Big transitions are underway throughout American education. A new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, has drawn to a close the era of No Child Left Behind. Thirty of the 50 state school chiefs—those charged with implementing the new law—have assumed their posts since 2014. With baby boomers retiring, the nation’s educator workforce is turning over at an unprecedented clip; there are now more teachers in their first year than at any other experience level. In a few short months, a presidential administration that has pursued arguably the most ambitious national school-reform agenda in U.S. history will be replaced by … Heaven only knows.

Here at Education Next, we are in the midst of a transition of our own. Our founding editor-in-chief, Paul E. Peterson, who has steered the journal on a steady course since its 2001 launch, has decided it is time to hand over the reins. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education, Paul has clearly made his mark as a political scientist and education scholar. Yet the launch of Education Next and its success over nearly two decades may be his most enduring legacy. As his successor, I will do my best to make that so.

In the journal’s inaugural issue, the editors of Education Next announced their dual commitment to “readability and scholarly integrity”—qualities that too often seem incompatible. To Paul fell the task of proving that a journal on education policy could achieve both. Fortunately, he possesses unique editorial gifts: the vision to detect angels hidden within the marble of even the most disjointed manuscripts, and the discernment to see when more polished submissions conceal evidentiary or logical flaws. Equally important has been his sheer devotion to ensuring a high-quality final product. Rarely over the past 16 years has he been without a stack of page proofs filled with painstakingly entered edits.

I step into the role of editor-in-chief with some hesitation, having seen up close the energy Paul has devoted to the job. But I take confidence from the talent and dedication of the editorial team he has assembled, and from the fact that Paul himself will remain active as the journal’s senior editor.

A second key asset that I inherit is a large and growing audience, both in hard copy and especially online. It is to you, readers, that we editors are ultimately accountable. Please don’t be shy in letting us know how we are doing.

What can you expect from Education Next going forward? As always, you will find vigorous coverage of and debate over the defining policy issues facing American education. Regardless of your views on those issues, you can expect them to be challenged. You will find more content presented in new and different formats, ranging from an increased number of web-only articles and interactive graphics, to our recently launched podcast, to live events. And, with evidence mounting that the challenges facing American education reach beyond the K–12 level, we will strategically expand our coverage of higher education as well.

Education Next was founded on the belief that “bold change is needed” in American education. That was true in 2001 and remains so today. The journal’s mission has been to serve as an independent voice, presenting “worthy research, sound ideas, and responsible arguments” to help steer the system in new directions.

At this time of transitions for both the journal and the sector it covers, carrying out that mission feels as important as ever. I am honored to have the opportunity, along with our entire team, to pursue it.

—Martin R. West

New York City’s public hearings on closing schools for poor performance often featured passionate testimony, shouting from the audience, and parents and teachers waving signs that read “Save Our Schools” and “Stop School Closures.” The educational improvement tactic of last resort almost always triggers protests—similar scenes have played out in Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia in recent years.

Closing schools is clearly controversial. But does it work?

We found a unique opportunity to study performance-based high-school closures in New York City, which closed 44 low-performing high schools from 2000 to 2014. The closures were part of a sweeping and interconnected set of secondary-school reforms introduced by former mayor Michael Bloomberg and chancellor Joel Klein, which also included opening more than 200 new small, themed high schools and extending high school choice to all students throughout the district. By implementing these changes together, they hoped to eliminate dropout factories, improve educational options available to students who had been historically assigned to failing schools by virtue of where they lived, and raise graduation rates. After they were slated for closure, high schools would stop accepting new students and gradually phase out as students transferred elsewhere, graduated, or dropped out over the next three years.

During the next decade, graduation rates in New York City rose dramatically. Between 2003 and 2011, for example, on-time graduation rates increased from 51 percent to 69 percent, and college enrollment rates kept pace with the increasing number of high school graduates. Still, closure decisions remained unpopular. Parents and teachers complained about instability and the loss of neighborhood institutions. Lawsuits filed by the United Federation of Teachers and the NAACP alleged that the closures were carelessly orchestrated and would do students harm. Critics claimed that Bloomberg and Klein were primarily interested in weakening teachers unions, not improving student achievement.

Much has been written about the controversy surrounding performance-based school closures, but there has been no rigorous assessment of their impact on student achievement. Does the closure process harm students who are enrolled in a school while it is being phased out? Are future students better-off because a low-performing option has been eliminated?

To explore these questions, we studied the 29 high school closures begun between 2003 and 2009 in New York City to determine the degree to which a closure affected a range of student outcomes, including graduation rates, mobility, attendance, and academic performance. We analyzed outcomes for 20,600 affected students: 9th-grade students who chose to stay after a closure announcement, 9th graders who transferred elsewhere, and rising 9th graders required to attend different high schools because of a closure.

We found that for students already enrolled in a school that was later closed, the phase-out process did not have a systematic impact, positive or negative, on their attendance or academic performance. This held true whether they remained at the school throughout the phase-out process or transferred to another high school. However, we found that for rising 9th-grade students, the closure of their most likely high-school option led them to enroll in somewhat higher-performing high schools and substantially improved their likelihood of graduating with a New York State Regents diploma.

While our analysis provides the most reliable evidence to date on the overall impact of the closure process on student outcomes, we cannot identify the precise mechanisms that explain closures’ impact or lack thereof. More research is needed to understand how school closures affect factors like teacher performance, student and staff morale, and family engagement over time. Our findings, however, suggest that high school closures in New York City during this particular period produced meaningful benefits for future students while not harming, at least academically, the students most immediately affected by them.

Which Schools Were Shut?

Before analyzing whether school closures had a positive effect on student outcomes, we first wanted to know: Were the high schools designated for closure really the lowest-performing high schools in New York City? The official criteria for performance-based closures were fluid, and officials from the New York City Department of Education faced criticism that closure decisions were opaque and unregulated.

To answer this question, we analyzed ten indicators of student performance at the 322 New York City schools that enrolled 9th-grade students for at least four years between 1999 and 2008. The ten indicators were: 9th-grade attendance rates; rates of college readiness at the end of each grade (as measured by the number of students on track to earn a Regents diploma as opposed to a less-rigorous “local” diploma); the number of credits earned and Regents exams passed by grade 12; dropout and transfer rates; graduation rates; and rates of receiving a Regents diploma. Then, we averaged data over the two- to four-year period prior to closure announcements and created a performance index that ranked schools.

We found that the 29 schools designated for closure were consistently among the lowest-performing high schools in New York City during the years studied (Figure 1). None of these schools were ranked above the 20th percentile in the district at the time of the closure decision, and a majority were ranked in the bottom 5 percent. All of them were ranked in the bottom 5 percent during at least one of the four years leading up to the closure decision. They posted especially poor graduation rates: less than 40 percent of students at closure schools graduated within four years, compared to citywide averages of about 60 percent during those years.

We also analyzed the demographic and performance characteristics of incoming 9th-grade students during those years at all 322 schools. Notably, we found that the schools identified for closure served similar proportions of low-income and special-needs students compared to other high schools across the city (Figure 2). However, based on students’ 8th-grade test scores and attendance rates, they enrolled higher concentrations of low-performing and chronically absent students. The closure schools also had a much higher concentration of students who were older than the typical student for their grade (indicating that they may have been retained in a prior grade).

In light of these differences, it is possible that the poor outcomes at closure schools reflected students’ incoming readiness rather than the schools’ effectiveness at ensuring student success. To test this, we made a second set of comparisons that adjust for differences in the background characteristics and prior performance of incoming students. We found that about half of the difference in student outcomes in schools slated for closure and the broader sample of schools can be explained by differences in incoming students’ demographic characteristics, absenteeism, and achievement in middle school. Therefore, substantial performance gaps remain between the groups of schools, even after accounting for the differences in the students they served, suggesting that struggling students were less likely to succeed in the closure schools than they were in other schools throughout the city.

The evidence indicates that the schools slated for closure in New York City were failing many of their students. However, our analysis also revealed a group of other high schools that exhibited similarly poor performance and enrolled similarly low-achieving students—but were not selected for closure. In each year we studied, we found between 10 and 29 schools where performance was at or below those identified for closure. All of these schools were ranked in the bottom 10 percent of schools, and all but eight were ranked in the bottom 5 percent. It is unclear why they were not closed.

These schools—similar to the closure schools except that they were not scheduled for closure—serve as a comparison group for the analyses that follow.

The Phase-Out Process

New York City opted to close schools through a “phase-out” process rather than shut the doors and send students elsewhere all at once. After a school was slated for closure, it stopped admitting new 9th-grade students. Students already enrolled were allowed to transfer to another high school of their choice, or to continue attending the closure school until the year of their expected graduation. The closure school slowly shrank as students left or graduated over the next few years.

Critics deemed this phase-out process cruel. Students were described in the press as casualties who bore the brunt of persistent school failure and then had their lives upended when officials decided to intervene. The New York Times described it as “purgatory,” with “elective classes and after-school programs falling away” and “favorite teachers seeking new jobs.”

On the other hand, some closure advocates predicted that students would benefit during the phase-out process. Since each school’s enrollment declined as students transferred, graduated, or dropped out, students who chose to stay as their school phased out could potentially receive increased personal attention and resources from the administration and faculty. Alternatively, students who chose to leave could transfer to other, potentially better high schools, an option that was not typically offered to New York City students after 9th grade.

To determine which hypothesis was more accurate, we assessed the net impact of the phase-out process on a range of outcomes for the 9,600 9th-grade students who were beginning their high school careers at a closure school just as that closure was announced. This group, which we call the “phase-out cohort,” had the maximum exposure to the phase-out process. The outcomes we analyzed included: attendance, chronic absenteeism, mobility, graduation rates, diploma type, and credits earned.

In order to assess the impact of a closure decision on graduation rates, we first predicted rates for the phase-out cohort if their school had not been slated for closure, based on their characteristics and the prior trend in performance at their school. We then compared students’ actual graduation rates with the prediction, to see if they did better or worse than expected. We found that more students in the phase-out cohort graduated high school than expected. There was an improvement in the graduation rate of 6.5 percentage points (Figure 3).

However, the improved graduation rate was not necessarily caused by the phase-out process itself. New York City was in the midst of many school-improvement efforts during the years studied, including new accountability rules and interventions at low-performing schools citywide. It is possible that the improvement in graduation rates was not unique to the phase-out cohort but rather was an artifact of these other reforms. In order to shed light on this possibility, we also projected graduation rates for students at the comparison schools, and compared those projections with their students’ actual graduation rates.

We found that graduation rates at the comparison schools were improving more quickly than those at the closure schools in the years leading up to closure decisions. In addition, students’ actual graduation rates were slightly higher than the projected trend: 40.6 percent, compared to the projected rate of 39.2 percent, for a difference of 1.4 percentage points.

Whereas the schools identified for closure experienced an increase of 6.5 percentage points relative to their projected graduation rate, the other low-performing comparison schools experienced an increase of 1.4 percentage points. This means that the net difference was a 5.1-percentage-point increase in graduation rates over and above the influence of other factors that were affecting low-performing schools citywide. This difference is not statistically significant at conventional levels, meaning that we cannot conclude with confidence that it is not a result of chance. That said, it is reasonable to conclude that the phase-out process did not have a negative impact on the graduation rates of students enrolled in the schools during the process—and may even have improved them.

Looking beyond graduation rates, we also found that the phase-out process did not have a clear impact—positive or negative—on other academic outcomes for the phase-out cohort, such as credits earned or Regents exams passed, or on attendance. While phase-out cohort students did better with respect to some of these outcomes than expected, based on their background characteristics and the prior performance trend at their school, students attending comparison schools also registered gains.

Mobile and Non-Mobile Students

The phase-out process did have a systematic impact on student mobility. As with graduation rates, we projected mobility rates for the phase-out cohort if their school had not been slated for closure, based on their characteristics and the prior trend at their school. We then compared students’ actual mobility rates with the prediction. We found that more students in the phase-out cohort left their school before 12th grade, with the percentage of students still in their 9th-grade school at the end of 12th grade dropping by 6.9 percentage points to 48.8 percent, from 41.9 percent. Of course, because students in the phase-out schools were given the option of transferring, it is not surprising that they were more likely to change schools.

At the same time, however, students in the comparison schools were somewhat more likely to stay in their 9th-grade school through the end of 12th grade: we found an increase of 2.6 percentage points, to 44.5 percent from 41.9 percent. By comparing the changes at the two groups of schools, we found a net difference of 9.5 percentage points.

Were students better-off if they remained in the closure schools, or did they do better if they transferred? To explore this question, we conducted two sets of analyses.

First, we examined outcomes for students who remained in their 9th-grade school through the end of their scheduled 12th-grade year, or until they dropped out or graduated. As with the core impact analysis, we compared outcomes before and after the closure decision for both the closing schools and comparison schools, to shed light on the degree to which the phase-out process itself affected outcomes for non-mobile students.

