Vol. 23, No. 2 – Education Next

How Teachers Unions Became a Political Powerhouse

Daniel DiSalvo — Wed, 15 Feb 2023 10:00:34 +0000

How Policies Make Interest Groups: Governments, Unions, and American Education
by Michael T. Hartney
University of Chicago Press, 2022, $35; 312 pages.

As reviewed by Daniel DiSalvo

During the Covid-19 pandemic, school districts with strong teachers unions were slower to bring students back to the classroom than districts with weaker unions were. Controversy over the unions’ power to determine the mode of instruction capped off a decade in which teachers unions were the most polarizing aspect of American education politics. School reformers blame them for blocking changes to improve public education; union advocates argue they defend teachers, improve conditions for students, and prop up the labor movement.

In a new book, How Policies Make Interest Groups, Michael T. Hartney makes a courageous but careful foray into the highly charged debate over the causes and consequences of teacher unionization in America. Regarding the causes, he traces how state labor laws impelled teachers from being a politically disengaged group to becoming a “potent force in American politics.” In short, state governments created modern teachers unions. As for the consequences, Hartney argues that teachers unions have blocked many of the initiatives of the bipartisan education-reform movement and largely succeeded in preserving the traditional organization of most public schools. He also finds evidence that union political clout “can reduce [student] academic performance.” Recently, teachers unions have suffered a few setbacks, such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus decision, which prevents unions from exacting fees from nonmembers and has led to declines in membership. Yet despite such obstacles, Hartney argues that teachers unions will remain powerful players in education politics. (Disclosure: I co-authored an essay with Hartney for Education Next that was a first cut at this last claim. See “Teachers Unions in the Post-Janus World,” features, Fall 2020.)

Drawing on a wealth of data, How Policies Make Interest Groups is a statistically sophisticated study of the role of teachers unions in education policy. Hartney pulls from a number of sources, especially the National Education Association’s extensive historical records, along with his own surveys, the American National Election Study (ANES), contract data from the National Council on Teacher Quality, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores, public records from a variety of states, and much more. He tries mightily to support nearly every claim with the best data available, all the while being candid about the data’s limits.

The first half of the book details the remarkable transformation of teachers from a politically disconnected group in the 1950s to a political powerhouse by the 1980s. In the 1950s, teachers did little politically besides vote, according to ANES surveys. By the 1980s, the teachers unions had established PACs in all 50 states and were sending more delegates to the Democratic National Convention than the state of California was. The change was sparked, according to Hartney, by new state collective-bargaining laws, which created an ensemble of “subsidies” that facilitated union organizing. By “organizing all teachers in a school district into a single employee bargaining unit,” Hartney writes, the new laws “made it both logistically easier and financially less costly for unions to recruit teachers to participate in politics.” Collective-bargaining agreements negotiated under the new laws established a host of privileges that facilitated union recruitment and the political mobilization of teachers. These benefits included free use of school buildings and equipment; access to teacher contact information, school mailboxes, and bulletin boards; presentation time at faculty orientation; and paid release time for teachers to work on union business.

The results were a major uptick in political activity by both individual teachers and their union organizations. After collective-bargaining laws went into effect, teachers—and only teachers—reported to the ANES a large increase in their willingness to participate politically. This is because the new laws solved the unions’ collective-action problem, creating organizations with stable memberships and revenues that could mobilize teachers. For instance, the NEA could unify its membership into a national federation and raise dues without losing members—something many other membership organizations have tried and failed to do. State labor laws thus created a “massive federated interest group capable of coordinating political action in fifty states and thousands of school districts.”

Michael Hartney

The second half of Hartney’s book examines effects of teachers unions as government-made interest groups. He shows how teachers and their unions strategically prioritize state politics for voting, lobbying, and campaign contributions. The unions give 90 percent or more of all PAC contributions in state politics made by education advocacy groups. Teachers and their unions are also very successful in school board elections—nearly a quarter of all school board members are current teachers or former educators. Because teachers unions are almost always more politically powerful than their opponents, elected officials have strong incentives to pay attention to union demands.

To assess how power translates into policy, Hartney provides a “scorecard” of the consequences of teachers union political activity. It shows that when teachers unions are on “offense,” trying to win things for their members, their record is mixed. They’ve clearly won some things they wanted, such as establishing a federal department of education. They’ve clearly lost on other things, such as the enactment of a federal public-sector collective-bargaining law. Meanwhile, they’ve had some success reducing class size and raising teacher pay (despite these two goals being in tension). However, when the unions are on “defense,” trying to block changes deemed antithetical to their interests, they are much more successful. Teachers unions have mostly thwarted efforts to impose teacher testing, merit pay, and school vouchers, as well as moves to alter tenure and seniority rights. Reformers have won some victories here and there (most notably in Washington, D.C., and New Orleans) and have had some success in creating charter schools. What’s more, the federal government now requires schools to test students in grades 3 through 8 every year and make the results transparent at the school level. But in most of the country, public schools operate pretty much the same way they did 30 years ago.

The biggest question is what it all means for kids. Sometimes teachers unions’ interests jibe with students’ interests, but sometimes they don’t. Hartney takes a stab at the most difficult and controversial topic: assessing whether union influence lowers student performance. As he stresses, the data and measurement problems of such assessments are formidable. Therefore, any results should be treated cautiously. And yet, when Hartney analyzes better measures of union power and student achievement than previous studies used, he finds that “states made less progress on the NAEP when organized teachers interests wielded greater resources in state politics.” His findings are congruent with more-methodologically sophisticated recent scholarship than with older studies that found the teachers unions had either no impact or a slight positive impact on student learning.

All told, Hartney has written a meticulous, nuanced, and thoughtful book that should be read by anyone who cares about public education in the United States. Readers on all sides of the education-policy debate will find support for their views in it. Supporters of teachers unions will find evidence that the unions are pretty good at advancing members’ interests, such as smaller class sizes and higher pay, and at blocking reforms championed by billionaire philanthropists. Critics of teachers unions will find evidence that their political power obstructs efforts to improve America’s public schools and that it may lead to lower student performance at higher cost.

Whether this book will prompt readers to revisit their prior convictions is hard to say. But Hartney’s fine-grained empiricism cuts through much of the cant and hyperbole in debates over the role of teachers unions in education policy. In that respect, among many others, it is big step forward.

Daniel DiSalvo is a professor of political science at the City College of New York-CUNY and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

This article appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

DiSalvo, D. (2023). How Teachers Unions Became a Political Powerhouse: A nuanced look at the role of unions in education policy. Education Next, 23(2), 69-70.

The post How Teachers Unions Became a Political Powerhouse appeared first on Education Next.

A Poor Poverty Measure

Ishtiaque Fazlul — Tue, 14 Feb 2023 10:00:43 +0000

Free and reduced-price meal designations are inaccurate indicators of family income.

In education policy and public debate, we often talk about students from “low-income” families. That descriptor is typically based on data from the National School Lunch Program, which provides qualified students with school meals for free or at a reduced price. Enrollment in the program, which is operated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, plays a central role in identifying low-income students in U.S. schools and thus a central role in consequential education funding and accountability policies at the federal, state, and local levels.

For example, the federal Every Student Succeeds Act requires states to track gaps in student achievement by poverty status. Among the 50 states, 44 use free and reduced-price lunch enrollment to identify low-income students. These data are also commonly used to allocate federal, state, and local funding to schools serving low-income children. School and district poverty rates, as determined by free and reduced-price lunch enrollment, additionally feature prominently in social science research, school-funding lawsuits, state laws and regulations, and philanthropic investment.

Yet a close look shows that free and reduced-price meal designations in the National School Lunch Program are grossly inaccurate indicators of family income. Using administrative data from Missouri, we find that student enrollment in the program is oversubscribed by about 40 to 50 percent relative to stated income-eligibility rules. This finding is not unique to Missouri. We see the same basic pattern in an extended sample of 27 states. Moreover, this is not a recent phenomenon. Enrollment in the school lunch program was oversubscribed even before 2014–15 when the “Community Eligibility Provision” was rolled out nationally, which permits sufficiently high-poverty schools and districts to enroll all their students to receive free meals.

While it has been understood for some time that school lunch enrollment as a poverty indicator is blunt and prone to error, the magnitude of the problem has not yet been fully appreciated. In exploring the rules, features, and processes of the National School Lunch Program, we find that the program’s design, incentives, and lack of income-verification enforcement likely contribute to the oversubscription. These findings raise important questions about the administration of a program that supports the nutrition of American schoolchildren as well as key datasets driving policy and funding decisions across the country.

More Than Just Lunch

For three quarters of a century, schoolchildren from low-income families have received low- or no-cost meals under the National School Lunch Program. In 2019–20, the program provided subsidized lunches to nearly 22 million students at about 94,000 public and nonprofit private schools across the United States.

Students are enrolled in the program in two ways. Through direct certification, students are automatically enrolled for free school meals if their families receive benefits such as food assistance, Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or if they are migrant, in foster care, or homeless. Alternately, school districts administer income surveys to parents to determine eligibility. Students from families with incomes at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty line qualify for free meals, and those from families with incomes between 130 and 185 percent of the poverty line qualify for reduced-priced meals. State and federal aid programs like Medicaid and food stamps verify incomes reported by participants, while school districts usually do not. In addition, if an attempt to verify eligibility fails, a student’s enrollment in the lunch program ends, but there are no other repercussions.

Enrollment in the school lunch program is a commonly used proxy for student poverty in policy, research, and for other purposes. But is it an accurate indicator of family income? To answer this question, we analyze school meal enrollment and two alternative measures of poverty in Missouri schools during the 2016–17 school year to determine how closely they are aligned. Our data on meal enrollment are from the state education department and show students’ National School Lunch Program designations. Each student is coded as enrolled for free meals, reduced-price meals, or neither. Our alternative poverty measures are based on students’ direct certification data and estimates of school-neighborhood poverty from the National Center for Education Statistics, which are based on the incomes of households located near schools as reported in the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.

Assessing Accuracy

A case could be made for using either direct certification or school neighborhood poverty data for the purpose of assessing the accuracy of students’ meal designations. In Missouri, direct certification applies to students from families living at or below 130 percent of the poverty line, which is the same income threshold for free-meal enrollment by the National School Lunch Program. And while school-neighborhood poverty estimates are reported as the average family income associated with a school, with some basic adjustments they also can be used to estimate the share of students living at or below 130 percent of the poverty line.

However, there is no guarantee that either alternative metric is itself accurate. Therefore, in a two-way comparison of free lunch data to either direct certification or school neighborhood poverty data, it would be difficult to know the source of any discrepancy. Given this, we first compare the two alternative data sources to each other. When we do this, we find that the estimated shares of students in a school living at or below 130 percent of the poverty line are very closely aligned, which gives us confidence that both alternative measures are accurate, on average.

We then conduct similar tests to assess the accuracy of the shares of students who receive free or reduced-price lunch. That is, we test whether the school lunch program enrollment share in a school matches the share of students living at or below 130 percent of the poverty line (free) or 185 percent of the poverty line (free and reduced price) as measured by the direct certification and school neighborhood poverty data. If schools and districts are following the National School Lunch Program rules, these numbers should line up.

This is not what we find. We conduct a series of alignment tests where a value of 1.0 indicates one-to-one correspondence; that is, 1.0 means the poverty data from the measures being compared match each other across Missouri schools, on average. While the direct certification and school neighborhood poverty measures are aligned with each other, neither of them lines up with free or reduced-price lunch enrollment (see Figure 1). Compared to direct certification, free lunch enrollment flags 39 percent more children in a school as living in households with incomes at or below 130 percent of the poverty line, on average. Similarly, compared with school neighborhood poverty, 47 percent more children are flagged as living in households with incomes at or below 130 percent of the poverty line in the free lunch data.

We then assess alignment at the free-and-reduced-price enrollment threshold of 185 percent of the poverty line. Unfortunately, we cannot conduct the alignment test at this threshold using direct certification data because that threshold is 130 percent in Missouri. However, we can use the school neighborhood poverty data, which show that enrollment for free and reduced-price meals is also substantially oversubscribed, by about 40 percent.

Next, we explore how the Community Eligibility Provision figures into our findings. This provision, which was included in the 2010 reauthorization of the program and was rolled out nationally during the 2014–15 school year, subsidizes free meals for every student at participating schools and districts. To be eligible, a school or district must have at least 40 percent of students qualify for direct certification. For districts and schools in Missouri (and many other states) that adopt community eligibility, all of their students are reported as being enrolled for free meals. Community eligibility for free meals will certainly contribute to our finding that the poverty rate is overstated by data from the National School Lunch Program, but the magnitude of the effect is unclear.

To disentangle the effect of the Community Eligibility Provision, we incorporate data from the 2013–14 school year, just before the provision was implemented. Specifically, for schools that adopted community eligibility in our data from 2016–17, we use their free and reduced-price meal enrollment rates to the 2013–14 values. We leave the enrollment rates for non-participating schools unchanged. This exercise shows that while the Community Eligibility Provision has contributed to oversubscription in the free lunch category in recent years—as expected—it is not the primary driver. The provision explains 15 percentage points of the free lunch oversubscription and 9 percentage points of the free-or-reduced-price-lunch oversubscription in our data, or about one third to one fourth of the total oversubscription rates. The implication is that even before the Community Eligibility Provision, enrollment was greatly inflated relative to the National School Lunch Program’s stated income thresholds.

