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Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: Being Skeptical of Classroom Technology

elaine — Fri, 23 Oct 2026 17:46:58 +0000

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice: Being Skeptical of Classroom Technology

Over the years, readers and students have asked me about the work I have done on school reform and especially new classroom technologies. I answer some of those questions in this post. But first some background.

I began doing research and writing on teacher and student uses of technology in the early 1980s when the first personal computers appeared in classrooms. That writing turned into Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology since 1920 (1986). I then began working on a larger study of teacher and student uses of new technologies in preschool and kindergarten, high schools, and universities. That study became Oversold and Underused: Computers in Classrooms (2001). In Hugging the Middle: How Teachers Teach in an Era of Testing and Accountability (2009), I devoted one chapter to teacher and student uses of technologies across four school districtsin the San Francisco Bay area In The Flight of the Butterfly and the Path of the Bullet (2018), I described 40-plus teachers who, in my opinion, had mastered the technology to the point where it was in the background, not foreground, of a lesson.

Over three decades, then, those writings on teaching and technology put me squarely in a bin labeled “Skeptic.” Early comments on these writings were testy. Promoters of new technologies, were they vendors, practitioners or policymakers, would curtly dismiss concerns I and others raised by calling us “Luddites.”

No more. Public scorn for anyone who would probe prevailing beliefs in the magical efficacy of computers in schools has become unfashionable. I have found educators and non-educators who deeply believed in classroom computers as engines of learning, now willing to listen to critics when concerns are raised about the many goals of schooling in a democracy, implementing new technologies, and insufficient research to support purchases of new devices and software. More and more parents now ask questions about screen time in lessons. I find these changes encouraging but hardly a game-changer.

Why? Because there have been fewer skeptics than true believers in new technologies. Since I am in the minority, the questions that I have been asked are more of a personal character seeking elaboration of why I have explored the use of classroom technologies and their links to school reform and disclosing what technologies I have used in past decades as a teacher and administrator.

1. Why did you begin writing about using technology in classroom lessons? In the late-1970s, I began doing research and writing about the history of classroom instruction. In 1984, I published How Teachers Taught: Constancy and Change in American Classrooms, 1890-1980. In that book, I tracked the repeated (and failed) efforts of Progressive reformers over a century to change classroom practice in urban, suburban, and rural classrooms from teacher-centered to student-centered lessons. In doing the archival research, parsing photos of teachers teaching, and reading accounts of how teachers taught different lessons, I saw the classroom use of different technologies from blackboards, stereopticons, and textbooks to overhead projectors, films, radio, instructional television, and laptops. The idea that reforming teaching was linked to the introduction of new technologies intrigued me. Was introduction of new technologies another way that reformers believed could move teaching away from traditional lessons? I discovered that the answer was yes.

2. Do you personally use any electronic technologies?

At home I have a desktop computer, laptop, and a smart phone. The desktop I use at home; the laptop and mobile phone I have used when I did research and traveled to school sites. I have used all of them for personal, business, and professional work such as this blog. Please do not ask me how many times I check my email.

3. When you taught high school history and social studies in high school and graduate classes at Stanford, did you use technologies in your instruction?

Yes, I did. I used regularly (daily and weekly) both old and new technologies in high school teaching between the 1950s and 1970s such as 16mm films, film strips, overhead projectors, and videocassettes. As a professor for twenty years I have used my laptop in seminars to do quick polls of students, show video clips, etc. I rarely, however, made PowerPoint presentations.

4. If you are (and have been) a regular user of technologies, why are you skeptical of their use in classrooms?

I am allergic to hype. Vendors and enthusiasts have promoted past electronic technologies as ways to solve problems from low academic performance to alienation among students and over-reliance upon traditional teaching practices. Hype is over-promising. Over-promising inexorably leads to disappointment. And frequent disappointment often produces cynicism; cynicism, too often, leads to inaction.

Second, companies that invent new technologies often persuade school districts to use their products by offering them at low cost because they are initially experimental–either alpha and beta versions. Companies want to find out whether these products work and are useful to teachers and students. Combine hype and experimentation to a captive audience (after all, children and youth are compelled to be in school until a certain age) and that could become a toxic combination. Thus, both professionals and citizens have to ask hard questions of policymakers who buy and deploy electronic devices for classroom instruction. Such questions as: what’s the evidence that students will do better academically as a result of using these devices? What’s the evidence that teachers using these devices will be more efficient and effective using the company’s product?

Third, the enormous amount of money spent on new technologies without much evidence of their effectiveness on teaching and learning means that other options such as investing budget dollars in hiring more teachers, providing more professional development, and lowering class size are lost. That is not only inefficient but it is also evidence of data-free policymaking.

