The case for college-for-all

Hi, folks. I’m back from college dropoff and back in the saddle. The feelings, they do continue, but by all accounts my son is off to a great start. Thanks for the notes of encouragement and congratulations. It’s a wild ride!

One programming note: You’ll notice that today is not Tuesday. I’ve decided to stick with my once-a-week cadence, at least for now, but will publish on Fridays going forward. An end-of-week roundup of ed policy commentary, if you will.

In today’s edition, we hear reformers, including Laura Slover, Mike Kirst, Dan Goldhaber, Vlad Kogan, and David Griffith, make the case for college; watch Christy Hovanetz tee off on WorkKeys; listen to Regan Kelly explain how collective bargaining agreements can impede the implementation of high quality instructional materials, and debate “relinquishment” and Indianapolis with Jed Wallace, Patrick Gavin, and Ethan Gray.

Last week I asked whether the pendulum has swung too far away from “college for all” and toward the embrace of career pathways. And many of you said: Oh yes!

It’s not that people literally believe that all high school graduates should matriculate directly to college, or that there’s not value in high-quality career and technical education programs. But many reformers do worry about discouraging students who might succeed from giving college a try—especially if they pick the right institution and get the right support.

Let’s start with Laura Slover, who acknowledges that the “college and career readiness for all” movement “leaned much more heavily toward the college side of the equation.” But that doesn’t mean we should over-correct in the opposite direction. Laura writes:

The answer isn’t a choice between “college for all” and “career pathways.” Students need multiple high-quality pathways to success, and those pathways should be permeable, rigorous, and connected to real opportunities. A student should be able to pursue career-connected opportunities without closing the door to college, just as a college-bound student should have opportunities to develop skills, experiences, and credentials with labor-market value.

Going forward, we must be clear that all pathways are valued and integral to our societal fabric. At the same time, encouraging multiple pathways cannot mean that students are “sorted.”

…Now the system must fulfill the promise of helping every learner develop the knowledge, skills, and experiences that allow them to succeed in whichever path they pursue. Understanding the broader set of capabilities students bring to the table is part of that change process. That’s why capturing evidence of competencies including but also beyond academics needs to be part of the system in the future.

Mike Kirst—an OG standards-based reformer extraordinaire—thinks that the “permeable” pathways that Laura supports are already here. He writes:

I do not know if we have overcorrected concerning promoting college compared to career, but the policy analysis needs much more context to understand student options than you provide. In my recent paper, I provide several sectors of post-secondary education that are options for students that you do not discuss. These include dual enrollment by completing a college course in high school, apprenticeships, certificates, licenses, on the job training, military education, internships, and transferring between sectors. Most of the sectors excluding colleges are expanding their enrollments. There are 134,000 entities that offer credentials.

About 34 percent of our workforce use a license or certification in their jobs. Moreover, students may start community college in a four-year college transfer program, but later transfer to a community college CTE specialization.

There is a lot of movement among these sectors. For example, over 50 percent of students transferring from a four-year public institution moved to a two-year public institution. Students will stop out at a community college and enroll in a job specific credential program at a private school. The concept of a pipeline is not reality, and successful student navigation among all these complex choices is difficult with little guidance on what is the best choice. High schools rarely know where all students go immediately after graduation, but about 75 percent go to some form of postsecondary education (not including on the job training).

Mike’s corrective is an important one. It really is complicated out there, although I’m not sure that insight helps K–12 leaders figure out what students should be doing in high school. Should all students take a traditional college-prep curriculum, with a little bit of CTE on the side, so as to avoid the “sorting” that Laura refers to? Or should we embrace the model in Maryland’s Blueprint, which allows pathways to diverge in the 11th grade, as long as students have demonstrated a solid base of traditional knowledge and skills? That’s my preference. But my colleague David Griffith makes an important point that we shouldn’t ignore how hard it’s going to be to build high-quality CTE programs at scale:

The problem isn’t that the pendulum has swung too far away from college for all. It’s that some of the same folks who are bemoaning the K–12 system’s manifest inability to implement the science of reading at scale are (with inexplicable confidence) loudly celebrating that same K–12 system’s supposed capacity to design literally hundreds of high-quality pathways that will help kids land literally thousands of ostensibly in-demand jobs that are constantly evolving in ways policymakers cannot possibly anticipate.