We found that students who remained in the closure schools during the phase-out process were more likely to graduate high school. The graduation rate rose to 53.4 percent from the projected 42 percent, an 11.4-percentage-point increase. In addition, students were more likely to earn a Regents diploma at graduation; that rate grew to 38.2 percent from 15.1 percent, a 23.1-percentage-point increase. By contrast, the graduation rate was flat at comparison schools. The percentage of students earning Regents diplomas increased, though not as sharply as in closure schools, to 30 percent from 15.1 percent. On most other indicators, student improvement was modest and similar to that in the comparison group, indicating that improvement cannot be ascribed to the closure process.

The second strand of analysis focused on students who transferred from their 9th-grade schools to another New York City high school before the end of their 12th-grade year, or before they dropped out or graduated. Among those students, we found no evidence of a systematic net impact (positive or negative) on outcomes. Students who transferred from closure schools showed modest improvements in some outcomes relative to their school’s projected performance based on past trends. Transfer students from the comparison schools also showed improvement over projected performance. Overall, none of the estimated net differences were statistically significant.

After the High Schools Close

What about students who would have been assigned to one of the closure schools but matriculated to high school after the phase-out process began? To answer this question, we identified a cohort of approximately 11,000 8th-grade students who lived in neighborhoods or attended middle schools that fed into the closure schools, and who had background characteristics similar to students who had previously enrolled at the closure schools. These students were compelled to attend a different high school than the one they would have otherwise attended; we refer to them as the “post-closure cohort.” New York City’s open choice system provided them with access to schools throughout the city, which often included one or more new small, themed high schools, including those that opened in the same building as the larger school that had been closed.

There are at least three plausible hypotheses about a closure’s potential impact on outcomes for these students: that they would do better, because a closure eliminates their weakest educational option; that their outcomes would be the same, because they would likely transfer to a similarly low-performing school nearby; or that their outcomes would be the same or worse, because even if they transferred to higher-performing schools, the schools may not be well-suited to meet their needs.

The post-closure students we identified for this aspect of the study dispersed widely (Figure 4). In all, the 11,000 students in the post-closure cohorts were distributed across 374 different high schools. On average, for each closed high school, displaced students ended up attending 82 other high schools across the city. However, many students stayed nearby: 87 percent attended school in the same borough, 53 percent remained in the same community school district, and 45 percent enrolled in a small high school located in the same building as their closure school. Underlining the interrelated nature of New York City’s secondary-school reforms, 57 percent of students enrolled in a small high school serving fewer than 110 students, and 28 percent enrolled in a school that had opened the year they enrolled.

By comparing schools on a variety of measures, we found that post-closure students generally enrolled in higher-performing high schools than they would have otherwise attended. At these schools, the population of entering 9th graders was less likely to be older than usual for their grade, had higher middle-school attendance rates, and had higher average 8th-grade test scores. Furthermore, they had substantially higher 9th-grade attendance rates and lower rates of chronic absenteeism. However, the two groups of schools enrolled similar percentages of students who received special-education services, were English language learners, or were eligible for free or reduced-price school meals.

In short, students from the post-closure cohorts enrolled in better-performing schools. But did they themselves do better? To answer this question, we extended our projections of a range of student outcomes at both the closure and comparison schools, to provide an estimate of what would have occurred had the schools stayed on their historical trajectories. Net differences represent the effects of a closure, showing us the impact on students who had to choose a different high school.

While students at both groups of schools did better than the trends projected in the years studied, closures produced positive and statistically significant impacts on several key outcomes for displaced students versus those in the comparison group (Figure 5). Most notably, closures improved graduation rates for displaced students by 15.1 percentage points—with all of that improvement coming through a 17.4-percentage-point increase in the share of students earning more rigorous Regents diplomas. The closures also produced a net improvement in 9th-grade attendance rates and credit accumulation. Taken together, this is compelling evidence that students benefited from having a low-performing option eliminated from their high-school choice set.

Policy Implications

As districts across the country continue to grapple with the persistent struggles of very low-performing high schools, it is imperative that we build better evidence about the range of options at their disposal, including performance-based closures. While these findings provide encouraging evidence about their impact on students who no longer had to attend those high schools, future debates should be sensitive to both the limitations inherent in this study and issues not yet addressed by this or other research.

Our analysis does not include impacts on teachers, administrators, the surrounding community, or other schools nearby. And while we attempted to isolate the impacts of school closures on student outcomes, it remains possible that other, unmeasured factors were also at play. In addition, this research stops short of dissecting the influence of specific features of the phase-out process on student outcomes. We cannot identify the precise mechanisms that explain closures’ impact or, in some cases, the lack thereof. Future work on closures should examine such factors as staff composition and mobility, faculty and student morale, and interpersonal relationships, to achieve a richer understanding of how closures impact school communities and student outcomes.

Finally, it is important to keep in mind that, although we found that students who likely would have attended the closed schools fared better elsewhere, they still did not fare well. On average, just 56 percent of these students graduated from high school within four years. This highlights deeply entrenched inequalities in New York City schools, where poor students of color lag far behind their more-privileged peers on a wide range of measures. Ultimately, whether or not closures are part of the policy framework in any district, there is a need to invest in vulnerable students and to identify structures and supports that maximize their odds of success.

James J. Kemple is executive director of the Research Alliance for New York City Schools and research professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development at New York University.

Christopher Cerf, the state-appointed superintendent of Newark Public Schools, smiled broadly as he arrived at Arts High School for a school advisory board meeting last March. He sprang out of a car driven by an aide, and waved to a clutch of protesters gathered in front of television cameras. On his way to the auditorium, he shook hands and offered hugs; once there, he scanned the crowd like a politician, looking for people with whom he needed to make a connection. He exchanged greetings with a group of students and former students who call themselves the Newark Student Union and frequently show up to protest. A megaphone was nearby.

Cerf was not rattled when students began shouting “save our schools!” through the megaphone, or when they and others called him a liar, demanded his resignation, and declared that he only cared about students in charter schools. At one point during the four-and-a-half-hour meeting, he was accused of poisoning children. “If we can’t have what we want, we shut it down!” someone shouted.

The most immediate cause of the anger was new results from annual water-quality tests, which found elevated amounts of lead in 30 of Newark’s aging school buildings. But that latest outrage was layered on top of long-simmering frustration with the state of New Jersey, which has controlled the city’s schools and determined who is in charge of them for more than 20 years. In some ways, the sole purpose of the meeting was for members of the public to air their concerns: the Newark Public Schools Advisory Board is publicly elected but has only limited power under New Jersey’s state takeover law, making Cerf the only person in the auditorium with any real decision-making power.

That power also makes Cerf, like his predecessors, the person Newarkers can blame when things go wrong, as well as the face of state oppression. Cerf was appointed superintendent in July 2015 by New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and had previously served as his state commissioner of education. His tenure follows the controversial leadership of former superintendent Cami Anderson, who led a series of unpopular initiatives in quick succession, including a new citywide enrollment plan and lottery that allowed parents to choose any traditional or charter school in the city, closures of underenrolled or poorly performing schools, mass firings of teachers and principals, and a new merit-pay program for teachers.

The changes had some benefits for students, but many parents and teachers felt ignored and disrespected, and the relationship between Anderson and the public broke down. Protesters, bloggers, and other critics called her a bully who dismissed anyone who disagreed with her as a defender of a system that was failing far too many students. The Newark Public Schools Advisory Board passed a “no confidence” vote in her leadership. Public outcry became so impassioned and so personal that Anderson and her leadership team stopped attending advisory board meetings in February 2014, declaring that they would focus aggressively on implementing change rather than participate in forums they considered dysfunctional and “no longer focused on achieving educational outcomes for children.”

Months later, Anderson resigned and it was up to Christie to appoint a successor. In a move that seemed politically tone-deaf, if not outright hostile, Christie replaced her with her former boss: Cerf.

“More Reformy Than Ever”

Cerf’s reputation and résumé did little to win fans in Newark—as commissioner, he had been deeply involved in reform efforts there and would be, as one blogger put it, “More Reformy Than Ever.” He had quit in 2014 for an executive post at Amplify, a company that provides data, curriculum, assessment, and professional development services to school districts and at the time was part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. When Cerf’s nomination by Christie was announced, critics seethed. When he was officially confirmed by the New Jersey Board of Education, John Abeigon, the president of the Newark Teachers Union, was thrown out for disrupting the meeting.

But Cerf was more experienced in education than skeptics allowed. Cerf, 60, started his career as a history teacher in Cincinnati, Ohio, a generation before top-achieving college students sought out teaching opportunities through Teach for America. Columbia University law school, clerkships in the U.S. Appellate and U.S. Supreme Courts, a stint in the Clinton White House, and private practice followed. He completed the Broad Academy for superintendents in 2004, and then spent five years as deputy chancellor of the New York City schools under then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools chancellor Joel Klein.

From the start, Cerf understood that as superintendent he had to take a different approach from Anderson’s, and do all he could to smooth the political waters. That was evident in his first appearance at an advisory board meeting, in August 2015.

“I pledge to you a dialogue based on civility and respect and availability and facts and information,” he told the audience and board. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, he said, but “they’re not entitled to their own facts.”

“Our children are watching how we conduct ourselves,” he said. “We are providing a model for how civil civic discourse takes place, and how we do that even when we disagree is so critically important.”

Disagreement over the governance of Newark schools goes back more than two decades; the state took over the district in 1995 after documenting years of academic failure, unsafe buildings, corruption, and lavish spending by elected school board members. Board members had been given cars and gas allowances, and were allowed to eat on the district’s dime at numerous local restaurants. A report at the time noted that, as state officials were seizing files in the district offices, three board members were attending a conference in Hawaii. Meanwhile, just one in four Newark high school students passed state proficiency tests in reading and math.

For years, state-appointed superintendents came and went. Newark outspent virtually every school district in the country—it spent about $25,000 per student in 2013, for example—yet there was little change in outcomes for students, who mainly come from low-income families (Figure 1). Today, 79 percent of students receive free or reduced-price school meals. Some 47 percent of students are African American, 44 percent are Hispanic, and 8 percent are white.

Soon after he was elected in 2009, Christie, a Republican, and then-Newark mayor Cory Booker, a Democrat who has since joined the U.S. Senate, agreed that something radical needed to be done. They vowed to join forces and make Newark a national model for how to improve urban education, and Booker went looking for money to make that vision a reality. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had famously stepped up with a $100 million gift that was to be matched by others.

The gift in 2010 drew national attention to Newark from two opposing camps. On one side: the informal network of advocates, philanthropists, educators, and nonprofit organizations that all back higher academic standards, greater accountability, and improved teaching, and who saw the city as a potential proof point for their theories of how to improve student outcomes. On the other: the anti-charter school crowd, the American Federation of Teachers, and other critics who decry what they call corporate-style education reform, and who saw Newark as a place to draw the line and fight back.

The contentious years ahead were the subject of a high-profile book by former Washington Post reporter Dale Russakoff, The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools, which was published just as Cerf became superintendent. The book focuses on the difficulties in implementing change in Newark, despite bipartisan leadership, financial support, and the attention of education watchers nationwide. A major theme, according to Cerf, is a “narrative of failure” in Newark schools.

Changing that narrative is a critical challenge, he says, one helped by evidence of improvement in recent years. The suspension rate is down 37 percent. The graduation rate has risen to 70 percent from 61 percent in 2011. And about one in three Newark students attends “beating the odds” schools, those that outperform schools with similar demographics in their state in reading and math, according to a 2015 study by the Center on Reinventing Public Education.

Newark has retained 95 percent of teachers evaluated as “effective,” Cerf says, even though the district pays salaries lower than in surrounding towns. Only 63 percent of teachers who did not earn “effective” ratings remained in the district. The district also has invested heavily in new curricula in mathematics, science, history, and the arts. And more than half of Newark schools now have longer school days.

The premise of The Prize, Cerf says, was that if he, Anderson, and Booker had moved more slowly and worked harder to build local support for their ideas, they would have gotten a warmer reception. But, he says, that analysis is flawed.

“For Dale to criticize Cory and Cami for failing to have overcome political saboteurs, but give a complete pass to the saboteurs themselves, tells only part of the story. There was a vicious campaign of misinformation that was designed to thwart any changes.”

The Value of Listening

Cerf has set two major goals for Newark schools: to give every student in the city a chance to attend a successful school, and to meet state requirements that would allow the district to regain local control. Unlike Anderson, who was charged with using the Zuckerberg largess and the state’s backing to bring about the dramatic changes envisioned by Booker and Christie, Cerf views his job as making sure those changes take root, grow, and eventually bear fruit. Both jobs are difficult, and require different skills and temperaments. Anderson had to be bold and was under pressure to get quick results. Cerf has to build on and improve Anderson’s initiatives, while preaching patience and building and maintaining productive, long-term relationships with major constituencies in the city: families, the advisory board, the teachers union, and the mayor’s office.

