instead, we use a statistical model to estimate the relationship between private-school enrollment and the family’s income relative to families nationwide, and then compute the estimated proportion of students enrolled in private school in the relevant year at the 10th, 50th, and 90th percentiles of the income distribution. We refer to these family-income percentiles as low, middle, and high.

In reporting our results, we pay particular attention to changes in the size of the gap in private-school enrollment rates between families at the 90th and 50th income percentiles, which we call the “90-50 gap.” We do this because the growth in income inequality among families with school-age children in recent decades has been overwhelmingly in the top half of the income distribution. For example, among families with children in grades 1 to 8, the 90th percentile income in 1975 of $111,410 was roughly double that of the 50th percentile income of $56,084. In 2013, the comparable 90th percentile income of $183,959 was nearly triple the 50th percentile income of $68,256.

Findings

Our analysis finds a strong positive role of family income in predicting private-school enrollment, as well as a marked decline between 1968 and 2013 in the share of students from middle-income families attending private schools (see Figure 2). For example, in 1968, 18 percent of elementary-school-age children from high-income families attended a private school, compared to 12 percent of children from middle-income families and 5 percent of children from low-income families. In 2013, the percentage of children from middle-income families had declined by almost half, to 7 percent, while the percentage of children from high-income families remained roughly steady at 16 percent. As a result, the 90-50 gap in private elementary-school enrollment rates grew from 5.5 percentage points in 1968 to 9.3 percentage points in 2013.

Much of the expanded 90-50 gap is due to declining enrollment at Catholic private schools, which historically served large numbers of children from low- and middle-income families. In addition, growth in the gap among students at private nonsectarian elementary schools has been particularly large, almost entirely due to a substantial increase in the enrollment rate of children from high-income families.

We also find that private-school enrollment rates are much higher among middle- and high-income families living in cities than among families with similar income levels living in suburbs, and that the 90-50 gap grew more among urban families than among suburban families. In addition, on the whole, private-school enrollment rates are lower for black and Hispanic families than for white families, but differences in family income account for a large part of those differences.

Finally, we find that private-school enrollment trends differ dramatically by region: the percentage of students from high-income families enrolled in private school increased in the South and West and decreased in the Northeast and Midwest. The 90-50 gap grew much more in the South than in other regions.

School Type: While the private elementary-school enrollment rate for children from high-income families remained stable overall, many affluent families have shifted from religious to nonsectarian schools over the last four decades. And while the private-school enrollment rates for children from middle- and low-income families declined due to decreasing Catholic school enrollment rates for these groups, those declines were somewhat offset by increases in their enrollment at other private religious schools.

Private nonsectarian elementary schools serve a small percentage of the nation’s students, but a growing share of high-income students. Just 1 percent of middle-income students enrolled in those schools in 1969, and the percentage grew slightly to between 1 and 2 percent in 2011. But the enrollment rate among high-income families grew from 2 percent in 1969 to 6 percent in 2011. As a result, the 90-50 enrollment rate gap grew from 1 percentage point in 1969 to almost 5 percentage points in 2011.

We also analyzed enrollment trends at Catholic elementary schools, looking closely at the period from 1987 to 2011. Enrollment rates for students from families in the bottom half of the income distribution fell slowly but steadily over those 24 years. Among middle-income students, the enrollment rate in Catholic schools fell from 7 percent to 3 percent in 2011. Meanwhile, the enrollment rate for high-income families declined by only 1 percentage point, from 11 percent to 10 percent. As a result, the 90-50 gap in enrollment rates grew from 4 to almost 7 percentage points.

At non-Catholic religious elementary schools, enrollment over the same 24-year period diverges from the trends elsewhere. Enrollment for children from middle-income families increased from 3 percent to 4 percent, while that of children from high-income families declined from 6 percent to 5 percent. As a result, the 90-50 gap in enrollment rates in non-Catholic religious elementary schools in 2011 was half the size of the comparable gap in 1987.

Race: We looked at enrollment rates for white, black, and Hispanic students overall, as well as among low-, middle-, and high-income families in each group. On the whole, enrollment for white students decreased from 16 percent in 1959 to 11 percent in 2013. Enrollment decreased far more dramatically for Hispanic students, dropping from 13 percent enrolled in private schools to 3 percent. By contrast, the private-school enrollment rate increased among black students, from 3 percent to 5 percent.

