Policies that expand school choice aim to empower parents by giving them the opportunity to choose the school that best fits their child. Publicly funded school choice has increased considerably in recent years, helped by a variety of initiatives, including public charter schools, transfer options for students under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), inter-district enrollment programs, and a variety of policies to subsidize private-school tuition.

School choice has the potential to promote equity by allowing students to attend schools outside their neighborhood zone. But school choice can only fulfill this potential if parents are informed about their options. Information about school quality has proliferated in the past decade, thanks to federal accountability rules and the widespread accessibility of school performance data via the Internet. Yet despite the increase in the supply of information, critics allege that many parents still don’t know enough about local schools to take full advantage of school choice.

This raises a question that has not been addressed: if choice programs rely on knowledgeable parents to drive competition and market-based decisions, do such programs act as an incentive for parents to become more informed? Does the existence of a choice program cause parents to seek information about their educational options? If this is the case, then concerns based on how informed parents are in areas where choice is limited may not tell us much about how informed they would be if given more options.

We address this question by analyzing more than 100 million individual searches on the nation’s largest school-quality website, GreatSchools.org. These data are linked to information on changes both in public school-choice options under the now-defunct NCLB law and in the number of charter schools in an area. Our analysis constitutes the first direct assessment of how the demand for school-quality information responds to the choice environment.

We find consistent evidence that search frequency increases due to the expansion of school choice as a result of NCLB and the growth of charter schools. This finding suggests that the mere availability of school information is not sufficient to alleviate knowledge gaps; rather, parents must also have an incentive to seek out and use the information available. Given prior findings that clear information about school quality can lead parents to choose schools that increase student achievement, our study highlights the potential value of pairing choice policies with easily accessible data on school quality.

Data 

The key challenge facing empirical study of how school choice affects information acquisition has been a lack of systematic data. We fill this gap with online search behavior from GreatSchools, a nonprofit organization that provides comparison information and, in some cases, user reviews on all K–12 schools in the United States. The GreatSchools website supplies users with simple and straightforward information on school test scores and demographics in a manner that enables comparisons across schools. It is free and does not require registration.

Specifically, the website provides up-to-date information on school enrollment, grade levels served, the racial and ethnic makeup of the student body, and performance on standardized tests. Featured prominently are two pieces of information that may be of particular interest to families with children: a score of 1-10 based on recent standardized test results, and “community ratings” that ostensibly come from current and former students and their families. Schools are rated 1-5 stars on three factors: teacher quality, principal leadership, and parent involvement. There are direct testimonials from reviewers as well.

Our data come from the universe of specific search terms entered by users from January 1, 2010, through October 31, 2013. The data contain specific text strings entered into the search bar and the number of times each term was searched each month. Users had the option of entering the name of a city (e.g., Rochester), a school district (e.g., Brighton), a school (e.g., Twelve Corners Middle School), or a Zip Code (e.g., 14810). Users also could enter addresses and find schools near those addresses, and starting in August 2011, they could specify a particular state from a new drop-down menu. Our data do not reveal the origin of the search (such as a user’s IP address).

The data comprise 102,616,862 individual searches that contain more than three million different search terms over the almost four-year study period, with the number of searches increasing rapidly each year (see Figure 1). Using these raw search data, we generate counts of searches for each month for all geographic areas that potentially constitute a school-choice zone for residents. We identify 1,854 of these “search units,” which are a mix of cities and counties. We can match about 80 percent of the total searches to search units that form the basis for our analysis. Unmatched searches include those with typos and those for school names that are too generic to be matched to a specific search unit.

The lack of state identifiers in the data prior to August 2011 creates some difficulties in matching searches to locations. Some city names, such as “Springfield” and “Portland,” exist in multiple states; the same is true for school district and county names. Our solution is to assign these searches to search units in the same proportions pre-August 2011 as we observe after August 2011, when state identifiers became available.

We also collect data on public school-transfer options generated by NCLB, which required schools that received Title I funds and failed to meet minimum requirements on standardized tests for two consecutive years to offer students the option of transferring to a local school that did meet the benchmark. This information is available for 39 states; the remaining states did not publish information about school-improvement outcomes under NCLB during our study period. On average during our study period, about 21 percent of schools in the 39 states with this information had NCLB-induced choice, with considerable variation across areas and over time.

Finally, we also gather data on the number of charter schools in each search unit as an additional measure of school choice. On average, each search unit had 5.4 charter schools in it over the course of our study period, again with ample variation. Over 41 percent of the 1,854 search units had at least one charter school, while 25 percent had more than two, and 10 percent had 12 or more.

Method

Our goal is to measure the causal impact of school-choice policies on demand for information about school quality as indicated by the number of searches on GreatSchools. Simply examining the association between choice policies and school searches would be misleading, because areas that have more school choice may have more search behavior for any number of reasons, including perhaps that their residents had higher demand for choice options in the first place.

We instead focus on changes over time within each search unit. For example, does search behavior increase by a larger amount in areas where more schools became eligible for NCLB choice? This approach allows us to account for any differences across cities that remain during the four-year period we study.

Our analysis also takes into account the month and year in which each search was conducted. Both the prevalence of school choice and the overall number of searches were generally increasing during the roughly four-year period we study, but the increase in traffic could simply reflect increasing familiarity with the GreatSchools website as a resource. By adjusting the numbers of searches in a given area for the number of searches nationwide, we can be more confident that any changes we observe in that area are driven by changes in the choice environment.

Results

We find clear evidence that the availability of public school-choice options under NCLB increased demand for information on school quality. As the number of low-performing schools eligible for transfer options grew under NCLB, the number of Internet searches about those search units increased. Similarly, when states received waivers from NCLB that permitted them to stop providing transfer options for new students, the number of searches fell.

When the number of schools eligible for transfers under NCLB increases by 10 percentage points, the number of searches climbs by 7.2 percent (see Figure 2). An increase of one standard deviation in NCLB choice of 21 percentage points thus would imply a 15.1 percent increase in search frequency.

The availability of choice under NCLB largely vanished when the Department of Education began granting waivers of many of the law’s requirements to states. Between 2010 and 2013, 34 of the 39 states in our analysis received such a waiver. States that were granted a waiver usually allowed students who had already switched schools to continue their enrollment, but they eliminated school-choice options for other students in Title I schools previously identified as being in need of school improvement and for students in newly identified schools.

We would expect any effects of such waivers on the demand for school-quality information to be proportional to the percentage of the population that previously had access to NCLB-based choice. Indeed, we find that the effect of choice options under NCLB becomes weaker after a state obtains an NCLB waiver, with searches declining by 4 percent for each 10-percentage-point increase in the pre-waiver choice percentage. Thus, waivers reduce the effect of NCLB choice by more than half.

To put the size of these estimates into perspective, it is helpful to compare them to the proportion of families moving into the search area in a given year. These families are more likely to engage in online school research and to use GreatSchools.org in the absence of school choice. Comparing changes in search rates to mobility rates also provides a lower bound on the amount of online searching done by existing residents because of choice.

Using the 2010-14 American Community Survey, we calculate the proportion of families with a 5- to 17-year-old child in each search unit that did not live in the area the prior year. On average, about 5 percent of search-unit families are new entrants each year. Thus, even under the extreme assumption that all families entering an area would use the GreatSchools website, our estimates suggest resident families, spurred by the availability of NCLB-based choice, are responsible for a large share of online searches.

We also assess how school-search frequency changes based on the number of available charter schools in the search unit. Our findings indicate that adding a charter school to an area is associated with a 5.3 percent increase in searches. We caution that the opening of new charter schools could reflect an increase in demand for choice, and that this part of our analysis is not based on sudden changes in school ratings (as in the case of NCLB-based choice) or a policy change (as in the case of NCLB waivers). But this result provides suggestive evidence that charter school entry induces parents to obtain school-quality information and that the effect of choice on demand for information may not be limited to NCLB.

Implications

Our results indicate that parents respond to increased school-choice options by collecting more information about the quality of local schools. This novel finding has several important implications.

First, it implies that for many families, the availability of school-quality information alone is not sufficient to lead them to become better informed about school options. Parents must also have an incentive to seek and use this information. It is perhaps not surprising that families with few school-choice options are less likely to access the available information about schools in the area. This finding can help explain why, even in the information-rich post-NCLB world, some parents appear to have incomplete information about schools.

Second, our findings point to an additional channel through which school-choice policies affect parental behavior. In addition to increasing families’ choice sets, these policies can induce parents to seek information about school quality. To the extent that better information improves the match between families and schools or leads to pressure on schools to increase measured achievement, this effect can augment the impacts of school-choice policies.

Third, our results suggest that online search tools such as GreatSchools can be powerful mechanisms through which to provide families with the information they need to take advantage of choice programs and about local schooling options more broadly. That the information is being provided by an independent third party might increase the credibility of the information from parents’ perspectives, although more research is needed to understand how parents interpret school-quality information from different sources.

Michael F. Lovenheim is an associate professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University. Patrick Walsh is an associate professor of economics at St. Michael’s College.

Not long ago, nearly everyone viewed universities as beacons of knowledge, wisdom, and scientific progress guiding us toward a brighter future. After World War II, college enrollments climbed steadily with every passing year. Even when Democrats and Republicans could agree on nothing else, they both subscribed to the old adage, “the more education, the better.”

Not so today.

In our most recent public-opinion survey, (see “The 2017 EdNext Poll on School Reform,” features, Winter 2018), we find sharp differences between Democrats and Republicans about the value of a bachelor’s degree (as distinct from a two-year associate’s degree). Three-fourths of Democrats would choose the bachelor’s for their children, but only 57 percent of Republicans would. Conversely, nearly a third of Republicans would have their children go for an associate’s degree, while only a sixth of Democrats would make that choice.

What’s driving these differences of opinion? Is politics clouding our judgment of what’s best for our children? Or do people, when they have the appropriate information about the costs and benefits of college alternatives, put politics aside in making these choices?

