(This article is the first in a multi-part series on the presidential cycle’s campaign education policy and messaging.)

As 2024 approaches, all signs point to this being one of the most consequential education-focused elections in recent memory. Governor Ron DeSantis has made K-12 and higher education his top messaging and policy priority, while Donald Trump has raced to outflank him by releasing an education policy “platform” and recently attacked DeSantis’ K-12 record. The House GOP passed a “Parents Bill of Rights” bill modeled after states like Florida. Meanwhile, over a dozen conservative legislatures have recently proposed, and in some cases passed, sweeping legislation on Education Savings Accounts, representing the most significant expansion of private school choice in our nation’s history. Amidst all of this Republican activity, President Biden is doggedly pursuing student loan relief, while the Supreme Court stands poised to deliver a potential landmark ruling on affirmative action in the coming months. Add to the mix a series of durable and polarizing debates like those over Critical Race Theory and the rights of trans minors. 

This is a marked difference from recent presidential election years that saw scant attention to education issues. If you remember, the most significant K-12 exchange in the 2020 primary came when then-Senator Kamala Harris jabbed Joe Biden over bussing — a policy that hadn’t existed in any meaningful way for decades. 

The critical question will be how the candidates and parties weave these issues into a compelling narrative. The race to define the very question voters ask is the most critical battle of any campaign, and whoever frames the choice in the election usually wins. For example, you can convince people you are the most intelligent, prepared, and ethical person in the race — but if the electorate is looking for who will shake things up, you’ve wasted your time and resources. This dynamic has played out many times in our lifetime: 

• If the 2000 election was about who was the smartest, Gore would have won. Bush framed the election about who was more likable (remember the “who you’d rather have a beer with” conversation?). 
• If the 2008 Democratic primary was about who was the most experienced, Hillary Clinton would have won. Obama made experience a liability, tying Clinton and eventually McCain to the old Washington way of doing things. Trump did something very similar in 2020, albeit with a different flavor. 

The most common tug of war over the framing of the election is “change” versus “more of the same.” Generally, if you are an incumbent, you want to convince the electorate that everything is heading in the right direction and that you are here to preserve or incrementally improve the status quo. The most famous example of this framing was President Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign, which featured the now-famous Morning in America ad:

Notice that the ad doesn’t even feature any video of Reagan himself, mention his opponent, or outline any plans for the future. It just highlights how great things were going (for suburbanites). 

If you are a challenger, however, you want to convince the electorate that everything is going to hell — and that you are the only person/party who can turn things around. My favorite example of this is Al Gore’s 1992 “upside down” rally speech: 

I know, I know. Not the same Al Gore you remember, is he? If that version of him had run for President in 2000, that election would have turned out much differently. Anyway . . . 

Every now and then, an incumbent can pull off the seemingly impossible and run as a change agent or as the opposition. That is sort of what Biden and Democrats did in the midterms when they framed the election around the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision and election denialism. Yet those opportunities are rare. Usually, the incumbents are the “more of the same” party. 

That brings me back to the 2024 election and education policy. Republicans will be running as change agents. Like it or not, the story they tell the electorate is quite clear. It goes a little like this (my words):

It’s time for parents to regain control over their kids’ education. They desperately want to take it back from radical leftists who want to teach our kids to hate their country and hate each other, adopt radical ideas on race and gender, and to question the very idea of hard work and merit. That’s why we’re codifying a Parents Bill of Rights that for the first time gives parents the ability to see their children’s curriculum and lesson plans, to participate in any meaningful life conversations that school staff is having with kids, and to hold staff members who attempt to indoctrinate our kids accountable. And through our historic expansion of Education Savings Accounts, we’re allowing parents to use their tax dollars however they see fit to educate their children. Private schooling will no longer be the exclusive option for the rich. We want every family to have the opportunity to access the best schools — whether zoned, magnet, charter, or private. Speaking of which, we’re also taking aim at the bloated and unaccountable higher education establishment who’ve been running up costs, pushing extreme views, and discriminating against white and Asian applicants. That’s why we’re weakening tenure protections for professors — allowing us to hire and fire based on performance — and why we’re investing in the expansion of career and technical education, so we can once and for all break the higher ed monopoly and give you better choices for your children. 

This is a classic change message. There’s a clear and simple description of the problem, a compelling villain, and a series of solutions with the parent at the center. 

Notice I use the phrase “take back control” — which was the successful pro-Brexit slogan. I believe the GOP will use nearly identical language because the slogan can mean different things to different parts of their current coalition and persuadables alike. During the Brexit campaign, Take Back Control could be a racist dog whistle, but it could also be about economic and legal independence, a call for more sovereignty, or a primal scream against a rapidly changing world. Similarly, a “control” message around education could, of course, motivate voters over issues of race and gender in schools — but it could also appeal to lower-income parents fed up with their options, suburban parents with lingering frustrations over Covid closures, or any parent who simply feels the world getting scarier and their children slipping away. Republicans are banking on Democrats going the way of the “remain” crowd — attacking all opponents as racist and failing to see the complexity of their opposition. 

And like Brexit, the GOP doesn’t have to defend the actual implementation of many of their most ambitious policies. They can sell an idea. For example, most of the recent Education Savings Accounts bills include a multi-year ramp-up — where the most significant shocks to the system won’t be felt until well after the 2024 election. They can capitalize on hopes and dreams without owning the downsides. 

If it’s not obvious, I believe the GOP education message will be highly effective. 

