NEPC - Blog Post of the Day

Curmudgucation: Behind Fad-Prone Education

elaine — Fri, 14 Aug 2026 12:40:09 +0000

Curmudgucation: Behind Fad-Prone Education

Robert Pondiscio posted a question-- "Why Is Education So Damn Fad-Prone?"-- that everyone who has taught for more than two years has often asked. The fad-addiction of education is exactly why every announcement of The Next Miracle Cure is met by a bunch of teachers shaking their heads, rolling their eyes, and closing their doors.

"But this time is different!" proclaim the progenitors of every new big idea, just before they start bitching about how "the education establishment" or "the blob" or "special interests" are too resistant to their brilliant transformational idea. Lordy, Arne Duncan is still out there trying to explain how his reformy ideas were awesome and totally should have worked but the establishment just didn't try hard enmough. Spoiler alert: This Time is never different. And Pondiscio notes that it is actually teachers who keep education somewhat fad-resistant:

Why is education so damn fad-prone?

The easy answer is also the most insulting—that educators are uniquely susceptible to trends, quick to abandon what works, and too eager to embrace whatever comes next. But that answer is wrong. Classroom teachers are typically the least enthusiastic participants in these cycles, having learned through experience how quickly today’s “transformational” idea becomes tomorrow’s abandoned initiative.

He points to four structural reasons that contribute to recurring fad chasing, and they aren't a bad start to explaining the phenomenon.

Weak feedback loops.

Pondiscio argues that "in most sectors, failure reveals itself quickly," and while I think there's room for debate there, I agree with him that in education the feedback signal is "low and noisy." There are so many variables-- student turnover and many factors outside the classroom mean that changes in outcomes are hard to attribute to any single factor. We should note that this limitation has not kept many reformsters from arguing that measuring outputs would allow us to identify teachers and methods that are effective. I would add to his list the lack of any good measure of outcomes (the Big Standardized Test is not such a measure).

But mostly the feedback loop remains weak because it usually carefully and deliberately cuts actual classroom teachers out of the loop. Nobody is better positioned to see exactly how the hot new idea works on the ground than the people who are right there, and yet the teacher view is subject to benign neglect and at worst (as in the days of Common Core) treated as if teachers are the problem of education and not the expert ground troops.

Publishers and other instructional materials manufacturers feed this dynamic because their target audience is usually not actual teachers, but administrators. Many instructional materials are bad because they were made to be sold, not to be used. And that means NEW! is better.

And when it comes to evidence-based choices, consider this rather grim finding from a recent meta-study which found that the rate at which education research precisely reproduces results of previous studies is-- zero.

In the absence of clear feedback loops, education is plagued with policy by assertion-- folks who just declare that Policy X or Instructional Strategy Z are excellent because it just feels true. And education has been plagued by decades of people insisting that American schools are failing, based on their insistence that it is so. Even when data is available, the loop can be disrupted by bias and political gamesmanship; just this week, Secretary Linda McMahon was one more Ed Secretary to misrepresent what "proficient" means on the NAEP.

Leadership legitimacy requires visible change.

Administrative churn is a blight. I have written before about resume bombs; a new administrator doesn't build a resume by keeping things running smoothly. No, if they want to call themselves "forward thinking change agents," they have to change something. Blow stuff up, start a new program, get that next job, then leave the district to pick up the pieces. "Implemented new widget education program" looks great on a resume, whether it actually works or not.

Low barriers to new ideas.

"In fields like medicine or engineering, new approaches must pass through layers of validation before they reach widespread adoption. Education has far fewer guardrails." Ain't it the truth. In education, anybody with a few gazillion dollars in business success can decide that he's going to push a set of standards in an attempt to standardize the entire US education system to his preferences, and that won't even be the only time he tries to transform the system.

And he's not the only one. So many Hot New Ideas have been pushed by folks whose education expertise is based on nothing except they went to school when they were young. Education is largely free of anyone to say, "You'll need to provide some evidence before we even let you in the door." If someone in education does try to resist, just cue more complaints about the establishment and the monopoly and putting adult concerns ahead of children's. It's not just that there are few barriers to faddish new ideas-- it's that many folks believe they have a right not to be met with any barriers to their ideas.

Add forty-some years of politicizing of education, so that now political avenues are considered a legitimate way to pursue new instructional approaches. The reading wars have been going on for a long time, but No Child Left Behind sold the idea, now being pursued by Science of Reading fans, of using government to settle instructional debates. We're at a place where to be an education advocate or mover and shaker, it's more important to be good at politics than to be good at education.

Moral urgency.

The magical phrase "for the children" allows folks to wave away all objections to their cool new idea, along with its cousin "don't put adult concerns ahead of children's needs." Morla urgency is always part of education discussions, and rightly so. But it is suspicious that moral urgency is always used to ramp up speed rather than caution; it's always "the children can't wait another second" and not "we owe it to the children to make sure we get this right." Common Core had to be rammed through quickly because we couldn't wait a second to rescue children. These days, folks like to wave around the "terrible NAEP scores" as proof that schools had better buy the newest AI-powered edu-whizbang.

All four of these are real features of the education system. They render it vulnerable to fad-of-the-week ideas both on the macro and micro level, and these vulnerabilities have been exploited by everyone from corporate salespersons to well-meaning amateurs to reformsters of all stripes to privatizers who simply want to dismantle the whole thing.

Pondiscio argues for slowing down and not throwing out functioning ideas to make room for this week's fad. "In short," he concludes, "we need to make competence visible."

That's a great thought. I'm just not sure how it happens. The folks who are looking to the edufad to bring them money and/or power are more invested in bolstering their own preferred fad than taking a look at whether it is successful or not. A whole wing of the reformster/privatizer world has worked hard to make incompetence visible, whether it exists or not (do not forget Chris Rufo telling his Hillsdale College audience, "To get universal school choice, you really need to operate from a place of universal public school distrust.") This is another way in which a free market approach to education is counter-productive. The free market does not foster superior quality; the free market fosters superior marketing. And marketing loves on asymmetric information in which the seller knows more about the product than the buyer.

We could, I think, damp down the faddishness of education. There is nothing that tamps down faddishness like a level-headed district administration that eschews fads in favor of long-term investment in unexciting things that work, leavened with investment of time and attention in new things that are taken on thoughtfully and given time to prove themselves (or not). How we grow more of those high quality administrators has puzzled me for forty-some years. But more of these people would in turn affect what companies thought they could get away with selling.

And if everyone-- edu-corporations, legislators, bureaucrats, thinky tank folks-- listened more to teachers, the whole loop, the whole education process process would work so much better. I'm not pretending that getting teachers into the loop would be easy. Out of a group of four million, you are going to find A) a non-zero number of oddball perspectives and B) a distinct lack of unanimity. On top of that, the teachers who could probably provide the most useful perspective may well be too busy to talk to you. But the current practice of locking teachers out of education discussions (unless they have been pre-screened to make sure they have agreeable opinions) is not helping education in this country avoid the latest in education hula hoops.

elaine August 14, 2026

Source

Curmudgucation

Shanker Blog: Do One-Size-Fits-All Literacy Programs Serve English Learners?

elaine — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 12:16:45 +0000

Shanker Blog: Do One-Size-Fits-All Literacy Programs Serve English Learners?

My teaching experience in a bilingual school versus a dual immersion school couldn’t be more different, although they shared one commonality: the balance between engaging and overburdening English learners (ELs) was hard to strike.

In the bilingual school, language barriers impeded my classroom daily. Although our lessons were taught bilingually, my co-teacher and I struggled to understand each other and often dealt with miscommunications. The administration mandated that state tested subjects be taught in English exclusively, implying that bilingual aims were on the backburner to test scores. Our EL students were constantly on call to translate for the non-Spanish speakers who didn’t understand the content, which distracted them from focusing on their coursework and put improper pressure on them to synthesize and interpret lessons.

But in the dual immersion (DLI) school, I struggled to get my EL students involved at all. I didn't even know which of my students were enrolled in the DLI program, but I wrongly assumed that because I taught almost all the ELs in my school that many of them would be enrolled to take advantage of its academic benefits. In the DLI program, students were eligible to receive a certification in bilingualism which could be leveraged for college and career advancement. I was shocked to find that despite the DLI program offering their native language, only a few of my 250 students were enrolled. The program marketed bilingualism as a career investment: but one aimed at English-dominant students acquiring a second language, not at students who were already bilingual and had the most to gain from formal recognition of that skill.

These experiences reflect a broader pattern in how state policy has approached English learners: investing in programs that promise inclusion while rarely centering the students those programs are meant to serve. The data reveals this gap, as 50% of ELs who are in the U.S. school system since kindergarten fail to reach proficiency within 6 years.

Dual Immersion Benefits Non-Native Learners

Many states have experienced rapid population growth of non-English speakers in the last few decades, and in response, have implemented practical school reforms to support students from non-English-speaking households. Utah’s dual immersion programming represents a widespread reform that was designed to support ELs but has instead largely served the white population.

