Hey, friends. It makes me happy that, after a super-joyful World Cup tournament, it appears that The Odyssey is bringing delight to many here and around the world. Maybe we’re just all craving things to feel good about.
Today we hear from Laura Hamilton and Conor Williams on accountability; Rick Hess, Stefanie Sanford, Cami Anderson, Rachel Canter, and Bruno Manno on career pathways; Matt Barnum, Ary Amerikaner, and Halley Potter on desegregation; Jed Wallace on portfolio districts; and Alicia Anderson, Elliot Regenstein, and William Corrin on school start times. But first: Should we quit teaching foreign languages in America’s schools?
As I’ve watched my two sons go through a comprehensive public high school, one of the things that angers me the most is the fact that they have to take so many required courses because various politicians decided that they should. For years, for example, it was enough for Maryland high schoolers to take a semester of health—until some lawmaker pushed for a whole year instead. That might not seem like a big deal, but that’s a semester that could have been spent on something more interesting. You see the same line of thinking when legislators add course requirements to solve other problems in American society, from financial literacy to driver’s ed to the now-anachronistic “coding for all.”
But as I’ve written before, including last week in SCHOOLED, what drives me craziest is our continued practice of making middle and high school students study foreign languages. Sometimes there’s an explicit state mandate to do so, and sometimes it’s just pressure from colleges, which often expect applicants to have at least a couple of years of foreign language under their belts.
My beef is not with the idea that it would be great for American kids to know other languages. It would be great, as I understand the potential benefits that come from immersing yourself in a second language and culture. And it’s got to be good for our brains to be pushed to learn another language, even later in life as some dementia researchers believe.
The problem is that we are terrible at teaching foreign languages. And it’s obvious why: We don’t typically start until kids are 12. If we sincerely wanted to succeed in teaching American kids another language, we would mimic other countries and start much earlier—in preschool or at least by kindergarten. We would make it a priority and hold schools accountable for helping their students become bilingual.
Instead, we start too late, make crotchety teenagers go through the motions of trying to learn another language, and almost uniformly fail to achieve the desired outcome.
Consider this sobering factoid: Only 11 percent of Americans report speaking a second language “very well,” and just 7 percent of those eleven percent report learning that language in school. That works out to less than 1 percent of Americans becoming fluent in a second language thanks to what they learned in school.
Yet we plod forward anyway, contributing to what you might call the “bull-shittification” of the American high school. Yes, our high schools have always entailed a certain amount of BS. That’s just the nature of any large bureaucratic organization. And it’s not altogether terrible for young people to have to learn to deal with BS, as it’s part of life. But that doesn’t mean we have to keep piling on the BS. And the millions of kids sitting in French or Spanish or Mandarin classrooms must know that it’s mostly BS. Almost nobody is actually becoming fluent. Many of their teachers are less than fluent themselves. It’s not taken all that seriously by their high school, given that there’s no accountability tied to it. Everyone is just going through the motions.
So let’s stop pretending. Especially now that people can stick AirPods in their ears and hear what a foreign language speaker is saying, let’s stop the charade and give students back some of their time—time that could be used studying something they are actually interested in, or time that could be used for them to get an extra hour of sleep, as I argued last week.
Or if we actually think helping more young Americans become bilingual is a priority, let’s do what every other country does and start when kids are young enough to succeed.
What do you think? Should high schools give up on teaching foreign languages? If not, why not? Hit me up at SCHOOLED@fordhaminstitute.org, respond to this newsletter, or leave a comment.
It’s been over a month since Ross Wiener published his anti-accountability diatribe in the New York Times. We’ve covered the myriad responses (here, here, and here), and now Laura Hamilton joins the clamor, asking “how can school accountability reflect the purposes of education?”
The choice facing accountability system designers is not between a narrow system that fails to acknowledge the broad purposes of schooling and a complex, burdensome system that dilutes attention to crucial goals. A coherent, purpose-driven approach can help ensure that accountability systems are clear about what they measure, modest about the inferences and decisions those measures can support, and useful to the many constituencies who rely on these systems for decision-making.