These trends could reflect shifts in each group’s income distribution or changes in the overall private-school enrollment rates by family income. Black and Hispanic families were less concentrated in the bottom 10 percent of the income distribution in 2013 compared to 1969, so we might expect their private-school enrollment rates to rise even if enrollment rates among families at each level of income remained constant. This is why it is important to examine trends in private-school enrollment rates for black and Hispanic families at particular points in the national family-income distribution.

In 1969, just under 2 percent of black children from low-income families attended private elementary schools. This rate rose slowly over the next four decades, reaching 4 percent in 2013 (see Figure 3). Enrollment for black children from middle-income families was steady, at 5 percent in 1969 and 6 percent in 2013. In contrast, the private-school enrollment rate for black students from high-income families increased from 11 percent in 1969 to more than 16 percent in the mid-1990s. Subsequently, this rate fell slightly, to 14 percent in 2013. The net effect of these trends is that the 90-50 gap among black students in 2013 was 8 percentage points, slightly larger but not statistically different from the comparable gap of 6 points in 1969.

Hispanic children were less likely to enroll in private school overall in 2013 than in 1969 (the first year with data available for Hispanic student enrollment), with the steepest decline among middle-class families, whose rates fell from 15 percent to 3 percent. However, the decline was modest for children from high-income families, falling from 18 percent to 15 percent, and the 90-50 gap among Hispanic families grew from 3 points in 1969 to 12 points in 2013.

Community Type: In 1968, 19 percent of children living in cities and 13 percent of those living in suburbs attended a private elementary school. Over the next half century, both percentages declined, to 10 percent of city dwellers and 8 percent of suburban children. Among high-income urban families during those years, the share of children enrolled in private school peaked at 30 percent in 1989 and was 24 percent in 2013 (see Figure 4a).

For middle-income families living in the suburbs, the private-school enrollment rate fell from 11 percent in 1968 to 6 percent in 2013. The comparable enrollment rate for children from high-income suburban families remained steady, between 15 and 18 percent, from 1968 until recently, but fell in the years following the onset of the Great Recession. As a result of that decline, the 90-50 gap among suburban families was the same in 2013 as it had been in 1968: 7 percentage points.

We also find declines in overall private-school enrollment rates among families living in the Northeast and Midwest during the study period. The rates fell by roughly half, from 22 percent to 10 percent in the Northeast and from 16 percent to 9 percent in the Midwest. Meanwhile, those in the South and West held steady at around 7 percent. Looking at enrollment by family income, in the South, the enrollment rate of children from high-income families actually increased from 14 percent in 1968 to 19 percent in 2013. We find a gap of 14 percentage points in 2013 between the private-school enrollment rates of children from high- and middle-income families—twice as large as the comparable gap in 1968 (see Figure 4b).

Explaining the Patterns

We consider a number of potential explanations for the trends that we observe in private-school enrollment. We do not claim to present evidence of causation; rather, our potential explanations are hypotheses supported by descriptive evidence, which we offer to motivate future research.

One major explanation for these patterns is the widespread closures of Catholic schools, which had relatively low tuitions and were concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest. Due to a decline in the number of clergy and members of religious orders, who provided low-cost teaching services, as well as financial and other pressures related to public disclosures of long-standing sexual-abuse issues in the church, the number of Catholic elementary schools in the U.S. declined by 37 percent between 1970 and 2010.

The Catholic elementary schools that remain open are more expensive, with an average tuition in 2010 of $5,858 (in 2015 dollars), which is more than six times the average tuition of $873 in Catholic elementary schools in 1970. During this period, middle-income families with elementary-school-age children experienced an average real-income increase of 23 percent, while the average real income of low-income families with children declined by 22 percent. Though average tuition rates do not reflect scholarships and other discounts, these averages and income trends may help explain why Catholic elementary schools increasingly serve affluent students.

Meanwhile, since the late 1970s, tuitions at other types of private schools also have increased more rapidly than median incomes. The average inflation-adjusted tuition in nonsectarian private elementary schools increased from $4,120 in 1979 to $22,611 in 2011. Given the high tuitions in nonsectarian private elementary schools, it is not surprising that enrollment in these schools rose faster among students from high-income families than among those from low-income families, or that the 90-50 enrollment gap increased substantially.

