Eamonn Fitzmaurice/LA School Report

Most states have revised their strategies for teaching children to read over the last half-decade, a reflection of both long-held frustration with slow academic progress and newer concerns around COVID-related learning loss. An attempt to incorporate evidence-based insights into everyday school practice, the nationwide campaign has been touted as a promising development for student achievement.

But many states don’t adequately train or help teachers to carry out those ambitious plans, according to a new analysis.

The report, released today by the nonprofit National Center on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), identifies five key areas where education authorities can arm teachers with better skills to teach the fundamentals of literacy — from establishing strict training and licensure standards for trainees to funding meaningful professional development to classroom veterans. While a handful of states were singled out for praise, others were criticized for inaction or half-measures.

Dozens of states use licensure tests with little or no content related to the “science of reading,” the extensive body of research into how people understand written language (including one, Iowa, that administers no licensure test that deals with reading whatsoever.) The vast majority do not require districts to choose reading curricula that reflect the science of reading.

NCTQ President Heather Peske, a former high-ranking K–12 official in Massachusetts, applauded recent changes in state law as “well-intentioned,” but cautioned that they could only meet with success if executed with care.

“Passing state policy is the very beginning stage of doing this work,” Peske said. “It’s really the implementation that we need to focus on now.”

Though it has germinated in academic and policy circles for years, the legislative push around early literacy first gained public prominence in Mississippi, which enacted a rash of new laws around reading instruction a decade ago. That dramatic overhaul included changes to public pre-K offerings, new resources provided to districts (including special coaches assigned to underperforming schools), and even the controversial practice of holding back third graders who failed an end-of-year exam.

Mississippi was identified in the report as one of the national leaders implementing necessary reading reforms, along with Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Minnesota, Ohio, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, and Virginia. By contrast, Maine, Montana, and South Dakota were rated “unacceptable” across the five recommended action items.

Eamonn Fitzmaurice/The 74

Even as aspiring teachers are being trained, the authors argue, many are being set up to fall short in their first assignments. Just 26 states provide detailed standards for what teaching candidates need to know about the science of reading, including critical aspects like phonics, phonemic awareness, and fluency. Twenty-one states don’t establish any standards for the specific instruction of English learners, who account for as much as 20 percent of all K–12 students in places like Texas.

In spite of the clear signs that thousands of teachers are minted each year with incomplete or inaccurate notions of the science of reading, a majority of state education departments allow outside entities and accreditors to approve literacy offerings in schools of education and other teacher preparation programs. Just 23 states administer their own process of approval, and only 10 consult literacy experts in the decision of whether to approve individual programs.

Eamonn Fitzmaurice/The 74

Once those new teachers enter the classroom, many will be stuck using materials that are poorly aligned with the best research on how to improve reading outcomes, the study concludes. Only nine states — Nevada, Arkansas, Tennessee, Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, Ohio, Virginia, and South Carolina — require that districts use high-quality reading curricula, such as those approved by vetting organizations like EdReports. The remaining states, accounting for 40 million K–12 students, make no such requirement; 20 states don’t even collect data on which curricula districts are using, so families must make their own inquiries into whether their children have access to effective instruction.

Even while popular early literacy approaches, such as “guided reading” and “balanced literacy,” have fallen out of favor with education experts in recent years, hundreds of school districts still spend millions of dollars each year to access them. Some include wealthy suburban districts in high-achieving areas like Greater Boston, where high average reading scores are complicated by large disparities between high- and low-performing students.

Peske said that while the report did not delve into regulatory questions like whether to introduce universal dyslexia screening or to retain low-scoring elementary students for extra reading instruction, those issues were also important parts of state rules around foundational literacy. But teacher preparation and support stood above the rest, she concluded.

“We know teachers matter most; they’re the most important in-school factor in impacting student outcomes,” she said. “So if we’re actually going to see improvement in student reading rates, we need to make sure teachers are prepared and supported to implement and sustain scientifically based reading instruction.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Eamonn Fitzmaurice/LA School Report

For K–12 education, 2023 was a year spent over a threshold.

Schools had one foot in the shutdown era, still struggling to restore a sense of normalcy that disappeared in 2020. A steep rise in behavioral and disciplinary issues, which many teachers hoped would be only the temporary product of COVID’s generational disruption to routines, stayed with us. Millions of kids have remained separated from their local schools — not because they’re prevented by public health measures from entering the building, but because they’re simply choosing not to attend classes. And across a whole range of academic subjects, actual student learning is lower and slower than it was before the pandemic.

Meanwhile, school systems are adapting to trends and technologies that have arisen just over the past few years. Districts are spending billions of dollars to establish or expand tutoring programs, which may be America’s best tool to combat learning loss, while AI platforms like ChatGPT are transforming the way instruction can be delivered (and challenging schools’ ability to keep ahead of cheating).

And researchers continue to ask all the questions that have traditionally set the parameters of America’s K–12 agenda: Why do student populations self-segregate? Is it better for kids to be assigned to tough or easy graders? How much do teacher training programs really help? Have charters caught up to traditional public schools?

As we do every year, The 74 has compiled a year-end inventory of the most fascinating discoveries, insights, and ambiguities that came out of education research in 2023.

Welcome to the year in charts.

1. Student absenteeism is out of control

You could spend a lot of time simply tallying the aspects of student life that COVID made worse: significantly diminished achievement, lower odds of graduating on time, escalating behavioral challenges, and fewer applications to college. But the most dangerous consequence might be its effects on how often children came to school.

According to data collected by Stanford University Professor Thomas Dee, the proportion of K–12 students who were chronically absent — i.e., who missed 10 percent or more of the school year — nearly doubled during the pandemic, vaulting from 14.8 percent in 2019 to 28.3 percent in 2022. Extrapolated across all schools, that means an additional 6.5 million kids became chronically absent following COVID. Every state Dee studied saw an increase of at least 4 percentage points, but those with higher pre-pandemic rates of absence experienced the largest jumps.

The findings jibe with those of other alarming research on attendance. An analysis from Johns Hopkins University’s Everybody Graduates Center and the advocacy group Attendance Works, covered by The 74’s Linda Jacobson in October, showed that in 2021–22, two-thirds of American students attended a school where at least 20 percent of students were chronically absent. In over half of all high schools, chronic absenteeism rates topped 30 percent that year.

2. Catch-up learning hit a wall last year

But are kids (at least, the ones actually showing up) regaining the ground they lost since 2020? According to much of the testing data that emerged this year, the answer is no — or at least, nowhere near quickly enough.

In a July report, researchers from the nonprofit testing organization NWEA combed through nearly seven million children’s scores on the Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) assessment, which is administered both in the fall and the spring to measure how much students learn during the year. But test takers in the 2022–23 academic year made markedly less progress in key subjects than comparable elementary and middle schoolers who sat for the exam before the pandemic, with growth in reading and math falling by as much as 19 percent and 15 percent, respectively. Only third-graders exceeded the pre-COVID learning averages.

The stalled momentum was directly cited in the Center on Reinventing Public Education’s dispatch on “State of the American Student,” which distilled a host of worrying trends and warned that America has little time left to reset the trajectory for millions of adolescents. According to ongoing indicators like the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which released long-run scores for 13-year-olds this spring, average performance in math and reading has been set back to levels last seen decades ago.

Even if schools and families feel like they’re through with the pandemic, the pandemic — and the harsh blow it has dealt to kids — isn’t done with us.

3. Virtual tutoring can work

Thankfully, states and districts aren’t sitting on their hands in the face of learning loss. Supported by billions of dollars of federal funds, many have invested heavily in tutoring programs that promise to help struggling children overcome the challenges imposed by past school closures and virtual instruction. The question is whether those efforts work for enough students to justify their cost — and according to data generated by the National Student Support Accelerator, a Stanford initiative devoted to studying the effects of tutoring, there is reason for hope.

In October, the Accelerator circulated a paper showing impressive results from OnYourMark, a fully virtual program provided to developing readers. The study found that among 1,000 students enrolled in Texas charter schools, participating in OnYourMark resulted in kindergartners gaining the equivalent of 26 extra days of learning in letter sounds and first graders receiving 55 additional days of sound decoding. The news is particularly encouraging in that it shows a path to success for virtual tutoring, which has often been shown to be far less effective than in-person instruction.

4. Grade inflation got worse during the pandemic

As the chaotic transition to online learning got underway in 2020, schools had to decide how they would judge the work of students cut off from their teachers and classmates. Many opted for more lenient policies, including eliminating F grades and granting credit for late or incomplete work, out of a desire to avoid more punitive measures during a crisis.

It’s difficult to chart the average impact of the shift across thousands of school districts, but the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) recently released a brief focusing on a decade of student records in Washington State. The picture was stark: While the average middle and high school GPA for math rose by 0.11 points between 2011 and 2019, it got a boost three times that size — one-third of a GPA point, or about the difference between a C-plus and a B-minus — between 2019 and 2021.

In general, wrote CALDER director and American Institutes for Research vice president Dan Goldhaber, the relationship between student grades and their scores on state standardized tests “has diminished over time,” particularly in math. A similar pattern is suggested by the annual release of ACT results, which show scores remaining largely flat in recent years even as students’ self-reported high school grades have climbed. And just like with price inflation, GPAs that soared during the pandemic still haven’t fully come back to earth.

5. Tough grading has its advantages

So what are the effects of higher course marks? Several papers released this year indicate that they can be surprisingly negative.

In a paper circulated this fall, a trio of researchers explored the consequences of a statewide switch to more lenient grading standards undertaken in North Carolina  in 2014. The policy was meant to make grades more comparable between school districts, but in effect, it also lowered the threshold for each letter grade in high schools. It also seemed to affect various student groups quite differently. As expected, the highest-achieving kids received higher grades (though only in their freshman year), but disturbingly, struggling students didn’t receive a similar bump. They also seemed to disengage from school, accruing substantially more absences than students who weren’t exposed to the looser standards; over time, those absences likely hurt their learning, as measured by relatively lower scores on the ACT.

If easier grading holds the potential to hurt attendance and widen achievement gaps, the opposite may also be true. In a study that also focused on North Carolina schools, American University Professor Seth Gershenson discovered that eighth and ninth graders assigned to math teachers with relatively tougher grading standards later saw higher math scores throughout high school. And far from validating fears that hard classes make kids tune out, those students were also less likely to be absent from class than their peers.

6. COVID hit social studies too

Much of the concern over learning loss is focused on weakened performance on the core disciplines of math and reading. In fact, the academic harm was widely dispersed.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress — a federal standardized test often called the Nation’s Report Card — only measures proficiency in social studies every four years. The exam’s latest results, revealed in May, showed that eighth graders’ average history scores fell by five points; civics scores fell by two points, the first decline in the history of the test. All told, the results for both have fallen to levels last seen in the early 1990s, the latest evidence that COVID has triggered a generational reversal in knowledge acquisition.

The swoon came amid a national debate over how to teach about American history and government, with states like Virginia initiating significant overhauls of their academic standards. But the phenomenon appears to be international in scope: Results from the International Civic and Citizenship Education study, which tests over 80,000 eighth graders across 22 industrialized countries on civic knowledge, showed that large numbers of test takers couldn’t answer questions about election fairness or democratic governance. Only 55 percent of respondents said they felt their nation’s governmental system “works well.”

7. Choice might be good for public schools

The explosive growth of school vouchers and education savings accounts, which allow families to spend public funds on private education, has dominated the school choice debate this year. Public school choice (i.e., charters and open enrollment policies), while also controversial, has receded somewhat from conversation.

But a working paper released this summer indicates that, in addition to providing more instructional options to families that want them, intra-choice can improve learning throughout wider communities. University of Chicago economist Christopher Campos and data scientist Caitlin Kearns scrutinized Los Angeles’s Zones of Choice initiative, which allows families within designated neighborhoods to select among multiple high schools rather than send their children to the one nearest their home. Participation in the program, they learned, significantly increases students’ English exam scores and boosts their enrollment rate at four-year colleges by 25 percent. Those gains were concentrated among schools exposed to the most competition and those that previously performed the worst, strongly hinting that inclusion in the Zones pushed them to hold onto students by improving their offerings.

A different study of choice in North Carolina yielded broadly similar results, though with caveats. Focusing on the state’s decision to lift its cap on charter schools in 2012, the paper’s authors revealed that the move incrementally improved public schools’ value-added scores as measured by state standardized tests; that improvement, while small in scale, generated huge value in the aggregate, as the study concluded that the average public high schooler’s lifetime wages were lifted by $1,500 by allowing more charters to open. As in the Los Angeles study, the promising effects seem to have come about through competition for students.

Dispiritingly, however, the impact on pupils who actually enrolled in the charter schools after the cap was lifted was negative, perhaps because the newly established schools tended to employ more “non-traditional” models (e.g., project-based or experiential learning, such as Montessori) that weren’t as successful as existing charter options.

No one said this stuff was simple.

8. Charters aren’t underperforming anymore

Charter schools have been around for over 30 years. For most of that time, their advocates and detractors have argued passionately over just how effective they really are at improving academic achievement. The primary arbiter of those disputes, most often, has been Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), which has released a series of studies over more than a decade comparing the performance of charter students with those enrolled at district public schools.

In the first few editions, those reports showed the newer schools lagging behind their traditional counterparts — evidence that the sector’s opponents’ cited frequently throughout the fierce school reform battles of the Obama era. But the latest iteration — CREDO’s first national evaluation in a decade, including data on 1.8 million students across 31 states and cities — calculated that charter students receive the equivalent of 16 extra days of learning in literacy, and six extra days of math, than students at the local public schools they would have otherwise attended. The edge, while decidedly slight, masks larger variation among subgroups: Black students gained an average of 35 extra days of reading growth and 29 extra days of math, equal to more than a month of supplemental instruction.

Not all charters are created equal, however. An article published last month in the journal Education Next, and covered by The 74’s Greg Toppo, compared the performance of charter sectors in each state based on their students’ performance on NAEP. Somewhat surprisingly, the state with the top showing was Alaska, where charter students score an average of 32 points higher on the test than the national average for charter school students. Their peers in Pennsylvania, Oregon, Michigan, Tennessee, and Hawaii weren’t so fortunate, with each scoring at least 21 points lower than the national average.

9. Teacher prep can be rethought on the fly

Starting in spring 2020, Massachusetts launched a grand experiment: Concerned that the tumultuous working conditions of the pandemic would discourage young people from becoming teachers, the state began issuing emergency credentials to teaching candidates even if they hadn’t completed the necessary coursework to be licensed. Over the next three years, almost 20,000 such licenses were granted to instructors who worked full-time while simultaneously working to meet their licensure requirements.

Boston University’s Wheelock Education Policy Center has followed the progress of those early-career teachers. Their analysis, laid out in multiple reports, presents a quietly stunning observation: As measured through a combination of school-level performance evaluations, principal questionnaires, and student scores on standardized tests, the emergency-licensed teachers perform similarly to their colleagues who completed traditional teacher preparation programs. Students assigned to them were not disadvantaged in learning in spite of their unconventional path to the classroom. What’s more, by the program’s second year, one-quarter of emergency licensees were non-white — vastly more than the statewide average in Massachusetts.

The notion that aspiring educators can thrive in the profession without reaching it through the traditional channels isn’t a new one; Teach for America and other alternative credentialing programs have existed for decades, yielding some real successes during that period. But the Massachusetts experience illustrates some of the specific benefits of dropping licensure requirements during a crisis. Namely, making entry more flexible (and shaving off the years of study and thousands of dollars in tuition that often act as a deterrent to otherwise qualified candidates) can produce a more diverse and no less effective workforce.

10. More good news on third-grade retention

Legislation around the science of reading has swept through dozens of states over the last decade. In part, the political success of the new literacy agenda is due to the popularity of most of its planks: evidence-backed curricula, teacher coaching, and additional resources for kids and schools that need them.

By contrast, third-grade retention — holding back students for a year if they’re not on track to succeed by the end of that crucial threshold — plays the role of the bad cop. In spite of the existing evidence that struggling elementary schoolers in states like Florida and Indiana can see large benefits from repeating a grade, many parents and teachers still consider that step too punitive.

But according to a paper circulated in June, the upsides of the approach extend in some unexpected directions. In a study of 12 large school districts in Florida, which has had a retention policy related to reading scores for over 20 years, researchers found that third graders made significant gains in scores for both math and reading after being held back. Even more promising, targeted students’ younger siblings also saw larger learning gains than the brothers and sisters of comparable students who weren’t retained.

It’s unclear what feature of Florida’s law led to the positive “spillover effects,” but study co-author Umut Özek told The 74 that families might be responding in an advantageous way to the experience of their older children. “When you get a signal that says, ‘Your kid is not performing at a level that will allow them to be promoted to fourth grade,’ that’s a very clear signal that will likely induce a response from parents.”

11. Asian students in, white families out

“White flight,” as it’s usually understood, refers to the phenomenon of working- and middle-class white families decamping from inner cities in the 1960s and ‘70s as a response to increased crime, deteriorating local economies, and growing numbers of African American residents. It’s a hotly contested phenomenon, but many in the education policy world blame it for contributing to school segregation and shrinking the tax base of urban school districts.

This year, superstar researcher Leah Boustan applied the concept to a different setting. A student of prior racial migrations at the city level, the Princeton economist studied the movement of Asian-American students into 152 California school districts, all of them suburban and relatively affluent. The sizable growth over the decades of the early 21st century appeared to generate its own version of white flight — more specifically, for every Asian student who enrolled in local schools, 1.5 white students left.

The departures weren’t correlated with any other demographic changes. But accompanying survey evidence convinced Boustan and her collaborators that they also likely weren’t triggered by racial animus. Instead, they pointed to white parents’ wariness of academic competition with Asian-American kids, who out-achieve other student categories in virtually every academic metric.

“Someone is showing up in the district who scores better than they do,” Boustan said in an interview with The 74. “In relative terms, the white kids are generally falling behind.”

12. Extracurricular activities show large racial gaps

The most significant education development of 2023 may well have been the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the case that prohibited the use of racial preferences in college admissions. The end of affirmative action as we’ve known it, occurring just as colleges move en masse away from the use of entrance exams like the SAT and ACT, means that admissions decisions will increasingly be made on the basis of other parts of the application package.

One of those will undoubtedly be extracurricular activities — the menu of clubs, productions, athletics, and volunteer opportunities that high schoolers have learned to embrace in order to be considered well-rounded. But if their aim is to foster diversity while adhering to new legal constraints, colleges might think twice before relying on them too heavily. According to an April study drawing on nearly 6 million college applications from the 2018–19 and 2019–20 admissions cycles, participation in extracurriculars is surprisingly race-specific. White, Asian-American, and wealthy students, along with those attending private high schools, reported engaging in many more activities than their African American, Latino, American Indian, and low-income classmates. The activities they choose also tend to feature more leadership roles and confer more honors, both of which could help win a university slot.

If race, test scores, and extracurriculars are reduced in prominence, however, it’s difficult to say what will take their place. Separate campaigns have been waged against the use of admissions essays, which have been found to favor wealthier students, and undergraduate letters of admission, which often leverage social capital that disadvantaged kids don’t have. In the end, admissions officers might be left throwing darts at the wall.

13. Flexible pay has unintended consequences

The Act 10 legislation, passed in 2011 by Wisconsin Republicans, ignited one of the most furious school reform controversies of its era. By stripping teachers of the right to collectively bargain over salary schedules and benefits, then-Gov. Scott Walker dealt a massive blow to teachers’ unions, perhaps the most influential progressive force in state politics. It was also a provocation that some credit with catalyzing the revived organizing movement of the last half-decade, which has seen a rash of teacher strikes and renewed hostility to other planks of the reform agenda.

In a study published in the education journal Education Next, Yale economist Barbara Biasi looked at the transformative effects of Act 10 on teacher labor markets, which suddenly became much more flexible as schools could opt to pay different salaries to teachers on the basis of either career tenure or classroom performance. That had some positive effects for individual districts: Younger, more effective teachers were able to win large pay increases by moving to areas where their lack of seniority wasn’t held against them.

But the state also saw an unpalatable side effect. In part because younger female teachers are more reluctant than their male counterparts to negotiate aggressively for higher pay, flexible-pay districts also saw a newfound gender wage gap begin to open. Though small on average, Biasi found that the cumulative effect over a teacher’s career could amount to an entire year’s pay.

14. Gifted education does little to increase segregation

The last few years have brought a clash between advocates for educational equity and proponents of gifted education. That battle — over gifted programs’ place in the K–12 portfolio, and whether all kids truly have access to them — has largely played out in major urban districts like New York and San Francisco, where both prestigious exam schools and accelerated learning more generally have been criticized for their disproportionately tiny number of seats offered to Hispanic and African American pupils.

But several studies recently emerged that tell a different story. One, published in Education Next by Williams College economist Owen Thompson, examines the effect of K–6 gifted programs on the racial makeup of kindergarten and elementary classrooms. Examining enrollment information for nearly 47,000 public schools around the United States, Thompson found that the special sections are disproportionately made up of white and Asian students. But because they are so small in scope, they make a negligible impact on the overall demographics of the schools in which they are housed. In fact, eliminating every such program would not significantly change the exposure of different student groups to one another.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that gifted learning opportunities can’t be made available to more kids, however. And a separate paper, by NWEA researchers, suggests that the key to welcoming more English learners and students with disabilities into accelerated classrooms is for states to enact formal mandates related to the provision of gifted services, require districts to maintain their own formal gifted plans, and regularly audit them for compliance. 

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Math achievement tumbled for American 15-year-olds between 2018 and 2022, according to the latest results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an exam comparing academic performance in the U.S. against that of dozens of other countries. In a pleasant surprise, however, their reading and science skills appear to be undiminished over the last four years. 

Announced Tuesday morning, the scores represent more proof of steep learning loss in math during the pandemic and its aftermath. But they also provide the first international context for COVID’s impact on American students, indicating that many students abroad — including in countries that have often ranked among the world’s top performers — may have experienced even worse setbacks.

Eighty-one countries participated in PISA in 2022, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the intergovernmental authority that administers the test. Among that group, average scores fell by 15 points in math and 10 points in reading since 2018, while science scores were not significantly changed. 

