Education Next

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

New from David Houston: It can be difficult to keep track of all of the contemporary debates roiling the politics of education. On any given day, news headlines might be highlighting our sharp disagreements over?how best to teach about race and racism in America’s past and present, the?rights of gay and transgender students?(and their parents), the?passage of new school choice legislation, the ongoing?legacy of pandemic-era learning loss, rising rates of?chronic absenteeism, or the value of?cell phones?and?artificial intelligence?in schools—to name a few. It would be both reductive and inaccurate to characterize these debates as mere distractions. Each of them reflect real differences in how Americans view the roles and responsibilities of schools in our large, diverse, and divided society. Yet a close look at the results of public opinion surveys reveals an important and often overlooked truth: the American public is less concerned about these hot-button issues than about the nuts and bolts of teaching and learning. It has been a banner year for high-quality, scientifically rigorous polling of the public’s attitudes toward education issues. Not all surveys are created equal, and some do a better job than others of assembling a representative sample of U.S. adults and eliciting their unvarnished views. In general, surveys that recruit participants by dialing random phone numbers or mailing random addresses—a time-consuming, complex, and increasingly expensive process—have a?stronger track record?than their proliferating counterparts that recruit participants via the Internet. Even after applying statistical adjustments to make their samples look more like the population as a whole, polls that recruit participants online are more likely to capture unusual subsets of the American public, whose views do not necessarily generalize to the entire country. Keep reading: https://lnkd.in/gVKw-GTS

In a new article for EdNext, Chester Finn, Jr. writes: In 1953, the Oxford philosopher Isaiah Berlin published one of the 20th century’s most celebrated essays, titled “The Hedgehog and the Fox.” He was riffing on the Greek poet Archilochus, who wrote that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” In this essay, Sir Isaiah divided people—well, writers and thinkers, those sorts of people—into two categories. As summarized in?Wikipedia, they are: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include?Plato,?Lucretius,?Blaise Pascal,?Marcel Proust?and?Fernand Braudel), and foxes, who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include?Aristotle,?Desiderius Erasmus, and?Johann Wolfgang Goethe). Reflecting on my own engagement with education over the past 60 years, beginning just a dozen years after Berlin wrote, I find that I started as a hedgehog but have turned into a fox. My hedgehog self, I should add, was young, optimistic, probably naive. Becoming a fox has meant growing skeptical, wary, perhaps jaded, though still determined. Once upon a time—college senior time, LBJ time—I pretty much agreed with President Johnson that the way to end poverty in America while achieving other worthy ends was to beef up the education system, particularly the parts that served poor kids, and that the way to do that was to ramp up its funding, such as via the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the War on Poverty, both of which he pushed through Congress. Keep reading: https://lnkd.in/gyGYmtiR

In a new article for EdNext, Holly Korbey writes: On a hot and humid July afternoon, the Huntington Learning Center franchise in Brentwood, Tennessee, was hopping. Tucked into a strip mall in Nashville’s?wealthy southern suburbs?and strategically located between some of the state’s?best public schools, the tutoring center was occupied that day by elementary and middle schoolers who would probably have preferred to be at camp or the pool. Instead, they were scattered throughout the quiet back room of the center, pencils to paper, working—mostly on worksheets, mostly in reading and math. Summer is tutoring’s busiest season, which means K–12 students filter through the center all day long instead of just after school, getting help with everything from basic phonics to ACT test prep, either one on one ($75 per hour) or in groups of three or four students with the teacher circulating among them ($60 per hour). On that day, three or four tutors were on the job, ranging in age and experience from college undergrad to retired teacher, checking work, providing feedback, and correcting mistakes. Franchise owner Brian Telford said that most of Huntington’s students, whether they come in person or work from home on their digital learning platform, arrive at private tutoring because they need remediation in either reading or math. Often, they need help with both. After the standard full evaluation, families often realize their children are missing more core skills than the one they came in for; a good portion of the center’s students have been diagnosed with some kind of learning challenge or disability, most often ADHD. Telford, a soft-spoken Southerner, worked in the corporate world for decades before buying the franchise with his wife in early March 2020, just weeks before Covid-19 shuttered schools nationwide. He declines to divulge which curriculum and teaching methods Huntington uses to get its students back on track, but he said families come to the center for a variety of reasons, looking for academic help for their students. “We are serving a lot of needs,” Telford said. “Sometimes it’s [because of] Covid; sometimes they move, and they’ve missed some school. There have always been students that struggled in school, right? Some of the students we see may have still needed help, even if Covid hadn’t happened.” Keep reading: https://lnkd.in/gFncz4Ds