Judging by the headlines, it would seem that choosing between an associate’s and a bachelor’s degree has, like so much else, been drawn into the ever-widening political divide of our time. Speaking at Gateway Technical College in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last April, President Donald Trump said, “Vocational education is the way of the future.” A month later, his secretary of transportation, Elaine Chao, elaborated: “The good news is that workers don’t need an expensive four-year degree to access [many] good-paying jobs.”

By contrast, Democrats are pitching for a vast increase in tuition subsidies to students at both two-year and four-year colleges. “It is imperative that the next president put forward a bold plan to make debt-free college available to all,” Hillary Clinton declared during the presidential campaign. After the election, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced a bill that would enact free tuition at two-year and four-year institutions alike.

The value of a bachelor’s degree has never been greater. According to the College Board, students who get a bachelor’s earn, on average, 33 percent more annually than do students who receive only an associate’s degree. As Princeton economist Cecilia Rouse puts it, “for most students, the benefits [of a bachelor’s diploma] will outweigh the costs.”

Yet community colleges have their place in American higher education. Associate’s degrees provide certificates that open up job opportunities for many.

Still, it would be a matter of concern if partisan politics were interfering with people’s choices about their children’s future. Do these leanings persist even after people receive accurate information about the costs and benefits of both a bachelor’s and an associate’s degree?

To explore this question, we did an experiment in our poll. Before asking people their preferences for their children’s higher education, we gave a subset of the respondents information about both the earnings information mentioned above and the average cost of tuition, board, and fees at two-year colleges ($7,620 per year) and four-year public institutions ($14,210 annually). When Democrats receive this information, just 66 percent prefer the four-year degree, the same percentage as that for Republicans. Economic realities triumph over politics.

Even when this information is not supplied, the difference between Democrats and Republicans is much smaller among parents of children 18 and under. Seventy-six percent of Republican parents want their children to pursue a four-year degree, almost as high a proportion as the 82 percent of Democratic parents. That difference, too, is erased when information on college costs and potential earnings is provided.

I find these results comforting. An associate’s degree is the right choice for some, while a bachelor’s program is the better option for others—but choices with respect to children’s education should be based on something other than political viewpoints. It is probably utopian to think that needless partisanship could be eliminated on other issues if we could provide people with better information about them. But it is good to know that, at least in this one area of personal decisionmaking, common sense still prevails.

— Paul E. Peterson

There are good reasons to assume that teachers’ beliefs and expectations can influence student success—an idea that has been embraced by parents, students, teachers, and policymakers. During graduation season each year, proud valedictorians thank the nurturing adults in their lives for pushing them to do their best. President George W. Bush famously criticized the “soft bigotry of low expectations” in support of his education-reform agenda. More recently, 2015 National Teacher of the Year Shanna Peeples declared, “You have to ignore it when a child says, ‘I don’t want to,’ because what they’re really saying is, ‘I don’t think I can and I need you to believe in me until I can believe in myself.’”

However, despite abundant anecdotes and theories suggesting a causal effect of teachers’ expectations on student outcomes, documenting its presence and size has been challenging. The reason is simple: positive correlations between what teachers expect and what students ultimately accomplish might simply result from teachers being skilled observers. In practice, distinguishing between accurate and biased expectations is difficult, because both teacher expectations and student outcomes are likely influenced by factors that researchers are unable to observe. Anecdotally, we believe that teachers’ expectations are important. But just how important might they be? And could differences in teachers’ expectations of white students and black students help to explain gaps in key outcomes such as college enrollment and completion?

To explore these questions, we analyze the federal Education Longitudinal Study of 2002, which followed a cohort of 10th-grade students for a decade. Among other questions, the students’ teachers were asked whether they expected their students to complete a four-year college degree. We use these responses to first document the presence of racial bias in teachers’ expectations, and then study the effects of differences in teacher expectations on students’ likelihood of completing college.

Our analysis supports the conventional wisdom that teacher expectations matter. College completion rates are systematically higher for students whose teachers had higher expectations for them. More troublingly, we also find that white teachers, who comprise the vast majority of American educators, have far lower expectations for black students than they do for similarly situated white students. This evidence suggests that to raise student attainment, particularly among students of color, elevating teacher expectations, eliminating racial bias, and hiring a more diverse teaching force are worthy goals.

When Expectation Becomes Reality

As a senior at her predominantly low-income Latino high school in south-central Los Angeles, Desiree Martinez told one of her teachers she dreamed of attending UCLA. In an open letter published years later, after she earned her degree, she recalled this response:

“You let out a sigh; I watched as a frown and puzzled look quickly grew on your face. You commented, ‘I don’t know why counselors push students into these schools they’re not ready for.’ My heart fell as you continued, ‘students only get their hearts broken when they don’t get into those schools and the students that do get in come back as dropouts.'”

Martinez then confided in a different teacher, who encouraged her not to let “people like that be the reason to hold you back.” Now the first in her family to graduate from college, Martinez plans to become an educator, and thanked the encouraging teacher for “pushing me when I needed it the most.” The pessimistic teacher was white; the optimistic teacher was Latino.

Teacher expectations are not always so overtly shared. In more common daily scenarios, how might they influence students’ self-perceptions and performance? Students might perceive and emotionally react to low or high teacher expectations, which could benefit or damage the quality of their work. Or, they might actively modify their own expectations and, in turn, their behavior to conform to what they believe teachers expect of them. Alternatively, teachers with expectations for certain types of students may modify how they teach, evaluate, and advise them, and in the case of low expectations, could perhaps shift their attention, time, and effort to other students.

Each of these possibilities creates feedback loops that trigger self-fulfilling prophecies: intentionally or not, teacher expectations cause student outcomes to converge on what were initially incorrect expectations.

Data

To study the extent to which these kinds of scenarios might unfold on a larger scale, we use rich survey data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS), which was conducted by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. These data are from a nationally representative sample of roughly 6,000 students from the cohort of students who were in 10th grade in 2002, and include information from student surveys, teacher surveys, standardized tests, and administrative data from schools. Most important for our purposes, teachers are asked to predict how far in school each student is likely to go, such as to finish high school, start college, or earn a degree. Our primary measure of expectations is whether a teacher expects a student to complete a four-year college degree.

Three features of the data make them well suited for an analysis of the impact of teachers’ expectations on student outcomes. First, the study followed students through 2012, providing accurate measures of educational attainment eight years removed from an on-time high-school graduation. Second, it elicited subjective expectations of each student’s ultimate educational attainment from students’ 10th-grade math and reading teachers. Having two contemporaneous expectations per student facilitates within-student comparisons of multiple teacher expectations formed at the same time. Third, the data contain rich information on students’ academic and socio-demographic backgrounds, factors that potentially affect both teacher expectations and student outcomes.

We use these data to explore two main questions. First, are teacher expectations racially biased? And second, what is the effect of teacher expectations on student outcomes?

Racial Bias in Teacher Expectations

The ELS data reveal clear disparities in the expectations that teachers have for students of different races. Figure 1 shows that teachers expect 58 percent of white high-school students to obtain a four-year college degree (or more), but anticipate the same for only 37 percent of black students. This disparity foreshadows a large difference in actual educational attainment: 49 percent of white students ultimately graduate from college, compared to 29 percent of black students.

These gaps in both expectations and attainment are troubling. But it is unclear to what degree they reflect racial bias as opposed to differences in socioeconomic status and levels of academic preparation between white students and black students that could influence both expectations and outcomes. Nationwide, on average, black students are four times more likely to live below the poverty line and 30 percent less likely to have a college-educated mother than white students. Both GPA and standardized-test-score averages are lower for black students than for white students.

To what extent does the gap in teacher expectations reflect real differences in the objective probability of college completion? And to what extent is it a function of racial bias manifesting as unduly low expectations for black students relative to white students?

We look back to Martinez’s story as we exploit a unique feature of the ELS data. Recall that the survey included college-attainment predictions for each student from two of their teachers at the same school and the same time. We take advantage of the fact that if two teachers disagree about the expected educational attainment of a student, at least one of the teachers must turn out to be wrong. We further examine whether such disagreements are related to the racial match between students and teachers, which would suggest that at least a subset of teachers have systematically biased beliefs about students’ educational potential.

Comparing two teachers’ expectations—one black and one white—for the same student at the same point in time eliminates the effect of other aspects of the educational environment on teacher expectations and student outcomes. For example, if black students are more likely to attend and black teachers are more likely to work in under-resourced schools, a naive analysis might conflate the effect of having a same-race teacher with that of school resources. Comparing two teachers’ expectations for the same student solves this problem, because the two teachers work in the same school environment and evaluate the student at the same point in time, and thus observe the same environmental and contextual factors that might influence a student’s educational success.

We find large, statistically significant bias when it comes to white teachers’ expectations for black students, and almost none for white students (see Figure 2). White teachers were 9 percentage points less likely to expect a black student to earn a college degree than their black colleagues when both teachers were evaluating the same student—on average, 33 percent of black teachers expected the student to finish college, compared to 24 percent of white teachers. We also find that these biases were slightly more pronounced for black male students than for black female students.

These results suggest ample room for biased expectations to limit black students’ educational attainment by creating self-fulfilling prophecies. However, they do not determine whether it is white teachers who are too pessimistic, black teachers who are too optimistic, or some combination of the two. Nor do they prove the existence of a causal effect of expectations on student outcomes, or shed light on the size of any such effects.

The Causal Effects of Teacher Expectations

To begin to understand the extent to which teacher expectations matter, we first compare the college completion rates of students whose teachers have lower and higher expectations for their educational attainment. Figure 3 shows that college completion rates for both white students and black students are systematically higher for students whose math teachers had higher educational expectations for them. (The same pattern is evident when using the expectations of students’ reading teachers.) However, even with the knowledge of racial biases in teacher expectations, we can’t be sure that a causal relationship between teacher expectations and student outcomes exists.