Given these reasons, I remain deeply skeptical of those companies touting new technologies for both school districts and parents that will improve teaching and children’s academic achievement.

elaine October 23, 2026

Source

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

Shanker Blog: The Accountability Gap: D.C. Schools and Students With Disabilities

elaine — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 16:04:12 +0000

Shanker Blog: The Accountability Gap: D.C. Schools and Students With Disabilities

When I first moved to D.C., it took me some time to get used to the school system. Multiple city agencies share oversight of public schools, and enrollment is split nearly evenly between traditional public and charter schools— making finding a teaching job strenuous (lots of separate fingerprint appointments!). It wasn’t until I was in the classroom that I grasped how exhausting this fragmented system is for families. Witnessing the difficulty of transitioning from a public to a charter school was one of many consequences of this fragmentation. One of my parents moved to an online charter school because she was told her family would get more targeted support, only to realize that she had to quit her job to monitor her child’s lessons adequately due to her child’s ADHD.

In December 2024, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) confirmed these challenges by releasing a report from their investigation on DCPS for discrimination of students with disabilities (SWD). In this report, the Commission highlighted two findings of discrimination: DCPS relies on due process complaints to deal with injustice, and they fail to provide transportation services for SWD that require it.

These observations contribute to a larger pattern of fragmented governance for marginalized students. The District of Columbia's education governance system is structurally fragmented in ways that obscure accountability and prevent meaningful community participation. Because D.C. functions simultaneously as a city and a state, its education agencies operate across overlapping and competing jurisdictions with no single body held democratically accountable for outcomes. This fragmentation did not flourish on its own; policy actors have prioritized market-based ideologies that treat parents like consumers in a free market. As a result of this neoliberal model, families in need are left with improper access to school resources and civic engagement. Both community and researcher voices agree that D.C.’s governance system requires structural reform to enforce democratic accountability and promote equitable access to high quality public and charter schools to all students.

D.C’s Unique Governance Structure

In the District, public education is delivered through two sectors: DC Public Schools (DCPS), which operates as a single traditional public school LEA, and the public charter sector, which spans 133 schools overseen by the DC Public Charter School Board (DC PCSB). Charter schools have shown consistent enrollment growth in all of D.C., but particularly in wards 5 and 8 with a 50% enrollment increase between 2011 and 2015. The highest number of charter schools are located in Wards 5, 7, and 8, which also hold the highest population of marginalized families. 92% and 90% of D.C. residents are black in Ward 7 and Ward 8 respectively, which nearly doubles the city’s 43% average. Similarly, 26.6% and 35.7% of residents in Wards 7 and 8 are in poverty, which is considerably higher than the city’s average of 17.3%.

The District’s governance system is complex, with many agencies overlapping to support public schools. Figure 1 represents the governance structure through a top to bottom flow chart, provided by the Office of the Student Advocate. The top authority held accountable for education is the Mayor of the District, currently Muriel Bowser. The blue lines represent collaboration but no direct line of authority to the D.C. Council and State Board of Education. The Council, and its Committee on Education, hold legislative authority over public education matters. The State Board of Education provides support and oversight but has no authority over the Mayor or Council. These governing bodies are both elected and thus held publicly accountable for education issues. The Office of the Student Advocate and the Ombudsman both support public and charter school students.

Moving down in public facing authority, the governance system splits to represent DCPS and the charter sector. These bodies are connected with red lines to the Mayor, whom they are accountable to. On the left side, DCPS is supported by the Chancellor, OSSE, and the Deputy Mayor of Education who executes the Mayor’s agenda. OSSE is responsible for “raising the quality of education for all D.C. residents”, spanning to manage both public and charter schools. On the right side, DC PCSB and its Executive Director authorize charter schools and oversee their individual operations. All positions in the bottom half of the flow chart are appointed.

While DCPS and the charter sector both report to the Mayor, they operate through separate chains of authority with no direct line between them. OSSE and the Office of the Student Advocate serve as the only entities with formal reach across both sectors, making them critical public facing liaisons. The curriculum, teachers, and resource decisions are impacted significantly based on the sector a student is in.

Like other districts committed to a restructuring of low performing public schools, D.C. has functioned under mayoral control since 2007. The red lines in Figure 1 portray how the Mayor is in direct authority of all decisions regarding school compliance, performance, and policies. Mayoral control is often acclaimed for maintaining strong political accountability through elections. This accountability system is known as political accountability by scholars Loeb and Byun, as elected officials make decisions based on their constituents and are held accountable through re-election. However, many D.C. community members disagree, stating that mayoral control creates convoluted agencies that are inaccessible for parents who don’t know where to start when they have a problem.

The fact that D.C. functions as a city and a state further exacerbates the mayoral control aspect of governance. In all 50 states, the governor and mayor roles are held by separate elected officials: a mayor that answers to city services, and a governor that answers to statewide policy. But in D.C., the Mayor holds both roles. So, community members who want to challenge a state level education decision have no separate state political area to appeal to.

