Hi friends. Thanks for all the kind words last week. I hope to see many of you today at JebFest, a.k.a. the ExcelinEd annual summit, in New Orleans. I’ll be moderating a great panel on phone-free schools this morning at 9:30 a.m. in Empire A, along with Ellen Weaver, David Figlio, and Melanie Hempe. Come say hello!
Today in SCHOOLED, I ponder whether education reform is hopeless in Democratic-run states, plus round up recent posts by Jorge Elorza, Ashley Berner, Liz Cohen, Jean Twenge, Paul DiPerna, Chad Aldeman, Joanne Jacobs, Marty Lueken, Marc Porter Magee, Nathan Sanders, Karen Vaites, and Robert Pondiscio. Plus, Charlie Barone and Melissa Tooley chime in about teacher pay.
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As I said up top, today I’m at JebFest in New Orleans, gathering with hundreds of state legislators and other policymakers, plus policy wonks from far and wide. Though there will surely be left-of-center folks there, the group does lean rightward and will no doubt celebrate big wins in recent years in red states on a wide array of issues—not just school choice—and plot what’s next.
Contrast that with the sad (I mean it: truly sad) state of affairs in blue America. As my good friend Van Schoaleswrote for the Fordham Institute over the weekend, reformers faced another big loss in the recent Denver election, with union candidates winning all four contested school board seats in Van’s adopted hometown. This is on top of the unions flipping the Albuquerque school board, too.
In the Denver case, Van blames some tactical mistakes on behalf of the local reform “harbormaster,” but acknowledges that the environment is just really tough.
National politics also played a role. Though all candidates were Democrats, union-backed contenders appeared more authentically progressive. Reformers’ associations with Republican donors—however tenuous—hurt them in a deep-blue city where Trump-era polarization still looms large. The union candidates benefited from being perceived as “true blue.”
…When Denver voters were asked to choose between “teacher lite” and “teachers union,” they chose the true-blue teachers union candidates.
Center-left reform groups could be playing perfect baseball and still strike out right now, given today’s politics.
No doubt, y’all are doing your best to make lemonade out of lemons. Kudos, for example, for Ed Trust-NY, Educators for Excellence, and the Robin Hood Foundation for trying their darndest to slow down the Big Apple’s insane (and inequitable) class size reduction mandate. Kudos also to reading reformers in Massachusetts like MassPotential who are working their butts off to get a science of reading bill past the teachers unions and into law. And to charter advocates in inhospitable terrain in states like California who, as Jed Wallacekeepsreporting, are sometimes finding ways to win despite the odds.
But it sure looks bleak.
The reason is basic political science. The incentives for candidates to fight for centrist voters have fallen apart, what with culture wars pushing so many states into deep red or deep blue territory (which makes statewide offices like governorships uncompetitive) plus radical gerrymandering (which makes legislative seats uncompetitive). Most elected officials have to worry more about primaries than general elections. So that means skewing toward the base, and especially “the groups.”
Back in the late 90s and 2000s, that wasn’t so much the case. We didn’t even talk about “red states and blue states” until the early 2000s. Centrist Democrats could win elections in part by promising to improve the schools, triangulating between the unions and other defenders of the traditional system, and the (often) stingy Republicans.
That era is over. And in education, for Democrats in blue states, that means an unwritten rule to no longer get crosswise with the teachers unions. Unfortunately, the list of real reforms that the unions like is rather small. (In my estimation, it includes pushing back against phones in schools, grade inflation and lax disciplinestandards…and that’s about it.) This development is having real-world consequences for kids and taxpayers alike, giving blue states a well-earned reputation for high spending and lackluster achievement.
(Compare that to Republican states like Texas that are pushing ahead on districttakeovers and teacher compensation reform; or Indiana, which is looking to put charter schools in its capital city on equal footing with traditional public schools when it comes to transportation and facilities; or Ohio and Missouri, which both enacted huge fundingincreases for charter schools in recent years.)
But please, friends on the left, tell me I’m wrong. Provide examples of student-first reforms that continue to be enacted and implemented in Democratic states or ideas for how to change the dynamics to make such reforms possible.
Speaking of blue states, Andy Rotherhamreads the tea leaves on the future of ed policy in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The fact that Abigail Spanberger ran as a moderate is one reason for hope; another is reformer Anne Hyslop’s appointment as education transition chair. But with Democrats sweeping Virginia’s House of Delegates, the pressure to kowtow to the unions will be fierce.