As in several other standardized tests conducted since COVID’s emergence in 2020, those declines are unprecedented; over 20 years of PISA testing, average math and literacy scores have never moved by more than four or five points between consecutive assessments. Peggy Carr, commissioner of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, told reporters on Monday that many developed countries across Europe and Asia “suffered tremendously” from the learning disruptions triggered by the pandemic. 

“These results are another piece of evidence showing the crisis in mathematics achievement,” Carr said. “Only now can we see that it is a global concern.”

But while American students’ 13-point drop in math fell within the international average, their relative stasis in PISA’s other testing domains of reading and science (minus-one and minus-three points since 2018, neither of which is considered statistically significant) provide surprisingly positive news. Indeed, while U.S. scores slumped across all three subjects, our rankings among PISA participants actually improved since 2018: From 29th in mathematics to 26th, from eighth in reading to sixth, and from 11th in science to 10th.

Those shifts in relative performance result from even greater COVID-era slides in other countries. Among those seeing especially large reversals in math were Iceland (minus-36 points), Norway (minus-33 points), Poland (minus-27 points), and Slovenia (minus-24 points). Fifteen-year-olds in Finland, which has built an international reputation for top performance on exams like PISA, saw a 30-point drop in reading skills over the last four years. 

In a somewhat curious development, the index of four Chinese provinces where students have traditionally taken the PISA (Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang) did not report scores for the 2022 round. In previous administrations of the test, those students yielded the top scores on all three subjects — although those results were also criticized by international observers for allegedly being “cherry-picked” from China’s wealthiest and highest-achieving areas.

According to the OECD, the four provinces participated in the 2022 test, but their performance couldn’t be measured because schools were closed during the intended data collection period. Impressive scores were posted by students in the Chinese jurisdictions of Hong Kong and Macau, though these will likely also be considered atypical of learning across that country’s vast mainland. 

Among PISA’s top-scoring nations in math were the East Asian participants like Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, Japan, Chinese Taipei (Taiwan), and Korea. Singapore, Ireland, Estonia, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan boasted the strongest readers.

The scores will undoubtedly be used as an indicator of how learning was affected by COVID. Two-thirds of participating countries reported that they closed schools for longer than three months for the majority of their students during the pandemic. Students in countries that experienced briefer periods of closure did see smaller drops in math scores, the OECD reported, but Carr said the statistical correlation was “weak.”

A wealth of research conducted since 2020 has drawn close connections between virtual learning and academic damage. But prior standardized testing releases, such as that of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, have shown that states that kept schools open also endured significant learning damage, muddying the argument over the ultimate impact of shuttered schools.

Tom Loveless, a researcher who previously headed the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, said that America students’ math decline, while significant, was not “enormous.”

“Compared with the other OECD countries, we definitely had schools closed for a longer period of time,” Loveless said. “If you take this as a pre- and post-pandemic indicator, I would have expected a larger drop.”

Other learning observers were more bearish on the Americans’ showing, especially compared with comparable youths in countries far poorer than the U.S. Sal Khan, founder of the online learning platform Khan Academy, argued that the international averages concealed significant disparities between the highest- and lowest-achieving test takers.

“The results are disappointing, but not surprising, and consistent with all of the other data we’ve seen post-COVID,” Khan added in an email. “In general, I think the state of math education is pretty bad globally — but there is less of an excuse in wealthy countries like the United States.”

The findings also raise the question of how school leaders in the United States and other countries will boost student performance in the long run. Local and state test data in the U.S. confirm that many students are still performing substantially worse than children of the same age four years ago. And with the imminent expiration of federal emergency funds that have underwritten extra staffing and programs over the last several years, authorities will need to move fast to effect a turnaround.

Bob Hughes is the director of K–12 learning programs at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has funded school reform and improvement programs in the U.S. for over two decades. Last year, the organization announced that it would commit over $1 billion to improve math instruction across the country by making the subject more engaging and relevant to students.

While calling the PISA scores “upsetting news,” Hughes added that schools and school districts could jump-start significant progress in math by employing a host of evidence-based strategies: high-impact tutoring for struggling students, improved professional learning for teachers, and more rigorous curricular materials (the “Singapore math” approach, which has shaped elementary math instruction in that country since the 1980s, has spawned a legion of fans in the U.S. as well). 

“We actually have much better data than we’ve had in the past, and we have a clearer view of what the interventions need to be,” Hughes said. “We just need to get to the business of doing it rather than spending a lot of time wringing our hands.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to LA School Report’s parent company, The 74.

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All significant harms. But then there’s the bottom-line figure that appeared last winter: $28 trillion.

That’s the projected cost, in lifetime earnings, to the children whose academic abilities were set back during the COVID-era, totalling about $70,000 per person over the course of their careers. The figure was reached by Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, based on the cratering eighth-grade math performance measured by last year’s National Assessment of Educational Progress. And it could be permanent if schools don’t do something about those diminished skills.

One of the most influential and widely cited academics studying American education, Hanushek has spent over 40 years studying how schools lift kids’ achievement and whether test scores translate into later-life success. A longtime fellow of the conservative Hoover Institution, he won the prestigious Yidan Prize for Education Research in 2021, which brought a $3.9 million award for new projects. He is also deeply involved in some of the biggest ongoing debates in education policy, including whether the achievement gap between rich and poor students is growing or slowly closing.

Above all other issues, Hanushek is tied to the question of whether spending more on schools will consistently result in better student outcomes. He has been both resolutely skeptical of the proposition and influential in the statehouses and courtrooms deciding whether to increase education funding. Over the last decade, a raft of studies have offered new evidence that increasing expenditures on schooling does, in fact, lift achievement — a developing literature that Hanushek acknowledged in a lengthy review released this spring, while still insisting that the amount of dollars expended matter far less than the quality of the interventions they underwrite.

Money is also at the center of what the veteran researcher calls his “simple and complete” fix for COVID-related learning setbacks, detailed in a 2022 policy brief. But rather than paying to lengthen school days or fund tutoring programs, Hanushek advises that districts spend remaining pandemic relief aid on incentives for the best teachers to take on extra students; he also proposes buying out the contracts of their least effective colleagues.

In a conversation with The 74’s Kevin Mahnken, Hanushek talked about how the most advanced economies reward skill (and punish the lack of it), why he believes voluntary learning initiatives tend to increase achievement gaps and what the United States could do with $28 trillion.

“The cohort that suffered these learning losses isn’t going to be around for much longer,” he said. “We’re graduating 3.5 million of them each year, and they’re going away without any real chance of recovery.”

This conversation was edited for length and clarity.

Can you contextualize what $28 trillion of potentially lost wages actually means? It’s a sum so large as to be almost mystical.

Sure. You know that we had a recession because of the pandemic, when businesses closed. The total cost of that is about 1/15th the same amount, maybe $2 trillion. The best estimates I’ve seen of the effects of the 2008 recession are something like $5 trillion. And if you want a third option, $28 trillion is a little more than one year of America’s GDP. So it’s as if you closed down the economy for a whole year.

Am I right in thinking about this as essentially a huge number of deferred opportunities for growth, like businesses that don’t expand or innovations that are slower to arrive?

It’s everything about the economy. But a better way to think about it for most people is that everybody who was in school during the pandemic will experience 5–6 percent lower lifetime earnings. It’s almost like a 5 or 6 percent added tax, with this cohort earning less than the cohorts immediately ahead of it and immediately behind it, because they’re just less skilled. Unless we do something about it.

But how confident are we that these test results are really measuring skills that are important in later life? Do we have proof that there’s an actual relationship between student scores on NAEP or state exams scores and their future economic activity?

Historically, people haven’t looked so much at the effect of test scores or cognitive skills on earnings because we just haven’t had much data. We’ve recently gotten data from a bunch of countries in the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development], and it shows that the U.S. rewards economic skills more than almost any other country on earth.

But consider that in reverse. It also means that the U.S. punishes the lack of skills more than almost any other country on earth. What this is essentially showing is that employers really do pay attention to the skills people have. Those skills determine how well people can adapt to new jobs, and they help determine how capable people are in actually doing their jobs. Nobody objects to the idea that people who are smarter generally earn more. And while there is a lot of variation around that — from NBA players, who often don’t finish their degrees, to college graduates who find themselves driving taxis — that’s the kind of relationship we would expect to see.

Is that connection between demonstrated academic achievement and economic success just a result of the highly knowledge-based economies that prevail in rich, Western countries like the U.S.?

Precisely. One country that rewards skills slightly more is Singapore, and Singapore basically doesn’t do anything except for knowledge-based industries.

If it’s so clear that increased educational attainment is linked to better economic prospects, does it worry you that we’ve seen a decline in the number of students applying to college the last few years?

We don’t know if that’s going to last. But in the short run, it’s a potential concern that people aren’t going off to get more skills. Part of it is that in the current economy, it looks like you can get a huge reward from going straight into the labor market after high school. But it just won’t compare with the reward from going to college.

There are variations in the returns [to college]. You can go into some college programs that ultimately don’t pay off, at least if you pay the full tuition. But on average, college graduates are earning something like 75 percent more than high school graduates, and that differential is large enough that people who get fixated on the cost of tuition and debt cost are really making a huge mistake if they don’t go to college. The differential more than compensates for the cost of getting that college degree.

Could you please explain what you’ve dubbed the “simple and complete” way of addressing learning loss?

Every time I mention my preferred strategy, people sort of turn away. [Laughs] People are much happier saying, “Let’s do exactly what we’re doing already, but just a little bit more of it.” And it boils down to lengthening the school day, lengthening the school year, trying some tutoring here and there. But even if you could implement that — which nobody knows how to do — the data suggests that it wouldn’t make up for the kinds of losses that kids have suffered. It’s just not a strong enough treatment.

“What states have done since 2016 is backing off holding teachers responsible for student outcomes,” said Stanford economist Eric Hanushek. “This has negative effects on learning.” (The Hoover Institution)

Something everyone mostly agrees with is that teachers are really important, and that effective teachers are very, very valuable. People start to disagree when you ask, “What do you make of that?” My answer for dealing with the current learning losses of the COVID cohort is to try to get our most effective teachers to just work more intensively by taking on a few more kids. You can, in fact, provide incentives from the existing ESSER money — which will be around for at least another year — and provide them with help in grading, essentially lighten the load and make it possible for them to teach more kids.

The place where everybody stops listening is here: We know that our most ineffective teachers are just harming kids. If we could take some of the ESSER money and buy out the contracts of our least effective teachers, the combination of those things could be enough to make up for the learning loss we’ve seen.

We’re almost completely back to normal schooling. But the cohort that suffered these learning losses isn’t going to be around for much longer; we’re graduating 3.5 million of them each year, and they’re going away without any real chance of recovery. So we have to do something that’s quick — we can’t wait to hire and train a new group of teachers, or wait to figure out which kinds of instruction might help them the most. We just don’t have the time. But my point is that our current workforce is good enough to make up for this! We have, on average, a really good teaching force, though we don’t use the most effective teachers enough, and we overuse the least effective teachers.

The issue of urgency is obviously critical, but I wonder if it really supports your point. Given the logistical and political difficulties of that kind of approach, it seems much simpler to increase the quantity of instruction students receive — by providing tutoring and lengthening the school year, for instance — than by improving the quality through the strategy you describe.

The problem is that nobody is willing to actually make it mandatory that people stay longer in school. Los Angeles had a voluntary program to try to add four days to the school year, and essentially nobody showed up. But even if they did, what would it mean? Say a quarter of your kids actually show up for two extra days: What do you teach them, and how do you integrate that with their normal classroom instruction? You could, at best, improve their soccer skills.

Voluntary added days generally expand variation in academic performance because the kids who need [extra schooling] the least are the ones who tend to show up for voluntary learning days. It’s people at the top of the academic scale who take advantage of voluntary activities, and the people at the bottom don’t. That’s why I said before that we don’t know how to implement things like tutoring and supplemental instruction at scale. We have a few examples of it working, but we don’t know how to put it into 100,000 schools.

Does it surprise you that, in the five years since the Janus ruling, the organizing strength of teachers’ unions seems to have risen in much of the country? Teacher pay became something of a national issue during the summer of 2018, and now you see Republican governors excited to announce pay raises.

It’s a huge obstacle that you can’t get schools and teachers’ unions to agree to anything. We have a strike going on in Oakland Public Schools, where the union is trying to wring the last bit of money out of the pandemic; they’ve been offered over 20 percent pay increases over three years, but they don’t think that’s enough. [After nearly two weeks of school closures, the Oakland teachers’ strike ended on May 16.]

One of my favorite books on my bookshelf is called Teacher Shortages and Salary Schedules. It has a 1962 copyright. The thesis of the book is basically that if you pay all teachers the same amount, you’re likely to get either very underpaid math teachers or very overpaid PE teachers; you tend to see the former, and that’s where some teacher shortages come from. It’s a problem that certainly exists, and in my opinion, the biggest shortage is a shortage of highly effective teachers that we would like to keep in.

Do you think there’s something positive in the settlement we’ve reached in the U.S., wherein we hire lots of teachers but have largely deferred salary increases? I’m reminded of a paper written by your frequent collaborator, Ludger Woessmann, which found that students earn better grades and stay in school longer when they have an adult mentor in school — that seems like something that small class sizes would foster, no?

It can be very important to build close relationships [between students and teachers]. The problem is that everything we measure suggests that reducing class size is not the most important thing, and that having an effective teacher in a classroom is so much more important than having a slightly smaller class.

People get excited if they can see anything positive in the data about smaller classes. But the impact is so small relative to the impact that great teachers have. As you mentioned, teachers are now concerned about low salaries. But part of this Oakland strike has to do with hiring more people too; it’s just hiring more people and paying them more. There are demands for more ancillary people in schools, like counselors and nurses, and they want to put caps on class size as well. So no one’s given up on quantity, which is the thing that unions like. Unions make their money by having more people, so they’re always happy to push for smaller class sizes.

If I could change the subject slightly: We’ve recently finished some work on Dallas, which radically changed the way it evaluates and pays teachers. It’s much more related to effectiveness in the classroom now than under the traditional salary schedule. The other thing they did was introduce an incentive scheme to get the best teachers, measured by prior performance, to work in the lowest-performing schools in Dallas.

We found two things from this experiment. One is that the most effective teachers were willing to do that for relatively modest average salaries. The second was that once they moved to the lowest-performing schools, the worst schools in Dallas began approaching the citywide average within two years. This is a policy that has been shown to work, and work at scale where you can turn around entire schools.

But the unfortunate thing they did was say, “Oops! Now that these schools are performing well, they aren’t eligible for the program anymore.” They took the incentives away, and the best teachers left because there are lots of easier places to work. And they will if they don’t get paid.

You’ve got another paper on Dallas’s pay-for-performance reform. It reminded me of the debate over Washington, D.C.’s IMPACT teacher evaluation system, which people have said is really hard to replicate, in part because the political blowback in the District was so fierce.

There was a bit of blowback in Dallas as well. Mike Miles was the superintendent who devised the entire Dallas system, and he worked very hard to convince a somewhat grumpy school board to put it in place. Then, just as it was starting to come together, he left. So there’s no doubt, this is politically difficult.

The question is, are you willing to give up $28 trillion and settle for having the 31st-ranked school system in the world because it’s politically difficult? I’m not somebody who needs to make my living by politics. But it’s clear that the rewards of adopting these policies are so, so large, even if there are also political costs. Someday I hope the teachers’ unions also see that it’s in their interest to make some marginal changes to the old “no differentiation” policy.

I realize that’s just your estimate, and it’s not as though it would be dropped as a lump sum in the national checking account; but if the value of restoring lost learning is anything approaching $28 trillion, it could fund all our K–12 schools many times over.

The cost of the current U.S. education system is about $750 billion, so you’re talking about potentially funding that system for decades with the money that you could get out of this. Frankly, we have to get some people who are willing to lead in this time of crisis.

Are there any useful lessons from the catastrophe of the pandemic — or perhaps technology, including advances in virtual and asynchronous learning — that we might use to improve schools going forward?

The thing I learned was sort of the opposite.

It became very clear that having a teacher in the classroom is much better than hybrid instruction that only sometimes has a live, in-person teacher. And hybrid instruction, in turn, is better than fully remote instruction. There’s noy doubt that we gained a greater appreciation of the importance of the classroom teacher, even in these kinds of chaotic circumstances. We had other ways of trying to teach, but we couldn’t do away with effective classroom teachers.

We did mobilize the tech industry to try to improve virtual instruction in a variety of ways, and maybe we’ll come out a bit ahead from that. But I worry that we won’t try to learn from when and where virtual instruction works best, and when and where it doesn’t work.

Do you think the public sector, including federal entities like the Institute of Education Sciences, needs to take a more active role as a catalyst for breakthrough learning platforms and technology? Given the mixed record of ed-tech generally, I wonder if we actually have reason to be hopeful.

Sure, I like what IES has been doing. The amount of money we’re talking about there is pathetic, really, compared with the size of the problem. We have systematically underplayed any role of research and evaluation in education compared with other industries. But education is the base industry for most of this other stuff that we’re pouring money into.

The most recent NAEP release shows decades’ worth of progress — this time in civics and U.S. history — essentially erased since the beginning of the pandemic. I’m wondering whether you think the gains of the last 25 years or so, often characterized as the “education reform era,” were all that big to begin with.

Reform has been less reformist than many of us would have liked. It hasn’t accomplished what we wanted.

On the latest NAEP release, the thing that I thought was most important is that we really expanded the gaps in scoring. The top end of the scoring distribution did okay in social studies, but the lower-performing students fell further. What we’re seeing just reinforced these gaps, the spread-out distribution. At the bottom end, it seems that some eighth graders don’t even know what the separate branches of government do; they barely know the difference between the legislature and the executive. That’s very worrisome to me because the U.S. has thrived by having a common society. We might be losing some of that, and the polarization we see in our politics can only be heightened by these kinds of results.

The expanding achievement gap, which we’ve seen on other NAEP tests, is really concerning. Forty percent of eighth-graders scored below the NAEP Basic level in U.S. history, for example.

Yeah, and NAEP Basic is really basic. On subject-matter tests like these, kids scoring below that level really don’t know much at all; on math and reading tests, they’re kind of hopeless because they are not likely to be able to go on past eighth-grade knowledge. In the math test, it’s also roughly 40 percent of eighth-graders in the country scoring below Basic. That’s not a position you want to be in.

There’s been an enormous amount of newer research from scholars like Jesse Rothstein and Kirabo Jackson on the effects of education funding on school outcomes, with much of it suggesting that money really does matter. As perhaps the single figure most associated with the opposing view, are you getting ready to wave the white flag?

[Laughs] I thought the debate was settled, but it’s come back. I spent the last year and a half reviewing, in great detail, all the studies that people cite for this claim. But those people largely choose the studies they like based on their answer to this question. It turns out that there is huge heterogeneity in what these studies find about the importance of spending money on education.

You get very different effects across these studies, and it’s not well understood when money has a big effect and when it doesn’t. There’s no reason to infer from some of this recent work that we can be assured of a great achievement gain, or a lifetime earnings gain, by simply putting more money into the existing system.

At a certain level, this is largely a political debate because Kirabo Jackson and Jesse Rothstein recognize that how you spend money is also really important. My view is that how you spend money is considerably more important than how much you spend. We’re currently spending something like $17,000 per kid on education, and an extra $300 is not going to make much difference unless you spend that money well.

I’m reminded of a paper from a few years back that argued that the positive effects of school finance reforms are mostly driven by states that also adopted test-based accountability.

Yeah, it was very simple and straightforward that if you put more money into systems with good accountability for outcomes, you get much larger results. Part of the problem is that the current federal accountability law, ESSA, is loosening accountability all over the place and particularly for teachers. What states have done since 2016 is backing off holding teachers responsible for student outcomes. This has negative effects on learning.

The effects of spending have been argued endlessly over the last few decades. What are the biggest questions you’d like to see investigated going forward?

One of the developments coming out of the pandemic is that schooling is going to start becoming very different. It’s clear to me that just doing what’s called homeschooling is not going to be the answer, but parents have often looked for something different than what they got during the pandemic and even before the pandemic. You have lots of political fighting over education savings accounts and choice.

I don’t think any of these things is going to be the answer, but understanding the possible choices is important because choices are going to expand for lots of people. We don’t understand where they’re going to go and what the effects of those choices are going to be.

If states continue to expand school choice, does it become harder to improve policy through the districts? It seems like the lever of traditional public schooling will just move fewer students in the future.

Well, if we had Milton Friedman-style vouchers everywhere, we’d still see 80 percent of kids enrolled in traditional public schools. I like having more choice, and I think it’s important. It’s important to improve the charter sector as well. But the traditional public schools are still going to be there for the rest of my lifetime, and probably yours too. So we still have to be concerned about how we operate traditional public schools because they’re the backbone of our economy.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

A prolific researcher at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, Kahlenberg didn’t just welcome the end of affirmative action as we knew it — he served as an expert witness for the suit’s plaintiffs, Students for Fair Admissions, in their successful efforts to strike down diversity plans at elite colleges as discriminatory and unconstitutional.

The 6–2 opinion represented the fulfillment of a generation of work for Kahlenberg, the author of 18 books ranging from personal memoirs to biographies to education policy tomes. For the last few decades, he has waged a long and sometimes unpopular campaign to broaden the focus of educational integration to make room for class, which he says represents the crucial divide in American life. Assembling racially heterogeneous students of identically middle- and upper-class backgrounds to learn together, while cordoning off the children of the working class and the poor, is the surest way to reinforce the advantages of the wealthy, he has argued.

Just months after his argument carried the day at the Supreme Court, Kahlenberg is exploring a different facet of inequality in his new book, Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See.

Released in July, Excluded details how “exclusionary zoning practices,” such as bans on apartments or mandates for single-family homes, are used to restrict the supply of housing and further segregate neighborhoods as more hopeful buyers are priced out. What’s more, since most families choose where to live based at least partly on the quality of local schools, such tactics also push most of the top-performing public schools in the country out of reach of poor and working-class people.

Veteran researcher Richard Kahlenberg released his latest book, Excluded, in July. (Hachette Book Group)

It seems unlikely that convenings of zoning authorities will become as heated as school board meetings have in recent years. But to Kahlenberg, the NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) instinct is of a piece with Harvard’s now-banned admissions policies: a means of capturing opportunity by those with the resources and wherewithal to grab them.