Since becoming superintendent, Cerf says, he has spent 80 percent of his time on “small-p politics” and has reached out even to “people who have been the loudest voices, people who have called me the devil to my face and said what we’ve done here is criminal.” He regularly seeks the advice of community groups, parents, teachers, and principals at closed-door meetings. “I ask them, ‘if you were in my chair, what would you do? What do you need? What stands in the way of you and academic performance?’” He has also convened a series of public meetings around the city to inform the district’s strategic plan.

Cerf says it’s a leadership style that has evolved over his time in education. He says that when he was younger, he believed that eliminating inequity required ignoring “the inevitable noise and objections and just throttle down, and do it, and wear a flak jacket and realize that people are going to say awful, ugly things about you,” and do all they can to get in the way.

Cerf says he still believes closing achievement gaps and improving student outcomes is urgent, and that the only way to do that is to make sure all decisions are made in the interests of students. But he says he has learned a lesson from the events in Newark and the growing pushback on education reformers nationally.

“I appreciate, in a way that I hadn’t before, that there is an essential value in listening and giving people an opportunity to seriously engage on important questions.” Still, as he often points out, “there is a difference between listening and agreeing.” He attends every advisory board meeting and does what he can to maintain civil discourse.

According to Booker, Newark politics have always been rough, and public frustration with 21 years of state control over city schools is understandable. Still, he says, the loudest and most antagonistic voices, those of the people who show up regularly to protest at city council and school advisory board meetings, are not necessarily representative of anyone but themselves.

“It’s a tribute to Chris that he doesn’t get upset by a lot of the tumult and is laser-like focused on improving student achievement,” Booker says.

At the advisory board meeting in March, when Cerf was drowned out by a derisive roar of protests during the discussion of the lead results, he did not get upset.

“I can either tell you the facts or you can scream from the audience,” Cerf said, and waited while the disruptions continued, despite the meek attempts by the board chair to regain order. “I’m not going to [speak] until they shut up … that’s not the way democracy is conducted in this country,” he told the board chair evenly.

Eventually, he was able to proceed. There was plenty of information to share: Cerf had immediately insisted the lead test results be made public—something his predecessors had not done during the previous six years when similar results reached their desks—and arranged for drinking water to be delivered. He asked district staff to prepare a detailed report on the findings and the history of lead testing in the district, and began providing weekly updates on what was being done to address the issue. In the months to come, the district would test every source of water in every school in Newark; offer free, voluntary blood testing for all students; and hold regular public meetings to discuss families’ concerns.

Working with Local Leaders

Cerf has also forged collaborative relationships with local elected leaders.

Antoinette Baskerville-Richardson, a former theater and speech teacher, union official, and district administrator who now chairs the advisory board, said Cerf’s relationship with the board is evolving. She credits him with providing members with more extensive and timely information than his predecessor. She also noted that Cerf gave the board permission to call itself the Newark Board of Education—a symbolic gesture to drop the “advisory” label, which was appreciated by board members—and allowed it to vote on district expenditures before they are made, although he still has the final say.

“He smiles a lot, he’s cordial, he’s much more palatable than Cami Anderson,” Baskerville-Richardson says. “On the other hand, he has also exposed a part of himself, via his willingness to talk and engage, that is very combative, edgy, and sometimes disrespectful.”

Cerf has also collaborated with Booker’s successor, Mayor Ras Baraka, a former city councilman and high school principal whose 2014 campaign was based on his opposition to Anderson and her reforms and had the backing of the Newark Teachers Union. Last year, Cerf, Baraka, and other city leaders announced a $12.5 million plan to improve academics and provide social supports to a handful of schools in the South Ward, the poorest section of Newark. The South Ward Community Schools Initiative includes $10 million for school improvement and $2.5 million for dropout prevention services, and is to be funded in part by the Foundation for Newark’s Future—the organization that managed the Zuckerberg gift and matching funds, which are now exhausted. (The organization officially ceased operations at the end of April with $5 million left unspent; any remaining funds were to be held and dispersed by the Community Foundation of New Jersey.)

Baraka and Cerf, with Christie’s support, also are leading an effort to end state control in Newark schools. Districts under state control can earn back local authority by consistently demonstrating to state monitors sound policies and procedures and overall effectiveness. A nine-member Newark Educational Success Board, whose members include parents, students, and business and community leaders appointed by the mayor and governor, has been tasked with developing a plan that will restore local control as soon as possible.

Success board member Donald Katz, who is chief executive of Newark-based Audible, Inc., the audiobook and podcast company, praised the board’s work and credited Cerf with hastening the district’s progress toward independence. “What he has done is make around-the-clock efforts to create meetings of the minds among people who had hardened into certain viewpoints,” Katz says. “People have no idea how hard he works and all that he does to make sure all of the stakeholders who should be at the table are there.”

In March, Baraka praised Cerf in an annual state-of-the-city speech. “We’re not in a perfect place, but we have a new superintendent now … and a very contentious and raucous environment was turned into a plan, after 20 years, to clearly define a path toward local control for our schools,” he said. “Our job is not to just complain about the problems we have but to actually fix them.”

Still, there are some built-in tensions that Cerf has not been able to soothe, such as his relationship with the Newark Teachers Union. On one hand, he speaks with the union president, Abeigon, about once a month; the union had refused to speak with Anderson for more than two years. On the other hand, Abeigon has declined to negotiate a new contract for Newark teachers; the last contract expired in 2014. Instead, he is waiting until Christie’s term as governor ends in 2018.

The Charter Factor

Another source of strife is intense disagreement over the role of charter schools in the district. One-quarter of Newark’s 47,000 students now attend a total of 43 charter school campuses; when all of the charter schools authorized by the state open, they will serve up to half of the city’s students (Figure 2). While they are supported by many families, charter schools face frequent public criticism—including by Baraka—that they are destroying the school district.

Cerf, an appointee of a pro-charter governor, is often labeled as a charter school advocate. He says he is less interested in how schools are governed than he is in making sure there are good schools in every neighborhood. “The point is that this is a part of a coherent change theory that is starting to bear fruit,” he says. “It’s not that we’re going to support charter schools and not traditional schools, we’re not ‘all in’ on charters, like in New Orleans. But, rather, we want to holistically manage a system of all different types of schools.”

The number of charter schools has quintupled over the past four years, which has cut into the district’s overall revenues. Payments to charter schools have grown from $117 million to an estimated $226 million of the district’s total budget, estimated at $990 million this year. To be sure, Newark’s per-pupil spending remains high compared to other districts in New Jersey and nationwide. But with fixed costs and declines in state aid in recent years, Newark has struggled to cut spending fast enough to offset the loss of revenue.

“One of the reasons emotions are running so high is that our children are the casualties of this war called school reform,” says Deborah Smith-Gregory, the president of the Newark chapter of the NAACP. “The charter schools continually get more money and the traditional schools get less.”

Under state law, charter schools are supposed to receive 90 percent of a school district’s per-pupil tax levy, and, unlike traditional public schools, must pay all of their building costs out of that amount. However, in practice, a complex state funding mechanism means charters may get slightly more, or substantially less, than neighborhood schools, based on their enrollment. Charter advocates claim the schools receive 70 percent of what traditional public schools in New Jersey receive, on average, while charter critics note that many outspend traditional public schools.

Regardless, many parents in Newark perceive charter schools as superior. Last year, 42 percent of parents who used Newark’s centralized enrollment system listed a charter school as their first choice. A 2015 study by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found Newark charter schools outperformed traditional district schools: 77 percent of Newark’s charters were more effective at raising test scores in reading, and 69 percent were more effective at raising scores in math.

Nijn Wagstaff, a state worker who dropped out of a traditional Newark high school before returning to school to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees, has sent two of her three children to charter schools. “I find myself many times defending my stance on charter schools versus traditional public schools,” she says. “As soon as I say charter schools are public schools, eyebrows are raised and the snarls come out and they say, ‘why aren’t you sending your son to a public school?’”

She says that her oldest son struggled academically and barely graduated from Newark’s Weequahic High School, a large comprehensive high school. Since high school, he has struggled “to find stable employment and find his place in society,” she says. Her second son graduated from a high school operated by KIPP New Jersey, which operates eight charter schools in Newark. He went to community college and is a manager at Sprint while finishing up business courses.

Her youngest son has only attended KIPP schools. “The teachers there truly, truly set the bar very high as to how children are supposed to be treated academically and nurtured all around,” she says. “Everybody is so helpful and loving, and they try to do anything they can to help you and the children.”

A Focus on Common Ground

There are some signs that the battle over charter schools may be dying down.

For example, earlier this year Mayor Baraka, the Newark City Council, school board members, the leaders of many charter organizations, education-related nonprofit groups, the Newark City Council, and several local and state representatives all signed a letter asking Christie to provide additional state aid. The letter noted that the district had already cut $150 million in costs and laid off 900 employees in recent years. More cuts, the letter said, would be devastating.

“We acknowledge that there have been issues related to our schools that have divided us in the past,” the letter said. “And disagreements over complex policy issues remain the subject of spirited, although increasingly civil, debate. We are united, however, around the central value of assuring that every one of our city’s children has access to a free quality public education.” The letter persuaded Christie to allocate an additional $27 million for the district and charter schools.

Another sign that factionalism in the city may be easing came in the April school advisory board election. Voters chose three candidates who proclaimed themselves part of a “unity” slate. One of the candidates was loyal to the mayor; another was aligned with a longtime political leader in the city’s North Ward; and the third was supported by a local pro-charter parent organization called the Parent Coalition for Excellent Education.

“Rather than focusing on differences, a community chose to rise together to address issues that unite us all,” Muhammad Akil, the group’s executive director, told a local newspaper. He called the results a turning point that demonstrated the political power of charter school backers as well as others who are seeking more high-quality learning opportunities for local students.

In addition, most of the charter schools in Newark signed a “compact” committing themselves to ensuring that “every child in Newark is enrolled in a great school, regardless of whether it is operated by the district or under a charter.” They also agreed to make it easier for parents to enroll their children in charter schools, and promised to make public more information about their track records.

Ryan Hill, the executive director of KIPP New Jersey, says Cerf has done “an amazing job of listening before acting. He’s shown he really cares what people think about this work and what they believe needs to be done. He’s helped Newark heal.”

Richard Lee Colvin, a longtime education journalist, currently manages the writing team at the U.S. Department of Education. He wrote this article prior to joining the department.

Over the last 20 years, I’ve been involved in more than 100 charter-school start-ups. Until recently, I had one consistent approach to getting a school up and running. It involved a lot of money and at least a year of groundwork: studying effective school models, organizing all the logistics, and preparing a 300- to 400-page charter application.

Although it usually worked, my approach had a big flaw. I rarely tested the new school models before the students showed up on day one. And it could take another two or three years to discover if the school was a winner or a dud.

What if there were a way to refine a school concept before risking all that time and money, not to mention the academic and emotional lives of students?

In 2010, I founded 4.0 Schools in New Orleans as a nonprofit “incubator” of new ideas for doing school. The mission: to bring together a community of creative educators and entrepreneurs and help them develop and launch their ideas. I asked the six people in our first cohort to get started in my usual way, by committing a year to soaking up proven concepts in successful schools.

But one of the participants, Josh Densen, challenged my approach. Josh didn’t want to sink a year into studying existing models. He wanted to ask parents what they were looking for in a school. He started hosting sessions in living rooms around New Orleans, and learned that the two things parents most wanted in a school were socioeconomic and ethnic diversity and a focus on creative thinking. He did a lot of searching on the web but couldn’t find such a school to emulate.

Then Josh had a crazy idea, inspired by the competition that had erupted between old-school New Orleans restaurants and the new food trucks that were roaming around selling their wares. Why not try a food-truck version of his school? Josh bought some creative-thinking manipulatives and started doing “pop-up” versions of his school at community music festivals. Kids and parents loved it, and some became regulars. Josh then partnered with the Samuel L. Green Charter School. Each week, he and some of the kids from the festivals would visit the school and engage Green students in testing his concept for a class designed to boost creative confidence. In 2013, Josh opened Bricolage Academy — now one of the most diverse schools in New Orleans.

At 4.0, we’ve been trying since then to “de-risk” the process of new-school creation and make it more iterative, responsive, and agile. Four years after Josh’s first pop-up experiment, we’re formalizing this approach through an initiative we call the Tiny Fellowship.

The idea is to give aspiring school and learning-space founders the resources needed to test promising concepts on a tiny scale. Students and their families provide feedback during the pilot, allowing for improvements to the model before a full-scale version is launched. 4.0, which is funded largely through philanthropy, provides design guidance, leadership coaching, and financial support.

One school that’s been incubated this way is Rooted School, founded by Jonathan Johnson, which will open as a New Orleans charter in 2017. Rooted’s unique model provides students with internships in high-growth, high-wage start-ups—gigs that pay $16 an hour.