We move beyond an analysis of simple correlations by using three distinct, but related, research designs to identify the causal impact of teachers’ biases on students’ educational attainment. Each research design has different strengths and weaknesses, but the fact that they all produce similar results suggests that we have obtained good evidence on the causal effect of high-school teachers’ expectations on student outcomes.

Each of our three strategies takes advantage of the fact that multiple teachers report expectations for each student. Our first approach measures the relationship between student outcomes and one teacher’s expectation, controlling for the other teacher’s expectation as well as the student’s home background, academic ability, and past grades. The second teacher’s expectation is a valuable control in this setting, as it explicitly accounts for many of the unobserved factors that affect both the first teacher’s expectation and the student’s educational attainment. When implementing this approach, we only compare the outcomes of students for whom the same pair of teachers is making the assessments to ensure that our results are not biased by certain kinds of students being assigned to teachers with especially high (or low) expectations.

Of course, even after controlling for the second teacher’s expectation, the threat of an unobserved factor biasing our results remains. Our second approach seeks to identify random variation in teachers’ disagreements about whether students will complete college. For example, we take advantage of the fact that some teachers are more optimistic by nature than others, and thus are more likely to have high expectations for all students. We measure this in the data as the teachers’ average expectations for all students other than the one being rated.

Another possibility is that chance encounters between a teacher and a student outside the classroom might affect the teacher’s expectations for that student, whether or not the behavior was typical of the student or related to his or her likelihood of completing college. Such factors are normally unobserved by the analyst; however, the teacher survey includes a battery of teacher-specific perceptions of each student that might affect one teacher’s expectation but not another’s. Specifically, teachers were asked whether each student was “passive” and “attentive” in class. Similarly, students were asked whether they found math and reading to be “fun.” These are also factors that likely affect educational attainment, but we expect that subtle differences in the expression of these traits between 10th-grade math and English classrooms should not affect students’ educational attainment.

Our second research design uses each of these factors—a teacher’s optimism, her assessment of a given student’s attentiveness, and the student’s enjoyment of her class—to predict her expectations of whether the student will complete college. We then use that prediction, rather than the actual expectation captured on the survey, when estimating the effects of expectations on college completion. In doing so, our key assumption is that these factors do play a role in shaping teachers’ expectations about their students but don’t otherwise affect the student’s likelihood of completing college.

Our first two strategies produce remarkably consistent results. Having a reading teacher who expects a student to complete a four-year college degree increases the probability that the student actually goes on to complete a degree by 18–20 percentage points. The effect of a math teacher’s expectation is somewhat smaller, at 12–15 percentage points (see Figure 4). Both effects are statistically significant.

How large are these effects? To interpret these results appropriately, consider a teacher’s relative level of confidence in her student’s eventual college attainment. The difference here is not between believing a student has zero chance of completing college versus being certain that the student will earn a degree. Instead, consider what would happen if a teacher changed her confidence that a student will complete college from, say, 70 percent to 90 percent. Our estimates suggest that an increase of 20 percentage points in the likelihood that a teacher places on a student completing college leads to an increase in the eventual college attainment of about 3 percentage points, increasing the attainment rate to 48 percent from the base rate of 45 percent. This effect is similar in size to those found in evaluations of primary-school inputs’ impacts on postsecondary outcomes, such as being assigned to a teacher who is particularly effective in raising student test scores (see “Great Teaching,” research, Summer 2012).

This finding confirms that the racial gap in expectations for college attainment documented above puts black students at a disadvantage. But it does not tell us whether teacher disagreements about black students mean that black teachers are overly optimistic or white teachers are overly pessimistic.

This uncertainty motivates our third and final analytic approach, where we measure the bias in teachers’ expectations as the difference between students’ actual outcomes and whatever we would have expected based on everything we can observe about them in the absence of self-fulfilling prophecies. This approach produces two striking results.

First, we replicate our previous results on the causal impact of teacher expectations on college completion and the effects of race match on expectations. Second, our estimates of teacher biases suggests that all teachers are overly optimistic about whether their students will complete college, but that white teachers are less optimistic about black students than are black teachers. In other words, it is not generally the case that black students face negative bias from white teachers in an absolute sense. Rather, the negative bias is a relative one in that the black students do not receive the same positive bias, or benefit of the doubt, enjoyed by white students.

All teachers are optimistic, but white students receive more optimism than their black classmates. This means that even though white teachers’ lower expectations for black students are in a sense more accurate, this accuracy is selectively applied in a way that puts black students at a disadvantage. Since positive expectations increase students’ likelihood of going to college, the greater optimism heaped upon white students magnifies black-white gaps in college completion.

Implications

In sum, our analysis suggests that teacher expectations do not merely forecast student outcomes, but that they also influence outcomes by becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. Moreover, we find that the nature of white teachers’ expectations places black students at a disadvantage. For a student with a given objective probability of college completion, white teachers are less optimistic when the student in question is black. Policies that would put black students on the same footing as white students in terms of how teacher expectations are formed could narrow attainment gaps.

We identify two broad implications for education policy and practice. First, policymakers and school administrators should expand efforts to increase the diversity of the teaching force. Doing so requires both increasing the racial diversity of new entrants into the teaching pipeline (for example, via college entrance and major choice) and retaining more existing teachers of color. However, diversifying the pipeline in the short run is limited by constraints on the supply of non-white teachers, which itself is likely a consequence of the impacts of biased expectations and teacher representation discussed above.

Second, while creating a more diverse teaching force is clearly a long-term goal, there are steps schools and districts can take right away to reduce teacher bias and support positive expectations for all students. Schools can improve pre- and in-service training on expectations and bias, a potentially light-touch and low-cost intervention that can be deployed in real time. Programs that encourage empathy and cross-cultural understanding, for example, may help reduce bias-driven disparities in expectations for student outcomes.

Not surprisingly, large gaps in the objective probability of college completion exist by the time students reach the 10th grade and these would need to be addressed with earlier interventions. However, promoting positive expectations broadly among teachers of all subjects and grades can provide critical support for student success at any age.

Seth Gershenson is associate professor of public policy at the School of Public Affairs at American University. Nicholas Papageorge is Broadus Mitchell assistant professor at Krieger School of Arts and Sciences at Johns Hopkins University.

Education Next showcased the results of its 2017 opinion survey at a September event at the Hoover Institution in Washington, D.C. Hanna Skandera, who led the transformation of New Mexico’s schools as state secretary of education, participated in a panel discussion on the poll. Serving as moderator was Alyson Klein, federal education policy reporter for Education Week. The following excerpt is edited for clarity and brevity.

Klein: The 2017 EdNext poll found significant erosion in support for charters among the public. How does that finding track with your experience on the ground?

Skandera: It is quite the opposite in New Mexico. The reality—which I don’t see changing anytime soon—is that parents are demanding great schools for their kids. They often don’t distinguish between charter and non-charter. They ask: “Is this a great school?” and “Will it serve my child?” To give you one example: my little sister in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program was on a waitlist of 1,200 kids at a school with 400 students. In New Mexico, parents and families are committed to getting the best education for their kids.

Klein: We’ve seen a decline in support for merit pay for teachers, although a plurality of the public still supports it. . . . I’m wondering, is that a blip? Or is it the tip of the iceberg? And is there anything out there that you can attribute those changes to?

Skandera: It’s important to understand where our teachers land in their performance measures. After all, that performance has everything to do with how our children will succeed. When I first arrived in New Mexico, there was no clear picture on how to differentiate our teachers. When we asked principals to evaluate their educators and to include student achievement in those evaluations, 99.8 percent of our teachers received the same rating. We knew, as tough as it might be, we owed it to our children to close the honesty gap and work on where we needed improvement. Closing that gap took a lot of time and energy, and I think we got stuck on the measurement piece—but it’s what we do with that information that’s far more important. We can’t just “measure and walk.” We need to get to the right conversation to figure out how to improve teacher performance and ultimately provide our students with the best education possible.

However, as we move forward, it’s also important to avoid another pendulum swing, which is typical of policy at the federal and state level. Often we see a reactionary response. We should use the nuggets of why we started measuring in the first place to inform where we want to go next.

Klein: Thanks in part to the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 (ESSA), states are going to have a bigger role than ever in shaping K–12 policy. But when we look at the polling data, it seems that the public’s perception is shaped quite a bit by national debates, some of which may have only a tangential connection to education. How can state leaders help parents and communities see the local impact and rationale for a particular policy?

Skandera: It takes a lot of work—but connecting directly with parents, families, teachers, and community leaders is essential. I had the privilege of serving for nearly seven years in New Mexico, and it took me way too long to realize that if I tried to communicate through the traditional chain of command—state chief, superintendents, principals, teachers, and parents—I would utterly fail to reach families and communities. It was the worst game of telephone; we were lucky if we were still on the same topic by the time word got to the parents.

We need to think about how we can reach our communities in meaningful ways. We conducted focus groups throughout the state, and when we spoke to parents in the ways that they think about education issues, we saw that they wanted many of the same things we were trying to get accomplished. Parents fundamentally support knowing how their kids are doing, having choices, and measurement.

It would be foolish to do community focus groups using the term “ESSA.” Parents and families don’t know what that is. In fact, as soon as you utter an acronym at a community forum, people say, “Great, I thought this was going to be about my child.” The language we use, the topics we choose, and how we talk about them are critical. For far too long in education, the conversation has been centered on our own selves and our own systems. It’s time to start listening to our parents and teachers and finding ways to respond directly to their needs.

A truism of school reform has long been the promise that technology, properly applied, will fuel dramatic improvement in teaching and learning. When tech-enabled schools or online learning programs haven’t delivered the hoped-for results, some have dismissed these shortcomings as implementation problems—or evidence that we haven’t yet deployed the right tools or the most effective strategies. But what if the challenge is bigger? What if today’s connected youth are not well served by spending school hours in front of screens?