Tuitions have also increased substantially in non-Catholic religious elementary schools in recent years. In 1993, the average inflation-adjusted tuition was $3,896; that nearly tripled by 2011, to $9,134. It is therefore surprising that the 90-50 enrollment gap did not increase between 1987 and 2011.

Another relevant factor for families’ decisions is the perceived quality of the public schools with which private schools compete. One mark of comparison is student performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), where the difference between the average math scores of public and private 4th-grade students declined markedly between the 1990s and 2011. This could explain why the percentage of elementary-school students attending private schools declined slightly during this period.

But these patterns differ between cities and suburbs. Average math and reading scores on NAEP are considerably lower for public-school students in cities compared to those in suburban schools, in part due to residential segregation by income. Suburban families give their schools better ratings, too: annual survey data from Phi Beta Kappan show that more families in the suburbs rated their local public schools an “A” or “B” throughout the 1980s and early 1990s than urban parents at the same income level. Further, high-income suburban parents gave their local schools better ratings than low-income suburban parents, likely reflecting the greater capacity of high-income parents to move to communities with high-quality public schools. In contrast, high-income parents living in cities did not rate their local public schools more favorably than lower-income urban parents, which helps to explain why high-income urban parents are more likely than affluent suburbanites to send their children to private school.

The striking differences across regions in private-school enrollment trends may reflect regional differences in the composition of private-school enrollment. Private-school enrollment in the South was not substantially affected by Catholic school closures; it was affected by white flight following school desegregation orders. In addition, the South is home to a significant number of conservative Christian families, and Supreme Court decisions banning prayer in schools may explain the increasing percentage of middle-income families sending their children to non-Catholic religious elementary schools. Interestingly, the percentage of high-income families in the South who sent their children to non-Catholic religious elementary schools declined over this same period, and the 90-50 gap in enrollment rates in other religious elementary schools narrowed.

Implications

The distribution of private elementary-school enrollments in the U.S. has changed dramatically over the last 45 years. Today, non-Catholic religious elementary schools serve more low-income students than Catholic elementary schools do. Meanwhile, the percentage of students from high-income families who attend private nonsectarian schools has grown substantially. Much less is known about nonsectarian private schools than about Catholic schools, which historically were the dominant supplier of private-school services in the U.S. and the subject of a great deal of research.

Given that less than 10 percent of American children attend a private elementary or secondary school, why should we care if gaps by family income in private-school enrollment rates have grown? Relative to residential mobility patterns, trends in private-school enrollment play only a modest role in explaining increases in school segregation by income. But that role is not inconsequential, and could be important for two additional reasons.

First, if the private schools affluent families choose for their children provide a better education than the schools available to children from lower-income families, these choices pass on economic advantage to the next generation and undercut the potential for intergenerational economic mobility. Second, it is possible that well-educated affluent parents who send their children to private schools may be less interested in devoting their political and social capital to advocating for better public schools.

What can the data tell us? We know that the percentage of American children attending private elementary schools has declined from 15 to less than 9 percent in recent decades, and that Catholic schools and nonsectarian private schools increasingly serve students from high-income families. It is more difficult to judge whether these shifts in enrollment have contributed to gaps in educational outcomes. If average per-student expenditure is an indicator of instructional quality, this may be the case. The 90-50 enrollment rate gap has increased the most in nonsectarian elementary schools, which are more than twice as expensive, on average, as religious schools. However, middle-income parents pay less than high-income parents who enroll their children in private school, due not only to scholarship assistance but also to the relative costs of the schools these types of families choose. We know of no evidence about whether more-expensive private schools are more effective than less-expensive schools, though the choices of affluent families suggest that they believe they are.

The key trends identified by our analysis have troubling implications. As a result of growing residential segregation by income, low-income families are increasingly concentrated in urban areas. In such places, one quarter of high-income families enroll their children in private schools compared to a much smaller—and declining—proportion of middle- and low-income families. As a result, both urban public schools and urban private schools have less socioeconomic diversity today than they had several decades ago.

Higher-income families increasingly live either in the suburbs or enroll their children in private schools. Moreover, the private schools their children attend are more likely to be expensive nonsectarian schools than was the case four decades ago. Together, these trends indicate an increasingly polarized pattern of school enrollment. As a result, American schools—both public and private—are increasingly segregated by income.