And speaking of Democrats for education reform, Jorge Elorza and Ashley Bernermake the case for folks on the left that we should copy Europe’s approach to educational pluralism, including its public support for religious schools. I love it, but of course I’m not their target audience. I also appreciate their approach to the LGBTQ issue: “It is within states’ purview to tie school funding to non-discrimination with respect to gender identity and sexual orientation,” they write, “as Maryland and Maine already do.” That’s true, for now, but it’s hard to imagine that today’s Supreme Court is going to allow such governmental intrusion into religious schools for much longer.
Sticking with school choice, Marty Lueken and Nathan Sanderswrite, in a well-argued post, that we need to get the details right to make choice work. Expanding eligibility is not enough. We also have to sweat the small stuff, from parent information to transportation to timely payments. To my ears, this echoes what Katie Reed wrote about “market enablers” a few weeks ago for CRPE.
Meanwhile, Liz Cohenmakes a very good point that demands for equity, transparency, and accountability in private school choice programs should apply to the public schools as well.
Chad Aldeman, an alum of the Obama administration, says “Don’t Just Copy Obama (on Education).” He also argues that Fairfax County should listen to parent demand and use an abandoned private school campus for a second Thomas Jefferson high school. Yes, on both counts!
Karen Vaites has a double-header this week, too. (Don’t you love all the baseball analogies?) First, she argues that knowledge-rich, book-rich ELA instruction is behind the Southern Surge (maybe?). And then she weighs in on Mamdani and gifted education.
The UC San Diego math department created a stir last week when it announced that the remedial course it had created for underprepared students was too hard, pegged as it was at a middle school level. Robert Pondiscio steps up to the plate and hits that softball out of the park (there I go again), arguing that the outcome was practically inevitable, given UC’s test-blind admissions policy, combined with rampant grade inflation in high schools. “Every force in American education has been working toward this moment,” Robert writes. “We replaced rigor with rhetoric, and the bill has come due.”
Joanne Jacobsis rightfully angry that colleges continue to admit students who are woefully underprepared, and it’s not just UCSD.
Marc Porter Mageetees off on the UCSD math report, too, and offers a helpful history lesson about how California got to the point that it banned the use of tests in college admissions. Gladly, much of the anti-testing movement is now in the rearview window, as its negative consequences become ever clearer.
Meanwhile, Tim DeRoche is fighting against school attendance zones nationwide, recently in Los Angeles, Austin, and Pittsburgh.
Paul DiPernatells you everything you ever wanted to know (and then some?) about what polls have to say about tutoring in his latest post for the EdChoice Substack. For example, according to 50CAN, the group of students most likely to receive tutoring are those getting B’s and C’s. Interesting.
Don’t just ban the phones, ban the other devices, too, arguesJean Twenge in the New York Times. It’s a good point—one that Dan Buckmade a year and a half ago. It’s going to be challenging, though, given how ubiquitous one-to-one devices are, and how reliant students and teachers have become on online “learning management systems” like Google Classroom.
Speaking of technology, I contribute to CRPE’s Phoenix Rising series by arguing that AI gives states an excuse to re-evaluate their high school course requirements, ideally with a “zero-based” approach.
After five years of convoluted admissions processes aimed at diversifying enrollment, Boston Public Schools appears to be shifting back toward a merit-based approach for entrance into its storied “exam schools.” —Renu Mukherjee, City Journal
Here we go again: A group is seeking charter authorization for an online virtual charter school in Oklahoma, this time a “values-based education that integrates general academic excellence with Jewish religious learning and ethical development.” —Nuria Martinez-Keel, Oklahoma Voice
The challenges faced by families navigating school choice in LAUSD are immense. In a district that covers 700 square miles, connecting families with information about student transportation, the common enrollment system, and other resources isn’t easy. —Linda Jacobson, The 74
Differentiated pay for teachers in hard-to-staff assignments and specializations —i.e., extra compensation for teachers in schools with high concentrations of low-income students and domains like special education, English Learner and bilingual education, and STEM—holds great promise as a strategy to address some of the most persistent teacher workforce challenges that affect student outcomes. Research indicates that differentiated pay for teachers in hard-to-staff assignments and specializations can help both to improve access to high-quality teachers and boost student achievement. Despite the rationale and evidence for differentiated pay, however, the strategy is quite uncommon in teaching. That’s due, more often than not, to opposition from unions to tying pay to anything other than seniority or advanced degrees.
