Rachel Canter: Reading reforms don’t work without accountability. Is she right?

The Mississippi Marathon started long before its Science of Reading efforts, plus debates on Advanced Placement, education fads, and more.

Happy Friday, folks. It’s beautiful here in Washington. I hope the same is true where you are.

Today we dig into Rachel Canter’s firsthand account of the Mississippi Miracle Marathon. Plus we round up a discussion among Robert Pondiscio, Doug Carnine, and Peter Greene on education’s faddism problem and what to do about it; a debate between Paul Peterson and Trevor Packer on whether the Advanced Placement program is lowering the bar; Denise Forte and Andy Rotherham on President Trump’s Education Freedom Tax Credit; and Robin Lake and Travis Pillow on ways districts can survive today’s declining-enrollment, expanding-choice environment.

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As the story of Mississippi’s remarkable educational progress has climbed the ladder from ed-policy journals to the lofty heights of mainstream media, the conventional wisdom has hardened about what explains it. Namely, a robust science-of-reading law combined with energetic implementation led by former state superintendent Carey Wright.

But that’s only part of the tale. Or so argues Rachel Canter, the founder and longtime executive director of ed-reform group Mississippi First, who takes to the Atlantic to offer her firsthand account of her home state’s turnaround.

As I detail in a new report for the Progressive Policy Institute, Mississippi’s transformation depended on holding students, educators, and even policymakers accountable for better student performance. Imposing real accountability in education is politically onerous, which is why such policies have fallen out of favor over the past decade. But reforms that try to copy only Mississippi’s commitment to reading science without accountability will not deliver the intended results. Fixing education is never that simple. If states really want to replicate our success, they need to understand that what Mississippi did wasn’t a miracle at all.

Indeed, to extend the Mississippi Marathon analogy, the state’s reading reforms didn’t start until around the 13-mile mark. The first half of the race featured No Child Left Behind, the Common Core, and an A–F accountability system.

This commitment to high standards was the context in which Mississippi passed our now-famous literacy law in 2013. Under the Literacy-Based Promotion Act, Mississippi students who cannot read sufficiently by third grade are held back a year—“retained,” in education-policy parlance. Importantly, the law allows only very narrow exemptions, such that the overwhelming majority of children promoted to fourth grade must pass the state reading assessment in their first three tries. It also requires schools to screen students through state-approved assessments three times a year and send parents a letter reporting their child’s progress. These two accountability requirements made sure that everyone in the system would be in a hellfire hurry to teach children to read. No one wanted children to fail.

Unfortunately, too many want to skip the eat-your-broccoli parts of Mississippi’s reforms. Rachel writes:

I’m ecstatic that other states are recognizing and seeking to emulate our work. Unfortunately, the policies they have rushed to adopt look less like pages from the Mississippi playbook and more like elaborate paper snowflakes, with many of the most important pieces snipped out. As Idrees Kahloon wrote for The Atlantic in October, states across the country are considering and passing literacy reforms at a time when they have otherwise abandoned the foundation of standards and accountability. Few have committed to the sorts of accountability measures, such as parental notification and strict performance-based retention, that built the conditions for Mississippi’s reading initiative to succeed.

This mentality plays out in statehouses and departments of education in quietly pernicious ways. In Michigan, for example, lawmakers are considering their second revamp of a 2016 literacy law that failed to raise student outcomes, and they still seem torn on holding students to high standards. The original law included a third-grade retention policy that granted several broad exemptions, including allowing parents to opt their children out of being held back. The policy proved both unpopular and ineffective and was repealed in 2023. Lawmakers are now thinking of resurrecting it without fixing its flaws.

It’s great that so many states are embracing the science of reading. But if Rachel’s right—and I think she is—lots of them will be disappointed when the results fall far short of Mississippi’s. There’s been plenty of discussion about the importance of implementation—which Rachel covers, too—but less about the tough-minded accountability necessary to make the reforms stick, including:

• A rigorous A–F school accountability system.

• A grade-retention policy with hard limits on exemptions.

• Strict parental notification rules.

I’m an accountability hawk, so this all makes sense to me. But I know others in the reform coalition are less convinced that putting pressure on schools and educators will lead to positive outcomes. Consider what Karen Vaites wrote last week (covered here in SCHOOLED):

The accountability theory of change assumes that schools know what to do to raise outcomes, and if we just put the right carrots or sticks in place, they will do it. I don’t actually believe that’s the case, writ large. The embrace of crummy programs is a symptom of an education ecosystem where educators receive (and often believe) loads of misguided signals about what works to improve outcomes.