In 2001, a Utah family member filed an OCR complaint about their nephew’s school, submitting that the school was grouping together ELs into isolated classrooms and providing inadequate curriculum/instruction. This complaint led to an investigation, which forced the state to implement an EL endorsement requirement and ELD instruction blocks for English learners. But in 2007, former Gov. Jon Huntsman began to advocate for a better way to integrate ELs into Utah schools: through dual immersion. Huntsman served as an ambassador to Russia and China and came back to his home state committed to making new economic and global goals of success for Utah students. Although the program offers that the two way programs—which teach both English and the program language—should have at least one-third native speakers, in 2013 only 8% of 3rd graders participating were English learners. By investing so heavily in DLI programs to ‘serve ELs’, the state managed to predominantly serve white populations instead. Utah’s case was not an anomaly: literacy policy has continued to treat ELs as the justification rather than the starting point.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Science of Reading

The politicization of science of reading legislation has created additional structural barriers for ELs. Tracing SOR back to NCLB and the Reading First Initiative, researchers note that the foundational 1998 Reading Panel report largely failed to study diverse learner populations, and assumed ELs should reach native language proficiency before starting to learn to read in English. A study on how SOR legislation affects deaf learners analyzed 24 recent SOR bills and found that state policies frame reading as a policy problem, and equally equate dyslexia, disabilities, and El interventions in one grouped mandate. This symmetrical language assumes that each of these states have the same demographics, and that reading interventions for students with disabilities and ELs will look the same.

Reading intervention provisions are not the only place researchers find problematic in SOR legislation: the gaps extend into how states prepare the teachers responsible for carrying out those interventions. While ELs benefit from the same foundational literacy pedagogy as all students, they additionally require oral language development and linguistic scaffolding that most teacher preparation programs do not include. State policies have largely failed to mandate oversight of whether teacher preparation programs incorporate EL-specific, science-based reading strategies. Teachers in bilingual programs must be trained to develop genuine bilingualism in their students, not simply translation skills.

Even when bilingual programming exists, the structural problems do not stop at teacher preparation. Research on dual language programs find that many plans are based in deficit frameworks for emerging bilingual students, particularly by using monolingual assessment practices. A policy brief reviewing Texas’ literacy legislation criticized the required assessments for ELs and found that when Spanish scores were combined with English, the students underperforming decreased from 84% to 40%. In short, when diagnostics and assessments are only completed in English, non-native English speakers may be mischaracterized. This leaves equity gaps in this type of intervention for English learners, as their bilingual growth is not reported accurately.

Bottom Line

The throughline across bilingual schools, dual immersion programs, and science of reading legislation is the same: English learners are rarely the starting point of policy design and are instead expected to adapt to systems built around other priorities. Utah's dual immersion expansion is an early example of this pattern. The economic and global competitiveness goals that drove that expansion were not EL goals, and the students who were meant to benefit were largely left out.

Science of reading legislation has followed a similar trajectory. When EL interventions are folded into the same legislative mandate as dyslexia and disability accommodations, and when the assessments used to track progress are monolingually normed, the policy infrastructure around English learners ends up measuring something other than what it intends to. What is consistent across these approaches is not a lack of investment, but a gap between the populations that policies are designed around and the populations they are meant to serve. Whether that gap closes depends on how seriously states take the distinction.

elaine August 13, 2026

Source

Shanker Blog

The Digital Delusion: i-Ready Finally Has Real Research…and It Changes Nothing

elaine — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 17:53:22 +0000

The Digital Delusion: i-Ready Finally Has Real Research…and It Changes Nothing

The Evidence is Stronger, But The Conclusions Remain the Same

Several months ago I published an article highlighting the lack of research concerning i-Ready: a genuinely strange state of affairs for a program currently being used by over 13 million students.

At the time, only four independent studies of this tool existed – and none had been published in a reputable, top-tier journal.

That has finally changed.

Last month, Online Learning – a Q1 educational journal – published the strongest evaluation of i-Ready to date. Although not a randomized controlled trial (it was a retrospective observational study), this is a careful, well-executed piece of work using sophisticated statistical methods and tens of thousands of students.

As such, this deserves to be taken seriously.

So, what did they find?

A QUICK REFRESHER

Until now, the strongest evidence on i-Ready came from several evaluations conducted by Johns Hopkins Researchers. Across those studies, the conclusion was bleak:

Across grades 3 through 6, i-Ready showed a 0.8% improvement in mathematics performance with no measurable change in reading.

However, seeing as these studies were industry funded and non-peer reviewed, it could reasonably be argued that the conclusions are not definitive.

But now we have something stronger and much larger – so does it change the picture?

THE NEW STUDY

Researchers from Georgia State University examined two years of i-Ready implementation (2021-2023) across grades 1 through 9 in a large Georgia district with 131 schools – 81 of which used i-Ready.

Overall, 67,602 student-year cases were eligible to use i-Ready, yet only 27,717 - about 41% - actually used the program. The authors acknowledge they were unable to explain why most eligible students never used the software.

Importantly, the authors are refreshingly honest about the limitations of their data. Before presenting any results they write:

“Our analyses are descriptive versus causal, as we cannot fully…understand or account for selection into treatment…[and] we were unable to account for other recovery interventions occurring during the same period.”

That sentence gives me confidence in the paper: rather than overselling the findings, the authors openly acknowledge exactly what their design can (and cannot) tell us.

THE RESULTS

After two years, students who used i-Ready scored approximately:

+0.04 standard deviations higher in Reading
+0.04 standard deviations higher in Math.

That’s it.

That’s the headline.

To put this into context, an effect size of 0.04 standard deviations is equivalent to moving the average student from the 50th percentile to about the 51.5th percentile - a gain of just 1.5 percentile points.

Although the paper reports some intriguing subgroup findings (particularly among students with intellectual disabilities) the absence of a reported correction for multiple comparisons makes those findings difficult to interpret.

Finally, because the study does not clearly establish that treatment and comparison students received equivalent amounts of total instruction, it cannot rule out the possibility that some - or even all - of the observed +0.04 standard deviation benefit reflects additional time spent learning rather than any unique effect of the software itself.

To clarify, if students in the control condition received their normal classroom instruction while students using i-Ready received that same instruction PLUS additional time on the platform, then the comparison is no longer between instructional methods - it’s between different amounts of instruction. Under those circumstances, any observed advantage could simply reflect the well-established benefits of increased practice and learning time.

Had the control group, instead, spent an equivalent amount of time engaged in evidence-based, non-digital practice (such as worked examples, guided practice, or teacher-led small-group instruction), it is entirely plausible that they would have achieved similar, or even greater, gains.

Because this was a retrospective study, however, the authors cannot determine whether i-Ready replaced existing instruction or merely supplemented it. That leaves this important alternative explanation unresolved.

The overall story, however, is remarkably simple: the strongest study ever conducted on i-Ready found almost exactly the same small effects as previous evaluations.

Ironically, the research so many people have been waiting for ultimately changes nothing: the evidence is stronger, but the conclusion remains the same.

A FEW ODDITIES

Although this paper is strong, that doesn’t mean every aspect of it is beyond criticism.

In fact, the researchers made three decisions that deserve closer scrutiny.

“Weeks of Learning”

The researchers translated a gain of +0.04 standard deviations into roughly two additional weeks of learning.

Although that might sound impressive, readers are never shown how this conversion was calculated: there are no equations, no adaptation tables, not even a citation.

Presumably, the authors estimated typical MAP Growth gains across each year level, assumed those gains accumulated at a constant rate throughout the school year, and divided accordingly. Converting a single end-of-year difference into "weeks of learning" therefore implicitly assumes that learning accumulates at a constant rate throughout the school year. That assumption is neither defended nor justified in the paper (nor is it reflective of the typically saltatory nature of learning gains).

Regardless, the “weeks of learning” reported in this paper is an inference, not an observed result. Accordingly, although it may make for an appealing headline, it is much less scientifically convincing.

The Cost Estimate

Following their learning analyses, these researchers make an odd reference to cost: they estimate that the district spent $831,510 on i-Ready subscriptions over the two years. This was calculated by assuming $30 per subscription across the 27,717 active users.

There are at least two problems with this estimate.

First, the authors acknowledge there were a total of 67,602 students with access. If the district purchased subscriptions for every student who had access (as is common with district-wide software contracts) the subscription cost would have been approximately $2,028,060 rather than $831,510.

Second, they offer no reference for their proposed $30 subscription fee - and it is unclear whether this figure reflects access to a single subject or to both i-Ready Reading and i-Ready Mathematics. Because the paper reports outcomes for both subjects but never specifies how licenses were allocated, the true program cost could be substantially higher, potentially approaching $4,056,120 if separate subscriptions were required for both Reading and Mathematics.

Extrapolated, that suggests between $500,000 and $1 million dollars were spent for each 0.01 standard deviation growth amongst users: a substantially altered cost-benefit calculation.

The authors themselves note a number of other interventions (such as small-group instruction and after-school programs) that almost certainly generate better results for far less cost.

What Was Actually Measured?

Finally, the study measured outcomes using MAP Growth.

As discussed in my previous article, MAP Growth is an adaptive computer assessment that closely resembles the instructional structure of many digital tutoring platforms – including i-Ready.

By no means does this invalidate the results, but it does raise an important question about transfer. Would we observe the same gains on assessments less closely aligned with the tutoring environment? Or would we have seen growth even lower than 0.04 standard deviations?