Richard J. Murnane is Thompson Research Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Sean F. Reardon is the Professor of Poverty and Inequality in Education at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Preeya P. Mbekeani and Anne Lamb are doctoral students at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Enrollment is dwindling. Deficits are mounting. And more closures are looming: that’s the prediction of many higher-education experts, who are concerned about the future of small private colleges in America.

Elite schools are not in trouble; they can count on deep applicant pools and practically limitless resources from their endowments and alumni networks. Public college systems, though not without their own fiscal challenges, are ultimately backed by the government’s power to tax. But small mid-tier private schools tend to have modest endowments, and after decades of tuition hikes comparable to those of their elite peers, are now dangerously at risk of pricing themselves out of the market. Their problems will soon be compounded by demographic realities: the college-age population is expected to decline over the coming decades, leading to even tighter competition for students. The storm has yet to break in full, but a recent spate of closings and mergers may signal greater turbulence to come for the private nonprofit sector, whose 1,700 institutions enroll about 30 percent of all students attending four-year colleges.

The fiscal crisis of the small private college will play out in different ways across the nation. States vary in both their demographic projections and the degree to which their higher-education systems rely on private schools. Informed observers agree that more closures are on the horizon, though they debate how truly “disruptive” the shakeout will be.

But the more important question is, what kind of higher-education system do we want? One that’s composed mainly of elite schools for top students and public universities for everyone else? Or a system that offers a variety of choices, in both the public and private spheres, for all kinds of students?

Private colleges typically offer smaller classes, more personal attention, mentoring from faculty, and a tight-knit academic community. On a smaller campus, students can find ways to stand out—perhaps in student government, or maybe in the research lab of a faculty member who in a large university would rely on grad students. Students at private colleges also tend to finish their degrees more quickly—graduating within an average of four and a half years compared to six at public colleges.

Unlike a large public system, a small private college doesn’t have to be all things to all people—but the features that make it unique can also constrain its market. Consider St. John’s College, whose campuses in Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, offer a well-respected “Great Books” program that the school adopted in the early 1930s to save itself from fiscal collapse. For several years now, St. John’s has been grappling with a structural deficit in the millions. In New York City, The King’s College represents a noble effort at Christian liberal-arts education, but it has a negligible endowment, putting it only one or two bad years of enrollment away from distress. In Massachusetts, Assumption College and Gordon College are religiously affiliated schools that, unlike many of their peers, still take seriously the spiritual aspects of their mission. It is not safe to assume these schools will be around 15 to 20 years from now, at least in their current form. The same could be said of Bard College at Simon’s Rock and Marlboro College in Vermont. Art and music schools tend to be very small; the Boston Conservatory, which merged with Berklee College of Music in 2016, is likely not the last of such institutions to succumb. Several historically black colleges—a long-struggling cohort—are small and private. One universal truth about these very different colleges? They are not for everyone, but they are exactly the right thing for some. In K–12 education, with the recent growth of charter schools and other choice initiatives, families in some locales now have a greater range of schooling options. And yet, in higher education, consumer choices are narrowing.

The Nature of the Crisis

Industry publications such as Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education seem to be reporting almost daily on the challenges facing private colleges. Sweet Briar, a women’s college in Virginia, announced plans to close in 2015, despite an endowment valued at more than $80 million. Sweet Briar has since re-launched, but its fiscal stability is far from assured. Burlington College in Vermont, thrust into the limelight by a loan scandal involving former president Jane Sanders, Bernie Sanders’s wife, shut down in 2016. In addition to the Boston Conservatory merger, Massachusetts has seen other closures: in 2017, Wheelock, an education college, agreed to be absorbed into Boston University, resulting in layoffs for most Wheelock staff. This year, Mount Ida announced that it would be acquired by the University of Massachusetts, and long-struggling Atlantic Union College near Worcester closed. Elsewhere, tenured faculty were laid off last year at Mills College in the Bay Area and the College of New Rochelle in New York, and Colby-Sawyer in New Hampshire recently decided to cut five majors, including English.

A common thread among these struggling or failing colleges is that they are small and less selective, admitting more than half of all applicants. Less-selective colleges generally command fewer financial resources than their more-selective peers (see Figure 1). Their price tags are lower, but not so low as to free them of the necessity to provide significant student aid in order to meet their enrollment targets. For students who receive aid—a significant cohort at all four-year colleges—the price they pay out of pocket at a less-selective school is roughly the same, at the median, as they would pay at an elite institution. A discounted tuition price of $23,000 a year for an Ivy League education may strike many parents and students as a deal, but they might question that amount at a less-prestigious institution.

