But behind the scenes, all manner of shady stuff.

Before taking the job, the superintendent made a secret deal with a consulting firm. If the business received future contracts from the district, the superintendent would get ten percent of the gross revenue. Not immediately, of course. Paper sacks of cash are bush league. Do try to keep up.

No, the money would be parked in accounts tied to relatives until the superintendent left office, when it could be laundered as a “signing bonus” for a new job that was also part of the package.

The superintendent went to work. First, an announcement for a splashy new idea. Local foundations stepped up to fund a pilot. District staff were directed to find more money to expand the initiative. The favored company was given privileged information about the procurement process. When bidding concluded, the firm won—first to the tune of a few million dollars, then much more.

Altogether, the dirty company would receive more than $23 million in business. The feds began investigating when they noticed money flowing through shell accounts.

This is the story of Barbara Byrd-Bennett, former CEO of Chicago Public Schools. She admitted all of the above in a plea deal after being arrested and charged with fraud in 2015. She got 4.5 years in federal prison.1

L.A. and New York are the only districts larger than Chicago. Leaders in both cities have been subject to federal raids in recent years. Alberto Carvalho is currently on leave as superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) after a visit from FBI agents to his home and office on February 25. New York’s then Chancellor, David Banks, had his home searched in September 2024, reportedly related to an investigation of his brother’s unregistered lobbying practice.

To be clear, Carvalho and Banks are not the same as Byrd-Bennett. They haven’t been charged, let alone convicted.

But if armed law enforcement officers beset Walmart, Amazon, and Apple headquarters; if their CEOs had to forfeit their electronic devices; if banker boxes of documents filled up black cargo vans, it would attract attention. Shareholders might revolt. We’d have a media meltdown about toxic corporate culture.

No such response has followed raids on our three largest districts, which have combined annual budgets of more than $60 billion. Why?

Here’s the core problem: it’s shockingly easy to steal from schools. A culture of insufficient prevention and oversight leads to far too much corruption - and over time, it metastasizes into indifference about non-financial matters such as poor instruction and student failure.

At the risk of providing a how-to manual for the substantial portion of Education Daly subscribers who are aspiring criminals, we’re going to walk through just how bad this can get.

There are at least four major points of vulnerability for graft:

#1. School Board Members

Board members approve vendor contracts for major expenses like construction, transportation, and insurance. With such influence, a stray hand can find its way into the cookie jar.2

• Larry Marshall served on Houston Independent School District’s board from 1997 to 2013. Marshall often met with district vendors. Those vendors subsequently hired his friend, Joyce Moss Clay, as a do-nothing “consultant.” She passed along 75 percent of her earnings to Marshall. Marshall “unrelentlessly” (sic) pressured district officials on behalf of his favored contractors. This went on for more than a decade. While Marshall showed a remarkable facility for evading prosecution, he was sued by a firm that says it was locked out of HISD work for refusing to pay bribes. It won a multi-million dollar judgment against him.

• Albert Morrison shows that even a small district can be fleeced for big dollars. After receiving a whopping total of 649 votes, Morrison became a board member for the Madison School District in Michigan, where he somehow squeezed $560,000 in payments from a restoration and construction company between 2014 and 2018. The firm earned $3 million in contracts for a district with fewer than 2,000 students. Morrison spent his kickbacks on vacations and a boat slip in Florida before the FBI came calling. He pled guilty and received 45 months in prison.

If companies pay fat bribes out of pocket and still make money off the resulting contracts, how padded are their bids? And how on earth is nobody noticing?

#2. District Employees

Lax financial controls and excessive trust in longtime employees can make embezzlement a lucrative pastime.

• Frank Tassone was the beloved superintendent of Roslyn School District on Long Island. In the early 2000s, he teamed with the district’s business executive, Pamela Gluckin, to steal over $11 million through abuse of the district’s expense and reimbursement systems. With two senior officials cooperating, it was simple to approve fraudulent invoices and payments. A few bucks here and there… and the next thing you know, it’s $11 million.3 A student journalist helped bring them down.

• Vera Liddell was the food service director for Harvey School District 152, near Chicago. During the COVID era when federal relief money was flowing, Liddell spent over a million dollars on chicken wings for Harvey’s cafeterias - which felt odd, because wings are not reimbursable under federal guidelines and are almost never served in schools due to bones being a choking hazard. Nuggets only, friends. Respect the nugget. But nobody choked. Liddell diverted the wings when they were delivered and re-sold them for personal profit. How many wings are we talking about? It amounted to something like 250 pounds per student. For quite some time, Chickengate went undetected because there was no process for reconciling what was ordered, delivered, and consumed in Harvey. In the meantime, a single under-supervised employee did loads of damage. She got a nine-year sentence.

#3. District Vendors

All it takes is a few willing allies inside the district to concoct a lasting scheme.

• Norman Shy ran a benign-sounding company called Allstate Sales that provided cleaning supplies and other basics to Detroit Public Schools. District principals were empowered to select vendors from an approved list. It was their job to certify that purchased goods were received. In exchange for kickbacks from Shy, some principals signed off on invoices for items that were never delivered. From 2002 to 2014, Shy skimmed $2.7 million through fraudulent billing while paying out $900,000 to at least 13 district personnel. One enthusiastic principal received $324,000 for her end. She and Shy were sentenced to multiple years in federal prison.

#4. Union Leaders

Unions blast districts for ineptitude when scandals strike, but they have plenty of their own problems.

• Barbara Bullock turned the Washington Teachers Union into an all-purpose fraud juggernaut in the late 90s. It’s difficult to convey the full effort. Over $1 million charged to American Express cards for personal purchases, many of them luxury items. Inflated checks written to her driver - with partial proceeds refunded to her. Union funds paid to shell accounts that Bullock controlled. Unauthorized increases in dues deducted directly from members’ paychecks. Though all of this happened down the street from the American Federation of Teachers headquarters, the parent union took no action until the schemes had been in place for years and the local chapter was virtually bankrupt. The financial damage here was to teachers, not students, but that doesn’t make it less sad.

Let’s Sum Up

What I know: High profile, high dollar school frauds have been a periodic occurrence for decades.

What I suspect but cannot come close to proving: This is a broader problem. Sure, these salacious examples could be outliers. But I worry they are unusual only because the culprits were caught. These people are criminals like Elmer Fudd is a hunter. But what about the grifters who aren’t so greedy? Who cover their financial tracks with a little care? Who know when to step away? How many districts have a hole in the bottom of their financial bucket that nobody has discovered? With local journalism decimated, who’s even watching?

What I definitely do NOT know: How to stop it.

The vast majority of educators are ethical and underpaid. In the service of thwarting bad behavior, we could wrap districts in regrettable layers of red tape that repel talent. That’s a real danger. It’s hard enough to get capable leaders to accept the long hours and grief that come with running a major urban district. Sending auditors to crawl up their backsides won’t improve matters.

But we cannot have federal agents visiting district offices so often they know the front desk secretaries by name. Are there practices we can borrow from other sectors?

Yes, there are. This whole thing hinges on prevention. After-the-fact enforcement is largely ineffectual and unaffordable. Education is too decentralized. We have thousands of districts, most of them with just a handful of schools.

How does strong prevention work? The Government Accountability Office (GAO) has a detailed framework for internal controls. It focuses on preventing fraud by anticipating it - by treating it as expected. Most school systems have not operated this way. It’s all about trust and tradition. We love the kids! We are shocked - just shocked! - each time someone steals from them.

GAO says:

• Map where fraud is most likely to happen. Where can money be diverted? Who has access? If you don’t know, you are a mark.4

• Segregate duties so one corrupt person can’t select a vendor and also approve a purchase order.5

• Do not rely on invoices. Verify that work actually happened and goods were received.

• Use data to catch patterns. It’s becoming much cheaper to do this with AI. Scan for invoices just under certain thresholds or vendors sharing the same mailing address - for a start.

• Force bookkeepers to take vacations. When they step away, others must operate their systems - and are likely to spot malfeasance if it exists. The selfless, workaholic finance employee is a stock figure in the fraud oeuvre.

• Keep an eye on the bosses. “Management override” is apparently a trigger word for veteran investigators. Crusading leaders who demand instant momentum create the conditions for theft. That was Barbara Byrd-Bennett’s signature move.

We don’t need rigidity. It will tie the hands of leaders and drive away honest vendors who are unwilling to plod through procurement mazes that already take too long. We need common sense practices that draw attention to the right red flags so generally honest folks are not tempted to break bad.

This Matters

The siphoned dollars make a difference. They could have funded boxes of crayons and class pets and field trips and teacher appreciation lunches.

But the bigger issue is what our school systems become when fraud happens constantly and with impunity. The core focus is no longer learning. Schools become commercial enterprises lacking the moral compass that makes them special. Rot seeps downward from the central office to classrooms.

Recall the famous Atlanta cheating scandal of the 2000s. Teachers held after-school parties to change student responses on state tests. They earned awards for their schools and financial bonuses for their own pockets. Kids were given falsely inflated information about their performance that prevented them from receiving the remedial support they needed. It set them back for years to come.

This happened in 44 different Atlanta schools. That’s what a culture of corruption can do. And it’s what we cannot continue to allow.

Have your own ideas on how we can fix this problem? Add them in the comments. We need all the solutions we can get.

3

Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney starred in a film version of the story called Bad Education. I haven’t seen it but Rotten Tomatoes tells us it’s fresh. Someone give us a review in the comments.

There’s Tracy Flick (Election), wallpapering the halls with homemade campaign posters. Max Fischer (Rushmore), fencing in his school blazer.1 Hermione Granger (Harry Potter), hand frozen in the raised position. Cady Heron (Mean Girls) proudly joining the Mathletes before learning they are social kryptonite.2

Trying hard was uncool. In the teen code, status should accrue effortlessly to rebels who barely want it. Better to be Ferris Bueller (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), Cher Horowitz (Clueless), Jeff Spicoli (Fast Times at Ridgemont High) or Ren McCormack (Footloose) — boatloads of charisma, no strain.

The humor landed because the try-hards accepted the standard hopes of adults and then dialed them up so energetically that even the adults found them annoying.

There are fewer try-hards today. Over time, American schools have reduced friction in the name of worthy aims like equity, wellness, and belonging. By friction, I’m talking about the conditions - and reasonable pressures - that make effort necessary, not optional. Some changes were sensible. But collectively, we’ve watered down the notion that it takes effort to succeed - that trying is a key part of a student’s job.

The chain goes something like this:

• We demand less

• Students rationally do less

• Lower effort reduces cognitive engagement

• Reduced cognitive engagement drags learning

National achievement shows the damage. Since 2017, eighth graders taking NAEP math have been asked about their effort by reacting to the statement “I keep working hard even when I feel like quitting.”

While average math scores have declined for all student groups, those who say the statement is only “A little like me” or “Not at all like me” have lost the most ground - and they are still dropping.3

Ferris is no longer thumbing his nose at the system. The system has become Ferris.

Bye-Bye Friction

Examples of reduced friction include:

• Lenient Grading. Grade inflation has accelerated over the past decade and persists despite research suggesting it harms students by reducing their future academic success and earnings.4 It also decreases effort - particularly for struggling students. Some schools go the full Monty, banning zeros for work not completed, removing penalties for late submissions, banning homework, or allowing unlimited test retakes. (Most of these policies are unpopular with teachers.)

• State-Sanctioned Absenteeism. The most elemental facet of effort is showing up. Since COVID, we’ve had an epidemic of chronic absenteeism that we cannot seem to fix. On top of that, ten states newly allow students to be absent from school for mental health days. In no way am I suggesting that students suffering with mental health issues be forced to show up when they are unwell or unable. But the laws don’t require any evidence that a student has an issue.5 Kids can just take a day. Or multiple days. Missing school has been broadly normalized - including by policymakers.

• Lower Graduation Requirements. One state after another is reporting all-time high graduation rates, which is odd because test scores are down. How is this happening? One factor is credit recovery, a practice that allows students who fail a course to receive credit through alternative processes that do not involve retaking the entire class. It’s almost always much easier than the original course. Some states depend heavily on credit recovery to ensure students can earn diplomas. Then there is the demise of exit exams. In 2012, half of states required students to pass tests to graduate. Today, it’s down to six. That happened fast. So, credits are easier to get and there’s no check for understanding to serve as a backstop. Graduation rates have risen automatically - and will continue to do so.

These shifts send a message to students: We adults will adjust the system before we ask you to adjust your effort.

Even if we don’t intend it, our choices frame trying hard as excessively stressful - even traumatic.

Effort Is Not Traumatic - It Is How Learning Works

The University of Virginia’s Dan Willingham has written for decades about the psychological sausage-making that is learning. My reading of his work, much of it published in the once-great American Educator magazine, suggests:

• What we remember depends on what we actually think about.

• Unless the cognitive conditions are right, we humans are happy to avoid thinking. Yet, there is a productive level of stress that makes us stronger.

• Sustained practice is essential. Otherwise, gains fade.

Summary: Less effort means less learning. Against this backdrop, our decade-long education depression makes sense. Look, I’m not trying to claim that student effort is the only thing that determines academic outcomes. All sorts of things are important, from curricula to field trips to healthy food to good sleep - but can we at least agree that kids trying their best is part of a balanced breakfast?

Do We Value Effort?

Some schools still embrace the try-hard ethic. Eva Moskowitz, founder of Success Academy, is relentless and unapologetic on its behalf. In How the Other Half Learns, Robert Pondiscio describes Success Academy campuses as intensely serious about student focus. Silence and attention are taught explicitly. Transitions are choreographed to avoid lost time. Students are told constantly that effort matters. Discipline is tight.

As a result, Moskowitz is the Tracy Flick of the charter world, treated as a pariah by many educators who find her methods draconian. To some degree, I understand. Success Academy is not everyone’s cup of tea. But let’s not forget that more than 90 percent of its students meet New York state standards in reading and math. Eva’s focus on effort seems to pay off for families who buy in.

Meanwhile, in the broader landscape we’re responding to our era of tech-based distraction by deploying ever more tech-based education platforms, hoping they will be so well engineered that students won’t be able to help themselves from completing all sorts of lessons, thereby solving our learning challenges. Techno-optimist influencers like MrBeast are telling us that “kids could probably learn more in 5 hours than they currently do in 8 hours.”

The track record for this approach is not good and not improving. As just one example, a recent study of Khan Academy found that while 200,000 students had access to its platform, only 20,000 used it for even 30 minutes per week, as recommended. Most were active for fewer than 10 minutes.

Khan Academy declared victory in a confusing and meandering statement. But rolling out a learning tool that goes largely unused is a failure. It’s like opening a film on thousands of screens and grossing only a few million dollars. It’s Gigli.

I’m worried that we’ve lost the plot a little bit. What matters is not what cool things tech might do under perfect conditions. What matters is whether kids think. Can we still distinguish between those things?

What makes kids try harder?

Teachers, mostly. Strong teachers motivate students to elevate their effort as the material gets more challenging. A positive school culture - the sum of many teachers and support staff aligned to the same standard - ensures consistency across classrooms and magnifies the effect.

The Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) study showed this pattern by surveying lots of kids. Learning gains were higher in classrooms where students agreed with statements such as:

• “My teacher pushes us to think hard about things we read.”

• “My teacher pushes everybody to work hard.”

• “In this class, my teacher accepts nothing less than our full effort.”

• “My teacher doesn’t let people give up when the work gets hard.”

• “My teacher asks students to explain more about the answers they give.”

Pushing students isn’t the whole story. In the study, high-performing teachers also ran well-organized classrooms and based lessons around worthy, rich content. But they expected kids to work.6

Want a real-world example? just profiled a small Maryland county that’s generating remarkable, sustained improvement in literacy:

Students are expected to complete two 15-minute blocks of reading at school — and then read for 30 additional minutes per day at home. This regimen may vary based on the child’s age and skill level, but kids have to log what they read and then have their teacher or parent sign off.

Families, in fact, are the third key component of Worcester’s reading plan. At the beginning of the school year, they’re asked to sign a “home coach contract” saying that they will check and monitor their child’s reading. Throughout the year, kids are expected to read for half an hour at home five days a week. Over the course of a 180-day school year, that could add up to 900 extra minutes of practice.

This district missed the memo on reducing friction. In Worcester County, effort reigns.7

The Genie in the Backpack

AI could make our problems profoundly worse. It is a cold, efficient friction-gobbling monster.

For centuries, students were forced to confront the blank page. They often sat with confusion until clarity began to emerge. That struggle, per Prof. Willingham, was the point.

Now a student can spend six seconds tapping out a prompt and receive polished work in return. The lamp is rubbed. The genie grants the wish.

The greatest danger here is not cheating but habituation. Kids may become conditioned to delegate their thinking until they no longer have the stamina for deep learning and understanding. At that stage, what is the point of school?

Let’s recalibrate a bit

I don’t want our schools to be miserable pain factories ruled by stopwatches and hard hearts. Truly. But we have an effort problem. Some would write off our current crisis wholly to screens and social media. But Big Tech can’t wear the jacket alone.

As adults, we create the conditions under which schools operate. We’ve made plenty of choices affecting student engagement that have nothing to do with technology… and they’ve bitten us in the tuchus. There’s room for course correction if we stop apologizing for effort and resume valorizing it.

How? Make effort the rational choice for students.

• Name grade inflation as a harmful instructional practice and approach it accordingly. We haven’t done this yet. Grading policies are almost entirely a teacher’s personal decision. But now that we know lenient grading is bad for kids, we need to stop it. We no longer feel it’s acceptable for elementary teachers to ignore phonics. Why would we look the other way if middle school teachers hand out A’s without asking kids to think hard?

  • Related: Back up teachers who are demanding. School administrators and parents, that means you.

• Make retakes cost effort. Before students get a second chance at a test they bombed, require that they submit written corrections for the first test and complete a practice problem set or essay that demonstrates progress toward mastery. Otherwise, the first test is just a free sneak preview that the teacher wastes time grading.8

• Treat punctuality and attendance as non-negotiable. Don’t be afraid to issue sensible consequences for students who aren’t showing up, such as letters home, restrictions from school field trips and sports, or requirements to attend summer school to make up what’s been missed.9

• Reinstate public recognition of effort. Honor rolls, perfect attendance certificates, 95 percent homework submission awards - these things send a message celebrating important habits and accomplishments.

• Make better high school culminating assessments. I’m not wedded to state-administered exit exams. Alternatives include publicly defended senior projects, independently scored course finals, and International Baccalaureate programs. If nothing changes, the value of a high school diploma is going to erode quickly.

• Teach effort. Practice it. Eva Moskowitz has her eye on the right ball. Students need to understand how to persist through difficulty, when to ask for help, how to organize themselves to study, and how to distinguish between strenuous thinking and genuine distress.

We laughed at Tracy Flick for being too much. That was our bad, Tracy. We need you back - at least a smidge.

3

Additionally, there are fewer students in the top effort categories than past years. Less effort AND less learning for each level of effort.

It seemed like a no-brainer. Millions of Americans were gambling illegally through numbers games and other lightly policed amusements. The proceeds went to criminals. Why not bring this activity out of the shadows and into the civic domain where it could be appropriately regulated - and taxed?

Even better, the revenue from lottery sales would fund schools. It’s not a vice if it benefits kids, right?