Unfortunately, this study cannot answer that question.

SO NOW THEN…

This paper represents the benchmark evaluation of i-Ready: it is statistically sophisticated, transparent, and avoids making causal claims its design cannot support.

And it reaches almost the exact same conclusion as every previous evaluation.

i-Ready appears capable of producing very small improvements on assessments closely aligned with the instructional model. Whether those improvements justify the financial investment, loss of instructional time, and opportunity costs is a separate question – one schools should be asking before investing millions of dollars into digital tutoring.

The methods may have improved, but the estimated impact has not.

elaine August 12, 2026

Source

The Digital Delusion

Second Breakfast: Broken Record

elaine — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 01:52:00 +0000

Second Breakfast: Broken Record

I often feel like I’m repeating myself here, because in fact I am. I am, in part, because ed-tech entrepreneurs and evangelists keep repackaging the same ideas, desperate to sound innovative instead of stuck in some Cold War science fiction fantasy. “Intelligent tutoring systems” become “adaptive learning” then “personalized learning” and now AI tutors, for example.

I thought I’d write something about conversation-ending cliches in today’s newsletter -- about the ways in which certain phrases get trotted out repeatedly in education-technology and serve to shut down debate and inquiry. You know the stuff: all the talk about the inevitability of AI and the “jobs of the future” and whatnot. Then I remembered that I’d written about this very thing: about psychologist Robert Jay Lifton’s notion of the "thought-terminating cliche" as a way to end a conversation and, importantly, to silence criticism or doubt: "brief, highly reductive, definitive-sounding phrases, easily memorized, and easily expressed. They become the start and finish of any ideological analysis,” as he put it. It’s a rhetorical tactic of cults, Amanda Montell argues in her book on the language of fanaticism.

I wrote about this very thing not even six months ago. It’s as good a sign as any, I suppose, that I need to take a little break. But truthfully, it’s May 1 and the first couple of weeks of May are just really, really hard for me. My head and heart aren’t here; they’re there.

There were some really important stories this week: the news from ASU, for starters, about the school’s new “AI” tool Atomic that, without professors’ knowledge or consent, has vacuumed up their course materials from the LMS -- lecture materials, videos, and so on -- to train a chatbot that will offer “personalized” (LOL) micro-lessons full of short, fast AI slop. (For the bargain subscription fee of $5/month.)

Ben Williamson observes that this is part of a push on the part of universities to reduce everything to a data asset that can be further monetized. That is, this isn’t simply about the elimination of faculty labor and expertise through automation -- although it is assuredly also that -- but the turn in the purpose of of higher education institutions from “academics” -- teaching, learning, research -- to “financialization.” It shouldn’t be a surprise that ASU is at the forefront of this, with its long history of working with GSV and its connection to the god-awful ASU-GSV event (bonus: ASU professor wil.i.am and “AI” “future-proofing”).

Something about thought-terminating cliches and cults there, for sure.

So here are a bunch of links to a bunch of stories that hopefully you won’t spend your weekend reading. Hopefully you’ll be offline, outside.

I will be. And I’ll be back in a few weeks, not with a clear head or happy heart. But I will be back.

More bad technology vibes:

Jill Barshay writes about new research that’s found that “AI gives more praise, less criticism to Black students.”

“Silicon Valley-backed companies are selling $50,000 genetic tests to anxious parents, despite shaky science,” writes Christopher Cox in NY Mag.

More eugenics in this piece in The Wall Street Journal: “How Silicon Valley’s Brightest Parents Broke Their Own School.”

Retraction alert!

“The more young people use AI, the more they hate it,” says Janus Rose in The Verge.

“I took an algorithm to court in Sweden. The algorithm won,” writes Charlotta Kronblad in a story about algorithmic decision-making and school admissions.

“NYC withdraws plans for an AI-focused high school,” The Gothamist reports. Good riddance.

John Herrman on “My Adventures Setting Up an OpenClaw Agent”:

Just because you believe you have a software-shaped hole in your life doesn't mean you should force students to think they have one too.

Via The New York Times: “How A.I. Killed Student Writing (and Revived It)”

Jennifer Berkshire examines some of the reasons why we’re seeing “the big tech backlash.” I think I'd add this reason: it sucks! Computers suck! Stop pretending like it's amazing! If "software ate the world," as Marc Andreessen cooed back in 2011, then what it's shat out since then is what we're living in now, and it's awful.

News about that other menacing technology, the car, that, much like the computer, is all wrapped up with cliches about inevitability and individualism and "what choice do we have?!?": “Walking near a D.C. school raises the chance of being hit by a car, data shows.”

(Image credits)

Today’s bird is the little ringed plover. Its Latin name is Thinornis dubius – “dubius” meaning dubious (shocking, I know), doubtful, uncertain. The bird isn’t uncertain, but naturalists were. (Imagine that. Uncertainty from scientists.) Was this a different bird than the common ringed plover, they wondered? And yes, it is. The latter does not have the distinctive yellow eye ring that the little ringed plover can boast. (The common ringed plover, to its credit, does have lovely orange legs.)

elaine August 10, 2026

Source

Second Breakfast

Generation Tech: Social Media Use Is Linked to Mental Health Disorders, Not Just Low Well-Being

elaine — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 01:13:11 +0000

Generation Tech: Social Media Use Is Linked to Mental Health Disorders, Not Just Low Well-Being

We’ve known for a decade that clinical-level depression, self-harm, suicidal thoughts, and suicide rose among adolescents after 2011.

We also know that the more time a teen spends using social media the more likely it is he or she is unhappy, low in life satisfaction, or high in symptoms of depression.

There’s a bit of a difference, though: The studies of change over time have shown increases in mental health issues that require treatment, while the studies among individuals mostly focus on low psychological well-being or symptoms of depression measured by questionnaires. This difference has led some to argue that there is no evidence of a link between social media use and mental health disorders that require treatment.

I’ve always been skeptical of this argument given the strong links between self-report well-being or symptom measures and mental health disorders; the self-report measures correlate strongly with clinical diagnoses and are often used to screen for mental health disorders. It’s pretty unusual to find someone with major depression who says they are happy and doing well.

Still, having data showing a link with mental health disorders would be even better. That way, we’d know for sure that social media use was associated with actual mental health disorders – the type that require treatment – not just with unhappiness, low life satisfaction, or elevated symptoms of depression.

My colleagues and I have done a few of these studies. We found a link between social media use and self-harm behaviors in a large sample of UK adolescents, though self-harm was measured via self-report. We also found that digital media use was linked to depression, self-harm, and suicidal thoughts according to clinical criteria among 9- to 10-year-olds in the U.S. in the ABCD dataset. However, social media use was low in this very young population.

Ideally, we’d want a large sample of adolescents with clinically diagnostic measures of mental health disorders as well as a solid measure of social media use. A study that came out last year (Fassi et al., 2025) does just that …

… and it finds an even larger link than studies using well-being measures.

Teens with mental health conditions including generalized anxiety disorder, major depressive episode, eating disorders, oppositional defiant disorder, or ADHD spent more time on social media than those without a mental health condition, g = .46. That means teens with mental health conditions spent nearly a half a standard deviation more time using social media. That’s equivalent to a linear r of .22, almost exactly what another dataset showed for social media time and self-reported depressive symptoms among girls (r = .24).

For teens with internalizing disorders like anxiety or depression – the clinical-level equivalents to low well-being or high depressive symptoms – the effect size was even larger, g = .62. That’s a linear r of .30, higher than any study I know of that looked at social media time and well-being or depressive symptoms.

There were other differences between those with and without mental health disorders as well. Teens with internalizing disorders were also more likely to experience social comparison on social media (feeling they don’t measure up to other people’s profiles or photos), feel a lack of control over the time they are spending on social media, and report a bigger impact of social media feedback on their moods. Even those with externalizing disorders (like conduct disorder) spent more time using social media than those without any mental health disorder.

Above: Selected figures from Fassi et al. (2025)

This dataset still has more to tell us. For one thing, Fassi et al. did not control for sex. That’s very odd, as girls both spend more time on social media and are more likely to have internalizing disorders. The overall effect sizes may be somewhat lower since they didn’t include that control. The set-up of the analyses, comparing estimated social media time in each group, is strange – in my view, it would be better to see the percentage of teens with a mental health disorder at each level of social media use. The gray shading in the figures above does not indicate statistical significance; instead, they reflect g = -.40 to .40, which the authors of the article (pretty arbitrarily) designated as the “smallest effect size of interest.” Given that childhood lead exposure and adult IQ is g = .22, a g of twice as much is going to leave out many important and meaningful effects. Nevertheless, social media time was above their very high threshold.

This study puts to rest the idea that mental health conditions are not associated with social media use. They are, and at an even higher level than measures of well-being or depressive symptoms. That is further evidence that increases in major depressive episode and self-harm among teens after 2012 are linked to the rise of social media and smartphones. Combined with the two recent meta-analyses showing that social media reduction improves depression and well-being, this study is yet more evidence pointing toward severely limiting social media use among adolescents.

elaine August 10, 2026

Source

Generation Tech

Janresseger: Will Federal Education Funding Flow More Smoothly in FY 2026?

elaine — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 13:28:24 +0000

Janresseger: Will Federal Education Funding Flow More Smoothly in FY 2026?

