Experts have raised a variety of factors contributing to this reality: learning loss due to the pandemic, increased screen time, the dissolution of long-form reading and teacher burnout. While each of these points are critical, there’s an even deeper, more fundamental issue facing students that a flurry of educational reforms haven’t fixed and may have worsened:

They are simply not spending enough time actually reading in school.

Practice makes perfect, but without the reps, there’s no room for growth. Research kids should have at least 15 to 30 minutes of uninterrupted reading time a day. The reality? Much worse. On average, middle school and high school kids are getting about, if that.

This poses an even greater challenge for students in poverty. Kids who have little to no reading opportunities at home depend on school to fill the gaps. When reading minutes are reduced, they’re hit the hardest.

So how do educators fix it?

It turns out, they already have the answers. Here’s what the research tells us.

First, schools must protect uninterrupted reading time — and make it non-negotiable.

Right now in school, kids are bombarded with interruptions: digital devices, announcements, visual distractions, visitors. In fact, a recent of the Providence Public School District revealed that classrooms are interrupted more than 2,000 times a year, resulting in the loss of between 10 and 20 days of instructional time. What’s more, administrators often underestimate or misperceive how these interruptions might be disrupting the learning process.

Students need to be given the space to focus. If educators want to make changes, they need to get intentional about providing stronger opportunities for kids to focus in school: rethink the physical environment to reduce visual noise, streamline communications for students and build in time for cognitive processing.

That means giving students the time and space to get their reading reps in.

Second, teachers must make the time kids are spending in school worthwhile.

Giving kids the time and space they need to read, requires that they know how to do it. And there needs to be accountability and checks that tell us the practice is worthwhile. That’s where a strong curriculum comes in.

Educators need to be asking ourselves whether the work we’re asking students to do is worthy of their time and intelligence. If our kids are spending 15,000 hours in school across K-12, it’s on us to ensure they’re getting out what they’re putting in. It starts with providing high-quality instructional materials that are comprehensive, coherent, evidence-based, knowledge-rich, and grade-appropriate.

shows students learning under a coherent curriculum gain an average of 1.3 months of additional learning — 1.8 months for struggling students. With the right instruction, kids who are hit the hardest finally have the opportunity to catch up.

Unfortunately, TNTP’s 2018 multi-system study,, and its subsequent study revealed that students are rarely taught grade-level work, and they’ve often seen the materials that are being covered in a previous class. As a result, while kids are getting As and Bs, they’re demonstrating mastery of grade-level standards just 17% of the time.

Bottom line? Kids are doing the work, but they aren’t being appropriately challenged. They’re caught in an incoherent moshpit of disconnected academic programming. Schools are underestimating students’ potential, and it’s backfiring on their ability to learn to read.

Schools need to prioritize a curriculum that is cohesive, knowledge-rich, and grade-appropriate to support true learning. If we’re going to ask kids for their time, let’s make it count.

Finally, schools need to be clear-eyed about how they are measuring success.

Today, the domain of English Language Arts is made up of three key areas that are interconnected: reading, writing and oral language. these areas work hand in hand to help students build their skills; writing improves reading comprehension, while oral language supports both reading and writing.

The problem? Most testing tools that are used for instructional decision-making focus on a small slice of what it means to be proficient in the higher order skills of ELA. They rely on limited data sets like from to draw conclusions around proficiency across the whole domain, sometimes with big consequences for kids and teachers and instructional programming. Often, these tests don’t measure grade-level proficiency, they measure recall. That’s why our children can get As and still not be proficient readers.

If schools want our kids to succeed in literacy — an imperative in the age of AI — there has to be a more advanced discussion about assessment. Schools need to adopt an assessment system that aligns with the domain of English Language Arts. That means moving away from single-point-in-time multiple choice testing strategies and adopting assessment practices that hold the bar for higher order reading, critical analysis, writing, speaking, communicating and collaborating.

Solving the literacy gap doesn’t require an overhaul of our education system or an innovation that is smarter than all humans combined. As educators, we can teach children to read who attend school for 15,000 hours. We need a collaborative, aligned effort to challenge the status quo. We need leaders who are willing to pull on the right levers for change: protect reading time, provide high-quality, grade-level materials and measure what actually matters

The reports, both the results of small, intensive gatherings of educators, policymakers, researchers, tech officials and students last year, share a common warning: AI in schools must serve human-centered learning that doesn’t simply push for more efficiency. To do anything else risks creating a generation of young people ill-equipped for the future.

The findings come as young people say they’re turning to generative AI more than ever: A Pew Research Center survey released last week found that more than half of teens ages 13 to 17 use chatbots to search for information or get help with schoolwork. About four in ten report using AI to summarize articles, books or videos or create or edit images or videos. And about one-in-five say they use chatbots to get news.

For the first report, a group of 18 people met in July in Phoenix. Brought together by , a training and policy organization, and , a digital curriculum company, the treats the question of how schools should view AI as a literal “Choose-Your-Own-Adventure” story: The authors lay out three possible scenarios in which educators in an imaginary school district make radically different decisions about the technology.

In the first scenario, the district retreats from AI altogether after a data breach, abandoning a previously created “Innovation Lab,” while teachers return to traditional instruction and testing.

The restrictions soon backfire. Students continue using AI at home, but without guidance, take shortcuts on homework, developing a kind of survival mechanism they privately call “school brain.” Seeing how irrelevant most lessons are, they do just enough to get by, offloading thinking to AI tools. When tested, they show shallow understanding and poor foundational skills.

Test scores plummet, college acceptances drop and 40% of graduates land on academic probation. Employers report that graduates can neither work independently nor collaborate effectively with AI. Teachers begin departing in waves.

Retreating from AI, the authors find, creates “the worst of both worlds” — students who can neither think independently nor use AI effectively.

In the second scenario, the district, facing competition from AI-driven private schools, goes all-in, adopting a comprehensive, district-wide AI platform for automated instruction. The platform promises greater efficiency via AI tutors, automated grading and behavioral monitoring. And while it initially lowers costs and produces higher test scores, teachers find that students are soon gaming the algorithms rather than learning. The auto-grader penalizes valid but unconventional answers, while multilingual learners are unfairly penalized for non-standard answers on tests.

Teachers find themselves defending grades they didn’t assign and can’t fully explain, while families that challenge grades are stopped by “proprietary algorithms” that even administrators can’t review. The system delivers “a black box” that removes human judgment: “Students could feel the difference between being evaluated by an algorithm and being understood by a teacher.”

Before long, graduates struggle with collaboration, creativity and adaptability — skills employers and colleges increasingly value.

In the report’s third choice, the district, via its Innovation Lab, redesigns its offerings to prepare students for an AI-driven future while keeping a focus on “human-centered” education. Rather than focusing solely on technology, it develops a “graduate profile” that emphasizes critical thinking, ethical reasoning and human-AI collaboration, among other indicators.

The lab shifts to flexible, project-based learning, and students soon learn to use AI as a tool that supports but doesn’t replace their thinking. While the district continues to satisfy state accountability through testing, it also pursues federal innovation grants to fund portfolio-based assessment systems based on the graduate profile.

All is not rosy, though. The redesign is expensive and hard on teachers. Enrollment suffers as political resistance builds steam. But graduates soon demonstrate an ability to critically evaluate AI tools, adapt quickly to workplace changes and develop a “learn how to learn” mindset that serves them in the long term. 

Alumni soon report that their “robust” portfolios of work are a huge advantage in competitive job markets, and employers say they are the only new hires who critically evaluate AI’s recommendations, spotting hallucinations and biases.

Amanda Bickerstaff, AI for Education’s co-founder and CEO, said the first two scenarios are what educators at the July convening said they were seeing most often in schools.

“There was a strong recognition from everyone, including the students, the two high schoolers, that the traditional methods have not worked … for decades,” she said. “But it feels safer.”

As for going “all in” on AI, she said, that point of view is inevitable in many places, given current aggressive efforts of tech giants like Google who are “pushing into schools,” going direct to students.

“There’s this real pressure from both ed tech and AI itself, because it’s such a big market that’s never really been figured out,” she said.

What makes it worse is that few tech firms employ enough teachers to ensure that their products work well for students. “They don’t have hundreds of education people,” Bickerstaff said. Their education teams are “fractions of their headcount, working on tools that are instantly in students’ hands.”

The third path, in which the district redesigns its offerings, is “the most human” of the three, she said, and the most intentional. “The third path is the one that trusts humans and educators and students and families,” Bickerstaff said.

‘Explicitly ambidextrous’ schooling

by the , a think tank at Arizona State University, also calls for a new approach to schools’ decisions about AI, saying the technology “should be a catalyst for human-centered learning, not a replacement.”

The CRPE report, the result of another gathering in November, asserts that schools are at a pivotal moment. Their AI policies could go one of two ways: They can either entrench outdated educational models or help bring about a fundamental transformation of schooling.

“One of the big things that came out of those discussions was a strong feeling among the group that AI is currently being thought of as a productivity tool for the education system that we have, rather than a tool to radically improve teaching and learning and outcomes for kids,” said Robin Lake, CRPE’s executive director.

During its meeting, the group repeatedly discussed an “efficiency paradox” that could make schools faster and cheaper without addressing students’ actual needs. To protect against it, they call for a more coherent, human-centered approach that is “explicitly ambidextrous,” improving current practices while intentionally building toward new learning models.

The problem with AI, the report alleges, is that it could simply improve the efficiency of outdated educational models. It notes that the , a time-saving testing technology, for decades reinforced low-level standardized assessments, often at the expense of improved learning.

Instead of using AI as a new kind of Scantron, it says, AI could make way for several innovations, including new assessments that capture real-time performance as students work. It could even measure key non-academic indicators such as belonging, confidence, curiosity and relationship quality.

Lake said the report’s idea of an “ambidextrous” approach to AI came from an acknowledgement by the group that “we have to attend to the kids who are in our schools right now — and the teachers,” she said. “We have to use whatever technologies are available to make things better, but we also have to make investments in big, really different whole-school designs.”

Those could include not just better assessments but ways to help teachers provide “rigorous personalization grounded in the science of learning.”

Districts could create classrooms with multiple adults working in teams based on their expertise. And AI could enable schools to match students to internships and other experiences, handling administrative tasks so humans can focus on relationships.

Lake said the group that met in November kept coming back to one idea: Keeping an eye on both the future of school and the reality of the schools we already have.

“A lot of times when we have these conversations about AI and the future of schooling, it feels very floaty and abstract,” she said. “So I really appreciated that the fellows had a vision to connect the here-and-now to what kids need to know and [should] be able to do in the future. That feels really important for us all right now.”

In eighth grade reading, the percentage of students on grade level or above in those schools grew at three percentage points over last year — from 36% to 39%. In math, the percentage of fourth graders on track in majority-Black schools grew from 36% to almost 40%, the latest i-Ready assessments from Curriculum Associates found.

Those are “bright spots” in a snapshot that otherwise shows recovery has remained stagnant five years following the pandemic, said Kristen Huff, head of measurement at Curriculum Associates. 

Black students “had a bigger dip, especially in the early grades, so they have more room to catch up,” she said. But generally, performance has plateaued and there’s still a long way to go to reach 2018-19 levels. “I think we have to hold ourselves accountable to at least that bar, but that’s not the end goal.” 

The 2024-25 data, shared exclusively with The 74, represents almost 12 million K-8 students in reading and more than 13 million in math who took the i-Ready tests during the last school year. Unlike the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the i-Ready adjusts questions to students’ level. The prompts are more advanced if kids are working above the benchmark and easier if they’re below, offering teachers a view, Huff said, of how much progress students need to make to catch up. Nearly half of fifth graders, for example, are on grade level in reading, while 29% are two grade levels or more below, the results show. The picture is similar in math, with 53% on target and 20% far behind.

While students are learning, they’re not mastering as much material as their peers did before COVID. Learning loss is more pronounced in the younger grades, confirming that even those students who were too young to attend school were affected by the disruption. Multiple studies have shown that economic hardship and fewer opportunities to socialize left less prepared for school. In reading, 60% of first graders — those who were toddlers during the early years of the pandemic — are on grade level. That’s down from 68% in 2018-19.

‘Slight improvement’

Majority-Black schools, however, were well behind majority-white schools before COVID — by roughly 20 percentage points. Their scores also saw a steeper drop off after the pandemic. 

About a year after the pandemic, McKinsey &Company, a consulting firm, used i-Ready data that students in majority-Black schools were a full year behind those in predominantly white schools, an increase of three months over the prior achievement gap.

“Black students were often at the lowest achievement levels in many districts,” said Kareem Weaver, co-founder of Fulcrum, an Oakland, Calif.-based nonprofit that provides literacy expertise to school districts. “It makes you wonder what was happening before for students to be at a level where even slight improvement is considered noteworthy.”

If students don’t acquire strong reading skills and basic math facts in elementary school, they won’t be able to keep up with more challenging assignments, said Ameenah Poole, who worked as a high school administrator in East Orange, New Jersey, until 2022. Her former colleagues, she said, often wondered why students came to them as struggling readers and lacking proficiency in math. 

“These foundational skills are paramount,” said Poole, now principal of Ecole Toussaint Louverture Elementary in the district. 

In a school already not meeting expectations under the state’s accountability system, the pandemic just put kids further behind. Many parents in the 84% Black school have jobs in the service industry. Some are nurses, one drives an Amazon truck, Poole said, and most parents didn’t work from home when schools went remote.

A lot of students didn’t even log in to class, and rebuilding attendance routines has been slow and sometimes futile, she said.

“The culture during the pandemic and post-pandemic [was] that school was an option,” she said. “We say, ‘If you miss a day, you miss a lot.’ Students have to be here in order for us to teach them.”

On New Jersey’s state test, 19% of third graders met the standards in reading in 2022. That’s the same year the district began using i-Ready. Students work on skills like phonics and vocabulary or measurement and geometry in 40-minute blocks every week. 

At first, the extra instruction didn’t translate into higher scores. In fourth grade, the percentage of students reaching the proficient level actually fell to 11%. But when those same students were fifth graders in 2024, Poole began to see the payoff. Thirty-five percent met or exceeded the goal. 

That still means the majority of students are working below grade level, which the i-Ready data also shows. 

Student learning is “moving in the right direction,” said Huff with Curriculum Associates, “but it’s not accelerating fast enough.”

The way the i-Ready results are reported, however, could be hiding some improvement, suggested Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research. 

Identifying the total percentage above and below the threshold doesn’t capture those students who may have moved up a level or two over time. Districts are “far from full recovery,” he wrote in an from 28 states. But he concluded that $190 billion in COVID relief, the largest-ever one-time infusion of federal funds for schools, contributed to a significant increase in math performance during the 2022-23 school year. 

Mark Sullivan, superintendent of the Birmingham City schools in Alabama, saw evidence of that in his district.

“I told the teachers, ‘You [will] have to teach like you’ve never taught before,’ meaning that we had to make up multiple grades within a year because of unfinished learning,” he said. 

A 2024 Curriculum Associates showed that Birmingham, where 89% of students are Black and 86% qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, outpaced the state in math recovery after the pandemic. The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University the district for the same reason.

Leaders rearranged the calendar so that at the end of every nine-week session, students had a week off. But teachers provided optional instruction during that open week. About 7,000 students participated “when they didn’t have to come to school,” Sullivan said. “We’re seeing the fruits of that.”

“Even if the feds decide that they’re not going to require statewide assessments, that is not something that I’m going to buy into,” she said. “The moment you lower standards, you do kids a disservice.”

With President Donald Trump on a path to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and revert power back to the states, Wright’s words gave urgency to a burning issue state leaders have been wrestling with for months.

While Education Secretary Linda McMahon has declared it’s “absolutely” necessary to continue the National Assessment of Educational Progress — which allows the public to compare student performance across states — she’s so far been silent on federal requirements for state testing and the need to identify low-performing schools for extra support. The lack of a plan has left some wondering if sending education “back to the states,” as Trump is fond of saying, means abandoning what has been a mainstay of education policy for more than 20 years.  

“This is one of the discussions that the department, the administration, the Senate and House need to talk through,” said Jim Blew, co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute, a right leaning think tank that supports Trump’s agenda. 

A department official during the president’s first term, he argues that the Every Student Succeeds Act, the law that spells out federal requirements for testing and accountability, has had little impact on holding students to high standards. 

“States that do not want to be transparent about their testing results simply aren’t,” he said. “If you don’t believe me, just go and try and find the results for any state.”

As the president’s plan takes shape, some Republicans are trying to remove those annual testing and accountability requirements altogether. Sen. Mike Rounds of South Dakota reintroduced last week that would not only eliminate the education department, but also repeal ESSA. In exchange for a federal block grant, states would be required to submit student data to the Treasury Department, complete an annual audit and follow civil rights laws — but not conduct annual tests.

The rationale is clear, said Charles Barone, senior director of the Center for Innovation at the National Parents Union: Maintaining some federal authority over testing and accountability could imply there’s still a role for the department.

“Sen. Rounds’ bill simply has federal programs as money streams,” he said. “No policy attached.”

Since the pandemic, a handful of states, like Oklahoma, and , have rolled back expectations for passing state tests. The changes are likely to result in more students reaching grade-level targets even if they haven’t learned more. The trend has revived debate over the “honesty gap” — the discrepancy between NAEP’s higher standard for proficiency and the often lower bar set by states. 

Others, like and education Secretary Aimee Guidera are phasing in tougher assessment and accountability systems. To Blew, that shows the federal government should just stay out of the way. 

“At the end of the day, states are going to determine this,” he said. “Let’s give them the freedom to do that.”

Passed a decade ago, ESSA requires states to test all students in third through eighth grades in reading and math, to assess students once in high school and to ensure at least 95% of students participate in testing. States also have to break down results by race and for different student groups, including those in poverty, English learners and students with disabilities. 

The major components meet the threshold of what Barone describes as the “” for accountability. 

Testing every student allows parents to get assessment results for their own children, which can then be used to determine where students are struggling or if they need more challenging work. 

Disaggregating the results shines a light on how districts serve historically marginalized students — data that is especially important to policymakers and advocacy groups. Finally, a common test allows for apples-to-apples comparisons across schools and districts. 

“Over the years, a consensus has formed that you want certain guardrails in place,” Barone said.  

‘A federal backstop’

Observers don’t expect Rounds’ bill to get very far. But some call it a harbinger of a return to the days , the strict accountability law that preceded ESSA. In the 1990s, just a fraction of states tested students every year and many imposed no consequences for failing schools. 

“I think accountability is already at a pretty low point,” said Cory Koedel, an economics and public policy professor at the University of Missouri. “If things go back to the states even more formally, I would just expect that unwinding to complete itself.”

Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who chairs the education committee, is expected to introduce another proposal to eliminate the education department and revamp the role of the federal government in education. Blew said that bill could be weeks away. 

Democrats and some state leaders warn that dumping federal testing and accountability requirements and issuing block grants would allow states to turn their backs on the neediest students.

“If you get rid of accountability, you’re just essentially giving [states] a blank check,” said Stephanie Lalle, communications director for the Democrats on the House education committee. Federal mandates, she said, are how you push them to “not discriminate and incentivize them to close the achievement gap.”

At a February conference on assessment and accountability in Dallas, Virginia ed secretary Guidera shared data showing how her state’s performance on NAEP steadily improved between 2003 and 2013 — the NCLB years. 

The landmark education law, which set strict testing and accountability requirements in exchange for Title I funds, passed in 2002. Data shows the policy led to nationally, but it quickly became highly unpopular. The law set ambitious goals for all students to be proficient in reading and math by 2014, but drew considerable pushback from critics who said it led schools to teach to the test. But even if states continue their own testing and accountability systems, Guidera doesn’t want Washington out of the picture.

“We need the federal backstop,” she told The 74. “We have to have high standards, and we need to be honest with ourselves about where every child is.” 

‘A rallying cry’

Opposition to standardized testing comes from both the left and the right. Educators grumble that it eats up too much class time and that results from spring tests come back too late to help students or make adjustments for the fall. Others, , say state tests offer a narrow view of student learning. 

The question is what states would do if the federal government were no longer in the picture. In his conversation with Wright and other experts earlier this month, Scott Marion, executive director of the Center for Assessment, leaned on a handy metaphor: a motorcycle cop holding a radar gun. 

“What if nobody was checking your speed?” he asked.

State leaders have been thinking about the possibilities.

Rep. Robert Behning, an Indiana state legislator, said he “would be willing to look at other options, like sampling” — giving tests to a random, representative group of students instead of everyone. can be less of a drain on teachers’ and students’ time and still give the public district and school-level results. But the tradeoff is that most parents would be left in the dark about their children’s performance.  

Other state leaders like the idea of spreading assessments rather than building up toward one big test.

“We’ve got better assessments that tell us more about our students,” Eric Mackey, Alabama state superintendent, said during a in March.  

But research shows there are with arriving at a final score for the year and the model might not reduce testing time.

Marion giving state exams every other year, which would allow more time in the intervening years to employ innovative methods like asking students to complete a project to demonstrate their learning.

Marianne Perie, an assessment expert who advises states on test design, said she wouldn’t be surprised if Oklahoma completely stopped giving statewide assessments. In March, state Superintendent Ryan Walters questioned the integrity of the 2024 results, even though they were included in for districts and schools.

But in other states like Tennessee and Mississippi, annual tests have been “a rallying cry” for parents and policymakers, said Emily Oster, a Brown University economist who tracks states’ . 

Such states “have championed their gains in the last few years,” especially in English language arts, she said. 

Tennessee, for example, was among the first to bounce back from pandemic-era learning loss. At the same time, the fact that roughly 60% of third graders still scored below grade level in reading was worrisome enough to lawmakers that they passed a law requiring students to be retained or get extra help over the summer and retake the test. 

Remote learning during the pandemic and in-depth reporting on poor literacy instruction has also motivated more parents to push for improvements.

“Parents are increasingly demanding accountability from their educational system, which will make sunsetting these assessments more complex,” Oster said.

Roughly value state assessments and think they should be used to guide support for struggling schools and students, according to a National Parents Union poll.

‘Come up with something better’ 

If the federal government does hand more control over assessment and accountability to states, Barone said it’s far more likely to happen through waivers from McMahon than legislation. 

ESSA allows the secretary to excuse states from annual assessments. That’s what former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos did in 2020 during the pandemic. She waived the accountability provisions for both 2020 and 2021. Barone sees no reason why McMahon wouldn’t do the same. 

A former Democratic staffer in the House, he thinks it would be hard to improve on the existing testing regimen. But even he agrees that the accountability side of the equation hasn’t led to measurable progress in how states support — and attempt to turn around — their most troubled schools. 

