Hi, friends. Happy Juneteenth to one and all. I don’t look back on 2020 and 2021 with much fondness, but the creation of this new federal holiday was one great outcome of that turbulent time.
Today we analyze Indiana’s approved federal waiver with assistance from Aleksandra Appleton, Matthew Stone, Stephen Sawchuk, Denise Forte, and Dale Chu; react to attacks on reformers from the left (Jennifer Berkshire) and the right (Robert Enlow); and catch up on other recent takes from Jessica Poiner, Dale Chu (again), and Joanne Jacobs.
Finally, let me know what you think about Team Trump moving special education and the Office for Civil Rights out of the Education Department, and whether your views have changed since the last time we checked in on the dismantling. What remains of ED reminds me of the knight in the famous Monty Python scene, “It’s just a flesh wound!“
The OSERS and OCR news captured most of the national headlines this week, but for us wonks the big news was the Trump administration’s partial approval of Indiana’s waiver request. Herewith are some thoughts:
On funding flexibility, as Chalkbeat’s Aleksandra Appleton pointed out, the big news is how small the change will be. As with Iowa, Indiana will be able to move some money around within its own Department of Education, but in Aleksandra’s words, “the waiver does not grant all Indiana districts similar flexibility to spend the money they receive from the state, as the state originally requested in its waiver application. Instead, it allows the state to create a pilot program for up to 15 percent of local education agencies that will allow them to merge Title II, Part A and Title IV, Part A funds.” Indiana took a big swing, and the administration played small ball.
Likewise, even on accountability,Kirsten Baesler’s response was measured, allowing Indiana to use its new (andconvoluted) system only for high schools for federal purposes. That’s a big win for reformers pushing the Department to hold the line, given that approval was not given for grades 3–8.*The high school changes, though, are significant. As Matthew Stone and Stephen Sawchuk of Education Week report:
Indiana will no longer have to weigh the academic indicators spelled out in ESSA—graduation rates and math and reading test scores—as heavily as other factors when grading its high schools and designating schools in need of improvement….Under that new system, the state said it would rate high schools the following way: 10 percent based on graduation rates; 10 percent on standardized test results, including the SAT; and 80 percent on other factors, which might include AP courses, ACT scores, completion of courses for the state’s “honors enrollment” seal, end-of-course tests in biology and U.S. government, and obtaining workforce credentials.
Echoing what many reformers said back in December when we debated the Indiana waiver here at SCHOOLED, Denise Forte said in a statement that “Indiana’s plan appears to vary standards across student groups in a way that will allow the state to say, ‘Everyone is doing just fine.’” I agree with those concerns, and the details will matter enormously, especially on how students (and schools) earn credit for workforce credentials, the value of which can vary tremendously.
Which is why, as Dale Chu told Ed Week, it’s going to be super important to see how the accountability system works in practice, and whether the fears of Denise and others are realized. Do Indiana high schools escape failing grades (and federal identification) for dubious reasons, like getting their English learners to show up to school regularly? “The real test is how it plays out in practice once the A–F ratings are released,” said Dale.
Even better: Katie Jenner and her team could release any modeling they’ve done to show how this system will work in practice.
Let’s also acknowledge, though, that high school accountability is badly broken—and almost everyone knows it. That’s also been a recurrent theme here at SCHOOLED. Our graduation standards are lower than ever; we all agree that “college for all” is misguided, but there’s less consensus on how to move to “pathways” without returning to old-fashioned tracking; and especially in the AI Age, there’s more confusion than ever about what our high schools should be doing. So if there’s an area where the federal government should allow some innovation and experimentation, high school is definitely it.
What did I miss? Get wrong? Reply to this newsletter, email me at SCHOOLED@fordhaminstitute.org, or leave a comment.
* I’ve heard from reputable sources that the Department of Education told Indiana officials they did not need a waiver to use their new accountability system for grades 3–8. So ignore what I said about ED’s “measured response” on accountability!
Jennifer Berkshire is working on a long read about Democrats and education reform for The New Republic, but previewed it recently in her Substack newsletter. It’s not making me any more optimistic about Team Blue, as she writes that “the candidates I’ve been talking to are smartly centering an impassioned defense of public education as part of an affordability agenda.” It’s one thing to defend public schools, but it’s a very different thing to apologize for (or simply ignore) their poor results. Speaking of which, Jennifer writes:
Stop trying to make Mississippi happen
As I’ve written here, there is much to be learned from the success of Mississippi (and insisting that any increase in achievement must be a scam doesn’t exactly aid the cause of public education). But a big part of what excites what’s left of the bipartisan education reform coalition about the “Southern Surge” is that these states spend so much less on education than their blue-state counterparts, thanks in large part to the weakness/nonexistence of teachers unions. When candidates, blue and mostly red, run on “make [insert state] more like Mississippi,” voters likely hear something along the lines of “we’re spending too much on your kid’s education”—a sure loser of a message.
Really? Then candidates should make sure voters know that Mississippi is crushing it on student progress—and that their states could do it, too.
