ST Math, an online program from MIND Research Institute used by more than 1.3 million P-8 students, employs a visual, gamified approach to teach math. I recently spoke with MIND’s chief data science officer Andrew Coulson, who heads evaluation of student and teacher usage and outcomes for ST Math, about the program’s approach to math learning and evaluating education technology more broadly.
Hess: What is ST Math—how does it work, and how is it different from all the other math programs and curricula out there?
Coulson: ST Math is a supplemental visual instructional program for students from pre-K through grade eight that leverages the brain’s innate spatial-temporal reasoning ability to comprehend and solve mathematical problems presented as a game. ST Math avoids complex abstractions when a student is first encountering a math concept. There are no new math symbols or vocabulary to start—just animated visual puzzles that start easy, become challenging by design, and must be solved to move forward. The puzzles provide dynamic visual models that explain why the math works. This low cognitive load to start provides a lower barrier to begin learning. Students, regardless of their math-proficiency level, engage by testing out their ideas and learning from thousands of repetitions of immediate, visual formative feedback. And for them, ST Math is a challenging game, so they are motivated to persevere and win.
Hess: Why make it a game?
Coulson: In our case, the math itself is the game. There aren’t unnecessary or distracting features interspersed with math problems. Our research indicated that nonmathematical features typically found in games, such as avatar creation or timers, were a distraction for some kids, so we eliminated them! Using game mechanics, such as including informative feedback and intrinsic motivation, has awesome implications for academic content. You get as many chances as you need to solve a puzzle, but you do ultimately have to solve it. Students don’t believe a game designer would make a puzzle too hard for them to overcome, so they persevere through challenges.
Hess: Where did this idea come from?
Coulson: Twenty-five years ago, neuroscience researchers from the University of California, Irvine, had the insight that our brains are hardwired for visual pattern manipulation. These researchers created visual puzzles to test this observation and found that all students had a surprisingly high visual reasoning ability. They knew that this innate ability was not being leveraged to solve a serious education problem: a lack of deep conceptual understanding of mathematics. This led to the founding of our nonprofit and the patenting of our unique approach. We continued our research and created a math curriculum that uses visual puzzles.
Hess: What’s the cost for ST Math?
Coulson: ST Math can be purchased by districts and schools. The ST Math site subscription model provides access to ST Math for the entire school population, across all grade levels, at one annual price, which starts at three-thousand five-hundred dollars annually and varies by enrollment. Families can subscribe to ST Math Homeschool if their child is not using ST Math through their school. ST Math Homeschool was made free to families on March 14, 2020, due to COVID-19 and resulting school closures. This program will remain free through June 2022.
Hess: Some parents might be wary of game-based learning—how do you reassure them that students are actually learning?
Coulson: I agree with wariness about games that mix too healthy a serving of nonacademic fun with actual learning. To a parent overseeing their child playing ST Math at home, I would say this: Look at your child’s face to see if there is higher-level thinking going on a substantial amount of the time. See if your child is being challenged and if they celebrate when they overcome a challenge. Even try some puzzles yourself!
Hess: How do you gauge the program’s learning outcomes?
Coulson: ST Math’s reporting helps ensure productive time on task. Teacher reports illustrate the math each student has covered, as well as their time of use and productivity in puzzle completion. While some struggle is beneficial, teachers can check on pre- and postquiz scores and receive alerts when students are struggling. When it comes to the efficacy of ST Math, we have third-party evaluations and established an annual study cadence with repeatable results. One of our largest studies ever, which included over one-hundred-fifty thousand students, was released by independent researcher WestEd and verified by SRI. Researchers found that schools that consistently used ST Math outgrew similar schools in statewide rank by fourteen percentile points.
Hess: Do you have any favorite success stories?
Coulson: We all hear the narrative that some people have “the math gene” while others do not. Parents are elated when one of their children who thought they had no chance at understanding math becomes engaged and confident in their abilities. It’s not a research data point—it’s a life-changing moment for that family. In my almost twenty years at MIND, I’ve heard so many stories like that—too many to count! One that has particularly stayed with me is about a kindergartner from D.C. public schools, a once-introverted student, who thrived since using ST Math. Not only did the success he earned through ST Math improve his confidence, it also opened up leadership opportunities for him. Once the student reached one-hundred percent completion of ST Math early, he pivoted to sharing his expertise as a mini math coach, helping other students through struggle and success. I love stories like this that show ST Math has value even beyond math.
Hess: What are one or two concrete tips you can give to parents or teachers evaluating ed-tech offerings?
Coulson: Especially over the past year, companies have offered an overwhelming number of learning resources to schools and families. The needs of each student are different, so I recommend parents research whether a resource has robust, recent, and repeated evidence showing that it works across diverse groups of students, as then it’s more likely to add value for your child. We actually put together an e-book to help parents and teachers do just that. Additionally, learn what the providers’ recommended usage requirements are to get the results and make sure your child is putting in that usage.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Frederick Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and an executive editor of Education Next.
By: Frederick Hess Title: The Case for Game-Based Math Learning Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/the-case-for-game-based-math-learning/?utm_source=The%2BCase%2Bfor%2BGame-Based%2BMath%2BLearning&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS%2BReader Published Date: Mon, 31 May 2021 10:00:09 +0000
The latest skirmishes in education’s never-ending culture wars—the tussles about critical race theory, “anti-racist” education, and diversity, equity, and inclusion in the classroom—can be dispiriting. I’ve got friends and colleagues on both sides of these battles, who hold positions that are both heartfelt and hardening. I am not naïve enough to believe that they are likely to declare a truce anytime soon. Nor do I have any particular wisdom about the perfect way to address these sensitive issues.
Still, I believe that common ground is there to be found, if not between the hard-liners on either side, then at least among parents and educators out there in the real world of kids and classrooms. I also believe that a great many Americans yearn to occupy such ground. After a crippling pandemic and way too much partisan warfare, so many of us long to get back to working together to help all students make progress. Here are five promising and praiseworthy practices that I believe most of us could get behind, regardless of our politics or our views on other issues, while doing a lot of good for millions of kids.
1. The adoption and implementation of “culturally-affirming” instructional materials. The label is new, but the idea is not: Kids should be able to see themselves and their cultures in the books that they read. Mostly that’s about making sure the canon is inclusive and diverse, with authors and characters that represent America’s diversity. The good news is that several of the best English language arts programs already do this quite well, especially EL Education, which is purposefully inclusive of Black, White, Hispanic, Asian-American, and Native American themes, authors, and characters, and gets all greens from EdReports. But we should keep getting better at this so that all children feel like they’re valued as part of the great American story. High-quality professional learning is going to be an essential accompaniment to the materials.
2. The effort to diversify the education profession. This is simply common sense, especially because of the large demographic gulf between our student population and our educator corps. Everyone benefits from teacher diversity. It’s a shame that ed schools have made such little progress making it happen. It’s particularly important for students of color, especially Black students, given the growing research evidence demonstrating the positive impact on such children in having the opportunity to take classes from teachers of the same race. As we at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found in a recent study by scholar Seth Gershenson, this may be one reason that urban charter schools outperform their district counterparts. They are simply better at recruiting a diverse staff, and matching their pupils to same-race teachers, and that is showing up in higher achievement.
3. Helping teachers maintain high expectations for all students, regardless of race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic background. This is right in line with education reform dogma going back a generation, encapsulated by President George W. Bush’s call to end the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” Simply put, it’s racist to expect less from Black children and other children of color. (That’s a message that some “antiracism” advocates need to hear, too.) It’s also un-American. This is one of the primary motivations for statewide academic standards and uniform assessments. A high-quality curriculum can be extremely helpful here, too, as it articulates what high expectations look like in daily practice. We must also pay attention to grading practices and to the subtle messages that educators send to their students.
4. Teaching students to empathize with and understand others, especially those whose lives are more difficult than their own. This, too, is scarcely new. It’s part of “social and emotional learning,” or what others call “character education,” and has been part of great schooling since ancient times. But there’s a case to be made that, given America’s growing diversity and inequalities, it’s more important than ever for children to appreciate that some kids have it much harder than they do. And in particular, that many Black Americans face particular challenges because of racism that their fellow Americans need to better acknowledge and understand. We also need to help students learn to listen to each other, and engage with views from across the ideological spectrum—essential objectives for high-quality civics programs.
5. Presenting the history of slavery, Jim Crow, and other painful chapters in an honest, unflinching way. Everyone should want all American children to know the evils of those institutions, given how at odds they were with the principles of our founding as well as our current aspirations. This isn’t reinventing the past on the basis of today’s values. It’s correcting efforts to sugarcoat the horrors of those chapters in American history. Of course, instructional materials and methods should be age-appropriate. But nowhere in the United States should these topics be avoided. Nor should we fail to teach the significant progress that we’ve made on these and other fronts. Instead, we should aim for an approach to teaching history that is both critical and patriotic.
—
This list covers quite a lot of territory. It is congruent with the education reform movement of the past several decades, and I don’t see it as ideological, even as I recognize that some aspects will appeal more to progressives and some more to conservatives. Some should even appeal to the advocates on either side of this issue! Importantly, it avoids both mandates and bans on how schools should address these topics. In a big, diverse country, we should allow schools to figure out the best path forward, especially schools that parents themselves have chosen.
At the same time, let’s not let our solutions to old problems cause new ones. Most importantly, nobody should be demonized because of their race, and schools should never seek to indoctrinate their students. About that, the conservative critics are right.
Still, for education leaders that want to advance a positive agenda without alienating parents, teachers, and students, these five actions—embracing culturally affirming instructional materials; diversifying the teaching profession; maintaining high expectations for all students; teaching students empathy; and presenting American history in a manner that is both critical and patriotic—present a path forward. They sure beat fighting each other into oblivion.
Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an executive editor of Education Next.
This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.
Give a child a book, or teach her to read? The question sounds philosophical, even biblical. It was raised in a recent Boston Globe editorial about how Boston should use more than $400 million in new federal funding for schools.
School leaders and communities planning to use this one-time windfall face a tension: invest now to create value after the money is gone, or spend now to address the urgent needs of unfinished learning.
Two ideas mentioned in the Globe editorial highlight the two possible approaches: building in-school libraries (offered by Superintendent Brenda Cassellius) and tutoring.
For a similar cost, you get two very different things.
Capital costs for libraries are pretty clear — you have to buy books, and you need to outfit a room with shelves, furniture, tracking systems. Let’s call it $500,000.
The operating costs are significant. There is the obvious need for a librarian, with an average salary of over $100,000 and about $30,000 for benefits. But you also have to account for the loss of a classroom — in a typical Boston Public Schools elementary school, that means 20 fewer students at about $6,000 a pupil passed along by the district. Altogether, it costs the school about a quarter of million dollars to run the library every year.
An average Boston Public Schools elementary school has at least 12 classes; many have more. With a standard school day, that means about two library periods per week for each class.