In a conversation with The 74’s Kevin Mahnken, Kahlenberg spoke about the failure of ‘70s-era busing, his abiding admiration for Sen. Robert Kennedy, and what he calls liberalism’s “elitism problem.”

“Harvard gave large preferences based on race and created a majority-minority class, which I think is a wonderful thing,” he said. “But it also had many, many more wealthy students than low-income students. We’re beginning to see the ways in which racial preferences have propped up a much larger system that is biased against working-class and low-income people.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Mahnken: How do the main themes of this book — zoning and access to housing — relate to schools?

Richard Kahlenberg: I come at housing from the perspective of education, and the architecture of educational inequality rests on two pillars. One is exclusionary zoning — bans on apartments, minimum lot sizes and the like — which keeps people apart by class and race. The other is mandatory neighborhood assignment for most students. Essentially, zoning rules determine who gets to live where, and that determines where children are allowed to go to school.

There are exceptions to that in the form of public school choice programs that try to disentangle residence and school assignment. I’ve long been a supporter of those programs, but you bump your head against the reality that more than 70 percent of American schoolchildren attend their neighborhood public schools.

Maybe I’m a slow learner, but I should have gotten into housing policy years ago. Housing policy is school policy.

Reading the book, it made me think that education journalists should spend almost as much time following the agenda of local housing authorities as we do focusing on school boards.

You see an example of that in Montgomery County, Maryland, where there was a kind of natural experiment of what matters in improving the opportunities for low-income students. Around 2010, Heather Schwartz at the RAND Corporation examined two strategies that were pursued in this liberal, diverse county right outside of Washington, D.C.. One was to spend $2,000 extra for each pupil in high-poverty schools, for good things like extended learning time and reduced class size in early grades.

At the same time, a local inclusionary zoning law mandates that when builders develop a certain number of units, they have to set aside a portion for low-income and working-class families. In essence, there was a random assignment of low-income students to different public housing units, which are spread throughout the county. Some of those students lived in the higher-poverty areas and received the extra $2,000 at school; the other group lived in more affluent parts of Montgomery County and didn’t receive the extra funding, but did attend schools with lower levels of poverty.

Over time, Schwartz found that the housing intervention, which resulted in economic integration, had a far greater effect on academic achievement than the school spending intervention. In seven years, the math gap was cut in half between low-income students and middle-class students, the reading gap was cut by one-third. It shows that housing policy matters enormously to student outcomes.

Is it striking to you that land use is mostly a submerged issue in the K–12 agenda? After all, neighborhood selection is the way most people exercise school choice. 

Yes, people of means very often choose neighborhoods based on the strength of their schools. And everyone should look for what’s best for their kids. The problem comes when government actively excludes those of lesser means by rigging zoning laws to prevent lower-income people from living in certain neighborhoods.

So I don’t have any qualms with parents choosing housing in this way. I have a big problem with laws that effectively keep working-class families from exercising that same choice.

Do you agree that housing laws have gained this importance in part due to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Milliken v. Bradley, which made it extremely hard to mandate busing between cities and their surrounding suburbs? You’ve explored this fairly deeply in your writings about the socioeconomic integration of K–12 schools.

Busing became deeply problematic in the North, and it mostly worked in the South. The difference was that in the South, you often see countywide school systems, so there was no place to flee. There is strong research to suggest that desegregation in the South had a much more positive effect on the achievement of African American students than it did in the North.

And that brings us right back to the power of socioeconomic status. The research always suggested that the reason African American students did better in racially integrated schools was that, on average, whites had higher socioeconomic status.

So in the South, there was cross-class and racial integration precisely because the districts encompassed cities and suburbs. In the North, that wasn’t often the case, and after Milliken, the power of racial integration to produce class integration diminished considerably. To be clear, I think there are social benefits to racial integration, even if it doesn’t increase academic achievement. It’s a good thing for children, but if you’re trying to raise academic achievement, it’s the socioeconomic mix that matters more than the racial mix.

The other piece of this is compulsion. Today, sophisticated integration plans — which, for legal and educational reasons, are built more on class than race — tend to rely on incentives and choice rather than compelling people. It’s because families with means are able to rebel, either buying out of the system or moving further out.

Intriguingly, the racial demography of urban areas has changed quite a bit in recent years, with both suburbs and inner cities becoming more diverse than they were in the ’70s and ’80s. Is the same true of socioeconomic status?

Black-white segregation has declined by about 30 percent since 1970. While we haven’t made enough progress on racial segregation, and it’s still really prominent in many cities, we’re headed in the right direction. But Sean Reardon’s research at Stanford shows that, by contrast, income segregation has roughly doubled over the same time period.

There have been two periods in this country when exclusionary zoning has accelerated. The first arrived in 1917, when the Supreme Court struck down racial zoning in Buchanan v. Warley. Black people were explicitly prohibited from living in white neighborhoods under these plans in Baltimore, Louisville, and elsewhere, and the Court said that was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. But very quickly, towns figured out they could achieve much the same result through economic zoning. You know, “You’re welcome to live in this neighborhood so long as you can afford a detached, single-family home on half an acre of land.”

The second came in the 1970s, and its timing was suspicious in that Congress had just passed the Fair Housing Act. Communities doubled down on exclusionary zoning during that time as well, though it was less effective because by that time, there was a growing African American middle class. In some cases, they were able to buy homes in neighborhoods that were more affluent. [U.S. Senator] Cory Booker, whom I interview in the book would be one case; his parents were executives, and because of the Fair Housing Act, they were able to move to a Newark suburb called Harrington Park. He was able to attend strong schools and go off to Stanford, but he also had lots of friends and cousins who weren’t so economically fortunate. They remained behind.

The main point is that the two big expansions of this practice of exclusionary zoning came in response to advances for civil rights.

We’ve seen some modest wins recently for the YIMBY [“Yes in My Backyard”] movement in places like California, but so many homeowners are really resistant to the idea of densifying their communities. Isn’t it likely that flooding resources to poor schools, while apparently less effective than socioeconomic integration, would be the easier way to effect change?

I do support putting more money into high-poverty schools, and I don’t think you have to choose between improving them and integrating them. You can do both.

A home for sale in California, which has seen some of the sharpest increases in real estate prices of any state. (Getty Images)

My concern is that maybe 95 percent of education reform is about trying to make separate-but-equal more workable. I don’t want to abandon efforts to invest more resources in high-poverty schools, but we need this complementary strategy as well. For one thing, if your goal is raising achievement and the prospects of disadvantaged kids, a lot of evidence shows that it’s more effective to integrate than to provide extra resources.

Secondly, the two are connected in a reciprocal relationship. In theory, yes, you could try to invest tremendous amounts of money in under-resourced schools. But you’re asking the political system to support an effort whereby families with the least political power command the greatest resources. We do see that in states like New Jersey, where a state court mandated extra funding for schools with high concentrations of poverty, and in a few other liberal communities like Montgomery County. But it’s not the rule.

In other words, integration is politically difficult, but so is flooding poor schools with massive resources. The other thing is that when we take housing policy off the table, we miss the importance of neighborhoods in predicting life chances. Because it’s not just academics and schooling, it’s about who you know in your neighborhood and what social connections they have that could benefit you down the line. That social aspect is another reason not to pursue a neo-Plessy [v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court decision authorizing separate, but equal public accommodations] approach of accepting segregation and trying to do the best you can with it.

You’ve already mentioned your support for public school choice policies like diverse-by-design charter schools. Do you think the rapid spread of Education Savings Accounts in red states is likely to temper or accelerate segregation along lines of race and class?

That stuff is a big step backward. My former Century Foundation colleague, Halley Potter, did an analysis of whether private school vouchers increased or decreased segregation. Her answer was that they increase it, and certainly that was the original motivation of many of the early proponents of voucher programs in the South — to create more segregation, not less.

Here’s a good explanation for the necessity of public school systems. I wrote a biography of Al Shanker, the longtime leader of the American Federation of Teachers. One of the stories I learned writing it took place at a private meeting of education mucky-mucks. At a certain point, the president of Notre Dame stood up and asked, “What is the rationale for public education in the first place, as opposed to people just taking their money to a system of private schools?” There was a long silence, after which Shanker said, “The reason we have public schools is that they teach kids what it means to be American.” And it’s true that the charge of public schools is to instill the liberal democratic values that make our nation different from a lot of others, even if they don’t do it perfectly.

Private schools have different purposes, which usually include deepening a particular religious faith. That’s fine, but their purpose is generally not to create better citizens. I know there are studies that claim private schools do a good job imparting the values of citizenship. I’ve got some problems with some of those studies, but the point is that public education’s rationale is to make possible the continuation of our experiment in self-governance. I don’t want to give up on that lightly.

Robert Kennedy was a hero of yours, and you invoke his philosophy in the book as a corrective to what you call liberalism’s “serious problem with elitism.” What do you think he would have made of the end of affirmative action in college admissions?

Bobby Kennedy is a touchstone for me. In the 1968 presidential campaign, he made the observation that we have deep racial inequalities in this country, but that underneath them are even bigger class divisions that often go ignored. We use race as a proxy for class in a lot of political conversations.

Kahlenberg sees Robert Kennedy as a model of egalitarian liberalism that could unite Americans of different races. (Getty Images)

That tendency serves the interest of my fellow highly educated liberals. If you take the example of affirmative action, Harvard gave large preferences based on race and created a majority-minority class, which I think is a wonderful thing. But it also had many, many more wealthy students than low-income students. We’re beginning to see the ways in which racial preferences have propped up a much larger system that is biased against working-class and low-income people.

At Harvard, 71 percent of the African American, Hispanic, and Native American students came from the richest one-fifth of the African American, Hispanic, and Native American population nationally. White and Asian students were even wealthier. There was even a way in which racial preferences propped up legacy preferences, in that people who supported lowering admissions standards for enormously advantaged applicants could point to racial diversity and say, “Look, the system’s fair. There are lots of different factors we take into account.” Now we see that Wesleyan recently abandoned legacy preferences, and I think a lot of other elite universities are going to give up that unfair, ancestry-based privilege.

On elitism, Fareed Zakaria has written that the cardinal sin of the Right is racism, and the cardinal sin of the Left is elitism. One might expect that politically conservative areas would have more exclusionary practices — because, for instance, voters in those areas are more likely to support an exclusionary wall between the United States and Mexico. But in fact, there is substantial research to suggest that the worst forms of exclusionary zoning are in politically liberal areas along the coasts. Even within states, there are more acute forms of exclusionary zoning in politically liberal communities.

Why would liberals, who generally consider themselves openhearted and inclusive of people of color and LGBT individuals, be exclusionary in this way? The more benign explanation is that liberals support environmental protection, regulation, and due process, all of which tend to make it harder to build housing and other major projects. At the very least, those have been weaponized by liberals to exclude.

And there’s a less charitable explanation. As Democrats became the party of the highly educated, there were both good and bad things that came with that. Some experimental research suggests that people with high levels of education have more favorable attitudes towards traditional targets of prejudice. That’s a good thing, but at the same time, highly educated people exhibit many more stereotypes and negative attitudes toward those with less education — the folks that Hillary Clinton famously described as “deplorable.” I think liberals like me need to take a close look in the mirror on some of these issues of class bias.

Do you think self-interest is playing a role as well? In my interview with Tony Carnevale, he basically said that most schools don’t believe they can afford to be more class-diverse. Obviously, many people also fear that new housing will lower their own home values.

Absolutely. The reason why universities have sought racial diversity without class diversity is that it’s cheaper. You can devote more resources to faculty salaries, expanded administration, new buildings, and the rest of the things universities want to do.

But there’s good news from states [such as California, Florida, and Michigan] that have previously banned affirmative action. The evidence suggests that universities won’t just give up on racial diversity; those with resources will reach into their pockets and provide more money to expand socioeconomic diversity as a means of indirectly creating racial diversity.

During the recent Students for Fair Admissions litigation, the University of North Carolina said, “We can’t afford to expand financial aid. It’s not a viable alternative to using race in admissions.” Lo and behold, after the Supreme Court ruled, UNC announced that it will significantly expand their financial aid. And kudos to them for finding the money necessary to foster racial diversity!

Over time, universities will develop a number of new liberal programs to ensure that racial diversity is achieved — by giving a break to economically disadvantaged students, by expanding financial aid, by eliminating unfair preferences for the children of alumni. Then we can end up with both racial and socioeconomic diversity.

You’ve naturally got to be pleased to have prevailed in court in your capacity as a witness. But how is this ruling going to lead to more egalitarian colleges and universities? What needs to happen next, whether in colleges, statehouses, or Congress?

There’s a paradox in public opinion polling. On one hand, Americans are deeply opposed to counting race as a factor of who gets into college. Pew found something like 74 percent of respondents opposed to using race. At the same time, Americans want their universities to be racially and economically diverse, and they strongly support other efforts — such as giving an edge to students from low-income backgrounds — in order to create diversity.

When racial preferences were banned in states like Texas and Florida back in the ’90s, Republican governors worked with state legislatures to come up with a variety of new programs. That is to say, states and universities did not simply give up on racial diversity when they couldn’t use race in admissions, because the political system does not want to see segregation in elite higher education.

Activists have spent decades attempting to repeal California’s Proposition 209, which ended the state’s affirmative action programs in 1996. (Getty Images)

The other dynamic is that the Republican Party is increasingly the party of the white working class. White working-class people have been angry about affirmative action for a long time. But suddenly, universities are going to start saying, “We’re going to provide a meaningful break to working-class students of all races.” I find it hard to believe that Republicans will oppose those efforts at the very moment that their political base becomes eligible for class-based affirmative action.

It seems like your emphasis on integration raises questions about the nature of what we call “school quality.” If the socioeconomic background of your classmates is a major factor in determining what you can learn — as the Coleman Report also found way back in the ’60s — then should we order our priorities to pursue residential and school integration over more conventional school improvement efforts?

I would broadly agree. If the dual purposes of public education are to create social mobility on the one hand, and social cohesion on the other, then we want to use housing policy and public school choice to bring kids of different backgrounds together. Economically segregated schools oftentimes defeat well-intentioned education reform efforts.

If you care about curriculum or teaching, as I do, having a system segregated by class makes it more difficult to provide equality. You want all students to be exposed to a good curriculum, for example, but we know that there are many fewer advanced classes offered in high-poverty schools. We also know that some teachers consider it a promotion to move from a high-poverty school to a middle-class school.

You can chip away at that. I support paying bonuses to highly qualified teachers who agree to teach in high-poverty schools, and I support the expansion of AP classes in high-poverty schools. But at the end of the day, those efforts ignore the essential reality that Coleman detected in his study, which grew out of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: Separate schools for rich and poor are rarely equal. Rather than putting our heads in the sand and ignoring that central finding, which has been repeated and repeated again since Coleman, I think we need to face it head-on.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Largely constrained from enacting its national K–12 agenda, the Biden administration nevertheless made waves in the education world earlier this month by appointing economist Kirabo Jackson to a seat on its Council of Economic Advisers.

Jackson, a labor economist and professor at Northwestern University, is far from a household name, but his work has made a significant impact on education policy over the last decade. In particular, he has been the most outspoken of a group of researchers arguing that higher spending on education can meaningfully lift students’ prospects — a position at odds with the widely held political consensus of the 1980s and ‘90s. 

The Council is a three-member body that advises the president on economic affairs. While it shares that responsibility somewhat with other offices, including the Treasury Department and the National Economic Council, its influence as a kind of think tank within the Executive Branch has proven to be considerable. Since its founding in 1946, four former CEA heads have gone on to chair the Federal Reserve, including former Chairwoman Janet Yellen, who now serves as President Biden’s treasury secretary.

The panel will face its share of fiscal and workforce problems over the next few years, principally the question of how to further suppress inflation without leading to job losses. But Jackson’s appointment signals that Biden’s team is keeping its eye on the president’s K–12 priorities. Those priorities have met with only limited success through the first three years of Biden’s term; an increase in funding for school counselors last fall made some progress on his campaign pledge to double the presence of mental health practitioners in schools, but a corresponding commitment to triple the budget of Title I has failed to materialize.

Whether Jackson’s appointment, which is not subject to Senate confirmation, will jumpstart the White House’s education work is unclear. But it will bring an expert on education finance into even greater prominence, and likely put a spotlight on some of the issues he’s worked on throughout his career. 

Here’s a quick guide to four studies that have helped build Jackson’s reputation.

1. Money really does matter 

For decades, researchers have debated whether directing more resources to schools (i.e., spending more to raise salaries, hire more teachers, or buy better curricula) actually results in better academic results. Many economists — pointing to substantial growth in education spending alongside modest improvement in standardized test scores — have voiced doubts.

But a 2015 study co-authored by Jackson, American University Professor Claudia Persico, and University of California, Berkeley, Professor Rucker Johnson has helped shift the views of the policy community to the opposite view. Analyzing the impact of court-mandated education finance reforms on children born between 1955 and 1985, the team discovered that boosting education funding by 10 percent annually for each of a student’s 12 years of public school produced the learning equivalent of an extra .27 years of schooling. The effects carried into adulthood as well; affected students were 3.67 percent less likely to be poor, and they received wages that were 7.25 percent higher than otherwise.

The paper was not the first or last to emphasize the importance of money to kids’ academic success. But as much as any over the last 10 years, it has helped shape the conversation around one of the most contested areas of American education.

2. Schools affect more than test scores

Another of Jackson’s fascinations has been the range of child outcomes that schools contribute to outside of purely academic ones. That perspective is somewhat unusual in the economics of education, where empiricists tend to focus on metrics that are most available and legible: grades and test scores.

In a 2016 paper, Jackson went further, investigating the role of classroom teachers in developing students’ non-cognitive skills. Those traits — such as motivation and self-control — are thought to be critical, if hard-to-measure, prerequisites to adult activities like finishing college and holding down a job. Relying on a set of proxies for non-cognitive skills, including suspension rates and absences, the study examined how ninth-grade teachers both fostered non-cognitive growth and test score trajectories over time.

In the end, he found that teachers sometimes generated significantly different effects on skills than they did test performance. What’s more, their influence on non-testing outcomes was associated with students’ high school graduation and plans for college-going “above and beyond” their impact on test scores; in fact, combining testing and non-testing measures of teacher quality was more than twice as predictive of student success as using scores alone. Particularly as some in the education world turn away from a perceived over-use of assessment, the findings demonstrate the depth of what’s still unknown about how schools help kids thrive.

3. Some kids get more out of great schools

Good schools are good for everyone, right? The building blocks of a superior learning environment, from great teachers to supportive peer relationships, lift all boats.

While those sentiments are true by and large, a paper from last yearadds a bit of nuance. Co-authored by Jackson, Shanette Porter, John Easton, and Sebastián Kiguel, it looked at thousands of students in Chicago high schools, where inequality in educational opportunity is extraordinarily high. In total, the team found, less-advantaged students — those with lower eighth-grade test scores, more disciplinary incidents, and from lower-income homes — benefit the most from attending highly effective schools that improve both test scores and non-cognitive skills.

Not only were those potentially at-risk kids more likely to graduate high school, they were also arrested less and saw better odds of enrolling in college than otherwise similar peers. In addition, the holistic index of school effectiveness used by Jackson and his co-authors was found to be more predictive of later-life success than simply using test scores alone.

4. Single sex schools might not be the way

In one of his earliest works as a solo researcher, Jackson examined the effects of students being assigned to single-sex schools in Trinidad and Tobago. Proponents of sex-sorted schooling often point to the developmental and social differences between boys and girls, who reach maturity at different ages.

By exploiting the quasi-randomness of the algorithm that assigned students, however, Jackson was able to directly analyze the effects of attending all-boys and all-girls academies. In the end, he found, most students saw no academic advantage from being so assigned — though participants who expressed the strongest preference for that form of education (predominantly girls) did see some bump in learning. Strikingly, girls enrolled at single-sex schools also took fewer science courses on average.

Tony Carnevale

What now?

That’s the question confronting university administrators, faculty, applicants and their families in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. The 6-3 ruling by the Court’s conservative majority struck down race-conscious admissions policies at both Harvard and the University of North Carolina, overturning the decades-old model of affirmative action in higher education.

That system — blessed by an earlier version of the Court in the 1978 Regents of the University of California v. Bakke case — allowed schools to include race as a consideration in offering university acceptance, but only as a means of cultivating the benefits of a diverse student body. But after a series of failed legal challenges over the past 20 years appealing to the bench’s increasingly rightward tilt, a group of Asian plaintiffs prevailed in arguing that they were unconstitutionally disadvantaged by affirmative action as currently practiced.

“Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin. This Nation’s constitutional history does not tolerate that choice,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion.

But if the status quo of college admissions has been cast aside, a replacement hasn’t yet been offered. According to Georgetown University’s Anthony Carnevale, the future remains murky.

Carnevale is the longtime director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW) and one of America’s most-cited economists on the intersection of schools and the labor market. A former member of multiple federal panels on employment and technology, and a passionate advocate for additional K–12 funding and policy experimentation, he has long pondered the question of what might follow an abrupt end to affirmative action.

His observations and proposals fill a 134-page CEW report published in June, which may help shape colleges’ and policymakers’ response to a new landscape of socioeconomic mobility. If elite schools can no longer act as an access point for historically disadvantaged groups to enter the middle and upper classes, he and his co-authors argue, the logic of broad-based education reform — including both dramatically boosted resources and an overhauled approach to college and career counseling — becomes inescapable.

In an interview with Kevin Mahnken, Carnevale discussed the legacy of the Bakke case and multiple generations of racial preferences; the plausibility of class-based selection metrics replacing the vanished system; and the future of a higher education sector that could increasingly come to be seen as elitist. While lamenting the end of affirmative action as we knew it, he argues that colleges should step up efforts to become truly egalitarian.

“One of the problems for elite colleges is that they’re going to become unpopular because everyone is going to see them as what they are: institutions that preserve elites,” he said. “If you’re an elite college president, that’s a problem you have to deal with.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What’s your perspective on this ruling and the legacy of race-conscious admissions?

Basically, affirmative action has been a Band-Aid that’s been used by politicians and the rest of us, so that we have a little racial access to elite colleges. And it’s stopped us from truly reforming education. Now the Band-Aid has been ripped off, and race is a gushing wound in America.