Concerns about the small private college are rife among those who study the higher-education market. In a much-discussed 2015 report titled “Small College Closures Poised to Increase,” Moody’s Investors Service looked at the nonprofit and public four-year sectors as a whole, and projected that the number of closures would soon triple and the number of mergers would double. Moody’s based its predictions on an analysis that showed that very large schools (those with 10,000 or more students) had been gaining market share for years and that smaller schools, which lack economies of scale, tend to have less capacity to support their operating costs through tuition revenue alone. Last year, the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), a leading trade group, put out a report examining about 560 private schools’ “composite financial index,” a measure of budget and balance-sheet strength. While touting the private sector’s overall fiscal resiliency, the report concluded that about one third of the schools fell short of the benchmark standard of financial health. Schools with enrollments below 1,000 exhibited generally weaker fiscal fundamentals than larger institutions.

Not everyone agrees about the best way to predict the likelihood of a school’s closure: the U.S. Department of Education (ED) issues its official “financial responsibility composite score” rankings annually, awarding scores ranging from -1.0 to +3.0 and using them (and other factors) to determine an institution’s eligibility for federal financial aid. The department has drawn criticism for assigning equal scores of fiscal health to extremely healthy schools like Yale (2.7 in ED’s most recent round of scores) and more-obscure institutions like the Hypnosis Motivation Institute in Tarzana, California (also a 2.7).

But whatever one’s precise measure of college fiscal distress may be, it is striking that this topic is so prominent in higher-education policy these days, considering that we’re in the midst of the longest economic expansion since World War II. Under-resourced though they may often be, less-selective schools’ endowments, in real terms, have added about $4 billion in value since the last market peak in 2007.

To be sure, the demise of the small private college has been predicted before, and the topic has been susceptible to hype. The influential Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has predicted that half of all colleges and universities could face closure during the 2020s. The latest data from Digest of Education Statistics, however, do not indicate such a dire scenario. Annual closures of four-year nonprofit schools have remained in the single digits in recent years, or well within historical parameters.

But there are sound reasons to think that this time might be different, and that the rate of closures in the future will exceed the historical rate. First, the full impact of demographic decline has yet to set in. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education projects a rise in the number of graduating high-school seniors until the mid-2020s, when a steep drop will commence (see Figure 2a). These national numbers mask considerably worse news for the Northeast and Midwest regions than for the South and West (Figure 2b). If one takes the Great Recession era as the baseline, 10 states will have at least 20 percent fewer high-school graduates in the pipeline by 2030. College attendance rates, of course, are determined by more than just raw demographic numbers. For instance, a middle-class child in suburban Connecticut, both of whose parents have master’s degrees, is far more likely to attend a four-year college than a member of a low-income immigrant family in Arizona. Still, Nathan D. Grawe, in his 2018 book Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education, weighs many factors and concludes that “demographics really is destiny”: raw population numbers are what matter most in predicting future demand for postsecondary education.

Furthermore, it’s the regions that are facing the toughest demographic projections that also have the highest saturation of private colleges. As noted above, the Boston area has seen several recent closures and mergers. More than two thirds of the four-year college enrollment in Massachusetts is at private nonprofit institutions, one of the highest rates in the nation. By contrast, in 20 states, concentrated mainly in the South and West, 20 percent or less of the four-year enrollment is at private nonprofit institutions. Richard Ekman, president of CIC, speaks of a “kind of a mismatch” between the availability of college options outside of the Southwest and Southeast and the awareness of such choices on the part of students from those regions, particularly those from “first generation” families. Indeed, a number of studies have documented the tendency of students nationwide to choose a school within an hour’s drive of home. So, except for elite schools, which draw students from across the country and beyond, most four-year colleges operate within a regional market. Assuming that these self-imposed geographic constraints persist, and that the number of private schools in the Northeast and Midwest shrinks, students in these regions will eventually face the same limits on college choice as their peers in the South and West currently do.

