One potential Portrait of a Graduate? Readiness for jury duty.
And lots of other reader feedback on what we should prepare our students for.
Happy Memorial Day Weekend, folks. Or MDW, as the kids say. I kept seeing that acronym in recent days and finally had to look it up. Duh!
Before you head out for rest and relaxation—or perhaps while you’re engaging in R & R, sipping a cool drink, or just putting your feet up—take the time to dig into a memorable SCHOOLED. Today’s is chock-full of thoughts about the “portrait of a graduate” movement, including offerings from Ross Wiener, Karin Chenoweth, Conor Williams, and Jordan Posamentier; a roundtable of sorts about the Education Scorecard results, featuring Tom Kane, Matt Barnum, Jill Barshay, Steven Wilson, and Freddie deBoer; plus Emily Oster on school start times and Joe Viteritti on the Education Freedom Tax Credit.
Most important: Let’s all keep America’s fallen heroes in our hearts this weekend and always.
Tuesday’s newsletter on the growing number of states and districts publishing “portraits of graduates” struck a chord and elicited a lot of responses, most of them rebutting my argument that these efforts are largely a waste of time, or worse. My favorite came from Karin Chenoweth on X.
Back in 1994, a New York appellate court said that the aim of a public school education should be to prepare students to be able to serve on juries upon graduation. The first time I heard this I thought that rather weird and shallow, but upon reflection, I realized it was actually a pretty good goal and could serve as a “portrait of a graduate.”
To serve on a jury you should have basic scientific literacy, including having a sense of skepticism; you definitely need math literacy, particularly a sense of data and probability; you should have a grasp on history and have thought about the human condition as depicted in literature and the arts; and have a sense of the obligation citizens have to one another.
Whether in a criminal or civil case, whether you are a defendant, a victim, or a plaintiff, those are the kinds of things we should want from jurors. And people are eligible to serve on a jury right around when they graduate from high school. I think the jury standard is a bit more specific and helpful than some of the other gauzy language you quote.
I like that a lot. Though I would point out: Almost all of what Karin describes (basic scientific literacy, math literacy, etc.) fits comfortably within the frame of traditional academics, and is thus already included in high-quality state standards.
What y’all did not like was my contention that only schools of choice have the ability to develop portraits that are anything but gauzy. (See comments to that effect here and here.)
My argument is that it’s hard in such a big diverse country to come up with “profiles” that make real choices without offending people. “We value this but not that” is inherently divisive. That’s OK for schools of choice because nobody is mandated to attend them. Parents and educators can choose schools whose values align with theirs. It’s not so good for traditional public schools, where attendance is compulsory.
And if the profiles don’t make real choices, or express honest values, they tend to be meaningless pablum.
But perhaps they don’t have to be? Ross Wiener thinks it’s possible for traditional public schools to articulate a clear and compelling vision:
Mike’s recognition that schools have always been about more than academic achievement should lead us to take public deliberation and goal-setting more seriously. Communities should be able to ask what young people need to thrive as workers, neighbors, citizens, and human beings—and then organize teaching and learning around those commitments. Connecting learning to this larger “why” may be an important part of motivating students to work harder in school…
If traditional public schools are left with the thinnest version of the mission—test scores, course credits, and compliance—we should not be surprised when families seek schools with a clearer sense of purpose. Public schools should be allowed and even expected to offer one.
But will everyone in a given geography agree on that sense of purpose? I’m a public-school parent, and I doubt it—big-time. In deep-blue Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live, it leads to lots of talk about “social justice” and the like—not a great fit for my Republican-registered son. I bet rural communities display greater enthusiasm for developing patriotic Americans—which some subset of families likely feel uncomfortable about. That’s the rub.
Conor Williams, meanwhile, sees other challenges:
The real problem is with the systematization of messy, organic, non-academic behavior into crisp, meaningful goals. Even presuming that we could come down on a handful of goals for our portraits of graduates, we’re almost always going to run into problems measuring and synthesizing data to make them matter. I’m a hopeless lefty, but I’ve long appreciated conservatives’ awareness of what outcomes policies can actually measure—and which behaviors it can actually incent, let alone dictate. That’s why portraits are always going to trend towards becoming what you called “pablum.”
It’s a little like family engagement—everyone agrees that it’s super important, no one really opposes it. But it’s a nuanced, complicated thing that requires a lot of judgment from schools and educators...which is why policies to make family engagement better are so hard to craft.
Yup. Of course, the Carnegie Foundation and ETS are working on figuring out how to measure “durable skills.” So maybe this problem will one day be solvable? Until then, the measurement challenge is real.