Finally, we consider school lunch and neighborhood poverty data from a larger 27-state sample to show that our findings are not unique to Missouri. This exercise involves different datasets and some additional assumptions, the details of which we provide in another publication. Suffice it to say here that the average oversubscription rates in this larger sample are close to the rates in Missouri. We conclude that the oversubscription of free and reduced-price lunch is likely endemic in the United States.

Why Is Enrollment Oversubscribed?

The degree to which enrollment in the National School Lunch Program is oversubscribed is not well understood—but perhaps it should not be surprising. Outside of direct certification, free and reduced-price lunch enrollment is based on mostly unverified surveys. These are administered by school districts to parents, and both groups have incentives that encourage oversubscription.

Districts may be motivated by concerns about child welfare and academic performance; healthy, ample lunches during school contribute to both. But districts also may be incentivized to encourage and approve parent applications in order to gain access to additional federal, state, and local funding to support low-income students. Meanwhile, parents are incentivized to enroll their children because participation lowers their food costs.

In addition, the United States Department of Agriculture does not seem particularly interested in enforcing income eligibility rules. As noted by David N. Bass, only a very small number of applications go through an income-verification process (see “Fraud in the Lunchroom,” feature, Winter 2010). In fact, according to the department’s Eligibility Manual for School Meals in 2017, attempting to verify more than 3 percent of applications without special cause is prohibited. When eligibility is checked and cannot be verified, the student’s meal subsidies are discontinued, but there are no other consequences. The incentive structure clearly favors districts and parents stretching the boundaries of eligibility.

We do not want to go too far down the path of wondering why the federal agriculture department does not enforce its income-eligibility policies more strictly, much less whether it should. The most obvious explanation is that lax enforcement is a strategy to increase meal access for students in public schools, especially considering other initiatives to promote broader access to subsidized school meals, like community eligibility. This may be an appropriate approach to policy implementation given evidence that children benefit from expanded access to free and subsidized meals.

However, this highlights a fundamental problem with using these data to inform other consequential education policies: enrollment for free or reduced-price school lunch is not a reliable measure of family income. Rather, it is a measure that can be, and seemingly is, manipulated by administrators to promote their own objectives related to meal access and program participation. The end result is that school lunch data are a poor proxy for student poverty counts. The problem is not with the National School Lunch Program’s administration of its own program, but rather the education system’s reliance on enrollment data to achieve objectives for which the program and data were never designed—and are not maintained—to support.

The United States Department of Agriculture does not seem particularly interested in enforcing income eligibility rules for the school lunch program.

A Policy Problem

The use of data from the National School Lunch Program in consequential education policies is ubiquitous. The most prominent example is in state funding formulas, which use free and reduced-price lunch enrollment as the basis for distributing billions of dollars to school districts every year. While states’ allocations of federal Title I aid to support low-income students are based on Census data, not National School Lunch Program data, school lunch data can affect the allocation of federal aid within states and school districts. State accountability policies that track achievement gaps by poverty status also commonly use free and reduced-price lunch enrollment to identify students in the “low-income” group.

The substance and scope of these policies suggest that the consequences of inaccurate school lunch data are significant. For example, consider a funding formula designed to allocate resources to students living at or below 185 percent of the poverty line. If oversubscribed school lunch data are used to proxy for this condition, our estimates from Missouri indicate that the number of students identified as low-income would be overstated by about 40 percent. If the resources to support low-income students are from a fixed budget set aside to support the true target population, the inflated count due to oversubscription would greatly dilute the resources available for each targeted pupil. And that would shift funding away from the most severely disadvantaged students.

Our findings support the position that the education system should move away from relying on National School Lunch Program meal designations as consequential measures of income status. In addition to showing that lunch program participation is greatly oversubscribed, we also note the possibility of substantial variation in oversubscription among school districts. This can lead to a situation where districts receive funding support that is more related to their success in soliciting applications that show eligibility rather than the actual number of low-income families they serve. To the extent that this variation exists, school districts that are more aggressive in signing up students or where parents are more engaged in the application process stand to gain more than districts that are less aggressive, even when their underlying levels of true poverty are the same.

Where do we go from here? Consternation among policymakers caused by the Community Eligibility Provision has led some states to change from using school lunch data to using direct certification data to count low-income students. Our findings in Missouri suggest this shift improves accuracy. However, a caveat to this result is that different states implement federal social-assistance programs differently, and those particularities make it difficult to project how broadly our findings will generalize outside of Missouri. The primary concern is how state policies differ regarding eligibility for food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the primary program that leads to direct certification. Some states allow families with incomes of up to 200 percent of the poverty line to qualify for the program through Broad Based Categorical Eligibility. Missouri is one of a handful of states that does not have Broad Based Categorical Eligibility.

Variation across states in their policies regarding Broad Based Categorical Eligibility has two implications for poverty measurement using direct certification data. First, it means that direct certification status conveys different information about the level of poverty in different states. This has implications both for individual state policies and federal policies that affect multiple states. Second, it is unclear whether direct certification status will accurately measure the income thresholds intended by state rules, given differences among states in program participation and how income rules are enforced. For example, in some states, participation in Medicaid can lead to direct certification, but research shows that many Medicaid-eligible families do not participate in Medicaid. Concerns have also been raised about the fidelity with which Broad Based Categorical Eligibility criteria are enforced.

A larger conceptual concern is that income metrics based on direct certification share a critical flaw with metrics based on free and reduced-price lunch: they are not policy invariant. Like with data from the National School Lunch Program, the criteria that determine direct certification status are subject to continued change as policymakers target evolving policy objectives outside of the education system, not accurate poverty measurement.

Looking Ahead

Despite these concerns, direct certification data are likely the most feasible alternative to school lunch data to identify low-income students and implement education policies to support those students—at least in the short run. Over a longer horizon, we hope for more comprehensive solutions. One aspirational alternative would be to merge education data with tax data from the Internal Revenue Service, state tax agencies, or both, which could capture family income more accurately. This merge is technically feasible, and proof of concept has been established by recent research and at least one state policy. However, to adopt this as common practice would require overcoming political barriers and establishing new avenues of data sharing between agencies in most states.

In the more immediate term, it is worth considering policies that lessen the emphasis on flawed measures of family income in favor of broader indicators of student need. For instance, we could develop generalized measures of student disadvantage to inform education funding and accountability policies. Such measures could incorporate imperfect information on poverty from subsidized meal data and direct certification data but also include information about geographic mobility, attendance patterns, test and other school performance measures, and participation in remedial programs, among other factors. By considering these many facets of disadvantage together, we can improve measurement and expand our understanding of the broad range of need among students.

Ishtiaque Fazlul is a clinical assistant professor at Kennesaw State University. Cory Koedel is a professor at the University of Missouri, where Eric Parsons is an associate teaching professor.

This article appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Fazlul, I., Koedel, C., and Parsons, E. (2023). A Poor Poverty Measure: To identify children in need, look beyond free lunch data. Education Next, 23(2), 48-53.

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How to Get to Sesame Street—in 1990s Russia

Frederick Hess — Wed, 08 Feb 2023 10:00:12 +0000

Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia
by Natasha Lance Rogoff
Rowman & Littlefield, 2022, $26.95; 302 pages.

As reviewed by Frederick M. Hess

Thirty years ago,in the wake of the Cold War, the powers that be at Sesame Workshop recruited a young documentary filmmaker to bring Sesame Street to Russia. This is her story. Natasha Lance Rogoff found herself courting Russian oligarchs, assembling financial deals, recruiting puppeteers, assuaging bureaucratic sensibilities, and seeking to promote a culture of empathy amidst the violent, anything-goes culture of early 1990s Moscow.

Today, Lance Rogoff is an award-winning television producer and the wife of globe-trotting Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff (whom she meets and marries in the course of the narrative) and Putin’s Russia has little use for children’s television. But this is a tale firmly rooted in the early 1990s. And it’s quite a tale, one that doubles as an evocative primer on educational entrepreneurship, cross-national collaboration, cultural literacy, and puppet design.

In launching Ulitza Sesam, Lance Rogoff was tasked with landing Russian and American stakeholders, finding a production partner, and then producing the show. Early on, Lance Rogoff meets with Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky, a former Soviet mathematician who controls Russia’s largest television network. Berezovsky, described as “Russia’s Don Corleone,” meets Lance Rogoff and her sidekick for dinner at Moscow’s first sushi restaurant, where he agrees to provide the necessary $3 million.

Thus the reader appreciates Lance Rogoff’s distress when she receives word that Berezovsky’s car has been blown up. She frantically tries to find out if he survived, and learns that no one knows but that the blast decapitated his driver. Berezovsky did survive the assassination attempt, only to flee to Europe. The deal was kaput. As one Russian television executive had warned, “It’s impossible to negotiate any deals with Russian television executives today, because one year from now any of the people in charge could be fired, in prison, or worse—dead.”

Lance Rogoff eventually connects with post-Soviet oil tycoon Vladimir Slutskyer and his circle of new-money Russian oligarchs (including Russia’s “Sausage King”). She meets them at a cement warehouse with 12-foot-high steel gates, armed guards, and a barbed-wire fence, after Slutskyer explains that the group never meets in the same place twice. Lance Rogoff drily tells the reader, “This is disconcerting, but I guess it’s a good sign they’re taking precautions. Maybe one of them will live long enough to become our partner.” The oligarchs pledge $12 million, but the deal is nixed by Lance Rogoff’s boss, who tells her, “What you’re proposing is a Ponzi scheme—cooked up by a bunch of corrupt businessmen.”

It was back to square one.

Natasha Lance Rogoff appears on set as producer of Ulitza Sesam in Moscow. Her memoir details the challenges of bringing an American-based children’s program to Russia.

Producing the children’s show featured its own frustrations. At an initial meeting with the writer and directors that Lance Rogoff hopes will anchor the show, the backlash is harsh. She shows them some Sesame Street clips. One director shakes his head, “The Sezam Street-style Monsters are not Russian, and they are too strange looking for Russia.” Lida Shurova, who gets hired as head writer, adds, “Russia has a rich, and revered puppet tradition. . . . We don’t need your American Moppets.”

Foreign-language versions of Sesame Street typically use a combination of the original American Muppets and local creations. When Lance Rogoff meets with the celebrated Russian puppeteer Kolya Komov, though, he suggests that the new show simply use his puppets instead of the Muppets. Komov sends the room into gales of laughter when he picks up his traditional folk puppet Petrushka, has it grab a tiny stick, and starts beating the sock puppet in his other hand while shouting in Russian, “I’m going to kill you!” Komov gloats, “You see? Everyone loves my puppets.” There’s also an insistence on including Baba Yaga, a Russian witch who eats children. Lance Rogoff sighs, “We have moved from Petrushka, who beats people, to a cannibal witch.” They eventually settle on three new Slavic Muppets, though the Russians complain that orange monster Kubik doesn’t look sufficiently Russian. Lance Rogoff figures the problem is the spare eyebrows. She explains to the New York puppet designers, “He has to look more like Brezhnev.”

There’s not much smooth sailing. A major curriculum-planning confab is interrupted when Chechen rebels seize Budyonnovsk. Lance Rogoff’s honeymoon ends after 12 hours when she gets a call informing her that soldiers with machine guns have seized her Moscow offices. Getting her Russian production partner to deliver promised funds is a losing struggle. As one director tells her, “It’s best to avoid delays by never writing anything down; that way you’ll never know if there are delays or not.”

At a planning session, a Russian math consultant impatiently explains, “Our preschoolers are much smarter than American children. We will need a more advanced curriculum for our show.” Dubbing American footage is a challenge because the Soviets hadn’t really dubbed international film or television for three decades; they’d had a single announcer read all the dialogue for all the characters in a monotone. And the story of the Russians’ first trip to New York City is rife with telling details—including Lance Rogoff learning that she can’t take them to a highly regarded Italian restaurant because they’d be insulted by the pasta. As her consultant tells her, “Only poor people eat noodles. Find a steakhouse.”

In the end, the show comes together, wins coveted prime-time commitments on both of Russia’s major networks, and is able to recoup its substantial costs. But the cultural tensions are stark, and revealing, throughout. Lance Rogoff muses that, despite the enthusiasm for Western products and entertainment, Russians fear for their national identity and fret over “American culture hijacking Russian childhood.” When Lance Rogoff suggests a show segment on kids running a lemonade stand, it’s rejected because it would portray children engaged in “dirty mercantile activities.” The head writer, a veteran of the old regime, rejects scripts from younger writers, sniffing that they lack “any scientific understanding of writing” and that they’re unrecognized by the Soviet-era Union of Writers.

For those of us who fear that Americans today are too flip about the evils of communism, Lance Rogoff’s frank discussion of the Soviet legacy is most welcome. She relates what one Russian executive tells her: “Every successful Russian enterprise needs a good spy. Unless someone is watching us, we Russians do not work. We’ve lived in a police state for seventy years and are creatures of habit.” In seeking the right musical mix for Sesame Street, she laments, “Since the days of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and Jim Morrison, the Soviet Ministry of Culture had outlawed rock music as ‘decadent, bourgeois, and incompatible with the aims of socialism.’” She notes that the Soviet state silenced “artists whose music aesthetic did not conform to communist cultural ideals.” Those unfamiliar with the realities of Soviet Russia might just get a new appreciation for life in the totalitarian superpower.