By starting lotteries, states didn’t just legalize gambling; they endorsed it. They advertised it. They provided moral cover by tying it to education. Spending a few dollars on a scratcher wasn’t a shady thrill—it was charity.

One state after another approved its own lottery. There are now 45 of them.1

Except this turned out to be a public con. Lottery revenues rarely increased overall education funding. Instead, they replaced general fund dollars, freeing up politicians to spend on other priorities without having to raise taxes.

Even worse, lotteries are regressive. Poorer households buy more tickets as a share of income. If a governor explicitly proposed funding schools through a mechanism that disproportionately extracted money from struggling families, the idea would have been laughed out of the room. Yet lotteries got a pass. Over time, they normalized gambling as a household pastime.

Gambling is now omnipresent. Thirty-eight states have casinos. Following a 2018 Supreme Court decision that struck down a federal ban on sports betting, 40 states legalized it.

An example of changing mores: In 1979, gambling was so taboo that Willie Mays lost his job as the Mets hitting instructor for working in a public relations role at an Atlantic City casino. Today, every other television commercial is LeBron James promoting DraftKings’ NFL betting platform - and he’s still an active NBA player.

Industry lobbyists and elected officials have told us not to worry about all this gambling: it’s regulated, it’s voluntary, and the harms are manageable, they say.

I disagree. Ubiquitous gambling has been a disaster for kids. And it’s rapidly getting worse.

Gambling has come for the boys in a big way

Common Sense Media just did an eye-opening new survey focused on boys, who are significantly more likely to gamble than girls.2 Highlights:

• Teen gambling has become alarmingly commonplace. Half of boys aged 16-17 report gambling in the past year - more than are using alcohol, nicotine, or marijuana.

• Gambling is baked into video games. Some teen bettors participate in traditional games like poker (online or in-person) or purchase scratch-off tickets.3 Others bet on sports through season-long fantasy leagues, March Madness pools, or single-game wagers. But the most prevalent form of teen betting is trading real money for random, chance-based rewards while playing video games or trading/betting in-game items that were acquired using real money. Examples of popular titles with such features include Counter-Strike 2 and EA Sports FC.4

• Social media touts gambling constantly. According to Common Sense, almost half of boys who gamble say they view gambling videos or streams online. That tracks - they are interested in the topic. But here’s something strange: most of the boys say this content “just started showing up” before they searched for it or followed accounts related to it. Sixty percent of boys now say they see ads for online gambling on YouTube and social media. One hundred percent of those boys are underage. Additionally, major players like DraftKings pour money into the sponsorship of influencers who are old enough to gamble - but whose audiences include many who are not. Betting is so much a part of Barstool Sports that it was purchased in 2020 by a gaming company.5

• Peers are a huge influence. Boys whose friends gamble are more likely to follow suit. They also tend to gamble with greater frequency and suffer consequences such as financial hardship and tension at home.

Gambling is following the social media path. As Jonathan Haidt has argued, no one was ready for the damage wreaked on teen mental health after online platforms introduced features like retweeting and liking posts. Initial regulation and oversight were zilch. It took years for us to realize that our teens were phone-addicted and miserable. The horse had long since decamped the barn.

It’s happening again.

Gambling is an education issue

As you would expect, a teen gambling habit is academically unhealthy. Even so, I was surprised at how few studies have examined education effects for American high school students. When we add findings related to college students and research from other countries, it gets a little clearer. Gambling is associated with:

• Weaker school performance

• Higher absenteeism and disengagement

• Greater stress and anxiety

• Increased likelihood of other unsafe behaviors

For some adolescents, gambling competes on a daily basis with homework for attention. It stokes dopamine systems already overstimulated by phones. And it instills risk-taking that undermine the habits schools are trying to teach. That’s the cost for kids.

But schools and educators are getting the shaft here, too. They endure the consequences of student gambling despite lacking any ability to curtail teen exposure.

It is parents, after all, who often socialize gambling to their kids by discussing their own wagers. Some even allow their children to bet underage on their accounts.

It is policymakers who legalized betting, swept the cash into their coffers, and scurried away without adding appropriate safeguards. Most states:

• Do not include gambling in student health surveys

• Do not provide schools with guidance or curricula on gambling literacy

• Do not train counselors to identify gambling-related harms

• Do not restrict gambling advertising in spaces where teens spend their time

We would never ask schools to address vaping, drug use, or social media addiction with so little data and so few tools. But with gambling, that’s pretty much what we’ve done.

It’s not working. These teens who develop a gambling habit aren’t likely to grow out of it when they graduate high school. Approximately six percent of today’s college students are problem gamblers - twice the rate of the national population.

Recommendations

We need a more robust plan for protecting our kids from a world where they are destined to be surrounded by gambling 24/7. Here are a few ideas:

1. Treat youth gambling like substance abuse. Invest proactively in prevention. Add gambling to the Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS). Build treatment infrastructure. Get serious.6

2. Ban or severely restrict sports gambling advertising where teens are watching. No more quippy Kevin Hart/LeBron banter to sell DraftKings during Sunday afternoon NFL broadcasts. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but let’s go back to insurance and truck commercials. Take the social media companies to the woodshed if they are allowing the algorithm to flood teen users with gambling content.

3. Raise the bar on age verification. Current safeguards barely qualify as a joke. Any app with gambling-adjacent features should require upload of a government ID with a selfie match, periodic re-verification, and - most importantly - confirmation that the device installing the app is registered to someone of legal age. Pull apps from the store if their audited fail rate is too high.

4. Hold parents accountable. Parents who provide alcohol and drugs to teens are often prosecuted. We may need some of the same approach to deter parents who facilitate underage gambling.

5. Require the gaming companies to fund gambling education. This should happen in middle school and include information about the risks/consequences of addiction and support to identify common on-ramps to gambling such as video game features.

6. Stop using education as political cover. Gambling revenue shouldn’t pay for schools. Just stop. It’s a flimsy cover. If states want to allow gambling for adults, fine, I’m not trying to be a prude about it. But kids should have good schools because education is a top priority, not because the government preys upon the addictive vulnerability of lower income citizens.

If we do nothing, I fear that we’re going to see a stream of ugly stats and headlines for years to come - and there will be a generation of young adults asking us why we didn’t help them miss this iceberg dead ahead. Let’s step up.

Why am I telling you this? In the past decade, these DoDEA schools have become our nation’s best. They are clobbering the competition - particularly when it comes to less privileged students.

Forget Massachusetts. Forget Mississippi. When it comes to #1, the race isn’t close.

Never heard of DoDEA? You aren’t alone. Let’s get you up to speed and consider why we should be paying more attention to the weirdest - and most successful - American schools.

DoDEA consists of 161 schools serving 67,000 K-12 students belonging to active duty military or civilian Department of Defense families. The schools are spread across the U.S. (31 percent), Asia (29 percent) and Europe (40 percent).1

Though DoDEA schools are staffed by civilians, they exist within the military chain of command, reporting to the Secretary of Defense rather than the Secretary of Education.2

Now, about this wild claim that DoDEA has the best schools in the country: Who says so?

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) says so, that’s who. DoDEA has the highest score on each of the tests whose results are reported at the state level: 4th and 8th grade math and reading.3

That’s a good start. But longtime readers know that NAEP averages are not always the best indicator of system quality.4 Details matter. And it’s in the details where DoDEA truly rules.

Here are four ways DoDEA is the top academic dog:

#1. DoDEA Is Depression-proof

We’ve discussed at length the decline in U.S. student achievement that began around 2013. Somehow, this education depression skipped DoDEA schools, like they resided in a parallel dimension.

In 2013, DoDEA was barely among the top states for 8th grade math, snarled in a four-way tie for 10th place with Washington, Colorado, and Pennsylvania.

As the graph below shows, the other top states then dropped precipitously. DoDEA, on the other hand, held steady. As a result, it now holds a lead of nearly a grade level over its nearest competitor, Massachusetts.5 This is remarkable - both DoDEA’s deviation from national trends and the gap it has created with the rest of the pack.

I’m very curious about this part. DoDEA has been around for decades, doing roughly the same work, but it has not always been a top performer. Something made it get hot just when the rest of the country went cold. Put a pin in that - we’ll come back to it.

#2. DoDEA Nails Fundamentals

The key driver of lagging national achievement has been our lowest-performing students. Today’s strugglers are struggling far more than their peers of yesteryear.

The graph below is similar to the one above, but it focuses on students at the 10th percentile of the score distribution for each state. These are the strongest states on this measure as of 2013. DoDEA was already sitting pretty in second place.

Since 2013, however, as the rest of the country has seen 10th percentile scores fall by one or two grade levels, DoDEA has dipped only slightly. The current 14-point gap between DoDEA and North Dakota is enormous - and remember, North Dakota is the second-best state.

The DoDEA performance floor is much higher than anywhere else. Example: Eighty-one percent of DoDEA’s 8th graders score at least Basic on NAEP math, which is a good shorthand for being able to solve rudimentary problems. In New Mexico, the figure is 42 percent. That’s how you set a floor.

#3. DoDEA Delivers Old School Equity

Some states that regularly top NAEP rankings - say, New Jersey and New Hampshire - tend to coast on demographics. They have substantial affluence and small minority populations. Their white students from relatively privileged backgrounds score quite well - and there are enough such students to ensure the state’s overall average is among the best.6

DoDEA is the opposite.

Let’s talk 4th grade reading for a moment, since it is so critical for students to master literacy during the elementary years. Results for DoDEA White and Asian students in 4th grade reading are good but not singular. For those groups, it ranks 2nd and 7th, respectively. Nice.

When it comes to Black 4th graders, though, DoDEA is playing a different game altogether. Check out the graph below. Sixty-seven percent of DoDEA Black 4th graders score Basic or higher on NAEP. The runner-up, New Jersey, is at 53 percent. States like Maine, Wisconsin, and California don’t even crack 30 percent.7

The same is true of Latino 4th graders. DoDEA laps the field, with Mississippi trailing by 15 percent in second place. In Oregon, a Latino 4th grader is less than half as likely to score Basic on NAEP as a DoDEA Latino 4th grader.

To my knowledge, these figures are unprecedented. No school system has so dramatically outperformed all others when it comes to the minority students who have often been the focal point of our education improvement efforts. This is the very best kind of thumping - one based on kids learning lots more.

#4. DoDEA Ensures Demographics Are Not Destiny

Students with more educated parents do better in school. Makes sense. And we’ve all read a zillion headlines about how adolescents don’t read anymore and only consume the equivalent of algorithmic video Pez candies. We’re helpless.

DoDEA did not get that memo. Its schools are very, very good at teaching reading to children with less educated parents.

The plot below maps average NAEP reading scores for 8th graders whose parents graduated college vs those who did not (i.e. did not finish HS, graduated HS, some education after HS).

As expected, states like Massachusetts and New Jersey shine with the children of college graduates. Mississippi does better, comparatively, with the children of non-grads.

DoDEA cleans up with both groups. They are such an outlier that they almost seem lonely there in the upper right. The average DoDEA 8th grader whose parents did not graduate college is about 2.5 grade levels ahead of peers in the next-closest states, Indiana and Massachusetts.

But that’s not the wildest part. Look more closely. Children of non-college graduates in DoDEA schools score as high (279) as children of college grads in Massachusetts and New Jersey.

(This is the part where I drop the mic and attempt to skulk away, only to trip and concuss myself.)

Any Reasons to Be Cautious in Hero-Worshipping DoDEA?

Sure - you know there are.

DoDEA schools are nothing like typical American public schools. All the kids have at least one employed parent, for a start. Their schooling is delivered by that parent’s boss, in essence. Military bases are highly secure, organized, purposeful settings. Relatively few DoDEA students qualify as low income.

I would add that the demographics of DoDEA families have shifted in recent years to the point that 70 percent of students report that their parent(s) graduated college. While DoDEA does a wonderful job with the kids of non-grads, as we just saw, we’re talking about highly educated school communities. Only 45 percent of California students, for instance, have parents who graduated college.

For these reasons and more, we should not rush to anoint DoDEA as “what works” and attempt to carbon copy it in communities across America. With that caveat, let’s get the to the question you’ve probably been asking already…

What Makes DoDEA So Successful?

Let’s start with what DoDEA doesn’t do. No matter your priors, it will confound them.

Conservatives will be annoyed to hear that DoDEA Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) and vouchers played no role because they don’t exist. Likewise, there are no charter schools. DoDEA did not ban or break its teachers union, the Federal Education Association.

It may chafe progressives to learn that DoDEA did not eschew standardized tests or adopt restorative justice discipline models or make every location a community school.

Instead, DoDEA’s transformation began in 2014 when it hired a former Army officer and district superintendent named Tom Brady as its Director.8 He was an odd selection. At the time, the sun was setting on the classic era of education reform. Common Core had become a political piñata. Testing and accountability were going out of style. No Child Left Behind would soon be replaced. The Broad Superintendents Academy, which had trained Brady, was increasingly controversial.

Brady proceeded to ignore all of this. He inherited a DoDEA system divided into three autonomous regions - Europe, Asia, and the Americas - each with its own curricula. His first order of business was to create a “One DoDEA” vision that integrated the regions to achieve greater instructional coherence. Students who moved due to a parent transfer, which is ubiquitous in military life, would find their new schools covering virtually the same material as their old one.

Next, Brady unreservedly embraced a lightly rebranded version of Common Core called “College and Career Ready Standards” and deliberately rolled them out, one subject at a time, over the course of several years.

The whole thing was run with military precision. Lacking an elected school board and small town politics, DoDEA zigged when the rest of the country zagged. Instead of devolving decision-making and reducing its emphasis on measurable learning, as many states did during the 2010s, it placed a bet on treating its far-flung system like an urban district reform project.9 And that bet paid off, big time. When Brady retired in 2024, he’d piloted DoDEA to the top position on every NAEP test.10

This is the provocation of the DoDEA story. It represents a path not taken. While facing the same realities as other systems this past decade - rising teen use of social media and screens, adolescent mental health crises, COVID disruptions - its performance did not suffer in the same way.

It’s tempting to look at DoDEA and shrug. Different kids. Different context. Different world.

But that reaction - that dismissive lack of curiosity - speaks volumes. It shows how we’ve accepted a narrative that declining student learning was unavoidable, that we couldn’t have done any better given the hand we were dealt.

DoDEA did do better, though. It’s putting up some of the best numbers in the history of American education. Now that we know that, it’s awfully hard to un-know it. It’s hard not to wonder whether we made some regrettable calls.

At the least, DoDEA’s dominance is an invitation to reflect honestly. Let’s take it. Let’s learn more about how DoDEA improved instruction in its schools and ask what’s transferable. If we miss such opportunities, we could be stuck in this rotten depression for another decade. Who wants to risk that?

Personal Postscript

In 1965, my great aunt, Beth Daly, joined DoDEA as an English teacher in Bermuda. After stints in the Azores and Kaiserslautern, Germany, she returned to the states in the late 70s to complete a master’s degree. In 1982, Beth rejoined DoDEA as a reading specialist in Gelnhausen, Germany, staying until her retirement in the late 90s.

Every year, she sent nutcrackers from the local Christmas market to my brother and me. To this day, mine decorate our living room each December - see below. During study abroad in college, I joined Beth and her teacher friends for a holiday trip to Izmir, Turkey, where we spent New Year’s Eve at an Air Force base party.

My family is extremely proud of Beth’s service and dedication. And we miss her - she passed away in 2008. She would be awfully pleased to see DoDEA’s current results. If you have DoDEA educators in your family, don’t forget to tell them how much their work means.

I knew the Trump administration had big plans to change the federal role in education. I did not anticipate that it would sunset most of the civil rights monitoring and enforcement that dates to the Great Society era.

We’re in a new paradigm where states will decide nearly everything for themselves, including whether they need to improve their schools. For now, the feds will focus on keeping score via NAEP and placing spending decisions in the hands of families. More will unfold in 2026. As usual, I haven’t a clue where we will land.

But education is really about hope - hope for our kids, hope for our communities. Schools manufacture hope in tiny daily increments, like stacking up Lego bricks. I remain hopeful that the building happening in so many places will pay off. It’s what motivates me to read a lot of articles and research and bother you about it.

I’m deeply grateful to everyone for reading The Education Daly. I have a ball talking to smart folks as I’m writing these pieces and just as much fun fielding outreach and outrage when they go live. Thank you.

Now, to answer a question nobody asked, here are this year’s five most popular posts (based on views) along with a few updates:

#5:

A decade of dismal education outcomes has seeded a strange and surprising nostalgia for No Child Left Behind, which Matt Barnum recently explored. Its 2015 replacement, the Every Student Succeeds Act, is now seen as a massive failure.

NCLB haters can relax. The future of school accountability is unlikely to look like the past - especially with the Department of Education holding yard sales where cubicles are priced three for $20. On the other hand, there is an unmistakable new public appetite for academic fundamentals. Politicians would be wise to read the room.

#4:

Once upon a time, education was a top domestic policy issue. Those days are long gone, but system leaders continue to proceed as if spending can grow in perpetuity… even if enrollment, attendance, and achievement free fall.

That’s a risky bet. With the recent passage of a federal tax-credit scholarship program and Democratic governors realizing they probably have no choice but to opt-in, big shifts are possible.

#3:

Whoa daddy, this was bad news. Over the course of 2025, there was a whiplash narrative shift from “when will student learning recover from the pandemic?” to “what the hell has been going on since 2013?” That shift kicked into high gear on Jan. 29 with the release of the most depressing test data in our history.

The saddest part was the long term consequences for kids. The second saddest part was the widespread lack of ownership and honesty from state leaders, most of whom cherry-picked silver linings and ignored the big picture.

Journalists took notice. We got some outstanding reporting this year questioning the pattern of complacency.

#2:

I’m shocked and happy to see this one in second place. There’s a tendency to blame our challenges with attention, focus, mental health - even attendance - on screens and phones. But how, on a practical level, does technology contribute to negative outcomes?

A key element is the disruption of sleep. Kids go to bed later, sleep with their devices in-hand, wake up constantly, and arrive at school feeling like they’ve been partying with Mötley Crüe. As Mike Goldstein says, teens cannot flourish until we reset what happens from 3pm to 3am.

#1:

The runaway winner. This piece received 3x as many views as anything else I wrote. Bari Weiss cross-posted it on The Free Press and by the commutative law of addition, I think I own a substantial chunk of CBS News - we’re checking with the lawyers now.

Why was it so popular? People love to argue about Mississippi. Boy, do they. Some folks did amazing work documenting the Southern Surge and the causes behind it. Others shattered word count records and laws of statistics attempting to debunk that tale. Then the debunkers faced their own debunking. Dizzying. At this point, you can ask AI to crank out literally anything about Mississippi and it will get more clicks than Taylor Swift’s engagement photos. Dare ya.

I remain baffled that we have endless time to debate whether and why Mississippi improved and so little interest in states like Oregon that have unquestionably declined and done almost nothing about it. Maybe we’ll get to that next year…

Honorable mention goes to July’s piece on summer vacation, which would have made the top five if I based the ranking on likes. It really struck a chord with the non-wonks out there.

We’re done here. Please enjoy the holiday season with your loved ones. We will be back in January to push the rock up the hill. Thanks again for your engagement. I’m tempted to make a New Year’s resolution to reduce typos and horrible Gen X pop culture references but let’s all be real for a second.