So, what do you get? For about $1.25M over the next three years, each kid gets to visit a library for about 70 hours per year (and you keep paying for it after).
Now let’s take the case of tutoring, using the same elementary school example. An Americorps tutor costs a school or school district about $18,000. Throw in a coordinator or non-profit to help ($100,000/year), perhaps invest in training the tutors in reading remediation (like Orton-Gillingham) for about $3,000 each tutor.
So, what do you get? For about $1.25M over the next three years, a school could provide about 1,500 hours of reading tutoring per year (but it goes away after that).
Which is more valuable?
There can be arguments on both sides of this, but there shouldn’t be an argument about who should decide: principals, teachers, families, and students. This is not a policy position, it’s a practical solution. The people with the most information will make the best decisions. They know what their buildings, educators, and kids need.
It was encouraging that during a recent meeting of the commission set up to decide how to use these funds, the Boston Public Schools committed to at least 50 percent of the federal dollars being allocated to schools and school-based planning. It was confusing that the documents released publicly after the meeting were different, including the removal of the graph indicating this commitment to schools.
There is no shortage of good ideas on how to spend this once-in-a-generation funding opportunity.
But this money will only meet its intended purpose if those good ideas are centered in schools.
Will Austin is the founder and chief executive officer of Boston Schools Fund.
As Lambda School, an online coding bootcamp, finds itself in the news on the heels of a lawsuit alleging false advertising, its full-throated defense raises a larger and more urgent set of questions that transcend the performance of one school: the need to move to a common set of standards to measure post-secondary student outcomes.
There is a long history of suspicion and questions around the emergence of new, nontraditional models of education and training for adult learners.
The California Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education, for example, has continually challenged upstart models of schooling. It levied a small fine of $75,000 against Lambda and previously accused the Holberton School, a two-year, project-based software engineering school, of being an “immediate danger to the public’s health, safety, and welfare.” Why? Because it offered a program that didn’t fit into the bureau’s regulatory framework.
But that framework, albeit well-intentioned, is anachronistic, as it focuses largely on inputs like the type and tenure of faculty members employed and processes like the methods for awarding credit.
Similar input-based frameworks for consumer protection exist across the states to measure everything from financial solvency to the number of books in a school’s library. But in an era where the shelf life of skills is shrinking and the need for rapid upskilling is urgent, new approaches are critical.
Consumer protection matters, but it should encourage continuous improvement and innovation to deliver value in real outcomes for students. Faculty turnover, for example, could be a signal of a problematic program, with the risk of inconsistent delivery—or an indicator that a program is drawing upon the talents of instructor practitioners with real-time experience aligned to the demands of the labor market.
It’s past time for regulators to shift the focus beyond program inputs to instead focus on capturing outcomes aligned to standards that matter. Such frameworks, like the one that the Council on Integrity in Results Reporting created or that of the Education Quality Outcome Standards Board (where Michael is on the board), have already been used by non-traditional providers. And society has decades of experience with financial auditing upon which to draw.
Had Lambda School originally used independently audited placement rates aligned to an external standard, critics and proponents alike could have grounded their arguments in facts and moved to a deeper conversation that centered less on whether Lambda School complied with the rules, but on whether students benefited or were harmed.
Shifting from a compliance toward an outcomes-based framework for evaluating our collective educational investments is firmly in the interest of all schools—not just those experimenting with new models that challenge our vestigial frameworks. As Lambda’s experience shows, schools should realize that in the absence of verified outcomes, it takes only a few disgruntled students or a few poorly done courses to mount a challenge to the reputation of a school. Not only that, but external funders also ought to insist that the schools they support use well-defined standards and pay for audits—or they won’t invest. The risk is too high and the signal is too important to send.
The opportunity is also too big to miss. The status quo isn’t serving most learners or employers particularly well, and new education and training models, like the kinds designed by Lambda and Holberton, are critical to changing that. A greater focus on outcomes would help the market grow in a healthy way—incentivizing promising new players while guarding against bad actors.
Given that regulators already play a role in authorizing post-secondary programs, they should shift from their focus on compliance to fostering a better set of options for students by moving away from measuring inputs to instead tracking outcomes that matter, including career placement, earnings, and retrospective student satisfaction, no matter whether the educational provider follows a traditional design or is creating a new model.
Moving from an input-based to an outcomes-based paradigm isn’t easy. Providers and regulators that make the shift will, no doubt, encounter competing definitions for measures like career placement, with schools using widely different numerators and denominators. For example, does a barista job count as a placement, or does the graduate need to be in a job related to the program? If the graduate isn’t actively looking for a job, do you still have to count them among your unemployed?
And although some private organizations already offer rankings for graduate programs and colleges, the way U.S. News ranks law schools or medical schools, these metrics tend to be focused on inputs as well because that’s the information that is available. Having regulators shift the focus to outcomes could then allow private organizations to create more robust and useful rankings to prospective students. Plus, regulators are uniquely positioned to be able to simplify the collection of relevant data, as they are able to respect individual privacy while connecting education and workforce datasets—which, in most states and across the nation remain separate today.
There are ample models for how this could function, as private and publicly mandated ranking systems coexist productively in other industries. The Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy collect fuel economy ratings, for example, which Consumer Reports in turn leverages in its ratings.
Working with existing frameworks that have thought through many of the relevant questions of measurement, like that of the Education Quality Outcome Standards Board, can help. And regulators should insist that third-party auditors examine the statements. All of this is to build a new set of norms that focus on the results programs produce and the outcomes that truly matter for students.