What about the Democrats’ message? Here’s Biden’s education message from the most recent State of the Union address:

Restoring the dignity of work also means making education an affordable ticket to the middle class. When we made 12 years of public education universal in the last century, it made us the best-educated, best-prepared nation in the world. But the world has caught up. Jill, who teaches full-time, has an expression: “Any nation that out-educates us will out-compete us.” Folks, you all know 12 years is not enough to win the economic competition for the 21st Century. If you want America to have the best-educated workforce, let’s finish the job by providing access to pre-school for 3- and 4-year-olds. Studies show that children who go to pre-school are nearly 50% more likely to finish high school and go on to earn a 2- or 4-year degree, no matter their background. Let’s give public school teachers a raise. And we’re making progress by reducing student debt and increasing Pell Grants for working- and middle-class families. Let’s finish the job, connect students to career opportunities starting in high school and provide two years of community college, some of the best career training in America, in addition to being a pathway to a four-year degree. Let’s offer every American the path to a good career whether they go to college or not. And folks, in the midst of the COVID crisis when schools were closed, let’s also recognize how far we’ve come in the fight against the pandemic itself. . ..  

“Let’s finish the job” is classic more of the same messaging. You can find it in hundreds of speeches from mayors, governors, and presidents running for reelection over the years. 

What’s notable is how little in Biden’s speech is new. How often have you heard about 21st Century jobs, Pell Grants, more teacher pay, or expanded pre-K? Take out the references to Covid, and much of what Biden says here could have been in a speech from Clinton’s second term. That’s not to say it’s terrible policy, but it’s far from a fresh or compelling narrative (Democrats often confuse the two). Biden and Democrats need to link together these (and ideally more) policies and tell one compelling story. In a future post, I will propose a few options on this front along the lines of what I do for the Republicans above. 

Remember, this is what the best and brightest speechwriters and policy minds in the Democratic Party could muster — during Biden’s most high-profile speech as president to date. At a time when his political opponents are talking about education issues daily. 

One could argue that the GOP education message isn’t fresh either. After all, Republicans have talked about private school choice and racial grievance for as long as I can remember. But the scope and coordination of their policy moves and the sophistication of the message are more expansive and effective than ever before. If you don’t believe me, read the recently passed education bill from Arkansas and then watch Governor Huckabee Sanders’ accompanying speech. As we’ve recently discussed on the Lost Debate, you can argue with her choices, but you can’t say it isn’t bold or new. In the coming years, we’ll see many more bills of this kind passing through other state houses, and you can be assured most 2024 GOP candidates (up and down the ballot) will propose legislation along similar lines, telling nearly identical stories. 

Democrats, being the party of more of the same, will likely defend the status quo (and perhaps add incremental improvements). If parents love their current school options, vouchers and Education Savings Accounts sound radical and dangerous. If they love their teachers and principals, they’ll balk at onerous “transparency” requirements or weakened tenure. But if they are frustrated by their current options or resentful of the indignity and inequality of the system, then they are likely to be much warmer to significant change. 

So what does the polling say? Are parents satisfied with their options? Recent polling from Murmuration found the following:

Only 7-in-100 registered voters rate the performance of the U.S. education system as excellent; about three times that many (22%) rate it as poor. Overall, we find that about one-third rate our schools as either excellent (7%) or good (27%), while 60% see them as only fair (38%) or poor (22%); 6% declined to offer an opinion.

While voters are more likely to rate the public school system in the neighborhood where they live better than the nation’s system, still only 12% rate their schools as excellent. In total 46% rate their local schools as excellent or good (34%), 29% as only fair, and 15% poor. Among parents, the ratings are slightly better as 54% rate them excellent (16%) or good (37%), and 42% only fair (31%) or poor (11%).

This gives either side confirmation of their theory. Democrats will point to the fact that parents are more likely to rate their own school as positive even if they aren’t satisfied with schools generally. Republicans, on the other hand, will point to the anemic enthusiasm for the system as a whole as an opportunity to sell a change message. 

The Murmuration poll also found that Democrats have a 10-point edge on education issues writ large and that teachers’ unions are viewed favorably by most voters, especially younger voters. However, other recent polls have found more trouble for Democrats. Here’s a summary from the conservative American Enterprise Institute from 2022:

In March 2022, when Rasmussen asked 1,000 likely voters, “[w]hich party do you trust more to deal with education issues, Democrats or Republicans?” 43% reported that they trusted Republicans, compared to just 36% who favored Democrats. Other polls confirm this finding: A June 2022 poll by Democrats for Education Reform found that 47% of voters in battleground districts trusted Republicans on education while 44% trusted Democrats. Another poll of voters in battleground states by the American Federation of Teachers revealed that 39% of voters trusted Republicans on the issue, giving them a one-point lead over Democrats.

I’m not sure what to believe in the polling other than that the electorate is movable. This may be bad news for Democrats because they’ve long taken their advantage on education issues for granted — and depend on an electorate that believes the current system works. 

If the polls are unreliable on these issues, they may be in a way that should give Democrats even more reason for concern. For example, Populace found that one of the largest collective illusions is on the issue of education, with 74% of people aged 30-44 saying privately that they believe parents should have a say over public school curriculum even though only 48% are willing to say so publicly. 

When you combine that reality with the differences in the party’s narratives, Democrats should feel some urgency to start telling a clear, compelling, and coordinated story about our kids’ future.  

In my next post, I will discuss the various options for Democrats on that front — weaving together policy and communications. I’ll also dig deeper into the polling to discern what voters really want. 

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The post Is The GOP Winning The Education Message Wars? appeared first on The Branch.

Image Credit: Warner Brothers

Let’s get some background out of the way:

• Abbott Elementary is a popular show on ABC about a group of educators at a traditional public school. 
• The show’s creator is a woman named Quinta Brunson, who attended a public charter high school. 
• Season two of the show features a storyline about a charter school that opens up across the street. 
• The story is not flattering for charter school supporters. 

As you can imagine, I’ve received many nervous messages from educators asking how we “handle” the show’s treatment of charters. 