The key, Laura argues, is to use different measures for different purposes:
For example, a state might retain existing ESSA indicators for the purposes of identifying the lowest-performing schools and providing comparable data for monitoring, administer an annual climate survey for public reporting and informing school-level interventions, and allow districts to select additional indicators related to civics, workforce preparation, or student well-being for local planning.
I like that, as it syncs with the notion that states should act forcefully when schools fail to help students make progress from year to year in English language arts and math. We don’t want to tell principals: If you’re doing a good job with student well-being, we’ll look the other way if your kids can’t read. Because just like student achievement, student well-being is necessary but not sufficient.
Conor Williams has thoughts about accountability, too—and in particular how it can help to restore public trust in our public school system:
A path forward for schools will require rebuilding public confidence in the public education system’s ability to deliver upward mobility to students—to future graduates—who show up, work hard, and follow the rules.
How? Local, state, and federal policymakers need to set compelling, transparent goals for K–12 systems that reflect families’ actual priorities for kids and schools. For instance, fashionable as it might be to posit that public education needs to be remade with AI and other ed tech tools, public skepticism about their role in schools is growing. Leaders can’t persuade families that schools are on the right track by ignoring the things families really want.
And Conor is skeptical that Ross knows what families really want:
After all, when the Pew Research Center asked what’s taking schools in the wrong direction, more parents—nearly 70 percent—said that “schools are not spending enough time on core academic subjects.”
Boom!
Another big topic this summer is career and technical education. Almost everyone agrees that the “college for all” push was misguided and that high school students deserve high-quality pathways into career training. But is our agreement real, or just an inch deep? And how can we avoid making the same mistakes with career pathways that we made with previous high school reforms? Rick Hess interviews Stefanie Sanford about this and more. Rick writes:
I’m reminded of the push to boost high school graduation rates 20 years ago. Back in 2005, school districts had long reported dazzling graduation rates. On your watch, the Gates Foundation commissioned research showing the real figure was much lower. Reformers made tackling that a priority and enjoyed a lot of success. From 2005 to 2024, the real graduation rate increased from 75 percent to 89 percent. That would seem to be a huge win.
Of course, it turned out that a substantial chunk of that “success” was a product of credit recovery, lowered standards, and grade inflation. Today’s sky-high completion rates sit side by side with declining academic achievement and eye-popping rates of chronic absenteeism.
Stefanie parries:
Career pathways may have the opposite problem. Where the grad rate was a concrete, well-defined metric, “pathways” can mean apprenticeships, dual enrollment, certifications, work-based learning, or all of the above—almost anyone can project their priorities onto it. That flexibility is politically powerful. But it creates a different risk: Rather than reducing complexity to one gameable metric, we may be building momentum around something too loosely defined.
Yup! Stefanie then offers three pieces of advice for policymakers:
First, don’t rely on a single attainment measure. Remember Goodhart’s Law: Once a measure becomes the target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Second, pair attainment with proof through independent validation…
Third, build feedback loops tied to concrete outcomes that students and families care about: jobs, wages, college credit, and advancement.
Whereas Stefanie (and Rick) focus on quality and rigor in career pathways, Cami Anderson worries about students who lack access to these opportunities.
Often, CTE programs that look good on paper are just screening out the very students they should be particularly eager to serve. Many of the programs require minimum GPAs, evidence of reading skills, or demonstrated work readiness to enroll…
Meanwhile, the young people who stand to benefit most from expertly designed approaches are often the least likely to attend schools that provide the academic preparation, social capital, and access needed to take advantage of them. The programs accessible to them tend to be about temporary work exposure, antiquated jobs, or low-wage work. School systems, workforce initiatives, and city officials pat themselves on the back for engaging such students at all. Compounding the problem, employers are far less likely to see this group as worth taking a chance on.
I appreciate Cami raising this issue, which is tough and important—and congruent with her leadership of New York City’s alternative high schools over a decade ago. But I strongly disagree. I don’t think we should be shy about saying that students are not going to succeed in high-quality career pathways if they can’t read, write, or do math, or if they haven’t learned to behave properly.