Lance Rogoff’s unsparing account is a testament to the power of perseverance, flexibility, and the conviction that this children’s show could matter in the lives of little kids in a land where people had suffered under decades of oppression. It’s ultimately a deeply inspiring tale, even if (as might be expected from a Russian history) it’s also one tempered by an epilogue that notes that Putin canceled Ulitza Sesam in 2010 and has ravaged the shoots of freedom that arose during the post-Soviet pathos.

The volume is far from flawless. There are times when the tenor grows mawkish, the narrative unclear, or the personalities indistinguishable. But such complaints are outweighed by the volume’s charms, such as this: On his first night in America, a Russian staffer tells Lance Rogoff, “People here seem so free.” He sadly ponders, “Everyone looks happy. . . . I wonder what I might have accomplished as a young man if the choice in my country had been greater.”

Lance Rogoff doesn’t know what to say. Finally, the Russian breaks the silence, his voice cracking slightly, “Natulya, I hope you realize how lucky you are that you grew up here.”

Indeed. It’s a sentiment that those of us involved in American education would do well to recall more often.

Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.

This article appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Hess, F.M. (2023). How to Get to Sesame Street— in 1990s Russia: A tale of perseverance, flexibility, and the conviction that a children’s show could matter for kids in a land of oppression. Education Next, 23(2), 64-65.

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PISA: Mission Failure

Montse Gomendio — Tue, 07 Feb 2023 10:00:11 +0000

In the contentious world of education, nearly every proposed reform has its detractors and supporters. Yet common sense might indicate that a policy backed by solid evidence would foster agreement between policymakers, governments, political parties, and education stakeholders. Shouldn’t objective data override ideological divides and political bickering?

Many reformers have looked to assessment and accountability, both within countries and internationally, as a means of encouraging consensus. On the global scene, their hope was that the evidence generated by international assessments could contribute to our common understanding of what works in different countries, since comparative data can identify which policies have boosted student achievement in top-performing nations.

Unfortunately, these expectations have not been met.

Since 2000, the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, has tested 15-years-olds throughout the world in reading, math, and science. Developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or OECD, and administered every three years, PISA is designed to yield evidence for governments on which education policies deliver better learning outcomes as students approach the end of secondary school. The OECD is a member-led organization of nations that provides policy advice to governments and encourages peer learning between countries. Initially, PISA testing involved only the rather homogeneous group of OECD member countries, but its ambition grew. From the first cycle (2000) to the last (2018), the number of participating countries increased from 32 to 79, owing largely to the addition of many low- and middle-income countries. At this point the OECD asserted that “PISA has become the world’s premier yardstick for evaluating the quality, equity and efficiency of school systems, and an influential force for education reform.”

And yet, according to PISA’s own data, after almost two decades of testing, student outcomes have not improved overall in OECD nations or most other participating countries. Of course, that same time period saw a global recession, the rise of social media, and other developments that may have served as headwinds for school-improvement efforts. Even so, PISA’s failure to achieve its mission has led to some blame games. In an effort to explain the flatness of student outcomes over PISA’s lifetime, the OECD asserted in a report on the 2018 test results that PISA “has helped policy makers lower the cost of political action by backing difficult decisions with evidence—but it has also raised the political cost of inaction by exposing areas where policy and practice are unsatisfactory.” The OECD was essentially pointing the finger at its own members and other countries participating in PISA, accusing them of not following PISA’s policy advice.

This finger pointing is based on two assumptions: first and foremost, that PISA policy recommendations are sound, and second, that the evidence provided by PISA data is itself enough to reduce the political costs associated with implementing education reforms.

Both assumptions are seriously flawed. My professional experience as an academic and national education minister allows me to look at this issue from a unique vantage point. When I served as Spain’s secretary of state for education, I became keenly aware of the political pushback that education reforms face, how and why that pushback remains hidden from public debate, and the helplessness policymakers feel when they try to ameliorate differences of opinion by bringing objective evidence to the table. As deputy director for education at the OECD and later head of its Centre for Skills, I enjoyed the privilege of providing advice to governments all over the world, which allowed me to observe how much the success of specific policies and the magnitude of the political costs associated with implementing those policies differ between countries.

PISA has proven to be a successful metric for comparing education systems, a challenge that many thought impossible. The fact that the PISA ranking of countries by student performance is similar to the rankings generated by other international assessments has been used both to argue that PISA is robust and to question the need for another test. But PISA is different, mainly because, within the OECD framework, its role was predefined as a tool for policy advice, and it enjoys the privilege of direct communication channels with governments. Unlike the sponsors of other assessments, PISA officials work tirelessly to enhance the program’s media impact, a strategy that has two closely linked objectives: to magnify PISA’s visibility and to put pressure on governments to follow its recommendations. Clearly, PISA has a better chance of achieving these goals when exposed weaknesses in an education system provoke a media furor. Program officials seem particularly proud of the “PISA shock” that occurs when unexpectedly poor results in a country lead to media outrage. This happened in Germany in the first PISA cycle, and, as the OECD wrote in a 2011 report, “the uproar in the press reflected a very strong reaction to the PISA results. . . . Politicians who ignored it risked their careers.”

Politicians around the world do view PISA as a high-stakes exam that leads to intense media scrutiny and political blame games. But surely the only measure that truly reflects PISA’s success is its ability to shape reforms that improve student outcomes. As we have seen, trends over time reveal a flat line, so what went wrong?

Quality and Equity

Policy recommendations from PISA are based on a combination of two different approaches: 1) quantitative analyses that search for links between student outcomes and a range of features of education systems and 2) qualitative analyses of low- and top-performing countries. Many critics have noted that PISA’s quantitative analyses cannot be used to draw causal inferences, mainly because of the cross-sectional nature of the samples and the almost-exclusive use of correlations. Meanwhile, its qualitative analyses also suffer from serious drawbacks such as cherry-picking. While these issues are well known, others have gone largely unnoticed.

PISA seeks to measure two complementary dimensions of education systems: quality and equity. While quality is typically measured in a straightforward way—that is, in terms of average student test scores—equity is a multidimensional concept that PISA measures using metrics such as the relationship between socioeconomic status and student performance, the degree of differences in student performance within and between schools, and many others. The problem is that none of these variables tell the full story, each of them leads to different conclusions, and PISA’s prism on equity is ultimately too narrow.

To illustrate this point, I turn to my own country, Spain. From the very first cycle, PISA has hailed the Spanish school system as a paragon of equity. In fact, the praise has gone as far as to suggest that Spain has prioritized equity over excellence, a choice that PISA officials have applauded and domestic policymakers have used as an alibi to downplay the poor overall performance of Spanish students. PISA deems Spanish education to be equitable based on the finding that most of the variance in student performance in the country occurs within rather than between schools, a result it interprets as revealing no major differences between neighborhoods based on wealth or between schools based on their selectivity. But there is an alternative interpretation: The equity metric that PISA has chosen to highlight is not appropriate in a country with high rates of grade repetition. Variation within schools is large because PISA tests 15-year-olds irrespective of their grade level. That means that Spain tests a large proportion of students who are one or several grades behind because they have repeated grades at least once. The additional problem is that focusing on a single variable while ignoring the bigger picture leads to mistaken conclusions. Grade repetition in Spain is a reliable proxy for early school leaving, which, in turn, leads to a high rate of youth unemployment and a large number of individuals who are not in school, the workforce, or training.

Unfortunately, in Spain the dropout rate has hovered around 30 percent for decades, and when I became secretary of state for education in 2012, at the peak of the financial crisis, the rate of youth unemployment was above 50 percent. It is simply wrong to define as equitable an education system where nearly one in every three students (most of them disadvantaged students or migrants) drops out of school without a minimum level of knowledge and skills.

Labeling Spain’s school system as equitable is not an isolated case of misdiagnosis, since PISA also defines as equitable the education systems in countries such as Brazil, China, Mexico, and Vietnam, where a substantial proportion of 15-year-olds do not attend school, either because they never did or because they dropped out. It is mistaken to suggest that lessons about equity can be drawn from these countries.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) headquarters in Paris is where PISA was developed to assess students in reading, math, and science.

Wrongheaded Recommendations

These mistakes mean PISA incorrectly identifies the countries that should serve as role models, but what really matters is the policy recommendations PISA develops after comparing many countries. In a nutshell, out of concern for equity, the program warns against the implementation of any measures that could lead to segregation, such as ability grouping, school choice, and early tracking. This advice seems to be influenced more by ideology than evidence, since none of PISA’s own statistical analyses justify such recommendations.

Consider the case of vocational education and training. PISA’s conclusion is that it lowers student performance in the subjects tested by the program—reading, math, and science; thus, PISA’s recommendation is to postpone vocational education until upper secondary school to minimize the harm. However, the vast majority of participating countries already follow this practice, stipulating that students cannot choose vocational education until the age of 16. Since PISA assesses 15-year-olds, the number of vocational students it tests in most countries is zero. In those few countries where students follow different tracks at younger ages, the results do not always support the conclusion that vocational students perform less well. Thus, PISA is poorly positioned to provide policy recommendations on this topic.

Another questionable policy recommendation from PISA concerns school choice, about which the OECD concludes that, after correcting for socioeconomic status, students do not perform better in private schools than in public schools. These analyses, however, lump private schools together with government-funded, privately managed charter schools, thus making it impossible to draw separate conclusions about charter schools, which in many countries are the real target of controversy. More elaborate analyses using data from many international assessments, as well as other studies, have concluded that school choice often does lead to better student outcomes without necessarily generating segregation and that some of the few countries with early tracking show little (if any) differences in student performance and employability rates for vocational-education students. PISA needs to pay more attention to academic research and look at the broader picture.

PISA’s qualitative analyses rely heavily on differences between Nordic countries and others. In particular, the sharp contrast in PISA’s first cycle between the unexpected success of Finland and the unexpected poor performance of Germany has crystallized into an influential legend: that inclusive policies in place in Finland at the time led to both quality and equity and should be emulated, while the heavily tracked system in Germany led to inequity and should be avoided. Nordic societies were egalitarian long before PISA started, however. The alternative explanation is that in egalitarian societies teachers deal with a rather uniform student population, and therefore these countries can, without much risk, implement inclusive policies that tend to treat all students similarly. In contrast, less-egalitarian societies may require differentiated approaches and policies to meet the challenges that come with a heterogeneous student population. A number of comparative analyses show a correlation between the degree of economic inequality and the extent of disparities in student outcomes. Thus, the right question to ask is: To what extent can education systems compensate for large social, economic, and skills inequalities, and how?

I will return briefly to Spain which, compared to Nordic countries, is a rather inequitable society, not just economically but also in terms of skills. According to the OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills, adults in Spain have low skill levels compared to their counterparts in most European countries. What’s more, because in Spain universal access to education came about relatively late and the dropout rate has been high for decades, older Spaniards have very low skill levels, as do the relatively large proportion of adults of all ages who dropped out of school early. Among populations with such a lopsided distribution of skills, children entering school have very different starting points, levels of support at home, and access to resources. For teachers to be effective, it may be necessary to adopt practices that reduce student heterogeneity through the use of ability grouping or, in more extreme cases, different tracks. If these measures are not implemented early enough, students who are behind when they start school may not be able to catch up with their peers and, as they lag farther and farther behind, may end up repeating grades. In the 1990s, Spain implemented a rather radical comprehensive reform that delayed the start of the vocational-education track by two years (moving the starting age from 14 to 16) and avoided any differential treatment of students until the age of 16. This system was designed, as the OECD recognizes, for the sake of equity. But it failed: early school leaving increased as 14-year-olds no longer had a vocational option.

Latin America is also a region where levels of inequality are very high. Most countries there follow the egalitarian rules (no early tracking, no ability grouping, almost-nonexistent vocational education), leading to poor educational outcomes: low student achievement and high rates of grade repetition and early school leaving. In these countries, more than 70 percent of teachers and principals report that broad heterogeneity in students’ ability levels within classrooms is the main barrier to learning.

Political Pushback

These examples point to a broader conclusion: policy recommendations cannot be universal, because what works in egalitarian societies may lead to bad outcomes in societies with high levels of inequity. Education systems should instead follow a sequence of steps as they mature. Singapore shows the way. A few decades ago, Singapore had an illiterate population and very few natural resources. The country made a decision to invest in human capital as the engine of economic growth and prosperity, and, in a few decades, it became the top performer in all international assessment programs, thanks to an excellent and evolving education system (see Figure 1). But PISA does not draw any lessons from the fact that Singapore started improving by implementing tracking in primary school in an effort to decrease its high dropout rate. Once this was achieved, the country delayed tracking until the end of primary school. Even today, however, Singapore remains one of the few countries with early tracking, along with Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland.

Singapore is one of the education superpowers of East Asia, a group that also includes South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and certain regions within China. While Finland was PISA’s top performer in reading in the first cycle (when a small number of countries was compared), student outcomes in that country have since declined. In contrast, these East Asian countries consistently outperform other nations—particularly in math and science—and their extraordinary outcomes continue to improve. The comparison between this group and the low-performing countries in Latin America (that is, countries on the opposite poles in the PISA rankings) is useful in examining PISA’s second assumption: that the evidence provided by PISA data is itself enough to minimize the political costs associated with implementing education reforms.

