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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the Center for Educational Progress

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

Oregon Education Survey | April May 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This evidence-based learning process is demonstrated as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

Carnegie Learning: Marketing over Evidence

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

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

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

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

Brockton middle school math teacher Mike Sullivan told me:

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

Reading Lessons for Math: Why Evidence Keeps Getting Ignored

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t miss this episode!

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

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

I have loved EdTech for a long time.

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

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

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

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

Technology Transfers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Security Theater

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Canvas Hack

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

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

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

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

So where do we go from here?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I call this the wildfire effect.

The wildfire effect: How bad ideas spread

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

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

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

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

5. It becomes justification for education policy.

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

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

What’s at stake? A lot.

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

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

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

Step 1. Ask for evidence

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

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

Here’s an example:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 2. Evaluate the evidence

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

1. Opinion pieces

2. Newspaper or magazine articles

3. Articles that are not peer-reviewed

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 3. Become informed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image 1: Practitioners and the Information Void

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. What reaches them is often wrong,

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

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

1. The evidence doesn’t reliably reach the practitioners

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

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

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

2. What reaches them is often wrong

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4. Self-immunizing pedagogical theories resist evidence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image 2: Institutions and their Vetos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ed schools and the captured training pipeline

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

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

• Ed schools transmit the romantic-constructivist paradigm →

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

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

• Districts adopt aligned curricula →

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New York’s $10m reading training boondoggle

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

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

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

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

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

San Francisco’s decade-long algebra detracking disaster

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

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

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

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

The Argument

Education research is weak and sloppy. Why?

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

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

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

D.C.’s charter decline

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

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

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

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

Ten Miles Square

The Stunning Collapse of KIPP DC

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

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4 months ago · 27 likes · Matthew Yglesias

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

Image 3: Chaos in the System

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

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

“Because no one was there to stop me!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karen Vaites (once again) puts it best:

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

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

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

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

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

The Paradox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Part 2…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Important Caveat and Disclosure

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

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

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

What is Understanding?

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

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

Levels of Understanding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ending the Understanding Fixation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social Studies Must Be Included in Accountability to Be Prioritized

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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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Check out the polls at the end of this post to share your predictions for the Elite Eight rounds!

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.