After doing some pop-up experiments, Jonathan wanted to further test his concept before launching his school. First, he partnered with the Algiers Charter School Association. Then he pitched his idea to dozens of families and recruited 15 students to participate in a one-classroom, one-semester version of Rooted hosted on the Algiers campus. With lots of help from the Algiers staff, the Rooted team (I’m the board chair) learned far more from those students and families than we ever could just talking about our ideas.

A trial run with only 15 students is not a perfect test—but it’s far less expensive and risky than betting a few million bucks on a full-fledged school with no prior testing. Our process is based not on paper but on pavement—the pavement under the feet of school founders and real students and families.

It’s great when people think big, but even better when big thinkers test small, early, and often. If we can validate our ideas on a tinier, more human scale, listening carefully to students and families, we might find a better approach to school reform—doing it with, not to each other.

Getting away from paper and onto pavement may seem like a tiny change, but I think it’s a big deal.

Matt Candler is the founder and CEO of 4.0 Schools. This article was adapted from a chapter by Matt Candler in Educational Entrepreneurship Today, edited by Frederick M. Hess and Michael Q. McShane (Cambridge: Harvard Education Press, 2016).

In 2009, 48 states and the District of Columbia joined together to launch the Common Core State Standards Initiative. Their mission: to develop common academic standards in English and mathematics that would help ensure that “all students, regardless of where they live, are graduating high school prepared for college, career, and life.”

It was a laudable goal, but one that 15 years of federal mandates had failed to accomplish. Tasked by the federal government with bringing all students to “proficiency,” most states set undemanding standards, and the quality of their assessments varied widely. The Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association set out to raise and unify K–12 standards through the Common Core initiative.

Common standards call for common assessments. Late in 2009, the Obama administration, through its Race to the Top (RttT) program, announced a competition for $350 million in grant money to spur the development of “next-generation” tests aligned to the Common Core. Six consortia formed to submit applications for funding, but mergers left just two seeking to develop the new assessments. The government awarded four-year grants to the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) and the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC).

Earlier in 2009, also through Race to the Top, the administration had offered $4.35 billion in funding through a competitive grant program designed to encourage states to enact the feds’ preferred school-reform policies—including the adoption of better standards and assessments. Most states were willing to sign on to Common Core and the aligned tests to improve their chances of winning a grant. By 2011, one year after the standards had officially been released, 45 states plus the District of Columbia had signed on to the standards and joined one or both of the assessment consortia.

But as states moved to implement the new standards and assessments, controversy began to swirl around the reforms. Although the Common Core standards drew criticism from parents and pundits, from the right and the left, most states stood firm in embracing them. Yet loyalty to the consortia’s assessments has proved much weaker. The number of states planning to use the new tests dropped from 45 in 2011 to 20 in 2016.

This presents a puzzle: why have so many states abandoned the consortia, even as the standards on which they are based continue to live on in most places?

Consortia Beginnings

Proponents of the next-generation assessments argued that such tests would enable educators to track progress toward the higher-order thinking skills—such as critical thinking, communicating effectively, and problem solving—that the standards emphasized. By collaborating through a consortium, states would be able to produce a higher-quality assessment, at lower cost, than what they could achieve on their own. The Common Core–aligned tests would also allow policymakers to use the same measuring stick to evaluate student progress in different states.

In 2010, the PARCC and SBAC consortia reported having 26 and 32 member states, respectively, representing diverse political environments. Only Alaska, Minnesota, Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia declined to join by the end of that year. Alaska, whose state standards were closely aligned with the Common Core, affiliated with SBAC in 2013. Minnesota adopted only the English language arts standards and so did not join a consortium. Nebraska, Texas, and Virginia never adopted Common Core or affiliated with a consortium.

The two consortia took similar approaches to assessment design. Both sought to develop state-of-the-art assessments that focused on problem solving and the application of knowledge and moved away from former tests’ reliance on multiple-choice questions and the testing of factual recall. The new tests would be administered by computer, reducing the time needed to evaluate results and thus enhancing the usefulness of this information for teachers and schools. And finally, both consortia committed to transparent communication of student-achievement data to stakeholders.

The consortia differed in a few particulars. SBAC adopted a computer-adaptive test model, in which the difficulty of the assessment would vary according to students’ responses, and it made high-school assessments optional for the states. PARCC required all member states to use the same test vendor (Pearson) to implement the assessments, while SBAC allowed its members to choose their own.

State Exits Increase

State participation in the consortia declined just as implementation of the new standards and tests was set to begin. The pace of withdrawals quickened over time, particularly for PARCC, which five or six states left every year between 2013 and 2015 (see Figure 1). As of May 2016, just six states planned to implement the PARCC-designed assessment in the 2016-17 academic year. SBAC also faced attrition but fared better and still retains 14 states that plan to use the full test. (That figure includes Iowa, where a legislative task force has overwhelmingly recommended the SBAC assessment, though as of early 2016 state officials had yet to formally accept the recommendation.) By early 2016, 38 states had left one or both consortia, short-circuiting the state-by-state comparability that the tests were designed to deliver (see Figure 2).

Political Resistance

Much of the opposition to the Common Core–aligned assessments—particularly among parents—is related to a broader backlash against the amount of testing students now undergo and a perception that it diminishes instructional time and encourages “teaching to the test.” While proponents argue that the Common Core standards and assessments represent an improvement over those most states used under the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, many have come to see Common Core as simply NCLB 2.0.

Criticism from both ends of the political spectrum has buffeted Common Core. On the right, many Tea Party adherents and others view the initiative as a dangerous or even unconstitutional expansion of federal control of education. It was not difficult for opponents to cast Common Core as a federal initiative, given 1) the Obama administration’s use of RttT incentives (and later, waivers to NCLB requirements) to encourage states to adopt the standards and 2) the administration’s funding of the consortia. While the Common Core initiative is actually a product of state cooperation, the 2014 Education Next survey found that 64 percent of respondents who had heard of Common Core believed that “the federal government requires all states to use the Common Core standards” (see “No Common Opinion on the Common Core,” features, Winter 2015). To many conservatives, the standards have become a powerful and threatening symbol of big government, causing critics on the right to dub it “Obamacore.”

Furthermore, the Common Core assessments emerged onto the public agenda in the wake of revelations of widespread privacy violations by the National Security Agency, playing into heightened fears about data mining. In this context, conspiracy theorists like Michelle Malkin could whip up public fear with her March 2013 National Review column, “Common Core as Trojan Horse: It’s time to opt out of the creepy federal data-mining racket.” The 2014 Education Next survey found that 85 percent of Americans who had heard of Common Core erroneously believed that the federal government would receive detailed data on individual students’ test performance.

On the left, some of the opposition to Common Core and its assessments is related to broader resistance to high-stakes testing, the linking of student scores to teacher evaluations, and other reform measures such as school choice, which some see as “corporate school reform.” Diane Ravitch of New York University, a prominent critic of Common Core, wrote in 2015, “The reason to standardize education across the nation is to create an attractive business climate for entrepreneurs.” The business community has indeed been among the most vocal supporters of Common Core, arguing that higher academic standards are imperative to ensuring that the American economy has the high-quality workforce necessary to compete in the global marketplace. The association of big business with Common Core has fueled Americans’ long-standing antipathy toward the power elite. Some have even argued that Common Core is a scheme intended to increase the profits of large companies such as Pearson and Microsoft. Still others see the initiative as part of an even larger conspiracy to dismantle public schools and privatize education. In this view, public schools will struggle to meet the higher standards—and not receive the resources with which to do so—and this will open the door to the expansion of charter schools, private-school voucher programs, and online virtual learning. As Susan Spicka, a Pennsylvania parent, wrote, “[H]igh stakes [tests] are being used as a tool by corporate school reform advocates to put public schools in the hands of private businesses, whose goal is to profitize our children, not to educate them.”

These criticisms from the extremes of the political spectrum have not persuaded many states to drop Common Core, which is bolstered by a large and bipartisan group of policymakers and other elites. The consortia-designed assessments, however, have not fared so well, because their implementation became intertwined with new, controversial teacher evaluations and school accountability measures.

Assessments Meet Accountability

Proponents of Common Core made their case by arguing that the standards would improve public education and eventually strengthen the workforce: they would ensure that all high-school graduates were “college and career ready,” that America remained “globally competitive,” and that all students had access to a rigorous education “regardless of where a child lives or what their background is.” But universal standards, on their own, accomplish none of these goals. In order to effect change, they must be paired with aligned testing that gives reliable information on which children are making appropriate progress in school, and which are not.

Standards coupled with assessments can thus provide the basis for holding students, teachers, and schools accountable for student learning in K–12 education. In the case of Common Core, the assessments were more rigorous and established a higher bar than did most traditional state assessments. Furthermore, the new assessments emerged at a time of rapid upheaval for K–12 accountability, when school districts were introducing enhanced consequences for teachers, principals, and schools that failed to improve student achievement.

School administrators, teachers, and their unions were initially quite supportive of the Common Core and its potential to improve teaching and learning. The aligned assessments, however, became politically charged, because they were introduced simultaneously with new teacher-evaluation systems that used student-achievement data as a significant criterion. Educators contended that states were tying the employee-evaluation process to the new standards and assessments too quickly, before teachers and students had been able to put the Common Core into practice. Many feared that the new assessments would result in arbitrary or unfair personnel decisions. Forty-three states, D.C., and Puerto Rico had received waivers from NCLB requirements, however, and had little choice: the waiver program essentially required them to develop new teacher evaluations, even as they rolled out the new standards.

A 2014 PDK/Gallup poll found that 76 percent of teachers continued to support the goals of Common Core, but only 9 percent supported using those test scores to evaluate teachers. As Sandi Jacobs, managing director of state policy for the National Council on Teacher Quality, said, “There wasn’t enough concern about how these things [the Common Core and teacher evaluation] were running down the path together until the tests became an issue.”

The unions, too, continued to support the standards but opposed the consortium-designed assessments because of their link to teacher evaluations.

Hindsight suggests that implementation of the assessments might have been more successful, and politically sustainable, if the new standards and tests had not been connected to states’ K–12 accountability systems, and especially teacher evaluations, until key stakeholders had become acclimated to them. But, under pressure from the federal government, most states tied the new assessments to accountability at a time when teachers’ practice and local curriculum had not yet become fully aligned with new expectations.

As backlash against the assessments has swelled, even support for the Common Core standards has begun to dwindle. In 2013, the Education Next poll showed 76 percent of teachers and 63 percent of parents supported the standards. By 2015, the same poll found that just 40 percent of teachers and 47 percent of parents supported them.

Implementation Challenges

States varied tremendously in their readiness to implement the consortia-designed assessments, which represented a significant shift from most states’ prior assessment systems. The new assessments set forth more-challenging proficiency benchmarks for students and required substantial investments in technology as well as increased testing time. Lamenting schools’ preparedness for the transition, one teacher foreshadowed the implementation challenges ahead by tweeting, “We start testing on standards we’re not teaching with curriculum we don’t have on computers that don’t exist.”

State education agencies and districts struggled to finance and manage the implementation of the new standards and assessments. The American Association of School Administrators argued that states needed to “slow down to get it right,” while Dennis Van Roekel, then president of the National Education Association, charged that implementation had been “completely botched.” Teachers complained of insufficient professional development and lack of quality curriculum. States and districts confronted massive technology failures, owing to insufficient preparation and contractors who failed to deliver the needed technology upgrades. Parents revolted as the consortia set testing times and proficiency benchmarks that they viewed as developmentally inappropriate and, in some cases, a waste of resources. States also varied widely in how well they communicated with educators, parents, and the general public about the new tests.

Support from the Wrong Places

The Common Core standards and their aligned assessments drew many supporters from the federal and state governments, from the philanthropic community, and from reform advocates, but most members of these groups do not have a personal stake—a vested interest—in what happens in schools at the ground level. Therefore, their support alone is not enough to sustain education reform over time. Federal and state policymakers sometimes embrace high standards and quality assessments in principle, but when they experience intense pressure from interest groups and the public, their support is likely to falter. Indeed, many former supporters of Common Core, including Republican governors Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, Chris Christie of New Jersey, and Mary Fallin of Oklahoma, have withdrawn support of the standards in the face of political opposition from conservative interest groups, teachers unions, and swarms of parents and other voters.

Advocacy organizations such as Achieve and the Collaborative for Student Success can help build political support, but in the case of Common Core, efforts have largely focused on lobbying policymakers, not building the kind of broad-based coalitions needed to reengineer the K–12 system around high standards, quality assessments, and accountability for results. Parents and other community members were often left to learn about the standards and assessments via their social networks, where ill-informed but powerful negative interpretations of the reforms circulated through social media and were passed along by teachers, or at the dinner table. And the standards won few advocates among the parents and guardians who struggled to help their children navigate the new expectations with little guidance to support their efforts.