If you have been tracking what is happening to federal funding for the nation’s public schools, you won’t be surprised to learn that Education Week‘s Mark Lieberman continues his role as the best reporter on this subject. Here are two updates from last week.

How will federal funding flow this year once most of the Department of Education’s programs have been sent to other federal departments through interagency agreements?

Lieberman reassures state education officials and school district leaders that most key programs will continue to have their funds released “through the U.S. Department of Education’s grant portal this summer… Programs like Title I aid for disadvantaged students and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA)… allocate funds for school districts, but by law the money flows first to states in two batches, one on July 1 and another three months later… In a statement, an Education Department spokesperson said the agency is ‘committed to delivering formula funding by the July 1 deadline.’ ”

Operation of Title I is traveling to the Department of Labor, and the work of IDEA is traveling to the Department of Health and Human Services. Lieberman describes what is expected to happen with Title I: “The Department of Labor’s Employment and Training Administration in recent months has advertised new education grant competitions ‘on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education,’ and the two agencies have touted their collaboration in jointly running the competitions. Still, most staffers overseeing those programs still work for the Department of Education. The postings announcing grant availability list Education department email addresses under the section with contact information.”

To what extent did the Trump Administration Violate the Congressional power of the purse last year?

Lieberman reports that data recently released by the Department of Education show that under Linda McMahon’s leadership, the Department of Education “sidestepped Congress on more than $1 billion in education spending.”

“The Education Department, under President Donald Trump, subsequently subtracted appropriated funding from more than a dozen programs and instead added those dollars to other priorities, according to an Education Week analysis of congressional justification documents the White House published this month as part of its fiscal year 2027 budget proposal… The Education Department typically publishes its ‘spending plan’ mere weeks after Congress passes a new fiscal year budget, confirming allocations lawmakers laid out in their budget bills. Congress approved fiscal 2025 spending (last year’s final federal budget) in March of last year, but the Education Department’s spending plan never materialized. That means the recently published numbers offer the first glimpse at how the executive branch decided to spend funds Congress appropriated more than a year ago.”

Here are merely some of Lieberman’s examples of what the new numbers show. “For four Education Department programs, the Trump administration spent more than what Congress had prescribed: charter schools ($60 million added), civics instruction ($140 million added), historically Black colleges and universities ($438 million added), and tribal colleges ($56 million added). To come up with those added expenditures, the Trump administration effectively zeroed out another four programs entirely, rerouting a total of $463 million for teacher preparation, public television, university foreign-language studies programs, and Hispanic-serving higher education institutions. For another eight programs, the executive branch underspent the allocation Congress approved. That included redirecting hundreds of millions of dollars for minority-serving institutions within a higher education grant program—Aid for Institutional Development—that the Trump administration has argued violates the Constitution.”

Lieberman explains where McMahon’s department found $60 million to add to charter school spending: “To bolster the Charter Schools program, the agency depleted the entire $31 million allocation for the Ready to Learn grant program, which supports the development of educational TV programming for young children. The remaining $29 million boost for charter schools came from portions of fiscal 2025 allocations for four other programs: Magnet Schools ($14 million), Javits Gifted and Talented ($9 million), Statewide Family Engagement Centers ($3 million), and Assistance in Arts Education ($3 million). The Trump administration last year slashed ongoing grants for each of those four programs as well as dozens of others, arguing in many cases that individual grantees were engaged in diversity-related initiatives that contradicted the president’s priories. But for most of those changes, the department offered no public announcement, instead notifying individual grant recipients with little warning that their awards had been discontinued.”

Perhaps there will be less cutting or rearranging of Congressionally allocated education dollars in the coming year: “Lawmakers included language in the fiscal 2026 budget law they approved in February that much more explicitly restricts movement of money from one program to another.” Lieberman reports that the ranking members of both Senate and House appropriations committees, Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) “said they prioritized unambiguous guardrails in the fiscal 2026 budget to block the Trump administration from further reprogramming funds.”

Lieberman adds, however, that Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought has threatened to use “pocket rescissions,’ in which the executive branch proposes to rescind appropriated funds so late in the fiscal year that the appropriation of the funds expires whether Congress approves the changes or not. In other words, this year, Congress could allow Congressionally appropriated dollars to expire.

Lieberman quotes Sarah Abernathy, who served for a decade as executive director of the Committee for Education Funding, a federal budget advocacy group: “This is the first time I’ve ever seen an administration say, ‘We have tons of authority to make our own decisions about funding levels for programs.'”

elaine August 7, 2026

Source

Janresseger

The Reliable Narrator: NAEP 2026: The Politics of Testing

elaine — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 04:58:37 +0000

The Reliable Narrator: NAEP 2026: The Politics of Testing

"Despite the best of intentions, however, in practice, reading assessments sometimes negatively impact students and their learning opportunities." Forzani, et al. (2022)

The members of the Development Panel tasked with creating the 2026 NAEP Reading Framework offer cautions at the beginning of their explanation of the politically disrupted drafting process leading to the 2026 NAEP revisions:

Despite the best of intentions, however, in practice, reading assessments sometimes negatively impact students and their learning opportunities, whether the tests themselves exhibit biases or the results are reported in ways that invite stereotyping. This is true even for reading assessments that are not “high stakes” (i.e., have important consequences for individual students), such as the NAEP. Negative consequences of assessment appear to disproportionately impact students from historically marginalized groups, such as students of color (Lee, 2016), multilingual learners (Butvilofsky et al., 2020; Fairbairn & Fox, 2009), and those students whose families are of lower socioeconomic means (Barton & Coley, 2009). (Forzani, et al., 2022, p. 154)

With a revised NAEP being administered in grade 4 and 8 for reading and math in 2026, you can anticipate a refreshed round of crisis mongering to follow, notably in how the results are reported and interpreted.

As Forzani, et al. (2022) explain, NAEP began in 1969, but had a much different purpose then than now:

NAEP was intended to provide a low-stakes, curriculum-independent index of trends in achievement, that is, an assessment with no consequences for individual students, schools, districts, or states and reflecting skills or objectives that could be gained from a wide range of experiences—in or out of school (Wilder et al., 2008). Originally, NAEP was conceptualized to be more like a survey than a test (Jacobsen & Rothstein, 2014). In fact, in its initial years of implementation, scores were reported by individual items (showing the frequency of correct and incorrect responses). There was no plan for all of the items on any NAEP assessment to“add up” to anything like a reading score or a math score. (p. 159)

Over the decades, NAEP evolved, including reading comprehension scores and ways to track reading over time. The 2026 reading framework is the third, following frameworks in 1992 and 2009.

The problems that have developed with the test include that the achievement levels are often misunderstood and misrepresented [“It should be noted that the NAEP Proficient achievement level does not represent grade level proficiency as determined by other assessment standards (e.g., state or district assessments)”], especially in the context of media and political claims of a reading crisis.

For example, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon posted on social media: “When 70% of 8th graders in the U.S. can’t read proficiently, it’s not the students who are failing—it’s the education system that’s failing them.”

In 2018, journalist Emily Hanford popularized the current “reading crisis” in her article “Hard Words,” writing, “More than 60 percent of American fourth-graders are not proficient readers, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, and it’s been that way since testing began in the 1990s.”

Five years later, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof repeated that statistic: “One of the most bearish statistics for the future of the United States is this: Two-thirds of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient in reading.”

The problem is that NAEP uses “proficient” for an aspirational level of reading, set at the 70th percentile (Rosenberg, 2004), but NAEP “basic” more closely represents “grade level” proficiency since most states set their grade proficiency at NAEP basic (for example, grade 4 reading):

Thus, the three examples above are high-profile misrepresentations of reading proficiency in the US.

As the current reading crisis driven by the “science of reading” story illustrates, while students have no individual stakes when taking NAEP, those students, teachers, and schools are directly impacted by media and political rhetoric and the legislation and policy that follow misreading and misrepresenting NAEP test scores.

While some may recognize that NAEP has become a significant political cog in the education reform machine, Forzani, et al. (2022) have detailed that the NAEP revision process has also become politically corrupted.

The Development Panel sought to make the test more equitable but also to expand what counts as reading comprehension:

In terms of accounting for students’ assets, the VP advised the DP to focus on a “best foot forward” stance so that all students, including culturally and linguistically diverse children and English learners, had a fair opportunity to demonstrate what they knew and could do. (p. 156)

Here, it is important to understand that all testing requires that some authority determines how to measure learning and which elements of learning constitute what is being measured.

The Development Panel establishes what counts as reading comprehension. Most standardized testing necessarily uses proxies for learning, thus some reading skill or combination of skills stands for the more complex “reading comprehension.”

As an example of how this is a problem, many beginning readers are given “reading” tests that are assessing nonsense words (DIBELS, for example), requiring no meaning making from students (see also in England the use of annual phonic checks).

This is a narrow test of fixed phonics rules, but not a test of reading comprehension.