Put another way: If we implemented new accountability schema today, paranoid schools would be just as (or more) likely to embrace the next faddish tech-enabled solution (“just like iReady, untested for efficacy, but now AI-enabled so it’ll work this time!”) as they would to embrace the curricula in Louisiana and Tennessee. Ask me how I know.

So I think we need to go upstream with accountability, and look at accountability at the input level, or at least better research/insight, so we give better signals to schools (and school boards and parents) about the quality inputs/programs.

Rachel, of course, is arguing for “both/and”—both capacity-building around curriculum and instruction and accountability for results. Note, though, that in Mississippi, at least, the accountability piece came first.

Have the rest of us lost our nerve? Are we still willing to stand up for tough school accountability systems, grade-retention policies, and honesty with parents when their kids can’t read? Let me know by responding to this newsletter or emailing me at SCHOOLED [at] fordhaminstitute [dot] org.

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Robert Pondiscio asks “why is education so damn fad prone?”

Every few years, education seems to discover something new that will finally fix schools—a new framework, a new approach, a new way of thinking about teaching and learning. It arrives with urgency and conviction, spreads quickly, reshapes professional development and classroom practice, and then fades away, either replaced by the shiny new thing or layered on top of it. Twenty-first century skills, trauma-informed pedagogy, flipped classrooms, 1:1 devices—all promised to succeed where the last one fell short.

Don’t blame teachers, Robert argues. They are the victims of constant, mindless change, not its drivers. Instead, look to:

1. Weak feedback loops.

2. Leadership legitimacy [that] requires visible change.

3. Low barriers to new ideas.

4. Moral urgency.

Doug Carnine agrees, especially about “weak feedback loops” and “low barriers to new ideas.”

Education lacks the guardrails that keep other professions from drifting into fads. It fails to link and integrate research, preparation, licensure, accreditation, and accountability. Without that integration, effective practice remains vulnerable to being overridden by ideology, weakened by poor training, or swept aside by the next leadership change. That is why the churn never ends. The system has no mechanism for promoting and protecting what has already been learned.

Peter Greene thinks empowering educators is the answer:

If everyone—edu-corporations, legislators, bureaucrats, thinky tank folks—listened more to teachers, the whole loop, the whole education process would work so much better. I’m not pretending that getting teachers into the loop would be easy. Out of a group of four million, you are going to find A) a non-zero number of oddball perspectives and B) a distinct lack of unanimity. On top of that, the teachers who could probably provide the most useful perspective may well be too busy to talk to you. But the current practice of locking teachers out of education discussions (unless they have been pre-screened to make sure they have agreeable opinions) is not helping education in this country avoid the latest in education hula hoops.

This is a hugely important question and Robert, Doug, and Peter all provide important partial answers. But I do wonder whether the fads and churn are as prevalent in the real world of schools and classrooms as we think. We have so little information about what’s actually happening in America’s education system, save from occasional surveys and anecdotes from the press. Maybe it’s the media, and we in the policy world, who continually chase the shiny new thing. It sure seems possible to me that lots of administrators and teachers are (understandably) ignoring the noise and just doing the work.

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Another live debate is about whether the Advanced Placement program is dumbing down what it takes to get a passing score on its exams and thus college credit. Though these questions have been asked before, Paul Peterson restarted the controversy in a post a few weeks back:

Massachusetts politicians are celebrating the highest scores any state has ever received on Advanced Placement (AP) examinations, tests used for college admissions and substitutes for college courses. Seemingly, students are better prepared for college than ever before.

Were it only so. Unfortunately, the higher scores are likely due to easier AP tests, not more learned students. Though Massachusetts students continue to outperform those in other states on the exams, there is no evidence that the performance of the state’s own students exceeds those of students in prior years.

The College Board, the agency in charge of the AP program, admits its questions are easier and passing scores have been lowered on key tests like the English Language exam. They justify the easier tests as an adjustment to a less demanding curriculum in high school and lowered expectations by colleges and universities. In other words, AP is simply adapting to a broad decline in educational standards.

Trevor Packer, head of the AP program at the College Board, says it isn’t so:

AP Exam questions are not easier than in the past, nor are they harder. The exams themselves have not changed. Well-established equating processes ensure the difficulty of AP Exams remains consistent from year to year.

So why have AP scores increased in some subjects and decreased in others? Because the process of converting students’ specific AP Exam points into scores on the 1–5 scale has become more precise.