In the end, what disgusts me most about this outcome is that they’re demanding that minority applicants humiliate themselves. The best way for a minority to get into Harvard now — it’s allowed in this opinion — is to write an essay about the hardship you’ve suffered; that your parents abused you, that your neighborhood abused you, that you got beaten up going to school every day, and that was good for your character. I find that humiliating, to turn on everyone you know and care about so that you can get into Harvard. Telling your story in this way is kind of like racial porn: “Let’s see who’s got the sorriest story to tell, and we’ll let them in!”

There are definitely going to be fewer African American, Latino, and Native American people on campus, no doubt about it. That’s what’s going to happen here. The question is, how does everybody respond?

How do you think they’ll respond? Are college admissions officers freaking out right now?

Anthony Carnevale: I’m not sure about “freaking out.” I go to meetings of college officials where this topic is the center of the discussion, and people basically don’t know what they’re going to do. In one of those meetings, a lawyer opened the conversation by saying, “The first question you have to answer is, do you want to get sued?” I thought, “Boy, that’s a good question.”

If you want to make your name in higher education, you can disobey this ruling and let them sue you. If you’re Harvard or Georgetown, and slaves helped build the buildings, maybe you should do that and make a point. But I don’t see any way out of this because the anti-preferences side is committed, and not all of them are racists — a lot of them are just idealists. They’re well-funded, they’re well-organized and they’re always three steps ahead. They’re already challenging changes to Gifted and Talented programs, and if anyone’s wondering whether they’ll persist [in those challenges], I think the answer is yes.

If I were as rich as Harvard, I might simply disobey the ruling. What are they going to do? They’re like the pope — they have no army. Maybe they’ll sue you.

Deliberately contravening a Supreme Court order seems incredibly risky, though. I wonder if universities are entering a particularly dangerous period with respect to the law and public opinion.

It is risky because people’s feelings are easily aroused on this issue. One of the things that will happen is that the ACE [the American Council on Education, a nonprofit advocacy group representing 1,700 institutions of higher education] will take a beating.

I think the College Transparency Act [legislation re-introduced this spring, which aims to modernize data collection from universities and give families a fuller picture of schools’ enrollment, completion, and post-completion earnings statistics] will pass when there’s an opening for it. It has strong, bipartisan support, and one of the things you can do to whack higher education is to make them more transparent in terms of their employment and earnings effects. There’s also a push for expanding funding for workforce training, so we’re going to get transparency on degrees and accountability on training. All of that stuff will move now.

I worked on the Hill a long time, and higher education annoys politicians because they think it’s arrogant and ungrateful. Higher education leadership tried to stop the GI Bill, and they lost. They tried to stop student aid because they wanted that money to go to institutions, and they lost again. They lose at every turn when it comes to issues going beyond higher education. Whacking the elites is a common American sport that appeals to both parties for different reasons.

So if I’m a lobbyist for higher education, I’m looking for another job.

What has been the final legacy of race-conscious standards of college admission since the Bakke case?

The importance of Bakke was that it saved race-conscious affirmative action just in time. There were questions even then about whether it could survive, and it’s never been popular.

If you ask the American public straight-up, “Do you agree that we should give racial preferences in admissions to selective colleges,” a majority will say no — and that includes a majority of African Americans, Latinos, etc. If you ask them, “Do you think there are fundamental problems in the American system that are racist and need attention,” they’ll say yes. But if you give them anything specific, they’ll reject it.

So Bakke saved the day by deferring to the expertise of educators, the notion being that educators understood higher education better than judges do. What has now happened is that the deference is over, and they’re no longer going to defer to American education institutions on race. The argument is that race is too much; even if diversity is a good thing, we can’t base admissions decisions on it because that would be racist.

Could there be any replacement measures for racial preferences? 

The courts have been chipping away at preferences in admissions for a long time, and we’re now at the point where they’re saying it’s the end. But it’s not clear that it is. In many people’s judgment — lawyers and others — courts will begin to defer to class instead. Many decent people argue that the real issue of concern here, across all our diverse peoples, is class. We believe strongly in striving and Horatio Alger, and we want to reward that. The polls make clear that the public still believes that, and it’s part of our culture.

The classic story is Poor Kid Makes Good. Everybody likes that, you want to give that kid a break. But for some reason, we don’t recognize the connection of race to American history and the disadvantages that are still there. It’s a failure to deal with American racism, and it has been since Bakke. The hope among some people is that we’ll use class as a proxy for race, but class and race are not the same thing. They are two very different forces in disadvantaging people’s lives, though a lot of people notice that they often go together.

We’ve done a very long set of studies over the years and discovered that, no, you don’t also get race when you screen for class. You can claw back a bit of the racial diversity you had before affirmative action was banned, but not much of it.

Nevertheless, a lot of people are celebrating a potential switch to class-based affirmative action, saying, “Finally, going to Harvard isn’t just going to be for rich minority kids anymore.” The truth is, it never was. Most of the African Americans and Latinos who go to the top 193 schools are from the bottom half of the income distribution. A lot of them aren’t poor in the classic sense, but they’re not a bunch of rich kids.

The thing people don’t talk about when it comes to class-based admissions is this: A basic problem for people who are poor is, obviously, that they don’t have money. And with the exception of places that are filthy rich, like Harvard and Yale — they can do whatever they want, and their concern is prestige rather than money — colleges just can’t afford class-conscious affirmative action. There have been efforts, but what people forget about colleges, whether they’re selective or not, is that they’re businesses. What they’re always trying to do is find as many kids who can pay full tuition as possible, and if they’re lucky, more than 50 percent of your families will do that.

There’s a bargaining process that every middle-class family is familiar with, where families visit eight colleges and strike the best bargain they can within their kids’ preferences. The colleges will give them “merit aid,” but what it is is a bargain. You get all the full-pay parents you can get, and you haggle with the parents you have to haggle with. Then, whatever you’ve got left over, you can use it for athletes, legacies, the trombone player you need in the band. But you really don’t have room for many poor kids.

You might say to these schools, “You’ve got an endowment of something like $2 billion. How the hell can you not afford it?” Well, if a college president takes money out of the endowment, the alumni are going to get him fired.

How did this whole focus on diversity get started?

As a practical matter, this has always been about white kids. James Conant, who was the president of Harvard after World War II, determined that we needed 5 percent of kids to go to college. He therefore decided that we should build a certain kind of high school nationwide, the “comprehensive” high school. It was comprehensive because it offered a college pathway to a small share of the kids; it offered vocational education, mostly for boys; and it offered home economics and typing for women.

But one of the big moments in the history of education came in 1983. After A Nation at Risk, we decided to do away with the comprehensive high school and provide every American child a full academic education through high school. And the real political reason behind that reform was the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, the disability movement. Basically, anti-tracking sentiment killed the comprehensive high school and, in the end, created an academic curriculum that assumed everyone would go to college. Since Obama, the battle cry has been to make every kid college- and career-ready, but of course, high schools don’t. A lot more kids are graduating high school and going to college, a lot of them are dropping out, and a lot of the kids who don’t make it are the ones you’d figure wouldn’t make it.

Underneath all this, there’s a fundamental shift in the relationship between education and the economy. We needed an elite to run our military, our businesses, every institution in American life, and most of these people were going to be white males. We realized that if you’re going to run a diverse economy and be the global leader in a diverse world, you need to have some understanding of demographic diversity. The reason we did affirmative action was for them — they needed it! If you’re going to run a company in America, you need to have a diverse workforce, or Reverend Al’s going to show up.

The way this will work out is that employers will need to have diversity in their leadership. They’ve got to “look like America,” as Bill Clinton used to say. So irrespective of what the court’s done, they’ll go to UMass instead of Harvard to recruit, and they’ll find plenty of talented minorities there. They’re serious about this, and they have no choice — you can’t run a company with an all-white leadership team.

What about the political consequences?

It will be hell for the Democratic Party. The Supreme Court has effectively put a Band-Aid on racism for years, and now we’re ripping it off. If minorities are a core part of your coalition, you’ve got to come up with something for them.

Joe Biden’s answer is: We’re going to go back and do what we should have done in the first place. We’re going to have preschool for everyone, we’re going to increase spending for Title I, we’re going to increase funding for low-income schools, and we’re going to make community college free. In other words, now that you can’t just mess around with the elite schools, you’ve got to focus on the whole damn system. That’s not very satisfying because you’re talking about 40 years of work. There’s going to be much more focus on making the education system produce minority elites who aren’t from rich families.

The landmark case was brought by Asian American plaintiffs who argued that Harvard’s admissions policies discriminated against them. (Getty Images)

This changes the conversation on education reform, which has run out of gas at the K–12 level. That discussion is about to get revived because there’s nothing else to do except go back to the beginning and get it right.

That sounds refreshing, but also potentially impossible.

In the end, K–12 has caused this problem, so we’ve got to go back to court cases in the states. There have been a lot of those, and they’ve been reasonably successful over the last few decades. But it’s a big, big deal. Politically, it’s going to be awful because what you’re talking about, in part, is screwing around with the local control of schools.

The education system is now the primary pathway to a good job in America. That wasn’t true back when I was young. If you had an uncle working at Chrysler, he could get you in.

You didn’t need to go to college; truthfully, you should drop out of high school instead of waiting. But in all the research — OECD [the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] was the first organization to start saying this, in the ’90s — the education system is now the primary institution that ensures the reproduction of advantage from one generation to the next. It’s a machine where you go to a good grade school, a good high school, a good college, and you get work-based learning and internships. Then you marry a college graduate, move to a neighborhood with good schools and the whole thing starts right over again.

The thing is, it’s hard to argue with. And if we weren’t a diverse nation, it would be an ideal system. But we are a diverse nation, and diversity clearly matters in terms of who wins. Both Republicans and Democrats have tried to reform the K–12 system, and they did good things, but it wasn’t nearly enough.

What I’m hearing is that this change to college admissions is occurring in an economy with an increasingly ossified relationship between higher education and success in life.

The endgame now is much clearer than it used to be. According to our projections, which run out to 2031, we’re going to have 171 million jobs. Forty percent will require a B.A. or more, and about three-quarters of those jobs will be good jobs. Meanwhile, 30 percent of all jobs will be middle-skilled, and maybe 40 percent of those jobs will be high-paying and secure. And then there’ll be jobs for high schoolers, only about 20 percent of which will be good jobs — largely because of the infrastructure bill.

That said, there’s still quite a bit of variability. That’s why, in the United States, 40 percent of people with B.A.s make more than people with graduate degrees, and 30 percent of people with A.A.s make more than people with B.A.s. It’s a system, more and more, where what you study really matters. If you go to a community college and learn about HVAC, you’re going to get a good job. There’s movement here.

Why wasn’t affirmative action ever popular? You mentioned the fact that polling around it is terrible, but it was also striking that a ballot measure to bring back race-conscious admissions failed — in California, of all places — a few years back.

Think about it: Every family has that guy — in my family, it’s a couple of immigrants — who came over and worked hard with a pick and shovel, and by the third generation, we all went to college. Everybody’s got that story about themselves and their families, and we’re almost neurotically tied to hard work and individual success. The idea that somebody who worked less hard or was less qualified could get the job over my grandfather, which they did, was anathema. The striving, the upward mobility, is what we reward.

Now, if you recognize racism in America, you ought to question that perspective somewhat. That is, in America, there were people who weren’t allowed to strive. But it’s a tough American problem because it creates the cultural contradiction of rewarding people based on the color of their skin. You put that to the average guy in a bar, he’ll say, “Hell no! Whoever works the hardest and does his homework should get the job.” To my mind, it’s a very superficial understanding of the United States and its history, but we are who we are.

If I’m a Republican, I’m standing up to make a righteous speech about how the people who deserve advantages are now going to get them. Even if you look at Democrats, they tend to agree with that, so you’ve got to find a Plan B. I’ve worked for a lot of politicians, and boy were they happy that the Supreme Court handled abortion and affirmative action. Now it’s falling into their laps.

If you’re a Democrat, the abortion ruling last year was very advantageous. On affirmative action, not so great.

Is it possible that colleges will effectively ignore this ruling? They can just jettison the use of admissions exams, which were a big part of the evidence in this case, and admit whomever they like, right?

If you look at the data, test-optional [admissions] has increased the recruitment of high-income kids. White kids. If you take the test away, colleges and universities can admit more legacies, the quantity of whom is growing all the time. After this decision, they can admit anyone — except African Americans and Latinos.

In an ideal world, if you’re talking to a student who wants to go to your college, you should be talking about the whole kid, not just their grades. There’s something to holistic admissions. But it also frees up colleges to do whatever they want, and what they want is not to admit poor kids. The flip side is that in American politics, elitism is not a good look. Americans don’t like elites, even if they themselves are elites. There are already bills in Congress that would prevent colleges from admitting legacies. That won’t go anywhere, but we’ll get transparency on legacies; they’re going to have to report to the Department of Education how many legacies and donor kids are in their freshman classes. You can call it grievance, or revenge politics, but it’s going to happen.

Harvard grad student Viet Nguyen started a grassroots organization determined to end the practice of legacy admissions at colleges. (Getty Images)

One of the problems for elite colleges is that they’re going to become unpopular because everyone is going to see them as what they are: institutions that preserve elites. If you’re an elite college president, that’s a problem you have to deal with. If you don’t have any African American or Latino students on campus, people aren’t going to like it. Resentment politics might become stronger in higher education because the class differences and race differences will get even more real.

Class has always been real — elite colleges have always done better with race than with class. If you walk around on a college campus, you can’t tell what a poor kid looks like. But you’ve got a much better chance of bumping into an African American or Latino kid than a poor kid on an elite college campus. They just don’t go there.

Combined with the decision to overturn the Biden administration’s student debt forgiveness program, we’ve now seen big reversals for universities as engines of social and racial equality. It seems like higher education will increasingly come under some skepticism from the political realm.

Yeah. We’re going to get a big emphasis on training and career education because it’s a program that can reach the working class in a way that Harvard and a lot of four-year schools never could. The Democrats need it to shore up their working-class voters, and the Republicans need it to retain white working-class voters as well.

So higher education is going to get some competition from training. That’s good for two-year institutions, but not four-year institutions. More than 20 states now allow you to get bachelor’s degrees at community colleges. Higher education is being rebuilt, in other words. Pretty soon we’ll have a mandate to force higher education institutions to tell their applicants what happened to all the other students who took the program they’re in, whether they got a job, and how much money they made. The data is there for that.

Transparency and accountability is about to come to higher education. You can’t stop it now.

Is it possible this judgment will affect a school like Harvard much more than one like UNC? My guess would be that the types of students who are currently benefiting from racial preferences at the most selective institutions will just apply, and gain acceptance to, slightly less selective institutions. But the more elite the institution, the more challenging it could be to find top nonwhite students.

Yeah, it’s not a choice for these kids between Yale and jail. It’s a choice between Yale and Dartmouth, or Colby, or Bates. But it should change the demographics at the top, say, 40 institutions, and people will be pissed off about it. The newspapers will write headlines about the shrinking number of minorities enrolled at their local colleges, and that will get noticed politically. The decline in the number and shares of minorities at elite colleges will be a constant topic. The people who fund me already want me to get in and start tracking this.

Did affirmative action save America from racism? No, that’s pretty clear. But it allowed elites to operate in a way that made them seem like they were progressive and honoring America’s racial history. So the reputational effects are real. Parents are going to want their kids to go to diverse schools, and there might not be many.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

NAEP

COVID-19’s cataclysmic impact on K–12 education, coming on the heels of a decade of stagnation in schools, has yielded a lost generation of growth for adolescents, new federal data reveal.

Wednesday’s publication of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — America’s most prominent benchmark of learning, typically referred to as the Nation’s Report Card — shows the average 13-year-old’s understanding of math plummeting back to levels last seen in the 1990s; struggling readers scored lower than they did in 1971, when the test was first administered. Gaps in performance between children of different backgrounds, already huge during the Bush and Obama presidencies, have stretched to still-greater magnitudes.

The bad tidings are, in a sense, predictable: Beginning in 2022, successive updates from NAEP have laid bare the consequences of prolonged school closures and spottily delivered virtual instruction. Only last month, disappointing results on the exam’s history and civics component led to a fresh round of headlines about the pandemic’s ugly hangover.

But the latest release, highlighting “long-term trends” that extend back to the 1970s, widens the aperture on the nation’s profound academic slump. In doing so, it serves as a complement to the 2020 iteration of the same test, which showed that the math and English skills of 13-year-olds had noticeably eroded even before the emergence of COVID-19.

Those disturbing findings, since aggravated by the greatest disruption in the history of American schools, look all the worse today. Reading scores fell by four points between 2020 and 2023, mirroring similar declines in other NAEP releases since last fall, while math scores math scores tumbled by nine points. But an even greater reversal — seven points in reading, and 13 points in math — can be measured going back to 2012, when long-term scores began to slip.

The results set off yet another chorus of alarm bells among federal officials. Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers NAEP, told reporters that they “should remind us that this is a huge scale of challenge that faces the nation today.”

“Certainly the pandemic has made things worse and made things more challenging for us,” Carr said in a media briefing. “But these troubling trends that we’re seeing date back a decade, particularly for our lower-performing students.”

In keeping with prior NAEP releases, lower-performing students saw larger score declines than those at the top of the heap. (National Assessment of Educational Progress)

One of the most consistent findings from previous NAEP rounds, echoed in the most recent release, is that students already in need of academic help sustained the worst damage. That phenomenon is displayed most vividly in math: While students at every performance level experienced statistically significant drops in achievement, the fall for those at the top of the heap (minus-six points for those scoring at the 90th percentile of all test takers) was dwarfed by the hit delivered to those at the bottom (minus-14 for those scoring at the 10th percentile).

Again, when compared against the results of a decade ago, the trend becomes even clearer. The drop for top performers stands at seven points since 2012, while the average decline for all 13-year-olds grows to 13 points over that span. But students scoring at the 25th and 10th percentiles have tumbled by a truly stunning margin: 19 and 27 points, respectively.

The long-term trends exam (LTT), which is assessed less frequently than the biannual “main NAEP,” also tests different skills than that test. It measures somewhat simpler material in numeracy, focusing more on basic skills and mathematical definitions than on complex problem-solving, and its content has generally gone unchanged over the last half-century.

Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) at the American Institutes for Research, said that after a long stretch of progress in the late 20th and early-21st centuries, quantitative measures like the LTT test are now “flashing red.”

“When I talk with lay people about long-term achievement in the country, they tend to think that it’s been really flat over the long term, [but] it’s been trending upward — though arguably too slowly — for much of the last four or five decades,” Goldhaber wrote in an email. “It is amazing how much progress was lost quickly.”

Thirteen-year-olds sit close to a critical pivot point in their K–12 careers. According to NCES, about 60 percent of students sitting for NAEP this year were eighth-graders getting ready for the transition to high school. In last year’s first post-pandemic release of NAEP data, eighth-grade math performance fell notably further than that of fourth graders.

Performance in math and English has stalled over the last decade — first gradually, from 2012 to 2020, then severely, from 2020 to 2023. (National Assessment of Educational Progress)

Beyond the divergence between high- and low-scoring participants, already-concerning disparities widened along the lines of race and ethnicity. The gaps in reading and math scores between white and African American students, totalling 23 and 29 points in 2012, grew to 27 and 42 points in 2023. The math gap between white and Hispanic students also grew, from 22 points to 28 points, over the same interval, though the literacy gap between those two groups shrank by four points.

Ancillary survey data, which accompanies raw NAEP scores and provides context about both in-school and out-of-school educational trends, offered additional reason for worry. One facet can be seen in terms of coursework, where the percentage of 13-year-olds reporting that they were enrolled in algebra fell from 34 percent in 2012 to 24 percent in 2023. While 29 percent of respondents said they were taking pre-algebra in 2012, just 22 percent said the same today; at the same time, the proportion of students enrolled in “regular math” rose significantly. Virtually all of that movement occurred between 2012 and 2020, before the onset of COVID.

The drop in algebra enrollment was driven substantially by respondents in the West, where the percentage of algebra students fell from 51 percent to just 19 percent in a little more than a decade. While a shift of that magnitude cannot be attributed to a single origin, California has spent the last few years locked in a debate over whether to delay students from beginning the algebra sequence until the ninth grade.

With respect to literacy, fewer students now report that they read for pleasure than in previous NAEP administrations. Fully 31 percent of respondents said that they “never or hardly ever” read for fun in 2023, compared with just 22 percent who chose that response in 2012. That seldom-reading category is now more than twice as large as the group saying that they read on their own time “almost every day” (14 percent, down from 27 percent in 2012).

Tom Loveless, a longtime education observer who formerly headed the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center for Education Research, said he found the increase disquieting.

“The ability to read has long been a marker of educational status,” Loveless said, also citing similar trends detected by the ongoing Progress in International Reading Literacy Study. “That may be changing, with the perceived value of reading in decline.”

Finally, the release confirms earlier reporting about an ominous and far-ranging increase in student absences from the classroom. One-quarter of participating 13-year-olds said they had missed more than two days of school over the previous month, up from about one-sixth of respondents just three years ago. Meanwhile, the number saying they’d missed 3-4 days rose from 11 percent to 15 percent, and the proportion who said they’d been absent five or more days doubled, from 5 percent to 10 percent.

Frederick Hess, a political scientist who leads education policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, called the overall results “bleak.” But he declined to speculate whether they might also represent a nadir before a hopeful future rebound, in part because it remained ambiguous which factors were weighing down student achievement the most.

“Part of the problem is we don’t really know what’s driving these scores down, so it’s hard to know if that’s played out or not — or what kind of changes will turn the tide.”

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Charter school students make more average progress in math and English than their counterparts in traditional public schools, including months of additional learning in some states, according to a new national overview. The authors of the study find that campuses grouped within larger charter management organizations are particularly effective at accelerating student achievement.

The report, released Tuesday morning by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes, provides perhaps the most thorough perspective available of the landscape of charter schooling, which has grown significantly in recent years.

Macke Raymond, CREDO’s founder and director, said that the report sketched a picture of continuous improvement for the charter sector over the last 15 years. The center’s first national analysis, issued in 2009, showed charters under-performing traditional schools in both core subjects; in a 2013 follow-up, they slightly bested traditional schools in English while still lagging in math. That movement represents a modest silver lining for American education, she said, after a prolonged period during which learning — as measured by standardized tests like the National Assessment of Educational Progress — largely stagnated even before the pandemic.