Tuition Discounting

Another threat to small private schools lies in the practice of tuition discounting. For several decades, it has been common for colleges to provide most students with an institutional grant to partially offset the cost of their education. The “discount rate” represents the gap between the “comprehensive fee” (sticker price)—now beginning to top $70,000 at some schools—and what a student actually pays. Schools discount tuitions to make college affordable for families who can’t pay the full cost; to craft student bodies in accord with institutional priorities such as diversity; to attract higher-quality students; and because they have little choice, given that “everyone” does it—elite, public, and mid-tier private schools alike.

In his 1994 book Liberal Arts Colleges: Thriving, Surviving, or Endangered?, David Breneman defended tuition discounting, pointing out that though discount rates had been rising, so, too, had “net tuition revenue”—total cash inflows, from students and their families, even after the aid outflows had been accounted for. Two decades later, though, there is growing concern that discount rates are reaching the point of diminishing returns. A 2017 analysis by researchers Ann Gansemer-Topf and Luke Behaunek looked at a cohort of more than 400 liberal-arts colleges and found that, over the preceding decade, the rate of growth of institutional aid flowing out had outpaced the rate of growth of net tuition revenue flowing in.

The problem is twofold, involving both the number of students who get a break on tuition and the magnitude of those discounts. The most recent survey by the National Association of College and University Business Officers found that 89 percent of freshmen receive some aid, and that the average grant covers about half their tuition (see Figure 3). In last year’s survey, when the average discount rate was almost 2 percentage points lower, 40 percent of college business officers surveyed said that they considered the discount rate for their institution to be “unsustainable or sustainable in only the short term.”

Competition from State Schools

Another factor exerting pressure on private colleges is increased competition from public institutions. Over the last decade, state government budgets have been squeezed by a combination of low rates of revenue growth and the rapidly escalating costs of Medicaid and public-employee pension and health-care benefits (see “Higher Ed, Lower Spending,” features, Summer 2018). The resulting “crowd-out” effect has constrained the funds available for states’ discretionary spending in other areas, such as higher education. The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association documents that aid levels nationwide have not recovered since the Great Recession, and in fact have not truly recovered from the prior recession of the early 2000s. In the world of public finance, no one expects states to succeed in bending the cost curve on Medicaid or pensions anytime soon. Accordingly, many states across the nation are looking at ways to somehow consolidate or restructure their higher-education systems.

But the budget struggles of state schools have not translated into an unqualified boon for private schools, since public systems have responded by stepping up their student recruitment efforts, especially targeting out-of-state students who can pay the full freight. The University of Maine, whose host state faces some of the harshest demographic headwinds in the nation, has posted promotional billboards along highways in several Northeast states. Public universities across the nation also compete with private colleges, both in and out of state, by creating “honors” colleges—smaller, more-selective colleges within the larger system. About 100 institutions now offer such programs, according to U.S. News & World Report.

As rare as private school closures are, public school closures are even rarer. Data from the National Center for Education Statistics show that, over the last quarter century, only four four-year public schools have shuttered, compared to 124 four-year private nonprofit closures. And public college is still a relative bargain: even after crowd-out-induced aid reductions at state schools, the national average for the net price (tuition and fees less aid) at a four-year private college is roughly twice that of what in-state students pay at a four-year public institution, according to the Department of Education’s most recent “Condition of Education” report.

A small private school with a structural deficit of a few million dollars may need to bolster its recruitment efforts, but it probably can’t afford to devote even a few hundred thousand dollars to that end. Many parents may view a small liberal-arts college with a high price tag as a risky proposition, and so, in order to make themselves seem like a safer and more attractive choice, private schools must dole out more aid.

Moody’s has cited large schools’ “deeper set of academic programs” as a factor in their recent success at gaining market share from smaller schools, and some small private schools have been forced to pare back their offerings as part of an effort to stabilize their finances. Large state schools, with their many and varied courses of study, can always suggest to parents that if dance, film, or philosophy doesn’t work out, their sons and daughters can always fall back on communications or business.

In theory, the closure of some small private colleges might be good for those that survive, since they could pick up more market share. But closures might actually work against the remaining institutions, if small becomes associated with risk or failure in the popular imagination. A school that’s already struggling to maintain enrollment and persuade donors that it deserves their support could be further harmed by reports casting doubt on the viability of peer institutions.