The law requires states to identify the lowest-performing 5% of schools, analyze why they’re struggling and adopt a proven , like coaching teachers or changing leadership. But a report found that less than half of states were complying with those requirements.

“There’s not a lot of evidence that even those that are doing it are doing it well,” Barone said. Maybe Trump’s planned overhaul of the federal role in education, he said, is an opportunity to “come up with something better.”

Those findings emerge out of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card. Amid an otherwise-disastrous release of fourth- and eighth-grade scores last month, experts hailed the emergence of a new hierarchy of educational excellence that largely runs through the South.

There’s a catch, however: That revised national leaderboard is visible only after researchers account for the wide variety of student populations in each state. to the 2024 NAEP were produced by the left-leaning Urban Institute, which has long applied statistical controls to scores in an attempt to develop a more precise understanding of how well schools are teaching children. 

At the heart of the effort is an acknowledgment that student demographics are not evenly sorted across state borders. Black students live across the Deep South, while English language learners are to be found near the Mexican border. Perhaps most prominently, rates of child poverty below the Mason-Dixon line than above. Higher or lower concentrations of these student groups, which have all historically posted lower NAEP scores, can heavily sway states’ performance in ways that may not accurately represent the quality of their schools and teachers, said Matthew Chingos, Urban’s vice president for education. 

Adjusting for demographic traits produces “more of an apples-to-apples comparison” between different parts of the country, he added.

“If you want to go to a random state, ask a fourth-grader a math question, and have the highest chance of them getting it right, you’ll probably be fine going to the place with the most white, high-income kids,” Chingos said. “But if you want to randomly place a kid in the state where he’ll learn the most, then this list is a better approximation of that.”

To reach that approximation, Chingos and co-author Kristin Blagg used NAEP’s national data to compare test takers in each state directly against those of the same age, gender, race, socioeconomic background, special education status, and English language learner designation. These calculations effectively simulate a world in which Hispanic students, for example, are as plentiful in Maine as in Arizona. 

The consequent shifts are surprising. 

In NAEP’s raw (statistically unweighted) scores for fourth-grade math, the one subject in which American students made significant gains over the last two years, the top 10 states were Massachusetts, Florida, Wyoming, New Hampshire, Utah, North Dakota, Minnesota, Texas, and New Jersey. But only four of those (Florida, Massachusetts, Texas, and Indiana) remained among the top 10 in Urban’s estimates. Strikingly, New Hampshire and North Dakota actually fell to the 11th- and 12th-worst in the country after controlling for demographics. 

Inter-state contrasts can be even more stark. New Jersey eighth graders earned an average reading score of 266 second-best in the U.S.), while their peers in Arkansas scored 255 (tied for tenth from the bottom). In Chingos and Blagg’s report, however, the two states are nearly identical.

Among all states, Urban measured Mississippi — which underwent a much-celebrated academic revival over the past decade — as receiving the highest adjusted scores in fourth- and eighth-grade math, as well as fourth-grade reading. It nearly grabbed the top spot in eighth-grade reading for good measure, finishing just behind Massachusetts, Louisiana, and Georgia. A (illustrated and by education advocate Marc Porter Magee) also placed Texas, Indiana, Florida, South Carolina, Illinois, and Kentucky among the top states after averaging all four age/subject combinations.

Carrie Conaway, a senior lecturer at Harvard who previously served as chief research officer at Massachusetts’s state education agency, said that both raw and adjusted scores provide an important lens on the true extent of learning. But when local leaders want to benchmark their results against other states’, she added, Urban’s release is “the only way to do it.”

“It’s not that one measurement is better than the other, it’s that each question comes with a different set of assumptions and conclusions you could draw,” Conaway said. “But I do think that more people are interested in the question of whose system is the best, independent of demographics.”

A matter of perspective

The unavoidable reality is that states must educate the students who actually enroll in their schools. No amount of empirical maneuvering will change those headline numbers.

Yet Urban’s alternative perspective undoubtedly reflects some authentic improvements in school outcomes. Not only did the adjusted scores for Louisiana rank second only to Mississippi, the state also saw some of the fastest-growing raw scores on the 2024 round of NAEP — including the only significant ascent in elementary literacy anywhere in the United States since 2019.

Those strides have accompanied the implementation of of reading instruction that was consciously modeled after strategies first adopted by Mississippi. But it is difficult to identify which factors led directly to better achievement, Chingos said, arguing that any theories about how learning gains were accomplished would have to allow for the fact that states “have done a whole bunch of things over a long period of time.”

“In Florida, was it the , the , or something else? In Massachusetts, was it or the ? You seldom see a clean story like in Mississippi, where they did a big overhaul of reading instruction, and they saw reading scores go way up,” he said.

Some also question the importance of rankings themselves. Derek Briggs, a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder who specializes in student evaluation, said that he was more interested in examining the rise or fall of scores over time rather than states’ comparative positioning on a list. Adjustments like Urban’s have value as a way of delving into the results of a one-time exam, he continued, but they are ultimately less useful in the context of NAEP, which tracks each state’s performance going back to the 1970s.

“If the perspective you’re taking is to look at trends and change over time, then in some sense, it doesn’t matter that certain states begin in different positions,” said Briggs. “Yes, you can see that the states are in different spots in the original year, but what you really want to focus on is the change.” 

Chingos conceded that top-down ordering is “always a little weird,” particularly in the middle of the rankings, because changes of just a point or two in either direction can meaningfully alter how states perceive and present themselves. While he and his colleagues try to communicate the complex ways in which academic reality can be obscured by demographics, the response of state leaders is typically more predictable.

“The states that get adjusted up love this,” he said. “The states that get adjusted down ignore it.”

‘We take seriously our role as leaders’

Few will have the option of ignoring the decline in student learning over the last decade, which worsened dramatically during the COVID era. According to a district-level study of the NAEP results conducted by researchers at Harvard and Stanford, just 6 percent of American students live in school districts where math and reading levels are higher than they were in 2019. And in areas with large numbers of minority and low-income students.

With the from Washington, states are attempting to launch an academic recovery that will accelerate growth for the kinds of student populations that feature prominently in the Urban Institute’s analysis. While their paths to improvement may not be easy to emulate, top-scoring states provide a model for stragglers. 

John White served as Louisiana’s superintendent of education between 2012 and 2020, when local schools — historically some of the lowest-performing in the country — . In an interview, he said he believed that states like Louisiana were able to reach disadvantaged student populations through assertive K–12 oversight led by governors, legislatures and state education agencies. Many others embodied a more “passive” approach that largely centered on dispensing resources to schools and districts, he argued.

“If you look at the states at the top of the Urban Institute list, you would have to say that it’s almost synonymous with those that have said, ‘We take seriously our role as leaders of classroom- and school-level change, and we don’t see ourselves just as rule makers and check writers,’” White observed.

While significant differences exist among successful school systems, White said, the unifying element is usually a leadership class that willingly embraces its role as a guarantor of student success. Those responsibilities extend to the selection of high-quality curricula, the provision of teacher training in domains like the science of reading, and the maintenance of high standards and accountability for schools and teachers. 

In a recent essay, literacy advocate Karen Vaites Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Alabama as beacons of reading growth for the rest of the country to follow. White agreed the region has gained momentum in recent years, adding that the “golden age” of education reform was by Southern governors like Bill Clinton in Arkansas, Jim Hunt in North Carolina, and the Bush brothers in Texas and Florida. Along with strong state leadership, he said, particular features like unelected state superintendents and county-level school districts likely explain some of their progress. 

To policymakers in states that have struggled to boost student success, and particularly those whose NAEP scores fall after demographic adjustments, he recommended that the challenge be “taken seriously.”

“If you’re the state chief in a place like that, the question in front of you is how to use the tools you have to systematize a long-term approach to change,” he concluded. “I don’t see any evidence — and Massachusetts has proven so for decades — that you can’t systematize improvement over multiple years.”

But that era ended abruptly Monday when the U.S. Department of Education put Carr, who has worked across both Republican and Democratic administrations, on paid leave. A department spokeswoman cited the fact that Biden appointed Carr to the position. Carr’s term was set to expire in 2027.

“I’m still processing and have no words to share right now. It’s a lot to take in,” Carr said in an email, declining to answer further questions. 

The move, coming less than a week after officials canceled an upcoming math and reading test for 17 year olds, raises questions about the future of the congressionally mandated National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Carr earned respect from both sides of the aisle with her ability to present the results — both promising and discouraging — in an objective way. Some former officials say the decision to put her on leave reflects President Donald Trump’s desire to streamline NAEP. But others say losing her expertise at a time when student performance still hasn’t recovered from the pandemic could compromise the integrity of the assessment program.

“Without knowledgeable decision makers like Peggy Carr, it is likely that the scientific quality of NAEP, and other important data collections, will be eroded,” said Eric Hanushek, a Stanford University economist and former member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets NAEP policy. He added that political interpretations of the data could undermine public trust in the assessment’s value. “Today, schools and states must face up to the reality of their performance. If given the chance, some states will argue that their poor performance is just a matter of poor data — allowing them to avoid addressing any performance problems.”

Andrew Ho, a Harvard University assessment expert and also a former board member, called Carr an “institution” and “truth teller” who presented testing results in a nonpartisan way.

But others say politics had nothing to do with the decision to let Carr go. 

Mark Schneider, a Trump appointee who stepped down last March as director of the Institute for Education Sciences, which includes NCES and NAEP, said the program’s increasing costs during Carr’s tenure were out of step with an administration determined to cut spending. 

“NAEP is going to take a haircut. I don’t think there’s a question about that,” said Schneider, Carr’s former supervisor and NCES commissioner under George W. Bush. “The question is ‘How do you prioritize what it does in a harsh fiscal environment?’ ”

He argued that canceling the long-term trend test for 17 year olds is just the first step toward making NAEP, which costs $192 million, a leaner operation that concentrates on math and reading. 

“We’ve been doing main NAEP since the 1990s. Why do we need long-term trend tests?” he asked. “NAEP has grown and grown and grown, and from my perspective, it’s way too expensive.”

‘Did a lot of homework’

Carr began her long career with the federal government as a chief statistician in the Office for Civil Rights before moving to NCES in 1993. For over 20 years, she served as associate commissioner for assessment and has long translated NAEP and international assessment results for reporters, educators and policymakers. 

“She did a lot of homework preparing and rehearsing for presentations of NAEP results, so that she knew the results thoroughly and could answer any questions,” said Andrew Kolstad, who served as her senior technical adviser in the 1990s. “People in the department and in the testing industry called on her for her experience.”

Chester Finn, president emeritus of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and former chair of the board, said Carr won his respect for “meticulously” fact-checking his , Assessing the Nation’s Report Card: Challenges and Choices for NAEP.

She offered a number of critical judgments “without ever once trying to compromise my authorial integrity or get in my face,” he said. “In her day job, she’s been superb at explaining and interpreting NAEP data without spinning it or crossing the line into causation.”

When students took the first NAEP tests after COVID school closures, Carr wanted to brace the public for sharp declines. In an exclusive interview with The 74 in 2022, she said that while scores for fourth and eighth graders in reading and math were already falling prior to the pandemic, “it’s more than likely we’re going to see the bottom drop even more.”

While some former commissioners served under only one president, others worked through transitions to new administrations. Carr served as acting commissioner under President Barack Obama and Trump until the latter appointed Lynn Woodworth. Under Biden, Woodworth stayed on until the end of his term in 2021. 

Carr wasn’t alone in asking for more resources for NCES, which collects and analyzes data on all aspects of education, including enrollment trends and the state of the teacher workforce. During his tenure Woodworth pushed for more and equipment, rather than contracting with outside agencies, but said his requests were always denied.

Schneider applauded Carr for driving the requirement under No Child Left Behind to administer the core NAEP math and reading tests every two years. The law required states to participate to receive federal funds. 

​�ċ”Someone had to turn NAEP into that machine to deliver on a regular basis data required by law,” he said. “She deserves all the credit in the world for that.”

Carr also led the transition to a in 2018 and to of students’ answers in 2022. But Schneider, who has indicated he wouldn’t rule out returning to his former position, said the program hasn’t kept up with “modern data-collection techniques.”

He’d prefer the next commissioner to have state-level experience and to be more “critical of these big research houses” like ETS, which has held NAEP contracts for roughly 40 years and just won in January. 

“The challenge for NAEP, and more broadly for NCES,” Schneider said, “is modernization — creating new data systems that are faster, cheaper, better.”

“Everyone is very nice to me, and I feel like I belong here,” said Alan, a third grader. “I feel like I am a part of this family.”

In a city with and a school district , this scrappy elementary school stands out. 

Nearly all the kids who attend Figueroa come from poor families and many have disabilities or are learning English. 

Often kids from such backgrounds struggle in school, but the students at Figueroa Street are making progress. 

In reading, the school saw a 14% increase in students in 2024 who met state standards from the previous year. In math, Figueroa saw a 12% jump from the year before. 

Teachers and students say that’s because everybody in the school is like family. The school achieved a 92% average attendance rate so far this academic year, up from 85% the last year. 

This, while the district itself is still crawling out from under sky-high chronic absenteeism rates. 

“I think it’s getting people to love their community,” said Principal Shawn Peyatt, who has worked at Figueroa, previously as a teacher, for more than 30 years. 

“At the end of the day, school’s a way out,” said Peyatt. “School is going to make a difference.” 

Teachers at Figueroa Elementary say the rise in student test scores is linked to school culture.

“People work together well here, and we look out for each other, and it’s nice – you feel supported here,” said Julie Harrington, a third grade teacher, who has been working at the school for 23 years. 

“Most of our teachers have been here for many years,” said assistant principal Frank Sanchez. “We’ve all been waiting for the right leader to come on board and just take us there.”

Prior to Peyatt’s leadership, a classroom designated for “emotionally disturbed” students often saw fights that spread to other parts of the school.

“It was a dumping ground for behavior,” said Peyatt. “Really what you were seeing was it was all Black boys, but they weren’t emotionally disturbed. They just probably had some tough times.” 

After much back and forth, Figueroa Street Elementary was eventually able to get the district to end the program. Things began to look up. 

While in training to become a principal, Peyatt made attendance her top priority, instituting one program after another to keep students in school. 

“They say it takes three days to make up one day out, which means you never make-up,” said Peyatt. “Attendance is the first thing.”

During the pandemic, the previous principal, Peyatt and Sanchez viewed themselves as “essential workers,” going to students’ houses if they did not join online classes, delivering chargers, notebooks, pencils and holding fundraisers for families struggling to pay rent.

After an initial dip post-pandemic, the school received $38,000 in funding for attendance improvements and used the money to implement new programs in hopes of getting students back on track. 

Working with the Partnership for Los Angeles Schools, an organization that partners with Los Angeles Unified to target high-need schools, Figueroa hired an English and math coach. 

Coaches work with teachers, providing feedback on lessons and serving as an extra teaching resource.

The Partnership was first introduced to the school 15 years ago. In addition to teacher training and curriculum development, it serves as a mediator between Figueroa and the school district. 

“They gave us the control to be able to bring in our own people, our own teachers,” said Sanchez. “That was a big turning point.”

After the pandemic, the school also created an attendance award system, hosting a pizza party for classes that achieved full attendance and providing students with points towards the school gift shop for good behavior. 

If students are absent for two or more days, administrators will go to their house to check on them. 

“This year we decided to incentivize parents,” Peyatt said. “We’re doing raffles for parents that have kids of excellent attendance.”

Instead of expecting students to ace every test, teachers look instead for their ability to improve. 

Leticia Hurtado, a third-grade teacher at Figueroa, said teachers do this by “allowing [students] to struggle, allowing them to make mistakes.” 

The kids know teachers at Figueroa will help them through.

This article is part of a collaboration between The 74 and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

Released Tuesday morning, is the latest dispatch from the , a data project led by a team of researchers at Dartmouth, Harvard, Stanford, and the testing group NWEA. In two studies released last year, the consortium unearthed in high-poverty areas since 2020, along with resulting from billions of dollars in federal assistance to K–12 schools. 

This week’s update comes on the heels of a disheartening publication of test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card. While some had hoped that results from that exam would provide reason for hope, only minimal progress was made in fourth-grade math; reading scores were actually worse than in 2022, the nadir of the pandemic. 

Thomas Kane, a professor of economics and education at Harvard, compared the sustained learning loss of the last few years with “the tsunami following the earthquake” — a destructive after-effect that has almost entirely resisted remediation efforts by local, state, and federal authorities. Struggling students, in particular, have fallen further behind their higher-performing peers, he observed.

“Given all the money that’s been spent, and the fact that students already lost ground between 2019 and 2022, you would have expected that there would be some bounce-back in reading,” Kane said. “But no, actually. Students continued to lose ground, especially at the bottom end.” 

While NAEP offers state-by-state comparisons, along with the results from several dozen major urban districts, the Scorecard group combines those figures with local testing data for 35 million students across 43 states, allowing the public to chart the trajectories of individual districts since 2019. 

Across the country, Kane and his collaborators calculate, just 11 percent of students in grades 3–8 are currently enrolled in districts where average reading levels exceed those measured in 2019; 17 percent are in districts where math knowledge is higher than the last pre-pandemic year. Set against the continuing fall in literacy, a slight rebound in math scores — about one-tenth of one grade level since 2022 — represents most of the good news. 

In relatively poorer communities, that silver lining is almost entirely accounted for by federal ESSER funds, which totaled $190 billion between 2021 and 2024. The report indicates that those grants prevented an even greater freefall in learning, while noting that “there were higher-impact ways to use the dollars” to speed student recovery.

Rebecca Sibilia is the founder of , a research and advocacy group that advocates for more and better-designed resources for schools. A frequent critic of the quality of school finance data, she said the breakneck pace at which ESSER dollars were appropriated and distributed made it virtually impossible for them to be maximally effective.

“We absolutely have research that shows money matters, and helps us understand how money matters,” she said. “ESSER was not constructed in a way that aligns with that research.”

Michael Petrilli, president of the right-leaning Thomas B. Fordham Institute, called the Scorecard study “devastating.

“We already knew that the bottom had fallen out for most states, but now we see how hard it is to find districts bucking the terrible trends,” he wrote in an email.

‘Two kinds of bad news’

Perhaps the most alarming trend of the period bridging the COVID depths of 2022 and the present day has been a substantial rise in educational inequality. 

By sorting thousands of school districts according to their number of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (a commonly used proxy for poverty), the Scorecard researchers found that academic recovery over the last two years has proceeded much more quickly in affluent areas.

In nearly one-third of all low-poverty school districts, math performance has been restored to the pre-pandemic status quo; the same is true in just 8 percent of high-poverty districts. In all, over 14 percent of the richest districts (i.e., those where household income is higher than in 90 percent of other places) have returned to 2019-era learning in both math and reading, compared with less than 4 percent of the poorest districts. 

A similar dynamic has been apparent in NAEP scores going back more than a decade. While the 2010s saw gradually declining results on average, the highest-scoring students tended to make some progress in each administration of the exam. Meanwhile, their struggling classmates experienced much larger reversals. Since 2013, the disparity in fourth-grade reading performance between kids at the 90th and 10th percentiles, respectively, grew by 14 points; the divergence in eighth-grade math grew by 16 points over that decade.

Stanford sociologist Sean Reardon, who leads the Scorecard project alongside Kane, said the widening gaps make it clear that the task of general academic recovery must be accompanied by a special focus on students who are at risk of never getting back on track. 

“There’s two kinds of bad news between the NAEP results and ours,” Reardon said. “One is the disappointing lack of recovery, and even continued decline, in reading. Those average trends are disappointing, but they’re compounded by the fact that the negative trends are worse for the kids in the highest-poverty districts.”

The worrying class bifurcation is apparent from coast to coast, but Kane specifically identified achievement gaps in his home state of Massachusetts. There, the well-to-do Boston suburbs of Lexington and Newton have either surpassed their academic performance of a half-decade ago or have very nearly dug themselves out of the hole. 

Just a few miles away, however, in the working-class cities of Everett and Revere, the average student is floundering more than a year behind the pace set by similarly aged students just five years ago. In Lynn, one of the most troubled school districts in the state, elementary and middle schoolers are two years behind in math and over 1.5 years behind in reading.

The report includes from relatively disadvantaged communities (including Union City, New Jersey, Montgomery, Alabama, and Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana) that had made significant strides back to normalcy. But the typical such district still faces years of work to regain what was lost. 

Joshua Goodman, an economist at Boston University, said that education leaders needed to guard against the sense that emerging gaps simply represented the “new normal.” If he’d been told in 2020 that children would still be scuffling to this extent by the middle of the decade, he said, he would have been shocked and disappointed. 

“I think I implicitly believed that, once the pandemic receded and schools reopened, the normal operation of kids’ lives would somehow cause them to bounce back,” Goodman recalled. “I don’t know if I was just being naive or not thinking it through properly, but this is a very grim result.”

Meager return from COVID funds

The dour note struck by observers is largely related to the meager returns of Washington’s relief efforts. 

Previous work from the Education Recovery Scorecard has pointed to a modest bump in student performance that followed an infusion of billions of dollars to states and districts. But that upward movement didn’t come close to reversing the full extent of COVID’s damage; for that, researchers estimated, hundreds of billions of dollars more would be needed.

With federal funds now expired, and no new federal appropriations on the horizon, ESSER’s final impact can begin to be measured. For every $1,000 spent per student between 2022 and 2024, the authors estimate, math scores increased by roughly .005 standard deviations (a scientific measure showing the distance from the statistical mean). 

In comparison with other policy changes in education, Kane and Reardon showed, this is a fairly small figure — just a tiny fraction of by schools that adopted the Success for All reform model, for example, or those that followed the implementation of high-dosage tutoring programs. 

Kane said the relatively freewheeling structure of ESSER funds — states were only required to spend 20 percent of the aid on programs specifically aimed at lifting student achievement — meant that many expenditures were not efficiently targeted at the schools and students of greatest need. The small payoff could serve as a warning to Republicans reportedly the Department of Education and disbursing its various revenue streams to states to spend freely. 

“This is an example of bypassing federal regulators, or even bypassing state regulators, and giving all the money directly to school districts,” Kane argued. “We just saw what happens: Some school districts will figure out how to use the money well, but others won’t.”

Referencing widely circulated papers by school finance researchers Kirabo Jackson and Eric Hanushek, Sibilia said the general case for spending more on K–12 schools was sound. But ESSER money was sent out the door quickly, often to districts that didn’t serve large numbers of needy students. While spending it, district leaders had to make fast decisions with incomplete information.

