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. Karen Vaites calls the curriculum review landscape “frankly bananas,” which (besides being an awesome way to put it) is surely among the more polite things a New Yorker can say about the field.

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…

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9 days 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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2 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. Hardly half of the states publicly share any data on which curricula districts adopt, and that’s not to speak of the gap between what is formally adopted and what teachers actually end up using in the classroom.

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 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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This is the fourth matchup post in our Elite Eight series. Read the full bracket announcement here.

Intro: Clash of the Titans

The geographical arrangement of our bracket means we have our two heaviest hitters in terms of SES-adjusted NAEP scores in this final Elite Eight matchup. These two states have spent the last decade or so proving many skeptics wrong: mentioning Louisiana’s educational successes still too-frequently raises eyebrows, and Indiana outperforms blue-state neighbors that spend considerably more per pupil.

But who wins on the fine-grained measures when we start to get specific?

Evidence-Based Instruction

Indiana and Louisiana both have fantastic track records on early literacy legislation aligned with the Science of Reading, each scoring an 18 of 18 on their ExcelinEd implementation reports. Both states require all K–3 teachers to complete SoR training and pass an SoR-aligned test for licensure. Louisiana was the very second state to prohibit three-cueing and Indiana legislated a ban of its own the following year.

While ExcelinEd gives Louisiana a slight lead over Indiana on Full Implementation, 9-7, what really sets these states apart is the way they approach getting High-Quality Instructional Materials into schools. First, everyone should go read Karen Vaites and her brilliant work on how Louisiana and Co. made the Southern Surge happen. (It goes way beyond phonics!1) Louisiana started rigorously reviewing curriculum in 2013 and issued state contracts to vendors whose materials met their standards, making HQIM both cheaper and easier for districts to adopt. The state also created its own free Guidebooks and developed thorough, curriculum-specific teacher training — all years before those additional SoR accomplishments. Now, in addition to being one of just two states using “book-rich, knowledge-curriculum statewide,” Louisiana is the only state whose 4th-grade reading NAEP scores actually improved through the pandemic (2019–’24). All this was done without curriculum mandates!

By contrast, Indiana does require its districts to use approved curriculum from state-approved lists. Although this means ELM’s methodology grants Indiana a “Full” on HQIM and Louisiana only a “Partial,” a bit more subtlety is needed. Curriculum mandates, while a powerful tool, are only as strong as a state’s approval list. Look at the most common K–5 reading curricula in Indiana:

Although the most common, CKLA, is a content-rich, “knowledge-building” curriculum, Wonders and Into Reading are “basal readers,” lighter on content and with few actual books. Yet both of the latter still make it onto IDOE’s Advisory List!

Indiana remains a great state for evidence-based instruction, and would have the superior policy infrastructure in most other matchups. But against Louisiana, who started early and earnestly and is seeing that investment pay off, being “great” just isn’t enough. With masterful form, Louisiana wins on EBI.

Assessments & Accountability

While both states administer statewide assessments in core subjects, only Louisiana maintains a high-school assessment students must pass for graduation.

Indiana administers regular statewide assessments: ILEARN covers certain core topics (math, sciences, among others) and extends into some high school topics (government, biology) and IREAD covers foundational reading skills through the Grade 6 level. In principle, the ILEARN assessment is the core state accountability measure for elementary and middle schools, which drive local A–F school ratings based on performance. But Indiana has not given out school grades since 2018.2 Thankfully, the State Board of Education has just adopted a new accountability system set for the 2026–27 school year featuring revised A–F ratings, but the tradition still has nearly a decade of dust to shake off. Meanwhile, although taking the SAT is required for high school graduation, students need not reach a minimum score to pass; accordingly, statewide assessments in Indiana do not offer a true performance bar for certifying college readiness.

But they do in Louisiana! With the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program, or LEAP 2025, high-schoolers must take and pass three subject assessments in core categories to secure their diploma. As part of Louisiana’s revamped accountability system Grow. Achieve. Thrive, each school’s students’ LEAP 2025 performance then figures into their School Performance Scores, offering statewide feedback on student learning. (And pace Indiana, Louisiana’s accountability-system revamp did not follow years of hibernation.) All this amounts to a more consequential accountability structure than most states maintain.

Ultimately, LEAP 2025 and Grow.Achieve.Thrive give Louisiana stronger assessment tools and accountability levers than Indiana, and in turn they give an edge in this category.3

The Learning Environment: Policy vs. Practice

Policy-wise, both states are resisting some of the more popular, yet ineffective contemporary trends in school discipline reform. Neither Indiana or Louisiana has gone down the road of banning suspensions for young students, or mandating restorative justice as a prerequisite for removal.

But importantly, if we were grading states purely on student behavior, safety, and classroom order outcomes, neither Louisiana nor Indiana would score particularly well compared to the rest of the field. These are states where the classroom reality is rougher than most, even as their policy frameworks for dealing with it are sounder than many traditionally well-performing states’ now are. That tension is the backdrop for everything below. So: recognizing that both states are contending with more disorder than they were even five years ago, where do the details diverge?

Devices and Distractions

Louisiana moved first. In 2024, Governor Landry signed SB 207, banning students from having any electronic device on their person for the entire school day (with reasonable medical exceptions, etc.). Importantly, this ban included lunchtime, and any devices brought to school have to be turned off and stowed away for the day.

Indiana was, correspondingly, a step behind. A 2024 law banned phone use during instructional time, but left passing periods and lunch unregulated. Educators reported the partial ban was hard to implement, and so Indiana moved toward a stricter regime. In March 2026, Governor Braun signed SB 78, expanding the restriction to a full bell-to-bell ban. Well done to both Governors! Both states are now in strong positions on devices, but Louisiana had a full year head start, and Indiana’s stronger law doesn’t come into effect until the summer.

Discipline

Both Indiana and Louisiana law offer teachers and administrators broad authority to maintain classroom order by suspending or expelling students for disruptive misconduct or substantial disobedience; neither has the restrictive bans seen in some states on, e.g., willful defiance or young-grade suspensions.

Two noteworthy differences tip the scales southward. Although both states permit corporal punishment, Louisiana at least prohibits its use “for students with exceptionalities.” Louisiana law also adds explicit protection for teachers, preventing principals or administrators from prohibiting or discouraging school employees from taking disciplinary action consistent with policy, and also preventing them retaliating against employees for having done so. Local initiatives like Dads on Duty, based in Shreveport, also signal positive directions here for Louisiana.

Louisiana beat Indiana to the punch with its full bell-to-bell phone ban and maintains an edge on its approach to classroom order. Again, although the margins are close, they favor Louisiana.

Winner: Louisiana

Indiana is extremely competitive and easily remains our ‘gold standard’ for the Midwest. Without a doubt, in most other brackets Indiana would advance to our semifinals. Yet against such a strong opponent, Indiana falls just short. Louisiana is truly a phenomenal performer on evidence-based literacy instruction, and the state boasts strong enough education policy on other dimensions to complete a clean sweep. Hoosiers should be proud of what they have accomplished for their students, but nonetheless, Louisiana advances.

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In February, 2025, the now-dissolved DOGE began to gut the Department of Education. The Institute of Education Sciences, the department’s research and statistics division, was devastated. DOGE terminated nearly 90% of IES staff and cancelled $900 million in contracts, many of which were nearly finished. These cuts hit muscle, disrupting key IES tasks and obligations, including the collection and dissemination of vital education data that states and stakeholders rely on. (For example, we’re still waiting on data promised this past December!)

After twelve months of uncertainty, ED released the Reimagining The Institute of Education Sciences report on February 27. Authored by senior advisor Dr. Amber Northern, the report details recommendations for reforming the IES to be more efficient, timely, actionable, and accessible to practitioners. While many of these calls for reform were not new, they took on a new urgency after the severe DOGE cuts.

In the wake of this report, the CEP recently spoke with Dr. Elizabeth Tipton, professor of statistics and data science at Northwestern and past president of the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness, one of the organizations who have filed suit against ED and Secretary McMahon over DOGE’s cuts. We’d first reached out to Dr. Tipton to better understand how educators should use gold-standard resources on evidence-based instruction, such as the What Works Clearinghouse Practice Guides, but the timing of this new report gave us even more to discuss with her. Before we spoke, she directed us to this lucid commentary from Dr. Betsy Wolf, which we highly recommend you read as well.

[This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.]

You’ve described the funding cuts to the IES as an “existential threat” to education research. Has your assessment changed at all in light of the recent Reimagining The IES report?

I was surprised the report came out as soon as it did, and it was nicer than I thought it could be. I think Amber Northern did a pretty good job given the situation she was in. She took the job seriously. I appreciate that throughout the report there’s an emphasis on the need to meet statutory requirements; maybe they should meet some differently than in the past, but there are statutory requirements that they have not been meeting.

But the report largely echoes what many other reports say, and what many in the research community have been saying should happen. I was on this National Academies Consensus Study Report consensus panel in 2022, and we said very similar things about the needs and concerns of communities and schools, and that they needed to do a better job of meeting them. So that’s not radically new.

Right now, it feels like we’re just waiting to see whether there will still be a Department of Ed. And where is IES going to sit if they get rid of the Department of Ed? It’s a nice report, but the Department is being dismantled, so I don’t feel fundamentally different after reading it. I won’t feel good until we have a very clear signal that they have to restaff the IES to capacity and that they have a specific deadline for doing so. That’s about the best we can hope for. At this point, we can’t ask them to bring back the people or contracts that they let go. Too much time has passed.

You know, $900 million in contracts is a third of the federal investment in education research. In one sense it’s not that much; we don’t invest that much in education research at all. But as a share of the total, that hit is a huge amount. And when you take into account the $800 million that was cut from the NSF, together that’s nearly two-thirds of the federal education R&D cut in a year. That’s substantial. We really have lost a field in this.

A recent piece of ours raised questions about how educators can best use the recommendations in the What Works Clearinghouse Practice Guides. The WWC is the best federally funded resource we have for finding out what actually works, and yet even when teachers look to the practice guides, they aren’t always actionable. What explains this disconnect?

I think it’s important to remember that the WWC is not the only such clearinghouse that the government has. There are multiple federal evidence clearinghouses in the US, and they’re common in other countries as well. Critics of the WWC often speak as if it’s this weird thing that IES invented, but the idea of having a clearinghouse of information isn’t unusual. They exist as an enterprise for screening evidence, based upon some criteria, and collecting that evidence so the government knows which interventions are worth investing in. We can’t use “Can you get it published?” as a filter for good research — you can get anything published somewhere. For this reason, most of these clearinghouses will focus on studies with strong research designs, because they’re focused on finding interventions that could change student outcomes and that are worth investing in. That’s a very special part of education research.

That said, the thing I think I’ve learned about the WWC over time is that we haven’t worked hard enough to understand how people make decisions in schools. I like to say my cohort and I ‘grew up’ in IES: I started graduate school in 2006, and so I was in one of the first cohorts of one of the IES pre-doctoral fellowship programs, at some of the first IES meetings, and at the beginning of the SREE. We all grew up in this system. Many things we took for granted as facts, and as time passed it struck me that we needed to ask whether these facts were true. One of them was that teachers are the primary users of the WWC — that teachers go to the WWC and base their decisions on the information they get.

I started becoming even more interested in how and whether people use this data and evidence through a former student of mine, Katie Fitzgerald (Villanova University), and she and I now have a grant focused on that decision-making process, alongside a human computer interaction researcher, Alex Kale (University of Chicago), and with an advisory board with expertise in school decision making. Largely, what I’ve learned is that teachers don’t use the WWC. In elementary schools, teachers aren’t typically the ones deciding which reading programs or math programs to use. Major curricular decisions for the whole grade level, for the whole school, are often made by the school district. Sometimes the school decides, and maybe once you get to high school teachers could be making decisions about using this versus that book, but for the most part it’s a district higher-up making decisions in a very standardized way.

This realization came after years of conversations — at conferences, with other methodologists and researchers, and even with those designing the WWC — in which we all talked about teachers being the main users of the WWC. We actually had no idea how people used evidence, or that this database was built on a premise of how the world worked that was incomplete, and that therein was a knowledge mobilization problem. There was an idealized vision by some academics that “if we just build this database, like they do in medicine, then teachers will come, look at it, and improve their teaching,” all without knowing teachers aren’t the primary people making these decisions. They of course are not going to go to a database to do that. And so I think that for a long time, the issue with the WWC has been that it was just really divorced from reality.

But as Betsy Wolf says, there has been a real effort in the last few years to become very aware of this. The National Academy’s report pushed back on this in 2022. In many ways, it wasn’t supposed to be about the WWC; it was really not in our charge, but we couldn’t help but make comments about it. Now this question of how people actually get and use evidence has come to the forefront. The IES knows that one of the things that gets downloaded the most off of their website is the practice guides, and you see that in the Reimagining report. The practice guides are really important; they know that they’re downloaded a lot, that they’re used, and that people talk about them a lot. They combine evidence, expert panels, data, and reviews that say ‘These are ways to think, these are the top interventions, and these are the principles of a good reading program in this area.’ Those tend to be more useful, partly, I think, because we can just never have all the studies necessary to cover every possible combination of grade-level intervention and context that people would need to turn to evidence for every decision.

How much does the criticism aimed at the IES & WWC grow out of a general misunderstanding about how research works? With medicine, there seems to be a better understanding that not every medical intervention that gets brought to trial will work; a lot will fail, and it takes a lot of investment before those failures give way to something that really works. It doesn’t seem like there’s anywhere near that kind of patience in education.

That’s a great question. Part of the problem for IES is that Mark Schneider, the previous director, was constantly complaining that the science was full of nothing but failures. But you’re right that this is exactly what you would expect. First of all, what we expect in science is that we all have a lot of great ideas, and most of them don’t work. That is the nature of science. If you look over at medicine, the number of pharmaceutical trials that make it from Phase 1 through Phase 3 — from the lab to FDA approval — is very low. Second of all, it takes a very long time. For research to go from basic science to efficacy research and finally to the FDA takes something like 17 years.

When you take into account that IES is just 25 years old, and they’ve had to build an entire field of people to do this work, then if at the end of the day the main thing we got out of IES is the science of reading, that might be about what we’d expect for this investment at this point. Over this period, think of how many graduate fellows, postdocs, and early career researchers they funded in this paradigm of thinking. They showed that with substantial investment, you can actually build a new part of a field. You’ve gotten a lot of studies that have collectively come together to build what we now call the science of reading. Many of those were funded by IES. That is a huge success for us! There are other things, too, but that’s about what we would expect — that most things would fail, but a few would be monumentally impactful. That’s how science is.

You’ve said the IES needs to be given the strength to regulate curriculum materials based on what we know works in education; I don’t see anything like new regulatory strength in Reimagining. Even if every recommendation in the report is adopted, the IES is restaffed, and the cancelled contracts are reinstated — without new regulatory powers, are we largely left in the same place?

I honestly think so. The IES has always talked about itself in relation to medicine. Many wanted to plan IES to be like medicine, and the IES has mirrored the use of phased trials in medicine with phased trials of its own. But there are two major mechanisms that medicine has had that we’re still missing. One is substantially more money. Look at the NIH’s budget, and then look at our budget for the IES. Historically it’s been at least 10 times as much. They can do so many more trials, so much more quickly, and as a result their knowledge production is much bigger and much faster. When you have that much money, you can actually also grow the number of people in the field. More people means more research ability and a more robust research economy, and your evidence base grows really fast when you have that.

Two is regulation. We don’t have either of those things. There’s a lot of pressure right now across the government to minimize regulation, even pressure on the FDA. Tech companies want minimal regulation in education so they can make money off of slipping new products into classrooms as quickly as they can; other companies want minimal regulation for the same reason. But the American people need regulation, and I think that’s one of the fundamental tensions here.

Growing up in the IES system, we understood research as first doing a small study to develop an intervention, then doing a pilot study, then doing an efficacy trial, and then — if it works — doing an effectiveness study. This is how we would know stuff worked, and then it would go into the WWC, where people would choose from it. But no publisher’s curriculum has to be evaluated in order to be sold to schools. So although you have careful scientists over here doing due diligence studying interventions, wanting to ensure what they’ve developed is robust and really works before they bring them to schools, anyone else can just take whatever curriculum they want to schools and tell them it works.

IES is a well-meaning system, and in a way I hate how everything’s blamed on IES — like, “Oh, it’s the fault of IES that there’s not enough evidence when I go to the WWC for every decision I need to make.” Well, that’s because you didn’t give enough money to IES, right? IES was only invented 25 years ago — you had to build an entire field, and now that you’ve finally gotten the field, you cut off funding. But you need money to do this stuff! If you’re not going to give it funding, then how can you expect there to be evidence for every decision? There’s this expectation that IES would somehow solve NAEP scores by itself, as if people are required to listen to researchers!

I’ve been thinking of this as a tension at IES. The Institute of Education Sciences was created as a scientific agency tasked with developing a deeper, scientific understanding of how kids learn, with the idea that this deep, scientific knowledge would eventually improve learning outcomes for students. Yet somewhere along the way, it started being held to the standard of successfully changing schools now, in a very urgent way. Are we building a science here, or are we a machine for creating interventions that are marketed to schools? Those are two different enterprises, and I feel like there’s been a bit of a bait and switch, that we created IES for one thing, and now we’re being judged for another. That is not how it was set up. It feels like instead the research community is getting blamed for other people’s mistakes, which just feels unfair.

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This is the third matchup post in our Elite Eight series. Read the full bracket announcement here.

Massachusetts has long been an education superstar, its record stretching back before the founding of the United States. The country’s first public school was founded there, and for the past 25 years Massachusetts students have been consistently outscoring their peers on the NAEP. That excellent record is a good sign that something is working about Massachusetts education policy.

Though New York has relatively well-performing students, robust funding, and also a long history of strong public education institutions, in other ways it is much closer to Texas than Massachusetts, its neighbor; anyone reading education news recently knows that New York (and especially New York City) frequently becomes a hotspot for education and culture war issues that go national. But, as we said at the start of the Texas/Minnesota matchup, the public persona a state gets online or in the media is not the same as the results it actually produces for its students, families, teachers, and schools.

Assessments & Accountability

Established via the Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993, the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) offered rigor and accountability that made it highly respected in reform circles. For three decades, Massachusetts sophomores had to pass the MCAS tests in English, mathematics, and science & technology to graduate, and advocates pointed to the state’s sterling NAEP scores as evidence for the value of such an accountability vehicle. However, Massachusetts voters (with considerable help from the MTA, which has long advocated against “high-stakes testing”) eliminated that requirement when they approved Question 2 in November 2024. Now, students must earn a Competency Determination to graduate high school, but school districts in Massachusetts each set their own policies for what a Competency Determination entails. While certain minimal requirements govern the details of these policies, districts now have considerable leeway in the standards to which they hold their students.

New York, on the other hand, still operates its Regents Examination system, a longstanding set of end-of-course exams students must pass in order to graduate. But the Board of Regents plans to phase out the exam as a graduation requirement by the 2027–28 school year. Set to replace it is the state’s new, holistic “Portrait of a Graduate” framework, which identifies six attributes graduates should demonstrate before being handed a diploma: academically prepared, a creative innovator, a critical thinker, an effective communicator, a global citizen, and reflective and future-focused. Under the new framework, students will be able to demonstrate proficiency in each of these qualities using multiple pathways, including capstone projects, community service, and “work-based learning experiences.”

The specifics of the replacement are vague, and thankfully the plan can still be modified or delayed prior to approval. Replacing objective tests and (relatively) clear content standards — especially in core topics, like math and ELA, not “work-based experiences” and “community service” — with vague and holistic qualities is probably a step in the wrong direction. Put most charitably, though, New York is at least replacing the Regents exams with something. The state’s high school graduates will still have to demonstrate a certain level of competency; the pathways by which they demonstrate competence may be less rigorous, but flexible, vague statewide standards are still statewide standards, and can (hopefully) be moved in the correct direction.

So New York currently requires a graduation exam with real consequences, while Massachusetts has already removed those consequences. If the Regents phase-out proceeds in 2027–28 without modification, this advantage will diminish, but the fact that New York articulates statewide competency standards in its proposed replacement is enough for New York to eke out a win on Assessments & Accountability.

The Learning Environment

Here both states seem to be locked in a contest to see who can enact the more naive and convoluted set of policies governing classroom order, student behavior, and the school learning environment overall.

The Phones

The one bright spot here is that New York has implemented a bell-to-bell phone ban that came into effect this school year (2025–26). It covers all internet-enabled personal devices during free periods and lunch (hence “bell-to-bell”), though the rules come with a number of exceptions and asterisks, as Chalkbeat reported. Schools have frequently tried magnetic pouches, bought with funds provided by the state from the bill, but apparently students are finding workarounds to those.

Moreover, giving some students exceptions (like for those who travel off campus for certain activities, or need it for language translation, or because of a special need or disability) and not others can be tough for school officials and administrators to carry out effectively. All of these complications can make a good policy stumble, but it is still in its first year. The phone ban bill in Massachusetts is currently stuck in their state House. The Senate passed S.2561 last summer, but the bill stalled, and so this school year MA schools saw no anti-phone mandate from their higher-ups.

Discipline

Both states have spent the last decade or so adopting discipline philosophies and frameworks that can all broadly be grouped under that label “restorative justice.” In this way they’ve layered procedural constraints on top of cultural incentives against discipline ( atop even more procedural constraints, for one state!), and the end result has been predictable: more chaos, less learning. The somewhat disappointing question, then, is which state is messing this up less.

Massachusetts brought Chapter 222 into effect in 2012, requiring schools to exhaust alternatives before issuing long-term suspensions and requiring superintendent notification before any Pre-K-3 out-of-school suspensions. While the statute constrains administrators, it is no outright ban. Admins can bypass alternatives when they document them as “unsuitable or counterproductive,” or when a student poses a “specific, documentable concern about the infliction of serious bodily injury.”

In New York the Dignity for All Students Act (2010/2012) adds a lot of procedural complexity to maintaining classroom order — 24-hour reporting timelines, mandatory documentation, annual reports to NYSED. At the city level, New York City has among the most restrictive discipline policies in the country; NYC does prohibit K-2 suspension, and its 2019 discipline code both mandates restorative justice in all middle and high schools and permits supports/interventions in lieu of disciplinary responses for lower-level infractions. These changes make it more, not less likely that New York will be able to grapple with its stark chronic absenteeism rates that it has seen in recent years.

Neither state should really earn a passing grade here. Both have restricted school and teacher authority to maintain order in ways that impose costs on the vast majority of students who aren’t persistently or consistently disruptive. New York has actually passed a bell-to-bell phone ban (the effectiveness of which remains to be seen), but Massachusetts arguably has not gone quite as far in the wrong direction on sensible classroom order policies.

MA’s Final Sprint: Evidence-Based Literacy & Math Instruction

Here is where New York’s momentum comes screaming to a halt. The distance between MA’s progress on evidence-based literacy policy and New York’s is greater than for any of our other Elite Eight matchups. Despite the well-warranted fanfare for Gov. Hochul’s recent “Back to Basics” literacy legislation, ExcelInEd’s implementation report for New York shows just how much still needs to be accomplished. Out of 18 fundamental principles, as yet New York has adopted only two in policy — state funding for literacy efforts and district guidance of high-quality instructional materials guidance for districts.

Yet Massachusetts checks both these boxes and eight more, including funding for professional training in the science of reading, SoR-aligned teacher prep programs, a licensure test requirement, and both reading and dyslexia screeners. We can look forward to NY adopting some of these soon, but there is a lot of ground to cover.

Even more impressive, though, is that Massachusetts is well on its way to leveling up on high-quality curriculum now that the state senate unanimously passed curriculum mandates with S.2924 on Jan 29. Curriculum quality has been a big weakness for MA, as numerous districts remain wedded to ineffective programs. But soon, all K-3 districts will be required to adopt DESE-approved, evidence-based curricula, and friend-of-the-Substack Karen Vaites is bullish on MA leadership’s ability to improve its existing approved-curriculum lists to make good on the plan. Few states can boast of mandating approved curricula to this degree. While we’re still waiting on the final bill, with the massive political momentum.1

On math policy, Massachusetts’s evidence-based math instruction record isn’t as stellar, but New York’s isn’t clearly better. While NCTQ considers New York’s elementary math licensure test stronger than MA’s, New York doesn’t recommend high-quality math curricula as Massachusetts does. Regular readers of the CEP Substack will also recall that New York has an upsetting recent history of issuing (and then defending!) badly misguided recommendations on math instruction. Despite claiming its Numeracy Initiative communicates “evidence-based” practices for teaching math, the New York State Education Department actually just contradicted rigorous research and spread frightful myths about effective math instruction. Massachusetts has done nothing so egregious.

As it stands, then, Massachusetts leads New York by a healthy margin on early literacy policy, and the upcoming curriculum mandate bill ensures the latter’s “Back to Basics” initiative doesn’t close the gap. Both states still have ground to cover, but between that difference in reading policy and the problems with math guidance from NYSED, Massachusetts emerges the clear victor on evidence-based instruction.

Winner: Massachusetts

Massachusetts has spent a generation as American education’s leading state. But cracks have emerged: the MCAS has lost its teeth, the state is slow to oust phones from classrooms, and its discipline restrictions are cultivating disruption. To the west, though discipline isn’t much better, the schools in New York are refreshingly phone-free, and what will replace the fading Regents Exams still looks to preserve some statewide accountability infrastructure.

But the content taught in these classrooms lags behind, and enough so to decide this match. Massachusetts sets a better foundation for reading and math than New York, with a sounder policy infrastructure more aligned with the Science of Reading. New York is improving, but not fast enough to succeed in this head-to-head. We sincerely applaud Gov. Hochul for “Back to Basics,” but we also ask that she take a close look into how the basics of numeracy are being flouted in state-sanctioned guidance.

Massachusetts advances to the Final Four.

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Rahim Nathwani is a technologist based in San Francisco, making businesses better with tech and AI. He believes almost everyone can and should learn more math. His 9-year-old son is on track to complete Algebra 1 before 5th grade.

Attacks on Excellence is a series from Education Progress featuring critical coverage of the education policies and research paradigms that are holding students back. If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, check it out below!

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article showing that a YouCubed paper presented data that didn’t match the public record.

Before writing that article, I replied to the X post in which the co-author, Stanford University Education Professor Dr. Jo Boaler, shared a link to the paper. She did not respond. I then filed a public records request with Healdsburg Unified School District (HUSD). That request led to a series of email exchanges with the paper’s other co-author, Dr. Erin Fender.

Dr. Fender was responsive from the start, even though she’s a busy school administrator. She runs day-to-day operations as both Director of Alternative Education and Principal of a community school at the Sonoma County Office of Education.

She told me that, although the chart was labeled HUSD, it in fact showed data from one specific school: Healdsburg Elementary School (HES). She shared the spreadsheet in which she had assembled the data. Unfortunately, the discrepancy wasn’t just a labeling problem. Even the HES data didn’t match the spreadsheet:

After I shared this screenshot with Dr. Fender, she acknowledged the numerical errors and said she would correct them. But I was disappointed when I reviewed YouCubed’s revised version of the article, posted on March 20, 2026, ‘updating’ some of the data. Although a key chart (the one that tells the story of dramatic math improvement) was replaced, no disclosure was made about what updates had been made.

More importantly, the new chart introduces a problem that is, in some ways, worse than the one it fixes. The original chart had wrong numbers. The new chart has hidden two significant confounds (the closure of a charter school and significant changes in the English Learner (EL) population) and results that did not replicate for 3rd or 4th grades.

Lastly, the case study’s entire reliance on a disconnected piece of quantitative data is ironic considering YouCubed is a recent signatory to a position paper proclaiming that quantitative education studies meeting strict scientific standards are of limited value. YouCubed’s own case study lacks any control group or disclosure of the significant limitations of its design. The double standard and material omissions suggest YouCubed’s and Dr. Boaler’s issue with quantitative evidence is not principled, but conditioned on whether it supports their preferred instructional methods.

What (Undisclosed) Changes Were Made

The original paper showed a chart labeled HUSD. My article pointed out that the numbers on that chart didn’t match the district’s official data.

In the revised version, the chart no longer shows district-wide data. It now shows data for a single school: Healdsburg Elementary School (HES). The revised version does not mention this significant change, one that significantly affects what the data mean.

The paper does not acknowledge that it originally showed district-wide data and now shows single-school data, a change that not only fundamentally alters what the chart shows, but also the conclusions that can be drawn from it.

The Fire That Only Affected 5th Graders

The revised paper, like the original, attributes a dip in scores to the Tubbs Fire, which devastated parts of Sonoma County in October 2017.

But 3rd and 4th grade math proficiency at Healdsburg Elementary went up in 2017–18. The dip is specific to the grade level shown on the paper’s chart.

If a community-wide disaster caused 5th grade scores to drop, you would expect to see a similar pattern in 3rd and 4th grade scores at the same school, in the same year. The paper offers no theory about why only 5th grade scores were affected.

Here are the CAASPP data for all three tested grade levels at Healdsburg Elementary:

Problematic Recent Score Trends for Grades 4 and 5

Grade 5 tells a beautiful story: a steady climb to 75% proficiency. But the YouCubed paper ignores grades 3 and 4. Both show gains through 2022–2023, and then both decline in the most recent years. Grade 3 math proficiency dropped from 65% to 56%. Grade 4 dropped from 55% to 46%.

The same school. The same teachers. The same “seven actions” that YouCubed’s paper claims is driving the student proficiency improvement. But only one of the three tested grade levels is going up, and it happens to be the one featured in the paper.

If the instructional approach is what’s driving the improvement, it should show up across grade levels. If improvement shows up only in one grade, a simpler explanation is that something specific to that grade is responsible.

But what other undisclosed and unrelated HES-specific changes may have caused dramatic increases in student performance?

The Charter School That Disappeared

Healdsburg used to have a second school serving elementary students: Healdsburg Charter School, a district-run charter school. Students were split roughly evenly between the two schools.

In 2019, a local paper, The Press Democrat, reported on how vastly different those two elementary schools were demographically from each other. Both HUSD administrators and local community members voiced concerns.

In 2020, HUSD closed the charter school, many of whose students then transferred to HES. The consequence of this closure is visible in the public data: HES 5th grade enrollment more than doubled (from 47 in 2018–2019 to 95 in 2020–2021). New students flooded in. Although total enrollment is down from its peak, demographics now are vastly different than they were before the charter school closed.

And here is the problem the revised paper does not address: when a school absorbs students from another school, the academic profile of its student body changes immediately and over the following years. If the incoming students have higher average achievement than existing students then, as those higher performing students age, each grade’s overall proficiency rate would rise, not because instruction improved, but because the composition of the student body changed.

In the 2018–2019 school year, the two schools had dramatically different math proficiency rates:

From the chart above, it’s easy to see that moving Healdsburg Charter’s students into HES would improve HES’s math performance.

The English Learner Confound

Another major confound is the significant success HES has had getting English Learners (ELs) to fluency, and the decline in general in ELs. The subsequent positive academic results for ELs are likely due not just to the closing of the charter school, but also to changes in the HES EL program.

Talking with The Press Democrat in 2019, HUSD Superintendent Chris Vanden Heuvel blamed the academic performance gaps between the then-two schools on a problematic EL program at HES that the district ended in 2017 or 2018 (i.e., prior to the charter school closing). He also made other recommendations to improve EL performance, to be implemented beginning in the 2020–21 school year.

The evidence backs up the positive effects of Vanden Heuvel’s efforts on ELs. Beginning in 2017 or 2018, the data show that HES became increasingly successful at getting its ELs to acquire English language fluency at earlier grade levels. This is reflected in the chart below, and it is noteworthy that these improvements occur at almost the same time period covered by YouCubed’s chart. As a result, HES’s English Language Arts standardized test scores improved significantly between 2014–2015 and 2024–2025. (For 3rd and 4th grades, this improvement was greater than the improvement in math scores.)

The chart below shows the percentage per grade level of HES students who were Reclassified Fluent English Proficient (RFEP, i.e. former ELs who are no longer identified as ELs):

The percentage of ELs in the HES student body also declined dramatically between 2015 and 2025 as shown below. This decline cannot be fully attributed to improvements in its EL program and is not disclosed in the YouCubed paper. Conversely, the YouCubed paper states “60% of entering kindergartners are English Language Learners” without mentioning the dramatic decline in ELs in the tested grade levels as shown below.

These are textbook confounds. As Stanford University Education Professor Linda Darling-Hammond has noted, cohorts with fewer ELs score higher on standardized tests simply because acquiring a new language takes 5–7 years.

The revised YouCubed paper does not mention any of these significant variables. It does not contain the word ‘charter’ at all and only mentions “English Language Learners” once. Instead, it simply presents the rising HES proficiency numbers as evidence that YouCubed’s preferred instructional methods drove improvement.

Doubting Quantitative Data, and Using It Selectively

This selective use of evidence is a well-known, long-standing issue with Dr. Boaler (here, here, here) and similar issues have been noted with YouCubed (here, here). Moreover, YouCubed recently endorsed a position paper that downplays quantitative evidence in education research — a stance Dr. Boaler has held for decades. Yet this case study relies on a long-term standardized test trend in one grade level as proof of success.

When using such data, the case study should have been controlling for factors like income, race/ethnicity, EL status, special education status, and prior achievement, because changes in the student population can artificially inflate or deflate results. Or, at the very least, the case study should have disclosed the potential issues with not controlling for such other factors.

Without a well-defined control group, any observed gains in that one grade level could just as easily be due to normal maturation, teacher effects, changes in curriculum, or shifting student demographics rather than the mindset program itself. Moreover, the strongest designs don’t just compare students to “business as usual,” but also benchmark against a group receiving evidence-based instruction recommended by the U.S. Department of Education and shown to improve student academic achievement (e.g., structured, explicit teaching with guided practice and feedback, memorizing math facts) to see whether the mindset intervention adds anything beyond what is already known to improve learning.

In fact, the YouCubed case study lists a number of other changes to the HES math program that had nothing to do with a “mathematical mindset” approach, such as:

• aligning teaching to standards

• using multiple curricular resources to supplement core curriculum

• using more formative assessments

• testing instructional changes and reviewing student evidence together

• creating teacher learning teams for collaboration

• giving teachers structured collaboration time

• engaging parents and families

• creating a STEM specialist model

• ensuring math was taught by teachers who liked and focused on math

• using a two-teacher model for math for grades 3-5

Improvements in the one grade level in the case study could just as easily reflect a different student population, other instructional changes, or external factors, rather than the approach YouCubed is promoting.

What This Adds Up To

When I first saw issues with the data in the study, I thought of the type of questions Dr. Boaler recommends students ask themselves when looking at data:

In these middle grades, students can start to become vital consumers of data, asking questions such as, “Is this a fair and clear way to represent the data?” Students can also learn to deal with uncertainty in data collection, analysis, and representation and reflect on how their decisions in each of these steps have the potential to introduce bias.

Each of these issues identified above might have an innocent explanation. But, taken together, these problems paint a picture of a paper that is not rigorous enough to support the claims it makes, and of a correction process that introduced a larger problem than the one it sought to fix.

If the evidence for this approach is as strong as the authors claim, why does it keep falling apart when someone checks?

Attacks on Excellence

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

LATER TODAY, the SFUSD Board of Education will vote on a new math placement policy for the district’s middle schools. In 2014, Algebra 1 courses were removed from middle schools as part of a “detracking” effort by the district to address racial gaps in advanced math placement. This idea, of course, was a terrible one. Despite some early calls from proponents about the “promise” of detracking, like this op-ed from Jo Boaler, the end results were predictably terrible. Achievement gaps likely increased, advanced course enrollment fell, and trust in the public schools declined.

It took nearly ten years and sustained focus from parents and politicians to get the Board to vote in 2024 to restore middle school algebra to all middle schools by the 2026-27 school year. And voters demanded the restoration again a month later, overwhelmingly passing Prop G (~80% in favor), a ballot measure calling for the return of middle school algebra classes.

What the district is actually proposing to deliver — after all of that — is a system where only 2 of 21 schools have a real pathway to standalone algebra. At the other 19, even students who qualify will need a counselor meeting and signed parental consent to opt out of their normal grade-level math course.

This result is frustrating, but also hardly surprising: What do you think eliminating Algebra 1 in middle school meant? No math anxiety? No unequal enrollment numbers?

If only!

Confusion and reform (2014)

The debate over whether Algebra 1 should be offered in SFUSD middle schools was distorted from the start, because the stated goals of the detracking effort were either confusing, misleading, or largely pretextual.

Details from the actual Board meeting for the original vote are illustrative and familiar. The reformers were clearly motivated to reduce or eliminate racial enrollment and achievement gaps in the district, but this justification is obviously not enough for the parents, educators, and civic groups who rightly reject lowering standards and limiting academic opportunities as means for achieving those goals. So the reformers defended taking away middle school algebra by claiming that the new plan would teach fewer topics more deeply, thus making it more “focused” and “coherent.” Advanced students will not be served worse, just differently, because the emphasis on conceptual understanding and problem-solving in the new courses will provide stronger foundations for future, more difficult courses. (The same arguments are being levied against gifted and talented programs in New York City.)

Decades of bad scholarship on the harms of tracking students has given the veneer of empiricism to lots of shoddy arguments in favor of detracking, so I won’t say those were pretextual. What does seem pretextual, at least in hindsight, is the supposed need to detrack middle school math in the district in order to prepare students for new Common Core standards the state was adopting after No Child Left Behind was repealed. If offering middle school algebra was so unworkable in the new framework, why did so many nearby districts not follow SFUSD’s lead?

The long decade (2014–2023)

Nearby districts made the right call by not detracking middle school math. The decade after SFUSD did so proved the reformers wrong and the critics right: achievement gaps increased, advanced course placement went down, and student schedules got less coherent.

A Stanford study found that not only did detracking do nothing to address the racial math enrollment gap in SFUSD, but it also led to a ~15% decline in AP math course enrollment overall. The term for this isn’t “equity,” but “leveling down.”

Families with resources found workarounds to their kids’ now-degraded public math education. By the Class of 2021, nearly a quarter of students had to double-up on classes and summer coursework to get around district restrictions. Private tutoring and outside coursework (like Khan Academy) also boomed in popularity over this decade, though the exact numbers there are harder to quantify.

Enrollment also cratered over this period, going from roughly 58,000 students in 2014-15 to about 49,500 by 2023-24. Attributing that to detracking middle school math or any other single controversial SFUSD policy would be hasty, though, given that falling enrollment is a national trend, highly accelerated by the Covid closures and rising classroom disorder. Still, detracking SFUSD middle schools almost certainly contributed to this trend, making public middle schools that much less attractive to any parents with children who learn math faster than their peers.

The district’s early claims of success, meanwhile, were starting to fall apart under scrutiny. Jo Boaler and SFUSD had been advertising the seemingly positive results from detracking, such as fewer students repeating Algebra 1 and increasing enrollment in “advanced” math courses. As a result, the first draft of California’s new math framework even cited SFUSD as a model for the state.

When the parent group Families for San Francisco filed public records requests and looked into the actual data, though, the picture started to change. Tom Loveless has a great article going over the different ways SFUSD et al. contorted the data to try to find a good narrative to sell the public. In short, the drop in repeat rates was largely because the district dropped a required end-of-course exam to advance to Geometry (a classic “equitable grading” practice!); the “advanced math” enrollment gains relied on counting a compressed Algebra 2/Precalc course that the University of California — the state’s most prestigious public higher education system — refused to classify as advanced. Excluding this course erased any enrollment gains the district had been touting.

It’s no wonder, then, that in 2022 San Francisco voters recalled three SFUSD school board members in a landslide. The algebra debacle was just one of several grievances that fueled the recall, alongside unpopular efforts to rename schools and controversial admissions changes for Lowell High School, arguably the district’s most prestigious magnet program.

The Board relents and the voters speak up (Feb–March 2024)

Even after the recall, it took the new board another two years to actually vote on reinstating middle school algebra. The board voted 6-1 to do so on February 13, 2024. The plan was to introduce a two-year pilot program at roughly ten schools, testing three different models for offering middle school algebra, with a full rollout to all 21 schools by the 2026–27 school year.

After a decade of being forced to play algebra-keep-away with SFUSD, voters were understandably less trustful of the district’s will and ability to bring algebra back. The new plan from the board was yet another delay, and seemed to risk overcomplicating the matter by testing out three separate models in only a little under half of the district’s middle schools. Algebra access was still limited, and so voters responded by overwhelmingly passing Prop G, a non-binding ballot measure making it the official position of the government of San Francisco that SFUSD reintroduce algebra to its middle schools.

Where’s the algebra? (2024–25)

As of November 2025, roughly half of San Francisco’s middle and K–8 schools were still not offering on-site algebra. And as the San Francisco Standard reported, at places like Denman Middle School, opposition to middle school algebra can still come from ideologically motivated school officials and principals standing athwart the motivated students and dedicated teachers begging their admin to let them learn and teach algebra. The district’s spokesperson, per the Standard article, also refused to answer questions about whether on-site algebra will be available at all schools this coming year.

For parents and students at the non-pilot schools, the options remained a self-paced online course with no live instructor, or a compressed summer program. Algebra is offered in middle schools across the country, and yet for SFUSD this offering is already becoming some kind of lost technology that seems impossible to recreate. But it’s just basic course scheduling, at least until convoluted values and mismanaged reform programs get in the way.

Algebra slow-rollers (Today–???)

All of this brings us to today. Or a couple hours from now, rather, when the board will vote on whether to move forward with only mild modifications to the original 2024 plan. In the newest version it will be possible for some students to take Algebra 1 as a standalone course in 8th grade; i.e., they can take the course without having to also enroll in normal 8th grade math (“Math 8”), which would cost them one of their elective slots.

The catch? Only two middle schools in the district — out of 21 — will offer the Algebra 1 standalone course. There are also the strange additional procedural requirements that somehow manage to both (1) make it harder for prepared kids to take the course, and (2) make it possible for unprepared students to enroll as well. Students deemed “academically eligible” (according to their prior scores on state exams) can opt out of Math 8, but only after a counselor meeting and with written parental consent. Students deemed not eligible can take it as well, but cannot drop Math 8, and so will lose an elective. (What even…? Whatever.)

Only two schools — Hoover and Alice Fong Yu — will implement an accelerated math pathway that will allow students to avoid “SFUSD’s Algebra Fork” of a policy, which seems tailor-made to make taking algebra in middle school as convoluted as possible. Moreover, Hoover and Alice Fong Yu’s model is the model used by nearly every nearby district, so again, this problem was both conjured by (and remains relatively unique to) SFUSD policy and personnel.

According to Teresa Isabel Shipp, SFUSD’s Associate Superintendent of Educational Services, the goal of this new scheduling policy is “to ensure that every middle grade student has sustained time to read deeply, write thoughtfully, solve complex problems, ask questions and receive meaningful feedback from their teachers.”

That is a fine goal. It also has nothing to do with why 8th graders still cannot take a normal algebra class at 19 out of 21 district middle schools. Reintroducing algebra in such a bizarre, inefficient, and inequitable way is bound to cause more headaches and resentment. More important, though, is how bad implementations of good public policy can undermine years of slow, agonizing progress, thwarting political majorities and further distancing elected officials from the opinions and values of their constituents.

Let’s see how today’s vote goes.

UPDATE [03.25.26]

My take on details from the recent San Francisco Chronicle article:

The board voted 4-3 last night to approve the plan. Superintendent Su called it a “major milestone” that “continues to be rooted in equity,” which is a remarkable thing to say when you are the institution responsible for creating the problem you now must ever-so-carefully manage. SFUSD eliminated middle school algebra, watched the predictable consequences unfold for a decade, and is now treating the complexity of undoing its own mistakes as evidence of its own seriousness and moral virtue.

PTSA President Sara Meskin probably put it best: The plan is “really convoluted,” and “access to algebra in middle school should not be only for kids whose parents are able to navigate the system.” She’s right. And she’s also describing the system the district just built, twelve years after messing up and leaving multitudes of cohorts behind.

Related Articles

Attacks on Excellence

Early in my career, I taught public policy as an adjunct at Governors State University, a public university in the southern suburbs of Chicago.

One of my first assignments asked students to write about a policy issue that mattered to them — why it was important, and what solutions they could explore to solve it.

As I handed them back their assignments at the next week’s class, the mood in the room shifted. Students were stunned. Several told me these were the lowest grades they had ever received at the university.

I understood their frustration. They had done what was asked of them. They turned in the assignment, showed up to class, and put words on a page. By the standards they were used to, that should have been enough. But the writing wasn’t strong. Their arguments were underdeveloped, sources were thin, and basic mechanics were a problem.

What struck me wasn’t the pushback itself — it was how genuine their surprise was. These weren’t students trying to negotiate a grade they knew they hadn’t earned. They honestly believed they had done well. Somewhere along the way, the system had told them they were performing at a level they weren’t.

I also understood the incentive I was supposed to follow. Adjuncts live and die by course evaluations and enrollment numbers. A reputation as a tough grader doesn’t get you rehired — it gets you replaced. The rational move was to hand out B’s, keep everyone comfortable, and secure my next semester.

That experience has stayed with me as I’ve watched grade inflation become one of the most pervasive and least confronted problems in American education. What I saw in that classroom wasn’t a failure of individual students or individual teachers. It was a symptom of a system where no one has an incentive to tell the truth.

All Incentives Point One Direction

Even though my experience was in a post-secondary environment, the pressure I felt to inflate grades is not unique to college. The incentives to inflate in K-12 are stronger, more embedded, and harder to escape.

Start with the classroom teacher. Most teachers who inflate grades are not being told to do so. They are making a rational calculation to avoid a situation they know will follow if they don’t.

A rigorous grade often means a frustrated parent. A frustrated parent often means a phone call to the principal. A phone call to the principal means a meeting, a justification, and the mental labor of defending a grade that, in most cases, the teacher will be pressured to change anyway. Most teachers would rather give the B and move on with their day.

But the pressure does not stop with parents and principals. It is structural.

Over the past several years, a growing number of selective colleges have adopted test-optional admissions policies, dropping the SAT and ACT from their evaluation criteria. It has had a significant downstream consequence: the high school GPA became the dominant quantitative measure in a college application. Every K-12 teacher in America implicitly understands this. An honest B+ in a rigorous course might accurately reflect what a student knows. It might also be the grade that keeps that student out of their first-choice school.

The same dynamic plays out at the state level. Several states tie college scholarship eligibility primarily to GPA. Florida’s Bright Futures program and Georgia’s HOPE Scholarship both use GPA thresholds as the primary gateway to state-funded financial aid. When a student’s scholarship money is on the line, the pressure on teachers to keep grades above a certain threshold is overwhelming.

Then there are the grading policies themselves. During and after COVID, districts across the country adopted a set of practices marketed as “grading for equity.” These included grade floors — policies that guaranteed students a minimum score of 50 out of 100, even for work never submitted —, unlimited exam retakes, and the elimination of credit for homework and class participation. The stated goal was to remove bias from grading. The practical effect was to sever the already weakening connection between grades and mastery.

The result is a system where inflation is rational at every level. Teachers inflate preemptively to avoid conflict. Administrators back down when conflict arrives. Schools operate within a postsecondary admissions process that has placed GPA at its center. At no point does anyone in the system benefit from maintaining rigorous standards, and at every point, there is a tangible cost for doing so.

It is a textbook collective action problem. Each actor in the K-12 system, acting rationally within their own constraints, contributes to an outcome that harms students, misleads parents, and degrades the value of an education for everyone.

Parents Just Don’t Understand

Grade inflation would be less damaging if parents knew grades are an unreliable indicator of their child’s academic performance.

They don’t.

A 2023 study by Gallup and Learning Heroes surveyed nearly 2,000 parents of K-12 public school students and found that 79 percent report their child is receiving mostly B’s or better. Almost nine in ten believe their child is at or above grade level in reading and math. These numbers are wildly out of step with reality. On the 2022 NAEP, only 33 percent of fourth graders scored proficient or above in reading. Only 36 percent did so in math. Among 12th graders taking the ACT, just 40 percent met college readiness benchmarks in reading and 30 percent met them in math.

Parents are not stupid. They are misinformed. The Gallup-Learning Heroes study found that 64 percent of parents rely on report cards as one of their top three sources of information about their child’s academic progress. Only 21 percent said the same about year-end state standardized test results. When your primary source of information is telling you everything is fine, you have no reason to act.

This matters because parents do act when they know there is a problem. A 2026 working paper from the Becker Friedman Institute by Derek Rury and Ariel Kalil studied how parents weigh grades against standardized test scores when making decisions about investing in their child’s education — in tutoring, for example. Using over 23,000 investment decisions from more than 2,000 parents, they found that parents respond to both signals, but place significantly more weight on grades. When grades are low, parents invest, regardless of what the test score says. When grades are high, but test scores are low, parents do not invest. The high grade crowds out the response that the low test score would otherwise trigger.

That finding is the mechanism through which grade inflation does its real damage. It is not just that the signal is wrong. It is that the wrong signal actively suppresses the corrective action parents would take if they had accurate information.

A child who is struggling in math but receiving a B will not get a tutor. Their parents will not schedule a meeting with the teacher. They will not look for supplemental programs. The inflated grade has told them there is no problem.

Why Parents Don’t Trust the One Signal That Could Help

The question, then, is why parents discount the one signal that could cut through the noise. Standardized test scores are designed precisely for this purpose — to provide an objective measure of what a student actually knows. Two factors explain why they fail to serve that function.

The first is a sustained public relations campaign against testing. Teachers unions and allied advocacy groups have spent years framing standardized tests as reductive, biased, and harmful. The language is familiar: “teaching to the test,” “reducing kids to a number,” “high-stakes testing.” This messaging has been effective. The Rury and Kalil study found that nearly 40 percent of parents believe standardized tests are biased against certain groups. When asked directly, 71 percent of parents said grades are more important than test scores for making decisions about their own children. Only 8.5 percent said the opposite.

The second is timing. Standardized test scores typically arrive months after the test is administered — sometimes over the summer, sometimes well into the following school year. By the time a parent sees the result, it is stale. Compare that to a report card, which arrives every quarter. Parents understandably weigh the signal that shows up when there is still time to do something about it, even if that signal is unreliable.

This combination is deeply damaging. Parents are left with one signal that is timely but dishonest, and another that is honest but delayed, and culturally discredited. The natural self-correcting mechanism — parents investing in their children when they see them struggling — has been broken by the very system that is supposed to be providing honest information.

The Costs of Grade Inflation

The costs of this broken feedback loop are not abstract.

A recent study by Jeff Denning and colleagues linked high school administrative data from Los Angeles and Maryland to postsecondary and earnings records to measure the long-run impact of grade inflation on students. They found that being assigned to a teacher with higher average grade inflation reduces a student’s future test scores, lowers the likelihood of graduating from high school, decreases college enrollment, and ultimately reduces earnings. The cumulative effect is large: a teacher with one standard deviation higher than average grade inflation reduces the present discounted value of their collective students’ lifetime earnings by $213,872.

That number is worth sitting with. Grade inflation is not a victimless accounting trick. It lowers college attendance. It reduces lifetime earnings. It makes our students less prepared and, collectively, our workforce less capable.

When a country systematically tells its students they are performing well when they are not, it produces a generation that is less prepared than the one before it. This is not hypothetical. NAEP scores in reading and math have declined over the past decade even as average GPAs have risen. The share of high school students graduating with an A average has increased significantly since the early 2000s, but the share demonstrating proficiency on national assessments has not kept pace. We are handing out more A’s for less learning. The downstream consequences — a less literate workforce, fewer students prepared for rigorous postsecondary programs, lower productivity — are diffuse enough that no single institution is held accountable, but real enough that we will feel them for decades.

Grade inflation is, in this sense, a form of national self-deception. It flatters us in the short run and diminishes us in the long run. Unlike other forms of educational failure, it is almost perfectly designed to go unnoticed — because the very mechanism that would alert us to the problem, the grade itself, is the thing that has been corrupted.

There’s one more issue with grade inflation: it doesn’t stay contained. It spreads to adjacent systems, including the ones that are supposed to serve as external checks on grade inflation itself.

Consider what just happened in Massachusetts. On March 3, Governor Maura Healey celebrated that 35.8 percent of Massachusetts public high school graduates scored a 3 or higher on an AP exam — the highest percentage in the nation and the highest on record. State officials touted it as evidence that students are better prepared than ever. What they did not mention is that the College Board has changed how it scores AP exams. Passing rates have surged nationally in recent years not because students are learning more, but because the exams have gotten easier. The number of correct answers needed for passing scores has been reduced. The College Board confirmed the changes but neither the organization nor Massachusetts officials noted them in their press releases.

This is grade inflation’s downstream logic applied to a different institution. The AP exam was designed to be an objective, nationally comparable measure of college-level mastery. It was supposed to be the kind of signal that could not be gamed by local grading practices. But the same incentive structure that inflates classroom grades has reached the College Board. Students and families are happier because they get college credit. Schools are happier because they look good. Governors get to hold press conferences.

When the checks on grade inflation are themselves inflated, the system has no remaining mechanism for self-correction. That is why legislative action is necessary.

What States Can Do

There are three things states can do right now to help curb grade inflation.

End test-optional college admissions at public universities.

The shift to test-optional admissions is wrong-headed for a number of reasons, as I’ve written before.

But it also did something else: it removed the one external check that kept grade inflation from being costless. When standardized test scores were part of the admissions equation, a school that handed out inflated A’s would eventually be exposed by mediocre SAT or ACT results. Test-optional policies eliminated that accountability mechanism. States that control their public university systems can restore it. Requiring standardized test scores for admission to state universities would not solve grade inflation overnight, but it would reintroduce a signal that schools cannot manipulate.

The tide is already turning. Over the past two years, a growing number of universities have reversed their test-optional policies after reviewing admissions data from the pandemic era. Every Ivy League school except Columbia has reinstated a testing requirement. MIT, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Pennsylvania all now require scores. Ohio State reinstated its requirement after finding that students who submitted test scores had higher GPAs and were more likely to persist through their degree. The University System of Georgia restored testing requirements at four additional campuses. Princeton’s decision followed a five-year internal review that found academic performance was stronger among students who had submitted scores. University officials starting to take data seriously is beginning to reverse these disastrous, ideologically motivated changes. Universities looked at what happened when they removed the external signal and concluded that grades alone were not sufficient to predict whether a student was prepared. State legislators overseeing public university systems should reach the same conclusion.

Get test scores back to parents faster — and make them harder to ignore.

Rury and Kalil make clear that parents will act on negative academic information — but only if they receive it in an accessible form and at a time when action is still possible. Right now, standardized test results often arrive months after the test is administered. A parent who receives their child’s state assessment results over the summer or halfway into the following school year has no actionable moment. The information is stale before it arrives. Report cards, by contrast, show up every quarter. They are immediate and familiar. It is no surprise that parents weigh them more heavily, even when they are unreliable.

Virginia is showing what a better approach looks like. In 2025, the General Assembly passed House Bill 1957, a comprehensive overhaul of the state’s Standards of Learning assessment system that takes effect in the 2026–27 school year. The law requires schools to provide score reports to families within 45 days — a significant improvement over the months-long delays that are common in most states. Those reports will include not just the student’s individual performance, but a comparison to the performance of other students in the school, the school division, and the state. Scores will be reported on a 100-point scale, replacing the old system that produced numbers like 487 that meant nothing to most parents.

Most consequentially, Virginia will require that SOL scores count for 10 percent of a student’s final course grade, starting with seventh graders. That provision is worth paying attention to. It does not replace grades with test scores. It forces the two signals onto the same report card. A parent who sees an A in math alongside a 43 on the state assessment will have a much harder time ignoring the discrepancy than a parent who receives those two pieces of information months apart, in different formats, from different sources. It is a transparency mechanism embedded directly in the grade itself.

Other states should look at Virginia’s model closely. Faster turnaround on state assessment results, clearer and more usable score reports, and structural linkages between test performance and course grades would give parents a timely, objective benchmark to look at alongside the report card. The goal is not to replace grades, but to ensure that parents have access to at least one signal that grade inflation cannot corrupt, delivered at a time when it can still change behavior.

Make grades honest.

Improving the delivery of test scores to parents is a worthwhile reform. But it is important to be clear-eyed about its limitations. If the goal is to ensure that parents have accurate information about their child’s academic performance, the most direct path is not to make parents care more about test scores. It is to make grades honest.

Rury and Kalil demonstrate why. When grades are high, parents do not invest — regardless of what the test score says.

The grade is the dominant signal. It has been the dominant signal for decades, and no amount of redesigned parent reports or 45-day turnaround mandates is likely to significantly change that. 71 percent of parents say grades matter more than test scores when making decisions about their own children. That preference is deeply ingrained, reinforced by frequency and familiarity, and actively defended by institutions that benefit from the status quo. Trying to get parents to weigh test scores more heavily means fighting an uphill battle against culture and a well-funded opposition that has spent years telling parents not to trust tests.

Fixing the grade itself is a different proposition. If grades reflect actual mastery — if a B means a student has demonstrated competence and an A means they have demonstrated excellence — then parents do not need to cross-reference two conflicting signals and decide which one to believe. They can do what they have always done: look at the report card. The difference is that the report card would be telling the truth.

This is why direct legislative action on grading practices should be the priority.

South Carolina is showing what that looks like. In 2025, Senator Jeff Zell — a former Sumter County school board member who had fought to end his district’s policy of guaranteeing students a minimum score of 50, even for work never submitted — filed S. 537 after the new board considered bringing the policy back. His bill was straightforward: prohibit school districts from requiring teachers to assign a minimum grade that exceeds a student’s actual performance.

Rep. Fawn Pedalino took the concept further. Her bill, H. 5073, goes beyond banning grade floors. It requires that only academic performance be considered in assigning high school course grades. It mandates that students complete all required assignments before becoming eligible for credit or content recovery programs — a direct response to the practice of students blowing off a class and coasting through a makeup course. It prohibits districts from counting benchmark assessments in final grades when the content has not yet been taught. It directs the State Board of Education to convene a task force to overhaul the state’s Uniform Grading Policy. Lastly, it enforces compliance by withholding 10 percent of a district’s State Aid to Classroom funding for violations.

H. 5073 passed the South Carolina House 110 to 2. That margin is worth noting. When the issue is framed correctly — that this is about making grades mean something again, not about punishing students — the politics are overwhelmingly favorable.

The South Carolina model is instructive because it addresses grade inflation at its roots without telling individual teachers how to grade. It removes the structural policies — grade floors, no-consequences credit recovery, benchmark tests counted as final grades — that make inflation the default.

Other states should follow.

The students I taught at Governors State were not lazy. They were not unintelligent. They had been told, semester after semester, that their work was good enough — and they had no reason to doubt it. When I handed back grades that reflected what their writing actually demonstrated, they were not just disappointed. They were confused. The system had failed them long before I entered the picture.

That is what grade inflation does. It does not help students. It lies to them. It tells them they are prepared when they are not. It tells their parents everything is fine when it is not. It suppresses the very interventions that would address the problem if anyone knew the problem existed.

Teachers are not the villains of this story. They are trapped in a system that punishes honesty and rewards the path of least resistance. Parents are not the villains either. They are making rational decisions based on information they have every reason to trust. The problem is structural. It is a collective action failure in which every individual actor behaves rationally and the outcome is worse for everyone.

Collective action failures require collective solutions, and our states have the tools.

They can ban grade floors and tighten credit recovery requirements, as South Carolina is doing. They can force test scores onto the report card and get results to parents in weeks instead of months, as Virginia is doing. They can end test-optional admissions policies at public universities to restore an external check the system desperately needs.

None of this will be easy. The incentives that created grade inflation are powerful, and the constituencies that benefit from the status quo are large. But the costs of inaction are no longer abstract. They show up in declining college completion rates, in reduced lifetime earnings, in a workforce that is less capable than it should be, and in a generation of students who were told they were ready and found out too late that they were not.

The students at Governors State deserved honest information about where they stood. So does every student and every parent of a student sitting in a K-12 classroom. The question is whether we are willing to build a system that provides it.

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Texas takes on Minnesota in the second round of the March Education Madness Elite Eight. If you missed the announcement post, give that a read here!

The Lone Star and the North Star

Texas is perhaps the most politically visible state in American education right now, with only a few other states like New York, California, or perhaps Florida making similar waves. Whether the issue is school choice, high-profile curriculum fights, or religious displays in public schools, Texas is likely to be found at the vanguard of such education policy fights. But more and more “policy fights” actually turn out to be high-intensity, lowish-stakes Culture War Quibbles, which have a tendency to obscure whether the state is actually building an education system oriented toward excellence.

Minnesota, by contrast, does not make national headlines very often for its schools. Prior to the pandemic, its reputation as a high-capacity, well-run blue state seemed to carry over to what was thought of its education system, i.e., good schools and good student outcomes. But now we’re entering the latter half of the Covid Decade, and the policy landscape across America has been shifted, shaken, and unsettled to such a degree that it might be wise to test longstanding assumptions.

So which state is actually doing better on the things that matter most for student learning?

Standards, Instruction, and Accountability

When it comes to evidence-based reading instruction, these two states are neck and neck. As detailed in ExcelinEd’s Early Literacy Matters reports, Minnesota and Texas have each fully implemented policies related to four fundamental literacy principles and partially implemented policies for seven, giving each state identical 11/18 scores. They reach these scores via different routes (Minnesota is stronger on universal reading screeners and eliminating three-queuing; Texas is stronger on science of reading training and educator prep alignment), but the race here is basically a tie.

Evidence-based math instruction is where Texas pulls ahead. The June 2025 NCTQ State of the States report rates Texas well ahead of Minnesota on several key policy levers. Texas specifies detailed math standards for its teacher prep programs for each of the four core content areas (numbers & operations, algebraic thinking, geometry & measurement, and data analysis & probability); Minnesota does provide a list of topics but does not clearly detail what prep programs should teach in the core areas. Texas is also one of only 5 states that uses a math licensure test that the NCTQ rates as a “strong” measure of content knowledge — and one of just thirteen that require all elementary teaching candidates to pass an acceptable test. Minnesota’s prep test doesn’t pass NCTQ’s bar. Moreover, Texas publishes a list of recommended math curricula. Even though requiring high-quality materials would be even better for Texan students, it’s better than nothing, which is what Minnesota offers here.

For assessments and accountability, Texas’ advantage is strong. Both states test reading/writing, math, and science, but Texas also administers a statewide social studies assessment. More significantly, Texan students must pass five STAAR ( “State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness”) end-of-course exams to graduate high school. Minnesota, meanwhile, has progressively weakened its graduation exam requirements over the past decade or two, starting with alternative graduation pathways in 2009, and by 2013 had effectively eliminated them. (Students still have to take statewide tests, but not to graduate.)

Other graduation requirements, though, make this matchup a bit more interesting. At the baseline level, Minnesota holds students to a higher standard; all grads have to take Algebra 2 (or an equivalent class). Texas’s Foundation Diploma, meanwhile, only requires 3 years of math, and doesn’t require Algebra 2. What Texas does have that Minnesota doesn’t, though, is its Distinguished Diploma track, which requires 4 full years of math (including Algebra 2), four years of science, and two years of a foreign language.

Across these criteria, then, Texas pulls ahead of Minnesota, primarily on the strength of its math instruction pipeline, its exam requirements, and the different diploma tracks.

Curricula and Culture Wars

Comparing Texas and Minnesota’s graduation requirements naturally raises another question: What are students actually learning in these required courses? In Minnesota, the answer is starting to get more complicated, because more controversial.

Before diving into the specifics, though, it will be useful (wise?) to be clear about what the real issue is here. The problem with Ethnic Studies mandates — in Minnesota, in California, and elsewhere — is not that schools are teaching more Black history, or Latino literature, or Native American culture. That’s fine. In principle it’s just and good.

The problem is that the ethnic studies curricula actually being implemented in American schools are bad. Not merely politically inconvenient, but academically lacking in fundamental ways. They’re built on shallow or uncontested ideological frameworks; they’re produced by a small network of consultant-activists; and, most importantly, they displace instructional time students need for foundational skills! California’s pioneering ethnic studies mandate — for a comparison from a much richer state — has effectively collapsed. It’s unfunded, hyper-litigated, and plagued by districts paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to consultants that frequently peddle reductionist and inflammatory narratives. (We’ll have much more to say about this slow-burn curricular grenade in a forthcoming piece.) The relevant point here, though, is that Minnesota looked at this track record and decided to go further, or worse, entirely failed to reflect on how similar efforts have gone.

In 2023, Minnesota’s education omnibus bill required ethnic studies courses at all grade levels — and allowed for an ethnic studies course to substitute for social studies, language arts, arts, math, or science credit, provided it “meets the applicable state academic standards.” A student in Minnesota can fulfill a math or science graduation requirement by taking an ethnic studies course.

You don’t have to be a conservative culture warrior to see the problem here. The math-and-science substitution isn’t about whether social studies electives should include more diverse perspectives. It’s about whether a course on systemic oppression and ethnic identity can do the work of an Algebra or Biology course. State Rep. Ron Kresha (R-Little Falls) has sponsored HF29 to repeal the substitution, arguing that mandates are “stealing time from reading, math and science.” The House Education Policy Committee approved it 7-6 in February 2025.

The statute’s defenders would note that the course must meet applicable state standards for whatever credit it replaces. But Minnesota’s ethnic studies standards are the issue — they frame American institutions as systems of oppression and position students as agents of resistance. A course satisfying those standards embeds an ideology that, long-term, destroys local trust and community buy-in to public schools. The standards themselves are the problem.

Texas, to be sure, has its own curricular controversies, most notably efforts to inject Christian sectarian doctrine (via the Ten Commandments) into classrooms. In addition to being unconstitutional, such efforts undermine the ways in which red-leaning states are getting things right. Ultimately, though, issues like displaying the Ten Commandments in classrooms — i.e., culture war issues — don’t really meaningfully distract from learning in the classroom. They affect roughly ~zero students’ capacity to do, e.g., long division. Minnesota’s ethnic studies substitution is different in kind: a statutory pathway to graduate without core math or science coursework, so long as the replacement checks the right ideological boxes.

The Learning Environment

The post-pandemic behavioral crisis forced every state to confront classroom order, but Minnesota and Texas have responded with fundamentally different philosophies about what a safe, focused learning environment requires. On phones, they’re converging. But on discipline, they’re diverging fast.

Devices & Distractions

As we discussed in the last Elite Eight matchup, school policies on phones and distracting devices seems to be a rare area of genuine bipartisan agreement in ed policy, something in short supply post-Covid. Both Texas and Minnesota recognize that phones are a problem for learning, mental health, and classroom focus, and we see both states moving in the right direction.

Texas has a bit of a head start, though, because last year Governor Abbott signed HB 1481 into law, requiring all school systems — traditional public districts, charters, and school boards — to adopt written policies prohibiting students from using “personal communication devices” during the school day. The bill also included money to help schools implement the ban, covering purchases of phone lockers, pouches, and other implementation costs.

The Texas bill gets correct a lot of the details of what can easily be a tricky or contentious kind of policy, as well. The ban covers the entire school day, and applies to free periods or free time between classes, too. All different sorts of devices fall under the “personal communication device” definition — so playing rules-lawyer on the ban will be tough — and it specifies straightforwardly that refusing to turn over a device counts as a student conduct violation, which in Texas gives teachers and administrators the flexibility they need to ensure distraction-free classrooms.

Minnesota is just a step or two behind Texas here. A 2024 law required every district to adopt some kind of policy governing phone use, but it didn’t specify what exactly the policy had to be. Many districts have since adopted strong policies about devices and phones (Stillwater and Saint Paul, to name two), but the statewide mandate from 2024 lacked teeth. Thankfully, the Minnesota legislature is now trying to strengthen that bill. HF 2516 is pending legislation that would require bell-to-bell bans for K–8 schools, and classroom bans for high school students. Hopefully the bill will be passed into legislation this year, if so adding another state to the list of those with strong, anti-distraction, statewide school policy.

Discipline

Texas and Minnesota are taking radically different approaches, though, when it comes to the question of discipline, safety, and student behavior. Texas has largely reversed course on experimenting with restorative justice (“RJ”) frameworks; Minnesota, on the other hand, is expanding their presence in its schools.

2023 was a watershed year for school discipline policy in Minnesota, as that year’s education omnibus bill embedded K–3 suspension bans, mandatory non-exclusion practices, and RJ practices into law, and thus into districts and schools across the state. Part of the law defines the kinds of practices schools must exhaust before choosing to dismiss/expel a student, like “PBIS,” SEL and mental health services, counseling, and academic interventions. Minnesota also apportioned several million dollars for RJ training, and requires each school to designate a staff member to ensure that such policies are “fairly and fully implemented.”

Last year there was an effort by some Minnesota lawmakers to roll back elements of the 2023 law; these bills appear to be stalling, however, and so the 2023 law remains on the books.

Texas, meanwhile, underwent its own period of progressive discipline experimentation — and then semi-promptly reversed course. Thus, it wasn’t exactly always red-state vs. blue-state on this issue. In 2017 and 2019, under Republican governance, Texas limited how and when schools could suspend young students, and many districts adopted restorative practices. But since the pandemic, there’s been quite a concerted backlash.

The legislature’s answer was HB 6, the “Teacher Bill of Rights,” which passed the House 124–20 in 2025 and was signed into law by Governor Abbott. Teachers in Texas can now remove a student from class after a single incident of disruptive, unruly, or abusive behavior, whereas previously the behavior first had to be documented multiple times. A removed student also cannot return to the classroom without the teacher’s written consent and a formal return-to-class plan. Reversing reforms from the last decade, Texas now allows students below grade 3 to be placed in out-of-school suspension if the behavioral issues are serious or chronic enough. Thankfully, HB 6 also created a Virtual Expulsion Program for students who’ve been expelled but cannot access a juvenile justice schooling alternative.

A Quick Note on Corporal Punishment in Texas

It doesn’t seem necessary, it’s clearly ripe for abuse (at least compared to alternative practices), and research suggests it doesn’t work. Texas should stop this practice, and props to Minnesota for getting this one right.

Minnesota and Texas are thus synecdoches for today’s dominant dueling meta-theories on school discipline and classroom order. Where Minnesota continues to build a system based on the idea that exclusionary discipline itself is the core problem, Texas understands that failing to remove disruptive students produces the most acute learning and lifelong harms for their peers, teachers, and school cultures trying to function. In our opinion, the evidence substantially favors the Texas approach, at least as a default.

Though the phone policy gap is narrow and closing, Texas wins on the core discipline question, i.e., whether teachers and administrators have the authority and tools to maintain orderly classrooms. Minnesota has chosen the progressive discipline orthodoxy; Texas has aggressively reversed course toward teacher empowerment and common sense. The corporal punishment thing doesn’t really look good for Texas. But it doesn’t change the overall assessment: Texas offers a learning environment where teachers can teach and students can learn without being held hostage by a discipline framework designed around the needs of the disruptive few.

Winner: Texas

Texas wins this matchup on policy substance, despite the prevalence of culture-war-first ed commentary. Stronger math teacher preparation, five mandatory end-of-course exams, a Distinguished diploma track, an enforced phone-free school law, and a discipline framework that empowers teachers stand out in this policy sphere.

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Nevada takes on Utah in the first round of the March Education Madness Elite Eight. If you missed the announcement post and the regional round results, give that a read here!

114°W

West Wendover, Nevada is the larger of two neighboring border cities straddling either side of the 114° west meridian. 2.3 miles eastward across the state line lies Wendover, Utah, a city with a similar demographic makeup but only a fourth of the population. Enrollment at West Wendover Elementary is just over twice that of Anna Smith Elementary; in both schools, the student body is more than three-fourths Hispanic, and a majority of children qualify for free or reduced lunch.

Many things are similar for the students in these communities, and the two schools are more like each other than either is to their own state’s “average” school. But despite their similarities, the state line means nuances in education policy that can make a big difference. ELL students benefit disproportionately from policies that promote phonics-based structured literacy, and students who decode in a second language are also those for whom three-cueing policies are most pernicious. Statewide policies on school discipline and phone use, meanwhile, are crucial for ensuring orderly classrooms with minimal distraction.

While schools like West Wendover and Anna Smith — high-ELL, high-FRPL, comparatively remote — often present unique challenges for policies on science of reading instruction, discipline, and phones, they are for the same reasons precisely the schools with the most to gain when good education policy is implemented at the statewide level.

For the first Elite Eight matchup in our March Education Madness, we’re taking a look at how the two states that meet along 114° west fare when it comes to providing the policy foundations for academic excellence. It’s rank 4 Nevada against rank 7 Utah — who will win?

Utah’s Early Lead in Evidence-Based Instruction

While both states have adopted evidence-based instruction policies aligned with the Science of Reading (SoR), Utah did so a full three years earlier than Nevada with the passage of SB 127 in 2022.1 This legislation checked several major boxes for evidence-based literacy:

First, SB 127 mandated SoR training for all K–3 teachers and administrators: existing K–3 teachers and admins were required to complete the LETRS training by July 1, 2025, and all new K–3 teacher candidates must pass the Utah Foundations of Reading Assessment (UFORA) to earn their licensure.

Second, SB 127 requires Utah’s local education agencies (LEAs) to provide and use state-approved, evidence-informed materials for core instruction and evidence-based materials for intervention. In addition, the law established the Early Literacy Repository, a regularly updated collection of SoR resources for teachers, admins, parents, and teacher preparation programs, and moreover provided SoR-trained literacy coaches to schools with low literacy performance.

Tellingly, in its 2024 “State Reading Policy Action Guide,” the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) singled out Utah as a premier example of how to implement effective reading instruction, citing the state’s SoR-aligned teacher preparation programs and its “clear, explicit standards for candidate knowledge and demonstration of skills specifically aligned to SBRI [scientifically based reading instruction].”

Now, in 2025 Nevada made major progress on multiple fronts. For one, the Nevada Department of Education released a revised State Literacy Plan formally adopting SoR for PreK–12 and emphasizing both multi-tiered support systems (MTSS) & structured literacy progression.

Then, adding legal teeth, the Nevada legislature passed SB 460, which aligned teacher preparation programs to the science of reading and required all K–3 teachers to complete SoR training. Yet despite this recent spurt, Nevada is still a ways off from narrowing the distance made by Utah’s head start. Because of SB 460’s training deadline for teachers — end of 2027–’28 school year if hired before 8/1/25, or within 3 years of starting if hired thereafter — it’s too soon to see the full fruit of Nevada’s new policy.

It is important to note, too, that while ExcelinEd’s (excellent!) Early Literacy Matters Implementation Reports credit Nevada with 14 out of 18 early literacy principles and Utah with only 12 of 18, these tallies count “full,” “partial,” and “future” implementation equally toward the total. Whereas Nevada’s two-point margin is attributable to its five future-implementation commitments, when it comes to full+partial implementation, Utah leads 12 to 9.

And now thanks to recent developments, three of Utah’s current “Not adopted” scores — dyslexia screening, three-cueing ban, and third-grade retention — are set for the “future” column. When it became clear that Utah was behind on SB 127’s goal of reaching 70% reading proficiency for third graders by 2027, state leaders redoubled their commitment. Inspired by Mississippi and other literacy leaders, legislators in early 2026 introduced SB 241, a bill that stands to implement a formal ban on three-cueing, mandated dyslexia screening, and third-grade retention for readers. Meanwhile, although Nevada introduced AB 187 (2023) to ban three-cueing, the bill never received a hearing and no such ban was adopted.

With a three-year head start on SoR policy implementation, a more comprehensive framework, and even more progress on the horizon, Utah wins on evidence-based instruction.2

A Close Contest for Discipline & Learning Environment

Effective learning requires a safe and orderly environment. Classroom distractions and disruptions, chronic absenteeism and misbehavior, and at worst, violence, all undermine even the best pedagogical and curricular policies.

In this final leg of the match, then, we’re going to compare how Nevada and Utah protect the learning environment along two policy dimensions: (1) discipline & classroom order, and (2) devices & classroom distractions. Each state has taken steps to tackle these two defining classroom environmental problems of the 2020s, but how do they size up?

Discipline

Back in 2019, the Nevada state legislature passed Bill No. 168, seeking to disrupt the “school to prison” pipeline by requiring schools to make “a reasonable effort to complete a plan of action based on restorative justice” with a pupil before removing them.

But a mere four years later, only one state legislator stood opposed to rolling back the 2019 restorative justice (“RJ”) law. It turns out that keeping the most disruptive and violent students in classrooms by forcing teachers to jump through a series of misguided quasi-therapeutic exercises has bad effects on student learning. Community-building circles, affective statements, and “restorative mindset trainings” are some of the practices that turned out to be better in theory than in practice.

With strong backing from Governor Joe Lombardo, AB330 restored Nevada practices to a healthier middle-ground, removing most of the RJ requirements, though preserving the framework for schools that might lean too far back in the punitive direction. But now selling drugs in school and violence toward teachers and employees are first-time removal offenses, which are changes that seem to have already disproportionately helped students in the most disrupted classrooms. Chronic absenteeism declined from 34.9% to 25.9% from 2023–24 — still above the national average, but a meaningful trajectory shift. While we certainly can’t attribute the entire shift to disciplinary reforms, we should still keep an eye on this trend.

Utah, however, has not made as much progress as Nevada when it comes to removing RJ practices from its schools. R277-609 includes restorative practices as a component of district discipline plans. It doesn’t put the same kinds of roadblocks as Nevada’s old RJ bill did, but it still bakes those practices into school frameworks.

When a disruptive student requires a restorative process like a “community-building” circle — with the student(s) they were bullying, in many cases — this degrades learning. And the absence of a clear, statewide statement against such practices hurts Utah’s performance in this category.

Devices & Distractions

Getting distracting devices out of the classroom is going to be a defining educational initiative of this decade. So far across the United States a multitude of policy responses have emerged. As of almost one year ago, 22 states had adopted some type of ban on phones in schools, and now that number might be rising to over 35 by the end of this year.

Here, Utah actually beats out Nevada for being ahead of the game when it comes to statewide policy on phone use in the classroom. Bell-to-bell is meaningfully stronger than instructional-time only. The distinction matters because passing periods, lunch, and before/after school are where social media spirals, cyberbullying, and re-distraction happen. Nevada’s laws leave these windows open.

Individual counties in Nevada, like Washoe County, have chosen to go further than the statewide statute; but that’s just a district initiative, subject to change and left up to more local decision-makers. And even though Utah has an opt-out policy, the statewide default to banning phones is a massive step in the right direction.

Winner: Utah

Nevada and Utah both rank in the bottom five nationally for per-pupil spending — Nevada 47th at $11,927, Utah dead last at $11,289 — and both have among the highest student-to-teacher ratios in the country. These are two lean systems, and so the question is what they’ve done with what they have.

Utah wins on reading. A three-year head start on SoR implementation, a licensure exam gatekeeping new teachers, and now SB 241 pushing further with a three-cueing ban, dyslexia screening, and third-grade retention. Nevada’s SB 460 is real progress, but full implementation is years out and the state still lacks the specific tools Utah has either adopted or is about to.

Discipline is a split decision. Nevada gets credit for rolling back its failed RJ experiment; Utah gets credit for the stronger phone ban. Neither state has put both pieces together yet, though overall both are (mostly) moving in the right direction.

Math is a wash, as Utah has more structure on paper, but its integrated model is in active dispute, and Nevada’s requirements are thin.

For kids like those one might find at Anna Smith Elementary in Wendover, Utah — high-ELL, high-poverty, remote — state policy can make a real difference. Utah has built a better ladder here than Nevada has.

Utah advances.

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Rahim Nathwani is a technologist based in San Francisco, making businesses better with tech and AI. He believes almost everyone can and should learn more math. His 9-year-old son is on track to complete Algebra 1 before 5th grade.

Part 2 has since been published on our Substack.

There is a pattern in American math education reform. An organization claims that a new teaching approach produces dramatic gains. Schools and districts adopt it. Years later, when someone checks the evidence, the gains turn out to be overstated, the methodology turns out to be flawed, and the students who were promised a better education are worse off than before.

The organizations driving these reforms say they want equity. But when their evidence doesn’t hold up, the children who suffer most are the ones these reforms were supposed to help: kids from low-income families, whose parents can’t hire tutors to fill the gaps.

This pattern has played out at least three times with research associated with YouCubed, one of the most influential math education organizations in the country.

The Chart That Doesn’t Match the Data

YouCubed, a Stanford-based initiative led by Professor Jo Boaler, recently published a PDF claiming dramatic math score improvements in Healdsburg Unified School District in California. The chart showed a compelling story: scores starting very low, climbing steadily, ending impressively high. It’s the kind of result that gets shared in school board meetings and cited in policy decisions.

There was one problem: The numbers don’t match the public record.

California publishes its student test data openly. Anyone can look it up. For the most recent year, YouCubed’s chart and the state data roughly agree: about 75% of 5th graders at Healdsburg meet grade-level standards. But for the baseline year (the “before” picture that makes the improvement look dramatic), YouCubed’s chart shows approximately 24%. The state’s official data for the same district, year, and grade band shows approximately 44%.

Here’s the chart from the YouCubed PDF:

And here’s a recreation of the chart based on official government numbers:

That’s not a rounding difference. That’s a gap of 20 percentage points, and it runs in exactly the direction that makes the improvement story look better.

When you replace YouCubed’s baseline with the actual public data, the narrative changes completely. Scores were roughly flat for several years, then showed a recent uptick. That might be a legitimate result. But it is not the dramatic turnaround that YouCubed presented to educators and policymakers, and which Jo Boaler shared on X.

Maybe There’s an Innocent Explanation?

In education research circles, it’s common to see researchers exclude certain subgroups from their data. The most frequent justification is something like: “We excluded chronically absent students because they didn’t receive the full intervention.”

That’s a methodologically reasonable thing to do, as long as you say you’re doing it and explain why.

The YouCubed document makes no mention of any data exclusion. But let’s ask: could data exclusion explain the discrepancy?

Here’s the problem. If you exclude chronically absent students from a proficiency calculation, you would generally expect the remaining percentage to go up, not down. Students who miss a lot of school typically perform worse on tests. Take them out of the calculation, and the percentage of students who meet standards would likely increase, not decrease.

But YouCubed’s 2016–2017 figure (24%) is far below the state’s figure (44%). That means their exclusion would have had to somehow remove the higher-performing students from the calculation. That is the opposite of what “excluding chronically absent students” would do.

We cannot think of a legitimate methodological reason why a district’s proficiency rate would be nearly cut in half by a data exclusion. If there is one, Youcubed’s report should explain it. It doesn’t.

A Quick Explainer: Why Cohort Comparisons Matter

Even setting aside the data discrepancy, there is a deeper methodological problem with the chart — one that matters even if every number in it were correct.

The chart compares “5th graders in 2017” to “5th graders in 2023.” These are entirely different groups of children. The kids who were in 5th grade in 2017 are in their early 20s now. They are not the same kids who were tested in 2023.

Imagine you run a tutoring program. In Year 1, you tutor a class of students who happen to come from lower-income families and score an average of 60 on a test. In Year 5, a different group of students — from more affluent families, in a district that has added new staff — scores an average of 80. Can you claim your tutoring program caused the improvement? Of course not.

The right way to evaluate whether an educational intervention works is to track the same group of students over time and see how they progress. This is called a “cohort study.” It’s standard in medical research (think clinical trials), and it’s the gold standard in education research too.

We went ahead and pulled the cohort data from California’s public records. We tracked each group of students as they moved through the grades. What did that analysis show? Here it is:

It did not show consistent improvement across cohorts. The picture was much more mixed than the YouCubed chart suggests.

In fact, if we look at the most recent cohorts (the kids who entered 3rd grade in 2018 or later), we see that almost all cohorts (grades) have a downward trend: the chance that any given kid meets state standards in math goes down as they spend more years at Healdsburg school district.

This matters because the entire point of the YouCubed document is presumably to persuade: to show that the YouCubed approach works, and that other districts should adopt it. If the underlying analysis is methodologically flawed (and if the baseline data appears to be inaccurate) then that persuasion is built on sand.

The Study That Couldn’t Be Verified

This would be easier to set aside if it were an isolated mistake. It is not.

YouCubed’s influence traces back to Professor Boaler’s most celebrated research: the “Railside” study, published in 2008, which claimed that a reform-math approach at a California high school produced dramatic gains, especially for minority students. That study became enormously influential. It shaped curricula, frameworks, and professional development programs across the country.

In 2012, two Stanford mathematics professors and several colleagues published an extended critique. They raised serious concerns: the school had been misrepresented, the data couldn’t be independently verified, and the conclusions overstated what the evidence showed. Rather than release the underlying data for independent review, Professor Boaler characterized the critique as harassment.

The data was never made fully available. The study remains widely cited.

The Framework Built on Selective Evidence

In 2023, California adopted a new Mathematics Framework that drew heavily on Boaler’s ideas and YouCubed’s recommendations. The framework discouraged ability grouping, de-emphasized procedural fluency, and delayed access to advanced math courses — all in the name of equity.

More than 1,000 scientists and mathematicians signed an open letter objecting. Their concerns: the framework cited research selectively, dismissed evidence from high-performing countries, and would likely harm the students it claimed to help — particularly those aiming for STEM careers.

A Stanford mathematician who reviewed the framework’s citations in detail documented numerous cases where cited studies either didn’t support the claims being made or actively contradicted them. Misrepresented citations, like misrepresented data, are hard to attribute to innocent error when they consistently run in the same direction.

The Pattern

Three cases. In each one, research associated with the same organization claimed dramatic results. In each one, outside review found serious problems with the evidence. And in each one, the discrepancies ran in the same direction: making the reform approach look more effective than the data actually showed.

A single error is understandable. Research is hard, and mistakes happen. But when the mistakes consistently flatter the same conclusion, the most straightforward explanation is not bad luck.

This matters because education policy is downstream of evidence. When a district eliminates ability grouping, it cites research. When a state delays algebra, it cites research. When a school board adopts a new curriculum, it cites research. If that research is unreliable, every decision built on it is compromised.

Who Pays the Price

When a math reform fails, the cost is not distributed equally.

Families with resources respond to a weak math program the same way they respond to every institutional failure: they route around it. They hire a tutor. They enroll in a supplemental program. They move to a different district. And this last dynamic is perhaps the most destructive: declining public school enrollment means system-wide strain, fewer resources for schools and teachers, and eventual school closures. This phenomenon is showing up across the country, and it seems to be driven by wealthier, white, and asian families, especially those in deep-blue districts experiencing acute education dysfunction. Seattle has seen thousands of families leave public schools, and private schools in San Francisco are brimming with new applicants.

Families earning $200,000 a year have options and are evidently ready and willing to use them.

A family earning $40,000 does not. When school math instruction is the only math instruction a child receives, the quality of that instruction is the ceiling on that child’s opportunity. A low-income child whose school adopted a curriculum based on overstated evidence doesn’t get a do-over.

The cruelest irony is that these reforms are justified in the language of equity. The children they claim to champion are the ones with the fewest alternatives when the reforms don’t work.

What Should Be Different

None of this means that math education shouldn’t evolve, or that traditional approaches are beyond criticism. But it does mean that the organizations driving reform need to meet a basic evidentiary standard: the same standard we’d expect of a pharmaceutical company claiming its drug works.

That standard is straightforward. When you publish results, the underlying data should be available for independent review. When your chart shows a number, it should match the public record. When you cite a study, the study should actually support the claim you’re making. And when someone finds an error, the response should be a correction, not an accusation.

These are not hostile demands. They are the minimum that parents, teachers, and policymakers deserve before reshaping how children learn mathematics.

One bad chart would be forgivable. But what we’ve described here is a pattern: influential organizations are shaping how millions of children learn math based on research that hasn’t survived basic scrutiny, and the kids who pay the price are the same ones the reforms were supposed to help.

Your child’s math education deserves evidence that holds up when someone checks.

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Which states have education policies that best foster student excellence?

It’s a question that gets asked surprisingly rarely — and when it does, the answers tend to rely more on reputation than evidence. Though the tide is slowly turning, many still assume Massachusetts is good and Mississippi is bad, and leave it at that.

We wanted to do better. Starting today and culminating with a Championship on April 6th, Education Progress is running our first March Education Madness Tournament — a state-by-state, data-driven competition to find out which state best promotes educational excellence across the socioeconomic spectrum.

The Field

Fifty states is a lot of states. We needed a way to organize the field that was simple, defensible, and didn’t require us to make judgment calls about which states belong together.

The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis already does this by dividing the country into eight regions based on economic and social similarities. States in the same BEA region tend to share demographic profiles, policy traditions, and labor markets. So we borrowed their map and turned each region into a conference.

Each round of the tournament will run a bit differently — mostly because reiterating and re-reading the same analyses round after round would be extremely tedious, but also because it provides an opportunity to illustrate different ways states can either support or impede educational excellence.

For this first round — the Regional Qualifiers — one state will be selected as a standout in educational excellence from each region, and they will advance to our Elite Eight bracket. We go into more detail about the regional matchups below, but generally speaking we wanted the scoring framework and the results to be relatively straightforward and simple for winnowing fifty states down to eight. So we gave every state a weighted score based on how well their lower, middle, and higher-income students perform on the NAEP’s national 4th- and 8th-grade math and reading tests, with greater weights given to how well the state supports its middle-class and disadvantaged students.

From here, the regional winners will face off in a single-elimination format in four Elite Eight rounds — the Far West, Rocky Mountains, Southwest, and Plains on one side of the bracket, and the Great Lakes, Southeast, Mideast, and New England on the other. The NAEP data got them through the regionals, but here we will more closely examine why, considering each state’s (1) evidence-based instruction, (2) assessments and accountability, and (3) discipline and school climate. Each Elite Eight round will evaluate the competing states against these different policy questions.

The Final Four will consist of the states that have these fundamentals locked in, and so we will have to dig a bit deeper for these faceoffs. In these two matchups, the contenders will be evaluated according to (1) the alternative education pathways they provide, (2) their graduation standards and graduate profiles, and (3) their overall gifted and talented education policy.

We will share more details about the Championship Round in a couple weeks. Throughout the tournament, though, the pro-excellence checklist will deepen as the field narrows. What matters first are the fundamentals, then the policies that supercharge excellence, and then their execution on those policies. In each successive post, the previous winners’ policies will be scrutinized in head-to-head contests until we finally crown our National Champion of Educational Excellence.

But first, and finally — which states will be advancing from the Regional Qualifiers to the Elite Eight? (Stay tuned to find out after a message from our sponsor, DraftKings. Just kidding.)

The Regional Qualifiers: Which States Lift All Boats?

To select our Elite Eight, we’re using a widely referenced measure of student achievement in the country: the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation’s Report Card.

For the first time in 2024, NAEP introduced a Socioeconomic Status (SES) Index that goes beyond free-lunch eligibility, to capture a richer picture of students’ economic, social, and cultural resources. The index classifies students into three categories — Low SES, Middle SES, and High SES — and reports average scores for each group at the state level in both mathematics and reading, at grades 4 and 8.

We use these scores to answer a simple question: Which state in each region gets the best results across the socioeconomic spectrum, and who does so for the students most in need of academic resources?

How It Works

Step 1 — Rank. For each of the four NAEP assessments (Grade 4 Math, Grade 4 Reading, Grade 8 Math, Grade 8 Reading), we rank all states by their average score within each SES category (Low, Middle, High). Highest weighted average NAEP scores = Rank 1. This produces 12 rankings per state (4 assessments × 3 SES levels).

Step 2 — Weight. Not all performance is equal. A state that serves its Low SES students well is doing something harder and more important than a state that merely rides the advantages of wealth. We apply the following weights to each SES rank:

Step 3 — Score. For each state, we compute a Seed Score for each of the four assessments:

• Grade 4 Math Seed Score = (Low SES rank × 3) + (Middle SES rank × 2) + (High SES rank × 1)

• Grade 4 Reading Seed Score = (Low SES rank × 3) + (Middle SES rank × 2) + (High SES rank × 1)

• Grade 8 Math Seed Score = (Low SES rank × 3) + (Middle SES rank × 2) + (High SES rank × 1)

• Grade 8 Reading Seed Score = (Low SES rank × 3) + (Middle SES rank × 2) + (High SES rank × 1)

These four Seed Scores are then summed into a single Total Seed Score. The state with the lowest Total Seed Score has the strongest overall performance across the two grade levels and both subjects, with greater weight given to how well the policy serves its middle-income (2x) and disadvantaged (3x) students.

Step 4 — Select. Within each of the eight BEA regions, the state with the lowest Total Seed Score advances to the Elite Eight.

Interpreting the Results

This rank-based score is designed for clarity, not fine-grained precision. When two states finish with very close scores, we flag it — as a “photo finish” (within 5%) or a “virtual tie” (within 2%) — and show the NAEP point differences so readers can see whether the matchup was decisive, or effectively a coin flip. Round 1 is thus a quick, transparent way to pick regional standouts. We are not claiming that #1 is meaningfully better than #2. For this tournament, we just wanted a fast way to see which states were moving in the right direction.

A Note on Missing Data

The 2024 NAEP SES Index is not available for every state. Alabama, Alaska, Colorado, New Hampshire, South Dakota, and Utah had insufficient data for the SES index in 2024 and are noted with an asterisk (*) in the regional tables. For the Rocky Mountain region — where both Colorado and Utah are missing from the SES index — we use overall NAEP average scores (all students) instead of SES-weighted ranks to ensure the region’s full five-state field competes. All other regions use the SES-weighted method, with missing states excluded from their regional field.

Regional Results & the Elite Eight

Massachusetts emerges from the New England regional qualifiers. Winner by Seed Score: Massachusetts (204) over Connecticut (594).

Massachusetts led in all 12 subgroup cells, averaging +5.9 NAEP points across the board. Its High-SES students ranked 2nd nationally in 4th-grade math and 1st in 8th-grade math, but the win wasn’t just about wealthy kids — its Low-SES ranks ranged from 8th to 13th across all four assessments. Connecticut had strong High-SES performance (7th in 4th-grade reading, 5th in 8th-grade reading) but its Low-SES students ranked in the 30s and 40s in three of four assessments, and that gap cost it under our weighting.

New York wins the Mideast qualifiers. Winner by Seed Score: New York (338) over New Jersey (383).

New York led in 7 of 12 cells, though New Jersey actually averaged slightly higher in raw NAEP points (+1.1). New Jersey had the stronger High-SES showing — including 4th nationally in both 8th-grade math and 8th-grade reading. But New York’s Low-SES students ranked 5th in 8th-grade math and 12th in both 4th-grade reading and 8th-grade reading. With Low-SES weighted at 3x, that was enough.

Indiana advances from the Great Lakes qualifiers. Winner by Seed Score: Indiana (179) over Ohio (318).

Indiana led in 11 of 12 cells, averaging +2.2 NAEP points. Its Low-SES students ranked 3rd nationally in 4th-grade reading and 4th in 8th-grade math — numbers that would be competitive in any region. Ohio’s one win came in High-SES 8th-grade math, where it ranked 11th nationally to Indiana’s 19th, but that wasn’t nearly enough to close the gap.

Minnesota moves on from the Plains qualifiers. 📸 Winner by Seed Score: Minnesota (527) over Nebraska (554).

Photo finish. Minnesota and Nebraska both scored 135 in 4th-grade math and were within 4 points in 4th-grade reading. Nebraska had the better 8th-grade math result — its Mid-SES students ranked 4th nationally there, compared to Minnesota’s 12th. Minnesota pulled ahead in 8th-grade reading (weighted score of 137 vs. 179). With the totals this close (527 vs. 554), the tiebreaker went to combined Low-SES rank, where Minnesota’s 84 edged Nebraska’s 94.

Louisiana leads the Southeast qualifiers. Winner by Seed Score: Louisiana (86) over Mississippi (94).

Louisiana posted the lowest total seed score (86) in the entire 44-state SES-weighted field, earning that through remarkable 8th-grade results. Its Mid-SES students ranked 1st nationally in both 8th-grade math and 8th-grade reading, and its Low-SES students ranked 7th and 1st in those same assessments. Its 8th-grade reading weighted score of 6 — reflecting ranks of 1st, 1st, and 1st across all three SES categories — was the single strongest assessment result in the tournament. Mississippi was actually stronger in 4th grade, with Low-SES students ranking 2nd in math and 1st in reading, but Louisiana’s 8th-grade dominance sealed it.

Texas takes the Southwest qualifiers. Winner by Seed Score: Texas (308) over Oklahoma (548).

Texas led in all 12 subgroup cells, averaging +4.6 NAEP points over Oklahoma. Its Low-SES students ranked 3rd nationally in 4th-grade math — the best mark among all eight Elite Eight qualifiers. Its profile showed strength across the board in the earlier grades, though there’s more ground to make up by 8th-grade reading, where its Low-SES students ranked 29th. Oklahoma had decent Low-SES 4th-grade math performance (9th nationally) but fell off in the upper grades.

Utah rocks the Rocky Mountains qualifiers. (Overall scores method.) Winner by Rank Sum: Utah (8) over Colorado (10) and Wyoming (10).

With SES data unavailable for Utah and Colorado, this region used overall NAEP averages. Utah led the region in 8th-grade math (281.8) and placed 2nd in 4th-grade math (241.5) and 8th-grade reading (261.2). Colorado edged Utah in 4th-grade reading (220.9 vs. 219.3) and 8th-grade reading (264.5 vs. 261.2), but Utah’s math advantage was decisive. Wyoming led in both 4th-grade assessments but dropped to 5th in 8th-grade reading, costing it the tiebreaker with Colorado.

Nevada nabs the Far West qualifiers. Winner by Seed Score: Nevada (224) over California (473).

Nevada led in 8 of 12 cells, averaging +1.5 NAEP points over California. The story here is Low-SES performance: Nevada’s disadvantaged students ranked 4th nationally in 4th-grade math, 2nd in 4th-grade reading, 3rd in 8th-grade math, and 2nd in 8th-grade reading. California had the stronger High-SES results (5th in 4th-grade math, 3rd in 8th-grade math) but its Low-SES students ranked in the upper 20s and 30s. With our 3× Low-SES weighting, Nevada’s advantage was comfortable.

Our 2026 Elite Eight

How the Lens Sharpens Each Round

Bracket Schedule

Now the real competition begins. Our Elite Eight face off in a single-elimination bracket, with the West and East sides advancing in parallel. In the Elite Eight, we evaluate whether each state has the fundamentals in place: evidence-based instruction, meaningful assessments, and a learning environment that protects the classroom.

West Elite Eight: Nevada vs. Utah — March 10th | Texas vs. Minnesota — March 12th

East Elite Eight: Indiana vs. Louisiana — March 16th | New York vs. Massachusetts — March 19th

In the Final Four, we move to the policies that supercharge excellence: career and technical education pathways, rigorous graduation standards, and gifted and talented programming.

West Final Four: week of March 23rd

East Final Four: week of March 30th

And in the Championship, we’ll be asking which state backs its policies with real investment, and does so efficiently.

Championship: week of April 6th

The last state standing gets crowned the 2026 Champion of March Education Madness.

Niels Hoven is the founder and CEO of Mentava, building software for early literacy and accelerated learning. He has also developed one of the strongest pro-excellence public voices in the education space today over on his X feed. We hope you enjoy his article!

In America we claim to value excellence, but it seems that our schools never got that memo. Compare China’s “genius program” with how the US approaches talent in schools.

China identifies kids with extraordinary academic ability early, and nurtures that talent to turn them into founders and senior leaders of some of the country’s top technology companies. In contrast, the US sees giftedness as a problem to be solved: our educational system’s goal is to equalize outcomes, and exceptional children must be held back to allow slower kids to catch up.

There’s a cruel irony at the heart of some of our most well-intentioned education reforms. Meant to help disadvantaged students catch up with their high-achieving peers, a generation of progressive policies have systematically undermined academic excellence in our schools, and eliminated opportunities for the disadvantaged students whose interests they claimed to champion.

Shuttering gifted and talented programs, eliminating accelerated math, and eschewing standardized tests in admissions: across three different initiatives, we see the same dynamic at work. Reformers claimed to be raising the floor, when in reality they were lowering the ceiling.

In a country once fixated on excellence — meritocracy, exceptionalism, counting gold medals — one would think this result was intolerable. But despite technology and global competition driving an international arms race for excellence, the excellence of America’s youth has been systematically suppressed by the institutions whose explicit job is to develop it.

The Dismantling of Gifted Programs

In October 2021, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced plans to phase out the city’s gifted and talented program, which had admitted about 2,500 kindergartners annually based on testing. The program would be replaced with “Brilliant NYC,” which claimed it would accelerate learning for all 65,000 kindergartners. The rationale was straightforward: the existing merit-based program disproportionately served White and Asian students.

de Blasio’s plan was later reversed by incoming mayor Eric Adams, who instead expanded gifted programs to more schools. Now, however, history is repeating itself.

In early 2026, newly inaugurated Mayor Zohran Mamdani (New York’s first self-described socialist mayor) announced plans to eliminate gifted and talented admissions for kindergartners, echoing de Blasio’s earlier effort. Mamdani’s claim is essentially the same: testing five-year-olds for academic talent contributes to racial and socioeconomic inequity in schools. As usual, the administration has framed the change not as an elimination of advanced learning, but as a shift away from separating students early and toward providing “advanced learning for all”.

While gifted programs beginning in third grade would remain for now, the historical pattern is to phase out gifted programs on a cohort basis, i.e. each year, one more grade is eliminated. This minimizes outcry from current program participants who get to finish out their time, but ensures no new kids get the same opportunities.

The impulse behind de Blasio’s and Mamdani’s proposals — and similar efforts in San Francisco, Seattle, Washington D.C., and elsewhere — reveals a troubling assumption: if a program doesn’t serve all students proportionally, it shouldn’t serve any students at all.

This assumption is wrong on two levels.

First, it confounds equal outcomes with equal opportunity. Our education system’s goal is to maximize opportunity for every student to achieve their potential. Our schools are not intended to be equalizers, holding children back in order to right imagined wrongs.

Second, and more fundamentally, the assumption treats the existence of advanced academic programs as inherently suspect — as though any structure designed to serve high-ability students must be a mechanism of privilege rather than a recognition of genuine differences in academic need. This gets the relationship between excellence and equity exactly backwards.

When New York has eliminated gifted programs in the past, wealthy families enroll their kids in private schools, hire tutors, and find enrichment programs. A family earning $200,000 a year has options. A family earning $40,000 does not. For a low-income family with a gifted child, a public school gifted program may be the only opportunity that child has for intellectual challenge. Eliminating public gifted programs doesn’t remove opportunities for wealthy kids, it just leaves the poor child with nowhere to go.

Algebra for None

In San Francisco, students used to take algebra in 8th grade. If a student was sufficiently prepared, they could take it in 7th grade.

However, because some students failed algebra in middle school, the district decided that no students should be allowed to take algebra in middle school.

In 2014, San Francisco Unified School District eliminated accelerated middle school math, including the option for advanced students to take Algebra I in eighth grade. Every student, regardless of ability or preparation, would take the same math sequence. The goal was to equalize outcomes, reducing disparities in advanced math course-taking and closing achievement gaps.

It didn’t work.

Wealthy families turned to private tutoring, summer courses, private schools, or moved to other school districts. Rather than supporting the stated goal of “equity”, banning middle school algebra turned academic excellence into a luxury available only to the rich.

The assumption that we should slow down students who are ready for more is hard to justify on any theory of what schools are for. Schools exist to help each student learn as much as they can. Equity means equal opportunity, not artificially engineering outcomes by preventing kids from learning.

It took a decade of activism and an overwhelming vote at the ballot box to convince San Francisco to reverse their disastrous policy of anti-excellence. Math proficiency had declined, and officials acknowledged that the racial gap in advanced math hadn’t closed. The experiment had failed, but not before affecting thousands of students who were ready for more challenging coursework and never got the chance.

The Test-Optional Trap

When elite universities began dropping SAT and ACT requirements during the pandemic, it was hailed as a victory for equity. Standardized tests, critics argued, were biased tools that favored wealthy students. Making them optional would level the playing field.

As usual, the meritocracy critics were wrong. The reality has been exactly the opposite.

A National Bureau of Economic Research paper published in January 2025, based on Dartmouth’s admissions data from 2017–2022, found that high-achieving applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds who submitted test scores increased their admissions chances by a factor of 3.6x — from 2.9 percent to 10.2 percent. For first-generation college applicants, submitting scores increased their chances by 2.4x.

But many of these students weren’t submitting their scores. Only about 70 percent of first-generation students who scored 1500 or above submitted, compared to 90 percent of other applicants. These high-achieving students from disadvantaged backgrounds were being overly conservative, not realizing that their scores would actually be viewed favorably.

Meanwhile, when admissions officers reviewed applications without test scores, they placed greater weight on essays, extracurriculars, and letters of recommendation — precisely the areas where wealthier applicants have the largest advantages.

MIT found that test scores were one of the most effective tools for identifying socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lacked access to advanced coursework, but were ready for rigorous academic work. Yale’s internal research reached similar conclusions.

For all their flaws, standardized tests provide something crucial: an objective benchmark that cuts through the noise of inflated GPAs, variable school quality, and unequal access to extracurriculars. A low-income student who scores a 1500 despite coming from an under-resourced school signals something important about her academic ability that might not be visible anywhere else in her application.

Test-optional policies removed that signal. And in doing so, they made it harder for talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds to demonstrate what they could do.

The Pattern

These three examples share a common structure. In each case, a program or standard that identified and served high-achieving students was dismantled in the name of equity. In each case, the reform failed to achieve its stated goals. And in each case, the students who lost the most were those with the fewest alternatives.

It is damning enough that these policies have failed on their own terms. Even more pernicious, however, is that these policies reflect a vision of education in which excellence is not the goal but a threat. Progressive reformers claim that they want both equity and excellence. But they have consistently dismantled structures of excellence, choosing to artificially equalize outcomes instead. Rather than help every student reach their potential, they would rather ensure that no student has the opportunity to explore excellence.

When a school district eliminates gifted programs, it is saying it does not believe it’s the school’s job to challenge students who are ahead. When a district forces all students into the same math track regardless of readiness, it’s prioritizing the appearance of equity over the reality of learning. When a university drops testing requirements in admissions, it’s removing one of the few tools that allowed students without resources to prove what they could do.

To be serious about both equity and excellence, the path forward requires expanding access to gifted programs rather than eliminating them. Equity means being fair to all students, even high achievers - telling them that they belong, their academic needs matter, and they deserve the opportunity to be challenged every day in school.

It means investing in better identification methods that find talented students wherever they are, including in populations that traditional screening has missed. It means treating giftedness as a spectrum, rather than a binary. It means maintaining rigorous academic pathways in public schools so that students don’t have to leave the system to be challenged. And it means keeping standardized testing as one tool among several, while providing free test prep and support to students who can’t afford to purchase it privately.

Finally, it means recognizing that equity and excellence are not opposing values. A system that refuses to challenge its most capable students is not equitable.

The evidence is increasingly clear. MIT, Yale, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Princeton have all reinstated testing requirements. San Francisco reversed its algebra policy after a decade of failure. The debate over gifted programs continues, but the pattern is unmistakable: leveling down doesn’t work, and the students who pay the highest price are those who can least afford it.

Conclusion

The tragedy of these reforms is that they were born from genuine concern about inequality. But good intentions don’t exempt policies from scrutiny, and the actual effects of these reforms have been clear: they have made it harder for talented students to access the challenges and recognition they need to grow.

Equity in education doesn’t mean artificially engineering equal outcomes. It means ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to explore their full potential. For some students, that means additional support to master grade-level content. For others, it means access to advanced opportunities that will challenge them to grow beyond it.

Both matter. Both are part of genuine equity. And both deserve to exist in our public schools.

The choice isn’t between equity and excellence. It’s between reality and ideology, equalizing opportunity or artificially engineering equal outcomes. It’s between a vision of education that respects the diversity of student ability and one that pretends it doesn’t exist. When it comes to our children’s future, we need to support excellence instead of suppressing it.

Samantha Lippert is a third-grade teacher and the author of an awesome Substack herself. We came across this piece and thought it was one of the clearest practitioner accounts we’ve read of what happens when classroom instruction is actually aligned with learning science — so we asked if we could share it with our readers. She said yes!

This past week I was standing at my classroom’s small-group table, surrounded by nine students leaning forward in their chairs, eyes fixed on me, waiting for the next lesson.

What struck me in that moment wasn’t just their attention, but it was what they were ready to learn.

Every student sitting around that table had already mastered the core math facts traditionally taught in third grade. Addition and subtraction facts were automatic. Multiplication facts to 81 and division from 81, skills many students don’t master until much later in the year, were already fluent. Now, they were moving on to more complex mathematical work together, eager for the next challenge.

They weren’t asking if the work would be hard.

They were asking what came next.

Before beginning instruction, I paused and said, “I want you all to know how proud I am of you. You’re working on math skills above third-grade level. I’ve never had a group of students who mastered their facts like this and were still so excited to keep doing harder and harder things.”

Their faces lit up with smiles, not because the work was easy, but because they knew they had earned their way there.

That moment captured something powerful: students experiencing success not by chance, but through instruction intentionally aligned with how learning actually works.

The Question That Changed My Thinking

In math education, we often say students need “more practice.” More worksheets. More repetition. More time.

But this year, my classroom data pushed me to ask a different question: what if the problem isn’t the amount of practice, but the design of it?

At the beginning of the year, Acadience Math data showed wide variability in my third-grade class, with 44% of my students performing below benchmark. What stood out wasn’t a lack of understanding. Students often knew what to do. The issue was how much mental energy basic computation required. Counting strategies lingered, simple calculations took time, and by the time students reached problem-solving, their cognitive resources were already depleted.

Learning science explains this clearly: when foundational skills aren’t automatic, working memory is consumed before reasoning can even begin. Instead of asking students to try harder, I needed to change the instruction itself.

The Instructional Shift

This year, my classroom implemented a program developed by Brian Poncy, called Facts on Fire, a structured math fluency system grounded in cognitive science. The daily routine took just about four minutes, but it was intentionally designed. Students practiced skills at their individual instructional level, advanced only after demonstrating mastery, and engaged in brief, timed retrieval practice with ongoing progress monitoring .

The goal was never speed.

The goal was automaticity — effortless recall that allows students to focus on thinking rather than calculating.

Those four minutes became a protected part of Tier 1 instruction within my classroom. Differentiation was embedded into the structure itself, allowing students to access the same core instruction while progressing along individualized learning paths for their math facts.

Why This Works

Facts on Fire reflects how the brain actually learns. Students retrieve information from memory rather than reviewing it passively, strengthening neural pathways and making learning more durable. Since practice is brief and consistent, it is spaced rather than massed, leading to stronger retention and less forgetting.

Students work at the edge of their competence — challenged but not overwhelmed — which maximizes growth without cognitive overload. As automaticity develops, cognitive load decreases, freeing students to focus on problem solving, reasoning, and conceptual understanding.

Fluency doesn’t replace thinking. Fluency supports thinking.

What The Data Showed

By mid-year, the classroom data has told a clear story. In September, most students had mastered only basic addition facts, subtraction mastery was limited, and no students demonstrated mastery of advanced computation. By February, nearly all students had mastered foundational facts, subtraction skills expanded significantly, and many students progressed into multi-digit computation. Growing numbers reached multiplication and division fluency, and some advanced into higher-level algorithms.

This growth occurred within a heterogeneous classroom that included four students receiving special education services for Specific Learning Disabilities (SLD) in mathematics. These students participated fully in the same structured fluency routines as their peers as part of Tier 1 instruction, with individualized placement and mastery-based progression embedded into the system itself.

Automaticity develops through efficient retrieval. When practice is untimed, students can rely on compensatory strategies that allow completion without strengthening memory. Timed retrieval, when used intentionally, in short intervals and paired with mastery-based advancement, supports the neurological processes required for fluent recall.

For this reason, students with IEPs participated in the same timed instructional practice as their peers, while extended time remained available for assessments and evaluative tasks. This approach aligns with both learning science and the intent of accommodations: supporting access to learning rather than removing essential components of instruction.

Acadience Math benchmark data reflected the impact of this inclusive, science-aligned approach. From the beginning of the year to the middle of the year, students averaged approximately 63 points of growth, with individual gains ranging from modest increases to growth exceeding 100 points. Nearly every student demonstrated positive movement, and several transitioned from well-below benchmark into approaching or benchmark ranges. The percent of students below benchmark on Acadience went from 44% in September, to only 19% in February.

Notably, students who began the year with the lowest scores, including students receiving special education services, often demonstrated the largest gains. Systematic fluency instruction functioned as an equity lever, reducing opportunity gaps rather than reinforcing them.

What The Growth Revealed

The most important change wasn’t higher scores.

It was growth — academic and internal.

Students weren’t just getting faster at the same skills. They were advancing into increasingly complex mathematics. As automaticity increased, cognitive effort decreased, allowing students to take on harder problems with greater confidence and stamina. This progression mirrors exactly what learning science predicts when instruction includes retrieval practice, spaced repetition, mastery-based advancement, and immediate feedback.

Math fact fluency is often misunderstood as memorization. In reality, it functions as a cognitive support system. When foundational knowledge becomes automatic, persistence increases, frustration decreases, reasoning improves, and confidence grows. Automaticity doesn’t replace thinking, it creates the space for understanding.

That is why the growth didn’t stop at performance.

The biggest surprise wasn’t academic, it was emotional and motivational. As progress became visible and predictable, effort reliably led to success. Math stopped feeling like guessing and started feeling learnable.

That shift was most evident in the questions students began to ask. Instead of asking whether they were finished or how much time was left, students started asking, “What will I move onto next?” — often before they had fully mastered their current skill. They weren’t rushing the work. They were anticipating what came after it.

Those questions revealed something deeper. Students no longer viewed learning as a pass-or-fail moment. They understood it as a progression. Mastery wasn’t the finish line — it was a gateway.

That is what I later saw at the small-group table. The students leaning forward, eager for the next challenge, weren’t unusually motivated children or a “high” group by chance. They were students who had experienced success so consistently that they trusted the process. In learning-science terms, their self-efficacy had increased, and the expectation that effort leads to growth had become internalized.

They didn’t ask if they would grow.

They asked what came next.

And when students come to expect growth rather than fear failure, the classroom itself begins to change.

Coming Back to That Table

Later that day, I found myself thinking again about the nine students gathered around the small-group table — the same students working beyond third-grade expectations, leaning forward, asking for harder problems, eager for what came next.

That moment didn’t happen by accident.

It was the result of small, consistent instructional decisions grounded in learning science. Four intentional minutes a day. Clear goals. Immediate feedback. Practice designed to match how the brain actually learns.

Over time, those decisions changed more than skill level. They changed how students saw themselves. These students weren’t just faster with math facts. They had become learners who trusted the process of learning, who expected growth because they had experienced it again and again.

Standing there with them, the pattern was impossible to ignore. When instruction is aligned with learning science, success stops feeling like a surprise.

It becomes predictable.

I was standing at our small-group table, surrounded by nine students leaning forward in their chairs, eyes fixed on what they were ready to learn next.

Final Reflection

Educational improvement doesn’t always require sweeping reforms or longer lessons. Sometimes transformation begins with small routines grounded in strong evidence.

In our classroom, four intentional minutes a day changed how students experienced mathematics and, more importantly, how they experienced themselves as learners.

Read the full article below, or start with the key takeaways:

The question: When teachers unions fight to preserve institutional structures like seniority-based pay, does that actually serve students — or can labor interests and student learning come apart?

The backdrop: The United Educators of San Francisco struck for four days in February 2025, framing the strike as pro-student. Critics called it self-serving. Neither side engaged with the strongest available evidence.

The evidence: Three studies on Wisconsin’s Act 10 paint a complicated picture. Baron (2018) found short-run declines in student achievement after union power was reduced. Biasi (2021) and Biasi & Sandholtz (2025) found that districts replacing rigid union pay schedules with flexible ones saw long-run gains of 0.15–0.21 standard deviations — with the largest gains for disadvantaged students. Foy (forthcoming) found the same positive effects using a different method entirely.

The caveats: These are findings from one state with unusually rigid pay schedules. Flexible pay also widened the gender wage gap. The broader literature on unions and achievement is mixed. Short-run disruptions were real and shouldn’t be dismissed.

The problem: Union advocates pushing to repeal Act 10 aren’t engaging with this research at all. Neither are most critics of the UESF strike, who rely on accusations of bad faith rather than evidence about institutional design.

The bottom line: The equation “supporting unions = supporting teachers = supporting students” has a broken link. That doesn’t mean unions should be abolished — but it does mean they can’t be exempt from scrutiny on student outcomes, especially when the evidence cuts against the structures they’re fighting to preserve.

The strike last week by the United Educators of San Francisco was historic — the first in nearly half a century. Yet the back-and-forth spurred by the strike was nothing if not familiar. When the teachers union and its supporters claim that they strike on behalf of the students, critical parents and observers respond that it’s not about the children’s interests at all — only the union’s own interests.

In the UESF’s strike announcement on Monday, February 9th, the pro-student framing was front and center: “the growing vacancy and turnover crisis in SFUSD harms students every single day.” The argument was implicit but straightforward. Students need stability; stability means retaining good teachers; and retaining good teachers means higher wages and competitive benefits. Educators will leave if they can’t afford housing in the city or healthcare for their families, and the more who leave, the more those who stay become overloaded and under-resourced. None of this advances student learning. “We will return to our classrooms,” the strikers assure the reader, “the moment the District agrees to the conditions that stabilize our schools and protect the education our students deserve.”

The critics, in turn, claimed this framing was belied by their conduct, which appeared to aim less at stability than at leverage. Even if the worst anecdotes were misunderstandings or outliers, several well-established actions smacked of bad faith. An independent fact-finding report noted that the union “has not met its burden of proof” that the district could afford its demands. It also called UESF’s combined wage-and-benefits proposal “simply not an option,” and recommended “a conservative approach” to “survive State scrutiny.” The union rejected those findings and struck anyway. It declined Mayor Daniel Lurie’s and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s calls for a three-day delay so schools could remain open during continued negotiations. At 10 p.m. on the second night of the strike, the district had a new health care counter ready but the union left the table without reviewing it.

To union critics, a striking teacher’s sign that asked whether the rain was “Maria Su’s crocodile tears pretending she cares about our kids“ was rich with irony — couldn’t the same be charged of the union?

Now that the dust has settled, we must wait to see whether the $183 million deal can get past state fiscal advisers or proceed without layoffs. But the public commentary on the strike raises important questions about how we argue about teachers unions. When cash-strapped parents are suddenly forced to arrange for childcare, it’s easy to understand how ‘You don’t really care about students’ becomes a reflexive reaction. But it’s a rare thing for attributions of cynical motives to advance debate. Vanishingly few teachers enter the profession without caring for the well-being of their students. Most want what is best for students, and, to that extent, a teachers union must also ultimately represent what is best for students, so long as it faithfully represents what teachers want. It seems unlikely that UESF believes its tactics were, overall, bad for students but good for the union; more likely, they just sincerely believe that what’s good for the union is also good for the students.

If their goal is not just voicing frustration but successfully changing minds, critics of UESF should set intentions aside and focus on a more specific question: Do the institutional structures that teachers unions fight to preserve actually serve the students? Naturally, the union thinks the answer is yes. But what if the evidence is more complicated?

Act 10 & its Legacy

The most provocative data about the effects of teachers unions, for me, comes from studies on the impact of Wisconsin’s Act 10. Act 10 deserves some background. Passed in 2011 — when I was still attending high school in Green Bay, WI — Act 10 was unveiled by Governor Scott Walker as a “budget repair bill” aimed at addressing the state deficit; this would be achieved primarily by reducing compensation to public-sector employees. As a product of a progressive family that included multiple government employees, I was enraged. For us, supporting unions was supporting the working class; and
supporting teachers unions was supporting teachers, and supporting teachers was supporting students. The equation was uncomplicated.

That this battle was happening in Wisconsin made it feel especially significant. In 1959, Wisconsin became the first state to grant public employees the right to collectively bargain — a landmark in American labor history. Act 10 was a seismic reversal of that legacy. An existential threat to public-sector unions, the law limited collective bargaining to base wages capped at inflation, required teachers to contribute to their own pensions and healthcare, mandated annual union recertification elections, and prohibited automatic dues collection. More than 100,000 people protested in the Capitol. Fourteen Democratic state senators fled to Illinois to deny the quorum needed for a vote. A recall effort gathered more than 900,000 signatures.

I was angry at being a year too young to vote in that recall election; when the results came in, I was livid. Walker won by a larger margin than he did in his original election; after everyone saw how he’d treated public employees, how could he have even more support?

I carried a settled view of Act 10 for years: the unions and their supporters were right, Walker was wrong, and future data would confirm it. If you’d told me in 2011 that the law would be struck down fourteen years later — as it now has been, in October 2024, I would have predicted being thrilled. Recently, however, things got more complicated.

Act 10 offered something of a natural experiment for social scientists. While the law imposed strict limits on collective bargaining agreements, it did not cancel existing ones. Pre-existing CBAs remained in force until they expired, and since expiration dates varied across different Wisconsin school districts, some districts were exposed to the reforms immediately while exposure in others was delayed by months or years. Researchers could compare outcomes across districts with different exposure timings, controlling for the kinds of confounding factors that usually plague evaluations of public policy.

The first notable study exploiting this variation looked like a vindication for teachers unions. In 2018, economist E. Jason Baron found that “the reduction in union power associated with Act 10 reduced composite scores on the state’s standardized exam … by roughly 20% of a standard deviation” — a meaningful decline, and one concentrated in the lower half of the achievement distribution. The explanation appeared straightforward: the law triggered a sharp increase in teacher turnover and a reduction in salaries, both of which had disruptive effects on student achievement.

While Baron’s working paper was quickly cited by union-supportive outlets as evidence for the harms of Act 10, in it he stresses that its findings should be treated as “purely short-run” and “future research” is still necessary:

Importantly, because the identification strategy is structured so that the estimated treatment effects are immediate to the decline in unionization, the findings presented in this study should be interpreted as purely short-run and likely as a transitional effect from an old steady state to a new equilibrium. While I provide evidence that Act 10 had negative, disruptive effects on student achievement, I leave it to future research to fully characterize Wisconsin’s post-Act 10 long-run equilibrium. Nevertheless, declines in test scores, even in the short run, could have lasting effects on students.

Future research into the law’s disruptions did, in fact, complicate the picture considerably. In 2021, Yale economist Barbara Biasi published a (celebrated!) paper arguing that the Wisconsin school districts that replaced the rigid, seniority-based pay schedules that unions had negotiated with more flexible pay schedules in the wake of Act 10 attracted higher-performing teachers, as measured by their value-added contributions to student test score growth; lower-performing teachers, meanwhile, “either mov[ed] to districts which remained with the salary schedules or le[ft] the public school system altogether. As a result,” Biasi concludes, “the composition of the teaching workforce improved in FP districts. Effort exerted by all teachers also increased and, subsequently, test scores improved.

In 2025 follow-up, Biasi and co-author Wayne Sandholtz extended the analysis to five years post-implementation and to students grade 3–8, a broader and younger population than the high schoolers in Baron (2018). The results inverted Baron’s findings: after five years, average student test scores increased by 0.15–0.17 standard deviations, and by 0.21 for economically disadvantaged students.

Now, it is important to frame the contrast between these studies carefully. Baron (2018) captured a real transitional disruption: teachers left, schools were destabilized, and students struggled to adjust. However, what Biasi (2021) and Biasi & Sandholtz (2025) capture is also real: when the dust settled, Wisconsin students in the districts that had replaced union-backed pay schedules saw long-run gains — especially the disadvantaged.

Further evidence that Act 10 benefited student achievement comes from a current working paper by economist Morgan Foy, who used a different identification strategy entirely — union decertification elections rather than CBA expiration dates — and found the same positive achievement effects. Foy’s most provocative finding was about the mechanism, which in fact competes with the explanations offered by Biasi (2021) and Biasi & Sandholtz (2025): the gains appeared to come not primarily from replacing low-performing teachers with high-performing ones, but from increased productivity among the very same teachers. Foy also found lower-performing teachers were more likely to be union members. This is, to put it mildly, an uncomfortable finding for uncritical union supporters.

Some Caveats

Let me acknowledge what this evidence does not show. These are findings about one reform in one state; Wisconsin had a particular labor-market, a particular demographic profile, and had unusually rigid seniority-based pay schedules before Act 10. The broader academic literature on unions and student achievement is genuinely mixed. It would be too rash to generalize from Wisconsin to nationwide claims about the effects of weakening teachers unions on student learning.

Moreover, Biasi’s own work shows that, in addition to bringing higher test scores, flexible pay reforms also exacerbate a gender wage gap, mainly attributable to women being less likely to negotiate aggressively when offered a position. Notwithstanding its dampening effects on student achievement, collective bargaining served a pay equity function that it no longer can after Act 10. Flexible pay reforms also present a double-edged sword: although performance improves for disadvantaged students in the districts that attract high-performing teachers, some disadvantaged students in the districts they leave may lose out. Baron’s caution, too, remains a live concern: the students whose scores fall in the short term may still suffer lasting effects.

We cannot, then, characterize the impacts of Act 10 in Wisconsin schools in any tidy way. Just as it is unproductive to criticize teachers unions on the basis of alleged unsavory intentions, so is it too hasty to claim that these studies show unambiguously “good” or “bad” outcomes for student learning. But we simply will not make progress in our debates about teachers unions if we continue to ignore the findings that show negative effects on student achievement. Teachers unions will not reckon with the most robust studies until their critics start to rely on them.

In December 2024, a WI circuit judge ruled that by exempting all public-safety workers except teachers and other municipal employees from state restrictions on collective bargaining, major sections of Act 10 violated the state’s equal protection doctrine. Although a higher court stayed the ruling, union voices have celebrated the development. Yet absent from these statements is any engagement with the complications introduced by recent research. Studies have moved forward; advocate talking points have not.

Some critics of the Act 10 repeal efforts offer breakdowns of the resulting costs to school districts. But the costs that should concern education advocates aren’t just fiscal. They include the potential reversal of gains in student achievement — gains that were largest for the students who can least afford to lose them.

Progressives cannot credibly advocate for repealing Act 10 without at least acknowledging that there is strong evidence that it improved student achievement. Especially insofar as progressives remain committed to equity, they must also grapple with the finding that these benefits were largest for the most disadvantaged students. If you care about educational equity, you have to grapple with this. You may grapple with it and still conclude that restoring collective bargaining is the right call — that the distributional risks, the gender equity costs, the value of institutional worker voice, and the limitations of generalizing from one state outweigh the measured gains. That is a defensible position. But it is not the position the repeal coalition is taking. They are simply not engaging with the evidence at all.

That insight is valuable. But it also doesn’t resolve the deeper structural question for San Francisco and its public schools: even if the pension crisis were solved tomorrow, would union-negotiated pay schedules — the kind that reward seniority over effectiveness and protect lower-performing teachers from accountability — actually serve students? The evidence from Wisconsin suggests the answer is more complicated than anyone on that picket line wants to hear. Demanding that union policies do not harm student learning is not ipso facto anti- teacher; it is at least as “pro-student” as promoting stability in schools. The equation I grew up with — “supporting unions = supporting teachers = supporting students” — has a broken link. Supporting teachers and supporting students are not always the same thing, and the institutional structures of collective bargaining can drive a wedge between them.

I don’t wish for unions to be abolished, and I don’t believe that union leaders are all Evrart Claires. Unions provide educators real benefits, many of which may be justified independently from any instrumental relationship to student test scores. But those benefits do not exempt unions from scrutiny on student outcomes. And when unions resist the kind of pay flexibility that rigorous research shows improves learning — particularly for disadvantaged kids — they need to explain why, in terms that go beyond “worker dignity” and “the right to bargain.”

Whatever union structure ultimately prevails — in Wisconsin, in San Francisco, or anywhere else — it must not backtrack on the achievement gains the evidence has documented. If the price of restoring collective bargaining is reimposing rigid seniority schedules that drive effective teachers away and shield ineffective ones from accountability, then we are choosing adult interests over children’s learning. And if we do that while claiming it’s “all for the kids,” we should not be surprised when parents stop believing us.

The evidence is strong enough that I can no longer maintain the uncomplicated equation I grew up with. But it is also not strong enough to support the mirror-image certainty that unions are simply bad for kids. What it demands — of anyone who takes student learning seriously — is that we stop treating this as a settled question with tribal answers, and start treating it as what it actually is: a genuinely difficult problem, where the interests of workers and the interests of children can come apart, and where honest people have to decide what to prioritize when they do.

Read the full analysis below, or start with the key takeaways:

What it is: The first federal tax credit scholarship program. Donors give to nonprofit scholarship organizations (SGOs), get a dollar-for-dollar tax credit up to $1,700, and SGOs award scholarships to students for tuition, tutoring, supplies, and more.

What it isn’t: It’s not a voucher. No public money goes directly to parents. It’s a tax incentive for private giving.

Who’s eligible: Families earning up to 300% of area median income — roughly 85–90% of the population.

What’s new: No aggregate funding cap, nearly universal eligibility, minimal federal regulation of schools and SGOs, and a state opt-in structure with no single entity running the show. Taxpayers in state that don’t opt in can still get the tax credit by donating to SGOs operating in other states.

Where things stand: Five states have formally opted in. Twenty-eight governors say they will. The program starts January 1, 2027, but key rules — including SGO list deadlines and the per-taxpayer vs. per-return question — are still unresolved.

The bottom line: This program will neither save nor destroy American education. It will expand what existing SGOs already do, create incentives for new ones to form, and leave most oversight to the states. The details will determine whether it works.

On July 4, 2025, the first federal tax credit scholarship program in American history was signed into law as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill.

It’s a big deal, and almost nobody is explaining it well. There’s a lot of noise about what it is, what it isn’t, who it helps, who it hurts, and so on. Most of it is wrong, or at least incomplete.

I know this because I was part of the team that passed Illinois’ tax credit scholarship program. I wrote the bill and lobbied for its passage in the state’s capitol. I was also the primary liaison for rulemaking between the coalition of organizations that advocated for the bill and the Departments of Education and Revenue, who shared implementation duties.

Long story short, I know how these programs work and how they’re implemented. So if you want to understand what the federal tax credit scholarship program is actually all about, keep reading.

What It Isn’t and What It Is

Before I explain key parts of the program, it’s best to say what the law isn’t.

It’s not a voucher. A voucher takes public money and sends it to a parent to directly pay for education expenses. It’s also not a personal tax credit. A parent cannot claim it if they incur education expenses for their child.

A tax credit scholarship program is different. It incentivizes private individuals to donate to nonprofit organizations — called scholarship granting organizations, or SGOs — and gives those donors a credit on their taxes in return. The SGOs then turn around and award scholarships to eligible students for eligible expenses.

Most state-based tax credit scholarship programs only provide scholarships for tuition to private or outside-of-district public schools. Only three provide scholarships for additional education expenses. They are located in Florida, Missouri, and Utah.

It is these programs, which are often called tax-credit ESAs (short for education savings account), that the federal tax credit scholarship program is most like. The only difference is that tax-credit ESAs are only available to students who exit the public school system while federal tax credit scholarships are available to both public and private school students. Eligible expenses under the federal tax credit scholarship program are more expansive than just tuition — they mirror those allowed in the Coverdell Education Savings Account Program. These include tuition and fees; books, supplies, and equipment; special needs services; tutoring; uniforms; transportation; and supplementary items and services.

The Mechanics

Here’s a breakdown of how the money flows through the program:

A taxpayer donates cash to a qualified SGO. Under the new federal program, that donor gets a dollar-for-dollar, nonrefundable tax credit of up to $1,700 — meaning their federal tax bill drops by exactly the amount they donated, up to that cap. It’s not a deduction, which merely reduces your taxable income. It is a credit, which reduces your actual tax liability dollar-for-dollar. It’s one of the most generous federal tax incentives for charitable giving.

The SGO — which must be a 501(c)(3) nonprofit — is then required to use at least 90% of the money it takes in on actual scholarships. It can keep up to 10% for administrative costs. Those scholarships go to students whose household income doesn’t exceed 300% of their area’s median income.

That “area median” piece is important — it’s not a flat national number. It varies by where you live, which means the eligibility threshold in Manhattan ($437,400) looks very different from the threshold in rural Mississippi ($150,000). It also doesn’t adjust for family size, unlike the federal poverty level.

The SGO must also distribute scholarships to at least 10 students who don’t all attend the same school; it has to prioritize renewals and siblings before awarding new scholarships; and it cannot give scholarships to the relatives of board members or significant donors to the SGO.

What Makes the Federal Program Different

If you’ve followed tax credit scholarships at the state level, a lot of the federal program will look familiar. But there are several things about the federal version that break the mold.

First, let’s start with the cap, or rather the lack of one. Most state tax credit scholarship programs have an annual funding cap. Florida’s is over a billion dollars. Illinois’ was $75 million. These caps exist because state legislators want to control how much revenue they’re forgoing. The federal program has no aggregate cap. The $1,700-per-taxpayer credit is capped individually, but there’s no ceiling on how many taxpayers can claim it.

Estimates on how much the program will cost are all over the place. The Joint Committee on Taxation — the body that calculates the cost of federal tax policy — estimates that the credit will raise $563 million in its first year, and nearly $3.5 billion a year thereafter, resulting in a total $26 billion cost over ten years. Democrats for Education Reform — an advocacy organization that supports the program — estimates that the tax credit could cost as much as $24 billion a year.

It’s hard to know which of these will be closer to reality once the first year is complete. Most state-based tax credit scholarship programs, save a few, have high caps on individual donations. Illinois’, for example, allowed donations up to $1 million annually. Because of this, most SGOs solicit donations from wealthier individuals. The result? In most state-based programs, between 1–2% of taxpayers give.

The federal tax credit is an entirely different animal. The max a tax filer can get a credit for is $1,700. This means that in order for SGOs to raise significant money, they will need to have much larger scale taxpayer outreach operations. Many SGOs, especially those that only operate in a single state, have never done that before.

Second, the federal program lacks something most mature state programs have built in: a mechanism for directing more resources to the students who need them most. The law says students whose household income is at or below 300% of area median gross income are eligible, and that’s it.

That’s a departure from how many state programs handle it. Illinois’s tax credit scholarship program used a tiered system — families at lower income levels received larger scholarships, and the amount decreased as income went up. It was designed to ensure that the students with the greatest financial need got the most help. Texas’s new Education Freedom Account program — an ESA, not a tax credit, but instructive as a comparison — uses a multi-tiered prioritization system. Students with disabilities from lower-income households get first priority, followed by students from families at or below 200% of the federal poverty level, then those between 200% and 500%. Families above 500% are admitted last and capped at 20% of the program’s total funding.

The federal program makes no such choice. A family earning $290,000 in a high-cost metro area is treated the same as a family earning $40,000 in rural Appalachia. The SGO decides who gets a scholarship, how much they get, and on what basis — within the broad parameters of the law. Some SGOs will prioritize low-income families because that’s their mission and that’s what their donors expect. Others may not.

Third, there’s the eligibility threshold. At 300% of area median income, the pool of families whose children are eligible for a scholarship is significant. Some estimates put it at 85 to 90% of the population. This tracks with what’s been happening at the state level over the past few years, where the trend has been moving decisively toward universal eligibility. States like Florida, Arizona, Arkansas, and Alabama have already opened their programs to all students regardless of income. West Virginia and Iowa went universal out of the gate. While the federal program has a cap, it is nearly universal. This is not the tax credit scholarship program of yore, which focused almost exclusively on working class and low-income families.

Fourth, the federal program doesn’t impose many of the requirements on private schools and SGOs that are present in many state-based programs. An analysis by the Government Accountability Office in 2019 found that nearly two-thirds of states require schools to be accredited by the state or a state-approved entity and 50% of states require private schools to give their scholarship students the state test or a nationally normed test in order to participate. The federal tax credit scholarship program has no such requirements.

The same is true for SGO regulations. While they do have to ensure that they are giving scholarships to eligible students for eligible expenses, and are not spending more than 10% on administrative costs, SGOs do not have to meet the same requirements found in state-based programs. Case-in-point: 86% of states require SGOs to undergo a financial audit or independent financial review in order to participate in their tax credit scholarship programs. The federal program does not.

Furthermore, there are no regulations on non-school education providers. Who can tutor under the federal tax credit program? The law doesn’t say.

Compare that to Florida. Under Florida law, part-time tutors receiving scholarship funds must hold a valid Florida educator’s certificate, an adjunct teaching certificate, a bachelor’s or graduate degree in the subject area they’re teaching, or certification from a nationally recognized research-based training program approved by the state Department of Education. Full-time private tutors have additional requirements — they must comply with attendance recordkeeping, reporting to the state board of education, and limits on how many students they can serve at once.

Lastly, there’s the opt-in structure. The federal government created the program, but it doesn’t run it. States have to affirmatively choose to participate, and the governor — or whoever state law designates — is the one who makes that call. There’s no federal agency overseeing day-to-day operations. The Treasury Department and IRS handle the tax credit side. The states handle the SGO side. If you’re looking for a single entity that’s solely accountable for the program, you won’t find one.

One final note on the opt-in. If a Governor — or the entity the law designates — decides not to participate in the program, it does not prevent taxpayers in their state from donating to SGOs in other states. It only prevents SGOs in their states from raising donations through the tax credit and giving scholarships under the program. This fact has been a key argument for advocacy groups wanting Democratic governors to opt-in. It’s one that was mentioned by Colorado Governor Jared Polis when he was interviewed by the 74 about why he chose to have his state opt-in even when other Democratic governors are choosing not the participate:

“I think most, if not all, Democratic governors will get there as they learn about the chance to boost charitable contributions in their state. If there are states that don’t, for some reason, people in those states can still give to charities in states like Colorado. In other words, taxpayers everywhere will be able to get the tax credit. But if a particular state doesn’t opt in, then the donors in that state would be giving out of state. I do believe states will opt in as they see the opportunity for additional donations to help at-risk kids and middle-class kids in their state.”

Where Things Stand

The program doesn’t go live until January 1, 2027, but the machinery is already moving.

On December 12, 2025, the IRS issued Revenue Procedure 2026-6, which created the process for states to make an “advance election” to participate. The mechanism is straightforward: submit IRS Form 15714, a simple one-page form that signals your state’s intent to opt in. The form doesn’t commit a state to anything binding on its own — it’s essentially a statement of intent. To actually activate the program, states must later submit a list of qualified SGOs to the Treasury Department. That second step — the one that actually matters — doesn’t have a deadline yet. The IRS has said it will provide guidance on the timeline and procedures in the future. So right now, we’re in a strange limbo: states are raising their hands, but nobody’s been told when to show up or what to bring.

As of early 2026, five states have formally submitted Form 15714: Virginia, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, and Montana. Two more — Alabama and Nebraska — have signed executive orders signaling participation, but haven’t filed the paperwork. Another eight — Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas — have said they plan to participate but haven’t taken official action. In total, 28 governors have indicated they’ll opt in. Four have said they won’t: New Mexico, Oregon, Wisconsin, and Arizona, where the governor vetoed opt-in legislation. The remaining 18 governors and the mayor of D.C. haven’t announced a decision.

The political pattern is roughly what you’d expect. Republican-led states are moving quickly while Democratic governors are more cautious — but, it’s not a clean partisan split. Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, has said he plans to opt in, calling it “free money.“ North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Josh Stein, vetoed a legislative opt-in bill, but said he’d participate once the federal government issues guidance.

Virginia is the state worth watching most closely right now. Before leaving office, Governor Glenn Youngkin submitted Form 15714 to the Treasury Department. But, he did something extra — he submitted an initial list of SGOs. He started with eight organizations — two Virginia-based, six national — and added five more within a week, bringing the total to 13. The IRS made clear that it wouldn’t actually process any SGO list submitted with the advance election form, so Virginia’s list was more of a political statement than a regulatory action. But, it sets the template for what participation looks like in practice.

What This Will Actually Look Like in Practice

If you listen to the loudest voices on either side of this debate, you’d think the federal tax credit scholarship is either going to save American education or destroy it. It’s going to do neither. What it’s going to do is something much more mundane, more complicated, and more human than either side wants to admit.

Let’s start with what’s probably not going to happen. The nightmare scenario critics love — wealthy donors funneling money to SGOs so rich kids can attend elite prep schools on the public’s dime — doesn’t match how these programs actually work. The families sending their kids to $40,000-a-year private schools aren’t waiting around for a scholarship funded by $1,700 donations. The income eligibility threshold is generous, yes, but the scholarship amounts that SGOs typically award don’t cover full tuition at high-end schools, and most established SGOs specifically target low-income families. The plumbing of this system — the intake forms, the income verification, the partner school networks — is built around families who need help.

What’s more likely is that SGOs are going to keep doing what they’ve already been doing, just with a new funding stream. Organizations like ACE Scholarships and Children’s Scholarship Fund have been awarding private school scholarships for decades. They have infrastructure, staff, partner school relationships, and waitlists. The federal tax credit gives their existing donors a new incentive to give and potentially brings new donors to the table. In states that already have tax credit scholarship programs, the federal credit will layer on top of what’s already there. An SGO in Florida or Alabama isn’t going to reinvent itself. It’s going to use the additional revenue to serve more families off its waitlist or increase award amounts. For these organizations, this is a capacity expansion, not a paradigm shift.

That’s the optimistic version, and in a lot of cases it’ll be accurate. But here’s where my experience makes me nervous. Not every SGO is a well-run nonprofit with a 20-year track record. The federal program is going to create an enormous financial incentive for new SGOs to form, and not all of them will be good actors. When you create a dollar-for-dollar tax credit with no aggregate cap, you are building a magnet for money. And, where money flows, opportunists follow. There will be SGOs that spend too much on overhead and not enough on scholarships. There will be private schools that see this as a revenue stream first and an educational mission second. That’s not a reason to kill the program. But it is a reason to take the oversight question seriously, and right now, the federal law leaves most of that to the states.

An additional question is to what extent public and charter school students will benefit. After all, scholarships can fund tutoring, after-school programs, technology, transportation, and other expenses for these students. That’s technically true. It’s not entirely theoretical either — some of it is already happening. Step Up, Virginia!, one of the SGOs on Virginia’s list, explicitly serves both private and public school students, offering scholarships for private school tuition alongside funding for public school tutoring and assistance. EducationSuperHighway, another organization on the list, has spent its entire existence focused on public school connectivity and infrastructure.

But whether public school participation happens at any meaningful scale is a different question. The vast majority of the SGO ecosystem that exists today was built to serve private school families. That’s what most of these organizations know how to do. They have relationships with private schools. Their donor bases care about private school access. Their application processes, income verification systems, and scholarship distribution models are all designed around private school tuition. The organizations currently serving public school students in this space are the exception, not the rule.

Here’s a possible solution. Nothing in the federal law prevents public school district foundations — the 501(c)(3) nonprofits that already exist to raise private money for public schools — from registering as SGOs. These foundations are already set up to receive tax-deductible donations and distribute funds for educational purposes within their districts. If a district foundation qualifies as an SGO, it could accept donations under the federal tax credit and use those dollars to fund tutoring, after-school programs, technology, and other eligible expenses for students already in public schools. Similarly, nothing prevents public or charter school teachers from serving as tutors under the program. A teacher who tutors students outside of contract hours could be paid with scholarship funds, creating a new revenue stream for educators and a new service channel for families — all within the public school ecosystem. The infrastructure for this already exists in most communities. What’s missing is the awareness that it’s an option and the willingness of district leaders and state officials to build it into their SGO frameworks.

What to Watch Going Forward

There are a handful of things I’d be watching closely if I were a parent, an educator, a state official, or just someone who wants to know whether this program is going to work.

SGO List Deadlines

The IRS still hasn’t announced when states need to submit their finalized SGO lists to solidify their advance elections. That deadline will be the first real pressure point. Filing Form 15714 is easy — it takes 43 minutes to complete, according to the IRS. Building a vetted list of qualified SGOs that meet the statutory requirements is a different animal entirely. States that moved fast to file the advance election may find themselves scrambling when the actual deadline drops. Any state that fails to submit its SGO list in time gets locked out for 2027. No SGO list means no qualified organizations. No qualified organizations means no scholarships. The clock hasn’t started yet, but when it does, it’s going to move quickly.

What States Layer on Top

The federal law is deliberately thin on requirements for participating schools and SGOs. That means the real regulatory framework is going to be written by the states. The Treasury is currently evaluating how to handle this. Will it allow states to add nondiscrimination provisions, financial reporting requirements, academic accountability measures, or limits on who can be served, or will it require governors to serve more of a ministerial function, simply collecting the list of SGOs who qualify and submitting them to the Department?

The Virginia Question

Governor Youngkin opted Virginia in and submitted an SGO list on his way out the door. Governor Spanberger, a Democrat, now owns a program she didn’t choose. Does she leave it alone? Opt-out? Try to slow-walk implementation? What she does — and how the federal government responds — will set a precedent for every other state where a new governor inherits an opt-in decision made by a predecessor.

New SGO Formation

The existing SGOs that are included on Virginia’s list have track records you can evaluate. What I’m watching for is the wave of new organizations that will inevitably form prior to the program going live. A dollar-for-dollar uncapped federal tax credit is a powerful incentive, and it’s going to attract both mission-driven nonprofits and people who see an opportunity to skim 10% off the top of a new revenue stream. The first major scandal involving a poorly run SGO will be a defining moment for the program. How quickly it comes — and how states and the IRS respond — will shape public trust for years.

Donor Math

Here’s something most people haven’t thought about yet. The statute says the credit is up to $1,700 per taxpayer. For a married couple filing jointly, the assumption has been that means $3,400 — one credit per spouse. But that’s not settled. Treasury is currently working through whether the $1,700 limit applies per taxpayer or per return, and the answer has significant implications for the program’s fundraising potential. If it’s per return, you’ve just cut the maximum contribution from married couples in half.

Whatever the limit ends up being, it represents a fundamentally different model from how state-level tax credit scholarship programs have historically worked. Most state programs have relied on a smaller number of larger donors — businesses and wealthy individuals making five- and six-figure contributions. The federal program’s individual cap means it needs volume: millions of small donors each giving $1,700. But will they? Claiming a tax credit requires more effort than dropping money in a collection plate, and most Americans have never heard of a SGO. The program’s reach depends on whether these organizations can market themselves to an entirely new donor base. That’s a massive awareness and logistics challenge, and the answer will determine whether this program is a rounding error or a genuine force in reshaping K-12 education.

The 90/10 Question

The federal law requires SGOs to spend at least 90% of their revenue on qualifying scholarships, keeping no more than 10% for administrative costs. That sounds straightforward until you start asking what counts as revenue. Most established SGOs don’t operate on a single funding stream. They receive money from state tax credit programs, private philanthropy, corporate giving, endowment income, and soon, the federal tax credit. The question the Treasury is working through is whether the 90/10 requirement applies only to qualified contributions received under the federal program, or to the SGO’s entire operating budget.

The distinction is enormous. If it applies only to dollars raised through the tax credit, a SGO can maintain its existing overhead structure funded by other revenue streams and keep the tax credit money almost entirely dedicated to scholarships. But, if the Treasury interprets the requirement to apply to all revenue, it could create a serious problem for SGOs that have been operating sustainably for years. Organizations that spend 20% of their total budget on administration would suddenly be out of compliance, even if every federal dollar they receive goes directly to scholarships. It could force established SGOs to restructure their finances or, worse, discourage them from participating altogether. In addition, it would be particularly punishing for smaller organizations that don’t have the economies of scale to run on a 10% margin.

Where This Leaves Us

The federal tax credit scholarship program is coming. It will begin on January 1, 2027.

Whether the state you live in has opted-out, opted-in, opts in tomorrow, or holds out for final guidance, the federal tax credit scholarship is now a part of the tax code, and it’s going to reshape the K-12 education landscape in ways that aren’t fully predictable yet.

What I know from having done this at the state level is that the details nobody wants to talk about are the ones that matter most, especially the rules. That’s where this program will succeed or fail.

I support states opting-in to the program. I wouldn’t have spent years writing, lobbying for, and passing a tax credit scholarship program in Illinois if I didn’t.

However, I didn’t write this piece to convince you to support it, too. I wrote it because the conversation around the federal tax credit scholarship has been dominated by advocates selling a dream and opponents selling a disaster, and neither version is particularly useful.

If this new program from the One Big Beautiful Bill is going to help students as much as it possibly can, then parents and policymakers need to understand how it works and what it can realistically do.

When DeepSeek released R1 in early 2025, the model matched OpenAI’s performance at a fraction of the cost. American observers asked how a small Chinese startup could challenge Silicon Valley’s dominance. Last week’s viral Financial Times piece proposed an answer: China’s decades-long investment in its talent development pipeline.

DeepSeek’s team of 100+ engineers were almost all products of China’s “genius class” system — a nationwide network of intensive STEM programs that annually selects roughly 100,000 high-ability teenagers for specialized training. Nearly everyone on the team was an International Science Olympiad medalist. In 2025, of 23 students China sent to the Olympiads, 22 received gold medals.

The pipeline isn’t just producing talent for the AI race. The most recent Critical Technology Tracker report, published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, reveals that China has replaced the US as the global leader in research output: China now leads in 57 of 64 critical technologies, 24 of which are considered “at high risk of a Chinese monopoly.” Even within the US, tech companies with “leading or strong positions in AI, quantum and computing technologies” employ more researchers who come from China (38%) than from the US itself (37%).

While continuing to welcome high-skilled immigrants is essential for driving our country’s STEM success, it is not enough for us to settle for only drawing talent from overseas. It is time to get serious about serving the eager gifted students at home.

An education crisis in a Cold War

The launch of Sputnik 1 threw the US federal government into a state of emergency. When the National Science Foundation Act was passed seven years prior, in 1950, the intention had been to advance scientific research and education in order to maintain America’s postwar dominance on the international stage. Now, in 1957, the US felt the urgent need to catch up. Out of this need came the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), which directed federal funding toward providing American students the educational support and rigorous training required to make America a powerhouse of science and technology.

The public was concerned too. Popular media quickly seized on the idea that America’s school system, built around uniform pacing and broad access, was quietly neglecting all students, with the effects most visible among its highest-achieving. Newspapers and magazines warned that students were sitting in classrooms that prioritized fun, frivolity and anti-intellectual coursework over excellence, leaving future scientists, engineers, and innovators under-challenged. Few outlets captured — and amplified — this fear more effectively than Life magazine, which ran a widely read five-part series examining the educational aims of America’s public schools. The series profiled remarkable young students while sharply questioning whether American schools were capable of developing their potential. Through compelling storytelling and iconic photography, Life framed all children as the national asset most in need of intentional investment rather than blithe disregard, with special attention paid to the unmet potential of the nation’s brightest students. The message resonated with a public already rattled by Sputnik: American excellence will not be self-executing.

Yet just one decade later, members of congress wondered where all that initiative had gone. The country’s priorities had shifted; the fears Sputnik had inspired of being left behind had subsided, and were replaced by concerns about students struggling the most in school. While these latter concerns were noble, on the federal level, they came with a forgotten appreciation for the condition and needs of the gifted and talented.

A blueprint ignored: the Marland Report

In 1969, Sen. Jacob Javits (D-NY) introduced legislation, cosponsored by Rep. John Erlenborn (R-IL), that would require the U.S. Commissioner of Education to assess and report on the state of gifted education. His message to the Senate was the following:

“Today, a decade since the passage of NDEA, the Federal effort toward meeting the needs of the gifted and talented has diminished to the point that there is not one single Federal law or program devoting significant resources toward the education of gifted and talented youth, nor does the U.S. Office of Education employ anyone with responsibility in this area.”

It is hard to overstate just how comprehensive the report was — all 50 states were surveyed, numerous leading researchers were consulted, the longitudinal data of Project TALENT’s approximately 450,000 high school students were analyzed, and four thorough case studies were produced of model gifted programs in California, Connecticut, Georgia, and Illinois.

The report’s findings were striking:

• Of the nation’s 1.5-2.5 Million gifted students, only a fraction received appropriate services

• Differentiated gifted education was a low priority at federal, state, and local levels

• Existing state laws were ineffective

• Identification of gifted children was hampered by “apathy and hostility” among teachers and staff

• Most strikingly, gifted children “can suffer psychological damage and permanent impairment of their abilities” equal to or greater than other underserved populations when not put in an appropriate education environment

In response, the report offered a number of specific recommendations:

• Define gifted and talented children in federal law

• Establish dedicated federal leadership and staff for gifted education

• Provide categorical funding and support through existing laws like the Elementary and Secondary Education Act

• Conducting national surveys of effective programs

• Support research, personnel training, model demonstration projects, and state capacity-building

• Prioritize identification and services for underserved groups

• Initiate immediate activities to build infrastructure, including program development and evaluation

As a result, Congress established the Office of Gifted and Talented within the U.S. Office of Education (predecessor to the Department of Education) in 1973. This provided some federal coordination and modest grants for demonstration projects, teacher training, and program development — aligning with recommendations for leadership and model initiatives.

It also began limited categorical funding under the Education Amendments of 1978, with appropriations reaching about $6–18 million cumulatively in some periods, supporting special projects and addressing underserved populations to some degree.

Unfortunately, much of the early infrastructure was dismantled during the Reagan era, when federal education funding shifted from categorical grants to block grants. As a result, federal money for gifted education disappeared overnight.

Years later, in 1988, Sen. Javits introduced the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Act. It provided dedicated funding for research and demonstration projects; grants to states, districts, and institutions; and a national research center on gifted education.

However, the program’s scale remains woefully inadequate. Annual appropriations have typically hovered in the $13–17 million range (e.g., $16.5 million in FY 2024 and similar levels in prior cycles), a minuscule fraction — roughly 0.02% — of the overall federal K-12 education budget. This tiny investment supports only targeted research and grants rather than providing any direct or broad funding to local school districts for gifted programs.

Even more troubling is the fact that it faces perennial threats of elimination: it has been repeatedly targeted for zeroing out in presidential budget proposals (including in FY 2026) and House appropriations bills, and often requires sustained advocacy to keep it alive.

The Javits Act was a welcome win for advanced education. But it’s far from a national talent development policy. It’s a tiny, discretionary grant program that’s perpetually underfunded and repeatedly targeted for elimination in budget proposals.

Untapped potential

The lack of a coherent, intentional talent-development policy causes the US to systematically lose high-potential talent. This is especially true for high-achieving students (HALO) from low-income families.

One of the clearest illustrations of America’s talent loss comes from the landmark “Lost Einsteins” research by Opportunity Insights. By linking tax records, school data, and patent filings across more than one million individuals, researchers discovered something striking: children from wealthy families are far more likely to become inventors than equally high-performing peers from low-income backgrounds. The gap isn’t driven primarily by ability. It’s driven by exposure. High-achieving students from disadvantaged families often lack access to mentors, enrichment opportunities, and innovation networks that help transform raw academic talent into scientific or entrepreneurial breakthroughs.

The scale of this loss is staggering. The researchers estimate that if children from low-income families invented at the same rate as the wealthy, America’s innovation rate would quadruple.

Education research on high-achieving, low-income students reveals a parallel pattern earlier in the talent pipeline. Recent Fordham Institute research describes a “leaky pipeline” in which HALO students demonstrate academic excellence in early grades, but steadily lose access to the advanced coursework, enrichment, and institutional supports that drive long-term success. In Ohio, for example, HALO students are outnumbered by more affluent high-achieving peers by roughly three-to-one in elementary school, but that gap widens to six-to-one at four-year colleges and ten-to-one at highly selective colleges. These disparities are strongly linked to unequal access to opportunity: HALO students are 26 percent less likely to enroll in advanced middle-school math, 34 percent less likely to take AP, IB, or dual-enrollment courses, and 44 percent less likely to receive gifted services. Yet participation in these advanced opportunities dramatically improves outcomes, with even a single AP or IB course associated with a 29-percentage-point increase in four-year college enrollment among HALO students.

Much of this is the result of HALO students not being identified early-on in school. Research by Jason Grissom, Christopher Redding, and Joshua F. Bleiberg found that a high-achieving student in the top socioeconomic quintile is about twice as likely to receive gifted services as a student in the lowest socioeconomic quintile in the same school even when the students are achieving at similar levels in math and reading.

Taken together, these findings suggest that the United States does not lack talent — it lacks systems that reliably identify, cultivate, and sustain that talent. Countries with explicit talent-development strategies treat high-ability students as a national resource, investing in early identification, accelerated learning pathways, and mentorship pipelines that connect promising students to advanced educational and career opportunities.

A good place to start

To be clear, adopting a China-Style talent development system would likely be far from ideal in the United States. The human cost of China’s high-pressure system is well-documented, and it is a highly centralized state. We need something more, though, than the current hodge-podge of state and local policies.

A bill, called the Advanced Coursework Equity Act and championed by Rep. Cory Booker (D-NJ), is a good (albeit imperfect) place to start.

At its most basic level, the legislation creates a large federal grant program designed to help states and school districts expand access to advanced academic coursework. That includes Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, dual enrollment, honors classes, and gifted and talented programs. The legislation strongly encourages universal screening, which means evaluating all students for advanced learning opportunities rather than relying on teacher referrals or parent advocacy — two mechanisms that consistently favor families with greater time, information, and social capital.

The bill also recognizes something policymakers too often overlook: access alone is not enough. Many students who are capable of succeeding in advanced coursework never enroll. Some attend schools that simply do not offer advanced classes, while others face exam fees or tuition costs for dual enrollment that make participation financially unrealistic.

In order to be eligible for grants, states and districts receiving funding would be required to track who is participating in advanced coursework and who is succeeding once they enroll. That kind of data matters. By requiring better reporting, the legislation attempts to move conversations about excellence from rhetoric to measurable outcomes.

None of this makes the bill a silver bullet, though. It focuses heavily on middle and high school coursework rather than earlier talent development, where achievement gaps often begin. It does not fully address the teacher pipeline challenges that limit the availability of advanced coursework, particularly in rural and high-poverty schools. And, like most federal education legislation, it relies on grant incentives rather than establishing a comprehensive national strategy.

Still, progress in education policy rarely begins with sweeping changes. It begins with targeted reforms that address obvious failure points. Legislation like the Advanced Coursework Equity Act is a good first-step towards developing a national talent development policy.

American talent in the 21st century

If there is a single lesson running through America’s history of talent development, it is that we tend to act only when external pressure forces us to confront our complacency. Sputnik jolted the country into recognizing that intellectual excellence required cultivation. Today, the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence and the emergence of global competitors like China present a similar moment of clarity. The question is not whether the United States has the raw talent to compete; the question is whether we are willing to build systems capable of finding and developing that talent.

The historical record shows that we have repeatedly identified the problem and repeatedly failed to sustain the solution. The Marland Report laid out a remarkably clear blueprint more than fifty years ago, warning that neglecting gifted students would carry both economic and human costs. The research since then has only strengthened.

The Advanced Coursework Equity Act does not solve all these challenges, and it wisely avoids copying the rigid and punishing Chinese talent system. What it does offer is a more balanced path forward — one that expands opportunity while protecting flexibility, local autonomy, and student well-being. By encouraging universal screening, increasing access to rigorous coursework, and demanding real accountability, the legislation sets us on the right path for future wins.

A true American talent strategy will require broader investments in early enrichment, teacher development, and mentorship networks connecting education to innovation and economic growth. But every durable policy architecture must begin with a strong foundation.

The AI era will reward nations that can systematically discover and cultivate their most capable minds. If the US hopes to remain a global leader in innovation and prosperity, it must move beyond episodic bursts of concern and toward a sustained commitment to developing talent at scale.

Let’s start with some good news. In her January State of the State address, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced her “Back to Basics” proposal for math instruction. Hochul plans to require the New York State Education Department (NYSED) to “provide instructional best practices to school districts” that “equip teachers across the state with evidence-based teaching techniques and materials.” And in NYC, new Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels is pledging a renewed focus on automaticity with basic math facts. “Knowing your times tables is very, very important in math,” Samuels told CBS. “You can’t factor on your fingers.” Even as Samuels helped roll out the city’s discovery-based math curriculum, NYC Solves, he now seems to acknowledge the value of prioritizing clear instruction that ensures fluency.

Now for the bad news. Even as Hochul and Samuels tout a return to fundamentals, the statewide education apparatus remains committed to the opposite message.

Back in October, we featured a guest post by professor Ben Solomon about his petition to retract the NYSED numeracy briefs. Commissioned as part of NYSED’s “Numeracy Initiative“ and written by Dr. Deborah Loewenberg Ball, the University of Michigan education professor behind TeachingWorks, the briefs were supposed to “highlight the evidence-based features and best practices of effective mathematics instruction.”

Yet despite their “evidence-based” framing and purported scientific rigor, the briefs stunned many educators by ignoring key research and regurgitating pernicious inaccuracies about effective math instruction. On October 10, Solomon’s petition (boasting 216 signatories at time of writing) was sent to Commissioner Betty Rosa. Then, on October 22, NYSED released its response. This response, written by Ball with an introduction by Assistant Commissioner JP O’Hare, doubled down on the contents of the briefs and accused the petitioners of politically motivated “misinformation.” Three months later, the briefs remain unchanged; under the aegis of “peer-reviewed, evidence-based research,” NYSED is marketing contested pedagogy as settled science.

In his piece, Solomon asked how it was possible that “university-affiliated professional development providers double-down on practices shown decades ago to be ineffective, ignoring hundreds of published empirical studies and meta-analyses.” Today, we explore how it is possible for the purveyors of bad pedagogy to defend their ideas with the imprimatur of a state’s education agency.

Ball’s response is disappointing, but it is also instructive. It shows us how advocates of these ideas continue to dodge criticism, and it shows us what arguments to expect when we see this happen again elsewhere.

Ball’s Defense

The petition to retract the numeracy briefs identifies key ways in which they depart from recommendations grounded in rigorous research. As Solomon explained, good, evidence-based briefs would emphasize:

1. Ensuring fluency in core skills through practiced repetition and timed exercises;

2. Measuring student learning with regular, timed assessments to inform instruction;

3. Explicitly teaching and modeling fundamental principles; and

4. Deploying exploratory, inquiry-based learning only after explicit instruction and only for students who are competent with the basics.

The reasoning behind each of these points is straightforward and well-supported. Later math proficiency requires mastery of basic math facts to the point of fluency or automaticity; without these basics committed to memory, students will struggle with more complicated work. Deliberate practice with brief, timed exercises is among the most effective ways to ensure this basic fluency, and brief, timed assessments are a reliable gauge of how much students have learned. Moreover, clear, explicit instruction consistently leads to higher learning gains than competing approaches, especially for struggling students. While inquiry-based “discovery” approaches can benefit students who already grasp the fundamentals, they leave students without sufficient prior knowledge even further behind.

The NYSED briefs diverge from the research consensus on every one of these points.

A comprehensive response to the petition would need to justify why the best-supported instructional practices are not highlighted in due proportion to their effectiveness, why less effective practices are emphasized disproportionately, and why the research base on which the briefs rely omits the highest-quality evidence. Specifically, Ball would need to explain what basis she has for deemphasizing basic fluency, practiced repetition, timed assessment, and explicit instruction, while at the same time promoting inquiry-based approaches without cautioning about their limitations.

To be convincing, Ball would need to show either that the evidence in favor of the practices highlighted in the petition is contradicted by competing high-quality evidence, or that the evidence favoring the recommendations in the briefs is at least strong enough to warrant emphasizing them at the expense of those highlighted in the petition.

Ball’s response offers no such convincing justification. Although her response is structured as a point-by-point rebuttal to three discrete criticisms and four alleged inaccuracies, this structure obscures more than it clarifies. Ball’s responses to the first three criticisms all deploy the same argumentative move. Call it the “Scope-and-Methods Two-Step”: first, she defines mathematical proficiency broadly enough to claim that the petition’s evidence only addresses one component (procedural fluency), and is thus too narrowly scoped. Then she claims studying the remaining components of math proficiency require entirely different research methods — methods that conveniently cannot be held to the same exactly empirical standards as those in procedural fluency research.

This two-step strategy allows Ball, on the one hand, to dismiss any rigorous evidence as “narrow” without engaging with it directly, and on the other, to exempt the recommendations in the briefs from proper scrutiny. In doing so, she makes her position unfalsifiable by any evidence brought to bear in the petition, and only then responds to the individual charges of inaccuracy.

Let’s see the Two-Step in action.

Dancing the Two-Step

“Criticism #1: The recommendations are not based on research.”

Consider Ball’s argument against what she identifies as the first criticism from the petition. The petition charges that the briefs fail to cite “the results of rigorous empirical studies”; the studies they do cite include “only 2 experimental studies and 2 meta-analyses,” and of the research they cite that is actually peer-reviewed, that research “is overwhelmingly articles reflecting personal experiences and opinions.” Given the briefs’ repeated framing as “evidence-based,” this is a serious charge.

How does Ball respond? She asserts that the petition only cites studies addressing how to develop “speed and accuracy,” which are only one component of math proficiency, whereas the NYSED briefs cite studies that address ways to develop all the components of math proficiency; and since, moreover, studies of different components appeal to “different methods,” the studies cited in the petition cannot contradict recommendations based on studies cited in the briefs:

[Although] the petition claims that only two experimental studies and two meta-analyses were used as the basis for the briefs, ... such methods are not the only kinds of research that are appropriate for decisions about mathematics instruction. Brief 1 … specifies … different methods and kinds of studies appropriate for different questions and components of mathematics instruction. For example, while … the development of speed and accuracy, may be appropriately studied through randomly controlled trials, other aspects, such as the development of the use of mathematical representations, language, and proving, require investigation in particular contexts of classroom learning across time. Similarly, issues related to grouping students, classroom discourse, and the use of manipulatives require close analysis of teaching in order to produce usable knowledge for instruction. … In contrast to this broad application of evidence, the citations included with the letter represent a narrow segment of the research ... [and] are not enough to address the complexity of mathematics teaching and learning.

Notice what this response does not do. This response does not refute, or even address, the petition’s claim that “performing fluently or automatically all the foundational skills” is the necessary foundation for “advanced math performance” (p. 3); neither does she show that we have reason to doubt the validity of the rigorous studies that support that claim. Instead, she uses the Two-Step to escape the responsibility to address the claim at all: “the development of speed and accuracy” is simply one among multiple “different … components of mathematics instruction,” and because these different components require “different methods,” the rigorous research cited in the petition has no bearing on her recommendations or the validity of the research they spring from.

Here we see the first core problem with the Two-Step: saying that there are other components of math proficiency besides the fluent, automatic performance of basic operations — “procedural fluency” in the briefs — says nothing about the necessary relation between procedural fluency and those other components.1 The petition, too, identifies and stresses the importance of other components of math proficiency, such as “the rapid mastery of new concepts which then enables creative and generative problem solving” (p. 2). But procedural fluency is not merely one strand among others — it is necessary for building these other highly valuable, higher-order skills. This is precisely why the petitioners take issue with its unacceptable de-emphasis in the briefs, and it is precisely this claim that Ball would need to refute for a convincing response.

The Two-Step’s second problem also appears in this excerpt: when appealing to “evidence,” Ball cannot have it both ways. The entire selling point for why educators should care about the NYSED numeracy briefs is that they offer “Evidence-Based Practices for Teaching Mathematics” grounded in “substantial peer-reviewed, evidence-based research” — a label that, in other fields, means that the recommendations are informed by the kind of “rigorous, controlled studies of cause and effect” that best signal expertise and credibility.

But the briefs do not rely on studies using such rigorous research methods, and Ball’s response gives us no reason to doubt the findings of the petition’s studies, which do. The charge against the briefs was that they minimize the importance of the instructional practices best supported by the preponderance of rigorous evidence for teaching math effectively; they minimize the practices that best develop mastery of basic facts, including practiced repetition and timed tests, and they minimize the importance of explicit instruction, instead promoting “inquiry and discovery approaches to teaching and learning” out of proportion to what the evidence suggests.

Ball does not engage with these studies when making her rebuttals, nor does she offer competing evidence or critical responses. Instead, she uses the Two-Step to bypass these duties entirely: “studying different components requires different methods.”

Saying that there are other research methods besides RCTs and meta-analyses, however, is not yet demonstrating that these other methods and the studies that use them are rigorous enough to give us good evidence.

Fields with good epistemic hygiene rank the quality of their research methods based on how well they account for factors like confounding and bias, and the reason RCTs and meta-analyses are such respected methods is that well-conducted ones do this very well. As in any field — but particularly in education — much research that is cited as evidence is not good evidence because it accounts for confounding variables and bias poorly. For a piece of education research to give good evidence that an instructional practice is effective, that research has to give us good reasons to believe that practice will reliably promote student learning and retention for a wide variety of students when performed by a wide variety of teachers. Practices fail to meet this bar of reliable, wide applicability for many reasons, and high-quality education research is rigorous about controlling for factors that might explain why a practice that works in one context doesn’t in another, or why another practice that seems to be working may not be what’s causing the effect at all. If research is not sufficiently rigorous, the reasons it gives us for favoring one practice over another are not going to be good reasons.

The fact that one study uses different research methods or investigates different targets than another does not simply release that study or those methods from the demands of rigor. The methods by which astronomers determine the age of a star are different from the methods by which geologists determine the composition of a sample, but each is accountable to standards of rigor when they conduct and publish their studies. While the natural sciences are held up as paragons of methodology, this accountability is not unique to such fields.

Brief 1 offers “conceptual analysis” and “ethnography” as “different kinds and methods of inquiry” that can result in “valuable insight.” But different methods will still have internal standards of rigor, and crucially will also have different limits. Uses of conceptual analysis are better or worse based on, e.g., the quality of logical reasoning, the extent of engagement with critics, and ease of accounting for counterexamples; ethnographers that incorporate less data, take fewer meticulous notes, and follow the literature irregularly will be worse ethnographers.

But methods like conceptual analysis and ethnography are less equipped to offer rigorous, controlled, falsifiable explanations for phenomena than experimental methods that make and rigorously analyze testable, replicable predictions. That one uses “different methods” means neither that those methods are equivalent in rigor nor equivalent in explanatory power — and it certainly does not mean one has an excuse to discount the findings of multiple, rigorous, replicated studies that converge on conclusions that don’t fit one’s vision.

Moreover, unless those wildly underspecified, alternative research methods Ball mentions — like “investigation in particular contexts of classroom learning” and “close analysis of teaching” — measure up to exacting standards of clarity, testable predictions, meticulous observation, and corroboration by multiple data sources, those methods cannot provide good evidence for the kinds of claims Ball makes. Even if they did offer insights into “different components of math instruction,” that would not suffice to refute the evidence cited in the petition calling for retraction of her briefs.

All this is to say that if Ball is going to convince a methodologically literate reader by citing studies that use “different methods” for “different components,” she had better have the right receipts.

As we see from her next two responses, she does not.

Rinse and Repeat

“Criticism #2: The briefs advance an approach to teaching mathematics that has been shown to be ineffective in developing students’ mathematical competence.”

Ball avoids responding to the substance of this criticism, too:

Brief 1 explicitly rejects ‘an’ approach [to teaching mathematics].... [R]ather than advocating for one approach or arguing against another, the brief ties mathematics teaching to specific aspects of mathematics … Learning to attend to mathematical structure, prove the completeness of a solution, or justify a geometric transformation requires different mathematical skills than does correctly solving … calculations. Each of these components of mathematical competence are specifically identified … [and] instructional methods cannot be generalized across these different forms of mathematical capability and skill.

Again, the charge in the petition is that the weight of the evidence shows specific approaches — explicitly teaching and modeling core principles, ensuring fluency in the basics, deferring discovery exercises until students are ready — are better for developing math proficiency than competing approaches, since a solid grasp of the basics is necessary to build proficiency in higher-order skills.

Ball’s response is a dodge: the “mathematical skills” required for “correctly solving … calculations” are different from the skills required for other math tasks, and the “instructional methods” that teach one skill “cannot be generalized across” different skills; accordingly, she concludes the briefs do not promote ineffective approaches, but rather promote approaches effective for different skills.

But Ball gives us no evidence or reason to believe that different instructional approaches are needed to teach different skills. Conversely, as Solomon wrote in October, the overwhelming research consensus gives us terrific reason to believe not only that the same approaches that build procedural fluency build math competence generally, but also that the same approaches that help students build literacy help them build numeracy:

The science of math shows that many of the lessons gleaned from the science of reading cross over, such as (a) explicitly teaching and modeling fundamental principles, (b) ensuring fluency in core skills, (c) measuring to inform instruction, and (d) saving exploratory and “hands on” learning for when students are ready for such. The skills and targets are different; the means to attain them the same. [Emphasis added.]

The briefs do not promote these evidence-based best practices for math instruction, and, in her response, Ball nowhere justifies her claim that “instructional methods cannot be generalized.” She simply asserts it. Where is her evidence that different methods are needed for the different components? Where is the evidence that Ball’s methods do better for these strands than explicit instruction and timed tests? Where is the evidence that Ball’s methods are better for different learners?

This last question is particularly important. Rigorous research finds that students who struggle with math and students with disabilities are even more in need of explicit instruction than students who are proficient. Yet Ball gets away with claiming, without justification, that the briefs “provide evidence-based guidance” for teaching “students with special needs and multilingual learners, as well as students who are denied opportunities to engage in mathematically challenging work.”

At this point, the reader should be able to predict what happens in her next response.

“Criticism #3: The briefs do not align with the ‘science of math’ and the ‘science of reading.’”

Ball asserts that “the ‘science of math’ is not ‘settled science’ and scholars … continue to research, develop, and critique the evidence base for each.” She continues:

The work conducted by psychologists focuses on particular versions of direct instruction and on basic arithmetic skills. These studies do not provide evidence related to the learning goals in the standards for mathematics learning. […] New York’s standards […] specify goals for mathematics learning that include but go beyond arithmetic computation with speed and accuracy [...] includ[ing] conceptual understanding and mathematical reasoning.

This is the Two-Step as usual. Ball first narrows the scope of her opposition: the work of “psychologists on particular versions of direct instruction and basic arithmetic skills” only concerns “speed and accuracy.” She then denies that studies or methods germane to speed and accuracy could also be germane to the recommendations in her briefs: “these studies do not provide evidence related to the learning goals” beyond speed and accuracy, such as conceptual understanding and mathematical reasoning. She does not mention that the petitioners also value conceptual understanding and mathematical reasoning, but stress that those goals are out of reach without sufficient procedural fluency. Neither does she allow that the studies themselves could be relevant; the evidence base is simply different.

The “not-settled-science” gambit offers one novel twist on the Two-Step, but no one claims the science is “settled” in some final sense. All education researchers — including Ball herself — are more than welcome to conduct and publish new rigorous research revealing data incompatible with the current consensus, or revealing that they tried and failed numerous times to replicate landmark experiments. These would be incredible findings; if such revolutionary studies stood up to scrutiny, they would be cited with alacrity and could certainly secure a tenure-track position for a junior co-author.