Problem #1. The news about Oregon’s 8th graders is not good

On the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), they ranked 40th among states in math.1 Their low performance stands out because Oregon is relatively affluent—20th in per capita income. Even so, Oregon’s students trail their peers in poorer states like Kentucky, Tennessee, and Missouri.

Fortunately, there’s an alternate universe where Oregon’s ranking is dramatically better - where it actually rises to the top, surpassing all others. That’s good news, right?

So where can we find this alternate universe?

It’s called “2013.” If only Oregon could have been judged in 2024 based on its NAEP performance from 2013, it would have ranked 1st. Numero uno.

But Oregon plummeted between 2013 and 2024. The same thing happened in most states. As you may have heard, we’re afflicted by an education depression.

Which is why Oregon could have skipped from 40th to 1st simply by stopping time and freezing its 2013 scores in place. Those 2013 scores weren’t magnificent, mind you. They ranked 29th in the moment. But in 2024, they would have ruled.

Spoiler: This is not really a story about Oregon. It is a story about America’s free-falling academic performance and the enormous economic consequences that will follow.

The chart below shows all 50 states plus DC. The blue dots show where each state actually ranked in 2024: Massachusetts was no. 1, Wisconsin was no. 2, etc. The orange dots show where each state would have ranked in 2024 if it could have submitted its 2013 score instead.

• In total, 29 different states could have ranked 1st in 2024 if they were judged by their score from 2013 rather than their actual 2024 score. Maine, Texas, Rhode Island… I feel like Oprah shouting “You get a car! You get a car!” So many Oregons. What used to be mediocrity would now be best-in-class.

• The worst performing state in 2024 - New Mexico - would have jumped to 26th if it substituted its 2013 score. Cellar-dweller no more.

• When you see a state in the chart whose 2013 score would not have helped so much - e.g. Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, DC - that’s a good thing. The more a state has to gain by substituting its 2013 score, the worse it has generally done since then. We are looking at you, Delaware and Maryland.

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Problem #2. Weaker academic results drag the economy

Stanford economist Eric Hanushek has been thinking about the alternate universe. He recently calculated what would have happened to the U.S. economy if achievement did not deteriorate over the past decade and instead remained at peak 2013 levels. As he put it, those who “know more earn more,” and "nations with a more skilled workforce grow faster in the long term.”

Hence, sustaining 2013 academic performance would have led to greater GDP (gross domestic product) going forward. How much greater? In present value, our economy would be $90 trillion larger by the end of this century. Our current GDP, for reference, is $30 trillion. The future loss is equal to 3x the size of today’s total economy.

That’s major cheddar. How can we put it in perspective?

• The combined net worth of all U.S. billionaires is about $6.7 trillion. They could forfeit all their assets and it would cover less than 10 percent of the economic losses we’re set to incur.

• Remember when the economy imploded in 2008? Mortgage-backed securities had some flaws, it turns out. Almost overnight, the federal government was propping up banks and bailing out the domestic car industry. We were two steps away from potato sack clothes. During the worst of that crisis - from late-2007 to mid-2009 - the economy shrank 4.3 percent. Hanushek projects that the hit we’ll take from lower student achievement will be 6 percent per year for 75 years. That’s not just worse. It’s many times worse.

Why are education and GDP connected? Better-educated adults produce more output per hour of work and adapt to new technology more easily. They develop more inventions and patents. They create something called “knowledge spillover,” which to my great surprise is a positive outcome that compounds the effects of higher skills on GDP over time.

When the economy does not grow, wages stagnate. Everyday essentials like housing, food, transportation, childcare, and healthcare eat up a larger share of income. In a nutshell, affordability goes to hell.

Problem #3. Affordability’s big political moment has a blind spot for schools

Zohran Mamdani brilliantly harnessed affordability to score an out-of-nowhere mayoral victory this year in New York City, cruising past a creepy ex-governor everyone thought was in jail and the beret guy who founded a vigilante group.

President Trump, who won what termed an “affordability election” last year, was so impressed that he invited Mamdani to the White House and said nice things about him. (He really did that, I know you think I’m joking.)

Correctly sensing the moment, Democratic gubernatorial candidates Abigail Spanberger (Virginia) and Mikie Sherrill (New Jersey) rode the affordability train to November routs. Affordability is “the new winning formula.”

Why? People apparently like affordability. They hate high prices. Such a revelation.

Mamdani has ambitious plans to arm-wrestle costs into submission through levers such as rent control, zoning, tenant rights, higher minimum wages, free transit, subsidized childcare, and city-owned grocery stores.

Will he succeed? I hope so. This may be controversial, but here at Education Daly world headquarters, we’re squarely in favor of families being able to afford stuff. Unfortunately, I’m totally unqualified to comment on the political or economic viability of Mamdani’s ideas. You are better off reading arguments from people who know what they are talking about.

But there’s one area where I’m quite confident, based on past evidence: One of the best ways to build long-term affordability is a high-performing public education system.

And when it comes to schools, this talented wave of affordability crusaders has offered too little. Mamdani plans to relinquish oversight of his city’s schools rather than make it his business to improve them. In a fall debate, Sherrill served up an embarrassing example of outdated condescension toward Mississippi and Louisiana’s rising performance. Spanberger’s education plan is paint-by-numbers gobbledygook.

We need better leadership - because of Problem #4.

Problem #4. The real-world consequences of sinking achievement have already arrived

This fall, an internal report from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) found that over 1,000 newly admitted students need remedial coursework on basic concepts like rounding numbers and maneuvering fractions. That’s 30 times the number of UCSD students that required remediation just a few years ago. Most of them have sparkling transcripts full of good marks in advanced high school math courses. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been admitted. But they cannot actually do much math. Their K-12 districts likely responded to lower student readiness with heaps of grade inflation.

If we could take that time warp back to 2013, students across the board - including UCSD freshmen - would have much stronger math skills. Instead, we’re stuck in the present, where kids are taking out loans to pay college tuition for classes that will teach them things they should have mastered years ago. They won’t graduate with the same ability to contribute in the workforce. Remedial education is not just a personal setback—it’s economic quicksand.

And that sound you hear? That’s $90 trillion of future GDP sliding into a money pit.

Solution: Make education an explicit part of affordability

Lacking a workable time warp, education needs to become an affordability priority in two ways.

First, we need to produce better education results in the near term at an affordable price. We cannot be Oregon, which has spent far more money on its schools over the past decade for wildly worse results.2 Nor can we be California, handing out high school A’s and B’s to students who will then be forced to repeat that coursework in college. We are seeing too little payoff for the investment of vast sums - just as we did with pandemic recovery funds. Inefficiency in K-12 is preventing more investment in childcare, housing, transportation, etc. It’s time for national and state leaders to lay out a clearer vision. Why do they believe results have fallen? And what are they doing about it?

Second, stronger learning outcomes must be a central element of the future affordability agenda. Better standards of living require a healthy, expanding economy that shares opportunity broadly. Childcare and groceries are critical. But if we continue to see more students with very low academic skills, they will earn less and it will be impossible to subsidize goods and services for all of them, no matter how aggressively redistributive we become. Alternatively, we can reverse our post-2013 trends and improve affordability by producing young people who are truly ready to support themselves and their families. Affordability will fail if it becomes a debate over distribution of a smaller pie. Cheaper housing? Yes - but only if those new houses are near strong schools.

Let’s hop aboard the affordability juggernaut recognizing that the only viable path to success includes education. Otherwise, our affordability dreams - and the future prospects of the politicians who have ushered them to the fore - will quickly evaporate.

One fall day in 1982, my kindergarten class at Dennis Elementary School in Decatur, Illinois, took a field trip to the Kelly’s Potato Chip factory. It was magical. I can still smell the potatoes boiling in the fryers and taste the hot salty samples they passed out at the end. It bettered my disposition toward formal education. Up to that point, I’d been a skeptical participant. Finally, I thought to myself, after all this nonsense about the alphabet, all this waiting in line for half a sip at the drinking fountain, we’re getting to the real stuff. The snacks. How they are made.

It’s one of my few kindergarten memories.1 I’m getting old. I can’t tell you what songs we sang or what we did during rug time. But I won’t forget the potato chip factory.

I’m not alone. Ask anybody to name their best day at school and they are going to tell you about a field trip almost every time.

Friends, I have news: The venerable institution of field trips is in trouble. We need to save it — so it can revive our flagging schools.

A Brief History of Field Trips

Long before my turn as a processed food tourist, field trips were invented by progressive educators who believed children learn best from engagement with the real world. They called it nature study — a focus on tangible objects, not printed books. Prominent boosters included John Dewey.

But transporting classes of students long distances was infeasible. That’s why they became “field” trips. Most destinations were walkable and nearby. Teachers pointed out fish in streams or taught the names of trees in the forest. Students romped.

Modern field trips came about with the advent of better transportation. In 1927, a Georgia Ford dealer named A.L. Luce built the first modern school bus by bolting a wooden body onto a truck chassis. Voilà. A century later, his company is still among the nation’s largest manufacturers of buses.

The distinctive yellow color was standardized in 1939 to make black lettering easier to read. My Baltimore middle school students of the 1990s referred to such vehicles exclusively as “cheese buses.” They were cheap and simple. A cheese bus could get us to Philadelphia or D.C. and back the same day.2 The possibility of an on-board bathroom was absurd.

Roomy modes of conveyance and better roads turned many American museums from stuffy showplaces into educational institutions. After World War II, waves of little baby boomers consumed art and natural history in record numbers. Sputnik sparked a boom for new science centers that lasted until the Millennium.

OK, fine, you say. Millions of kids rode cheese buses to museums where they pretended to pay attention to tour guides. They ate room-temperature bagged lunches. They annoyed their chaperones. They pressed their bare butts up against the bus windows, to the horror of passing cars. They thanked the heavens for sparing them from class. But was there any real educational value to this time, expense, and fuss?

Yes, there was.

Evidence Says Field Trips Work

Researchers have discovered that field trips are more than a reprieve from school tedium.

Jay Greene and a group of colleagues found that students who visited an art museum showed stronger critical thinking and higher subsequent interest in learning about art than a control group. They achieved better scores on measures of “historical empathy” — the ability to understand and appreciate what life was like for people who lived in a different time - and tolerance of differing viewpoints. Given the challenges facing our schools today, that sounds like the perfect elixir.

Greene later found similar benefits for live theatre. I find this wholly believable. Have you ever read a Shakespearean play end-to-end? Boring and wordy. How about watching a filmed performance on TV? Stink-a-rino. But a live performance? Transformative. Kids are engrossed.

In 2020, Greene was part of another team that found students randomly selected for arts-based field trips had fewer behavioral infractions and attended school more often.

It’s not just the arts. Outdoor trips have been shown to boost critical thinking, perseverance, teamwork, and a connection to nature.

These aren’t graduation trips to Six Flags or afternoons at a bowling alley for making the honor roll. We’re talking about purposeful endeavors that are instructional, guided, and typically bookended with a real debrief. They aren’t a distraction from learning — they are learning.

There you have it: vindication for field trips. The juice is worth the squeeze.

Why Are Field Trips Dying?

Field trips entered a great period of decline in the early 2000s - well before research studies had shown their substantial benefits.

Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History once welcomed more than 300,000 students per year. By 2014, it was down to 200,000. Post-pandemic, it shrank even further, to 138,000.3

A 2023 study of nationally-recognized art museums concluded that 15 out of 18 had experienced field trip attendance losses since the early 2000s — typically 30-60 percent.

There are several common explanations:

• Accountability ruined the fun. This is the factor most often cited by educators to researchers. The rise of standards and testing in the 1990s - followed by No Child Left Behind in 2001 - raised pressure on educators to deliver higher scores at all costs.4 No time for out-of-school junkets.

• Field trips got privatized. As dollars were prioritized for raising achievement, Parent-Teacher Associations (PTAs) often allayed district reluctance by offering to raise funds for field trips. You can guess how this went. More affluent kids kept visiting museums. Less affluent kids got double blocks of language arts and a video about pyramids.5

• Principals hesitated to approve trips. They worried not just about costs and time but safety, logistics, and alignment to the school’s instructional needs. Some teachers simply stopped asking.

• The Great Recession was brutal. Massive budget cuts after the 2008 financial crash put field trips on the chopping block. More than half of districts reported imposing limitations by 2010-11. Field trip attendance at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County dropped by 30 percent in just two years following the financial crash.

• Buses became a pain. After COVID, the good old days of affordable cheese buses were gone. Driver shortages and fuel costs forced districts to prioritize getting students to and from school. Midday field trips were a primary casualty.

Save Field Trips, Conquer the Suck Factor

Potato chips notwithstanding, my purpose here is not nostalgia.

I’m concerned that the decline of field trips - which has lasted decades, persisting after serious accountability evaporated with the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015 and school budgets rebounded to new records in the wake of the recession - points to a larger loss of vibrancy in our schools. We see it in lower performance, higher chronic absenteeism, and epidemic loneliness.

The technical term for this phenomenon is the “suck factor.” School begins to absorb a general quality of sucking. Nobody wants it to suck, but it does. Everyone feels it.

We’ve known for over a decade that high-quality field trips invigorate kids in all the best ways - and they improve academic performance rather than dragging it down. And day after day, apparently, we do nothing with this information.

Instead, we are playing it safe, doing what’s easy and routine. The equivalent of a football team punting on 4th and 1 rather than playing to win. And the longer we acquiesce, the more the suck factor is growing.

Field trips can help us defeat the suck factor - if we commit to them.

Education leaders are fond of saying we need to make hard choices. I agree. They tell us money is tight and every penny must be spent wisely. I’m not arguing otherwise.

So let’s make a hard choice to ensure we can fund field trips that will open minds and lead to lasting memories. Where can we find the resources?

What if we stop spending so much on technology for elementary students?

Some of my readers just exploded with indignation. Curses have been muttered. I hear you — you are saying AI is the future, tech helps us personalize instruction, I need to see a demonstration of this new platform that’s transformative, I just haven’t seen it done right yet.

Maybe all that’s true, but I don’t find the evidence very persuasive. K-12 tech spending is now ~$30 billion per year. That’s something like $550 per student. Results have been lackluster. Yet we keep pouring more money into that hole and wondering where it went.

Are we sure, for instance, that we need 1:1 screen devices for kids in grades K-4? Most schools have had them for the past decade, which will go down as the worst stretch in the recorded history of U.S. schools when it comes to learning and engagement.

What we need is kids back on cheese buses.

My proposition: One serious field trip per year for kids through eighth grade. We’ll get them talking to each other, using their eyeballs to look at something besides screens, and recognizing that the world contains marvels.

The Kelly’s Potato Chip factory may be long gone, but its magic endures.

Here comes the fun part

Over the past month, I pestered school leaders, public officials, professors, journalists, random parents, and people I ran into at the airport with the same question:

What is a memorable field trip you took as a student?

These are their responses. They warm my heart. When you get to the end, please add your own in the comments if you have one!

• “Alcatraz, 4th grade. Fun ferry ride to the island and then a cool guided tour. Just seeing the size of cells and picturing what solitary confinement would be like.”

• “When I was in the sixth grade, we went to NASA space camp in Huntsville, AL. To experience floating inside a unit simulating space and return home to no inside plumbing was a stark dissonance and a demarcation line for me that I could - and would - have a very different life as an adult.”

• “We went to a ‘pink’ pine forest in Allegheny state park and went for a long hike - as a kid it felt like miles and miles. I can still close my eyes and see the pink forest.”

• “We took multiple trips to the Morris County Museum in elementary school. They had an amazing collection of geodes and rocks, and you could buy small samples in the gift shop. We collected them.”

• “Trip to DC in 5th or 6th grade - first time there, seeing the sites I had only seen pictures of, the White House, Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, etc. Down and back in one day by bus, bag lunches from home, but a memorable and special day.”

• “In 4th grade, we visited a hospital. We were shown the lung of a deceased person who smoked. And a lung of a non smoker. Suffice to say, I don’t smoke. Scared straight, the smoking edition.”

• “I went with school to Yosemite—my first time in a national park, and my first time backpacking. It changed my life. I was a city kid who had never slept outside or seen stars. The trip did what school does at its best—it opened the world a bit wider.”

• “An architectural tour of St. Louis, sometime in high school. Led by our history teacher, so it was only tangentially related to the subject. But I had no idea that St. Louis had so many beautiful old buildings.”

• “A trip to Clove Lake Park on Staten Island, nice park, a picnic lunch, some relay races and general running around, but seemed like another world from our urban Brooklyn neighborhood.”

• “My 8th grade year as part of graduation week, my class went to Dauphin Island Sea Lab— it made me want to be a marine biologist.”

• “I remember a field trip to the Field Museum in Chicago -- we lived a couple hours away in Michigan -- and it felt both enormous and surreal. How could humanity have done all this, so long ago, and still have it sitting right next to where the Bears football team plays? Our teachers did a great job of making it fun. Plus a girl I thought was cute was in my group. So yeah, a good day all around.”

• “AP History class trip to Williamsburg, UVA, and Monticello. Growing up in the Deep South and never travelling that far before, it finally dawned on me that all this stuff we studied in class was actually real because I saw the places where it happened. I fell in the James River because I wanted to touch the water.”

• “My small town San Bernardino County high school was one of many Southern California school districts invited to participate in a Student for a Day event at UCLA, where among other things, we got to attend classes, eat in the dorms, talk with undergraduates and so on. The class I got assigned to was in the giant, ornate old Royce Hall where none other than Angela Davis was the professor. As she thundered forth from the podium, I was dumbstruck. If this is what college is, I thought to myself, I can’t wait.”

• “The Wonderbread factory. I was a third grader in a public school in DC, and I haven’t a clue where our classic yellow bus took us. But it couldn’t have been too far. I still vividly remember the extraordinary aroma that permeated the air. I realize now that Wonderbread is to bread what Velveeta is to cheese. But the memory completely stuck.”

• “Had the same science teacher for 7th/8th grade. She would take us to a nearby forest with a pond. Just looked it up on Google Maps, it was located in the back of my K-8 school. Fooled me, as it felt a world away, back then.

  Over those two school years, we went to that forest/pond during all of Minnesota’s seasons. Likely the reason I was drawn to the sciences thereafter.” 

• “I loved the ones at interactive science centers like the LA Science Museum where you could make things, experiment with things, and see things like gravity and other conceptual science and math concepts in action.”

• “The summer after 9th grade my earth science teacher organized a camping/hiking trip across the Southwest. We flew into Phoenix and rented a couple vans, hit places like Sedona, Four Corners, Grand Canyon, Yosemite. I grew up in a small town in Virginia. Camping under the stars at the Grand Canyon might as well have been exploring a whole other country.”

• “Williamsburg, VA. It was the first time I had stayed in a hotel.”

• “My school took us to Northern Minnesota for a sleepaway camp. The formal socialization (see: trust falls, obstacle courses) and informal socialization (see: middle schoolers bunking up together with no care for the lights out policy) sticks out for me as someone who was otherwise not really exposed to a lot outside of my immediate family.”

• “In central Virginia, we took buses up to the Smithsonian almost every year in middle school. They would drop us off at the cast iron dinosaur sculptures outside the Natural History Museum and tell us to get back to the triceratops by whatever time in the afternoon we had to leave. What I remember is the freedom to roam wherever we wanted. It was oddly routine and glorious at the same time.”

Your turn - the comments are open.

Come with me to Chicago, a city with roughly equal numbers of White, Black, and Hispanic residents. How are children from each community doing in school?