The simultaneous and temporary explosion in districts’ budgets had led to a concurrent increase in shoddy vendors for services like tutoring and professional development. No matter the amount of money that Congress might have awarded, she added, the effects of ESSER would have been dampened by the limited supply of high-quality providers.

“There are a few researchers in the country that are dogmatic in saying that money, no matter how it’s spent, will give you a positive return,” Sibilia said. “But I think 95 percent of the people studying money in education will tell you that spending is only as good as what you can buy.”

Sixteen tables, two seats to a table, all in rows, face front “because that’s where the instruction is coming from,” he said.

About the only technology in the room: small handheld whiteboards, dry-erase pens and small stacks of index cards. The walls are almost entirely bare. And phones are out of the question, stowed in backpacks before class.

It’s intentional, said Harvard, who teaches Advanced Placement Psychology at James Clemens High School in Madison, Ala., a suburb of Huntsville.

Over the past decade, he has become something of an expert in focus, memory, forgetting and distraction.

Harvard has put these principles into his first book, published last week, titled, appropriately, . 

Harvard hopes the book will offer practical advice to teachers on how to use the principles of cognitive science to create better learning environments.

The time is right for a new book about attention, said , a professor of English at the City University of New York and founding director of CUNY’s Futures Initiative. She said she’s excited to see Harvard’s work.

Davidson noted several indicators of rising inattention, from falling reading scores to the growth of media misinformation and the higher prevalence of young people who say they’re with traditional education. 

“I think people are really seeing that what it means to pay attention is important,” said Davidson, who wrote 2011’s . 

Harvard mostly focuses on more intentional teaching methods that reduce distractions and help students manage the vast amount of content they’re called upon to remember —  often called “.”

These ideas are decidedly not on tap in most teacher preparation programs, said Harvard, who earned his master’s degree in education in 2006. His coursework contained “nothing on cognition — there was nothing on the brain, nothing on how we learn.”

‘Why don’t I already know about this?’

It wasn’t until 2016, a decade after graduate school, that Harvard happened upon the now-defunct Twitter account “The Learning Scientists.” In plain language, educational psychologists from around the world laid out the basics of cognitive science for educators. 

Harvard was gobsmacked. Instead of just shooting in the dark, he finally saw research on the effectiveness of various learning strategies. 

He found himself instantly hooked and soon for the group. That led to his own website, which eventually became the popular blog .

Nearly a decade later, he’s traveling the world, speaking at conferences about strategies that affect students’ ability to channel ideas into long-term memory. He’s lost count of how many times he’s had to inform audiences that — humans can’t consciously focus on more than one thing at a time.

Harvard subscribes to something he calls the “SAR method,” an accessible way for students and teachers to think about memory. When they’re about to start a lesson, he tells students that memory follows a three-step process: Sense, Attend and Rehearse. 

“You can hear your teacher,” he said. “You can see your teacher. You can see the board. You can sense it. But are you attending to it? Are you paying attention to it, or are there things getting in your way? Are you trying to multitask? Is the person sitting next to you talking?”

Once a student attends to the material, the rehearsal happens. That’s perhaps the most important and tricky part. In the book, he likens it to an athlete’s ability to learn a new routine. If he or she doesn’t rehearse before the big game, he writes, “that would not be a good recipe for success on the playing field.”

Rehearsing in the classroom can take the form of a multiple-choice quiz, a discussion or a project. The key is to access the material from memory and use it appropriately.

Accordingly, he begins many classes by simply asking students to review what came the day, the week or even the month before. Retrieving those memories, he said, makes them more likely to be there the next time the brain goes looking for them.

Another principle he employs is “wait time.” When most teachers ask a question, they’ll settle for the first student with her hand up. But Harvard adds a step, ordering students to retrieve their handheld whiteboard. Before anyone can answer out loud, everyone must attempt an answer in writing.

“Now they’re committed to thinking,” he said. “They’re committed to writing something down. It seems like such a simple thing, but when you make the students do that, you give them time to think.”

As they’re studying, he’ll often give students a kind of slow-motion, three-stage assessment he calls “Brain-Book-Buddy” to offer a more honest take on what they actually know.

In the first assessment, they answer a series of questions from memory. Then they fill in the answers they couldn’t remember with the help of their notes. In the final test, they can talk to classmates.

“They end up getting all the right answers, but they’re also acutely aware of what they actually knew, what they knew with their notebook, and what they had to ask their buddies, their peers, about,” he said. “It’s an ongoing conversation of them thinking about their thinking.”

‘Attention Contagion’

Lately Harvard has been evangelizing most eagerly about an emerging topic in cognitive science known as “.” Only a handful of small-scale studies exist on the topic, but Harvard says the evidence is compelling.

In the research, students pose as attentive or non-attentive classmates, and researchers judge how well actual subjects attend to lessons in their presence — how many notes they take and their performance on post-lesson quizzes. The results suggest that seatmates’ behaviors have a profound effect: When a student is surrounded by inattentive peers, the behaviors are contagious. It works the other way as well: If a student is surrounded by peers who are visibly paying attention, they’re more attentive. 

had undergraduates watch a video lecture with a “classmate” posing as someone who either seemed attentive — leaning forward and taking notes — or slouched, shifting his gaze, glancing at the clock and taking infrequent notes. Researchers found that being seated behind these classmates had a profound effect: Subjects sitting near attentive students took significantly more notes and rated themselves as being on task. They also scored more than five points higher on a multiple-choice quiz.

Other studies have replayed the dynamic, with similar results. The findings even hold true for students observing one another in a Zoom-like virtual environment, where all that’s visible is a student’s face staring into a webcam.

In other words, Harvard notes, attention and inattention can actually pass through the Internet.

He considers the findings especially resonant because the “contagion” doesn’t come from obviously bad behavior like yelling, interrupting a teacher or staring at a phone. It’s stuff that he and most other teachers would typically let slide.

“They’re just slouching in their chair,” he said. “They’re just not taking notes. They’re gazing out the window.”

What the studies show is that attention operates by a kind of quiet osmosis, in some cases literally felt but not seen.

, the researcher who has pioneered this work, emphasized the “non-distracting” nature of the inattentiveness in his studies, noting that it’s “driven by more than just peer distraction.” Peers can detect these inattentiveness cues, he told The 74, even via tiny changes in the case of the online environment, suggesting that students “pay attention to their peers on webcam — even when the video thumbnails are quite small.”

More data needed

In an email, Forrin cautioned that attention contagion ”has not yet been studied in real classrooms,” only in laboratory settings with video lecturers. But he said he’s confident that attention and inattention “can spread between students during lectures,” and that this spread affects learning. Students “are attuned to their peers’ motivation to learn” and pay more attention when they infer that others have strong learning goals. They pay less attention when they sense weak or no goals. 

He suggested that teachers do their best to cultivate these goals in their students. They should also let students choose their own seats so they’re not consistently sitting near inattentive peers.

But he said more data are needed to determine whether these phenomena occur in real classrooms, especially with live teachers and different levels of student motivation.

Davidson, the CUNY scholar, said research on topics similar to attention contagion go back all the way to , who at the turn of the 20th century was studying the social aspects of “vivid” thoughts, distraction and focus. More recently, she noted, the psychologist Danie Kahneman, who helped establish what has become behavioral economics, studied .

And of course TV producers who pioneered the “canned laughter” of laugh tracks on early TV knew that suggestions of an engaged audience make viewers respond in kind. 

But perhaps the greatest experts in attention contagion, Davidson said, are stand-up comedians — she interviewed several for her 2011 book, and they told her that visibly bored audience members are “the kiss of death” in live performance. “People fall asleep in the front row, and pretty soon they’re falling asleep in the whole theater,” she said.

Harvard, for his part, is convinced that attention contagion in the classroom is real — and he tells students about the research.

“It’s powerful for students to hear that simply being inattentive can distract someone else from learning,” he said.

More broadly, he said, cognitive psychology has simplified his approach to teaching, allowing him to focus on proven strategies that are neither traditional nor progressive. 

The most cynical person, he said, would probably say his classroom is “too traditional. But I’m not thinking, ‘Do I want a traditional or a progressive classroom?’ When I designed it, I’m thinking, ‘How can I put my students in the best situation where they can pay attention to what they need to pay attention [to] and be distracted the least?’ That’s everything that I’m thinking about, and nothing else.”

Newly released scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, often referred to as the Nation’s Report Card, show that both fourth and eighth graders have lost ground in reading — not just compared with the status quo of 2019, but also the most recent round of the exam, which was conducted during the heart of the pandemic. Math scores were flat for eighth graders and up slightly for fourth graders, but those gains were predominantly driven by the progress of high-performing students. 

The alarming results are in keeping with those revealed by earlier iterations of NAEP and highlight decade-long trends of both stagnation in overall academic growth and growing disparities between top students and their struggling classmates.

Jane Swift was the Republican governor of Massachusetts from 2001 to 2003 and now serves on the , the nonpartisan entity that oversees NAEP. In an interview, she expressed frustration that the country is still “stuck where we were” two years ago. 

“Everybody is tired of hearing about the pandemic,” Swift said. “This is not an issue that is driven solely by the pandemic. Looking at this data, it’s clear that we’re in enormous risk of losing an entire generation of learners unless we show some focus and leadership.”

The highest-achieving test takers continued to pull away, or at least hold steady, while lower-performing children lost yet more ground. In fourth-grade reading, only participants testing at the 90th percentile staved off a drop in scores; those at the 50th percentile fell by two points, and those at the 10th percentile experienced a four-point slip. In eighth-grade math, scores at the 90th percentile jumped by three points since 2022, while those at the 10th percentile fell by five points. 

Another notable divergence opened up on ethnic lines. While eighth graders from most demographic groups were statistically unchanged in reading over the last two years, Hispanic students fell dramatically: by five points on average, by eight points for those at the 25th percentile, and by three points even for better-than-average participants at the 75th percentile. 

In all, about two-thirds of eighth graders exceeded NAEP’s “Basic” level of achievement in reading, fewer than did so in 1992. Thirty-three percent of students about to head into high school placed below the Basic threshold, the most in the history of the exam. 

Julia Rafal-Baer, a NAGB member and education consultant who was previously the assistant commissioner of the New York State Education Department, said K–12 policymakers had to acknowledge the persistent failure to alter the trajectories of low-performing students.

“If we’re saying that a third of this year’s ninth graders are below NAEP Basic, we’re saying that one-third of these kids likely can’t tell us the main idea of a text,” Rafal-Baer said. “They can’t draw any explicit features from that text. What does that mean for these kids? What’s the plan to re-engage them and improve their outcomes?”

Some hopeful signs in math

Even with the abundance of bad news, some positive signs indicated the beginnings of a turnaround in math learning. 

Fourth graders climbed upwards by two points in the subject over the last two years, after dropping by five points between 2019 and 2022. While falling somewhat short of a major stride — again, higher-scoring students enjoyed significant gains, while those at the bottom of the distribution did not — it marks the first sign of post-pandemic progress on NAEP.

Bob Hughes, director of American K–12 education programs at the , said that while it was critical to track year-to-year fluctuations in math scores, national leaders in government and philanthropy needed to focus more on the broader development of better tools and strategies to deliver math instruction. Compared with the decade-long coalescence of educators around the science of reading, which has taken hold in dozens of states around the country, no similar consensus exists for math, he argued.

Further, he added, a host of technological applications and tutoring models has continuously evolved since the emergence of COVID. While the best classroom use of such innovations is still to be discovered, Hughes described himself as bullish on their long-term prospects.

“I don’t think the technology is positioned now to be a magic bullet in solving some of the challenges we see on NAEP,” Hughes said. “But there are some promising developments that, over time, should help us accelerate achievement amongst even students that are the farthest from standard.”

Among results for individual states and school districts, often closely watched for exceptions to national or regional trends, comparatively few distinctions were in evidence. Fifteen states, mostly clustered in the Northeast and South, enjoyed a significant bounce in fourth-grade math compared with 2022 (Nebraska was the sole state in which scores declined over the last two years); still, only Alabama elementary schoolers are now farther along in the subject than similarly aged students in 2019. 

Another exception was Louisiana, the only state in which fourth-grade reading scores were higher than in 2019. Notably, the state’s scores in fourth-grade math were also higher than in 2019, though not by a statistically significant amount. Local losses in eighth-grade math and reading were among the smallest of any state.

John White, who served as Louisiana’s superintendent of schools from 2012 to 2020, said the state’s progress was due to a long-running emphasis on the improvement of curricular materials and strong accountability.

“There have been changes to rules and programs over time,” he said, “but the essence of the plan remains constant: select evidence-backed curricula, build teachers’ skill every day on the practices needed for those curricula, and be transparent about the results schools achieve.”

White added that the “jarring” results for the nation as a whole could not all be attributed to the hangover of COVID learning loss, and that education leaders have to arrive at a better understanding of how to improve them.

“We have to look deep within the test results themselves, and across a broad range of factors inside and outside of schools, to come to a stronger hypothesis than we have today,” he concluded. “That should be a national priority, and if national leaders don’t lead it, prominent state and city leaders should.”

That has long been a dream of testmakers: to embed assessments in student work and, in a sense, make them indistinguishable.

For very young children, however, that’s a challenge. Much of what they know is revealed not through easy-to-interpret writing, but talk and play. To assess these kids effectively, one needs to be able to turn their quirky utterances into data.

That’s the basic idea behind Curriculum Associates’ of Dublin-based SoapBox Labs. The has spent the past decade developing software that understands the unique speech of children and translates it reliably into text. As schools focus on the Science of Reading, that could be the key to making assessments a more seamless part of teachers’ workflow, especially for those who instruct children as young as pre-kindergarten.

“The future of assessment is invisible because it is integrated with instruction,” said Kristen Huff, Curriculum Associates’ head of assessment and research. “It is not disruptive. It’s authentic. And it helps the teacher personalize the learning path for each student.”

Like virtually every other educational publisher, Massachusetts-based Curriculum Associates, founded in 1969, is trying to figure out how to offer teachers about student learning.

The publisher’s popular reading and math programs are used by an estimated 13 million students nationwide. Curriculum Associates now says its reading program speech recognition technology that can be operated not just by teachers but by the youngest students, with artificial intelligence listening and revealing exactly how well they understand the words they read and, some day, the math they do. 

The new tool will likely roll out next fall, the publisher says. 

For years, educators have puzzled over how to effectively assess the work of young children. They typically can’t just sit down, read texts and answer questions. They need hands-on instruction through different kinds of media — watching, listening and reading in equal measure — to understand what they’re learning. They act out stories, they sing, they chant rhymes, they talk and move around. 

Paper-and-pencil tests are mostly out of the question. 

To those who have studied it, voice offers the quickest means of assessing a child’s abilities, since in all but the most special cases there’s little space between a child’s thoughts and his or her utterances. “It’s the most natural way for most children to convey information,” said Amelia Kelly, SoapBox’s chief technology officer. 

But putting a keyboard, mouse, trackpad or even a touch screen in front of many students creates “confounding factors” that limit their ability to show what they know, she said.

By capturing students’ voices as they read independently on a tablet or laptop, then translating that into text and comparing it to what’s on screen, teachers can get valuable insights into kids’ understanding. Good voice assessments can help teachers see gaps in children’s learning so schools can challenge them with appropriate work. 

But processing kids’ voices accurately is another challenge altogether. 

‘They shout, they whisper, they sing’

SoapBox founder Patricia Scanlon, an engineer with a Ph.D in speech recognition technology, has said the company grew out of her personal experience watching her own child struggle to learn how to read. 

One day in 2013, she opened an email from the maker of a game her 3-year-old daughter was using for help. The app automatically sent parents updates, and this one told Scanlon her child had completed seven levels in the game, a major achievement. 

“Suitably impressed,” Scanlon asked her daughter to show her the game. She soon realized that the child hadn’t actually mastered the material — she’d simply guessed at the correct answers and gathered rewards without mastering the skills. “She had learned to hack the game,” Scanlon said, impressed with her daughter’s ingenuity — but steamed at a wasted opportunity.

What was missing, she realized, was a way for the game to hold her daughter accountable, to “invisibly and continuously” quiz and assess her progress, despite the fact that, at age 3, she and most kids can’t hold a pencil, control a mouse or type on a keyboard.

With her background, Scanlon knew that even in 2013, speech recognition technology worked well for adults but not for younger children, who have higher pitched voices and rarely follow standard language rules: “They shout, they whisper, they sing, they elongate, they over-pronounce the words,” she said.

Of course, children come to school with regional accents and years of learning distinctive dialects at home. And millions of kids are learning English as they enter school. So she began building a proprietary “voice engine” that would accurately record what young children say in real-world, noisy environments and on ordinary consumer devices like Chromebooks and iPads.

At the time, the biggest AI voice recognition systems such as (Amazon’s Alexa was still about ) were being trained almost exclusively on adult voices, in “grown-up” situations: consumers purchasing products, drivers seeking directions or hikers asking about the weather. 

Siri and other systems worked well for these nominal tasks, but they weren’t built for school, where children are struggling to learn. Kelly, SoapBox’s CTO, compared it to training an AI-guided self-driving car on a Formula 1 racetrack instead of a crowded, congested street. When you finally got the car out onto the streets, it wouldn’t work.

So Scanlon and her colleagues spent the next decade training SoapBox’s AI to learn from children in both Europe and the U.S. That meant teaching the AI that a word said by an English language learner in Dublin is the same one spoken by one in Philadelphia or a kid from the American South.

“If it doesn’t work for every student equally, then it doesn’t work,” said Kelly.

She sees that functionality as an ethical concern. Voice-activated AI “can be the great equalizer here,” she said. “I think it can help solve the literacy crisis — but only if people use it. And people are only going to use it if they trust it. And they’re only going to trust it if it works.”

The terms of the November sale weren’t disclosed, but it will almost certainly create a huge competitive advantage for Curriculum Associates, which gets exclusive access to a technology that has been widely used by other publishers.

Before the acquisition, SoapBox had licensed its technology to dozens of education providers such as McGraw Hill, Scholastic and Amplify, essentially enabling them to outsource voice recognition for their own products. With the 2023 deal, those partnerships stopped, Curriculum Associates said.

According to , before the acquisition, Soapbox had raised $10.4 million in funding since 2017. Its most recent investor last year was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which provided an undisclosed sum to underwrite development of a voice engine for U.S. students.

By next fall, Curriculum Associates envisions that the technology will be so simple to use that even the youngest students could work independently, putting themselves through the paces of self-guided games and activities that evaluate their reading skills on an ongoing basis. While it’s still piloting the technology in schools, one teacher who has seen a preview said she’s eager to see it in action. 

LaTanya Renea Arias of Kingsland Elementary School in Kingsland, Ga., said having better data about students is key not just to learning but equity — especially when 55% of students are people of color but 80% of teachers are white.

Though she has taught for a decade, she said, “I don’t have an ear to pick up every single dialect, to have great understanding of how a word that I pronounce sounds differently” when a particular student says it. “But I still need to credit them with their learning and their knowledge.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

While it looked like the number of students scoring at the lowest level dropped by over 12%, the reality was more complicated. 

“Comparing 2023 to 2024 is challenging,” David Johns, an associate superintendent, . In conjunction with the unveiling of new standards last year, the state for proficiency and performance levels. Below basic became “developing” and basic, “approaching.” 

“It’s not exactly apples to oranges, but it’s like apples to apple juice,” he said.

Wisconsin isn’t the only state that recently instituted changes that effectively boost proficiency rates. Oklahoma and recently made similar adjustments. lowered passing or “cut” scores in reading and math last year, while and are considering such revisions.

Changing standards and proficiency targets is a routine process for states that some say offers a reflection of what students know. But given the cataclysmic effects of COVID on student learning, experts say now is not the time to tweak how we measure performance. 

“Many parents are already underestimating the degree to which their children are ,” said Tom Kane, a Harvard researcher who has been tracking students’ recovery from COVID learning loss. “Lowering the proficiency cuts now will mislead them further.”  

Even Jill Underly, Wisconsins’s education chief, confessed to some bewilderment about the process last year.

“The crummy thing is, I am an educator and I don’t understand it — so how are parents supposed to understand this too?” she wrote in a June 2023 email. “For example, what does Proficient mean vs. Advanced? That they are at grade level vs. the next grade level? I just hate this stuff so much.”

The conservative Institute for Reforming Government, which obtained the email through a public records request and shared it with The 74, is pushing the state to level with parents about poor student performance in the aftermath of COVID. 

Shifting the goal posts “sends a message that we are accepting post-pandemic levels for student performance and shows a lack of belief in every student,” said Quinton Klabon, the think tank’s senior research director.

Chris Bucher, a spokesman for the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, said Underly’s comments show she was “doing her job” by asking the department’s experts tough questions in an effort to make the complex calculations more transparent. To help explain the changes, the department released a of how it altered standards and cut scores. 

‘An outlier’

The scoring changes in Wisconsin and other states are likely to fuel fresh criticism of the “honesty gap” — the chasm between the disparate, conflicting measures states use to determine student progress and the , uniform standard for proficiency set by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. 

Known as the Nation’s Report Card, NAEP defines proficiency as “solid academic performance” and “competency over challenging subject matter.” It’s a higher bar than merely being on grade level and one that has long triggered debate. Education researcher Tom Loveless, formerly with the Brookings Institution, calls it “,” and one of international tests showed that many students in high-performing countries couldn’t reach it.

But it’s a goal many states were striving toward just prior to the pandemic, when several commentators first about the “honesty gap,” and one some experts think states shouldn’t abandon. 

“It is the only common yardstick that is available to compare student achievement across states and across the large urban districts,” said Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for NAEP. “From the board’s perspective, standards are not going to be lower for [kids] when they enter college or the world of work.”

Frustrated with test standards in New York, Ashara Baker, a Rochester mother and state director of the National Parents Union, created her on student outcomes. While she included state data, broken down by race, she also cited NAEP proficiency rates as a comparison.

“When you’re lowering these cut scores, clearly the goal is to show some sort of growth,” she said. “But I think we’re getting away from the actual goal of why we do assessments. They should really demonstrate where kids are struggling or where there is a gap.” 

Christy Hovanetz, a senior policy fellow at ExcelinEd, a think tank, added that unlike grades on assignments and homework, state assessments should provide parents “objective” information on how their children are doing. Schools also use them to determine which students are eligible for extra help. Lowering the bar, she said, means some students who need aid might not get it.  

“These assessments are how we help identify students for extra support and assistance,” she said. “Now there will be a lot of kids that aren’t going to be getting those high-dosage tutoring sessions or who aren’t going to be getting that additional support in math that they might need.”