This is how healthy, evidence-based science works: the scientific consensus shifts when multiple rigorous studies produce results inconsistent with that consensus. What makes “the science of math” and “the science of reading” so impressive is that rigorous studies keep piling up that converge on the same results. But Ball cannot provide research that disproves that consensus on equal footing, so she deflects by mischaracterizing the goalposts of scientific inquiry instead.

Setting the Facts Straight

After two pages spent poisoning the well, the final section of Ball’s response addresses the briefs’ alleged factual inaccuracies. The petition draws particular attention to four issues and the briefs where they occur:

1. The myth of math anxiety and timed testing being a cause of math anxiety (Brief 2);

2. The myth of explicit instruction (or direct instruction) being a selective instructional strategy, mostly useful for the disabled (Brief 2, 4, 7);

3. The myth that structured repeated practice of math facts and standard algorithms isn’t useful (Brief 2, 3, 7); and

4. The myth that discovery learning should be prioritized in the early stages of acquisition (Brief 2, 4, 7).

Because Ball’s approaches to myths 1 and 3 share a similar structure, as do her approaches to myths 2 and 4, it is helpful to treat them in these pairs.

Timed Tests and Repeated Practice (Myths #1 and #3)

The research consensus highlights two important functions for timed tests and assessments. First, they are essential for academic screening and formative assessment — assessment that informs teachers of how best to respond to students’ needs. Second, timed assessments are a valuable form of structured, repeated practice, which is highly effective for training students’ fluency and automaticity with basic math facts.

To the charge of perpetuating myth 1, Ball responds that “Brief 2 does not say that timed tests are the sole cause of math anxiety.” Instead, the brief merely “challenges the claim that such drills are the only way to develop fluency,” since although they do accomplish this, “they can raise anxiety, and … there are other approaches to develop fluency.”

To the charge of perpetuating myth 3, Ball responds in a similar way:

Brief 2 points out that timed practice of isolated facts is not the only way for students to develop fluency and procedural skill. It cautions that such methods can have negative effects and recommends considering other kinds of practice that involve quick repetition along with reasoning.

Notice the rhetorical sleight of hand. The petition does not accuse the briefs of saying that timed tests are the sole cause of math anxiety, nor that structured repeated practice is the only way to develop fluency. The accusation is that the briefs minimize the value of timed tests and repeated practice — practices that are among the very best supported by the evidence. Ball now spins this minimization as merely “challenging” the idea that these practices are the “only” way, a claim no one made. This is the classic motte-and-bailey: state strong claims, then when challenged, retreat to weaker, more defensible versions of those claims. Yet these more defensible versions still completely miss the point.

The petition makes clear that evidence-based timed tests are essential for formative assessment. It also addresses the true cause of math anxiety: poor math comprehension, which the best practices directly address. Teaching students the basics effectively reduces math anxiety, because students who understand math have less to be anxious about. Moreover, when Ball suggests “other approaches to develop fluency,” she cites no high-quality studies demonstrating that her alternatives are as effective as timed practice. The petition’s criticism stands: the briefs deemphasize what works in favor of what sounds good.

Explicit Instruction and Discovery Learning (Myths #2 and #4)

The research consensus also highlights the importance of explicit instruction, which the briefs disparage, and cautions of the limits of discovery learning for early instruction, which the briefs contravene. Ball responds that the briefs merely “challenge the universal recommendation that all mathematics is best taught through explicit and highly directed instruction.” Moreover, she claims, Brief 2 does not recommend “pure discovery,” but “guided discovery,” which purportedly does not suffer the same pitfalls as “pure discovery.” The brief “makes clear the need for structured and scaffolded instruction as well as for inquiry that is carefully set up and guided.”

Here in her response, finally, Ball concedes that explicit instruction is appropriate — a concession that any educators reading the briefs themselves would struggle to find. After diminishing the research on the effectiveness of explicit instruction, Brief 2 suggests it is often not “grounded in meaning” — whatever that means. Later, Brief 4 alleges that explicit instruction assumes students are “empty vessels” and not “sense-makers”; no evidence is offered to support this, nor is the construct “sense-making” ever defined. In Brief 7, this allegation is echoed with warnings (again without citations) that teachers must “consider with care whether explicit instruction guidance is mathematically accurate and not just getting students to get right answers” and that “explicitness … might constrain students’ sensemaking.”

In stark contrast to the now skeptical, now denigrating treatment of explicit instruction, discovery-based approaches are introduced enthusiastically and without similar caution. A teacher relying on the briefs for guidance would reasonably conclude that discovery learning is the preferred approach and explicit instruction a fallback for struggling students.

But Ball’s response ignores the petition’s central criticism: “Discovery learning is important, but it should occur for mastered concepts and skills … not when a new skill is being introduced….” The research is clear that discovery approaches work best after students have already developed fluency through explicit instruction — not before.

The briefs also fail to warn teachers about the significant limitations of discovery-based methods. Teachers must be extremely skilled to implement discovery methods effectively; discovery takes far longer than explicit instruction, meaning less material can be taught in the same time; and children can “discover” the wrong rules and go uncorrected, ingraining misconceptions that are difficult to undo. None of this appears in the briefs. A document claiming to offer “evidence-based” guidance should at minimum acknowledge these well-documented pitfalls.

Neither is Ball’s appeal to “guided discovery” a convincing defense. The extent that “guided” is better than “pure,” she says, is because “structured and scaffolded instruction” is important and “inquiry” should be “carefully set up and guided.” But these are precisely the virtues of explicit instruction! The more structured, the more scaffolded, the more carefully guided — the closer we get to explicit instruction by another name. At what point does “guided discovery” become simply explicit instruction with a progressive gloss?

This is not a minor terminological quibble. In any rigorous field, methods must be specified clearly enough to be replicated. “Guided discovery” fails this test. It functions less as a well-defined instructional method than as a rhetorical escape hatch — capacious enough to absorb any criticism by claiming to include whatever element the critic finds missing. If a study shows pure discovery fails, defenders claim they meant guided discovery. If explicit instruction outperforms inquiry methods, they claim guided discovery includes explicit elements. The term operates much like “balanced literacy” did in the reading wars: a catch-all that can never be pinned down, never be falsified, and never be held accountable for poor results.

Until Ball specifies what “guided discovery” involves concretely — what teachers should do, in what sequence, with what safeguards — it is not a method. It is an evasion.

The Equity Contradiction

Three months after the petition was sent, the briefs remain in place. NYSED was sold a bill of goods: they trusted that “expert” recommendations were “evidence-based” without knowing how to evaluate the claim, and they have dismissed the concerns of the petitioners who pointed it out. One might wonder how Ball and her supporters at NYSED justify promoting pedagogical approaches that the best evidence shows are less effective. The answer lies in how they frame their goals.

Advancing equity is a core theme of the numeracy briefs, not merely a goal of math instruction but as a lens through which all instructional decisions must be filtered — curriculum content selection, assessment, representations, leadership. In practice, this lens consistently tilts in one direction: away from measuring whether students have mastered specific skills, and toward ensuring they feel affirmed and positively identified with mathematics. Brief 2 warns that “poor performance on timed tests” could lead students to be “labeled as ‘below’ or ‘behind.’” Brief 3 instructs teachers to “acknowledge” the “competence” of all “students’ mathematical ideas” so they can disrupt “patterns of inequity that position students as ‘struggling,’ a pattern that disproportionately affects students of historically marginalized identities.” Brief 5 cautions that identifying what students don’t know “can contribute to the reinforcement of deficit orientations associated with marginalized identities,” and when performance differences appear across demographic groups, tells teachers to “interrogate” whether “their results are accurate” — the implication being that the assessment, not the instruction, may be at fault. A teacher reading these briefs would learn to be suspicious of rather than responsive to her own assessments, and she would trust that the recommendations help her disadvantaged students on the basis of reassurances, not evidence of effectiveness.

This framing does not come from nowhere. TeachingWorks, Ball’s organization, markets itself as having “evolved to explicitly support teachers and teacher educators to disrupt persistent patterns of injustice.” A visitor to the Approach & Impact page is immediately assured that “Equitable practice is always at the core” of the TeachingWorks mission; their P–12 programs and services are “based in research that aim to disrupt injustice and advance equity in teaching and teacher learning.” These are each admirable goals. But in the briefs, “equity” and “evidence-based” are treated as though they mean the same thing. Brief 8 four times uses the phrase “equitable and impactful mathematics teaching” as a single concept — as though a practice cannot be equitable yet ineffective, or effective yet inequitable. The effect is to make the briefs’ recommendations unfalsifiable: if evidence-based instruction and equitable instruction are the same thing by definition, then no evidence can show that the briefs’ preferred methods fail disadvantaged students. The briefs simply beg the question that their approach is equitable because they intend it to be.

Ball and NYSED reinforce this insulation by framing their critics as politically motivated. O’Hare’s introduction to Ball’s response notes that the petition was publicized by the “conservative Manhattan Institute” and accuses critics of “politic[izing]” the work. But the petition opens by stating that its diverse signatories want to “equip all children with mathematical knowledge” and “close opportunity gaps” — hardly a conservative attack on equity. By dismissing critics as ideologically motivated, Ball and NYSED avoid engaging with their substantive arguments. This is an ad hominem defense, not an intellectual one.

And the substance matters, because the empirical evidence points in the opposite direction from the briefs’ assumptions. Explicit instruction significantly outperforms constructivist approaches for struggling students and students from disadvantaged backgrounds. When students lack background knowledge or foundational skills, they benefit most from clear, direct instruction that builds competence step by step. Discovery-based approaches tend to widen achievement gaps: students who already have strong foundations can “discover” new concepts, while those without the requisite fluency are left to flounder. As Carl Hendrick has written, there is a painful irony in progressive educators championing methods that further privilege already-privileged students while disadvantaging those most in need of structured support.

We have seen this pattern before. Whole-language instruction was promoted as more authentic and engaging than phonics, but it was students from disadvantaged backgrounds who suffered most when schools abandoned systematic reading instruction. Ball explicitly resists comparisons to “balanced literacy” and “the science of reading,” and for good reason: public sentiment has finally caught up to the reading reformers, and whole-language approaches are now broadly discredited. Ball knows where this story ends.

The briefs tell teachers that identifying struggling students reinforces “deficit orientations” and that assessments may reflect bias. But a child who cannot fluently add and subtract does not need her identity affirmed. She needs to be taught.

Conclusion

Recall the good news: leaders like Governor Hochul and Chancellor Samuels are beginning to recognize the importance of evidence-based math instruction and automaticity. Yet they face an uphill battle against a throng of institutions — the education department, the associated ed schools, the professional development providers — committed to approaches that the evidence doesn’t support.

The point isn’t just that more math teachers in New York are going to be misled by the content of Ball’s math briefs. We may take some solace in knowing that these sorts of statewide instructional materials often go unread by many teachers; they are not the be-all-end-all for teaching kids, and even when poorly made likely can’t derail an entire state’s math instruction. But the briefs are an endorsed artifact of a state education agency. And not just any state’s, but New York’s. That means there are system-level issues with how we produce and signal educational expertise, on the one hand, and how we hold education agencies and officials accountable, on the other.

The emperor who has no clothes should be embarrassed, and the subjects who don’t speak up should be ashamed. So let’s keep the pressure on. The petition to retract the NYSED briefs has 216 signatories and counting, and it deserves even more attention — from parents, teachers, and the policymakers now pledging a “back to basics” approach. Every educator who reads the petition and Ball’s response can see the bad arguments and clichéd dodges for themselves. Public accountability matters, even when public pressure doesn’t produce immediate results. The embrace of science by the American education establishment is long overdue, it is only through that pressure that the “experts” who guide education policy will grow to deserve that title.

American students deserve math instruction grounded in the best available evidence, not meager reassurances that poor methods are just “different” from ideologues dressed in lab coats. The path forward is the same one the reading reformers eventually won: explicit instruction, practiced fluency, and honest assessment. The only question is how long it will take for the institutions to catch up.

David Shuck is a contributing writer and editor at the Center for Educational Progress.

How did we get here?

Neither major party seems to care about excellence in education — not really, not in a way that translates into serious policy. Democrats have abandoned it for equity theater. Republicans have abandoned it for embarrassingly easy culture war wins. And American students are caught in the middle, their education held hostage by a political system that has forgotten what schools are actually for.

This is a story about how we got to this impasse, and what it might take to get out.

Part I: The Democratic Retreat from Excellence

Democrats were once the party Americans trusted on education. That trust has eroded, and it’s worth understanding why.

The progressive education reform movement has become laser-focused on equity — specifically, on closing achievement gaps between demographic groups. On its face, this sounds reasonable. Who could object to helping struggling students catch up? But in practice, this focus has come at the expense of effective pedagogy and educational excellence. Worse, many of the reforms pursued in equity’s name actually reproduce the patterns of injustice they claim to address.

The Moral Logic of Progressive Education Reform

To understand how progressives think about education policy, you have to understand their moral framework. For progressives, excellence measures — absolute gains in student learning — don’t have what Freddie deBoer calls “social justice valence” unless they also address relative disparities. A reform that raises all boats equally leaves the achievement gap unchanged, and therefore fails to address the underlying injustice progressives care about.

This creates a strange asymmetry. Progressives cannot applaud excellence measures unless they also close gaps. But they can applaud apparent equity measures even if they don’t improve learning at all. The social justice framing is morally primary; gifted students are already doing well enough and are not objects of serious concern.

The result? Excellent students get abandoned. Gifted and talented programs are cut. Selective admissions are eliminated. And the focus shifts entirely to reducing disparities — even when the methods used to reduce those disparities don’t actually help anyone learn.

Biting the Hand That Feeds

There’s a bitter irony at work here. The most educated progressives — the ones driving these reform efforts — are themselves insulated from the harms of the bad pedagogy they support.

As the parties have become more polarized by education level, progressives are increasingly those who did well in school, often effortlessly, often because their parents were also highly educated and supported learning at home. It is easy for these reformers to take pedagogy for granted. If they or their children could already read well before entering school, they may not see the failure of whole language instruction for children who don’t learn what they need at home.

This is the central tragedy of progressive education reform: the people making the decisions are precisely the people least affected by them. They can afford tutors when public schools fail. They can move to better districts. They can pay for private schools. The costs of their experiments are borne by the families who have no such options.

Constructivism: The Theory That Sounds Good, But Isn’t

The pedagogical theories progressives are drawn to sound like equity wins that also help improve student learning. They do neither.

Consider Jo Boaler’s approach to math instruction, which deemphasizes memorization of basic facts and promotes open-ended “discovery” learning. Or Lucy Calkins’ whole language approach to reading, which rejects systematic phonics instruction in favor of having students “discover” reading through exposure to literature. Both approaches are marketed as more engaging, more creative, more equitable than traditional methods.

The problem is that they’re not backed by the science of learning. Decades of rigorous research show that explicit instruction — clear, systematic teaching of foundational skills — produces better outcomes than constructivist approaches, especially for struggling students. The students who can “discover” mathematical concepts or “pick up” reading naturally are the ones who already have strong foundations built at home. The students who most need structured instruction are precisely the ones most harmed when it’s withheld.

And so the methods marketed as equitable actually widen achievement gaps. Wealthier students can afford better instruction outside of school; poorer students cannot. The progressive education establishment has spent decades promoting approaches that systematically disadvantage the students they claim to care most about.

When “Equity” Isn’t About Achievement

When progressives aren’t focused on equity in academic achievement, they’re often focused on other kinds of equity in the school setting — which frequently manifest as culture-war issues that are wildly out of touch with median voters.

Discipline. Progressive educators have pushed hard for “restorative justice” practices that minimize suspensions and expulsions. The theory is that traditional discipline disproportionately affects minority students, and that restorative approaches are both fairer and more effective at changing behavior. The reality is much messier. Many restorative justice implementations have led to chaotic classrooms, with teachers unable to remove disruptive students and struggling students unable to learn in the resulting environment. Parents — including minority parents — consistently support stronger discipline than progressive reformers advocate.

Curriculum. Progressive educators have pushed for curricular changes involving critical race theory, ethnic studies requirements, and “culturally responsive pedagogy.” Whatever the merits of these approaches in principle, in practice they often arrive as mandates that districts must implement before addressing basic reading and math deficiencies. When parents are worried about whether their kids can do arithmetic, telling them the curriculum now includes mandatory modules on systemic racism reads as tone-deaf, at best. It makes parents question whether the district has their children’s best educational interests at heart.

Admissions. When Harvard’s admissions office described Asian applicants as lacking personality, we saw how elite institutions can violate civil rights while claiming to promote equity. The pattern of discriminating against high-performing Asian students in the name of diversity has been replicated at selective high schools across the country — from Stuyvesant in New York to Thomas Jefferson in Virginia. These policies paper over old racial myths with new ones, all while claiming the mantle of social justice.

The Political Consequences

The political consequences of this approach have been severe. Democrats have hemorrhaged trust on education — an issue that was once a pillar of their electoral coalition. David Shor and other Democratic strategists have warned for years that the party’s education positions are electoral poison, but the warnings have largely gone unheeded.

The teachers’ unions — major players in Democratic fundraising and organizing — have been consistent advocates for many of the most unpopular progressive positions, from keeping schools closed during COVID to defending curricula that parents find alienating. Democratic politicians, afraid to punch left, have generally deferred to the unions rather than to the median voter.

The result is a doom loop. Progressive education policies alienate parents. Parents flee to charter schools, private schools, or the suburbs. Public school enrollment declines. The political coalition that supports public education weakens. And the institutions that remain double down on the very approaches that caused the flight in the first place.

Meanwhile, the Southern states that have embraced evidence-based literacy instruction are seeing real gains — gains that serve as a political embarrassment to blue states that should be outperforming them. This is how issues and institutions transform from reliable political architecture into ammunition for one’s opponents. Chris Rufo doesn’t have to be a good batter when Democrats keep serving up wiffle balls!

Part II: The Republican Absence of Vision

Republicans have had easy pickings. Rejecting bad progressive ideas has required no serious thought about what should replace them.

When conservatives reject the DEI focus in education, they can claim to be re-centering excellence as the guiding goal. When they reject progressive culture-war overreaches, they can claim classrooms are for learning, not politics. But this rhetorical positioning allows Republicans to appear pro-excellence without actually advancing the policies, pedagogical techniques, and curricular changes that matter.

Winning by Saying No

Consider the political arithmetic. (I’m sorry this is so clunky, I’m really not a math guy. Metaphors, though!) When Democrats introduce a bad idea, we go from zero to minus-x. When Republicans defeat that bad idea, we go from minus-x back to zero. Republicans can claim victory — they stopped something harmful! — without having accomplished anything positive in a cumulative, genuinely progressive way.

But American education wasn’t some excellence utopia before DEI. The same constructivist pedagogies that progressives now wrap in equity language have been undermining student learning for decades. The same ed-school orthodoxies that produce today’s “culturally responsive” curricula produced yesterday’s “whole language” instruction. Defeating the latest progressive fad is necessary but nowhere near sufficient.

Republicans don’t have to outrun the bear. They just have to outrun Democrats. And right now, Democrats are making that very easy.

The School Choice Escape Valve

The positive vision Republicans do offer is school choice — vouchers, charter schools, education savings accounts. The theory is that market competition will drive improvement: parents will choose better schools, forcing bad schools to improve or close.

There’s something to this. The ability to exit a failing school is valuable, and competition can spur innovation. The One Big Beautiful Bill’s new national voucher program represents a significant expansion of this approach.

But school choice alone doesn’t solve the underlying problems. Charter schools and private schools draw from the same pool of teachers trained in the same ed schools with the same bad pedagogical theories. Many charter schools use the same constructivist curricula as the public schools families are fleeing. The escape valve lets some families get out, but it doesn’t fix the pipeline.

And school choice, as currently implemented, risks abandoning the students stuck in dysfunctional public schools. Not every family can navigate voucher programs or find transportation to better schools. The market vision, in its enthusiasm for choice, can become indifferent to those who have no good choices available.

The Southern Surge as Exception

There is one genuinely positive development on the Republican side: the Southern literacy surge. States like Mississippi and Alabama have adopted evidence-based reading instruction — systematic phonics, explicit teaching, regular assessment — and seen dramatic improvements in student performance. We can thank Karen Vaites for comprehensive coverage of this genuinely positive development.

This is what a positive vision for education actually looks like: identify what works, implement it systematically, measure the results, and adjust. The Southern states did this not by fighting culture wars but by taking the science of reading and curricula implementation expertise seriously.

If more red states adopt this playbook, it could represent a genuine transformation. But so far, the Southern Surge remains an exception. Most Republican education policy remains defined by what it opposes rather than what it represents.

Part III: The Trump Distortion

Into this already dysfunctional landscape has come the Trump administration, whose approach to education policy has been ... aggressive.

Burning It Down

The administration’s approach to the Department of Education has been less reform than demolition. DOGE-initiated cuts gutted the personnel needed for basic functions — like producing the annual Condition of Education report that Congress has required since 2002. Whether these cuts were legally valid is now beside the point; you can’t wave a magic wand to reconstitute departed researchers and statisticians.

The administration has conflated two different goals: making government more efficient and eliminating progressive policies. These overlap in places but are not the same thing. Cutting the staff who compile education statistics does nothing to advance any conservative policy goal; it just makes it harder to know what’s happening in American schools.

DEI as the Only Issue

The administration’s fixation on DEI has crowded out attention to everything else. Fighting with universities over diversity statements, investigating admissions policies, threatening funding cuts — these actions dominate the education news cycle.

Meanwhile, the education establishment has responded by doubling down on DEI practices, sometimes openly defying new regulations and state laws. The result is a mutually reinforcing spiral where both sides treat DEI as the only education issue that matters.

The tragedy is that many Americans are sufficiently disgusted with elite education institutions that they’re content with “burn it all down” as a result. When Harvard and Stanford have spent years promoting policies that seem designed to alienate ordinary parents, schadenfreude at their difficulties is understandable. But “own the libs” is not an education policy. The question of what should replace the current system remains unanswered.

Part IV: What’s Being Left on the Table

Both parties are leaving enormous political opportunities on the table.

Polling consistently shows that Americans — including majorities of all minority Americans — support gifted education, acceleration for advanced students, and rigorous academic standards. They support discipline policies that keep classrooms orderly. They want their kids to learn to read and do math. These are not controversial positions among actual voters, even if they’re controversial among education policy elites.

The party that credibly commits to evidence-based instruction, high standards, and meeting students where they are — rather than where ideological frameworks say they should be — has a significant political opportunity. The party that actually delivers results, as Mississippi has for reading, will have a compelling case to make.

The Stakes Are Higher for Democrats

The stakes are asymmetric. Democrats control the institutions that drive education policy and research: the ed schools, the teachers’ unions, the professional associations. This gives them both more responsibility for the current mess and more capacity to fix it.

But it also means that the ideological capture of those institutions constrains what Democratic politicians can advocate. Ed schools remain captured by constructivist theories. Unions remain committed to policies that protect member interests over student interests. Critical education theories have become the default framework for thinking about schooling in progressive spaces.

For Democrats to credibly reset on education, they would need to confront these institutional interests. That’s politically difficult — but the alternative is continued erosion of public trust in public education.

The CEP Vision

This is where we come in. The Center for Educational Progress has been developing a positive vision for educational excellence that either party could adopt:

Meet students where they are. This means ability grouping, acceleration for advanced learners, and remediation for those who need it. It means abandoning the “one-size-fits-all” model that holds back fast learners and fails to support struggling ones.

Embrace the science of learning. This means explicit instruction in foundational skills, systematic phonics for reading, practiced fluency for math. It means deferring discovery-based approaches until students have mastered the basics.

Measure what matters. This means regular assessment to inform instruction, honest reporting of results, and accountability for outcomes. It means resisting the temptation to lower standards in the name of closing gaps.

Let every student advance as far and fast as their curiosity and determination will take them. This is the vision we’ve been developing — and it’s a vision either party could champion.

Part V: A Path Forward

Educational excellence should be a bipartisan issue. But right now, both parties have left the field. This creates an opportunity for whichever party is willing to seize it.

For Republicans: “We actually have a positive vision that promotes what we care about — the learning and development of our children. And the pedagogy we support is backed by the research. Democrats claim to be the party of ‘trust the science,’ but in education, that’s clearly false. We are the party you can trust to follow the evidence.”

For Democrats: “We are returning to the positive vision of education that you used to trust us for. Republicans don’t have a positive vision — just criticisms of progressive excesses. We see now that we ignored the science of learning, and that even if our motives were moral, the effects were worse. We still care about disadvantaged children, but now we know the right way to help them learn. We’re righting the ship for all children.”

Either script could work. Everyone seems to be focused on… everything else, though. (And I’m also not a political consultant. Just a lawyer — but not a barred one (yet)!)

American students don’t care about any political posturing. They just want schools that teach them to read, to calculate, to think. They want the chance to advance as far as their talents will take them. Whether they know it or not.

Neither party is currently offering that. But one of them could. Or both! The iron is hot, and the opportunity is there for the taking. Who will strike first?

Thomas Briggs is the (Interim) Executive Director and Director of Operations at the Center for Educational Progress.