But read Jennifer’s whole post, as it contains some tidbits I find more promising and plausible, like her reporting on the true grassroots backlash to ed tech, and the overdue pushback to “college for all,” including from the left.
Meanwhile, Robert Enlow takes a swipe at reformers from the right. He lists what he sees as the winners and losers of today’s school choice surge, and puts “old school reformers” squarely in the loser category:
While parent and policymaker support for a broader, unrestricted version of universal choice has increased, there are some reformers still stuck in the old-style mode of technocratic education reform. They like school reform as it used to be, not how it is now. The old guard believes and acts as if they know the best levers to pull to make change, and that free-market educational choice is too messy. They have a particular vision of what “accountability” looks like, what data should be collected, and what should be done when schools fail to meet their standards. But the world has passed them by. Unless and until they recognize that education reform is now a bottom-up enterprise instead of a top-down one, they will have the same conversations with the same people and no impact at all on policy.
Yes, we “technocrats” foolishly believe that “accountability” should have something to do with whether students are, you know, learning. Guilty as charged!
But to be clear, plenty of us reformers still love school choice and find the anti-choice chestnuts tiresome. That includes my Fordham Institute colleague Jessica Poiner, who offers a fact check on the oft-stated argument that, unlike private schools, public schools are “open to everyone.” Yeah, right. Looking at how this plays out in the Columbus area, where she lives and works, Jessica explains:
The public schools that claim they’re open to all aren’t actually open because you don’t make enough money to live there. You can’t send your children to temporarily live with family or friends because districts have teams of lawyers and private investigators to hunt you down. And although Ohio has a statewide open enrollment policy that approximately 80 percent of districts participate in, the affluent, high-performing districts that surround cities like Columbus are almost exclusively closed.
Yet many of these districts have the gall to support a lawsuit against Ohio’s EdChoice program. Shameless!
One idea embraced by some technocratic reformers (not a slur!) is the adoption of through-course assessments. Dale Chu is skeptical, writing in the Education Gadfly that “the assessment that does everything is too good to be true.”
Through-year assessment is appealing because it promises to address multiple longstanding frustrations with existing state tests. But growing enthusiasm for it rests on a shaky assumption: that a single assessment can simultaneously satisfy accountability requirements, improve instruction, provide timely feedback, reduce testing burden, preserve local flexibility, and produce valid statewide comparisons. It slices, it dices, it even juliennes!
Instead, Dale writes, states should accept the tradeoffs inherent in any given assessment and deal with the fact that we’re going to need more than a single one. He continues:
The more states try to have it both ways, the more they run into the tension of serving multiple, competing purposes at once. It is the same dilemma captured in the classic Saturday Night Live commercial for “New Shimmer,” a product advertised as both a floor wax and a dessert topping. Through-year assessment has something of a New Shimmer problem: It is being asked to function simultaneously as an accountability instrument and an instructional tool, as a system for comparability and a system for flexibility—design goals that do not naturally coexist in a single product.
I think Dale’s right, though I hear good things about Montana’s approach, which offers districts “modular” assessments that can be spaced and arranged as they wish throughout the school year, but that add up to a valid summative assessment. Maybe this deals with the problem of through-year assessments tying districts to a single curriculum, or at least course sequence? I’m curious to know what you think.
Let’s finish our round-up with Joanne Jacobs, who aggregates education news and opinion better than anyone. In a recent post, she highlights the educators in K–12 and higher education begging California policymakers to return rigor to the college admissions process.
More than a thousand University of California faculty, led by Berkeley mathematicians, signed an open letter calling for a return to SAT/ACT testing for applicants to STEM majors. They say they’re reteaching middle-school math to Calculus 1 students.
It’s no surprise to Elizabeth Statmore, who teaches at San Francisco’s Lowell High, the largest single feeder to the UC system. Every year, she finds herself teaching very basic math—fractions, the distributive property, exponents and roots—to her high-achieving students, she writes in Voice of San Francisco. These holes in their knowledge will sink them in college STEM classes.
“We knew,” she concludes. “We had the data and we saw the problem, but we sent these students downstream along the conveyor belt anyway.”
Kudos to the professors and the teachers, whom Robert Enlow would probably consider to be “technocrats” and “old school reformers” because they care about standards and student learning. Welcome to the club, folks!
“Massachusetts lawmakers on Tuesday announced a deal to overhaul literacy instruction for the state’s youngest learners,” writes John Hilliard, who notes that, despite Massachusetts Teachers Association opposition, “lawmakers contend they have to act now to stop a decade-long decline in student achievement.” Their compromise mandates phonics-based instruction and bans cueing, while also empowering the state education agency to vet curricular materials and increase accountability. Mary Tamer is happy about the bill, so you should be, too.
Democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George won this week’s D.C. mayoral primary and is unlikely to face a serious challenger in the fall election. Her platform echoes complaints from the Washington Teachers Union, reports Kevin Mahnken, and threatens to undo decades of reforms that led to better outcomes for students, including the district’s rigorous teacher evaluation system:
Lewis George has declared that she will end IMPACT if elected. In responses to a candidate questionnaire circulated by WTU, she claimed the system “undermines educators’ expertise and students’ joy of learning.” While committing to retain mayoral control, she has also suggested that she will transform Washington’s office of the superintendent into an independent agency—an idea that could lead to less direct oversight over student data and standards, some worry.
I’m hearing from some local reformers that Lewis George will turn out to be OK on our issues. More to come on this one, for sure.
“The law has passed, now comes the hard part,” writes David Bass about the Education Freedom Tax Credit. He explains how the program provides an opportunity for philanthropists to help shape the future of school choice policy around the country.
Last week, I asked whether the draft OMB regulations on domestic spending were worth freaking out about. I’m now convinced that, when it comes to research—in education and other fields—the answer is yes. Here’s how Alex Tabarrok puts it:
American science has long been state funded but not state directed. Since Vannevar Bush, money has flowed through many agencies to independent universities, allocated largely by peer review. The system has flaws—conformity, gerontocracy, waste—but it had one great virtue, the system was decentralized and not under state control. This rule proposes to bring science funding under top-down, state control.
That doesn’t sound good!
But what about non-research programs? There the issue is not as much about political control, which is more appropriate when we’re talking about policy initiatives. But the separation-of-powers concerns remain. Matt Hurt writes in to say:
I also worry about the separation of powers and overreach of the executive branch. However, Congress has abdicated its authority in a number of ways. One such way is the manner in which much legislation is carried out these days. Massive omnibus bills that no member of Congress or even their staffs can read, much less fully understand the implications of the legislation. As far as education bills, once passed, it is filtered through unelected bureaucrats at USED, the SEA, and then the LEA before it gets down to the classroom. How likely is it that the impact of the federal legislation has the intended impact after going through so many hands?
Simeon Stolzberg somewhat agrees, and offers some context:
Regarding the proposed OMB regulations, I can see the concern that this will be used to insert White House priorities into the appropriations process, which could be a serious problem each time the White House changes hands. Congress is supposed to have the power of the purse and this could be used to effectively block spending that Congress intended. I see two places this can occur: the grant application process and termination of existing grants….
That said, I worked at the USDOE in the early ‘90s on Goals 2000 (the cutting edge of education reform at the time, hah), and as anyone who has worked on disseminating federal grants knows, Congress already gives federal agencies considerable discretion in deciding how to distribute funds. Congress writes legislation in broad strokes, while agencies have to convert abstract language into detailed requests for proposals.
Under Goals 2000, we bent over backwards writing grant requirements that would fit into the law as written while advancing the president’s and secretary’s priorities. This meant incentivizing states to align their standards, curriculum, and assessment systems without stepping on states’ rights in controlling their own education systems.
So I don’t see anything wrong with the president’s policy priorities informing and shaping grant parameters, they just cannot completely replace those established by Congress in the first place. Depending on the specificity with which Congress writes its appropriation legislation, the president generally still has considerable power to decide how those funds get spent.
Regarding existing grants, here the [draft language] seems to give federal agencies the power to terminate existing grants simply because the White House doesn’t like them, even if they align with the intent of Congress for the use of those funds. The president should not get to decide if he wants to fund things like USAID if Congress has already said the federal government will fund USAID.
Finally, Arun Ramanathan weighs in with his thoughts on how reformers can appeal to America’s new philanthropists:
Education reformers first need to understand the culture, assumptions, and language of the AI sector. That means more than occasionally using a commercial LLM like GPT or Gemini. It requires understanding how high-quality AI systems are designed, trained, evaluated, deployed, and improved.
One of the challenges facing education philanthropy is that many of the institutions and leaders that shaped the last 30 years of ed reform don’t understand AI, nor do they appear especially interested in developing that expertise. As a result, we are seeing a mix of random acts of AI with limited educational value, alongside broad opposition that is often disconnected from a nuanced understanding of the technology’s strengths, limitations, and risks.
The AI community views this moment as a foundational technological shift comparable to the arrival of the internet. Much of the education sector, by contrast, is responding as if AI were simply another instructional technology initiative or a new version of the 1:1 device movement. That framing dramatically undersells both the opportunity and the challenge.
AI is not just another educational technology. It has the potential to reshape how humanity tackles some of its most complex problems. We are already seeing breakthroughs in medicine, scientific research, archaeology, geology, and climate modeling. Education should approach AI with the same level of ambition. Rather than asking how AI can fit within the existing ed reform model, we should be asking how it can help solve some of education’s most persistent challenges: language acquisition, early literacy, mathematical reasoning, workforce preparation, and more. Doing so will require a willingness to reexamine many of the assumptions that have defined the reform movement from standards, curriculum, and assessment to the very organization of schooling itself.
If education reformers want to attract the attention of the next generation of AI philanthropists, we must demonstrate not only that we understand AI and speak its language, but that we are prepared to apply it to problems at a scale worthy of its transformative potential.
See you next week!
Mike
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