As with most states, New York’s threshold for proficiency lines up with NAEP’s basic level, defined as “partial mastery” of fundamental knowledge and skills, according to a from the National Center for Education Statistics. The report showed that at the time, Wisconsin had some of the toughest standards for reading and math in the country, which meant that a higher percentage of students fell short compared with other states.

That made Wisconsin “an outlier” Bucher said. 

“Our previous test scores made it appear kids were performing worse on standardized assessments than they actually were,” he said. “We listened to a group of experts — educators who are in the classroom each day teaching kids — who recommended we use cuts that align to our standards and take us closer to grade-level expectations.”

Next month, NCES is expected to update its 2021 report with a new comparison of states’ proficiency cut scores and NAEP, one that is likely to renew criticism of the way states measure student performance. 

“States that have been more ambitious are now sticking out like sore thumbs,” Klabon said. “It’s kind of a race to the bare minimum, rather than a race to the top.”

‘A sense of urgency’

One state that is choosing to stick out is Virginia. Rather than calling it unrealistic, the state, under Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, is hoping to reach the ambitious NAEP standard.

The governor to the honesty gap in 2022, announcing sweeping changes to the state’s testing regimen that include stricter standards, assessments and cut scores. A new , which takes effect in 2025-26, is expected to label a majority of schools off track or in need of “intensive support.” 

“We are not telling parents, students, teachers, policymakers and citizens the truth about where our children really are on mastering content,” state education Secretary Aimee Guidera told The 74. “Why isn’t there a sense of urgency?”

The 2021 NCES report showed that Virginia had the lowest standards for proficiency in reading. Virginia education officials pin its poor showing on decisions made by previous Democratic governors. In 2014, under former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the state passed a law requiring students to . And under former Gov. Ralph Northam, the State Board of Education in reading and math.

accuse the Youngkin administration of fueling a negative perception of schools in order to  private school choice, including education savings accounts, which in the state legislature last year. 

Virginia saw the largest decline in the nation in fourth grade reading on the 2022 NAEP test, dropping from an average score of 224 to 214. But 32% of students were proficient — same as the national average. On several other , including the SAT and exam, Virginia students have historically ranked near the top.

Advancing school choice was a “mandate for Youngkin and he has pursued it with dogged determination,” said Cheryl Binkley, president of 4PublicEducation, a Virginia advocacy group. He has appointed school choice advocates to the state board, she said, and pledged to increase the number of .

But Guidera points to increases in and over $400 million the state provided to as evidence that leaders aren’t trying to “tear down” public schools.

Under a different Republican administration in Oklahoma, the opposite scenario is playing out. As The 74 reported last month, the state education department, led by Superintendent Ryan Walters, made its state tests less challenging, especially in reading. In third grade, for example, 51% of students scored proficient or better, compared to 29% last year. 

Richard Cobb, superintendent of the Mid-Del district, near Oklahoma City, said district leaders know student performance has improved, but the department’s changes had the effect of artificially inflating the magnitude of the gains.

The move represented a break from work led by Walters’s predecessor, Joy Hofmeister, to align the state with NAEP’s stronger proficiency targets. In 2017, over 70% of students on average were performing at the proficient level through elementary and middle school on state tests, but only a quarter went on to earn a competitive score on the ACT test in 11th grade.

“The whole idea was trying to get an honest indicator of student readiness as early as third grade when kids start testing,” said Maria D’Brot, a former deputy superintendent in Oklahoma who traveled across the state with Hofmeister to explain the honesty gap to local superintendents. 

Their message wasn’t well received.

“Joy’s adjustment to the cut scores was wildly unpopular and demoralizing,” said Cobb, who has led the district since 2015. “NAEP should not be our target, and many superintendents told her that.”

But in the summer of 2017, 121 educators met at the Cox Convention Center in Oklahoma City to determine tougher cut points for each performance level. Just as the public, plummeted. The in third grade reading, for example, dropped from 72% to 39%.

Hofmeister, who was reelected in 2018, remains proud of that work, which she said would make students better prepared for college and a competitive job market.

“I remember feeling like this is worth it if it means I’m a one termer,” she said. 

Ten Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) community schools will be given an opportunity to pilot new approaches to assessments in the 2025-26 academic year. 

And once the schools adopt alternative assessments, they won’t have to participate in standardized tests, other than those mandated by state and federal governments, the district school board decided in a 4-3 vote on Tuesday. 

The policy, which comes as part of the , was authored by LAUSD school board President Jackie Goldberg and board members Rocio Rivas and Kelly Gonez. 

Goldberg said that over the past several decades, corporate entities have turned education’s focus away from cultivating a love for learning — and toward test taking, which she believes has become the “be-all and judge-all of schools.” 

She emphasized that multiple choice, standardized assessments are not the only way to gauge students’ learning. 

“I knew where my students were, what they could read, what they understood, what they didn’t — because that’s what you do when you teach,” Goldberg said, adding that class discussions and projects can also be used to observe progress. “You’re continuously assessing.”

Once the 10 community schools establish new “innovative, authentic, rigorous and relevant” methods of assessment, they will not be required to administer the district’s iReady diagnostic tests, which teachers have criticized for taking up large chunks of instructional time. 

Rivas said students would be relieved of some of the anxiety and stress that comes from ongoing standardized testing. She read several messages she had received from students in the district during Tuesday’s meeting.

“If we already take five state tests … in the end of the year, why do we take the end of the year iReady?” one student wrote in a letter to Rivas. “They both are the same reason: to show you what we know.” 

“I was really stressed out — worrying about all of these tests. I also gained a lot of anxiety since testing started, and I could not focus on my own life because I was so stressed.” 

LAUSD board member George McKenna, however, opposed the measure, questioning how students are supposed to learn without being given tests to work toward. He added that the initiative has “promise” but that he did not trust the policy would be implemented properly. 

Board members Tanya Ortiz Franklin and Nick Melvoin also voted against the resolution — which will require LAUSD to establish a Supporting Meaningful Teaching and Learning Initiative that community schools can apply to be part of. 

Schools that are part of the initiative would have to select a community school “lead tacher” who is grant funded and would receive additional professional development from both Community School Coaches and UCLA Center for Community Schooling, among others. 

The 10 schools in the cohort, according to the resolution, will also have to adapt their instructional programs to “integrate culturally relevant curriculum, community- and project-based learning, and civic engagement.”

“This is just one step,” Gonez said during Tuesday’s meeting. “But I really look forward to the way this resolution will be implemented — to see what innovative ideas that I know our teachers have and see how we may be able to pilot a more joyful education, a transformative education, which really brings the community schools model to full fruition.” 

Dominique Bryant made the switch for her 10-year-old after two years of watching him struggle with reading. She first noticed how far behind Malcolm was in second grade when he couldn’t read the instructions on a homework assignment. 

“I looked in his face and he just was so defeated. I said ‘I’ve got to do something else,’” she said. Now her two daughters, Ebony and Aviana, attend the school as well.

One way Burbrella stands out in a growing marketplace of unconventional school options is by grouping students of similar ages and learning needs together in pods — a format that a lot of families became familiar with during the pandemic. The school, however, takes a more mainstream approach to measuring how well students learn math and reading. Teachers turn to some of the same assessments still used in traditional public schools, like the Iowa tests to pinpoint students’ skills when they first enroll and i-Ready to monitor progress throughout the year. 

“We look for their strengths, their interests, and we integrate that into play, nature and projects — just to really make learning fun — but also to close the gaps they have academically,” said Dominique Burgess, the school’s founder.

Her reliance on widely used assessments is not unique in the expanding universe of school choice options, according to a from Vela, a nonprofit that promotes and provides grants to such programs. Most leaders of unconventional schools use methods like observation, student presentations and projects to track progress, but more than half also use standardized tests or assessments built into online curriculum — like DreamBox and Zearn. Leaders of such programs say parents are their number one audience for the data. But with more states allowing families to use public funds for tuition at microschools and other private school programs, there’s also for greater transparency into how students stack up against their peers in district schools.

Burgess, previously a public and charter school educator, doesn’t have a problem with that. 

“I think we’re at a very pivotal point in this whole movement,” said Burgess, who also has an online program that serves students from 19 states. “A lot of what we’re doing needs a light shined on it — not just for parents to say ‘Oh, it’s something different. Let me go try it’ — but more so the country can see this might be the new way of educating kids and providing families with choice.”

Vela, with a network of 3,000 founders of alternative schools, was “uniquely positioned” to survey leaders on how their schools define and measure student success, said Meredith Olson, president and CEO. 

Of the 223 programs that responded, 70% said they track academic progress, but ranked developing students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills as more important than reading and literacy skills — 74% and 66%, respectively. Nearly 40% of the school programs said they measure math skills, and 13% said they don’t track anything. 

Programs using digital tools are more likely to capture student assessment data using education technology from Khan Academy than any other program, Vela found in its survey. More than half of school founders said they use the popular website, with much smaller percentages using Lexia for reading (24%) or Zearn for math (15%).

Laurie Hensley, who runs the Learning Essentials microschool on an acre of property southeast of Phoenix, doesn’t let her students move to the next level until they score at least 90% in Lexia. Sometimes she “has a little chat” with parents if their child still can’t master a lesson after multiple attempts.

“But most of the time kids are progressing,” said Hensley, who worked as a paraprofessional in a charter school before launching her own program five years ago. “The whole point of being out of a public school is that they progress, even if it’s slower. As long as they’re moving forward, I don’t worry about them.”

Doug Harris, a Tulane University economist who studies school choice, including education savings accounts, said he’s not surprised that many microschool leaders rely on Khan Academy to tell them how students are performing. 

“Microschools have only one or two teachers and they can’t be expert in, or create assessments for, such a wide variety of material,” he said. But even if public funds are paying for students to attend a microschool, the public won’t necessarily see that data. “Khan doesn’t provide useful info to anyone but those families and educators in the school.” 

That’s not good enough for many opponents of ESAs, especially those in Arizona, which places no academic requirements on private programs that serve students with public funds. Criticism has spiked in recent months as the state makes to accommodate growth in the program. 

Holding microschools accountable

“Microschools propped up by taxpayer funds should be held to the same standards as public schools, which means they should take the same tests and post the same level of results,” said Beth Lewis, executive director of Save Our Schools Arizona, a public school advocacy organization that strongly opposes the state’s ESA program. “Otherwise, it’s not really about school choice at all, since parents don’t have access to any information about the microschool’s academics. And taxpayers have zero information about their return on investment.”

Jenn Kelly, who runs Education Through Adventure microschool in Scottsdale, agrees that ESA-funded programs should be held accountable for student achievement. But she thinks portfolios full of student work provide a more accurate picture than tests. The question, she said, is who would review the assignments.  

The state education department’s ESA staff “is already overloaded with purchasing and vendor pay requests,” said Kelly, a former special education teacher in district, charter and Catholic schools. “What happens if a child does not show any growth … from year to year? Does the state pull the ESA funding for that child? Every answer raises more questions.”

Unlike Arizona, some states with ESAs or vouchers, like West Virginia and North Carolina, require programs to administer either state tests, or another standardized assessment, and submit the data to the state. 

In West Virginia, Michael Parsons, who runs Vandalia Community School in Charleston, said he’s interested in how students in his school compare with those in other microschools, as well as those in public schools. But he’s most concerned about his students making progress. 

“Most important as a teacher is accountability to my students and their growth, and as an administrator, accountability to my staff,” he said. “If I can keep those two things on par, then accountability to parents, taxpayers, regulators happens by default.”

At Burbrella, Burgess said she could have given the same end-of-grade assessments that students in North Carolina public schools take, allowing for a direct comparison, but she described them as “not kid-friendly” and decided against it. 

One reason parents seek out is because they feel public schools have a narrow focus on testing. 

Bryant remembers how stressed her oldest daughter Ebony would get before state tests in New York City, where they lived before relocating to Burlington.

“She freezes up and does terribly. Compared to her performance in school, it was like night and day,” she said. At Burbrella, assessments don’t create the same level of anxiety. “It’s more like, ‘We’re going to assess where you are, and then we’re gonna work from there.’ ”   

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation, Stand Together Trust and the Beth and Ravenel Curry Foundation provide financial support to Vela and to The 74. 

Oklahoma school districts got some shocking, but welcome news this month when the state released results of student tests from last school year. 

Student performance, especially in English language arts, appeared to have skyrocketed. A highlight: An impressive 51% of third graders scored proficient or better, compared to 29% last year. The reported jump came a full eight years before the majority of Oklahoma students are expected to reach proficiency under the to meet federal accountability laws.

But elation quickly turned to disbelief as local officials took a closer look at the data. 

“Nobody makes jumps of that size,” said an assessment director from a school system near Oklahoma City. The official asked not to be named because she does not want to “put a target” on her district.

To put the outsized gains in perspective, The 74 asked Andrew Ho, a leading testing expert at Harvard University, to review the results.

Math progress in Oklahoma, where student performance has long trailed , was two to 10 times that of , depending on grade level, he said. In reading, gains were 10 to 20 times greater.

“If this is true, … the average fourth grader will be reading and writing like last year’s average sixth grader,” said Ho, a former member of the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for the federal test widely known as “the nation’s report card.”

As Ho surmised, Oklahoma’s purported gains are largely illusory.

Interviews with those familiar with the state’s testing process, as well as emails and other documents shared with The 74, reveal that the scores don’t reflect true growth, but a decision by the state, under the auspices of Superintendent Ryan Walters, to lower the bar for proficiency.

“Last year, you needed to know more to get proficient,” said a source familiar with the work of a Technical Advisory Committee the state convened this summer to examine proficiency targets. But the source, who asked not to be named because of ongoing work with the state, said “this year, using the same items, you didn’t need to know as much and you’re still considered proficient.”

It is not uncommon for states to massage results of large-scale assessments, particularly after they institute new standards. This past spring was the first time Oklahoma students took tests reflecting a 2021 update to language arts standards and 2022 math overhaul. But states often accompany such complex shifts with attempts to communicate, first to districts, and then to parents, how they were made and what they mean. 

“Historically, I understand that [the department] has handled these types of changes with media events where the department has invited news organizations to help support the communication of changes to the system,” a member of the Technical Advisory Committee wrote in May to Catherine Boomer, the department’s assessment director, according to an email shared with The 74. 

Boomer referred questions to the department. As of Wednesday evening, a spokesman for the department had not responded to calls or emails from The 74.

In a press conference following Thursday’s monthly state Board of Education meeting, Walters  the results had been released, despite the fact that the state posted scores on its website Aug. 1. He called media reports “gaslighting” and “fan fiction.” He said his office had yet to make a “big announcement” about the new scores because staff was still working with districts to “make sure the context is there.”

But districts say the state has offered no communication about how to interpret the results. A statement from the Tulsa Public Schools, the state’s largest school district, said the department has not yet issued guidance on how to compare the data to previous years, a “technical guide” on the scoring changes or any indication of how the results will affect low-performing schools.

An email dated Aug. 14 showed the department was moving in that direction. Julie DiBona, the vice president of program management at Cognia, the state’s testing vendor, told the technical panel that education department officials were asking for a meeting to discuss scores. On the agenda: “How to lead public discourse around comparing the results of the new tests with the old tests. “

A spokesman at Cognia declined to comment. 

But that meeting hasn’t happened. In fact, Walters recently praised early results in Tulsa but made no mention of the internal machinations over scoring. The district demonstrated a remarkable 16 percentage point increase in students scoring proficient or advanced in grades 3 through 5.

“The numbers are tremendous,” Walters said at a state Board of Education last month. 

The disconnect has left many local officials at a loss.

“I am not alone in believing that the gains demonstrated on [the state test] would be nearly, if not completely, statistically impossible” in a normal year, Stacey Woolley, the Tulsa district’s board president, told The 74.

In the Moore Public Schools, for example, almost two-thirds of third graders scored proficient or advanced in reading, compared to 38% last year. In Stillwater, about an hour north, the percentage of fourth graders in those top tiers jumped 21 points. 

Some put the blame for the communication breakdown on Walters, who has spent the summer mired in messy political brawls and controversial academic initiatives. In June, Walters drew national scrutiny by requiring all public schools to teach the Bible. , citing a lack of transparency and failure to distribute funds to districts, at least two dozen Republicans said they’d be seeking an impeachment investigation against him. And on Tuesday, a by the U.S. Department of Education said his department needs to improve financial management, and called it out of compliance in areas such as testing and handling Title I funds. Walters the previous administration for some of the concerns. 

“There are red flags all over the place,” said Erika Wright, leader of the Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition, who called the lack of communication from the state part of the superintendent’s “dismal track record on honesty and transparency.”

‘Moving the goalpost’

Parents rely on testing data to understand what their children are learning, and the resulting proficiency rates help establish school grades in the state accountability system. Officials use those figures to determine which students and schools get extra academic support. 

That’s one reason why calibrations like the one in Oklahoma are common.

In May, Clare Halloran, a researcher at Brown University, confirmed the updates to the state’s standards with Alyssa Tyra, who oversees English language arts at the Oklahoma education department. Halloran works on tracking state assessment data. 

“They confirmed that 2024 is a new baseline and not comparable to prior years,” Halloran said. When states change standards, “a lot of times you’ll either see a big drop or a larger increase than normal. It’s essentially because they’re moving the goalpost a little.” 

Teachers analyzed test items and recommended how much content students needed to learn to place in each of the four performance ranges, from below basic to advanced. On a 200-400 scale, 300 is the cut point for proficiency. Emails show the advisory committee was uneasy about leaving the scale as is, but the state decided not only to keep 300 as the proficiency cut off but that students didn’t need to get as many correct items to reach that level.

The official with the Oklahoma City-area district said the data has left her wondering how much progress students actually made.

“It would have been nice to celebrate that we made gains, instead of just feeling that this is not accurate,” she said. “It’s not representative of the hard work we’ve been doing.”

Spring 2024 preliminary state test results reported to districts across the state were scored incorrectly according to the Mississippi Department of Education, leading the agency to end a contract with the company responsible for the error.

School districts across the state were left scrambling to re-assess the corrected data, which they use to make determinations about everything from graduation requirements to instructional strategies for the 2024-25 school year, which for some districts has already begun. Some students ended up meeting graduation requirements and graduating in the summertime.

The majority of initial data was incorrect due to erroneous scoring by the Northwest Evaluation Association — the Oregon-based company the state contracted with to provide and process the tests. In a July 18 meeting, the State Board of Education voted to sever their contract with the company, which the state has been working with since 2015. The Mississippi Academic Assessment Program measures student achievement in English Language Arts, mathematics, science and U.S. history.

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The average yearly contract with the company has been $8,161,518.84.

“We were not aware that there was any type of error when we initially received the files from the vendor, but we were concerned,” Paula Vanderford, chief accountability officer for MDE, said.

At the state level, the dip in proficiency scores raised eyebrows, but MDE staff was unable to identify anything that would confirm the scores were inaccurate.

The results were then shared with school districts. Many districts reported knowing that something was wrong as soon as the scores were returned to them, because of their ability to look at individual student performance.

“The word I kept using was unexpected,” said Ryan Kuykendall, chief accountability officer for DeSoto County Public Schools, the largest public school district in the state. “We do a lot of assessments throughout the year to track student progress and adjust our instruction, so the hope is that when the state assessment comes back you sort of know where the students are. So, the results were unexpected.”

The data was released to school districts on June 17. By July 2, after communication with districts about their concerns, the state confirmed that the data was erroneous and that they would be receiving a new batch of data.

This put a squeeze on central offices across the state, who had to process the test results for a second time, in a fraction of the time.

“It was extra work. There’s no way to deny that. The way I viewed it and tried to get across to our department is that we’re just after the correct results. Whatever the correct results are, are what we need,” Kuykendall said. “But I can’t pretend that it didn’t make our administrative schedule very difficult and tight.”

MDE identified the error, but it had to rely on the vendor to fix the programming error that led to the erroneous scoring and provide the state with correct data.

Though a different vendor processes the 5th and 8th grade science, biology and U.S. History MAAP assessments, all state test results were processed again to ensure accuracy, State Superintendent of Education Lance Evans said.

MDE was unable to provide details about the severance of its contract with NWEA, but to Data Recognition Corp. for the upcoming school year. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, of which NWEA is a division, will continue to be the provider for the state’s .

“In short, faulty item parameters used in our scoring process resulted in incorrect achievement level thresholds, which determine how students perform on an assessment,” Simona Beattie, communications director for NWEA, said in an email. “While we are disappointed in the decision made by the Mississippi State Department of Education to terminate our contract…we understand the state’s frustration and are focusing on our continued work with MDE to provide its alternative state assessments.”

Statewide, the Mississippi Department of Education has been notified of 12 students across seven districts who became eligible to graduate after the assessments were rescored, and graduated this summer. None of the scoring changes resulted in those students passing the tests — Mississippi students who score well enough on subject area tests can graduate if their class scores are high enough.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Through it all, we believe this post-COVID, tech-accelerated world needs a pragmatic approach to accountability, one that measures conventional academic attainment and adds critical social-emotional and career skills to the mix. Most importantly, this approach must honor the unique strengths and opportunities each community faces and ensure all its voices are heard, including students, families, teachers, administrators, and business and local leaders.

We call this approach Accountability Plus. 

Over the last three years, our organization, , has partnered with over 150 schools and districts across the United States to rethink what success means for their students. We help each district and its community — the school board, business leaders, families, staff and students — generate a unique vision for success and systems for tracking, celebrating and communicating what students have achieved.

These locally defined accountability models expand the definition of success to emphasize real-world skills like problem solving, collaboration and communication, as well as whole-child outcomes like physical, mental,and emotional well-being, while maintaining an emphasis on growth in math, reading and other academic subjects. School systems then track student progress through like performance tasks and portfolios, not just standardized tests.

Logan County Schools in Kentucky is a great example of what is possible when both state and district policies are oriented to the whole child and measure what matters. As a member of the the district has been designing and testing a local accountability model that focuses on measuring four “” — student performance, growth, readiness and well-being — through state testing, classroom observation and school climate survey data.

This model doesn’t ignore standardized test scores, but uses them as one of multiple measures. It is powerful to see communities determine what matters most and hold themselves accountable to getting there using a process that tells a more complete story.

Another example involves the Hawai’i State Public Charter School Commission. Learner-Centered Collaborative and several other consulting organizations have been engaged with a network of Hawai’ian-focused charter schools created to integrate Hawai’ian culture, language and identity.

Our engagement with these schools began with a review of their vision, mission and values to ensure clarity of purpose. From there, we helped them develop one-page that are specific to each school. Each provides a high-level overview of desired success metrics (e.g. 70% of students participate in school-provide leadership opportunities) as well as where the data will be sourced from (e.g. student surveys) and how well the school is is attaining specific outcomes (e.g. 55% of students participated in first semester).