Let’s start with how you shouldn’t handle it. Exhibit A is the following tweet from a woman named Jeanne Allen, who is the founder of the Center for Education Reform:

Quinta Brunson responded with the following: 

Adding:

As I see it, there are several problems with Jeanne’s approach here. I don’t know her and don’t want to pile on what has likely been for her a tough few days. But we can learn a few lessons from how she handled this. 

First, it’s important to emphasize that Brunson is an alumnus of a charter school. That means she was once one of our students. And we love our students as much when they are adults as we did when they were kids. Every time we engage them, including on issues with which we may disagree, we should do so from a place of compassion. We should also assume the best, which is not what Jeanne did when she accused Brunson of being motivated by profit.

Second, the profit motive accusation is absurd. The show was already popular, and I can’t see why Brunson would have profited more from an anti-charter plot than a pro-charter plot. (Though, I can attest that being pro-charter is often a humorless existence.)

Third, it’s a TV show. I confess to being frustrated with the show’s treatment of charter schools the first time I saw it (I even podded about it), and I continue to be frustrated by how the haters have weaponized it. But it’s a fictional show, not a Frontline documentary. When we fight art with logic, we look lame. Now, we should treat differently any statements Brunson or others (like Nikole Hannah-Jones, Congressman Jamaal Bowman, or Jessica Winter from the New Yorker) make about charters outside of the show. I’ll get to that below.  

Fourth, to the extent there is a debate to be had with Brunson, Jeanne Allen is not the one to be having it. There are times when everyone — from grassroots to grasstops — has a role. This isn’t one of those times. It would be one thing if Jeanne were arguing with commentators trying to make meaning of the show to shape policy (we should all fight that stuff), but we should step aside and let others with a more authentic connection to Brunson’s experience engage with her on the meaning of the show. 

Fifth, if we insist on engaging Brunson, start with curiosity. I’d love to interview her and learn more about her experience and how it shaped the show. I have friends who I respect a ton who’ve worked for the network that ran her school, but I don’t know a lot about their model, their performance, or the particular campus she attended.  

Sixth, there’s a way to view this saga as flattering to charter schools. She’s one of our alumni, after all, and she made it big. She must have received a great education to be able to write and lead like she does. I can also sympathize entirely with her conflicting feeling of love and frustration with her experience. Her journey reminds me of years ago when many of my fellow Staten Islanders hated Pete Davidson because they felt he talked down about them, which he occasionally did. He also loved the island, which became apparent over time when he did works like The King of Staten Island or this unforgettable video. People are complicated. 

Now, let’s take our focus off Brunson and examine the broader context. There’s a concerted effort by affluent, mostly-white progressives to undermine the kinds of school choice they don’t use (charters, vouchers) and defend their methods of choice (neighborhood schools, private schools, selective admissions magnets). I’ve written about this at length. These elite liberals often hide behind intellectuals of color who agree with them (e.g., Nicole Hannah Jones, Ibram X. Kendi) while ignoring and attacking those who support school choice (e.g., Howard Fuller, our very own Chris Stewart). They want to smuggle false claims about charters through the debate around Abbott Elementary. Claims like:

• Charters receive more money
• Charters aren’t popular
• Charters don’t perform as well
• Charters don’t serve special needs students as well

I’ve spent years battling back these claims. For most of them, there’s extremely compelling evidence for the exact opposite. I don’t need to go through that data here, but we’ve done many many podcast episodes outlining the contours of those debates. 

The point is we have a gazillion advocacy and communications people who ostensibly get paid to tell the truth about charter schools, and we have countless alumni who’ve had wonderful experiences at their schools. Get out there and push back against the army of blue checkmarks and out-of-touch journalists pushing false claims instead of attacking Brunson’s character. 

This saga should also underscore that you should build your own rails if you don’t like the tenor of journalistic coverage. It’s never been easier to start a new publication and to build an audience. 

And if you don’t like Abbott Elementary, create your own art. A few years ago, a Hollywood studio asked me to write a show about my experience as the principal of a charter school. I wound up writing a treatment for a show (it was never made) that had less to say about education policy than about criminal justice issues and race, in part because the didactic debate around charters and reform makes for lame art. Perhaps that’s what Brunson was grappling with. It’s hard to make the stuff we do poetic or funny. I couldn’t do it. If you can, let me know and I’d be happy to help.

Deep South Defenders, By Ravi Gupta

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In 2013, President Obama shook up the world of higher education by proposing a bold plan: the federal government would rate and evaluate colleges and universities to keep them accountable for skyrocketing costs and lackluster outcomes. Set to fully launch in 2015, the new rating system would consider a school’s tuition, the debt load of its graduates, and even the proportion of low-income students the school served. The end goal: reward high-performing institutions with more federal aid and give students a better bang for their buck.

Obama stated during the program’s announcement, “Colleges that keep their tuition down and are providing high-quality education are the ones that are going to see their taxpayer money going up.” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan further emphasized the importance of responsible use of federal funding, stating, “We have a financial and moral obligation to be good stewards of these dollars.” While the rating system could have been established through executive action, tying federal aid to performance would have required congressional approval.

The congressional GOP’s response to Obama’s proposed plan was immediate and fierce. Rep. John Kline, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, labeled the program as “arbitrary” and a dangerous move toward “federal price controls.” Senator Lamar Alexander, the top Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, warned that requiring all 6,000 higher education institutions to conform to the same standards would essentially turn “Washington into a sort of national school board for our colleges and universities.” Senator Marco Rubio, a leading contender for the 2016 GOP nomination at the time, criticized the plan as a “slippery slope” that would ultimately lead to the private sector relinquishing more of its freedom to innovate and take risks.