Teacher quality is widely recognized as key to both the success of East Asian countries and the failure of Latin American countries. In East Asia, only top-performing students can enter education-degree programs, and, throughout their careers, teachers continue to develop their skills via demanding professional-development pathways. This emphasis on teachers’ lifelong learning means that they spend less time in the classroom, a trade-off that leads to large class sizes. In contrast, in Latin American countries, students in education-degree programs are academically weak, selection mechanisms to enter the profession are ineffective, and accountability mechanisms are almost nonexistent. As a result, teachers tend to have high levels of skills in East Asian countries and weaker skills in Latin American countries.

There is widespread recognition that the main constraint to raising teacher quality in Latin America is political. Unions in the region are very powerful by global standards, and they put huge pressures on governments to defend their interests, among which small class size is prominent. Smaller classes mean more teachers and more union members. A larger membership results in greater monetary resources and the increased power that comes with them. In contrast, union power in top-performing East Asian countries is very weak. This crucial difference is what makes the implementation of certain policies (such as large class sizes or rigorous teacher training and stricter selection mechanisms) very costly in political terms in Latin America, while such political costs barely exist among top-performing countries in East Asia.

The evidence from PISA on class size is one of the most robust results about what does not work in education. Decreasing class size uses up a vast amount of resources and seems to have no impact on student performance at the system level, so PISA’s policy recommendation has been to increase class size. However, many countries (including OECD members) have not acted on this evidence-based recommendation. They have continued to reduce class size over time because of the huge political costs of not doing so. Most increases in education spending have therefore gone toward a strategy that has no impact on student outcomes. This example suggests that evidence, no matter how robust, is unlikely
to diminish the high political costs associated with reforms that result in the redistribution of the vast resources (and power) that education systems command.

PISA seems to misunderstand the nature of the political costs that reformers face. Those who oppose change are not resisting it because they haven’t been convinced of the merits of the reforms. Evidence won’t change their position. Decreases (or lack of increases) in investment generate a head-on conflict with the vested interests of unions and other stakeholders that will strongly oppose policies that reduce the resources these players receive. These vested interests tend to be hidden in the political debate, since pressures to decrease class size in order to increase the number of teachers are often presented as attempts to improve the quality of education.

Students in London sit for their PISA exams in 2017. Although the United Kingdom was among the top-scoring countries, Asian nations like China and Singapore performed better.

Mistaken Assumptions

In conclusion, PISA’s two assumptions—that PISA’s policy recommendations are right and that the evidence provided by PISA data is enough to minimize the political costs of attempting education reform—are flawed. First, some of PISA’s conclusions are based on weak evidence. The greater problem, though, is that most policy recommendations are strongly context-dependent, and PISA’s recommendations may be difficult for policymakers to interpret correctly if they lack precise knowledge of their education system’s state of maturity. Ignoring this fact and making universal policy recommendations has dire consequences for many countries, particularly those most in need. It would be much more helpful for PISA to look at countries that have achieved gains and try to extract lessons for other countries that had similar starting points when they joined PISA but have not improved.

Policymakers should remain aware, though, that reforms cause intense clashes of interest when resources are redistributed. That is especially the case when powerful unions are among the losers. Evidence has nothing to do with the nature of such conflicts. Those reformers who have tried and failed when confronted with such huge political costs need better advice from PISA, not a reprimand.

Montse Gomendio is a research professor at the Spanish Research Council. Formerly, she served as Spain’s secretary of state for education, as OECD’s deputy director for education, and as head of its Centre for Skills. She is co-author of Dire Straits: Education Reforms, Ideology, Vested Interests and Evidence (2023).

This article appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Gomendio, M. (2023). PISA: Mission Failure – With so much evidence from student testing, why do education systems continue to struggle? Education Next, 23(2), 16-22.

The post PISA: Mission Failure appeared first on Education Next.

Resisting the Youth Sports Industrial Complex

Jonathan V. Last — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 10:00:02 +0000

Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania are Ruining Kids’ Sports—And Why It Matters
by Linda Flanagan
Portfolio, 2022, $28; 304 pages.

As reviewed by Jonathan V. Last

My younger daughter is a gifted runner. Midway through this year’s cross country season, her times started increasing. She was getting slower. I asked her what was going on. She explained that she didn’t like the feeling of total exhaustion she experienced at the end of a race, or the pressure and expectations of being out in front. So she’d decided to run at a comfortable pace and enjoy being in the pack, with her friends.

Her decision struck me as crazy. The whole point of racing is to run as fast as you can. To find your limits and push past them. To discover the drive to accomplish more than you think possible.

Also: My daughter is nine years old.

It does not matter—at all—what she does in 4th-grade cross country. And yet I almost suggested she should be running her hardest and not focused on “having fun” with her teammates.

The crazy person, it turned out, was me.

That’s the point of Linda Flanagan’s Take Back the Game, a book about the corruption of youth sports. It should be required reading for every parent. It should be handed out in the hospital along with What to Expect the First Year and Healthy Sleep Habits, Happy Child.

Flanagan, a journalist and former running coach, has pulled off a rare trick: she diagnoses a societal sickness, traces the roots of the malady, and prescribes a cure.

Linda Flanagan

The problem is that we have a Youth Sports Industrial Complex that forces kids into single-sport specialization before they hit middle school. It demands that children be involved in (expensive) club and travel sports programs starting in elementary school. It turns parents into ATMs for the businesses in this sector and Uber drivers for their progeny, because Madison must go to practice three nights a week and then, on Saturday, to the tournament that’s three hours away.

Because it’s good for her. Or something.

This sickness has many causes—including declining public funding for recreational sports and free-market dynamics—but the most significant is “college.”

I put “college” in quotation marks, because the problem is not undergraduate education, but what the idea of “college” has come to mean to us. Since 1980, the real-dollar cost of a public, four-year degree has increased more than 350 percent. At the same time, the admissions process for elite—or even just pretty good—colleges has come to resemble the Hunger Games.

My oldest kid is a high-level baseball player. He’s played with dozens of talented boys over the years, and not a single one has ever said he hoped to make it to the bigs. All of them talked about getting college scholarships.

As such, relying on achievement in youth sports as a ticket to college has become something like playing the lottery. Parents and kids hope that if they put enough time and money into a sport they can one day cash out with a scholarship—or at least entrance to a “better” school.

As is true with all lotteries, this delusion is based on a warped perception of reality. As Flanagan shows, being a recruited athlete is a huge boost in the college-admissions competition. Accomplished athletes get in to elite schools at four times the rate of legacy candidates. And at smaller schools, the athletes can be a nontrivial percentage of the yield. For instance, Georgetown University holds 158 slots for athletes in each class of 1,600 students.

But the mundane reality is that putting Jimmy into an intensive travel baseball program at age 10 costs at least $5,000 a year. If you invested that money annually in a no-load mutual fund, then you’d have about $50,000 for college by the time Jimmy packed off to State U, whether or not he got a sports scholarship. (This is not financial advice.)

Of course, people play lotteries because they’re desperate. And the evolution of college has made many parents plenty desperate.

***

The most valuable section of Take Back the Game is Flanagan’s conclusion, which reads as part policy tract and part self-help book for parents. Her suggestions are powerful because they’re so obvious.

Her first dictum is to delay entry into organized sports as long as possible. Don’t sign them up for pee-wee soccer to get a jump on the club scene—send them out into the yard to kick the ball around. Have a catch with them. Shoot baskets. Let them tumble and do cartwheels in the grass. As Flanagan says, “Just let them play.”

It really is that simple.

Flanagan understands that at some point kids may want to progress to the organized level—and from there, they might get sucked into the maw of travel sports. That’s because, as the 19th century journalist Walter Bagehot observed about financial leverage, once one person has it, everyone else must use it just to keep pace.

So if your kid winds up inside the Youth Sports Industrial Complex, give her off-ramps. All the time. Make it clear that the only reason for her to do the sport is that she wants to. That if she decides to stop swimming and take up the oboe, then all of the time and resources put into swimming over the years won’t have been “wasted”—that those experiences will have helped shape who she is.

In short: when it comes to your kid’s athletic development, present-value considerations should always dwarf future-expected returns.

Another key precept from Flanagan: The family is more important than kids’ sports.

I know people who put off family vacations because their 7th grader had a basketball tournament over winter break.

Think about what that means. Fifty years from now you, the parent, might be dead and gone. Your family could have gone on vacation and made memories that would have lasted their whole lives. And you traded that away for a couple of meaningless basketball games that no one will even remember next month?

No. The moment you get involved in travel sports, make certain that both your kids and the organization understand that family always comes first. And if the club isn’t okay with that, then find one that is.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson from Take Back the Game is that parents have agency. Youth sports have become warped, but parents don’t have to go along with it. They can carve out better paths for their families by being clear-eyed and intentional.

Jonathan V. Last is the editor of The Bulwark.

This article appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Last, J.V. (2023). Resisting the Youth Sports Industrial Complex: Children’s sports are corrupted, but parents don’t have to play along. Education Next, 23(2), 62-63.

The post Resisting the Youth Sports Industrial Complex appeared first on Education Next.

Gifted and Talented Programs Don’t Cause School Segregation

Owen Thompson — Tue, 31 Jan 2023 10:00:12 +0000

For decades, gifted and talented programs have offered small, selected groups of students enrichment and faster-paced lessons. They also have stoked controversy and allegations of contributing to racial segregation and academic inequality. New York City’s program, for example, was planned for virtual elimination in 2021 based on longstanding concerns about relatively low enrollment rates for Black and Latino students, who account for about 70 percent of all city students but 25 percent of gifted and talented students. After public outcry, the program was preserved, but with major changes: more classes, including in less-advantaged neighborhoods, and more pathways for students to qualify.

Racial segregation and racial gaps in student achievement in U.S. public schools are well-documented trends. So too are race-based differences in student enrollment in general-education versus gifted and talented programs. But are gifted and talented programs drivers of racial segregation? If so, to what extent?

To explore these questions, I look at the federal education department’s Civil Rights Data Collection surveys, which provide detailed data on the existence and racial composition of gifted and talented programs at virtually every elementary school in the United States. I focus on the period between 2009 to 2018 to investigate and compare the racial compositions of gifted and talented and general-education programs. I then apply standard indices of racial segregation to determine the extent to which gifted programs contribute to within-school segregation.

Overall, gifted and talented programs do disproportionately enroll more white and Asian students and fewer Black and Hispanic students. However, they have only a minor impact on racial segregation, in part because they enroll relatively small numbers of American schoolchildren. When I track enrollment changes at specific elementary schools before and after gifted programs are initiated or discontinued, I find virtually no impact on the percentages of white and Asian students. Gifted and talented programs are not a major contributor to racial segregation in U.S. elementary schools.

Who Is Gifted?

Gifted and talented programs have been a feature of American public schools for nearly a century. Nationwide, these programs enroll a relatively small share of students. In 2017–18, for example, 1.6 million elementary-school students were enrolled in gifted programs out of 23.6 million students overall, or 6.9 percent of total enrollment.

There is no single standard definition of giftedness. Instead, states and school districts apply locally selected measures of intelligence and ability to determine which students are accelerated relative to their peers. These encompass a broad spectrum of approaches: IQ, demonstrated ability in multiple intelligences, creativity and problem solving, and focus and task commitment. Some programs use screening tests to determine entry, while others are based on teacher recommendation and portfolio review.

The structures and operations of gifted and talented programs are similarly diverse. While no official data is collected on their basic operations, a 2019 national survey of more than 1,200 gifted and talented teachers and coordinators conducted by Education Week provides some insight into common practices.

The survey found that the most common method of delivering gifted and talented instruction was in “pull-outs,” where identified students are removed from the mainstream classroom for a portion of instructional time. Some 86 percent of gifted and talented educators reported using pull-outs compared to 32 percent reporting self-contained classrooms. The most common gifted and talented services were “content enrichment,” where instruction provided deeper coverage of grade-level topics, and “content acceleration,” in which students moved more quickly to new topics compared to their general-education peers down the hall.

There is little question that segregationists historically used within-school tracking programs like gifted and talented education as an intentional strategy to subvert legally required school integration. Many school districts in the South initiated test-based classroom assignments in the wake of strong school desegregation enforcement in the 1970s, for example. While many of these programs were successfully challenged in the courts, the general practice of ability grouping was not itself ruled unconstitutional.

Contemporary implementations of gifted and talented programming are rarely seen as explicit attempts to resurrect de jure racial segregation. But racial gaps in tests scores, as well as other common features of gifted and talented screening processes, such as the availability of fee-based aptitude test-score prep programs, have the strong potential to result in de facto racial imbalances in gifted and talented programs and contribute to overall racial segregation. In addition, research suggests that many common screening processes are subject to some degree of racial bias; for example, Jason Grissom and Christopher Redding found that Black students with high tests scores are less likely than similar non-Black students to be referred to gifted programs, especially when they are taught by a non-Black teacher.