In Hawai’i, the metrics also include a strong cultural identity,  social-emotional skills such as collaboration and adaptability, and academic measures like reading and math.

We are now creating dashboards to help educators visualize their schools’ results and brainstorm ways to improve them. 

The key is that they are not seeing tests as the sole focus of their efforts. Instead, they are emphasizing ongoing assessment and continuous improvement based on the data collected through their expanded set of metrics. This is a model that can be adapted for any community.

We and our partners are not the only ones answering the call for a pragmatic approach to accountability. Action is being taken in communities across the country where there is a clear dissatisfaction with the industrial-era model of education and its legacy accountability system. 

Getting started takes only belief in two things: that every school has the ability to listen to students and the broader community, and that it can redefine success and establish shared goals for accountability around metrics that matter.

In a recent letter, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona invited states to apply for funding for innovative, flexible accountability models. Conditions are ripe for educators, policymakers and stakeholders to collaboratively define what matters most and to develop holistic models that incorporate multiple measures of success. These honor and celebrate the many ways in which people are smart, rather than just ranking and sorting them based on narrow measures. 

It is incumbent upon everyone who has a stake in the education of young people to create new accountability models that serve the unique needs of every child. Redefining success and creating meaningful accountability frameworks can ensure that all learners know themselves, thrive in their communities and actively engage in the world as their best selves.

Oh, and they’re fun.

That sophistication — and a bit of that fun — may soon be coming to school assessments.

Educators and developers are increasingly looking to the digital world of games and simulations to make tests more stealthy, playful and, they hope, useful. In the process, the new assessments may also push schools to become more creative.

“The idea is: Can assessment be more embedded?” said Y.J. Kim, an at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Can assessment be more exciting? Can assessment be more flexible?”

In November, NWEA, which publishes the widely used , unveiled a 3D digital assessment on the popular that tests how well middle-schoolers have learned Newton’s .

The game, called Distance Dash, requires two students to work together to launch vehicles of different sizes and payloads. The goal: Get both to the finish line in perfect sync.

Students pick a skateboard, a bike, a grocery cart or an automobile, load each with different items, then collaboratively fine-tune the forces placed on them. The whole time, the game covertly measures several objectives, including whether students understand the principles of acceleration and how to apply optimal force.

Tyler Matta, NWEA’s vice president of learning sciences engineering, said the assessment grew out of the , which require students to analyze and interpret data and understand patterns.

He said helping design it was a stretch for NWEA test makers, who hadn’t previously worked with game designers. “We got to see what goes into building educational games, which was all very novel for us. We learned a ton.”

The organization is working with developer , which has produced . 

“As an assessment, it’s important that you actually have the ability to fail,” explained Filament’s Kenny Green, the project’s producer. The data it generates — for instance, how many times students tried and what modifications they made — are all important for teachers to see. 

The new exam appears as Roblox, the popular gaming platform, moves further into schools. Last October, it said it’ll to expand educational experiences on its platform, two years after an initial $10 million outlay. 

Rebecca Kantar, Roblox’s head of education, said physics lends itself well to such collaborative simulations. Distance Dash, she said, is “representative of the kind of team-based problem solving real scientists do when they’re working through a physics problem in real life.” 

Another recent development: In 2022, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development assessed creative thinking for 15-year-old students in more than 60 countries via the assessment, which boasts interactive items that allow students to submit drawings with a . 

The test also includes open-ended tasks with “no single solution but multiple correct responses,” organizers said. The first results are expected this year.

Advocates hope to someday make tests more personalized and, in many ways, indistinguishable from games, said Bo Stjerne Thomsen of the . “What we hope is that playfulness becomes a serious part of assessment,” he said.

Better still, more playful tests, he said, could open the door for schools to offer more creative, inquiry-based learning. 

He and others who are support the new tests don’t mince words: They envision a world where the kind of high-stakes, multiple-choice tests we all grew up with give way to assessments that for the first time allow teachers to capture a broader array of “non-cognitive qualities” such as teamwork and creativity, while keeping students focused on learning.

“Every time you try to pause an experience or stop a learning experience, it actually stops the engagement,” said Thomsen. It’s the same with play: “As soon as you start measuring play, the play stops.”

‘It’s about you engaging with someone else’

Tests can also be demotivating, even though they’re designed to help students show what they’ve learned, said Yigal Rosen, who led the creation of the PISA test.

He recalled interviewing fourth-graders who had taken NAEP science exams: At least one-third of the questions, according to students, were “super boring” and not engaging.

“They will skip them,” Rosen said. “They will just select ‘Whatever.’”

Now the chief academic officer at , the learning software company, Rosen recalled that when his team tweaked the NAEP test with a “playful version” that invited students to work together, he said, scores rose by 50%. “It’s no longer about you just responding to this dry prompt,” he said. “It’s about you engaging with someone else.”

When they think of playful assessments, most teachers probably think of digital tools like the popular learning platform , which allows teachers to create game show-like quizzes and polls that engage students on mobile phones and other devices. Louisa Rosenheck, Kahoot’s director of pedagogy, admitted that testing, for all its progress, is “still an underdeveloped, untapped area.” 

Digital tools like Kahoot that help teachers do informal assessments as they teach are helpful because they “feel more low-stakes” than traditional tests. “It’s very quick, it’s informative. You can get feedback very, very easily,” she said. “But the question types, the formats, often are still kind of discrete items.”

In that sense, she said, they don’t take advantage of what good games can do: Collect extensive data on students’ thinking and decision making — much more important indicators than whether they got the correct result. But that’s expensive, so many educational games simply assess how far a player gets and how many tasks or levels she completes.

‘Stealth assessment’

Researchers have been toying with the idea of more playful assessments for decades. Nearly 20 years ago, researcher began looking at ways to seamlessly weave tests directly into the fabric of instruction.

Shute devised the idea of “stealth assessment,” a system that discreetly tests students’ learning in interactive and immersive environments such as digital games. 

Aside from offering a less obtrusive way to measure learning, stealth assessment aimed to help with “flow,” the mental state in which a person is so engaged and exhilarated by a task that they forget they’re working. 

For most students, any exhilaration melts when test time nears.

“Assessment is inherently about power,” said the University of Wisconsin’s Kim. “Assessment is inherently about evidence and rules.”

By contrast, the new kinds of assessments empower students to challenge and question rules. In one proposed scenario, students in the PISA creativity test are asked to build a paper airplane, then come up with ideas to improve it.

In another, students design a “bicycle of the future,” suggesting three original improvements over standard bikes. Then they’re asked to tweak the design of a proposed anti-theft camera mounted on the bike. Finally, since the future bicycle is automatically powered, they must suggest “an original way to reuse or repurpose” the pedals.

“The idea should be original,” the test says, “in the sense that not many students would think of it.”

Kim has spent the past few years developing playful assessments for the classroom, originally with teachers, teacher trainees and game designers at MIT. Where Shute, her mentor at Florida State University, called it “stealth assessment,” Kim prefers the term “playful assessment.”

‘It’s a mind shift’

Kim has lately been testing something she calls the , a free, printable card game for teachers that Kim describes as “Charades meets Telephone” to teach the process of drawing conclusions from a chain of evidence.

In the game, players take on one of three roles: Performer, Observer or Interpreter. They can only see one of the other two players, and gameplay proceeds as the performer silently acts out, in three movements or less, what’s on a card. The observer takes notes on what she sees and determines how to tell the interpreter what she saw. 

Like many in the field, Kim said a big roadblock to more playful tests is that so many school systems use assessments for teacher evaluations. “At the end of the day, we are obsessed with the idea that ‘Assessment is score: score about performance and proficiency.’”

Meanwhile, for most educators, play “is not something that is productive,” she said. “So for teachers to kind of switch their mindset in terms of, ‘Assessment can be fun, and this is an assessment,’ it’s a mind shift.”

On this episode Timothy Knowles, President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, joins Diane and Michael to discuss how this historic foundation looks to drive the future of American education. On K–12, they discuss why Carnegie has partnered with the Educational Testing Service and why they are seeking to assess a broader array of skills — not just focus on the standards that are already assessed. They also dive into Carnegie’s push to undo the Carnegie Unit and move toward a competency-based system. Knowles also shares details on the Foundation’s efforts to prioritize social and economic mobility in higher education by changing how they classify colleges and universities.  

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Diane Tavenner: Hey Michael.

Michael Horn: Hey Diane.

Diane Tavenner: Well, we are fully in the holiday season at this point, and I’m super curious. A couple of clips away from the big part of COVID, are you noticing or experiencing anything different this year?

Michael Horn: Oh, yes, we are. We are hosting constantly, it seems. We have had one of my kids’ entire class and all their friends over. We’ve had parties galore, and it seems like it’s never going to stop. We’re going to do it apparently straight through New Year’s. So that feels like a big difference. As you know, we’ve been renovating our house. That’s basically done. COVID basically done. Knock on wood that there’s nothing else coming. And so there we are. And here we are in this, our fifth season, still working through some of the sticky issues in K-12  education, all the way into how it impacts higher education and lifelong learning, frankly, and trying to give people a different vantage point on how to think about these intractable — historically — issues. And I guess the last thing to say is, as listeners know, this year we’re doing a lot more guests, a little less of Diane, Michael, a little bit more of people out there doing some really interesting work. And today you have invited a guest, Diane, who is doing a lot of interesting work. 

Diane Tavenner: That could not be more true, Michael. It is my great pleasure to have invited Tim Knowles here today to be with us. He’s the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning. And as you know, I am really privileged to sit on the board of that foundation. And so I have a really front row seat to the ambitious agenda that the foundation is undertaking. So much of what Tim and the team are seeking to tackle relates to the topics that you and I have been talking about on all of these seasons here, on Class Disrupted. And so I just thought it would be really fun to go back and dig into some of those, like, seat time, competency-based learning, assessment, accountability, but through the lens of a really historic foundation that has a really ambitious, modern agenda and has had really profound impacts on our schools that I don’t think most people realize or understand. And so I’m super excited for this conversation. Tim, welcome.

Timothy Knowles: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Michael Horn: Yeah, well, we’re incredibly excited. I was really thrilled when Diane told me she was going to extend the invite. And before we dive into the work that you’re doing now that Diane just alluded to, I know that the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning has a long and pretty storied history. Can you tell us a little bit about the organization and why it has mattered to K-12 education in this country?

Timothy Knowles: Sure. So, Carnegie Foundation is 120 years old and it’s been instrumental to a wide range of educational things. The first thing it did, literally the first thing it did was create TIA, now TIA CREF, the largest retirement fund for teachers, professors, and people working across the social sector. It then created the pesky Carnegie Unit, or the Course Credit, the bedrock currency of our educational economy, which I expect we might get into a little bit further. And it’s done other important things through its history. It created Pell Grants, it created standards for engineering, law, medicine and schools of education. And more recently, it introduced improvement science, known colloquially as continuous improvement, to the education sector. But big picture, it’s an institution which has, or I like to think of it as an institution which has, looking around the corner in its DNA. It’s identifying levers to press, to improve both the quality of K-12 and the post-secondary sector, to incubate things, and to bring them to life at a scale that’s persuasive. And today our stake is firmly in the ground for first-generation underrepresented and low-income young people nationwide.

Diane Tavenner: Well, and that is one of the many reasons that I really appreciate being able to be on the board and be a small part of what Tim and the team are working on. The only thing that I would add is I was really surprised to learn when I joined the board that it’s the first nonprofit in America. It was enacted by Congress and became the first nonprofit in America. So, many of us who work in education, I think, take nonprofit entities and organizations for granted. And here’s the founding member of that team. So just a really fascinating, long, long history.

Timothy Knowles: I look really good for 120, don’t I?

Michael Horn: Better every day.

Diane Tavenner: Interestingly, for how old it is…Are you president number eleven?

Timothy Knowles: Ten. 

Diane Tavenner: I mean, not a lot of presidents.

Michael Horn: That’s impressive.

Diane Tavenner: Tim, you just alluded to it. For the last stretch of time under the previous president, because you’ve been here at the Foundation for a couple of years now, the Foundation was really focused on improvement science. And one of the interesting elements of this Foundation is that the current president really gets to define, has the full latitude to define the agenda. And so under Tony Bryk, that’s when I joined and when a whole vibrant improvement science community really formed. You’re continuing that. You believe deeply in improvement science and have a long history of it as a method for how we do our work, but then have layered this really ambitious agenda on top. I want to start with one of those meta outcomes. There’s a few of them that you’re driving to, and that is to accelerate social and economic mobility and achieve equity across the educational sector. And you just alluded to this. Earlier in this season, we had Todd Rose on the podcast and he shared a number of findings that suggest that a majority of Americans are really starting to question the ROI of four-year college and even our K-12 education system. And that they have this perception that education has become the end goal versus sort of a means to achieving a good life, economic security, freedom, however you want to say that. And this big outcome that you’re talking about seems to be in tune with the sentiments of the American public, if you will. So will you talk to us about why this big meta outcome is important to the foundation and honestly, what you think can be done about it?

Timothy Knowles: So I’m going to start with a sort of personal reflection about that. My first job as a teacher was teaching Southern African history in Botswana, and it was before apartheid fell. And so by day I taught a fundamentally emancipatory history curriculum, and by evening and by weekend, I was involved more directly in what was then known simply as the Struggle. I had the opportunity about 25 years later to visit South Africa, which I hadn’t traveled to, when it was free. And I met with artists and activists and clergy like Desmond Tutu involved on the ground in the Struggle. And to a person, literally to a person, they said it was teachers, students, and professors who broke the back of apartheid. From a personal perspective, if educators were responsible for that, our work here to accelerate economic and social mobility and achieve equity seems eminently doable. I guess I would also say personally that I want to live in a nation and I want young people to live in a nation. Whether you grew up on Navajo Nation or in rural Appalachia or in the South Side of Chicago, you have the opportunity, legitimate opportunity, to lead a healthy and dignified life. I’m much less interested in arguments about the particular kind of school you attend public, private, charter, home school, or the time it takes to finish high school or a postsecondary degree. I care much more about how to build systems that enable millions more young people to possess the knowledge and skills that they need to lead purposeful lives. I know for your listeners, there are some out there who are going to be persuaded more by data about why social and economic mobility matter. There was a study, just to cite one study, there was a study by the Federal Reserve in Boston and economists from Duke and the New School. It was called the color of money. And they looked at the net worth of families living across a range of American cities by race. And the average white family’s net worth was $247,000. The average Puerto Rican family’s net worth was $3,020. And the average non-immigrant black family’s net worth is $8. To be clear, I’m not suggesting education is not a powerful engine of economic mobility. We know it is. What I am suggesting, and where Carnegie is putting our stake, is that it could be a much, much more powerful one.

Michael Horn: Just, I mean your own personal story and how you come to this is inspiring. Tim, the few times we’ve gotten to connect at different conferences and so forth, hearing you speak about it always touches a chord, I think, for those listening. And obviously you just alluded to how you all now want to make sure that the system evolves and really creates a lot more opportunity for a lot of individuals. And I think that relates to a big partnership that has been in the news quite a bit lately, which is this partnership with ETS, the Educational Testing Service. Can you tell us about what you’re trying to do and why?

Timothy Knowles: First of all, I don’t think assessment is a singular answer to serving young people better. Young people need to love school. They need to be engaged. They need to feel challenged and pressed. They need to learn hard things and relevant things. They need to experience learning, not just enact learning. So I don’t think we’re going to assess our way to a better place. However, there are a set of skills that we know matter, that we know predict success in life, in the workplace and in the schoolhouse, and yet we haven’t paid them as much attention as we might. And their skills affective behavioral, cognitive skills like persistence, communication, critical thinking, creative thinking, collaboration. We think they deserve more attention, not at the expense of reading or algebra or history. Disciplinary knowledge really matters, and you can’t think critically without something to think about. But we think these skills in particular need to be elevated. We also know that these skills are developed in all kinds of contexts, both in the schoolhouse and outside, that many young people who demonstrate them, they’re too often invisible or illegible to postsecondary institutions, and to employers, and even to students and parents themselves. So just by way of an example of what I’m talking about, if I’m growing up in rural Indiana and I work for 2 hours every morning on my family farm, and then I get to high school at 7:30, every day on time. I have a 98% attendance rate. I do my homework on time, I get B’s or better, and then I have a job after school or on the weekends. Taken together, those skills, in my view, would represent persistence and they should be made visible to students themselves, certainly to educators and to postsecondary education institutions and employers. So if I was to state Michael, really simply, what we’re trying to do with ETS, we’re trying to build a set of tools that will provide insight into key predictive skills that the education sector has neglected. I don’t think teachers have neglected these skills, and I could say more about that. I think they know that these skills matter. But we want to build tools that will capture evidence of learning also wherever it takes place. And to make those insights visible and legible to students and parents, actionable for teachers, and useful for postsecondary institutions and employers. That’s at the heart of this.

Michael Horn: That’s super helpful. Diane may jump in as well because she’s been working in these domains for a long time. FoR1, I guess I’m curious when I hear you say that, from my perspective, critical thinking, creativity, things like that, there are a set of skills that can be applied in different domains, but being a good critical thinker is in a domain, right? It doesn’t necessarily cross unless you have domain knowledge. So I’m sort of curious how you square that circle with something like the example you used, perseverance, which I would put, in Diane’s language, the habits of success, different from skills, which might be a set of artifacts across lots of different domains to show those habits. And so I’m sort of curious, are you thinking of them all as the same set of assessments that will capture these? Or how do you distinguish some skills that sit within academic standards perhaps, or academic domains, let me say, versus those that maybe are a collective evidence across lots of bodies of work?

Timothy Knowles: That’s a great question. And frankly, is the work that we are doing right now is to figure this out in terms of which skills are we really going to draw on disciplinary knowledge? Which skills are we going to draw on extant data that may exist like the kid in Indiana I just described? And which skills actually do we need to build tools for from the ground up that we may not have a nuanced enough set of tools to measure, for example, collaboration or working with others? So do you need to build game-based or scenario-based tools that would help you, give you visibility in terms of how someone is developing on that arc? But it’s a very good question and clearly, whether it’s critical thinking or even persistence, you don’t want to divorce that from content and from subject matter. You learn a great deal about young people in terms of their persistence based on their approach to complicated problems and hard problems and how they go about solving them. So this isn’t divorced from disciplinary knowledge in that sense by any means. I think in terms of assessments, first of all, I should say the aim was not to take on the American assessment industry and all the politics that go with it and try to introduce an incrementally better set of disciplinary assessments that feels like that would be sort of a Common Core redux. And I think we saw that play out pretty clearly and we saw where dividends were paid and where they weren’t. So, I think really the intention here is to identify competencies that we know matter that predict success that are developed in all kinds of contexts and create a set of tools that won’t look or feel like traditional assessments and push the educational sector to attend to a richer array of outcomes. Another important thing that I think is worth pointing out, which actually makes me optimistic about this, perhaps more optimistic than I should be. There’s something, as you both know, but maybe not all your listeners know, that is sweeping the nation in the form of these things called portraits of a graduate, or portraits of learner. States and school systems and schools have been developing them, engaging lots of stakeholders, basically asking, who do we want our young people to be? What do we want them to be able to do? So colleagues from ETS analyzed as many as they could find. This is one of the wonderful things about being partnered with ETS. I feel like I have 3000 new employees I can ask to do things. But they analyzed all of these portraits, and there were about eight to ten core skills that Americans say they want young people to possess upon completion of K-12. It’s almost as though – and this resonates, Diane, with some of your work – but it’s almost as though there’s an invisible consensus about the core purpose of schooling. Kind of a river running through our nation, whether in red places or blue places, in cities, in rural areas, about what we want our young people, who we want our young people to be. That’s hopeful to me. So if we can help the other thing that people say about the portraits, if you speak to them candidly, is A) They haven’t changed anything, like we haven’t actually changed what’s going on on the ground, even though we put a lot of energy into it, and B) We have no way of measuring these things. That, to me, represents an opportunity in the US, right now, that I think is worth plumbing.

Michael Horn: I’ve just learned a tremendous amount from you, and I had a takeaway that I think I haven’t had from the press stories on this, which is, in essence, you’re not trying to do what we recommend you never do in disruptive innovation, which is to try to leapfrog the incumbents with a better assessment or a better this widget whatever, but instead go to the areas of non-consumption where the alternative is nothing. And you’re right. I see the same thing in the portraits of graduate, which is there’s no teeth. There’s no way to measure or represent or have an asset based framing around these things because there’s nothing to measure them. So you’re going there. I think maybe the second question is less mine and more what I think a lot of people are wondering, which is why partner with ETS on this? Because they have a reputation in different quarters and different ways, as you know. 

Timothy Knowles: That is a completely fair question, Michael. And I know you both know as well as I do that most assessment companies across the world are grappling with what their future will look like and are seeing, quote, market share evaporate really quickly. Standalone assessments that bring schools to a screeching halt for two weeks in May and are not predictive of very much, I hope are not going to be part of the equation for the long term. And yet those very assessment companies, including ETS, have made an incredible business based on that design. ETS is clear-eyed about that, in my view. They hired a new CEO, Amit Sivak, who is exceptionally clear-eyed about. And one of the magnetic forces, from my perspective, was they have the capacity to build for scale. I don’t, Carnegie doesn’t. We’re a small organization. When I introduced to the board the idea of focusing on the future of learning, which is really the aim here, is to get at learning. One of our board members, who is a very well regarded scholar of assessment, said, well, what about the future of assessment? And at the time I thought, we really don’t have the capacity to build credible, reliable, valid tools to do some of this work. Then, Amit, who I’d known prior to ETS, joined ETS, and I thought there was an opportunity that led to a year’s worth of conversations about whether they are willing to really try to innovate and in essence create a separate entity within ETS, but with its own walls and autonomy to build a new set of tools that would attend to these skills, that would think about assessment in very different ways and that would be focused on the insights that were generated, not focused on the test as it were. So that’s why ETS. Now, to be fair, again, I think the test for us is can we build something different? Is it going to be useful to young people? Is it going to be useful to parents, to teachers? I think we can, but I know we won’t know unless we try. That sounds slightly glib, but I think it’s true. Like we have to take a shot at broadening the picture of what we say is important for young people. It bears probably saying that we met recently as part of this work with the 50 teachers of the year from across the country, from each state, and introduced the work to them. And literally there were some teachers in the room in tears and I was like, “Why?” But they were saying, bring it. This is the work we want to do. This is in essence the work that parents know we should do. And this is why we started to teach in the first place. That’s my short answer to “Why ETS?” We have enough elegant examples that live around the edges of our profession. Everybody in this sector can point to elegant examples of competency-based learning that haven’t scaled. So we need to think about – if we’re serious about tipping or using this tipping moment – we have to figure out how to enact at a broader scale than we have tried to historically. 