The Free Tuition Movement

The emerging free-tuition movement could further strengthen the hand of public institutions at the expense of the private sector. Bernie Sanders made free tuition a progressive cause during his presidential campaign, though programs offering two years of free community college exist in red and blue states alike. In 2017, New York governor Andrew Cuomo hailed the state’s new “Excelsior” program as the nation’s first to offer tuition-free education for middle-class students at four-year state schools (low-income New Yorkers already paid no tuition to State University of New York and City University of New York schools). But such a program, even if well intentioned, could hurt private colleges. A November 2017 report by the Albany-based Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities in New York found that 30 of its member colleges that enrolled mostly New Yorkers had experienced enrollment drops since Excelsior launched. New York Times columnist David Brooks lamented: “Suddenly the state’s 150 private colleges have to compete with ‘free.’ Many of these schools are already struggling to survive. If upper-middle-class students are drawn away to public colleges, private ones may close. That hurts the state’s educational diversity, it destroys jobs, and it hurts the state.”

During heavy manufacturing’s decline throughout the second half of the 20th century, higher education expanded and in so doing helped prop up many post-industrial economies in upstate New York and elsewhere in the Northeast and Midwest. The closure of a small, less-selective college may be of limited significance for the nation as a whole, but a loss of hundreds or more well-paying jobs could be profoundly disruptive to the Rust Belt community where that college is located.

Is College Still Worth It?

The rapid escalation in the cost of college has prompted some, such as Glenn Reynolds of the University of Tennessee College of Law, to assert that we are in the midst of a higher-education “bubble”—that costs have been bid up far beyond the underlying value. In principle, the dwindling numbers of high school seniors could be offset if students started to attend four-year colleges at higher rates. Indeed, that is apparently how colleges overcame the demographic decline that 1970s-era researchers were predicting would wreak havoc on them. Instead, enrollment grew during the 1980s and ’90s, when the economy experienced sharp rises in the demand for skilled labor and in the “wage premium” of a bachelor’s degree over a high school diploma. But by the same token, the economist Richard Vedder sees a connection between a recent slight decline in total college enrollment and a stagnation in that same wage premium. If he’s right, that’s discouraging news for schools now dealing with enrollment woes, because the attendance rate is not going to rise unless college seems even more worthwhile in the future than it does right now. Student debt currently stands at $1.4 trillion.

Many four-year private schools pride themselves on their liberal-arts curricula, but over the years the integrity of the liberal arts has been compromised by the twin influences of “vocationalization” and politicization. The former may be seen in schools where business and finance rank among the most-popular majors but which describe themselves institutionally in terms such as “rooted in the liberal arts.” Vocationalization is both an effect of tuition inflation and a cause, insofar as colleges have long held out the promise of bright job prospects for graduates to justify their price hikes.

Politicization is behind the many free-speech controversies on campuses these days. The academic environment, supposedly intended to open minds and expose students to a rich spectrum of ideas and thought, is now overwhelmingly dominated by faculty with progressive views. In 2016, Samuel Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College analyzed 25 years of data from the Higher Education Research Institute and found that in the South and Great Plains states, liberal professors outnumbered conservatives 3 to 1. On the West Coast, the ratio was 6 to 1, and in New England, an astonishing 28 to 1. To a frustrating degree, conformity with prevailing opinion matters far more, in terms of who gets heard in academia, than independence of mind or even scholarly credentials. Social scientist Charles Murray and the law professor Josh Blackman are both distinguished conservative intellectuals, and yet protesters thwarted their recent attempts to speak on college campuses, whereas, every day, countless lectures and panels featuring far less impressive liberal speakers take place without incident.

Both of these trends, vocationalization and politicization, threaten to weaken the value of a liberal arts education, and it is interesting to consider the relationship between them. Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, speaks of an “implicit bargain” that the “academic left” has made with mainstream America: “We will control the campuses, but we’ll guarantee those kids who come here seeking to become accountants or investment bankers or engineers will get the credentials they need to move on with their lives.” Developing a strategy to save a school from fiscal ruin will require differentiating it from its competitors, but that’s easier said than done, since college leaders are typically deeply reluctant to break with academia’s vocationalist and political consensuses.

As noted earlier, this is not the first time that pundits have predicted doom for the American private college, and the bears have been wrong before. But, taking a still longer view, perhaps the historical record is more troubling for private colleges. Until the 19th century, private nonprofit institutions dominated the higher-education landscape. However, over time, their share of all four-year enrollment has gradually declined and now stands at about 30 percent. That is unlikely to reach zero any time soon, owing to the fiscal impregnability of the Ivies and near Ivies. But in certain areas of the country, the public sector looks impeccably poised to pursue a near monopolization of higher education. Such a scenario would hardly provide incentives to keep costs down. And for legions of college students in these regions, diversity of choice would be greatly diminished.