Data and Method

My analysis is based on data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection surveys, which are conducted biennially and are mandatory for virtually every public school in the country. I focus on the five surveys administered from 2009–10 to 2017–18, which included consistent data about gifted and talented programs. These surveys collect information on a wide variety of school characteristics including enrollment, discipline, teacher characteristics, expenditures, and curricular offerings, and most of the data is disaggregated by student race and ethnicity, sex, English proficiency, and disability status. For this analysis, I consider only whether the school operated a gifted and talented program in each year, as well as the race-specific enrollments of the gifted and talented program (when present) and of the full school. I include public charter, magnet, and alternative schools offering any grade from K through 6 in all 50 states plus Washington, D.C., but not schools that offered only a special education curriculum or were not observed in all five surveys. The resulting data set includes 46,704 public elementary schools observed five times over a span of nine school years.

I calculate race-specific enrollments using the racial and ethnic categorizations that were collected in a consistent fashion across all survey years. I divide enrollment into two main groups: Hispanic and Black students, and white and Asian students. (The group of Hispanic and Black students also includes a small number of Native American students.) This allows me to identify racial differences in gifted and talented program enrollments and analyze how the racial composition of those programs affects racial segregation between and within schools.

Enrollment rates by race confirm that widely held perceptions about gifted and talented programs are correct. These programs disproportionately enroll white and Asian students compared to Black and Hispanic students.

Nationwide, the average gifted and talented program enrolls 60.1 percent white students and 8.2 percent Asian students. These students account for smaller shares of enrollment in non-gifted programs: 50.9 percent and 5.1 percent, respectively (see Figure 1). The opposite is true of Black and Hispanic students: Black students account for 11 percent of gifted and talented students but 17 percent of non-gifted enrollments, while Hispanic students account for 19.8 percent of gifted and talented students but 25.5 percent of non-gifted enrollments.

Because the racial composition of many gifted and talented programs does not resemble schools’ overall enrollment, critics have argued that such programs essentially constitute independent, racially segregated programs within supposedly integrated schools. This argument holds that standard between-school segregation measures substantially understate the true level of racial segregation within schools, and that eliminating gifted and talented programs therefore could be an effective desegregation strategy.

To evaluate this claim, I calculate two standard indices of segregation for all schools in the sample. I then do the same calculations as if gifted and talented programs are standalone, separate schools, to see how much gifted and talented programs contribute to racial segregation within schools.

First, I calculate the dissimilarity index. When applied to schools, this index measures how evenly members of different racial groups are distributed across different schools relative to a district’s overall enrollment. It can be interpreted as the share of students from one school who would need to move to another school in order to make the racial composition of each school match that of the district as a whole. The dissimilarity index therefore ranges from 0 to 1, with larger values indicating greater segregation.

Then I calculate the exposure index, which measures how intensively one group of students is exposed to another group. It can be interpreted as the probability among members of one racial group that a randomly selected peer will be from a different racial group. My analysis focuses on the exposure of Black and Hispanic students to white and Asian students, such that the exposure index values give the share of Black and Asian students’ peers who are white or Asian. Note that unlike the dissimilarity index, larger values indicate less segregation.

To isolate the influence of gifted and talented programs on racial segregation, I first calculate these two indices between all elementary schools in the same district. I then re-calculate each index between all elementary schools and all gifted and talented programs within the same district. The latter measure therefore reflects both between-school segregation and any within-school segregation that results from gifted and talented programs. Finally, I calculate the difference between the two measures for both indices, which shows how racial segregation would change if gifted and talented programs were discontinued and those students returned to non-gifted classrooms at their schools.

Results

Gifted and talented programs do contribute to racial segregation—but not by very much. In looking at school districts that have gifted and talented programs, which includes about 70 percent of the total dataset, my analysis indicates that if these programs were ended and gifted students were returned to non-gifted classrooms, the value of the dissimilarity index would decline by about 0.03, or approximately 18 percent of its mean value.

Overall, racial dissimilarity between all public elementary schools in districts that have gifted and talented programs is 0.171 (see Figure 2). When I recalculate that index as though gifted and talented programs were their own separate schools, racial dissimilarity increases to 0.201. However, because most gifted programs operate as occasional pullouts, rather than standalone classrooms, this estimate likely overstates their contribution to racial segregation.

I also conduct the same calculations for all U.S. school districts, including those that do not have gifted programs. Racial dissimilarity between schools is 0.151 overall and 0.172 when gifted and talented programs are included in the analysis as separate schools, a difference of 0.021. Finally, I calculate dissimilarity for larger, diverse U.S. districts, which I define as serving more than 35,000 students and where Black and Hispanic students make up between 10 percent and 90 percent of enrollment. In these districts, racial dissimilarity is 0.439 overall and 0.452 when gifted and talented programs are included as separate schools, a difference of 0.013.

In looking at the exposure index, I find essentially no impact from gifted and talented programs on a Black or Hispanic student’s likelihood of having white or Asian students as classmates. In districts that have gifted and talented programs, the overall exposure index is 0.649. The exposure index is 0.643 when gifted and talented programs are included as separate schools, a difference of -0.006.

This may seem incongruent with the overrepresentation of white and Asian students in gifted and talented programs. However, remember that gifted and talented programs account for only 6.9 percent of total school enrollments, a relatively small share. In addition, 27.3 percent of gifted students are Black and Hispanic. While that is a smaller percentage than overall Black and Hispanic enrollment of 47.7 percent, it is still a substantial number of students relative to overall gifted and talented enrollment.

I then look at how starting or ending a gifted and talented program affects a school’s racial composition. Public debate has focused on whether these programs disproportionately attract and retain white and Asian students who might otherwise enroll in other schools, so I focus on changes in white and Asian student enrollment in the years before and after a program is added or discontinued. About one-fourth of schools, or 12,037 out of 46,704 total, either initiated or eliminated a gifted and talented program during the study period. My analysis tracks these trends for program starts and cancellations in 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2018, resulting in eight specific event studies.

I do not find any consistent evidence that gifted and talented programs have a causal effect on schools’ race-specific enrollments (see Figure 3). None of the eight studies reveal a trend in white and Asian enrollment after the elimination or initiation of a gifted and talented program. In addition, there are no indications that gifted and talented programs are started or discontinued in response to changing racial compositions.

Questions to Consider

My analysis indicates that gifted and talented programs are a small or negligible contributor to racial segregation in U.S. elementary schools. Eliminating all gifted and talented programs nationally would have a minimal impact on standard measures of racial segregation, and the presence of a gifted and talented program does not appear to causally impact the racial composition of enrollments over time.

One caveat of these findings is that while the reductions in segregation that could potentially be achieved through modifying gifted and talented offerings may be modest overall—at approximately 18 percent with respect to the dissimilarity index and close to zero for the exposure index—policy changes related to gifted and talented programming may be more practical to implement than those affecting the sorting of students between schools. For example, busing programs or redrawing enrollment zones often decided at higher levels and are extremely contentious. Given this, although changing gifted and talented programing can certainly be controversial as well, it may be a relatively actionable step that district or even school-level policy makers can undertake to modestly remediate racial segregation.

Another caveat is that gifted and talented education is primarily a feature of elementary schools. Previous research has found that within-school segregation is less extensive in primary schools than in secondary schools. An analysis of tracking and racial segregation at the high-school level, such as in Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate classes, might yield different conclusions. A third caveat is that there may be subtle interactions between racial segregation between and within schools. For example, an analysis of Hispanic student enrollment in North Carolina classrooms found districts with less segregation between schools also have more segregation within schools. Further research on this and related patterns would be valuable.

Nonetheless, my findings suggest that any impacts of gifted and talented programming on racial segregation at the elementary-school level are likely to be minimal. The questions facing school and district leaders, then, are whether these selective programs benefit those young students identified as gifted or harm the students who are not. While the analyses reported here do not directly prescribe whether gifted and talented programs are a desirable overall education policy, they do indicate that the effects of existing gifted programs on racial segregation should not be a first-order policy consideration.

Owen Thompson is an associate professor at Williams College.

This article appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Thompson, O. (2023). Gifted and Talented Programs Don’t Cause School Segregation: Uneven enrollments, but minor impacts on racial separation. Education Next, 23(2), 54-49.

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The Biggest Enemy of Equity Isn’t Excellence. It’s Mediocrity.

Michael J. Petrilli — Thu, 19 Jan 2023 16:53:40 +0000

Students at Stuyvesant High School leave after classes end for the week, March 13, 2020, in New York.

Last fall, Stephen Sawchuk published an Education Week article exploring why “educational equity” had become a “trigger word”—even though the notion has been baked into federal policy for decades. “Equity may be the law,” he wrote, “but we don’t agree on what it means.”

I can understand Sawchuk’s confusion because, properly construed, the call for greater equity can and should command widespread support from Americans across the ideological spectrum. A potentially unifying argument might go something like this:

In a great country like ours, we should aspire for every child to grow up to achieve his or her full potential. Anything less is a waste of talent and a blemish on human dignity and flourishing.

Schools have a particular role to play in helping children achieve their full academic potential, and supporting roles in helping children develop socially, emotionally, artistically, and athletically, as well.

Yet we know that our country is failing to live up to this aspiration because millions of boys and girls are failing to live up to their full potential. And we know that most of the reasons have to do with what happens between conception and kindergarten—that the strains of poverty, family instability, parental substance abuse, and other social ills mean that many children enter schools far behind what their cognitive trajectory otherwise could have been.

We know this in part because of the evidence of achievement gaps that can be measured at school entry, if not before. If we reject the notion that genetic differences drive racial achievement gaps as morally and empirically dubious—which we absolutely should—then the explanation for their existence as early as age five must be differing life circumstances, including the gaping chasms in socioeconomic status and its associated opportunities.

A major focus of “equity work,” then, is to close these gaps in the zero-to-five years—both because it’s the right thing to do, and so that all children have the opportunity to achieve their full potential—cognitively, academically, and otherwise.

This project has tended to be the domain of the political left, with its calls for better pre- and post-natal healthcare; the eradication of environmental pollutants like lead paint; direct financial supports for families with young children, like 2021’s expanded and fully refundable child tax credits; and expanded public support for high quality childcare. Yet the political right has contributions to make, as well, with its calls for greater personal responsibility; greater family stability, especially via married, two-parent families; and for welfare programs that encourage—rather than discourage—marriage and work, which have been shown to lead to better outcomes for kids.

Schools also have a critical role to play, especially at the elementary level, where students are still young enough for a great education to make a significant difference in their academic trajectories. Schools may not be able to overcome all of the damage of poverty, family instability, and their associated ills, but they can do a lot, as we know from the markedly different achievement trajectories of children in the highest-performing high-poverty schools—many of them public charter schools—compared to kids in more typical school settings.

Educational equity, then, means providing children, and especially poor children, with excellence—excellent instruction, excellent curricula, excellent teachers, excellent tutoring, excellent enrichment. Some of that costs more money in high-poverty settings, so yes, educational equity demands that we spend more public dollars on the students who need it most.

The greatest enemy of equity, then, is mediocrity. It’s the everyday bureaucratic dysfunction that remains all too common in American education. It’s the decisions that public officials take that block excellent schools, including excellent public charter schools, from growing or replicating. It’s the inertia that keeps traditional public schools from retaining many of their best young teachers. It’s the refusal to intervene when a principal is not up to the task of creating a culture of excellence.

Note what is not an enemy of equity: excellence. Indeed, far from it—excellence is the antidote to inequity.

* * *

And yet—back to the puzzle that Sawchuk presented in his article—some “equity advocates” have turned the notion into a “trigger word” by arguing that excellence is indeed the enemy. By their line of thinking, anything that helps a subgroup of children achieve at high levels, or even just celebrates that achievement—such as gifted-and-talented programs, exam schools, or National Merit Scholarships—is at war with equity. These advocates see equity as a zero-sum game. Rather than focus on helping every child achieve his or her potential, potential that inevitably varies from individual to individual, they seek a world in which the outcomes children achieve are closer to equal—even if that equality comes by leveling-down the high achievers.

Needless to say, this conception of equity is highly unpopular, and not just on the political right. As well it should be because it’s also morally bankrupt. It is simply wrong to embrace policies and practices and seek to put a ceiling on any child’s achievement—just as it is wrong to block efforts to get all students to a floor of basic literacy and numeracy.

John Gardner once asked if we can “be equal and excellent too.” The answer is an unequivocal “yes!” And in the domain of racial equity, the way to do that is to ensure that all children, from every racial and ethnic group, get what they need to live up to their full potential. And for high-potential children from underrepresented groups in particular, it means identifying their talent early, cultivating it through gifted-and-talented programs and the like, and keeping them on a trajectory of high achievement all the way through high school and beyond.

It bears repeating: Excellence is not the enemy of equity, it is the antidote to inequity. Equity advocates would do well to keep that in mind.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

This article appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Petrilli, M.J. (2023). The Biggest Enemy of Equity Isn’t Excellence. Education Next, 23(2), 5.

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Numeracy for All

Shalinee Sharma — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 10:00:06 +0000

The Concrete to Pictorial to Abstract framework provides students with a deeper understanding.

For the first time since the 1990s, in nearly every state, fourth graders and eighth graders who took the National Assessment of Educational Progress exam lost ground in math. Leading researchers have stipulated that low-income students may have lost up to 22 weeks of learning instruction. The surrounding rhetoric indicates that even with learning recovery efforts, we may have lost a generation of math learners.

While these sobering statistics have provided a long overdue wake-up call, kids have been struggling in math for decades. Even before the pandemic, the United States ranked 37th in math out of 77 countries that participated in the latest Programme for International Student Assessment. The pandemic has only intensified the need to ensure U.S. students deeply understand math.

As the CEO and co-founder of Zearn, I’ve spent the past decade working alongside educators and researchers studying real-time data on building math understanding. What I know for sure is that every kid can learn math and that we can take steps to create a numerate society. Among the key steps to doing that:

Create learning experiences that equip students to make sense of math.

As a sixth grader in Buffalo, New York, I was in the advanced math class. I remember math as flipping to the next chapter and seeing a brand-new thing that I was going to learn. With each new chapter, I memorized a list of often disconnected procedures.

My memory reflects what international rankings, like PISA, have shown: the traditional American approach to math is not a formula for deep understanding. U.S. students tend to learn by memorization and employ tricks rather than developing true understanding. Across the board, students who characterize themselves as memorizers score lowest on the PISA exam. By contrast, kids outside of the U.S. performed better on PISA because they are more than an inch deep in their math understanding. When teachers present math as a progression of a few big ideas, it leads to deeper understanding.

One of the most proven approaches to do this is the Concrete to Pictorial to Abstract framework. This teaches kids to understand math concepts in an intuitive and tangible way and helps them to see how they can apply their knowledge to real-world problems.

For instance, rather than tell students to memorize that 3 x 0 = 0 or N x 0 = 0 or anything times zero is zero, we start with the concrete. We take out three plates. If the three plates have one cookie each, then we have three cookies or 3 x 1 = 3. If the three plates have two cookies each, then we have six cookies or 3 x 2 = 6.

If we, however, have three plates and zero cookies on each plate, then we have zero cookies, so 3 x 0 = 0. Similarly, if we had 20 plates with zero cookies on them, then that is zero cookies too. It then becomes clear to kids why N x 0 = 0. It’s not a rule to memorize. It’s an idea to understand.

This is how the Concrete to Pictorial to Abstract framework provides students with a deeper understanding. The framework also gives students an anchor when they don’t know how to start or solve a problem. Students who learn this way will look at equations and try to turn them into pictures or stories they can concretely understand. Ultimately, that helps them to tackle any problem.

Accelerate the math learning of every student.

During a short period of time in my childhood, I was very sick and missed a lot of school. When I returned, teachers would try to work with me on every concept I had missed. This was challenging, but we’re talking about weeks of unfinished learning.

Today’s teachers have an unprecedented task of addressing more than two years of disrupted learning, and they simply do not have enough time to go back and reteach everything.

The great news is they don’t have to. A better way forward exists.

Learning acceleration is a promising approach that focuses on teaching students lessons appropriate for their grade level, and reteaching only the skills and lessons from earlier grades that are necessary to understand the new content.

Imagine a seventh grade lesson on negative numbers. Part way through the lesson, a student – let’s call her Brianna – is confronted with this problem: 1.4 / 2 = ?

Brianna is stumped on operations with decimals, specifically division. She is supposed to be learning about negative numbers, a new idea, but she is stuck here.

In a traditional remediation approach, she would be stopped here, and she might not see negative numbers again for weeks or months. Because division of decimals is a fifth-grade concept, she would stop moving forward in and spend her time catching up on fifth-grade content.

Learning acceleration is a different way of helping Brianna. Instead of going back and doing an extensive review of decimal operations, she begins with what she knows: whole-number division (14 / 2=?). She is provided a short lesson that demonstrates how dividing decimals follows all the same rules as dividing whole numbers. Then she goes back to the negative number lesson.

The next few times she confronts decimal operations she needs these short lessons again in the context of her seventh-grade learning. After a little while, however, Brianna has caught up on decimal operations and all the while moved forward in her 7th grade learning of negative numbers.

Implement scalable and coherently connected, extra learning time.

Extra learning time – often in the form of tutoring – is something often only afforded to select students. My sixth-grade twin boys have been fortunate to receive extra support in areas they have needed more help.

Not everyone is so fortunate. To ensure all kids can catch up and move forward in math, we must implement extra learning time at scale. Moreover, this extra time must be coherently connected to what students are learning in core math time. It also must address any confusion on specific topics being taught. Absent this alignment, we are wasting students’ extra learning time.

Recently, one of my sons needed help with ratios, which he was learning in his math class. To promote understanding, his teacher used extended time to address his specific questions and present ratios in a different way. I am grateful that this extra learning time was dedicated to understanding ratios versus having him spend time on concepts he may not have fully mastered from prior grades.

Tennessee and Texas educational leaders have approached their statewide, high-impact tutoring programs in this manner.

Share real-time data to make ongoing, evidence-based improvements.

Data must be used better to continuously improve: to identify what is and isn’t working and to effectively communicate what needs to change to best support students’ learning. Leaders must employ data to drive decisions from selecting curricula and leveraging technology to determining how extra learning time is spent.

By sharing real-time data and partnering with experts from various fields, we can answer the most important questions about how kids come to understand the big ideas in math and apply them in real life. Progress in teaching and learning will not come from making a single, massive change overnight, but from many small, yet critical, evidence-based improvements along the way.

Math is imperative for individuals and for society. It has been critical to my success and my enjoyment as a learner. For this to be true for every kid, we must build a system that ensures numeracy for all. For every student to deeply understand and, dare I say, love learning math, every adult who touches students’ school experiences has a role to play.

Shalinee Sharma is CEO and co-founder of Zearn, a nonprofit educational organization behind the math learning platform used by 1 in 4 elementary-school and 1 million middle-school students nationwide.

This article appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Sharma, S. (2023). Numeracy for All: U.S. kids were struggling in math even before the pandemic. Here are four key ways to help students understand. Education Next, 23(2), 71-72.

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Supreme Court Opens a Path to Religious Charter Schools

Nicole Stelle Garnett — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 14:25:02 +0000

Students at St. Elizabeth of Hungary, a PK-8 private Catholic school in Dallas, work on a lesson.

In June 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court held in Carson v. Makin that Maine violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment by excluding religious schools from a private-school-choice program—colloquially known as “town tuitioning”—for students in school districts without public high schools. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts concluded that “the State pays tuition for certain students at private schools—so long as the schools are not religious. That is discrimination against religion.”

Carson was, in some ways, unremarkable. For the third time in five years, the court held that the Constitution prohibits the government from excluding religious organizations from public-benefit programs, because religious discrimination is “odious to our Constitution.” But the fact that Carson was not groundbreaking does not mean that it is not important. On the contrary, Carson represents the culmination of decades of doctrinal development about constitutional questions raised by programs—including parental-choice programs—that extend public benefits to religious institutions. Among the most important of these questions is whether there is “play in the joints” between the First Amendment’s religion clauses—the Free Exercise Clause and the Establishment Clause—that might permit government discrimination against religious institutions in some situations. Going forward, the answer in almost all cases is likely to be no. Both clauses, the court has now made clear, require government neutrality and prohibit government hostility toward religious believers and institutions. (The court clarified—but did not overturn—its 2003 decision in Locke v. Davey. In that case, the justices upheld, by a vote of 7–2, a Washington State law prohibiting college students from using a state-funded scholarship to train for the ministry; that law, the court ruled, did not violate the Free Exercise clause. Arguably, Carson narrows and effectively confines Locke to its facts by characterizing it as advancing only the “historic and substantial state interest” against using “taxpayer funds to support church leaders.”)

Carson does, however, leave at least two important questions unanswered. The first concerns the decision’s scope. The holding makes explicit that “a State need not subsidize private education. But once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.” Carson is silent, however, on what it means for the government to “subsidize private education.” In particular, it leaves unanswered the question of whether the nondiscrimination mandate applies to charter schools, which are privately operated but designated “public schools” by law in all states—and supported by tax dollars. Does the Free Exercise Clause require states to permit religious charter schools?

The second question concerns which regulations states may lawfully impose as a condition of participation in private-school-choice programs. Right after the court issued its decision, for example, Maine’s attorney general, Aaron Frey, clarified that all private schools taking part in the program, including religious schools, are bound by the Maine Human Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. As a result, while Carson opened the door for religious schools to participate in the tuition-assistance program, many declined to do so because of the tension between the non-discrimination mandate and their religious commitments. Carson says nothing about whether such non-discrimination mandates—or other regulations that some faith-based schools may find objectionable on religious grounds—are constitutionally permissible.

Troy and Angela Nelson, with children Alicia and Royce, were plaintiffs in Carson v. Makin who wanted religious education included in “town tuitioning.”

Understanding Carson

In rural Maine, many small school districts have no high school. Since 1873, the state has given these districts the option of permitting residents to use public funds to attend private schools. Students could use these funds at religious schools until 1980, when the state decided that the Establishment Clause prohibited the practice. At the time, this conclusion was defensible: The Supreme Court’s existing Establishment Clause doctrine could be interpreted to prohibit students from using public funds at religious schools. Beginning in the 1980s, however, the court shifted course and began rejecting challenges to programs aiding religious-school students. When the exclusion of religious schools from the tuition-assistance program was first challenged in 1996, it remained unclear whether the constitution permitted, let alone required, Maine to permit participating students to attend religious schools. (I was one of the lawyers who filed that first challenge, Bagley v. Town of Raymond. We lost on establishment-clause grounds.)

In 2002, in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, the Supreme Court upheld a voucher program enabling disadvantaged children in Cleveland to attend religious schools. The court concluded that the program did not violate the Establishment Clause for two reasons. First, it was “religion neutral,” giving students the option of attending either secular or religious schools. Second, religious schools benefited only indirectly, as the result of parents’ independent choices.

Zelman clarified that states could include religious schools in private-school-choice programs but was silent about whether they could choose not to, as Maine continued to do. The answer to this question unfolded in three recent cases. Trinity Lutheran Church v. Comer (2017) held that Missouri unconstitutionally excluded a religious preschool from a playground resurfacing program. Espinoza v. Montana (2020) found that the Montana Supreme Court violated the Free Exercise Clause by invalidating, on state-constitutional grounds, a private-school-choice program because it included religious schools. And finally, Carson rejected the argument that there is a constitutionally relevant distinction between discrimination based on the religious character (or status) of an institution and discrimination motivated by a desire to avoid spending public funds on religious conduct (for religious use). In Carson, this so-called “status-use” distinction undergirded the argument that Maine was not discriminating against schools for being religious, but rather because they taught religion. Carson clarifies that the court has “never suggested that use-based discrimination is any less offensive to the Free Exercise Clause” than status-based discrimination. This clarification by the court is important. Since integrating religious and secular instruction characterizes schools in many faith traditions, asking them to stop teaching religion is tantamount to asking them to stop being religious.

Plaintiffs Dave and Amy Carson received no tuition assistance from the town of Glenburn, Maine, for their daughter Olivia to attend Bangor Christian Schools.

Religious Charter Schools

Carson has few immediate implications for existing private-school-choice programs. Thirty-one states, D.C., and Puerto Rico each have one or more such programs, and only two states—Maine and Vermont—ever excluded religious schools. In the medium term, however, the Carson decision may open the door to (and certainly will prompt litigation about) religious charter schools. Here’s why: Carson makes clear that states choosing to fund private education must extend benefits to religious schools. And, although Carson does not address the question of religious charter schools, if charter schools are constitutionally analogous to private schools then—as one state attorney general recently concluded—charter-school laws prohibiting religious charter schools (as all such laws do) are unconstitutional.

This question has enormous implications for education policy, since charter schools command a sizable portion of the K–12 market. While the private-school-choice movement has gained tremendous momentum in recent years, only just over 700,000 students—about 1.3 percent of all K–12 students or 15 percent of all private-school students—participated in a private-school-choice program in 2021–22. In contrast, charter schools, which are authorized in 44 states and D.C., educate nearly 3.5 million students (7 percent of all public-school students). Charter schools are privately operated but universally designated by law to be “public schools.” All state charter laws require charter schools to be “secular”; many prohibit religious institutions from operating them at all.

The constitutionality of laws prohibiting religious charter schools was in question before Carson. Indeed, Justice Stephen Breyer flagged the issue in dissent in Espinoza, asking, “What about charter schools?” He reiterated his question in his Carson dissent: “What happens once ‘may’ becomes ‘must’? . . . Does it mean that . . . charter schools must pay equivalent funds to parents who wish to give their children a religious education?”

The answer turns on a legal doctrine unrelated to religion, known as the “state action” doctrine. Under this doctrine, privately operated entities are not bound by the federal Constitution except when their actions are effectively the government’s actions. The state-action question is pivotal, because the Supreme Court has made clear that the Establishment Clause requires government actors, including district public schools, to be secular. Thus, if charter schools are state actors, state laws requiring them to be secular are not only constitutionally permissible, but also constitutionally required. On the other hand, if charter schools are not state actors, then states, after Carson, not only may permit religious charter schools but also must. That is to say, if charter schools are, for federal constitutional purposes, private schools, then charter-school programs are programs of private choice, and states cannot prohibit religious schools from participating in such programs.

Kendra Espinoza, with daughters Sarah and Naomi, won a Supreme Court ruling in 2020 for a Montana state scholarship program to include religious schools.

Charter schools are, by design, distinct from district schools. Most importantly, they are privately operated and exempt from many public-school regulations. But are they different enough from district schools to be treated, for federal constitutional purposes, as private schools? The answer is far from straightforward. The Supreme Court has articulated a number of factors to determine whether a private institution is a state actor. These include whether it is performing a function that has been “traditionally the exclusive prerogative of the State”; whether the government controls it to such a degree that it is a governmental agent; and the degree of interdependence (or “entwinement”) between the government and the private actor. The overarching inquiry is whether there is a “sufficiently close nexus between the state and the challenged action to attribute the action to the government.” As the Supreme Court has observed, “a State normally can be held responsible for a private decision only when it has exercised coercive power or has provided such significant encouragement, either overt or covert, that the choice must in law be deemed to be that of the State.”

It is easier to explain which attributes of charter schools do not make them state actors than to explain which ones might: First, they are not state actors, because they are schools. Education obviously is not “traditionally the exclusive prerogative of the state,” since millions of children are—and have long been—educated in private schools or at home. Second, the fact that the law calls them “public schools” does not automatically mean they are state actors. The Supreme Court has held that legal categorization of an entity as public or private is not dispositive of the state-action question. Third, the fact that state laws enable their creation does not necessarily make them state actors. After all, most private schools (as well as most charter schools) are operated by private corporations, which do not exist before a state grants their corporate charter. Clearly, issuing a corporate charter to a private corporation does not make it a state actor. Fourth, they are not state actors simply by virtue of being regulated and funded by the government. In Rendell-Baker v. Kohn (1982), the Supreme Court found that a private school was not a state actor even though it was heavily regulated by, and received more than 90 percent of its funds from, the government. “The school,” the court observed, “is not fundamentally different from many private corporations whose business depends on [government] contracts. Acts of such private contractors do not become acts of the government by reason of their significant or even total engagement in performing public contracts.”

Federal courts are divided on the state-action question. In 2010, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that an Arizona charter school was not a state actor in a lawsuit challenging a teacher’s termination as a violation of the 14th Amendment’s due process clause. The court rejected the claim that charter schools’ legal designation as “public schools” controlled the state-action question and found an insufficient nexus between the state and the school’s decision to fire the teacher, concluding that the termination was the purely private action of a private corporation. In contrast, earlier this year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that North Carolina charter schools are state actors in a case alleging that a classical charter school’s dress code, which requires girls to wear skirts, violates the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause. The majority’s opinion turned on several factors, including the degree of public funding and the fact that North Carolina law calls charter schools “public” schools. The majority also said that the state had delegated its constitutional obligation (to provide public education) to charter schools. Several judges vigorously dissented, arguing that the majority opinion adopted an expansive definition of state action that is inconsistent with Supreme Court precedent.

No court has yet considered the question of whether the First Amendment permits and/or requires states to authorize religious charter schools, although litigation is undoubtedly on the near horizon. In December 2022, the attorney general of Oklahoma, John O’Connor, issued an opinion letter finding that provisions of state law prohibiting charter schools from being operated by or affiliated with religious organizations and requiring them to be “nonsectarian” in all operations likely violates the First Amendment. Having found that charter schools are not state actors, he concluded that “the State cannot enlist private organizations to ‘promote a diversity of educational choices,’ and then decide that any and every kind of religion is the wrong kind of diversity. This is not how the First Amendment works.” Although an attorney general’s opinion does not have the same legal standing as a court opinion, the state will permit religious charter schools for the time being.

Charter schools defy easy categorization, and it could be years before the Supreme Court weighs in on the issue (although a petition asking the court to review the Fourth Circuit’s decision is pending currently). It is also possible that, given variations in the ways they are regulated, charter schools may be state actors in some states, where they are more closely controlled by states or school districts, but not in others, where they enjoy significant operational autonomy. That said, it is my view that, in most states, charter schools are not state actors. If that is right, then charter schools are essentially programs of private-school choice, which Carson holds not only may permit religious charter schools but must permit them. That does not mean that religious schools must, should, or will seek authorization to operate as charter schools. Many may reasonably decide not to, especially in states with robust private-school choice. Indeed, a number of education reformers reacted negatively to the Oklahoma attorney general’s opinion authorizing religious charter schools; these critics raised prudential concerns about the risk of greater governmental control over charter schools than schools participating in private-school choice programs. I share many of their concerns and embrace their support for expanding private-school choice. But the prudential question of whether religious organizations should operate charter schools is not the same as the legal question of whether the Constitution gives them the right to do so—and a strong case can be made that it does. That case likely will be tested in court sooner or later.

People wait outside the Supreme Court in January 2020 to hear oral arguments in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue.

The Regulatory-Strings Question

A second question left unanswered in Carson concerns the range of regulations that can be constitutionally imposed on participants in choice programs. Carson prohibits states from requiring schools to secularize as a condition of participation in a funding program, but there are many other regulations that schools might object to on freedom-of-religion grounds. Maine reminded schools about the state’s nondiscrimination requirements, which led many religious schools to decline to participate. Thus far, no school has challenged these regulations.

Private schools in the United States are lightly regulated. The same is true of private schools participating in choice programs, although most states impose modest additional requirements on the latter—for example, requiring them to hire minimally qualified teachers, to administer a standardized test (but typically not the state test), and to teach certain basic subjects. A handful of programs regulate student admissions. For example, Louisiana requires schools to randomly select scholarship recipients, D.C. prohibits schools from considering religion in admissions, and Maryland prohibits schools from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity or expression.

Before turning to the “regulatory strings” question, it is important to note that the government undoubtedly could impose many additional regulations on private schools regardless of whether they accept public funds. Private and religious schools might object, for example, to a rule requiring them to administer the state achievement test, but such a requirement would be constitutional. States have chosen to lightly regulate private schools. I believe that choice is a wise one that respects and fosters educational pluralism. But many of the regulatory choices made by states with respect to private schools are the result of political compromise, not constitutional mandate.

This is true even of some regulations burdening religion. Under existing doctrine, the Free Exercise Clause does not prohibit regulations that incidentally burden religion, provided that they are religion neutral and “generally applicable.” The Supreme Court has explained that a law is religion neutral if it treats religious conduct and institutions at least as well as like secular conduct and institutions. For example, a nondiscrimination regulation that applied with equal force to all private schools would be religion neutral. And a regulation is generally applicable unless it includes exceptions or gives government officials discretion to grant exceptions. For example, a regulation requiring private schools to administer the state achievement test except if doing so would be unduly burdensome would not be generally applicable. If a law fails to satisfy either of these criteria, then the government must offer a “compelling interest” justifying it and demonstrate that the government cannot achieve that interest in a less burdensome way.

There are, however, regulations that the government could not directly impose on religious schools but might be able to impose as a condition of participating in a private-school-choice program—that is, in order to receive public funding. Consider, for example, employment decisions regarding teachers in religious schools. The First Amendment prohibits the government from regulating in any way religious institutions’ selection of “ministers,” a category that includes—the Supreme Court has held—teachers responsible for religious instruction and faith formation in religious schools. (Disputes about the scope of this so-called “ministerial exception” will be set aside here.) The ministerial exception is situated within the court’s broader “church autonomy” doctrine, which precludes government interference with the internal organizations of religious institutions. Regulations outside the employment context might also fall within the protections of this doctrine—for example, rules prohibiting religious schools from preferring (or limiting enrollment to) co-religionists.

It is clear that the government may not directly regulate religious schools’ employment decisions about ministers, including some teachers, through nondiscrimination law or otherwise. The same is true of other regulations that implicate church autonomy. What is not clear is whether the Constitution permits the government to accomplish indirectly what it cannot accomplish directly. Can the government condition participation in a private-school-choice program on religious schools’ waiver of their constitutional rights?

The answer to that question turns on the so-called “unconstitutional conditions doctrine.” This doctrine reflects the concern that the government might use the power of the purse as leverage to accomplish what would otherwise be unconstitutional ends. Unfortunately, the doctrine is a hopeless mess, with some cases finding it permissible to condition the receipt of a public benefit on the waiver of a constitutional right, others finding such conditions impermissible, and none satisfactorily clarifying the line between permissible and impermissible conditions.

The application of the unconstitutional conditions doctrine to private-school-choice regulations undoubtedly will be addressed in future litigation. Thus far, there has been virtually no litigation about the issue, probably because existing regulations are unobjectionable to religious schools. In January 2022, a federal district judge held that Maryland violated the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment when it prohibited a school from expressing religious views on sexuality if the school chose to participate in a state voucher program. The decision, however, is narrow. The judge found only that the state’s restriction on the school’s expression ran afoul of the unconstitutional conditions doctrine. She took care to clarify that her decision did not address the constitutionality of the underlying regulation prohibiting discrimination against LGBT students in admissions. At this point, it is premature to make predictions about how courts will rule on other claims that the government is imposing unconstitutional conditions on participation in private-school choice programs. It is worth noting, however, that Carson itself is an unconstitutional conditions case. Although the court did not discuss the doctrine, it made clear that Maine could not condition participation on schools shedding their religious identity. This suggests that the court might view skeptically other conditions that had similar effects on schools’ ability to live out their religious mission, including perhaps regulations limiting schools’ autonomy over the employment decisions subject to the ministerial requirement.

Retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer questioned the implication of public funding for religious schools on charters in a dissenting opinion for Espinoza.

Even if the government can legally impose regulatory conditions that burden religious freedom as a condition of participating in private-school-choice programs, there are many good reasons not to do so, including respect for religious liberty and educational pluralism. Moreover, the success of choice programs turns in part on the participation of academically strong schools. Regulations, including those that ask schools to waive religious-freedom rights, will increase the cost of participating, likely leading some good schools to opt out and leaving fewer options for participating students.

Carson was an important victory for religious liberty that promises to have wide-ranging implications, both within and outside of K–12 education. The full extent of those implications, including the answers to the two questions addressed here, remains to be seen. These questions will undoubtedly be tested in future litigation. Both seem destined eventually to wind up on the Supreme Court’s docket.

Ultimately, the two questions may intersect. To date, the regulatory conditions placed on schools participating in private-school-choice programs have—by and large—been unobjectionable to religious schools. Legislative efforts to impose conditions in tension with the faith commitments of some schools have fallen short. If, however, advocates succeed in leveraging Carson to open the door to religious charter schools, especially in states without private-school choice, regulators may respond (as they have in Maine) by imposing operational requirements that are in tension with some schools’ religious commitments. Some existing charter-school laws likely include regulations that some religious organizations would find objectionable. These rules may dissuade religious organizations from seeking authorization to operate charter schools, prompt them to pursue litigation challenging the requirements as unconstitutional conditions, or both.

Nicole Stelle Garnett is the John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame.

This article appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Garnett, N.S. (2023). Supreme Court Opens a Path to Religious Charter Schools: But the trail ahead holds twists and turns. Education Next, 23(2), 8-15.

The post Supreme Court Opens a Path to Religious Charter Schools appeared first on Education Next.

Predicting the Next School Shooting May Never Be Possible

Stuart Ritchie — Tue, 13 Dec 2022 10:00:11 +0000

School shootings are at an all-time high.

That’s according to the National Center for Education Statistics, which has been keeping track of the numbers for about 20 years. The center’s analysis shows a recent spike in the number of incidents in which someone brandishes or fires a gun on school property. In 2000–01, the earliest school year for which data are provided, there were 30 such incidents. In the most recently documented year, 2020–21, there were 145 (see Figure 1). Numbers from other sources indicate that the increasing trend has very much continued since then. Although the number of incidents doesn’t necessarily track the number of casualties, some of the deadliest shootings on record have occurred in the past few years.

What are schools to do? As a psychologist, my job is at least partly to try to predict human behavior. Is there a “profile” of the typical school shooter that could help us identify those who might commit a shooting in the future? Is there some combination of characteristics and circumstances that pushes people—specifically students—toward acts of extreme violence? And if these questions are unanswered or unanswerable, what can schools do instead to protect their students from these horrific incidents?

Although school-shooting numbers are high now compared to those from one or two decades ago, in an absolute sense the number of incidents is still tiny. Even 145 incidents in a year is a vanishingly small proportion, given the more than 130,000 schools and many millions of students in the United States (the National Center for Education Statistics notes that school shootings make up less than 3 percent of all youth homicides in the nation). For anyone who wishes to predict such incidents, this immediately throws up one of the most vexing problems in statistics: the issue of the base rate.

The problem is this: Imagine you had a highly accurate test for predicting future school shooters—a diagnostic interview with a very perceptive psychologist, say, or a complex machine-learning algorithm. Imagine you rolled it out and tested huge numbers of students to uncover and flag those who were potentially a danger. The fact that there are so few actual shooters in such a large population means that, despite your test’s high level of accuracy, if it isn’t perfect, it will generate a large number of false positives, labeling non-shooters as shooters. As explained by Vox.com, if a 99-percent accurate test is run on a group of 100,000 people, including one genuine future shooter, it will mistakenly collar 1,000 students who have no intention of committing gun violence.

This logic is unintuitive, but it follows simply from the numbers: predicting rare, low-base-rate events is extremely difficult. With so many false positives, schools and police could never hope to identify the true shooter, let alone intervene in some way to avert their course.

