Education Next

New from Martin West: The latest?Nation’s Report Card?dashed hopes that U.S. students might have finally closed pandemic learning gaps. The results show reading scores are down nationally in both 4th and 8th grade, compounding declines on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP. Math scores ticked upwards from 2022 in 4th grade, but not enough for students to reach achievement levels seen in 2019. And scores were flat in 8th grade after a historic drop in 2022. Persistent learning loss is pervasive nationwide: achievement in each state lags pre-pandemic levels on at least one test. And it’s intensifying inequality. The gain in 4th-grade math reflected improvement among high-achieving students. The reading declines were largest for low achievers. There are plenty of factors contributing to our ongoing slide, but I’m increasingly convinced a big part of the problem is that many stakeholders (from policymakers to parents to educators) are thinking about learning loss the wrong way. When my exercise routine gets disrupted by an injury or a busy stretch at work, my conditioning quickly deteriorates. When I’m able to return to the gym, the first few workouts are a grind. But if I stick it out and resume my routine, I find that I’m back to my baseline (48-year-old) fitness level within a few weeks. I worry many people think recovery from educational disruptions works much the same way—that if we just get kids back into classrooms and learning under normal conditions, they’ll get back on track in short order. Keep reading: https://lnkd.in/grHdFvBz

New from Josh Dunn: At the beginning of the 2023–24 school year, the then chancellor of the New York City Public Schools, David Banks, announced that the “balanced literacy” approach to reading instruction would be banished from the city’s schools. “We have not taught the kids the basic, fundamental structures of how to read,” he proclaimed at a press conference. “We have gotten this wrong in New York and all across the nation.” Balanced literacy took hold in many of America’s elementary school classrooms in the 1990s. Supporters of the approach maintain that it blends whole language and phonics methods and that it should be tailored to the individual needs of students. The term “balanced literacy” certainly makes for an appealing brand. Who would root for “unbalanced” literacy? But the approach wasn’t working. In 2022, only about a third of the nation’s 4th graders?tested as proficient?or better on the NAEP reading assessment. For several decades, the high priestess of the balanced literacy movement has been Lucy Calkins of Columbia University, who directed the now-defunct Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. Calkins once estimated that her Units of Study reading curriculum had been adopted by as many as one in four U.S. elementary schools. Irene Fountas of Lesley University and Gay Su Pinnell of the Ohio State University have also been primary purveyors of balanced literacy, through their Fountas and Pinnell curriculum. At the core of the trio’s approach was an article of faith: the key to literacy instruction is getting children to love reading. This was supposed to be accomplished by having teachers read aloud to them and then letting children choose which books they wanted to read, according to their own interests. The curricula also relied on “cueing,” in which students guess at words based on “context clues” instead of sounding them out. Keep reading: https://lnkd.in/gETZMCbr

Hugely grateful to Education Next for publishing this very personal piece about my education across two worlds, and what I've learned from it. https://lnkd.in/erJvtkEy

My Q&A with Nicholas Lemann in the new issue of Education Next - the case for testing content over aptitude to promote mass access, as outlined in Nick’s new Princeton University Press book, “Higher Admissions.” Adapted from our recent #HigherEdSpotlight conversation.

New from Jon Marcus: Rusmariel Alcantara and her classmates are working in a windowless physics lab at a community college campus in the western Massachusetts city of Springfield, tackling an exercise in distance, acceleration, and velocity. When she’s here, Alcantara says, she’s often mistaken for a college student. In fact, she still has a year and a half to go before she graduates from high school. But she already has enough college credits to add up to an associate degree. “I feel very prepared,” says Alcantara, who nearly detoured to a vocational high school at the end of 8th grade before enrolling instead at a charter high school called Veritas Prep that requires all of its students to take college courses. Now Alcantara is planning to go on to a four-year university for a bachelor’s degree. “I had lost my passion for school. Now I feel purposeful, like I’m achieving something. I feel like I have to act more mature—watch how I say stuff and what I say. I know how to read a syllabus and what to do when I get to a campus. This isn’t a new environment anymore.” That’s what can happen when high school students are put into college courses, according to the many advocates of the approach, which is growing meteorically: they become more comfortable with the idea of college and can imagine themselves there. Keep reading: https://lnkd.in/gEPz_7z2