In this forum, Daniel Scoggin, co-founder of the GreatHearts classical charter-school network, makes the case for school environments that put face-to-face dialogue and inquiry at the heart of learning. In contrast, Tom Vander Ark, CEO of the advisory firm Getting Smart, argues that K–12 education is poised to transform itself through wisely employed ed-tech.

 

 

Putting Dialogue over Devices Shapes Mind and Character
By Daniel Scoggin

 

 

 

 

The Problem Is Wasted Time, not Screen Time
By Tom Vander Ark

How does the current array of technology in schools fit with the ages-old aspiration of forming thoughtful and reflective young men and women who will strive for a greater good beyond themselves? If the first principle of education is to produce such individuals, how does educational technology support or deter from this purpose? How should today’s teachers and education leaders approach the issue of “screen time” in the classroom?

Of course, learning has always been entwined with technology, and it always will be. From the papyrus scroll, to Gutenberg’s breakthrough printing press with movable type, to the newspaper, radio, television, and now the Internet, there have been subsequent  dawns of a new information age. In this spirit, we don’t need a jeremiad on the teacher versus the computer or on how screens in schools mark the end of Western civilization. If deployed properly, ed-tech can be an effective support to good teaching and content: taking over many mundane tasks from the teacher, serving as a coach-tutor that assesses and responds to a student’s individual needs, and allowing teachers to share best practices and weave world-class expertise into lessons. As the learning scholars Frederick Hess and Bror Saxberg have clarified, schools and teachers that wisely use learning science to deploy tech in their classroom, as a craftsperson uses the right tool at the right time, have a real shot at enhancing student engagement and results.

What we need to question is not the technology but rather the assumptions behind its use. Some educators, viewing ed-tech as a “silver bullet,” indiscriminately toss it in front of today’s so-called digital natives, assuming that more gadgets equal more learning. The opposite may be true. According to a recent Education Week analysis of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the shares of 4th- and 8th-grade students using computers for math instruction grew rapidly from 2009 to 2015. But the increased access has not led to “better” use, which the authors define as “activities that require critical thinking, such as making charts and graphs.” Instead, rote activities such as math drills and practice now occur more frequently, and “the gap between active and passive use has grown over time.”

As we sober up from the tech-infused party of the past 20 years, we should think about what should come first in our schools: shaping not just our students’ ability to persevere and solve difficult problems but also their character—their empathic connection with others, their capacity to see our shared humanity, and their ability to problem solve with others for a common good. I believe this is the ultimate project of schooling in our democracy, and the misapplication of ed-tech will put it at risk. In a time of increasing political and economic polarization, we need conversation, empathy, and character woven into our public life. Schools are uniquely suited to fostering such abilities and qualities.

Conversation and Community 

Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix and a savvy education reformer, has talked about how software is best at teaching “subjects with correct answers,” and not so good, at least not yet, at clarifying subjects that require interpretation—helping us understand an Emily Dickinson poem, grasp the multifaceted complexity of the Civil War, or appreciate the nuances of a mathematical proof. Googling can tell you billions of facts, and adaptive software can coach you to shore up your gaps in algebraic skills, but it is in conversation and community that we wrestle with the real questions of humanity. What does it mean to be a human being? What is justice? Add to that the perennial moral questions we should ponder in our early years, such as what is my duty to myself, my family, my friends?

We have created the conditions in which our students have limitless access to information but limited capacity to organize, analyze, and understand it. The scarce quality among our children today is not intelligence but rather the ability to deliberate carefully, to see the multiple sides of an issue, and then to exercise sound judgment according to grounded values and proper ends. We sometimes call this capacity critical thinking, but when it’s aligned to first principles (read: basic philosophical truths), the ancients called it wisdom.

Socrates put it another way: “Wisdom begins in wonder.” In the context of schooling, we must develop in our students the ability to step outside their own perspectives. They must be able to “de-self” in order to mature. As Aristotle observed, “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” This goes beyond critical thinking to heroic listening and rigorous empathy. In the study of literature, history, ethics, science, and the arts, we can convert our classrooms into mini-republics that reveal the best of human nature as we study it.

Can’t this conversation and community be “virtual”? Don’t social media serve as the new public square?

My response is to answer how Socrates would, with another question: can one parent virtually? Most of us would agree that good parenting requires direct human interaction. So, too, does education.

Building on the work of the sociologist James Davison Hunter, the New York Times columnist David Brooks talks about morally “thick” versus “thin” institutions.    “A thick institution becomes part of a person’s identity and engages the whole person: head, hands, heart and soul. So thick institutions have a physical location, often cramped, where members meet face to face on a regular basis, like a dinner table or a packed gym or assembly hall. . . . Thin organizations are more anonymous, ephemeral, transient, and transactional, while thick organizations think in terms of virtue and vice.”

The best schools have qualities in common with an extended family, a traveling sports team, or a military platoon. They are thick communities, where students and teachers celebrate and suffer together; where you know when someone is having a bad day and ask what you can do to help; where in the classroom adventure and risk, cheers, and even embarrassment are experienced directly; where the wrinkle of a brow and what is not said mean just as much as what is spoken; and where disagreement can squat in the room like the elephant it usually is and not be mouse-clicked away.

Screens in Context

At GreatHearts, the classical charter-school network I cofounded, we are certainly not against technology. We just believe in putting reflection and conversation first. Our high school students have at the center of their day a two-hour Socratic conversation on works of great literature, philosophy, and history. What’s more, teachers deploy Socratic pedagogy in all subjects, from music to physics. Students have periods of time away from their smartphones and tablets during the day, and first engage with one another and the subject matter, to think, to laugh, and even, sometimes, to be bored and figure out what they are going to do about it. They are asked to leave behind the neurochemical high of skimming, surfing, texting, and Snapchatting, and engage the frontal lobes of their brains, the executive functions of deep reading, intuiting first principles, problem solving, and recognizing the inherent value of the human beings in front of them.

And technology, when it is working well in the classroom, has a similar end. It draws us closer to the mystery and beauty of reality, as when an electron-microscope feed reveals the structure of a plant cell to a whole class at once (an aha moment on steroids), or when we watch the world’s foremost geologist explain how volcanoes work, using high-def eruption footage to illustrate the talk. These tools and content, when used at the right moment for the right end, enable breakthrough epiphanies for students that stoke further conversation and questions.

Too often, however, the Internet and other digital technologies mainly serve to distract and numb us. Nicholas Carr, citing the science-fiction writer Cory Doctorow, calls them “an ecosystem of interruption technologies.” In this light, an essential skill we can impart to our students is to recognize the difference between their digital experiences and other forms of knowing. The point is not to cordon students off from technology—that would be foolish—but to teach students how to go back and forth thoughtfully between various media and understand the costs and benefits of each. The student’s job here is to cultivate the prudence to know when a digital experience can enhance, continue, or make possible interactions that would otherwise be forestalled, and, conversely, to know when a medium is being asked to do more than it should. For instance, students might use digital resources to conduct research and prepare for in-person conversations, then follow up on these dialogues with a class blog where they offer clarifications, share their writing, and develop seminar questions for the next convening. And coherent programs can be well supported by online learning and even some stand-alone online courses. “The development of a well-rounded mind,” Carr posits, “requires both an ability to find and quickly parse a wide range of information and a capacity for open-ended reflection.”

The MIT professor and author Sherry Turkle writes in Reclaiming Conversation that the new mediated life of unreflective turning to screens has gotten us into trouble. “Research shows that those who use social media the most have difficulty reading human emotions, including their own.” Screens offer the “illusion of friendship without the demands of intimacy.” However, Turkle goes on to say, “the same research gives cause for optimism. We are resilient. Face-to-face conversation leads to greater self-esteem and an improved ability to deal with others.”

Accordingly, we need to create in-person, digital-free circles for conversation, at least until the digital realm shows us it can offer an authentic space for such exchanges. In these conversations, students can seek first to understand the perceptions and premises of classmates; to ask clarifying questions before making assertions; and to then assert from first principles, acknowledge ambiguity, respect others in disagreement, live at times in doubt, and allow multiple interpretations to exist even when convictions are confirmed. This unsettling process forms gentlemen and gentlewomen who have a capacity to govern themselves and others.

Great schools are the crossroads of the human condition. They are messy and vulnerable places where you are known by and know the other and which cannot be relegated to the ash heap of efficiency. And we who seek to bring classical education back to public life argue that at the table of these conversations should be what G. K. Chesterton called the “democracy of the dead,” the great ideas and authors of the past. At GreatHearts, our students’ fresh thoughts and voices are brought into dialogue with forefathers and foremothers who wrestled with the same enduring human questions that face us today. It is a joy to see students escape the tyranny of the present and their own very real and pressing concerns to ponder the permanent aspects of the human condition, both good and bad, and to grapple with what has been, what is, and what might be possible.

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, said in his commencement address at MIT this spring: “I’m more concerned about people thinking like computers, without values or compassion or concern for the consequences. . . . That is what we need you to help us guard against. Because if science is a search in the darkness, then the humanities are a candle that shows us where we have been and the danger that lies ahead.”

I hope that we can soon find a new path forward, a synthesis between the digital and the conversational. It will be this next generation of students, philosopher kings and queens, to borrow a conceit from Plato, who will solve for what is authentically human amid the conditions they did not create.

This is part of a forum on screen time in school. For an alternate take, see “The Problem Is Wasted Time, not Screen Time,” by Tom Vander Ark.

Are today’s students spending too much time in front of computer screens? The more important question is: are students engaged in powerful learning experiences and, whenever possible, given voice and choice in what, how, and when they learn? Digital technology can powerfully facilitate this process, if thoughtful adults deploy it wisely. Otherwise, it can be mind-numbing, or worse.

The emerging generation of educational technology has the power to accelerate learning productivity in ways we can scarcely imagine. If we can ensure that students are connected to it through the help of teachers, a natural balance between online and offline experiences will develop.

Unfortunately, the performance of digital technology in the classroom proved disappointing early on, because its rapid influx into schools coincided with another dominant trend in U.S. public education: the national push for standards and accountability. Over the past 25 years, K–12 education has been shaped by these two forces, and neither has succeeded as well as hoped.