Sure this can be taken too far, as may be the case in Massachusetts, where the career-tech high schools are so academically selective that many students who could succeed in the trades and want the chance to get started while in high school don’t get to.
And Cami is right that we need initiatives that can help our lowest-achieving, most struggling teenagers to succeed, and those initiatives should include a career-training component. But that’s different from saying that all career pathways need to incorporate that difficult mission.
Another key question is how the heck we’re going to get employers to participate in high-quality career pathways programs, especially by taking in youth apprentices or interns. Rachel Canter and Bruno V. Manno make a strong case that the problem is too difficult for individual schools to solve on their own; states need to step up. They suggest four actions that state leaders should take, based on six case studies they recently wrote up:
Develop a statewide work-based learning framework that incorporates work-based learning in graduation requirements and accountability systems so that schools do not feel that the time and effort spent developing high-quality programs will go unrecognized.
Fund intermediary and coordination capacity directly, as well as the other true costs of earn-and-learn programs like student wages and transportation, rather than expecting schools or employers to absorb those costs informally.
Create licensure flexibility for industry experts, following Indiana’s “workplace specialist” certification and similar adjunct-teaching pathways that let qualified professionals teach or supervise career-related coursework without a traditional teaching credential.
Make regional collaboration easier by establishing legal and funding structures for intermediaries, especially for small or rural schools, that can build partnerships with local industries.
Good stuff, though I’m still not sure if that’s going to be enough to dramatically increase the number of youth apprenticeships and the like. But it’s worth a try!
Unlike accountability and career pathways, desegregation doesn’t get a lot of ink these days, though a few folks are trying to change that. One of them is Ary Amerikaner, described by Matt Barnum as “The activist and lawyer who’s trying to integrate schools by race and class.” In an interview, Ary tells Matt why it’s important to keep working on this thorny problem:
It matters because separate truly is not equal. We have seen for years—our entire country’s history—that so long as we go to schools in separate buildings, students of color and students from low-income families will inevitably get the short end of the stick.
The second reason it matters is because in our increasingly diverse democracy, our foundational institutions are being torn apart at their seams along lines of race, often by design. The only way that our country can get through that is by having real relationships that are built from the earliest ages across lines of difference.
Halley Potter is also worried about segregation—and how the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit could make it worse. After discussing the ugly history of “Segregation Academies” that sprang up in the South in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, Halley writes:
Some voucher programs that started out serving mostly students of color have now seen an increase in White students in recent years. When North Carolina’s private school voucher program launched in 2014, for example, a majority of students receiving vouchers were Black, and just 27 percent were White; however, as the program expanded incrementally from one serving only low-income students to one with no income limits, the percentage of vouchers going to White students grew to 73 percent, in a state where only 51 percent of school-aged children are White. A 2024 investigation by ProPublica into North Carolina’s private school voucher program found 39 schools that fit the profile of segregation academies that were receiving public money through voucher programs.
The new federal private school voucher program specifies that participation is open to families earning up to 300 percent of area median gross income, which means it would be open to roughly 90 percent of students nationwide. With near universal eligibility, the federal program could easily be susceptible to similar patterns of segregation, disproportionately benefiting White students and furthering segregation between public and private schools.
To which I say: Maybe, but not likely. After all, as Halley herself writes:
Nationwide, the biggest drivers of school segregation are segregation between public school districts and among public schools within districts. However, private schools contribute, as well, accounting for an average of 12 percent of school segregation between White and non-White students across all metro areas—combining both the segregation occurring among private schools, and the segregation between private schools and public schools.
I too wish the federal tax credit’s income limits were stricter, so that only poor and working-class families could benefit. But the overwhelming reason that our schools are segregated is that our neighborhoods are segregated. So it’s not surprising that neighborhood public schools reflect this segregation.
Halley is making a case against blue states opting into the federal tax credit. But if she, and others, want to do something about school segregation, their focus should remain on the locus of most such segregation: the public schools.