“When you compare [our findings with] the results of NAEP — which, over an equivalent period, have completely flatlined — what you’re looking at is really the only story in U.S. education policy where we’ve been able to create a set of conditions such that schools actually do get better,” Raymond argued.

Macke Raymond

The new study focuses on charter school performance in 29 states, as well as Washington, D.C., and New York City, incorporating standardized test scores between 2015 and 2019. All told, over 80 percent of tested public school students were included in CREDO’s data set. More than 1.8 million charter students were each paired with a “virtual twin” (i.e., a nearby pupil possessing similar demographic traits and prior test scores) enrolled at the district school that the charter student otherwise would have attended.

The research team calculated that charter school students gained the equivalent of an additional 16 days of learning (based on a traditional 180-day school calendar) in English compared with similar kids at district schools. Their six-day edge in math was smaller, though still considered statistically significant.

But even those averages, comprising millions of student measurements across the country, contain significant variation. Black students attending charter schools gained 35 days of growth in reading and 29 days in math — as if they’d attended school for an extra 1.5 months over a single school year. Hispanics enjoyed 30 extra days of reading and 19 in math. By comparison, white and multiracial students lost the equivalent 24 days of annual math learning in charter schools.

Smaller sub-groups experienced similar divergences. Poor students saw much higher gains in charters than in traditional public schools (23 extra days of reading growth, 17 extra days in math), as did English learners (six extra days of reading, eight in math); students with overlapping designations (such as both African American and low-income, or both Hispanic and English learner), also made considerable strides

By contrast, special education students were seriously stymied, losing 13 days of reading growth and 14 days of math at charter schools relative to kids receiving special education outside of charters. Raymond called that inequity one of the few sore spots revealed by the study, adding that charter schools should be “taken to task” for the collective failure.

“With the exception of very few charter schools that specialize in particular kinds of special education, the sector has basically thrown up their hands and said, ‘This isn’t our job,’” she said.

Even among charters, some types tend to yield better results than others. Specifically, those grouped within a charter management organization (CMO) — a network, either non- or for-profit, that operates multiple schools, such as the well-known KIPP or Success Academy organizations — provide 27 extra days of instruction in reading, and 23 extra days in math, than traditional schools. Stand-alone charters, which encompass roughly two-thirds of all charter schools, generate 10 extra days of reading growth and negative-three days of growth in math.

Douglas Harris, an economics professor at Tulane University who has previously studied the impact of charter schools on surrounding public school districts, said that the results of the CREDO report largely dovetailed with those of his own research on school choice in New Orleans and elsewhere. He also said that the especially impressive findings from CMO-affiliated schools were somewhat predictable given that many cities and states only consider top-performing charter schools as candidates for replication.

Douglas Harris

“Some of this is kind of mechanical — not in a bad way, it’s just how the sector operates. If you’re a stand-alone, and you do well, you can open another school,” Harris said. “Then you become a CMO, and they’re better because they were selected to build on their own success. That’s a positive aspect of the charter model.”

Even more distinctive was the dividing line between what might be deemed “traditional” charters and those offering instruction virtually, which had already earned an ugly reputation for low academic quality even before the pandemic began. The popularity of the virtual charter sector has grown substantially since the emergence of COVID — one analysis by the Network for Public Education found that fully or mostly online programs enrolled 13 percent of all charter students during the 2020–21 school year — even as they delivered a staggering 124 fewer days of math growth than traditional public schools, along with 58 fewer days of growth in English.

If virtual initiatives were excluded from the national sample, the average charter school advantage would jump from 16 extra days of reading instruction to 21, and from 6 extra days of math instruction to 14.

Martin West, the academic dean at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, called the report “easily the most comprehensive analysis of charter school performance to date” and echoed concerns about the performance of virtual charter schools.

“The results continue to raise questions about the regulatory environment for virtual charter schools, whose results drag down the overall performance of the broader sector,” West said. “These schools may provide an essential option for students for whom in-person learning truly isn’t possible, but state policymakers should look carefully at who is attending these schools and how well they are being served.”

Martin West

An additional state-by-state analysis showed that individual jurisdictions have built particularly effective charter school sectors. Across New York State, charter students receive the equivalent of 75 extra days of growth in reading, and 73 extra days in math, compared with demographically similar students at district schools. Massachusetts (41 extra days in both subjects), Maryland (37 extra days in both subjects), Tennessee (34 extra days of reading and 39 in math), and Rhode Island (90 extra days of reading and 88 in math) offered similarly impressive statewide results. Charter school students only experienced significantly weaker reading growth in one state, Oregon.

An additional lesson came with respect to new charter entrants versus existing options. New schools opened by existing CMOs tended to outpace their district competitors, but also to be out-performed themselves by older schools within their own CMO.

“The new schools that have come in since the second study are strong, but they’re not as strong,” Raymond observed. “So it’s not that new schools are coming in and kicking butt and dragging the sector along with them. It’s that, over this period, individual schools around the country are making incremental changes that lead to this trajectory of upward performance.”

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The revelation comes from The Condition of Education 2023, the latest in a series of annual digests from the National Center for Education Statistics surveying the landscape of K–12 schools. Its contents offer a nuanced account of how COVID-19 affected student experiences both inside and outside the classroom.

But the report also represents the fullest record yet of the decade preceding that once-in-a-century jolt to learning, during which K–12 spending climbed, school choice blossomed and the teaching pipeline narrowed. Compiling surveys and other data collections from over a dozen federal and international sources, the report captures how trends dating back to the middle of the Obama administration were either accelerated or untouched by the emergence of COVID.

The number of pupils enrolled in charter schools leapt from 1.8 million in 2012 to 3.7 million in 2021, when they accounted for 7 percent of all public school enrollment. Over the same period, white students shrank from a narrow majority of the total American student body to a smaller plurality. Public school revenues grew by 13 percent — compared with a 3 percent increase in student enrollment — while the dropout rate (measured as the percentage of 16–24-year-olds who haven’t earned a diploma and aren’t attending school) fell from 8.3 percent to 5.2 percent.

“The condition of education, as one might expect, is a complicated picture for the United States,” Peggy Carr, the commissioner of NCES, told reporters. “The impact of COVID on our education system gives us…an opportunity to rethink where we were.”

One bleak and well-known phenomenon that came into focus in the 2010s was the worsening mental health reality for adolescents, many of whom have reported spiraling rates of depression and anxiety. Those problems were clearly aggravated by pandemic-related school closures, which separated tens of millions of children from friends and teachers for months at a time.

In survey findings gathered last spring, leaders at 70 percent of schools said that they were faced with higher proportions of students seeking psychological and behavioral support. But only 56 percent of respondents agreed (and just 12 percent strongly agreed) that their school was able to effectively deliver that support.

Overall, 72 percent of schools said they provided mental health trauma support during the 2021–22 school year, just one of the strategies employed to help children recover from pandemic-related setbacks to learning and social-emotional development. The same percentage said they were offering remedial instruction, while three-quarters said they had implemented summer enrichment programs before the school year started.

But such supplemental services were undoubtedly difficult to roll out during a time of spiking demand for school staff. Across a dozen varied academic disciplines and specialties, more schools said they had difficulty hiring for positions in 2020–21 than in 2011–12. In particular, during the first full pandemic year, substantial portions of public schools looking to hire said they had difficulty filling vacant roles in foreign languages (42 percent), special education (40 percent), physical sciences (37 percent), mathematics (32 percent), and computer science (31 percent).

Chad Aldeman, a school finance and labor market analyst, said in an email that the differences in hiring conditions between the two comparison years made it somewhat predictable that job candidates would be at a premium during the hottest jobs economy in decades.

“We were in a totally different economic environment in 2021–22 than we were a decade prior,” said Aldeman. “The ‘prime age’ employment rate was very low [during the Great Recession], and the unemployment rate was 8.3 percent in January 2012, compared to 4 percent in January 2022. It would be surprising if schools were bucking these trends and not struggling to hire in this environment.”

At the same time, however, a breakdown in the teacher training pipeline might have contributed to the apparent pandemic-era shortages in teachers and other school staff. Between the 2012–13 and 2019–20 school years, the report showed, the number of candidates enrolled in traditional teacher preparation programs shrank by 30 percent; the number of people completing such programs declined by 28 percent, from 161,000 to 116,100, during that interval.

On the heels of those developments, public school enrollment counts were profoundly changed by the impact of COVID and the switch to online learning.

Longer-term trends show a steady increase in total students, from 49.5 million to 50.8 million, between fall 2010 and fall 2019; but over the next academic year, the entirety of that decade-long growth — 3 percent of all public school students — vanished as public school enrollment fell back to 49.4 million. (Notably, persistent growth in the charter school sector continued during the early stages of the pandemic, with charter school enrollment swelling by 7 percent between fall 2019 and fall 2020.)

As earlier reporting has indicated, drops in head counts were heavily concentrated among the youngest students. While 54 percent of three- and four-year-olds were enrolled in school in 2019, just 50 percent were in 2021. The percentage of five-year-olds in school also fell, from 91 percent to 86 percent, during those two years.

Thomas Dee, an economist at Stanford who has carefully examined state enrollment figures during the pandemic, said the statistics were “a potent reminder” of the educational harms suffered since March 2020.

“The sustained declines in pre-K and kindergarten enrollment are important,” Dee wrote in an email. “Many of our youngest learners are missing important early learning opportunities, and it will be years before most age into conventional testing windows that will provide some indication of what this means for their learning.”

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Eamonn Fitzmaurice/LA School Report

Two major players in K–12 education launched a joint effort last month to develop new assessments that could help shift schools’ focus away from traditional “seat time” requirements and toward more accurate measures of mastery over academic content.

The new tests, to be created by the Educational Testing Service and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, are meant to usher in competency-based forms of schooling that would allow students to proceed through academic material at their own pace. Leaders of both organizations hope they will also capture a broader array of non-cognitive qualities, like teamwork and relatability, that are highly prized in the modern workforce but undetectable through conventional academic metrics like grade point average or school attendance.

The adoption of more personalized instruction and assessment has faced a key obstacle in the form of the Carnegie Unit, the namesake foundation’s strict definition of annual credit hours that students must accrue to demonstrate their grasp of material. (The calculation essentially breaks down to one hour of seat time per day, per subject, for 24 weeks.) Though largely unknown outside the education world, many high schools and universities have based their academic requirements on the Carnegie Unit for over a century.

But Timothy Knowles, the foundation’s president, said that while the Carnegie Unit had served a useful purpose at one point, new discoveries in neuroscience and cognitive psychology have proven that pupils learn different subjects at highly variable rates. What’s more, he added, the capacity now exists to test for valuable qualities that were previously invisible to admissions officers and employers.

“We’re in a position to do something that we hadn’t before,” Knowles said. “Unlike 20 years ago, we can actually reliably measure the skills that we know are predictive of success in postsecondary education and work.”

Competency-based learning and assessment has long been theorized as a preferable alternative to existing educational models, which critics describe as too standardized to deliver instruction to individual students with vastly divergent levels of academic preparation. Instead, they allege, the status quo came to reflect the production processes of 20th-century industry, with students replacing widgets as the product. In a recent interview, Knowles himself telegraphed his desire to phase out the Carnegie Unit, calling time a “crude” metric to determine educational attainment.

Carnegie Foundation President Timothy Knowles and Educational Testing Service CEO Amit Sevak at ASU+GSV summit in April.

With a range of philanthropic and education-focused advocates backing the movement, virtually every state has promoted some version of competency-based policies. Those efforts hit a high-water mark in Maine, where high school graduation requirements were refigured over the last decade to emphasize proficiency on subject material. But disputes over the definition of proficiency and teachers’ differing grading standards led many to question the new approach, with legislators later backing away from the competency-based model.

Similarly rocky transitions were seen in Vermont and New Hampshire, which attempted similar shifts. The central puzzle facing critics of the current model (i.e., calendar-centered requirements and standardized assessment) is what will come to supplant it.

Scott Marion, president of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, said that the challenge in executing the hoped-for switch to competency-based learning lay in designing realistic measures of achievement to replace existing tests. To deliver on advocates’ promises, he observed, such measures would need to be both tailored to individual students and academically credible.

“Competency-based assessment is not for the faint of heart,” Marion said. “It’s being done quite poorly in a lot of places. So if ETS and Carnegie can bring a little more rigor to it, it might be good.”

With interest in competency-based approaches growing, more players have leapt into the field, with the best-known among them a national consortium that developed a “mastery transcript.” The project has gained adherence among high schools over the last year.

The ETS-Carnegie proposal is also emerging at a time when traditional high school admissions exams, such as the SAT and ACT, have lost significant market share. Both the aftereffects of the pandemic and concerns about inequitable outcomes from standardized testing have led thousands of colleges and universities to go test-optional in the last few school years. With those leading indicators of secondary achievement potentially passing from the scene, demand is expected to rise for measures that could take their place.

ETS, which administers the widely used GRE, PRAXIS, and TOEIC tests, has itself announced multiple rounds of layoffs during and after the pandemic.

Perhaps the biggest question hanging over the newly announced partnership is the proposed measurement of not just cognitive and behavioral skills — including everything from comprehension of math content to teamwork and leadership — but so-called “affective” skills as well. As described by ETS head Amit Sevak at the educational technology conference ASU-GSV, such skills could include something like emotional intelligence, or the ability to successfully convey sincerity and empathy to others. Just how those kinds of competencies can be conveyed to students, let alone measured by third parties, is debatable even to backers of competency-based instruction.

Michael Horn, a cofounder of Harvard’s Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Education, said he would be watching the development of such measures carefully.

“This part, from my reading of the literature on assessment, is both unproven and underdeveloped. So the how is going to be very important,” Horn said. “I’m going to be very curious to see what the investments look like as they go forward, and I hope they don’t overpromise.”

While no concrete timeline has been released for the conception of the new suite of assessments, Carnegie and ETS are reportedly aiming to conduct a multi-state pilot that could begin as early as next year. In an interview, Sevak said he envisioned students being able to access a digital “transcript” detailing their ongoing growth in areas like collaboration and creativity. Real-time data could build their awareness of their comparative strengths and weaknesses, he added.

“That more holistic approach is in contrast to much of the assessments in K–12 and higher education, which are really cognitive-driven and tied to logic and reason,” Sevak said. We’re looking at a more holistic approach that is more tied to the future of work.”

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NAEP/The 74

Eighth graders’ knowledge of both history and civics fell significantly between 2018 and 2022, according to the latest scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Federal officials called the decline an ominous sign for America’s civic culture, with U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona criticizing some states for “banning history books and censoring educators.”

Posted this morning, results from last year’s administration of the nationally representative test — sometimes referred to as the “Nation’s Report Card” — showed history scores dropping by an average of five points on a 500-point scale. Average civics scores fell by two points on a 300-point scale, the first-ever decline in the 25-year history of the test. After modest increases over the last few decades, performance in both subjects has fallen back to levels measured in the 1990s, when the subjects were first tested.

Taken together, the scores provide only the latest evidence of declining U.S. academic performance across a range of disciplines. Just last fall, the release of math and English scores showed severe damage inflicted during the pandemic, with years’ worth of academic growth similarly erased or massively reduced.

• Read more: NAEP science scores down for fourth-graders, flat for older students; are reading challenges to blame?

Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, told reporters that the unprecedented reversal in civics was “alarming,” though not of the same magnitude as last year’s release. More disquieting were the history results, she added, which began their slide nearly a decade ago and are now nine points lower than in the 2014 iteration of NAEP.

“For U.S. history, I was very, very concerned,” Carr said. “It’s a decline that started in 2014, long before we even thought about COVID. This is a decline that’s been [going] down for a while.”

Beyond the headline figures, the test also measured lower performance across all four of the sub-themes included on the NAEP U.S. history test, including changes in American democracy (minus-five points), interactions of peoples and cultures (minus-five), economic and technological development (minus-five), and America’s evolving role in the world (minus-three).

Equally noteworthy, Carr observed, was a phenomenon that has been consistent across multiple rounds of NAEP stretching back over the better part of a decade: Scores for the most successful test takers (those at 90th percentile in U.S. history and both the 75th and 90th percentile in civics) are statistically unchanged since 2018, while relatively lower-performing students did significantly worse.

Those diverging trends were reflected in the numbers of participants scoring at NAEP’s different achievement thresholds. The percentage of eighth graders scoring below NAEP’s lowest benchmark of “basic” in U.S. history (defined as only partial mastery of the requisite skills and knowledge in a given subject) grew from 29 percent in 2014 to an incredible 40 percent in 2022. In civics, the proportion of students scoring below the basic level rose to 31 percent from 27 percent in 2018.

By contrast, just 13 percent of test takers managed to score at or above NAEP’s “proficient” benchmark in U.S. history (defined as being able to read, interpret, and draw conclusions from primary and secondary sources) — the lowest proportion of eighth-grade students reaching that level out of any subject tested by NAEP. Only about one-fifth of students met or exceeded the proficient level in civics, the second-lowest proportion for any subject.

Patrick Kelly, a 12th-grade teacher of AP U.S. government in suburban Columbia, South Carolina, said that the results, while disappointing, could hardly be called a surprise. In spite of their importance to the country’s social fabric, he continued, requisite attention and precedence has not been granted to either history or civics.

Sample question (NAEP/The 74)

“When it comes to social studies instruction, we’ve marginalized it for quite a while nationally,” said Kelly, who also serves as a member of the National Assessments Governing Board, which oversees the construction and administration of NAEP. “You get out of something what you put into it, and we haven’t been putting enough in to get anything other than the results we’re seeing.”

A ‘neglected sphere of learning’

The new scores arrive at a period of contention around social studies, when both policymakers and members of the public allege partisan interference in classroom instruction.

Conservatives, including a swell of newly emergent parent groups, have spent much of the past few years complaining that teachers and school district leaders are indoctrinating children through ideological instruction on topics like race, gender and sexuality. Progressives counter that Republican-led moves to narrow topics of classroom discussion and remove controversial books from school libraries constitute a more pernicious form of political meddling.

In a statement, Secretary Cardona echoed some of the latter claims, arguing that the lower NAEP scores reflect the disruptive effects of COVID-19. Restricting the autonomy of teachers “does our students a disservice and will move America in the wrong direction,” he said.

“The latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress further affirms the profound impact the pandemic had on student learning in subjects beyond math and reading,” Cardona wrote, adding that it is “not the time…to limit what students learn in U.S. history and civics classes.”

Sample question (NAEP/The 74)

But whatever the impact of recent disputes over lengthy school closures or district-led equity initiatives, the drop in history knowledge can be traced back to 2014. It was around that time that a new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, replaced No Child Left Behind — a development that many hoped would reduce classroom focus on the core subjects of math and English and make more room in the school day for instruction in science, social studies, and the arts.

If that shift occurred, it can’t be detected in the latest NAEP results. Edward Ayers, a renowned historian who serves as both a humanities professor and president emeritus of the University of Richmond, said that history education still languishes as “a neglected, de-emphasized sphere of learning” within the K–12 world.

The downward-trending performance “reflects 30 years of disinvestment in the teaching of social studies,” reflected Ayers, who recently launched an online hub called New American History to provide free learning resources to K–12 teachers. “It reflects the diminished amount of testing devoted to those subjects. We have emphasized STEM and reading and sacrificed this kind of learning in schools across the country.”

Recent findings from nationally prominent research and advocacy groups have sounded a similar note. A recent and wide-ranging survey of the elementary social studies landscape was conducted by the RAND Corporation, warning of a “missing infrastructure” for the teaching of civics and history in elementary schools. Few states require regular assessment of social studies knowledge, the study found, and many rely on low-quality standards. While 98 percent of elementary principals reported evaluating their teachers on math and reading instruction, just 67 percent said the same of social studies. A sizable majority of teachers said that the task of selecting curricular materials for social studies lessons fell to them, and just 16 percent said they worked from a textbook.

Survey responses from eighth graders who took the exam dovetailed somewhat with those findings. Between 2018 and 2022, the proportion of students who said they were enrolled in a dedicated U.S. history course declined from 72 percent to 68 percent. Just 55 percent said they had a teacher whose “primary responsibility” was teaching U.S. history, compared with 62 percent four years prior.

Ayers said that the “diminished” focus on history endangered the development of civic skills and inclinations. Only a renewed push for more and better instruction in social studies could reverse that, he said.

“I care about people living in public, living with one another. And there’s nothing like getting outside of yourself — that’s kind of what the humanities do generally. To step outside your own perspective and imagine another time, another place, another gender, another skin, is the best way to foster a sense of common purpose.”

• Read more: Commentary: Teachers are on the front lines of preserving democracy. They can’t do it alone

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Photo by Allison Shelley for EDUimages

They might not want to hear it, but it’s true: Students assigned to teachers with tougher grading policies are better off in the long run, research suggests.

According to a paper released last fall through Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform, eighth- and ninth-graders who learned from math teachers with relatively higher performance standards earned better test scores in Algebra I. The same students later saw their improved results carry forward to subsequent years of math instruction, and — contradicting fears that high expectations might cause kids to resist or give up — they were less likely to be absent from classes than similar students assigned to more lax graders.

Seth Gershenson, an economist at American University and one of the paper’s co-authors, said the breadth and longevity of the positive results showed that they were not flowing from a quirk of testing. Rather, high standards “change the way students engage with school,” he argued.

“There really is a persistent, long-lasting sea change that students experience when they have a tougher grader,” Gershenson said. “And it’s not like you have to be super tough; any marginal increase in standards adds a little boost.”

The findings build on earlier work by Gershenson, which showed that pervasive grade inflation in K-12 settings — defined as student course grades that are considerably higher than their corresponding scores on end-of-year exams — is more prevalent in schools serving larger percentages of affluent students. They are also noteworthy in light of the post-COVID academic environment, which has seen many teachers relax their grading policies either through personal initiative or in response to district mandates.

The study is built on grading and testing records for a huge swath of North Carolina students who took Algebra I in either the eighth or ninth grades. In all, the sample included over 365,000 pupils across nearly 27,000 classrooms and 4,415 teachers — a rich enough selection to allow comparisons between thousands of similar students assigned to different Algebra teachers over a 10-year span.

To assess the impact of different standards, Gershenson and his colleagues used multiple measures of grading severity, again relying on the relationship between course grades (over which teachers have wide, though not total, latitude) and performance on end-of-year exams. For example, an Algebra teacher whose students tend to receive higher course grades than their scores would indicate is considered an “easier” grader, and vice versa.

The researchers then sorted the teacher sample into four comparison groups, ranging from the easiest graders to the hardest, and charted the trajectories of their respective students before and after they took Algebra I. Disproportionately, the teachers grouped in the “toughest” quarter were likelier to be white, female, and more experienced than the sample as a whole.

They also tended to achieve more in the classroom.

Across several metrics of academic success, students who were exposed to higher grading standards fared better than their peers. Compared with students who had previously demonstrated similar levels of math performance, those assigned to stricter graders saw larger scoring gains. Notably, those effects were both sizable and linear, meaning that the tighter the grading practices — moving from the easiest-grading quarter to the very hardest — the larger the improvement on test scores.

Students of tougher graders also maintained some of their scoring advantage into the next two classes of North Carolina’s math sequence, geometry and Algebra II. The effects were actually twice as large in Algebra II as they were in geometry, a nuance the authors specifically cited in the paper: Perhaps because of the similarities in content between the two levels of algebra, they theorized, students who were formerly held to higher standards did especially well in the later class, even though the effects should have faded more because of the further passage of time.

“That suggests this wasn’t a pure grade-chasing effect where students crammed more for the test so that they could do better and get the grade they needed,” Gershenson explained. “Instead, it makes me think that there was some real learning that happened and was retained.”

‘Good for everybody’

Though it sets out to measure the benefits of tougher grading policies, the study jibes somewhat with research investigating the inverse phenomenon of grade inflation. According to the High School Transcript Study, a long-term analysis of student grades conducted by the U.S. Department of Education, the average high school GPA rose from 3.00 in 2009 to 3.11 in 2019. But performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, stayed flat over the same period.

That federal assessment generated some attention when it appeared last spring, but it only covered the years before the pandemic. Another report, released by the testing group ACT, found evidence of significant grade inflation over 2020 and 2021, with self-reported student GPAs climbing even as ACT scores themselves did not.

Not all education policy scholars are concerned about these revelations. Zachary Bleemer, a professor of economics at the Yale School of Management, has argued that some grade inflation — whether at the university or K-12 levels — can correct inequalities in which student groups pursue intellectually rigorous subjects. (Female college students, in particular, have been shown to discontinue studies in economics if their initial grades are poor.) What’s more, ACT’s hypothesis could rightly be viewed with caution, given the organization’s potential interest in casting high school grades as less reliable than scores on college admissions tests.

But it is also broadly reflected in accounts given by teachers themselves, who have sometimes spoken openly about softening their approach to grading as a response to COVID’s disruption to in-person learning. In big districts like Los Angeles, San Diego, and Clark County, Nevada (home to Las Vegas), new standards have deemphasized deadlines and classroom behavior, giving students more time and chances to complete graded work.

ACT

Education authorities have justified those changes as an equity-minded strategy to keep students engaged who might otherwise become frustrated or fall behind in their studies. But Gershenson and his co-authors found no evidence that North Carolina students assigned to harder graders became alienated from school. In fact, those students were slightly less likely than their peers to rack up unexcused absences.

Best of all, whether measured by attendance or test scores, the results of higher standards were broadly similar for a range of different students. While higher-performing math students enjoyed marginally larger gains than their relatively lower-performing classmates, effects were ultimately beneficial across 20 different student categories — each differing by race, sex, class rank, and prior achievement level in math.

Gershenson, who sees grade inflation as a significant problem that distorts how scholastic performance is interpreted, said the near-uniformity of his team’s findings was a strong signal that high standards are “good for everybody.”

“For none of these outcomes… is the effect negative. Sure, the effects are smaller for some groups than others, and they’re smaller for some outcomes than others. But on no dimension are students being harmed by higher grading standards.”

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The 46-year-old entrepreneur and former financial analyst is the founder of Khan Academy, a nonprofit site offering thousands of free video lessons on a range of K-12 subjects. Since its beginnings as a YouTube channel (which itself grew out of Khan’s early efforts to tutor his niece in math), the organization has blossomed into an internationally known learning tool reaching tens of millions students in over 100 countries. Among its English-speaking users, Khan’s gently probing voice has become the soundtrack to their efforts to learn algebra or geometry.

The organization’s mission grew during the pandemic, as traffic to the website surged amid widespread school closures. User minutes on the site grew steadily in 2020 while American students were largely learning in isolation from teachers and peers, and for a time, school systems across the country were attempting to recreate Khan Academy’s model on the fly.

Their efforts, while often heroic, were insufficient. Reams of COVID-era research have shown conclusively that remote instruction led to disastrous learning losses in foundational subjects, with particularly steep declines in math skills. And even after two years of doleful news about schools and learning, October’s release of NAEP results still managed to shock education observers.

The federal test, often called the “Nation’s Report Card,” showed that fourth and eighth graders both sustained unprecedented drops in math performance. The damage to older students was especially severe, with 38 percent of eighth graders scoring below the exam’s lowest level of proficiency during the 2021–22 school year. While the worst of the pandemic-related learning disruptions is behind us, a long climb remains ahead.

In an interview with LA School Report, Khan said that learning recovery can’t stop with a return to the pre-pandemic norm, which saw huge numbers of students ill-prepared for college and bound for frustrating bouts with remedial coursework. He believes that American math education should be more organized around the principles of “mastery learning,” a pedagogical strategy that focuses heavily on providing pupils the necessary support to address their existing knowledge gaps before moving on to new material.

Failing a shift toward more effective math instruction, he argued, the damage revealed by October’s NAEP scores will result in lasting harm to students’ prospects in life — and it won’t be distributed equally.

“My kids are doing just fine, and everyone in their school is doing fine,” Khan said. “But somebody else’s kid is on the other end of that average, doing pretty darn badly and probably unable to compete.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

What are your thoughts on the huge declines in math performance revealed by NAEP? Is this roughly what you were expecting, given the effects of COVID?

Sal Khan: My big takeaways are that it’s not surprising that the drops were larger in math, and it’s not surprising that they were larger in eighth grade than in fourth grade. We always talk about how math is cumulative — if you start having gaps earlier on in math, it becomes that much harder to even engage later on. Gaps obviously matter in reading comprehension, and you want a strong foundation, but you can still engage later on if you fall behind.

The silver lining on these results is that they put a spotlight on what’s happened, but it’s not as if scores went from decent to bad; they went from horrible to even-more-horrible. Pre-pandemic, about one-third of eighth-graders were proficient in math, and now one-fourth are proficient. And it’s actually worse than that in some of the large urban districts that we know need a lot of help. Detroit Public Schools went from [5 percent of eighth-graders being proficient in math to 4 percent]. If I looked up where I live — Mountain View, California, or Palo Alto Unified School District — I’m guessing those numbers are closer to 80 or 90 percent proficiency. So even though the averages are pretty bad, they also hide the problem.

The idea of math as a uniquely cumulative subject is one you hear a lot about. Can you explain how that works in greater detail?

In education, memorization and math facts are kind of nasty words, but I definitely believe that fluency is valuable. So I’ll talk about it on a theoretical level.

Say you’re a little shaky on what seven plus seven is, and you have to count on your fingers. Then you move on to multiplication, which is basically repeated addition: seven plus seven plus seven. If you have to compute those things and don’t know off the bat that seven plus seven equals 14, you’re not going to get the multiplication fluency either. All of a sudden, you start doing word problems or exponents, and you’re going to be in a lot of trouble. And this keeps happening! If you get a 70 percent on your negative numbers test, you’re going to be adding fractions with negative numbers next, and you might not even get a 70 on that test. So you compound these gaps, and of course it will eventually fail. The way I usually talk about it is with a homebuilding analogy, where if you have a weak foundation, what you build on top of it will collapse.

This isn’t a crazy theory. I visited a school in the Bronx a few months ago, and they were working on exponent properties like: two cubed, to the seventh power. So, you multiply the exponents, and it would be two to 21st power. But the kids would get out the calculator to find out three times seven. They knew what to do, but the fluency gap was adding to the cognitive load, taking more time, and making things much more complex. And if you get to an algebraic equation where you have to get that in several steps — and God forbid someone says you can’t use a calculator because it’s just simple multiplication — it just gets harder and harder.

Put the NAEP data aside. Maybe 50 or 60 percent of American kids try to go to college, and of those who do, the majority are placed in remedial math — which is not high school math, it’s like seventh-grade math. Even college algebra is really a remedial class, essentially tenth- or eleventh-grade math, and most kids can’t place into college algebra. It shows you how they slow down around that point, and in my mind, it’s because of these gaps.

Remedial math is also kind of the kiss of death in terms of college completion, right?

Exactly. This is a whole other conversation, but we have a program with Howard University where students in Title I high schools can get mastery in college algebra on Khan Academy, and then Howard University gives them transferable college credits for the subject. That’s one of the ways we think we can get people back on track.

Another idea that circulated after the NAEP release was that eighth-grade math is a kind of gateway to more sophisticated academic concepts, making it an especially bad year to see reversals. 

Actually, they’re both interesting years. Fourth graders are starting to integrate a lot of the arithmetic they’ve learned up to that point, and in eighth grade, you’re combining the arithmetic with pre-algebra and starting on algebraic material. The eighth-grade Common Core standards are essentially Algebra I, and Algebra I is the most popular course on Khan Academy. It’s not surprising to me because that’s where people start hitting walls.

Why? Because it’s a new way of thinking about math. But for most people, it’s because their fluency in pre-algebraic or even arithmetic-level skills is pretty weak. If you look at the curve in the national data, kids fall further and further behind relative to where they should be, year in and year out. And when students are able to do personalized practice and address their unfinished learning, it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that eighth grade is also when students see the biggest, most dramatic gains in math.

Algebra I is the most popular course offered by Khan Academy, founder Sal Khan observed. (Nikolas Kokovlis/Getty Images)

You mentioned that memorization is sort of a nasty word. But I think many people experience a bit of success with that in the early years of math, with the multiplication tables offering one example. Do you think there’s room for more of that in K-12 math — perhaps through methods like direct instruction, which places a lot of emphasis on explicit teaching methods and systematic lessons?

Yeah, although I’m actually a little bit allergic to direct instruction. I’m the chairman of two schools that I started, and for high schoolers, I think there should be no lecturing at our schools. You should be asking questions, making the students think about things, making them collaborate. With younger kids, of course there’s going to be more direction there, but it still shouldn’t really be a lecture. I think that’s really important, especially for young kids. What we call play, that’s really children exploring so that they can learn about the world. Kids love to explore and do things; they don’t love to sit in the chair with their fingers on their lips and learn to be docile.

In the math wars, there’s the rote learning and memorization, whatever you want to call it, and there are higher-order skills and problem solving. I absolutely think it’s got to be both. Schools that only do the latter, like project-based learning schools, their kids still struggle to get engineering degrees even though they were potentially doing engineering-type lessons during high school. Because they didn’t learn fluency in some of the core skills! Meanwhile, I know plenty of people who went through traditional education systems that might have leaned a little bit towards rote learning — especially in other countries like India and China and Korea — and I don’t think that’s ideal either. But you do have to get the core fluencies before you get too conceptual, in many cases, and advocates of more progressive education don’t necessarily buy into that.

Those eighth-graders I met in the Bronx were not atypical. I just wanted to sit down with them for like 24 hours and make sure they could nail their multiplication tables. Some people think that if you make them memorize the multiplication tables, they won’t know what multiplication is. No, they understand the concepts, and they know what multiplication is. But can you imagine going through life saying, “I don’t know what three times seven is”? It’s actually a problem if you see a pair of pants that costs $70, but they’re on sale for 30 percent off, and you can’t figure out that you can save $21. You’re going to be in trouble. So I do think that math facts shouldn’t be a forbidden concept, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also do conceptual learning.

I feel the same way about history. When people say that kids can just Google things, I think, “I don’t know, it’s pretty useful for me to know when World War II was.” These are things that shouldn’t be in competition with one another.

You used the phrase “math wars,” and I’m wondering how much those are truly being fought. What we called the reading wars were really destructive, but also constructive in that they’ve produced a huge research literature about how to teach literacy. Does it strike you that the math world hasn’t really been through the same process, and that the “science of math” is therefore something of a mystery to both educators and kids?

Yes and no. The reading wars were whole-language vs. phonetics, and again, I think the answer is both: You probably start with phonics and move more toward whole-language as kids get older. You don’t need to fight these wars.

It’s not like there aren’t already cases of kids learning math really well. There are lots. We started talking about how math is cumulative, and the strongest evidence for that — from well before Khan Academy existed — is around the notion of mastery learning, which always gives students the opportunity and incentive to fill in any gaps they have. And it’s had something like 200 efficacy studies, all of which were dramatic in terms of what they found for student learning. That’s essentially the pedagogical underpinnings that we’ve used; we’ve had 50-plus efficacy studies of Khan Academy, and they all have the exact same narrative.

So I don’t think it’s a secret of what we should do. The kids at KLS [Khan Lab School] — and they’re not indicative of a historically under-resourced community, it’s in the middle of Silicon Valley — are growing 1.5–2 times faster in math than demographically comparable kids in local public schools. That’s because they’re doing mastery learning, and they’re doing some things in peer-to-peer and active learning that are contributing as well. I think if you let kids work in their zone of proximal development, and you motivate them, you can actually accelerate people in math pretty quickly.

What about the long-term trends in American math results? Last year’s NAEP release shows pretty clearly that, even though we’ve stagnated or declined recently, we’re still quite far ahead — in some states, massively so — compared with the early 1990s. Do you think that’s a meaningful thing to keep in mind?

The long-term trends have definitely been positive. There has been progress, for sure, and I think that a lot of that has come from things like desegregating schools. When I was growing up in New Orleans, there were public schools that didn’t have air conditioners. These were the legacy schools from Jim Crow, so I think a lot of that progress is probably basic blocking and tackling, just having some level of equality before you even start talking about equity.

And there has been improvement in teaching as well. I believe it’s now mainstream for teachers to say, “I’m not going to just lecture at my students for an hour.” It’s far more typical now, compared with when you and I went to school, for the math teacher to give a short lecture and then break the class into groups to solve problems together. But the fact remains that it’s a disaster when only one-third of kids are proficient in math and a majority of kids going to college need math remediation at something like the seventh-grade level.

Post-pandemic, the rate of learning might get back to where it was pre-pandemic. But it just means that you’ve been set back by 15 or 20 percent, at least, and now you’re going to continue to learn at that suboptimal rate. The average American kid learns at about .7 grade levels per year, and that accumulates to the point where lots of high school seniors are closer to the seventh-grade level than the twelfth-grade level. Which, again, is exactly what the college remediation numbers show.

It’s a huge problem, and it’s hugely unequal. My kids are doing just fine, and everyone in their school is doing fine. But somebody else’s kid is on the other end of that average, doing pretty darn badly and probably unable to compete.

The NAEP results showed that almost 40 percent of American eighth graders scored below the test’s most basic proficiency level. What does it mean to be an adult with only the most rudimentary math skills? 

That 40 percent is going to be sitting in classrooms, getting more and more frustrated and continuing to think they’re not smart.

And the people around them are also going to think they’re not smart. Imagine you’re a well-intentioned teacher thinking that you’re explaining ninth-grade math just fine, and this kid just doesn’t get it. By that point, there are going to be two problems: One, they have all these gaps that are hard for you, as a ninth-grade teacher, to address. And two, their self-esteem is shot, and they’re checked out. Some of these kids are going to drop out of high school, not even think about college, and be that much less likely to have a good path in front of them. It’s not a good scenario.

I remember reading one account, though I’m not sure how true it is, that because the lead time in prison planning is around 10 years, the authorities would look at fourth-grade test scores to correlate the planning. That’s about the darkest idea you can imagine, but it’s not crazy. Prison is obviously an extreme circumstance, but dropping out of high school, or dropping out of college with debt, is where a lot of these kids are headed.

You may have also seen the research showing that, based on previous data tracking math scores and economic trends, a permanent drop in NAEP performance of this magnitude could erase something like $900 billion in future earnings.

And remember that it will disproportionately hit certain student demographics. If it were my child that fell into that “below basic” category, my wife or I would probably quit our day jobs. Knowing what I know about the system and its implications, and given that we have the resources, I would go all-in to help my kids catch up. And we’re talking about 30 or 40 percent of the country.

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President Biden signing the federal spending bill in late December. (Twitter/@POTUS)

Funding increases written into the recently passed $1.7 trillion federal omnibus package will provide a substantial jumpstart to education research and statistics this year — and could even evolve into an entity mirroring DARPA, the Pentagon’s storied research and development branch.

The law, passed by bipartisan majorities and signed by President Biden in the closing days of 2022, includes a $70 million boost to the Institute for Education Sciences, the Department of Education’s arm for statistics, research, and evaluation. Within that 9.6 percent bump — which brings IES’s overall budget to $808 million — $40 million are allocated for research, development, and dissemination, including an unspecified amount intended to foster “quick-turnaround, high-reward scalable solutions intended to improve education outcomes for all students.”

That initiative will be housed within the National Center for Education Research, one of the Institute’s four research and statistics hubs, with the hope that it will eventually be spun off into a fifth such center. In an interview with The 74, IES Director Mark Schneider described the infusion of money as a down payment toward “something the department’s been talking about for 20 years.”

“I will be pushing for a separate center,” Schneider said, adding that he and his colleagues were “ecstatic” with what Congress provided. “There’s no question about it, this is a major accomplishment. The department, IES, and many people outside have spent a lot of time and energy trying to get this established.”

The bill’s passage comes after what some in the academic community have called a decade of disinvestment in federal education research. In the wake of cuts or freezes to funding in the Obama administration, the Institute’s National Center for Education Statistics had to alter its calendar for administering the federal K–12 assessment known as “the Nation’s Report Card,” one of the U.S. Department of Education’s best-known products.

More recently, the Institute announced that it would not be offering competitive grant programs in research methodology or systemic replication in education research in Fiscal Year 2023. Those technical-sounding competitions make up much of the federal government’s R&D infrastructure for K–12, contributing to the emergence of ideas and products that improve student learning.

In the hopes of reversing those developments — and spurring a nationwide recovery from COVID-related disruptions to school — Congressional Democrats and Republicans teamed up last summer to offer legislation that would have created a “National Center for Advanced Development in Education.” That proposal would have authorized an organization with the specific intention of advancing scalable advances in teaching methods and technology, such as voice recognition software to assess dyslexia. While language authorizing the so-called “NCADE” was included in the House’s FY 2023 budget proposal, it didn’t make it into the bill that ultimately passed Congress.

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, an Oregon Democrat who co-sponsored the NCADE legislation last year, said in a statement that she would continue working to create a new center within IES in 2023.

“The [IES] funding increase and language included in the omnibus is a win for innovation in education research,” Bonamici said. “This is an exciting opportunity to expedite the development and adoption of emerging technologies, helping more students and quickly closing learning gaps.”

The idea for a national K–12 center focused on research and development predates both the pandemic and the last few presidential administrations. President Obama’s 2012 budget proposal explicitly called for the creation of such a body, invoking the example of DARPA, the advanced defense research agency that is credited with bringing about such technological innovations as weather satellites, GPS, and the internet.

The comparative latitude granted to DARPA, which can contract with research partners across multiple sectors and maintains significant flexibility over project deadlines, differs somewhat from Washington’s existing K–12 research institutions. Felice Levine, executive director of the American Education Research Association, said in a statement that the funding offered in the omnibus bill would prove valuable to researchers, policymakers and professional educators at a time when millions of students have experienced setbacks to learning and social-emotional development.

The federal investment represents “a vote of confidence in the role high-quality education research needs to play in identifying and countering the devastating impacts of the pandemic on the nation’s students,” Levine said.

Schneider added that he hopes to spend much of 2023 reorganizing the Institute — possibly by moving its work on prize competitions and transformative research, as well as the Small Business Innovation Research program into the newly established unit — before pushing Congress again to consider a new “NCADE” center.

“We’ve been pushing on this, we’ve been trying to increase the rapidity of our experiments, we’ve tried to make sure there’s replication, we’ve increased our demands for dissemination and scaling up,” Schneider said. “We have a really developed model of what a modern education R&D infrastructure looks like, and…I’m hoping this new unit will be a catalyst to continue to push that change, and ultimately the foundation for NCADE.”

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It was the year that Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s most prominent public health authority, declared that the country was “out of the pandemic phase,” as COVID case rates plummeted from their Omicron highs. By the fall, President Biden was in somewhat controversial agreement with that sentiment, noting that most people had laid down their masks and returned to something like normal.

And while some uncertainty remains around the possibility of winter surges in American schools, the most visible hallmarks of the COVID era have at last receded. The lurching progression from in-person to virtual classes is over, following an explosion of school exposures last winter. Mask mandates, social distancing, and endless disinfectant wipes are also predominantly a thing of the past, with virtually all children approved to receive vaccines.

But in terms of the pandemic’s impact on education, it’s still only the end of the beginning. With each month, new findings emerge revealing more about what remote instruction did to learning and how families reacted. The potentially lifelong shadow the virus has cast over K-12 students — from how babies develop speech to what today’s adolescents will earn decades from now — is largely mysterious.

Previous editions of this list have covered the wider world of education policy and research: issues like school financing, choice, accountability, and testing. This year, The 74 is focusing exclusively on the lessons of the COVID era — one that is now passing from the scene — and the questions that remain in its wake.

Here, laid out in charts, maps, and tables, are 14 discoveries that changed how we think about schools in 2022.

The scope of learning loss

By the end of last year, a steady trickle of research had already begun to reveal the harm wrought by prolonged school closures and the transition to virtual instruction. But this fall brought the most definitive evidence yet of the scale of learning lost over more than two years of COVID-disrupted schooling: fresh testing data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card, pointing to severe declines in core subjects.

The unprecedented drop in math scores, which fell by an average of eight points for eighth graders and five points for fourth graders, was especially disturbing. But reversals in literacy were also notable, with sizable increases in the number of students testing below even the “basic” level of reading proficiency. What’s more, the results affirmed dismal findings from NAEP’s “Long-Term Trends” test — an earlier version of the exam that has been administered since the early 1970s — showing that the pandemic set back nine-year-olds’ performance in math and reading to levels last seen two decades ago.

“We’re seeing a lot of that very long-term progress completely erased over the course of a couple of years,” said Dan Goldhaber, a University of Washington professor, of the long-term results.

As many experts warned, additional research has also made clear that the academic damage of COVID was not shared equally. NWEA, the nonprofit testing group whose MAP exam has proven an invaluable assessment tool throughout the pandemic, released a study in November indicating that already-wide achievement gaps in elementary classrooms have grown between 5 and 10 percent in the last few years. Those disparities grew, NWEA analysts specified, because of slumping achievement among struggling students.

College entrance exams contributed yet another dispiriting perspective, with average scores on the ACT slipping below 20 for the first time since the presidency of George H.W. Bush. Only about one in twelve test-takers from low-income families met standards of college readiness across all of the test’s four subjects.

In 2022, researchers, educators, and the public discovered the full extent of what COVID did to K-12 learning. 2023 will provide a test of how quickly that learning can be restored — and how seriously we are approaching the problem.

The geography of remote learning

Multiple studies have identified a strong association between academic backsliding and time spent in remote learning. And while different states and districts switched back to in-person instruction at different speeds, a disturbing commonality emerged: The least-advantaged kids were usually the slowest to return to the classroom.

A May paper co-authored by experts at NWEA, the CALDER Center at the American Institutes for Research, and Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research used data from over 2 million students to show that — whether in states that reopened schools relatively quickly, like Florida, or those that stayed remote much longer, like Virginia — schools serving the highest proportions of low-income students spent the most weeks remote during the 2020–21 academic year. Notably, however, the socioeconomic gaps in exposure to virtual teaching were much larger among the group of predominantly blue states that tended to reopen more hesitantly. In those states, high-poverty schools spent more than two additional months in Zoom classrooms than low-poverty schools.

Harvard economist and study co-author Thomas Kane observed that the greater prevalence of remote learning among poor students, who are already less likely to succeed academically than their better-off peers, could be an additional driver of achievement gaps for years to come. In an interview with The 74, Kane said that the academic recovery interventions planned by school districts were “nowhere near enough” to compensate for COVID’s toll.

“Based on what I’m seeing, most districts are going to find that students are still lagging far behind when they take their state tests in May 2023,” Kane said.

But was the public convinced by the reams of detailed and well-intentioned research on the results of online learning? Public polling suggests that the answer is ambiguous. At least one 2022 survey — albeit one conducted before much of the research on learning loss was released — indicated that Americans prioritized curbing the pandemic’s spread over keeping schools open.

Poorer districts lost the most

Few doubt that some amount of learning loss is linked to the hasty and unplanned adoption of remote instruction. How much is still ambiguous, however. One data tool released in October — devised by Harvard’s Kane and the eminent Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon, among others — leveraged a combination of state test scores and federal NAEP results to deliver a granular, district-by-district overview of the pandemic’s academic impact.

While the researchers found that academic performance in predominantly in-person districts held up much better than mostly remote districts within the same state, they also stipulated that school closures were not “the primary factor driving achievement losses”; some states that spent much of the pandemic open as usual, such as Maine, sustained far greater score declines than those that saw widespread closures, such as California. And beyond the question of remote-versus-in-person, it is clear that districts with greater concentrations of poor students experienced the worst academic effects over the last few years.

In districts where 70 percent or more of students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, average math performance fell by 0.66 grade levels. By contrast, in districts where fewer than 39 percent of students qualified for free lunch, only 0.45 grade levels of math achievement were lost. Above all, the ultra-local look at test scores showed a startling amount of variation in how different school districts experienced the same event; in reading, almost 15 percent of all students were enrolled in districts where achievement actually grew during the pandemic.

Enrollment fell as families fled

The pandemic left an impact on schools far beyond its blow to student achievement. Due to a combination of public dissatisfaction, increased mobility, and economic upheaval, families withdrew from their public schools in unprecedented numbers — as many as 1.5 million during the 2020–21 school year, or about 3 percent of all public K-12 enrollment, according to a 2021 report from NCES.

Further scholarly investigation has unearthed the important role that learning modality played in that flight. According to a comprehensive report from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, the districts that spent the most time remote throughout the first pandemic school year lost at least 500,000 more students than they would have if they had stayed open during that time. And in the period that followed, fewer students returned than did to districts where campuses mostly operated in-person.

The findings suggested that widespread loss of students was not just “pandemic-related; it was pandemic-response related,” Nat Malkus, AEI’s deputy director of education policy, told The 74’s Linda Jacobson.

Meanwhile, enrollment trends detected this spring by the data company Burbio showed that major urban districts continued losing students through the 2021–22 school year. Only a handful of states examined by the organization during that time saw an enrollment increase of more than 1 percent compared with the previous year.

The youngest weren’t spared

While we’ve gained a better empirical understanding of how K-12 students’ lives and learning trajectories were altered by COVID, it will be years before we fully grasp the ways in which the youngest Americans were affected. But a provocative study of child development and language acquisition has already given cause for alarm.

Using LENA “talk pedometers” — a wearable technology that measures the number of spoken interactions occurring in the vicinity of young children, as well as their own vocalizations — researchers at Brown discovered that babies born after July 2020 produced fewer vocalizations and demonstrated slower verbal growth than comparable children born before 2019. The younger group of babies also experienced slower growth of white matter — subcortical nerve fibers that facilitate communication between different regions of the brain — perhaps the result of hearing fewer words spoken and engaging less often with their caregivers.

If the cognitive development of young learners was slowed by the extraordinary social isolation imposed by daycare closures and lockdowns of public spaces, it will produce unavoidable consequences for schools in the next decade.

Old before their time

Even as social and intellectual growth was apparently slowed for some infants and babies, psychologists warn that the compounded stress of the last few years may have harmfully accelerated the maturation process for older kids.

A slew of surveys highlight newly elevated levels of student stress, the product of public health worries, economic anxiety, and even domestic abuse. But a recently published study offers proof that those factors actually changed the neurobiology of some adolescents. Examining MRIs of 128 matched subjects — half measured before and half after the pandemic began — a team of psychologists found that the group assessed after COVID demonstrated higher “brain age” than their chronological age and experienced faster growth in the amygdala and hippocampus, areas of the brain that regulate fear, stress, and memory.

Such sped-up aging has historically been seen in cases of household trauma and neglect, and its consequences can include decreased capacity across a range of intellectual functions. Follow-up scans are already planned to assess whether the process has been remediated.

Teachers under strain

Eamonn Fitzmaurice/The 74/iStock

Adults in schools have shown their own signs of exhaustion. In a survey of nearly 4,000 K-12 teachers and principals conducted by the RAND Corporation, about one-third said they intended to quit their jobs, a significantly higher proportion than it found during the chaotic pandemic months of early 2021.

That figure almost certainly doesn’t betoken a future exodus from the profession; educators have historically been much more likely to say they intend to leave than to ultimately act on those plans. But it could mean that large numbers will stay in their jobs past the point of burnout, their effectiveness permanently dimmed. On average, the poll found that the teachers and principals were more than twice as likely to report experiencing frequent, job-related stress than other workers.

Teachers were also twice as likely as comparable adults to say they were not “coping well” with their stress. While the most commonly cited contributing factor was the task of addressing learning loss, some school employees also complained of staff shortages and the difficulty of managing their own childcare responsibilities.

Social shuffle

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that young adults’ personal relationships, no less than their academic prospects, were fundamentally changed by months spent away from their peers.

In some ways, those changes were positive: According to a June poll released by Pew, 45 percent of American kids between the ages of 13 and 17 said they felt closer to their parents after two years of disrupted schooling. But sizable minorities also reported feeling less close to friends, classmates, teachers, and extended family, a web of social connections that might have proven vital during a lengthy period of difficulty.

Somewhat surprisingly for a survey administered over two years after the emergence of COVID, nearly 20 percent of the teen respondents said they had not attended classes exclusively in-person during the spring of 2022 (a time of somewhat elevated virus case rates). About two-thirds said they would prefer a return to entirely in-person schooling in the future.

Future earnings endangered

The downstream consequences of thwarted or deferred academic success are destined to include financial disadvantages; after all, today’s underserved pupils are tomorrow’s underprepared workers. But until the fall release of NAEP, it was difficult to produce a broadly shared measure of American students’ stifled progress.

With the arrival of those scores, Harvard economist Kane — him again — and Dartmouth professor Douglas O. Staiger immediately calculated a projection of how much potential income could be lost due to diminished math learning among eighth-graders since 2020. Based on the historical correlation between math gains on NAEP and professional earnings growth, the figure they reached was astounding: $900 billion of future earnings, if the declines in learning were to remain permanent for all students in the United States.

“When there are improvements in scores, those kids coming out of school are going to have better outcomes later in life,” Staiger told The 74. “And we can infer from this recent decline that all the cohorts in school now are going to do a bit worse than we expected.”

The paper was one of a series of analyses focusing specifically on the drop in math knowledge, which appears to have been particularly significant. But the extended disruption to literacy instruction left a substantial mark as well, particularly among students at the beginning of their reading careers. Amplify, a curriculum provider, released data this fall showing that 4 percent fewer second graders and 8 percent fewer first graders are reaching grade-level reading goals than in 2019; meanwhile, almost one-third of third graders were assessed as needing “intensive intervention.”

Those bleak findings echo the results of Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready assessment, which revealed that the percentage of elementary students reading below grade level grew between 2021 and 2022. That subgroup of students, sometimes called the “COVID cohort,” is running out of time to get back on track.

Costs of recovery

The havoc inflicted by the pandemic is now an inescapable fact for schools, families, and public authorities to deal with. But what’s it going to take to surmount the considerable educational challenges and get kids back on track?

The federal government has allocated roughly $190 billion in relief funding to states for that purpose. But according to researchers Kenneth Shores and Matthew Steinberg, that amount won’t be sufficient to get the job done. The true cost, they say, will fall somewhere between $325 billion and $930 billion, huge sums that include not only the pedagogical resources to restore lost learning opportunities from the last several years, but also the out-of-school interventions that power so much of the academic growth that goes on inside classrooms.

There is no indication that anywhere near that level of funding — or even any further money at all — is coming. In the meantime, school districts are only required to spend 20 percent of their federal aid on learning recovery.

Latino students take a hit

Children of all backgrounds were bruised by the effects of shuttered schools, but among them, Latino students are notable for having recently enjoyed sustained academic momentum. As their share of the national student body has increased to nearly 30 percent, they have also seen rising achievement scores and post-secondary outcomes compared with their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

COVID put that progress on pause, according to a July report from the advocacy organization UnidosUS. After leaping from 71 percent to 82 percent over the last decade, the on-time high school graduation rate for Latino students fell slightly in 2021. Worse still, the rate of college enrollment for Latino freshmen shrunk by 7.8 percent between the spring of 2020 and 2021. That figure bounced back somewhat over the next academic year — along with rates of college-going for most Americans — but still fell below the pre-pandemic norm.

The particular stumbles experienced by Latino kids have explanations that both precede the pandemic and are directly linked to it, the report found. Long before 2020, Latino households were less likely to report having a computer or high-speed broadband in the home. Meanwhile, Latino students were disproportionately likely to be enrolled in low-income schools, which were themselves more likely to stay remote longer during the pandemic.

Eamonn Fitzmaurice/The 74/iStock

Explosion of absenteeism

Along with the surge of full-on disenrollment from schools, a shocking number of K-12 students spent the last few years missing day after day of instruction. Just how many days of absence is difficult to know precisely, however, because of ambiguities in the way attendance figures were collected during the COVID era.

An NCES brief released this fall indicated that over 10 million students were chronically absent (i.e., missing over 10 percent of the school year) in 2020–21. That would be an increase of more than 25 percent relative to the pre-pandemic norm, but according to a team of analysts from Johns Hopkins University and the nonprofit group Attendance Works, it is also very likely a serious underestimate. Because of challenges in knowing which students “attended” all of their virtual lessons (versus simply logging into Zoom and then logging off, for instance), statewide absence counts in the NCES figures sometimes vary widely from district-level reporting.

Based on the early release of more detailed 2021–22 figures from California, Connecticut, Ohio, and Virginia, the authors wrote, it is reasonable to predict that as many as 16 million kids were chronically absent last school year, a doubling of the pre-pandemic number.

The teacher exodus that wasn’t

Were American schools plagued with teacher absences this year, or not? It was a question that captivated news sources, but also divided education experts, because it contained an even thornier question within it: If the supply of teachers remains mostly steady, but demand for them spikes, are they truly at a deficit?

In spite of widespread fears that veteran teachers were quitting in huge numbers as a reaction to the pandemic, no mass departure ever took place, according to a paper by Brown economist Matt Kraft. Turnover actually fell slightly in the summer of 2020 and stayed within the typical annual range the next year. But weak hiring during the first few months of the pandemic may have contributed to higher-than-usual vacancy rates, perhaps triggered by fears of Great Recession-style budget cuts that never materialized.

In fact, a windfall of federal cash followed instead, leading districts to add new jobs in late 2020 and 2021, and the resultant hiring spree has indeed made candidates for teaching positions hard to find. But even that phenomenon isn’t true everywhere, since numbers differ widely across state lines. According to a paper released this summer, Mississippi’s rate of vacancies per 10,000 students is more than 68 times higher than that of Utah.

State teacher turnover across time

Hopeful signs

As the long legacy of COVID grew clearer, research in 2022 gave the education world plenty of reasons to worry. But it has also contributed some hopeful signs of renewed progress in schools.

The good omens aren’t popping up everywhere, but some are to be found in state-level testing, which has resumed around the country after being suspended for at least the first pandemic year. According to Tennessee’s state exams, the number of students meeting or beating grade-level reading standards rose from 29 percent in 2020–21 to over 36 percent in 2021–22. In all, more than three-quarters of the state’s school districts reported reading scores higher than were seen in the pre-pandemic period.

“We are seeing this broadly across the state, and across district types — urban, rural and suburban,” Tennessee Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn told The 74’s Beth Hawkins. “We are really, really proud of what our districts have done.”

Several other Southern states have begun to make their turnaround, with Mississippi a particular standout. This summer’s release of 2021–22 testing data showed average scores in math, English, and science nearing or exceeding 2019 levels, while performance on the U.S. history exam skyrocketed compared with 2020–21 (the first in which it had been given). Just as notably, passage rates on the state’s third-grade “reading gate” — a state-mandated test that students must pass to progress to the fourth grade — fell by only .6 percentage points between 2019 and 2022.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Teachers who worked remotely were more likely to experience depression and isolation than those delivering in-person instruction. (Getty Images)

Teachers were far more likely than other workers to experience anxiety during the first year of the pandemic, a newly released study has found. And among teachers, those who worked remotely for most of the 2020-21 school year reported higher rates of depression and loneliness than those who worked in-person.

The study, which leverages a massive survey sample collected online throughout the pandemic, was published earlier this month in Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Educational Research Association. Its findings highlight the mental and emotional toll exacted by COVID, while also offering new insights into how different employment sectors coped with its hardships.

Polling has consistently shown teachers and other school employees reporting signs of elevated stress over the last two years, with education experts worrying that higher levels of burnout might cause more educators to leave the profession. Joseph Kush, a professor of psychology at James Madison University and one of the paper’s authors, said that he and his collaborators were “kind of shocked” at the results.

“Our thought was that healthcare workers battling this virus on the front lines would clearly have the highest levels of distress,” Kush said. “And they were very high, but we found that teachers were actually quite a bit higher.”

The study relies on data from the COVID-19 Trends and Impact Survey, an ongoing measure of public opinion developed by Facebook and Carnegie Mellon’s epidemiology-focused Delphi Research Group. The poll solicits daily responses from a random sample of Facebook users about their physical and mental health.

Kush and his co-authors, a trio of researchers from Johns Hopkins University, gathered data from between September 2020 and March 2021 — in many ways the nadir of COVID, when deaths often exceeded 3,000 per day and vaccines were still not widely administered. They focused on information from over 2.7 million employed adults, including nearly 135,000 teachers. Demographic identifiers related to age, gender, educational attainment, household size, and level of economic worry were also included.

Finally, they compared self-reported instances of anxiety, depression, and isolation among four different areas of the American workforce: education (from preschool through high school), healthcare workers, office workers, and a broad category of “other” occupations, including military personnel and agricultural workers.

The results were striking. By far, teachers had the highest odds of reporting anxiety — 40 percent higher than healthcare workers, 20 percent higher than office workers, and 30 percent higher than members of the “other” category.” They were also likelier than healthcare workers, though by smaller increments, to report feeling isolated or depressed; office workers and “others” were notably more likely than teachers to say they were feeling isolated.

The spectrum of mental health ailments interacts somewhat unexpectedly with the frequency of remote vs. in-person work. While the healthcare category is broad — encompassing nurses and doctors, but also dentists, home health aides, and therapists — it is taken to represent the group that incurred the greatest risk of contracting COVID. White-collar employees, by contrast, were perhaps the demographic most shielded from the pandemic’s effects, with a huge proportion of offices operating remotely through the early months of 2021.

In the middle sat teachers, who fluctuated between in-person and remote instruction depending on timing and geography. School employees often received little clear guidance from state or federal authorities on how best to mitigate health risks to themselves and their students, and most were also navigating a chaotic transition to virtual teaching.

Kush said that while the degree of remote work was perhaps the single factor most correlated with worsening mental health, the education profession sat particularly uneasily atop the pandemic’s ambiguities.

“Education was unique in that it grappled, even within districts, about whether teachers were going to work in-person from week to week,” said Kush. “That change, and the uncertainty in that, clearly brings this spike in anxiety.”

Notably, the remote-vs.-in-person dynamic was also present within the teaching workforce itself. Teachers conducting their lessons in Zoom classrooms were substantially more likely to experience symptoms of depression and (somewhat predictably) isolation than their colleagues working in school buildings.

Whether the study’s findings can be boiled down to a simple mechanism — that working away from customers, colleagues, and students simply led to lower emotional well-being — will depend on the findings of further research, including an investigation of which workers reported relatively worse mental health before COVID emerged and after its most severe disruptions were allayed.

One demographic caveat worthy of further examination pertains to gender: Female teachers were 70 percent more likely than male teachers to say that they felt anxiety during the period covered by the study. The teaching field is predominantly female, though the same could be said of healthcare workers.

“The makeup of the education and healthcare workforces is relatively similar, and we see gender differences both across all occupations and when we examine teachers exclusively,” Kush said. “So not only is this finding generalizable across all occupations, but even within teachers.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Incumbent Superintendent Tony Thurmond (Getty Images) and education advocate Lance Christensen (campaign photo)

California’s race for state superintendent is in its final days. But according to some local observers, the outcome has been in hand for most of the year.

Incumbent Superintendent Tony Thurmond might have avoided campaigning entirely, in fact, if he’d picked up just a few extra points of support in the June primary. Instead, he settled for 46 percent of the vote — just a few points shy of the majority threshold to avoid a runoff — and the mantle of clear favorite heading into the fall. Thurmond’s opponent in the nonpartisan election, education advocate Lance Christensen, finished 34 points and more than two million votes behind him in the last round.

In terms of competitiveness, the contest is a shadow of previous campaigns. In both 2014 and 2018, the state’s competing education factions spent tens of millions of dollars trying to win the superintendency and influence state policy on school choice and accountability. The spirited electioneering came in spite of the fact that the office’s formal functions are quite limited, and authority over K-12 schools is split with the governor, state assembly, and the California State Board of Education. 

Those were intra-Democratic elections fought between philanthropy-backed education reformers and an organized labor movement headlined by the powerful California Teachers Association, featuring serious clashes on issues like the expansion of charter schools. This cycle pits Thurmond, the slight victor over the reformers’ favored candidate in 2018, against Christensen, an obscure former Republican staffer in the state assembly who has attacked the teachers’ union and quixotically pushed to bring private school choice to the deep-blue state. And while the next superintendent will confront significant educational challenges, from pandemic-related learning loss to curricular reforms around math and English, the debate over the future of education policy has largely remained quiet.

Instead, with the reform movement (and money) appearing to sit on the sidelines, and a gubernatorial race that has similarly proven incapable of generating voter interest, Thurmond’s progressive message is widely expected to carry the day. Tom Loveless, a veteran education policy analyst who formerly led the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, called Thurmond a “Teflon candidate” who, though criticized for his leadership style and the state’s lengthy school closures during COVID, is likely to sail to a second term.

Tom Loveless

“He’s had all kinds of controversy in his office, and yet no serious opposition arose in terms of the election,” Loveless said. “It just doesn’t seem to be affecting his electoral prospects.”

Prolonged school closures

Thurmond’s tenure has been marked by the usual degree of criticism directed at a high-profile policymaker in the nation’s largest state. Complaints of low morale and hostile management in the California Department of Education, the 2,700-employee agency that the superintendent leads, have led to a spate of departures of senior officials. The office also came under fire for hiring a personal friend of Thurmond’s to serve as superintendent of equity, despite the fact that he lived and held a job in Philadelphia at the time.

Representatives of the state education department declined to comment on this article.

Those spats, while damaging, were inevitably overshadowed by the emergence of COVID-19 and its massive disruptions to schooling in 2020 and 2021. 

Beginning in March 2020, thousands of schools in California remained closed for in-person instruction for over a year. The approach reflected Gov. Newsom’s aggressive posture toward suppressing the spread of the virus, which also saw lockdowns of small businesses throughout the state. But as in other areas, it alienated a vocal segment of the public who worried that the long months of virtual learning were adversely affecting kids.

Gov. Gavin Newsom was criticized for his approach to COVID safety measures in schools, but he easily defeated a recall attempt last year. (Getty Image)

Federal data collected during the middle of the pandemic indicated that California was among the states with the highest percentages of shuttered schools. And while reopening policies varied by district, by the end of the 2020-21 school year, local reports found that roughly half of the state’s nearly six million public school students were still learning from home. Public frustrations with the slow pace of reopening — along with pandemic-related mobility that forced some to flee the state — has led to a sizable drop in the number of children enrolled in California schools. 

It also contributed to an unexpected recall campaign launched against the governor last fall. That vote ended with a strong Newsom win, proving that the backlash against the state’s COVID policies was limited in its political impact. And indeed, public polling indicates that majorities of both adults and K-12 parents generally approve of how Newsom handled the K-12 school system. But the same polling also finds that faith in K-12 schools has dropped around the state. Paired with the trend toward disenrollment, those responses suggest growing dissatisfaction with the course of public education in California.

Megan Bacigalupi is an Oakland mother and the executive director of CA Parent Power, an activist group. A Democrat-turned-independent, she has criticized Thurmond for not militating more energetically in favor of earlier school reopenings and greater resources for struggling students. Still, she added, the role of superintendent is principally advisory, and Gov. Newsom held more power to influence policy over the last few years.

“Tony Thurmond had a bully pulpit and should have used it during school closures to advocate for students and families,” Bacigalupi said. “But the person who was most responsible for our schools being closed was Gavin Newsom, not Tony Thurmond. Gavin Newsom has, and had, a lot more power than Tony Thurmond does.”

‘Moving the goalposts’

With just weeks before Election Day, the academic effects of the pandemic reentered the spotlight with the release of both California’s state test results and those of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a federal measure sometimes called “the Nation’s Report Card”). 

Both exams showed significant losses in student performance on math and reading, but the NAEP scores surprised some — particularly those who worried about the state’s prolonged closures — by indicating modest drops compared with other parts of the country. In a press release, the governor’s office trumpeted the findings as showing that California “performed better than most other states” at mitigating learning loss during the pandemic. 

Thomas Dee, an economist at Stanford, objected to that framing, arguing that analysis of California’s pandemic performance had to be mindful of the ways in which COVID reshaped K-12 enrollment across the state. Hundreds of thousands of disproportionately disadvantaged students, if not more, may have left the state in the last few years, potentially biasing the results upward, he remarked.

Thomas Dee (Courtesy of Stanford University)

“You’d expect that test score declines would be attenuated simply because some of the most educationally vulnerable students are no longer in those schools,” Dee said. “So there’s something I find kind of unseemly about celebrating that. When you move the goalposts, maybe you shouldn’t be doing an end-zone dance.”

More controversially, the release of state standardized test results, which revealed similarly disheartening achievement losses, were originally meant to be postponed until after the election — a break with the traditional release calendar. Thurmond’s office backtracked after sustaining public criticism, but ultimately opted to release the scores on the same day that the more sanguine NAEP scores came out. 

The cloud of pandemic learning loss hangs over the larger question of where California schools are headed. With his docket mostly overtaken by educational crises the last two years, much of the Thurmond education agenda has been shunted to the side. Notably, however, the superintendent successfully pushed for $200 million in state funding this year to hire graduate students pursuing careers as school social workers and mental health clinicians.

Megan Bacigalupi (CA Parent Power)

Thurmond’s preferred policy strategy has been to  convene task forces on key K-12 issues, from the digital divide to the achievement gap, which have generated proposals for action in the coming years. Some members of those bodies have praised Thurmond for adopting a collaborative approach to surfacing new ideas. But Bacigalupi, who has been particularly critical of California’s efforts to improve reading, said that multiple years of “government by task force” had managed to earn some good press while failing to do much of significance. For example, a touted reading panel declined to recommend the adoption of research-based approaches to instruction (focusing heavily on phonics and sometimes referred to as “the science of reading”), instead opting to deliver books to children’s homes.

“To me, school closures were awful — they harmed kids — but I’m now actually more concerned about what’s not happening on issues like early literacy,” said Bacigalupi, who has not endorsed a candidate in the race.

The next four years will be critical — not just in terms of an academic turnaround from COVID, but also to render a near-term verdict on whether a systemic jump in school quality can be accomplished in California. Thurmond has outlined a plan for his second term, including $250 million in proposed spending on new literacy strategies (roughly $42 for each K-12 student in the state), new investments in universal school meals and free preschool, and additional mental health supports. During a virtual event hosted Wednesday by the California Reading Coalition, he announced that he would hire a statewide literacy director “steeped in best practices for how to help our children learn.” 

Christensen, who spent years as a Republican staffer in Sacramento before helping to lead education initiatives for the conservative California Policy Center, has launched his own criticisms of inaction against the department, vowing to shake up the state’s education governance by devolving more power to local districts. He even helped draft a longshot proposal to create education savings accounts, which would offer parents thousands of dollars to pay for schooling costs outside traditional public schools. The proposal, already adopted by conservative activists in more right-leaning states, never stood a serious chance of enactment in solidly blue California.

In the end, Loveless noted, the conservative challenger likely had too much ground to make up before Election Day. What’s more, he added, the complicated structure of education responsibility in state government — in which the governor calls the shots, usually in consultation with an education advisor and the legislature, while the state superintendent occupies something like a cheerleader position — did not signal much possibility of meaningful policy changes coming from the department. 

“The division of labor has never really been made clear to the public, in terms of if you’re unhappy with schools, whose feet do you hold to the fire? The answer is, it’s a centipede.”

The 74’s senior writer Linda Jacobson contributed to this report.

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Eamonn Fitzmaurice/The 74

The staging is classic for a campaign ad in late-September: a close-up of a disappointed-looking woman sitting at a kitchen table.

The speaker is a mother of five in Wichita, and the target of her reproach is Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly. A Democrat, Kelly was America’s first governor to order K-12 buildings closed in the spring of 2020. After winning a surprise victory in 2018, she is now one of the most endangered incumbents this fall, and — if the commercial is any indication — her record on schools will be the primary focus for her Republican opponent, state Attorney General Derek Schmidt.

The newly aired attack is typical of battleground elections nationally. With a little over a month to go before the midterms, the issue of K-12 education has come to inhabit an unusual role: a rare point of intersection between national and local politics, as well as a deep faultline in competitive races.

Both attention and acrimony have mounted continuously since the last national election, with angry cleavages over COVID-related school closures giving way to debates over curriculum, instruction and the rights of parents. And while the public focus has also been redirected by abortion and persistent inflation over the past few months, multiple surveys have shown growing dissatisfaction with schools and surprising parity between the parties on an issue that Democrats have traditionally dominated.

Republicans have grabbed the initiative by directly addressing parents — both in campaign materials and policy prescriptions — and casting themselves as the defenders of families’ interests. In Nevada and Wisconsin, vulnerable Democratic governors stand accused of presiding over ideological indoctrination in classrooms and inept recovery from pandemic learning loss. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who stands to become House Speaker if his caucus enjoys a good night on November 8, recently rolled out a campaign agenda that includes a “parents bill of rights.’ Even campaigns for state superintendent, a position so obscure and technocratic that most states simply appoint theirs, are now seeking and winning the support of President Donald Trump and other conservative idols.

But the truly unexpected turn is only apparent further down the ballot. After decades flying under the radar of all except the most attentive voters, school board elections are suddenly attracting more attention and resources than at any time in recent political memory. New advocacy groups have materialized, left and right, to promote candidates and push more parents to get involved in school governance. And their efforts have been noticed by the fastest-rising politician in America: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who made his own foray into local politics this summer by endorsing dozens of school board hopefuls around his state. The resounding victory of his slate has only hastened DeSantis’s ascent as a potential challenger to Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. Increasingly, the small-bore powers affecting individual schools and districts are playing out on a national stage.

Rebecca Jacobsen, an education policy professor at Michigan State University, chronicled some of these trends in a recent book about the growing influence of national politics on low-level elections. But that analysis, she noted, couldn’t foresee the post-COVID flowering of organizations devoted almost solely to capturing boards and changing policies from the ground up.

“As someone who has studied local education politics, what’s remarkable is the way that education is getting drawn into a highly polarized, partisan debate,” Jacobsen said. “Even debates that were more left/right before were not nearly as stark as they are now.”

But Tiffany Justice said that the explosion of interest in local campaigns was, if anything, inevitable in light of the repeated crises and consternation surrounding schools since 2020. A co-founder of the Florida-based conservative group Moms for Liberty — perhaps the most notable new entrant in this midterm cycle — Justice said that K-12 would be a point of emphasis in elections up and down the ballot this November.

“There’s nothing more important in a parent’s life than their children, and nobody’s going to fight for anything like a parent is going to fight for their child,” Justice argued. “If I was running for office, and I wanted to win, having parents in your corner is a pretty smart move.”

Education in the culture wars

While school boards are the primary governing entity for virtually every school district in the United States, they have seldom been thrust into the national political discussion. The staid content of the average board meeting, generally ranging from budgetary goals to facilities management, wouldn’t quicken the pulse of most activists.

The most recent exception came in the ‘80s and ‘90s, when Christian conservatives began seriously pursuing board seats amid debates about issues like school prayer and American history standards. In suburban areas like Loudoun County, Virginia, right-leaning members petitioned the state to end its mandate on sex education. A quote attributed to Ralph Reed, a prominent evangelical leader and GOP consultant, declared a preference for one thousand school board members over winning the presidency.

After notching some wins, the wave dissipated. It wasn’t until the early Biden area that Loudoun County — much more socially progressive after decades of demographic transformation — again saw a serious bout of public engagement in school governance, this time directed against the board’s policies on COVID, gifted education and school bathrooms. The perception of liberalism behind the district’s equity agenda figured heavily in last year’s race for governor, ultimately won by Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

Jon Valant, director of the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, called the Youngkin win a proof point that statewide campaigns could turn on education issues. In the intervening period, however, action could only be taken at the local level, where thousands of board races across the nation offer a plethora of opportunities. The sheer number of seats being contested makes it difficult to follow trends in school board races (Valant called data collection on the subject “a nightmare”), but turnout in some districts has been below 10 percent in past elections. In a 2020 survey, 40 percent of board members said they hadn’t faced any competition in their last election.

“These are, relative to just about every other election we have, extremely low-information and low-turnout races,” Valant said. “That means that they’re relatively easy to flip.”

Activists have tested that theory over the last two years by forming political action committees and financing challengers; in some districts, more people have filed as candidates this year than over the last two elections combined. And shake-ups have followed in states like Texas, where, among other organizations, a PAC sponsored largely by a Christian cellphone company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to capture board seats in multiple counties.

Ryan Girdusky, an author and former Republican staffer, formed the group 1776 Project PAC in 2021 out of what he said was frustration over prolonged school closures during the pandemic and politically tinged lessons that he contends were common during the period of virtual instruction. While his initial hopes for the project were modest — its staff still consists of just four people, two working part-time — he said he was shocked by the response he has received from over 30,000 small-dollar donors. According to the campaign finance tracker OpenSecrets, the PAC has raised over $2.5 million since last year.

About 95 candidates backed by the 1776 Project have won their races out of 118 they’ve endorsed, Girdusky said, arguing that its success on a relatively small budget was proof of education’s potency as a campaign issue.

“The thing is that the Right just gave up after a while and focused solely on school choice, and that was a mistake. I think education is a much more prevalent ‘culture war’ issue than a lot of other things that are talked about much more.”

Parents and the pandemic

It will be difficult to measure the ultimate success of groups like the 1776 Project or Moms for Liberty (or even Red Wine & Blue, a progressive organization that has sought to mobilize women in suburban districts to protest laws that ban the teaching of “divisive concepts”). Presuming they make a noticeable dent in the races they target, fast-forming political movements are often just as quick to run out of oxygen and dissolve.

But at least for this cycle, state-level politics is fixated by the question of what happens inside schools.

The call for a national “parents’ bill of rights” — first introduced in Congress last fall, and written to mandate transparency around curriculum and safety in schools — has now been echoed by Paul LePage, a former Republican governor of Maine who is now running to win back his old job. Republicans in the state also aired an ad this spring criticizing the Maine Department of Education for promulgating lessons intended for kindergarten classrooms that included material on gender and sexual identities (the lessons were later removed).

In Wisconsin, where school board elections are officially non-partisan and campaign costs have typically run into the hundreds of dollars, the state GOP has dispensed $284,000 to its county offices in a bid to grab more seats — more than three times as much as Democrats spent. Republicans in California have unveiled a program called “Parent Revolt,” attempting to recruit more candidates to run in the roughly 2,500 board races this year. Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, whose reelection prospects look fairly secure in public polls, has nevertheless convened a new “parents’ council” to advise lawmakers on education policy after her Republican opponent called for more family engagement.

But the figure who has most unmistakably bound himself to education politics this year has been DeSantis. After dominating national headlines earlier this year by fulminating against the teaching of critical race theory and gender identity, the Florida governor launched an unusual intervention into school board races, endorsing 30 candidates for a variety of boards this summer. The move provoked an immediate reaction, as DeSantis’s Democratic rival, Charlie Crist, announced that he was backing his own group of “pro-parent” aspirants.

The dueling endorsements could hardly have worked out better for the Republican, as 24 of his favored candidates either won their races outright or performed well enough to proceed to later run-off ballots. In addition to boosting party enthusiasm and interest ahead of his November reelection bid (which political observers expect him to win handily), DeSantis demonstrated strong coattails in a crucial 2024 swing state.

Susan MacManus, a political scientist at the University of South Florida, said that the political coup was made possible by the explosion of parental anger and suspicion over the last few years. Before COVID, she argued, there was “no payoff” to becoming involved with unpredictable, down-ballot races.

“Obviously, if a race is very low-profile with voters, what’s the point of getting in the middle of it? But what the pandemic did was to focus voters’ attention on school board races,” MacManus observed. “All of a sudden, it became relevant politically to get engaged in endorsing.”

Michigan State’s Jacobsen said that the shift in focus toward state- and local-level education politics represents more than just a political opportunity; it also follows the recognition that, following years of an expanding federal role in overseeing K-12, most influence still resides in school communities themselves.

“These national groups seem to be aware that you can’t just mandate from the top anymore. We tried that with No Child Left Behind, tried turning our attention to the national level and saying, ‘Let’s push a law through, and everybody will have to [reform schools].’ But the local level still has a great amount of power.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

NAEP

National testing data released this morning reveals severe damage inflicted on student math and reading performance, reaffirming COVID-19’s ongoing educational toll. Even as some states have shown evidence of academic recovery this year, federal officials cautioned that learning lost to the pandemic will not be easily restored.

Eighth-grade math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often called the “Nation’s Report Card,” fell by a jarring eight points since the test was last administered in 2019, while fourth-grade scores dropped by five points; both are the largest math declines ever recorded on the test. In reading, both fourth- and eighth-grade scores fell by three points, leaving them statistically unchanged since 1992, when NAEP was first rolled out.

The findings comport with those of previous assessments of students’ COVID-era achievement, whether conducted by academic researchers or state and district authorities, which have shown undeniable evidence of diminished performance in English and especially math. Just a few months ago, the release of scores for 9-year-olds on NAEP’s “Long-Term Trends” assessment — a different exam measuring today’s students against a baseline set in the early 1970s — offered similarly ominous results.

Even still, the education world has waited nervously for the unveiling of today’s data, perhaps the most important federal scores to appear since the pandemic began. Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, said that while relative stability in reading scores across some of the nation’s largest districts offered a few “bright spots … amidst all the chaos of the pandemic,” the unprecedented reversals in math should spark serious concern.

“Normally for a NAEP assessment … we’re talking about significant differences of two or three points,” Carr said on a Friday call with reporters. “So an eight-point decline that we’re seeing in the math data is stark. It is troubling. It is significant.”

A look at the results in their entirety show just how significant. There were no statistically significant gains in math, for either fourth or eighth graders, in any state in 2022. Instead, fourth-grade scores dropped significantly in 43 jurisdictions (either the 50 states, the District of Columbia, or schools operated by the Department of Defense Education Activity) while remaining statistically unchanged in 10. Eighth-grade math fell in 51 jurisdictions while holding steady in just two, Utah and the DoDEA schools. The average eighth-grade score has not only fallen since 2019 — it is significantly lower than when the test was administered in 2003.

Translated into the exam’s performance levels, a massive downward shift can be seen. In 2019, 34% of fourth graders and 27% of eighth graders scored below the “NAEP Basic” level in reading — the most rudimentary threshold of English mastery classified by the test. In 2022, those groups had grown to 37% of fourth graders and 30% of eighth graders, respectively. The below-basic classification also swelled in math, from 19% of fourth graders and 31% of eighth graders in 2019 to 25% of fourth graders and 38% of eighth graders in 2022.

Beneath the headline numbers, differing effects among student groups also made an impact on longstanding achievement gaps. For example, gaps expanded in fourth-grade math performance between white and African-American students, white and Hispanic students, male and female students, and students with and without disabilities. Conversely, gaps actually closed between many of the same groups in eighth-grade reading — including by a surprising seven points between English learners and native English speakers.

Brown University economist Emily Oster, who has studied the effect of  COVID and remote learning on student achievement, said that trends in NAEP scores were dynamic and varied, making them difficult to distill. Big-picture phenomena, however, broadly lined up with the existing evidence, she argued.

“Every state has four numbers, so one can construct quite a lot of different narratives around that. But the general patterns are that the losses are big, they’re much bigger in math than in reading, and they’re much bigger in more vulnerable kids. Those seem like things that are very consistent with every other piece of information that we’ve seen in post-pandemic testing.”

Julia Rafal-Baer is a K-12 education expert who serves on the National Assessments Governing Board, a nonpartisan body that sets policy for NAEP. In a statement, she said the results demonstrated the existence of “an education crisis” that demanded new solutions.

“The latest data isn’t telling us anything we didn’t already know,” Rafal-Baer wrote in an email. “COVID was exceptionally disruptive, and we’re running out of time to ensure that kids can indeed recover from this level of unfinished learning.”

State-by-state comparisons difficult

No state could be said to have defied the downward pressure exerted by the pandemic and its countless challenges to learning. But the national averages do conceal substantial variation across different areas of the country.

Some of the states where scores dropped the furthest, for example, were clustered in the mid-Atlantic region. Delaware’s fourth-grade math scores dropped an astonishing 14 points — nearly three times the national average — while its losses in fourth-grade reading (-9), eighth-grade math (-12), and eighth-grade reading (-7) were also significant. Virginia (-11 points in fourth-grade math), Maryland (-11 in eighth-grade math), and the District of Columbia (-8 in fourth-grade reading) also saw some of the worst declines across various age/subject combinations.

By contrast, a small group of states seemed to weather COVID reasonably well, experiencing less severe declines than most. Overall, while performance in eighth-grade math was weakened virtually everywhere, 10 jurisdictions, including Georgia and Wisconsin, saw no statistically significant decline in fourth-grade math. Another 22 were able to stave off declines in fourth-grade reading, while 18 did so in eighth-grade reading.

A small number of states — Alabama, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, and Louisiana — kept scores from significantly falling in three out of four age/subject combinations. Most impressive of all, Department of Defense Education Activity schools — 160 across 11 foreign countries, seven states, and two territories, each serving military families — saw no statistically significant drops in any subject or age group. Eighth-graders in DoDEA schools, in fact, made the only statistically significant growth of any student group in this round of NAEP, improving in reading by two points since 2019.

The differences between states will naturally raise questions about the procedures they followed to offer schooling during the pandemic. Among the states that saw the largest score declines, many stuck with remote learning far into the 2020-21 school year as a precaution against COVID spread.

Oster, whose previous research has found that longer periods of remote instruction were linked with more severe learning loss, called the results “very consistent with what we’ve seen in state-level data, which suggests that places that had the most in-person learning lost less than the places that had more virtual learning.” Even so, she added, a state like California — where she would have expected student scores to fall especially dramatically based on that correlation — instead saw more modest declines.

NCES’s Carr argued that the release provided little scope for comparisons between states, since so many jurisdictions experienced “massive, comprehensive declines.”

“There’s nothing in this data that says we can draw a straight line between the time spent in remote learning, in and of itself, and student achievement,” she said. “Let’s not forget that remote learning looked very different across the United States — the quality, all the factors that were associated with implementing remote learning. It is extremely complex.”

Megan Kuhfeld, a researcher at the nonprofit testing organization NWEA, said that the average NAEP effects dovetailed with her own expectations based on previous research studies of post-pandemic learning loss. That said, she agreed with Carr that the huge diversity of COVID learning policies — where neighboring school districts sometimes took radically different approaches — made direct comparisons difficult.

“Prior research has supported the idea that remote instruction was a primary driver of widening achievement gaps, but I think it is harder to make that sort of inference at the state level because district reopening policies often varied widely within states,” Kuhfeld wrote in an email.

Urban districts fared better in reading

If a silver lining exists within the release, it comes from some of America’s biggest cities.

In addition to all 50 states and Washington, D.C., 26 urban school districts around the country participate in NAEP’s Trial Urban District Assessment. The measure offers a unique look inside districts that collectively enroll millions of students and were subject to substantially different state-level public health policies.

Disappointingly, math results in these districts were no better than elsewhere: Fourth-grade scores and eighth-grade scores alike sank by eight points, matching or surpassing the declines for the nation as a whole.

Performance in English, however, offered somewhat sunnier news: Average scores in reading held up in 17 cities, falling in just nine. Fully 21 of the 26 urban districts managed the same in eighth-grade reading, with only Shelby County, Tennessee, Jefferson County, Kentucky, Guilford County, North Carolina, and Cleveland, Ohio, experiencing statistically significant drops. In Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest district, eighth-grade reading performance even improved.

Michael Petrilli, who leads reform-oriented Thomas B. Fordham Institute, nevertheless took a dark view of the overall NAEP outcomes.

“There’s no sugar coating these awful results,” Petrilli said. “Save for Los Angeles (which I honestly cannot explain), the only question is whether states and localities did bad or worse. These data tell us how big a hole we’ve dug for ourselves. Now it’s up to all of us to dig ourselves — and our students — out.”

Others took a somewhat more hopeful outlook. Tom Loveless, a longtime education researcher who formerly led the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, said the urban districts’ results provided “a glimmer of hope in these otherwise dismal data.” Moreover, he added, both the NAEP data and scores from state standardized tests have already shown evidence that student achievement is bouncing back from their pandemic nadir.

Going forward, Loveless observed, state and school district leaders will likely view this round of scores as a kind of new student performance baseline. That could provide an accountability mechanism if things don’t improve.

“I think 2021 was probably the bottom, and we’re getting little shards of progress in these NAEP data,” he said. “But I’m expecting [the 2024 NAEP results] to look quite a bit better, and the state tests, too. If they don’t, I think people will start raising harsh questions.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.