Philanthropists who supported Common Core also underestimated what would be necessary to support the transition to higher standards. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation invested $230 million in design, implementation support, and advocacy. But, as Jay Greene of the University of Arkansas argues, foundations can’t compel change, because the resources they invest are so small relative to the budgets of the organizations they seek to affect, and any effort to impose a solution will draw out opponents who are far more powerful and vested than the foundations themselves. Greene finds that philanthropic investments have the greatest impact when they create constituencies that advocate for change, but this didn’t happen in the case of Common Core.

The lack of vested stakeholder support had particularly acute consequences for the assessments. Standards for student learning are not likely to draw many opponents when they are just words on a page, because they threaten no one. But when policymakers seek to hold students, teachers, and schools accountable for those standards using aligned assessments, they are far more likely to stimulate opposition from those who have much to lose.

Saving the Standards

In the wake of the political controversy over the Common Core and its aligned assessments, policymakers faced intensifying pressure to change or abandon them. Between 2012 and 2014, the number of bills introduced in state legislatures that aimed to pause, review, or revoke the standards or aligned assessments increased eightfold. Oklahoma and South Carolina pulled out of the standards, while Tennessee and Arkansas revised them through state reviews. Indiana also withdrew, though most observers point out that its new standards are very similar to those it had adopted through Common Core.

In many states, however, policymakers who supported Common Core took a different tack: they sought to diffuse opposition to the standards by withdrawing from the consortia-designed assessments, perhaps the most visible and consequential elements of the new accountability systems. As Mike Cohen, the president of the advocacy organization Achieve, observed: “The new SBAC and PARCC assessments have Common Core written all over [them]—federally funded, part of a national effort … In many states where opposition to the Common Core emerged, the compromise was to hold on to the standards and get rid of the aligned tests.” Mitchell Chester, commissioner of education in Massachusetts, agreed, saying, “Often, as in Florida and Louisiana, it was governors making a political calculus” and concluding that the cost of staying in the consortia was too high.

Abandoning the assessments did not change the opinion of the most strident opponents of the standards. Indeed, critics of Common Core were quick to point out that the compromise agreements negotiated in Louisiana and Massachusetts did not stop the implementation of Common Core (both states will continue to use some elements of the consortia-designed assessments). But the moves may mollify more moderate groups, whose commitment to the issue was never firmly rooted.

Looking Ahead

Sustaining voluntary multistate efforts like the consortia presents considerable challenges. Faced with declining membership, both consortia have contemplated changes to their assessments to manage the growing political pushback against the Common Core and standardized testing in many states. The two consortia have worked to address concerns expressed by teachers, schools, and district administrators by reducing testing time, shortening the time periods over which tests are administered, limiting the number of units covered, and reducing the number of required testing sessions.

In late 2015, PARCC announced new flexibility for states, giving them more control over test-vendor selection and the option of using the complete assessment or specific items (or blocks of items) to customize their own assessments. Massachusetts and Louisiana have both moved forward with “hybrid” state tests that combine consortia- and state-designed assessment items. Mitchell Chester believes such a hybrid approach is likely to become more prevalent in the future, noting that this model “addresses both the political problems and the customization needs in states.” The hope is that a block of test items could be developed that all states could use for comparability purposes—a “core of the Core.” Can such an approach produce assessments that adequately align with the Common Core? Can it provide the kind of interstate comparability that proponents of the standards envisage? The future will tell.

It is possible that these changes may stem the tide of consortium withdrawals and generate new interest in the assessments from states that have already withdrawn. As Louisiana superintendent John White has noted, “[S]tates … want [test] results that are comparable with other states, they want the cost savings that come with sharing development of test questions across multiple states, but at the same time they want to maintain control of their own test.” Given more flexibility to determine the content, length, and administration of assessments, states could still achieve some of the benefits of collaboration while preserving the ability to respond to local needs and priorities.

The consortia may also emerge stronger as a result of surviving the conflict that has surrounded them. The diversity and number of states taking part in each consortium was always a challenge. As Bill Porter, leader of the High Quality Assessment Project, noted, “It’s challenging to get 20 states around the table really trying to compromise with each other on what to prioritize and how much money to invest in assessments.” With a smaller number of more like-minded states, the consortia may be able to focus more deliberately on improving implementation.

At the same time, however, the consortia will face new competition from other Common Core–aligned assessments. This year, the College Board (which is headed by Common Core lead author David Coleman) rolled out a new Common Core–aligned version of the SAT for high school students, as did the ACT with the Aspire assessment system, which also offers assessments for grades 3–8. Several states have already opted to use the SAT and ACT in high school for federal accountability purposes, drawn by the idea of using a college entrance test to assess student learning.

Whatever fate awaits the consortia, their work has resulted in new opportunities and imperatives for states to work together on assessment design and implementation. As former Maryland schools superintendent Lillian Lowery noted, one of the chief benefits of the consortia was the “communities of practice they generated and the pooled intellectual capital of the states involved.” And despite the problematic implementation of the new assessments and the political controversy that has swirled around them, evidence suggests that the consortia-designed tests are a substantial improvement over previous state assessments. A significant number of states are now engaged in unprecedented collaboration around common standards and tests—and how to deliver instruction to meet them—and these efforts are likely to live on, with or without the consortia.

Ashley Jochim is a research analyst at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington Bothell. Patrick McGuinn is professor of political science and education at Drew University and a senior research specialist at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education.

Throughout the 1990s and well into the new millennium, the massive Los Angeles Unified School District barely noticed the many charter schools that were springing up around the metropolis. But Los Angeles parents certainly took notice, and started enrolling their children. In 2008, five charter-management organizations announced plans to dramatically expand their school portfolios, and now more than 100,000 L.A. students attend independent charters (see Figure 1). Another 40,000 students are enrolled in dependent charters, which are created by the district and considered part of the district’s portfolio of schools.

Many people, including some wealthy philanthropists, are eager to accelerate that growth, while the district—and the teachers union—want to rein it in. The conflict between the two camps has polarized not just families and educators but the entire city. And last fall, after someone leaked a private multimillion-dollar plan to vastly expand the number of charter schools in the district, the hostilities rose to new heights.

L.A. Unified, with an enrollment of 550,000, is the nation’s second-largest school district, behind only New York City. The district sprawls over 720 square miles, more than half the size of Rhode Island. It includes not only the city of Los Angeles but 31 smaller municipalities as well. The only glue holding it all together is a web of clogged interstate freeways.

As spectacular as its sprawl is the size of its debt. L.A. Unified is saddled with $13 billion in unfunded pension and health-care-benefit liabilities. The district is one of the very few that still offers retirees and their dependents lifetime medical coverage. Because it has failed to set aside adequate funds to cover the costs involved, the district has no choice but to tap into its operating budget. The operating deficit, projected at $333 million for 2017–18, could exceed half a billion dollars by 2019–20 (see Figure 2).

So far, the district has failed to take decisive action toward putting its financial house in order. Although it has lost 100,000 students since 2006, the district has actually added teachers and other employees: the administrative staff grew 22 percent over the past five years, according to a district report released in May. With the decline in enrollment has come a drop in revenues: state aid is based on the number of students attending a district’s schools.

Half of the enrollment decline stems from the rising popularity of the district’s 228 independent charter schools. The other half has resulted from other factors: parents enrolling their children in private schools, families moving out of the city, and a decline in the birthrate. Although champions of the district insist that charter schools are draining money—and some of the strongest students—from traditional schools, critics say the district’s focus on charters is merely a strategic attempt to distract public attention from its own financial mismanagement.

When charters were first authorized by law in California in 1992, nobody—not school superintendents, not union leaders, not even charter advocates—imagined they would grow to their current scale: 1,230 schools statewide, with 80 new schools opened in the 2015–16 school year. L.A. has more charter schools than any district in the country. If you count dependent charters, the total rises from 228 schools to 282, representing 23 percent of the student population.

The waitlist for those 282 charter schools: 41,830 students.

The city’s charter schools are popular because many of them are very good. Multiple studies suggest that L.A. charters are among the best in the nation at helping low-income minority students succeed in school (see Figure 3). The most thorough research comes from Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, which in 2014 concluded that L.A. charter-school students, on average, gained the equivalent of 50 additional days of learning per year in reading and 79 additional days in math, compared to district school students.

Over the past decade, the performance of L.A. students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation’s report card, has risen, narrowing gaps with the California average and the average for large cities nationwide (see Figure 4). However, the performance of charter-school students on the NAEP far outstrips that of students in district schools. And the fiscal challenges now facing the district, and the resulting political turmoil, threaten the continuation of that progress.

Escalating Tensions

Last fall, the conflict between charter and district schools intensified after someone leaked a plan from the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation to raise up to $490 million from foundations and wealthy individuals to double the number of charter schools in the city, with the goal of enrolling about half the students in the district within eight years. The proposal had to be taken seriously, since it came from the billionaire Eli Broad, who built two Fortune 500 companies and became L.A.’s most prominent philanthropist. A patron of the arts, medicine, and education, Broad has invested nearly $600 million in education over the past 15 years, supporting a mix of traditional and charter schools.

When the Los Angeles Times leaked details of the draft plan in August and September 2015, the news set off a community-wide crisis that roiled for months. The union, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA), staged protests and crafted an effigy of Broad. Several L.A. Unified school-board members denounced the plan, and member Scott Schmerelson asked the board to adopt a resolution officially opposing it.

The union, led by Alex Caputo-Pearl, immediately seized upon the public relations opportunity to pursue the national anti-charter theme of billionaires trying to privatize public schools. (It didn’t help that the report was replete with corporate terms such as “market share,” “strategic messaging,” and “proof points.”) On its website, the union posted an unflattering photograph of Broad (pronounced “brode”) with the headline “Billionaires Must Stop” superimposed on a red stop sign. Below Broad’s photo, the caption leads off with: “Hit the Road, Broad.”

Elected in 2014, union chief Caputo-Pearl is widely respected by both supporters and opponents as a talented organizer, the likes of which this city has never seen. (Caputo-Pearl did not respond to my requests for an interview.) His efforts were welcomed by L.A. Unified supporters and charter critics. “When that [plan] leaked, everyone was shocked,” said Scott Folsom, a former PTA president in L.A. and longtime district watcher. “Eli Broad and a group of charters taking over half the district? What happens to the other half, the half that don’t get taken over?”

Folsom echoed the oft-heard criticism that charters siphon off the top students, and the children of the more-motivated parents, from the public schools. “Charters cherry-pick by taking the most aggressive, frustrated, and interested of those parents and make the promise that their kids will do better at a charter school,” he said. California charter advocates, however, point to multiple studies indicating that so-called cherry-picking does not account for the higher test scores seen among charter students.

Caputo-Pearl’s goals mesh well with those of the district, and based on recent headlines, it would appear that the war against charters is succeeding in directing attention away from declining enrollment and rising debt.

Who leaked the report that ran the Broad plan off the tracks for a year? Times reporter Howard Blume won’t say, but given the large number of union sympathizers and others who received advance copies, one might well ask: Who didn’t leak it?

Troubles upon Troubles

Tensions around co-location—the practice of housing charter schools and district schools in the same facility—ramped up after the draft plan became public.

The co-location initiative began in 2000 when California voters approved Proposition 39, which mandated that district facilities be “shared fairly among public school pupils, including those in charter schools,” and that districts provide charters with facilities that were “reasonably equivalent” to those given to district schools. Charter leaders say they supported the proposition on the assumption that school districts would treat their students equitably, as stated in the law. But from this perspective, L.A. Unified never complied, leading to lawsuits filed by the California Charter Schools Association to force co-locations (full disclosure: I have a daughter who works for CCSA). Each side of the conflict mobilized its parent allies.

Often, one side would accuse the other of falsely claiming they needed a larger facility, or one side would identify empty rooms that the other side would say were needed as art rooms, music rooms, teachers’ collaboration rooms, and so on.

From the perspective of L.A. Unified supporters, Proposition 39 was a Trojan horse. Its main purpose was to make it easier to pass bond issues for public school funding, and district advocates say that most voters were not aware of the provision (“buried in a little Easter egg,” as Folsom put it) requiring public schools to offer charters their unused space.

Folsom said that the magnet schools in the district manage to share space with charters without friction, but that charters forcing their way into other schools created an “us-versus-them” mentality.

As a result, the charters are feeling the heat, especially during “walk-ins” organized by the union, where students, parents, and teachers have protested charter expansion. One sign carried by a protester at one of these events implored: “Billionaires, have a heart. Your plan will tear our schools apart!” When I visited one of the Equitas charter schools in the spring, I learned that their schools had seen three demonstrations in just one week. One morning a group of parents filed into the flagship school, asked to fill out paperwork for enrolling their children, and then suddenly leaped into demonstration mode, pulling leaflets from their pockets. Interestingly, all the parents were wearing yellow visitor ID tags issued by a local L.A. Unified middle school.