Many university officials were even more critical of the plan. Robert G. Templin Jr., president of Northern Virginia Community College, referred to it as “a sledgehammer to the whole system.” Ken Starr, president of Baylor University, labeled it “quite wrongheaded.” The American Council on Education president, Molly Corbett Broad, vowed to be “vigilant in working to prevent tying the receipt of aid to metrics” on behalf of the organization that represents colleges and universities. Charles L. Flynn Jr., president of the College of Mount Saint Vincent, stated that the rating system “cannot be done well” and criticized the initiative as “uncharacteristically clueless.” Similarly, Adam F. Falk, president of Williams College, warned that the system would be “oversimplified to the point that it actually misleads.”

The barrage of attacks from higher education and skeptical Republicans worked. Here’s the New York Times from September 2015, the year the system was supposed to go into effect:

President Obama on Saturday abandoned his two-year effort to have the government create a system that explicitly rates the quality of the nation’s colleges and universities, a plan that was bitterly opposed by presidents at many of those institutions. . . . The White House on Saturday unveiled a website that does not attempt to rate schools with any kind of grade, but provides information to prospective students and their parents about annual costs, graduation rates and salaries after graduation. . . . White House officials noted that . . . the new website will not be linked to student aid.

No ranking. No link between quality and funding. No accountability. 

At the time, some university leaders said they did not need a government ranking system because they already had private ranking systems, such as the U.S. News & World Report lists. But currently, many elite schools are undermining the private rankings as well. In recent months, several prestigious law schools, including Yale, Harvard, Georgetown, Stanford, and the University of California Berkeley, have announced that they will no longer provide data to the U.S. News & World Report, effectively pulling out of the rankings altogether. Top medical schools, such as Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Pennsylvania, have followed suit. Many of these institutions have also dropped standardized testing requirements, depriving the public of the only transparent and objective data points available.

Eric Gertler, CEO of U.S. News & World Report, fired back, arguing that elite universities were ducking accountability:

Elite schools object to our use of a common data set for all schools because our rankings are something they can’t control and they don’t want to be held accountable by an independent third party. There is added urgency as the Supreme Court considers a pair of cases on affirmative action that could change admission norms. Some law deans are already exploring ways to sidestep any restrictive ruling by reducing their emphasis on test scores and grades—criteria used in our rankings. By refusing to participate, elite schools are opting out of an important discussion about what constitutes the best education for students, while implying that excellence and important goals like diversity are mutually exclusive.

Where is the Biden administration in this fight? Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona attacked the rankings. “It’s time to stop worshiping at the false altar of U.S. News & World Report,” he said. “It’s time to focus on what truly matters—delivering value and upward mobility.”

This is an astonishing victory for the higher education establishment. A decade ago, they were in the crosshairs of a Democratic president who wanted to hold them accountable in unprecedented ways. They not only beat back that effort but are now poised to squash key pillars of non-governmental accountability while removing many transparent and objective admissions standards—and they are doing so with the full backing of a Democratic president. This is the same president who has attempted to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans without requiring anything from the institutions that have been driving up college costs. 

College administrators claim their opposition to standardized testing and the U.S. News & World Report rankings are fueled by a desire for greater equity. I have already shared elsewhere why this is a faulty argument:

●     On the Lost Debate podcast concerning rankings 

●     In Persuasion and the Regressives podcast with respect to subjective and qualitative admissions processes

●     In the Lost Debate Substack regarding standardized tests 

These elite schools will find a reason to oppose any ranking, including those in the Obama proposal, which planned to emphasize equity and would not have considered standardized test results. Notably, many of these institutions claiming to act in the name of equity have refused to abandon legacy admissions policies. 

If elite higher education has its way, students applying to their schools will have no objective metrics to predict admissions success, poor and piecemeal data on program quality, and no rating systems to incentivize schools to improve on key metrics. Under no pressure to deliver results, schools can hide behind opaque criteria and manicured data. In essence, students will be left to tap-dance their way through admissions processes that emphasize elaborate and expensive extracurricular activities, professionally edited essays, and demeaning selection interviews. 

I do not claim that the U.S. News ranking or Obama’s proposed rankings are perfect, but they are better than no rating system at all. Ideally, we would have a diversity of governmental and private rankings that students and parents can review. When Obama abandoned his effort, Planet Money created its own ranking system—one that emphasizes graduates’ earnings relative to tuition cost, favors colleges that contribute best to upward mobility, and preferences graduates’ ability to pay off loans fastest. U.S. News considers many of these factors, but I am skeptical of their formula. For example, social mobility and graduate indebtedness contribute only 5% to a college’s score. They also factor in alumni giving rates, which I would not include at all. 

In his 2013 bus tour promoting the rating system, Obama addressed an eager audience of 7,200 students, saying, “Colleges are not going to just be able to keep on increasing tuition year after year and passing it on to students.” He added, “we can’t price the middle class and everybody working to get into the middle class out of college.”

Back then, the average annual cost of private college tuition was $25,707. By 2021, that number ballooned to $38,185, far outpacing inflation.

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I recently had coffee with an NYC teacher friend who casually mentioned that, at her school, they “don’t do summer training.” “How could that be?” I asked. “You mean you just don’t do enough training? What are we talking about here? A week of summer professional development?” “No,” she said. “We come in for a day or two to set up our classrooms and attend administrative meetings.” 

I thought she was exaggerating, but it turned out she was right. This is how NYC public schools allotted time at the start of the 2022–2023 school year:

• August 29: administrators return
• September 6: teachers return
• September 8: students return

During the entire school year, there are only four full professional development days, not including external training that teachers arrange to keep up with their certification. 

Let’s assume that the average school day is six hours long. In a 180-day instructional year, the typical student spends around 1,080 hours, or 64,800 minutes, in school. That means an NYC teacher is given a little over one minute of dedicated in-school professional development for every hour a student spends in the building. 