At Ecorse High School in Michigan, an example of target hardening: students go through a metal detector and have their bags searched by security as they enter the school building.

Problems with Profiling

After a conference in 1999 where criminal-profiling experts debated this issue, the FBI released a report that argued against attempting to produce a profile of the “typical” school shooter. The problem of the low base rate means that almost any profile that might predict the likelihood to commit a school shooting—the stereotype would perhaps be a white male loner with anger-management issues, suicidal tendencies, and heavy involvement in a niche subculture—will also be shared by a considerable number of other students. Tarring them all with the brush of “future school shooter” would be unfair, to say the least—for reasons that will be familiar to readers of Philip K. Dick’s “The Minority Report”—and would also be useless in a practical sense.

What’s more, to rely on this profile would be to overlook a large number of potential school shooters. The impression from the media, understandably focused on mass-casualty spree killings like Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, and Uvalde, is that school shooters typically fit the profile I sketched above. But a 2021 study by Sarah Gammell and colleagues looked at all incidents in which a gun was fired on school property, during or around the school day, between 1970 and 2020—of which there were 785—and found that many school shootings are not at all like the most sensational, highly publicized incidents. Thirty-seven percent of shooters were adults; just 14 percent turned the gun on themselves. Across the subset of 276 cases in which the race of at least one of the shooters was reported, a minority of shooters (44 percent) were white. Moreover, and despite the intense media focus on these weapons, only 8 percent of the shootings involved a rifle; more than 75 percent involved a handgun. Finally, just over half, 52 percent, occurred outside the school building—though incidents that occurred inside tended to be deadlier.

Professor Dewey Cornell of the University of Virginia is a proponent of threat assessment.

The wide variety of school shooting events—spree incidents, gang-related violence, escalated personal rivalries, and more—further complicates any attempt to profile a typical shooter. For some types of shootings, the reliable predictors might be similar to those that predict all kinds of youth violence: after all, it is well understood that antisocial behavior generalizes across contexts, and so its predictors should, as well. These predictors include low academic achievement, deviant peer groups, poor social skills, or substance abuse, among many others.

The best predictor of future school violence, though, is an obvious one: prior antisocial behavior. This was the headline result of a 2022 meta-analysis by Jillian Turanovic and colleagues, who systematically reviewed the entirety of the scientific literature—761 studies—on predicting many different kinds of school violence. No other predictor came close, though in an absolute sense the correlation between past and future antisocial behavior was no more than moderate. Meta-analyses are infamously only as good as the studies they include, but this result is highly plausible: disagreeable and violent tendencies are relatively stable across a lifetime. Yet it is dispiriting that our best, most comprehensive, and most up-to-date efforts at prediction produce such obvious answers (“earlier violent behavior predicts later violent behavior”).

There is also a worrying detail in this meta-analysis. The results described above pertain to school violence in general. When the study authors restricted their analysis to the prediction of students bringing a weapon to school, the correlation grew far weaker. The meta-analysts concluded that “weapon carrying may be more difficult to predict based on youths’ past behaviors or participation in other forms of school aggression or delinquency.”

Thus, the more-specific, extreme act of bringing a weapon to school—let alone using it in a shooting—is simply not something we can predict satisfactorily, even in the more abstracted context of a study. For making real-life predictions, or predictions about specific individuals, all bets are off. More than two decades after the FBI cautioned against profiling, the agency’s advice remains true: attempting to profile a school shooter produces far more questions than answers.

Do Other Strategies Work?

So, if profiling is a fool’s errand, what kinds of policies should schools adopt to reduce the risk of a mass-shooting incident?

One option is “target hardening”—the incorporation of metal detectors, locked doors, security guards, cameras, and other means to make the school a more difficult place for a would-be shooter to assault. As Bryan Warnick and Ryan Kapa have argued in Education Next, target hardening also has a meager evidence base supporting its effectiveness, and might, in at least some cases, have adverse consequences (see “Protecting Students from Gun Violence,” features, Spring 2019). The authors argued that schools with more target hardening have higher levels of student fear, anxiety, and alienation from the school in general—though it should be noted that the evidence for these effects is, in a now-familiar pattern for the research in this area, itself rather thin.

Despite the lack of evidence in favor of target hardening, the federal government and some individual states together committed $800 million in 2018 to increase target-hardening measures.

Another option is a “zero-tolerance” approach—the decision that even minor acts of rule breaking that could potentially relate to future violence should be punished harshly and similarly to much more severe infractions. An analogy is to the “broken-windows” policing used in New York City, among other places, in the 1990s. The broken-windows theory holds that visible signs of violence and misbehavior in a neighborhood often incite more violence and misdeeds. In policing, the idea was that Draconian punishment for misdemeanors like jaywalking contributed to a climate where other, more-serious crimes also began to decline (though the evidence examining this proposition is mixed).

Zero tolerance has been the default discipline policy in many schools since the mid-1990s. Many parents favor the approach, since they perceive that potential threats will be swiftly dealt with in their children’s school. Critics, though, point to the very high level of suspensions and expulsions that arise under such a policy and argue that not only is the evidence on the policy’s effectiveness unclear, but also, in some cases, this approach might even backfire. One example is the 1998 Thurston High School shooting in Springfield, Oregon, where an expulsion seemed to have been among the primary triggers for the perpetrator’s decision to act. The policy is also by design rigid and inflexible, and there are many examples of students being suspended or expelled for naïve but ultimately innocent acts, such as bringing toy guns or camping utensils to school.

What’s more, the evidence implies that prior acts of violence are not strong predictors of later antisocial behavior that involves bringing (real) weapons to school. We might thus expect that a zero-tolerance policy, even if it did work to keep general school-violence rates low, would still fail to prevent the rarer, more-extreme bursts of violence that characterize school shootings.

Threat Assessment

A final option is to wait for the potential shooter to make the first move. That is, instead of attempting to predict which students might commit a school shooting or other form of violence, and instead of expelling every minor or major rule-breaker, schools can wait for students to threaten to commit violence and respond immediately. A 2002 report from the Secret Service noted that, in 81 percent of the school-violence cases they analyzed, “at least one person had information that the attacker was thinking about or planning the school attack.” That percentage needs updating with data from the past two decades, but even if it turns out to be considerably lower, it remains true that, in a substantial number of cases, we have prospective information—not mere “he-was-always-very-suspicious” hindsight. This is information that schools could act upon.

Having information on a threat immediately narrows the field of possible shooter candidates and gets around the base-rate needle-in-a-haystack problem of predicting who will become a shooter in a very large pool of individuals. Indeed, the entire premise of the “threat assessment” perspective, as it is known, is that prediction in general is not a viable option. Professor Dewey Cornell of the University of Virginia, the most prominent proponent of threat assessment and the author of its most commonly used variant, the Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines (CSTAG), argues that “the barriers to conducting rigorous research on the prediction of mass violence seem insurmountable.”

Instead of proactive prediction, then, Cornell advises schools to be reactive—but in a methodical, structured way. Upon discovering a threat of school violence, the CSTAG system recommends that a team of experts in each school follow these steps:

1) Interview everyone involved: the student who made the threat, the target(s) of the threat, and any witnesses.

2) Decide whether the threat is credible. Some threats may be attempts at dark humor, online trolling, or cries for help that don’t reveal a true underlying danger. These are considered “transient” and are handled with a light touch.

3) For more-substantive, credible threats, warn and protect the targets, make an attempt to resolve any conflict, and discipline the threatener.

4) For the most serious threats—for example, specific threats to carry out a shooting or to murder an individual—contact law enforcement and/or mental health services.

5) Make a “safety plan” and keep monitoring the student in the months after the threat is made.

Although this policy has the strong advantage of highlighting potential cases that might explode into violence, and discourages overreaction and unnecessary intervention, it does have some obvious limitations. As noted above, not all shootings are accompanied by a threat. And even if at least one person knows about the threat before the shooting, in many cases the person may never report it, perhaps because they fail to take it seriously, or because of intimidation (one commonly discussed element of threat assessment is how to encourage these witnesses to come forward). One can also imagine a future scenario where more-savvy potential shooters are aware that threats are taken seriously and so keep quiet about their plans.

Nevertheless, the research on threat assessment is far more detailed and substantive than that on other approaches. There are correlational studies, quasi-experimental studies, and even a randomized controlled trial that compared threat assessment to business-as-usual zero-tolerance discipline. But once again, we hit the inherent limitations of conducting research on rare occurrences like school shootings: the researchers, in reporting the outcomes of their studies, have often had to use a variety of proxies rather than measures of actual violence.

For example, there are studies showing students in schools that use threat assessment are more likely to seek help; more likely to feel fairly treated; and have lower levels of suspensions. The randomized controlled trial, similarly, showed lower likelihoods of suspensions in 100 students who made threats in threat-assessment schools compared with 101 students in other schools. But since meting out fewer suspensions is explicitly how the policy works—after all, it is the alternative to the zero-tolerance approach—these results seem more like confirmation that schools are implementing the policy properly; they do not directly answer the question of whether the policy reduces levels of violence (or indeed, reduces the likelihood of a school shooting). As Cornell himself notes, there have been no K–12 school shootings in Virginia since 1998, “but this cannot be attributed to the widespread use of threat assessment, a practice that was initiated in 2001 and was legally mandated statewide in 2013.”

Certainly, other correlational studies find evidence that schools that choose threat assessment tend to have lower levels of proxy measures such as student-reported bullying. But correlational studies are vulnerable to confounding—that is, it’s possible that schools that adopt the threat-assessment approach differ from business-as-usual schools on important variables (such as parents’ income), and that these other factors are the real drivers of the differences. The researchers attempted to control for this and other factors statistically, but controlling for variables after the fact can often, as statisticians have noted, yield misleading results.

Thus, what we need are more studies where schools (or students) are randomized to different conditions to provide causal evidence on the impact of these policies. For that reason it’s dismaying that the only randomized trial of threat assessment occurred as long ago as 2012 (there is evidence that people disapprove of randomized policy-based experiments in general, which might partly explain the apparent lack of interest in further research). What’s more, also essentially all the research on threat assessment has been carried out by Cornell, who wrote the guidelines. It is no criticism of the quality of the existing work to say that one hopes that other, independent researchers will run their own studies, to provide the detailed and varied evidence required to fully evaluate the policy.

Now is perhaps a good time to perform this research. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, signed into law by President Biden in June 2022, includes—among various provisions relating to mental health and gun safety—$200 million to follow up on 2019’s STOP School Violence Act, which focused on support and training for threat-assessment policies in schools. One hopes that rigorous evaluation of such policies will be part of this funding initiative.

Students run from Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, during the mass shooting there on May 24, 2022. Two adults and 19 children were murdered.

Where to from Here?

In the meantime, should we give up on prediction entirely? In a recent working paper, University of Michigan economist Sara Heller and colleagues used new statistical techniques on a large dataset provided by the Chicago Police Department to build a model predicting who is most likely to become a shooting victim. Their result was pithily described in the title of their paper: “Machine Learning Can Predict Shooting Victimization Well Enough to Help Prevent It.” Their model identified a small subset of people who were at disproportionately high risk of being shot: 0.02 percent of the population who accounted for 1.9 percent of shooting victims. They argued that their classification was accurate enough to justify government spending on social-service interventions for this population, in order to reduce their risk of being shot.

Could a similar model be developed in the future for the perpetrators of shootings, and then for mass-shooting perpetrators? In a world where ever-more data is collected on individuals—via cellphones, GPS, cameras, internet-search histories, social-media posts, and more—it’s not inconceivable. In a recent study, University of Pennsylvania researchers Richard Berk and Susan Sorenson used novel statistical methods to predict intimate-partner violence. Someday, we might see advances in scientific methodology that allow us to surmount the fundamental problems in predicting much rarer events, such as school shootings. But just look at how even Berk and Sorenson talk about their new methodology. Even though they are optimistic, they argue that their results should not:

be construed as a powerful justification for our procedures nor for proceeding quickly toward policy implementation. There are many moving parts, each of which needs to be skeptically examined and subjected to much more empirical testing.

It is refreshing to see scientists with a cutting-edge method engaging in the opposite of hype, urging caution about their research. And the acknowledgement of the many moving parts reminds us that, when it comes to preventing gun violence in schools, school policy is just one part of a complex picture that also includes failures of law-enforcement procedure (most recently and tragically highlighted at the Uvalde shooting) and the myriad firearm laws and loopholes across different states, among other factors. All of these aspects deserve the attention of policymakers and researchers.

Predicting rare events, at least for the moment, hits up against fundamental limitations of psychology in particular and statistical analysis more generally. Despite some tiny glimmers of hope, education leaders and social scientists may never be able to anticipate school shootings with any useful degree of accuracy. For that reason, responding to threats as they arise might be our best bet. But to be sure about this, we urgently need a better, fuller set of research evaluating the threat-assessment perspective and any specific variations on its basic themes.

School shootings are on the rise. Research on how to prevent them should be, too.

Stuart Ritchie is a senior lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London. This article benefitted from additional research by Anna Wood.

This article appeared in the Spring 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Ritchie, S. (2023). Predicting the Next School Shooting May Never Be Possible: If it’s not possible, is threat assessment the best alternative? Education Next, 23(2), 24-30.

The post Predicting the Next School Shooting May Never Be Possible appeared first on Education Next.