New from Natalie Wexler: It’s clear, from the experience of schools across the country and around the world, that when teachers align their instruction with the principles of cognitive science—whether intentionally or not—all students can benefit. Those who benefit most are generally the students who struggle in a system where retention of information is considered relatively unimportant and learning through unguided inquiry rather than explicit instruction is valued. Science-based teaching can not only raise the level of student achievement overall but also make the system more equitable by narrowing gaps between high- and low-achievers. Unfortunately, this kind of teaching is happening in only a few small pockets in the United States, and many educators are either unfamiliar with the principles behind it or view them with skepticism or outright hostility due to their training. What can be done to overcome those obstacles and bring science-informed teaching to the millions of children who could benefit from it? We need a sense of urgency, but we also need to recognize that solving this problem at scale will take a while. The United States has an extremely decentralized education system, so there’s no way to simply legislate a shift in curriculum and pedagogy for the nation as a whole. Even in countries with less decentralized systems, it’s been difficult to make much headway. Still, in the United States, there is a lot that government can do to encourage a shift to science-informed teaching. No state, to my knowledge, has explicitly embraced principles of cognitive science, but most have now adopted some legislation or set of policies aimed at bringing early literacy instruction in line with the science of reading—which is a crucial component of cognitive science. Keep reading: https://lnkd.in/gWaAYEfd

My piece on Our Village School is out in Education Next! Grateful for this opportunity ??https://lnkd.in/gcw7F6UX

In Salman Khan’s new book,?Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That’s a Good Thing)?(Viking, 2024), the Khan Academy founder predicts that AI will transform education by providing every student with a virtual personalized tutor at an affordable cost. Is Khan right? Is radically improved achievement for all students within reach at last? If so, what sorts of changes should we expect to see, and when? If not, what will hold back the AI revolution that Khan foresees??John Bailey, a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, endorses Khan’s vision?and explains the profound impact that AI technology is already making in education. John Warner, a columnist for the?Chicago Tribune?and former editor for?McSweeney’s?Internet Tendency, makes the case?that all the hype about AI tutoring is, as Macbeth quips, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Explore the Forum: https://lnkd.in/gwagC2_a

In an article for EdNext, Matthew A. Kraft and Sarah Novicoff write: For decades, policymakers have argued that the American education system fails to provide the necessary instructional time for students to remain competitive in an increasingly globalized economy. In 1983,?A Nation at Risk?warned that “mediocre educational performance,” due in part to the comparatively fewer hours U.S. students spend in school, threatened the very safety and economic security of the country. A decade later, the National Education Commission on Time and Learning?declared?“Time is learning’s warden. Our timebound mentality has fooled us all into believing that schools can educate all of the people all of the time in a school year of 180 six-hour days.” In 2009, President Obama?echoed these sentiments, arguing that the American school calendar “puts us at a competitive disadvantage” and that “the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom.” Nonetheless, the traditional school schedule remained largely static over the last few decades. In recent years, to address learning loss after the Covid-19 pandemic, state leaders have?advocated for increased time in school. Several districts around the country, including in?Texas?and?Virginia, experimented with extending school-year calendars to more than 200 days. In 2023,?New Mexico lawmakers?increased mandatory school hours to 1,140 each year—an increase of 15 percent for elementary schools—and?Alabama lawmakers?introduced a bill to add 30 days to the school year. At the same time, however, a growing number of districts have shifted schedules in the opposite direction to address post-pandemic staffing shortages. About?900 districts?nationwide, including more than half of all districts in?Colorado, now follow four-day schedules, up from 650 in 2020. What are the potential impacts of these changes to time in school, and what decisions can we make to maximize benefits and minimize harm? We conduct a comprehensive review of the relevant research and an analysis of newly compiled data that compares American students’ time in school to their peers across the country and around the world. In addition, we conduct a case study to identify schedule-based disruptors of instructional time and suggest how schools can make the most of the time they have. Keep reading: https://lnkd.in/g4dhxcZ5

In a new article for EdNext, Virginia Lovison, Ph.D. and Cecilia Hyunjung Mo write: When it comes to attracting and retaining teachers, public attention is typically focused on pay. The driving assumption is that many teachers are underpaid relative to the challenges and importance of their work, and that by improving teacher compensation, we can solve staffing challenges and improve student outcomes. It sounds reasonable, but it doesn’t match up with exiting teachers’ feedback about their jobs. Teachers?rarely cite dissatisfaction with salary?when leaving the job. While compensation certainly matters to teachers,?working conditions?may matter just as much—or more. To figure this out, we designed a survey that asks teachers to choose which school features they prefer when comparing a pair of hypothetical job offers, including salary, school support personnel, class-size reductions, coaching, and childcare subsidies. We then determined the average costs of those features and conducted an analysis to show how much teachers value them in terms of cuts or boosts to their own pay, to compare the relative values of these roles to teachers with their costs to schools and districts. Teachers’ preferences are clear: they want to work where they will have the support of full-time experts in special education and pediatric physical and mental health. An overwhelming majority describe these supports as “beneficial” or “extremely beneficial” when asked to rate special-education co-teachers (93 percent) and paraprofessionals (92 percent), as well as counselors (89 percent) and school nurses (88 percent). These roles are so important that teachers are willing to forgo salary increases when asked to choose between the two. Our analysis shows the average teacher is willing to trade a 21 percent raise for the full-time support of a special-education co-teacher and an 18 percent raise for a full-time special-education aide. Keep reading: https://lnkd.in/gAZc7JkB