Over the past two decades, scores for the city’s White students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) rose substantially. In 4th grade reading, the average White student is now scoring 13.1 points above peers from 2003.

What does that mean? Ten points on NAEP is approximately one grade level, so learning for White students has improved by more than a year.

Gains in math have been even more remarkable: White students are scoring nearly two years higher in 4th grade and more than two years higher in 8th.1

How about the other kids? Not so good. Hispanic students have gained ground but not nearly so much as White peers. Black students have made zero progress in reading. Black 4th graders are actually reading worse than their predecessors in 2003.

Knowing this dynamic exists — large progress for White students that has not been broadly shared — one might expect Chicago to be putting together some sort of special strategy to ensure all racial groups succeed. And perhaps that strategy should pay particular attention to Black students.

Guess what? Chicago did exactly that. This past February, it announced the Black Student Success Plan, described as “a firm commitment by the district, a roadmap, and a call to action for Chicago’s educational ecosystem to ensure equitable educational experiences and outcomes for Black students across our district.” Good job, Chicago!

Well, it would be considered a good job under most circumstances.

The Trump administration felt differently. It responded with a civil rights investigation, arguing that “by focusing on remedial measures only for Black students,” the district violated federal law. Next, the administration cited the Black Student Success Plan as justification for canceling a grant to Chicago’s magnet schools.

Perhaps you find this confusing. I certainly do. Under No Child Left Behind (NCLB), states were required to disaggregate data. If subgroups lagged, schools had to develop interventions to raise their performance. Otherwise, districts faced penalties, including sanctions and the possibility of lost funding. It was the law.2

It’s still the law. The Every Student Succeeds Act contains nearly identical provisions.

Yet here we are. That approach has been deemed illegal. What gives?

Our answer lies in a logo at the top of the Black Student Success Plan crediting its author: the “Chicago Public Schools Office of Equity.”

Ah - equity. Not long ago, the term was ubiquitous in education circles. It was the centerpiece of strategic plans for districts, non-profits, and philanthropies. Many of us found it difficult to speak or write consecutive sentences without referencing it.

But no more. Equity is a political football, quite controversial. A Trump administration day one executive order sought to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.3 In response, websites and mission statements have been scrubbed to remove any mention of them.

This seismic shift marks the end of the Equity Era in American education. We can either curse the unfairness of it all or get busy planning what’s next.

What is equity?

My preferred definition is “what kids actually need to succeed.”4 Equality under the law - desegregated schools, non-discrimination protections - was one thing. But legislation and court orders from the 1950s through the 1970s yielded only marginally better outcomes. Equity described the elements that were required to get the job done: fair access to enrollment, sufficient funding, clean/safe facilities, good textbooks, qualified teachers, clear standards, advanced coursework options, and high performance expectations.5 Equity was equality in practice.

During the Accountability Era, which lasted roughly from George H.W. Bush’s 1989 education summit through the widespread issuance of NCLB waivers in 2012, equitable performance gains were the central outcome schools and districts were expected to produce.6

As the concept of equity ascended in prominence during the 2010s and accountability receded, equity absorbed broader dimensions. Many districts paid more attention than before to the racial composition of faculty, patterns of student discipline, and the treatment of race, identity, and history in curricular materials.

These new areas of focus didn’t come out of nowhere. Leaders were responding to data showing that some groups of students still did not feel safe, supported, and included.

Critics, however, felt that equity had drifted beyond its remit, morphing into publicly sponsored political activism with little connection to the performance improvements that had once been promised. They attacked DEI and called for the entire concept to be removed from schools. The equity consensus has rapidly unraveled.7

Chicago’s Black Student Success Plan embodies the conflict nicely. It is grounded in the district’s mission to “provide a high-quality public education for every child, in every neighborhood.” It leverages NCLB-era tools like annual reporting, progress monitoring, and continuous improvement. It sets a goal to “accelerate growth and attainment for Black students” within five years. All of this is consistent with the classic definition of equity.

But that’s not all it does. The document is peppered with ed school jargon like “liberatory thinking,” “healing conditions,” and calls for educators to “critically examine their own identities and privileges.” There are numeric targets for reducing suspensions of Black students but no such goals for math or reading performance. If the Trump administration has one of those Ghostbusters meters tuned to detect wokeness - and without question, they do - it caught fire when they scanned this plan.

Personally, I can live with the Black Student Success Plan. It’s sometimes mushy and performative. An easy target. I have notes. But the district is trying to do its job: ensuring all its students have what they need to succeed. In past decades, Black students have not had that - and their potential has been shamefully squandered. We should focus there.

Alas, my opinion doesn’t matter. At this point, equity has become politically coded. I concede the point. For progressives, it remains a mom-and-apple-pie virtue. For conservatives, it is a veneer for unlawful discrimination. Never the twain, as they say.

The upshot: Polarization about the term “equity” means it cannot realistically be the foundation for a broad, cross-partisan project to improve education, as it once was. We need a new vocabulary. Because we need that cross-partisan project.

RIP, equity.8

After equity

I’m optimistic. Seriously. I believe there remains a meaningful consensus about what our schools are supposed to do. Yes, education has declined in political importance and both parties have catered to their flanks. But there’s a path.

Let’s start by celebrating that equity as a concept was a huge step forward. It moved us beyond broad school and district averages, which disguised the neglect of low-income students. We need to keep that part. If we don’t want to call it equity, fine. I’m not the language police. But when we say “all” kids, it needs to mean all.

So what’s a list of things all kids deserve that can maintain popular support?

1. High standards and high support

Lower expectations in the wake of NCLB and the pandemic were a mistake. Grade inflation harms struggling students the most by giving them little reason to try. We need to ask our students to achieve real learning milestones and ensure they have the tools to get there.

2. No ceilings on advancement

Every student should have access to as much academic rigor and advanced coursework as they are willing to tackle. Slowing high-performing students down in the name of reducing gaps with lower performing students is counterproductive and extremely unpopular with the general public. Pass.

3. Practical life skills

Punctuality, attendance, time management, attentiveness, and persistence are just as important as academics. We do not want these little darlings living in our collective basement in 20 years. Some schools have surrendered in recent years to student disengagement. Let’s do the opposite. School should be where young people master the habits that will determine whether they thrive as adults.

4. Healthy tech habits

No student should graduate from a K-12 school system without demonstrating the ability to use and limit technology. AI fluency will be required for many jobs of the future. The ability to pry oneself away from addictive screen behavior will be required for all of them.

5. Affordable childhood

Public schools are free but they are just the beginning of what constitutes a well-rounded upbringing. Families need help paying for sports, summer camps, tutoring, music lessons, and dance classes. When activities become too costly, privileged kids get to do them and lower income kids don’t. We can’t accept that. The advent of Education Savings Accounts (ESA) in red states is creating an appetite for flexible dollars that can be tailored to each child’s passions. A new federal tax credit may bring this concept to many more states. If properly tailored, it can be a powerful tool for leveling the playing field.

Did you notice we did all of that without saying equity?

Our verbiage matters less than what we achieve. We can stop scrubbing websites. I don’t think Chicago’s Black families are invested in language wars. Like all families, they want a future for their kids. And they deserve one. Their communities should share in the benefits of education. Yes, we’ve made some progress on that front, but not nearly enough. The ideal of equity has often superseded the reality of it.

Finally, neither side in this debate has a monopoly on righteousness. Yes, attempts to broaden the meaning of equity probably contributed to its demise. But menacing school systems for their commitment to serving minority kids, as the Trump administration has done, is wrong-headed and will backfire. It’s a betrayal of our most fundamental American values.

So how about a truce? Let’s do a better job for students and people can call it whatever they want. Even equity.

BONUS: Chris Stewart posted a great rebuttal to my piece that’s well worth reading. If you don’t already follow him, you should!

On a comedy show.

It was no anomaly. In the course of a few years, Stewart also booked DC schools chancellor and StudentsFirst founder Michelle Rhee. Historian Diane Ravitch appeared multiple times. The Colbert Report was even more engaged with education. Stephen Colbert interviewed Teach For America founder Wendy Kopp, New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, KIPP co-founder Dave Levin, and Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Children’s Zone - among others.1

Around the same time, Time magazine ran a famous/infamous cover story featuring Rhee. In 2010, NBC’s Meet the Press - then the highest-rated Sunday-morning political program with a few million viewers - devoted an entire special edition to education. Guests included Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, and Rhee. They discussed the importance of accountability and teacher quality.

Education was a leading domestic policy issue. It was hot.2 American schools were improving. Optimism reigned.

Fast-forward to 2025. Public satisfaction with schools is the lowest ever recorded. In a recent Gallup survey, respondents were asked to name our nation’s most important problem. Three percent said education. Back in 2000, it was five times that many and education topped the list of concerns, beating out perennial hits like crime and taxes.

During last year’s presidential campaign, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris barely discussed education on the stump and were not asked about their plans in debates.3

Let’s face it: Education is an also-ran issue. Given that student outcomes are mired in a long depression, that’s worrisome.

How did we get here?

Education’s run as a top public concern was relatively brief, as Rick Hess and others have pointed out. There are several possible explanations for its decline:

• No Child Left Behind passed. Congress took decisive, bipartisan action in 2001, approving the bill by margins of 90 to 10 percent in both houses.4 With the steam let out of the issue, folks quickly pivoted to hating on NCLB.

• Other crises eclipsed education. The bursting of the dot-com bubble. September 11 and the War on Terror. The subprime mortgage crisis. The Great Recession. And so on.

• Politics realigned. The Great Recession ignited populist energy on the right (Tea Party) and left (Occupy Wall Street). did a great job of explaining how Republicans became much more conservative and Democrats became much more progressive, leaving education - which had been a centrist cause - ideologically homeless.

• Fewer households have school-age kids. An aging population means there are more Americans whose priorities are senior housing and health care, not K-12 education.

• Reformers overreached. During the Race to the Top era, we turned every dial to 11 simultaneously: higher standards, new assessments, explosive charter school growth, tougher teacher evaluations, etc. Backlash ensued.5

There’s more but you get the idea. Education got demoted.

The consequences of being an also-ran

Less public engagement with education has meant less momentum for improving our system. For example, where once there was pressure to improve learning for students from less privileged backgrounds, some states have recently created the illusion of progress by lowering cut scores on exams, enabling them to instantly declare more kids proficient.6 I doubt Meet the Press is going to air a special edition about that anytime soon.

I don’t mean to make a breathless claim that the sky is falling because education isn’t the #1 national priority. Nothing like that. The vast majority of our kids still attend public schools and their parents are generally satisfied with their experience. As has always been the case.

But things are changing. More evolution than revolution. Recent trends have reshaped the terrain in ways that deserve our attention:

• Schools have fewer students. Two-thirds of traditional school districts lost enrollment between 2019 and 2023. Some are paying bounties to private firms to fill seats. Low birth rates guarantee this challenge will persist. Districts will be cutting costs and closing buildings.

• Vouchers are for real. Thirty-three states now fund private school choice. Of those, 12 have no income cap on family participation. More states may follow suit now that federal law provides a tax credit for contributions to private school scholarship providers. Even blue states may feel compelled to opt-in.

• Parents are increasingly wary. Many Republicans and Independents - who make up over 70 percent of the electorate - are dissatisfied with the amount of say they have in their own child’s education. Surveys show far lower levels of satisfaction among public school parents than their private school counterparts.

Headwinds against public schools are strengthening. At this rate, what will the playing field look like in another decade? I suspect we will see many more middle-class kids in private schools, subsidized by public dollars. Traditional districts will lose market share and increasingly rely on affluent, progressive enclaves and low-income communities as strongholds. Student outcomes will scuffle along, well below the historic highs of the early 2010s.

Are we ready to accept these outcomes as unavoidable? I’m not.

Three ideas:

#1. We need our leaders to lead

For nearly four decades, every U.S. president supported an education vision that included higher standards for students and the schools that served them. Reagan commissioned A Nation at Risk. Obama oversaw Race to the Top. Donald Trump (versions 1.0 and 2.0) and Joe Biden have done nothing of the sort.

The problem is not just federal. At the state and local level, I get the impression that some leaders take education for granted. They operate from an assumption that it remains a top priority. They ask for large funding increases each year and scream-sing “I BELIEVE THE CHILDREN ARE OUR FUTURE…” in a Whitney Houston karaoke voice if anyone balks.7

Other leaders attempt to make an affirmative argument for public education - but their case is strange. They appear to see our schools as noble but helpless; beleaguered, sainted, under-resourced, gamely trying to be everything for all kids. They maintain that we cannot expect positive academic results until all schools are “fully funded,” an ambiguous target that never seems to be met. Wash, rinse, repeat.8

I’m afraid this strategy is doomed. It sends the message that schools don’t work - and won’t work. Who is motivated by this sentiment? Only someone living in denial about the current populist era of distrust would bank on its success.9

Especially now, we need leaders who can champion public education to regular, boring people who follow the news and pay taxes and vote but don’t spend half their day posting about politics on social media. Where are my normies at?

For these folks - who are quite numerous - I submit that the best way to build support for education is to show confidently and credibly that it is good. Effective. It deserves our trust as an institution because it delivers. It converts dollars into happy outcomes for kids efficiently. It is accountable for doing its job. It fixes problems quickly when they arise. It is a service that understands our shared priorities and is focused on them.

Leaders need to offer better schools in exchange for more resources. That’s very different than “TEACH THEM WELL AND LET THEM LEAD THE WAY…!” ♫

#2. We need to give our leaders something to sell

Twenty years ago, mayors and governors could speak with a confident sense of possibility about education, pointing to spunky charter schools with gobsmacking achievement, record numbers of elite college graduates seeking to become teachers, and dysfunctional districts regaining their footing.

These days, what are we giving our elected leaders to work with? Most of them would readily admit they are opportunists. If there’s an angle that will help them score headlines and win elections, they’ll jump on it. Their silence is not just a lack of courage. It’s a lack of ammo.

That’s on us, collectively. As a sector, we need to put some wins on the board. Otherwise, education will remain irrelevant for the same reasons as the Chicago White Sox.

We have a vast array of non-profits and think tanks. They should be seeding a new generation of promising ideas. Where are the innovative solutions for chronic absenteeism? What are we doing to make teachers less miserable? What’s the 2020s equivalent of the charter school movement in the 90s? Right now, we don’t have one.10

Innovation isn’t everything. Excessive hype and premature scaling have humbled us in the past. But off-the-record, I suspect many elected officials would say they avoid education because they don’t see the play.

#3. Public schools should compete openly with private schools - especially in states embracing vouchers

A recent poll shows that 84 percent of independent voters say they would probably send their kids to a private school if public funds covered at least a portion of the cost. That’s a big deal.

But public schools have unique advantages they can leverage to rebuild family confidence. Transparency, for instance. Anyone can access detailed information on student performance or absenteeism for any public school - broken out by demographic group - with a few keystrokes. Most private schools cherry pick what they share and with whom.

Another example is proximity. Public schools are more likely to be neighborhood-based and walkable. When they are not, they provide transportation. For working parents, safe and timely buses are a godsend. Few private schools offer them.

What about fees? Tuition at private schools is just the beginning. They charge extra for all sorts of things, like sports participation, that public schools typically provide for free. Parents end up nickel-and-dimed. Or accessibility. One in six students has special education needs. Private schools are under no obligation to admit them or provide necessary supports.

I could go on about the quality of facilities, teacher salaries and longevity, or the breadth of course offerings.

Public schools - especially when they are executing at a high level - have a compelling value proposition. They should say so.

This has not been happening in recent years. When private schools bootstrapped solutions to reopen during COVID, many districts dithered for months. It cemented the notion that public schools are a safety net, not a high quality service. They are for unfortunate kids whose parents can’t send them anywhere else. I fear it will take decades to repair that damage - and it won’t happen without hard work.

Let’s play to win

Education once had a story to tell. It still does. Good schools work. They create transformative, lifelong opportunity. The operative word here is “good.” Mediocre, unfocused schools won’t get education back on the front burner.

I’ll finish by returning to Margaret Spellings, star of late-night 2007 television. Speaking just last week on an excellent webinar about current national achievement trends, she had a warning for those who dismiss our downward slide and see school performance data as a distraction.

“If we don’t have a problem, then we don’t need a solution. And if we don’t have a problem or a solution, then we don’t need money.”

She’s right. Jon Stewart, maybe bring her back on the show.

Farming doesn’t work that way. The busy seasons are spring and fall. Early American schools in agrarian communities generally held their sessions in the winter and summer for this reason.

The origins of summer vacation are urban, not rural. As East Coast cities like New York and Boston became crowded, dirty, and unhealthy during the 1800s, wealthy families decamped during the hottest months for seaside destinations. Progressive educators argued that all kids should have similar opportunities to frolic and play outside like “hedonists.” School calendars adapted accordingly.

But poor city kids weren’t winging off to the family estate in Newport for pastoral romps. They were trapped in sweltering tenements. They played stickball in the street or courted trouble or watched the paint peel.

This has always been the problem with summer vacation. It is magical. It is perfect. And for 150 years, it has been mainly for rich kids.

Can we do anything about it? Let’s discuss options.

Summer vacation is awesome

We’re dealing with a basic trade-off. When kids aren’t in school, they don’t learn. In fact, their skills generally erode somewhat from the last day of a given school year to the first day of the next.

But the magnitude of “summer slide” is largely manageable. Most students catch up fairly quickly when school resumes.

In exchange for the missed opportunity to continue growing academically, kids spend their time doing other things - almost all of them associated with positive long term outcomes.

Some examples:

• Jobs. Teenagers who participate in summer employment programs earn more money, complete high school more often, and get arrested less frequently.

• Travel. Family trips are more than an excuse for dads to drag race supermodels on the highway.1 They improve academic performance, with greater gains in literacy from cultural attractions (museums, art galleries) and larger benefits in math from attending sporting events. Plus, family vacations are super fun.

• Sports. When the weather is warm and the days are long, kids spend more time outside doing things that aren’t feasible in the winter. Unsurprisingly, researchers find that the volume and intensity of physical activity are higher in the summer months - and sedentary behavior is lower. Taking advantage of summer flexibility to join a team sport is particularly beneficial, as those kids see massively better psychological and behavioral health outcomes.

• Overnight camp. Spending a few weeks in a buggy cabin with random bunkmates is associated with a host of social-emotional outcomes including self-esteem, leadership, lower anxiety, and skill at making new friends.

In short, the bargain works. Kids lose about two months of instruction; they gain the best memories of their lives - and skills they will later rely upon. At least, some do.

Less privileged kids don’t get the same deal

These great rites of summer? They are far more accessible to kids whose families have $money$.

Gallup reports that lower income families are less likely to enroll their kids in any type of structured summer programming - and cost is the main driver.

It’s getting worse. From 2019 to 2024, inflation drove up the price of day camp by over 25% to about $530 per week, per child. For day camp.

Overnight camps generally run $1,000 to $2,000 per week, a figure that increased by about 25 percent annually in recent years. How many families have that kind of money? Very few.

Maybe teens from households with more modest incomes are working instead of attending fancy sleep-away camps. Nope. The kids most likely to hold summer jobs are those whose parents make the most money. Getting hired requires things like knowledge of what’s available, references, and reliable transportation. Guess who has those things?

So how do low income kids spend summer?