I’m a big fan of Trevor, and of AP, but in his most recent post, Paul brings the receipts:

Trevor Packer insists there has been no “dumbing down” of AP exams, stating, “The exams themselves have not changed... Well-established equating processes ensure the difficulty of AP Exams remains consistent from year to year.”

This statement is technically correct but strategically framed. It emphasizes one piece of the puzzle (the difficulty of the test questions) while ignoring another (the conversion of raw test scores into AP scores).

Dumbing down does not require easier questions. It can be achieved just as effectively by changing how test scores are mapped onto the 1–5 scale—exactly what [Evidence-Based Standard Setting] does.

And here’s what’s happened to some of the most common AP exams, according to Paul:

• Top score (5): The share of students earning a 5 increased from about 10 percent in 2021 to 17 percent in 2025, on average—a 61 percent increase. Under the old system, the share of 5s awarded in these subjects, on average, hardly changed over the previous six years.

• Top two scores (4 or 5): In 2021, just 28 percent of test takers received a 4 or 5 on these nine exams. By 2025, that had jumped to 45 percent, a gain of 17 percentage points—or a roughly 63 percent increase.

• Passing scores (3 or higher): The share of students receiving a 3 or better rose from roughly 52 percent to 71 percent over the same period, a 19 percentage-point increase—resulting in a 37 percent jump in passing rates.

This at a time of declining student achievement on other measures and a democratization of access to AP courses and exams.

I think Paul’s basically right about what’s happening, but not about why. He thinks this is about maintaining AP’s market share; I think the College Board is facing a real dilemma. They have evidence that students who were scoring a 2 on some exams went on to college and got solid grades in the same subject—indicating that AP standards were loftier than higher education’s. Surely that’s because of declining standards—call it grade inflation—in the colleges themselves, for which there is overwhelming evidence. But if AP is, at the end of the day, about awarding college credit, how is it fair to deny that credit to students who are achieving mastery according to higher education’s own standards? Especially when college credit comes with significant monetary value for those acquiring it?

Still, instead of making it easier to score a 3, 4, or 5 on its tests, I think the College Board should instead have pushed universities to accept 2s for college credit. It could have maintained its own standards while pointing out the erosion of those in higher ed.

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Speaking of eroding standards, Chad Aldeman reports on The Graduation Gap, a new project from the Collaborative for Student Success. “The idea is simple,” writes Chad. “We wanted to quantify the distance between a state’s high school graduation rate and its math proficiency rate.”

• In Florida, the state reports a 90 percent graduation rate while just 44 percent of students scored at level 3 or above on the state’s end-of-course exams in algebra and geometry. The state warns that students performing at this level “may need additional support for the next grade/course.”

• In Connecticut, 89 percent of high school students graduate within four years. Yet, just 31 percent of the state’s 11th graders met college-ready benchmarks on the SAT math portion. Rhode Island’s gap is even wider: 84 versus 23 percent.

• In Washington, D.C., 86 percent of students graduate within four years, but only 15 percent of students met or exceeded the state’s expectations on their Algebra I, Algebra II, or geometry exams.

• Tennessee schools can boast of a 92 percent graduation rate, while just 29 percent of high school students met the state’s expectations in algebra and geometry.

None of this is surprising. As we covered in SCHOOLED last year, it’s probably never been easier to graduate in America than it is today, and there doesn’t seem to be much appetite to fix that. Chad argues that “it’s disingenuous for states to continue to grant high school diplomas and send students off into the world as if they’re fully prepared for college or a career.” But of course, that’s exactly what states are doing, and IMO will continue to do. Bona fide college and career readiness is a high standard! I’m more hopeful that states could enact legislation saying that their public colleges—including community colleges—can’t admit students with very low likelihood of completing a degree or credential. In other words, they cannot accept students who aren’t proficient in reading and math.

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Speaking of high schools, CTE pathways are all the rage these days. Now we’ve got fresh evidence from Ohio about which industry credentials boost earnings and for whom, thanks to a great new study by Jay Plasman, published by the Fordham Institute, and written up by my colleague Aaron Churchill.

Here are Dr. Plasman’s main findings:

1. Credentials typically provide students with an income boost right after high school, but wage returns weaken over time.

2. Some credentials hold value as students reach their mid-twenties—but others do not.

Figure A: Credentials’ wage returns seven years after high school, by career cluster

Note: Solid bars indicate statistically significant wage gains or losses. Information about which specific credentials are tied to each career cluster is available here.

3. Young men benefit more from credentials.

4. Credentials are associated with higher wage returns when paired with career and technical education course completion.