To step back for a moment: Under the leadership of Secretary of Education Richard Riley in the 1990s and his successors, Rod Paige, Margaret Spellings, and Arne Duncan, a bipartisan drive for better and more equitable student outcomes prevailed. Standards-based reform was fed by three factors: increased expectations for learning beyond high school, which led to a focus on college readiness for all; the availability of reliable and cheap measures of student proficiency in reading and math; and the push for teacher and school accountability.

The standards movement did reap some laudable results: higher expectations for students, a commitment to equity, more measurement of student learning, and educational practices informed by data. However, the movement also had unintended consequences. Most notably, it bred a narrow focus on testing and compliance, often driving out creativity and collaboration rather than encouraging them.

The mid-1990s also saw the rise of the Internet and the first generation of mobile technology, which quickly led to more (connected) computers in the classroom. People in and out of school—at least those with broadband access—entered the anyone-can-learn-anything era. However, the first quarter century of tech-enabled learning in the schools was dampened by standards-based reforms, which not only locked in teaching to grade-level cohorts of students but also valued seat time over learning, proficiency over growth, and consumption over production. We learned that good teaching matters but forgot how important it is to give students agency over their own learning. Instead of encouraging innovation with the newly available tech tools, accountability systems based on narrow and dated measures tended to clamp down on new approaches. Many teachers decried the idea of “teaching to the test,” the new standards, and in turn, what they saw as the depersonalization of schooling wrought by technology. “Standards” and “technology” were often painted with the same brush.

But we have entered a new era. Today’s ed-tech offers unprecedented opportunities to improve the ways in which we educate our young people. It’s time to lean into these opportunities rather than reject them, particularly in light of these five key innovations and trends:

Worldwide connectivity. As it grows more sophisticated by the month, your mobile device is a powerful hub of seamless, synced, and simple-to-use tools. According to the technology-research firm Gartner, 20 billion devices will be connected by 2020. Cheaper, faster devices and nearly limitless data storage are accelerating the pace of change in every aspect of life, including schooling.

Intimate computing. We’re moving from personal to “intimate” computing, in which you know the technology, and it knows you. Soon, nearly everyone will have a digital “personal assistant” that will manage priorities, prompt as well as respond, span the personal and the professional, and continuously learn about the user’s information needs.

For more than 20 years, we have used a screen and mouse to navigate our computing experience. That experience is quickly becoming an omni-channel one with multiple communication points, including voice, touch, movement, and (if Elon Musk is right) even the brain itself. With a proliferation of sensors in all aspects of life, a personal interface will move seamlessly between home, transport, school, and workplace. Human–machine symbiosis will drive the automation economy.

Experiential computing. In the next three to five years, students will be immersed in augmented and virtual reality all day, every day, asserts Seth Andrew, founder of the Democracy Prep charter schools in Harlem and White House adviser to President Barack Obama. With virtual-reality technology, users wear special goggles and headsets to experience a simulated environment, be it a rainforest, the mouth of a volcano, or a space station. Augmented reality (AR), in contrast, doesn’t block out the user’s environment but adds to it, for instance, by inserting an interactive hologram into the person’s field of vision. Andrew is bullish on the potential of these technologies to deliver content, especially in career education, world languages, and certain electives. While he may be overreaching in his prediction of “all day, every day,” both virtual and augmented reality have much to offer in the classroom—or wherever future learning takes place (see “Virtual Reality Disruption,” what next, Fall 2016).

Tech-facilitated personalized learning. Proprietary reading and math systems that automatically adjust to the learner’s performance are already in wide use in K–12 classrooms, while fully adaptive learning-management systems are gaining a foothold there and in career and technical education. New blended-learning models combine online and face-to-face activities to meet students where they are; help them move on when they’re ready; and expand access to electives, languages, and careers. Still in its early days, personalized learning shows great promise for K–12 education.

Competency and credentials. We live in an increasingly “show-what-you-know” world, where it matters less where you went to school and more what you know and can do. Micro-credentials are emerging as a new means of gauging content mastery (see “Competency-Based Learning for Teachers,” what next, Spring 2017). They are a digital form of certification that indicates when a person has demonstrated competency in a specific skill set. More and more, we will see such measures of competency replacing seat time as the indicator of academic progress.

With personalized and competency-based models, learning can happen (and be assessed or demonstrated) anytime, anywhere. For example, LRNG is an online, national network of community-based learning opportunities for young people, especially the underserved. Some states will extend portability of education funding to community organizations with the expansion of education savings accounts.

Getting Screen Time Right

Given these emergent forces in technology, how can educators, policy leaders, and parents best deploy ed-tech to advance student learning and growth? The key to getting screen time right, in my view, is to start by asking: What should young people know and be able to do? What kinds of experiences will help them develop important knowledge, skills,
and dispositions?

In addressing those questions, a new generation of schools is using models that combine the benefits of personalized learning—accurate diagnosis and individually paced content mastery—with the power of project-based learning—extended challenges that promote deeper-learning competencies such as critical thinking, working collaboratively, problem solving, and taking responsibility for one’s own learning. These new models blend learning activities—long and short, online and offline, individual and team, production and consumption, discipline-based and integrated—into a productive sequence of personalized learning experiences.

The nearly 200 schools in the nonprofit New Tech Network (90 percent of them district schools) use personalized learning to prepare students for extended and integrated projects that build student agency, collaboration, critical thinking, and communication skills (the four outcome areas assessed for every project). This thoughtful blend has resulted in high rates of high-school graduation, college enrollment, and college persistence.

Increasingly, schools are using online learning-management systems such as Brooklyn LAB Charter School’s Cortex and the Summit Learning platform (offered free to teacher teams that apply to Summit Public Schools) to deliver and organize custom playlists of activities for students and to allow educators to track students’ progress incrementally (see “Pacesetter in Personalized Learning,” features, Fall 2017). Such platforms often include comprehensive curricula, student project ideas, and assessments.

The most effective blended-learning models use the best available tools to create the most optimal learner experiences while keeping adult guidance and peer relationships foremost. “It’s not about the device, it’s about the access the device facilitates,” says David Haglund, school superintendent in Pleasanton, California. Haglund believes in purposeful interaction. Sometimes that takes place online, but often it happens face to face. He acknowledges that some learners prefer reading printed material and thinks schools should accommodate
that as well.

“What facilitates empowerment?” Haglund asks himself. “What provides access to resources on and off campus? Young people need tools to connect, collaborate, gather feedback, and engage with people,” including those working in fields of interest to students. When employed toward these ends, technology can make learning more social instead of less so.

For instance, when Haglund was superintendent in Santa Ana, his 4th graders visited Disney Studios in Burbank. They produced their own films, screened them at a downtown theater, and shared them with producers in Santa Monica. Haglund watched his students engage with the producers in a professional way and then stay in touch for a month.

With all the excitement around virtual-reality field trips such as Google Expeditions, the Pokémon Go craze points to an even larger opportunity for augmented-reality field trips. Researcher Christopher Dede of Harvard has been working for more than a decade on outdoor AR science; now, mobile technology and a new sensor-rich world are making this kind of experience widely accessible. AR field trips are just the beginning of learning with smart machines in ways that blend online with real-world learning: fitness sensors that prompt activity, digital tools that support more effective team collaboration, real-time translation that kindles cross-cultural dialogue, robotic toys that spur computational thinking, and mobile apps that promote and analyze print reading.

Parents and Teachers

Technology is an amplifier. It can make good parents, teachers, and experiences better—or it can have the opposite effect. Mobile devices, games, and social applications are potentially addictive and can lead to unproductive or even dangerous behaviors. Again, the effective use of ed-tech requires thoughtful management and oversight by teachers and parents. Caring adults also need to help young people develop positive self-regulation habits.

Appropriate limits are essential, too. For instance, very young children who are developing language and motor skills should have little or no access to screens. And of course, schools need to establish guidelines for cybersafety and -security. Students and parents should be required to sign an acceptable-use form, teachers should create a culture of acceptable use, and schools should offer classes to parents on how to supervise device use and be alert to possible problem behavior online.

Parents wrestle with countless decisions about their children’s education and learning. In choosing and advocating for the most powerful learning experiences for their kids, they might keep in mind the Nellie Mae Education Foundation’s definition of student-centered learning: that which is personalized and competency-based; that happens anytime, anywhere; and that encourages students to take ownership of their own learning. All of these features require productive access to digital learning tools—and thoughtful advice from teachers and parents.

Leaders can create cultures where it’s safe for teachers (and students) to iterate and learn. Schools can work with like-minded schools in networks to leverage learning models and tools. Professional learning can model the same blend of online and offline practices we want for students.

Lean In

It’s never been easier to code an app, start a business, wrangle a big data set, and apply powerful tools to address global challenges. Young people deserve learning experiences that will help them develop an innovation mindset and design-thinking skills that will enable them to flourish in the automation economy where they will work with smart machines. Today’s students are tomorrow’s inventors, engineers, teachers, artists, and leaders. They need more from their schools.

A 2015 survey by Marc Brackett of Yale University asked 22,000 high-school students how they felt when they were in school. Their top responses were “tired,” “stressed,” and “bored.” Without active engagement on the part of the student, learning stalls out. Rather than focusing on grades and test scores, students need opportunities to take on big issues, work with diverse teams, and produce innovations that will make their communities proud. Technology can help motivate and accelerate learning. It can help young people create and invent, launch social movements, and even contribute to solving global problems. That requires schools where young people are producers more than consumers, collaborators more than observers, game makers more than game players.

It’s time for us as teachers and parents to lean in rather than push back. More than ever, we need to be intentional about how and when young people use technology and make it productive time, not a waste of time.

This is part of a forum on screen time in school. For an alternate take, see “Putting Dialogue over Devices Shapes Mind and Character,” by Daniel Scoggin.

For decades, education technophiles have envisioned a future wherein gee-whiz devices and engaging digital applications whisk students away from the doldrums of traditional classroom instruction and into a fun world of beeping computers, self-paced lessons, and cloud-based collaboration.

That may yet come to pass—and at some outlier schools, is already here—but don’t be surprised if the true transformative power of education technology is most evident when it comes to something old-fashioned: basic education research. The declining cost and easy availability of substantial computing power may enable us finally to unlock the black box of the classroom, giving scholars and teachers much more insight into what is and isn’t working. Technology can do more than just keep students engaged; it can equip teachers, school and district leaders, and policymakers with the sort of insights and analytics that can help them make better decisions for students.

A Challenging Research Subject

Studying the actual behavior of teachers and students has always been a difficult and expensive proposition. The most respected approach involves putting lots of trained observers—often graduate students—in the back of classrooms. There, they typically watch closely and code various aspects of teaching and learning, or collect video, take it back to the lab, and spend innumerable hours coding it by hand.

This kind of methodology has helped the field gain significant insights, such as the importance of teachers asking open-ended questions, and how better to evaluate teachers’ practice, à la the Gates-funded Measures of Effective Teaching initiative. But it’s incredibly labor-intensive, costs gobs of money, and thus may not be practical.

Alternatives to observational studies are much less satisfying. The most common is to survey teachers about their classroom practices or curricula, as is done with the background questionnaires given to teachers as part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Though useful, these types of surveys have big limitations, as they rely on teachers to be honest and accurate reporters of their own practice—which is tough even with positive intentions. It’s not easy to remember what you taught months ago, and teachers might also try to tell researchers what they think they want to hear or choose responses that cast themselves in a positive light. Another approach, asking teachers to keep logs detailing their work, such as how they spend time, is somewhat more reliable, but still far from perfect. It is also time-consuming, thus stealing precious minutes and hours from teachers’ most important work: helping students learn.

Not surprisingly, the research base on the real stuff of education—instructional practices, homework assignments, the curriculum as it is actually taught—is remarkably thin. Scholars have found easier, cheaper, and more fruitful yields from mining administrative data sets, usually stemming from compliance reports at the school or district level, than from collecting detailed information about what’s happening in real classrooms in real time. This has left the field, and policymakers, with a huge blind spot about what teachers and kids are doing, and what might or might not be working.

“Machine Learning” to Track Student Learning

Enter the machines. What if we didn’t need to have graduate students crouching in the back of classrooms in order to catalog the play-by-play of classroom instruction? What if, instead, we could capture the action with a video camera or, better yet from a privacy perspective, a microphone? And what if we could gather that information not just for an hour or two, but all day, 180 days a year, in a big national sample of schools? And what if we could then use the magic of machine learning to have a computer figure out what the reams of data all mean?

This possibility is much closer than you might imagine, thanks to a group of professors who are teaching computers to capture and code classroom activities. Martin Nystrand (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Sidney D’Mello (University of Notre Dame), Sean Kelly (University of Pittsburgh), and Andrew Olney (University of Memphis) are interested in helping teachers learn how to ask better questions, as research has long demonstrated that high-quality questioning can lead to better engagement and higher student achievement. They also want to show teachers examples of good and bad questions. But putting live humans in hundreds of classrooms, watching lessons unfold while coding teachers’ questions and students’ responses, would be prohibitively costly in both time and money.

So with funding from the Institute of Educational Sciences, this team of researchers decided to teach a computer how to do the coding itself. They start by capturing high-quality audio with a noise-canceling wireless headset microphone worn by the teacher. Another mike is propped on the teacher’s desk or blackboard, where it records students’ speech, plus ambient noise of the classroom. They take the audio files and run them through several speech-recognition programs, producing a transcript. Then their algorithm goes to work, looking at both the transcript and the audio files (which have markers for intonation, tempo, and more) to match codes provided by human observers.

The computer program has gotten quite good at detecting different types of activities—lectures vs. group discussion vs. seatwork, for example—and is starting to be able to also differentiate between good questions and bad. To be sure, D’Mello told me, humans are still more reliable coders, especially for ambiguous cases. But the computers are getting better and better, and good enough that, with sufficient data, they can already produce some very reliable findings at a fraction of the cost of a people-powered study.

It’s even easier, of course, if the underlying instructional data are digital to begin with. That’s the specialty of Ryan Baker, associate professor of teaching, learning, and leadership at the University of Pennsylvania. He and his team examine the “digital traces” of students’ interactions with digital applications—their key strokes, pauses, and answers when working on online math programs, for example. They then build algorithms to make sense of them. Their research starts by asking humans to watch students at work; their insights are fed into their computer models, which learn to replicate the human coding with enough time and data.

Such research has already borne fruit. Baker’s team and its computer have shown that more students become bored, then disengaged, when the material is too hard than when it is too easy. Short periods of confusion and frustration are good; long periods indicate that the student has given up. And some “off task” time—as long as a minute or two—is OK, as students tend to come back refreshed and ready to tackle whatever they are working on. Thus, teachers should allow kids some breathing room rather than cracking the whip the second they see students get distracted.

Putting Data to Work

This is incredibly useful information, the kind that can help teachers improve their practice and boost the efficiency and effectiveness of students’ time in class. Imagine if such studies—both of traditional classroom practices and the digital variety—became much more common. Large national studies like NAEP could complement teacher surveys with the collection of audio, every day, all day, in a big sample of schools. Plus, they could capture the digital activity of students, and ask teachers to scan student assignments and tests so those could be analyzed as well.

We would finally have an accurate picture of what’s actually being taught in U.S. schools. And if we combine that with state administrative and achievement data, and put it in the hands of competent analysts, we’d have a better way to examine which teacher practices, curricula, use of time, and on and on, are related to improved student learning. We could see whether teachers whose students make the largest gains really do make greater use of the concrete practices that Doug Lemov describes in Teach Like a Champion, for example. for example. And we could determine whether and where there are equity gaps in effective teaching, the level of challenge of student assignments, and much else that might be addressed in order to narrow the achievement gap.

Big hurdles remain, to be sure. The biggest aren’t technological, but political: Chronicling classrooms in minute detail will not go over well with all teachers, even if researchers promise that the data will be used for research purposes only. Nor will privacy-minded parents be thrilled; security protocols will need to be established that give everyone involved confidence that the audio recordings won’t fall into the wrong hands. And scholars will need to be careful not to make causal claims based on data sets that aren’t subject to experimental designs; the sheer quantity of data can’t make up for the lack of controls and random assignment. Big data alone can be a boon to “hypothesis generation,” but we’ll still need traditional studies in which teachers are asked to adopt new practices to learn whether the practices work.

Still, the power duo of big data and machine learning will enable us to build a research enterprise that actually improves classroom instruction, regardless of how traditional or technology-infused the instruction might be. That’s enough to make a computer smile.

Mike Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and executive editor of Education Next.

The current generation of American public-school students has grown up in the era of centralized, standardized data. Anyone curious about how local schools were doing could look at pass rates on annual exams in math and reading, the foundation of federally mandated, test-based accountability.

New rules are poised to change this system. The federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), written to shrink the federal government’s reach, enables states to embrace a more holistic approach to quality control. Test scores are still important, but so are attendance, school climate, graduation rates, and other non-academic measures. As states redesign their accountability systems, the challenge is how to best measure, report, and utilize this information to improve student learning.

One industry is offering itself up for the job: accreditation. For more than a century, schools have hired nonprofit accreditors to determine whether their operations and outcomes meet external quality standards, thereby earning an accreditation seal of approval. While accreditation is better known at institutions of higher education, where it is required for schools to participate in federal student-aid programs, it is also practiced, though little-understood, at K–12 public, public charter, and private schools.

How common, consequential, and rigorous is K–12 accreditation? How do accreditation reviews work? And do they offer a more holistic, and potentially more useful, approach to quality control for public and private schools?

For the most part, hardly anyone knows. An Education Next review of policies and practices across the United States found broad misunderstanding, uneven public reporting, and unpredictable variation in requirements and consequences.

In states like Georgia and Missouri, accreditation status makes headlines and has dramatically affected students’ trajectories and the economic fortunes of their hometowns. In states like Florida, it is neither required nor reported to the public. States such as Colorado and Virginia accredit districts themselves, while Michigan and Wyoming, among others, require districts to earn the status through an approved agency to remain in good standing. The review processes range from self-administered checklists to in-depth, in-person audits. And among schools and districts that seek the status, an estimated 2 percent are denied the credential.

After flying under the policy radar for more than a century, accreditation agencies are at an inflection point. Will they find themselves rendered irrelevant under ESSA—or at the center of the next generation of school accountability?

The Mystery of K–12 Accreditation

Defining accreditation and how it fits into the nation’s K–12 schools is a patience-inducing exercise.

“The education of the general public and the education of legislators to understand what we do and how we do it and why we do it is ongoing,” said Mark Elgart, chief executive of AdvancED, the nation’s largest accreditor. “I’ve been in this 22 years, and it’s just as prevalent today—we are constantly trying to meet that challenge.”

Trade associations, unions, and think tanks surveyed for this story don’t track the imprimatur. Even academics who study education reform are unsure what it truly stands for.
“I honestly don’t think most people are aware of it,” said Rebecca Jacobsen, an associate professor at Michigan State University who researches how accreditation fits into states’ accountability systems. “It’s been off the radar.”

The credential boasts a storied history. High schools started seeking accreditation through regional nonprofits in the late 1800s to provide colleges with a way to determine if their students were equipped for higher education. These reviews counted the number of library books and degrees held by teachers, among other inputs, rather than outputs like student test scores.

Today, there are four major accrediting agencies: AdvancED, the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools Commissions on Elementary and Secondary Schools, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, and the New England Association of Schools and Colleges. Some conduct reviews nationwide, instead of primarily serving schools and districts in states in their geographic region, which was how they operated historically.

The reviews have expanded to encompass detailed documentation and data analysis, days of onsite visits, in-depth meetings to chart progress and discuss future goals, and a culminating report detailing strengths, weaknesses, and a school’s or district’s final accreditation status. Onsite reviewers volunteer their time, but districts typically cover their room and board, and may pay a reviewing fee as well. Districts also invest hundreds of hours to complete the self-assessments that are part of the process and pay annual dues to remain in good standing. At AdvancED, for example, an accreditation review costs $1,950 plus expenses for reviewers, and membership fees cost about $900 per year.

K–12 accreditation differs from that of higher-education institutions in terms of both transparency and consequences. The U.S. Department of Education requires that postsecondary schools be accredited in order to participate in federal student-aid programs, and course credits from unaccredited institutions are often not transferable to accredited schools. There are no federal accreditation requirements at the K–12 level, where schools must meet state standards for performance.

Education Next surveyed all 50 state departments of education to determine the scope and importance of the practice, including reviewing information published on state web sites and by conducting telephone and email interviews. We obtained information for 40 states; 10 only provided partial responses to our repeated inquiries about the practice, and four of those 10 did not provide us with any information at all.

In most states, accreditation currently stands apart from accountability—the status is not relevant or included in public report cards that detail student achievement, growth, graduation rates, and indicators of postsecondary and career readiness. Accreditation also measures different aspects of a district or school, in addition to student performance, such as parent communication and participation, improvement plans, leadership effectiveness, curriculum and instruction quality, student mentoring, use of technology, and professional development.

About 20 states require all public schools to be accredited; none of the states that responded to our inquiries requires accreditation of all private schools. In states like Arizona and Illinois, schools aren’t required to maintain accreditation, while in others, like Idaho and Kentucky, schools and districts work with outside agencies to conduct in-depth reviews that require lengthy documentation and take at least 18 months to complete. Some states only seek reviews for schools or districts identified as failing by state accountability systems.

Many private and religious schools opt to earn accreditation as a marketing tool for parents, though for the most part, this information is not widely tracked. While some pursue mainstream accreditation through the major agencies, others seek approval from smaller associations focused on a particular educational approach, such as Christian or Montessori schools. While rare, losing accreditation can be fatal for a private school, said Elgart of AdvancED. Without it, many parents shy away from enrolling their children, fearful that their credits or diplomas may be meaningless after they leave the school.

Public-school parents might want to check their districts’ status as well; Elgart estimated that one in 10 U.S. high schools is not accredited, which can make for an unpleasant surprise once students attempt to enroll in college. In nine states, including South Dakota, Tennessee, Indiana, Michigan, and Idaho, state-awarded scholarships are limited to students from accredited schools. Some colleges and universities, such as both the University of California and California State University systems, require a diploma from an accredited high school, as do various state-based scholarship programs and some military-enlistment programs. In a little-known twist, students applying to colleges and universities out of state can also face roadblocks if their high school isn’t accredited by one of the four regional accrediting agencies.

“We get dozens of these stories every spring from angry parents,” Elgart said.

While there are more than 800 citations in state laws recognizing the nation’s accrediting agencies as gatekeepers for scholarships and college admissions, there is no definitive catalogue of what individual states require, much less what is required by colleges and universities after students graduate and want to enroll. The nation’s university associations and trade groups don’t track it. Neither does the federal government.

Accreditors on the Ground

But what does accreditation look like in action? To find out, we went to North Carolina to see what the process entails.

On a rainy April Sunday, AdvancED volunteers met with leaders from North Carolina’s Durham Public Schools (DPS) at a suburban hotel. It was a long time coming: Jill Hall-Freeman, the district’s executive director of leadership and professional development, had spent a year orchestrating an exhaustive self-assessment required by the reviewing agency before the group arrived. The outline of AdvancED’s expectations alone was 38 pages long; the documentation DPS provided in response spanned more than 700 pages.

But the work was crucial. North Carolina parents expect their kids’ schools to obtain the guarantee, Hall-Freeman said, even though the state doesn’t require it.

The preparation “was really hard and really scary,” she said. “As a district, it’s the standard in North Carolina to be accredited. You want the stamp of approval.”

Over dinner in a pedestrian conference room, DPS administrators told AdvancED reviewers of their struggles to educate students in a 299-square-mile county with the state’s second-highest violent-crime rate. Two-thirds of the district’s 33,000 or so students qualify for free or reduced-price meals. Some 47 percent are black, 30 percent are Hispanic, 18 percent are white, and 2 percent are Asian. Equity is a top concern.

District leaders acknowledged that their progress in raising student test scores was incremental, at best, and that they still have far to go. In 2015–16, third-grade reading proficiency fell to 45.7 percent from 48.8 percent two years earlier, while eighth-grade reading proficiency was flat at 39.7 percent compared to 39.9 percent two years earlier. There were pockets of progress, they said, with some schools posting marked gains.

They also noted persistent achievement gaps between children of engineers and university professors and students from working-class families. Gaps by students’ race remain significant: district-wide, in 2015–16 about 78.6 percent of white students passed end-of-course exams in math, reading, and science, compared to 34.8 percent of black students and 37.1 percent of Hispanic students.

Still, there were improvements to share. The four-year graduation rate climbed to 82.1 percent and the number of suspensions decreased. DPS adopted a new student code of conduct in 2016 in response to racial disparities in suspensions. “We’ve accomplished a lot in the last five years,” Hall-Freeman told the group.
After the administrators left, AdvancED reviewers settled in for the first of several lengthy discussions about whether Hall-Freeman’s statement was backed up by parent and student surveys, the district improvement plan, mental health program reports, grading policies, professional development plans, teacher turnover summaries, state test results, and scores of other documents in a voluminous database. Lead evaluator Tom Jones, a retired middle-school principal and former state director for AdvancED’s Kentucky operation, summed up the team’s challenge: “We’re doing our best to understand DPS and it’s not easy; it’s very complex.”

In the two days that followed, reviewers visited elementary, middle, and high schools chosen by Jones. The annual teacher turnover rate at DPS is 20 percent, and about half of the teachers in the schools they visited were in the first four years of their career.

From school to school, students’ performance on state tests varied widely. One elementary school principal said that students at the C-rated school were “far smarter than the numbers show—they know how to do things, but little things mess them up, like reading over a word, or a comprehension error in math.”

At a district high school, the principal noted that the proficiency rate had risen to 25 percent from as low as 17 percent in the previous year. “You may ask—with their scores low and graduation rates high—are they earning their education? I would say, yes they are.” However, the challenge of capturing the attention of high schoolers who perform years below their grade level quickly become evident in the classrooms that Jones visited. In a ninth-grade math class, about half of the 17 students were asleep with their heads resting on their desks as a teacher flashed slides on a white screen that detailed how to use the distributive property to simplify and evaluate expressions. Only four took notes.

“The kids are not the problem in DPS,” Jones said. “We saw some ineffective classrooms. We also saw some strong teaching—but it wasn’t consistent.”

The Verdict

Had DPS earned the right to remain accredited? Does a district with wide achievement gaps and napping high-school students meet minimum quality standards? Overall, less than half of Durham students met North Carolina performance standards in reading, math, and science in 2015–16. But AdvancED reviewers found some positives in those school visits and more than 700 pages of documentation.

Ultimately, DPS retained its accreditation. Reviewers applauded administrators for embracing diversity, improving graduation rates, providing choice, charting Advanced Placement test results slightly above other North Carolina systems, and maintaining strong mental health partnerships, leadership development practices, and community support. They also called out district challenges, including teacher turnover, support for minority and refugee students, and communication with families. The team recommended the district improve its collection and analysis of interim student performance data, establish and enforce expectations for student learning and classroom assessment, and ask principals to consistently monitor curriculum delivery and differentiation. All schools should also ensure students are “well known” by at least one school employee.

“One of the things that AdvancED highlighted—and this is very important—was that our self-assessment aligned with their findings,” said Superintendent Bert L’Homme, who is planning to retire after three years at DPS. “We’re on the right path, and we have the people and the tools that we need to succeed.”

But is that the right measure of quality? Why accredit a district where proficiency rates are so low? Is “getting better” the right standard?

Elgart of AdvancED responded that he “always gets that question—accreditation is not a benchmark of just student performance, it’s a lot more complicated than that.”

“Where there is the highest concentration of poverty you will find the lowest-performing districts,” he added. “We are going to keep pushing Durham. They’ve made improvements. They are not going backward. We pull accreditation when districts go backward or get worse.”

Whether improvements come quickly enough for students is another question.

“Current accreditation systems are set up to be honest brokers about school quality and set a low bar for what that looks like,” said Chad Aldeman, a principal at Bellwether Education Partners. “There might be long processes schools have to go through, but at the end of the day almost every school gets approved.”

Losing the Credential

Despite the relatively long odds, districts can lose their accreditation. It happened in 2008 in Clayton County, Georgia, and “it was devastating,” said former school board member Charlton Bivins.

“Just let me tell you how powerful the words ‘Clayton County has lost accreditation’ were in terms of the image of the county,” he said. “The recession coupled with the loss of accreditation caused some of our cities to almost go bankrupt. Businesses still don’t come. We have a mall that’s basically empty.”

But the loss also had unexpected effects, he said. The district regained its accreditation in 2009 in part by addressing the bureaucratic dysfunction that cost it the status. As part of that process, the district rewrote its mission statement and re-oriented staff toward that vision. It also sought out new supporters in the form of local legislators and business leaders, held hundreds of hours of public meetings, took out ads in local media, and communicated directly with parents about efforts to articulate and grow a more productive culture. After several years, administrators charted increases in both enrollment and graduation rates.

“As the school district goes, so does the community,” Bivins said. Previously, “the mayors and city councilmen were just worried about stuff in their individual districts—now it’s just the opposite: everybody is in everybody else’s business.”

In Missouri, accreditation losses have also caused surprising outcomes. State regulators pulled accreditation from several St. Louis–area districts in the last decade after years of poor performance. Under a little-known state law, students in the Normandy and Riverview school districts were then eligible to apply for a transfer to an accredited district—a contentious practice that was upheld by the state supreme court in 2013.

“Speaking for me and my son, it transcended our lives,” said Paul Davis, a taxi driver whose teenage son, Robert, transferred from the Normandy School District to the Francis Howell School District, commuting 50 miles round trip each day. He graduated high school on time and now attends Washington University on a science scholarship. “It was the best thing that happened to us in nine years.”

Robert was one of more than 2,000 students who fled the unaccredited Normandy and Riverview Gardens systems in 2013 and 2014 to attend suburban schools. The transfer was contentious on both sides: while many of these students’ academic prospects improved, $23 million in per-pupil state funding followed them, leaving their former classmates with fewer resources, according to James Shuls, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri-St Louis. In addition, the plan to accept transfer students from low-income, predominantly black communities at mostly white suburban schools was, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported, “met with acrimony.” Normandy High School was soon in the national headlines for another reason: the fatal police shooting in nearby Ferguson of Michael Brown, who had graduated from the school days before.

In 2014, after policy adjustments by the state school board, the Francis Howell School District announced it would no longer take transfer students, raising questions about the fate of students who had already transferred out of Normandy. After a series of court challenges, the transfer program survived and continues today.

Still, Davis wasn’t taking any chances. He was so worried Robert would be turned away at Francis Howell, he rented an apartment in St. George County so his son could remain at his new school through the end of senior year.

“I didn’t want him to miss a day of that education out there, not one hour—I saw the change after that first year,” said Davis. “I was hoping and praying we would get all four years, and when they said they would take it back, I said, ‘Heck, no. If we have to remortgage our house, or sell our car, whatever, we’ve got to stay in that school.’ ”

Transferring to a better school is one way to get a better education. But did the pressure to regain accreditation actually improve teaching and learning in Normandy and the other districts that lost their status? The Normandy School District, which was taken over by the Missouri Department of Education in 2014 and renamed the Normandy Schools Collaborative, remains unaccredited.

However, in the past year, the state has reaccredited St. Louis Public Schools. That was mostly celebrated as a good-news story, but some researchers say the accreditation formula includes so many factors that it does not place enough weight on student performance. A majority of St. Louis Public Schools students scored below proficient in math and English, but higher scores in the attendance and graduation-rate categories made up for poor results in academic achievement, Emily Stahly, a research assistant at the Show-Me Institute, found in an analysis earlier this year.

“Half the schools in St. Louis are failing, yet they are still receiving a stamp of approval from the state,” she said. The accreditation process “obfuscates what’s really happening with student performance—the kids are not actually learning.”

State officials disagree. The improvement process prescribed by the state has led “to a level of quality here that’s the best we’ve ever had,” said Chris Neale, assistant commissioner for the state Office of Quality Schools. In 2016, he noted, Education Week’s annual “Quality Counts” report found Missouri “did better than most at ensuring students from poverty are making better progress.” The report ranked Missouri’s overall state grade as 31st out of 50.

A Tool for Improvement?

Even as a debate rages over their effectiveness, accreditors are angling to be visible players in the next iteration of school accountability—as a matter of both relevance and survival. States are required to develop accountability plans under ESSA to receive their share of federal Title I funding. AdvancED is working with 10 states to incorporate its metrics into their review systems. The Middle States Association is also reaching out to states to propose similar ideas.

“I tell schools the reason you want to go through an accreditation process is it gives you a focused and organized way to develop an improvement process,” said Henry Cram, president of Middle States, who estimated that about 2 percent of reviewed schools do not earn the credential. “A lot of people in leadership don’t know how to do that.”
A recent survey by the Western Association found 97.9 percent of the 710 California high-school principals who responded agreed the accreditation process had positive effects on student learning. “Every school is a work in progress—even if they get the highest rating,” said the organization’s president, Fred Van Leuven.

How those ratings are reported to the public is a matter of debate, however. States are choosing whether to design accountability systems that encompass details, such as dashboards, versus those that aim for clarity, such as letter grades (“How Should States Design Their Accountability Systems?” forum, Winter 2017). And critics say the accreditation process lacks the transparency that current accountability systems provide. Unlike state-mandated report cards, final reports from regional accreditors can be difficult to find. Sunshine laws in some states require districts and schools to make them publicly available. The agencies themselves leave it up to school administrators to determine if they should be released.

That’s not the case elsewhere, said Craig Jerald, a Washington, D.C.-based education consultant who has studied how accreditation in the U.S. compares to England’s K–12 inspection program. “The first principle for accreditation is transparency,” he said. “In England’s system, not only can you go to a web site and pull up any report over time, they are very precise and very frank and to the point about what is good and what can be improved at any particular school.”

Experts also point to concerns about objectivity and conflict of interest in the current U.S. accreditation process. England’s national inspections agency employs a staff of full-time professionals who are trained to apply a comprehensive rubric of detailed questions. By contrast, in the United States, the volunteer teams of educators sent by regional agencies to review schools might go easy on them because they know their own school could receive a similar appraisal in the future, said Michigan State’s Jacobsen. “That fundamentally changes the way you operate—when you are thinking ‘this is going to be me next,’ you are less likely to be too harsh or too critical,” she said.

Regional accreditors also fund themselves through annual dues paid by schools and districts they accredit. These agencies’ chief administrators said the amounts are too small to sway the opinions of evaluators who, as volunteers, have no financial stake in the outcome.

“We are doing this with volunteers who are joining our organization and paying dues—it’s an in-and-out for us—we raise $2.5 million a year and we spend $2.5 million a year,” said Middle States’ Cram. “There are literally thousands of people involved in the decisionmaking process—it minimizes the conflict of interest as people making the decisions are not deriving financial benefit.”

But if accreditation becomes more central to states’ accountability plans, could the reviews continue to rely on the good will and donated time of volunteers? The complexity of the process and the attendant demands on volunteers may ultimately provide the biggest challenge to substantive, holistic, and consequential school-quality reviews.

“It’s going to be costly—the bottom line might drive this,” said Jacobsen of Michigan State. “It’s a lot easier to administer a test and collect data than it is to hire a team of experts and go out and do accreditation work.”

Jennifer Oldham is an independent reporter based in Denver.

Supporters of school vouchers had hoped that the time was ripe for the Supreme Court to deliver a death blow to Blaine Amendments—the provisions in at least 37 state constitutions that forbid public aid to sectarian institutions. But in ruling on Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer this past June, the court declined to strike that blow. The court’s reasoning, however, does suggest that recent state-court decisions that rely on Blaine Amendments are unconstitutional because they discriminate against religious schools.

Trinity Lutheran began in 2012 when Missouri excluded the church’s preschool from the state’s scrap-tire grant program, which helps nonprofits use recycled tires to make playgrounds safer. Citing Missouri’s Blaine Amendment, the state Department of Natural Resources informed the church that it was ineligible for the program. The church sued in federal court and lost twice before the Supreme Court stepped in.

The court voted 7–2 in favor of Trinity Lutheran. The broad majority included four conservatives; Justice Anthony Kennedy’s swing vote; plus two liberals, Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan. In contrast, Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion was narrow. He never mentioned Blaine Amendments and, in a footnote, explicitly limited the decision’s reach to discrimination “based on religious identity with respect to playground resurfacing.” He also distinguished between religious status and religious use, noting that Missouri discriminated against Trinity Lutheran simply because it was a church not because of what it proposed to do with the old tires. In a concurring opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch contended that this distinction is unsustainable and, at any rate, should not matter under the free exercise clause: Religious people must be able to act on their beliefs; that’s what “exercise” means.

The court might soon have a chance to decide Trinity Lutheran’s reach. The day after announcing its decision in that case, the court vacated and remanded Blaine Amendment cases from New Mexico and Colorado, to be reconsidered in light of Trinity Lutheran. Applying even Roberts’s narrow reasoning should lead to different judicial outcomes and possibly more appeals to the Supreme Court.

New Mexico Association of Nonpublic Schools v. Moses involves a state textbook-lending program for public and private schools, both secular and sectarian. Lower courts upheld the program but the state supreme court struck it down, noting that the state Blaine Amendment forbids using “any” funds to support “any sectarian, denominational or private school.” Under Trinity Lutheran, this position could be unconstitutional. The religious schools were singled out for exclusion simply because of their religious character not based on fears of how the textbooks (all of which are secular in nature) would be used.

Potentially more important is Douglas County School District v. Taxpayers for Public Education. In 2015, Colorado’s supreme court struck down Douglas County’s voucher program, saying that “a school district may not aid religious schools,” and, in the process, disparaged the program as a “recruitment tool” for religious institutions. Once again, even Roberts’s narrow reasoning in Trinity Lutheran could compel Colorado’s supreme court to reverse course. Douglas County requires that sectarian schools accepting vouchers must let students opt out of religious services, making any distinction between religious status and use less relevant. More importantly, the Colorado court required discrimination against parents simply because of their religious preferences. Parents who wanted to send their child to a religious school suffered on account of their religious status.

However, electoral politics could forestall Colorado’s supreme court from reversing itself on vouchers. Currently, Douglas County’s school board is split 4–3 in favor of the voucher program. Anti-voucher candidates won all three open board seats in 2015, and the pro-voucher members’ terms expire in November. If at least one anti-voucher candidate wins, the board will likely end the program and the case. The state supreme court would then dismiss it as moot. Colorado has seen vicious attacks on pro-reform school boards the past four years, with anti-reform advocates resorting to vulgarities, obscene gestures, and physical intimidation. Expect more of the same in Douglas County.

A final confrontation between Blaine Amendments and the First Amendment will require a live appeal of a decision that strikes down a voucher program by invoking a Blaine Amendment. If the anti-voucher forces succeed in Douglas County this November, that showdown will again be delayed. However, the substantial court majority in Trinity Lutheran suggests that, when such an appeal does reach the Supreme Court, there will almost certainly be four justices willing to hear it.

Joshua Dunn is professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs.