This article was my submission to the Fordham Institute’s 2026 Wonkathon contest, which asks what rules and regulations should govern the use of technology in the schools. You can read my article on their website here.

Charting the Course is a series from Education Progress featuring pro-excellence education commentary, news, and policy analysis.

1. Frictionless Surfaces

Much talk about how edtech can or should be used in the schools reminds me of a particular type of high school physics problem. They’re the ones that begin with “Assuming a frictionless surface…,” and they often describe a scenario where an object’s velocity stays constant because it isn’t encountering any resisting forces. Despite describing conditions that do not exist in the real world, these models still work — i.e., produce close-enough answers — because the effects of the friction that they assume away are usually small, and so can be factored in afterward.

Popular arguments and programs in favor of edtech adoption frequently make similar assumptions. The problem is that friction in the classroom, the home and the schools is of a different kind than the forces assumed away in those basic physics problems. An edtech product might show clear gains in a controlled setting: maybe it’s a supervised pilot, or a particularly motivated school or classroom adopting a device for a clear, limited purpose. Those results then get touted at trade shows or advertised to an Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum & Instruction, who usually exists in a procurement regime that incentivizes constantly adopting new technologies — mostly just software now — because the future of learning always had to be digital.

Yet all of these new software packages are getting loaded onto one-to-one laptops and tablets that students are now using in class and are expected to use at home. And neither in the classroom nor at home are those frictional forces as minimal as they are in the physics problems. Distractions, multitasking, and the glowing pull of machines that are literally built to do everything are the main forces acting on the object. They are the new learning environment we built.

2. Abstracting and Idealizing

All reasoning abstracts: it leaves things out, and research (especially education research) has to as well. One way it can go awry, though, is through idealization: reasoning about agents by attributing capacities that real humans lack, and then treating those capacities as the standard.1 Edtech’s evidentiary habits do both. They (and we) frequently reason about a kind of student that doesn’t really exist, and then appeal to implementation problems to explain why new learning software hasn’t worked. But the flaws are in the way we model edtech generally.

What education policymakers need is a revolution in the old sense of the word: a turning back. Instructional software should have to prove it beats analog materials under conditions students actually learn in. And the decision whether it has or has not must sit with individual districts; not with vendors, nor outsourced to some state agency list of products keyed to ESSA evidence tiers that don’t have enough to say about real classroom conditions. What states should do is establish a clear standard — like “Any instructional software purchase must carry the burden of proof against an analog comparator under deployment conditions” — and then ensure that district-level adoption decisions follow it.

3. Software and Noise

Why the special standard for edtech, i.e. new educational software, when hardly any educational product, analog or digital, has been subject to such a regime?

Because laptops and tablets are different from textbooks and worksheets. The latter are designed to do one thing, but laptops and tablets are designed to do… everything.2 The nature of the digital device is to not specialize for any particular task, but to maximize use cases across domains. So they’re good for answering emails, watching short-form videos, playing video games, browsing the web, and so on. Moreover, digital devices and the apps on them are designed to maximize how much each individual uses them. The essence of their design is to capture our attention, and so the frictions are latent in the products themselves. Attentional derailment devices, of a sort.

The field of education already struggles to get clean signals. Multiple large meta-analyses have shown that education research, broadly speaking, suffers from serious epistemological problems. This ranges from the methods it uses to produce knowledge to the standards it holds peer-reviewed research to. The latter is part of a larger replication crisis in the social sciences, and the former also directly impedes getting better, more efficient practices to teachers and schools.

Now, more and more learning is being done through broader and more “personalized” learning software packages. Whatever that will ultimately mean for education research, I suspect the end result will be more noise and more opaque signals. When we consider current research into edtech, however, the idealized student-user implicit in much of it frequently adds a layer of bias to the results. Where it might be possible to cut through noise with enough data, a bias resulting from an idealized model user will keep distorting results no matter how large the sample. All of this, to me, suggests the more reasonable attitude to take toward edtech adoption is a default skepticism of any software’s claims to improve learning.

4. District Decisions, State Standards

So what would carrying the burden of proof look like? State education agencies could supply a common protocol for carrying out on-site pilots under real conditions: some classrooms could use the new software program, while comparable classrooms would use the analog materials that the edtech claims to effectively replace. Every purchase request would have to name the analog comparator being replaced alongside the evidence that emerged from the classroom deployment trial. Lacking either, the request would be denied. A similar test could be required for any software contract renewal, too, which would prevent schools getting locked in to products that frequently get worse or bloated over time.

Districts could also start with weaker, more feasible versions of the analog standard by conducting the test during summer learning programs, or in supplemental instructional periods with students that are lagging or struggling more than their peers. (They could even start by comparing new edtech products to ones they already use.)

But because the standard would only apply to student-facing edtech, it would not prevent teachers and administrators from using cutting-edge technologies to improve everything happening around and behind instructional time. AI-powered software obviously has immense potential to streamline administrative processes, and teacher-facing diagnostics and planning tools are already starting to arrive. The risk will be that these products get bundled with less-effective, flashy student-facing ones, locking schools into entire “systems” that end up eating budgets and employee time with little benefits to show. Districts should thus require student-facing components to be priced and bundled separately.

5. Slow Progress is Good Progress

Maybe the country is already too far-down the edtech rabbit hole to make a strict “analog comparator standard” feasible. But there are nearly 14,000 districts that are at least able to try some version of it. While the standard won’t undo years of one-to-one rollouts overnight, perhaps it does not need to.

All that’s needed is to get the ball rolling in the right direction again, making sure to factor in the friction this time. That will be the first step toward restoring a healthy technological environment in the schools.

Attacks on Excellence is a series from Education Progress featuring critical coverage of the education policies and research paradigms that are holding students back.

There are two stories I could tell you right now, in the wake of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s viral article about her daughter’s education.

The first is this: The Pulitzer-winning New York Times writer of the 1619 Project sent her daughter Najya to an impoverished, majority-black elementary school because she wanted to use her influence to help all black children. She exercised her voice to change the school, and eventually Najya grew into a bright and capable honor roll student at a non-selective neighborhood middle school that was better than its test scores would say. However, systemic inequalities were too entrenched, and her daughter wound up failed by the same systems that failed many others, learning less than she expected before choosing to attend a rigorous high school and working hard to catch up.

But here’s another story: A wealthy and influential woman exercised New York City’s generous school choice options to send her child to an out-of-neighborhood school that currently receives more funding than almost any other school in the country and more than 90% of other schools in New York City, boasting funding of $52,349 per student and a 1:10 faculty-student ratio as of the 2024–2025 school year.1 She did so because that school exemplified her values, and she persuaded parents around the country to make similar decisions on the strength of her conviction. For years, she experienced a sort of motivated blindness towards the dysfunction of a place that saw children fighting in the lunchroom unsupervised, assigned fake homework and gave fake grades, and ignored her daughter’s needs, giving her the opportunity to brag in public about the value she brought her daughter’s school even as they ignored her in private. She did the same in middle school, building a close relationship with her daughter’s principal while celebrating her daughter’s place as an honor roll student and dismissing warning signs because some kids struggle with tests. As late as 2024, she spoke about her decision in glowing terms.

It was only when her daughter told her that she never got the education she wanted that she told the truth about what happened, revealing a decade of education horror stories.

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There are many things I want to say about the article, but the most important thing I can say is that I believe she wrote it as an act of love. She could have stayed silent in public as her daughter recoiled against the choices she made. Nobody was pressing her for an update. No matter how carefully she frames the outcome, the article does not help her politically. Kids are so powerless, so reliant on the adults who shape their worlds for them, and it is very easy for those adults to insist the kids see the world through their eyes or tell them they will understand the parents’ decisions when they are older. It is a gift to tell your child you were wrong about something important.

Next is that Najya will be okay. I do not say this because I believe education does not matter or that kids’ lives are not enriched by going to schools that take them seriously, provide a safe environment, and teach them meaningful and rigorous material at their level. It does, and they are. But there are many important things in life, and she has a capable and loving family who will fight for her.

Almost as important, however, is that Najya lived, and suffered through, the world Nikole Hannah-Jones and her political allies built. Almost everything about Najya’s school experience is a result not of structural inequities in society, but of a system that has every possible incentive to produce precisely the result Hannah-Jones bragged about and her daughter suffered through. It is admirable, courageous, and loving of her to write an article that, read seriously, undermines her entire political project.

But the article does undermine her entire political project, and an honest accounting of it must say so.

Her choice is a strange one on its own terms. She claims most black students in New York are forced to attend segregated schools, then outlines how she repeatedly chose schools outside her neighborhood with a high degree of flexibility based on her needs and wants. She was not trapped with, and did not choose to send Najya to, a neighborhood school where everybody lacked options. She looked for an overwhelmingly poor and black school for her daughter, reversing her own parents’ decision to seek an integrated school for her. Having done so, she compares herself favorably to other parents who “refus[e] to take or support any substantial action to integrate the city’s schools.” What she did was the opposite of integration.

Last year, I wrote about the “hostage theory” of education, a term coined by black Washington Post columnist Bill Raspberry after Washington, D.C. destroyed one of its best elementary schools in 1967. At a time of enormous white flight, the Amidon School was a successful, integrated magnet elementary school that maintained a stable ratio of about 70% black students and 60% of students from public housing while delivering high-quality, effective education to its students. Because two other elementary schools near it fared much worse at the time, the Washington, D.C. school board made an innovative, award-winning decision: they would combine the three elementary schools, sending students to one for first and second grade, one to third and fourth, and one to fifth and sixth, so the well-off parents would be inspired to help the other schools.

The project collapsed into dysfunction within a year. Parents who moved to the school’s boundaries because they believed in the project of an integrated education first suffered for it, then left the school. As Raspberry wrote in 1970, “Now instead of one good and two bad schools, Southwest Washington has three bad ones.”

Fifty years later, we are having the same arguments in the same ways, and the same forces hold power all too often in education policy. Everything about Hannah-Jones’s experience was hostage theory made manifest, with her own daughter as the hostage. She believed that the way to fix the education system was for parents to send their children to hand-picked underperforming schools, delivering their own time and resources to improving the education of all students at those schools.

In hostage theory, every successful school is the enemy, because every successful school is a sign that wealthier or whiter students must be hoarding education. Details like Amidon’s integration or Stuyvesant’s high proportion of low-income Asian students tend to be shoved away. The proposed solution, then as now, is to strip opportunities away from those who have on the theory that if they are forced into dysfunctional environments, their willpower will fix things.

The article shows the impossibility of such a position. There are several moments from it where I want you to put yourself in the shoes of the educators involved. Seriously think about it.

What would you do as the teacher of Najya’s fourth-year class, in a room where most students are performing far below the “grade level” standard you are required to teach them at, when one of your top students, getting private tutoring on the side paid for by her wealthy mother, eagerly raises her hand to answer every question? How much of your time and attention and care would you spend on her compared to rushing around the classroom putting out the constant small fires erupting in a room where for many students getting them to school already feels like an accomplishment to you?

Even granting the difficulties of the environment, it’s alarming and a clear dereliction of duty that teachers seem to have been fabricating scores on tests and ignoring homework. So — say you’re the principal of the school. A wealthy parent who has chosen your school as a passion project objects that your standard way of doing things is failing. Do you kick up a fuss and go toe-to-toe with the teacher’s union, pushing for teachers to be retrained or fired and looking for a batch eager to bring Standards and Accountability to the school? Or do you collect your paycheck, let teachers collect theirs, and explain each time the topic comes up that the school is underfunded, and that you’re doing your best in a difficult position until the school’s funding per student eclipses your city’s per capita income? Do you, eventually, stop taking her calls?

Or take Najya’s experience with middle school algebra, which saw her getting A’s in an eighth grade class before failing the standardized exam (which Hannah-Jones assumed was “because, like many children, she has trouble sometimes on standardized tests”). Imagine you’re a teacher at a school that has adopted an “Algebra for All” policy on the logic that “students should not be deprived of advanced academic opportunities because in the past they attended schools that did not properly educate them.” You have a classroom full of students, most of whom have enormous gaps in their understanding of arithmetic, and you are instructed to teach algebra to them and reminded that your class and school will look bad if they all fail. Do you give them grades that match their proficiency, letting most of them fail? Or do you lower the curve?

Every incentive in the environment inexorably pushes the same direction: blur quantitative metrics and call them into question, because metrics show gaps. Ignore students at the top of any given class, because other students have urgent problems and you need to triage. Provide fake homework and non-rigorous classes, because you are expected to advance students in lockstep, year after year, through material tailored for a hypothetical student their age no matter their actual education gaps and needs.

I would never send my children to a school like P.S. 307. I am likely to be, instead, one of the parents Nikole Hannah-Jones decries, looking for the sorts of schools she calls “part of a tawdry bargain to keep a dwindling number of white and wealthier parents from exiting the public school system”: schools that are prepared to teach my children at whatever level they are ready for, in safe environments, in rigorous and competent ways. I will do this, and I will advocate for other parents to do this, because I believe that it is better for everyone if schools serve the public rather than the public serving the schools.

You should not send your child somewhere out of obligation, then try to warp that place into your own image. You should find a school that wants your child there, not as an unpaid tutor or a role model for others, but because the school believes that every one of its students deserves an education that meets them where they are at. Instead of decrying schools that want to keep wealthier and white families in public districts, and that in so doing provide free opportunities that kids from poorer and non-white families can and readily do take advantage of, education advocates and parents should celebrate those schools as examples of free excellence.

As for schools like P.S. 307? The crisis they are facing is not one of funding. It is one of honesty amid perverse incentives. You cannot improve a system that does not want to improve. If education advocates insist that the challenge is always one of funding, that all kids should be taught the same material at the same pace in the same classrooms, and that the fault lies with parents who leave rather than schools that make them leave, you could pay $100,000 or more per student without making a real difference.

Nikole Hannah-Jones contributed to the honesty problem for a decade, painting a glowing picture of an environment in which her daughter was suffering. Even in her new article, she could only selectively cite national numbers to allege a resource gap, because in New York City, the P.S. 307s of the city have long been funded more generously than the Stuyvesants.2 Even in her new article, she celebrates that she persuaded many parents to follow in her footsteps even as she reveals that her daughter was frustrated and poorly served the entire way. Even in her new article, she criticized both the standardized tests that revealed her daughter’s actual needs and those who fought to preserve the selective public schools her daughter used as a lifeline away from her choices.

It is to her great credit that she listened to her daughter’s frustrations and used her platform to voice them, but advocates of hostage theory will never fix public education. Those who want to improve education in the United States should listen to Nikole Hannah-Jones not for her prescriptions, but for her accounting of the pain her advocacy of hostage theory caused her daughter.

Your kids only get one childhood.

Attacks on Excellence is a series from Education Progress featuring critical coverage of the education policies and research paradigms that are holding students back.

The recent piece by Nikole Hannah-Jones has laid bare a problem at the heart of The New York Times and the entire industry of public intellectuals working on projects in education.

In 2016, Hannah-Jones wrote about her decision to send her daughter, Najya, to a highly segregated, low-income public school, rather than one of the magnet schools or private schools they would have been able to afford. “True integration, true equality, requires a surrendering of advantage,” she argued, even “when it comes to our own children.” While “much of school segregation is structural … it is the choices of individual parents that uphold that system.”

Now in 2026, Hannah-Jones reflects on the consequences her convictions have had for Najya’s education. Her efforts to improve the school for others had come to nothing. Year after year, her daughter suffered under educators who neglected her potential and “largely refused to teach.” Today, Najya begrudges her mother for her choice:

“Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me. I never really got the education I wanted.”

As a former teacher and administrator, current researcher, and someone from a minority background, I have many thoughts. First and foremost, I will acknowledge that it took courage to publish this article with The New York Times. Recently I have reflected on my own complicity in uncritically adopting ed-tech in classrooms and in our institutional failure to present domain knowledge in K-12. My current work in academia is, in part, an effort to atone for the consequences of those choices and contribute to better institutional decision-making.

Yet while Hannah-Jones is rightly credited for the candor of her piece, and the Times is rightly credited for publishing it, we also need a public correction of the record. Hannah-Jones has apologized to her daughter for prioritizing moral convictions ahead of scholastic achievement, but she has yet to apologize to the thousands of parents and children who followed, or were pressured to follow, the model she continued to preach without voicing her doubts. It is not enough to print one’s diary. The more consequential act, for both Hannah-Jones and the Times, would be to state plainly the steps that schools, administrators, and policymakers can take to remedy the damage their ideas wrought.

Hannah-Jones acknowledges that her essay influenced others:

“The essay spurred community meetings in places near and far; and in New York City, it helped ignite parent and student activism around a subject that had largely disappeared from public discourse. Even a decade later, parents still share with me how my essay led them to make similar educational decisions for their children.”

Our most respected institutions played a central role in fueling this influence. As a nationally-renowned education writer and tastemaker, Hannah-Jones’s choices and writings influenced policymakers, educators, families, and school communities across the country, and her ideology became entrenched in our public systems. Her story was valorized in our most vaunted public square and recognized with awards. Her ‘moral clarity’ came to embody the good faith and seriousness she brought to our evolving public discourse about education. Countless families, whether they read The New York Times themselves or encountered her ideas through educators and institutions, came to believe that racism and segregation were the drivers of poor conditions and outcomes in low-income schools. Hannah-Jones, aided by the Times, has perpetuated a falsehood on a broad scale that neither has yet acknowledged.

Her public writing since 2017 has also been explicit about the moral priority she assigned to the common good embodied in public education, frequently at the expense of educational choice. She treated those who provided alternatives to public schools as threats to that common good, and framed families who chose to pull their children out of public schools as perpetuating educational inequality and segregation.

Yet this new piece does not address how that framework may have affected parents who sought different or better schools as options for their own children. It does not contend with those who made the opposite choice for their own children, or with the disdain she and others expressed toward educational structures that would reward excellence, prioritize discipline and routines, or reflect the various other hallmarks of “privileged behavior.”

What is most galling is that, across her numerous writings over the past decade, racial solidarity functions not only as a commitment to justice, but as a test of moral loyalty. As a mixed-race black teacher, I became a confidant for many minority parents who left “bad schools,” who felt profound guilt over their choice to pursue higher-achieving or more specialized programming. Parents who chose a different school, curriculum, or body of knowledge for their children were routinely made to feel as though they were abandoning the community; they were leaving “the village.”

Hannah-Jones and her husband were wholly entitled to enroll their daughter in the neighborhood public school. Whether or not they had the means to look elsewhere, it was their right to choose the environment that aligned with their values. Every child deserves access to a school that serves their unique needs, learning, and development. Every family should be able to seek the best option and have the flexibility to change institutions when a local option is not working.

By her own account she persisted with these choices, even when her daughter was not thriving. She persisted even as she became dissatisfied with changes in her local school’s organization and administration. Only her daughter can fully describe and reflect on the opportunities and costs of that choice. Through her writing, Hannah-Jones exercised a form of public agency that gave a private decision significance beyond the family. Over the past decade, she championed choices solely in the interest of advancing the public-school community, many of which yielded nothing better, while also promoting a broader effort to limit the choice available to other families. Her deeply personal decision thus evolved into an ethical litmus test, one elevated by her influence and standing with our national paper of record.

But today, we must move beyond Hannah-Jones’s personal choices to the platform she commanded. The New York Times did not simply publish her writings as mere commentary, but repeatedly presented her as an authoritative interpreter of education, segregation, history, race, schooling, and community transformation. Her work was widely disseminated, adopted by educators and institutions, and reinforced through national recognition.

The public question is not whether her choice served her daughter; it is what happens when one of our standard-bearing institutions transforms a family’s choice into a national educational template. How many times did administrators and principals nationwide excuse failing schools or ineffective teachers, thinking that if such a high-profile family appeared to find success in these conditions, they must be worthy of continued investment and support? How many schools were kept open in the name of community identity when they should have been closed for diminished proficiency, inconsistent discipline, or subpar achievement? How many effective programs were denied expansion in the name of racial equity? How much knowledge did this country’s children lose out on? How often, in following her example and recommendations, did parents and educators privilege ideology, identity, or symbolic justice over academic excellence and strong educational outcomes for students?

As Hannah-Jones has revealed the serious consequences of her educational ideal for her own child, we must consider whether she deserves continued platforming and authority in our public conversations about how other people’s children should be educated.

This is what has bothered me most: not simply that she made these choices for her family, which is every parent’s right, but that her writing has had such tremendous influence in shaping national conversations on what children deserve. Hers is a story about our attitudes toward educational choice, our willingness to tolerate institutional dysfunction in the pursuit of solidarity, and the meritocratic American ideal that was rejected because it became ideologically disfavored.

In the weeks and months ahead, will she accept responsibility for her thought leadership across our educational institutions? Will the New York Times apologize to the families and children who may have been materially disadvantaged by the narratives it advanced?

It is a small tragedy that her choices harmed her daughter. It is a bigger tragedy that her words pushed others to do the same. It will be a catastrophe if we allow this to go uncorrected and unacknowledged in the future.

The first in a new set of posts on AI in schools and the history and future of educational technology.1

Theories of Progress is a series from Education Progress building the intellectual framework for durable education reform: why the system resists improvement, what excellence actually requires, and what history tells us about how to build it.

1. The Scholastic Thermidor

I entered middle school just after the release of the first iPhone, and left a small handful of Bitcoin on my high school-issued laptop when I returned it to the technology office after graduating, in 2014. For my cohort — the tail-end of the millennial generation — the revolution in educational technology proved an exciting opportunity, especially for those of us that liked coding and playing video games.

But now looking back, it feels more and more like we were actually on the last chopper out of Saigon. Algorithmic content and short-form videos had yet to take over, and by childhood’s end at least half of our learning had still been through real books; not on screens, but in chapters, on paper worksheets, with pens and pencils. How did ed-tech get so pervasive, and go so wrong? And why did all of society seem to move in lockstep behind it?

I’ve started calling the first ed-tech revolution the Scholastic Thermidor because, besides a deluge of laptops and would-be subscription software purchases, the true revolution occurred elsewhere — in the back offices, in the slow birth of yet another “industry.” Thermidor captures the sense of a revolution unraveling, of a different interest or faction taking over from an earlier, more radical attempt that was running out of steam. It emerged from the Thermidorian Reaction, when Revolutionary France in 1794 started to realize it had lost its marbles during Robespierre’s Reign of Terror. Over a century later, Leon Trotsky revived the term in a somewhat propagandistic attempt to delegitimize Stalin and the October Revolution he had betrayed.2

Throughout our own revolutionary period, we have seen lots of new technology introduced into schools, but vanishingly little that actually innovates on the educational side. The “ed” in “ed-tech” was thus mostly speculative — Can interactive laptop software work in a classroom setting, with 20+ kids? What if it replaces pen and paper, or whole books? What if software companies were about to discover a new monetization model that came for the schools like a ravenous pack of hyenas? — but for decades we proceeded as though someone, somewhere, had shown that the cultural institution of pedagogy and the bio-mechanical activity of childhood learning can be moved en masse onto devices, into screens, through the Looking Glasses.

The genuine technological breakthrough for education, however, was the one manifest in No Child Left Behind3 and regular student assessments, better data about group proficiencies and performances, and a greater ability to monitor the results of a discipline (pedagogy) and a profession (teaching) that, for now, just had to have enough computers for students to take state tests a couple of times a year. Though flawed, the accountability revolution at least posed the right kind of question: Are students learning?

The Scholastic Thermidor changed the question. Are students using the new technology? One-to-one devices, flipped classrooms, 21st-century skills programs, and “personalized” instructional software were still in their infancy, but the future of the first revolution was already theirs.

2. No Child Left Behind

The first ed-tech revolution could not have come at a better time. I remember the transition. For me, from 1st through 4th grade (until 2006, roughly), computer classes were taught in the computer lab, on a couple dozen of those really cool-looking early iMacs:

The classes were mostly typing classes, from what I can remember. By 5th grade (~2006–2007), though, the computer lab had gone mobile, replaced by the “laptop carts,” which became regular features of every classroom that could find a way to use them. Maybe my experience was the exception, but laptops seemed to augment the classes that incorporated them, more or less. The two negatives that stand out to me now are:

1. The capacity for hijinks had radically increased, and we quickly became far more “technologically nimble” than most adults by the end of 7th grade.

2. Web browser games like RuneScape and Arcanists, and websites like MiniClip and AddictingGames, which decimated our sleep cycles. Worth it.

But besides these, early laptops were honestly pretty useful. It helped that we already had a solid amount of analog learning under our belts — to the point where we were writing a couple short paragraphs by hand, filling out basic research reports, making bibliographies and looking things up in encyclopedias. Laptops could then be introduced and, on the whole, make things a little bit better. Better presentations, more diverse research projects, more engaging classroom work via early apps, and all sorts of different little optimizations became possible.

The other side of this story, however, was all the awkward tech issues, bulky laptop carts or broken laptops, but also just the general sense that handwriting was old, laptops are new, and the future is computers so if they can use them, they should. New technologies and cultural habits were now jockeying for our time. Laptops also kept getting less and less expensive, and WiFi speeds faster and faster.

But seismic legal changes had set the Scholastic Thermidor in motion nearly a decade before my freshman year of high school even started.

In January 2002, George W. Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) into law, kicking off the “accountability revolution” in American education. This was the legal expression of the real first ed-tech revolution. That is, the true ed-tech revolution was the accountability revolution, because digital testing and reporting architecture (a new “accountability tech stack” for schools) made truly national assessment, reporting, and accountability practices possible. The federal government could now set standards, take measurements, and create incentives4 because the vast majority of students could be expected to take tests a couple of times a year, and states could convert the results into actionable information. That revolution drove much of the good that came from the era. Put another way, accountability architecture is necessary for modern education reform efforts, but far from sufficient if weak curricula, bad theories of learning, and perverse incentives abound.

Unfortunately, the tech stack underlying the accountability revolution was not going to be contained. The task would have been difficult even in hindsight, because it never would have been easy to prevent all ~14,000 school districts from succumbing to unregulated market and social pressures to innovate, on top of a legal mandate for schools to have certain tech available. That is, after No Child Left Behind was passed, it simply became legally and institutionally unsustainable for schools to not have a tech stack. So grew the ed-tech consumer base.

Maybe the story could have been different in a timeline where laptops were somehow never invented, or where costs prohibited schools and students from ever moving beyond a shared computer lab, but that’s not how technology or innovation work. Ed-tech was not merely going to transform how we monitor schools or measure students — no, it was promising a beautiful revolution in pedagogy and learning, too; an entirely new era for what it meant to teach and what it meant to be a student. That was half right.

The cultural catalysts for the Scholastic Thermidor were many, and powerful. Collectively, they produced an atmosphere ripe for overlooking the crucial question of whether learning and teaching could be successfully digitized.

3. Fervors of Progress

The paper-reduction craze was one of the odder ones. Our civilization does not have the best track record with sensible recycling or paper reduction efforts — one of the biggest causes of government paperwork, for example, is the Paperwork Reduction Act. (“For every new agency policy, generate and print a report about how it minimizes environmental impact and paperwork.”) Regardless, the number of times using laptops was pitched to us as some collective do-good effort was too many to count. “Instead of cutting down a tree, do the worksheet and submit your answers and get your grades online.” Or maybe consider how this poor village across the world was polluted by a paper mill. I also remember being told that laptops could be used, somehow, to give children in Africa access to a wealth of educational opportunities. The biggest educational barrier in the developing world was of course its lack of Western Content, and not its unstable governments, dictatorships, or general insecurity.

Part of this was also an understandable “grass is greener” fallacy when it came to textbooks and physical learning materials in general. Beyond being made from trees, they also took up space, students damaged and destroyed them, they went out of date, and there was even a whole panic about the dangers of increasingly heavy backpacks. The brute costs of maintaining an analog inventory of teaching materials pervaded school life; teachers had to spend time in class managing students who had lost their homework or brought the wrong textbook, and the need to have certain learning materials all in one place put great constraints on school scheduling and class(room) availability.

Intel’s 2010 white paper — “Blueprint Solutions: Digital Content in the K–12 Classroom” — neatly captured the Zeitgeist. Having to manage inventory and space also made material inequalities between schools and students more apparent, and a deluge of newly available statistics about spending, performance, and all sorts of other patterns was making educational inequality starker and more consequential.

This section lays it all out. The cost of textbooks had been rising dramatically for decades, nearly tripling (for college textbooks) between 1986 and 2004. Orthopedic surgeons were raising the alarm about the physical dangers of too-heavy backpacks. “Valuable warehouse space — complete with energy-consuming climate control equipment” was needed to store the books during summer months, and the sites became Temples of Waste as unwanted or old materials accumulated.

More important, instructional materials were frequently the most visible locus of the struggles that more often confronted the poor, the disabled, and the disadvantaged students. As the white paper notes, in 2005, California reported that over half a million students lacked access to textbooks in class, and 2 million students “could not take textbooks home to do homework.” Access was just one prong of the problem, though.

Textbooks were usually updated only after five, seven, or sometimes even ten years, and these timelines introduced a number of recurrent problems, especially for poorer schools. These cycles greatly increased the consequences of committing to subpar textbooks, or overlooking a supposedly innovative curriculum that was in vogue. Missing out on “easy” improvements to student performance would have made the rigid top-down incentives of the time sting even more, and there was of course the moral cost of providing inferior or out-of-date instructional materials to your students, depriving them of educational opportunities available elsewhere.

The physical infrastructure for analog materials also required its own bureaucratic apparatus. The drudgery of textbook procurement, storage, distribution, and replacement constantly confronted teachers and administrators alike; the possibility of eliminating any one of those would have been enticing. Digitization was thus appealing both to everyone’s moral senses and to the practical sensibilities of the practitioners.

But just because more students can “take a digital textbook home” does not mean that iterating on last year’s logistical issues actually solves students’ educational breakdowns. Maybe, as I’ve been told several times, they or their parents sold their school-issued device and said it was stolen. Or maybe it was actually stolen, or used to play video games and no one was around to tell them not to. Distributional or logistical issues were in this way often conflated with learning issues. A child who cannot take a textbook home has, genuinely, suffered a “learning failure”, but the essence of the failure doesn’t have to do with how the school or teacher understands learning. Digitization made materials lighter, theoretically cheaper to update and maintain and distribute, and most importantly easier to access. What digitization did not do, and what nobody proved it could do, was effectively replace analog childhood learning.

Access became a synecdoche for educational progress, but this was naive. The revolutionary atmosphere had positioned ed-tech as the solution to myriad equity and accessibility issues that had plagued education policy for years.5

Everyone also just seemed afraid; afraid of missing out on the digital revolution and being left forever behind as a result. Millions of Americans had just lost their jobs or their homes during the 2008 Great Recession, after all, so the stakes for everyone and everything felt higher.

At the time, computer coding was also far and away the most exciting new career opportunity for high school and college students. (And it was an early pillar of massive open online courses, or “MOOCs”.6) Though I ended up a “word-cel,” I took part in the early iterations of my high school coding and robotics classes. Because all of us had a solid foundation of analog learning — among other factors7 — we managed to pull off a “work hard, play hard” attitude with the fancy CAD-capable laptops and the flood of resources my school put into our program.

And flood the program with resources it did — I remember grumblings from other departments, like Music and Fine Arts, about how much money Robotics and Coding were getting; but hey, that was the future. And so robotics classes eventually came with a laptop and device upgrades for our cohort, which then became a WiFi/network upgrade for the whole school, and so on. (“Remember class, we aren’t learning how to build drones; we’re building “UAVs”.)

I experienced a privileged version of this tech transition, but the underlying dynamics were present in any school undergoing a rush of new funding for the learning architecture of the future. The problem, I think, is that self-directed digital learning, one-to-one devices, MOOCs, and unsupervised tinkering are most appealing to a highly ambitious and intrinsically motivated subset of students. And as it happened, the founders and C-suites of the major tech companies who were digital learning’s strongest warriors were all exactly this kind of incredible outlier for whom self-direction worked, who thrived in a world of digital distractions. For the motivated and obsessed, most of the downsides of the digital environment could be transmuted into learning advantages. In this way the “future of learning” picked winners and losers from the start, but the thought, or rather the hope, was that it was going to be for everyone. So long as every student could have a laptop and knew how to navigate the internet.

So-called “21st-century learning” thus evolved into its own educational movement, built on assumptions about the future economy and media environment on the one hand, and seemingly undeniable enrollment, economic, and social trends on the other.

But the fervors of the Scholastic Thermidor ultimately pushed schools into an economic arrangement they never signed up for. A decade of digital piracy and cheaper, more powerful devices and WiFi had birthed a new kind of seller’s market: the digital subscription model, or “Software as a Service” (SaaS).

4. District-2-District, Software-as-a-Civil-Service

As educational software became a professionalized service, an entire new ecosystem of managers, products, contracts, and middle-men was unleashed on the schools. The shift happened in three stages, but until it all collapsed each stage felt better than the last — like an arthritic frog getting boiled, except a plague somehow killed it first. (We’ll get to Covid next time, in Chapter 2.) There are finer-grained distinctions that we’ll discuss more in the next post, but the basic evolution of the economic and user models of ed-tech went something like Hardware → Software → The cloud.

Improvements in hardware costs, accessibility, and eventually student personalization were eagerly integrated into schools’ existing tech stacks. However, as the task of managing school technologies grew larger, so too did the shadow the new system cast over the educational ecosystem as a whole.

Hardware. Up until my middle school years, school technology took up about as much space as any one classroom did. The pedagogical footprint of the computer lab, and even to some extent laptops before one-to-one policies, looked rather familiar: teachers and students used them when it made sense to use them, and when typing classes or supervised classroom laptop time needed to end, everyone packed up and went along to the next period. What ed-tech-qua-hardware required, then, was quite sparse; learning how to use Word or PowerPoint on a 2004 iMac didn’t even require an internet connection! What was needed was the hardware guy, and for a time his role looked much like any normal “IT guy” or technical support position. Kids were hard on the devices, after all, and teachers sometimes had trouble getting the dongle and the projector to work.

Software. Sometime before 2010, software products started becoming indispensable to an increasing number of basic school functions. As I mentioned earlier, part of the reason for the growth of ed-tech-qua-software was just the huge convenience factor. Digital textbooks, for example, were still representations of the physical books; but now hundreds could be stored on a shared classroom machine, and students could start to access them all from one device, whether brought to them in class via cart, or bought for them by their school. Teachers were also able to scan or print excerpts from a single digital copy, so now it would matter even less if a student forgot their physical materials, where those were still being used.

What this evolutionary stage required was the software guy. As the number of ed-tech products expanded from a coterie of devices and routers to different digital textbooks and testing softwares, someone had to make sure every laptop on the cart or in a backpack was properly updated. If the browser or operating system wasn’t up to date, the student wouldn’t be able to properly take the digital test. After the test, someone from IT would have to go and extract the data from each individual computer, at least for a time, and so of course this required a more robust staff — and a staff that was increasingly becoming a necessary touchpoint for the everyday functioning of the classroom.

The cloud. One oft-forgotten element of school economic life in the prior stage was how often schools overbought educational software. The era of the unlocked PDF file accompanying a textbook was short-lived, in part because innovations outside ed-tech — in software distribution and purchasing, i.e. Software as a Service — were starting to work their magic on consumers’ wallets and big tech’s bottom line. Digital textbook and testing programs started to be sold in bulk seat packages, and schools frequently bought more seats than they needed, because ensuring every student could test was by far the more important priority. The solution to this overbuying? Individualized student accounts.

At some point, several different forces combined to enact the Software → Cloud shift. When laptops became cheap enough for every student to have them, and when WiFi and internet access became reliable and ubiquitous enough, it finally became possible for students to have unified digital accounts for school and all the ed-tech services used therein. This shift created the need for schools to have an additional managerial layer: data management and cloud services administrators. They weren’t managing software, and they weren’t fixing hardware, but instead managing student accounts, software serial number registrations, Apple school devices, and device permissions. These new cloud management roles couldn’t be mere auxiliary or low-status ones, though, because student data still had (and still has) some of the most stringent data-rights and privacy protection safeguards under US federal law. And so schools were going to make sure this new admin class had the tools it needed to make sure that their students’ data didn’t get stolen, lest a big lawsuit or state investigation come knocking.

The subscription/management trap. Taken together, the three stages of the ed-tech revolution I describe here brought about two seismic shifts in the economic and day-to-day operations of schools that they and society, at least in hindsight, seemed to miss. The first and more straightforward one is just that the ed-tech economic model schools are now chained to was not what anyone expected. Saddled with the experience of textbook procurement cycles, the thought of being able to simply avoid all of the physical toil and inventory maintenance expenses was made much more enticing by the fact that no one knew the kinds of economic models that were about to arise from the software space. So now schools are stuck paying every year, for nebulous software innovations, and the accessibility innovations didn’t seem to move the needle at all for student learning.

The second shift is less straightforward. But the basic idea is that everyone underestimated what managing student accounts, one-to-one devices, and digital learning would actually do to the classroom. Instructional time starts to bend around an infrastructure that has taken on a new purpose — not merely for accountability, but for pedagogy, too. How much is bent, how far, and what all this has broken is the subject of the next chapter.

For a couple years, though, the future of ed-tech wasn’t so clear.

The above process encountered at least one major structural barrier in 2011, when Congress zeroed out the major federal funding scheme for getting ed-tech into schools. Between 2002 and 2010, over ~$3.5 billion dollars had been earmarked for the Enhancing Education Through Technology program. The program had been far from streamlined, and half of the funds had to be distributed by the states via competitive grant applications which, unsurprisingly, were bigger burdens for low-income and staff-crunched districts. The applications also took up an increasing amount of district bureaucratic horsepower to submit, potentially win, and then have to faithfully implement. So a year after the Obama-era Department of Education itself recommended cutting the program, Congress obliged.

Federal funding had not been cut because America was collectively starting to rethink the ed-tech revolution, though. Every school and district still felt the pull of the era to digitize their classrooms and bring learning into the 21st century, but now without the financial support of the federal government. Stories like this one from 2014 were becoming increasingly common:

Ryan Imbriale had a quick and concise answer when asked whether his school district, Baltimore County Public Schools, received enough state funding to pay for its transition from textbooks to software: “No.”

As executive director of the district’s innovative learning department, Imbriale is overseeing a five-year project, called BCPS One, to move its entire curriculum online and make it available to teachers and students. He estimates that the district will spend more than $1 million a year on digital resources for its 108,376 students. The district was “lucky enough,” he said, to get one of the governor’s innovation grants.

On the other side of the country, the San Francisco Unified School District pays about $800,000 a year for software licenses and maintenance. Even with discounts from the companies, “the price tag is beyond the budget we get from the state” for technology, said Chief Technology Officer Matthew Kinzie. He said the district is seeking grants and donations to cover the costs.

But depending on these occasional infusions of money and continuing to look for outside resources isn’t practical.

The Wild West period of ed-tech funding could not last long, at least not like this.

5. Every Student Succeeds

By December 2015, America put a stake through the NCLB era with the ratification of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). ESSA was less a cause of the retreat and more a formal recognition that NCLB did not work out as well as hoped. Three years earlier the Department of Education had walked back the “Adequate Yearly Progress” accountability system that over half the states were failing to meet. The 50 states — even the states doing well — were tired of the atmosphere of over-optimization and punishing incentives. Now it was up to them to develop their own standards and methods for holding schools accountable. So long as they continued regular yearly testing on state standardized tests, of course, with at least 95% of students (and 95% of each student subgroup) participating.

Importantly, ESSA also amended the Title IV-A funding scheme to simplify the highly fragmented system that had grown under No Child Left Behind, creating three pillars of activities for which IV-A funds could be used: Activities to Support Well-Rounded Educational Opportunities; Activities to Support Safe and Healthy Students; and Activities to Support the Effective Use of Technology.

In its deliberative wisdom, Congress foresaw some of the dangers of large, unrestricted funds for technology in schools, and so it put a 15% cap on how much of the third pillar could be used “for purchasing technology infrastructure” (one-off device and software purchases, WiFi and router upgrades, etc.). The rest had to be used on more “human” activities, like teacher and student training, or developing new digital-first or blended environment courses.

The dividing line between “technology infrastructure” and other expenditures was not so neat in practice, though, for two reasons. First, as this presentation from the Washington state education agency might illustrate, the categories have a bit of play in their definitions. Purchasing a software suite to have on hand might trigger the 15% cap, but what if it is for a new course designed to foster digital citizenship? Or what if a new professional development course requires a WiFi overhaul? The boundaries blur.

Second, there is also some play in how districts can allocate funds across ESSA block grants. For example, they can elect to transfer Title II-A funds (for “Supporting Effective Instruction”) or Title V-B funds (for “Rural Education Initiatives”) to the Title IV-A bucket, effectively raising the 15% cap on purchasing tech infrastructure.

One possible reading of ESSA, therefore, is that it formalized our collective backtracking from the accountability revolution and its failures, but at the same time stimulated the embrace of the technology that had grown around that old system. That is, ESSA radically pulled back federal accountability standards — no more Adequate Yearly Progress, no more uniform benchmarks — while expanding federal funding and support for the tech stack those standards had required. Every state would still require yearly testing, but now they had to figure it out themselves. And of course they still had to prepare students for the 21st century.

Districts now had new ways to earmark more and more money for technologies meant for an infrastructure that had outlived its original raison d’être, and overlapping moral incentives to do so as fast as possible.

So why do kids need to understand how to use devices, before many can even read? Because assessments are administered on devices. Why does that matter? Because those assessments are used to evaluate teachers. And so a teacher, who knows that their job is based on students successfully performing on devices, is going to introduce students to devices earlier than they need, to ensure that they have the background knowledge and skills to use that device effectively when it counts. It literally does not matter at all whether this belief is true, because the incentive is built into the core structure of the education system.

6. Two Kinds of Looking Glasses

The promise was that a revolution was about to take place in teaching and learning, in the cradle of inexpensive laptops and digital interfaces. At the time “What else could the future have in store?” must have seemed an abundantly reasonable thought for many professionals whose careers were increasingly playing out via email. And yet —

The screens that looked at students became the screens that students looked through. A tech stack propagated to serve an accountability architecture was transmuted into a vessel for the future of learning, and spawned all the products and software services that came along with that. So it did not work and, as it was, it was never going to work, because no one proved that pedagogy could be digitized. Nobody produced a body of scholarly research showing pedagogy or learning could simply transfer onto screens.8 The education academies were asleep at the wheel.

The fact that a vigorous theory of digital pedagogy did not emerge — instead just a split between doomsayers on one side and surveyors and purveyors on the other — is prima facie evidence that the first ed-tech revolution was in fact something else. Lacking a working theory of how learning might constitutively change if it takes place via laptop screens and interactive software, education was ripe for disruptive innovation posing as genuine educational progress.

Now we’re caught in the gloom of the Scholastic Thermidor, and we’re confronting a new technology that finally makes the kind of ed-tech revolution everyone was vaguely imagining possible, at least in theory. Yet memories of the first revolution haunt us, so what we see approaching has the likeness of a monster.

Thankfully, whether it becomes one is up to us.

6

Higher education institutions were also feeling the pressure, and how they reacted to the digital learning revolution greatly accelerated it. Around the turn of the decade, colleges and universities were enrolling more students than ever before, reaping the benefits of the “college for all” cultural and policy environment. But by 2013 higher ed had seen its second consecutive year of enrollment declines, with 300,000 fewer students enrolled than the year prior. Customer satisfaction thus became a top priority, and so when students started rebelling against the high costs of textbooks and learning materials, higher ed institutions listened.

This enrollment crisis also coincided with the meteoric rise of a new competitor for colleges and universities: massive open online courses (MOOCs). In hindsight it seems that MOOCs — like much ed-tech — were not for everyone. Low-cost and easy-access allowed an explosion of students enrolling in the open online courses, but lacking rigid structure and traditional modes of credentialising meant that higher ed’s supposed new competition had a half life. While more people were signing up for MOOCs every year, an increasing portion of those who had enrolled were deciding to quit.

Sandeep Kaushik is a political consultant and former journalist in Seattle. He currently co-hosts Blue City Blues, a podcast about urban America and its discontents.

In one of Aesop’s fables, a dog crossing a bridge with a tasty piece of meat catches sight of its reflection in a stream. Thinking it sees another who’s found one even bigger, the dog urges forward, opens its mouth, and loses its dear meat downriver. Today, guest contributor Sandeep Kaushik brings us a saga about a similar creature, a well-meaning urban school district that lost sight of achievement- and accountability-based reform in pursuit of whatever purported to put equity first. From eliminating advanced programs to subverting student standards, Seattle Public Schools has selected radioactive means to realize identitarian ends, and the most vulnerable students are the ones who’ve paid the price. What follows is a long and gripping story about hindering progress, one that it’s time for the district to redress.

Attacks on Excellence is a series from Education Progress featuring critical coverage of the education policies and research paradigms that are holding students back.

The fastest-growing big city in the United States during the 2010s, Seattle is a knowledge economy superstar. Seattle not only boasts the third-highest median income among the 50 largest American cities, but also is the most educated major city in the country and among the most literate, with more than 70 percent of residents over age 25 holding a bachelor’s degree or higher. Seattle is also one of the country’s most politically left-leaning cities (like Zohran Mamdani in New York, Seattle’s recently elected mayor, Katie Wilson, is a self-described socialist), one that conceives of itself as a Disneyland of progressive public policy imagineering, where elected officials vie with one another to lead on incorporating au courant activist ideas and cutting edge cosmopolitan cultural commitments into governance.

Not coincidentally, Seattle’s public school system has foundered over the last decade, beset by declining enrollments, serious budgetary challenges, and mounting safety issues. Seattle’s test scores, while still relatively high overall, have lost significant ground compared to the national average. Perhaps most concerning of all given district leaders’ oft-proclaimed fixation on equity, Seattle’s public schools have in recent years produced ever widening achievement gaps, even as the district implemented comprehensive systemic changes intended to shrink these gaps.

Forces beyond Seattle Public Schools’ (SPS) control, like inadequate state support for education, the rise of smartphones in and outside of the classroom, and the disruptions of the COVID era have certainly contributed to the district’s troubles. That said, many of the problems afflicting the district are self-inflicted wounds. Dating from well before the pandemic shuttered schools, Seattle school district leaders made a series of purposeful, ideologically driven decisions to lower academic and grading standards, hollow out the district’s once thriving gifted and talented program, loosen discipline and consequences for truancy, and limit educational opportunities, and then compounded the litany of bad choices by demonstrating a willful blindness to their decisions’ negative downstream results.

As such, what happened in the Seattle Public Schools — just as much as the higher profile pandemic-era meltdown in the San Francisco Unified School District — stands as a cautionary tale of how good progressive intentions can go terribly wrong, and as a microcosm of how the national turn in some of the country’s most educated and economically successful blue jurisdictions over the last decade away from a focus on accountability and academic achievement in schools has turned into an extended exercise in self-sabotage. The result has been the educational short-changing of children of all races in Seattle, but with particular harm caused to poor and minority children.

NURTURING, NOT JUDGING

The top-line narrative of Seattle Public Schools’ past decade is the story of a comprehensive, even radical, internal cultural and pedagogic shift. The reset is broadly characterized as a turn away from a reformist culture built around instituting multiple layers of accountability (for students, teachers, and schools) that was intended to maximize academic achievement, to one fixated on warmer, less prescriptive, therapeutically tinged pedagogical approaches designed to foster a sense of identitarian belonging.

In keeping with the national Democratic Party’s embrace of education reform in the early Obama years, SPS from 2007–11, under the direction of then-Superintendent Maria Goodloe-Johnson, became intensively focused on boosting student achievement and school and teacher performance. And those efforts bore fruit: according to the Stanford Education Data Archive (SEDA), produced by Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project, Seattle students’ average test scores were 0.7 grade levels above the national average in 2009. By 2013 they had risen to 1.43 grade levels above average, finally peaking at 1.68 above average in 2018.

The rapid academic gains may have been real, but not everyone was pleased with the way they were being achieved. By the early 2010s, many progressive Seattle teachers and activists had joined forces with racial and social justice organizations to push back against what they saw as culturally inappropriate testing and academic accountability regimes that were unfair to children of color. In 2013, this opposition went national when some local teachers launched a defiant boycott of standardized tests, winning support from leaders of national teachers unions and other prominent progressive education advocates like Noam Chomsky, Diane Ravitch, and Jonathan Kozol.

Already in 2012 the district had adopted a new foundational policy for “Ensuring Educational and Racial Equity” that among its other elements mandated district schools offer a “welcoming culture and inclusive environment” for students. By the time Congress replaced No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and its accountability mechanisms in 2015, SPS was well on its way to unwinding what had come to be widely perceived as a cruelly indifferent, unfeeling, and counterproductive fixation on measurable outcomes. In its place, SPS moved to implement policies centered on making students who had previously been deemed underperformers, particularly black and brown students and those of lower socio-economic status, feel affirmed in Seattle schools. As the 2012 equity policy explained it, “A student whose history and heritage are appreciated and celebrated will learn better and be more successful than if that student is forced to overcome a cultural barrier.”

In short, a new organizational culture rapidly took root, committed to reforming the educational experience root and branch to incorporate new equity-focused, identity-based anti-racist approaches. Where previously the school district had seen its task as helping children from disadvantaged backgrounds to acquire the skills they needed to meet the district’s educational mandates, the new thinking was that it was the district’s obligation to adjust its mandates to better accommodate the children who were falling short. This new dispensation, with its “multiple pathways to success” (as the equity policy required) would eliminate the stubbornly persistent gaps in achievement between black and Latino children on the one hand, and Asian and white children on the other.

By any measure, Seattle’s public schools had performed poorly on addressing racial disparities in the NCLB era, despite recognizing wide achievement gaps as a problem for decades. When Stanford analysts first released SEDA in 2016, they found that Seattle had the fifth-biggest achievement gap among the 200 largest school districts nationally, with black children performing 3.5 grade levels behind their white peers — roughly 4 grade levels on the current scale. So at the outset of this cultural shift a decade ago, a hard break with the past seemed long overdue. Equalizing outcomes became the new north star for Seattle educators, and it quickly morphed into the district’s singular focus for driving changes that SPS decision makers expected would finally create a fair and just educational experience for the children in their charge.

On that basis Seattle Public Schools embarked on a sweeping set of what might be called “equity-reductionist” policies. In the older reform framework, eliminating inequitable group outcomes across divides of race and class was one goal among others in an array of desired educational outcomes. But now that array was reduced to just one, a singular consideration driving the decision-making of district leaders. Equity trumped all.

District leaders’ narrowed focus on engineering equal outcomes also carried the risk of being reductionist in a second sense: if equal outcomes were the only results that mattered, then it suddenly made perfect sense to reduce standards, eliminate choices, and force all children, especially higher-achieving ones, into a one-size-fits-all pedagogical box providing the quickest path to get there. Under this sort of equity-reductionist mindset, working to ameliorate performance barriers created by racial and class divides was not nearly enough; seeking to erase differential outcomes rooted in natural aptitude and ability became fair game as well.

That this is the wrong way to apply equity principles, that it doesn’t actually improve the academic performance of poor and minority kids, and that it might alienate families with higher-achieving children, didn’t seem to matter. The only thing that did was that the district moved boldly and decisively to try to ensure all identity groupings — and really, all individual children — performed as close to equally as possible, particularly by eliminating any educational programs that were disproportionately enrolling white and Asian children.

DETRACKING TO END “EDUCATIONAL REDLINING”

This is exactly what happened in the Seattle schools. By 2016, progressive members of the Seattle School Board, SPS central-office policymakers, and some prominent school principals had concluded that if differences in outcomes were going to be meaningfully addressed, radical curricular and pedagogical change would be needed. They began by experimenting with ending the practice of tracking students into distinct ability groupings based on testing results. Black and Latino students had been persistently under-enrolled in higher-level honors courses; thanks to promotion by anti-Common Core educator and detracking advocate Carol Burris, the belief took hold that eliminating those standalone courses, and combining higher-achieving students in the same classrooms with lower-achieving ones, would improve outcomes for all.

First on the chopping block was the district’s Spectrum program, which offered separate classes for children who had demonstrated the capacity to complete academic work one grade level above their age cohort. After a brief pilot in one school of reintegrating Spectrum kids into regular classrooms showed promising preliminary results, beginning in 2016 Spectrum classes were eliminated in all elementary and K-8 schools, and the district began piloting an effort to eliminate standalone honors classes in high school. The elimination of Spectrum in middle schools followed in 2020.

In 2019 a task force of parents and educators previously convened by the district was deep into the process of developing a set of recommendations calling for the district’s crown jewel, its highly subscribed-to, top-tier gifted and talented program, the Highly Capable Cohort (HCC), to be reformed to boost minority enrollment. But a vocal contingent of progressive activist school board members, impatient with bureaucratic process and time-consuming stakeholdering work, was already convinced that HCC was at the core of the district’s inequity problem. Moreover, the very idea of a separate program for gifted children violated their now ascendant equity-reductionist principles. Even before the task force could issue its proposals, the board’s progressives moved to kill the program, prodding then-SPS Superintendent Denise Juneau to declare war on HCC, which at the time enrolled nine percent of SPS students.

Juneau publicly denounced HCC as a “program of segregation” rooted in “educational redlining.” She further claimed that Garfield High School, a storied Seattle school which served as one of the program’s homes, was “Apartheid High” and the “slave ship.” Unsurprisingly, her harsh comments sparked an uproar among HCC parents, who organized to speak out in support of the advanced learning program.

Their pleas fell on deaf ears. When a contingent of minority parents turned out at school board meetings in 2020 to testify in favor of reforming rather than eliminating HCC, Chandra Hampson, an uncompromising progressive firebrand who had just joined the board but was already emerging as the leader of its majority identitarian activist wing, publicly dismissed them as “tokenized” fronts for privileged white parents. Hampson was hardly alone in thinking this way. Over the next five years, activist SPS board members and senior staff developed a pattern of dismissing any criticism of their equity-reductionist policies as emanating from entitled, white parents with retrograde, reactionary politics — this despite the fact that the complaining parents were racially diverse and almost all would self-identify as liberal or progressive.

Despite vocal and passionate parental support for HCC, the board mandated the elimination of standalone HCC classrooms within four years (although last year, in the face of a sustained crescendo of parent complaints, the board extended the date of its final elimination to 2030). Even as the battle over HCC raged, SPS moved in other ways to restrict opportunities for higher-achieving students, including deciding that all non-HCC children through sixth grade would be required to take the same math course, regardless of aptitude. And beyond sixth grade, no child would be allowed to take math courses more than one grade level beyond their current status.

AN ECHO OF SAN FRANCISCO

The board’s palpable contempt for anyone who expressed concerns about its leveling efforts triggered what would become an exodus of families out of the public schools. But the push to eliminate HCC and otherwise hold back higher-performing kids was not the only point of friction. As the pandemic hit and schools shuttered, and passions in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis triggered a frenetic wave of institutional changes across Seattle justified in the name of social justice, the perception began to spread among many parents that the education of Seattle’s children had become a secondary consideration for an increasingly ideologically driven school board.

They had reason to be alarmed that the SPS leaders had perhaps lost the plot. During the pandemic, the San Francisco Board of Education was pilloried by angry parents for putting far more energy into renaming rather than reopening schools. That anger grew after one of the San Francisco board members frivolously sued the district and her colleagues for $87 million after she was reprimanded for offensive tweets in which she used the term “house n****r” to refer to Asians, whom she added used “white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘get ahead.’” These antics from board members in San Francisco, which resulted in three of them getting recalled, received enormous national attention. In Seattle, though, similarly eyebrow-raising acts largely flew under the national media’s radar screen, even as they sparked similar parental anger.

Much of that anger, however, was being voiced privately, behind closed doors. Even before Seattle passionately embraced the spirit of the post-George Floyd racial reckoning, one downstream consequence of the district’s uncompromising embrace of equity reductionism was a chilling effect that silenced concerned parents or other observers who questioned whether the district’s new approaches were likely to be successful. Those who voiced even cautious concerns about the changes were angrily denounced as racists. Often leading the charge to silence dissenters was Tracy Castro-Gill, the district’s controversial Ethnic Studies Program Manager who maintained an active online and social media presence and a large support base within Seattle’s identitarian left (Castro-Gill was removed from her position in 2020 after having been accused of bullying behavior and other misconduct). Local media too became noticeably unwilling to probe the district’s major policy shifts that were being justified by the urgent need to address pervasive systemic inequities.

In the summer of 2020, after large homeless encampments formed near two Seattle schools, Hampson and her close ally, Seattle School Board President Zachary Pullin (then Zachary “DeWolf”), preemptively demanded the mayor refrain from clearing one of the encampments, which sat on school property. “We demand sweeps NEVER be performed on school grounds, adjacent or elsewhere in this City,” they wrote. The camp remained there for well over a year, as parents’ concerns mounted, even as several encampment residents overdosed and the school twice went into encampment-related lockdowns. Those concerns only grew as multiple allegations surfaced that the head of the small, dubiously credentialed nonprofit the district engaged to resettle the encamped had instead been spending district funds to buy meth, which he had female encampment residents help him inject.

As was the case with the San Francisco board members, Hampson and Pullin appeared far more interested in social justice wins than in establishing effective remote learning efforts or in getting schools reopened. After exiting the school board after one term in 2021, Pullin penned an unintentionally revealing Medium post detailing his term overseeing Seattle schools.

The 4,250-word piece extensively details Pullin’s work with activist students and groups to improve their sense of belonging. Pullin, who also identifies as Native American and queer, spared no effort to make trans, black, Native, and LGBTQIA+ students feel heard. For example, his “LGBTQIA+ Inclusion Resolution” passed by the board in June 2020, three months after Seattle schools closed during the pandemic, included a provision that “requires LGBTQIA+ history, contributions, stories, and achievements be explicitly included in all English and history curriculum.” He proudly touted his successful fight, also accomplished while schools were closed in 2020, to modify district policy to allow students two excused absences a year to participate in climate strikes and similar protest activities.

Yet in this extensive account, Pullin displayed an interest in academic performance and achievement in Seattle schools only twice. First was his celebration of successfully pushing forward a pandemic-period “A or incomplete” grading policy that he told the Seattle Times would ensure “no students are penalized because they might not have the same advantages at home that other students have.” This policy was justified, SPS said in a press release at the time, because “grading has been one of the biggest sources of inequities in education because student performance may be influenced by factors outside a student’s control.” Second was Pullin’s expression of satisfaction with the dismantling of what he called “the trauma of the District’s Highly Capable Cohort” which “has only perpetuated segregation and racism in schools.”

The questionable prioritization continued. In 2021 after a costly outside investigation, both Pullin and Hampson, who succeeded Pullin as board president, were mildly reprimanded by their board colleagues after having been found to have bullied and berated two senior black female staffers. They had been spurred to anger because the staffers had not moved quickly enough, in their view, to develop a new anti-racism policy that Hampson and Pullin felt an urgency to implement. The staffers, for their part, had pointed out that they were busy trying to stand up online learning in the midst of the COVID emergency, an explanation that did not satisfy the board members.

In an eerie echo of what transpired in San Francisco, Hampson responded by suing the district, unsuccessfully demanding the reprimand be rescinded. Remarkably, the spectacle of a sitting school board president suing her own district over being rebuked for bullying black staffers initially received no attention in the local press. After this author learned of the lawsuit from education blogger Melissa Westbrook, I asked her in May 2022 to write a story for a local online news site with which I was affiliated. In a telling indication of the local media’s reluctance to cover the mounting dysfunction within the district, the Seattle Times did not mention the lawsuit until August 2022, when the case was on appeal. Hampson’s appeal, as it happened, was denied.

The bullying behavior surfaced in this incident was just one expression of a growing toxicity and division within the upper ranks of SPS leadership. Superintendent Juneau began privately complaining of being similarly pressured and disrespected; in December 2020 she announced she would not seek reappointment to another term and then resigned early in May of the following year. Board members not aligned with its dominant progressive activist wing also complained privately of being ostracized and targeted; as two board members resigned in early 2024 for no longer living in the districts they represented, they issued a veiled statement alleging they had been targeted by some of their board colleagues. Juneau’s successor as superintendent, Brent Jones, despite pushing to implement their shared agenda, would also run afoul of the board’s identitarian activist wing. After narrowly receiving a one-year contract extension on a split vote in February 2025, Jones announced his resignation the next month.

GOING ALL IN ON EQUITY REDUCTIONISM

The district’s single-minded pursuit of equity reductionism continued to grow. In 2019, along with taking aim at the HCC program, district leaders loudly proclaimed that they were “laser focused on supporting Students of Color who are furthest away from educational justice” by “disrupting the legacies of racism in our educational system.” Achieving the district’s five-year strategic goal of “ensuring racial equity” would begin, they decided, by going all in on a single objective: improving educational outcomes for black boys. With great fanfare and $3.7 million in philanthropic support, an Office of African American Male Achievement (AAMA) was opened and given a mission “to dismantle the anti-Black institutional and structural racism that exists within school systems.”

By 2019, it had become an article of faith within the SPS bureaucracy and the progressive activist majority on the school board that Seattle’s achievement gaps were rooted in the alienation of minority children from mainstream white culture. And with this (mis-)diagnosis of the problem, instead of giving greater emphasis and resources to more traditional, more proven ways of improving educational outcomes for at-risk children, such as more individualized attention or intensive tutoring, SPS directed enormous effort into things like developing a new math curriculum (developed and championed by Ethnic Studies Manager Tracy Castro-Gill) infused with trendy progressive social justice nostrums. Teaching children that math was historically an instrument of oppression and Western dominance would, it was thought, make the subject less foreign and off-putting (the district later quietly dropped this foray into what conservative outlets nationally had begun mocking as “woke math” without public explanation). In 2022, they also added more ethnic studies classes.

The AAMA developed five strategies to improve educational outcomes for black boys, and substantial effort and expense were put into better understanding this cohort, including determining, via a survey of nearly 3,000 black students, how many identified as non-binary or gender diverse (seven percent of those between grades 3-12, in case you were wondering). Black students were empowered to have a voice in the development of equity policies, and Black Student Unions were created and supported in schools where black students were in the minority, as were family supports, peer-to-peer restorative circles, and “literacy tools based on cultural wisdom.” Equity-informed assessment approaches to better capture the “whole-student outcomes” of black boys and identity-based mentoring programs were also adopted.

District leaders were also deeply concerned by unequal disciplinary rates between black and white students, and responded by reducing punishments across the board for misbehaving students. In 2015, SPS halted most out-of-school suspensions for elementary school students. But racial disparities in student discipline persisted, even as the total number of disciplinary actions by the district continued to drop dramatically. In the 2022–23 school year, disciplinary actions fell by more than 50 percent compared to the previous school year. This repudiation of traditional disciplinary standards had direct classroom repercussions: teachers soon began complaining they had little recourse when students in their classrooms were acting out, until they demanded and won contractual changes in 2025 that restored teachers’ authority to remove disruptive students and required that the school’s principal consult with the teacher before returning a child to class.

Absenteeism too rose to crisis levels during the pandemic and stayed elevated afterward. In the 2022–23 school year nearly 40 percent of the children enrolled in the middle schools serving Seattle’s poorest communities were deemed chronically absent. Yet SPS, ever mindful of the risk of stigmatizing minority children or causing them emotional distress, took few enforcement actions to try to return students to the schools. Even as more than half the students at Rainier Beach (41 percent black) and Chief Sealth (22 percent black) high schools were chronically absent that year, SPS filed only 22 truancy petitions in total across the entire city.

IDENTITARIAN BELONGING FAILS ITS TEST

Yet all of that focus and funding to make black boys feel more culturally seen and supported, along with the reductions in disciplinary actions, produced no discernible improvement in “educational justice.” In fact, the academic performance of Seattle’s schools went in the opposite direction. Not only did the district’s test scores slip compared to the national average, but the racial achievement gap grew larger: the district had actually become less equitable.

When the pandemic hit and Seattle schools pivoted to online learning, standardized test scores fell across the board, just as they did everywhere. The decline had begun pre-pandemic, in 2019, but then accelerated sharply while Seattle’s schools remained shuttered. When state and national testing resumed, Seattle students’ scores had fallen from their peak of 1.68 grade levels above the national average in 2018 to just 1.11 grade levels above average in 2022. On a positive note, overall test scores have rebounded recently to 1.39 grade levels above average, which while still well below the 2018 peak places Seattle in the top 12% of districts nationwide, a result commensurate with SPS’ resources – the district spends the 10^th most per pupil among the country’s 100 largest school districts.

But the rebound was not nearly as strong for young black students. In spite of all of the targeted effort, achievement and proficiency gaps between black students and all students has actually grown since the 2018–19 school year. On the state Smarter Balanced Assessments (SBAs), black students’ ELA proficiency levels fell from an average of 38.3 percent in spring 2019 to 29.9 percent proficiency in spring 2025; their math proficiency levels fell from 27.4 to 19.6 percent in the same period. (The district’s official, post-pandemic goal had been to raise both levels to 70 percent by 2026.) Figure 1 shows how these declines for black students outpaced those of students overall.

Between the 2019 and 2025 SBAs, the proficiency gap between white students and black students increased by 4.8 percentage points in ELA and a full 12.6 points in math. In addition, the achievement gap that Stanford analysts found in 2016 has only gotten worse. Based on state and national data, in 2025, Seattle’s black students now score 4.7 grade levels below their white peers in math and 5 full grade levels in reading:

Over the five years between 2019 and 2024 that this failing focus on black boys was the district’s primary educational concern, the school board or senior staff made almost no effort to interrogate why AAMA’s programs and strategies were failing to deliver the desired results. Instead, any mention of the widening achievement gaps was left out of the district’s reports and communications, which continued to tout the efforts being made as if they were actually accomplishing something meaningful. This was in keeping with SPS’s move away from doling out consequences based on performance and results-based metrics of the sort associated with the education reform era. What really took precedence now at SPS was making students feel more seen and welcomed, as opposed to setting academic expectations that might make them feel challenged or inadequate. As Castro-Gill put it in a 2020 essay, “Closing ‘Achievement/Opportunity’ gaps is a Western way of thinking about education. It’s linear and views students as lacking something and needing to be turned into some ideal, which is defined by white supremacy.“

Still, the district’s abject failure in its efforts to help black boys was plain to see for anyone who looked past the wall of happy talk. In January 2025 the school board quietly dropped its goals of raising the proficiency levels of black boys, again without making any effort to excavate why the previous five years of effort had failed.

NO COPS, BUT RISING SAFETY CONCERNS

As the intensive focus on making black boys feel like they belonged was not producing positive results — at least by the traditional, non-equity-based measures — other students and families were feeling short-changed. It had become glaringly obvious that district leaders were more interested in often performative social justice concerns than in improving educational quality in Seattle’s schools. Prolonged school closures during COVID significantly heightened those concerns — Seattle schools did not begin reopening until April 2021, with full-time in-person instruction for all students delayed to September 2021, about a year after many private and charter schools had reopened.

Safety too became a rising concern. In June 2020, the school board, citing its desire to demonstrate support for defunding the police, voted to remove Seattle police officers who had long been assigned to act as “School Resource Officers” (SROs) in five Seattle schools in higher-crime areas. This occurred over the objections of some minority parents, and despite the fact that these officers were often trusted mentors with long-standing ties to the school communities where they were deployed.

The district pulled SROs just when it might have benefited from having them. In the wake of the pandemic, Seattle was not spared from the national crime spike. In 2022, a student at Ingraham High School was shot and killed in the building while school was in session; in 2024 a student at Garfield High (where more than a quarter of the student population is black) was fatally shot during lunchtime in the school parking lot while trying to break up a dispute, and earlier this year two young black boys were tragically gunned down at a bus stop outside of Rainier Beach High School in a heavily minority, high-crime area of Southeast Seattle, among other serious criminal acts in and around Seattle schools.

Despite these developments, the Seattle School Board has remained staunchly opposed to restoring SROs in schools. In the wake of the Garfield shooting, which occurred in broad daylight in front of dozens of witnesses (the perpetrator remains at large), SPS surveyed school families about restoring a police officer assigned to the school. Among the respondents, a supermajority of the school community expressed support, as did the school’s principal, who is black. Despite this, in the face of pressure from progressive activists, last October the board voted down a proposed one-year pilot to restore an officer at Garfield by a 5-2 margin.

CURIOUSLY INCURIOUS ABOUT PLUNGING ENROLLMENTS

The stagnant test scores, loss of focus on educational quality, constricted opportunities, and rising safety concerns had real downstream impacts. Many parents, particularly those from more affluent backgrounds or with a greater focus on educational attainment, began looking at other educational options for their children. (Asian families in particular removed their children at higher rates.) SPS enrollment has dropped by more than 4,000 students since 2019, even as the city’s population grew by more than 63,000. The percentage of students born in the city who enroll in public kindergarten has fallen to 53 percent, a 19 percent decline since 2012. Meanwhile, private school enrollments have surged nearly 20 percent since 2019, with private schools now educating more than a quarter of Seattle’s children, the second highest percentage in the country.

John Hay Elementary in upper Queen Anne, an upscale neighborhood where the median home price is in the seven figures, became the poster child school for SPS’s disenrollment crisis. The school shed 200 students, nearly 40 percent of its total enrollment, between 2020 and 2022. In keeping with SPS’s penchant for ignoring bad outcomes and inconvenient truths, the district made no effort to determine why so many families were abandoning the school. One parent who had a child enrolled at John Hay at the time says that back in 2022, some teachers at the school were overemphasizing social justice and other identity-related instruction instead of spending time on basic academic and life skills, particularly in the lower grades. “Are kids in kindergarten really able to understand land acknowledgments?”

He clearly wasn’t the only one who found John Hay’s prioritizing of social justice activism over traditional learning concerning. At the time, almost no one complained publicly about this shift in emphasis except in coded ways; in that era, the social risks in Seattle of speaking up against identitarian equity strategies were very real, particularly for more affluent white or Asian parents. But wealthier parents reacted by quietly removing their children and sending them to private schools where they would receive a more traditional education. While the levels of disenrollment at John Hay may have been extreme, there was reason to suspect that parental disenchantment with the district’s curtailment of advanced learning and its preoccupation with identitarian leveling over maximizing the educational attainments of each individual child was widespread.

No one knew for sure, though. For years district leaders attributed declining enrollments to the city’s rising cost of living driving out lower-income families, as well as to the growing prevalence of remote work spurred by the pandemic. For several years they refused mounting public calls to actually investigate why so many families were leaving, which heightened suspicions that they knew that if they asked parents why they removed their children it would become unavoidable that their equity reductionist policies were spurring the exits. That changed in 2024, when the district finally capitulated and commissioned an enrollment survey of parents and caretakers of current and former students. The results, released publicly in January 2025, were both eye-opening and entirely predictable.

Just short of three in five parents and caretakers of currently enrolled students said they had considered disenrolling their children from SPS because of concerns about educational quality, while 44 percent cited the curriculum being taught as a concern. Another 42 percent cited the changes to HCC as something that had caused them to consider leaving. Among parents who had already removed their children, 57 percent cited the quality of SPS’s education as a major motivation for doing so, while 48 percent cited the curriculum being taught and 20 percent said they were majorly motivated to leave by changes to HCC. In an open-ended question asked of disenrolled parents about what would induce them to re-enroll their children, by far the most common answer (27 percent) was improving academic rigor. Cost of living in Seattle was a major motivation to leave for only nine percent of respondents.

By then serious damage had been done. SPS’s declining enrollment had exacerbated the district’s financial woes, which further worsened after district leaders ended a five-day teachers’ strike in 2022 by agreeing to a contract that the district lacked the revenues to support. Annual deficits towered at $131 million in 2023, $104 million in 2024, and $94 million in 2025, with the shortfall made up by district leaders cobbling together short-term band-aids, draining reserves and engaging in questionable borrowing. The perception of a district in perpetual crisis further eroded parents’ confidence in district leaders. Things may not have reached doom-loop levels of family flight, exactly — enrollment in Seattle schools held steady in 2024 — but SPS’s constant budgetary scrambling added to perceptions of a district that was seemingly careening out of control and either unwilling or incapable of getting its house in order.

A REBELLION IN THE PARENTAL RANKS

For years the equity-reductionist approaches pushed by progressive school board members and some senior staff received little media scrutiny and generated almost no public pushback. That began to change in 2023, as word leaked out widely in the SPS parent community that several board members, led by School Board Vice President Liza Rankin, who had replaced Chandra Hampson as the leader of the board’s identitarian-progressive wing, were laying the groundwork to close a large number of Seattle schools.

In the summer of 2023, then-Superintendent Brent Jones began convening a series of “well-resourced schools community meetings” with the ostensible purpose of gauging the sentiments of parents and other stakeholders about what they were looking for in their local schools. But the real meaning of “well-resourced schools,” in the deliberately obfuscatory, borderline Orwellian parlance of the district, was to socialize the idea that district resources were stretched too thin across too many schools and therefore the district would be better off consolidating students in fewer, larger locations. That this was the district leadership’s way of setting the precedent for a major round of school closures was not lost on those paying close attention.

In September 2024, Jones finally surfaced what by then had become Seattle’s worst-kept secret. He proposed shuttering up to 21 schools, about a fifth of all of the public schools in the city (and more than a quarter of its elementaries and K-8s), arguing this was a necessary step towards addressing the district’s budget shortfalls. The backlash from parents was immediate and only grew after it quickly became apparent that the bulk of the schools slated for closure were the district’s “option schools,” which offered alternative curricula like STEM instruction or language immersion programs. As it happened, these schools were also the most popular schools in the district; in fact, the ten schools with the longest waiting lists to get in were all listed on the closure chopping block.

But for Rankin and her allies on the board, these schools were bastions of privilege and engines of inequity. (It’s also worth noting that many of the Seattle schools with the highest levels of Asian enrollment were targeted for closure.) Closing them would concentrate more resources into neighborhood schools with higher black and brown populations, the thinking went, and teaching all children under a one-size-fits-all approach would help to equalize outcomes. As Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat wrote about the district’s targeting of these schools, “Because you have to choose to go to an option school, and then apply, many families don’t. Rather than help them navigate this system, or open up additional intriguing options, the district appears to be heading instead toward uniformity.”

The surfacing of the school-closure plan turned into a galvanizing moment for frustrated and increasingly organized SPS parents. They saw through the district’s flimsy justifications that these closures were driven by economic necessity rather than its determination to shutter the schools they saw as catering to privileged children and siphoning resources from minority children (this despite the reality that the option schools tend to cost the district less per pupil than regular schools). As the backlash grew, and some parents initiated an effort to recall Rankin (the allegations in the recall petition were later deemed legally insufficient by a judge), for the first time school board members (and former members) publicly broke ranks with the board’s equity-reductionist wing, decrying the closure plan and the district’s questionable policies and pedagogical approaches more broadly.

Within three months, SPS first backpedaled, reducing the closure list to four schools, then ultimately withdrew the plan entirely. That did not stem the criticism, however. The dam had finally burst, and emboldened members of the board continued to call out the lack of accountability and poor leadership within the district. The fallout from the school closure fight fundamentally shifted the balance of power in the upper ranks of SPS. Rankin was replaced as president of the board in December 2024 by Gina Topp, a less ideologically hardline member with a more conciliatory approach towards board management.

HARRISON BERGERON EXITS STAGE LEFT

After Jones’s departure and a long period with an acting superintendent, the district’s fourth superintendent search since 2014 led to the selection of Ben Shuldiner, who took over the reins at Seattle Public Schools at the beginning of February. Shuldiner immediately offered a sharp change of tone. An outsider to the district, the energetic, blunt-talking New Yorker (who self-describes as strongly progressive) is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard who had become the youngest high school principal in New York state history. Most recently he oversaw the schools in Lansing, Michigan, a district about one-fifth the size of Seattle’s, where he significantly increased enrollments, attendance, test scores, and graduation rates.

In a bracing contrast to SPS’s usual diet of platitudes, deflections, and cold-shouldered dismissals, Shuldiner launched his tenure with a series of public appearances and community and stakeholder meetings where he forthrightly acknowledged that the performance of SPS was subpar and things would need to change — dramatically. He invited dissident parents to join him for collaborative work sessions to reimagine how the district is administered and structured. And in his public comments, including a public conversation with me in February, he has been a raging bull in the china shop of Seattle’s progressive-identitarian sacred cows, saying SPS has misconstrued its approach to equity and has enabled a culture of complacency and a lack of accountability.

When asked about the district’s equity approaches, he routinely cites the 1961 Kurt Vonnegut short story “Harrison Bergeron,” which imagines a dystopian future world where the state enforces equality of outcomes by suppressing individual talent and handicapping higher achievers: beautiful people are forced to wear ugly masks, athletic people are saddled with weights to limit their physical prowess, and so on. This sort of equity reductionism, Shuldiner admits, is the path that SPS has followed. “We made a really big tactical mistake by lowering standards rather than raising standards,” he said in a recent public appearance, and told the Seattle Times that SPS has exemplified “the soft bigotry of low expectations” towards “our BIPOC and multilingual students,” while “accepting and excusing low performance rather than owning it.” Asked how the district could do a better job of educating those students, he has a succinct answer: hold people accountable.

Beyond hiring a change agent like Shuldiner, the Seattle School Board has taken other recent actions that indicate a willingness to reset its approaches. In February, the board began dismantling its widely criticized Student Outcomes Focused Governance (SOFG) framework that had been championed by its identitarian activist wing and formally adopted in 2021. SOFG, with its rigid approach to delineating board responsibilities and focus that led to the elimination of standing committees (including the committee overseeing the district’s budget), fewer public board meetings, and inattention to issues of concern like school safety, had engendered widespread criticism. Perhaps most encouraging of all on the curricular front, in April, after an 18-month study process, SPS formally adopted a phonics-based “science of reading” curriculum for K-5 students, cementing its decision to move away from the “balanced literacy” whole-word recognition approach that had been entrenched in many blue jurisdictions.

Is a full-scale course correction for the Seattle schools in the offing? Superintendent Shuldiner is telegraphing further major changes, but it remains to be seen whether he will actually have success in restoring a culture of accountability and performance to Seattle’s public schools. Can he deliver equity the right (but much more difficult) way, by raising up those who are falling behind rather than holding back higher performers? Hard choices loom large, and while his call for a sharp change in direction has mostly been well received so far, the fraught, racially charged politics of Seattle’s school district will not be easy for an outsider to negotiate, and an anti-accountability backlash is certainly possible. In our February interview Shuldiner told me, only half-jokingly, “Either I’m going to be here 10 years or I’m going to be gone in six months.”

A BROADER LESSON FOR BLUE AMERICA

In some ways Seattle is an outlier city: it is a far richer, more educated, and even bluer city than most other big blue American cities. It is also a majority-white city, one more in tune than most with the latest trends in progressive cosmopolitan culture. As such, Seattle’s public schools have become a proving ground for latter-day progressive pedagogical experimentation.

But the same trends that have reshaped public education in Seattle have also been reshaping public education across urban America over the last decade. The portrait above of the wrong turn taken by Seattle Public Schools looks much like those that could be painted in countless districts across the country, just with bolder brushstrokes.

So if what happened in Seattle is broadly reflective of educational trends beyond the city’s borders, then it’s important to admit plainly that the people who were in charge of Seattle’s schools over the last decade failed. They promised that rebuilding Seattle’s schools on a foundational culture of identitarian belonging would address the many shortfalls and mistakes of the education reform era, and that a turn towards equity reductionism would deliver “educational justice.” They were wrong, in some cases spectacularly and embarrassingly so. But that they failed to deliver what they promised does not mean that they didn’t care.

They did care about Seattle’s kids. They cared about encouraging Seattle’s children to advocate for bolder action to combat climate change. They cared about making sure black and brown and gay and trans children across Seattle feel like they belong in the mainstream of their school’s culture, that they feel validated in their identities and connected to their communities. They cared that Seattle’s children demonstrate fluency in the cultural codes and cues that mark upscale, educated cosmopolitanism. They cared that no child feels like they aren’t good enough, or that they are less capable, or a failure. They cared that society’s structures and institutions — especially its public schools — do not oppress or mistreat children from underprivileged backgrounds. They cared deeply about all of those things, and many others. They just didn’t care nearly as much about the basic education of Seattle’s children.

Attacks on Excellence is a series from Education Progress featuring critical coverage of the education policies and research paradigms that are holding students back.

In 2020, the admissions process at Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology (TJ) underwent a radical change. After voting in October to eliminate the top-ranked magnet school’s infamously demanding entrance exam, in December the Fairfax County School Board announced a new admissions policy based on “holistic review.” In addition to their GPA and coursework, applicants would also be evaluated based on a “problem-solving essay,” a “Student Portrait Sheet,” and “experience factors” such as being “multilingual learners, economically disadvantaged, or eligible for special education services.”

The overhaul at TJ was the culmination of an intense debate in Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) over how to diversify the district’s most selective public high school. While criticism over the low representation Black and Hispanic students at such elite schools is not new, the outrage and urgency peaked in the summer of 2020. Amid the protests following the murder of George Floyd, the admissions statistics TJ published for its Class of 2024 were inflammatory. While the share of Hispanic students admitted was only 3.3%, the share of Black students was “N/A”; in place of a specific number for Black students enrolled was “TS” — “too small for reporting,” a category used for amounts of “10 or fewer.” By contrast, a full 73% of the Class of 2024 were Asian American. Although the Board’s December motion would ostensibly state that the new holistic admissions process “must use only race-neutral methods that do not seek to achieve any specific racial or ethnic mix, balance, or targets,” when the admissions statistics for the Class of 2025 — the first class post-overhaul — would come out the following year, Black students would rise to 7.1% of all admits, Hispanic students to 11.3%, and Asian-American students would fall to 54%.1

The month after the Board eliminated TJ’s entrance exam, a group of parents and alumni called Coalition for TJ filed suit against the Board, alleging that the new admissions policy discriminated on the basis of race and was intentionally aimed at reducing the number of Asian-American students in the school. Coalition for TJ argued the Board’s decision to retire the exam would mean that TJ would begin, on the one hand, admitting students who weren’t ready for the school’s advanced academic programming, and on the other, denying the opportunity to others who are prepared enough to benefit. As I’ve written before, the central benefit of magnet schools and G&T programs is that they offer advanced education opportunities to a concentrated group of prepared students. If too many students flounder in these advanced classes, or if advanced coursework opportunities must be scaled back because there are no longer enough capable students to sustain them, then the entire basis of these programs erodes.

Now, if the students admitted under the new policy don’t in fact flounder at higher rates, then there may well be far more students capable of succeeding in TJ’s rigorous program than there are seats available. In that case, the best way forward for students in FCPS would be for the district to expand the program or even fund additional magnets. But at many institutions, these sorts of admissions changes have not panned out well. Around the same time that admissions was changing at TJ, San Francisco’s Lowell High School transitioned from competitive admissions to a lottery-based process, and students’ grades plummeted. The share of Lowell freshmen receiving at least one D or F in their first fall semester more than tripled for the first class after the transition, jumping from 7.7% in fall 2019 and 7.9% in fall 2020 to 24.4% in fall 2021. After intense backlash, the policy was ultimately reversed. Meanwhile, in the now infamous case at the University of California, dropping the SAT from the admissions process resulted in a massive jump in the number of students at remedial math. At UC San Diego, that number skyrocketed from 32 in fall 2020 to over 1000 in fall 2025.

At TJ, a multi-year legal battle about the fate of admissions followed. At first, in February 2022, the District Court found against the Board: “The discussion of TJ admissions changes,” the judge wrote, “was infected with talk of racial balancing,” and communication between Board Members and FCPS officials revealed that “at least in part, the purpose of the Board’s admissions overhaul was to change the racial makeup [of] TJ to the detriment of Asian-Americans.” In May 2023, however, the Fourth Circuit reversed that ruling, arguing that Asian-American students were not discriminated against because the percentage of Asian-American students at TJ didn’t fall below the percentage of Asian-American residents in the district. Although the Supreme Court declined to reverse the Fourth Circuit’s ruling — over strong objections from Justices Alito and Thomas — last year Virginia’s Attorney General released a finding of reasonable cause that FCPS violated the state’s Human Rights Act & Title VI, whereupon the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights launched a Title VI investigation into FCPS the following day. No updates have been offered since.

In the meantime, the new TJ admissions policy is still in place, and while its opponents remain concerned about its effects on the program, whether academic performance has actually declined remains thoroughly unclear. There simply aren’t many indicators publicly available that we can use to figure this out. The FCPS can tout that the average GPA for the Class of 2025 still exceeded 3.95, Coalition for TJ can protest that the class had only half as many National Merit Semifinalists as were in the year prior, and the general stalemate continues. Since all TJ students generally ace Virginia’s standardized state exams, comparing those scores year over year grants limited insight into how school performance has changed. We can’t compare the SAT scores of classes admitted before and after the admissions change because the former haven’t yet been published. The most recent SAT scores available on TJ’s website belong to the class of 2024.

If the current pace continues, we won’t get to see the scores of the post-overhaul Class of 2025 until 2027, even though the vast majority would have taken their first SATs during their junior-year spring in 2024. That’s a full seven years until we have the kind of data we’d need for a verdict on how TJ’s new policy affects academic performance! For now, we can’t tell whether the admissions reform changed anything other than racial demographics.

In theory, Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act should then make requesting and obtaining both current and historical data fairly simple. But data about students’ SAT scores is in fact exclusively owned by the College Board and is only released with its explicit permission. Even if we get the SAT data though, it won’t tell us anything about whether the number of students in the program taking advantage of the advanced opportunities available changed.

Public schools are a public service. They are responsible to the constituents whom they serve. And yet, between the school districts themselves and the private testing organizations assessing their students, no one seems interested in sharing the kind of information we’d need to judge their decisions. We know slightly more about the Thomas Jefferson admissions case only because there was a lawsuit and national media attention, but ordinary parents and students should not have to wait for a nationally televised lawsuit in order to get evidence on the success or failure of their local schools. Most parents do not have the time to submit FOIA requests for the information they need even if they can afford the costs; yet even when they do, red tape and ownership clauses can delay its release until well past the time when they need it.

Overly intensive transparency requirements do impose a real burden. It would be a massive waste of time and money to have district administrators compile and publish every piece of paperwork that goes through their office. But providing information shouldn’t only be a reactive measure by school districts when faced with criticism. The burden of proof is on them when major decisions are made and data should be provided to back those decisions up. This level of transparency is hardly unprecedented. Research scientists must meticulously justify their use of funds when applying for grants, for-profit companies have to demonstrate to their shareholders that they are making the most money they reasonably can — is it really so unreasonable to expect something similar from public schools?

It can be difficult to prove the success or failure of a policy change like this. Grade and AP score inflation make both those metrics problematic. A comparison of SAT scores when TJ (hopefully) publishes the Class of 2025’s next year will at least indicate whether incoming students are more or less prepared, but the SAT doesn’t measure the kind of advanced skills and content that TJ focuses on. The best assessment tool for changes in student performance on those is one we’re lacking. Optimally we would be able to see the number of students taking each class and testimony from teachers about how the difficulty levels of their classes have changed. But the burden should be on the district, whom I hope have more information available to them than the public, to prove that their decisions are sound.

The problem is fundamentally one of mindset. The goal of any school district should be to prove to its constituents that its decisions are based on sound data. The district should be eager to prove that it is doing the right thing to impress the people it ostensibly serves; if they don’t, parents might take their kids out of the district or never move there in the first place. When a school district makes sweeping changes like those FCPS made to TJ, it should then have to justify that its changes actually improved student outcomes.

It seems that optimizing for academic outcomes was not FCPS’s goal. All this opacity makes me suspect that there are students attending TJ who are not prepared to do so and there are also students who would have benefited greatly but have been denied the opportunity. But until the district becomes interested in justifying its decisions based on the outcomes of its students, we won’t know for sure.

In May, Education Progress released the results of our survey of likely November 2026 Oregon voters showing strong, bipartisan support for dedicated talented and gifted (TAG) education funding. Today, with the November 3rd midterms less than three months out, the candidates asking voters to trust them with the education budget owe them a clear answer about where they stand. We’ll kindly point them in the right direction.

We’re excited to share here the full findings report for our Oregon survey. Oregon is polarized on many things, but on advanced education it’s largely agreed and far from alone. In blue states, red states, and purple states, voters nationwide all want greater investment in our most promising students, and a position this popular deserves attention to match.

The whole report is worth a read, but if you’re short on time, below are a few takeaways you can’t miss. Even if you aren’t an Oregonian, you probably have elections of your own.

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1. The right way to frame funding

Our split-sample survey described the same total two ways: half of respondents considered a proposal to dedicate “1% of Oregon’s K–12 education budget” to TAG programs, and the other half were told it would dedicate “$120 million.”

Under the percentage framing, initial support earned 66%, a solid two-thirds majority. Under the lump-sum framing, it was eleven points lower — still a majority, but smaller, at 55%. A gap held at every stage: after arguments in favor (69% vs. 62%) and after arguments against (63% vs. 54%).

Most Americans consistently and dramatically underestimate what public schools spend. “1% of the budget” sounds (appropriately!) modest, especially next to the 6.7% of students who need TAG services in Oregon. “$120 million,” on the other hand, can sound enormous unless paired with a headline like “Lawmakers approve record $11.4 billion for Oregon schools.”

For advocates, the practical lesson here is to lead with proportionality. Keep the total budget figure on hand in case opponents reach for the lump sum.

2. The most cited objection isn’t to gifted education at all

When ‘No’ voters explained their opposition in their own words, the plurality objection (26%) was that the money would be wasted, mismanaged, or lost to fraud. As one respondent put it, “If we had competent leaders, I might feel differently.”

This suspicion isn't specific to funding for talented and gifted education; it applies to every line item in the education budget. And if these voters hear the case for cost-effective, evidence-based, and transparently accountable TAG programs and services, this suspicion can be defused. Objections that stem from persistent myths about talented and gifted children — such as that they “will do just fine” without the tailored instructional support they need — come from a smaller minority of respondents. Yet while these myths remain tough to uproot, they also have decades of research against them, and their most recent expressions are no more convincing.

3. Voters reject detracking by more than five to one

The sharpest mismatch between public opinion and current education discourse might be that 83% of Oregon voters — 61% strongly so — disagree that schools should eliminate academically advanced classes and group all students together. Across every party, at least 82% disagree, including at least 54% who disagree strongly.

Whatever traction the detracking movement has in education schools and district offices, it has virtually none with the Oregon electorate. Nor should it with policymakers either.

Why it matters now

We’re grateful to the NAGC, the Davidson Institute, the ADVANCE Substack and others for circulating the results of our survey in their newsletters. The respondents in this survey belong to the same electorate that Oregon candidates for office are preparing to face in twelve weeks. Twice in recent sessions, dedicated TAG funding bills have died in committee, out of public sight. Whatever lawmakers thought they knew about the politics of those bills, our survey findings show that voter sentiment isn’t the obstacle. Majorities of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans all support dedicated funding for advanced education. Now it’s time for the campaigning, would-be policymakers to listen.

Read the full report:

Oregon Voter Survey Findings Report

2.29MB ∙ PDF file

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For our press release on the lawsuit, see here.

Education Progress is proud to announce that we are partnering with Orion Impact Litigation to sue Curriculum Associates, the company behind educational technology app i-Ready, for false advertising. i-Ready is one of the most-used K-12 educational apps in the country, with Curriculum Associates noting that more than fourteen million students (or roughly a third of K-12 students in the United States) use it.

We are not the first to raise problems with i-Ready. Earlier this year, parent Ryan Moulton wrote the viral article “Our Experience with i-Ready.” In it, he talks about how his son went from loving math as a small child to coming home from school in tears saying that he hated it. Moulton outlines how some kids would hide in the bathroom to avoid the software, while others would describe it as torture.

Moulton describes his disappointment with the app’s user interface bugs and oversights, its repetitive and basic work, and an apparent lack of adaptation. Compounding this all was that he had believed the marketing: he thought that, if his kids were persistent and did the work they were supposed to do, the app would reward them with the math they needed to learn. It did not. Nor is this isolated to a single parent. Similar reporting has come out from Unherd, NBC, Karen Vaites, and others, with students and teachers alike railing against it.

Getting institutions right for adults matters. Getting them right for kids is a matter of fundamental duty. When you’re thirty, you have alternatives, you have options, you control your own destiny. If an institution hands you an experience that does not work as advertised, you can walk out. You can make arguments in the public sphere. You can decide, for yourself, how and where you want to spend your time. While you’re a child, though, you are at the mercy of the adults in the room.

And if the adults in the room tell you that you must sit glassy-eyed listening to the same instructions hundreds of times, spending more and more of your time using an application waiting for the action to start, running out the clock hoping only to make it through another wasted day, well, that’s what you do.

Schools should respect the time and talents of their students. When they don’t, kids learn quickly that institutions are hostile and that the things that are supposed to help them exist instead as obstacles. Kids deserve better.

On its product pages, i-Ready talks about a mission to “give students what they need, when they need it.” Education Progress is suing i-Ready, in short, because we believe kids deserve schools that live up to that mission.

What claims do we make?

We make three core allegations against i-Ready:

First, we allege that it claims to provide a “diagnostic assessment” that does not diagnose. Curriculum Associates represents their product as providing “comprehensive insight into student learning” and identifying “the specific skills each student needs to develop.” But it offers only a crude screener, not a detailed diagnostic. It provides enough info to claim a student is ahead or behind in a broad domain and to guess how the student is likely to score on tests, but it does not show students or teachers the specific focused skills that need to be improved.

Second, we allege that it claims to provide “personalized instruction” but fails to deliver personalization tailored to actual students. It sorts students into categories such as “Phonics,” “Geometry,” “Measurement and Data,” and “Number and Operations,” then defaults to assigning generic lesson sequences to students in those domains no matter what their actual skill gaps look like.

Finally, we allege that it claims that when it is used “with fidelity,” iReady usage causes “46-percent greater” growth in English language arts and “38-percent greater” growth in mathematics than similar peers, but it relies on correlational studies that cannot be used to draw causal conclusions, studies that test students specifically on Curriculum Associates’ tests of Curriculum Associates’ lessons, scored by Curriculum Associates. Curriculum Associates markets a causal result not sufficiently backed by the research they provide.

Curriculum Associates conditions its claims of efficacy on “fidelity.” If students do not use the app for thirty- to forty-nine minutes per week for at least eighteen weeks, we allege that they point to insufficient fidelity on the part of students, families, and teachers that leads to the failure to deliver gains. This attempts to shift the risk of their underperformance to children, families, and teachers, leading to a self-reinforcing cycle where it can demand ever more time when students fail to gain from it.

All of these, we allege, are material misrepresentations of their product that mislead consumers, including many students and parents in the District of Columbia who are required to use i-Ready’s tools. Our ultimate goal with this lawsuit is to get i-Ready to back away from misleading claims that lead both schools and parents like Ryan Moulton who believe in the potential of educational technology to put trust in a tool that does not adequately serve their kids.

How can we do this?

Washington, D.C. has uniquely robust consumer protection laws. The DC Consumer Protection Procedures Act, unusually, allows individuals and nonprofit organizations to bring public-interest lawsuits against companies engaging in deceptive business practices. Historically, this has been used in high-profile suits against JUUL for youth vaping marketing, Marriott and StubHub for hidden fees, and in “greenwashing” environmental advocacy lawsuits against Coca-Cola and others.

Under the statute, we are suing Curriculum Associates on behalf of a proposed class of students and parents within Washington, D.C. schools in which i-Ready was mandated. Our partner in this lawsuit, Orion Impact Litigation, specializes in just this sort of work: while we can highlight the specific problems we see with i-Ready and others as part of our mandate to orient education towards excellence, Orion Impact Litigation focuses on working with nonprofits like us to bring suits against corporations whose marketing misleads the people our nonprofits fight for.

We are ready to fight to improve the education of kids in Washington, D.C. and around the country.

You can read the press release here, and see the full complaint here.

Justin Rosentover is a Junior Fellow at the Center for Educational Progress and recent graduate of the Science, Mathematics, and Computer Science Magnet Program at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland. This fall, he will be attending Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Charting the Course is a series from Education Progress featuring pro-excellence education commentary, news, and policy analysis.

Last month, in response to Katie Arnold-Ratliff’s viral criticism1 of gifted and talented programs in New York City public schools, Matthew Yglesias argued that the real problem with these programs is that parents barely care about their “actual educational efficacy.” Contra Arnold-Ratliff, who doubts there are “gifted” children to identify at all, Yglesias writes that,

“Precisely because you really can identify which kids are the most promising ones in a pretty reliable way, the mere fact that the graduates of a gifted program do well in life does not convey any information at all about whether the program is actually any good. [...] Parents are just massively, massively under-rating the power of selection effects and wasting a lot of time, money, and political capital.”

One study he points to finds that attending NYC’s specialized high schools “has little impact on [SAT] scores, college enrollment, or college graduation.” Some magnet schools and gifted programs do earn this finding: they crow about improving test scores and college prospects while contributing little more than the ability to gather smart kids together in one place.

But an out and out dismissal of the value of selective programs would be misguided; SAT scores and college admissions are not where to look for their value. Yglesias himself doesn’t dismiss them; instead he implores selective schools and the parents choosing between them to embrace a basic tenet for improving “the actual quality of education,” one that everyone outside of education already knows: “teach the material to the kids who are ready to learn it when they’re ready, regardless of their age.”

This principle — teach students where they’re at — needs more defenders and better execution. When gifted education programs deliver on this mission, they don’t gather advanced students to coast on selection effects, but to make advanced instruction practical. One of the most concrete benefits they offer is giving advanced students the chance to take advanced classes that are only available when enough of them are pooled in one place.

A model program

The magnet program at Montgomery Blair High School in Maryland, located just outside of D.C., shows what delivering this looks like in practice.2 Though the Science, Mathematics, and Computer Science Magnet Program only launched in 1985, already in 1993 the New York Times would write in amazement that Blair produced three Westinghouse Science Talent Search Finalists, more than Stuyvesant or Bronx Science. The local superintendent, Paul Vance, remarked at the time that “I have never seen a high school’s image turn around so quickly.”

Since then, Blair’s magnet program has maintained its position as a premier science and technology program. Students and parents who fixate on test scores still have plenty to celebrate. In 2024, the average SAT score of Blair magnet students was 1529, higher than the better known Bronx Science, Thomas Jefferson, and Boston Latin.

Yet you won’t find Blair alongside the high-profile magnets in the best public high school rankings of U.S. News and World Report or Niche. One reason is that these rankings grade whole student bodies, whereas the magnet program is only a fraction of Blair, enrolling a little over 400 students in a school of 3,200. The more important reason is that at Blair, chasing prestige is besides the point.3

It is made clear to Blair students from the minute they walk in the door that better scores and better college admissions are not the magnet’s goal. This is expressly opposed to what many parents want from the school because the school realizes where it is actually capable of adding value.

The number of American high schools that offer a course in complex analysis can be counted on your fingers and yet between a quarter and a third of Blair students take it. It is only because Blair has brought together a group of students who have managed to complete multivariable calculus before their final year of high school can this be done, and therein lies Blair’s great advantage. The desired material benefit of a specialized magnet program should not be that it boosts SAT scores; it should be to offer classes that would otherwise be impossible for high school students to take. Despite the discourse one hears around individualized instruction, the practical reality is that providing truly one-on-one individualized math instruction at a level beyond high school is incredibly difficult. The cost-effective way to offer classes like Complex Analysis is to bring together enough students who can take it all at once.4

To teach advanced material to advanced students who are ready for it requires reaching a critical mass of advanced students. When only a couple of students in a school would be ready, it’s unlikely to devote the resources for offering it. But when a school system has teachers who can teach advanced classes like Complex Analysis and enough students who can take those classes, then it is just wasting resources by not putting them together.

The people who administer the Blair program realize this and optimize for it. Rather than maximizing the number of standardized tests its students can do well on, Blair offers students an extra period a day to take more accelerated classes, meaning Blair students take eight classes a semester. It explicitly encourages students not to take AP classes (not that the students listen) since the program’s own content is more advanced than the AP material.

It is also vastly more enjoyable to attend a school with similarly able and interested peers. To Blair magnet students, the robotics team was a much bigger deal than any school sport was. By attending the Blair program, a student was automatically sorted into a group of people who liked the same things you liked and that was simply more personally enjoyable.

The fact that students have been selected for ability is an irrelevant criticism if your school is, like Blair, actually offering more content than would otherwise be available. This is how you actually go about “teach[ing] the material to the kids who are ready to learn it when they’re ready.” And so it is exactly what successful programs like Blair are trying to do. Teaching this material may not improve SAT scores, college admissions, or graduation rates.5 But that doesn’t matter when the school is providing additional learning that is of even more value to its students. I’m sure there are other GT programs that are set up badly and don’t recognize where their value lies, but the existence of such programs should not be used to discredit the entire gifted and talented enterprise.

The standard model for advanced high schools such as Thomas Jefferson or Stuyvesant is to select the top applicants from across a city, county, or region, concentrate them in one location, and offer advanced content, often with a focus on STEM or other subjects.6 The Blair model, on which the program makes up only a fraction of the school, offers considerable benefits for both the students in the program and the rest attending the school. Students in the program benefit from the existence of extracurriculars which would be hard to maintain in an entirely STEM-focused school, in addition to being able to interact with peers with more diverse interests.

Students outside the program, meanwhile, benefit from the fact that upper-level magnet classes are open to them so long as they can satisfy the prerequisites.7 Students who couldn’t enter the program in ninth grade, either because they did not want to or they were incapable of doing so, are thus able to benefit from the program. The whole school can draw on those classes once the critical mass that they need exists.8

Making attractive magnets

Montgomery County Public Schools currently intends to create four new magnet programs on the Blair model. In theory, I cheer this development. If there is more demand than the supply can accommodate, then more supply should be created. Between Blair and its sister program at Poolesville High School, there were 1,548 applicants and only 230 invites. However, there are no prerequisites to apply. It could be that all of the 1548 applicants would be able to healthily complete the program; it could be that only 230 can. It is probably somewhere in the middle, but the school district has failed to justify the number of new seats being created with any sort of assessment of the number of eligible students. If the district dilutes the number of students in each program such that there are no longer enough to take Complex Analysis, then it will be actively taking away opportunities.

This is in addition to other important-but-unanswered questions, like whether the new programs will have an eighth class, or how equivalent quality will be enforced across them. There is already a great deal of inconsistency between the two existing programs, and how this will be addressed when four new ones are being added simultaneously is unclear. But I would guess that the reason these problems are unaddressed is that the people who conceived this plan didn’t think about how the programs actually benefited their students.9 “Program makes scores go up and is overenrolled, therefore we should add more programs” is an insufficient viewpoint.

But it is entirely possible that this expansion will destroy the greatest benefit of the Blair program. If there are no longer enough students gathered in one place who want to take Complex Analysis or Biochemistry or Quantum Physics because they’ve been dispersed among half a dozen magnets, then the new programs really will just be selection effects masquerading as accelerated programs. If all you do is gather all the students taking AP Calculus BC to the same place without adding additional content, then you are not actually adding value. Some gifted and talented programs are probably like this, maybe even some of the famous ones. But that is not the same as adding value because you have selected advanced students and as a result are teaching them more.

As a method for school districts to provide more instruction to their top-performing students, gifted and talented programs are cost-effective. But if your goal is to maximize district performance on standardized tests, then sure, creating magnet programs doesn’t work. The students you will attract are not high-leverage data points and it will be much more cost-effective to focus on low-performing students. But if your goal is to provide the maximum possible number of opportunities for the maximum possible number of students, then concentrating your advanced students in one place is the way to do it. Blair’s particular model is then one step better because it expands its opportunities to those outside the program.

When districts are designing new accelerated programs and parents are choosing where to send their promising kids, the question they need to ask is not how to get the school with the best SAT scores ranking, but how to provide students with the advanced learning opportunities that otherwise would not exist. Those opportunities are perhaps the best way for teaching advanced students what they’re ready to learn and when, and for exactly that reason they can actually increase school quality.

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Evan Chen is a mathematician (PhD in number theory, MIT) and one of the most influential figures in the American competitive math landscape. A former International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) gold medalist, he has served as assistant academic director for the Math Olympiad Program, as Editor-in-Chief of the USA Math Olympiad (USAMO), and on the USA delegation to the IMO. He is the author of three textbooks (the first of which, Euclidean Geometry in Mathematical Olympiads, he penned while still in high school) and makes numerous resources available on his website, web.evanchen.cc.

Charting the Course is a series from Education Progress featuring pro-excellence education commentary, news, and policy analysis.

In the old days, the road to the United States team at the International Math Olympiad (IMO) started with the American High School Mathematics Exam. Back in the 1980s, this exam was taken by around 400,000 students every year, roughly 2–3% of all US high school students.1 Fast-forward to today: the starting exam, renamed the American Mathematics Competition (or “AMC”), now has two dates and two divisions. With four different entry points instead of just one, one would expect an even broader reach.

But reality looks completely different. In 2025, the total number of students across all four exams was under 100,000 — less than a quarter of the raw count 40 years ago, and well below 1% of high schoolers.2 And that’s double-counting the students who participated on both dates; if one counts the number of distinct students, the numbers are worse.

Given how often the United States scores highly in the International Math Olympiad, the quiet implosion of the American competition system might seem surprising. How did things end up this way? How can the United States continue to bring back gold medals3 from the International Math Olympiad every year even as the base competition system is crumbling?

What are math competitions for anyway?

To understand how the landscape has gotten this way, it’ll help to step back and ask what its North Star is. Why do we have math competitions at all? What’s the point of all this? When people think of the International Math Olympiad, the thing they know right away is that the problems are difficult. When the United States created a documentary about its 2006 IMO team, they named it Hard Problems: The Road to the World’s Toughest Math Contest. And in recent years, AI companies have treated success on the IMO as a grand target. Given this narrative, it’s easy to get the impression that the IMO is meant to identify mathematical talent, and the sheer difficulty ensures only the best students stand out.

But that perception is wrong. Math contests aren’t merely exams to measure talent. They create talent.

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The beauty contest

How can an exam create talent? To give you an idea, it might help to have an insider retelling of how IMO problems are selected.

Each year, the IMO forms a Jury with one representative from each country. The host country (in a laborious, months-long process of reading hundreds of proposals) presents the Jury a shortlist of about 30 problems. For every shortlisted problem, each Jury member submits two ratings. One rating is difficulty. But the other rating is arguably more important: how beautiful the problem is. A problem can be “acceptable,” “nice,” or “excellent.”

For someone who’s never seen a math contest problem before, this might seem bizarre. You know what it means for a problem to be easy or hard. But what could it mean for a problem to be “nice”? Maybe it teaches you something you didn’t know; maybe its statement immediately piques your curiosity. Maybe its answer is totally different from what you expect. Maybe its solution blows your mind. At minimum, it should be a problem that a contestant would want to work on. The most colorful quote I’ve seen comes from a competition called the Putnam:

It used to be said that a Broadway musical was a success if the audience left the theater whistling the tunes. I want to see contestants leave the Putnam whistling the problems. They should be vivid and striking enough to be shared with roommates and teachers.

For a real example, here is a problem shortlisted for the 2018 IMO.4 The solution is much too difficult to discuss in this post, but I hope its beauty will still nerd-snipe some of you.

A tennis tournament has N players in it. The organizing committee needs to schedule the matches for the tournament so that every two players play once, with one match played each day. Each player arrives to the tournament site the day of their first match, and departs the day of their last match. For each day a player is present on-site, the committee has to pay 1 coin to the hotel. When the organizers design the schedule, what’s the minimum possible hotel cost?

If you felt the itch to find an answer5 yourself, you understand the engine for creating talent with a test. Scratching the itch means sizing up the problem and choosing an approach, not just rehearsing the steps in the lesson of the week. “Teaching to the test” is rightfully viewed with suspicion in mainstream education when the tests are merely supposed to measure (often inaccurately) the learning that happened elsewhere.

But math competitions are different: the exam is the product.

The central guiding tenet of the math competition movement is this: if you pour your heart into designing instructive, interesting math problems, then the students studying those problems develop interest and learn an immense amount.6 The best problem-setters treat their problems with the same kind of care that choreographers, film producers, or game developers all do: experiences for a human audience to enjoy. Thus, top-tier math competitions almost always publish all their past problems and solutions, actively encouraging students to try them.7 (It’s the opposite of the classroom teacher who hides past years’ final exams out of fear students will study them.)

On a more practical note, there is one big real-world advantage to this approach: it’s cheap. If you wanted to build a system that engages millions of students per year, the per-student price tag had better be low. An annual contest can do that for just a few dollars per student engaged. And with the Internet, the cost of hosting an archive of past problems online is close to zero.

How are things falling short in reality?

So how did things end up the way they are today? If the problems on the IMO are so great, why has the audience vanished?

The overarching story here is something that won’t be unfamiliar to many readers: advanced education has long moved away from public schools. If you are interested in math above your grade level (or just outside the standard curriculum), you study it after school, not during it.

The AMC, which is supposed to be the entry point and many steps removed from the IMO, is suffering the same story. On one extreme, there are still pockets of students who are really familiar with all the competitions and study in their own free time (or during their normal math class when the teacher isn’t looking). The internet makes this straightforward: all the past problems are online, as are abundant study resources. Perhaps in response to increasing preparation from well-connected students, the AMC difficulty has crept up over time. I’ve even heard the modern AMC described as an “arms race over speed.” This arms race has produced something worse: a cheating problem so severe that it’s made news. A community happy to share its past problems now has people leaking upcoming ones. These are directions I worry about.

But what happens to everyone else? As math competitions grow increasingly disconnected from what’s actually taught in schools, the competitions turn into a niche activity insulated from outsiders. Although the AMC is supposed to be the first exposure for students coming from a normal high-school background, it’s now inaccessible to them: the AMC has earned a reputation as an exam designed only for geniuses. As for the schools, I think the late Dr. Kent Merryfield describes it best:

I was a 10th grader in 1969, in Oklahoma. It was a pretty strong high school in a community that valued education, and in which a significant number of parents (including mine) were engineers or scientists — but it wasn’t fundamentally all that unusual a place. At some point in the school year, I was just told that on such-and-such a day I was supposed to take some test, which turned out to be the AHSME. It was school business, and it was just something that was done. This was before there was any follow-on — no AIME, no USAMO, no U.S. participation in the IMO. But hey, when I got the highest score in my school as a 10th grader I thought it was a pretty big deal.

That’s what’s missing in what I see around me — the idea that “you will take the AMC” being ordinary school business at any more than a handful of places […]. There are many schools where the AMC is only offered because some long-veteran teacher has always done it and insists on it. Three years after that teacher retires, not only will the school no longer participate, but no one will remember that the school ever participated. Perhaps there’s enough life in a non-school model — but I have trouble seeing how that can be large enough or inclusive enough.

This is why the top students might appear unaffected despite the dramatic shrinking of total AMC participants. The quality of contest problems is no worse than 40 years ago; if anything, the problem designers today are even more capable.8 So the students who find the world of math contests and fall in love with it can still get something out of it.9 But today most schools have no idea what the AMC is. And unless the AMC can find a way to become relevant to schools again, it’s likely to stay that way.

Where could we go?

One could imagine driving math contest participation back up by marketing them as a reliable standardized test of math talent. I’m more cynical about this approach. The kind of things one would need to make an elite college entrance exam often conflict with the goal of designing problems that are interesting, creative, and insight-causing. And even if it could be done, there is something unsavory to me about turning what should be a fun and educational event into a high-stakes environment. One past director of the AMC describes it this way: “to do so would ‘bureaucrat-ize’ what is now a good mathematical experience and kill it.”

In my utopia, the goal is to have many different on-ramps into math, one of which is a healthy competition series, with students free to choose between whichever ones fit them the best. The math circle movement, for example, is another such road. I share the general view that anyone claiming they have the sole answer to math education is likely to be mistaken. I certainly don’t want to sell anyone that bridge.

What I’m concerned about is that in practice, the US doesn’t actually have many avenues for advanced math at all. The math contest system historically had one of the largest reaches, since it scaled cheaply to many students. And now that system is dying too.

Theories of Progress is a series from Education Progress building the intellectual framework for durable education reform: why the system resists improvement, what excellence actually requires, and what history tells us about how to build it.

In Invisible Geniuses: Could the Knowledge Frontier Advance Faster (2020), Ruchir Agarwal and Patrick Gaule find that a student who wins a gold medal in the International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) is fifty times more likely to receive a Fields Medal, the highest honor in mathematics, than a doctorate holder from a top-ten mathematics program.

Most find this surprising. While our most selective graduate programs boast prestigious admissions committees that employ intricate selection processes, it is teenage performance on the IMO that proves a far more reliable measure of lifetime mathematics achievement. And the predictive power of an IMO gold medal extends well beyond the Fields: every additional point scored in the competition carries 2.6% more math publications and 4.5% more citations.

The research on academic competitions has received surprisingly little attention, as have the communities of practice dedicated to training for them. Most discussion around advanced education focuses on schools, the classroom, and policies to reform them. Yet findings like those of Agarwal and Gaule reveal that academic competitions are a better instrument than we’ve credited for identifying and fostering academic talent.

Considering the role competition plays in athletics, it shouldn’t be hard to see why competition deserves more of our focus. Competitive settings draw out excellence in a domain. We expect to find exemplars of athletic ability at the World Cup, at the Olympics, at Las Vegas’s Ninja Warrior competitions. If we are serious about searching for the future builders of the knowledge frontier, academic competitions are the scouting pool.

How accurately might other competitions predict disciplinary renown? Does the Computer Science Olympiad predict anything about computer scientists? Does Moot Court or Policy Debate predict success as a judge or a politician? Do some competitions train people to innovate or speculate or investigate well, while others waste time on tortuous trivialities? We already value Quizbowl and the Junior Classical League competitions for fostering student enjoyment in the liberal-arts, but if they successfully measure or foster even greater qualities, we may not value liberal-arts competitions nearly enough.

We need not demand every math curriculum be organized around IMO drills to be curious whether new competitions or grander competition ecosystems could advance the careers of more young talent and geniuses. A working theory at Education Progress is that creating the conditions for robust academic competitions will reshape our education system for the better. Consider now just three of their strengths.

Academic competitions:

1. Promote the right pedagogy,

2. Send the right signal, and

3. Cultivate the right culture.

To understand why they do so effectively, we’ll examine each virtue in turn.

The Right Pedagogy

A recurrent criticism of our education system is that too many education school professors and classroom teachers are taken in by ineffective instructional practices, despite years of well-founded empirical evidence that testify to their flaws. But the appeal of “child-centered learning” and “21st century skills,” for example, has always owed more to their vibes than their research records.

Academic competitions are refreshingly resistant to these fads. The clear goals around which competitions are organized affords a corresponding clarity about the means by which students should pursue them. These contests present students with challenging problems meant to delight, instruct, and reward persistence. Solving these problems requires the deft use of methods, methods which in themselves need not be difficult to apply; at least in mathematics, linguistics, and computer science olympiads, the difficulty lies in choosing the right sequence of methods to make progress on open-ended challenges. But the way to improve is less open-ended: practice deliberately, then practice some more. The training that nurtures the traits that ground deftness, that improves one’s speed, insight, and decision-making in approaching new problems, involves the regular, repeated completion of other like problems.

A team of students get together and work on old problem sets; they piece it out through scribbles on scratchpads; they refer to their socratic mentor when stumped; they struggle and push and master the methods; and slowly, learning from failures and improving with time, they begin to see how simple skills can be versatilely employed. Ostensibly this process is the way to fulfill the goals of academic competition; pedagogically, the preparation itself is the point. The deliberate practice by which students pursue the goals of competition is the same kind of deliberate practice that advances the goals of education writ large. The persistence one develops for working through problems is likewise the same that serves students in curricular studies; the delight one feels when competing toward a solution is the same we want to motivate all students to chase. By spotlighting an objective that can only be achieved by consistent cognitive exercise, academic competition distills the experience of good instructional practice for students as well as does any pedagogical framework.

The Right Signals

Signaling theorists such as Bryan Caplan have claimed that the larger part of higher education’s function is to indicate a person’s pre-existing abilities, rather than to instill her with new ones. If students primarily wanted knowledge out of schools, they would agonize after getting a snow day. For the signaling theorist, the fact that they’re characteristically jubilant instead is a clue: students mostly want the certification that testifies to employers that they have that knowledge, not the knowledge itself.

Now, for critics who think education’s value is mostly a matter of signaling, the proponents of academic competition have good news, courtesy of Agarwal and Gaule: winning gold at the IMO is a fantastically stronger signal of mathematical ability than even a PhD from those top universities the critics are wont to scorn.

There are real structural reasons explaining why the signal strength of academic-competition laurels is resistant to many of the diluents plaguing college diplomas. Everyone is well aware of how grade inflation creeps everywhere, but competitions weather subjective bias far better than grade point average. Like the Princeton A’s of yesteryear, IMO gold medals are capped at ≈12.5% of participants. Anchoring the recipient count to a percentage of total participants simply subverts the collective-action spiral and preserves the meaning of the achievement.

Such competitions also sidestep admissions administrators as arbiters of value. Personal essays and holistic admissions policies again introduce subjective bias, on top of suffering from incomparability and patronage. While the stain of nepotism and meretricious superficiality permeates class markers, a wide candid world wants it straight: who is the swiftest, the strongest, the wisest, the learned, the skillful? That world appreciates how academic competitions remain comparatively clear signals for talent and achievement, as do the students themselves.

The stranger and wanderer and outsider can prove their worth in a fair competition. This is why the international scene of the IMO is also a route to upward mobility, and allows the discovery of talents hidden in the rough. The high performing low-income students who make it to a top ten school flourish.

However it is not all roses for the low-income performers. Agarwal and Gaule found that low-income country participants in the IMO are 16% less likely to get a PhD, have 34% fewer publications, and 56% fewer citations. These stats provide a hard nudge. They hint that much talent and possible accomplishment languishes for lack of employment, or lack of proper attention or opportunity.

A general merit and fairness problem persists across the entire world, and though it has existed forever, it need not persist as it always has. This gap can be closed. To provide a clear example, consider Tran et al’s research on gifted and talented sorting in Arkansas: 30% of students scoring in the top 5% on standardized tests were not identified as gifted, and students receiving free and reduced-price lunch were only half as likely to be so identified! Solutions to this underrepresentation are not hard to imagine. Better mentorship and policy in this area will be (relatively) cheap and effective. Allow the score to speak, and do not let teacher recommendations stand in the way.

The Right Culture

Competition builds culture by providing public honors and personal glory to those who do well, and by giving their friends a person to cheer for. In athletics this is so obvious that a blind mole can see it. But in the context of academic pursuit, we provide precious few outlets for such motivations. A student who otherwise has little way to know their worth, learns their own talent and nascent interests, and what is more they can be energized by the taste of victory. Few do not hearken to that for which they get riches. In other words, honors give participants a stake in the ends of the tournament, a greater interest in math, biology, law, or whatever it may be.

Four years ago I started building a regional logic tournament, inviting middle and high school students from schools around the St. Louis area to participate in a two hour competition as part of a team. Indeed my goal has been to build a local culture of academic struggle and conquest. I picked logic problems as the basis for the tournament for a few reasons. Knowing that many bright students have not felt the intrigue that good math problems can offer, I realized that the self-identified literary types still will show up to prove their logical abilities. The mathematically inclined would come anyway. It was the less-well-mathed that I wanted as well. Cast a wider net, catch more types of students.

The Logic Tournaments offers meaningful cash prizes for first, second, and third place, as well as honors to the student and their school on the Uriel statue and plaque publicly displayed all year. The students themselves have transformed the tournament. The students clearly expect the tournament will happen each year, and this propels the whole machinery forward. The culture of the competition is not just offered to students; students await the competition, and adults must rise to the challenge of delivering it.

A younger Jack Despain Zhou, before starting Education Progress, first realized the fun of competition in a Utah math tournament. He received an award for a top finish. More than just the public acknowledgement of his strengths, those honors gave him the confidence in his abilities, the spark of motivation, and the shiny new laptop he needed to give back to the commons.

In addition to facilitating individual self-discovery, these competitions also provide a setting for new collaborations; they bring together people who would otherwise be more isolated, removing impediments to a wide pool of likely confederates. Two parents at the school I run met years ago as youth at a math competition in Tokyo. Their interest was very long distance for a number of years, while he Carolina boy, and she a Chilena, contrived to build a family together in St. Louis.

The pianists and mathematicians Holden Mui and Andrew Wu also met at a mathematics competition. And now they collaborate not on math, but on music. Putting together piano pieces like this one, Poetry rivaling Ravel.

Academic competitions and Education Progress

So we at Education Progress have begun to explore the state of academic competitions. We are looking for insights, studying the field, reviewing the research, and weighing programs that we suspect will push the next generation of competitions and competitors forward.

Expect more from us soon on this (and other) topics — we’re quite excited to show everyone what we have been working on.

References

Agarwal, Ruchir, and Patrick Gaule. 2020. “Invisible Geniuses: Could the Knowledge Frontier Advance Faster?” American Economic Review: Insights 2 (4): 409–24. [link]

Tran, Bich Thi Ngoc, Jonathan Wai, Sarah McKenzie, Jonathan Mills, and Dustin Seaton. 2022. “Expanding Gifted Identification to Capture Academically Advanced, Low-Income, or Other Disadvantaged Students: The Case of Arkansas.” Journal for the Education of the Gifted 45 (1): 64–83.

Plutarch. 1916. “Pericles.” In Lives, Volume III, translated by Bernadotte Perrin. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Education Progress is excited to release the results of a new survey showing widespread support for dedicated gifted education funding across party lines in Oregon. Below is the press release we’ve sent to Oregon news outlets and education reporters nationwide. The full survey results are embedded at the bottom, and the assets and cross-tabs are available in our public folder here. We sincerely thank Margaret DeLacy and Jonathan Plucker for lending us their voices, and we look forward to publishing our deep dive into the results soon. Please share it widely!

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PORTLAND, Ore., May 26, 2026 — A new survey finds 66% of Oregon voters would support a proposal to increase funding for gifted and talented programs, without raising taxes, to 1% of the state education budget.

The survey, conducted by FM3 Research and commissioned by the Center for Educational Progress, polled 860 likely November 2026 voters statewide. Results found robust bipartisan support for the proposal: 65% among Republicans, 66% among Democrats, and 68% among Independents. Majority support also cuts across racial identity, geography, and education level, and rose to 69% overall after voters heard positive messaging.

“The lack of dedicated funding for gifted education means Oregon’s gifted students from rural, low-income, and racially diverse backgrounds are most likely to be overlooked,” said Margaret DeLacy, president of the Oregon Association for Talented and Gifted. “Half of Oregon’s 197 school districts either identify no gifted students or report no spending on TAG services.”

Oregon does not provide categorical state funding to school districts for TAG services. As a result, less than 0.1% of its $7.5 billion annual K–12 budget goes toward programs and services for gifted students. Fifty-six percent of voters polled consider this too little.

“These results speak to a growing body of evidence that policymakers have underinvested in advanced education, often drastically,” said Jonathan Plucker, professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education and director of the National Research Center on Advanced Education. “The current baseline for public investment is essentially zero. For our economy, our culture, and the lives of students and their families, we must find ways to help more of our students perform at advanced levels.”

Oregon voters appear to agree: 92% say some children need more than classrooms geared toward a typical student can provide, and 91% say gifted students deserve a challenging, engaging education in Oregon public schools.

That sentiment extends to specific priorities. Eighty-three percent of respondents consider it extremely or very important to increase funding to provide all students an education that meets their academic level, and 79% feel the same about providing students more opportunities to be challenged academically when needed. Advanced math classes (77%) and advanced reading classes (73%) also rank among the highest-priority items.

Methodology: The survey was conducted by FM3 Research from April 28 to May 3, 2026, among 860 likely November 2026 voters in Oregon, reached by telephone and online. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. The ballot measure was tested with a split sample using two wordings, one referring to “1% of the education budget” and the other to “$120 million.” The 1% wording produced higher initial support (66%) than the $120 million wording (55%), for a combined total support of 60%. After hearing supporting arguments, support rose to 69% and 62%, respectively; after hearing opposing arguments, it settled at 63% and 54%.

About the Center for Educational Progress

The Center for Educational Progress is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit devoted to studying and promoting excellence in education. Founded in 2025, the Center publishes Education Progress, which aims to unite pro-excellence voices from across the educational landscape.

Oregon Education Survey | April May 2026

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Attacks on Excellence is a series from Education Progress featuring critical coverage of the education policies and research paradigms that are holding students back.

Give Part 1 and Part 2 of The Evidence Crisis in Math Reform sub-series a read if you missed them!

The latest “math reform finally works!” story comes from The Hechinger Report, featuring a Brockton Public Schools math curriculum coordinator celebrating supposed middle school gains using inquiry-first instructional methods.

A closer examination of the data, however, reveals a much different picture: the bottom has fallen out for the least advantaged students.

When ‘Productive Struggle’ Meets Real Struggle: Brockton’s Post-2021 Reality

Brockton serves over 15,000 students: 72% low-income, 34% multilingual learners, 53% with a first language other than English, and a recent influx of 1,500 migrant students, some of whom hadn’t attended school regularly since second grade. These are precisely the students who most need strong, evidence-based instruction, especially after COVID-era learning loss.

Instead, the district implemented a new curriculum in 2021 built around Carnegie Learning and problem-based learning (PBL). In lieu of clear teacher-led instruction, students are thrown into open-ended, “real-world” problems and expected to discover concepts through group exploration and “productive struggle.”

The Hechinger Op-Ed highlights Brockton’s MCAS (the MA statewide testing program) proficiency gains from 2021 to 2025: sixth grade proficiency rose from 11% to 21%, seventh grade from 13% to 16%, and eighth grade from 13% to 21%. The Op-Ed presents these numbers as proof that inquiry-first instruction works.

Yet 2021 was the height of COVID learning loss. MCAS scores collapsed statewide that year, and Brockton middle schools did not have in-person learning from March 2020 until March 2021. Massachusetts also announced that MCAS scores would not be used for accountability in 2021, reducing typical pressure on schools to maximize performance.

Using 2021 as the baseline is therefore highly misleading. When compared to 2019, the last fully pre-pandemic year, the narrative changes substantially. While the district’s highest performers show no improvement, the lower-performing students’ achievement has collapsed.

Trends for the most disadvantaged student groups are even worse between 2019 and 2025:

Cognitive Science and Federal Guidance Say Explicit Instruction First For Struggling Students, Not “Productive Struggle”

The U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse 2021 math practice guide for struggling elementary school students is unambiguous, based on its highest evidence basis rating: students who are behind benefit from explicit, systematic instruction with clear teacher modeling, guided practice, immediate feedback, and cumulative review. In other words, the exact opposite of Brockton’s instructional approach.

The 2008 National Mathematics Advisory Panel — a blue-ribbon group convened by the U.S. Department of Education that reviewed the highest-quality available research — reached parallel conclusions for students across the elementary and middle grades.* The Panel found that explicit instruction consistently improved outcomes for students with mathematical difficulties, particularly in computation and word problems. It recommended that struggling students receive regular, structured, explicit mathematics instruction with clear demonstrations, guided practice, opportunities to verbalize reasoning, and immediate corrective feedback.

This aligns with cognitive load theory. Novices have limited working memory. When students are thrown into minimally guided, open-ended tasks before they possess foundational knowledge in that subject area, working memory becomes overloaded. The result is often confusion and frustration rather than learning.

Inquiry-first advocates often dismiss critics by caricaturing explicit instruction as “sage on the stage” lecturing or mindless memorization, like in the Op-Ed. In fact, effective explicit instruction involves active teacher guidance, checking for understanding, deliberate practice, and gradual release of responsibility. It helps students build the schemas and background knowledge before moving to inquiry (i.e., inquiry as the final step, not the first one). It supports conceptual understanding, student thinking, and meaningful problem-solving.

This evidence-based learning process is demonstrated as follows:

“Productive Struggle” and Building Thinking Classrooms: Weak Evidence, Recycled Hype

Brockton’s story (and the broader inquiry-first movement) on math leans hard into the opposite: inquiry-first “productive struggle” (a rebranded PBL approach that, as Holly Korbey reported, a growing number of districts and teachers are jettisoning because of its lack of evidence), Peter Liljedahl’s rebranded PBL Building Thinking Classrooms (BTC), and other discovery methods.

PBL is not new — it is almost 60 years old, based on the century-old progressive education philosophy rooted in John Dewey’s “learning by doing.” The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’s (NCTM) 1989 Standards elevated inquiry-first problem solving as a central theme in K-12 math classrooms — ideas the broader education world has promoted enthusiastically for decades since.

Supporters argue these approaches increase engagement, perseverance, and collaboration. But the evidence base is far weaker than advocates often suggest.

Even proponents acknowledge that BTC’s main research only measures engagement — student participation, “thinking” (which BTC essentially defines as discovery learning), time spent talking, and activity at whiteboards — and Liljedahl conducted such studies. But engagement is not the same as learning. Educational psychologist Paul Kirschner has often noted that students can appear engaged and busy without actually learning much.

Carnegie Learning: Marketing over Evidence

At the heart of Brockton’s “unified math strategy” is Carnegie Learning’s middle-school program. Carnegie heavily markets the program’s AI-driven personalization and collaborative problem-solving as proven solutions. However, the evidence is far less convincing than the marketing suggests.

The 2016 What Works Clearinghouse review examined numerous studies on Carnegie Learning and rejected most for poor research design, including several conducted by Carnegie itself. Independent large-scale studies have shown mixed or limited effects, with no rigorous evidence specific to middle-school settings. If the company is truly confident in its approach, why were its own studies too flawed to meet basic research standards?

Defenders often argue that these studies are outdated because Carnegie revised the curriculum in 2022. Yet Carnegie’s own 2023 “Evidence for ESSA” materials rely heavily on studies from 2018 or earlier, with no major new rigorous studies supporting the revised curriculum. Carnegie’s own internal reports are positive, of course, but this is marketing, not rigorous evidence.

The Hechinger Op-Ed even credits an interactive video streaming program for filling gaps, alleviating anxiety, and serving as a “lifeline” amid teacher shortages, while boasting a 440% increase in one school’s sixth-grade MCAS passing rates. But citing percentage increases at one school from an extremely low pandemic-era baseline masks significant declines across the district.

Brockton middle school math teacher Mike Sullivan told me:

“If the people downtown had put half as much energy into improving student learning as they did into gaslighting teachers about how great Carnegie was supposed to be, our students would probably be much better off right now.”

Reading Lessons for Math: Why Evidence Keeps Getting Ignored

The parallels with reading instruction are striking. For decades, balanced literacy and whole-language approaches emphasized discovery-oriented reading instruction while minimizing explicit phonics instruction. Those methods failed many struggling readers, especially disadvantaged students. In the past few years, the Science of Reading movement reversed course by emphasizing systematic, explicit instruction grounded in cognitive science, and dramatically improved outcomes.

But such guidance was not new. In 2000, the U.S. Department of Education’s National Reading Panel reviewed the research and recommended systematic phonics instruction. Yet the broader education industry — publishers, teacher preparation programs, and many curriculum leaders — largely ignored or downplayed these findings. Instead of shifting practices, whole-language philosophy was simply rebranded as “balanced literacy,” with phonics treated as optional or incidental rather than systematic and explicit.

The 2008 National Math Advisory Panel report met a similar fate. Former panel member and Brookings Institute scholar Tom Loveless observed that its findings “just collected dust on bookshelves,” particularly among advocacy groups like NCTM. Nationally, NAEP 4th- and 8th-grade math scores have been essentially flat for the past 20+ years, showing little sustained progress from widespread inquiry-oriented approaches.

A Failed Experiment Repackaged as Success: The Hechinger Report Should Retract This Op-Ed

This recurring disregard for evidence is precisely why the Op-Ed in The Hechinger Report is so damaging. By anchoring to a 2021 pandemic low, the Op-Ed spins a modest rebound among higher performers as proof that inquiry-first methods succeed with underserved students. Remove the distorted baseline, and the data reveal widening gaps and collapse among those who need help most.

Education journalism owes high-needs districts more: honest scrutiny, rigorous evidence, and methods grounded in how students actually learn — not repackaged experiments sold as breakthroughs. This misleading piece fails exactly the students it claims to help. The Hechinger Report should retract it.

*The story has been updated to clarify the description of the 2008 National Mathematics Advisory Panel report’s recommendation on explicit instruction.

Today we’re excited to share our conversation with Anna Stokke on Episode 71 of the Chalk & Talk podcast. Thomas and David join Anna to pick up where her guest piece left off, delving deeper into the uses and abuses of “research shows” in education.

One useful way we’ve been thinking about the obstacles to evidence-based instruction is the distinction between misunderstanding and conviction in education. Often, ineffective practices persist simply because educators and administrators haven’t been exposed to what the best research says about effective instruction; better awareness and a clear path to implementation are sometimes enough to put evidence-based practices in place.

In other cases, however, educators, administrators, and academics remain committed to ineffective approaches even after encountering the high-quality evidence that counts against them. In cases like these, challenges may be reflexively reframed on ideological or political grounds rather than engaged on the merits. These thornier cases demand a different response.

We work through this distinction with four concrete examples we’ve been covering on our Substack: the algebra placement failures in North Carolina, the New York State Math Briefs controversy and NYSED’s response, YouCubed’s recurrent data troubles, and the full arc of San Francisco’s algebra detracking experiment. We have posts going into more detail about each of these stories that you can find below.

Don’t miss this episode!

Listen to the episode at the Chalk & Talk website, or see our faces in the video version on YouTube!

The Schoolhouse is a series from Education Progress featuring articles for and from teachers, parents, education officials, and others working in the education system.

I have loved EdTech for a long time.

And for a long time everything about it made my job easier. My love began slowly, though, starting with simple communications to students and parents, or sharing problem sets that students would complete on paper from their math textbooks. As the technology evolved, so did use of it: distributing PDFs, sharing lecture notes, accepting assignments, communicating even more with families, and giving students more ways to access materials.

I did not have to worry about printing allowances, or whether a student had a pencil, which are bigger concerns than many realize. As schools moved to 1:1 technology, computers became abundant. I could stop providing printed copies of my typed lectures. I could communicate with parents more easily. I could allow students to type instead of handwriting, which by the mid-2010s had become so atrocious that it could only be interpreted with the help of a cuneiform tablet.

Most of the time, tech was also something my students liked. With very, very few exceptions, most students preferred typing papers and essays to writing them out by hand. Students generally preferred typing notes, even though we now know that is often an inferior method of learning. Most students preferred being able to edit and revise their work. They preferred being able to turn something in at midnight if they had a basketball game that went until 10 PM.

But decreasing friction came at a cost. Today we are reckoning with a decade of having conflated technological progress with progress in education. It is easier to update our EdTech platforms than it is to improve learning outcomes, and technological development has become a metric all its own.

Technology Transfers

It’s hard to say how it could have gone differently, though. EdTech gave us — teachers and school admins — flexibility with deadlines. It let me personalize classroom and accommodation materials and made collection and distribution easier in almost every way. It was a lubricant in the wheels of education. For myself and for the hundreds of students I taught over the years, it made a lot of daily classroom work much less onerous.

Not only did I love it, but I was also an early adopter. I started with Weebly and classroom blogs, then began using Canvas/Instructure in 2012. I helped integrate EdTech into every aspect of classroom management and classroom practice, from using Microsoft Teams for video calling to early adoption of Google Classroom. I have done it all. And yet, even as I continue to use it for my classes this week, I also understand its limitations. I also understand what instructors give up when we move instruction online.

While I am the first to say I love EdTech, I am also the first to acknowledge that sometimes it really sucks. There are times when, over the past 15-plus years, it has failed. I have had to extend deadlines. I have had to rush to print things out because the Wi-Fi was down or a student system had crashed. There are times when tech does not do the job it promises to do, and times when using it makes you neither more knowledgeable nor more competent in your work.

As much as I am an early adopter of all things EdTech, I also — shockingly (to many) — paired that with a devoted use of notebooks and paper-based materials. I would have discussions online and still require students to take handwritten notes and submit problem sets, graphs, and illustrations drawn by hand, even when Word, Slides or Desmos might have provided me with something more visually interesting, technically polished, or easier to read. To this day I have not found a suitable technological alternative to a student taking handwritten lecture notes, or keeping notebooks of vocabulary, mathematics proofs, or market diagrams.

It is a paradox, then, that I land where I am today: increasingly convinced that we need to reconsider 1:1 EdTech in K-8 classrooms and return much of early technology use to a more intentional, lab-based model. I think there are real benefits to using technology in the classroom. But it has a major problem we need to consider more carefully moving forward: the problem of security theater.

Having managed EdTech admin accounts across Microsoft Teams, Instructure, GSuite, and other platforms, I know how much information we provide to EdTech companies: student names, ages, birthdays, ID numbers, email addresses, parent contacts, assignments, grades, accommodations, and messages. All of this goes into a black box system that only the technology advisor or administrator really sees and approves, often on behalf of every student opted into that system while every parent has little choice but to accept it. Public or private, across the country, this is now normal. But what happens when that data is breached?

We say it is unavoidable because we have to use EdTech. But is it really that unavoidable? I still enjoy EdTech, and I will continue to use it. But that does not mean that I believe we have to use it uncritically. Does it make certain parts of the job easier? Undoubtedly. Recent regulations for ADA accommodations for visual media and audio media used in the classroom make EdTech one of the greatest tools for inclusion. But I would also be a hypocrite if I did not also acknowledge that it also had a deleterious effect on student privacy. I do not think we can separate the benefits of EdTech from its harms. And one of its main harms is the commodification of student data and student profiles.

EdTech allows us to communicate with parents and stakeholders much more efficiently through a thin veneer of security. These platforms give the appearance of walls and barriers around student information. They tell us that communication is protected, that data are secure, that access is controlled, and that vendors are compliant. But this is a façade. The truth is actually far more complicated.

Security Theater

Most EdTech companies claim to provide best-in-class security. But as administrators, we must rely on our technical advisors and on people more knowledgeable than us about how secure that information is. Most operate at a knowledge deficit. I devoted several years of my life to understanding cloud database structures, cloud data systems, multi-character key encryptions, and student information tagging, and while I have a much better understanding of what types of security EdTech platforms can provide, I also know just how much information most schools feel obliged to share with these platforms.

When I started using EdTech in my classroom there were no logins for students, no single sign-on, and no two-factor authentication. Student use of EdTech was often passive. Teachers used online blogs or personal pages to post materials for wide distribution. Students and parents could, if they wanted to, create their own accounts to access and participate in online discussions, coordinate material submission, or receive feedback, but accounts began anonymously in online systems and most of the coordination happened outside the digital world. Over time formalized systems were established to comply with FERPA as gradebooks and materials submissions moved online and became connected to unique student profiles.

Today, almost any tech-enabled tool requires the creation of a unique student avatar. That avatar is connected not only to individual students, but also parents, teachers, materials, assignments, and of course grades. Increasingly, these online learning systems are connected to student information systems, which also archive academic records, attendance records, discipline, and whatever other systems are connected across schools, districts, and state data collection systems. As schools have moved from being hubs for education to hubs for community services, our data systems additionally catalog vaccines opt-outs and immunization records, mental health appointments, social service referrals, health records, and other sensitive information housed in or coordinated through schools. While much of this is managed under HIPAA, anything shared from a HIPAA secure system willingly, but unknowledgeable, by parents goes into an SIS system or Cloud Platform that almost never maintains the same level of security.

I do not think most people understand what this landscape really looks like, or how it operates. Few grasp just how interconnected our school management systems have become, not just to each other but also to the numerous cloud platforms that schools and districts do not manage themselves. Most people, moreover, have no idea how much information schools are required to distribute across so many unique platforms including AWS, Azure, Box, Google Cloud, Dropbox, and so on. Families often have very little visibility into which privacy regime applies, which vendor holds the data, and what downstream integrations may touch it.

Clever was built to help manage the data coordination and login problem for districts, and it is used nationwide. But this is one example of a popular platform. There are many others managing, hosting, syncing, and transferring student data in the background. When we share and provide these student data profiles, we increase our exposure to bad actors. The issue is not just whether one database is encrypted. The issue is what happens when student identity, school records, assignments, messages, accommodations, grades, and third-party tools are all connected across systems.

What used to be securely stored in PDFs, PostgreSQL relational databases, and other encrypted storage systems is not suddenly insecure because of AI. Those systems can still be very secure when they are properly configured, access-controlled, and narrowly managed. The problem is that AI makes data exposure more consequential. Neural networks, transformers, and generative AI systems can now process images, scripts, text, tables, and scanned documents at speed. Their real power lies not simply in processing information, but in finding connections across information that once remained separate. This architecture is extraordinarily useful for science, research, and complex monitoring systems. But it also means that what we choose to collect, copy, sync, and retain is more vulnerable to reconstruction, linkage, and misuse than ever before.

We have built an education technology ecosystem where ease of access often depends on connecting more systems together. A student logs in once and reaches the LMS, email, documents, assignments, messages, third-party tools, assessment platforms, parent portals, and more. It all feels efficient, but every connection also expands the surface area of risk.

The Canvas Hack

Which brings us to last week, the ransomware hack of Canvas systems. Over 9,000 schools were impacted, and we still do not know the full scope of what was accessed or how exposure varied across institutions. But that uncertainty is itself part of the problem. The risk to any given school depends not only on whether it used Canvas, but on how deeply Canvas was integrated into its identity systems, messaging, student records, assignments, third-party tools, and student-facing communication systems. For some schools, the exposed information may have been relatively limited. For others, depending on how much information was shared with and routed through Canvas, the exposure may have been much broader. That is precisely the point. The danger is not just the platform. The danger is the degree of integration.

If this Canvas incident exposes anything, it is not that one login provider caused the breach, or that one type of school account was uniquely vulnerable. It exposes something broader: how deeply modern EdTech depends on linked identity systems, single sign-on, cloud platforms, browser-saved credentials, third-party integrations, and centralized student profiles. By allowing any company, system, or platform to manage student data at this scale, we give it more power than it deserves. And we engage in security theater.

We play-act that we are secure because the system looks professional, because the vendor has a compliance statement, because there is a login screen, because there is two-factor authentication, because the contract has been approved, or because someone in technology signed off on it. But vendor approval is not the same thing as safety. Single sign-on is not the same thing as safety. A privacy policy is not the same thing as safety. How did we let this become so ubiquitous in our education system?

It makes logging into everything easier. We can save passwords in our Chrome accounts and browsers. We can use Clever and other login systems to connect everything together. We can make a student’s digital school life seamless. But seamless is not always safe.

So where do we go from here?

Perhaps the problem of EdTech, laid bare for millions of students, teachers, administrators, and parents last week, is the wake-up call we needed. My suggestion today is simple: roll things back. Require EdTech only where and when it is actually needed. We need to look honestly at the value of EdTech in our schools, for students, and for the education ecosystem as a whole. Do endless EdTech subscriptions provide a real value-add for student learning? Do we need a 1:1 device program for every student at every level of instruction? Do we need every assignment, message, accommodation, assessment, and parent communication routed through third-party systems?

I am increasingly convinced that the answer, particularly at the K-8 level, is no. If we are serious about FERPA and COPPA, then we need to stop pretending that compliance is achieved because a vendor has a privacy policy, a district has approved a contract, or a parent clicked through a consent form they did not really understand. Compliance cannot be reduced to paperwork; it should mean minimizing unnecessary exposure in the first place.

For younger students especially, the default should not be full integration into an always-on EdTech ecosystem. The default should be to opt-out. Let’s bring back lab-based technology, limited-purpose tools, local storage where possible, paper-based alternatives, and far fewer student accounts connected across platforms. This does not mean no technology, but it does mean more technology with clear boundaries.

We need to care more about students’ realized learning, and we need to more intentionally ask which systems are essential in achieving that goal. Platforms that provide and extend access, accommodation, instruction, or communication — we can consider using those carefully. But many are not essential, and if one is not, we should cut ties with it.

In any case, what I have learned over the past five days is that the most meaningful technological revolution for schools may not be changes in security authentication, widespread use of AI, or the adoption of personalized learning platforms. It might just be refusing to collect, upload, connect, and retain data that schools did not need to hand over in the first place. Perhaps in doing so we can begin to reconstruct a model of education that works for the students in our classrooms, rather than one that quietly turns every child into a permanent digital profile.

Chalk & Talk is one of our favorite sources for education content, and so we’re thrilled to have this guest post from Anna Stokke, based on a presentation she gave at researchED Toronto in June, 2025. You can listen to Anna talk about this article on her most recent Chalk & Talk episode, now available here!

The Schoolhouse is a series from Education Progress featuring articles for and from teachers, parents, education officials, and others working in the education system.

People often ask me how I became involved in math education, and why I so often call out poor practice and insist on evidence. As with many of us, it’s personal.

We sent our daughter to school expecting she’d be taught math. After all, that’s what schools do: they teach kids how to read and do math. But our daughter didn’t seem to be learning anything in her math class. By Grade 3, most days either consisted of a “problem of the day” that students didn’t have the skills to solve, or confusing lessons on convoluted methods for doing basic arithmetic.

It all came to a head when we were invited to a parent math information night. “What should math look and feel like?” the flyer asked. “How do we help children see that math is a subject where thinking, not just remembering, is the main event?”

Who could be against thinking? Certainly not me. But if I’d known then what I know now, I’d have recognized this as code for “no remembering at all.” My husband and I walked to the school that evening hopeful that those first few months of Grade 3 were an anomaly. Maybe soon they’d start teaching some math.

Instead, the parent math night deepened our concerns. We were told that the new math curriculum (or standards, as they’re called in the United States) discouraged standard algorithms — the traditional vertical algorithms for arithmetic — in favor of invented strategies or less efficient, overcomplicated procedures. We were assured this approach promotes “conceptual understanding” but, as mathematicians, my husband and I were skeptical. To reinforce the message, we were given a research paper that supposedly showed that standard algorithms are harmful, claims that often trace back to the widely criticized work of Constance Kamii (see critiques here and here).

Looking around the room, most parents seemed satisfied. Who wouldn’t trust the schools to teach our children well?

Some weeks later, the school brought in a well-known Canadian math consultant and author to give a presentation to parents. When asked directly, she gave parents the advice that it doesn’t really matter whether kids commit multiplication tables to memory, a claim that runs counter to strong evidence (see, for example, here and here). It became clear where those “problems of the day” were coming from.

As for the research paper we’d been given, it was a small case study involving children with learning difficulties. There was no control group and no statistical analysis. The researcher drew faulty conclusions that did not follow from the evidence. It didn’t support what the school was telling us at all.

This was my first encounter with education research, and I wasn’t impressed. How could flawed studies and non-existent evidence shape how children were being taught math? And why was no one asking questions?

Our daughter’s classroom wasn’t an outlier. The same patterns were playing out in classrooms across the country. That moment set me on a path that I’m still on today to push for better standards in math education. Over time, I’ve learned to read between the lines, to ask pointed questions, to look closely at what’s presented as evidence, and to never take education claims at face value.

I’d like to share what I’ve learned, in the hope that it helps other parents and teachers.

The first thing to understand is that the phrase “research shows” is used loosely in education. It doesn’t carry the same weight as when a doctor or scientist uses the phrase. In education, it might refer to a blog post, an opinion dressed up as evidence, or a small, low-quality study. Even a published journal article in education should be scrutinized. A surprising amount of education research is of very low quality.

But the phrase is powerful and persuasive. It makes opinion sound like fact and lends authority to claims that haven’t been properly tested. Yet when a claim is repeated enough, it starts to feel like established truth.

I call this the wildfire effect.

The wildfire effect: How bad ideas spread

1. A flawed study or opinion piece is cited by an influential educator.

2. It’s repeated at education conferences, professional development sessions, and on social media.

3. It appears in district documents, books, and other education papers.

4. It then gets cited as well-established research.

5. It becomes justification for education policy.

At no point in the process is the evidence seriously examined.

A good example is the claim that timed tests cause math anxiety. This is not supported by high-quality research, and most claims seem to trace back to an opinion piece written by influential math educator, Jo Boaler. It has been repeated so many times that many educators believe it is accepted research. However, these assumptions are not supported by research, and recommendations from the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) list timed activities as a research-informed way to support students struggling with math.

What’s at stake? A lot.

When weak or non-existent evidence drives decisions, students don’t get effective instruction, struggling students fall further behind, teachers are misled, resources are wasted, and high-quality research gets drowned out.

For this reason, I believe more teachers and parents need to be proactive. A PhD, a position of influence, or a published book is not proof of accuracy. Anyone can write a book, and people with PhDs can be wrong. Evidence is what matters, not credentials.

Ask for evidence, evaluate it, and become informed. Here’s where to start.

Step 1. Ask for evidence

When you ask for evidence, you may encounter tactics designed to shut you down.

One common tactic is shifting the burden of proof: when someone makes a radical claim but refuses to provide evidence, instead throwing the burden of proof onto you.

Here’s an example:

• Claim: “Research shows standard algorithms are harmful.”

• You: “Please provide evidence of your claim.”

• Response: “You need to prove they’re not harmful.”

Who holds the burden of proof? As Carl Sagan said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The burden of proof lies with the person making the claim, especially when it challenges established practice. In this case, stating that standard algorithms are harmful is a radical claim that goes against conventional wisdom. It is therefore incumbent on the individual making that claim to provide evidence.

Another tactic to watch out for is the firehose effect: avoiding providing evidence by overwhelming the questioner with sources. I’ve experienced this firsthand, repeatedly. When I asked for evidence, I’d be told to read a book with hundreds of references. The reason is simple: it’s impractical to check the validity of hundreds of references.

The best example I know of someone pushing back against the wildfire effect is from Stanford math professor Brian Conrad. Alarmed by dubious claims in a 1000-page draft of the 2021 California Math Framework (CMF), he carefully examined every claim and reference. He found repeated citation misrepresentations, non peer-reviewed articles, and sweeping generalizations, which he documented in a public critique of the CMF.

Most people won’t do what Conrad did, but there are some things you can do to dampen the firehose effect. First, be specific. Ask for two or three high-quality studies — not entire books — on the specific topic in question. You can also divide large reference lists among several people. My colleagues and I did this recently when an education professor claimed that requiring K-8 teachers to take math made them worse math teachers. When asked for evidence she sent 22 articles. We split them up, read every one, and wrote a report on our findings. None of the provided articles supported her claim, and several contradicted it.

A third tactic you might encounter is credential deflection: instead of providing you with the requested evidence, someone questions your right to ask for it. I’ve experienced this directly. A contract instructor in a Faculty of Education once publicly wrote this about me: “Let me stress that her perspective as a mathematician is far different than that of a math educator. Many of the statements she makes are a reflection of her lack of knowledge regarding effective practice.” This is an ad hominem attack: criticizing the person instead of engaging with the argument. He was implicitly saying that only people trained in education are qualified to evaluate evidence within that field — as though there’s something special about education research that the rest of us can’t understand.

But this is preposterous. A mathematician is often in an even better position to identify weak methodology in education papers, such as missing control groups, flawed statistical analyses, or illogical conclusions. Honestly, critical thinking skills are often all that’s needed to assess the validity of many education papers. If someone attacks your credentials, direct them back to the critical question: please provide evidence for your claim.

The fourth tactic to guard against is gaslighting: when someone tells you that a poor practice you’ve witnessed is barely happening in schools. This tactic is used to shut down conversations before they can start. For instance, I’ve been told that inquiry-based instruction is rare and that most classrooms are dominated by direct instruction: the practice is hardly occurring, so why dwell on its effectiveness? A simple response is to provide evidence to the contrary, which means the best defense is having receipts. Professional development and school newsletters reflect how teachers are being encouraged to teach. What professional development is being offered? How often does it focus on explicit instruction, retrieval practice, acquiring fluency with basic math facts, or direct teaching of critical math skills versus Building Thinking Classrooms, growth mindset, or inquiry? These kinds of school and district resources offer a paper trail that can’t be easily gaslit.

Step 2. Evaluate the evidence

If you do receive research articles (which I’ve found is unlikely, particularly when the claim runs counter to common sense), you’ll need to assess them. First, here’s what doesn’t count as evidence:

1. Opinion pieces

2. Newspaper or magazine articles

3. Articles that are not peer-reviewed

4. Position statements: the NCTM (National Council for Teachers of Mathematics), for example, has published position statements that are not grounded in evidence.

Next, watch for these five red flags, discussed in detail here:

One common issue, often found in education articles, is the lack of meaningful and measurable criteria.

Math education is full of appealing but vague terms: critical thinking, conceptual understanding, number sense, curiosity, differentiation. These lack clear definitions and are difficult to measure. If you are told that a program promotes number sense or critical thinking, that’s a red flag. There really is no standard definition for what these terms mean, making them impossible to measure.

Another thing to watch out for is when programs get labeled as research-based, but the underlying studies didn’t actually measure whether students learned. For example, the popular math program, Building Thinking Classrooms, is often described this way, but the study often cited measured engagement, not whether students learned math (see critiques here and here). Engagement isn’t learning. Students can be very engaged but learn very little.

If a math program claims to be evidence-based, it should be supported by high-quality research that measured whether students learned math.

Step 3. Become informed

Finally, the best defence against bad ideas in education is to equip yourself with knowledge about evidence-informed practices. High-quality sources include the Institute of Educational Science practice guides, the National Math Advisory Panel Final Report, the National Center on Intensive Intervention, and the Education Endowment Foundation. These sources synthesize rigorous research and focus on what improves student outcomes. The more you know about what the best research supports, the easier it is to spot bad ideas before they spread. And check out my podcast Chalk & Talk, where I speak with experts from around the world about evidence-based education.

Our daughters have mathematicians as parents, so they got the math instruction they needed. Most children don’t have that advantage. If we want better outcomes for children, we must stop accepting “research shows” at face value and start demanding evidence.

Charting the Course is a series from Education Progress featuring pro-excellence education commentary, news, and policy analysis.

THE EDUCATION profession looks ripe for a crisis of public trust. Major districts are fumbling, scores are falling nationwide, and even Yale is reckoning with the mistrust in higher ed. Public opinion seems to reflect this: a record-low 35% of Americans are satisfied with K–12 education, and high-school teachers received their lowest “trust rating” yet (50% high or very high) on Gallup’s most recent “Honesty and Ethical Standards” poll.

Meanwhile, as education research writ large is under the microscope, poor research continues to move policy and good research is under attack. Unlike more scientifically rigorous fields such as medicine, education continues to entertain discredited ideas long after they’ve been debunked. No surgeon today debates virtues of handwashing; meanwhile, phonics and explicit instruction get buried, dug up, and then buried again.

When reformers ask themselves why education trails behind, a frequent point of reference is Douglas Carnine’s “Why Education Experts Resist Effective Practices.” “Education experts routinely make decisions in subjective fashion, eschewing quantitative measures and ignoring research findings,” Carnine writes, and we should not expect it to become an evidence-based profession until it faces “intense and sustained outside pressure.” The medical field did not replace a reliance on the subjective judgments of individual practitioners with a demand for “judgments constrained by quantified data that can be inspected by a broad audience” all on its own; it was only after the univocal horror of the Thalidomide tragedy were drugs required to prove safe and effective before being prescribed. When reformers see signs of a crisis of trust, it can be tempting to hope that such a crisis might pressure education to trade ideology out for evidence as has happened for other professions.

Yet to think Carnine’s account warrants a simple “crisis → reform” narrative is optimistic by half. “There are signs today,” he wrote in 2000, “that this is beginning to happen in education.” In 2025, the signs weren’t much different: “We are in education’s own crisis of trust.” It tells us something that the right crisis has still not arrived. When crises of public trust have forced other professions to embrace the evidence, the problems and levers were sufficiently clear for the public to converge on solutions. Nothing is so clear in education.

It is not so clear, for one, that a sense of crisis in education is widespread. Despite that record-low public trust rating, high-school teachers still rate 5th out of 21 professions; in last year’s poll, moreover, grade-school teachers were rated 2nd (61% high or very high), even with the outrage over grade-school reading instruction.

Further complicating the crisis narrative, disaggregating responses by political leaning reveals that public trust is fractured along partisan lies. Among Democrats-leaning respondents, trust in high-school teachers jumps from 50% to 71% high or very high; among Republican learners, the figure sinks to a mere 31%. On the left, then, there is even less evidence of a crisis-of-trust mentality; on the right, meanwhile, trust is falling in precisely the kinds of scientific institutions responsible for producing the research with which our educators need to align. So the side more inclined to ‘trust the science’ is less likely to doubt that educators are informed by the evidence, and those more mistrustful that educators grasp the research are less apt to support the institutions who conduct it.

This is our coalitional problem for education reform. The crises of public trust by which professions mature are ones where public mistrust can converge on something productive (policy change or institutional reform). But the two halves we would need for our reform coalition — those who trust research on the one hand, and those willing to pressure the profession to use it on the other — sit on opposite sides of the aisle. And the aisle is getting wider.

Regrettably, education discourse is structurally biased toward moral drama. Rather than the avenues most likely to afford agreement and change, social dynamics incentivize us to stress the high-stakes moral issues where convincing others is hardest — disputes about which civil rights apply to which students, or controversial curricula centering certain identities and diminishing others. Raising the temperature among fellow partisans scores identity-politics points and clout; agreeing with opponents on low-hanging fruit is worse for the algorithm than dunking on rabid takes; politicians don’t lean back toward the center or signal openness to compromise until after they’ve won their primaries. The resulting irony is that most attention is spent on what is least likely to change, whereas less attention is spent on our best chances for reform.

Most who join for the culture war, stay for more culture war. The allies recruited by moral outrage about banned books or athletics policies are not so easily regrouped when the discussion moves beyond topics parents might be used to talking or hearing about, like to pedagogical disputes or the science of reading conversation. Teachers’ views on DEI are more moderate than many realize on the right, and defeating DEI in the culture war doesn't automatically produce a better education. If students enter college unable to read, a rigorous, “classical education” with a “great books” curriculum is a pipe dream; if partisan hardball reformers continue winning territory — on either side — but the only replacements are dysfunction or mediocrity, then nothing has been solved.

Prioritizing the actionable levers that sidestep moral outrage is our first step toward more productively channeling mistrust. Universal screening, expanding access to advanced coursework, grouping students by ability, and emphasizing direct instruction shouldn’t be controversial. And even the most modest bipartisan wins reinforce a mutual trust that opponents can be reasoned with.

But while tactical sidestepping is necessary, it will not be sufficient. A reform coalition that brackets petty grievances will still face two structural obstacles that keep public pressure from reaching the machinery that needs it most.

The first is a vocabulary gap. Moral judgments don’t require technical expertise; they’re accessible to everyone and easy to apply to new cases, which is precisely why they dominate public discourse. Pedagogical disputes are different: they require some grasp of what the research actually says, a sense of where the evidence is strong and where it’s contested, and enough familiarity with the field to tell the difference between an approach that merely sounds rigorous and one that actually is. Parents irate that their children can’t read often can’t pinpoint why; being able to ask whether the problem is curriculum, instructional methods, professional development, or district policy already demands finer-grained concepts than the public audience has. A key reason Sold a Story was so galvanizing is that it named specific causes, actors, and points of failure for parents and policymakers. Without that vocabulary, frustration stays diffuse; until it can converge on diagnosis, it can’t converge on a remedy.

The second is an accountability mismatch. The institutions most accessible to parents, such as school boards, PTAs, and principals’ offices, are also the ones least connected to the upstream decisions that shape what happens in classrooms. A school board can fire a superintendent but can’t fix the teacher pipeline, and a PTA can raise hell about curriculum, but can’t revise what counts as “evidence-based” at the state level. Meanwhile, the entities with the greatest structural reach — ed schools, curriculum publishers, and state boards of education — are almost entirely insulated from public pressure. Their influence is pervasive and consequential, but they’re a layer removed from parents, invisible by default, and accountable to know one who is likely to show up at a meeting. The result is an inversion: pressure is strongest on the points where reform is least durable, and weakest where the real leverage is.

Together, these obstacles help explain why Carnine’s “intense and sustained outside pressure” has proven so hard to generate even when public frustration runs high. It is natural to think that a crisis of trust will be the proximate cause of a profession’s reform; closer to the truth, however, is that “crisis of trust” is the name we give to the moment when public mistrust finally converges productively on an actionable diagnosis. We are not yet at that moment. Reformers may see that mistrust abounds, but at present it is still too diffuse; not only is it split along partisan lines, but it lacks vocabulary to name the right targets and the institutional access to reach them.

“Dogma does not destroy itself.” Just so, public mistrust does not converge productively by itself. For those who believe that high mistrust is sufficient to trigger reform, increasing it to a fever pitch may seem like a recipe for change. But raising the temperature is of little help if it distracts from the tasks of building a common vocabulary and identifying the levers of consequence. Educators want to offer effective instruction, but many are equipped with ineffective methods rubber-stamped by ed schools and professional development opportunities dripping with fads. As teachers experience crises of their own, they need the support and training that comes with the institutional guardrails of an evidence-based profession.

Theories of Progress is a series from Education Progress building the intellectual framework for durable education reform: why the system resists improvement, what excellence actually requires, and what history tells us about how to build it.

TODAY’S WORLD is a world of regulations. For better and worse, the rise of the administrative state — a “fourth branch” of government sitting uncomfortably between Congress and the Presidency — has been a defining transformation of the past century. For a country of America’s size, such a transformation would have been impossible without the technological and social progress that accompanied it. Modern, coordinated workforces cannot be built effectively from populations fractured by prejudice or poverty, and even the freest of societies would be worth little to their people if they lacked the power to resolve collective action problems, or synthesize the fruits of labor and innovation into what we now call progress.

But while our world grew faster paced, our technology more powerful, and our communications more rapid, so did our world also shrink. A kid from Oklahoma now might go to California for school, then to Washington to raise a family, and then finally to Florida to retire. Widespread techno-optimism ran into the toxic byproducts of its own wild successes, and we can now even cure the side-effects of being able to make more food than we could ever eat. We also went from a poverty of available information to drowning in algorithmic entertainment. These dynamics should neither be blamed solely on capitalism, nor on the now-discredited system called communism. Modernity itself is just a double-edged sword.

So too is the administrative state. Depending on your political priors, though, you might see regulations and the administrative state as either the primary drivers or arch-nemeses of progress. Personally, I think the story is complicated, and the answer is probably some mixture of “both and,” depending on the context. Every industry expert can provide horror stories of regulatory failures impeding progress, but the vast majority of regulators exist because our legislators — our infamously dysfunctional, self-effacing, slow-moving Congress — felt the need to pass a law so that the Executive could do something: do something about pollution, do something about discrimination, do something about food and drug quality. And despite all the controversies, setbacks, and abuses of power administrationism brought with it, it also facilitated progress. Incentives were created so that populations and programs could be served by market forces and government agents that might have had no reason to go “there,” or felt no responsibility to serve “them.” The result is that we live in a society our grandparents hardly could have imagined.

THE STORY is remarkably different for education. The theory I will try to articulate over a few posts, starting with this one, is that education has been uniquely misregulated — so much so that we’ve landed in a paradoxical position where the educational landscape should be understood as a system that is simultaneously anarchic and overregulated. Education is drowning in regulations governing licensing, accreditation, accommodations, civil rights, and funding, and yet so few of these touch what arguably matters most in schools, like whether a reading or math curriculum actually works as described, or whether a student is being placed in classes that best reflect their ability and need.

This paradoxical situation, I argue, can help explain why durable education reform has proven so fleeting, so ineffective, and the diagnoses or solutions so cyclical. To do so I’ll borrow a framework from one of my favorite international relations theorists, Kenneth Waltz, which he used to explain why wars happen. His key insight in Man, the State, and War was not merely that wars have multiple causes operating at different levels, but that reforms targeting only one level are structurally doomed to fail. The problem, he argues, is that the anarchic structure of international relations serves as a permissive cause of war: war happens because there isn’t a higher power that prevents it. War is not inevitable because human beings are inherently flawed, nor is it preventable by improving their individual characters. Neither can it be prevented by just making every state a democracy, or by making them all rich and interconnected through free trade. The problem is a structural feature of the system in which they operate.

Borrowing his frame, I sketch out three different “images” of education reform that map onto different parts of the landscape today:

1. First-image reforms identify practitioners, teachers, and students as the primary instruments of educational dysfunction, failure, or success, and thus frequently focus on constituting the right kinds of individual actors.

2. Second-image reforms view the problem in terms of how institutions are composed and arrange themselves, including questions over what types of schools exist (public, private, charter), or the kinds of resources schools, districts, students and families have at their disposal (funding, student populations, choice, etc.). Change the institutional arrangements and structures, and you can reform education.

3. Third-image reforms identify system-wide problems and propose correspondingly system-wide solutions, like top-down accountability and testing (No Child Left Behind being the quintessential failed example, and the Southern Literacy Surge reforms, a promising effort appearing over the last decade).

There is something to each of these three images of reform. But meaningful progress in education will not materialize if reforms fail to affect core parts of all three images. The crucial piece that’s missing — a national architecture of educational quality-control — would be a kind of third-image reform that, crucially, also spans the other two images, as I’ll try to describe below. Thankfully the situation is not as bleak here as it is in international relations, because anarchy is a contingent feature of our education system, not a necessary one. The illegibility coursing throughout is the result of a series of policy choices that were made or not made, and so can be fixed.

The rest of Part 1 will be spent sketching out this three-image theory of education reform, identifying the promises and shortcomings of each one in isolation, and then presenting an account of what the current system lacks.

Part 2 will examine the shadow powers that have filled the void left by a non-existent national education quality-control architecture, drawing parallels to Renaissance Italy’s politics and power-struggles to illustrate why certain pathologies appear so difficult to dislodge.

The final post, Part 3, will offer some ideas for navigating what I call the Paradoxical American Renaissance that we find ourselves in, and examine what it might take to build the kind of architecture that our system currently lacks.

The risk, of course, will be creating yet another system vulnerable to regulatory or ideological capture. Part of the point of this first essay, though, is that the problem runs deeper than an absence of some “educational FDA.” Rather, it is education’s lack of common vocabularies, agreed-upon methods, and legible aims that would make such a regulatory agency imaginable in the first place. The hope is that telling the story as a series of regulatory and institutional failures will illuminate what a possible solution might be.

Image 1: Practitioners and the Information Void

Teachers and students are, intuitively, the two most important parts of the education ecosystem, and so most efforts to improve the schools naturally start in the classrooms. This means that first-image reforms get a great deal of attention in the education reform space.

Many of these reformers want to remake or reconstitute the practitioner in some significant way, whether that’s freeing teachers from the “tyrannies” of direct instruction, making them “guides on the side” instead of “sages on the stage,” or making them sufficiently “culturally proficient” educators. Other reformers try to remove the human variable as much as the idea of schooling can allow, whether that’s scripting curricula, ed-tech, or novel accountability systems. What limits both, however, is the information environment in which they operate: it is so generally degraded or hard to parse that, eventually, some incentive or another will start to produce and reinforce bad practice.

Practitioners work inside institutions that shape what reaches them (second-image), and inside a system lacking quality control and clear signals (third-image). And even if, from the first-image perspective, these infrastructural problems were fixed, a further, deeper problem would remain: one of the dominant pedagogical paradigms created by first-image reforms has immunized itself from the kinds of evidence such an infrastructure would even produce.

Compare the quality of the tools, certifications, and epistemic communities that your average practicing doctor has at their disposal with the tools available to a curriculum director at a run-of-the-mill public, private, or charter school. Doctors have meaningful board certification tests and standards; the FDA communicates the evidence-base via product labels, reports, and guidelines; doctors have to buy insurance and malpractice liability; and medical schools are a real grind. A curriculum director, in contrast, has a handful of disconnected curriculum reviewers, like EdReports; they get bombarded with vendor marketing materials, without any common language for efficacy, review standards, and so on; and the networking, conferencing, and professional development space is almost entirely unpoliced, and frequently dominated by education school celebrities.

First-image reforms run up against four different limits, which I’ll discuss in order. These are:

1. The evidence doesn’t reliably reach the practitioners,

2. What reaches them is often wrong,

3. When the right information exists locally, institutional dysfunction and gatekeeping block it, and

4. One of the most popular pedagogical orthodoxies actively degrades the information environment and immunizes itself from evidentiary critique

1. The evidence doesn’t reliably reach the practitioners

There is, despite everything, a robust and growing evidence base for how learning happens. (The best introduction to this work is, unsurprisingly, called How Learning Happens.) The evidence tells us that methods like retrieval practice, spaced repetition, and direct instruction reliably produce greater learning gains than the inquiry- or discovery-based alternatives. The problem is less that this evidence is missing, and more that a healthy pipeline from research to practitioner was never fully established.

The What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), housed in the Institute of Education Sciences, was one part of this pipeline that had been successfully built, though it never became what it truly needed to be. The WWC was responsible for producing the kind of independent evidence base which, in a system with functioning quality-control architecture, would be a constant point of contact for curriculum directors, teachers, and perhaps even the education schools. But what was built was not enough to pierce the ecosystem that, it turns out, largely ignored it. And now DOGE has been let loose on IES, although some in the administration are apparently realizing that the Education Department’s research and statistics wing might not be a wise part of the government to cut.

I think WWC and the IES needed a lot more resources, a lot more institutional teeth, and a much bigger PR campaign attached to it if it were ever going to do the things people expected it to have done by now. The main reason for this is because of a problem that lives upstream: the schools that credential the teachers are not doing a super great job. An investigation by the National Council on Teacher Quality found only about a quarter of the 700 teacher-prep programs taught all five components of evidence-based reading instruction. The general information environment for practitioners is fragmented, and as a result a lot of the best evidence never makes its way into the right hands.

2. What reaches them is often wrong

The absence of information is bad enough for practitioners, but what’s worse is that the information that does end up making its way through the pipeline is frequently bad, or unhelpful, or theoretically unsound (and potentially difficult to falsify). This discussion will be brief because we’ll return to it in the next two images.

Two recent news items in the education world show the problem well enough. First, consider EdReports, a quasi-independent curriculum review organization which, for years, has positioned itself as a kind of FDA for the K–12 curriculum market. The problem, as APM reported last year, is that EdReports’s ratings do not consistently track the actual evidence on how students best learn how to read. Other reviewers besides EdReports also suffer from key limitations or flaws. Holly Korbey* calls the curriculum review landscape “frankly bananas,” which (besides being an awesome way to put it) seems appropriate to me.

State education agencies — another party you’d expect to be keeping a watchful eye over the first image — frequently embarrass themselves in ways that EdReports’s fiercest competitors could only dream of. The New York State Education Department (NYSED), for example, released a work of numero-arithmatic fiction as its official guidance for how teachers and schools in the state should practice and think about math instruction. They’ve been ignoring a devastating petition for a while now; I briefly covered the situation last year, and my colleague, David, recently painted an even richer picture of the dysfunction that you can read right below.

The upshot, though, is the state endorsed a bunch of imaginary beliefs about student learning (that they don’t have different levels of mathematical talent [seriously]), math instruction (timed repetitive practices being maligned as a narrow tool for children that struggle), and assessment (that timed exams and quizzes create math anxiety, rather than merely revealing a lack of prior math instruction). Maybe you don’t think any teachers really take state materials like this seriously, and so this doesn’t matter. But perhaps it should.

3. Dysfunction and gatekeeping block the right information when it exists

Sometimes the information is there for first-image practitioners to use, but bizarre gatekeeping or boring-old dysfunction make using that information well impossible. First, I’ll share a story from my Aunt, who taught for many years at a public elementary school in Kansas City (edited from a phone conversation):

When we first started out [in the mid-90’s], we could do our own thing. We knew what our kids needed, and we could make it more interesting. We had basals, but we could adapt them, until they got rid of those and it was kind of like the Wild West for a couple years. None of us knew how to make our own curriculum, obviously.

But then with No Child Left Behind, they started making every teacher read from the same manual and rigidly follow all these state standards, and that pretty quickly abandoned phonics. All of those new reading techniques or wacky exercises were of course a disaster, but we weren’t allowed to deviate from them. So I would put phonics in our morning work, even if it was videos, or a brief overview of a word I knew they were about to encounter and wouldn’t be able to just guess.

But what the school was telling all of us teachers about phonics was “Don’t do drills — that puts pressure on the kids.” If everyone gets an award, but no one can read, then what’s the point of that?

They would also judge us on any given day about the state standards we were using that day — they had to be written on the board — and whether the students could recite the standards of the day. And so the principal or somebody from the central office would come in, inevitably pick on the worst-behaving kid to recite the standard, and that was supposed to mean that the students knew what was going on.

I’ll never forget there was a third grader I tutored who could barely read his own name — and the school kept asking me, “Why isn’t he getting on track? He has to pass the standards so he can go on to fourth grade,” and that always baffled me. He literally struggled to read his own name, and his parents were no help at all. Nothing can make up for parents not reading to their kids, or just sticking them on an iPad.

Toward the end of my time teaching we were also commanded to do iReady every day, and you’re seeing them getting sued now for sharing student data or whatever. But it was a totally messed up way to teach them the whole time. Tests 3 times a year, if kids weren’t moving up it was on the teacher, and I would see kids focus on the games that would pop up.

It’s just people that aren’t in the trenches who are making these policies. And it’s been a disaster.

There are probably countless stories like my aunt’s, and likely many more where teachers were not able to go around their administrators, or principals, or curriculum directors.

But sometimes the right information gets blocked because of some complicated nexus of systemwide dysfunction. Last year we published an article called “The Algebra Gatekeepers,” which describes how tens of thousands of high-scoring students in North Carolina were denied access to advanced math courses which, by their objective metrics, they were prepared for. Several forces came together to create this dysfunction. It turns out that the results of the tests weren’t readily available to teachers or parents, and that teacher recommendations prevented students from advancing, but without the reporting requirements to learn exactly why.

Many high-scoring students, for example, could have attendance or behavioral problems that make the environment in an advanced math course inappropriate for them. But many more were also being denied just because teachers felt like the class wouldn’t be the right “fit” for them. Incredibly, when the state passed a law to get the most proficient students into advanced math, the state board of education muddied the measurement system to get in the way.

4. Self-immunizing pedagogical theories resist evidence

The first three limits describe problems that the right infrastructure could, in principle, fix. What such an infrastructure couldn’t fix, though, is a situation in which one of the dominant pedagogical theories on offer — in academia and in the curriculum landscape — actively degrades the information environment and immunizes itself from evidence-based critique.

This family of constructivist pedagogical theories has been known by many names, but today it runs rampant in discovery learning, guided discovery learning, inquiry-based learning, culturally proficient pedagogy, and many other academic and curricular movements. Constructivists can be traced at least back to Dewey in America — one of the ur-theorists of the educational romantics — but today their standard-bearers are academics like Jo Boaler, Lucy Calkins, and Deborah Ball. These are the academics that, in order, inspired San Francisco to abolish algebra in middle school, convinced everyone that balanced literacy produced literate students, and drafted pseudoscientific guidance on math instruction for the state of New York.

I know the above seems to imply that all constructivists think alike, and more broadly that constructivist pedagogies are all kinds of pseudoscientific shams. I should emphasize that both of these claims are false. Some constructivist methods likely work great for some students, depending on their specific abilities, motivations, and social contexts. The same is certainly true for some programs, theories, or curricula that aim to produce more culturally proficient educators, or that claim to produce certain qualitative learning outcomes — like engagement, motivation, or conceptual understanding — more than their alternatives.

But right now, all of that exists more in the realm of folk wisdom, and less in the realm of science and evidence. Part of the problem is that a core feature of so much of the constructivist pedagogy attempts to perform a kind of double-reconstitution of the educational relationship. First, it reconstitutes the teacher: no longer a transmitter of content, but a facilitator of the student’s own construction of the knowledge. The evidence that this specific approach produces worse outcomes than explicit instruction has been, in my opinion, basically settled for over 20 years now. But the second reconstitution is where the dynamic gets even more intense: if knowledge is constructed by the learner, then who the learner is becomes, epistemically, the entire center of attention. The student’s culture, identity, and “lived experience” stop being background conditions and become part of what instruction is for — and in strong versions, it can become much of what instruction is about.

The double-reconstitution’s final act, in a logical sense, functions as a kind of self-inoculation against rigorous evidence. If the classroom is a site of identity constitution as much as it is instruction, then asking whether it is “working” in the ordinary sense not only looks confused, but frequently gets treated with moral suspicion. The demand for evidence isn’t refused on methodological grounds, and is instead positioned as hostile to the “true” task of education itself. And this is at least one part of the story of how constructivism exists today in the educational landscape.

The other part of this story, though, is the role institutions have played in it. Captured institutions are one reason why evidence-based practitioner reformers like Zach Groshell and Doug Lemov don’t control more of the teacher training pipeline. They are effectively swimming upstream against the tide of all the prestige academies, flashy curriculum providers, and lagging state standards.

But first a slight detour back to Waltz, to help explain how the second image is different.

Image 2: Institutions and their Vetos

Second-image theories in international relations locate the causes of war not in individuals, but in the internal structures of states and the way they arrange themselves. If all states became liberal democracies, according to some theorists, war would end — this is what’s known as the democratic peace thesis. Another second-image view says if states became economically interdependent, the costs of war would become prohibitive — what we can call “commercial liberalism.” Yet another says that if states federated and pooled sovereignty, the structural incentives for conflict would dissolve over time — this is Kant’s cosmopolitanism (the subject of my master’s thesis, if you’re interested). The key conviction across all these variants is that institutional arrangements and compositions are the skeleton key to international peace.

Second-image education reformers also believe the problem (at least mostly) has to do with institutional structure. There’s a left- and right-wing version of this conviction, and from the perspective of the second image, they’re just kinds of mirror images of each other. The left’s conviction is to concentrate power and resources at the implementation link — in unions, districts, credentialing institutions, struggling schools — focusing on things like labor conditions, funding, classroom sizes, and as we just discussed, romantic-constructivist pedagogical theories brewed inside the education schools. The right thinks the solution is to concentrate authority at the selection link — things like school/parental choice, charters, vouchers, and competitive or performance-based pay schemes for teachers, school officials, and school funding.

Both of these theories of education reform shift incentives, resources, and educational authority to particular actors that each thinks will tend to make the right kinds of decisions — if only they had enough autonomy. But both are doomed to fail for the same Waltzian reason. In a system with no quality-control infrastructure above the rearranged institutions, and no communicable standards available to those within or beneath them, any rearrangement merely becomes a temporary gain or loss, as institutions inevitably recreate old failures from new first principles. Doing so is hard to avoid because of three mechanisms endemic to this kind of system:

1. Supply chains lacking oversight. There aren’t meaningful mechanisms to verify the quality of a new curriculum, or the success of a particular pedagogical method — it reminds me of what advertising must have been like a century ago.

2. Veto points and institutional capture. The education system has an astounding number of veto points, whether that’s in the realm of regulation and oversight (federal government, state government, local boards, unions) or uncompetitive, parochial, and ideological research paradigms and theories (education schools). Any one of these veto points can stop a reform effort.

3. Metric gaming and signal degradation. This happens from the top down and the bottom up, i.e., in terms of the quality of the information flowing from the schools; or demanded from the schools by existing state oversight mechanisms; or advertised to the schools by researchers and curriculum providers. The rational response in such a disordered information environment is to degrade the signals, rather than address the systemic issues. This is the phenomenon of lowering cut scores, inflating grades, redefining proficiency, or pursuing abstract, confusing, and hard to measure results.

I’ll briefly discuss some cases where these mechanisms rear their heads.

Ed schools and the captured training pipeline

Part 2 will dive even deeper into the world of the education academy, but it’s important to mention them here, too. The academy is perhaps the most difficult to reform second-image institution, and yet if there had to be one party responsible for the durability of the romantic-constructivist paradigms we discussed above, it’s the ed schools.

Their stickiness, in part, comes from the fact that this captured institution sits atop the credentialing link in the education pipeline, before any other institution (state, district, school) has a chance to act. The self-sealing loop, radically oversimplified, works like this:

• Ed schools transmit the romantic-constructivist paradigm →

• Credentialed teachers and administrators1 staff districts, state education departments, curriculum providers, and education cultural engines →

• State guidance and available curricula reflect paradigm assumptions (recall the NYSED math briefs!) →

• Districts adopt aligned curricula →

• When outcomes disappoint, everyone just moves back up two bullet points →

• And so state guidance and popular curricula get rewritten by the same people, and we put another 50¢ in the pinball machines

This self-sealing loop ultimately persists because the credentialing institutions do not face meaningful external pressure to evolve into a mature, evidence-based profession.

I referenced that NCTQ study of the 700 teacher programs above to explain a limiting factor on first-image reforms. But the fact that only ~25% of the programs taught all five components of evidence-based reading instruction also evinces the capture and misdirection of the academic institutions as a whole. So does this study from 2020, which examined a flagship product from Columbia’s Teachers College, Units of Study, and found that it was not aligned with the best research on reading. This mismatch is reflected in the outcomes these graduate/credentialing programs generate in the trainees and the districts they teach in. Another NCTQ study, for example, found that budget-crunched districts frequently spend millions on master’s degree premiums that have no measurable impact on student outcomes (Brookings found similar results). Back in 2008 districts were spending ~$15 billion annually on these programs.

Expecting these institutions to reform themselves internally would be a mistake. To do so would require them to adopt a certain point of view — whether about evidence, or politics, or the point of education generally — that they preclude from the start by ideologically sequestering themselves. It starts with how different research paradigms get treated within the system. Many teachers even find that the academy’s obsession with equity crowds out topics more relevant to the profession, like classroom behavior or effective reading instruction. Scholars in other fields, like sociology, have already started sounding the alarm about how methodological stagnation can result from political and ideological echo-chambers. Such a reckoning for the education academy never seemed to stick, or really get going at all.

The ideological archipelago extends beyond the research, though, because education schools also produce tons of administrators and other kinds of quasi-public officials that control who enters the institutions and how they work on the inside. All of these forces combine to keep education in a state of immaturity compared to other fields. A mature field, as Douglas Carnine writes, is built on five pillars that education currently lacks: a shared knowledge base, research-aligned preparation, licensure rooted in competence, accreditation with teeth, and accountability for quality of practice. These pillars distinguish education from a field like medicine, and are part of the third-image architecture we will discuss more in the next section.

Two recent news items, though, perfectly illustrate what resisting outside reform pressures looks like in practice.

New York’s $10m reading training boondoggle

In 2024, Kathy Hochul signed “Back to Basics” into law, claiming that New York was “turning the page on how we teach students how to read.” After years of falling scores and amidst a growing national literacy crisis, $10 million was appropriated to redesign reading instruction and train around 20,000 teachers. This funding was given to New York State Unified Teachers (NYSUT) to run the training through their “Education and Learning Trust.”

But what NYSUT produced was a course filled with balanced literacy content, and multiple literacy experts have offered their critiques, even pointing out, as literacy researcher Isabel Beck put it, that the course rendered her work “backward.” The Hechinger Report article goes over all the details, but it’s a story ripe with second-image dysfunction: supply chains lacking oversight, odd veto points and captured institutions, and poor information signals about what trainings or curricula are actually doing what. It was particularly amusing to read the delayed response from the NYSUT (excerpted from the Hechinger article):

NYSUT advocates for structured literacy and science of reading-aligned instruction and practices. We do not advocate for balanced literacy in our course… [The course lets educators have] deep discussions around the shift from balanced literacy and why that’s no longer evidence-based.

Forgive me if all that seems hard to believe when read alongside a review of New York practices like the one offered by ExcelinEd. New York has only adopted 2 of the 18 fundamental principles that ExcelinEd uses to evaluate early reading programs across the states.

NYSUT’s advocacy apparently needs to step up its game. And the response from their official is disappointing, but it’s totally unsurprising given that the NYSUT will face no meaningful political pressure from all of this. So why would their officials be responsive to pressure or community concern when it goes against their ideological priors?

San Francisco’s decade-long algebra detracking disaster

If you want the full story on San Francisco’s terrible experiment in detracking middle school math, I wrote an article you can read here that goes over the full timeline, and the recent vote that only partially restored access to algebra for the city’s eighth-graders.

The story is filled with second-image dysfunction. From the outset the effort was backed by Jo Boaler, who brought her snake oil up from Silicon Valley (Stanford), right when the city started to reckon with how badly it was educating many of its students who were poor, or Black, or Latino, or just learning English. Boaler offered the perfect product at the perfect time — a different, romantic-constructivist approach to teaching math — promising that it would eliminate the gaps and oppressive sorting that traditional math instruction, by its nature, had created. She had Stanford’s imprimatur, after all.

But at the end of the day the policy proposal was to eliminate the public middle school option for algebra. Obviously this, by definition, eliminated some gaps that reformers had been pointing to — gaps like “how many more of these kids take 9th grade algebra than those other kids” — because that’s what not allowing anyone to take it in middle school is going to do no matter what. So the reformers sought other ways to show that the policy was working, and in the process the third mechanism — signal degradation and metric gaming — played a key role in their attempt to whitewash the experiment halfway through.

They reported increasing enrollment in advanced classes, but it turns out the boost went away when one class was properly categorized as, well, not advanced. AP enrollment also declined over the period, and just recently might be back to where it was before. And of course student proficiency gaps increased, which is the only gap that really matters at the end of the day. Tom Loveless and Kelsey Piper have both written excellent articles on the research manipulations and borderline malpractice that characterized the effort. (My words, not theirs.)

The Argument

Education research is weak and sloppy. Why?

Jo Boaler is a professor of education at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, with an enormously influential body of work arguing that students learn math faster and more effectively through her “discovery”-based methods. Her work got Algebra removed from middle schools across the Bay Area…

Read more

6 months ago · 208 likes · 64 comments · Kelsey Piper

Last month longtime Superintendent Su and the SFUSD board finally voted to “bring algebra back to middle school,” but the new plan shows how captured institutions and a lack of oversight were also key mechanisms in the story. It took a decade for the reform to be reversed despite overwhelming public support for middle school algebra, and the historic successful recall vote on several board members in 2022 was for a whole lot more than just detracking middle school math. Because the school board was, ideologically, an ally of Jo Boaler, the last institution that could have policed the curriculum pipeline — the board — failed to do so. It’s also why the board and other entrenched groups are so inexplicably stubborn about running a normal math course track in the district. All the surrounding districts do it, but the new plan is only bringing a normal track back to just two of the 21 middle schools in the district.

D.C.’s charter decline

With all these captured institutions, the other major second-image reform camp — the school choice movement — looks to move around the implementation barriers in education (poorly performing schools and districts, ideologically misaligned teachers unions) by introducing market dynamics and choice/exit options for families. The theory is that by changing the institutions at the selection level, you can bypass the deep-rooted implementation barriers.

Truthfully, I’m ambivalent about charters. I want states that have voted for charter programs to have the best-run charters they can, and I find the weaponization of alternative schooling systems by both the left and the right to be a form of irresponsible governance. But I also believe, in the words of a colleague, that often the only way to get governments to listen to people without financial resources is to give them the option to leave. So if implemented thoughtfully, things like education savings accounts, voucher programs, and charter expansion can meaningfully improve many poor families’ educational opportunities.

This piece is already getting too long, and also I don’t want to give charter advocates short-thrift, so I’ll have more to say in a future post. A couple things are worth mentioning, though. First, as a second-image solution, the school choice movement will eventually be confronted with problems arising in the other two images. How to address the teacher credentialing pipeline, or the curriculum production pipeline, or ideologically opposing or incompetent state education agencies? Teacher shortages are already a national problem — there are 3.8 million teachers, by the way — and so it’s not like there’s a big teacher store where you can go replace the one you got if it starts quoting John Dewey.

Different charter systems will eventually start to be run by different groups of people. And so who gatekeeps the new curriculum directors — or the curricular menus they choose from — when personnel start to shift and turn over? Matt Yglesias has an article on the collapse of KIPP schools in D.C. that’s worth a read, especially if you have the three-image framing from this article in mind.

Ten Miles Square

The Stunning Collapse of KIPP DC

Before the pandemic, KIPP DC was a middle-of-the-pack charter network. Its 11 campuses tested about 2,900 students, making it by far the largest charter operator in the District. Its proficiency rates — 37 percent in ELA, 40 percent in math — were roughly in line with the charter sector average and not far from DCPS. Some individual campuses, like Promi…

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8 months ago · 27 likes · Matthew Yglesias

The mechanisms that charters are meant to use to bypass dysfunction in the public school system existed in D.C., but the end result was a collapse in proficiency anyway.

Image 3: Chaos in the System

This third image operates a bit differently than the other two.

The first and second images identify what we call in law “proximate” or “efficient” causes. These are the kind of answers you would get if you asked “Why did you eat my sandwich?” and I answered “Because I didn’t know it was yours” (first-image), or “Because there wasn’t one for me” (second-image). The third image, in contrast, is a structural one, and so the kinds of causes it will identify are not proximate or efficient, but permissive causes. That is, it answers with reference to features of the system we occupy, identifying why wars (or sandwich thefts) are just the kinds of things that will happen given the lack of structural constraints on the different actors and their arrangements in the system.

“Because no one was there to stop me!”

In international relations, that structure is known as anarchy, or the absence of a sovereign authority above states. But Waltz’s insight isn’t quite as pessimistic as it might first seem. He doesn’t argue that nothing exists to push against those forces producing war, and so anarchy does not mean that wars have to be constant or omni-present. It’s just that no amount of purely first- or second-image reforms will be sufficient to prevent them completely.

So what do I mean by “educational anarchy” in the American system? The diagnosis at the systems-level here is a bit bleak, at the front end: there’s just no equivalent institution to, say, an FDA or NTSB that has merely been defunded or broken. Road safety, drug efficacy, and consumer technology look worlds apart today than they did when our grandparents were alive. Educational progress has not caught up.

THAT INSTITUTION has never existed. 14,000 school districts are making relatively independent decisions about what to teach, how to teach it, and what success or failure looks like. A shared, inter-district-ly legible quality control infrastructure isn’t anywhere on the horizon. Enforcement mechanisms to police failed and faulty curricula aren’t set up, nor are usable and widely available feedback loops mediating outcomes and practices.

This is a kind of educational state of nature. And just as Waltz’s anarchy doesn’t mean a complete lack of order — there are alliances, norms, balances of power, treaties, etc. — educational anarchy doesn’t mean a complete lack of regulations and guidance. As I said above, there’s an ocean of regulations governing licensing, accreditation, accommodations, civil rights compliance, funding formulas, and reporting requirements. But a strikingly little amount touches the quality of the educational products, or improves the methods themselves.

Unlike the anarchy of international relations, though, educational anarchy is not an inevitable structural condition. (A world government seems unlikely.) Rather, it is more of a policy gap that we have, in some sense, chosen not to fill, and one that entrenched actors in the system have prevented us from filling, to different degrees. (More on this coming in Part 2.)

Consider these “seven unexcused absences” from the educational ecosystem that would be unimaginable in the context of food and drug testing, or automobile and transportation safety. I don’t mean to claim that each of these are totally or completely absent — it’s just that functionally they are:

1. No independent evidence base.2 There is no institution charged with generating rigorous, unbiased evidence about what works in education, the equivalent of NIH-funded clinical trials that establish a treatment’s efficacy before products enter the regulatory pipeline. The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) is the closest approximation, but it has been gutted to just a ~couple dozen staff during DOGE’s tenure. Even before the DOGE disaster, though, there were issues with the material that IES produced in its What Works Clearinghouse not getting into the hands of teachers and school/district officials, or not impacting the flawed research paradigms found in education schools nationwide.

2. No pre-market testing.3 There is no requirement that a curriculum be tested for efficacy before it reaches students. Karen Vaites’ framing — that there’s no FDA for education — is the pithiest description of the problem. Jo Boaler’s Fluency Without Fear went from her website, to California’s Math Framework, and then into classrooms nationwide without an efficacy trial ever getting in the way. Even under Common Core, some of the top K–2 literacy programs in use diverged from evidence-based practices.

3. No standards or gatekeeping.4 There is no nationally-determined efficacy threshold any given curriculum has to clear, and no institution with the authority and legitimacy to approve or reject it. A Johns Hopkins report from 2019 found that only 17 states exercised formal authority over curriculum decisions, and even 14 of those 17 ended up approving more weak curricula than strong. Common Core was the closest attempt, nationally speaking, but it was stunted politically and flawed in its execution. Institutions that arose to fill in these gaps, like EdReports, never had regulatory authority, and they seem to be having their own issues with evidence at the moment.

4. No post-market surveillance.5 Once a curriculum is adopted, it’s incredibly difficult to systematically track whether it’s really working, or where. Only eight* states currently publish maps of which curricula they use, and that’s not to speak of the gap between what is formally adopted and what teachers actually end up using in the classroom. Hardly half of the states share meaningful statewide data on curriculum adoption.

5. No meaningful feedback loops.6 What happens when a curriculum fails? Not much, besides hopefully being replaced by the districts dealing with the fallout. The informational chain from research → curriculum → classroom → student outcomes is, for the most part, rather unidirectional. Moreover, parents are increasingly receiving report cards that don’t match test scores, and research shows parents put more weight in grades than standardized tests. Even when districts offer their own numbers, they’re frequently incorrect, distorted, and unaccountable to any regulatory body — like when SFUSD removed middle school algebra and for years tried to pad the statistics to show that it was working.

6. No recall mechanism.7 Even when an instructional approach or a curriculum is contradicted by the evidence, there are strikingly few mechanisms or pathways for the curriculum to be easily removed. Even though it was contradicted by decades of cognitive science, balanced literacy took decades and a podcast to start being dislodged from American schools. And even though Columbia’s Teachers College shut down Lucy Calkins’ operation, she just relaunched under a different name: “Mossflower.” (Odd.)

7. No professional licensing tied to knowledge.8 Education schools routinely teach methods contradicted by the best available evidence-bases. For example, a 2023 study from the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) found that only a quarter of the 700 teacher prep programs they investigated taught all five components of evidence-based reading instruction (phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension). A teacher can be licensed, fully credentialed, and trained in methods that, essentially, don’t really work. It’s sort of like if chiropractic made up a big chunk of what medical schools taught.

Taken together, these seven absences characterize a system that is, in the Waltzian sense, anarchic. Not because it’s completely lawless or without rules, but because it lacks any common standard for progress. These seven absences are, collectively, seven different dimensions of the system’s illegibility. And because of this, critically, there can be no overarching authority capable of making sure that what makes its way into classrooms is backed by evidence and standards.

No Child Left Behind, for all the criticism that it has gotten over the past few decades, did diagnose the correct kind of problem. That is, someone needs to actually be checking whether students are actually learning, and in this sense standards and accountability measures deserve more credit than they typically get. Under NCLB, NAEP scores did improve, and for a time the achievement gap started to shrink, though by 2010 that trend started to wither.

And yet NCLB failed, and the way it failed is this essay’s whole argument in miniature. The accountability pressure came from above — the third image — while the practitioner environment (first-image), the institutional incentives (second-image), and the informational environment (a three-image problem) were never aligned or reformed to support it. In the first image, teachers resented NCLB because they were being evaluated on metrics that were either bad or that they hadn’t been trained to produce, and parents and students resented it for a mix of good and bad reasons, resulting in an unmanageable political pressure bubbling underneath the entire reform effort.

In the second image, education schools and curriculum providers continued to push unworkable theories and bad products, and it seems like no coincidence that “balanced literacy” and constructivist pedagogy reached new modes of dominance around that same time. Finally, political power brokers like the national teachers unions also organized against NCLB, and schools frequently responded to this environment by gaming metrics and student outcome reports. Given the limits of the law as it was written and the education environment it was thrown into, I’m not sure there was any version of No Child Left Behind that would have been politically feasible or epistemically possible.

Karen Vaites (once again) puts it best:

An accountability theory of change assumes that schools know what to do to raise outcomes, and if we just put the right carrots or sticks in place, they will do it. I don’t actually believe that’s the case, writ large. We’re in an education ecosystem where educators receive (and often believe) loads of misguided signals about what works to improve outcomes.

Put another way: If states implemented new, tougher accountability schema today, schools would be just as (or more) likely to embrace the newest faddish tech-enabled solutions (“just like iReady, untested for efficacy, but now AI-enabled so it’ll work this time!”) as they would to embrace better curricula, like those in Louisiana and Tennessee.

And so after a decade of backlash from all sorts of stakeholders, in 2015 Congress relented and replaced NCLB with the Every Student Succeeds Act, handing accountability back to the 50 states. Most of them went on to loosen their standards, which is reflected in the growing disconnect between NAEP scores and state proficiency reports. For now, the national system has given up on meaningful third-image reform. Beyond the Southern Literacy Surge — which is not just one uniform story, but a family resemblance of ed reforms that seem to be playing out promisingly, more or less — a couple other states, like Virginia, have also recently experimented with third-image reforms. But education policy is more and more the focus of our increasingly polarized and partisan politics, and so now after new elections, many such reforms will hang in the balance.

The Southern Literacy Surge is a promising but fragile exception to what I’ve just been discussing. As I mentioned above, each state that’s a part of this reform — Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Alabama — is doing things a bit differently, and so will see varying degrees and durations of success. Louisiana’s model, however, is the most ambitious. It spent less on reading reform than New York did, and got dramatically better results. The reason isn’t some magic dust in the Louisiana soil, but rather because it built state-level architecture that touched all three images simultaneously: a state curriculum review process with real teeth (third-image gatekeeping), aligned practitioner training (first-image), and accountability mechanisms with statewide buy-in and institutional levers (second*/third-image).

While the limits are its state borders, Louisiana’s reform is the most ambitious three-image solution existing today. But without being institutionalized above the state level, it too can be reversed. And so can bad ideas spread within, if the right curriculum provider or education academic manages to convince state officials that their goals are aligned.

The Paradox

THE MAJOR education reform movements of the modern era can be understood as largely single-image fixes applied to a three-image problem. Teacher PD, science of reading mandates, and evidence-based instruction are all first-image fixes that are vulnerable to capture from the second-image institutions. School choice, charter expansion, or even fully democratizing the entire teacher workforce and school system into some federated united workers’ republics — these solutions don’t do anything about the first-image information void, or the second-image academic capture, or the lack of third-image architecture to ensure that, more or less, everyone is paddling up the right kind of creek. Can I make a stupid Birdbox reference? It’s like Birdbox!

The result is that education is simultaneously one of the most regulated yet least quality-controlled systems in American life. Deluges of compliance procedures and paperwork govern everything but the quality of the educational practices and materials. The compliance infrastructure, moreover, creates the illusion that someone is checking, or that progress is being made. But we’ve started going backwards faster than ever.

The costs of this backsliding haven’t been evenly distributed. As I’ve written about before, families with resources are the ones that can escape dysfunction in the public schools. (And I haven’t even mentioned any of the bad policies shaping disability accommodations, school discipline, and safety, which are the other key drivers of the flight.) Private schools, tutors, real estate in better districts, summer programs, limited vouchers, and an opaque college application process all work in favor of families with resources.

I cannot emphasize this point strongly enough. It is happening nearly everywhere. 41 states are experiencing declines, and 21 are going to see a 5% drop by 2030. Every major city will be affected. It’s happening in New York, Boston, Seattle, D.C., San Francisco, Portland, Detroit, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Chicago, and countless other smaller cities. A slightly different version of this story is playing out in places like Houston, Indianapolis, Salt Lake City, Cleveland, St. Louis, Baton Rouge, Montgomery, Little Rock, Columbus, and San Antonio, as families choose charters, private vouchers, and homeschooling as alternatives for their kids. I wish the trend were merely a result of declining birth rates, but that’s just another structural dynamic that’s going to start squeezing schools more and more.

If we keep ignoring the problem, then the policies that most affect families will increasingly be influenced by childless professionals with law degrees, like me. (Which is a bad thing.) What that means is that local and state governments will become more beholden to the kinds of people that don’t have skin in the game. What’s at stake, then, is the future political responsiveness of some of our most important local institutions.

This situation is completely unsustainable for a public education system, and more broadly it cannot sustain a literate, civic society. But the inequalities produced by education’s auto-liquidation also reach down to the instructional level, too. In the classrooms, two types of students will be able to navigate those recycled romantic education theories. Sometimes they’re the students whose parents are attentive enough to look beyond their kid’s 5th-grade report card, figure out that they can’t actually read, and then actually do something productive with the rage that I’m certain immediately takes hold.

The other type of student that succeeds in a learning environment that centers an adult’s idea of a child’s ego is, well, the student who likely should have some sort of academic ego. They’re the ones who likely have academically gifted parents, who are probably surrounded by books, and who can most reliably learn to read or multiply on their own. So who do we think is left falling through the cracks?

Tragically, we have allowed the reformers most responsible for the situation to parade the word “equity” around as if they’re the only ones that care about it. But it’s clear they hardly have any useful sense of the word, let alone for what it should entail. Because if they did they would realize universal literacy and number fluency are absolutely essential building blocks for any society of equals, for any society that is fair, just, or free.

In Part 2…

If the institutional architecture for quality control doesn’t exist, then what fills the void? The answer is that three shadow powers take up the negative space: prestige, patronage, and politics. Reputations in the education academy, marketplace, and state ecosystems frequently substitute for evidence; funding relationships between the fed, states, districts, academia, curriculum providers, taxpayers, and schools stand in for accountability mechanisms; and partisan politics and political leverage substitute for meaningful quality control. Together, these forces determine which curricula reach classrooms, which reforms survive implementation, and which voices end up shaping policy.

The parallel for next time, it turns out, is not some story of modern regulatory failure. Rather, it’s to something older, a world before the institutions we take for granted existed at all.

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Barry Garelick taught 7th and 8th grade math as a second career after retiring from the federal government where he worked in environmental protection. He majored in math at University of Michigan. He is the author of several books on math education, including “Traditional Math,” and "Out on Good Behavior: Teaching math while looking over your shoulder,” both published by John Catt. He and his wife reside in the central coast area of California.

We are excited to reprint this 2023 piece from his Traditional Math Substack, which will remain relevant so long as reformers continue to insist that conceptual understanding must precede procedural fluency.

The Schoolhouse is a series from Education Progress featuring articles for and from teachers, parents, education officials, and others working in the education system.

Conceptual understanding in math has served as a dividing line between those who teach in a conventional or traditional manner, and those who advocate for progressive techniques. (I am a middle school math teacher and in the former camp.) Among other things, the progressivists frequently argue that understanding a procedure or algorithm must precede using or applying the procedure/algorithm itself.

Arguments made in support of the above statement not only border on the ridiculous, but often cross it. For example, a teacher stressing over how to assess understanding with students learning to add and subtract told me: “When ‘your work’ consists of counting and adding and subtracting, there isn’t a whole lot of work ‘to show.’ At these basic levels there has to be another way to ascertain whether a student understands these basic concepts in a meaningful way.” So if a student consistently gets addition and subtraction problems correct and applies them to solve problems, what basic concepts does she feel the student lacks? Apart from such an extreme, one of the most popular arguments that has emerged as the poster child for the reform math movement’s push for understanding is the “invert and multiply” rule for fractional division. They argue that students know how to use the rule but have no idea why it works and that such conceptual understanding always helps students to solve problems. What is frequently left out of such discussions is that the teaching of fraction operations is not devoid of understanding; fractional division is presented in the context of what such operation represents, and what types of problems can be solved using it.

A discussion I once had with a math reformer about this provides an accurate picture of the two sides of the “understanding” issue. I said to consider two students solving the following math problem: How many 2/3-ounce servings of yogurt are contained in a 3/4-ounce container? One student knows why the invert-and-multiply rule works and the other doesn’t. Both students solve the problem correctly. I maintain that I cannot tell which student knows why the rule works and which one doesn’t. What I do know is that both understand what fractional division represents, and how to use it to solve problems.

The math reformer responded that the student who did not know why the invert-and multiply-rule works “obviously” does not understand fractional division. I failed to understand that reasoning, but I have heard variations of it through the years. Generally it goes like this: “Students who fail to understand a concept are unable to know how to use it or build upon it. They will end up with misconceptions that can go undetected for months or years.”

Informing math teaching with this kind of thinking can result (and often does result) in holding up a student’s development when they are ready to move forward. Students who show mastery of procedure but cannot explain the concepts behind them are viewed as “math zombies,” to use a phrase coined by a math teacher clearly in the “students must understand or they will die” camp. A math teacher I know who is not in that camp responds to such views by stating that “Worrying about math zombies is like worrying that your football players are too good at passing the ball — on the basis that their positional play is no better than the rest of the team, and therefore they obviously don’t understand what they are doing when they pass beautifully.” In this article, I hope (but realistically do not expect) to put the arguments about understanding to rest. Or at least place them in a conceptual context.

Important Caveat and Disclosure

I will state at the outset that I, like many teachers, do in fact teach the underlying concepts for algorithms, procedures, and problem solving strategies. What I don’t do is obsess over whether students have true understanding. And I don’t stop them from using a procedure or algorithm if they don’t “understand” it.

Conceptual understanding and procedural fluency often work in tandem — sometimes with understanding coming first, sometimes later. One feeds the other, and usually after a person has more mathematical tools and procedures that make understanding more accessible. (Case in point: many procedures and rules of arithmetic are easier to understand once one has a facility with algebra and symbolic manipulation.)

And sometimes, people can proceed without ever understanding a particular concept.

What is Understanding?

How one defines mathematical understanding is a large part of the problem. There is no one fixed meaning. Does it mean to know the definition of something? In freshman calculus, students learn an intuitive definition of limits and continuity which then allows them to learn the powerful applications of same; i.e. taking derivatives and finding integrals. It isn’t until they take more advanced courses (e.g., real analysis) that they learn the formal definition of limits and continuity and accompanying theorems. Does this mean that they don’t understand calculus?

Does understanding mean transferability of concepts? Or, as a teacher I had in ed school put it: “What happens when students are placed in a totally unfamiliar situation that requires a more complex solution? What happens when we get off the ‘script’?” Dan Willingham, a cognitive scientist who teaches at University of Virginia calls being able to transfer knowledge to new situations “flexible knowledge.” There is no simple path of understanding first and then procedural skills — and no simple path to flexible knowledge. Willingham explains that it is unlikely that students will make such knowledge transfers readily until they have developed true expertise. Understanding is an important goal of education, he argues, “but if students fall short of this, it certainly doesn’t mean that they have acquired mere rote knowledge and are little better than parrots.” Rather, they are making the small steps necessary to develop better mathematical thinking. Simply put, no one leaps directly from novice to expert.

Levels of Understanding

There are different levels of understanding. One can operate at a very basic level of understanding that grows over time. While some basic level are thought of as “rote memorization,” lower-level procedural skills inform higher-level understanding skills in tandem. Reform math ignores this relationship and assumes that if a student cannot explain in writing a process used to solve a problem, that the student lacks understanding. Testing students for understanding in this manner, particularly in the K-8 grades, will often end up with students parroting explanations that they believe the teacher wants to hear — thus demonstrating a “rote understanding.” How is understanding best measured, then? I maintain that understanding is not tested by words, but by whether the student can do the problems. At the K-12 levels, understanding is best measured by the proxies of procedural fluency and factual mastery. The mastery serves as evidence that higher skills grow out of lower ones. I expect that this last statement will raise hackles on those who work within the educationist domain and try to build into their studies a confirmation that higher-order thinking is at odds with lower procedural skills, and that focusing on procedures prevents understanding.

Math is not taught in a vacuum, in which students are told “Do this, and never mind what it means.” When students learn about multiplication, they are shown that 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 can represent four groups of three things, or 4 x 3. For fractional division, students are shown first what it means to divide an orange, say, into halves, quarters, and so forth. That context is further extended to include fractions divided by fractions; e.g., how many 3/8-ounce servings are in a 15/16-ounce container of yogurt.

In teaching math, we teach a procedure within a context as the examples above illustrate. While there are some concepts that a student may not understand, there are still connections that students make to previously learned material and contexts which serve to inform a recently learned procedure — and ultimately may lead to further understanding. Efrat Furst, a cognitive neuroscientist who designs and teaches research-based, classroom-oriented curriculum for educators and students, addresses this. She writes:

Memorization usually means the ability to recite certain facts like “four times three equals twelve” — a student that is able to do that is not [yet] considered to demonstrate an understanding of multiplication. However, according to the formulation above, the student does understand “four times three” at a basic level that allows effective communication in a specific context (i.e., answering a question in a math quiz). To create a higher level of understanding, additional concrete examples are required (e.g., “Jess has three baskets, four balls in each”) as well as explicit connection to the new concept (“so we can say Jess has four balls multiplied by three”). By adding more familiar (concrete) examples to demonstrate the meaning of the concept, we can establish a higher level of meaning for “Multiplication.”

One proxy that teachers use for understanding and transfer of knowledge is how well students can do all sorts of problem variations. A student in my seventh grade math class recently provided an example of this. As an intro to a lesson on complex fractions, I announced that at the end of the lesson they would be able to do the following problem:

The boy raised his hand and said “Oh, I know how to solve that.” I recognized this as a “teaching moment” and said “OK, go for it.” He narrated step by step what needed to be done: “You flip the -3/5 to become -5/3 and multiply and you get -5/4. Then on the bottom you change 2 1/3 to 7/3 and multiply it by -3/4 to get - 21/12. So then you have -5/4 on top and -21/12 on the bottom, and you divide them. So -5/4 ÷ -21/12 is the same as -5/4 x -12/21. When you get a positive, and the answer is 5/7.” And that happens to be the correct answer.

He had certainly never seen this exact same problem before. And while he did not know why the invert and multiply rule worked, nor could he explain why multiplying two negatives yield a positive product, he was able to orally dictate the method, taking it apart mentally and explaining it verbally. He put together basic skills that he learned and used reasoning to see how they fit together in order to solve a more complex problem.

Ending the Understanding Fixation

The belief that teaching procedures prior to understanding will result in “math zombies” is entrenched in educational culture. The people pushing these ideas view the world through an adult lens which they’ve acquired through the very practices that they feel do not work. They become angry that their teachers (supposedly) didn’t explain all these things to them and are certain that they would have liked math more and done better if only their teachers would have focused on understanding. Their views and philosophies are taken as faith by school administrations, school districts and many teachers — teachers who have been indoctrinated in schools of education that teach these methods.

These ideas are so entrenched that even teachers who oppose such views feel guilty when teaching in the traditional manner so reviled by well-intentioned reformers. Given that today’s employers are complaining over the lack of basic math skills their recent college graduate employees possess, the fixation on conceptual understanding that prevails in the early grades has created a poster child in which “understanding” foundational math is often not even “doing” math at all.

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Jaime Osborne, Ed.D. is a middle school social studies teacher in the Commonwealth of Virginia, a graduate of the University of Virginia, and founder of Northern Virginia Classical Academy.

Charting the Course is a series from Education Progress featuring pro-excellence education commentary, news, and policy analysis. This article was originally posted on Bacon’s Rebellion.

I attended the recent National Council of the Social Studies (NCSS) annual conference in Washington, D.C., an event that draws thousands of educators from across the country. Unsurprisingly, inquiry-based learning dominated the agenda. Even sessions not explicitly labeled as such framed inquiry as the preferred — if not superior — mode of instruction. The message was unmistakable: Inquiry-based learning is no longer one approach among many. It has become the orthodoxy in social studies education.

For those unfamiliar with it, inquiry-based learning is a way of learning that starts with questions instead of answers. Rather than a teacher just saying, “Here are the facts,” they ask questions like, “Why do you think this happens?” They encourage students to explore, ask questions, try things out, and find answers on their own, with the teacher acting more like a guide on the side.

My skepticism of this trend had been building for years. It crystallized at the NCSS conference in Nashville, Tenn., two years ago, when I stopped by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) booth and spoke with a representative about widespread learning losses, particularly among economically disadvantaged students. One exception stood out; namely Catholic schools. “Everyone is wondering what Catholic schools are doing differently,” the NAEP representative remarked.

As an adjunct professor in a school of education, I wasn’t surprised. Catholic schools tend to emphasize direct instruction and content-rich curricula. Their success aligns with decades of cognitive science research — most notably the work of E.D. Hirsch — showing that background knowledge is a prerequisite for reading comprehension and higher-order thinking. Critical thinking is not a generic skill that can be taught in the abstract; it is domain-specific and depends on what students already know. Yet many schools have become so enamored with vague “21st-century skills” that they have sidelined content knowledge, despite clear evidence that knowledge still matters.

Cognitive Science Drives Virginia’s Literacy Changes While Certain Social Studies Leaders Want to Ignore It

At around the same time, Virginia required teachers to complete the Virginia Literacy Act training, which reinforced these same research-based conclusions; namely, that explicit instruction and background knowledge are foundational to literacy. Yet in fall 2024, my district announced that my course, World History & Geography I, would move away from multiple-choice assessments in favor of local alternative assessments grounded in inquiry-based learning. The contradiction was striking. The science informing literacy policy was being ignored in social studies.

District leaders pointed to an article highlighting higher pass rates in Rockingham County after adopting local alternative assessments. Teachers reported that students were thinking critically and “doing the work of historians.” But this claim raises a basic question: How can students think like historians without first knowing history? Cognitive science is clear — skills do not exist independently of knowledge.

I attended several NCSS sessions with this question in mind. In one session featuring the DBQ Project and educators from Arlington and Alexandria City, I asked why Reading Standard of Learning (SOL) scores for economically disadvantaged students in those districts had declined sharply since the adoption of DBQs. The facilitator attributed the drop to a “lack of professional development,” sidestepping the possibility that the instructional approach itself might be contributing to the problem.

Another session, led by University of Kentucky professor Kathy Swan, framed inquiry-based instruction as a source of classroom “vibrancy.” Here, “vibrancy” signals engagement — energy, discussion, and participation — and draws on a common contrast in education debates, where content-rich instruction is often dismissed as rote or dull, elevating how lively a classroom feels over whether students fully understand the context.

During Swan’s session, participants analyzed Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car while discussing democracy and economics, and engagement was high with many teachers making references to Reagan-Bush era economic policies, Nelson Mandela, and deindustrialization. But when I asked when students would gain the background knowledge needed for meaningful deliberation, Swan dismissed the concern, saying students “bring ideas” with them. Ironically, she later shared a story that illustrated the problem perfectly: Her own son failed at baking a tart because he didn’t know to skin the hazelnuts. Swan acknowledged that the issue was a lack of background knowledge. The parallel to inquiry-based learning went unrecognized.

In another session, a high school teacher demonstrated a geography activity in which students guessed states using yes-or-no questions that were highly dependent on background knowledge. When I asked when geographic knowledge was explicitly taught, he replied that students already knew it. This assumption — that all students arrive with sufficient background knowledge — lies at the heart of the equity problem in regards to academic achievement. Many do not.

Social Studies Must Be Included in Accountability to Be Prioritized

While states like Louisiana and Mississippi have posted NAEP gains by emphasizing content-rich curricula aligned with professional development and assessment, Virginia has moved in the opposite direction. That divergence was evident at a recent Virginia Board of Education meeting, where social studies coordinators — including members of the Virginia Council of the Social Studies and the Virginia Council of Social Studies Leaders — urged the Board to pause adding history and social studies as accountability measures under the Every Student Succeeds Act. Doing so would effectively undercut HB 1957, which grants local school divisions flexibility in assessment methods.

If social studies is not included in accountability, history tells us exactly what will happen. Under No Child Left Behind, subjects that were not tested were systematically de-emphasized. Instructional time shrank, curricula thinned, and expectations fell. Accountability drives priorities, whether educators like it or not.

Yet many inquiry-based learning advocates appear willing to accept — or even prefer — that outcome. Rather than requiring all districts to administer standardized assessments in social studies across three grade levels, they argue for flexibility that would effectively remove the subject from meaningful accountability altogether. In practice, this means social studies becomes optional, uneven, and dependent on local philosophy rather than student need.

Presenting themselves as experts, speakers dismissed standardized assessments as rote and inequitable while praising performance-based alternatives for promoting critical thinking. The tone conveyed open disdain for content knowledge. Board Member Amber Northern’s remarks on equity were therefore especially important. While multiple-choice tests are imperfect, they are more equitable — particularly for disadvantaged students who benefit from structured, content-rich instruction. Research shows that how experts work in a discipline is not how novices learn it.

What is often omitted from this debate is that the social studies assessments under consideration are not static. They are already being updated and will likely include essays and other open-response items as part of legislation sponsored by social studies teacher and Senator Schuyler VanValkenburg (D-Henrico County). The false dichotomy between multiple-choice tests and deeper thinking is just that — false.

Several speakers claimed students have “benefited greatly” from performance-based assessments. Yet longitudinal Reading SOL data in those same districts tell a different story: Scores for disadvantaged students have declined. Increased instructional time in social studies can improve literacy — but only when instruction is content-rich. Inquiry-based models that assume prior knowledge cannot deliver that benefit.

A high school student also spoke in favor of district flexibility, praising his inquiry-based experience. He casually mentioned visiting “two of the Seven Wonders of the World,” unintentionally highlighting the background knowledge advantages some students bring to school — advantages inquiry-based models often assume, but which many students lack.

Multiple-choice tests are far from perfect, but they are preferable to the alternative Virginia is considering: De-emphasizing social studies altogether. Inquiry-based learning can be a valuable supplement, but it cannot replace content-rich instruction and assessment — especially for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Virginia’s accountability standards must include 4th-grade Virginia Studies, Civics and Economics, and U.S. History. While many educators may be “drunk” on inquiry-based learning, the Commonwealth still has the opportunity — and the responsibility — to ensure that all students acquire the knowledge they need to succeed academically and participate fully in civic life.

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