Yes, some forms of high school CTE make sense. No, there is no reason to think that “high school CTE for all” will go particularly well.

But there are risks on all sides of this equation. Dan Goldhaber considers what happens to higher education when we push underprepared students to give college a try:

I think Matt Barnum’s pushback, and the evidence he draws on, is right if the question is: “Do students on the margin of the college-readiness threshold benefit, on average, from going to college?” My read of the literature is that they do. But that’s a different question from “Should we admit more students at that margin of readiness?” The should here needs to account for the effects of encouraging or admitting more marginal students not just on those students, but on current and future college students, as well.

And that’s where things get more complicated: College is a credential that means something in the labor market, and admitting more students who aren’t really ready could diminish the value of that credential, and possibly the value of college coursework, if changes in the student mix lead to changes in how courses are taught.

Consider the following thought experiment. Would students who are clearly not ready for college benefit from receiving college diplomas, even without ever attending? My guess is that most would because of the current value of the college diploma credential. But, of course, the value of the diploma would be affected if there are significant numbers of students who are getting what is tantamount to a meaningless degree. Yup, I know you see that all of this applies to high school diplomas, too!

So I don’t know where we should draw the line in terms of encouraging more students to go to college, but I do wish we were investing more in making sure that students who do go to college are really ready to succeed. And I think that needs to start early given what we’ve learned about the stickiness of measures of academic skills (tests) from third grade through to college.

Finally, Vlad Kogan argues that “who should go to college is less important than where those students go”:

What reformers got wrong was not so much focusing on “college for all,” but paying too little attention to the quality of the colleges those students were going to. In addition to encouraging more students to go to better, more selective four-year universities, we should also be discouraging marginal students from going to for-profit programs and perhaps community colleges, where completion rates are dismal. As an aside, it’s also for-profit colleges—and professional programs like medical and law school—that are responsible for the sharp increase in student borrowing; net price at public universities is flat or even down in inflation-adjusted terms. So the same lesson applies to advocates concerned about unaffordable student debt.

This framing also exposes the huge flaw in the local “Promise” and other free community college programs, as I’ve recently written about here in Columbus. If they divert students from better programs (and the evidence shows they clearly do), that is not a win for those students.

The debate around “college or career” versus “college and career” can sound abstract at times, but here’s one example of where it gets real. Should states use college placement exams—the ACT, SAT, and now CLT—as measures of academic achievement in high school, even though they send a “college for all” message? Or should students be able to take career-focused assessments, like WorkKeys, instead? We’ve covered this issue several times here at SCHOOLED, especially because Alabama state superintendent Eric Mackey has proposed to use WorkKeys as part of the state’s accountability system.

Christy Hovanetz has been leading the charge against the idea, and in a recent post she laid out her arguments. Among them:

While WorkKeys includes nine subtests, the bronze, silver, gold, and platinum scores are based on the three subtests that assess only reading and math skills.

The intent behind WorkKeys is to provide an alternate “career ready assessment” but in practice, the WorkKeys questions assess reading and math skills at an upper elementary to early middle school level, not the high school standards states expect students to master before graduation.

Yikes, that’s not good.

There’s growing recognition that our systems for measuring student success at the high school level are broken. But even those of us who want career readiness to be part of the picture must be on guard against new indicators that simply lower the bar. A better approach than a watered-down version of WorkKeys, in my opinion, is to embrace a small group of industry credentials that have been shown to boost student earnings, as Ohio recently did.

And here’s some good news for accountability hawks: Alabama has backed down from including WorkKeys in its Ed-Flex proposal to the feds. Score a win for Christy, as well as local reform advocates in the Yellowhammer state!