None the less, since we tend to use standardized testing, most reading tests are heavily focused on measuring discrete reading skills (phonics, vocabulary, etc.), which may or may not correlate strongly with reading comprehension.

Some have called this an achievement gap, a label that has incited periodic back-to-basics reform efforts, almost since NAEP’s beginnings (e.g., A Nation at Risk, Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Every Student Succeeds), movements that have been lucrative to authors and publishers but have not significantly altered NAEP Reading outcomes (Willis, 2007).

(Forzani, et al., 2022, pp. 179-180)

More specifically related to the purpose of the article, the Development Panel also details the political and ideological aspects of testing and reading.

As the Panel explains, the 2026 revision process was unusually delayed: “The words ‘small but vocal minority’ of the Board are important to keep in mind; four or five on a Board of 26 members openly opposed, in public Board meetings, adoption of the Framework submitted by the DP” (p. 158).

The interference also included strong conservative resistance to the revisions (including conservative criticism on social media):

As a harbinger of future responses to the Framework, it is noteworthy that conservative Fordham Institute commentator Chester E. Finn published a critique of Draft #3 in a Fordham Institute blogpost (Finn, 2020) between the public ADC meeting in mid-July and the Board meeting on July 31. (p. 165)

Ultimately, the Panel believed the process was significantly and inappropriately compromised:

Although not explicit to the DP, at some point, full consensus had become the goal, and this goal was supported both inside the Board, by its Chair, and externally, by commentators like Finn. What was also clear was that, like the threat of filibuster in the U.S. Senate, consensus is a powerful tool to allow minority rule (in this case a small group of Board members) to control the agenda and the outcome of an important policy matter like the Framework. (p. 169)

Parallel to how media misrepresents NAEP scores, “A firestorm of negative—and generally inaccurate—media stories [about the revised reading framework] appeared in a wide array of outlets including Forbes, the Fordham Institute, The74, and EdWeek” (p. 178).

Forzani, et al. (2022) raise additional concerns about the political and market aspects of NAEP in the context of this disrupted revisions process:

Our nation’s varying opinions about NAEP Reading are evident in the ways the assessment’s results have been explained to the public. Fifty years of NAEP Reading have documented a persistent gap in performance between White students on one side of the gap and Black, Hispanic, and Native American students on the other (NAEP classifications; see, for example, the“Achievement Gaps” page for the website for the National Center for Education Statistics, 2021b). Some have called this an achievement gap, a label that has incited periodic back-to-basics reform efforts, almost since NAEP’s beginnings (e.g., A Nation at Risk, Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Every Student Succeeds), movements that have been lucrative to authors and publishers but have not significantly altered NAEP Reading outcomes [emphasis added] (Willis, 2007). (pp. 179-180)

The Panel believes an opportunity was squandered to make NAEP reading a better test of reading comprehension, but they also are skeptical that how NAEP is used will improve: “When interpreting NAEP reading scores in the future, one challenge is that misconceptions prevail about the nature of reading ability; that is, many members of the public—and even some educators—regard reading ability as static and singular rather than as dynamic and multifaceted” (p. 181).

The reality is that standardized testing in the US is a highly political process that, as the Panel notes, will be more “lucrative” to the media, politicians, and the education marketplace than it will serve the needs of our students.

elaine August 5, 2026

Source

The Reliable Narrator:

First Fish Chronicles: Stop Hitting Snooze on the “EdTech” Problem

elaine — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 17:21:19 +0000

First Fish Chronicles: Stop Hitting Snooze on the “EdTech” Problem

Note from Emily: I sometimes hear “we need to listen to young people” when it comes to issues like phone policies in schools, but then find those saying this are looking for a way to deflect our responsibility as adults to care for children and instead acquiesce to the demands of screen-dependent teenagers or savvy and powerful technology company marketing campaigns. This shortchanges the voices of youth who don’t just want to scroll Instagram during class, but who actively see screen use— both personal and educational— as a crisis we can’t ignore— voices like those of Agnes, a brilliant 9th grader in Vermont, who not only navigates life without email, a cell phone, or a Chromebook, but also calls on adults to actually do some adulting. This Op-Ed can also be found in The Caldonian Record.

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

Stop Hitting Snooze on the “EdTech” Problem

To the Editor:

Students’ families shouldn’t have to fight for what they already have a right to: an educational experience that promotes both academic success and health. Yet this basic truth is being actively ignored in schools statewide as parents get pushback from teachers, principals and superintendents for trying to opt their kids out of being put at a setback…this being receiving a personal laptop, or in the case of kindergarteners, a tablet.

Educational quality is being compromised by the unnecessary usage of the aforementioned tech in the classroom. The reason why is as simple as the fact that so-called EdTech is designed for the exact same purpose as social media: profit off of the attention of the human child. Distraction and effective learning cannot coexist—it is plainly a conflict of interest between Big Tech and education. The reality that I have observed as a high schooler is that as long as students are put in front of an addictive device, distraction from the work at hand is predominant, and within one of the most trusted institutions of society, it is Big Tech’s priorities that come first.

Furthermore, what I observe firsthand almost every day are not only the flaws in the system, but for what questionable reasons devices are needed in the classroom to begin with.

I have toured a few local high schools, and the noticeable pattern is that computers are mainly relied on to play “educational games,” type up papers, have quick access to research resources, and email (AKA reminding students of homework assignments that they should have written down in a planner, of which I spied none). But aren’t schools supposed to teach organization and responsibility, or am I crazy?

All I know is I can’t lie to myself about what I directly see: classmates consistently forgetting tasks and due dates even with Google Classroom at my own school, and how the first thing my peers do upon opening their Chromebook is not to write their essay, but text each other through Google Docs, or scroll, or search up gambling websites. As for research, taking a quick trip to the library has never yet failed me, and even the teacher at a school I recently visited admitted that all the resources needed to complete projects, in fact the whole curriculum, were available in analog form. The kids just liked the shortcuts, which are fine by all means in certain situations, but unfortunately not when it comes to learning.

It’s not really even a shortcut to give any developing being the path of least resistance: it is a fundamental rule that doing so sets them up for failure later on, and in the case of students who will be in the workforce not too long from now, that does not bode well. We’re not even factoring in the distraction element and ineffective learning that comes with the obtainability of the appealing YouTube on the school-issued device.

In simpler terms, I am living proof that it is very possible to function without email and a Chromebook; and with that and all the failings in the current system I have described in mind, why not switch to a computer lab? If the reasonable seems daunting, rest assured: all hundreds of Vermonters are currently asking for is for schools to not give them a hard time for wanting the better option for their kid: to partake in the exact same curricula in a print-based manner.

Vermont schools continue to hold their doors wide open for the destructive runoff of unchecked capitalism to flow in: the profiting off of hurting and disadvantaging the vulnerable, the kids whose interests should be put first. Which does not mean asking them for their input on how to use the dopamine-dispensing devices, in the same way that adults shouldn’t ask kids on their input for whether they should keep the candy around. Responsibility means taking action based on what independent research (of which there is an abundance on this topic) has proven.1

If it’s not enough to rail on about the destructiveness of Chromebook use in the classroom, then it may be helpful to bring up another issue with that specific widely used product: privacy law violations. Google is currently being sued for selling student data onward to literally anybody, also getting kids addicted to porn on school devices.2

It’s time for schools to wake up and realize that their whole purpose—to promote the academic and social success of children—is being compromised by the use of a largely needless and infuriatingly ineffective product. The alarm went off long ago when test scores and grades began to decline exactly when in-class laptop and tablet use was implemented.3 4 Lawmakers, too, keep hitting snooze on a concern that feeds the overall declining quality of the nation’s education, a topic that in itself clearly seems a huge priority within the legislature.

All that families want is the choice to give their kids a childhood: education, health, and play that doesn’t risk either of those things. So give us the choice to opt out of the tech that can ruin it.

Agnes Derrendinger is a writer and a 9th grader from Middletown Springs, VT.

1 Horvath, Jared Cooney. Written Testimony to U.S. Senate Commerce Committee. Jan 15, 2026. www.commerce.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/media/doc/Horvath_Written%20Testimony.pdf

2 Active Cases Archive - EdTech Law Center

3 Four+Vermont+Graphs Showing Reading and Math Test Scores decline with introduction on 1:1 computers

4 Why U.S. Test Scores Are in a ‘Generation-Long Decline’ - The New York Times

elaine August 5, 2026

Source

First Fish Chronicles

David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing: Resisting Educational Standards

elaine — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:24:21 +0000

David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing: Resisting Educational Standards

This post is a piece I published in Kappan in 2000. Here’s a link to the PDF.

It’s an analysis of why Americans have long resisted setting educational standards. Of course my timing wasn’t great. Just one year later, the federal government passed the landmark No Child Left Behind law, which established just such a system of standards mandates. Oops.

This small faux pas aside, however, I think the essay stands up pretty well. NCLB caused a big stir and eventually generated a counter-movement that resulted in its repeal and replacement by the more lenient and state-centered Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA).

But the movement to imposed curriculum standards didn’t go away. It morphed into 50 sets of state standards enforced by state testing regimes. And states widely adopted the Common Core curriculum. As a result, American students are now heavily tested, and classroom teaching has devolved into a relentless effort to raise test scores.