Some are on screens. In 2013, Seth Gershenson found that lower income children spent about two hours more per day watching television than higher income children.2

Others are just looking for something to eat. Of the 28 million students who get federally subsidized meals at school, only 5 million continue their participation in the summer months due to barriers such as transportation. Studies confirm that hunger spikes, leading to negative health consequences.

Summer for less privileged kids is a far cry from The Sandlot.3

We need to make a true investment in summer

This dynamic has been needling me. Summer vacation does exactly the job educators envisioned back in the 1800s. Big win. But the net effect is to widen opportunity gaps - not to shrink them.

We can’t get rid of summer break and make school year-round. Nobody would support it.

We can’t pay for low income students to participate in the high quality programs that wealthier students are accessing. It would be totally unaffordable.

Hold on - are we sure about that?

After all, per pupil spending has climbed steadily over the past decade - while student performance has dropped. As new tax revenue becomes available, the argument for funneling most or all of it into K-12 systems has gotten weaker. There are legitimate questions about how additional dollars would be spent. Chad Aldeman has done a tremendous job of showing that districts have continued to hire far more staff even as enrollment has declined. The political toxicity of closing schools has led districts to pour massive resources into keeping half-empty buildings open.

It’s hard to imagine the public will foot the bill for these strategies forever.

Alternatively, states could focus more resources on giving each kid a chance at a great summer. A rich kid summer. They should consider good ideas that come from across the political spectrum:

• Jobs programs. Chicago’s Brandon Johnson is one of America’s least popular mayors, but he is steadfastly committed to growing the number of 14- and 15-year-olds who participate in One Summer Chicago internships. Johnson has grown the initiative, which started successfully under Rahm Emanuel but atrophied during COVID, by 40 percent in two years. He deserves more credit than he gets. Other cities and states should be doing the same thing.

• Access to cultural attractions. Kansas offers Sunflower Summer, which provides free admission for pre-K through 12th grade students - and one adult guardian - to more than 230 museums, zoos, arboretums, etc. over the summer. It’s so popular, they had to reduce the length of the program this year to fit within budget constraints because only $3.5 million was appropriated by the legislature. That’s a pittance. Memo to Kansas: Take the win and fully fund the whole summer. Memo to other states: You need to follow Kansas’s lead with this type of initiative and you need to do it ten minutes ago.4

• Summer vouchers. Some readers just rage-dropped their phones into their coffee mugs at the mention of the v-word. Stick with me for a moment. President Trump’s recently signed One Big Beautiful Bill Act contains federal tax credits for individual donations made to scholarship-granting organizations. Those scholarships are essentially vouchers. States can opt in or out. For blue states, it’s a tricky choice: conform to the administration’s preference for vouchers or forego large federal financial subsidies that will accrue to taxpayers in states that sign-up. When full regulations are written, the administration should allow states to focus exclusively on scholarships for summer activities if they wish. Such states could offer a few thousand dollars to low- and moderate-income families to cover camp registration, cultural tourism, apprenticeship programs, sports teams… all the good stuff we are talking about here. States could claim their full share of resources without privatizing their school systems. The administration could brag about expanding “vouchers” to every state. Someone commission a poll. Wouldn’t this approach have broad appeal with parents?

The alternative

We can change absolutely nothing about summer. That’s an option. The status quo has hummed along happily for decades. So far as I’m aware, there is little policy momentum for a re-think.

If we go that way, though, wealthy families will continue spending gargantuan amounts on their children - a sort of social capital trust fund. Less fortunate kids will get a few summers of loosely organized day camp at their local park district and thousands of hours indoors doing nada.

That would be unfortunate.

The most American thing we can do is to celebrate that this is our season. We own it. The Fourth of July. Road trips. Cookouts. Baseball. Fireflies. Family reunions. Capture the flag. Huck and Jim rafting down the Mississippi. This is our DNA.

Every kid deserves a real American summer. Not just the rich ones.

It’s been difficult to say why. When these trends first arose, economists suspected they were caused by school funding cuts during the Great Recession. But even when budgets rebounded in the 2010s and increased during COVID, achievement kept dropping.

Another possibility is the demise of federal accountability once No Child Left Behind was replaced in 2015. Left to their own devices, states lost focus on what schools are supposed to do.

And then there is the rise of screen time. Kids have been increasingly distracted by algorithmic online content, driven to misery and isolation by countless hours spent staring at their devices - including while they are at school.

I’m persuaded that each of these theories has some validity. But - at least for me - they don’t fully explain the specific shape of a long-term deterioration that is:

• Broad: Almost the entire country is doing worse. Only Louisiana has higher fourth grade NAEP reading scores than it did in 2019. Only Alabama has improved in fourth grade math. Every other state is flat or down. This is a mess from sea to shining sea.

• Much worse for strugglers: Top scoring students - those at the 75th and 90th percentiles of the distribution - are doing as well as ever. In some states, they have improved. But today’s students at the 25th and 10th percentiles are scoring far lower than their peers a decade ago. The bottom has fallen out.

• Closely tied to family demographics: Students whose parents graduated college are scoring at very similar levels to peers from 25 years ago. Students whose parents did not graduate college are not doing nearly so well today as did earlier cohorts. That’s exactly the opposite of what our schools are supposed to be accomplishing, in terms of maximizing opportunity for kids of all backgrounds. The graph below shows scores for 8th grade NAEP math since 2000. From 2000 to 2013, scores generally improved for both groups and the gap was around 20 points, or two years’ learning. By 2024, the gap was 26 points - largely due to children of non-grads dropping so much more after the onset of the pandemic.

What would cause achievement to move in this particular way? I’ve spent more time than I care to admit thinking about it.

There’s a culprit that fits our pattern quite well. It has moved significantly in recent years. We have incontestable evidence that it affects development and learning. Shifts have been most evident with less privileged students, contributing to everything from absenteeism to classroom disruption to grade inflation. And so far as I can tell, we aren’t doing diddly-squat about it.

I’m talking about sleep. Or more specifically, lack of sleep.

How important is sleep?

Answer: super important. Beginning with toddlers aged 1-3, researchers find that sufficient sleep is associated with better language acquisition, stronger memory and executive function, improved behavior regulation, and higher performance on literacy and numeracy tasks in pre-K and kindergarten. On the flip side, little ones who don’t sleep enough tend to exhibit shorter attention spans and less cognitive flexibility.

Critically, early sleep habits often persist into later childhood, influencing long-term academic trajectories.

For decades, researchers have established links between sleep and socioeconomic (SES) factors. Mothers who graduated college are more aware of how much sleep kids require at each age. Their children sleep longer than the children of less educated mothers.1 Among racial groups, Black youth aged 6-19 average 30 minutes less sleep per night than their White peers.

It’s almost like sleep is a privilege.

Here’s something that surprised me: Even though children from lower SES and marginalized communities are frequently not sleeping as much as guidelines suggest, they are less likely to self-report inadequate sleep. Put a pin in that. We’ll come back to it.

Sleep patterns have changed

Adolescent sleep has been moving in the wrong direction for decades. Around 2013, however, deprivation started growing quickly. Eight hours per night is considered sufficient for teenagers.2 The graph below shows the share of kids reporting that they don’t get that much.

According to another national data set from 2021, about 40 percent of boys and nearly 50 percent of girls got only seven hours per night - or less. A decade earlier, both figures were around 33 percent. Chew on that for a moment. There are now several million more drowsy zombie children wandering our high school hallways.

As and Jean Twenge have shown, the primary driver of the post-2013 surge is nocturnal screen time. Heavy smartphone users are the most likely to have short sleep duration.

If you haven’t been raising or teaching teenagers lately, you may not realize how batty things have become. By 2010, over 80 percent of teens with phones reported that they slept with their device on or near their beds. Those who texted were substantially more likely to keep their phones nearby.

By 2014, 80 percent of boys and 90 percent of girls were using their phones in the hour before bed - just when they should have been winding down from the blue light adrenaline rush of being online and producing melatonin to sleep. Those who continued engaging with their devices overnight - perhaps because of constant notifications - woke more often, for longer periods of time, and got less total sleep.

Even among younger adolescents, it’s bad. A study earlier this year found that 1 in 4 kids aged 11-13 now sleep with their phone in their hand or in their bed. Not nearby. Attached.

In short, smartphones have conquered the wee hours, with sleep as the casualty. What could go wrong?

Sleep deficits are hurting schools

In the wake of COVID, educators have struggled with every manner of challenge. The students who don’t sleep - the ones who stay up late into the night on their devices and use them intermittently until dawn - are likely to be the source of those challenges.

• Chronic absenteeism. I wrote a three-part series in 2023 about kids missing school. Talked to dozens of people, read all sorts of papers. None of them cited inadequate sleep as a primary driver. In hindsight, I feel embarrassed that I didn’t do more legwork. A large-scale Norwegian study had already found in 2015 that adolescents with short sleep duration had four times the likelihood of school non-attendance compared to their well-rested peers. More recently, a California district reported in 2024 that low sleep was second only to illness as a cause of missing school among their students. At a recent American Enterprise Institute event, University of California, Davis professor Kevin Gee shared data taken from hundreds of thousands of student surveys in Rhode Island. He found that - again - lack of sleep is the leading cause of absenteeism after illness.

• Decreased learning. A 2023 CDC study of student wellness during the pandemic found that students reporting less than seven hours of sleep per night - and to reiterate, this is approximately 40 percent of boys and half of girls - also had more trouble with academics.3

• Fighting. A 2019 study from Portugal found that low sleep was a significant predictor of participation in physical fights among 17-year-olds even after controlling for parental education levels. No wonder principals were dizzied by a brawl uptick in 2022 and 2023.

• Grade inflation. With kids missing so much school and getting less sleep, schools have largely responded by decreasing rigor. Less homework, unlimited opportunities to retake tests, easy avenues to make up missed assignments after absences. I was part of a research project last year that found grades now remain high even when students have lower test scores and miss more school.

When discussing our failed COVID recovery, we often describe a widespread mental health epidemic driven by the toxicity of social media, too little time socializing in the real world with friends, and residual trauma from family members lost during the pandemic.

All true. But as we get further from 2020 and our problems linger, it seems like there’s more to the story. In addition to these other factors, COVID exacerbated challenges with sleep by increasing screen time particularly in ways that interfere with healthy nighttime and morning routines. It’s not just how much screen time. It’s when.

We have no strategy for addressing our sleep problems

I’m far from the first person to suggest that sleep for children and adolescents is an issue.4 It’s a known thing. But I am concerned that we aren’t making a strong connection between sleep and school - nor are we taking initiative to solve the problem. Let’s focus on absenteeism as an example:

• I downloaded and searched the strategic plans for the 10 largest districts. Not one of them mentions sleep, even though all of these districts have problems with absenteeism.5

• The US Department of Education’s guide to combatting absenteeism does not include the word “sleep.”

• Attendance Works, a leading non-profit on absenteeism that has done so much to advance our understanding of the problem, does not emphasize sleep as a direct strategy. Their most aligned recommendation is moving school start times later… which strikes me as accommodating our nighttime sleep deficits rather than fixing them.

To recap, we have an epidemic of chronic absenteeism. Students are telling us that lack of sleep is the second-biggest cause. I’m just suggesting that we can find room to address it as one part of a broader strategy.

Meanwhile, teachers get the shaft. Districts issue devices to kids beginning in kindergarten. Most of these devices have zero time limitations. They don’t shut off at a certain time each night. Parents who require their kids to store their phones in the kitchen at night often learn belatedly that the iPad their child uses for “homework” is repurposed into a late-night texting device via Google Docs.

Then, when kids show up to class red-eyed and unable to focus, teachers bear the brunt. In addition to supporting a broad range of academic needs, they are now managing a range of alertness. They can’t assign homework. Kids are too tired and distracted to do it. Some schools give up and decree that homework doesn’t count toward grades. Teachers are navigating student conflicts fueled by frayed nerves and fatigue. And then, at the end of the school year, everyone wants to know why the kids aren’t learning. We can’t be surprised that today’s educators don’t recommend their profession to others.

Rather than trying to get students proper rest, schools have tended to address pandemic issues by hiring more staff to support mental health. There are two problems here. First, are these folks doing anything to help kids get more sleep, which seems like a top mental health need? If so, why isn’t that reflected in the districts’ plans? Second, how are we going to afford all these new hires when we hit the funding cliff that’s approaching?

Indirect approaches aren’t going to work. Sleep needs to be named and sustained as a priority. Districts can:

• Communicate with parents beginning in pre-K about how much sleep children need and how to help them get it, including bedtime strategies, getting off and storing devices, reading stories aloud together, limiting wake-ups, and establishing morning routines. As I mentioned above, research has shown for years that some families have less awareness about proper sleep duration. Can we not support them by fixing that? Check out Mansfield, Ohio.

• Disable school-issued student devices at a reasonable hour. This policy would send a powerful signal about the importance of sleep. Yes, you are going to get parents who swear their third grader needs the device to complete her math homework at 10pm. No, that’s not a real thing. Lights out.

• Teach parents to use phone monitoring software. Wirecutter’s top recommended apps for iPhones and Android devices are free. They can shut off devices at bedtime, limit access to social media, and block installation of new apps without permission. Do districts know how many families use the apps? Do school-based technology staffers offer support? The answer to both questions should be yes.

• Start sweating tardies and absences. Offer a blend of support for getting to school on-time and reasonable, proportional consequences for missed instruction. I’m talking about reflecting attendance in eligibility for honors, field trips, extracurriculars, and credit accumulation, not prosecuting parents. Give families some backup in getting their kids to bed on-time.

Our education depression will end when young people are healthy and engaged. Would any step be more powerful than addressing sleep? It’s critical. It doesn’t cost much money. It will boost happiness for kids, the adults who teach them, and their parents.

But will we take action? Or continue to watch it get worse?

Mississippi is probably the top target. I don’t have to tell you why. You know about the poor health outcomes. The poverty. The corruption. The obesity. The confederacy stuff.

Wikipedia has an entry dedicated to the phrase “Thank God for Mississippi” because its horrible performance on so many metrics saves other states the embarrassment of finishing last. The term has been used since at least 1945.

Which has made it awkward in recent years as Mississippi has become the fastest improving school system in the country.

You read that right. Mississippi is taking names.

In 2003, only the District of Columbia had more fourth graders in the lowest achievement level on our national reading test (NAEP) than Mississippi.1 By 2024, only four states had fewer.

When the Urban Institute adjusted national test results2 for student demographics, this is where Mississippi ranked:

• Fourth grade math: 1st

• Fourth grade reading: 1st

• Eighth grade math: 1st

• Eighth grade reading: 4th3

How about Black students? The root of Mississippi’s bad reputation is its historically awful record on civil rights - including its refusal to integrate schools.

That was then.

Now, it has a different story to tell. Black students in Mississippi posted the third highest fourth grade reading scores in the nation. They walloped their counterparts in better-funded states. The average Black student in Mississippi performed about 1.5 grade levels ahead of the average Black student in Wisconsin. Just think about that for a moment. Wisconsin spends about 35 percent more per pupil to achieve worse results.

Mississippi has fellow southern stars. Louisiana was the only state to fully erase pandemic learning loss among fourth grade readers. It ranked in the top five for all four NAEP grades/subjects in the demographically adjusted results. Alabama was the only state whose fourth graders beat their pre-COVID performance in math. In years past, notable gains have been posted by Florida, Tennessee and Texas.

These successes have not been wholly unacknowledged. They have been dutifully and perfunctorily name-checked in news stories. Nonetheless, there has been, shall we say, a reluctance among national voices to extol Deep South examples as worthy of emulation by their so-called “better off” peers.4

You can’t go around saying Maine ought to visit Mississippi to learn how to teach reading. It’s insulting. You could ruin a cocktail party. After all, Maine has Kennebunkport. Mississippi has Biloxi.

But that’s exactly what should happen. Below are the reading scores for these two states over time. For context, 10 points on NAEP is approximately the equivalent of one grade level. In 2002, students in Mississippi were two years behind students in Maine. Today, they are about a year ahead.

Don’t you want to know how that happened? Me too.

There’s a much broader trend afoot. This spring, Paul Peterson and Michael Hartney showed that red states (as defined by 2024 presidential election votes) are overtaking their blue counterparts academically. In 2019, blue states had higher average NAEP scores on all four major tests (4th and 8th grade reading and math). By 2024, red states had taken the lead in three of the four.

With such striking patterns, one would expect some of these red states to be the hottest ticket in education. Reporters embedding in steamy southern capitals to write long form magazine profiles of crusading state chiefs. National commissions chaired by governors. Awards bestowed at fancy black-tie dinners.

But none of that is happening. Because these are SEC states.

More often, there have been sloppy attempts at debunking Mississippi’s success. Some of them ran in national papers. Others were withdrawn when the authors realized they were based on flawed information.

This isn’t just wrong. It’s a problem. There are lessons for our education community and for both political parties.

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Edu-Snobbery Hurts Us All

• We miss opportunities to help kids. I’m not saying we should go “full Finland” and turn Mississippi into a junket destination and object of hero worship. It’s not perfect.5 But we need to celebrate their thoughtful statewide strategy that has dramatically improved results without a colossal increase in spending. Their progress is not a fluke. It’s a clue.

• Underperforming states escape scrutiny. Our biases prevent us from asking, for instance, what’s going on in Oregon. Or Vermont. Or Maryland. There’s a case to be made that their instructional quality is among the weakest in the country based on their performance trends over the past decade. And yet, when’s the last time you heard them being pressed to defend their poor outcomes? They’re getting a pass.

• Our federal system becomes a weakness rather than a strength. Devolving most education authority to states theoretically allows innovation based on local needs. But it also presumes that successful practices will catch on with lagging states. That’s not happening. Instead, mediocre and low performing states are living in denial, cherry picking small wins to avoid confronting larger truths. This is one reason that the Every Student Succeeds Act, passed in 2015 and focused on reducing federal accountability, is increasingly seen as a colossal mistake.

• We waste money. Education spending has risen significantly over the past decade, partly due to COVID relief funding. But student outcomes have not risen. In fact, they’ve gotten worse. When states refuse to learn from peers because of a condescending attitude, they pour resources into failed strategies - and then ask taxpayers for more. This (probably) can’t go on forever. Some elected officials are beginning to reach their limit.

Dear Democratic Party: Are You Paying Attention?

Blue states are losing population. Estimates vary, but states Kamala Harris won in 2024 will probably surrender 12 congressional seats - and electoral votes - after the next census.

Given that reality, Democrats picked a terrible time to go AWOL on the issue of education. Harris barely mentioned schools during her campaign and did not put forth any plan to address the incredible academic losses of the COVID era. What was once a double-digit lead in voter trust on education has now become a dead heat or a slight advantage for Republicans.

There is a future where blue states are left behind electorally, through declining clout, and educationally, through stubborn refusal to accept that a number of red states are solving important problems and expanding opportunity for kids while wealthier, complacent Democratic strongholds phone it in. If Republicans start running - and winning - on their education track records, look out.

A few politicians have caught on. Rahm Emanuel recently called on Democrats to apologize for the excessive length of pandemic school closures. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis described this as an “all-hands-on-deck” moment. Sen. Michael Bennet has hinted that party leaders need to step aside so a new generation of ideas can win back voters who are defecting. All three of them see education as an issue where Democrats ought to be winning - but aren’t. My guess is that successful future Democratic policies sound more like them and less like Brandon Johnson.