Last month, I argued that curriculum-reform types and systemic-reform types might find common cause in removing from collective bargaining agreements any provisions that impede instructional improvement:

High-quality instructional materials, for example, won’t make much difference without high-quality professional development, teacher planning time, and regular coaching and feedback. But some union locals force districts to the bargaining table to negotiate all of that, and more.

That’s certainly the case in Montgomery County, Maryland, as Regan Kelly explained in a guest post in Nora Gordon’s Substack:

Do you want to improve student outcomes? The most reliable way to do that is to improve teacher practice. Simple, right? Not exactly. How do teachers improve? What support matters most? And who is responsible for making it happen? My experience (and the research!) suggest that anchoring improvement in curriculum and protecting meaningful collaborative time to prepare for instruction are two of the most important ingredients in effective teacher development.

Unfortunately, Regan writes that:

In March 2025, MCPS amended the contract with MCEA. The changes had significant implications for teacher preparation time. Teachers still have planning time (and the same total amount!), and schools still have instructional experts—reading specialists, department chairs, and content leads—whose roles include supporting teacher development. The big shift is that the amendment introduced—without a definition—the concept of “directed” planning time. In elementary schools, principals now can only direct teachers’ use of planning time twice per month and cannot use the entire planning block. Before the amendment, there was no such distinction or limit….

Why did the contract change? I think the idea was that teachers should have more freedom over their planning time. And that is a noble ideal. The rationale behind the change is understandable. Teachers are professionals. They need time to grade, contact families, prepare materials, reflect on student work, and respond to the realities of their own classrooms. No one wants planning time to become a series of compliance exercises or meetings that don’t improve instruction.

The question is whether, in restructuring how teacher planning blocks can be used, we’ve accidentally made it harder to provide the kind of collaborative support that research suggests supports teachers to implement high-quality instruction—and the kind of development that MCPS agreed teachers need.

These kinds of shenanigans are one reason I strongly suspect that high-quality charter schools are implementing HQIM more effectively than most districts. Without these burdensome CBA provisions, they can put in place effective practices—and without needing to trade away something else in return. Hey researchers: Someone should test that hypothesis empirically.

Speaking of charter schools, we’ve also often discussed here whether districts are capable of embracing and sustaining a “portfolio schools” model. I’ve been skeptical that the politics will allow it:

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.

In part, I was channeling Jed Wallace, who has been calling the breakthrough in Indianapolis—the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation, or IPEC—the charter movement’s “North Star”—in part because it ditches the notion that districts can ever be effective authorizers themselves. (Which is saying something since Jed was the one-time head of San Diego’s charter office.) Recently, Jed wrote about big-city districts:

Their 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.

Patrick Gavin, who used to run the statewide charter authorizer in Nevada, agrees and thinks it’s no accident that this is happening at a time when the enrollment cliff is causing hardship and pain.

The Indiana Legislature didn’t create IPEC because anyone woke up one day excited about joint governance structures. It created IPEC because enrollment decline and a surplus of nine thousand seats made school-by-school and board-by-board decisions insufficient to the scale of the problem.

Ethan Gray, meanwhile, is as excited about the Indianapolis breakthrough as anyone, but he pushes back on the notion that it’s the only approach that can work:

At the end of the day, we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Look at the Mile High City. Denver is one of the most well-known and well-studied examples of portfolio district reforms. In Denver they call it the “Family of Schools.” Most charter folk would argue that the reform era has completely stalled there, that the union takeover of the DPS board in 2019 signaled the end of the Bennet/Boasberg era of portfolio leadership. But look closer.

DPS still operates a unified enrollment system. Most charters are still in DPS-owned buildings. Local advocates have ensured that most charter renewals are won and that the occasional new school application has a fighting chance of approval (and the State Board appeal mechanism is a useful check and balance for the rare denial). DPS still operates a Portfolio Office. Simply put, Denver’s “Family of Schools” persists. Turns out some portfolio policies are pretty dang sticky because they work well for families and educators, too.