The issue? The possibility that Equitas charters might claim some empty classrooms in their school. (Equitas founder Malka Borrego said she has no interest in their space.)

Another incident occurred in the spring at Community Preparatory Academy (CPA), a charter that shares space with Ambler Avenue Elementary in Carson, a city of 90,000-plus people. CPA co-leader Maisha Riley arrived at the school on May 4 to find posters hanging face in on the perimeter fence bearing legends such as, “We Can’t Grow, So Charter Must Go” and “It’s Not Fair That We Have to Share.”

Inside the elementary school, students had written graffiti in the bathrooms: “F— CPA.” Riley said that on the first day of school, the Ambler principal had told her, “We don’t like charters. We don’t want you on our campus.” Riley’s students, she said, are frequently bullied by the district-school kids.

When Riley asked around, she identified the protest instigator as a 5th-grade teacher at Ambler who during the 2015–16 school year was also the UTLA union rep at the school. Far more revealing: that same teacher had been tapped by her principal to serve as the school’s liaison to the charter.

The district appears to have minimal interest in changing the dynamic between the two schools. After the incident, the district sent out a representative to conduct assemblies for the students to discuss “commonalities,” said Riley, who characterized the meetings as “fluffy and nice,” but added, “A lot of the bullying that was going on is still going on.” Riley asked for a new liaison (“A lot of the bullies came from her class, and she was the one putting up the signs. I didn’t see her as a neutral party”) but was turned down. That was the prerogative of the Ambler principal, she was told. Neither the Ambler principal nor the 5th-grade teacher returned calls.

The Carson confrontation offers an insight into famously laid-back L.A. The only press coverage of the incident was a local public-radio station report, which didn’t mention the dual roles of the Ambler teacher. In New York City, such an event would probably draw prominent coverage in the tabloids, complete with photos of the bathroom graffiti and perhaps accompanied by an editorial. The same holds true for the deficit issue, which has not received frequent or regular coverage in the media.

Charters Expand

L.A. Unified has been losing students at a rapid clip since 2008, when five charter-management organizations—Green Dot, Aspire, Partnerships to Uplift Communities (PUC), Alliance College-Ready Public Schools, and Inner City Education Foundation Public Schools (ICEF)—announced major expansion plans. Everything changed when these big operators made it clear they were going for scale, thus challenging L.A. Unified for huge numbers of students. Suddenly, school board members became identified as “pro-” or “anti-” charter.

“Until those five big CMOs made the announcement of big plans for growth, serving a significant portion of the low-income population in Los Angeles, I didn’t feel anybody was really paying attention to us,” said Marco Petruzzi, who oversees Green Dot Public Schools National. Green Dot’s California network operates 18 charters in the city.

By 2011, the school district had geared up for battle, mostly by making life miserable for the charters. Almost overnight, the paperwork demands on charters exploded. What were once routine charter renewals became ordeals.

A representative of one large charter operator, who asked to remain anonymous, said its schools were filing a thousand pages of accountability paperwork per school per year, employing the equivalent of five people working full-time on that task.

After the Broad plan was leaked in 2015, L.A. charters also got stung with a series of rejections from the board. In February 2016, CCSA published an “open letter” from charter leaders to the district’s board: “While two years ago the L.A. Unified Board of Education approved 89 percent of new charter school petitions, so far this year the board has approved just 45 percent. This decline is dramatic. Given that charter schools are continually gaining more experience and sophistication, it is difficult for us to understand why and how the district finds charter petitions so much less credible than before.”

L.A. Unified officials declined to comment for this article, instead issuing a brief statement from newly appointed superintendent Michelle King: “I believe in expanding opportunities that will empower all L.A. Unified students to succeed. In order to do this, we need to eliminate the ‘us-versus-them’ mentality that is dominating our educational landscape and come together for the benefit of all students. We need to share what is working best in our traditional schools, magnets, pilots, and charters so that L.A. Unified can be the best that it can be.”

Electoral Battles

Even before the Broad plan was leaked, the charter battle had been further politicized during the spring 2015 school board elections, in which charter founder Ref Rodriguez challenged the union-friendly incumbent Bennett Kayser for a seat. In what was possibly the most expensive school-board race in history (with $3 million spent overall), the union squared off against charter supporters, including the California Charter Schools Association Advocates, the association’s political-action wing.

It was also one of the nastiest races in recent memory. District residents received flyers that pictured Rodriguez, who is gay, burning in hell for his wickedness. On the other side, CCSA Advocates attacked Kayser in a television ad featuring images of a shattering coffee mug, splashing coffee, and the tag line, “L.A. Unified is broken. Bennett Kayser is at the bottom of it.” Kayser suffers from Parkinson’s disease, and supporters considered it a veiled reference to his condition.

Rodriguez won the seat, and charter supporters won a new ally on the board. For the union, it was a huge blow. California teachers unions, whose power in the state is legendary, have rarely lost political fights. But while the election clearly shifted the balance of power on the board, the situation changed again after the Broad plan was leaked, with the school board tilting against charters.

Unionization Effort

Another piece of this battle is the year-old attempt to unionize L.A.’s largest charter group, Alliance College-Ready Public Schools. Because it seems unlikely the union will reach the threshold of signing up half the teachers at Alliance’s 27 schools, charter supporters have raised the question: Is winning really the point? Win or lose, charter advocates point out, the union fight is demanding the time and attention of Alliance’s management, thus making it harder for them to focus on academic achievement and perhaps dampening the group’s desire to expand. Again, charter leaders granted Caputo-Pearl respect points. One leader told me: “If I were trying to weaken charters, that’s exactly what I would do.”

Another bonus: now the union can champion that fight before union-friendly legislators in Sacramento, the very power brokers who make life for charters even more difficult. For example, in May a state senator who formerly served on the UTLA board successfully requested an audit into Alliance’s use of funds to fend off the union recruitment.

And Caputo-Pearl has the enthusiastic backing of his members in this fight. So incensed were the teachers by the leaked Broad plan that they voted by an astounding 82 percent to increase their annual dues by a third, to $1,000 a year, in order to combat the growth of charters. Although UTLA members are not known for high turnout in union elections, more than 50 percent of them voted on the dues increase.

Repeal Movement

All the fury has led to an effort to repeal California’s charter-school law. The group Voices Against Privatizing Public Education is trying to attract 375,000 signatures to get such a proposal before voters.

Aside from the daunting task of gathering so many signatures, however, the prospect of Californians turning against charters seems remote. California’s extraordinarily liberal charter-school law, which gave birth to the nation’s first charter-management organization (Aspire), differs from those of other states, partly because it does not require a focus on poor and minority students.

In fact, the state’s very first charter school, located in the upscale San Francisco suburb of San Carlos, is dedicated to learning through the arts. Many charters in the state provide options that appeal to middle-class parents, such as distinctive instructional designs like Montessori and Core Knowledge. In California, there’s nothing unusual about suburban charters, and the resulting broad base of support from middle-class voters will make it very difficult to overturn the law.

In L.A., however, where most charters serve poor and minority students—and appear to be doing a better job of it than many of their district-school counterparts—there is more at stake. The Washington, D.C., school district, with only about 47,000 students, was able to downsize successfully to a mix of 45 percent charters and 55 percent district schools. But no one thinks that L.A.’s sprawling district is capable of achieving such a feat: attempting to move toward such a balance would probably lead to a district breakup.

And so the fight continues to accelerate. The leaked Broad plan didn’t create the tensions, said Green Dot’s Petruzzi, but it did provide the union with the perfect PR opportunity. “The union is getting really smart around how to message this: It’s always about billionaires privatizing public education. It’s never about ‘we have to serve our students better if we don’t want to lose them.’ They have this marketing down to a science, and they are very disciplined about it.”

The union has continued to portray the charters as a drain on the district’s strength. In May, a union-commissioned report calculated that L.A. Unified loses about $500 million per year to charter schools. But the fact is, any money diverted to charters is following students whom the district no longer serves. And the union math assumes that all charter-school students, were the charter option suddenly to disappear, would return to district schools, which is unlikely. Instead of cutting staff, however, the district is trying to hold on to more students by expanding its popular magnet-school programs, adding thousands of new seats for 2016–17. The district is also pinning its hopes on an uptick in the economy and a new influx of families moving into the city who will choose traditional schools.

That’s not just wishful thinking, according to Folsom. “This city is too bold, too dynamic, and too important for [continued student losses]. The city will start growing again, and the district at that point will have to start shoving the co-located charters off our school district property because we need the space for our public school population,” he said, also noting the legal challenges involved in trying that. “And then, welcome to a whole new fight.”

Is there hope? Superintendent King acknowledges a “broken relationship” with charters and has promised to convene a summit to work things out.

And some charter leaders hope the dispute could begin to generate more light than heat. “Conflict is not always a bad thing,” said Emilio Pack, founder of the STEM Prep charter schools. “People want to make this a black-and-white thing. I like the grays. I’m a pragmatist.”

The Broad plan, recast as Great Public Schools Now, “re-launched” in June with a changed emphasis on adding high-quality school seats wherever they are found, charter or district, a clear shift that resulted from the aggressive pushback against the original plan.

But while the district can definitely work to reduce tensions with charters, the prospect of detente between charters and the union seems dim, now that the union is equipped with a new fight-charters budget and a billionaires-as-culprits strategy that pushes deficits to the back burner.

For now, the future of the Los Angeles schools remains both troubled and cloudy. It’s possible that the conflict will bring new accommodations between the two sides. But it’s equally possible that the leaked plan to dramatically increase the number of high-performing charters will, ironically, result in fewer charters.

Richard Whitmire is a veteran newspaper reporter, a former editorial writer at USA Today, and the author of several books about education.

Vergara v. California, a 2012 lawsuit that challenged the state’s teacher-tenure laws, terrified teachers unions when it was filed. In April 2016, to the unions’ relief, they won a victory in the case. But that victory is likely to be Pyrrhic. Copycat cases have already been filed in New York and Minnesota that have a much better chance of success, and lawsuits in other states are sure to follow. Ironically, these cases will rely on the same political strategy and legal reasoning that unions have enthusiastically supported in school-finance cases around the country. Having sown the legal wind, the unions will now reap the litigation whirlwind.

Taking a page from the school-finance advocates’ book, the Vergara plaintiffs concocted a clever but dubious constitutional rationale against the tenure laws. They contended that California’s brief 18-month window for awarding tenure, onerous teacher- dismissal policies, and last-in, first-out requirements adversely affected minority students. This alleged “disparate impact,” they claimed, violated the state constitution’s equal protection clause. The unions suffered an embarrassing defeat when the plaintiffs won at trial—but the judge’s ruling was heavy on political rhetoric and light on legal reasoning (see “Script Doctors,” legal beat, fall 2014). as a result, while unions took a public relations hit, they seemed to be equipped with a strong argument for an appeal.

That was confirmed in April when a California appellate court overturned the trial judge. The problem with the plaintiffs’ argument, according to the court, was that it did not prove that the statutes in question disproportionately harmed a particular class of children. Instead, the plaintiffs only showed that the teacher- tenure protections potentially harmed all students. Winning because you might harm all children, not just some, is not exactly a resounding victory, but the unions were happy to take it.

Yet their celebration over the ruling could come to an abrupt end when the copycat lawsuits in New York and Minnesota are decided. Smoothing the plaintiffs’ way in Davids v. New York is the 1995 decision in Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) v. New York, a long-running constitutional challenge that contended that the state was failing to adequately fund New York City schools. The case became one of the nation’s most successful educational- adequacy lawsuits when New York’s highest court, the Court of appeals, ruled that the state constitution’s spare education clause guaranteed a “sound basic education” to every child.

Thus, in contrast to Vergara, in which the plaintiffs had to prove that teacher-employment statutes harm a discrete class of students, the New York plaintiffs only have to show that the policies deprive some students of a sound basic education, which CFE defined as “not merely skills, but skills fashioned to meet a practical goal: meaningful participation in contemporary society.” as evidence continues to accumulate that teachers are the most important school-based influence on student achievement, the plaintiffs should find it easy to satisfy this extremely broad standard. Hence, CFE, which the unions enthusiastically supported, created a legal superhighway for the Davids plaintiffs to travel.

In Forslund v. Minnesota, the plaintiffs are relying on the state constitution’s requirement that the legislature provide for a “thorough and uniform” education. as in the New York case, their arguments closely follow the reasoning of adequacy lawsuits from around the country. according to adequacy advocates, vague clauses like “thorough and uniform” actually contain divinable standards that courts can compel the legislature to meet. Compared to proving that schools’ problems stem from inadequate funding, showing that tenure, dismissal, and last-in, first-out policies harm children should be easy.

But even if the lawsuits do not ultimately succeed, the discovery process is likely to create a public relations nightmare for unions. That process will allow the lawsuits’ supporters to publicize embarrassing facts about incompetent teachers protected by tenure and generate momentum for reform in the legislature. Unions will, of course, object to the use of litigation for political purposes, but that has been the strategy of school-finance litigants for decades: use a lawsuit to pressure the legislature to cave in to your demands.