New from Daniel Buck: “It’s everywhere,” George Mooren, a sophomore at Kimberly High School in Kimberly, Wisconsin, told me when I asked about the prevalence of cheating at his school. Where a handful of students in every class used to take a sideways glance during a test or complete homework together, he and his older brother JR, a senior, said it’s now the majority of students the majority of the time. The pair described cheating as both more common and more wide-ranging, meaning greater numbers of students are cheating on a broader range of assignments. After school, students send around photos of homework or problem sets on Snapchat. They prompt ChatGPT to craft them an essay. JR told me about taking an online test in class and seeing almost every one of his classmates type questions verbatim into Google’s search bar. Before the advent of large language models, the technological breakthrough driving the latest wave of artificial intelligence, cheating remained a secondary or even tertiary concern in education, though the occasional scandal did make national headlines. In 2002, for example, the?New York Times?published a story?about a teacher who failed students for copying portions of a project from the Internet and how a parent coalition then tried to force the educator to award passing grades. And many readers will recall the?Operation Varsity Blues?cheating scandal that saw 53 people charged for lying, cheating, and scheming their children into prestigious schools. Even so, these news stories are not common. Why discuss cheating when we can kvetch about book bans or national test scores? Perhaps, since cheating will always exist, education reformers have never bothered to confront it. Maybe we ourselves look back with a guilty grin at our own shenanigans. In one?academic survey, a working administrator joked, “You’re telling me in your entire education you didn’t look at somebody else’s paper at least once? Give me a break! We’ve all been there.” Or it’s possible that reformers assume that the academic and learning consequences of cheating are minimal, so they focus on other efforts to improve outcomes. Keep reading: https://lnkd.in/ew55b5mK

"Steady nutritional advances over the course of the last 100 years have yielded continuous gains in aptitude and ability, just as in height." In an Education Next article, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University senior fellow Paul E. Peterson explores the correlation between #nutrition and intelligence, advocating for improvements to early childhood nutrition as a means of enhancing cognitive abilities worldwide. https://lnkd.in/gb7xKaP4

New from Jorge Elorza: Although my parents’ formal education extended only through fourth grade, they knew that a good education was the ticket to a better life. They made their way from Guatemala to the United States, and ever since, their message to my sister and me was the same: education, education, education! Like so many parents, my mother and father were willing to make any sacrifice and endure any hardship so that their children had a chance to attain the American Dream. Like so many parents, they also put their entire hopes and dreams on our city’s public schools to provide that opportunity. As I lived through my K–12 education journey, I enjoyed almost every part of the ride. However, reflecting back on my experience, I recognize some important lessons—beyond the academics—that were revealed to me over time. I’ve learned to appreciate all the helpers that we encounter along the way and to be thankful that they appear at key moments in our lives. I’ve learned about the sometimes-determinative role of luck. I’ve learned about the importance of great, lasting friendships. I can say without question that I would neither be who I am nor where I am today if it were not for Classical High School in Providence. Classical is the only test-in public high school in the city—the school that the most-prepared 9th graders attend. For kids who grow up on my side of the city (the less affluent, more challenged side), going to Classical often changes the entire trajectory of your life. If you attend Classical, you have a good shot of attaining the American Dream. If you do not attend Classical, things are different. Today, for example, only 2.4% of Providence 12th graders are able to do math at grade level. They may graduate from high school, but it’s hard to say that they are on track and prepared for success. A day that will always stand out in my mind is a random Friday in 1988. I was an 8th grader, and it was the last day to register for the Classical entrance exam. Being the irresponsible tween-ager that I was, I had not yet signed up. It was late in the afternoon when my guidance counselor, Lou Toro, came to my classroom and singled me out in front of my peers. He walked directly toward me, curtly told me to come with him, and, if I remember correctly, grabbed me by my shirt to let me know that I didn’t have a say in the matter. Mr. Toro walked me back to his office, put a pen in my hand, and made me register for the exam. If it were not for Mr. Toro, I would not have attended Classical High School. His intervention changed my life, and I will always be profoundly grateful to him. Keep reading: https://lnkd.in/guTUvYNk

For decades, most school choice advocates promoted vouchers as a means-tested program for families that would not otherwise be able to afford private schools. Targeted vouchers were deemed equitable, politically prudent, and fiscally responsible. Since 2020, however, a new wave of advocacy has prioritized the creation of universal programs that serve nearly all families irrespective of their household income—and such initiatives have been adopted in 11 states to date. To what extent do universal programs compromise the moral, political, and fiscal appeal of vouchers as they were first conceived? Is the rapid expansion of universal programs across the country worth that compromise? Derrell Bradford, president of the advocacy organization 50CAN, argues that it is. Mike Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and an executive editor of?Education Next, advocates for choice expansion that continues to prioritize need. Explore the Forum: https://lnkd.in/gR67e_5H

{new} Schools employ more special education teachers than ever. So why is there a shortage? Read my piece @ Education Next --> https://lnkd.in/e2nxjhGh