Diane Tavenner: I will just add here because I hear the critiques, just like you, and the questions. And I will just add from a personal experience, I think you might know this, Michael, and Tim, you certainly do, that several years ago, Summit actually partnered with a startup assessment company that was doing these exact types of assessments. So I know they’re possible, I know that they can be done. And then, of course, as a startup company, they got acquired and employers valued and wanted these types of assessments and they couldn’t stay in K-12 where the market was so competitive and unreliable, etc. And that was such a disappointment to me because I saw such the possibility of those types of assessments and how they could be used and that they really were possible. And so it feels like this is where the sort of solidness and the expansiveness of ETS, perhaps, enables us to move forward. And I would just add a fun fact, which is I don’t think relevant, but ETS is yet another entity that the Carnegie Foundation created and then spun out.

Timothy Knowles: We did — 75 years ago 

Diane Tavenner: Tim, you have started alluding to this already because these things are all connected and linked, but you said assessment is just a small part of it. And when you first started, it wasn’t even a thing that you were thinking that we needed to do, because what you’re really setting out to do is sort of build this architecture that produces what you call reliably engaging, equitable, experiential and effective learning experiences for all young people, every single one of them. And I think that those words, those concepts describe the type of learning that Michael and I are talking about all the time, that we are advocating for, that we believe in. So beyond assessment, what does that architecture look like? What else is happening to try to bring this to life?

Timothy Knowles: Here, we need to move away from models of schooling singularly dependent on the Carnegie Unit or the credit hour. It was established in 1906 to standardize an utterly unstandardized educational sector. So it was a great plan in 1906. But since 1906, we’ve learned a great deal from learning scientists and cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists about what knowledge is and how it’s acquired. So we need learning modalities that are truly competency or mastery based, whatever the language you want to use, that allow young people to solve real problems, that support experiential education, that enable them to work with mentors and experts and peers. The problem is not that we don’t know what this looks like. We do. Again, we can all point at examples of it. The problem is we haven’t figured out how to bring it to life at a scale that’s persuasive. Thing one for me is building, in essence, existence proofs and networks of existence proofs and amplifying and elevating them because this work is happening in ways that will generate momentum and attention. And I think we’re in an interesting moment where I’ve talked to 18 or 20 states in the last four months. State leaders, state chiefs, governors, they’re interested in how do we move to competency-based systems. There’s are opportunity windows open at the school system and state level, I think, post-pandemic that we have to leverage. And part of it is about cracking the Carnegie unit. Second thing I’d say is, and you may laugh me out of the podcast, which might be a first to be laughed out, but we need to think hard about learning experiences or curricula. And I know people feel like they’ve been down the curricular road before, but the tools and supports for teachers and students have to be taken into more careful consideration. The problem with the wave after wave of standards and accountability efforts over the last 40 years, and this is completely oversimplified, is that we thought if we cranked up the standards and tested for them on the back end, that somehow magically in the middle, the work that students and teachers would do every day would change. And I think the sort of governance reforms that led to charter schools were not that dissimilar. The theory being if we provided schools with flexibility and autonomy over hiring and money and use of time and governance, somehow the stuff that kids did every day would shift and we didn’t see that really occur. Part of the architecture demands building learning experiences for young people across disciplines, which are course-based, which are unit-based, which can come in different sizes to use that language, are much more engaging, much more experiential equitable and effective. So first thing is the Carnegie unit. Second thing is actually what gets taught. And the third thing is policy. The Carnegie unit has infiltrated much of our state-level policy, and I think we just assume that perhaps the states provide waivers so people can do what they want. Well they don’t. Seat time is the rule. That is the rule. Mastery or competency is not the rule. 990 hours of instructional time per annum, or some variation on 990 is the requirement for the vast majority of states. I’m a fan of guardrails, so I understand the argument that, “Well, you want to be careful about removing the guardrails.” But I’m not a fan of guardrails that don’t acknowledge what we’ve actually learned about learning over the last hundred years. And that’s the peril with this singular devotion to the conflation of time and learning. In my view, there’s a set of policy opportunities, if I was going to frame it in a more asset-based way, that I see. And there’s an appetite. And again, red states, blue states, both are interested. This is oversimplified, but I think the majority of the more conservative states that I talk to are interested in employment and access to jobs for young people who may otherwise leave their state. In the blue states, the interest is more about access and opportunity. But I think both are the same in this case, they’re fundamentally the same. Access and opportunity is really about employment, is really about social and economic mobility. I think there’s some more common ground, despite the kind of thrum of our national political discourse.

Michael Horn: I think you’re right. And I get super excited when you start talking about replacing this time-based unit – from the foundation that put it in place – with something much more meaningful and meaty. And it’s not surprising to me when I hear you – I want to use the word preaching – about this wisdom that you had to go and that you have. 

Timothy Knowles: Ouch

Michael Horn: Well, I want to yell “Preach!” But when I hear you say, “We ended up having to go to assessment,” that makes sense to me, because you have to replace the unit of time with something that is measuring progress in a different way. And so that makes sense. Now to switch gears completely, though, another part of the work — you’ve got your tentacles in a lot – another part of the work that you all do, and something that Diane and I have been talking a lot about on the show, is higher education, of course. And you all have a profound impact about how we think of the categorization of colleges and universities in this country. And you’ve made some big moves to change that. For our listeners that are less steeped in higher ed, can you tell us what the Carnegie classifications are in the first place, why they matter, why they have mattered, perhaps in the way that was not intended, and what you’re doing now with them to change those incentives?

Timothy Knowles: One of the things we do is we classify every postsecondary institution in the nation, almost all of them. There’s some that don’t submit data to the federal government, and so we don’t classify those, but something like 4500 institutions, we classify. Many of your listeners or some of your listeners may have heard of one of these classifications “research one” or “R1” classifications that comes from us. That spawned an arms race in terms of higher ed institutions aspiring to be R1 institutions and designated R1. Not just because of the One, but because the federal government follows it up with vast tranches of capital, of public capital. So there are real incentives to become an R1 that led to this arms race. So when I arrived at the foundation, the classifications had basically been spun off and had gone through very modest changes for 50 years. So since I got there, we’ve brought the classification…I’ve invented a new term, it’s called spinning on. We spun it back on and we brought them in house. Now with our partner, the American Council on Education, we’re trying to reimagine them from the ground up. So in 2025, all postsecondary institutions in the country will be classified in new ways. There’s lots of vectors of the work here, but one thing that I’m particularly excited about, and I hope will resonate with the kind of work we’re interested in on the K-12 side is developing a classification focused on the extent to which postsecondary institutions are engines of social and economic mobility. So every higher ed institution in the country will receive an economic mobility classification. So classification is distinct from a ranking. We’re not of the view that you can distinguish in credible ways between an institute number 599 and 600 on a list. Classifications are groups of institutions. So like institutions, in that sense, we’re less interested in naming names and creating another rank order. The primary aim here is to learn what institutions are doing to effectively accelerate social and economic mobility, to develop public policy that supports it. And just as R1s have been the recipients of large tranches of public capital, to drive public capital to those institutions that are accelerating economic mobility. So that’s that body of work. It’s fascinating because the big world doesn’t know much about it, but the higher ed world pays extraordinarily close attention to it. So two weeks ago I had a conference call with 1500 higher education leaders. That’s a third of them, or something close, which suggests how closely they’re paying attention. So we want to draw attention to one of the things that I think makes America and higher education great, which is the extent to which they’re actually making improvements in terms of young people from low-income backgrounds, first-generation young people, and underrepresented young people in particular.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, it’s really fascinating. It’s so interesting that a tool like that is visible to everyone. I mean, so many of the national rankings are based in part, like, if you look at their formulas, the beginning of the formula is this classification. So we all see it, but we don’t understand where it comes from. Super hopeful about the potential impact there. Okay, I have to squeeze one more thing in here before. This is like the speed round. But when I was in grad school, I learned about the Committee of Ten and the profound impact that they had. I’ve talked on this show about this before — Michael and I have talked about this — about how they really defined what the order and sequence of high school curricula was and put the sciences in order, alphabetically biology. So we did it that way for a really long time. You have launched something called the Carnegie Postsecondary Commission. So people should not be surprised to know there was a relationship with the foundation and that old committee. So you’ve launched a new commission. Tell us about it quickly.

Timothy Knowles: So sure. The Committee of Ten was founded in 1892. It was chaired by a guy called Charles Elliott, who was the president of Harvard at the time. Interestingly, and I didn’t actually know this until recently, Charles Elliott was charged by Andrew Carnegie to establish the foundation that I’m responsible for. So the congressional order that says we better create a nonprofit for this thing, the first signature on that congressional order is Charles Elliot. So it’s a very tangled web that we live and weave. So the postsecondary commission is a group of not ten, but seventeen K-12 and postsecondary leaders. My hope is that they become the Committee of Ten for this century that will be thinking hard again about the question of mobility and how we create not just K-12 and post secondary systems, but systems that might even become much more blurred. So K-16, K-to-work systems that are going to not try to reach consensus as a group, and they all signed up with this agreement. The aim is not consensus. The aim is to develop action papers that will provoke both thinking and policy, certainly, but then to help shape the work of the foundation, particularly on the post secondary side for the next decade for what I hope is my tenure. It’s a commission with institutional engine underneath it. It’s an extraordinary group of people. I won’t name them, but I would urge anybody who’s interested to go and look at our website and meet them because they are almost, to a person, first generation leaders who are doing exceptional things ranging from running large public systems to small colleges to K-12 systems serving young people who depend on the quality of school the most. It’s an extraordinary group. We just convened earlier last month, and the world should get ready.

Michael Horn: Well, with that tease, why don’t we leave the conversation there from a work perspective, but before people tune out, Tim, you’re joining us. Diane and I have this end of show segment where we talk about things we’re reading or watching, and we try to make them not about our work. We don’t always succeed, but we try. So can we ask you what’s on your watching, reading, listening list?

Diane Tavenner: Sure.

Timothy Knowles: I have a weird tradition. I read poetry from December 1 to the New Year because it makes me think differently. So, I’m right now, who am I reading? Haki Maributi, South Side of Chicago poet. Gwendolyn Brooks and W.H. Auden, not a South Side poet, so a mixture. But I find it takes me out of my day job and makes me think about the world and people and what I’m here for in different ways.

Michael Horn: I love this because poetry is one of those things I always wish there was time for. I never know how to fit it in. You may have just given an idea for not just me. So, Diane, what’s on your list?

Diane Tavenner: I’m going to go a little bit different this week. Coming off a time period where we had lots of family and fun friends around, I did a jigsaw puzzle this past weekend. Some special guests dropped in and helped put a few pieces in. It was so much fun. Makes your brain think differently. Very social. So that’s my, whatever, enjoyment of choice this week. How about you, Michael?
Michael Horn: I love that. That feels very COVID, I will tell you that, but I love it. Mine, I will go, I just finished the first season of The Morning Show with Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston and have moved into season two and really enjoying it. It’s a complicated set of storylines that follow a little too closely, like real life in 2019–20 and so forth. And we’re getting into the COVID period right now, but it makes you think, it makes you laugh, it makes you cry, and it’s enjoyable. So that’s where I’ve been. And we’ll wrap it there. Tim, huge thank you for joining us, talking through all the initiatives that you all are doing at Carnegie. And for all of us, we will stay tuned. And for all of those listening, we’ll see you next time on Class Disrupted.

Then the pandemic hit and “there were bigger fish to fry,” said Principal Beth Farmer.

But the state had a plan.

Teachers in those schools would receive two years of training in what’s known as the science of reading and use a new curriculum with explicit phonics instruction. Farmer has already seen the payoff: Seventy-five percent of third graders met the goal this year, with similar improvement in fourth and fifth grades.

“What appeared to be some penalty … has ended up being a gift,” she said.

The progress sunk in when she recently talked to a student after a quiz. “She said, ‘I was reading 14 words per minute, and now I can read 43 words per minute.’ When a kid can verbalize that to you, that’s real impact.”

Greenville, with roughly 77,000 students, is South Carolina’s largest district, so the results figure significantly into the state’s overall average. Fifty-four percent of third through eighth graders statewide scored proficient or above this year in English language arts — a big jump from the 45% of students at that level in 2019.

While most states remain behind, South Carolina and three others — Iowa, Mississippi and Tennessee — are recovering from or exceeding COVID-related declines in reading, according to researchers at Brown University. Iowa and Mississippi have also surpassed their 2019 performance in math. Experts say improvements in literacy instruction and an accelerated return to in-person learning are among the key policy decisions contributing to the rebound.

“I am encouraged to see some states surpassing 2019,” said economist Emily Oster, who leads Brown’s “This suggests substantial recovery is possible, and it provides an opportunity for learning.”

She said it’s “crucial” to understand what those states have done right.

In Iowa, more than 80% of schools offered in-person learning during the 2020-21 school year, according to state officials. In January of 2021, Gov. Kim Reynolds signed a law mandating that schools offer families in-person learning five days a week.

That’s likely one reason why the achievement declines in Iowa were not as steep as those in other states, said Heather Doe, a spokeswoman for the Iowa Department of Education. Between 2019 and 2021, the proficiency rate in English language arts dropped just 2 percentage points, compared with at least twice that much in several other states. 

Once more state results are released, Oster plans to match the data with the length of time schools were closed during the 2020-21 school year, as she did last year. The from the previous report was that states where schools were closed longer saw bigger drops in proficiency — as high as 20%.

In the other states, leaders overhauled the way students learn to read, a shift that is now showing up in test results. 

and were among the first states to adopt reform efforts that included a strong emphasis on foundational reading skills.

The turnaround in Mississippi — which in 2019 saw a dramatic leap in fourth grade reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — has garnered much attention and analysis. But a similar push was underway in the Palmetto State.

The state assigned reading specialists to schools that needed to improve, like Westcliffe. And it gave districts a list of recommended curricula. Greenville chose a program from , which Jeff McCoy, the district’s associate superintendent for academics, described as more “scripted” than the district’s prior approach.

“We recognized that phonics was a missing component,” he said.

The 2023-24 passed this year included $39 million to make a highly regarded training course — Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling — available to all K-3 teachers. 

is a more recent addition to the states requiring training and curriculum on foundational reading skills. Its literacy law passed in 2020. The state also used relief funds for and high-dosage tutoring.

Dale Chu, a fellow with the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a policy consultant who focuses on assessment, sees an additional reason for achievement gains in Tennessee: Despite the pandemic, the state was less divided over education.

“Unlike any other state, they’ve largely had bipartisan continuity on education policy across three administrations,” he said.

Parent advocate Sonya Thomas, executive director of Nashville Propel, said the scores are good news for students in the early grades since Tennessee “spent several decades” in most educational rankings. But she’s less optimistic about older students’ opportunities to catch up. Many, she said, are “several grade levels behind.”

‘Give this some time’

Despite the positive developments, researchers and testing experts urge caution about interpreting the increase in proficiency rates as a sign of true recovery. 

Scott Marion, president and executive director of the Center for Assessment, said Oster provides “a pretty useful look” at where states stand. But assessments aren’t comparable across states; what counts as proficient in one isn’t necessarily the same in another. 

Overall proficiency rates also tell just part of the story. In South Carolina, for example, racial achievement gaps haven’t changed much. In 2018, there was a 45 percentage point difference in proficiency rates between Asian and Black students in English language arts. Now it’s 43 points. In math, the gap has actually increased — from 52 to 54 percentage points.

Additionally, some students never cross the threshold from one achievement category to the next, in terms of going from “does not meet expectations” to “approaches expectations,” said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research.

“I’m particularly worried about kids at the bottom, who were unlikely to be proficient before or after the pandemic,” he said.

In most states, proficiency rates in reading are still stuck below pre-pandemic levels. Scores in math are headed in the right direction; nearly all are “making progress,” according to Oster. 

But her summary serves as a reminder of how long it will take for some students to rebound, Chu said. “If you look at learning loss and what schools need to do to catch up, there’s no precedent,” he said. “The [education] system has never done this before.”

Despite billions in federal relief funds for tutoring, summer school and extra staff in the classroom, five states — Arkansas, Delaware, Massachusetts, Minnesota and Nevada — have continued to lose ground in reading since 2019. The percentage of students scoring proficient or above dropped this year.

Minnesota, for one, is several years behind states like Mississippi in requiring reading instruction to include phonics. Just this year, the state passed the , legislation that provides $70 million for “science of reading” training and curriculum. 

Last month, the Minneapolis district’s disappointing literacy results sparked a at a school board meeting. 

“I would not say that it is a privilege to share this data,” Sarah Hunter, the district’s executive director of strategic initiatives, told the board. Since 2022, the percentage of district students who scored proficient decreased from 42% to 41% — the third consecutive year of decline. Board members blamed the pandemic and urged patience.

“I know our scores are still low,” said . “Let’s give this some time.” 

 Such comments left some advocates feeling uneasy.

“How do we hold districts accountable?” asked Josh Crosson, executive director of EdAllies in Minneapolis. “We have a lot of funding that goes to schools that aren’t doing well in literacy.”

He thinks the READ Act is a step forward, but doesn’t do enough to integrate literacy training and teacher preparation. 

“I don’t think we’re going to see improved outcomes in these first couple months,” he said. “I think we’re going to see improved outcomes in the next few years.”

South by Southwest Edu returns next week to Austin, Texas, running March 6–9. As always, the event offers hundreds of panels, discussions, film screenings and workshops on education policy, politics, innovation, and of course, this being 2023, the rise of artificial intelligence.

One keynote session will feature the renowned architect Frank Gehry chatting with his younger sister, educator Doreen Gehry Nelson, about creativity, critical thinking and collaboration in education. In another, pollster John Della Volpe will share new data from the November 2022 midterm elections and discuss how to engage with rising Gen Z leaders. 

In yet another, filmmakers will screen a new documentary featuring Oakland-based activist Kareem Weaver, who, fed up with bleak reading scores in his home city, filed a petition with the NAACP demanding change in early reading instruction. 

There’s actually too much to see and hear in the span of just four days, so The 74 has streamlined the selection process. We’ve scoured the schedule to highlight a few of the most significant presenters, topics and panels that might be worth your time. 

Here’s a highly subjective list of 23 sessions you shouldn’t miss in 2023:

Monday, March 6:

: In this session by two educators and a psychologist who treats addiction, panelists will share the neuroscience behind teen brains’ unique susceptibility to tech — and how adults can help students fight it via a science-based digital media curriculum and resources designed to empower teens to develop healthy relationships with their devices. .

: The LEGO Foundation’s Bo Stjerne Thomsen joins experts in early childhood education, critical thinking, and game-based learning to discuss how educators can chart student progress in hard-to-measure areas while kids play. This discussion will explore new ways to engage kids in creative play in a way that develops essential skills and new methods for assessing growth. .

: The lab director of Community & Implementation at Stanford d.school joins two leading philanthropic leaders to explore opportunities for change that happen when we treat our schools as “vital pieces of community infrastructure.” Panelists will discuss what we unlock when educators draw on what students are capable of across physical space, tech innovation and social connection. .

: The pandemic exposed millions of students to the opportunities and limitations of virtual learning. Three years after the most significant disruption to schooling in recent memory, a panel of educators and advocates ask how virtual learning can reshape how we recruit, train, hire, and deploy teachers and how a virtual education workforce could provide new solutions to ongoing staffing problems. This session is moderated by The 74’s Greg Toppo. .

: The pandemic accelerated a looming teacher shortage, with a twist: Just 20% of teachers are people of color, even as non-white students comprise the majority of U.S students, according to the Education Trust. Yet 40% of public schools do not have a single non-white teacher on record. How can we rethink teacher recruitment and training to ensure that teachers represent the students they serve? This panel explores a national initiative to recruit 1 million teachers of color over the next decade. .

: Polarization in education policy threatens to erode the broad support that schools have long enjoyed. The Aspen Institute and a bipartisan group of state policymakers developed Opportunity to Learn principles to undergird a new, positive bipartisan agenda for improving public education. The panel features Aspen’s Ross Wiener as well as two state lawmakers (one Democrat and one Republican) to explore how this approach can help rebuild support for public education. .

: Mesa Public Schools, Arizona’s largest school district, has committed to building team-based staffing models in half of its schools. It now has 30 schools with innovative staffing models, and early results are promising. This panel features a representative of Mesa schools as well as two scholars from Arizona State University, which is partnering with the district on new ways to address teacher shortages and workforce design. .

Tuesday, March 7:

(keynote, livestreamed): In this keynote session, renowned architect Frank Gehry chats with his younger sister, Doreen Gehry Nelson, about their respective careers, sharing their perspectives on the roles that “creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration” play in education. Gehry Nelson created a well-known method of design-based learning, a teaching methodology that has been applied in K-12 classrooms worldwide since 1969. .

: In this session, the National Association for Media Literacy Education will discuss implementing “train-the-trainer” models for scaling media literacy education and instruction in schools, districts and communities. This session is led by Donnell Probst, a NAMLE associate director and former college reference librarian. .

: Adequate school funding is a key to educational attainment, but the benefits don’t stop there. It affects earnings, crime and poverty, research shows. Join a panel of experts from the Learning Policy Institute, the Public Policy Institute of California and the Tennessee Department of Education to hear how funding becomes more equitable to ensure better outcomes, especially as schools tap federal pandemic relief funds. This session is led by The Dallas Morning News’ Eva-Marie Ayala. .

: Emerging approaches to demonstrating mastery, as well as advanced computational methods, hold the power to improve assessment while reducing time and administrative costs. Hear leaders across research, government and philanthropy talk about how innovation is creating the assessments of the future. .

: This new documentary film features Oakland-based NAACP activist Kareem Weaver, who was fed up with bleak reading scores in his own community and filed a petition with the NAACP demanding change in early reading instruction. The session also features American Public Media’s Emily Hanford, whose breakout podcast “Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong” is shining a light on the Science of Reading. .

: For the first time, Arizona State University is offering its courses for credit through YouTube. The partnership, called Study Hall, aims to help potential college-goers navigate higher education by earning credit for their first year of college online. The session features Study Hall’s Hank Green, a popular YouTuber who has been called “one of America’s most popular science teachers.” His videos have been viewed more than two billion times on YouTube. .

: About 15 million students in the U.S. live with unstable internet access — or no access at all. A $65 billion broadband-for-all plan is in place, but the effort isn’t expected to reach the last mile for all students until 2030. In the meantime, what are low-barrier options for students without internet access to access carefully curated resources of digital content on their devices? Hear Endless OS Foundation’s talk about alternatives. .

