Announcing the "Attacks on Excellence" Newsletter

Help us identify and track attacks on excellence in education

Welcome to the preliminary installment of Attacks on Excellence, our monthly newsletter highlighting threats to student excellence throughout the United States. You can help us identify and call attention to the forces holding our students back, as we build a record of the policies, practices, and personnel that, for better or for worse, deserve national attention. Each newsletter will include a roundup of recent submissions from our readers and staff, highlighting attacks on excellence from across the country that come to our attention that month. We will occasionally feature case studies or deep dives, as well as identify and amplify specific calls to action where appropriate.

Submit an anonymous report here or email us at centerforedprogress@gmail.com (subject: Attack on Excellence)

How to Attack Excellence

Broadly speaking, an attack on excellence is any educational policy, practice, or institutional decision that:

1. Exerts downward pressure on academic standards,

2. Exhibits hostility to or erases individual distinctions in ability, or

3. Inhibits appropriate individualization of educational paths or productive deviation from academic norms.

First, we recognize that trade-offs exist. And despite our insistence that education policy at its core must be all about fostering student ability and promoting excellence, it would nevertheless be facile to insist that it must be oriented entirely around one value. The problem is that some values — or rather some especially naive versions of values like “equity” or “choice” or “freedom” — have too long overshadowed core educational ones. And they have to such an extent that educationally destructive policies now make regular appearances in school districts, elite policy journals, and state and local legislatures across the country, often going largely unchecked. We’re developing a common vocabulary to capture how this educational expertise has gone astray.

Attacks on excellence can take many forms: State laws, district policies, classroom-level practices, internal memos, accreditation rules, funding choices, and bad narratives can all contribute to a deterioration of a pro-excellence educational culture.

Some examples include:

• The elimination of gifted programs and advanced tracks (“detracking” that forces faster students into slower classrooms)

• The system-wide lowering of academic standards with new grading policies that erase performance distinctions

• Efforts to increase graduation rates or reduce low or failing grades regardless of student performance (“no-zero” grading policies)

• Abolishing entrance examinations at the high school or college level (“test-optional” admissions) or degrading entrance examinations for selective public schools

• Mandating curricula that function as stand-ins for controversial ideologies

• Policies that excessively restrict diversity of educational paths, like compulsory attendance laws in systems lacking appropriate options for advanced students, overly restrictive regulations of homeschooling and alternative schools, and accreditation and licensing barriers monopolizing expertise

Why Attacks on Excellence Succeed

One reason why attacks on excellence keep finding their way into education policy is because of the nature of education policy itself: the time horizons are long, and the damage wrought is not always immediately dramatic, often playing out as a slow burn rather than a catastrophic conflagration. Moreover, the strongest advocates for misguided reforms are often dishonest or secretive about the nature of the changes they propose, which makes the task of determining what reforms are good or bad twice as hard.

As Democratic data scientist David Shor points out, anti-excellence policy is often extraordinarily unpopular when the public is asked directly. In his data, removing advanced classes is less popular than even historically white-hot policies like abolishing the police and reparations. This becomes visible when these issues go to voters directly: In San Francisco, more than 80% of voters supported the return of 8th grade algebra to their schools. But education policy is typically low-salience, and most people don’t think about these policies until they’re already well underway and difficult to stop. That’s where the CEP comes in.

Fighting for the pro-excellence counterculture in education will require unifying the collective voices of serious education reformers across the nation. Attacks on Excellence is one of our first steps toward realizing this goal.

Submit a Report: Our Call to Action

Our line is always open for tips to investigate and profile. We want local experiences and individual discoveries that all too often remain overlooked in the national discourse. Whether you’re a student, teacher, parent, administrator, or just a concerned observer, we would love to hear your story. Reports are always kept anonymous unless you explicitly request otherwise!

👉 Submit your report [here]

… or email us at centerforedprogress@gmail.com (subject: Attack on Excellence)