Republicans: Don’t Get Cocky

Success in education is hard to sustain. Time and distraction wreak havoc on gains that took decades to achieve. Ask Finland. Or Florida.

Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama climbed the charts because they focused on core academic instruction when much of the country used ESSA as an excuse to focus on anything and everything else. It paid off.

But it won’t be easy for red states to continue their impressive run when President Trump is firing off scattershot executive orders advancing culture war priorities that have little to do with student learning. Governors and state chiefs are getting dizzy keeping up with the things they are supposed to do. Polling suggests that moves like cutting every possible position and program at the Department of Education are unpopular. This could go south - no pun intended - in a hurry… especially if Democrats wake up and remember that education policy is a natural winner for them.

Who’s the next Mississippi?

Not all the serious education players are in the Deep South. Two that you should watch - Indiana and Iowa - are midwestern states that Barack Obama won in 2008. More recently, though, they’ve gone for Donald Trump three times in a row.

Indiana and Iowa are already in the Urban Institute’s top 10 for at least one NAEP test. They have innovative superintendents who mean business. And they are committed to leveraging the flexibility the Trump administration has promised.

If they rock the next decade of NAEP results, will they be overlooked in the national conversation because they are too farm-y, too milquetoast, too difficult for coastal people to locate on a map?

Probably. And it will be our loss.

Sounds like a growing, thriving city, no?

You might be surprised, then, to learn that Oakland’s schools are lately besieged by declining enrollment and massive budget shortfalls.

How does that math work? Did charter schools siphon students? Or perhaps parents were upset with COVID closures and opted for private schools or homeschooling?

Nope.

The cause of Oakland’s enrollment problem is mainly demographic change. In 2000, 25 percent of Oakland’s residents were under 18. In 2023, it was just 19 percent. Even as Oakland’s population grew by ~35,000, the number of under-18 residents dropped by more than 15,000 - which aligns almost perfectly to the district’s enrollment loss of 16,000.

Welcome to the new reality for our largest cities. Fewer kids. Half-empty school buildings. Eye-popping red ink.

There is a second thing you should know. Facing these headwinds, you would expect school systems to pull out the stops to attract more students.

But many of them are not doing that. Plenty of districts with empty seats make it needlessly difficult for families to enroll.

This is baffling. It is also counterproductive. If our cities don’t reverse both trends - failure to attract families with young children and to welcome them into public schools with open arms - the future for urban school districts is grim.

This enrollment reckoning is likely to become the biggest storyline in education for the next decade. Our districts are not ready.

The New Demography

• Cities have fewer children than they did a generation ago. Eighty percent of metro areas are trending downward in terms of kids aged 0-14. In the three years immediately following the arrival of COVID, our three most populous regions - New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago - lost an astonishing 600,000 children. Rising costs for housing and child care, among other necessities, has made big cities unaffordable for many families. So they raise their children elsewhere.

• Birth rates are way down. Let’s use Chicago as an illustration. In 2000, it recorded 50,885 births to city residents. In 2024, there were only 27,627. This decrease of 45 percent is often overlooked because Chicago’s overall population dropped only 8 percent in that same time span.1 U.S. families are getting smaller everywhere. The average number of children born per woman dropped more in 13 years between 2007 and 2020 than it did in 37 years from 1970 to 2007. Think about the magnitude of that data point for a moment.

• There are more senior citizens. Out of 387 metro areas tracked by the census, 99.7 percent have more residents over age 65 than they did in 2020. A quarter century ago, there were 35 million senior citizens in the U.S. Today, it’s 60 million. Americans are living longer. Just as critically, Baby Boomers - who began turning 65 in 2011 - have flooded the zone. This is why some cities are not shrinking even as their schools do. They are swapping younger residents for older ones. But this means swapping priorities, too. Senior housing and health care are getting more attention from elected officials - and more tax dollars.

The primary issue is not that our cities are failing to persuade local families to choose public schools. Despite all the chatter on this front, the share of children in other school settings has increased only marginally over the past decade - peaking during the pandemic - and appears to be settling somewhere between 15 and 20 percent. The remaining ~80 percent of kids are still in traditional district schools.

But in a context where there are simply fewer children in the first place, districts needs to be extremely effective at registering those that live in their boundaries.

That’s not happening.

Some Districts Alienate the Families They Should Be Recruiting

At EdNavigator, helping families enroll their children in school is one of the main things we do. Pediatricians refer parents and caregivers who are likely to need additional assistance due to housing insecurity, language barriers, unique needs of their kids, etc.

Today, we’re publishing a report - From Gatekeepers to Greeters - detailing our experiences. As you can see below, some districts behave as if they want more students. Others make the enrollment process as cumbersome as possible.

For individual families, enrollment often goes sideways. In those cases, it looks like this:

1. Communication is messy. Enrollment steps aren’t delineated clearly at the start. New things are introduced - like a home visit to verify residency, requiring a parent to take a day off work - midway through. One staff member tells the family their landlord needs to sign and notarize a form. Another says the family’s state health insurance paperwork is sufficient. Information that’s shared in multiple places, such as on the district website and via forms given out at the registration office, often conflicts because it is not updated consistently in each location. When families get confused, they delay taking new steps until they are sure they are doing the right thing.

2. Processes are ridden with sludge. In-person registration may require online pre-registration, which can take hours. Websites aren’t optimized for mobile use even though many low-income families only access the internet through their phones. Districts require separate proof of occupancy and residency - sometimes through a visit to someplace like a town hall. Only then can they go to the district and enroll. Assistance is available only during certain days and hours. Does that sound fun?

3. Language supports are thin. Even when districts know a family does not speak English, they continue to send enrollment-related communication to them in English only. Interpreters are made available only when a family insists upon them and is willing to wait until one can be identified. Tech-enabled tools are getting better but they remain far from sufficient.

4. Delays are common. Students with more complex situations, such as an unstable address or a need for special education services, are frequently unable to enroll immediately. Perhaps there is just one staff member who handles issues with homelessness and that person is on medical leave, for instance. Even when state law dictates specific timelines, they are not consistently followed.

Consequences Are Mounting

Two things can be true at once. School systems can be victims of larger population shifts they are not well-positioned to influence. And they can drive further enrollment losses through unfriendly dysfunction.

Some districts don’t care. They figure they are still getting the same pool of local tax revenue to educate fewer students. Perhaps they are avoiding “hard to teach” kids whose needs will be more expensive.

This is a terrible mistake for three reasons:

#1. Districts are racking up mountains of legal liability. Some of the practices I described above are a class action lawsuit waiting to happen. One side effect of increased electronic communication is a lasting paper trail of family requests and office visits. The old “we never received that form” defense is not going to work so well. Moreover, the Trump administration would love nothing more than to shame deep blue states with civil rights investigations revealing their welcoming rhetoric to be hollow. And let me be honest with you: They will find plenty of evidence to support their cases. This will get expensive.

#2. Performance is suffering. Opportunities to identify and address student needs early are lost when kids cannot enroll. Instead, they stay home during the pre-k years and even for part of kindergarten. Their challenges are then more time consuming and costly to support for years to come. For rapidly diversifying districts and states, this can become a persistent drag on results. It shows up clearly in growing gaps between top and bottom performers. As accountability continues to loom on the horizon, district and state leaders ought to be paying attention.

#3. Public trust is eroding. Parents talk. When a district cannot do something as straightforward as enroll students, word gets around. In Massachusetts, where EdNavigator supports more families than anywhere else, there has been a record number of attempts to override property tax caps due to rising inflation. Public officials are discovering that voters will reject them. Taxpayers won’t spend more on schools with shrinking enrollment and substandard services. Especially not when districts have gone on a hiring binge for non-classroom positions.

Cities Will Compete For Families - and Students

It’s not that large school districts ignore demographics, exactly. Most of them have long term enrollment projections that are occasionally paraded before board members. The problem is that they receive little scrutiny even though they are comically optimistic - usually intended to justify expenses on personnel and construction that the superintendent favors.

If we had more independent, audited analyses, they would tell cities that they need a family recruitment strategy. Now. Either they attract more young families or they plan for a future with far fewer schools and employees. It’s one or the other. Though some large districts are attempting to set the world record for kicking the can down the road, the can will eventually shred. For those ready to face reality, Bellwether just put out a free toolkit full of good ideas.

Mayors need to provide far better leadership. Some of them are admitting only belatedly that they have a governance problem. City Councils should require contingency plans for low enrollment before appropriating district budgets - especially when they are presented with very expensive collective bargaining agreements full of new hiring promises.

Additionally, districts must pivot aggressively to a customer service orientation. How will they know if they are on the right track? We created a quick self-assessment to help them inventory their enrollment supports. Bottom line: The goodwill - and federal funding - from the pandemic are exhausted. If you pay any attention to education, you’ll read loads about the threat posed by President Trump’s desire to nationalize private school choice. Perhaps. But if I were a superintendent, I’d be far more worried about the trend of Americans losing faith in public institutions.

Oakland deserves credit in this regard. As we share in our report, the district sees its role as making it as simple as possible for families to enroll. Families can register online through a system optimized for their phones - without having to upload documents, like IEPs, that may be difficult to locate. Their goal is to get families in the door rather than to keep them out.

Given the harsh reality of today’s demographics, more districts will follow Oakland’s lead. They have no choice. Cities without an active strategy to increase enrollment are headed for a downward spiral.

The only question is whether it’s already too late. Tick… tick…

Asked by NPR correspondent Cory Turner why student performance plateaued in the 2010s and then began to decline, West referenced a term that is less popular in education circles than head lice:

“There is good evidence, some of which uses NAEP data, that really does suggest a lot of that progress in the 1990s and 2000s was driven by test-based accountability.”

Accountability? Test-based accountability?

Surely, he misspoke.

Everyone hates accountability. Embodied by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) passed in 2001, it was associated with annual testing in grades 3-8 and demands for constant improvement of results - particularly among struggling subgroups.

Critics saw accountability as a counterproductive fiasco that degraded education without delivering the performance miracles it promised. Instead, they argued, it encouraged states to set low standards that students could easily meet, focus excessive attention on students near the cusp of passing, cheat to avoid punishment, narrow the curriculum to reading and math, and scrap real instruction in favor of endless test prep.

Sounds miserable, doesn’t it? In 2015, Congress acceded to the critics by scrapping NCLB. States would henceforth develop their own systems for accountability with relatively few guardrails.

And yet here we’ve got Marty West, uttering the A-word in public. They didn’t even bleep it on the broadcast.

He isn’t the only one. I’ve heard the A-word more times in the past month than in the past five years. It’s suddenly back. To understand why, we need to rewind a bit.

What happened after NCLB?

State systems for school oversight post-2015 were “accountability” like Scooby Doo was a guard dog.

In the absence of a muscular state or federal role, we entered a new era that put the onus on parents. It was unspoken. No one issued a decree that said parents would henceforth be on their own to ensure schools delivered on their promises. That’s just how it worked in practice. Parents had to fill any gaps that arose. It was parent accountability.

Privileged students did fine under this approach. Their parents tended to have college degrees, higher incomes, and discretionary time to engage. These families monitored their kids progress constantly, alert to any sign of struggle by the child or low expectations from teachers. They pushed their kids into advanced coursework. They limited screen time at home and ensured homework got done. They paid out-of-pocket for extra tutoring when it was necessary.

Less privileged students did not do fine. Their performance dropped noticeably before the pandemic and catastrophically during it. Perhaps their parents assumed everything was ok unless someone told them otherwise. As grade inflation increased, families likely heard only rosy messages.1 There’s reason to suspect that devices meant for completing schoolwork were repurposed for surfing the web and social media. We know that absenteeism went through the roof.

Now’s a good time to mention a trend that has been overlooked in the coverage of our recent NAEP results. It’s been widely noted that very high performing students - say, those at the 90th percentile of the performance distribution - are holding steady or improving while very low performers - those at the 10th percentile - are declining steeply.

This is true. But even among high performers, gaps have widened between students along socioeconomic lines.

Consider the chart below. It maps 8th grade math scores for students at the 90th percentile from 2003 to 2024. The top line shows children of college graduates. The bottom line shows children whose parents had less than a college diploma - meaning they did not graduate high school, received only a high school diploma, or completed only some college.

The lines mostly move in tandem until 2015, when the gap was 23 points. Beginning in 2017, high performers from lower education households stopped improving even as their counterparts from more educated households still climbed. Those whose parents did not graduate college also had a larger drop during the pandemic. Between 2015 and 2022, the gap between these groups grew by 6 points, which is more than half a year of learning.

If we look at the same group - high performers - broken out by household income, we see a similar pattern. After 2013, lower income students stalled while their higher income peers improved. Gaps got larger.

If this is what happened among strong students, you can imagine what happened to strugglers. It was much, much worse.

Education has always had a significant inherited dimension, where those who thrive in school tend to have children who do well, too. Genes matter, two-parent households matter, etc. Poverty, neighborhood violence, and trauma suppress achievement for less privileged kids. But in the past decade, the power of these factors has been magnified. Instead of increasing opportunity by allowing children of all backgrounds to maximize their potential, our system is conferring advantages on the students who already have the most of them.

That’s what accountability is meant to address. It forces us to pull apart averages so we can see the underlying patterns and adapt when we’re replicating unfortunate legacies instead of breaking them.

Wider trends are renewing interest in accountability

Here are three key reasons that chatter about accountability is humming:

1. Satisfaction with US public schools hasn’t been this low since the Millennium. According to a recent Gallup poll, education ranked 29th out of 31 aspects of society, just below “the amount Americans pay in federal taxes” and “the size and influence of major corporations.” Guess what happened the last time education did this poorly in the poll? Congress passed NCLB.

2. Schools are making weird decisions. More districts, for example, are adopting a four-day school week. Given what happened when students had less school during COVID, you are probably unsurprised that a shorter week generally hurts learning. Districts tend to justify it by claiming it saves money (the amounts are trivial) or helps them retain teachers (it doesn’t). But they keep doing it. Some of them are also limiting access to advanced math or purchasing vibes-based reading curricula. All dubious strategies for delivering results.

3. Spending has increased. Achievement has not. In 2024, the Census Bureau reported the largest spike in per pupil funding in over 20 years. Meanwhile, student performance has dropped to levels not seen since the 1990s or before. State-by-state analysis from the Edunomics Lab will shock you. The cost-benefit relationship is off.

What would next gen accountability look like?

We now understand why Professor West was dropping the A-bomb.

But there’s little reason to believe there will be a return to NCLB-style, federal accountability anytime soon. The Trump administration quite famously wishes to abolish the Department of Education. NCLB was unpopular even during its prime. Republican state leaders are focused on expanding education savings accounts (ESAs), not regulating schools. Democrats have given up on K-12 education almost altogether.

And still, folks keep saying “accountability.” What do they mean? Here are my guesses:

• Establish student learning as the non-negotiable responsibility of schools. Schools should have clear, public goals for achievement on state tests that are set in advance and reported out in a timely way. Tests aren’t the whole ballgame but outcomes on tests absolutely matter. Without goals, schools spin any and all results as wins by cherry picking whatever’s positive. They just did that with NAEP. Additionally, schools have been pressured to take on functions that are not their core competency, like providing mental health services and fighting culture wars, which make it more difficult to deliver on academics. Learning comes first. That’s what the public wants.

• Distinguish between success and failure. I’ll pick on California here for a second. Back in 2017, freed from its NCLB constraints, California unveiled a new school rating system. The Los Angeles Times said it “grades on a curve and paints a far rosier picture in academics than past measurements” and “nearly 80% of schools serving grades three through eight are ranked as medium- to high-performing.” Instead of ratings with actual names, the new system used colors. It hasn’t gotten better. Last September, California was assigned a D-grade by the The Center on Reinventing Public Education for obscuring information about student performance on its dashboard. It feels sometimes like the state prides itself on not knowing the difference between good and bad schools. If states aren’t going to hold schools accountable, the least they can do is empower families and communities with clear, actionable information to do it locally. Compare each school’s results with those that are demographically similar and be transparent about which ones are doing the best. Many states could do better in this regard.

• Reward smart spending. recently showed that our public schools added 121,000 employees last year. Is that because there were more students? Nope. Enrollment actually dropped by 110,000 kids. For every student we lost, we hired approximately one new staff member. That’s wholly unaffordable. I have some sympathy for schools here. They were sent dump trucks of money and a limited time to spend it toward COVID recovery. They did their best, though the hiring pool for educators was far from ideal. But it’s time for a reset. Taxpayers cannot continue to increase school budgets at the past decade’s pace. With enrollment forecasts down, we’re headed for belt-tightening. We should be offering financial incentives to districts that get more efficient by developing new staffing models, using technology smartly, and intervening with students early to avoid costly catch-up later. None of that is happening now. Accountable spending means looking not only at results but how much it costs to get those results.

This is how we end the education depression

In October, I argued that we’re stuck in a depression that began around 2013 and has now lasted more than a decade. In a subsequent post, I suggested that our strategy must encompass birth to age 25 so we are measuring our school systems based on the adults they produce, not just short term proxies.

Widening our aperture is critical. But we still must assess our performance and make decisions year-to-year. We need accountability. If state and federal officials don’t step up - and right now, it does not look like they will - nothing’s stopping educators and families from working together to do this locally. School boards can lead the effort. It’s the best way to support our students and the best way to earn future investments in our schools. Stop waiting for the higher ups to play the heavy.

Otherwise, school budgets are going to become tantalizing targets for cuts. Too many unneeded buildings, too many staff, uncontrolled pension obligations… all in the shadow of enrollment losses and underwhelming achievement.

If we fail to act and public support for education dries up, we’ll be using stronger language than the A-word.

It was that bad. Average performance dropped in reading and barely improved in math.

Here’s what we learned:

#1. The education depression continues

I wrote in October that we have been mired in shrinking academic outcomes for more than a decade, exemplified by a surge in students with very low performance levels. From 1990 to 2013, we made massive progress in that area. By 2022, most of it had disappeared.

The latest scores confirm that the depression rolls on. Below is an updated version of a graph I made in the fall. For each racial group, we have just as many eighth graders scoring Below Basic as we did in 2022 and far more than we had in 2013.

Five years after the onset of the pandemic, there has been virtually zero recovery. We’ve seen this across assessments. It’s not an illusion.

#2. Mediocrity rules

Massachusetts and Wisconsin tied for the top score in 8th grade math at 283. They are justifiably proud of their standing. But let’s put their performance in perspective. In 2013, that same score of 283 would have placed 30th. Let that marinate for a moment. Math achievement has fallen so far in 11 years that what would once have been an unremarkable score now leads the nation.

Reading is similar. The 2024 fourth grade leader - again, Massachusetts - would have tied in 2013 with Indiana, Washington, and Maine… for 14th.

Another troubling sign is a lack of positive outliers. In 2013, only five states were within 10 points - which is approximately one year’s learning - of Massachusetts in 8th grade math. It stood head and shoulders above the pack. This year, 24 states were within 10 points of Massachusetts and Wisconsin.

There is a golden opportunity for a handful of focused, aggressive states to remake the top of the leader board by improving just a handful of points. Start your engines.

#3. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is

Two years ago, Los Angeles Unified posted a shocking gain of nine points on the eighth grade reading test. This was unexpected for several reasons. First, pandemic school closures lasted longer in L.A. than most cities. Second, reading scores nationally dropped by three points in 2022 and not a single state improved. Yet, L.A. didn’t just improve - it soared.