So for the moment, the standards regime is in the driver’s seat and doing a lot of damage. This, however, doesn’t mean that the concerns that fueled American resistance to standards have disappeared. This resistance, which school reformers have long considered a major problem, may turn out to be the solution to our current test-driven and curriculum-narrowing approach to education.

So let’s revisit my old argument.

The history of such resistance suggests that there are three factors in particular that have made standards such a hard sell: a commitment to local control of schools, a commitment to expansion of educational opportunity, and a commitment to form over substance in the way we think about educational accomplishment. All three of these factors, which I treat below, can be traced in large part to our preference for one particular purpose of education: we have increasingly held the view that education is a private good, which should serve the individual interests of educational consumers, rather than a public good, which should serve the broader public interest in producing competent citizens and productive workers.

If you know my work, this is going to sound familiar. But for one thing, it’s a useful summary of issues from my first two books (The Making of an American High School and How to Succeed in School without Really Trying). You’ll find some familiar themes here: credentialism, conflicting goals of schooling, education as a public and private good, and the growing dominance of the latter.

In addition, however, it delves into some interesting issues in some detail. One such issue is the longstanding tension between schooling as the vehicle for social opportunity and schooling as the bastion of academic rigor. The votes are in and it’s clear that over the long history of US schools, opportunity has consistently trumped [sic] rigor. Social advancement over academic learning is a consistent priority. Which is part of what makes the standards movement such a radical reform effort. It’s upending the whole purpose of schooling.

Another related issue is the longstanding pattern of emphasizing form over substance, doing school over learning the formal curriculum. And a central player in this drama is the Carnegie unit, which doesn’t get as much credit [sic] as it deserves for shaping the form and function of US schooling. We move through the system by accumulating credit hours, which measure not how much we learned but how many hours we spent it class. You get credit for seat time. It has become the standard currency of the education enterprise.

What is so wonderful and so terrible about the credit-hour system is the way it eases access to education at the expense of competence in subject matter. For people concerned about establishing and enforcing curriculum standards in education, this system is a disaster. But its attractions are clear. It effectively makes all courses functionally equivalent to all others because they are all measured in the same currency of credit hours. It also effectively makes all institutions at a certain level functionally equivalent to all others because they all offer the same diplomas or degrees. All you need to do is accumulate enough grades and credits and degrees — here, there, or anywhere — and you can present yourself as possessing the functional equivalent of an education.

Those who want to establish academic standards are in many ways trying to roll back the tide of credentialism that has swept American education along for many, many years.

Hope you find this moldy oldie useful.

Resisting Educational Standards

The matter of setting standards for American education is certainly quite visible these days, but much of what we hear about it is not very enlightening. The talk is frequently filled with ideological heat rather than with critical light, and the tone of the discussion is more often nostalgic than realistic. In addition, the pitch in favor of standards is currently so strong that it may well leave a number of listeners wondering why such an obviously needed and beneficial reform wasn’t undertaken a long time ago. But the fact is that the effort to establish educational standards has always been an uphill fight in this country.

In light of these circumstances, it is useful to examine why Americans have so vigorously resisted educational standards over the years. The history of such resistance suggests that there are three factors in particular that have made standards such a hard sell: a commitment to local control of schools, a commitment to expansion of educational opportunity, and a commitment to form over substance in the way we think about educational accomplishment. All three of these factors, which I treat below, can be traced in large part to our preference for one particular purpose of education: we have increasingly held the view that education is a private good, which should serve the individual interests of educational consumers, rather than a public good, which should serve the broader public interest in producing competent citizens and productive workers.

Preserving Local Control

First, consider our traditional commitment to preserving local control. The core issue here is the wide and deep strain of libertarian sentiment that lies at the heart of the American psyche. The urge to preserve individual liberty is a key to understanding American society, and it is what defines our distinctive approach to politics, economics, and education. “Don’t tell me what to do” has long been our national slogan. By it we have meant in particular that government should keep off our backs — especially government that is far removed from our local community. All you need to do is remember that this nation was born of an uprising against a colonial government that tried to impose modest taxes on it from afar.

In education, this sentiment came to be expressed as a staunch defense of local control of our schools. During most of the 19th century, the local school was the primary unit of educational governance foremost Americans. An individual community built a school, hired a teacher, raised money through local taxes and fees, and implemented education on its own terms. Outside help was neither offered nor welcomed. This was the ultimate in local control. Even in large cities, control of education tended to rest at the ward level.

Consider some numbers that suggest the radical degree of decentralization that has long characterized American education. It was not until 1937 that we started recording information about the number of individual school systems in the country. In that year, which was some 40 years after the start of a massive effort by reformers to consolidate districts into larger administrative units, there were about 120,000 individual school districts in the US. This meant that on average there were only two schools per district. Now, that is really local control. Even now, after consolidation has continued for another 60 years, we still have about 15,000 separate school districts — each with primary control over financing, staffing, and setting curriculum standards for our schools. 1

Certainly state governments have taken steps over the years to assert greater control over these matters in K-12 schooling, and even the federal government has made tiny and tentative moves in this direction. But all these efforts have been undertaken in the face of enormous resistance by local communities, which have vigorously fought to preserve the autonomy of their schools. A modest proposal by President Clinton for vague and voluntary national standards provoked strong opposition in Congress and elsewhere. A variety of efforts on the part of states to introduce some forms of curriculum guidelines and to reinforce them with statewide testing have stirred up strong reactions at the local level. Reinforcing this local response to setting standards has been the hostility toward government that has characterized the politics of the last two decades. Increasingly, elected officials have won office on a platform of being relentlessly anti-government. They see their primary job as an effort to protect local communities and individual citizens from the intrusion of government control.

In light of this long history of opposition to government interference in local affairs, it is not surprising that efforts to set educational standards at the national or state levels have not proceeded very far. Standards are seen as an infringement of individual liberty, and efforts to impose them run into a classic American response: “Don’t tell me what to do.”

Expanding Educational Opportunity

Consider a second factor that has shaped American resistance to educational standards: our long-standing commitment to expanding educational opportunity. The American track record in this respect is quite clear. In the last 200 years, school enrollments in the U.S. expanded faster than in any other country. Demand for educational opportunity has simply been insatiable. As each level of education has started to fill up, the demand has grown for access to the next higher level. In the early 19th century, primary education was the subject of expansion. Pressure for access to education shifted to the grammar school later in the century, to the high school around 1890, and finally to the college and university today. For elected officials it has been political suicide to attempt to block or even to slow this process — even though they can point to the huge fiscal burden imposed by this expansion.

Consider some numbers that capture the sheer size and speed of this expansion of educational opportunity. High school enrollments doubled every decade between 1890 and 1940, when high school attendance had become universal for American teenagers. Meanwhile, over the whole course of the 20th century, enrollments in higher education have grown at a relatively steady rate of about 50% every decade, from about one-quarter million students in 1900 to about 15 million today. The result is that college attendance, like high school attendance half a century ago, has become the normal expectation for American families. And as college enrollments have started to level off in the 1990s, enrollments in graduate schools have been booming, so the pattern of expanding educational opportunity shows no signs of letting up. 2

This trend has had one rather obvious consequence for educational standards. The push has clearly been to expand the quantity of access to schooling rather than to improve the quality of learning that goes on there. It is very hard to enhance quantity and quality of education simultaneously, but Americans have never really tried to do so. We have always been more intent on making sure that our children receive more years of education and higher level diplomas than we ourselves received. After all, credits and degrees are what have been so important in providing an entree to good jobs. Under these circumstances, who cares about what students learn in school as long as school credentials continue to pay economic and social rewards to those who have acquired them?

Note that any effort to establish and enforce standards for teaching and learning in American education is likely to have the consequence of restricting access to the things that historically Americans have most wanted from their education system. Raising standards means making it harder for some students — maybe many students — to get good grades, get promoted, acquire a diploma, and gain entrance to college or graduate school. It has been firmly established over the years that to restrict access to education at any level is just plain un-American. And this is particularly true when the restriction falls on my children rather than on other people’s children. In this sense, the standards movement is standing in the face of a long history of easy access and modest requirements for academic performance, a history that threatens to run right over any reformer who blocks its path. If the American commitment to local control sends the standards movement the message “Don’t tell me what to do,” the commitment to expanding educational opportunity sends the parallel message, “Don’t get in my way.”

Consider another problem that the tradition of expanding opportunity poses for the standards movement. In this case, the problem is not a form of resistance but a kind of temptation — a temptation to approach the standards issue from a dangerously misleading historical perspective. Much of the rhetoric of the standards movement has a distinctively nostalgic air to it. It often sounds as if we are pining for a return to a golden age, a time when schools were tough and students had to struggle to meet their academic standards.

The big reason for not returning to standards from the good old days is that these standards will not do us much good at the beginning of the 21st century. For one thing, the standards from the old days are largely useless to us because the conditions that allowed schools to impose these standards no longer exist. We have the rapid expansion of educational opportunity to thank for this, and — all in all — thanks are probably in order here. For example, take the case of a leading 19th-century high school that I have studied in some depth. 3 Central High School in Philadelphia was the only high school for boys in the nation’s second-largest city. It enrolled 500 young men out of a city population of one million. To gain admission, students had to pass a grueling entrance examination, and three quarters of those admitted ended up flunking out before graduation. This was one tough school. In fact, Central could be the poster child for the standards movement — except that it is not clear that we can learn anything from this case that would actually help us today.