Let’s keep the school choice discussion going, this time with a focus on charter schools. Jed Wallace celebrates the (fantastic) news of Karega Rausch’s appointment to lead the new agency that will oversee all the public schools in Indianapolis, district and charter. (See SCHOOLED’s coverage of this groundbreaking Indy reform here.) What’s happening in Indy is easily the most exciting reform in the country right now, and the folks there are building a dream team to carry it forward.
What caught my eye about Jed’s post, though, was his smart take on the end of “portfolio districts” as typically defined.
The idea was that those leading our nation’s school districts could eventually be convinced to cede the direct operation of schools to others.
Neerav [Kingsland] called it relinquishment.
Robin [Lake] and Paul [Hill] called it the portfolio approach.
Gates spent the better part of a decade attempting to get charter schools and school districts to enter cooperative compacts.
All of it was driven by the idea that school districts would continue evolving toward becoming regulators overseeing portfolios of different providers while managing functions such as facilities, transportation, enrollment, and the allocation of public resources.
But at some point, the viability of the portfolio approach became fundamentally compromised.
And that was because, Jed writes:
[Districts’] authorizing moved from a portfolio mindset to learning new ways to play defense.
To prevent charter schools from growing.
And indeed, to take enrollment back, which seems the prime motivation of most urban school districts in this era of declining enrollment.
All in hopes of getting back to what the status quo clearly considers its nirvana:
A reestablishment of its position as monopoly provider.
For those of us, though, who believe that school districts operating schools while also authorizing them present an unavoidable conflict of interest—indeed, an absence of checks and balances reflecting one of the gravest aspects of public education’s misdesign—there has always been another coherent end state toward which they could evolve.
Not relinquishing the operating function, but the regulating one.
Rather than evolving toward becoming regulators, school districts could give up their regulatory role and become pure operators regulated by someone else.
In a sense, this gets us to something very much like the portfolio approach originally envisioned.
Just by a completely different means.
I think that’s exactly right. The only way “relinquishment” or a “portfolio approach” is going to work is with an Indy-style governance change, with a new public agency overseeing charters and district schools, and controlling the money, facilities, and buses.
Then districts can go back to doing what they are well suited to do: Provide quality education at scale, with a common curriculum, uniform teacher pay and evaluation system, and all the rest.
Chad Aldeman, “America’s Trillion-Dollar School System: 5 Trends Explain Where the Money Goes”
Charlie Barone, “True Crime and Project-Based Learning: Perfect Together?”
Rachel Canter, “How Mississippi Almost Abandoned Its Education Reforms”
Liz Cohen, “Screen Bans Can Be Education’s Dry January — Time for a Much-Needed Reset”
Anna J. Egalite, “Parental Choice Is Sending Public Schools a Message. Are They Listening?”
Jen Krajewski, Cynthia Lake, and Amanda Neitzel, “Advancing early literacy with a 1st-grade safety net”
Marty Lueken and Colyn Ritter, “Declining Enrollment Doesn’t Have to Mean Declining Schools”
Alexandra Walsh, “Walking away from education technology isn’t the answer to the latest backlash”
The New York Board of Regents will consider proposed regulations aligning teacher prep programs with the state’s science of reading framework, reports Alex Zimmerman. And in another blue state, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer signed new science of reading literacy training requirements into law, which will strengthen teacher training programs in addition to continued funding for training, literacy coaches, and approved curricula.
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I’ve argued for years that disparate impact analysis is a terrible tool for tying discipline numbers to civil rights enforcement, so kudos to the federal Department of Education, which rescinded portions of Title VI regulations last week to ban exactly that. Mark Walsh and Stephen Sawchuk detail how the topic shifted with the whims of the past few administrations, and share Secretary Linda McMahon’s statement “that the rescissions ‘ensure teachers retain control over their classrooms without fearing weaponized antidiscrimination laws’ that would require them to make race a factor in disciplinary decisions.”
Several years ago, Oregon’s state legislature inexplicably banned school districts from issuing truancy citations. Thankfully, Malheur County defied the ban and, in the process, posted the state’s best attendance numbers. Yet the state education department does not support bringing back the tool to keep kids in the classroom amid a chronic absenteeism crisis, and the state’s teachers union opposes “punitive actions” when kids don’t show up for school. Political pressure may be mounting, reports James Neff, with state senator Christine Drazan—running for governor—calling for the reevaluation of “every available tool” for the state that ranks near-last in the nation for reading and math achievement.