When skeptics wondered if something might be amiss with the results - an error in selecting the sample of students to be tested, perhaps - Superintendent Alberto Carvalho publicly compared them to flat-earthers. He maintained that the gains were real and attributed them to distribution of technology during pandemic shutdowns, tutoring, and teacher training.

There was some awkwardness last week when 2024 NAEP results showed that LAUSD’s eighth grade reading score dropped by eight points, wiping out the 2022 improvement almost entirely. Carvalho, apparently with a straight face, told the Los Angeles Times that “sampling methods can lead to anomalies.”

#4. Money matters, but it’s not mattering enough right now

Most research finds that providing more funding for schools leads to better outcomes such as higher test scores and more college-going. Just last summer, two separate studies found that the federal infusion of $190 billion for COVID recovery was helping.

Along comes these new NAEP results. We spent an unprecedented amount of money. And results are very discouraging.

Cue Edunomics Lab, based at Georgetown University. Marguerite Roza and her team examined each state’s return on investment (ROI) by comparing changes in spending since 2013 to changes in academic outcomes.

It’s ugly.

Consider Oregon. Had it merely kept pace with inflation, it would have increased school spending by about 35 percent from 2013 to 2023. In actuality, it raised spending by 80 percent. Over the same period, math and reading performance tanked, with math posting a remarkable 16-point decline - the equivalent of 1.5 grade levels. Oregon is spending much more and achieving much less.

Oregon is not alone. You can view all 50 states here. Washington and Vermont are pretty scary. Mississippi has bucked the trend with smaller spending increases and real gains in reading.

Here’s the bottom line: The case for investing more in schools is very weak right now because it’s not clear that new resources will yield better results. All of us who care about education have a stake in changing that storyline.

#5. Baghdad Bob is back and better than ever

Baghdad Bob was easily the best part of the Iraq War. Real name Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, he served as Saddam Hussein’s press chief. While American soldiers and tanks streamed into the capital city right behind him, he calmly reassured television cameras that no such invasion was happening. It was PR performance art.

I suspect Bob is now writing press releases for state education agencies. In the face of dismal national NAEP results, almost every state claimed victory and did a goofy, unconvincing touchdown dance.

Wyoming’s performance dropped on three of the four NAEP tests and was flat in the other. Its official statement, which makes no mention of this, says Wyoming “continues to stand out nationally.”

It was a popular move. The logic? Because other states did poorly, our state is doing awesome by comparison - even if our students are learning less than before. Shout outs to Illinois and Washington, among others, for going all in.

Florida, which had particularly bad reading results, goosed the ante by having its state chief, Manny Diaz, write a letter saying NAEP’s methodology is wrong and calling for the Department of Education to be abolished.

The only thing more disappointing than the NAEP results themselves has been the state response. Truly a low point for our sector. We are hiding from the truth about what we are providing for our students. Let’s do better, friends.

#6. Demographic adjustments change the picture

Fueled by coffee and chutzpah, Matt Chingos and Kristin Blagg from the Urban Institute published demographically adjusted NAEP results the same day as the national release. It’s a great resource.

The method here is to compare a state’s actual NAEP scores to what would be expected given that state’s student population. Factors considered include gender, age, race/ethnicity, and status for free lunch, special education and English language learner services.

It produces a very different leader board. Mississippi, for example, finished 13th in fourth grade math and 7th in fourth grade reading in the official NAEP rankings. Not bad! But adjusting for demographics, they finished first in both.

On the other end, New Hampshire’s fourth grade reading score was the fourth highest in the country. Once adjusted, though, they dropped to 24th.

This is yet another indication that some states are facing and meeting greater challenges while others might be achieving less than meets the eye.

What now?

The new test results suggest we’ve been chasing the wrong ghost for years. This isn’t about recovery from deficits that festered during COVID Zoom school.

The bigger picture is a prolonged slide dating to 2013 - especially among lower performing students. We’ve always had an achievement gap. It was getting worse prior to the pandemic. Since 2019, it has exploded and we can’t tell yet if it’s done growing.

Some districts and states have no plan to reverse the sad patterns because they barely acknowledge the patterns exist.

Patience is waning. But it can’t fall on system leaders alone to fix this. They need help. They need better insights on what caused our depression and better ideas for reinvigorating instruction. We’ve all got a role to play.

For now, our shared job is to be honest: This isn’t good enough.

Bonus reading and watching

• Watershed Advisors created a very handy dashboard that allows users to review individual state scores and changes over time, with filters. Highly recommended.

• In June 2022 - before the 2022 NAEP results had even come out - Mike Goldstein argued that learning declines would continue and NAEP 2024 scores would be even worse than 2022. He was exactly right. More importantly, Mike knew why. In speaking with school leaders on the front lines, he was hearing a stream of concern about low student agency, labor shortages, and rising disorder. The quality of teaching and learning was not high enough to reverse learning losses.

• I discussed the NAEP results on LinkedIn with and . Really enjoyable conversation with two folks who know the evolution of state and national policy as well as anyone. View here.

Everett, MA is a city of 50,000 located just north of Boston. Five years ago, on the eve of the pandemic, its school district enrolled ~7,100 students. Of those, about 1,780 - or 25 percent - were designated as English Learners (ELs).1

By the 2023-24 school year, the number of English Learners had grown to over 3,000, comprising 42 percent of total enrollment.

In raw numbers, Everett is serving 72 percent more English Learners than it did in 2019. That is a generation’s worth of demographic change packed into five years.

Declines in academic outcomes have followed. The percentage of Everett students scoring in the lowest achievement level (“Not Meeting Expectations”) for the annual Massachusetts English Language Arts (ELA) test jumped from 16 to 39 between 2019 and 2024. In math, it grew from 16 to 32 percent.

These test results have been influenced by the influx of English Learners, who are struggling far more than their EL peers from 2019. Back then, 33 percent of Everett’s EL students scored in the lowest level for ELA. In 2024, it was 63 percent.

Everett is not alone. Examples of COVID-era transformation abound in Boston. The neighboring communities of Chelsea, Revere, and Lynn also experienced sharp increases in EL enrollment. (The City of Boston itself barely nudged up, likely due to its sky-high housing costs.)

Similar to Everett, academic performance for EL students plummeted in these districts, with more scoring in the bottom achievement level. If you look to the left side of the graph, you’ll see the trend extends statewide.

Districts have pleaded for help.

This issue deserves more attention.2 Yes, we all know that public school enrollment declined during COVID. And yes, students lost massive academic ground during closures in 2020 and 2021 - ground that has never been fully regained. Those stories have been well told.

But some of the students who need the most support today weren’t even here in 2019. They attend schools that have been remade in half a decade. Plenty of districts have more students - not fewer - due to all the new arrivals.3

Districts are struggling to adapt

Here’s a snapshot of what it’s like when the number of English Learners explodes by 50 or 70 percent in a few years:

• Staff are overwhelmed. Enrollment personnel are buried in registration forms that require verification of things like residency and vaccination with parents who may speak little or no English - and lack a permanent address. Individual teachers do their best with tools like Google Translate to communicate with families. Bilingual staff who can talk directly with families are asked to wear unlimited hats.

• Critical services go undelivered. When districts cannot hire enough staff to fully serve EL students, they delay legally mandated special education evaluations or fail to translate important documents so parents can understand them. All sorts of things fall through the cracks.

• Outcomes look bad. A combination of higher student need and missing supports leads to worsening academic results, as has been the case in a number of Massachusetts districts. Even the hardest-working educators will struggle to evolve on-the-fly to such a dynamic environment. When districts are slow to change the way they do business, it only gets worse.

Families bear the brunt

My day job gives me a front row seat for this part. EdNavigator accepts referrals from pediatricians when they see families during office appointments who need additional support working through educational challenges like enrollment and special education evaluations.

Since 2021, we’ve received over 2,500 referrals - most of them for Spanish-speaking families residing in Massachusetts. Our Navigators spend months helping them connect with schools and ensuring their kids get the resources they need. The retail-level experience is very difficult. That probably does not surprise you based on my description of what happens on the district side. Broadly speaking:

• Families have no idea what to do. When they go to enroll, they find that every district has its own unique process. This form, that form. Everything must be done in a particular order. It’s rarely laid out in the language families speak. Messages sent asking for clarification routinely go unanswered. For newcomer families without a fixed address, the complexity is even greater. More idiosyncratic processes. In some districts, there is just one staff member who is familiar with the federal law that concerns homeless students, McKinney-Vento. If that person is on vacation or medical leave, nothing happens until they return.

• Things don’t happen on-time. The delays I mentioned above are routine, especially for children who need to be evaluated for special education. But even when a student eventually receives an Individualized Education Plan (IEP), schools may lack providers to deliver services. A family might not be informed, for example, that their child is not getting the occupational therapy promised to them in their IEP for the past several months. Nor might the family be told they are entitled to compensatory services to make up for what was missed.

• Many families give up. When parents attempt to register their younger kids for pre-K and don’t get follow-up from the local district, they often wait until the child is older and qualifies for kindergarten. In the meantime, the little one stays in daycare or at home, not learning English or receiving other supports that will prepare them for academic success. Data show this pretty plainly. In Everett, 45 percent of pre-K students are English Learners. For kindergarten, it jumps to 68 percent. Isn’t it in the interest of everyone - especially the district - to begin serving those EL students sooner? Perhaps this is contributing to the low EL test results we’re seeing?

All families benefit from a quality customer service experience. But for those facing language barriers, with fewer social networks and limited transportation options, smooth processes make all the difference in the world.

Districts are trying their best. But absent resources and a push for innovation, it is not going to be enough. Too many of them will function more like gatekeepers and less like greeters.4

We have two options here

On January 29, new national test results will be released.

Historically, Massachusetts has been near the top of the standings for each grade and subject.

Policy wonks are now whispering amongst themselves in muffled tones, wondering whether it has forfeited its edge through complacency. Long-serving, hard-charging Commissioner Jeff Riley departed last year. Recent academic signals haven’t been encouraging. A bill to mandate evidence-based literacy curricula died after pushback from unions and affluent districts, with Governor Maura Healey remaining silent.5 Voters eliminated the requirement for high school students to pass tests to receive a diploma.

I’m on-record as a prediction curmudgeon. We’ll have the data soon enough. But I can say with confidence that Massachusetts is grappling with more than pandemic learning loss. Its schools are feeling the shock of simultaneous, seismic events.

How Massachusetts responds will determine its outcomes for the next decade. There are basically two paths available.

The first is to ride out the demographic tide, hoping it’s a temporary shock followed by a return to pre-pandemic normalcy.

That’s not working. For most communities, there’s no sense chasing 2019. It won’t be back.

The dark side of this path is blaming problems on new arrival families, which is wrong on multiple levels. First, in many districts, achievement has declined across the board. It’s not just English Learners. Second, while some wish it weren’t so, all children in the United States are entitled to a public education, regardless of their immigration status. It’s the law. Districts that pretend otherwise will find themselves on the unpleasant side of legal liability.

The second path is to execute a strategy that gets the job done. Statewide. Cross-sector.

It’s not too late - but it’s getting close. To date, there’s been no emergency funding or additional assistance for Massachusetts districts grappling with demographic changes. Consequently, families are traversing red tape barriers on their own - with limited success.6

The task of identifying solutions will fall to the new K-12 Commissioner, who has not yet been hired and probably will not be on-the-job before summer.

The playbook, from the governor’s office down to the classroom, should look something like:

• Insist on coordination of operations, funding, and data across agencies overseeing housing, health care, education, and transportation - for a start. Consider simplifying or standardizing the steps of enrollment statewide so everyone can understand them and help families traverse.

• Find resources for districts. If we ask districts to serve lots of new EL students with zero new money, we can’t be surprised when it doesn’t work.

• Provide front-end support for families so they can access mandated services rather than relying on after-the-fact complaint and resolution channels that will be unused and ineffective. EdNavigator is one example but we’re far from the only option.

• Set some goals. What outcomes should be evident for districts, schools, and students? How long should it take for new students to get enrolled? To become proficient in English? To demonstrate proficiency in math and ELA on state tests?

• Rediscover district accountability. Advocacy groups should not be forced to sue school districts to ensure legal compliance. Especially if the state delivers overdue resources and help.

Twenty-five years ago, when Massachusetts was completing its rise in the academic rankings, it had the same share of English Learners as Montana and Minnesota. Today, it has a higher percentage than Arizona.

The only way for diversifying states like Massachusetts to remain top performers is to lead the way with innovative models for supporting English Learners. Otherwise, the numbers just won’t work. Consider the chart below:

It’s the right thing to do for kids and the best strategy to deliver results. The question is whether highly-ranked states - and you could add Utah, Connecticut, and New Jersey to the list, among others - will respond before they are surpassed. Your guess is as good as mine.

It is also pointless. In addition to pablum like “change is on the horizon,” we get mainly stabs in the dark and personal wish lists.

It’s true that some years turn out to be more consequential than others. But we rarely see them coming.

If you’ll indulge me, I’ll attempt to convince you by looking back at three of the most significant years in modern education history. They surprised us with ramifications we scarcely could have imagined.

1991 - The advent of mayoral control

Perhaps the most exciting thing to come out of Boston in 1991 was Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch, fronted by future underwear model and family comedy stalwart Mark Wahlberg. Good Vibrations.

A close second place: mayoral control of schools. Boston Mayor Ray Flynn successfully converted the nation’s oldest elected school board to a seven-member panel appointed by himself. The proposal won approval from the city council and state legislature.

Few understood at the time that a new era for schools was dawning - one characterized by more assertive intervention. The New York Times reported that sentiment for Flynn’s campaign was driven by public belief that “the committee has failed to address the low reading scores and high dropout rates.” It was becoming politically unacceptable for city leaders to wash their hands of failing schools by pointing fingers at their school board members. A Massachusetts legislator put it this way: “Now the Mayor will have no excuse not to improve our schools.”

Chicago followed Boston’s lead in 1995. It was then joined by Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, DC, among others.

Early advocates were far from certain that mayoral control would be successful. By 1993, Ray Flynn reversed his position and began calling for a return to an elected board. He conceded that communities of color had been disenfranchised by concentrating power in the hands of the mayor.1

In Chicago, one of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s supporters was quoted as saying “I think in my gut it's going to work out, but it's going to be a bit of a white-knuckle ride." Such an exciting endorsement!

Nonetheless, a number of mayoral control cities saw increased stability and improved performance - at least in the near term. Boston had just two superintendents between 1991 and 2006. Chicago had two between 1995 and 2009. Achievement went up. Dropout rates declined.2

As mayors felt pressure to deliver better results, they paid closer attention to a lever that had been - to be generous - an afterthought in the 70s and 80s: labor negotiations. Thick, complex contracts with teachers unions dictated how educators were hired and assigned, making it nearly impossible to restaff struggling schools with well-trained, invested teams.

Mayors like Michael Bloomberg in New York and Adrian Fenty in Washington, DC lent their full political backing to superintendents (Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, respectively) who refused to settle contracts until the byzantine provisions were removed. It worked. And tension between administrators and labor organizations became one of the essential stories in education nationally.

The interventionist trend spread. States took over districts and districts reconstituted schools.

Who could have foreseen the extent of this back in 1991? Nobody.

2008 - Education reform’s big moment seeds its decline

Heading into 2008, conventional wisdom was that Hillary Clinton would become the Democratic presidential nominee, beating back a spirited challenge from an inspiring-but-inexperienced junior Senator from Illinois. That’s certainly what the American Federation of Teachers believed in October 2007 when it went all-in for Clinton. They were confident that Clinton would, when elected, gut the No Child Left Behind Act the union had come to detest.

Instead, Obama won the nomination narrowly and the presidency resoundingly. He chose Arne Duncan, the reform-minded superintendent of the aforementioned Chicago district, as his Secretary of Education. Obama wanted more urgency for schools to improve results - not less.

Even before Obama was elected, however, the September 2008 financial crash put education policy on a different path that would unexpectedly come to define the next 15 years.

In the short term, federal bailout packages accelerated sweeping initiatives to turn around failing schools, expand the charter sector, and hold teachers accountable for student performance by offering grants to states with ambitious plans. That part got unlimited news coverage. Folks know all about it.3

But it wasn’t what really mattered. In the longer term, the Great Recession led to painful budget cuts for schools. According to leading economists, national spending dropped by about seven percent and took several years to recover. The funding shortages hurt student learning.

Against the backdrop of a terrible economy, demanding more from schools became politically infeasible - particularly given that NCLB had been ruffling feathers for years with its robust accountability measures.

Obama was soon squeezed by rising backlash. From the right, the Tea Party burst onto the scene in 2009. Eventually, it made opposition to Common Core a top priority. On the left, Occupy Wall Street arrived in 2011. Both signaled a shift toward populist skepticism of established institutions that would emerge as a transformative political current. Their momentum ensured that the days of centrist, nationalized education policy were numbered.

In the heady days of 2008, we had no clue what was coming.

2015 - The wheels fall off the school improvement bus

At the beginning of 2015, NPR did a nice roundup of education predictions from a diverse array of voices. They covered topics like blended learning, standards, student loans, and data platforms. Very few of them turned out to be accurate. Because that’s how these things work.

Instead, 2015 was pivotal in other ways.

The first “we’re not in Kansas anymore” moment came in February when philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad suspended their $1 million annual award for urban school systems. For more than a decade, the Broads had cultivated an Oscars-style atmosphere around the ceremony, filling venues like New York’s Museum of Modern Art with big education names from across the country. They invented the big district prize. Then, they shelved the whole thing. Why? The decision was “precipitated by sluggish academic results from the largest urban school districts in the country.” Translation: They didn’t think there were enough deserving winners to hold a contest. Whoa.

It was a signal that the era of splashy edu-philanthropy was coming to an end. There wouldn’t be any more Mark Zuckerbergs going on Oprah to pledge $100 million to Newark.4 Today, the retreat of funders is an open secret in the sector, much discussed behind the scenes though rarely in public, for fear of alienating the donors who remain.

Next, loads of parents stopped allowing their children to take the annual assessments mandated by NCLB in math and reading. They were frustrated by the outsized role they felt tests were playing, crowding out instruction and reducing teachers to drones. The trend was particularly notable in New York - and, more specifically, Long Island. About 20 percent of eligible students statewide did not test in 2015.

Political leaders got the message. Gov. Andrew Cuomo beat a hasty retreat on his policies to include student learning in teacher evaluations. By the end of 2015, Congress updated the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, moving away from imposing specific academic goals on states. The Obama emphasis on school turnarounds and teacher effectiveness? Nowhere to be found. The interventionist era that kicked off in 1991? This is where it ended.

At the time, it felt like a much-needed correction. Educators - and the organizations that represented them - were in revolt against what they saw as a wrong-headed consensus. States wanted a breather. There was a feeling that in the absence of federal bossiness, states would carry innovation forward in ways that suited their local needs.5

The states did not lead, though.

With the benefit of hindsight, ESSA is widely regarded as an over-correction. A good case can be made that the battle for COVID academic recovery was lost back in 2015, before anyone knew what a coronavirus was.

How so? When schools closed in spring 2020, we were almost five years into a hands-off era. No one was telling anyone what to do. And no one was intervening with schools that weren’t getting results. This led to a lot of shoe-gazing during the re-opening process followed by more shoe-gazing in 2022 and 2023 as learning loss erased decades of gains made since… well… 1991.