Central was an extremely attractive place to go, and everyone wanted to get in — in large part because it was the only one of its kind. Nowadays, however, everybody is required by law to attend high school, so students see enrollment as a burden — not a privilege. Eager volunteers have turned into reluctant draftees. At the same time, Central could pick its students from the top 2% of the school population, choosing those who were both better able and more willing to succeed in its demanding academic environment. And it could throw out anyone who could not or would not meet the school’s standard. Today, high schools have to accept all students within a particular geographical area, whatever their ability or attitude toward study. And these schools are not permitted to get rid of students simply because they don’t earn top grades. Why? Because we have decided that we want everyone to have a high school education and not just the privileged few. 4

Another aspect of the golden age that makes it of little use to us is this: the standards of yesteryear rewarded forms of learning that we don’t care as much about these days. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, learning in American schools, for the most part, meant memorizing the text, and academic achievement meant successfully reciting the text back to the teacher, either orally or in writing. Recall that one of the stunning pedagogical innovations of the late 19th century was the introduction of the lecture to American classrooms, when a few daring teachers actually sought to explain the text in their own words. So students may have had to work hard, and academic success may have been difficult to attain. But it is not clear that students learned more. At least it is not clear that they learned more of the kinds of things that we tend to value today. For example, in the good old days students memorized the names of all the major rivers in the world; today we try to teach them something about how ecological systems work. Do we want to go back? I don’t think so.

Standards under the old system were easy to establish, in part because they applied to so few and in part because they were based on a narrow and mechanical notion of learning. The truly hard task is to establish standards that apply to the many rather than the few — without destroying the benefits that broad educational access has brought to this country — and to do so in a way that rewards forms of learning that are broadly useful for the kind of society that our graduates will enter.

Form over Substance

This discussion of local control and expanding educational opportunity leads us to a third major factor that has caused trouble for educational standards: Americans’ longstanding commitment to educational form over substance. By this I mean our system’s emphasis on measuring educational achievement through seat time and credentials rather than through academic performance. That is, we measure success by the amount of time we spend sitting in classrooms — placing ourselves at risk of getting an education — rather than by the amount of knowledge and skill that we actually acquire.

Now it may sound strange to talk about commitment to educational formalism, rather than perhaps treating this as an unintended consequence or a simple blind spot in our national vision of education. But I think that commitment is the right word because we are talking about a component of our system of education that is so basic and so visible that it helps define what is distinctive about that system in our own eyes and in the eyes of the world. Also, this commitment is so fervently defended by educators, students, and citizens alike that we cannot realistically think of it as a simple accident of history. We have consciously created an education system based on attaining formal markers of success — grades, credits, and degrees — rather than one based on acquiring substantive knowledge. And we proudly proclaim to the world the advantages of this system.

But we did not always value form over substance in American education. In the 19th century, we measured educational success through students’ performance on tests of their know ledge of subject matter. Consider again the case of Philadelphia’s Central High School. The only way to get into this institution was to pass an examination that was so difficult it eliminated the large majority of the students who took it.

However, this performance-based model of achievement ran into a powerful political force — the emerging demand by educational consumers for broader access to the high school. And when standards came into conflict with educational opportunity, standards lost in a rout. Under intense political pressure, the board of education in Philadelphia first began to set high school admission quotas for the various grammar schools in the city rather than adhering to a single cut score on the entrance examination. Then the board began sharply increasing the enrollment at Central. When this was still not enough to meet demand, the board started opening a series of new high schools. By 1912, Central High School was just one of many regional high schools in the city, which, like the others, had to admit anyone who had succeeded in graduating from grammar school and lived in the attendance area. In short, the examination was discarded, and in its place came a system of admission by diploma. 5

A similar process was also playing itself out in colleges at the turn of the century. Like high schools, colleges had previously tended to admit students by an examination administered by the college itself. But this practice had become unworkable as the number of students seeking admission grew larger.

There were two obvious alternatives, both of which were pursued. One was to invent a general test across colleges that all prospective students could take, and, to this end, the College Entrance Examination Board was created and began administering exams. The other was to start accepting a high school diploma as proof of qualification for admission. Both methods have survived to the present day, but admission by diploma has become the dominant form. The College Board has continued offering entrance examinations for prospective college students, but these tests quickly devolved into tests of “aptitude “rather than subject matter. Today’s SAT helps sort students by something similar to I.Q., but it does nothing to measure how much students have learned in their high school courses. So form has also taken precedence over substance in college admissions.

Another event that helped make this change possible was the invention of the infamous Carnegie unit at the turn of the century — thanks to the collaboration of the Carnegie Foundation, the National Education Association, and the College Board. A Carnegie unit was defined as a quarter of the total high school instructional time for a student in a given year. The collaborators established a standard of 14 Carnegie units across specified subjects (that is, 3½ years of high school instruction in these subjects) as a prerequisite for college admissions. As a result of this invention, the official measure of curriculum mastery became the amount of time students spend in class. It was no longer what they learned but how long they were subjected to the possibility of learning. This was a momentous step for American education.

The implications of this change are clear. The Carnegie unit set the standard for much of what became distinctive about the American education system. This is a system that stresses attendance over performance, that encourages students to pursue the tokens of academic success rather than to demonstrate mastery of academic content. The Carnegie unit quickly evolved into the credit-hour system that is so fundamental to our form of education today. Students who accumulate appropriate grades in a course earn credit for that course equal to the number of hours per week that it meets. Students who accumulate a fixed number of credit hours across appropriate curriculum categories earn a diploma. And this diploma then qualifies those students for entry into the next level of education or into a particular level of job.

Those who want to establish academic standards are in many ways trying to roll back the tide of credentialism that has swept American education along for many, many years. In launching into this effort, standards reformers need to realize that they are attacking Americans’ God-given right to the credits and diplomas of their choice. Seat time is an essential corollary to educational opportunity because it is precisely what makes educational accomplishment so easy for us. That, in tum, is what makes the system so hard to roll back; it is also what makes it so attractive to others around the world.

Consider this example from the Persian Gulf. In the last few years, Kuwait has operated two parallel systems of secondary education. Under the old system, students are promoted from grade to grade by passing examinations that test their understanding of the subject matter they were taught that year, and they are admitted to the university only after passing a comprehensive examination on the entire high school curriculum. The second system, introduced just a few years ago, allows students to be promoted on the basis of course grades, to graduate from high school on the basis of accumulating the proper number of credits, and to be admitted to the university on the basis of a high school diploma and grade-point average. Guess which system is suddenly the most popular with students. The American-style system, of course, because it makes it much easier for students to graduate from high school and gain admission to the university. It is also the same system whose graduates now find themselves struggling in vain to keep up with the intellectual demands of university study. 6

All this evidence suggests another slogan that helps define the reasons for resistance to educational standards in thus. Indeed, it follows naturally from the first two I have suggested: ”Don’t make me learn, I’m trying to graduate.”

Conflicting Goals for Education

I have pointed to three factors that have helped create an American system of education that is highly resistant to educational standards, and now I would like to suggest an overall framework that helps make sense of this situation. Historically, Americans have been of mixed mind about the purposes of public education. Consider three such purposes — democratic equality, social efficiency, and social mobility. These goals have been in conflict over the years, and priorities have shifted over time from one to another and back again. Let me briefly point out the nature of each of these goals and their impact on education. Then I want to suggest how, from the perspective of these three goals, we can understand the reasons for chronic resistance to educational standards in this country and also why some ways of pursuing standards are more desirable than others.

One goal is democratic equality. From this perspective, the purpose of schooling is to produce competent citizens. The idea is that all of us as citizens need to be able to think critically, understand the way our society works, and have sufficient general knowledge to be able to make valid judgments about the essential issues in democratic political life (as voters, jurors, and so on). At the same time, democracies also require citizens whose social differences are modest enough that they can reach agreement about the policies shaping political and social life. Schools, from this angle, are the prime mechanism for providing shared level of competence and a common set of social experiences and cultural understandings essential for an effective democracy. Much of what is most familiar and enduring in the American system of education can be traced to this goal: the neighborhood elementary school and the regional comprehensive high school, populated by students from the entire community; whole-class instruction and social promotion; the stress on general over specialized education; and the emphasis on inclusion over separation of students.

Another goal is social efficiency. From this point of view, the purpose of education is less to educate citizens than to train productive workers. The idea is that economic growth requires workers with skills that are matched to particular occupational roles. As a result, schools need to provide specialized kinds of learning for alternative career paths, sort students according to predicted future careers, and then provide them with the specialized learning they need. Signs of the impact of this goal are all around us: in the stress on vocational programs in high schools and colleges, in the persistent practice of tracking and ability grouping, and in the prominent political rhetoric about education as investment in human capital.