Wednesday, March 8:

: John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, has been called one of the world’s leading authorities on global sentiment, opinion, and influence, especially among youth in the age of digital and social media. In this discussion hosted by the Walton Family Foundation, he’ll share new data from the November 2022 midterm elections and the panel will explore how to engage with rising Gen Z leaders to bring their unique vision for unity and collaboration to fruition. . 

: In this 90-minute interactive workshop led by Stanford d.school educators, participants will engage in the fundamental concepts underpinning Artificial Intelligence through symbolic play and hands-on design work. Participants will learn how AI can be used to address societal challenges, explore classroom applications, identify ethical implications and prototype different outcomes for social justice and the education system. .

: Experts say K-12 schools must increasingly offer education that’s personalized, skill-based, and interdisciplinary. But traditional school transcripts are ill-suited to capture the richness of these approaches. This panel discussion by representatives of the Mastery Transcript Consortium, the XQ Institute, the Aurora Institute and Big Picture Learning will explore insights and lessons learned from their credential design efforts. .

: Pandemic learning loss has engendered countless tutoring initiatives nationwide. Could tutoring be not just a short-term fix but an enduring feature of the U.S. education system? And what does research show about the benefits of online and hybrid models? This session, featuring former Tennessee Commissioner of Education Kevin Huffman and current Tennessee Chief Academic Officer Lisa Coons, will look at new research and on-the-ground implementation of evidence-based tutoring programs that improve outcomes for all students, particularly those historically excluded from such services. .

: As the pandemic recedes across the U.S., K-12 superintendents are retiring in droves. Top executive-search firms say business is brisk, with departures as high as any in recent memory. The American Association of School Administrators last fall found that about one in four superintendents had left their jobs in the past year, a marked increase from previous years. In their wake they leave a shallower recruiting pool. So is it time to rethink the superintendent pipeline? Should districts be more engaged in succession planning and growing future superintendents from within? This panel explores Texas school districts that were intentional about developing leaders and whose boards picked high-performing successors from within, allowing the district to keep raising the bar without losing momentum. .

: Educators should be intentionally designing the learning experience, say two experiential learning experts from the Minerva Project, an innovative college program that has made waves in higher education. This workshop will show how they design integrated online and offline immersive experiences that connect the curriculum to the real world “using awe and wonder as pedagogically useful tools.” .

: As drag queen story hours come under fire from conservatives nationwide, advocates say it’s more important than ever to understand their aim: Using drag as a traditional art form to promote literacy, teach about LGBTQ lives and activate children’s imaginations. This session, featuring three drag queens, will discuss the importance of LGBTQ family programming. .

Thursday, March 9

: This session features of Sandy Hook Promise, who will discuss the group’s “Know the Signs” school shooting and violence prevention programs. The session will bring together leaders who are equipping students with social and emotional skills to spot warning signs in their peers and intervene safely.

: In this session, two educators from the Groundswell Project UK will talk about young people and extremism, and how we can best challenge hate narratives in our schools and communities. Groundswell has been working in schools to counter hate narratives from the far-right to Islamism to misogynist extremism and other forms of violence. This session will offer best practices to educate youth on these issues. The session will also include personal testimony and examples of how young people can be misguided into extremist thinking — and how to help support vulnerable young people. .

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation and XQ Institute provide financial support to The 74.

Even so, the test’s administrators are interpreting the flatline at 54% as good news. Paul Gazzerro, director of data analysis at curriculum provider Amplify, said it’s likely that third graders would have fallen even further behind without efforts like tutoring and additional group instruction.

“It looks as if nothing happened, but the reality is I would’ve suspected that things could’ve gotten worse,” he said. “These are students in many cases that are missing very tangible skills. They may even be grade levels behind.”

The results come amid brighter news for younger students. The mid-year data, which reflects the performance of about 300,000 students across 43 states, show that more K-2 students are reading on grade level compared with 2022 — a sign that literacy skills overall continue to slowly inch back to pre-COVID levels. 

“The actual pandemic effect seems to be lessening,” Gazzerro said.

Amplify’s latest early literacy snapshot reflects a far less disruptive year than the last one. Schools aren’t dealing with frequent quarantines as they did during last year’s Omicron wave. In addition, many states and districts are in the midst of revamping how they teach reading and are using to purchase new curriculum and train teachers.

In some cases, states are taking the lead. Tennessee has put toward teacher training and ensuring districts have a phonics-based to match. And the Texas Education Agency will soon publish a list of approved materials to follow up a requiring districts to teach phonics.

At The 74’s request, Burbio, a data company, scanned 6,500 districts’ plans for spending American Rescue Plan funds. Over 3,800 report an emphasis on literacy, more than 4,100 mention reading and over 2,586 note ELA or English language arts. A smaller number, 530, specifically included phonics, and 258 identified science of reading in their plans.

It’s too soon to know whether these developments have had a measurable impact on students’ skills, but they’re “not hurting, that’s for sure,” said Susan Lambert, Amplify’s chief academic officer for elementary humanities. 

The return to a more predictable schedule has contributed to the growth as well, she added.

“We can make progress when kids are in the classroom,” she said. “The data shows that.” 

Amplify uses an assessment called Dynamic Indicators of Basic Literacy Skills, or DIBELS, to test student progress toward learning letter sounds and blends, recognizing sight words and gaining speed and accuracy. 

Students in K-2 haven’t caught up to peers who were in those grades just before COVID hit. But they did make more progress between fall and winter than students did last year. That’s especially true for the youngest students. In 2021-22, the percentage of kindergartners on track grew 15 points over that time period. This year, it grew 19 percentage points. 

‘Can’t spell Harry or Potter’

For teachers, it’s rewarding to see their students leap from identifying one or two sounds in a word to accurately writing complete sentences. 

JoLynn Aldinger, who teaches first grade in the West Ada School District, near Boise, Idaho, said her students’ growth over the past five months makes her want to “do cartwheels” in the classroom. 

A 25-year veteran teacher, she used to emphasize stories and comprehension over phonics. But when she had a 7-year-old in her class who took longer than her peers to learn letter sounds, Aldinger set off on her own quest to learn more about the so-called “science of reading.” 

‘I thought, ‘I have a master’s degree in reading. I should know how to teach reading,’ ” she said. “I knew what phonics was but I didn’t understand how explicit it needed to be.”

She applied for a grant from her school’s PTA, which paid $1,275 for her to receive training in methods often used with . The techniques, like pounding out syllables on their desks and spending extra time on letter blends, benefit even her strongest readers, she said. 

“I would have kids walk in my classroom who have read ‘Harry Potter,’ but they can’t spell Harry or Potter,” she said. 

Now she shows off her students’ improvement to anyone who will listen. And she asks other teachers if they’ve listened to “Sold a Story,” about how whole language or “balanced” literacy came to dominate reading instruction in U.S. schools. Research shows the approach, which focuses more on access to books and using pictures or other clues to guess words, can leave students without the phonics skills to become strong readers.  

‘Our COVID kids’

The Amplify data includes other indicators that trends are headed in the right direction. Racial gaps in reading — which during the pandemic — have narrowed slightly. And between Hispanic and white students, the disparities are even smaller than before COVID.

Since 2019-20, the gap between Hispanic and white kindergartners needing “intensive” support, for example, has fallen from 14 to 11 percentage points. And in third grade, the gap between Hispanic and white students on track dropped from 13 to 8 percentage points over the same time period. For Black students, it remains at 19 percentage points. 

Third grade, Lambert said, is when foundational skills “are supposed to come together” for students so they can learn from what they’re reading. 

That’s what Jean Hesson, elementary supervisor for the Sumner County Schools in Tennessee, hopes to see this spring when this year’s third graders take the state test. 

“These are our COVID kids,” she said. Even though the district has adopted a strong curriculum, “ultimately you have 20 wildcards sitting in front of you. You have to know where your kids are.”

As in districts statewide, Sumner teachers are now required to use phonics-based instruction. The district adopted the Wit and Wisdom curriculum for reading about history, science and other topics. It added the Fundations program for phonics and Geodes — a set of books that tie content and literacy skills together.

“The pictures don’t lend themselves to guessing words,” Hesson said. Students “truly have to decode and use their skills.” 

Almost 45% of last year’s third graders met or exceeded English language arts standards — an increase over pre-pandemic scores. Hesson is hoping that trend continues.

“If we had not had high-quality materials, teachers would have been teaching in a million different directions,” she said. “I can’t imagine the gaps that we would have created.” 

In this episode of Class Disrupted,  Michael and Diane dig deep in analyzing the big acquisition of nonprofit testing provider NWEA in the assessment market by Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt, one of the largest curriculum players in the United States. They conclude that we should be skeptical that the acquisition will improve teaching and learning for students or that it will pay off as much as HMH might like. 

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Diane Tavenner: Hey, Michael.

Horn: Hey, Diane. Wacky weather is continuing to roll out across the country it seems. And I hope speaking of that, you’ve all stayed dry enough in California, which frankly is not a sentiment that I normally need to express to you.

Tavenner: Well, Michael, the persistent rain has been a little bit strange, a little bit unfamiliar, but I will say, also welcome. Partly because we don’t have any personal complaints. We haven’t experienced significant destruction or risk and others have, so I want to be mindful of them.

But I will say, Michael, it does seem like our schools are never going to catch a break. Because with these storms have come power outages that have caused us to have to close several of our schools for several days, and honestly at this point we are kind of starting to wonder if we’re ever going to be able to consistently operate our schools with everyone in them.

Horn: It’s just insane to watch all this, Diane, and I’ve been following some of this with my friends in the Bay Area on Facebook and so forth.

But aside from weather and the normal question of our students in the schools themselves, which has been a recurring topic on a lot of our podcasts, I’ve been looking forward to talking with you because there was a major announcement in the world of assessments. And obviously assessments and accountability and the challenges they posed to the kinds of innovation that we both want to see are something you and I have discussed a lot on this show. But given the latest news, I’m just wondering if we can go much deeper on this topic.

I have a bunch of thoughts loaded up that I’m trying to sort out that are informed from the innovation side of my work on what this means for education. But I’ll be candid, I’m really excited to get on-the-ground perspective just to check my instincts on this.

Tavenner: Oh, you know how much I love geeking out on assessments. So I’m totally up for this. Before we dive in though, I’m pretty positive we’re thinking about the same story, but just to be sure. Are you talking about the one where Houghton Mifflin, or HMH, one of the three big textbook companies acquired NWEA, which as many of us know is a nonprofit that’s most known for what we call the MAP test. Which is basically an adaptive benchmark assessment and I think it’s used in about 10,000 school districts across the country and I will say personally I know used in a lot of charter schools.

Horn: Yep, that is the announcement that I’m talking about, Diana. It grabbed my attention.

Tavenner: All right. Well, mine too. I’m excited you’re bringing it up today. Because you know I’ve got a lot of feelings and thoughts about this topic in general and honestly this acquisition and so I’m excited to dive in. But it sounds like you have some real questions that we should unpack, so I’m curious about that. But before we do it, do you think I should give a bit of context and to help folks out?

Horn: Yeah, I think that makes sense, just so everyone’s on the same page before we dive in and geek out.

Tavenner: OK. Well, let me just, I’ll talk from my experience, and I was thinking, I think my first encounter with MAP, or NWEA, was probably around 2011-ish. If you remember, this is around the time of Summit’s redesign. It’s also a period of explosive growth for charter schools. And as a result, there were just a bunch of school leaders and philanthropists who were looking for ways to see if innovations, and I would say both charter innovations and school design innovations, were having an impact.

And interestingly, this is also the time period when Common Core is driving the full assessment conversation and what’s happening in the country. And so at least where we were in California, there was a bit of a space or pause on those big assessments while Common Core was coming into being. And so people were looking for things to fill the gaps during that time.

Anyhow, folks started using the MAP assessments. And a fun fact. Back in that timeframe, I remember giving the assessment to our 10th graders for the very first time and realizing that only a little over 2,000 10th graders in the entire country had taken that particular test.

I’m sure we’ll get into this as we start talking, but the number of people taking the test actually matters a lot given how it’s scored and what this test does. And certainly there were higher numbers in earlier grades. But the point is NWEA has grown pretty explosively over the last decade, at least from my perspective.

And so we fast forward to today, and NWEA is either a math or an ELA assessment. It’s administered three times a year — and I think that’s an important fact — by schools and teachers. It’s adaptive in that it’s on the computer and it feeds kids the next question based on how they did on the previous one.

And its purpose really is to show school year growth for our students and to give teachers and schools quote, “good information,” at the start of the year and the middle of the year about which students are on track to meet the grade level standards or to pass the end of the year assessment. And so conceptually, teachers and schools can make grouping decisions or curricular decisions or tutoring support decisions for students based upon that information.

But to be really clear, these aren’t really formative assessments that are embedded in curriculum itself. They’re not even tied to the curriculum. So they’re not driving instructional decisions and the absence of being connected to the curriculum…. Well, I’ll just say it as the company says it, is they really seek to be content-agnostic, and so there is a real distance there between what you’re doing in the classroom and these assessments.

Let me just give one additional piece of context, and that comes from the perspective of a parent. Because my child took these assessments three times a year for many, many years, and they don’t mean anything to students or families. I can’t sugarcoat it. There is literally nothing that happens for students or families as a result of these tests. The reports and results are basically nonsensical if you’re a student or a family and there’s just not any information in them that I can act on or use. And so in my experience, what happens is kids rightly start to ask the question of like, “Why am I taking this test so often? What is this for? What’s it doing?”

And as a school leader who was also that parent, I can tell you I spent a lot of my time trying to convince my own child and get him to convince his friends to do their very best on the test because it mattered for the school. And in reality it did because we were using those results for everything from charter renewal hearings to grant applications.

And so I’m going to stop there because that’s a lot, and you haven’t even introduced what you want to talk about yet, Michael. But as you can see, this is a juicy topic and I’m getting fired up already, so I’m super curious to hear what it’s provoked for you.

Horn: Well, I love this, Diane. I think it’s super useful context, and I love the passion and energy. I thought I would tap into it on your end, and so we have. But assessments more generally is something that I, as outside the classroom, as a non-educator, have really had to come up to speed over the last 15 years to better understand how different kinds of assessments can or can’t be useful. What their function is, what they are capable or incapable of telling you.

And I will say, I feel like I’m a constant work-in-progress on this, which is why I’m excited to check with you. But it is not really obvious to folks outside of the classrooms and schools oftentimes I think what an assessment says, and as a policymaker or someone like that making law about this stuff, it is very opaque, I suspect. That’s just further context.

But as I look at this acquisition, one of the stated reasons I think for it, and this is from the companies, not from me, but from the companies, I think the purpose of this assessment is that…. Look, you have this established assessment as a system that is used in lots of schools and districts across the country, and HMH now will basically be able to use those assessments to connect them with their curriculum and make personalized recommendations for each student.

The theory, I’m assuming, that they have at work is that they’ll be able to do what you suggest, or implied at least would be helpful. Which is that assessment should be used to actually be embedded in the curriculum and drive learning choices themselves, and in turn help bolster more personalized learning opportunities.

Now to be clear, they’ve been clear about this. Each set of products will still be sold separately and under their own brands. But I think a major rationale that they’re making is that the possibility now exists to combine these, to combine the assessments with the curriculum and buy them as a package, if you will.

Tavenner: I have to admit, Michael, I’m deeply skeptical. I’m really curious about the theory that suggests this is going to be a happy and productive coming together of these two very disparate things.

Horn: Yeah, well look, this is the theory or the theoretical reason for the rationale behind the acquisition. And why I assume as a nonprofit, NWEA probably said, “Look, this is for the good of our mission for the education sector.” I imagine that’s what they’re saying anyway.

But for the moment, I want to put aside one of the structural things that you mentioned that causes your skepticism, which is that these assessments aren’t, at present anyway, actually embedded in any curriculum or tied to any specific curriculum or given an on-demand way to drive student learning.

We’re definitely going to circle back to that. But I want to instead introduce a totally different theory on my end to analyze this move and its impact, and it’s called the theory of interdependence and modularity, and it’s one that we used in disrupting class as well as my most recent book, , and even in parts of . And it’s a theory that sort of combines engineering with business is the way I would think about it.

And as a refresher for those that don’t know and don’t geek out on the stuff routinely, the first half of the theory essentially says that when something is underperforming what customers or users need from it. And the way that two elements in the system interact are unpredictably interdependent, meaning the way one works and functions as dependent on the other one, the way it works and functions and vice versa. Then to make it good enough so that people will actually adopt it and use it, you have to do it in a proprietary structure and really have a proprietary design. And that’s because the two sides really need to be designed interactively.

So quick example from business, and then I’d love you to reflect on what that means for education. But way back when in the 1940s and ’50s when IBM came out with their mainframe computers, no one knew what a mainframe computer should look like or operator or anything. And so IBM just couldn’t exist as a standalone assembler of computers or even a seller.

They had to make every single part inside. The logic circuitry, the core memory, the operating system, assemble it, sell it, everything. Because each of those stages interacted in unpredictable ways with every other part of the process. And so if they had just thrown the operating system over the wall, if you will, to engineers on the other side assembling it, well, that would’ve impacted in unpredictable ways the performance of the fundamental computer and each side would’ve had to make unacceptable trade-offs. That just wouldn’t have been good enough and no one would’ve bought it basically, Diane.

Tavenner: OK, let me make sure I’m getting this before we go on, let me try to bring it into this context and see if I’m understanding it correctly. So in this case, we have curriculum, so textbooks, lessons, all of that, and a benchmark assessment, and they’re separate, they’re in separate organizations right now. But they’re interdependent because when you’re educating a child, you’re both assessing them and you’re doing this curriculum. Which is kind of confusing because curriculum has assessment in it as well, but we’ll leave that aside for a moment.

They’re interdependent, but they actually depend upon each other. But the key right now is it’s really unpredictable how that happens because, well, I guess I’ll just describe from my experience. Sometimes it often felt, like when we were giving NWEA, that the results of that were totally disconnected and unpredictable based on what we were seeing in classrooms and our knowledge of students and things like that. Is that, am I getting it?

Horn: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right, that there is certainly a dependence and in some systems it’s a well-understood dependence. It’s predictable. We can get into what that means later. But in many systems, it’s unpredictable.

You make a change to the curriculum, that should impact the assessments because otherwise you’re just not going to be getting reliable information and feedback on what a student actually has learned or knows now and can do with that information. And vice versa, if you make changes to the assessments, well that should mandate changes to the curriculum. And when they’re at arm’s length, they are not really feeding off each other.

And when you think about all the personalization that we want to see in the world, because students have different learning needs at different times, those interact in very unpredictable ways right now. Particularly as you get into, think about math or something like that and the sequence of learning and the dependence of different topics on other topics, etc., etc. These things weave together in very interdependent ways. They impact each other.

And so my sense is what you just said, which is that when you have the state of curriculum and assessment at arm’s length, separated from each other, they’re basically underperforming what schools need. Certainly Title 1 schools. I think you could make the argument in Lexington Public Schools where I am, that’s not the case. But in Title 1 schools in particular, those that serve lower income populations, for example, they really need these to be connected to help drive choices for the students on the ground, themselves.

And I think the evidence for this, Diane, actually, they don’t just have to take my word or maybe your word for this, it’s actually in the market itself. We’ve seen incredible traction and extraordinary growth of a different company over the past 15 years, which is this company called Curriculum Associates. And they make both the curriculum, the i-Ready curriculum, as well as the i-Ready assessments, and they use them as benchmark assessments, but they’re intricately tied to each other. And they essentially, in a closed-loop system, what you get on the assessment system determines what you do next in the curriculum and vice versa.

And interestingly enough, Curriculum Associates over the last 15 years has basically come from essentially nowhere to become one of the digital players that I would argue is disrupting much of the textbook market over that period of time. And I think it’s driven by the fact that their assessments and curriculum have been designed in an interdependent fashion.

And I think there’s further evidence for that in the struggles, at least relatively speaking, of a company called Renaissance Learning. And Renaissance, for those that don’t know, basically has historically offered the Star Assessments, another benchmark assessment instrument. And they’ve been sort of stuck, at least my sense is, with assessments where they’ve been trying to find partners, Diane, in the curricular space that they can align to, if you will, to provide information around.

But it’s been kind of kludgy because you’re integrating these curriculum that haven’t been built with the assessments in mind and vice versa, and you have a curriculum-agnostic assessment. And so they’ve acquired or partnered with providers like Nearpod or more to essentially have both sides of the equation.

But because they weren’t designed interactively, the feedback loop between them, or at least the theory would suggest … And full disclosure, I can’t make the judgments because I don’t use them. But my sense is that the theory suggests that the recommendations and integration of the two just wouldn’t be near as eloquent, if you will, as what Curriculum Associates offers because of the way they’ve built both sides of those items. And so to be clear, that means in a not good enough world where these things are underperforming, that favors interdependence.

Tavenner: Fascinating. What you’re sharing is bringing up two things from me, and so I want to just keep checking my understanding of this with you.

The first one is, it seems to me that maybe another example of this is the partnership between the College Board and Khan Academy. As folks began sort of pushing back on the SAT test as sort of these standalone assessments that are super high-stakes and they just felt like they’re disconnected and inequitable, the College Board partnered with Khan Academy to offer the learning curriculum part of the equation. The benefit there was it’s free, it’s to anyone who wants it. Bringing the equity piece. Is that a good example of this theory?

Horn: Yeah, and I think we’ll get into more how it is in a moment. But it’s sort of right, it’s this modular trying to build up into an integrated way, I think.

Tavenner: The second thing that comes up to me, which probably you’re like, “Of course it comes up to you,” is just what we did at Summit Learning. And it seems as you’re describing the theory, that this is what we did intuitively. We built, as you know, an entire system of learning and assessment to be interdependent and integrated from the very start. And we just thought it was the only thing that made sense. And I know we’re not alone in this realm, but there’s a reason that a lot of people don’t do it. There’s a whole bunch of reasons. That’s probably a whole other episode.

But it seems you’re offering evidence for those instincts. But I’m wondering about the modularity part of it, because we haven’t talked about that yet, and so how does it fit in?

Horn: Yeah, so I’m glad you asked because there’s a trade-off in this and there’s not one right place to be in this continuum. Because when you’re optimizing for raw performance by creating a really proprietary interdependent system, the trade-off is that you can’t get affordable customization. And this is a really important point, and it’s interesting actually because Summit Learning, you optimized for curricular modularity to create an interdependent system around parts that were underperforming, and so you made these sort of trade-offs.