But teachers unions seemed to be at odds with their counterparts in other fields, including in nursing. Nursing shares similar demographics and education requirements with teaching. There is also one other key similarity: the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) is the second-largest collective bargaining unit in the U.S. for teachers and, within the AFL-CIO, for nurses. Yet the union’s approach to compensation in these two sectors is worlds apart. NPU and ERN conducted the first-ever analysis of 6 matched AFT teacher and nursing contracts in 3 different locales. We found that while differentiated pay is rare, restricted, and meager in teaching, it is widespread, accessible, and far more generous in nursing.
The field of nursing, with its similarities to teaching, offers a lesson on how to remediate inequities and improve educator effectiveness: provide differentiated pay for hard-to-staff assignments and specializations to get the best teachers to where we need them most.
Melissa Tooley
Pay consistently comes up as an issue in surveys of teachers, although salaries vary drastically from state to state and locality to locality. So there’s no doubt that teacher pay is important, but it’s of the utmost importance in those districts and states where teachers can’t afford housing nearby and/or have to work additional jobs during the school year to be able to provide for their families’ basic needs.
At the same time, we’ve designed teaching in the U.S. to be an extremely demanding career, particularly in schools serving many students with special learning, behavioral, and/or physical needs. This leads lots of excellent teachers to cite burnout—not pay—as their reason for leaving the profession. So the reality is that no amount of money is sufficient if teachers are mentally, physically, and/or emotionally exhausted. In fact, a recent research paper found that teachers valued expert staff support in special education, nursing, and school counseling enough to trade off substantial raises for them. And when overwhelmed educators do continue teaching despite insufficient support, they often struggle to deliver effective instruction, weaken school culture, and fail to help students meet their full potential.
We don’t ask other professionals to choose between good pay or support. Can you imagine asking lawyers to choose between $20,000 more in pay or support from a paralegal? No, because either choice would reduce a firm’s ability to attract and retain effective employees.
Given the importance of teachers and school leaders for our students’ and our communities’ success, we shouldn’t be asking educators to choose between pay and support either. And even though schools have limited budgets, there are smart policy choices education leaders can make to provide sufficient amounts of both. Especially since it turns out that teacher turnover is actually a lot more expensive than teacher retention—an average of $25,000 per teacher in larger districts.
Here are just a few changes we can make to attract, develop, and retain high-quality teachers without spending a lot more money in the long run (and as you read through our current approaches, I encourage you to ask, in what other profession would we allow this??):
Attrition is highest among teachers in their first few years in the profession, in large part because we don’t adequately prepare novice teachers for the job, expect them to perform the same responsibilities as experienced teachers from day one, and don’t provide them with adequate on-the-job support. We need to invest in high-quality preparation pathways that provide a more gradual and supported on-ramp into the profession, such as residencies and apprenticeships.
Uncertified and not-fully certified teachers have higher attrition rates than fully certified ones. We should pay fully certified novice teachers a higher starting salary than those with “emergency” or temporary credentials to incentivize engaging in training and/or demonstration of competency before entering the profession.
Despite big changes in how the rest of the world does their work, most teachers remain isolated, stuck in their own individual classrooms. When that’s the case, it’s difficult to share ideas and resources with colleagues, let alone take care of pressing personal needs (yes, even teachers need to go to the bathroom and take urgent phone calls). Increasingly schools are recognizing the limitations of this antiquated approach and experimenting with innovative team-based staffing models and schedules that promote greater staff collaboration, peer-to-peer support, and flexibility.
Excellent teachers want to be recognized and rewarded for their talents, and to share their expertise with others, but currently there are limited opportunities to do that without taking on a school or district administrator role. By providing well-compensated opportunities for our most talented teachers to support the growth of other staff in their buildings—whether pre-service teacher residents or experienced teachers—schools can simultaneously retain more of our best teachers and build the capacity of their overall teaching workforce.
So adequate pay and support are both necessary to secure the educator workforce we need, and we don’t need big long-term funding increases to do both. But we do need education leaders to make more innovative and strategic choices.