This is a recipe for disaster and almost without comparison in the professional world. College basketball teams, for example, often train for up to eight weeks before the start of the season, and college football teams are allowed 25 practices before their first game (and you’d better believe that the most competitive teams are taking advantage of each one of those practices). Imagine one of these teams taking to the field or court after only two days together. They’d be a mess. Engineering 180 strong school days is much more complex than anything we ask of these sports teams, yet, we don’t give our educators anywhere near the amount of training time we give our athletes. 

Today, it’s fashionable to decry the deprofessionalization of teaching. For liberals, the problem is poor compensation; for conservatives, it’s a lack of accountability. For a brief moment, the compromise was to increase compensation for greater accountability. 

We should add a third variable to the mix, which should be less polarizing: the time we spend on training, planning, and collaboration—all critical ingredients of any flourishing profession. That’s why I’d push for a different compromise: increasing teacher pay in exchange for an additional thirty days of teacher training. That may seem like a lot, but the average private sector employee works 260 days a year and the average public sector employee works slightly less than that. Even with the extra thirty days, teachers in most cities would still spend far below the average hours at work. 

What would I do with this training time? Consider what I did when I was principal at Nashville Prep. 

I like to visualize the school year in terms of entropy. As the year begins, entropy is low, with schools in a relative state of calm and order. With time, entropy tends to increase as students push boundaries, and teachers get worn out as their trust dissolves and pressures mount.

Summer training at Nashville Prep was an entropy inhibitor—an opportunity to develop relationships that would endure under pressure, to learn and practice skills that would lead to calmer and more consistent classrooms, and to plan for contingencies that would otherwise take us off track. By taking time out over the summer to plan ahead, we also gave teachers and leaders a head start so that they spent less time crafting curriculum and lesson plans in the first few weeks and more time troubleshooting the unexpected. I’d then sprinkle full-day staff development days throughout the summer to serve as refreshers, allowing us to get together to let off some steam and reset, retool, and reconfigure our systems and techniques. 

As I look back at my time at Nashville Prep, I believe that our summer training was our secret sauce—the design element that allowed us to achieve results such as the following after just one year: 

• Highest math, science, and social studies TCAP scores of all open-enrollment public schools (district and charter) in Nashville (in our grade level)
• Highest reading growth of any public school in Nashville 
• Math scores that exceeded those of Williamson County, the highest-performing county in Tennessee
• Recognition as the “Most Innovative School of the Year” by the Tennessee Charter School Association

In our first few years, we were ranked the highest-performing charter school in Tennessee, according to both the state’s value-added metric and Stanford’s CREDO. 

Here are a few critical design elements of our training program: 

Schedule: While school typically began in the first week of August (the South tends to start earlier), the typical teacher started training in the first week of July, giving them an entire month of training. In addition, we had eight to ten staff training days throughout the school year, and we ended the school day three hours early every Friday to train and plan together. And all this didn’t include the external training our teachers did, often through Teach for America, the New Teacher Project, or local colleges, such as Lipscomb. 

Here’s Nashville Prep’s third summer training camp agenda:

We split our time between various types of sessions:

Mission and vision setting: We started our training by discussing why we had created our school, why we had set ambitious goals for it, and why we believed that we could achieve them. We layered in examples of other professionals (both within and outside education) who had overcome the odds to do great things. We also mixed in meetings with key stakeholders in the neighborhood we served, who spoke about their hopes and dreams for our school.

Teaching techniques and practice: We used videos gathered from excellent teachers nationwide (mainly through Doug Lemov’s workshops and materials) to level-set the instructional moves that every team member was expected to master. We watched videos of great teachers using the technique, discussed its nuances, and then relentlessly practiced it. Our practice started with drills (often two teachers practicing the same technique together), and then we worked our way up to full-group mock classroom practice sessions in which teachers taught their first week’s lessons to the others, who pretended to be non-compliant students. As you can see from our schedule, we had spent over half our time practicing techniques by the final two weeks of the training camp. Teaching is a lonely profession, and I found that teachers loved these sessions because they were fun opportunities to showcase their skills to each other. 

Systems and operations: Inspired by Excel Academy in Boston (perhaps the most systems-driven school I’ve ever seen), we geeked out on every aspect of student life. We fine-tuned our procedures and operations from the mundane to the complex. During the first two summers, we developed reliable systems for the following:

• A tutoring program that allowed us to create unique student–teacher pairings each day in response to data from the day before
• Student transitions and the setup and takedown of classrooms in the school building, which functioned as a night school for college students the minute we left the building (we rented space from Tennessee State University)
• Daily student progress reports that included up-to-date behavioral and academic information for families (this was before the time of the fancy apps that allow such reporting to happen seamlessly)
• Academic planning time. Initially, we had to build our scope and sequence and design our curricula and assessments. We were a small team, so teachers were heavily involved in the process and had deliverables throughout the summer (see below for that schedule of deliverables from the first summer) 

Team bonding: Over time, we became much better at offering less-structured activities, such as optional group workouts, team dinners, and book clubs. These were often the highest-rated sessions each summer. 

Time with students and their families: During our summer training camps, we held our parent orientation events, which gave our teachers time away from the pressures of the school year to develop the critical teacher–parent relationship. We also ensured that a team member visited every family home (or held a meeting in the neighborhood if families didn’t want us to come to their homes). Though our Director of Family Outreach, John Little, and I handled most of these visits, nearly all teachers went on at least a few visits each summer. During these visits, our team members talked to parents and kids about their expectations and goals for the school year and reviewed key school policies and practices.

Adult culture: We dedicated time to drilling down on professional norms—and practicing them. Teachers performed role plays in which, for example, a colleague approached them to gossip about another colleague, insulted a student or parent, or showed a lack of integrity in their work. 

Throughout the first few summers, I learned several important lessons:

• It’s tough to lengthen the training period after you’ve launched. Colleagues with established schools who tried to extend their summer training were met with much staff resistance. While it’s worth powering through such resistance, I advise you to err on the side of extended training if you’re starting a new school. You won’t regret the extra time, and even if you do, it’s always easier to take the days away later than to add them if you undershoot. 
• Differentiate the duration of the camp based on teachers’ experience. If teachers had already attended one of our summer camps, they could come in a week later than the rookies, shortening their summer camp to three weeks from four (this is what the NFL does with its rookie minicamps).
• Principals, give yourself time to plan ahead. Over time, I started taking off the final month of school so that I could return in June with a full tank of gas (while almost everyone else is still completely off). This gave me an entire uninterrupted month to plan training camp. The side benefit of this approach is that it allowed my second-in-command to develop leadership experience during a fun time of year (post-state testing, heavy on field trips and field days). 
• Create themes. Taking a page from Phil Jackson, each summer camp has a theme. For example, our second summer was “Better,“ meaning that although our results were great, we knew that we could do better (and a reference to the book by that name by Atul Gawande). For our third camp, “Taking on Goliath” was our theme, as we had started to get some pushback from some powerful forces on the school board and in more affluent neighborhoods, which were beginning to feel threatened by charter schools. We aligned our readings with the theme and even created special logos and T-shirts. 
• Summer training only works if you have a strong vision. As much as I believe in long and excellent summer training, it only works if the school leader has a strong plan and the authority to carry it out. I’ve talked to many teachers over the years who’ve been dragged into weeks of chaotic and unhelpful summer professional development by principals constrained by either union contracts, district bureaucracy, or a lack of intention.  

Finally, through a fellowship with Building Excellent Schools, I had the good fortune of spending a year traveling the country, before we opened the doors to our first school. I visited dozens of high-performing schools and networks—such as Uncommon Schools, the Sci Academy, and the Excel Academy—and begged, borrowed, and stole ideas from them as we built a vision for our first summer training camp. 

About eight years ago, I began hearing that many successful school networks were starting to shorten their summer teacher training in the interest of teacher sustainability. Over recent years, many of these leaders have told me they are experiencing a little buyer‘s remorse: they long for the days when they had the time to build a shared sense of excellence before students set foot in the school building. This is especially true of the post-lockdown days, when many schools feel compelled to reset their systems and culture but don’t have the time to do so. This makes me sad. 

If I were a funder or a policymaker, I’d prioritize reversing this trend.

The post The Alarming Decline Of Summer Teacher Training appeared first on The Branch.

They are all topics Lost Debate covered in the past week. Here’s a rundown of some education stories and segments you may have missed from around the Lost Debate network.

What Parents Want

Last week on the Lost Debate show, I spent an hour with Todd Rose, CEO of Populace. During the show’s first half, we discussed his team’s groundbreaking study on what he terms “collective illusions” – instances when people’s public and private views are out of sync. Rose convincingly argues that we’re self-censoring more than ever. We spent the second half of the interview on a separate multi-year study Populace conducted asking parents and the general public what they want from schools. Todd found that throughout the pandemic, the public’s desire for college prep in high school dropped. At the same time, their support of what they deem “practical skills” and personalized learning has risen. 

The End of Education Reform?

On yesterday’s episode of Regressives, I interviewed Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute about a provocative and informative piece he and Chester Finn wrote about the history and demise of education reform. The first half of the interview is a thorough retelling of how a bipartisan education policy coalition came together in the early 90s. Things get spicy in the second half of the interview, where we posit theories on why the coalition fell apart and what the future holds.

Is Stress Good?

On last week’s episode of Sweat the Technique, Ryan Hill and I interviewed Stanford Professor Dr. Kelly McGonigal about her book  The Upside of Stress. Before reading her book and talking to her, I believed stress could only be bad for you. But she changed my mind. McGonigal argues that stress is only bad for you if you believe it is. I know that sounds wacky, but listen to the interview. If it doesn’t convince you, she will challenge you. We also discuss the implications of this theory on the K-12 system.

Surfing As Teaching

On this week’s episode of Sweat the Technique, I interviewed Ru Hill, the founder of Surf Simply, which is widely viewed as the most successful surf school in the world (read more about the school here in the New York Times). Ru introduced me to surfing and helped me go from complete novice to fairly advanced-ish (we won’t be fact-checking that) in two years. We discuss how Ru does the seemingly impossible and how his approach to learning and coaching can serve as a model for people trying to learn anything. A related point: if you are a tax expert, kindly email me with some guidance on how many more of these interviews I must do before I can write off my trips to Costa Rica.

What Teacher Shortage?

On last week’s episode of our Spanish language podcast Pulso y Péndulo, hosts Carlos Curbelo and Fabiola Galindo debunk disinformation around teacher shortages.

Trouble in Tennessee?

On a recent episode of the Citizen Stewart Show, Chris Stewart and I unpack the controversy around the Hillsdale-linked charter school group trying to open many schools in Tennessee. I spill the tea on the local dynamics, including a potential split (imbroglio?) between MAGA school choice proponents and the more moderate and progressive charter supporters. Listen here.

Education Savings Accounts

What’s the country’s most important trend in K-12 education right now? Not ChatGPT and not CRT. It’s Education Savings Accounts. Rikki and I discussed this relatively new and growing method of school choice and what it means for kids, parents, politicians, and educators.

That’s all for now. Make sure to subscribe to our shows here. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review.

The post What Do Stress, Surfing, And School Choice Have In Common? appeared first on The Branch.

Writing in exile during the Bolshevik revolution, Vladimir Lenin famously noted that “there are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.”

I spent my K-12 glory years during a decade in which nothing revolutionary seemed to happen. Ironically, when I first signed up for the work, I thought I was joining a revolution. I quit my job in the Obama administration in early 2010 and moved to Tennessee just as the school reform movement peaked. Tennessee had recently won a Race to the Top grant, prompting a flood of eager, messianic educators like myself, who wanted to transform the system but would spend the next decade scaling innovations from prior decades. We did meaningful work and, in some cases, dramatically improved the odds for many kids, yet, with few exceptions, we didn’t fundamentally challenge the prevailing K-12 model.

If our movement had an intellectual father, it was Jim Collins. The buttoned-up author of Good to Great was a constant topic of conversation in conferences and workshops that underscored the need for sustained, incremental improvements and steady leadership. To be fair, the unsexy work of scaling what works is essential (especially when it helps kids), and some significant innovations did take hold throughout the decade, such as the (rocky and fraught) adoption of the Common Core standards. But even those changes had been cooked up and set in motion years before.

As we approached the decade’s end, the common debates around the K-12 policy and practice felt small and repetitive. In many cities, warring political factions had reached a stalemate and, at times, seemed bored by their own wars of attrition.

Then, 2020 threw the entire K-12 system into a wood chipper. In the early days of the lockdown, every educator I spoke to said the existing system wouldn’t emerge intact from the pandemic, but they were too busy with existential issues to think clearly about the changing landscape. Now that we’ve gotten our feet under us and secured enough distance from the lockdowns, we can look back (and ahead) and say that the past three years have unleashed something genuinely different and destabilizing.

In this post, I’ll outline the four most important forces driving that change. 

Education Savings Accounts

In the past few weeks, Iowa and Utah have passed legislation giving parents access to education savings accounts (ESAs), joining Arizona, the first (and, until now, the only) state in the country to make ESAs universally accessible to students.

What are ESAs? Here’s a helpful explainer from Education Week:

“In an ESA program, the state sets aside money, usually based on its per-pupil funding formulas, in individual accounts for participating students. Their parents or guardians can then withdraw that money to spend on approved educational expenses. That may be private school tuition, but it may also be used for tutoring, online courses, transportation, or even some types of therapy. In addition to helping families send their children to private school, an ESA program can also allow them to home school or cobble together a hybrid public-private education.”

ESAs are more expansive than school vouchers, which tend to be more narrowly tailored and usable only for paying tuition at a private school.

Over a dozen states have introduced ESA legislation over the past year. If the current trends continue, ESAs could spread to nearly every red state, drawing significant shares of families out of the public school system. Consider Arizona:

Now, 30,000 exits isn’t a lot, considering that almost one million students attend public schools in the state, but if the exponential growth trend continues, its effect on Arizona’s system will be more dramatic than that of any statewide school choice regime we’ve ever seen. And if other states follow Arizona’s trajectory, we’re in for a full-blown disruption of K-12 schooling as we know it.

There isn’t a lot of great polling on this issue yet, but one poll from YouGov (commissioned by yes. every kid., a pro-ESA group) found that Americans support ESAs by a four-to-one margin, with a third undecided. Paradoxically, the poll found that ESA support is stronger among Democrats than among Republicans, which makes me somewhat skeptical of the data because there’s no chance that Democratic politicians will support ESAs. In fact, progressives have begun to elevate opposition to these as a national cause. It’s also worth noting that the school reform coalition is split on ESAs—driven by worries that the issue will imperil their fragile political alliances.

The issue is an outgrowth of the larger Republican project around parent choice that grew to prominence through Glenn Youngkin’s successful gubernatorial campaign in Virginia and has become a hallmark of Governor Ron DeSantis’s administration. In this sense, ESAs are part of a broader conservative narrative of distrust of the public school system, often accompanied by parents’ bill-of-rights laws, curriculum transparency bills, and other more controversial pieces of legislation.

Needless to say, we can expect the issue to play a significant role in 2024, from the presidential contest to the down-ballot races.

The Decline of College?

On today’s episode of Lost Debate, I spoke to Todd Rose from Populace. His firm recently released a study that unearthed some startling changes in Americans’ attitudes toward higher education:

“Before COVID, respondents ranked being prepared to enroll in a college or university as their 10th highest priority for K-12 education. In post-COVID America, this is no longer the case. When given 57 priorities for children’s K-12 education, Americans ranked it as #47. However, they believe it is other people’s third-highest priority, demonstrating a deep societal misunderstanding of one another.”

Todd and I discussed some theories about what’s driving the shift. One factor we considered was whether debates around student loan forgiveness may have highlighted how debilitating the runaway costs of higher education tuition have been for our young people. Those costs likely seemed all the more absurd during the pandemic, when families were shelling out tens of thousands of dollars for Zoom classes. Add to the mix a sustained right-wing attack on higher education, and you can see why the public is skeptical of college.

I know that this piece is about trends upending K-12, but if parents and kids question the value of a university education, that can and should reverberate through the rest of the system.

The most durable added value of higher education will likely continue to be as credentialing and validating mechanisms for employers. There is, after all, only one path to becoming a physician in this country. This distinction may explain why non-certificate associate’s and bachelor’s programs are hemorrhaging students at the fastest rates:

Until recently, most colleges and universities believed that the demand for their products was relatively inelastic. That’s why they’ve had no trouble jacking up tuition across the board for so long. However, consumers may be hitting a breaking point. Over the past 10 years, college enrollment has dropped from 20.6 million students in 2012 to an estimated 18.2 million in 2022. That’s a net loss of about 2.4 million students. For-profit colleges have taken the brunt of the losses (showing that at least some categories of customers are becoming more price- and quality-conscious). Online-only colleges like Southern New Hampshire saw the most significant gains.

In short, different segments of this sector seem more elastic than others. I predict that the carnage will continue to be most severe in programs where the government doesn’t require a degree. In a future post, I will discuss these categories in greater detail and examine enrollment and price data by profit model, delivery method (e.g., online vs. in-person), price, and profession.

Unsteady Labor Market

At Lost Debate, we’ve done many segments attempting to determine whether we have a national teacher shortage. This has been a challenging task as the available data are extremely poor. Neither the federal government nor the majority of states collect and share raw numbers on the extent of teacher shortages. Available evidence suggests that by the middle of last year, we had 36,000–52,800 vacant positions and at least 163,000 jobs held by underqualified teachers. These estimates reflect the limitations of the available dataset, which excludes 13 states that don’t release vacancy estimates.

What we know for sure is that teacher shortages are unevenly clustered across the country. For example, Mississippi’s vacancy rate is more than 159 times higher than Missouri’s. The problem in Mississippi is so severe that some districts have had to take the depressing step of holding classes without teachers. Here’s a scene from one high school, as reported in the Washington Post:

“It’s near the end of the day at West Bolivar High School, and Jordan Mosley is stuck. The 15-year-old sophomore stares at her laptop and restarts the video. Her teacher that day is a stranger—a nameless long-haired man on the screen. He explains two-column geometry proofs and how students could use the software to complete them. “Prove if the length of AB is equal to the length of EF,” the man says. But there is no one to ask for help in this classroom, where students stare sleepily at laptops amid the din of a portable air conditioner. There is only a teacher’s assistant who can print out additional worksheets if they run into trouble.”

As we reported on Lost Debate, survey data from Mississippi First suggest that this is only the beginning and that growing numbers of the remaining teachers struggle financially and are at significant risk of leaving the profession.

Mississippi may be the most dramatic example, but many other states face alarming teacher shortages. Those most at risk are Alabama, Maine, Wisconsin, Montana, New Mexico, Hawaii, West Virginia, and Kansas.

When we at Lost Debate survey school leaders, the issue of teacher vacancies—and the related issue of teacher burnout—is the number one concern that we hear. That’s regardless of the state. Here are just a few excerpts from recent interviews we’ve conducted with school leaders:

“People are leaving faster than we can replace them, including school leaders.”

“We would benefit from more research to better understand why teachers are leaving…. We need to pay teachers and leaders more so we can attract better talent….”

“After the pandemic, people don’t want to work in a physical space every day—but school has to be that, and teachers have to be in schools. We don’t have the people we need to succeed at scale.”

“More teachers called in for “mental health leave” last year than in the 18 years before. It required us to put in rules around it, so now we have a sick-day policy…. We had more teachers than ever who went on leave mid-year last year; the attrition was 75% higher than usual. Normally, it is 15–20%, but last year, it was more like 27–30%. During the year, there was a lot that people leaving the profession could do—a new job, ed tech, and other cushy stay-at-home jobs.”

Notably, none of the leaders I quote above work in any of the hardest-hit states. Even those schools that aren’t yet displaying teacher vacancies are very likely at risk if the historically low overall unemployment rate continues. This will inevitably lead to more kids without classrooms, larger class sizes, and more under-qualified educators. We can only hope that it will also lead to increased investment in teacher salaries, training, and reforms and improved recruitment and promotion practices. 

Artificial Intelligence

Sometimes the cliche is true. As annoying as the hysteria around ChatGPT has been, we can’t ignore the fact that AI tools will have a dramatic impact on our schools. Our company has covered this topic at length in several podcasts, including these two segments on the Lost Debate show. Given the pace of change in the field, we’ve had to revise our takes on the issue every few days.

As of now, I see three different categories of ways in which AI will affect our schools.

Student output: I’ve read dozens of articles like this one predicting that AI will spell the end of the student essay. Though I believe that many of these claims are overblown, there’s no question that schools must adapt student assignments, technology protocols, and academic integrity policies to account for these new tools. Most notably, schools may no longer be able to assume that students alone are completing their writing assignments unless these are done under tightly controlled in-school conditions.

Standards and curriculum: Much of the AI educational commentary has focused on high school English and the role of the essay. However, the most significant disruptions from AI will start with the world that students will enter after their graduation. Will we have fewer radiologists, computer programmers, and finance quants? Will new jobs that we can’t even fathom today be created (like what happened with the ascendance of computer programming)? Educators must monitor these trends carefully and adapt their standards and curricula to ensure that students are truly prepared for this new reality. This, in my opinion, is the most critical work of the AI era—and the most urgent and nimble schools will have a distinct advantage.

School administration: There are a growing number of tools that can help schools take advantage of AI to improve their operations, such as AllHere. Some of these innovations help increase the efficiency of back-office staff and allow parents better access to critical information regarding their children. The key for schools will be how to take advantage of these applications without making interaction with parents impersonal, like what you get from your airline chatbot.

Conclusion

I could go on and talk about other significant forces, such as the rise of homeschooling, the movement against standardized testing, the crisis around student distraction, teenage isolation/depression, and the ascendance of personalized learning platforms. These are all massive shifts that we should add to the list above.

But let’s go back to where I started. I opened this piece by talking about the need for revolution. Yet, many of the forces I describe above aren’t necessarily good or purposeful. Take ESAs, for example. To many readers, these policies could lead to the destruction of public education as we know it. (I’ll give my full opinion on the issue in a future piece.)

That’s why Lenin’s quote is instructive. I wouldn’t describe the change he brought as positive, but no one disputes his impact. What Lenin knew and his enemies didn’t was that when a storm comes, you either harness the wind or get blown away. The Bolshevik movement relied on factors outside Lenin’s control (such as the incompetence and delusions of the Czar and the outbreak of World War I), which is also what those seeking to transform our current education system are doing (e.g., seizing on pandemic frustrations). Lenin also purged his movement of the moderate Mensheviks, which is precisely what education reformers fear is happening with ESAs (charter supporters aren’t radical enough).

I’ve gotten thoroughly carried away with the metaphor. Bottom line: The forces I describe here—whether man-made or extraneous, real or imagined, good or bad—will come together to foment something truly seismic in the K-12 space. If history is a guide, we have a limited window to steer them in the right direction.

The post This Time is Different appeared first on The Branch.