Finally, Jordan Posamentier suggests a twist on the portrait of a graduate idea, starting with the acknowledgment that there’s some there there:
I don’t think it’s a great success if a school graduates a cohort of straight-A students who are disengaged, directionless, mean, or miserable. There’s clearly something beyond grades that matters, and we should be trying to capture it.
Portraits of a graduate are one attempt to do that. Yes, they can feel fluffy or subjective in ways that frustrate families. But they’re also trying to solve an important problem. If we believe in the idea, the answer isn’t to throw portraits out. It’s to de-fluff them and reduce bias. And if we don’t believe they work, then we need a different, credible way to capture non-academic aspects of student success…
One direction I find promising is anchoring this work in students having a clear plan by the end of K–12, like with Spring Branch’s “T-2-4” or Chicago’s “Learn. Plan. Succeed.” If portraits were more tightly connected to what students actually need to execute a postsecondary plan, they could become more concrete and less prone to fluff or bias. Making them responsive to real plans might be one way to preserve their intent while improving their credibility.
To my ears, that sounds like a personalized plan for high school graduates, rather than a single “portrait” for an entire state or district. Which is quite appealing in its own way, for it allows plans to be closely connected to each student’s own values and aspirations.
The Education Scorecard report from Harvard and Stanford continues to attract massive (and well-deserved) attention. Indeed, I heard Tom Kane on the radio just before I started writing this. Speaking of whom, Tom sat down with Matt Barnum to explore some of the report’s major findings, as well as his thoughts about what might have caused America’s “learning recession.” Regarding the latter, Matt writes:
Kane offers two theories. “The slowdown in learning coincided with a dismantling of test-based accountability and a rise in social media use,” his study says. The evidence for both is circumstantial, Kane acknowledges. Other countries have also seen test scores deteriorate, which could be consistent with a rise in social media everywhere. Federal accountability helped drive learning gains in the past, according to some research, so easing the pressure may explain recent declines.
But as Matt points out:
Both theories have holes. Test scores have dropped even in early grades where social media use is not prevalent (although general screen use has accelerated for young kids). And accountability policies seemed most effective in raising math scores, but the most persistent recent declines have been in reading.
Freddie deBoer, on the other hand, says, in effect, “there’s nothing to see here, people!” As is typical, he makes a lot of smart points that are true. But he also downplays our test score declines on grounds that other countries are experiencing them, too:
The declines are major but not unprecedented, precisely because those declines are happening all over the developed world. I just wrote a post that looks at this reality extensively and with graphs. If you’re concerned with American academic declines, you have to grapple with the fact that every comparable country experienced the same declines at the same time, which strongly implies a common cause rather than a uniquely American failure.
Yes, that points to a potential common cause—likely screens, or maybe the after-effects of the Great Recession. But Freddie never explains why we should feel good that other countries’ students are also lagging. This means that kids all over the world aren’t achieving their full academic potential. The last time I checked, that’s bad!
At the other extreme is Steven Wilson, who tells Jill Barshay that the remarkable student-level progress seen in Washington, D.C.—both before and after the pandemic—isn’t nearly good enough.
First, let’s let Jill set the stage:
The Education Scorecard analysis, which compares more than 5,000 school districts across 38 states, finds that most of the country has been stuck in a reading recession—a decade-long slide in achievement that predates the pandemic. Between 2022 and 2025, only five states and the District of Columbia showed meaningful gains in reading. The nation’s capital posted the strongest growth of all and also led in math improvement.
“But the gains should not obscure a grimmer reality,” Jill writes:
In 2025, only 26 percent of Washington students met grade-level standards in math and only 38 percent were proficient in reading, according to a separate report from the D.C. Policy Center, an independent local think tank. Just 16 percent of high school juniors and seniors were considered to be college or career ready.
Which is sobering, yes, and worse than it would have been had the pandemic never happened—or had D.C. kept its schools open to in-person learning.
But it’s also basic math. Kids from low-income families, like most students in D.C., tend to enter the education system way behind, and even universal pre-K, ample funding, and excellent schools can’t make up all of the difference. A 16 percent college-and-career readiness rate sounds bleak, but put that in context. At last count, just 14 percent of students from the poorest quartile of the American population graduated from college.
But don’t tell that to Steven, who told Jill:
Gains of any magnitude are a good thing, but when most students—roughly two-thirds to three-quarters in the case of D.C.—are not functioning at grade level, this is nothing to applaud. Most students are still being failed by the system.
And:
Let’s take the klieg light and move it to the school systems that are educating nearly all of their students, rather than a third of their students.