5. Earning industry credentials is, on average, negatively associated with college attendance and degree completion.

As Aaron and Jay write, now that we’re learning which credentials have value and which don’t, states need to get more discerning about their college-and-career readiness indices, part of their high school accountability systems. Kids shouldn’t be considered “college and career ready” because they earned a CPR certification, for example. But an advanced manufacturing one? OK. Likewise, states shouldn’t let students earn high school diplomas with low-quality credentials. And they need to encourage CTE coursework-completion, too. The details matter, people!

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Let’s switch gears and check in on President Trump’s Education Freedom Tax Credit. Denise Forte is not impressed, calling it a “costly illusion.” She runs through several of the common arguments against school vouchers in general: private schools don’t have to take all comers, including students with disabilities; the initiatives increasingly subsidize affluent families whose children already attend private schools; public schools can struggle to cover their fixed costs when they lose kids and their state funding.

I don’t agree with all those points, though I understand them. But I’m not sure I understand this argument:

The claim that federal vouchers will not take money from public schools is false. The program relies on federal tax credits, up to $1,700 per person, and could potentially cost taxpayers $51 billion a year. Those lost dollars are no longer available to support public education, healthcare, nutrition programs, or other supports for students.

I mean, sure, hypothetically it’s possible that, down the road, Congress will vote to cut Title I and IDEA, SNAP and FRPL, etc. to make up for the lost revenue. But if recent history is any guide, it’s much more likely that our lawmakers will just put the tab on Uncle Sam’s credit card, like everything else.

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Andy Rotherham, meanwhile, wonders why Trump isn’t talking about his big, beautiful tax credit.

Donald Trump, McDonalds-eater, bullet-dodger, civilization-ender—and current U.S. President—talks about a lot of things. A lot. Total almost non-stop free association with this one. In our part of the world, his 2025 tax bill created a landmark school choice program in the country that a year or two from now will probably be the largest federal education program. It’ll also probably be pretty popular if polling is any indication. Yet he doesn’t talk about that? Not in speeches. Not on social media. Apparently not in private. Why is that? It seems like a no-brainer and it’s a lot more popular than $4/gallon gas or hours-long TSA lines. You wouldn’t be able to get a normal U.S. President to shut up about it. Yet here we are. Why?

Any thoughts?

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Finally, Robin Lake and Travis Pillow argue that, given declining enrollment and expanding school choice, districts need to better compete for students and find ways “to serve students, families and schools beyond those they directly operate.”

Competing today isn’t about marketing existing schools more effectively. It’s about rethinking what schools look like.

Some districts are already moving in this direction. Orange County, Florida, is facing enrollment declines for the first time in decades. To meet new demands, they’re exploring screen-free microschools and other specialized programs. Elsewhere, districts have launched classical education schools modeled on approaches gaining traction in the private sector. In Houston, a district-run virtual academy now serves more than 11,000 students, helping offset losses elsewhere.

As for serving students who aren’t enrolled in district schools:

In many places, families are piecing together education across multiple providers: a few district classes, an online program, tutoring, or homeschooling. In Florida, more than half of districts now offer classes or services to students using scholarships or education savings accounts, often on a fee-for-service basis. This keeps districts connected to students and creates new revenue streams.

But doing this well requires clearer rules. Questions about pricing, accountability, and safety are often unresolved. States can help by setting expectations for part-time enrollment and unbundled services, making it easier for districts to participate while protecting students.

Good advice!

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Dan Fitzpatrick interviews Google’s Head of Learning, who tells him that the most important problem in learning is motivation and that AI is no silver bullet. Still, he’s excited about ways ed tech can improve the teaching profession: “It can save time, translate languages in real time, turn curricula into podcasts, and let a special education teacher build a music app for a student who communicates through blinks. What it cannot do is make a student feel like they matter.” That, according to Ben Gomes, “remains the work of people.” —Forbes

No surprise: AI makes cheating easier. Kyla Scanlon breaks down the implications of a new Pew survey showing that 59 percent of U.S. teens believe students at their schools cheat at least somewhat often. “The impulse to cheat hasn’t changed—students have always wanted easier paths. But now, for nearly every type of assignment, cheating is almost always easier.” —The Argument

Jenny Anderson shares the story of one tech-forward middle school math teacher who, after years of lost learning time “futzing over lost chargers and bad links,” decided to ditch Chromebooks in his classroom. He realized the screens “offered students cover, a way to appear engaged without any actual sustained effort,” and found himself more aware and responsive to student needs without the screens. —The Atlantic