That’s a contrarian take, to say the least! I’m definitely in the “Denver reform has stalled” camp. But Ethan makes some good points. He continues:

Yes, it’s cleaner to separate the operator from the regulator. I’m not arguing with the design principle. I’m arguing with what comes from it—the implied theory that says we should hold out for Indy-style structural change and view anything short of it as not worth pursuing. A purity test of sorts.

If that’s our bar, we’ve just told 99 percent of districts that they shouldn’t even start. Indianapolis has had 15 years of unusually disciplined, well-resourced work by The Mind Trust and its civic partners. That’s not a starting condition, it’s a hard-fought endpoint…

So do we want more Indys? Hell yeah! And we should probably spend a lot of time and money figuring out exactly how to do that.

But we also need more Denvers.

What do you think? Should, say, all red states with big blue cities be pushing for Indy-style reform? Or is Indianapolis sui generis? Let me know by leaving a comment, responding to this newsletter, or emailing me at SCHOOLED@fordhaminstitute.org.

Other edu-opinions worth your attention

Chad Aldeman, “Lessons from the First Statewide Mandate on School Start Times”

Daniel Buck, “Can charter schools survive universal school choice?”

Cara Candal, “The Strategies Leaders Need to Deal With Plummeting School Enrollment”

Danny Corwin and Jennifer Dewees, “Amid the Emerging AI Economy, We Need a Skilled Trades Pipeline in High School”

Bill Hansen, “America’s Aging High Schools Need a Vocational Revival”

Nathan Harden, “We’re Teaching Kids Scarcity in an Age of Abundance”

Rick Hess, “Howard Gardner: How AI Will Force Us to ‘Rethink’ Education”

Lynn Jennings, “ESSA Waivers Done the Right Way: D.C.’s Request to Pause School Ratings”

Curtis Palmore and Robert Hiller, “Portrait of a Graduate Initiatives Can Fail, but New York’s Doesn’t Have To”

Nina Rees, “Virginia’s Charter School Paradox: Local Control as Obstacle—and Opportunity”

Jed Wallace, “When Philanthropists Walk Away, and the Need for Narratives that Do Justice to the Progress We’re Making”

Natalie Wexler, “Harnessing Social Studies Instruction to Boost Literacy”

Conor Williams, “The Science of Reading and Teaching English Learners to Read Are Not Incompatible”

Glenn Youngkin, “Dem Governors Across the Country Get a Failing Grade for Standing in the Way of Education Freedom”

Cheers to Houston Independent School District and Superintendent Mike Miles: “Three years into Texas’ takeover of the district, one of its most troubled schools has risen from seven consecutive F ratings to its first-ever A,” reports Naaz Modan. And cheers, too, to Texas’s A–F system, which allows high-poverty and struggling schools to get credit for rapid student growth by ignoring their proficiency rates.

Ohio has supported interdistrict open enrollment since the late 80s, allowing kids the opportunity to seek out better public schools. Now, changes to the state funding model under the “Fair School Funding Plan” are reducing the money available to districts receiving students from outside their attendance boundaries. April Helms and Kelli Weir report on how districts are blaming the change for their decisions to end their open enrollment programs, and charging tuition for current students hoping to stay in their schools.

Emily Oster digs into curious data within New York State’s preliminary 2026 assessment results. She walks us through the wonky details of year-over-year test score calibration and identifies a potential error in 2025 that likely inflated that year’s scores—making the apparent drops in the preliminary 2026 data look particularly bad.

And note her two lessons from the exercise:

First: The fact that it’s possible to make so much progress on this question even without asking the people who did this is a testament to the power of having the detailed data at hand. And it’s a reason we need to keep making that data accessible and usable. Making the data available holds people to account.

Second: We should try to train ourselves to be more skeptical of results even if we wish they were true. I, as much as anyone, would love it if introducing phonics would increase proficiency rates by 12 percentage points in a single year. But that number isn’t realistic based on what we know about testing. And this should have been figured out, and fixed, last year.

That’s all, folks! See ya next Friday.

Mike

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