And that’s the other piece of this, is that in practice, every system has some modular components and some interdependent ones, and you basically want to be interdependent where the performance isn’t good enough and modular where you’re overshooting so you can get that customization. And so in essence, what the theory says is that when you start to overshoot, that’s where you need that customization because people demand it, they want affordable customization. They want to be able to mix and match different parts and just pop them in, and to do that, you need modularity.

So the quick example, again, we’ll go to computers, is Dell computers, say, in the early 1990s. If folks remember, Apple, IBM, they had started to over-serve what people needed. They weren’t willing to pay for some of the improvements in that paradigm. And here comes Dell and they don’t make any of the parts inside of the computer and that means you can just jump on their website and be like, “I’d like this much memory, I’d like this kind of drive from Seagate, I’d like this kind of monitor, etc., etc.” And they fit together in very well understood ways and so Dell just quickly snaps the parts together and 24 hours later, you got shipped out an affordable customized computer.

And so I think you at Summit Learning know these desires very well. Because you chose to avoid purchasing on the open market a proprietary highly interdependent curriculum, and instead, as I said earlier, create something far more modular on that side because you wanted customized playlists and so forth for the students.

And interestingly enough — I’ll try to make the argument for you — I think you said that where the systems out there are really underperforming is in the integration or the interdependence, if you will, of the knowledge, skills and habits of success that are often broken apart and perhaps unfortunately so. And you said that’s where we really need the interdependence in the Summit Learning system.

Tavenner: I think that would be… 

Horn: Yeah, go ahead.

Tavenner: I think it’s all just clicking for me as you’re talking. We’ve never wanted or bought a textbook, because it’s so not customizable, and if you’ve ever been a teacher or know a teacher, you know that is the number one thing a teacher wants to do and needs to do, which is why those products don’t get used with fidelity. And so we are just, I think as practitioners so keenly aware of what actually happens on the ground and pragmatic about that, that that’s where we wanted customization. But super tight on the assessment part of it and the connection to it. And like you said, the connection of all the factors of learning, not just a single siloed content area, if you will.

Horn: Yeah, and I think that’s the big aha here, which is that you can’t actually just jump into a modular design. Everyone wants customization, it sounds great, but you can only move to it once the interfaces between the different components are predictable, specifiable and verifiable.

And I hear this all the time, Diane, in education circles, that we want an open system, we want an open this, we want an open that. As though open, in and of itself, is a good thing. And the only way though you can move to that kind of modularity is you really have to understand how each side works and functions and the impact of changes on one side with what it’ll do to the other.

And that means you have to be at the level of predictable causality. You need to be able to create specs and essence for exactly how those parts fit together at the interfaces. You need to be able to verify that the parts in fact meet the specs. And then in the early stages of creating something new, when it underperforms, that’s just really hard to do and it’s only when you get better and better and better, you start to over-serve people and you start to understand how these parts work.

Then you can start to shift to modularity because you have a better sense of how the overall system is interacting and the science of studying them essentially allows you to get more predictable. So a decade hence, maybe we could start to modularize Summit Learning, but we’re not there yet.

Tavenner: I’m having a reaction that I commonly have when we are talking, putting theory to practice, and often in my mind, I’m always putting it to our practice. And at first when you are describing the theory, my mind immediately goes to, oh no, we didn’t do that. We need to go back and do that. Oh no, we messed that up. We weren’t good innovators.

And then it’s funny, as we talk more and more, and I really calm myself down and think about it, I realize that a lot of what you’re saying, Michael, we do or did and that the theory really describes our behaviors. Which I think is good because you don’t want a theory that’s actually not describing what’s happening.

And I’ll be honest, the outcome of that work is strong. By designing a learning and assessment system from scratch that clearly prioritizes each and every student and incorporates the learning science and the full understanding of the needs and leverages technology, we really have created what I think is a very elegant and interdependent curriculum and assessment system that is highly modularized in the right places and thus customizable for the folks on the ground. Both students and teachers I would argue, and schools for that matter.

And as I say that, I’m cognizant that it sounds a little bit like bragging. But the point that I want to make is that it’s possible that what you and I are talking about, it’s not a fantasy, it’s not a future thing. It literally is happening right now in hundreds of schools across the country. And I just think that’s important because we always want to take this sort of third way future-looking perspective and what I don’t want this episode to sound like is just us criticizing a deal that happened without another solution. Because I do think there are other solutions and it doesn’t feel like we’ve compromised in the combined offering. And honestly, this acquisition feels like a compromise to me.

I suspect that a lot of people who care about seeing big rolled-up data and tracking and reporting on the percentage of kids in schools who are supposedly learning or not, they might be happy with this direction, Michael.

But for those of us who care about literally every single child and if they can read or solve problems and if every child’s motivated to come to school and knows how to learn, for those of us who think it’s unacceptable that we’re… School systems are unable to simply tell families if their child’s on track to be a skilled adult in areas that families care about in their life goals, and instead we send them these incomprehensible test scores in the mail months after a child took the test.

Well, look, I’m going to stop there because you could see I’m getting fired up again. But this is possible what we’re talking about, the theory says we should be doing, and I don’t think that this deal represents that.

Horn: And this is where I ultimately want to go as well, Diane. And I think there’s another issue as well underlying this, which is, it gets the multiple purposes that assessment serves. From driving learning to continuous improvement to accountability and transparency. And I think what’s also interesting on this is that the interdependent approach, frankly, it’s always going to struggle to serve a public accountability function in my mind in which we’re making judgements about the schools themselves, even as the theory shows why it’s the best way to optimize the teaching and learning.

And I’ll say that, again, to analyze Curriculum Associates for example, and with immense respect for the predictability of i-Ready assessments on what a student will score in a summative year-end assessment. But essentially, Diane, if the i-Ready assessments… I suspect some people are listening to us are just like, “Well, why wouldn’t we just use the i-Ready assessments to replace the summative year-end assessments. They’re curricular tied.”

Great end of story. But you can imagine that then there would be a really slippery slope that would come into play in which Curriculum Associates — And again, I’m not saying that they do this nor that these incentives exist right now, but in this alternative system I just described —  the incentive I think would exist for them to basically just give rosy assessments to student learning to show, “Hey, look, our i-Ready curriculum is really making a positive difference for students.” Because there’d be no check on the other end of it.

And then if they made those changes, which are no longer reflective of actual performance, now that means that the assessments would no longer be as useful for guiding learning for students and teachers. There’s a big trust issue here, in other words,

Tavenner: Michael, I experienced this in real life, where very few people actually take seriously the assessments built into Summit Learning as an outside valid way of measuring what we’re doing. I argue that they should because they can be completely valid and reliable in all of the things that we need. But there’s very little pickup there, and I suspect what’s underneath it is this trust issue that you’re surfacing right now.

Horn: Yeah, well, so I think this is where there’s another approach from the theory, which works frankly though only in a world of mastery learning that we’ve discussed in the past on this show in which students work toward mastery of each and every competency and time becomes the variable, not the student’s learning as the present system holds.

But that is if you have the interfaces clearly specified between curriculum and assessment, and that’s a big if, then you could have modular assessments created by a third party. So not the curriculum company itself. That an individual school or a district, or yes, even a state as Louisiana has, could select based on its alignment to their curriculum. And in that world, those assessments could both serve to inform instruction. They’re learning informative, but they’re also summative because the measures they’re giving are inherently of learning. Which is what your system does, just, to your point, it’s not third party, so people don’t trust it.

And the point being in that world, if I demonstrate mastery, I move on and that can be reflected and it’s more robust than a summative assessment because I can demonstrate it when I as a learner am ready to raise my hand in show mastery.

And so to come back to NWEA, this is the curve ball it seems to me that HMH is walking into here, and you’ve alluded to it several times. But just to say it from the theory perspective. On the one hand, by controlling the assessments, they theoretically, theoretically, different from theory, will have the opportunity to make them in a proprietary fashion alongside their curriculum and benefit from the same way Curriculum Associates has. But to do that, they have to do it from starting with assessments that are not curriculum aligned. That’s going to be a major lift.

And on the other hand, HMH can’t exactly serve the modular use case that I just outlined because it doesn’t have an array of assessments aligned to lots of different curricula that can be customized where the individual school or district or state or charter organization can select to drive learning. And it now owns both sides of the equation. So it’s sort of caught here, Diane.

Now I think there’s some silver lining here as well. There’s New Meridian, for example, a nonprofit. It exists as a newer third party provider seeking to offer modular baskets of assessments that you can pull off to match your curriculum. But I’m just not sure that HMH can make this jump as we’ve outlined.

So it’s possible, Diane, that it’ll be commercially successful as a sort of in-between solution, I guess in the market as the market maybe transitions over time. But I’m frankly not sure that that’s where the puck is going or frankly where it should go. And I really want to know how that lands on the ground for you.

Tavenner: Well, you probably have guessed that the idea of a commercially successful in-between solution isn’t landing very well with me. This is the thing that just really frustrates me about our sector and our work.

I agree with your assessment, Michael, and I think this is another example of what holds us back in education at the broader scale. We’ve got these two players who have a massive market share together. Well, I would call it massive, you might correct that, but it seems pretty big. And schools have to have curriculum and assessments and they’re under pressure to have something that tells them exactly where students are, especially coming out of COVID, so that they can help them direct resources to them. And just the expectations on teachers in schools continue to go through the roof around what they are expected to do.

And so tons of schools are going to use this joint offering, and in their mind they’re going to be told and sold on the idea that it’s better somehow and it’s going to suck for kids. I don’t know how else to say it.

It’s not better. It’s not good, and it’s not what our kids deserve and what’s possible. And what’s frustrating about that is it pulls the vision, the mind share, the resources, the energy away from what doesn’t suck, which is what we were describing before. Assessments that are embedded in project-based curriculum that’s authentically assessed in a way that dramatically improves engagement and learning and self-direction for students and job satisfaction and impact for teachers and gives them local control and all of the things that we care about that we know matter. And we have the capability to do that today, do something significantly more meaningful. And I just think that this pulls us away from that work. It pulls everything away from that work.

And I think it goes back to the conversation we had last episode, Michael, when we acknowledge that most people don’t even think about students as customers. And in my mind, this approach sort of epitomizes that. As I read the transcript of the interview with the two CEOs, there was literally not a single mention of this acquisition in terms of how it was valuable to students. They got down to teachers and said, “Teachers would have all this data and information.” Of course, the way I read that was like, “Wow, teachers have now a new expanded job.” And having had that information, know how hard it is to actually work with it.

So yeah, I’m going to stop again because I’m… But that’s how it’s landing with me honestly.

Horn: Well, no, I think that makes sense. But something you just said in terms of all the information we’re going to get and all this stuff and so forth. Let me step out of my innovator hat on that for a moment and talk about one other problem, in my mind at least, with NWEA assessments more broadly through an explicitly education lens. And this surrounds how so many of us want to shift to measuring student growth instead of point in time learning.

But the reality is that there are different ways to measure growth. And the public, and educators I think honestly, broadly speaking, don’t understand the difference. So when they see a growth measure, they don’t actually know what it’s telling them. And in this case, NWEA reports a norm reference growth measure as opposed to what would be called a criterion reference measure.

Essentially what that means is a norm reference basically evaluates you relative to other students like you at your “percentile,” quote unquote, of your learning. Whereas a criterion reference is against that yardstick of curriculum, but it has to be curricular aligned to be able to do that.

Now, as a result of that, frankly, the NWEA growth measure offers this incredibly false illusion where it basically, if I’m, say, a student in the fifth percentile of seventh grade or whatever else, then basically it’s going to compare my growth relative to other students in that same segment. And so I might grow one and a half years relative to those students. But that’s embedding all the lowered expectations and malaise of our education system in that growth measure.

When a parent hears one and a half years of growth, that’s not what they’re thinking. They’re thinking, “Oh, my kid grew from say the third grade to well into the fourth grade.” That’s what policymakers, I think here, that’s what I think educators and curriculum companies that use this stuff, I think that’s what they’re hearing too, and it’s just not what it’s measuring.

Plus, I think this gets back to what you said at the very beginning, and maybe this will start to wrap a bow around this. You mentioned that when you gave it to your 10th graders, only 2,000 kids in the country had used that. So now it’s driving a growth number relative to other students like them. I’m not going to be able to do the math that quickly in my head, but like 100 percentile points, whatever, it’s not a lot of kids in each percentile. You’re driving a growth measure off of that. That’s even less meaningful, I think, Diane.

Tavenner: Well, you’re opening the can of worms, and I know at this point we should be closing it, so I’ll be brief here. But I distinctly remember that conversation about those 2,000 kids. It stands in my mind a decade later because it was so clear to me, not initially, but when we really, really, really dug in to understand it, when the company rightfully said, “Well, there really aren’t kids like a lot of your kids.”

So you have to take these results with a grain of salt because there’s only 2,000 kids. And, I mean, Michael, we could do days on this, but let’s just start with the concept of, yeah, you’ve reinforced why these results are meaningless to parents and students because how can anyone in their right mind understand what you just said when you’re looking at a result or expect that that’s what you’re getting? You would just want something straightforward. Like, do I know this? Do I not? Am I good at this? Am I not? Yeah. Anyway.

But the second piece is this concept of bias. So we’re going to just compare you to people who are like at that moment in time, if you’re a quote “lower” performing student, what are the expectations? We know what our systems have in terms of expectations. We know what natural human inclination is.

I just think this is so destructive, and I’ll just share one last story about this. Part of those conversations with my son around this were so disturbing because he would come home and say, “The kids would just sort of share their raw score with each other and they would just stack rank the scores.” And what happened every time is quote the “smart kid, the super smart kid,” always got the top score.

So in my world where I’m caring about growth mindset and kids believing that hard work actually pays off, I was having to fight against what these results, the messages we’re sharing with kids, which was much more of a fixed mindset than a growth mindset. And we were doing battle against that in the context of the school because we were giving these tests, which I see the look on your face, and it just is like, it’s icky. There’s no other way around it.

Horn: It’s really crummy. It’s really crummy. All right, well, let’s not leave it there because I think there is hope on the horizon. And maybe Diane, frankly, as we see this acquisition, maybe it represents consolidation and often when you see consolidation in markets, it creates room for the disruptive plays underneath to gain market share. And so I’m hopeful that we will move to content aligned assessments and have some third party players working hard to align to the different curriculums out there so you can select the right ones for you and move to this world where it’s both driving learning, but also giving parents and students the information that they want about their growth. So I’m hopeful we’ll get there, but I don’t think this acquisition is the step.

Tavenner: A perfect place to leave it, Michael. And before we sign off, I would love to hear what you’re reading, listening to, or thinking about outside of our day-to-day? Add to my list?

Horn: Yeah, you bet. Well, so Sal Khan sends a book every few years it seems to folks who are on his advisory board. And so I got the one in the mail from him, which is by Epictetus. And the interpretation that he sent is by Sharon LaBelle. And I read it chunked, like a few lessons at a time over the last several weeks. And it was really helpful, Diane, at just resetting my own sense of how I think about my own life lived and what we can control and focusing on that. And so I really enjoyed it and was appreciative that Sal made the time to send it. What’s on yours?

Tavenner: Well, that’s awesome. I appreciate that. I have a fun one this week. So as we’re about to head to India, folks have been hearing about that for a long time. We watched a movie that’s on Netflix, it’s called RRR. It’s getting some positive press in the U.S. It is a Bollywood movie out of India. The hard part is it’s three hours, but I will say it is a fun three hours. It was joyful and interesting. It’s packed with all sorts of over the top action and it is over the top in many ways. But we deeply enjoyed it. And I think on the sort of interesting part of it, potentially quite controversial, but it really is offering a different narrative about the drive in India to be their own independent nation and how they engaged and interfaced with the British. And the normal narrative we all have is surrounded by Gandhi and a peaceful approach and there’s some folks who want to have a more fight struggle narrative. And so that is presented here for better or worse.

Horn: Super interesting. That’s a major political current right there, I know. And so I can’t wait to hear what you’ll learn from it as you come back if you choose to report on that. But for now, we’ll leave it there. Thanks for engaging with me on this conversation. And for all of you listening, we’ll see you next time on Class Disrupted.

Michael B. Horn strives to create a world in which all individuals can build their passions and fulfill their potential through his writing, speaking, and work with a portfolio of education organizations. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning and the recently released . He is also the cofounder of the Clayton Christensen Institute, a nonprofit think tank.

Diane Tavenner is CEO of Summit Public Schools and co-founder of the Summit Learning Program. She is a life-long educator, innovator, and the author of

During the campaign, Searcy, a former state representative who supports school choice, touted her ability to work across the aisle. But with Republicans prevailing in other statewide races, her message apparently didn’t break through.

In the wake of recent results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — showing flat performance in Georgia since 2019, but a sharp in eighth-grade math — Woods told The 74 he plans to “stabilize and improve student academic performance as we move out of the pandemic” and to “bolster and support our teacher workforce.”

With Woods looking to hold onto his seat, the state education department would continue its shift away from Common Core standards, long associated with the Obama administration despite their origin in the states. Georgia is in the process of implementing new math and English language arts . Observers suggest it will also join other states in emphasizing evidence-based literacy instruction.

“I have seen some encouraging signs that literacy is emerging as a focus,” said Ken Zeff, executive director of Learn4Life, a nonprofit working to improve education in the metro Atlanta area. “That could help reverse not just the latest NAEP results, but generations of students struggling with literacy.”

During the campaign, Woods emphasized his efforts to reduce testing and teacher evaluation visits. He said Searcy’s lack of experience as a classroom teacher made her unprepared to lead the education department. 

Searcy criticized Woods’s support for a state law restricting how teachers can discuss some , which she said ties teachers’ hands and undermines their professionalism.

A charter schools supporter, Searcy served as superintendent of a small, all-girls charter network before leaving to work as an educational consultant. Her advocacy for school choice, however, lost her the endorsement of the Georgia Association of Educators, the state affiliate of the National Education Association.

The race was largely overshadowed by other high-profile match-ups on the ballot, namely former football star Herschel Walker’s bid to oust Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and Stacey Abrams’s second attempt to defeat Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. Kemp was re-elected with almost 54% of the vote, but the Walker/Warnock race is still too close to call.

Fifty-three percent of second graders are on track in reading this fall, compared to 57% in 2019, according to Amplify, a curriculum provider. In first grade, the decline is greater — 8 percentage points.

There’s also some good news: The percentage of students in kindergarten through second grade reading on grade level is slightly higher than last year. But the rate in third grade dropped. And almost a third of those students need “intensive intervention,” like small group instruction or a double block of time on literacy during the school day, according to the results.

Susan Lambert, Amplify’s chief academic officer for elementary humanities, said she’s most concerned about students who aren’t getting strong reading instruction “to begin with” and then “aren’t receiving intervention either.”

She said teachers should be able to tell parents if their child is at risk and if they’re “slightly below grade level or really below grade level.” Then, she added, they should point to what students haven’t mastered and how they plan to work on those skills.

The results from 300,000 students in 40 states offer the first national snapshot of students’ reading performance this fall and reinforce takeaways from other recent tests. Students in some grade levels are approaching pre-pandemic levels. But as many researchers have predicted, it could take years before academic performance fully rebounds. Amplify will assess reading two more times this school year, offering educators and researchers a chance to see if students make strides by spring. But that depends on districts’ ability to overcome some of the major dilemmas they faced last year, including high absenteeism and teacher shortages.

“I actually expect we’re going to see better progress this year,” Lambert said. She noted that last year, students needed to readjust to classroom routines and teachers faced more social-emotional and behavior issues than they had in the past.

Those were the conditions in which fourth graders took the National Assessment of Educational Progress, due for release Monday. The results are expected to bring more crushing news about students’ reading skills. Those students would have been second graders when schools shut down, in the process of moving from an emphasis on word recognition to reading more challenging fiction and nonfiction. But many spent most or all of third grade learning remotely.

“Making that academic shift is big for them,” Lambert said.

To measure early literacy skills, like letter sounds, sight words and fluency, teachers used the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Literacy Skills, or DIBELS. While the test was administered virtually during school closures, it was still conducted as teachers observed students’ reading, which increases the reliability of the results, said Paul Gazzerro, Amplify’s director of data analysis.

The sample of students from 1,400 schools is not a “niche” data set, and the results represent 2 million students nationally, he said. “I think it actually speaks somewhat to what we see more broadly.”

But some students aren’t just off-track, he said, they’re multiple grade levels behind.

That’s what Jessica Sliwerski has seen at schools using the Ignite Reading tutoring program she founded a year ago. Third graders were reading at kindergarten and first grade levels.

“They have major decoding gaps,” she said. “I’d bet heavily that many third graders graduated into fourth grade this year and are still not able to read.”

By fourth grade, the curriculum requires students to do much more than sound out words.

“It’s noticing and wondering and context-building,” said Michael Burks, principal of Kipp Bridge Academy, a charter school in Oakland, California. The school was a pilot site for Ignite, which this year expanded to 1,100 students in six states.

Kipp Bridge is using the program in first, second and fourth grade to help students make up skills missed during remote learning. “We had some kids who were on a computer in the back of the car while mom and dad were doing DoorDash deliveries,” Burks said.

But he’s pleased with progress so far. All fourth graders who used Ignite Reading last year entered this fall on grade level, he said. And between 2021 and 2022, there was a 4% increase in students mastering English language arts skills on the state test.

“We are trending in the right direction,” he said.

The downside is that because of the program’s cost, only about 20 students in the three grade levels are receiving the extra support. It costs $2,500 per seat for a year, meaning that the same student might not use the program the whole time. Ignite’s tutors work with students over Zoom, usually during the school day.

“It’s a little bit of a triage situation,” Burks said. His goal is to eventually target the program to first graders to give them a solid foundation.

Similarly, the pandemic has accelerated a movement among states and districts toward phonics-based curricula and phasing out so-called “balanced” approaches, which focus on access to books and using pictures or other cues to read unfamiliar words.

According to ExcelinEd, an education policy think tank, 12 states have comprehensive early literacy policies that include “science of reading” training for teachers, screening for students with reading disabilities and extra help for those who are struggling. Five of those states — Arizona, Ohio, Michigan, North Carolina and Tennessee — added features last year as the impact of remote learning became clear.

Four states implemented policies after the release of 2019 NAEP results, which experts said already pointed to a reading crisis. Lambert said in addition to adopting high-quality materials, district leaders need to ensure school schedules allow for extra time on literacy instruction and target individualized or small group help to schools with the highest population of at-risk students.

Next week’s results will “probably not [be] good news, but it’s not that much worse than it’s always been,” she said. “We’ve had a struggle for a long time and I hope that people at all levels understand that it’s a long game.”