A new Brookings report finds high-poverty and predominantly non-white districts received higher public funding for most of the past half-century. “I definitely don’t want to put myself in the ‘money doesn’t matter’ (group), like we shouldn’t care about that at all,” lead researcher Sarah Reber told Amanda Geduld, yet “this idea that people have that obviously the reason that schools that serve poor students are struggling is that they have less money (is) not the case. For one thing they don’t—they have more money.”
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Also in the “like I’ve been saying…” category, Suchi Rudra considers how ambient AI can pick up on patterns that inform personalized learning in the classroom.
Last week I asked whether states should require public high schools to push their start times back to allow teens to get more sleep, and y’all had opinions! Let’s start with my colleague Alicia Anderson:
Maybe late start times—without replacing the extra hour at the end—solve the sleepy teen problem and provide a better approach for this trend toward 4-day weeks under the banner of preventing teacher burnout and providing more opportunities for teens’ non-classroom activities. Changing state-mandated instructional hours would give districts/schools more flexibility to set a schedule that works for their programs, but the state might want to be explicit that the reduced hours shouldn’t be used to drop a day.
I’d keep the early high school start time to preserve afterschool activities if choosing between one or the other. We know sports and other extracurriculars are super important, and for a lot of kids, it’s what keeps them coming to school. (Nat Malkus just studied this and claims causal in-season effects!) Many high schoolers use the time for jobs to support themselves and their families.
I want to see higher participation in athletics and extracurriculars, especially as kids grow more skeptical about the value of school when AI can think for them. Later start times—if paired with later end times—limit afterschool options and create outdoor practice windows so short that only children with family resources to seek out expensive indoor club sports can participate.
Next up, Elliot Regenstein:
So now that my youngest is off in college, the issue of high school start times is no longer personal. But after eight years of parenting children at a high school with an 8 a.m. start time, my personal feelings align with the research: High school should start later. And my wife regularly made the point that it’s almost impossible for individual boards and superintendents to swim against the tide of starting early, especially when schedules for sports and other after-school activities may be set across districts or by non-district actors. To really shift the whole ecosystem probably requires state action.
William Corrin has thoughts, too:
Back when I worked for the Evanston schools, I co-led a homeroom with one of the biology teachers. She had collaborated with researchers at Northwestern on some adolescent sleep research. It basically pointed out the same stuff that you flag about how high school kids would do better with later start times. It’s always periodically on my mind, and you cite some of the (surmountable) challenges related to how we do school—like scheduling for after-school activities like sports. In addition, juvenile crime is highest in the late afternoon (I believe this is still true), between end of school and return home of parents from work. Later start time of the school day and after-school activities that also shift into a later frame might help with that, too (though I suspect some of the young people getting involved in crime are not active or are less active in after-school opportunities).
I know of at least one large high school in NYC that manages their capacity by having cohorts of students that start school at different times. I’m pretty sure there are other high schools in NYC and elsewhere that also use this strategy. I do wonder if there might be some kind of natural experiment of sorts that could be possible looking at student outcomes for students in those differently start-times student cohorts.
Great stuff, folks. See you next week.
Mike
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Completely agree - we should drop all foreign language graduation requirements and colleges should stop requiring foreign language for admissions. For native English speakers there is almost never an economic return to learning a second language. (Not that they even learn the second languages they are taught in school). It’s a huge waste of time. Some states have switched to requiring a series of concentrated electives which students can fulfill via a foreign language sequence or a career tech ed sequence. This should be common practice. But colleges have to get on board as well and change their admissions preferences.
I love the take on foreign languages. I work at an MYP school where students are mandated to take a foreign language every year from grades 6-10, and I still don't think it is a good use of time and energy. Learning a foreign language should be a choice and not a mandate. I just shared your newsletter on my own Substack. I appreciate your analysis and hot takes!