Jill explains that Steven…
…points to individual schools or charter school networks, where very high percentages of low-income students are at or exceeding grade level. It’s much harder to replicate that success with low-income students across an entire large school district.
Yes, true, plus if Steven is remembering the days of “90-90-90” schools—those, typically charters, where 90 percent of the students were low-income, 90 percent were Black or Hispanic, and 90 percent were proficient in reading and math—that was before the Common Core movement raised the bar dramatically for what it meant to be “proficient.” And, of course, it was long before the pandemic and lengthy school closures knocked students way off track.
Implying that high-poverty schools can only claim to educate “nearly all of their students” if their proficiency rates are approaching 100 percent is the kind of hyperbole that keeps the Freddie deBoers in business. Say it with me: “Growth is good.”
Now that I got THAT off my chest, let’s turn to Emily Oster for her smart read on school start times.
Last week, a new paper, which has been released to the public but not yet peer-reviewed, put together the first large-scale data on the impact of later school start times, based on a policy change in California. Senate Bill 328 restricted public middle schools from starting before 8 a.m. and high schools from starting before 8:30 a.m., beginning with the 2022–23 school year. The authors found this change increased sleep, had some modest improvements in mental health, and increased student test scores by about 0.1 standard deviations, with larger gains among low-income students. This isn’t a game-changing number, but it’s also not trivial—it’s equivalent to about a third of a year of typical middle-school learning.
As Emily explains, other studies have found that sleep is super important for adolescents, and it’s possible that screens and social media are the reason that teens are sleeping fewer hours these days. (I explored the connection between that development and our declining test scores a few years ago.) Overscheduling kids with after-school activities might be interrupting sleep patterns, too.
But schools—and policymakers—can’t do much about how parents handle the afternoon and evening hours. What they can do is push high school start times back. I wonder if this should be a bigger issue for education reformers.
Finally, Joe Viteritti celebrates New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s decision to opt into Trump’s Education Freedom Tax Credit (EFTC). Joe thinks it’s good policy and good politics:
Why would a centrist politician like Hochul defy the powerful teachers union president and other labor leaders who have routinely aligned with her? Perhaps it was a purely political calculation. Where else do the EFTC’s opponents have to go if they have problems with her position? Her Republican challenger in this year’s gubernatorial race, Bruce Blakeman, declared support for the federal funding long before the governor did. While Hochul is polling favorably, it is still early in the election season…. Hochul may be thinking that the issue could neuter a perceived Blakeman advantage.
And as Joe points out, school choice is popular with Jewish, Catholic, Black, and Hispanic voters, all of whom could be important swing voters.
Joe is also encouraged by something Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said at a recent Congressional hearing—namely, that in line with “returning education to the states,” governors would be allowed to put their own stamp on the initiative. As I reported on Tuesday, I’m hearing that the Secretary simply misspoke; Joe is hoping that’s not the case:
Assuming limited funds are available, would it be possible to prioritize federal vouchers for low-income families whose children attend low-performing schools? Will states be able to hold participating private schools to existing educational standards? Will these standards be sufficient to hold newly opened institutions to acceptable levels of performance?
Good questions—and here’s hoping that Joe’s read on the Secretary’s statement is correct.
Matt Barnum is back and shares insights from a University of Chicago study looking at how old-school mailers helped Los Angeles parents learn about and select better, higher-growth schools for their children. Economist Chris Campos, who conducted the experiment, found that sharing information about student growth drove decisions, and not just for families who received the letters. Matt writes:
When a middle school was saturated with informational letters, more students tended to choose high schools with higher growth scores. That was even the case for families that did not get their own letter. In other words, what mattered more than individual information was a community-level shift in thinking. “There seems to be a tipping point,” Campos says.
He continued to track these students as they moved through high school. Those from middle schools where growth information was widely shared were more likely to enroll in college and to report more supportive high school environments. Campos’s theory for why is simple: They benefitted from choosing better high schools based on better information.
New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani used his first veto to block law enforcement’s consideration of buffer zones to protect schools from potentially violent protests amid rampant antisemitism. Binyamin Krauss, who leads a Jewish school in the Bronx, calls on New York’s city council to overturn the veto. —The Washington Post
“In America’s college dorms and high school homerooms, young adults are seeing the world differently, occupying separate online spaces and even demonstrating an aversion to dating,” writes Kevin Mahnken. The Gen-Z partisan gender gap—with “girls repelled by Trump’s policies and boys disaffected by Democrats’ seeming indifference to their concerns”—is emerging much earlier and appears much wider than differences in older generations. —The 74
Enjoy your long weekend!
Mike
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