In California, Vergara has certainly generated a torrent of bad coverage for teachers unions. When the union had to defend policies that protected teachers who spelled magician as “magition” and truth as “thruth,” the editorial pages of the Sacramento Bee, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times all came out for reform. With the Vergara plaintiffs’ recent appeal to the state Supreme Court, those unpleasant facts will stay in the news even longer. Even if the unions win in court, they’re likely to lose in the court of public opinion.

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

Over the past few years, students by the thousands have refused to take their state’s standardized tests. This “opt-out” phenomenon has prompted debate in state legislatures and in Washington, putting states at risk of losing Title I funds. Advocates describe opt-out as a grassroots movement of parents concerned about overtesting, teaching to the test, and a lack of transparency. Others oppose opt-out, viewing universal standardized testing as an important source of information for educators, students, and parents and a necessary tool for ensuring equity in public education.

Scott Levy, a New York State public-school parent and local school board member, and Jonah Edelman, cofounder and CEO of Stand for Children, a national organization advocating for college and career readiness for all, draw different conclusions in their analyses of the topic.

• “Opt-Out Reflects the Genuine Concerns of Parents,” by Scott Levy

• “This Issue Is Bigger Than Just Testing,” By Jonah Edelman

In a January 2014 speech, Arne Duncan, the U.S. secretary of education, urged parent leaders to hold high expectations for schools. “Please raise your voice for excellence—and against complacency,” he said. “Organize other parents…. Ask the hard questions, even when it means shaking things up and challenging the status quo.”

One year later, parents in New York raised their voices and shook things up when 20 percent of all eligible grade 3–8 students refused to participate in the 2015 state assessments. (By my calculations based on state-issued data, more than 225,000 students opted out.) Ironically, the policies being challenged were inspired by Duncan’s signature reform initiative, Race to the Top (RttT).

Many policymakers and pundits view the opt-out phenomenon as a fringe movement and have characterized test-refusing parents as uninformed middle-class suburbanites who are pawns of the teachers union and who are undermining accountability and the measurement of the achievement gap. An analysis of the facts suggests otherwise.

The New York test refusals were a symptom of legitimate parental concerns, resulting from the negative unintended consequences of school-reform policy. To get a clear
understanding of the test-refusal movement, we need to analyze its root causes and the underlying issues that drove parental discontent.

Fringe Parents?

New York’s 20 percent opt-out rate is impressive when compared to other expressions of civic engagement. For example, Governor Andrew Cuomo won the 2014 gubernatorial election by garnering only 19 percent of the eligible vote because of low voter turnout. Additionally, the 20 percent opt-out rate underrepresents the magnitude of parental opposition to New York’s current high-stakes testing policy. Many parents (like me) oppose it, but, for a variety of reasons, decided to have their kids sit for the 2015 exam. According to an April 2015 New York Times article, “even parents uncomfortable with the exams are discovering it is hard to push the button on the nuclear option.” Many superintendents discouraged opt-outs, fearing retribution from government entities. One district warned that schools with an opt-out rate in excess of 5 percent would risk being designated “In Need of Improvement,” at which point the state could require a “re-allocation of financial and educational resources … [that] could be significantly detrimental.” Districts that rely on Title I money worried that the federal government would withhold funds. The test-refusal rate was also very low in New York City, where state tests factor into middle and high school admissions and gifted-and-talented placement. Elsewhere in the state, the refusal rate was about 30 percent (see Figure 1).

Bamboozled by the Teachers Union?

Fifteen days prior to the 2015 state assessments, the New York State Union of Teachers (NYSUT) publicly encouraged opt-out. The Daily News wrote, “The attacks on testing are orchestrated to protect teachers, not students.” The Buffalo News editorial board stated, “Parents are being hoodwinked and NYSUT is the single most influential force behind the push.”

The union’s endorsement most likely did contribute to the record number of test refusals, but it does not fully explain the opt-out phenomenon. Beginning in 2013, parents began building a well-coordinated grassroots advocacy infrastructure to protest New York’s rollout of RttT. Specifically, parents were frustrated by the rapid and unrealistic timetable for implementation of the Common Core State Standards, the overemphasis on high-stakes testing, and the state’s effort to capture and analyze student data without an adequate plan to assuage data-privacy concerns.

New York simultaneously rolled out the Common Core, the new assessment program, and a new teacher-evaluation system but did not have the institutional capacity to implement so much change at once. Schools were required to teach the Common Core in 2012–13, but very few state curriculum modules were completed when the school year started. In other words, teachers were asked to implement a curriculum that was not available. Furthermore, many of the modules that were released contained errors. Nevertheless, in April 2013, New York became one of the first states to administer high-stakes Common Core tests.

More than 50 parent and educator groups from across the state united to form New York State Allies for Public Education (NYSAPE), with the mission of combating the state’s standardized-testing program and advocating for student data privacy. The group played an integral role in the movement by creating lines of communication between regional advocacy groups and parent and educator groups, relying heavily on social media, particularly Facebook.

In 2014, a year prior to NYSUT’s endorsement of test refusal, approximately 60,000 students opted out of taking the state exams. NYSAPE stated, “This was a deliberate decision on the part of parents to show how displeased they are with the Common Core exams and the way in which these tests have narrowed and diminished the education of their children.” A NYSAPE press release in March 2015 (also prior to the NYSUT endorsement) advertised 40 opt-out forums throughout the state during that month alone. The sample test-refusal letter on NYSAPE’s website received 175,000 hits leading up to the 2015 state tests. A steering committee member of NYSAPE wrote in a letter to the New York Times:

The 185,000-plus students who opted out of the state English Language Arts [ELA] test last week did so because of more than three years of organizing by a genuinely grass-roots movement of public school parents. This year parent groups held more than 100 forums across the state; rallied, protested and raised thousands of dollars for billboards promoting test refusal; and engaged tens of thousands more parents via Facebook and Twitter.

Testing and Accountability

Merryl H. Tisch, then chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, urged parents not to opt out, saying, “We don’t refuse to go to the doctor for an annual check-up.” However, many parents viewed New York’s testing system as educational malpractice. Reading a statement on behalf of the state PTA, its executive administrator said, “Parents need to trust that testing will actually benefit their kids and right now, that’s not what they see.” At its core, the opt-out movement is not a rejection of all testing. Parents supported reasonable measurement and accountability but were pushing back against a system that they believed compromised educational quality and failed to accurately evaluate teachers.

What were their specific objections? First, many parents thought the tests were too long. From 2010 to 2014, the length of the 3rd-grade ELA and math tests grew by 163 percent, and 4th graders were required to sit for seven (partial) days of state assessments. In 2015, some elementary school students took up to 540 minutes of standardized tests in April/May (in comparison, the SAT is 225 minutes). Many parents believe that the state did not consider the impact of high-stakes testing on students with disabilities, and there were reports that Individualized Education Program (IEP) accommodations have not always been honored during test administration.

Second, concerns were expressed regarding test quality and transparency. In 2013, several New York Assembly members summarized feedback from schools, stating that the test questions were “too vague and did not align with the Common Core curriculum.” Scoring procedures were opaque. The state PTA argued that setting cut scores after test results were known reduced trust among parents and teachers because “policy makers can set proficiency levels to make any case they choose.” Furthermore, the complete tests were not released, making it difficult for outsiders to assess the quality of the questions.

Third, parents felt the assessment system did not promote student learning. Scores were not received until the following school year (five months after testing), and initially, only aggregate results were released, making it impossible to pinpoint individual student weaknesses.

Fourth, the linkage of test scores to teacher evaluations proved controversial. Parents at forums shared anecdotal evidence of teaching to the test, less-creative teaching methods, and narrowing of instruction. In many districts, educators felt compelled to rely on state-scripted lesson plans. The New York State Council of School Superintendents reported that teachers were afraid to deviate from specific content for fear of not being aligned with the state assessments. These concerns were echoed in the findings of the New York Common Core Task Force, which Cuomo convened in 2015 to conduct a review of the standards and how they were implemented. The report highlighted that “students are spending too much time preparing for and taking tests,” teachers were “teaching to the test,” and the narrow focus on ELA and math has “diminished the joy in learning, inhibited creativity, and taken time away from other subjects.” Some schools doubled up on ELA and math instruction at the expense of science, social studies, art, and music. The task-force student ambassador expressed concern that the standards had diminished students’ excitement for learning “because they and their teachers are discouraged from pursuing and teaching topics about which they are passionate.” The state legislature passed a law limiting test prep to 2 percent of instructional time, but it was difficult to enforce.

Additionally, the new formulaic system was not a successful way to identify underperforming teachers. In 2014, only 1 percent of teachers statewide were ranked as “ineffective.” This year, a state court judge ruled in favor of a Long Island teacher, determining that the “ineffective” rating she had received on the growth-score portion of her evaluation (the part linked to student test results) was “arbitrary and capricious.”

Demographics

Critics of opt-out contend that test refusals happen mainly in middle-class and wealthy areas, hurting high-need schools by making it more difficult to measure the achievement gap. Opt-out leaders believe they are protecting all children from a measurement system that does more harm than good, and they have said they will opt in to standardized tests when the state rectifies the problems.

In fact, reforms placed a particularly difficult financial burden on “average” and “high-need” districts. (In New York State, “need” level has a precise meaning that indicates a district’s ability to meet student needs with local resources. The state designates a district as high, average, or low need by dividing the district’s poverty rate by its wealth per pupil.) The $700 million federal RttT grant that the state received covered only a fraction of the cost of implementing the required reform measures, putting financial strain on districts just after the 2008 recession. For example, in Rockland County, northwest of New York City, six districts collectively received $393,398 but estimated their implementation costs at $10.9 million. As a result, districts with tight budgets funded RttT by increasing class size, providing extra study-hall periods, and cutting athletics, librarians, art, and music. Judith Johnson, then superintendent of the Mount Vernon public schools, testified to the New York State Senate that rapid and unfunded reforms were not helping high-need districts. Rather, reforms were diverting precious resources to “statistically unreliable assessments that are used for high-stakes decision-making.” A recent survey of large urban districts nationwide found that students take an average of 112 mandated assessments during the K–12 years; the survey discovered no correlation between mandated testing time and student performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, whose aggregate results are reported via “the Nation’s Report Card.”

While it is true that students who opted out were more likely to be white, less likely to be English Language Learners (ELL), and less likely to be economically disadvantaged, the aggregate statistics do not tell the full story. The low opt-out rate in New York City (where, as previously mentioned, tests were used for admissions and placement) skews the statewide statistics. New York City has a disproportionate share of nonwhite students (86 percent versus 55 percent statewide), ELL students (14 percent versus 8 percent), and disadvantaged students (73 percent versus 54 percent). Outside of the city, high-need districts experienced a test-refusal rate in the 20 percent range. Furthermore, many non-English-speaking parents and parents with limited resources may not have had sufficient access to information or the ability to submit the paperwork required to exercise their opt-out right.

Aggregate statistics also fail to reveal granular differences among districts. For example, Blind Brook and Bronxville, in Westchester County, experienced a 23 percent and 2 percent opt-out rate, respectively, yet both are wealthy, high-performing districts, and they are located just 13 miles apart. Bay Shore, a Long Island district where the majority of students are nonwhite and classified as economically disadvantaged, experienced a 44 percent opt-out rate. Lackawanna, a Buffalo-area district with 90 percent of its students classified as economically disadvantaged, had a 46 percent opt-out rate.

Because opt-out is a grassroots phenomenon, communities varied in the extent of their participation, based in part on factors such as: 1) degree of parental involvement in the local schools, 2) whether the local PTA had an organized advocacy committee, 3) parental awareness of school-reform issues, and 4) access to the Internet and social media.

When Traditional Advocacy Fails

A group of national civil and human rights organizations have denounced test refusal, stressing that “we cannot fix what we cannot measure,” and that, instead of having their kids opt out, parents should be “stimulating worthy discussions” about overtesting. New York parents tried to engage state officials in discussion but couldn’t get them to listen.

Historically, there has been a clear path for parents to influence their children’s schools: reach out to the principal, superintendent, or school board, or run for a spot on that board. However, RttT reduced local control, and parents had difficulty navigating advocacy at the state level. The first hurdle was identifying the decisionmakers. Was it the governor who had the authority? The legislature? The board of regents (appointed by the legislature)? The state education department (appointed by the appointees)? Even leaders in Albany didn’t seem to agree. A December 2014 letter from Cuomo’s office to the regents chancellor said, “The Governor has little power over education, which is governed by the Board of Regents.” The chancellor responded: “The questions and concerns outlined in the letter relate to issues of State Law, which are under the direct control of the State Legislature and the Governor, not the Department or the Board of Regents.”

Nevertheless, community members tried to be heard. Thousands of parents signed petitions, wrote letters to local politicians and attended forums airing a litany of grievances about the test system. In 2013, 1,555 New York State principals signed a petition against the teacher-evaluation system. The school boards in 77 districts symbolically voted to opt out of RttT and return their RttT funds to the state, even though they were still legally bound to comply with the reforms. More than 125 districts passed resolutions opposing high-stakes tests tied to teacher evaluations.

Despite the protests, and although Cuomo agreed that reform implementation was “flawed,” the governor announced a new plan in early 2015 to increase the state test-score component of teacher evaluations from 20 to 50 percent. Because traditional advocacy methods failed to capture Albany’s attention, NYSAPE and other groups intensified their encouragement of test refusal. “We’ve written letters to legislators for years, until we were blue in the face, and they didn’t listen,” said Eric Mihelbergel, a founding member of NYSAPE.

Test-Refusal Impact

Policymakers could not ignore the unprecedented number of test refusals. Less than a year after Cuomo wanted to link 50 percent of a teacher’s evaluation to student test scores, he called for a “total reboot” of the system and formed the Common Core task force to investigate. The task force concluded that the “one-size-fits-all” reforms caused “parents, educators, and other stakeholders to lose trust in the system.” It recommended an overhaul of the Common Core standards and a moratorium on linking test scores to teacher evaluations until the 2019–20 school year. The panel confirmed the legitimacy of many of the issues parents had been raising for years. It found that the standards were too rigid, were not always age appropriate, and did not take into account students with special needs. In addition, the task force concluded that the high-stakes exams encouraged teaching to the test, were too long, and were not transparent.

Seven New York State regents published a position paper stating that the “malfunctioning” teacher-evaluation system was based on an “incomplete and inadequate understanding of how to address the task of continuously improving our educational system.” In March 2016, Board of Regents Chancellor-Elect Betty Rosa said, “If I was a parent and I was not on the Board of Regents, I would opt out at this time.” Finally, the New York State Education Department has committed to making the tests shorter and untimed, and to improving their quality and transparency.

The Obama administration has similarly shifted its stance, admitting that testing policies had “unintended effects,” such as excessive time spent on standardized tests. The administration will allow states greater flexibility to use other teacher-evaluation methods, such as student and parent surveys and observation and feedback systems.

Early reports suggest that the New York State test-refusal rate has remained high in 2016. Policymakers have begun to address parental concerns, but the length, transparency, and quality of the exams are still issues. Furthermore, the current moratorium on linking test scores to teacher evaluations is not enough to placate parents who want to see a permanent solution. On a positive note, policymakers are listening more attentively to their constituents, and the dialogue has improved.

Arne Duncan was right when he challenged parents to “ask the hard questions,” but if that tactic is to work, policymakers have to respond to the questions. For three years, parents in New York spoke out against state education policy, but they were ignored. It is a shame that they had to resort to test refusal in order to be heard.

Policymakers and parents alike believe in high standards, equity, and school accountability, but no one has a monopoly on the best ideas for achieving those goals. All constituencies must work together to construct a fair and effective system of assessment that supports teaching and learning rather than disrupting it.

This piece reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily represent the position of the local school board on which he serves.

This piece is part of a forum on the testing opt-out movement. For an alternate perspective, see “This Issue Is Bigger Than Just Testing” by Jonah Edelman.

What do we hear from those who oppose testing? Schools burden students with excessive test preparation. Districts force students to take standardized tests throughout the school year that aren’t aligned to what students are learning. Some states and districts have unfairly penalized teachers during this period of transition to common standards of learning.

What might come as a surprise to some is that I agree with all of the criticisms. There is too much test preparation. There are too many unaligned tests given throughout the year. And some states and districts haven’t given enough thought to how to evaluate teachers during the transition period. All that said, I firmly believe that tests are fundamentally necessary and that the new tests aligned with the Common Core State Standards, which are better and fairer than former assessments, are a key tool for educators and parents to ensure their students are on track for college and career.

Last year, roughly 20 percent of New York State public school students refused to sit for standardized tests. In the state of Washington, 48,000 students didn’t take the state assessment. A few other states, such as New Jersey and Colorado, also gained media attention when large numbers of students refused to take tests.

When we look further at these opt-outs, we find an interesting trend. Students who didn’t take the assessments in New York were more likely to be white, well off, and from upscale cities and towns (see Figure 2a). They were also modestly lower achieving than those who took the tests (see Figure 2b). In Washington State, the vast majority of those opting out were from economically advantaged households, and a high percentage were 11th graders. As they prepare for college, many 11th graders take the SAT or ACT and perhaps Advanced Placement exams as well, and they probably don’t relish the idea of also having to take state standardized tests.

Despite the media hype and the overheated and often irresponsible rhetoric of test-refusal activists (which only adds to students’ anxiety), this issue is about common sense and equity. Test refusers commonly try to throw all of education’s ills into the sink. There is no doubt that there was a rocky transition with the Common Core and the aligned tests, but instead of joining a productive debate and coming together with solutions, opt-out activists have taken unilateral action. The ones being harmed are those commonly stuck in the middle—the students. The simple question we need to keep at the center of this issue is, are we counting every child and ensuring that he or she is on a path to college and career? That needs to be our singular focus when it comes to talking about the value of testing as a tool in educators’ and parents’ toolboxes.

All parents, regardless of socioeconomic background, race, ethnicity, or their child’s disability designation, need to know how their child is doing in reading, writing, and math. Just because a student attends an advantaged school does not mean that he or she is automatically on track for college or career. Conversely, a student attending a chronically underperforming school is not necessarily achieving below grade level. Yearly assessments provide a piece of critical information for parents who in many cases may not be getting the full picture from their children’s report cards.

The fact is, no parent gets excited about his or her child taking a standardized test, just as we don’t get excited about taking our kids for annual checkups at the doctor’s office. My organization, Stand for Children, has championed legislation in multiple states to significantly reduce testing time. We also support the idea of districts conducting thoughtful audits of their assessment practices in order to weed out unnecessary testing.

Students should only take tests that 1) are aligned to what they’re learning, 2) are high quality, and 3) serve a useful purpose. While you wouldn’t know it based on the shallow media coverage, many educators consider the new generation of standardized tests to be far superior at assessing student learning than any previous tests. For instance, Massachusetts educators strongly prefer the PARCC exam over the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS), which isn’t fully aligned with the state curriculum frameworks. And a recent report by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, comparing the new tests with older ones, indicated that the PARCC and Smarter Balanced exams had the strongest matches with the criteria that the Council of Chief State School Officers developed for evaluating high-quality assessments.

Personally, I’m glad my sons, now 5th graders, are required to take a standardized test annually from 3rd through 8th grade. I deeply value their teachers’ perspective on how they’re progressing academically and in other ways, but I also want a more objective gauge of whether they’re on grade level in math, reading, and writing. For the same reason, I strongly believe in taking my sons for an annual medical checkup, even if they seem healthy to me.

Every child in our country needs to learn how to read, write, and do basic math. If children can’t master these fundamental skills, they can’t learn and progress in other key ways, and can’t possibly get a good job when they grow up. And they may well end up incarcerated or chronically unemployed.

That’s why educators, parents, advocates, and policymakers need to know how students are doing in reading, writing, and math throughout the K–12 years. For all students, but particularly for the tens of millions of American students growing up in poverty, it’s a life-defining question.

High-quality standardized tests help:

• parents know whether their children are on track so they can work with teachers to resolve issues before it’s too late;

• teachers know how their students compare with others across the state, and help the next grade’s teachers know what kind of support incoming students need;

• educators use data to inform instructional decisions in future years based on cohort performance;

• school leaders know which teachers are doing well and which ones may need extra attention;

• school administrators know which schools are doing well and which ones need careful review;

• policymakers and the public know how marginalized students—including low-income students of color and those with disabilities—are doing and help prevent school systems and society itself from ignoring their needs.

Let’s stay on that last point for a moment. There is a reason the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was signed into law in 1965 at the height of the Civil Rights movement, as there was clear disparity in states across the country in how students were educated based simply on the color of their skin, income level, or ability. Without standardized tests, how would we even know if disproportionate numbers of low-income children and children of color in a particular school or community are behind? How would parents in underserved communities with a high percentage of low-performing schools have any idea their children are attending a failing school? How else but with standardized tests?

These aren’t abstract questions. Given that the majority of public school students in our nation are nonwhite and come from low-income families, they are also defining questions for the future of our nation.

At Stand for Children, we work with thousands of low-income parents and guardians in underserved communities all across the nation, from Phoenix to Indianapolis, Boston to Baton Rouge, Denver to Chicago, Tulsa to Tacoma. Like the vast majority of low-income parents, the parents and guardians (including many grandparents raising grandchildren) with whom we work are deeply committed to their children getting a good education, knowing it’s their only hope for a better life. And yet, committed as they are, it’s frighteningly common for parents and guardians with whom we work to believe wrongly that their children are on track because they’re bringing home good grades. It’s also sadly common for these parents to think their children are in good schools—when that couldn’t be further from the truth.

I’m talking about the African American grandmother in Memphis who was horrified to discover after we taught her how to interpret standardized test results that her four grandchildren—all of whom were getting As and Bs in school—were up to three grades behind in reading. With the assistance of Stand for Children, she found the children extra help right away, and they’ve caught up.

I’m thinking of the many dozens of Latino immigrant parents we worked with in the Murphy School District in Phoenix who were dismayed to learn their district was chronically failing to educate their children. Armed with that information and empowered by the state’s open-enrollment law, they moved their children to better public schools.

Then there are the African American parents we supported at School 93 in a low-income neighborhood of Indianapolis, who, after learning their school was one of the worst-performing in the state of Indiana, advocated to bring a proven local school-improvement model called Project Restore to their school. The result has been a dramatically improved instructional focus, a positive school climate, and marked progress for students.

How would that caring Memphis grandmother have known her grandchildren were behind if it weren’t for standardized tests? Without standardized tests, how would the committed Murphy parents have known their district was wantonly failing? How would the School 93 parents have found out there was a problem with their children’s school? What would have happened to all of those children if they didn’t have this critical information point to add to the others?

I can tell you this with confidence: standardized tests aren’t a nuisance to the families we work with, nor for me. For the families we serve, whose children are more apt to attend low-performing schools and have less-effective teachers than their privileged peers, the time taken for standardized tests is a reasonable cost for receiving vital information about how their children are doing academically. The same should hold true for more affluent families choosing to opt out of the annual assessment. If children who are experiencing success in schools or for whom schools generally “work” (that is, white, middle-class, nondisabled children) don’t participate in the assessment, their parents lose valuable information. And decisionmakers lose valuable information about where there may be bright spots to learn from and where improvement or intervention is needed.

That’s why civil rights organizations such as the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, the National Urban League, the National Disability Rights Network, and National Council of La Raza campaigned so hard—and successfully—during the debate over the Every Student Succeeds Act to convince Congress and the Obama administration to continue to require annual measurements of student progress.

Opponents of standardized tests often ignore the vital role assessments play in the struggle for educational equity. They also commonly argue that the United States tests students more than most countries. That’s simply untrue.

Andreas Schleicher of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which oversees the multinational Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam, expressed wonderment at U.S. news coverage of test refusals. “The U.S. is not a country of heavy testing,” Schleicher noted. In fact, he told the Hechinger Report and U.S. News & World Report that most of the 70 OECD nations give their students more standardized tests than we do in the United States. The Netherlands, Belgium, and several Asian countries—all of which have high-performing education systems—test students much more.

Standardized tests are common the world over because they serve an essential purpose—to provide information about learning in schools. That said, standardized tests obviously don’t measure the myriad other ways children need to develop to be contributing members of society, and we need to make sure that schools don’t overly focus on core subjects and fail to educate the whole child. We also need to ensure that instruction is relevant and engaging so that students are motivated to come to school and learn.

Furthermore, there are ways in which we can improve standardized testing in our country.

An issue that gets little attention from the news media is that too many schools lack the technology or bandwidth to enable efficient standardized testing to take place. This situation must be remedied so we can minimize the time needed to administer standardized tests (and enable more students to benefit from better technology throughout the school year).

In addition, test providers should deliver assessment results more quickly so parents and teachers can use the information right away. And perhaps we need to consider shifting toward shorter assessments taken at intervals throughout the year. That approach needs further exploration, but it could provide teachers and parents with more immediately useful information. There are such tests on the market, but most don’t align with what students are learning, and they don’t yet enable monitoring of how educators, schools, districts, and states are doing.

For now, I hope that more parents will begin to recognize that standardized tests provide invaluable information that can help us move toward equity in public education and improve the system for everyone. Let’s stop this battle and instead work together for solutions that help all students get the education they deserve.

This piece is part of a forum on the testing opt-out movement. For an alternate perspective, see “Opt-Out Reflects the Genuine Concerns of Parents” by Scott Levy.