The contrast between these two conceptions of education is striking. Should the schools prepare people for political or economic life? Provide general or specialized instruction? Promote similarity or difference? But despite these differences, the two goals are also strikingly similar in that they both see education as a public good. The nature of a public good is that it affects everyone in the community: you can’t escape it, even if you want to. In this case, everyone gains if a public school system produces competent citizens and productive workers, and everyone loses if it fails to do so. That includes people who do not have children in public schools.

What is most distinctive about the third educational goal, social mobility, is that it construes education as a private good. 7 If the first goal sees education from the viewpoint of the citizen and the second from that of the taxpayer or employer, the third takes the perspective of the individual consumer of education. From this angle, education exists because of what it can do for me or my children, not because of its benefits for democracy or the economy. And the historical track record on this point is clear: people who acquire more diplomas get better jobs. Educational credentials give individuals an advantage over competitors, and that advantage pays off handsomely, helping some to get ahead and others to stay ahead.

The key point is that if education is going to serve the goal of social mobility effectively, it has to provide some people with benefits that others do not get. As a private good, education benefits only the owner, serving as an investment in my future, not yours; in my children, not other people’s children. This calls for an education system that focuses heavily on grading, sorting, and selecting students. Such a system needs to provide individuals with forms of social distinction that mark them off from the pack by such means as placing them in the top reading group, the gifted program, a higher curriculum track, or a more prestigious college.

The Roots of the Problem: Chronic Consumerism

This analysis of conflicting goals for American education can help us in our thinking about the problem of educational standards. It can help explain the longstanding and powerful resistance to standards, and it can also help explain why some approaches to establishing standards are quite different from others (if we consider which educational goals they are designed to advance).

The dominant influence of the goal of social mobility stands behind the three forms of resistance to educational standards that I have identified above. In part, the impulse toward local control comes from a strong American political tradition that focuses on the defense of individual liberties. But the hostility toward standard setting at the state or national level goes beyond a political defense of the local school board and town council. It also has a consumer dimension. As cautious consumers of education, we want to protect the value of the diplomas that our children acquire and to preserve the social advantages that education currently brings to them. We don’t want anyone to tell us what kind of education our children can get — not state governments or Congress, not state tests or national tests, and certainly not some organization of historians or math teachers. In particular, we don’t want any system of standards that might restrict access to the educational goods our children need in order to get ahead or stay ahead. Instead, we want a system like the current one, which allows our children to gain a competitive advantage over other people’s children.

The last thing we think we need is a standards effort that equalizes educational achievement and therefore puts my child and yours on an equal footing. As a result, we are deeply concerned that standards might force learning back into education. We don’t want anything that will intrude on the current system of rewarding students with diplomas if they serve their time and sit long enough in the right classrooms. As consumers, we feel that schools have a sacred duty to offer our children the grades, credits, and degrees they want, without imposing performance tests or learning requirements that might interfere with this process of individual advancement.

I should also make one final point: consider for a moment the implications of this historical sketch for people who see standards as the reform we need in American education right now — in spite of all the factors working against their adoption. Efforts to establish standards will have vastly different consequences for education depending on which approach we take. A useful way to think about this issue is to examine what standards might look like if they emerged from one of the three goals for American education rather than another.

From the perspective of the goal of democratic equality, the point of standards is to raise the average cultural competence of American citizens and to reduce the radical cultural differences that now exist between the advantaged and the disadvantaged. This is the kind of argument we often hear from people like E. D. Hirsch, Jr., and from the various subject-matter groups that are now promoting standards. The idea is to provide all citizens with the capacities they need in order to carry out their political roles as voters and jurors. The idea is also to give everyone access to the same cultural resources, which will allow them to function as members of the same community, rather than to see themselves — as so many in our current society now do — as members of subgroups that are sharply divided by cultural, racial, and physical barriers.

From the perspective of the goal of social efficiency, the point of standards is to raise the level of human capital in American society. This means the standards should help prepare workers for the full array of jobs that make up the American economy by giving them the skills they need in order to carry out these jobs productively. It is the kind of argument we often hear from Presidents, governors, and corporate leaders, who are worried about the economic consequences of inadequate education. The difference between this perspective and the pursuit of democratic equality is striking. Standards for democratic equality focus on higher levels of shared knowledge and skill, but standards for social efficiency focus on specialized training for particular jobs. This means radically different standards, for example, for the workers who assemble cars, for the engineers who design them, and for the executives who manage the process.

Despite these differences, however, these two approaches to standards both treat education as a public good, and so they both see educational standards as a way to provide benefits to the public as a whole. The aim is to enhance the competence of citizens and the productivity of workers in order to enrich the political and economic life of the larger community.

In this way, the social mobility approach to educational standards is strikingly different. The aim from this perspective is to preserve the advantages and increase the distinctions that arise from the way individual consumers currently work the education system. Schooling is already organized in a manner that enhances consumer rights at the expense of public benefits. We have always been better at sorting students than at teaching them. A consumer-based approach to educational standards is one that stresses this sorting function, and all too many of the proposals floating around the standards movement bear this mark. You can tell this kind of approach from the others because it tends to put special emphasis not on improving skills but on distinguishing winners from losers. The focus is on labeling rather than learning — giving gold stars to those who pass through the promotional gates, who get into the gifted program or the advanced placement class, and who win a special endorsement on their high school diploma. And giving lumps of coal to those who fail to make the grade in any of these ways.

This kind of consumerism is also what leads us to misread history and try to establish standards by returning to the good old days. As I pointed out earlier, the standards of yesteryear — to the extent that they really were higher, which is doubtful — were grounded in an education system that was nothing like ours. At the high school and college levels, this system could afford to be highly selective and brutally competitive because it served such a tiny proportion of the population. Those pushing the consumer perspective within the current standards movement would like to move several steps back in that direction because more selectivity and greater attrition would improve the competitive position of their children — assuming, of course, that the bodies falling along the wayside would be other people’s children.

Finally, a standards effort guided by consumerism would not only elevate private over public educational benefits but would also reinforce an already prominent and devastatingly harmful tendency in American education: the tendency to value form over substance. From the perspective of democratic equality or social efficiency, the aim of the standards movement is to improve the quality of learning in schools. But from the perspective of social mobility, the aim of standards is not to improve learning but to make it a little harder for everyone else to obtain the grades, credits, and degrees that are the symbols of academic success. The effect is to further debase education by turning it into an ever more intense game of “how to succeed in school without really learning.” However, I hope that this is not the primary sentiment of the people who are closest to American education and know it best. As citizens and educators, I trust that we will not pursue this consumerist vision of educational standards, which is so harmful both to the quality of education and to the quality of life in American society.

elaine August 4, 2026

Source

David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: The Secret Behind School Boards Buying Technologies

elaine — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 12:12:36 +0000

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: The Secret Behind School Boards Buying Technologies

Too often, neither research findings nor evaluation data including test scores guide most major policy decisions. Political and practical reasons do.

Consider the case of classroom technology. Politically smart state and local policymakers have believed since the 1980s–-here is where ideology enters the picture–-that buying computers, laptops, and tablets loaded with software, deploying them to K-12 classrooms, and watching how the devices engage both teachers and students will produce desirable classroom outcomes; it is considered “best practice” because, well, “we believe in it.”

The theory is (and has been) that student engagement with electronic devices and their software will dramatically alter classroom instruction and lead to improved achievement. The problem, of course (you no doubt have guessed where I am going with this) — is that evidence of these devices transforming teaching practices and raising test scores is not only sparse but also unpersuasive even when some studies show a small “effect size.”

That’s what I mean by “secret” in the title of this post..

So, if the research pantry is nearly empty and evidence for raising student test scores or transforming teaching practices are sparse, how do policymakers and administrators justify buying new devices and software?

Here are three reasons that I think explain why decision-makers allocate scarce budget dollars for new technologies.

First, keeping up with the rest of the changing world. Call it “modernization” or recasting schools as less like museums and more like fast-paced companies using technology in daily work. No more jokes about educators being technological slow-pokes. Use of new technologies is considered modern, being with-it, even an unadulterated “good” that all children and youth in age-graded schools should embrace.

Second, because new technologies are highly valued in the culture, school boards and their superintendents feel strong pressures to keep up with usage in other sectors–both public and private–undergoing technological changes. If those leaders do not act, they fear that taxpayers and voters will lose confidence in public schools. And public confidence is like money in the bank since tax-supported public schools are politically and fiscally dependent on taxpayers’ good will.

And there is a less obvious third reason for school leaders to purchase new technologies: increase efficiency in students taking tests and scoring the results. Schools have to have computers because most U.S. students take tests online. The Los Angeles Unified School District’s fiasco with iPads over a decade ago was triggered by demands to implement required standardized testing due to adoption of Common Core Standards. Just as the move from quill pens to pencils to testing-by-computer required no research studies but were done on grounds of cost-saving efficiency, so it was when the LAUSD School Board and Superintendent authorized buying iPads.

Note that the three reasons I offer are both practical and political–not in any negative sense–but ones that are realistic in the world that policymakers and practitioners inhabit. Research findings and student outcome data to support promises that school leaders make for the outcomes that high-tech purchases will produce, are simply not there. And that pattern of pursuing policies and innovations without much evidence to support school board and superintendent decisions is plain to see.

It is an open secret.

elaine August 3, 2026

Source

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: