Happy Friday, folks, and thanks for all the congratulatory notes about my son, Nico, who walked across the commencement stage on Monday. I am very proud of him—though, as I said at his party over the weekend (yes, I really did)—not so much for earning his diploma. After all, it’s never been easier to graduate from high school in America. And not even for getting straight A’s throughout high school, an accomplishment also achieved by 85 of his 500 classmates. (Grade inflation!) But for earning an Army ROTC scholarship and choosing to serve his country: That makes a dad’s heart melt.
OK enough about me, and him. Today I solicit ideas for how the new golden age of American philanthropy might accelerate education reform and improvement. Plus, we hear from Svetlana Jitomirskaya, Zvezdelina Stankova, Morgan Polikoff, and Checker Finn on grade inflation and academic rigor; Heather Peske and Preston Cooper on new student loan limits for teachers; Andy Smarick on Lamar Alexander’s new memoir; Charlie Barone on our missing sense of urgency; David Steiner on quality in education choice; Chad Aldeman on Randi Weingarten’s AI speech; Bibb Hubbard on test score reports for families; and Kalman Hettleman on why I’m wrong to blame everything on the unions.
Getty Images / marchmeena29
As readers surely know, OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX are all planning to go public in coming months, which will create a new crop of billionaires and centi-millionaires—and likely Earth’s first trillionaire. Here’s how Nan Ransohoff puts it in a Substack post that’s been making the rounds:
Hundreds of billions of dollars in new philanthropic capital will soon become liquid. The OpenAI Foundation holds 26 percent of OpenAI, worth about $220B at today’s valuation. Anthropic’s seven co-founders have pledged to give away 80 percent of their wealth and have instituted the most aggressive donor matching program for employees in tech history.
She does some back-of-the-envelope math and comes up with an estimate of $50 billion in new philanthropic spending every year. This is six times the annual spending of the Gates Foundation.
My question is how education reformers can convince the new philanthropists to invest in educational improvement. I worry that it may not be easy.
Note, for example, Ross Douthat’s off-hand comment in his column about this coming gusher of cash:
At its best, the infrastructure established by figures like Gates delivered effective efforts to reduce poverty and fight disease; at its worst, it threw money after fashionable political causes and education fads.
Or consider what Nan thinks the newly minted zillionaires are going to care about, coming as they do from the world of AI:
Belief 1: AI is fundamentally reshaping civilization and we need to make sure that goes well. There are two major questions at hand: (1) How do we ensure we make it through the AI transition? And (2) if/once we do, how do we ensure humanity flourishes? The first is more downside-oriented, concerned with catastrophic or at least major risk (biosecurity, loss of control, etc.). The second—human flourishing—is more upside-oriented. Flourishing here is broader than the usual short list. It’s longevity and economic abundance, yes—but it also extends into aesthetics, civic life, moral imagination, relationships, and the cultural infrastructure that gives life meaning.
Belief 2: Speed matters. The next X years are critical. There’s tremendous concern especially around the group of risks driving question (1) described above. The importance of speed in mitigating these risks is critical if not existential.
Speed is not something that education, or education reform, is known for. After all, as Sam Altmansaid (defensively but also accurately) back in February, “It takes about 20 years of life—and all the food you consume during that time—before you become smart.” I’m a big believer in starting reform efforts early, especially in elementary school, but the payoff doesn’t come for a decade or more. Some of these folks will worry that we’ll all be replaced by AI overlords by then.
“Human flourishing,” on the other hand, is something that great schools can definitely contribute to. And it makes sense, especially for high schools and colleges, to worry deeply and urgently about helping graduates through the “AI transition,” both in terms of preparing for jobs that are unlikely to be replaced by bots and in developing the “moral imagination, relationships,” etc. that will allow them to flourish along the way.
But does that mean we need to transform secondary and postsecondary education entirely? Double down on the liberal arts? Lean into career and technical education in fields that will be hard to automate? Everyone has opinions (myself included), but nobody knows for sure.
And what about the meat-and-potatoes school reform agenda? Raising standards, expanding high-quality choices, supporting excellent teachers, spending resources more efficiently and effectively? How do we get the AI billionaires to care about all of that? Especially at a time when student achievement is in the toilet and the conventional wisdom is that “nothing works,” that past philanthropy has “thrown money after education fads” and has little to show for it? I don’t think that’s true. We made a huge amount of progress from the late 1990s till the early 2010s, thanks in part to philanthropy. And lots of things work—even according to stodgy scholars—including charter schools, pre-K, merit pay, and more. But in the competition for philanthropic funding, we are starting with some serious disadvantages.
What do you think? How can ed reform sell itself as a smart investment to the new cohort of philanthropists? I’m not interested in how people can pitch their own efforts and initiatives, as much as selling education renewal as a category. Please weigh in by responding to this newsletter, emailing me at SCHOOLED@fordhaminstitute.org, or in the comments.
Last week we looked at efforts to curb grade inflation, both in high schools and at Harvard. This week brings some welcome news that universities and their professors are wanting to recover the most obvious antidote to inflated grades: tests! Doug Belkin reports on the growing, faculty-led demand to reinstate the SAT and ACT, both at the University of California and elsewhere.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, UC Berkeley math professors Svetlana Jitomirskaya and Zvezdelina Stankova note that even their institution’s famously left-leaning faculty agree that test-blind admission needs to go:
The scale of faculty alarm is staggering. Berkeley’s informal anonymous survey of the Academic Senate reveals that 83 percent of 430 respondents across all departments support a return to the use of standardized test scores in admissions. Democrats outnumber Republicans by 10 to 1 among Berkeley faculty, making this overwhelming opposition to a liberal agenda item even more remarkable. Like the letter, this survey finding is a nonpolitical collective warning that the removal of objective benchmarks has untethered admissions from academic reality.
The Editorial Board of the Washington Post points out why the consequences go beyond the hassle of teaching remedial math courses:
The University of California system—which enrolls more than 200,000 students—educates a sizable chunk of the engineers in America’s technology capital of Silicon Valley. Hobbling its ability to teach quantitative subjects will damage the U.S. economy in the long run, even if it’s hard to measure directly.
That’s a high price to pay for a superficial sense of justice. As the professors note: “The SAT/ACT mathematics requirement is not an obstacle to equity; rather, it is a prerequisite for it. Failing to measure preparation gaps does not remove barriers; it moves them into the classroom, where they become harder to overcome.”
My Fordham Institute colleague Checker Finn thinks this is among the signs of a “second wind” for standards:
True, we’ve had plenty of “Sputnik moments” before. And we’ve learned—sadly—that, in and of themselves, they don’t foreshadow a renaissance in academic standards and accountability. This kind of publicity does, however, at least signal widening awareness of the cost of their erosion.
Maybe returning the ACT and SAT to the center of the college admissions process will make everyone, including parents, care more about actual student achievement, instead of the squishy version that is poorly measured by grades. But that’s going to be hard, arguesMorgan Polikoff, because most non-wonks simply dismiss test results as not all that meaningful. And fixing grading isn’t easy, either:
Grades send unclear—and perhaps inaccurate—messages to parents about how kids are doing. They conflate and probably oversimplify multiple dimensions of student performance. Grading standards appear to have been getting more lax over time, and now we think too many kids are getting higher grades than they “should” based on students’ actual skills and performance. To solve this problem, we probably need to do things like rethinking grading and report card policies, training teachers on new and better approaches to grading, andaddressing the root causes that are encouraging poor grading behaviors (such as tremendous social pressures to give children good grades because people believe grades matter so much).
This is a tough one to solve—but solve it we must!
I don’t bother to cover much federal education policy here because it rarely matters. Congress does very little and the Trump administration is spending most of its time moving bureaucratic boxes around and fighting (or posturing on?) culture war issues. But bless my technocratic heart, here’s a policy wonky debate that will have a real-world impact: The administration’s proposed regulations to set limits on the amount of money teachers can borrow for graduate school.
I was surprised to learn recently that the federal government does not think teaching is a profession. New rules issued by the U.S. Department of Education exclude teaching from the list of “professions” in the regulations on graduate student borrowing. While Dan Lortie called it a “semi-profession” in his 1975 seminal book, Schoolteacher, this is the first time I have heard that teaching is not a profession at all.
The impact of the new rules is that graduate students seeking designated “professional” degrees are allowed to borrow up to $200,000 total, while graduate students in education (and other “non-professions”) can borrow just half as much. Additionally, the new rules allow colleges and universities to set lower borrowing rates for students who take courses part-time and for graduate students whose field earns a lower salary.
There are at least four unintended consequences to the new rules:
It hurts the pipeline of teachers.
It doubles the disadvantage for low-income graduate students who want to pursue teaching.
It threatens efforts to recruit teachers of color.
Perplexingly, it reinforces the notion that teaching requires no specialized knowledge and anyone can teach.
I’m a big fan of Heather’s and of NCTQ—shh, Fordham had a role in launching it 25 years ago!—but I fear that Heather’s got this one wrong. I see this move by the administration as basic consumer protection. We should want the federal government to limit graduate-student loan amounts so teachers (and others) don’t take on debt they will be hard-pressed to repay. Preston Cooper, who knows a million times more than me about student loan policy, agrees. He explains:
Most students in education programs, even at the graduate level, don’t borrow excessively. And almost all education degrees pass the new earnings-based accountability test.
But there are exceptions. Schools of education with exorbitantly high tuition are likely to see their students’ borrowing constrained under the new loan limits. This isn’t an accident but the intent of the policy. Congress has asked why the government should finance top-dollar programs when inexpensive options exist. The affected programs—which include some of the nation’s most elite education schools—will need to seek solutions such as lower tuition or alternative financing. Otherwise, they may lose students to programs with more reasonable prices.
Preston told me via e-mail that only a few programs, like those at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia, charge more than the loan limits set by the feds.
I agree with Heather that we should never send the message that “teaching requires no specialized knowledge.” But it’s worth celebrating, not bemoaning, this move to rein in exorbitantly expensive graduate degree programs—especially since, as Heather herself has argued, master’s degrees do very little to boost teachers’ effectiveness.
These sorts of wonky but smart policy moves were the trademark of Governor/Education Secretary/Senator Lamar Alexander. So argues Andy Smarick in a moving review of Lamar’s memoir about his life, public and otherwise. Andy writes:
Most books about governing start with a theory of how the world works and how to solve its problems. Marxism. Capitalism. Communitarianism. Post-liberalism. The theory is the book’s throughline and takeaway. Works from the modern American right are no different. Since the 1980s, conservatives have mostly stuck to a familiar ideology, a suite of principles like limited government, free markets, law and order, federalism, and originalism. Whether the book is on the administrative state, schools, housing, or something else, you could count on the author’s focus on these principles.
Lamar Alexander’s compelling new memoir, The Education of a Senator: From JFK to Trump, is different. It is all but ideology-free. This is the book’s great strength and its occasional weakness. It was also Alexander’s great strength and occasional electoral weakness as a public servant. As a young congressional and White House aide, governor and education secretary, and three-term U.S. Senator, Alexander was pragmatic and results-oriented. He developed a disposition to match; he was understated, accommodating, and diligent. What seemed to drive him were not grand theories but traits regularly found in leaders of the pre-ideology era: Ambition, love of community, practical wisdom, and a sense of public duty.
Such good writing, Andy! Then there’s this:
I learned that Alexander deserves credit not just for leading but catalyzing the modern education-reform movement. His governorship (1979-1987) preceded the advent of charter schools and vouchers, the Charlottesville summit, and the nationwide spread of accountability systems. He pushed for programs for gifted high schoolers and was an early adopter of computers in schools. His efforts at teacher-evaluation reform and performance pay came decades before Race to the Top. (His education policy consigliere was a Vanderbilt professor he’d met a decade earlier in the Nixon White House: Checker Finn.)
Politics is neither a science nor an art. It is a craft, like carpentry or playing shortstop. The dignity of a craft derives from the fact that it is acquired only through many years of repetitions. Hence patience is a conservative virtue. Faux conservatives who proclaim on the Senate floor their principled refusal to compromise often achieve their only intended result: cable television and social media resonance.
Three weeks ago, researchers from Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth released an education scorecard that sounded the alarm on educational outcomes across the U.S. including lagging achievement in math and reading and chronic absenteeism. And, last Friday, in Laos, expert divers rescued five cave explorers trapped deep underground who were in severe, life-threatening jeopardy.
So, I wonder: What would it look like if we, as a nation, treated the dismal state of students’ educational outcomes in the U.S. like the Laotians approached rescuing those individuals stuck in a cave?
It would mean mobilizing with the same urgency, clarity of purpose, and tactical focus that Laos showed—treating learning loss and absenteeism as a life-or-death national emergency rather than a chronic nuisance.
I’m not sure the metaphor works perfectly, but I like Charlie’s call for a sense of urgency, including this point:
Crucially, in a cave rescue you don’t tell local villagers, “Here’s a few million dollars. You’re on your own with some guidance documents and the ‘What Works Clearinghouse.’” You send concrete, evidence-based resources and people with the skills and gear they don’t yet have.
David Steiner is thinking about evidence and capacity-building too, in his case in terms of parental choice in education. He worries that the information we provide parents isn’t nearly enough, and proposes that:
Educators should have a place on the school website to describe their pedagogical approach and how they assess their own success. In math and ELA, if they choose to share growth data for their students from previous years, they should be able to do so once the principal has signed off on the data. Principals should share their vision for supporting effective teaching, outlining specific plans for providing professional learning and explaining how it will be distributed across the subjects and grades taught. Since repeated classroom observations using curriculum-integrated rubrics are the most effective form of professional development for raising teacher performance, parents should know the extent to which this is being offered (if at all).
One can dream.
I mentioned above, in the lead article, the challenge of figuring out what “the Age of AI” means for the high school and college curriculum. Chad Aldeman, for one, thinks knowledge will matter more, not less:
The students who will benefit most from AI won’t be the ones who know the least. It will be the ones who know enough to ask good questions, evaluate the answers, and then proceed to build on what they learn.
He pushes back on Randi Weingarten’s contention that we should:
Redesign schooling so active learning, including project-based, experiential and career-connected learning, is the norm across all grade levels. That means redesigning accountability, as well.
Chad writes:
Project-based learning can be valuable when students already possess a strong foundation of knowledge and skills. Too often, however, schools treat projects as a substitute for content rather than an opportunity to apply content. The result in some cases is that students spend lots of time doing activities without really learning very much.
Yup, sounds right to me. I think this is why Andy Rotherham’s hopes will be dashed that “AI will save project-based learning.” But we’ll see.
Leadership Preparatory Charter School, a K–8 school in Memphis, partnered with Teach Like a Champion to create an adapted math program that better served students struggling post-pandemic. Valissia Allen, the school’s founder, calls the arrangement “teacher autonomy with guardrails,” with teachers following the state-approved curriculum but gaining flexibility in how to deliver materials in their classrooms. Bri Hatchreports on the school’s success, where “nearly 44 percent of students scored as proficient on state standardized math tests—up over 20 percentage points from 2021.” Across the city, charter school students are recovering faster than their traditional district school peers, surpassing pre-pandemic levels last year.
“The City of Cleveland is asking developers and other organizations to propose plans for a dozen buildings the school district is shuttering at the end of this month,” reports Franziska Wild for Signal Cleveland. This despite the law requiring that former schools be offered to charter schools that need the space.
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Jason Gonzalesreports on what went wrong with an apprenticeship program in Colorado and why it’s so hard to make such programs work. “Ten years in, CareerWise offers an important case study in the challenges of offering robust on-the-job training for high school students,” he writes. It’s “an idea that has widespread bipartisan support and increasing investment from the public and private sectors but can be difficult to execute on a large scale.” Hurdles include hesitation from parents, competition from other opportunities, and unstable business participation.
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New York Governor Kathy Hochul caved to union pressure on pensions, lowering both the retirement age for teachers and their required contributions. The Washington Post‘s Editorial Board points out that the estimated $557 million in additional annual costs stemming from the deal leaves state and local governments paying for the priorities of special interests, money that could otherwise be used to support kids.
Financial pressure from falling enrollment is layering on top of other costs beyond districts’ control, ranging from rising gas prices to GLP-1 prescriptions upping health care plan costs. “More than half of the country’s 50 largest school districts are poised to or already have made cuts, or are facing a reported deficit,” writes Lily Altavena in Chalkbeat. There’s more to this story, though, as state funding and local property taxes are up in many areas. As Marguerite Roza—who’s been sounding the alarm on this issue for years—told 50CAN’sMarc Porter Magee, “The fiscal cliff is no surprise. It’s been right there in district multi-year financial forecasts. Lots of districts used one-time Covid money to add staff and raise pay. What we’re seeing now is the fallout now that relief funding is gone. Some chose to spend down reserves to put cuts off a year. But math is math.” Right-sizing may be unpleasant, but it’s also inevitable.
Bibb Hubbard of Learning Heroes responds to Josh Goodman’s clever idea to report state test scores with A–F labels:
Sign us up for redesigning score reports! With 10 years of user testing and designing a range of models with parents, we’ve seen what works—and what doesn’t—when it comes to ensuring parents have a clear understanding of what a report means for their child. Josh is right in his assertion that parents prefer letter scores because they are a familiar scale. And while I wish it were as simple as changing one report’s design, we know that isn’t sufficient.
Parents take in all sorts of signals to determine how their child is achieving and what actions to take: when they receive information, who delivers it, and how it is contextualized and explained. And so, while redesigning score reports is a step forward, it’s one piece of the puzzle in helping families have a more accurate understanding of where their child stands academically.
The Tennessee model, where districts are now required to include a child’s grade level on report cards, is a start. But we’re also working to support school leaders who play a key role in prioritizing family engagement as an instructional strategy—not as a nice-to-have or compliance item. This means training, coaching, and supporting teachers to build relationships with families so they can have regular, honest conversations centered on student learning.
Giving teachers access to scores, along with training on how to interpret and explain them to families, will also pay dividends. With this knowledge, teachers can help ensure families understand where their child is academically and how to partner with educators to better align learning across settings—from the classroom, to the home, to out-of-school-time programs. Our Engagement Advantage report found that a common thread among high-performing schools is proactive, personal communication with families centered on learning. You can’t replace the power of a one-to-one teacher-family partnership focused on academic success.
I was surprised to read that you “view the teachers unions as the number one impediment to student-centered education reforms.” You are usually more measured than such a sweeping, negative judgment which has been a favorite of the right for decades.
The picture is much more complicated than that. Unions have their faults. They could be of more help in getting rid of unsatisfactory teachers; they bungled school closings during the pandemic; they have been too slow in supporting charters schools; and they have tended to put teacher compensation ahead of other pressing budget needs like interventions for struggling learners.
On the other hand, they provide the greatest political support for adequate school funding, and they safeguard teachers from illegal or unfair personnel practices. Jane Hannaway and Andy Rotherhamwrote 20 years ago: “The problem is not that teachers unions enjoy too much power or leverage, it is that other constituencies [like superintendents and principals] exercise too little.”
And here’s another insightful quote: “aggressive superintendents and principals could push the envelope and claim authority for any management prerogative not barred outright by labor agreements…the depiction of [collective bargaining agreements] as an all-powerful, insurmountable barrier to reform may be overstated” That’s taken from a 2008 study by the Fordham Institute, and you co-wrote the foreword.
And calcified school administrators and college schools of education belong on the suspect list. And even more basically what about the impediments to school success caused by poverty?
And by the way, the largest teachers union in Maryland has been a significant supporter of huge, challenging reforms under the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future.
Time to get back closer to the middle on this subject.
See ya next week, folks!
Mike
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Great post, Mike. Strikes me that the latest era of education reform generally accepted the system's goals as given and focused on execution. No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top were largely premised on the idea that public education already knew what to prepare kids for; it just wasn't delivering competently or equitably. So reform meant tightening accountability, measuring performance, and improving execution within the existing model. The next wave is (or should be) a departure. It accepts that we still need a centralized public system to intellectually enrich the masses, but argues the real work is redesigning what that system is built to prepare kids for in a rapidly changing economy. The target shifts from execution to architecture.
And on speed: the instinct will be that education is too slow a bet for people who think in years, not decades. But that's exactly the case for architecture over projects. A thousand independent pilots take a decade to even learn from. Change the standards, the money flows, and the incentives, and you move the whole system at once. This type of leverage is how you compress the timeline and move the system forward at scale of the entire nation much faster.
That could mean using philanthropy not to fund a thousand independent tech-driven education projects, but to encourage this new wave of philanthropists to see how they can help shape the structures that determine outcomes at scale: academic standards, how public money flows, the incentives baked into the system, and things like who holds the authority to steer it all (exploring, for instance, whether locally elected school boards are still the right governance model in an era that demands the system adapt more quickly than ever to fast-moving labor markets). Perhaps for the coming generation of AI-wealth philanthropists, the pitch is that systemic leverage, not project proliferation, is how education philanthropy actually changes the future for tens of millions of children in our country.
Great post, Mike. Strikes me that the latest era of education reform generally accepted the system's goals as given and focused on execution. No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top were largely premised on the idea that public education already knew what to prepare kids for; it just wasn't delivering competently or equitably. So reform meant tightening accountability, measuring performance, and improving execution within the existing model. The next wave is (or should be) a departure. It accepts that we still need a centralized public system to intellectually enrich the masses, but argues the real work is redesigning what that system is built to prepare kids for in a rapidly changing economy. The target shifts from execution to architecture.
And on speed: the instinct will be that education is too slow a bet for people who think in years, not decades. But that's exactly the case for architecture over projects. A thousand independent pilots take a decade to even learn from. Change the standards, the money flows, and the incentives, and you move the whole system at once. This type of leverage is how you compress the timeline and move the system forward at scale of the entire nation much faster.
That could mean using philanthropy not to fund a thousand independent tech-driven education projects, but to encourage this new wave of philanthropists to see how they can help shape the structures that determine outcomes at scale: academic standards, how public money flows, the incentives baked into the system, and things like who holds the authority to steer it all (exploring, for instance, whether locally elected school boards are still the right governance model in an era that demands the system adapt more quickly than ever to fast-moving labor markets). Perhaps for the coming generation of AI-wealth philanthropists, the pitch is that systemic leverage, not project proliferation, is how education philanthropy actually changes the future for tens of millions of children in our country.