Until schools and regulators make the move to audited outcomes-based quality assurance standards, fights like those that have engulfed Lambda School will continue to rage. And those of us that are hopeful that innovators will create more valuable learning experiences for students, but not ready to believe any claim they make, will continue to be left in the dark about what the truth is.
Rather than fighting about what we don’t really know, we should focus on learning more about the true value of all programs and not just the ingredients used to produce them.
Michael B. Horn is a senior strategist at Guild Education and an executive editor at Education Next. Allison Dulin Salisbury is a senior vice president leading the employer solutions team at Guild Education.
A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Jason Riley, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss Riley’s new biography on Thomas Sowell, which chronicles the life of the long-time senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell will be available on May 25, 2021.
By: Education Next Title: The Education Exchange: Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell Sourced From: www.educationnext.org/the-education-exchange-maverick-a-biography-of-thomas-sowell/?utm_source=The%2BEducation%2BExchange%253A%2BMaverick%253A%2BA%2BBiography%2Bof%2BThomas%2BSowell&utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=RSS%2BReader Published Date: Mon, 24 May 2021 15:00:50 +0000
I hear my Republican colleagues going on about a ‘labor shortage’ in this country. Well, in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, some employers have raised wages — you know what? People came back to work in a hurry.
New York Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones is in the news after trustees at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill reportedly made her an offer to teach there without tenure.
The most consequential recent story about Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project she has championed—and for which she won a Pulitzer Prize—may be not the one in North Carolina, though. Instead, it may be the one that has been unfolding at the federal Department of Education. The department’s “Proposed Priorities: American History and Civics Education” attracted 33,967 comments in the month after they were posted.
The regulation lays out selection criteria for applying for federal grants to improve history and civics instruction. The federal government spends about $2 million a year on this, typically on between one and three projects that run for three to five years. Senator Lamar Alexander led the bipartisan effort to create the grant program. The first of the proposed priorities is “Projects That Incorporate Racially, Ethnically, Culturally, and Linguistically Diverse Perspectives into Teaching and Learning.” According to the proposed regulation, “there is growing acknowledgement of the importance of including, in the teaching and learning of our country’s history, both the consequences of slavery, and the significant contributions of Black Americans to our society. This acknowledgement is reflected, for example, in the New York Times’ landmark ‘1619 Project.’” The priority goes on to encourage “teaching and learning practices that…take into account systemic marginalization, biases, inequities, and discriminatory policy and practice in American history.”
The Senate Republican Leader, Mitch McConnell, and 38 other Republican senators sent Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona a letter expressing “grave concern” with what they called the department’s “effort to reorient the bipartisan American History and Civics Education programs…toward a politicized and divisive agenda.”
The senators said that “as powerful institutions increasingly subject Americans to a drumbeat of revisionism and negativity about our nation’s history and identity, American pride has plummeted to its lowest level in 20 years.”
The senatorial letter went on to fault the 1619 Project, saying it “has become infamous for putting ill-informed advocacy ahead of historical accuracy,” and that “Actual, trained, credentialed historians with diverse political views have debunked the project’s many factual and historical errors, such as the bizarre and inaccurate notion that preserving slavery was a primary driver of the American revolution.” The senators wrote that “citing this debunked advocacy confirms that your Proposed Priorities would not focus on critical thinking of accurate history, but on spoon-feeding students a slanted story.”
Republicans attempting to depict the Biden administration as “radical” might be dismissed as predictable. Less expected is another comment on the proposed rule. This comment was submitted by the Educating for American Democracy Initiative Executive Committee—a group that includes, among others, Danielle Allen, a Harvard professor who is exploring a run as a Democrat for governor of Massachusetts. Their comment also recommends changes, saying the emphasis in the proposed rule “is an incomplete foundation for civic learning.”
The comment goes on, with wisdom: “We can deliver full and accurate histories that can empower all learners as civic agents standing on an equal footing with one another. This requires, however, not only bringing the wrongs to the surface but also bringing forward the positive visions of democratic possibility and constitutional self-government that all the peoples of this country have developed over time. The story of the innovations to overcome problems of racial injustice and other forms of domination…should be as central to this priority as the excavation of the failings of our constitutional democracy.”
The federal rule and the public comments will eventually filter into what tens of millions of American schoolchildren experience in classrooms, but the method by which that will happen is indirect. The federal government does fund workshops for teachers and summer academies for high school students. Beyond those, though, the federal government can set a tone or rhetorical priorities, but it has no way to force local schools or teachers to comply. The public comments are a sign that any attempt to skew the curriculum to emphasize America’s faults in a one-sidedly negative way will meet widespread and bipartisan resistance.
One way that America defuses such controversies is with local or even individual autonomy—having parents or local school boards decide what their students learn. Decentralization prevents heavy-handed Washington bureaucrats from prescribing a national history or civics or even sex-education curriculum that might oscillate wildly every four or eight years depending on whether Republicans or Democrats control the White House. But in the absence of a national bipartisan consensus on some of these issues (see Frederick Hess and Matthew Rice, “Where Right and Left Agree on Civics Education, and Where They Don’t”), leaving such decisions about teaching U.S. history up to state and local policymakers or individual teachers and parents carries its own risks. The teaching may be so different in different places that it could in its own way fail to teach what the Republicans called “the shared civic virtues that bring us together” and instead end up leading down the road of what the Republicans called a “divisive agenda.”
A divisive agenda that arises organically from grassroots local and parental choices may have some advantages over a divisive agenda imposed by Washington’s top-down regulatory fiat. No matter who is calling the shots, though, one good test of any civics teaching is whether a student comes away understanding the Constitutional concepts—limited and enumerated powers, federalism—that make it so hard to impose a national history or civics curriculum. Another test might be whether a student can talk with others about what’s lamentably “divisive” and what’s admirably “diverse.”
Come to think of it, if the Biden administration is on the hunt for “priorities” for American history and civics education, the Constitution is a topic worth consideration. Interpretations may be contested, but at least the document itself is something that Americans have in common. And like America itself, it has, on a net basis, gotten more perfect over time.
If McDonald’s can afford to pay its CEO over $10 million in compensation and spend billions on stock buybacks to award its wealthy shareholders and executives, you know what? It can afford to pay all of its workers at least $15 an hour. I’m proud to support the workers on strike.
K–12 schools across the country are rushing to incorporate critical race theory and intersectionality into their curricula and pedagogy. Critical race theory maintains that racism is entrenched in American society and that the law works to consolidate and sustain white supremacy and privilege. Intersectionality holds that race, gender, class, religion, and other characteristics are related and confer advantages on people if they are in the dominant group and disadvantages if they are not. A white Muslim woman, for instance, would enjoy privileges because of her race but might experience oppression because of her gender and religion.
Last year in Raleigh, North Carolina, the Wake County Public Schools held a teachers conference promoting these ideas and their application in schools. One session, “Whiteness in Ed Spaces,” advised teachers to “challenge the dominant ideology” of whiteness and to fight back when parents objected. In Loudon County, Virginia, when parents did object to the district promoting critical race theory, a Facebook group of parents and teachers who supported the practice said they should “infiltrate” groups who opposed critical race theory and use hackers to “either shut down their websites or redirect them to pro-CRT/anti-racist informational webpages.”
As school districts continue to infuse critical race theory into their curricula, they might confront another obstacle: the law. One charter school, Democracy Prep in Las Vegas, Nevada, is learning that the hard way. In December, William Clark, a senior at Democracy Prep, sued the school, alleging that it gave him a failing grade in his “Sociology of Change” course and threatened to prevent him from graduating because he refused to confess his privilege openly as demanded by the school, the course curriculum, and the teacher.
Previously operating as the Andre Agassi Preparatory Academy, the school was taken over by New York–based Democracy Prep in 2016 as part of a nationwide expansion by that charter network. Democracy Prep modified the school’s civics curriculum to place heavy emphasis on intersectionality and critical race theory. All students are now required to take the yearlong “Sociology of Change” course. The class materials mandate that students “label and identify” their racial, religious, sexual, and gender identities and then determine whether “that part of your identity has privilege or oppression attached to it.” The course also obligates students to label white, male, Christian, and heterosexual identities as inherently oppressive and privileged because of their social dominance. The course’s teacher has labeled her own race as privileged, her gender as oppressed, her agnosticism as oppressed, and her bisexuality as both privileged and oppressed. The class content also informs students that “REVERSE RACISM IS NOT REAL!” (emphasis in original).
Clark began taking the course in fall 2020 and almost immediately protested the mandate to publicly announce and label his identities. Clark is biracial: his mother is Black and his father, now deceased, was white. He has “green eyes and blondish hair,” and, according to his complaint, “is generally regarded as white by his peers.” When he and his mother objected to the forced confessions of privilege and asked for an alternative accommodation to meet the course requirement, the school told him that if he did not complete the course, he would not graduate. Because he would not complete his required assignments, the teacher gave him a D-, a failing grade based on the school’s standards, prompting him to file suit.
According to Clark’s attorneys, Democracy Prep violated Clark’s constitutional and statutory rights. Pointing to West Virginia v. Barnette (1943), their complaint argues that forcing the student to publicly confess his identities as a white, male Christian and then attach “official, derogatory labels” to them violates the First Amendment’s prohibition on compelled speech. In Barnette, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down West Virginia’s mandatory flag-salute requirement for public school students. Writing for the majority, Justice Robert H. Jackson said that “if there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
Clark’s lawyers also allege that the school’s behavior created a “hostile educational environment” in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which says that “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Here they also point out that the school actually encourages students to “push back” against school policy but that when Clark did so they threatened and punished him.
For good measure, Clark’s complaint contends that the school’s treatment of him also violates Title IX, which forbids sex discrimination. Designating him as an “oppressor” based on his sex and gender and “categoriz[ing] and stereotyp[ing]” those identities in a “deliberately pejorative and offensive manner” constitutes sexual harassment under today’s interpretation of Title IX.
In response, school officials have made two primary arguments. First, they say that schools “have broad discretion over their curriculum . . . without running afoul of the First Amendment.” They contend that Clark was not, in fact, compelled to speak at all, because the assignments did not require him to affirm his identities publicly, and that he did not have to support any particular belief. “Courts,” the school asserts, “routinely reject students’ claims that coursework violates the First Amendment when it requires them to profess no particular belief.” In response, Clark’s attorneys point out that he in fact did have to affirm his identities to his teacher and any other staff members who had access to his assignments. Simply because he did not have to state his identities to the entire class did not matter, because “speech is not less compelled because the speaker is not required to speak to the largest possible audience.” As well, the course required students to assent to “highly contested” claims like “people of color cannot be racist,” Clark’s attorneys say.
Second, Democracy Prep argues that giving a student a low grade and threatening to prevent him from graduating was only a “discouragement,” not a penalty. The school contends further that it would be a violation of the court’s role to intervene, that doing so would constitute acting as a “super-school board” and “directing professional educators to administer particular grades” and “teach courses using particular assignments or strategies.” This argument might well have some force with judges and justices across the ideological spectrum who do not want to see themselves drawn into micromanaging curriculum and instruction in individual schools or classrooms. However, the same issue was raised and rejected in Barnette when the court ruled that the Constitution “protects the citizen against the State itself and all of its creatures—Boards of Education not excepted.”
Despite the defendants’ claims that the class and Clark’s punishment were legally unobjectionable, the school relented in early April, offering to expunge his grade and let him opt out of the course. Undoubtedly, this retreat was encouraged by a federal judge’s declaration at a February hearing that Clark was “likely to succeed on the merits” since the “speech is likely compelled.” The defendants, the judge said, would therefore have to “justify the curriculum under a strict scrutiny test,” the court’s most exacting level of review, which he said the class exercises probably could not survive.
Going forward, one might evaluate whether lawsuits like Clark’s are apt to succeed by asking what a court would say if the identities were reversed. That is, what if a teacher forced students to affirm a theory that held that being minority or female should inherently be associated with negative traits? (This is, of course, different from requiring students to acknowledge historical facts like the exclusion of women from the franchise or the existence of slavery and Jim Crow laws.) It’s hard to imagine a court saying that doing so would not violate the Constitution and civil-rights statutes. Of course, as William Clark learned, the nostrums of critical race theory and intersectionality forbid reversing those categories. But the nostrums of critical race theory and intersectionality are not the law.
Joshua Dunn is professor of political science and director of the Center for the Study of Government and the Individual at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs.
Over the course of the pandemic, the average corporate CEO has seen their pay explode by some 29%. The median worker has seen their pay decline by 2%. That is totally unacceptable.
How can we improve academic achievement and college attainment for disadvantaged students? To address this question, education researchers typically assess the impact of various interventions on all students whose family income falls under the limit for free or reduced-price school lunch—a broad category that fails to account for the effects of ethnicity and class in combination, as well as the considerable differences in economic and cultural resources among lower-income families in the United States.
This includes an earlier study co-authored by one of us, which used a randomized control trial to evaluate a school-voucher intervention in New York City and found modest positive impacts on college enrollment of African American and Hispanic American students (see “The Impact of School Vouchers on College Enrollment,” research, Spring 2013). That study, like many others, did not explore whether the program’s effects differed based on varying levels of disadvantage. We return here to the New York City voucher program to do just that.
Our study looks at the impact of using a voucher on college enrollments and on degree attainment. We also estimate effects of just being offered a voucher, even if it is not used to enroll in a private school. Our data now cover a span of 21 years, which allows us to record college enrollment and attainment up to seven years after a student’s anticipated date of high-school graduation and observe students’ college-going behavior even if their education was interrupted.
We find large differences in impacts between moderately and severely disadvantaged students. An offer of a voucher has no detectable benefit for severely disadvantaged students—minority students from either extremely low-income households or whose mothers did not enroll in college. However, for minority students who are either from a moderately low-income household or whose mother has attended college, being offered a voucher increases college-enrollment rates by about 15 percent and four-year degree attainment by about 50 percent. Those impacts are even larger if students actually use the voucher to enroll in a private school: enrollment at any college increases by up to 30 percent and four-year degree attainment increases by nearly 70 percent.
The voucher intervention we study did have its intended effects—but only for students from disadvantaged families that nonetheless had a certain amount of material and cultural capital. Our findings point to the limitations of half-tuition vouchers to promote college enrollment and graduation among the least-advantaged students, as well as their potential value for those with access to greater fiscal and cultural resources.
Unpacking “Disadvantage”
Evaluations of education interventions seldom account for differences among students in terms of their relative disadvantage. But other branches of research have drawn more nuanced distinctions.
For example, a number of sociologists and anthropologists have drawn contrasts between moderately disadvantaged and more severely deprived groups. In a classic study, William Julius Wilson emphasized the “social isolation” of deeply impoverished, racially segregated neighborhoods, where quality schools, suitable marriage partners, and “exposure to informal mainstream social networks and conventional role models” are in short supply. He theorized that programs designed to promote equality of opportunity that have positive impacts on the moderately disadvantaged may have little or no impact on “the truly disadvantaged.”
Consistent with this theory, quantitative research has documented sizeable differentials in educational attainment between those who are moderately and severely disadvantaged. For example, Martha Bailey and Susan Dynarski find important differences in the college-enrollment practices of students from the poorest families and those who are less so. Only 29 percent of high-school students born between 1979 and 1982 who lived in households in the lowest quartile of the distribution enrolled in college. But for students in the second-lowest quartile, the rate of college enrollment was 47 percent. The difference was starker still in those students’ college graduation rates: 9 percent among those in the lowest quartile versus 21 percent among those in the second quartile.
Meanwhile, qualitative research has deepened our understanding of the cultural and material challenges of those who are truly disadvantaged by both ethnic and class isolation. In his influential 1969 book examining an inner-city neighborhood in Washington, D.C., ethnographer Ulf Hannerz distinguishes between residents he labels “mainstreamers” and “street families.” The former, he says, are “stable working-class people” who “conform most closely to mainstream American assumptions about the ‘normal’ life.” By contrast, “street families” experience periodic unemployment and rely on government transfers.
Like Wilson, some sociologists focus on the structural effects of neighborhoods on the educational attainment and social mobility of the two groups. For example, John Kasarda has shown how the lack of private transport in large cities limits the access of the isolated urban poor to employment and other opportunities distant from the immediate neighborhood. But anthropologists note that poor neighborhoods contain diverse populations, and culture is not easily reduced to structural factors. The truly disadvantaged do not need to concentrate in specific places to lack cultural and material resources.
Despite the range of deprivation to be found among those perceived to be disadvantaged, researchers typically use participation in the National School Lunch Program as their poverty indicator, a blunt measure. Students are eligible for free or reduced-price meals at school if their household income is as much as 185 percent of the federal poverty line. In 1997, when the voucher program we study here launched, 37 percent of U.S. students received subsidized lunches. The income limit for free lunch was set at $16,874 for a family of three and $20,280 for a family of four, or $27,518 and $33,072 in 2020 dollars. Since then, Congress has allowed entire school districts to provide free meals to all students without collecting individual income-based applications if at least 40 percent of enrolled students receive other subsidized services, such as food stamps. By 2015, some 52 percent of U.S. students were eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches. When over half the student population are defined as poor, the definition of poverty is a very generous one.
In short, eligibility for participation in the school-lunch program does not provide a precise indicator of the population that Wilson characterized as truly disadvantaged. Yet a good deal of education research uses it as the sole indicator of socioeconomic status.
Revisiting a School-Choice Study
School-choice programs also define the eligible population in fairly broad terms that include not only those who are truly disadvantaged but also those who are only moderately disadvantaged. But to be effective, the exercise of choice would seem to require at least a certain amount of economic and cultural resources. Parents must have the time and energy to select the appropriate setting for their child, and the family may be expected to cover the cost of school uniforms, educational materials, and travel to and from the school. Beyond material considerations, schools may have rules for behavior with which students must comply if they are to remain in the school and demanding expectations for family involvement.
Yet evaluations of school-choice interventions typically ignore important differences in family capacities. Estimates of program impacts are typically made for the entire participating population or for all members of specific ethnic groups. This was the case in the earlier study of the New York City voucher program, to which we now turn.
In 1996, when New York City public schools did not open on time, the archdiocese responsible for the city’s Catholic schools offered to accept the public school’s one thousand “worst” students. The chancellor of the city’s school system rejected the proposal, but Mayor Rudy Giuliani embraced it, setting off a political firestorm over the proper boundaries between church and state. In the midst of this controversy, the nonprofit School Choice Scholarships Foundation was formed to provide private-school scholarships to any participating secular or religious private school in New York City. The foundation announced in February of 1997 that it would provide half-tuition scholarships for at least three years to 1,000 eligible elementary-school students. The scholarships were worth up to $1,400 per child per year and were for students entering grades 1 to 5 who qualified for free or reduced-price school lunch. Some 85 percent of the scholarships were reserved for students attending schools that had average reading and math scores below the citywide median on state tests.
More than 20,000 students applied. A sample of voucher applicants participated in an in-person eligibility screening, during which students took basic-skills tests in reading and math and the accompanying adult completed a questionnaire asking them about the child’s current school and the family’s demographic background. The vouchers were awarded by lottery in May 1997 and recipients entered private schools in the 1997–98 school year. Although the initial voucher offer was limited to three years, the scholarships were later extended to the end of 8th grade for students who had remained continuously in participating private schools.
Our analysis includes 2,634 students: a “treatment” group of 1,356 who received an offer of a voucher and a “control” group of 1,278 students who did not. The treatment and control groups have similar overall characteristics. Forty-two percent of the treatment group and 41 percent of the control group are African American, and 42 percent of the treatment group and 47 percent of the control group are Hispanic American. About one third of both groups report having an absent father.
To identify students deprived by both ethnicity and socioeconomic background, we restrict our analysis to students who are identified as a member of a minority group — that is, if the accompanying adult at the information verification session said that the ethnicity of the mother is either African American or Hispanic American. We then distinguish between “moderate” and “severe” disadvantage based on whether a minority student’s mother has any education beyond a high-school diploma. That decision is informed by research about first-generation college students, who are less likely to complete a degree. Among students offered a voucher, about 55 percent are at moderate disadvantage because their mothers have at least some college education; the other 45 percent are at severe disadvantage because their mothers did not go beyond high school, including 17 percent whose mothers dropped out.
We also look across levels of family income among minority students to distinguish between moderate and severe disadvantage. Some 49 percent of students live in households we consider “extremely low income” because they earn less than $13,067 a year (in 2020 dollars). That is half of the poverty line for a family of four and the level the U.S. Department of Agriculture uses to indicate “severe poverty.” We consider the other 51 percent of the treatment group, whose households earn at least $13,068 annually, to be “moderately low income,” including 10 percent whose households earn $32,670 or more.
With data from the National Student Clearinghouse on college outcomes as of 2017, we are able to compare college enrollment and degree attainment between the treatment and control groups after at least seven years of every student’s anticipated high-school graduation date. We are thus able to detect enrollment and degree acquisitions even if progress by students is delayed for an additional four years beyond what was observed in the prior study of this program. During the intervening period, enrollments at four-year institutions in the study sample increased to 29 percent from 26 percent and the four-year graduation rate increased to 16 percent from 10 percent, a 60 percent increase.
Results
Our analysis considers enrollment and degree attainment at both two-year and four-year schools. We look at the impact of the voucher program in two ways: the effect of being offered a voucher, whether or not it was ever used, and the effect of actually using the voucher to attend a private school for some period of time. About 78 percent of students who were offered $1,400 tuition vouchers actually used them for at least some period of time.
Impacts of a Voucher Offer. In looking at the entire treatment group, the offer of a voucher did not have a significant impact on students enrolling in or graduating from college. However, when looking separately at students who are at moderate or severe disadvantage, we find different impacts depending on student ethnicity, mother’s education, and household income. Minority students whose mothers have some college education are 8 percentage points more likely to enroll in any college if a voucher was offered, but those whose mothers did not progress beyond high school are about 4 percentage points less likely to enroll if offered a voucher (see Figure 1). In looking at degree attainment, we find a difference of 9 percentage points. Minority students with college-educated mothers are 7 percentage points more likely to graduate if offered a voucher—both for any college and four-year colleges. But we find that would-be first-generation minority students, those whose mothers did not attend college, are about 2 percentage points less likely to graduate—an impact that is not significantly different from zero.
We also observe a difference of 11 percentage points in rates of college enrollment among minority students who are at either moderate or severe economic disadvantage. Among minority students from moderately low-income households, the offer of a voucher boosts college enrollment by 8 percentage points and degree attainment by 5 percentage points. But the offer of a voucher does not have a positive impact on minority students from the lowest-income households, who are 3 percentage points less likely to enroll in college and no more likely to earn a degree than those in the control group. The voucher offer seems to have a noticeable impact on college enrollment and degree attainment for students who are only moderately disadvantaged by income, but no significant effect on students with severe income constraints.
For the most part, we do not observe differential effects on enrollment or degree completion at two-year colleges by either mothers’ education or household income. Apparently, the effects of the voucher offer on moderately advantaged students is to increase the overall percentage of college enrollments and to shift college choice from pursuit of a two-year degree to that of a four-year degree.
Impacts on Using a Voucher to Attend Private School. Children at moderate disadvantage, based either on their mother’s level of education or household income, are not significantly more likely than their less-advantaged peers to use a voucher to attend private school for at least some period of time. But the effects of the use of that voucher vary considerably by degree of deprivation.
For minority students whose mothers have some college education, using a voucher to attend private school boosts their enrollment rates at any college by 11 percentage points—a 21 percent increase (see Figure 2). For minority students whose households are moderately low-income, voucher use boosts enrollment by 15 percentage points. Moderately disadvantaged minority students who use vouchers also are more likely to earn a college degree. We find an impact of 10 percentage points on degree attainment both for students whose mothers have some college education and for students from moderately low-income households.
We underscore the especially notable impact on moderately disadvantaged students earning four-year degrees. Minority students at moderate disadvantage who use a voucher are 10 percentage points more likely to go on to earn a four-year college degree than those in the control group. Given the relatively low levels of college enrollment and degree attainment by disadvantaged students, this represents an increase of almost 70 percent.
In contrast, voucher use did not have a statistically significant effect on either college enrollment or degree completion for severely disadvantaged students. The difference in the impact of voucher use on minority students whose mothers did and did not attend college is 17 percentage points for enrollment and 12 percentage points for degree completion. The difference in the impact of voucher use on minority students from extremely and moderately low-income families is 19 percentage points for college enrollment and 10 percentage points for degree completion.
Discussion
As with the earlier study, our analysis finds little impact from the offer of a voucher when looking at the entire sample. But with data from four additional years, as well as by looking for differences in effects between moderately and more severely disadvantaged students, we find important differences. The voucher intervention has sizeable, positive impacts for students who, while still disadvantaged by most definitions, have more cultural and financial resources at home. This resembles conclusions drawn by qualitative research, which suggest that students and families often find it difficult to take advantage of school-choice opportunities unless their cultural and material resources have reached a certain minimum.
These results raise policy questions about voucher size. The New York City vouchers covered only half the costs of private-school tuition and were capped at $1,400. That amount seems unlikely to be helpful for the most disadvantaged families, who were unlikely to be able to pay the balance of the bill.
In addition, the significant moderating effects of mothers’ levels of education suggest that cultural factors may be at work. As numerous studies have shown, social and cultural capital are crucial for educational attainment. Nurturing social networks and institutions that enable parents to participate fully in voucher programs may be necessary to reap the benefits they provide. Schools, too, need to tend to the cultural needs of students and families if they wish to serve them effectively. In the presence of gaps in financial and cultural capital, school choice may do little to alleviate inequalities within the low-income community, as the most disadvantaged families remain in less effective educational institutions. This has evoked criticism, such as Diane Ravitch’s assertion that schools of choice “will leave regular public schools with the most difficult students to educate, thus creating a two-tier system of widening inequality.” But other commentators, such as Robert Pondiscio, say there is little reason why “low-income families of color should not have the ability to send their children to school with the children of other parents who are equally engaged, committed or ambitious for their children, [as that] is what affluent parents do.”
Whatever the merits of these alternative judgments, the results reported here suggest that the opportunity to attend a private school does not provide uniform benefits to disadvantaged students. Students whose households are in the most dire economic distress, and those whose mothers did not graduate or progress beyond high school, do not experience the same substantial, positive impacts as their less-disadvantaged peers. The New York City voucher program may have enhanced the educational opportunities for some low-income students, but the tools, policies, and institutions needed to ensure all students, including the “truly disadvantaged,” can realize their academic potential remain elusive.
Albert Cheng is assistant professor in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas College of Education and Health Professions. Paul E. Peterson, professor of government at Harvard University, directs the Program on Education Policy and Governance and is senior editor of Education Next. This article is adapted from a study published in Sociology of Education.