So, what does 2025 hold?

In the words of modern prophet Nate Bargatze, nobody knows.

It’s more sensible to take stock of the recent past than to predict the future. We will probably remember 2024 for all that didn’t take place.

• President Biden did not declare a state of emergency around student learning.

• Neither presidential campaign gave meaningful attention to education.

• No member of Congress made a serious proposal to update the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

• No state successfully reduced student chronic absenteeism below its 2018 baseline. Very few have improved their ELA or math achievement to pre-pandemic levels.6

Something’s going to happen, eventually. Millions of educators are out there every day, busting their tails to get us moving forward. I’m optimistic that we will see progress. History tells us these inert periods don’t last forever. I just don’t know when this one will end - or what 2025 will hold.

Meet back here in December and we’ll review the year together.

It’s been quite a year at The Education Daly. Fifteen newsletters. More than triple the number of subscribers we had in January. Circulation now in the multiple dozens.

Thank you to everyone for reading, sending me ideas, fielding my annoying requests for input, and gently telling me the things I got wrong. I truly appreciate it.

As we wrap 2024, let’s count down the five most popular posts along with a few late-breaking updates:

#5: Why Are Teachers Missing So Much School?

I opened this two-part series by marveling that more than 40 percent of Chicago teachers met the official definition for chronic absenteeism, yet no major media outlet had written a single story about the issue in at least four years.

Ears at the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board were hot. This fall, it published a blistering piece arguing that “showing up is the least we should expect from our very well-compensated public-school educators.” It earned them an equally blistering response from the Chicago Teachers Union.

It’s good news that this issue is finally getting the public attention it deserves. Nationally, Michael Bloomberg and The New York Times’s Brent Staples sounded the alarm. The next logical step is for states to begin reporting this data for all schools. Today, hardly anyone does. It’s a miss.

#4: The Rise and Fall of Finland Mania

Lordy, did I get lot of emails and texts about this one. People swearing they never bought the Finland hype. People telling me about big name leaders in education who are still out there selling Finland as the top education country in the world despite its large and sustained decline. People trying to convince me that Finland actually is the top education country. People promising to get me a better deal on auto insurance if I bundle-and-save.

This month saw the release of new international math test scores. And? Finland’s performance dropped in both fourth and eighth grades. Its students still do just fine, but among European countries it has been surpassed in eighth grade by England, Ireland, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Lithuania, Turkey, and Hungary.

Therein, friends, is the silver lining. The next time there is an opportunity to take a government-funded junket to learn about an international education miracle, we will have more appealing options. Dublin, here we come!

#3: How Did Teacher Evaluation Become a Thing?

This three-part series was a personal therapy session. I was a huge believer in the potential better teacher evaluations to improve instruction. For a short period beginning around 2007, the issue caught fire. Dozens of laws were passed. Huge sums of money were spent. But very little came of it, largely because of missteps that boosters like me need to acknowledge and own.

Where does this issue stand now? Dormant, for the most part. Texas is doing some interesting things to fund additional compensation for teachers in districts that build credible systems for identifying their best teachers. Rick Hanushek pointed out this fall that our $190 billion in COVID relief spending might have yielded better results if it made some attempt to leverage the power of great teachers.

For the most part, though, we’re back to treating teachers as interchangeable parts.

#2: Urban School Drama Has Come to the Suburbs

Second most-read piece of the year. I did not see this one coming. What started as a casual observation that a number of urbane, leafy suburbs like Evanston are experiencing more education turmoil has turned into an nonstop news feed.

In just over two months, things have gone from bad to worse. Evanston is surveying parents on their preferred budget cuts. I’m betting that their response will be “none of the above.” All of the incumbent school board members are heading for the hills. A school is closing mid-year. Enrollment is dropping further.

Evanston is far from alone. This show may be coming soon to an esteemed college town near you.

#1: We’re Living Through an Education Depression

Overwhelming response to this piece. It had the highest number of readers by quite a margin. It also generated the most new subscribers. I argued that our prolonged period of shrinking outcomes and opportunities for young people qualifies as a depression.

Our predicament has only deepened. As referenced above, international test results came out this month. They were “devastating” for the U.S. That’s not my term - it comes from our top testing official. The progress we made since 1995 has been wiped out.

In a positive development, nearly every news article acknowledged that our downturn began before the pandemic. It was common until recently to ignore that pattern and to write off all negative academic news to COVID. Baby steps.

Soon, we’ll have a new Secretary of Education and detailed math and reading test results for all 50 states. Let’s hope that 2025 is the year we get serious about reversing what has become a decade-long funk.

We’ll be back in January with a fresh newsletter about who-knows-what. Below are some of the questions on my mind. If you have suggestions, please send them my way.

• Is literacy guru Lucy Calkins a misunderstood scapegoat for America’s reading challenges or a fraud?

• Why did the massive federal allocation of money to schools for COVID relief barely move the needle on learning and what does it mean for the future of school funding?

• Which families are leaving urban districts in droves - and where are they going?

Until next time, please enjoy the holiday season - and truly, thank you.

Let’s start with a basic question: When we send our little ones to school, what are our hopes for them?

I doubt your answer is “kick-ass test scores!”

That’s because parents aren’t maximizers for achievement. Our goal isn’t to win fourth grade. Communities don’t think that way, either.

School is a part of raising children. An important part, yes. But just a part. Along with myriad other supports and experiences, strong schools produce students who thrive when they become adults.

Yet, when we talk about whether our schools are doing a good job, we rarely focus on the adults they help create. I find that strange.

After all, this is where the symptoms of our education depression are most evident. We are struggling to produce capable, independent, worldly young people who can succeed in all the right ways.

Today’s 20-somethings are more likely to live with their parents and less likely to live with a spouse, partner, or roommate than past generations.1 They’re saddled with piles of student debt. They are very online. Probably because they socialize in-person less often, they suffer from what our Surgeon General calls “an epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” Companies are hiring coaches to teach employees how to dress professionally, make eye contact, and greet people - things they once learned as teenagers working the register at McDonald’s.

Patterns have changed particularly for men. In 1980, 85 percent of 25 year-old males worked full-time. In 2021, it was just 71 percent.2 Fewer men in the workforce has meant that fewer of them are financially independent. Which exacerbates estrangement and anger.

Outside of elites who are still benefitting from the modern economy, the signs of struggle are everywhere.

This should surprise us. After all, educational attainment is up. Nearly 9 in 10 students graduate high school. Even among low income students, the figure is 80 percent. These are huge improvements from a few decades ago. And haven’t we been told endlessly that education and life success go hand-in-hand?

Not so much, these days. We have achieved more education (on paper) and less readiness for the real world. It’s been a hollow win.

Where did we go wrong?

One of our biggest mistakes has been focusing on the wrong goals. We set the finish line too early. The transition to adulthood now takes longer than it did 100 years ago when we made high school graduation the essential rite of passage. A young person’s education is not complete until they are ready to function independently in the real world. At this point, a high school diploma doesn’t come close to meeting that standard.

It’s time for a major correction. We should define the success of our education system based on outcomes for 25 year-olds, not 18 year-olds.

As Raj Chetty and his colleagues have shown through big data projects, elementary education has “large effects” on kids later lives. But neighborhoods matter, too. As do social connection and civic participation. Our objective is opportunity. When we focus too narrowly on short term indicators, we end up holding schools too accountable and not accountable enough.

Why high school graduation is a bad way to measure school systems

Our primary federal education law, passed in 2015, places zero emphasis on what happens to students after high school. In exchange for federal funding, states need to do certain things - such as test students in reading and math each year from grade 3 through 8 - and they must develop systems for monitoring the quality of schools. High school graduation rate is a mandatory indicator.

But the law is unconcerned with higher education. Districts are free to set a low bar for earning a high school diploma, which makes them look successful. If few students succeed in college because they are totally unprepared for the work, the districts can (and do) blame colleges. It’s not their problem. Out of their hands.

This is bonkers. It might have made sense in days of yore when the vast majority of American students did not finish high school and it was a legit proxy for academic accomplishment. That’s far from the case now. Graduation just means you showed up till the end.3

By capping the responsibility of K-12 systems at the end of high school, we give them a free pass for the dismal life outcomes many students - particularly those from less privileged backgrounds - are experiencing in their 20s.

The singular importance of high school graduation leads schools to make counterproductive decisions. Chronic absenteeism is a prime example.

It’s common in our sector to argue that “punitive” measures - like banning participation in extracurriculars on days kids don’t attend school or limiting the time allowed to submit make-up work - are not effective in getting students to attend consistently. The only sound approach, folks say, is to extol the positive virtues of showing up. I think that’s incorrect, as plenty of schools have reported clear improvements after adopting tough love.

But even if we concede that punitive strategies can go too far, why would we teach sophomores, via lenient policies, that showing up is optional? Are they going to earn a good living a decade later doing jobs where they can no-show 20 to 30 percent of the time without getting fired?

The same policies that might “work” in the short term for maximizing high school graduation cement habits that are making our young adults unemployable… and in need of coaches to teach them how to say hello.

What should we do instead?

We need an integrated youth development strategy that starts at birth and ends in early adulthood. As cohorts reach age 25, we should measure and report on the degree to which each community - and its schools, along with other systems - produce young people with positive results on dimensions such as:

• Educational attainment. Associate’s, bachelor’s, and graduate degrees. High quality credentials, too. We should be thinking about varied pathways. A young person with none of the above faces high economic risk.

• Employment. Not just a job, but a living wage that supports living somewhere besides your parents’ basement.

• Civic engagement. Voter registration. Bonus points for serving the public through the military or programs like AmeriCorps. We teach social studies to prepare citizens, right? What’s our measure of whether we’ve succeeded?

• Safety and lawfulness. Never charged with a crime. This speaks to finding community, developing social ties, knowing how to navigate perils. Far too many of our young people are enmeshed in the justice system.4

Why focus here?

• These are outcomes we truly value. Few parents have any idea what their child’s annual test results mean.5 Education officials routinely spin them to highlight the positives. Understandable. But unhelpful. Let’s keep our eyes on early adult outcomes that are important to families of all education levels, incomes, and political affiliations. We can form a new consensus that inspires desperately needed investments at a time when our schools are about to face tight budgets. Absent that consensus, I worry that the value proposition for funding our schools is fading.

• These outcomes are hard to game. School districts can inflate high school graduation rates, but they can’t do the same things with earnings, employment status, service records, or college attainment. Let’s stop measuring schools based on data they self-generate.

• These outcomes apply to a diverse array of school policy landscapes. Some states are shifting aggressively to universal education saving accounts (ESAs). Others have substantial numbers of charter schools. Some students spend time in public and private schools during their K-12 journeys. By focusing on a mid-20s finish line, we can maintain a common measure for all states that includes all young people raised in those jurisdictions, coast to coast.

• These outcomes can extend accountability to higher education. We have a crisis of confidence in college, which has become wildly expensive. Enrollments are down. But historically, colleges have escaped scrutiny for failure to support students or to prepare them for the workforce. Far too many young people scuffle around in some form of college for a few years after high school, only to emerge little better off than when they started. We’re spending too much for that outcome. If we focus on age 25, colleges will be squarely in the spotlight.

How do we start?

For beginners, we need Congress to pass a comprehensive education law that redefines our mission as continuing through early adulthood. Better yet, it can codify the ways multiple departments can collaborate on measurement, reporting, and oversight. Today, data sharing between high schools and colleges, for instance, is totally inadequate.

We also need to consider how schools and communities would execute this new education strategy through integration with other sectors, from health to employment. Clarifying responsibilities is essential. If everyone is accountable for education, it would be easy for no one to be accountable. I promise: I am not going to advocate for diluting the importance of basic academic skills.

That’s too much for us to discuss today. In months to come, we’ll tackle those questions and more. Until then, thanks for reading and thanks for all the outreach on this issue. It’s clear there is a burly appetite for a fresh approach. Keep the ideas coming!

By 2013, something remarkable had happened. The share of eight graders Below Basic was just 26 percent.

Even better, the progress was shared across every demographic group. For example, the percentage of Black students with Below Basic scores dropped from 78 to 48 percent.

It was an incredible victory for American schools. Fewer struggling math students meant more opportunities to complete advanced coursework, qualify for good jobs, and earn higher wages.

Unbeknownst to us at the time, 2013 was the high water mark. Achievement stopped improving. First, it stagnated. Then, toward the end of 2010s, it declined. And finally, along came COVID.

Below, you can see the picture as of 2022. The share of low performing math students increased compared to 2013 for each racial group - with especially large jumps for Black and Hispanic 8th graders. Much of the progress from the earlier period eroded.

Why did this happen?

Short answer: No one seems to know.

This goes far beyond the pandemic

We’re in the midst of an education depression. By depression, I mean an extended era of shrinking outcomes and opportunity. I hesitate to call it a “great” depression because that feels hyperbolic. But the duration - over a decade already - makes the term plausible.

I’m not the first to describe this problem. Mike Petrilli and Chad Aldeman are just a few of the policy-world voices who have been sounding the alarm for years. Journalists have covered it. In the past month alone, Kevin Huffman wrote about it in the The Washington Post and Jessica Grose of The New York Times generated chatter by calling it the crisis that neither presidential candidate has a plan to address.

But due to a generalized denial in the public sphere, this is still news to many people. If that’s true for you, don’t feel badly. Plenty of education conversations at the state and local level revolve narrowly around recovering from COVID learning loss - as if it would be a full victory to return to 2019 achievement.

Wrong. Our true problem is uglier. For more than 30 years, education indicators almost uniformly got better. We occupied ourselves by arguing (sometimes aggressively) about whether they were improving fast enough and whether marginalized students could close gaps entirely with more privileged students.

Those debates are no longer happening. Why? Because we’re moving in the wrong direction. Who wouldn’t love to return to the old days when our biggest grievance was the velocity of our victory? It’s become easier to ignore the big problem than to fix it.

Is there any evidence of this so-called “depression” beyond national test scores?

Yes, loads of it.

• Absenteeism. Longtime readers remember that we covered this issue in detail last fall and there’s still regular mainstream news coverage, so I’ll spare you a lengthy recap. At its core, absenteeism reflects disengagement from school on the part of students and families. In 2014, just 14 percent of students were chronically absent. In 2023, it was 26 percent. Figures are up in every single state that measures absenteeism.

• Higher education. Participation in college has moved steadily in one direction - up - for pretty much the entirety of American history. Until recently. In 2012, 41 percent of 18-24 year-olds had enrolled in a two- or four-year school. In 2022, enrollment declined to 39 percent. That drop is small, but dig beneath the surface and there are surprising trends. Enrollment in two-year colleges was down 34 percent over the decade, with declines particularly driven by White students, who are more likely than peers to express skepticism about the quality of education colleges are offering. The FAFSA debacle has further depressed enrollment. Views of higher ed have split along partisan lines. A college crisis is brewing.

• Reading. Let’s put achievement aside for a moment. We prioritize literacy among elementary students partly to create lifelong, passionate readers. How’s that going? In 2012, 27 percent of 13 year-olds reported that they read for fun “almost every day.” By 2020 - in surveys taken before the pandemic - the figure had dropped to 17 percent. That’s a big change in eight years. For the first time since the survey was launched in 1984, the share of kids who “never or hardly ever” read for fun - 29 percent - exceeded the share that reads almost every day.

Make a list of educational outcomes that matter to you personally. Then look up whether those measures were better for your local community in 2013 than they are now. I’m willing to bet you’ll see much the same pattern.

Why does this depression attract so little notice?

There was an era from the 1980s until Barack Obama’s second term characterized by heightened national attention to learning standards, school improvement, choice, and test-based accountability. Almost everyone uses the same term for it: education reform.

This past decade - which has seen a shift away from reform priorities in addition to falling performance - has no name. It’s the nameless depression.

When I ask folks about this, they bring up a few dynamics:

1. Losses were concentrated among low-performing students. We have roughly the same number of high-performers on national tests as a decade ago. Far more students are receiving perfect scores on the ACT exam. Elite colleges are awash in qualified applicants. At the same time, we have more struggling students - and their achievement levels are noticeably lower than was the case for strugglers in 2013. Old gaps have re-opened. But elite, affluent communities with highly educated (and influential) populations have been substantially spared.

2. We can blame COVID. In some respects, this is reasonable. Learning setbacks related to the pandemic were enormous and lasting. But it’s misleading to suggest that our educational downturn began when schools sent kids home in March 2020. The depression was well underway. COVID only exacerbated it. We can’t use COVID as a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card. Nor should public officials over-celebrate small gains that only cement our anemic recovery.

3. Test scores lost credibility. Data showing declining achievement has been clear and publicly available. But in the wake of the reform movement, nobody wanted to discuss it. In the 2010s, teachers unions and fed-up parents waged war on testing - nearly succeeding in removing the federal requirement to assess students annually in math and reading.2 Additionally, almost every state changed its tests - some more than once - during the transition to new learning standards. It was difficult to compare results from one year to another. The construction dust led observers to overlook a national pattern.

4. There were conflicting signals. Not every indicator has deteriorated in the past decade. High school graduation rates, for instance, have climbed significantly, from 80 to 87 percent. Hard to complain about good news. But graduation rates are almost entirely controlled by local schools. If they relax expectations and inflate grades - which is exactly what researchers find they’ve been doing - graduation rates will rise even if students are performing worse. Academic leniency has papered over learning deficits in many communities.

What now?

The original Great Depression ended when the American economy mobilized for World War II. We can’t wait around for a geopolitical event to fix this mess. We need leadership.

Some things for us to do:

• Acknowledge reality. It’s time to stop pretending. This applies to everyone - not just education officials. Funders and non-profits are just as guilty of hiding out in recent years. I’m on the email distribution list for dozens of organizations. Most of them never mention the crisis we’re in. It’s long been fashionable to say we are “data driven,” but the past decade suggests that’s a hollow claim. Having the wrong frame for our situation has prevented us from setting the right course.

• Resist the urge to find a simplistic scapegoat. Remember, our declines are evident in all 50 states. There is no national conspiracy to deliver poor results. Schools have focused on the priorities we’ve given them in the best ways they know. We can’t write off long term trends to hot button issues - like book bans or DEI initiatives - that draw big heat in a handful of places. My concern is that we’ve not been clear with schools about what’s most important and we’ve asked them to focus on too many things outside their core competence.

• Brace ourselves. In just a few months, we’ll have a new president and another round of NAEP results. We don’t know whether we’re about to see signs of hope or new reasons for despair. Based on state test scores released for 2023-24, I am not optimistic about big gains on NAEP.3

• Pass a new federal education law. The Every Student Succeeds Act, enacted in 2015, has been a dismal failure. It is wholly unsuited to our present challenges. We need bipartisan congressional leadership to develop a successor for the new era. Where will that leadership come from?

• Stop playing small ball. In the face of this depression, it often feels like our available solutions are piecemeal. Let’s start by establishing clear goals. Where will we be in 2030? 2035? And how big must our ideas be to get us there?

Next month, I’ll accept my own challenge and offer a few possibilities. Thanks for reading.

1

If you are curious to learn more about what “Below Basic” means, the good folks from NAEP have you covered here. One of the examples they provide is below. Just nine percent of eighth grade Below Basic scorers answer this item correctly.