Stephen Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. He is a graduate of St. John’s College, Santa Fe campus.

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Janus v. AFSCME that public-sector unions could no longer collect “agency fees” from employees who choose not to join the union. Two years ago, the court seemed poised to ban this practice before the unexpected death of Justice Antonin Scalia led to a four-four split in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. Marty West, executive editor of Education Next, spoke with Rebecca Friedrichs, the lead plaintiff in that case.

MW: As a veteran teacher, why did you object to California’s policies on agency fees? In what sense do these fees violate individual rights?

RF: Number one, it’s forced representation. My union was voted in when I was a little kid. I don’t know one person in a union who has ever had the opportunity to vote on the question of whether they even wanted the union that represents them. Second, the unions take $1,000, $1,200 a year [in fees], and they’re totally unaccountable; we don’t know where that money’s going in most cases.

MW: By law, teachers have been allowed to opt out of the portion of union dues that go to political activities, so, at least in theory, the agency fee only supported the collective bargaining activities from which all teachers stand to benefit—but you argued to the court that even the union’s collective bargaining activities are political, because they involve interacting with government about policies that control how schools are operated.

RF: Yes. In fact it was Justice Scalia who stated that collective bargaining in the public sector is always political, because it impacts taxpayer dollars. The unions’ legal coalition even conceded that point during our oral arguments. What’s more, the National Education Association’s Representative Assembly sets NEA’s resolutions and writes its new business items each year, and all teachers, including fee payers, are forced to fund their representation and decisions. Yet the NEA stands in solidarity with Planned Parenthood, Southern Poverty Law Center, ACLU, and other highly political, one-sided organizations that often run counter to the values and desires of many boots-on-the-ground teachers. Through agency fees, unions take our money and push their social and political agenda behind our backs. When we ask for accountability, we get bullied, silenced, and labeled “union busters,” “haters,” and “free riders.”

MW: How were you treated by your colleagues as your case moved through the federal court system between 2013 and 2016?

RF: The unions control teachers in what I call a culture of fear, and you’d better not speak out against them or they call you names. They called me radical right-winger; they called me spawn of Satan. Most people at my school didn’t speak with me openly—that was too scary—but a lot of teachers and administrators would pull me into darkened rooms, they’d hug me, they’d tell me they were praying for me, that they’d hoped I’d win.

MW: In a case similar to yours, Mark Janus was successful before the Supreme Court this past June. What do you think the consequences will be for teachers unions? Will they be weakened without the power to exact agency fees?

RF: I think that’s entirely up to the unions. If they continue their current behavior, bullying everybody and ignoring those who choose not to join, they will be weakened, because if people are allowed to leave, they’ll leave. But if the unions step it up and start doing what people want and stop getting so involved in divisive politics, I think they could actually do a lot better.

MW: What do you make of the recent wave of strikes in six states where teachers have walked out to demand better compensation but also better funding for schools?

RF: The teachers I know do not want to leave the classroom for a strike, they want to serve the children, but they’re bullied if they don’t go out and strike. They’re called “scabs,” they’re screamed at, they’re ignored. Unions use teachers and kids to push their agenda. Angry strikes are not how teachers want to stand together.

MW: What are other ways that teachers could unite to have more of a voice?

RF: Teachers can sit together and intelligently discuss what needs to happen to improve student outcomes in our schools. What is it that we really need to do a better job? There were many years when, more than a raise, I really wanted help in the classroom. Students would come to me four grade levels behind in reading, and I was expected to bring them up, and I was one teacher with 34 students. I wanted a teacher’s aide. I always wanted a science lab. I always wanted a music program. We never had any of that. Local teachers can get together and decide what’s best for the students in their community—working with parents, too, because parents have been voiceless. Teachers can stand together and leave the bullying state and national unions—decertify the entire web of union control—and then they can create “local only” associations and have a collective voice. Our dues would be about $200 a year, and we wouldn’t have to fund unaccountable state and national unions and their political agenda.

This is an edited excerpt from an Education Next podcast, which can be heard on www.educationnext.org.