How Fragmentation Affects Students with Disabilities

Disruption within D.C.’s governance system also leads to ineffective accommodations for the public sector. In late 2024, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights investigated DCPS for thousands of complaints that spoke to the district’s inability to adequately provide services for students with disabilities (SWD). The OCR Commission released their report with major findings of patterns of discrimination within the district, and a call to action for DCPS to take on recommendations or face further federal mandates.

The Commission highlighted that in D.C., there were 127 per 10,000 due process complaints filed against the national average of 33 per 10,000. This imbalance points to inequitable implications, as extensive time, money, and knowledge are prerequisites to filing a due process complaint. OCR also reported that OSSE fails to provide adequate transportation for SWD, with a multitude of complaints from parents that the district failed to notify them when the bus would be hours late or not show up at all. This left many parents to take on the responsibility of transporting their students themselves.

Put simply, the OCR investigation revealed that D.C.’s school systems place a huge responsibility on parents to ensure their students receive federally mandated services. The Commission agreed that market-based schools are designed to allow parents to choose their students best educational fit, while simultaneously placing the responsibility on parents to oversee school operations without institutional support.

Similar to this pattern, research on district school board politics reveals that fragmentation of governmental bodies can obfuscate public accessibility. D.C. is an example of what happens when decisions about schools are made by appointed officials who answer to the Mayor instead of families. In her book Navigating School Board Politics, Sampson argues for the integral role elected boards play in successful public education systems: "One of the biggest fallacies… is the idea that private and even public charter schools, which are governed by appointed boards, provide a better education than traditional public schools." D.C.'s appointed, fragmented chain of command leaves families with no clear democratic path to challenge decisions that directly affect their children.

Local advocates also scrutinized the lack of community voice and participation in public and charter sector decisions. During an interview with an active D.C. parent advocate, they stated that "one of the largest disconnects was parent education on knowing just how the system works... that parents were not fully versed in what due process looks like, what their rights were, what their children were entitled to." This parent perceived the system not only as inaccessible, but intentionally inhibiting community control. This confusion is echoed more broadly as well; parents navigating D.C.'s public education system have reported: "We don't know who these people are, what their roles are, and who we should reach out to when we have an issue." The many governance bodies that exist under, in between, and in collaboration with others creates confusion for parents on who to contact. Indeed, scholars Enoch-Stevens et al.agree in their article that treating parents as consumers inhibits parents' role in governance and accountability. In many ways, D.C. 's top down, convoluted governance system places an unfair burden on parents as the sole accountability arm with complicated legal matters such as advocating for their students with disabilities.

What Needs to Happen Next

It is evident that D.C.'s public school system needs structural reform: not just surface level fixes, but meaningful changes to governance, accountability, and community participation. Two reforms would shift D.C.'s approach from one that places the burden on families to one that provides institutional support. First, creating a unified SWD division within OSSE would consolidate oversight of special education services across public and charter schools, reducing families' reliance on due process and giving parents a clearer, more accessible channel for resolving accommodation concerns. Second, advocating for a community participation advisory board would formalize parent and teacher voices in charter authorization and expansion, addressing the democratic deficit that D.C.'s appointed governance structure has created. The burden to protect students with disabilities and hold schools accountable has fallen too heavily on parents. It is time for that burden to shift back to our institutions, and for those institutions to be genuinely accessible to the communities they serve.

elaine October 22, 2026

Source

Shanker Blog

Janresseger: In Powerful Statement, a Former School Reformer Rejects NCLB-Style, Test-Based Accountability

elaine — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 17:50:17 +0000

Janresseger: In Powerful Statement, a Former School Reformer Rejects NCLB-Style, Test-Based Accountability

The debate we were having fifteen years ago about test-and-punish school reform has been raging once again in the past month since the NY Times‘ Claire Cain Miller, Francesca Paris, and Sarah Mervosh reported that standardized reading test scores among America’s children have fallen over the past decade. The reporters quoted advocates who believe our society ought to correct this matter by bringing back No Child Left Behind-style, test-and-punish school accountability.

Strategies for punishing so-called “failing” schools—the foundation of both President Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and President Obama’s Race to the Top—have been soundly rejected by educational experts. Diane Ravitch recently reminded us about Campbell’s Law, which says that, “the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” Back in 2014, Harvard University testing expert Daniel Koretz published The Testing Charade: Pretending to Make Schools Better, which detailed some of the ways —according to Campbell’s law—that our nation’s obsession with standardized testing had undermined students’ education—excessive and boring drilling on language arts and math, the subjects tested; narrowing the curriculum to emphasize those two subjects and forget about other important academic work; and even cheating by a few school leaders who figured out the correct answers and forced teachers to teach specifically to the test.

Panic this spring about reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress has resulted in calls to restore NCLB accountability schemes as though that would be a solution. On Monday of this week, however, Diane Ravitch confronted newfound panic over scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress by highlighting an Atlanta Journal Constitution article by two experts on reading, David Reinking and Peter Smagorinsky, who explain that panic over a so-called reading crisis is largely tied to the confusing way scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress are reported: “(I)n 1990, NAEP officials did introduce four tiers of reading achievement: Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, and Advanced. These levels were established solely using subjective judgment about what’s expected of children tested at a specific grade level. Then, they set equally subjective cut scores to establish boundaries between these four levels… Much confusion is… centered in interpreting whether ‘basic’ is acceptably normal or if it is reasonable to expect all students to be ‘proficient.’ Many commentators, some of whom have a vested interest in arguing that there is a reading crisis… have promoted the false idea that ‘proficient’ is grade-level reading, which it absolutely is not. Then, they wrongly argue that two-thirds of American students are reading below grade level by counting ‘basic scores as below grade level.” Over the years, to correct this misinterpretation, reading experts have argued that “basic” is approximately a “C,” while “proficient” would at least be a “B.”

A new column, however, by Ross Wiener in Monday’s NY Times, The ‘No Child Left Behind’ Nostalgia is Delusional, is the most stunning attack on the attempt to bring back test-and-punish public school accountability.

Wiener describes himself as the former “policy director for the Education Trust, one of the most influential education reform organizations in the country. I testified before Congress, built coalitions for standards-based reform, and published analysis to advance No Child Left Behind, genuinely believing it was the path to public schools that better served low-income students and students of color.”

Wiener has, however, undergone a transformation: “Over time, I became convinced that, with the best of intentions, I and many others in the education reform community had transferred our moral commitment to children over to (a commitment to) the standardized tests.”

He explains: “(T)here was a question I couldn’t shake: Were the outcomes we were holding schools accountable for the ones that actually determined whether a young person flourished?” “Accountability policy gave unprecedented authority to the idea that standardized test performance is the most important outcome schools produce and made it the organizing principle of American schooling. What could be easily tested gained importance. What could not—the practical, civic, relational and developmental—was pushed to the margins.”

Today Wiener believes we are seeing the sad results of years of test-based school policy. “Earlier generations may have endured school that felt boring or disconnected because they trusted that adults and institutions know better. Many young people today do not share that trust, and they are not going to push aside their own questions of meaning and purpose on the assurance that compliance will eventually be rewarded. You cannot accountability-pressure your way to better educational outcomes when chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed, misbehavior is common, students are disengaged and skeptical that school prepares them for the lives they want to lead, and teachers feel not just tired but (also) stripped of the professional trust that makes the work meaningful.”

Wiener concludes: “Schools should put what students can do on equal footing with what they know, embedding real skills in academic learning rather than leaving them to chance or sequencing them to later in life. Schools should reconnect with the communities they serve, so young people learn through and about the places where they live. And they should reanimate the character-forming, developmental mission a pluralistic democracy requires.”

Wiener’s reflection made me remember Possible Lives, my favorite book by the late UCLA professor of education, Mike Rose. Rose made a series of visits during a three year period in the 1990s to observe teachers working in public school classrooms in communities across the United States. He portrays teachers in all kinds of communities helping students inquire, explore, and enjoy learning. In the book’s final chapter, Rose reflects on the teachers he observed:

“To begin, the teachers we spent time with were knowledgeable. They knew subject matter or languages or technologies, which they acquired in a variety of ways: from formal schooling to curriculum-development projects to individual practice and study. In most cases, this acquisition of knowledge was ongoing, developing; they were still learning and their pursuits were a source of excitement and renewal… As one teaches, one’s knowledge plays out in social space, and this is one of the things that makes teaching such a complex activity… The teachers we observed operate with a knowledge of individual students’ lives, of local history and economy, and of social-cultural traditions and practices… A teacher must use these various kind of knowledge—knowledge of subject matter, of practice, of one’s students, of relation—within the institutional confines of mass education. The teachers I visited had, over time, developed ways to act with some effectiveness within these constraints—though not without times of confusion and defeat—and they had determined ways of organizing their classrooms that enabled them to honor their beliefs about teaching and learning… At heart, the teachers in Possible Lives were able to affirm in a deep and comprehensive way the capability of the students in their classrooms. Thus the high expectations they held for what their students could accomplish… Such affirmation of intellectual and civic potential, particularly within populations that have been historically devalued in our society gives to these teachers’ work a dimension of advocacy, a moral and political purpose.” (Possible Lives, pp. 418-423)

I hope you will read Ross Wiener’s profound reflection on why test-and-punish school accountability went wrong and how our public schools will better serve students when our politicians stop defining a teacher’s job as the production of test scores.

elaine October 21, 2026

Source

Janresseger

The Digital Delusion: The Confound Dilemma: Why AI Schools Can't Tell Us Whether AI Works

elaine — Tue, 20 Oct 2026 17:31:33 +0000

The Digital Delusion: The Confound Dilemma: Why AI Schools Can't Tell Us Whether AI Works

In 2020 - years before large language models became publicly available - I argued that schools may want to consider radically reorganizing the academic day. Specifically, I proposed short, intensive academic sessions in the morning followed by extended afternoon blocks of focused work.

My reasoning had nothing to do with artificial intelligence or digital tutors – rather, it stemmed entirely from what we know about the biology of learning: the brain's changing capacity for sustained cognitive work across the day and the conditions under which newly acquired knowledge is most effectively consolidated and adapted.

At first glance, this schedule looks remarkably similar to what several AI-powered schools now advertise. But the resemblance is almost entirely superficial.

My proposal retained a broad academic curriculum (including languages, the arts, civics, and history) and used the extended afternoon blocks to deepen the morning’s learning through laboratories, revision, and sustained projects. The goal was not to replace explicit instruction with entrepreneurship or life-skills training, but to strengthen transfer by guiding students through the application of newly acquired knowledge in increasingly complex contexts.

Whether my proposal is ultimately optimal is almost beside the point. The important thing is that there are sound theoretical reasons to expect that reorganizing the school day, by itself, could improve learning outcomes. And that creates a non-trivial scientific problem for AI schools:

If reorganizing the school day can improve learning...
…and if AI schools simultaneously reorganize the school day while introducing AI tutoring…
…how can we confidently attribute any reported improvements to the AI?

Welcome to the Confound Dilemma.

CONFOUNDS ABOUND

In a well-designed experiment, researchers attempt to isolate a single variable. Everything else in the environment is held as constant as possible so that any observed change can reasonably be attributed to the variable being tested.

Once research enters the real world, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to control every meaningful variable. Schools, hospitals, businesses, and communities are constantly changing in countless ways, making it difficult (if not impossible) to determine which changes actually produce any observed outcome.

These additional variables, which change alongside the intervention of interest, are known as confounds – and they provide alternative explanations for any observed outcome which make causal conclusions far more uncertain.

Imagine a city installs speed cameras, lowers speed limits, repaves dangerous intersections, launches a road-safety campaign, and hires more police officers - all at the same time. Now imagine one year later, traffic fatalities decline.

Which intervention caused the improvement?

The honest answer is: we don’t know. Any one of those changes could have helped; several may have worked together; one may have offset the effects of another. Without isolating each intervention, attributing the entire improvement to, say, speed cameras alone would be scientifically unjustified.

Now replace ‘speed cameras with ‘AI Tutoring’, and you have the central problem facing today’s digital-first schools.

THE ATTRIBUTION PROBLEM

When several emerging school systems introduced AI-powered instruction, they didn’t simply add a new tool to an otherwise unchanged educational model. They simultaneously transformed nearly every aspect of schooling: the schedule, the role of teachers, the curriculum, assessment practices, parental expectations, mentoring practices, and much more.

Recently, these schools have reported remarkable improvements on measures of student learning. Importantly, these schools largely attribute these gains almost exclusively to the digital programs: their central claim is that replacing traditional teachers with AI tutors improves learning.

In previous posts, I’ve argued that many of these reported educational gains are likely overstated and may not reflect genuinely deeper, transferable learning.

That debate, however, is not the focus here. So, for the remainder of this article, let’s make the generous assumption that every reported improvement in these schools is genuine. Even under that assumption, a completely separate scientific concern remains: attribution.

How do we know the AI deserves the credit? When an entire system changes at once, every change becomes a plausible explanation for any subsequent improvement.

Again, I’ll make what I consider to be a very generous assumption: that students in these schools are genuinely learning more. Even so, there remain dozens - if not hundreds - of potential confounds. Luckily, we needn’t identify every single one: if just a handful provide credible alternative explanations for reported gains, then attributing those gains to AI becomes scientifically unjustified.

Let’s examine just three.

#1 ORGANIZATION

As noted above, there’s a strong argument to be made that reorganizing the school day could improve learning. This argument has nothing to do with artificial intelligence – rather, it stems from two basic principles of neuroscience.

The first is the brain’s limited capacity for sustained, effortful learning.

Acquiring new knowledge is metabolically demanding: as students engage in prolonged periods of focused cognitive work, the brain’s capacity for efficient learning diminishes . Although the precise biological mechanisms remain under investigation, one leading hypothesis implicates the depletion of astrocytic glycogen (the brain’s readily available reserve of metabolic energy).

Together with broader research on attention and distributed practice, this provides a strong theoretical rationale for structuring periods of intensive learning around strategically timed breaks rather than simply extending lessons indefinitely.

The second principle concerns flow-state.

Once new knowledge has been consolidated, the goal shifts from acquisition to application. Here, the opposite pattern emerges: rather than short, intensive periods of work, learners benefit from long, uninterrupted periods in which they can revise, experiment, and apply newly learned ideas to increasingly challenging contexts. These are the conditions under which flow-state is most likely to emerge - a neurological state associated with heightened focus, sustained engagement, and skill refinement.

Whether this specific organizational model is optimal remains an open question – but the point I’m trying to make is that there are sound scientific reasons to expect that reorganizing the school day, by itself, would improve learning.

Now consider what has happened in many AI schools: they have both introduced digital tutoring while simultaneously reorganizing the school day. If learning subsequently improves, how would we know which intervention deserves the credit?

Now consider the counterfactual: what if we implemented this same organizational change while retaining high-quality human teachers? If comparable gains followed, it would suggest that reorganizing the day – not the AI - was the primary driver of improvement.

#2 HIDDEN PREPARATION

One of the most impressive claims made by AI-powered schools concerns their Advanced Placement (AP) results.

Several schools have reported that their students consistently earn top marks in these exams – results which, if genuine, would appear to provide compelling evidence that AI tutoring can replace traditional instruction.

Even setting aside the obvious and well-documented issue of AP grade inflation, a far more fundamental problem remains for AI-schools.

Anyone who has taught an AP course knows that students cannot master an entire AP curriculum through thirty minutes a day of generic tutoring focused primarily on mathematics, reading, and basic science. The sheer breadth and specificity of AP content makes that impossible.

So, assuming these reported AP results are accurate, how are they happening?

The explanation becomes clearer when we look more closely at how several prominent AI schools prepare students for these exams. One publicly reports that students complete approximately 75 hours of dedicated AP preparation before sitting each exam. Another schedules a two-week intensive AP preparation bootcamp immediately prior to the examination period.

Those details change the interpretation entirely.

The 75 hours of explicit practice and dedicated two-week prep program constitute additional educational instruction. They are targeted, assessment-specific intervention. Once we recognize this, exceptional AP performance can no longer be attributed solely (if at all) to the school’s everyday AI tutoring model.

If those same 75 hours (or the same two-week bootcamp) were delivered within a conventional school by experienced teachers, we simply don’t know whether comparable – or even better - results would follow.

#3 PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT

Consider the type of person who would enroll their child into an AI-powered school.

First, these schools are prohibitively expensive, meaning they’re financially accessible only to a relatively small segment of the population. Second, parents must already be sufficiently dissatisfied with their child’s current schooling to actively seek an alternative. Third, they must invest time researching an entirely new educational model. Finally, many families enrolled in AI-schools undertake lengthy daily commutes (or even relocate) to make attendance possible.

Do these sound like the actions of indifferent parents – or of parents deeply committed to their children’s education?

It should come as little surprise that decades of educational research consistently associate this kind of positive parental involvement with stronger academic outcomes. Although there are important caveats (such as parents becoming overly controlling, creating unhealthy pressure, or undermining teachers), children generally benefit when parents are actively engaged in their education. Such involvement helps cultivate stronger academic self-concepts, higher expectations for success, greater engagement with school, and more productive partnerships between students and teachers.

One might argue that these parents were probably just as involved before enrolling their children in an AI school. But that’s beside the point. Families who choose these schools are systematically different from the average family attending a conventional school.

They have actively sought out an alternative educational philosophy, invested significant time and money to access it, and aligned themselves with a model they believe will benefit their child. Moreover, the very act of choosing such a school is itself likely to increase parental engagement, as families become more invested in reinforcing a model they have deliberately selected.

And once again, we’ve encountered a confound.

If students in these schools perform well, how much of that success reflects the AI tutor - and how much reflects an unusually committed family?

Now imagine if we fostered this same level of parental commitment within a traditional school with experienced teachers? Again, if comparable gains followed, parental engagement (not AI) would emerge as the more plausible explanation. And if even greater gains followed, we’d have genuine reason to question whether the AI was helping at all.

SO NOW THEN…

Over the past few years, an increasing number of researchers and educators have called for rigorous, independent evaluations of AI-powered schools.

The reason isn’t that they oppose innovation – in fact, quite the opposite. If AI schools have genuinely discovered a better way to educate children, we should understand exactly what is happening so those benefits can be extended to every school.

But that requires more than carefully crafted press releases and vague explanations of how the model functions.

For the sake of argument, I’ve assumed here that every reported gain is genuine. Even under that generous assumption, we’ve identified three plausible confounds (and there are doubtless many more) that could provide alternative explanations for student improvements. Until these factors are isolated and evaluated independently, we simply cannot know how much gain should be attributed to AI, how much belongs to the broader school model, or which elements are actually worth replicating elsewhere.

That is why rigorous comparative research matters.

If AI tutors truly improve learning, well-designed studies will demonstrate it (and, as discussed elsewhere, there are specific contexts in which they appear to). But if other elements of these schools prove more important than the AI itself, we need to know that as well. Either outcome will represent meaningful progress.

My goal here (as elsewhere) has never been to attack technology – I aim only to better understand what actually helps students develop. I am not anti-tech; I am pro-learning.

Luckily, science doesn’t require we trust claims – it demands we test them.

Watch video at original post.

elaine October 20, 2026

Source

The Digital Delusion

Code Acts in Education: Evidence Experimentation in AI Evaluation in Education

elaine — Mon, 19 Oct 2026 16:16:54 +0000

Code Acts in Education: Evidence Experimentation in AI Evaluation in Education

The introduction of generative AI into school settings remains highly controversial almost four years after the launch of ChatGPT. One source of growing public scepticism about the educational value of AI is a persistent lack of evidence of its benefits, plus concerns that much of the experimental research that has been produced is deeply flawed and misleading in its conclusions. As a result, new proposals are appearing about what would constitute good “policy-relevant evidence” on AI in education.

These proposals are important to identify and unpack since they are being produced by actors that include government departments, consultancies, think tanks and even the tech industry itself. They appear to challenge academic research on AI in education as the location for evidence production, revise existing evidence standards, and alter the methodological apparatuses and practices for evaluating the impacts on AI in educational settings.

We can understand this as a struggle over “evidence governance,” where multiple different actors are competing to govern the methods, techniques and standards through which “policy-relevant” research about AI in education is generated.

Public-private evidence partnerships

One significant example of emerging approaches to evidence of AI in education is a collaboration between the English government departments responsible for science and education. They have partnered with the Education Endowment Foundation as their “evidence partner” to conduct “rapid evaluations in schools and colleges” as part of a national AI testbed initiative.

This initiative positions schools and classrooms as tech testing sites. It has the specific aim of identifying AI applications with the “highest promise” for being scaled up rapidly across the schools sector. In this case, rapid in-school AI testing is promoted as an ideal knowledge practice for generating policy-relevant evidence about the classroom impacts of AI.

Another example is the “Learning Outcomes Measurement Suite” launched by OpenAI in collaboration with research partners through its “Learning Lab”, the company’s own “learning research ecosystem.” As one of its research collaborators put it,

This research allows us to learn quickly while also laying the groundwork for a deeper understanding of how AI can be thoughtfully integrated into schools in ways that truly matter.

The measurement framework therefore positions OpenAI itself as an evidence producer with the international collaborations and research infrastructure to evaluate the effects and impacts of its own applications in a range of school settings.

The English AI testbed and the OpenAI learning measurement suite both involve public and private sector organizations operating symbiotically in new kinds of evidence partnerships. They both emphasize rapid evaluation or quick learning from technology trials. And they also both emphasize research evaluations and tests taking place in real-world school settings.

For example, in an early trial using the OpenAI measurement suite, the “setup was designed to reflect real world study conditions rather than a tightly controlled lab environment.” It has subsequently been scaled up for a major study with 20,000 students in Estonia as part of a national collaboration with the national ministry of education.

These examples indicate how both governments and AI industry are seeking to govern the standards and methods through which evidence about AI in education is produced. They also proceed from the assumption that the purpose of research and evidence is to support stronger integration of AI into educational practice.

Implementation R&D

A new report by the think tank Brookings gives a name to these kinds of evidence practices: “Implementation R&D.”

Titled “AI is rapidly changing education and research needs to keep up,” the brief report from Brookings starts from the claim that traditional technology impact evaluation methods such as randomized controlled trials “move slowly and are not equipped to evaluate AI education tools that change quickly.”

Instead, the Brookings authors argue, Implementation R&D “emphasizes rapid testing, feedback, and refinement.” They go on,

implementation research and development, or implementation R&D, is better suited to the evidence needs of AI technology. Traditionally used to study early-stage products and interventions, implementation R&D helps refine how a tool is designed, delivered, and used in real settings before a large-scale evaluation. It provides initial evidence on a product’s effects on teaching and learning. If the product doesn’t seem to work, implementation R&D helps us figure out why.

Notably, they don’t claim that implementation R&D replaces RCTs, but that it produces the foundational evidence for designing RCTs.

Implementation R&D is not a substitute for RCTs. It is the foundation on which to build research that proves cause and effect. It focuses on learning what works before testing whether it works at scale. When assessing the effectiveness of an AI-enabled professional learning tool, for example, rapid cycles of testing, feedback, and refinement take place, with a continued focus on how the tool affects core teaching and learning outcomes.

Along similar lines, the Education Endowment Foundation in England anticipates proceeding from rapid evaluation through the testbed to long-term RCTs afterwards. The testbed will function to identify applications that appear to “work” in limited real-world classroom settings before scaling up the experiment through larger RCTs involving multiple school testing sites.

As such, the current experiments resonate discursively with the “evidence-based education” movement, with its emphasis on RCTs (however problematic these may be as methods to measure educational interventions), but depart by focusing in the first instance on early-stage rapid evaluation through real-world implementation of AI in existing classroom arrangements. The logic here is implement first, then test, and only later move to a rigorous trial following all of the normal methodological and quality standards that have been practised as part of evidence-based education for decades.

Moreover, the Brookings report highlights cycles of testing, feedback and refinement. This means that AI application producers can benefit from the participation of students and teachers in the tests.

In the case of testbeds in England, edtech companies awarded prototype development funds by the government will, therefore, benefit additionally from pilot testing their early-stage products in schools, with teachers and students as implementers of the prototypes and providers of product feedback for subsequent refinement. With OpenAI’s measurement suite, the company itself stands to be the beneficiary of feedback on its Study Mode application of ChatGPT from use by thousands of students, with Estonia as the first national testing site.

Edtech-biz experimentalism

The Brookings report refers to these kinds of Implementation R&D projects as “design-focused experiments” that “operate on timelines that match how AI tools are developed” and “generate credible, early evidence” that can “guide decisions about adoption or scale”. It concludes,

If we want to ensure AI tools contribute to the improvement of teaching and learning, we need to study how those AI interventions are deployed in near-to-real time, using iterative experimentation to move from early design to long-term impact.

AI tools should be held to high standards. But to make those standards achievable, the education sector must move toward a new paradigm for research focused on producing iterative evidence and proof of impact on the outcomes that matter most.

These efforts to make schools into real-world testing sites for near-to-real-time iterative experimentation should be understood as exemplars of a growing trend in “experiments beyond the scientific laboratory.” Tech testbeds have been conceived as sites of “testing-in-the-wild” with certain sites understood as ideal or exceptional as settings in which t0 conduct technology experiments.

In a study of state-industry testbed trials of new government technologies, for example, Brice Laurent and colleagues refer to “tech-business experimentalism”: “a regime of innovation that explicitly refers to the laboratory and experimental practices in order to accompany entrepreneurial ventures.”

Along very similar lines, AI education testbeds are a form of edtech-business experimentalism that take place through turning schools into exceptional sites for entrepreneurial purposes, in addition to if not instead of their discursively stated educational purposes. This is particularly evident in the case of OpenAI, which has transformed the Estonian education system into a mass site for rapid testing, evaluation, feedback and product refinement as a route to greater market potential. The OpenAI Learning Lab is not only a scientific venture but an entrepreneurial enterprise dedicated to generating evidence to support further rollout through securing government agreements to boost AI adoption in schools.

Elsewhere, Google DeepMind has begun testing its Gemini-based chatbot tutor in schools in the UK too, first at limited scale and subsequently with a far larger school sample. This is enabled by a memorandum of understanding with the Department for Education that makes English schools into exceptional sites for AI tech testing. Clearly the intention is to generate evidence that can be considered “policy relevant” and therefore convincing to policymakers who might be able to authorize or enable wider-scale adoption.

Even where live AI testing is government-led, then, as in England, the emphasis is on producing evidence about selected commercial prototypes and early stage applications. Generating the relevant evidence to support the further scaling of these prototypes, as the testbed program is explicitly intended to do, therefore mixes edtech-biz experimentalism with a kind of gov-tech experimentalism where the social setting of the school becomes a test site in government-industry technology testing.

As the sociologist Noortje Marres has recently argued, testbeds represent a kind of “experimental innovation” in which “business, science and government are expected to work together to facilitate the delivery of intrinsically dynamic socio-technical services, and which seek to merge engineering methodology with forms of social organisation.”

So too do AI education testbeds and trials combine engineering methodology with new forms of educational organization. Through new kinds of business, science and government relations around AI in education, the prototype engineer and designer is elevated as an educational actor, authorized to experiment in the organization and practice of pedagogy and the experience of being a learner. At the same time, students and teachers become experimental test subjects in such state-industry-science experiments in how to reorganize schooling through AI.

Evidence futures

New evidence practices related to AI in education raise several issues and implications. First is that new actors including AI companies and think tanks are claiming authority over the kinds of evidence and standards that are taken to be relevant to informing policy and practice. OpenAI’s establishment of a “learning research ecosystem” is one prominent example although other big tech and AI companies have also launched initiatives claiming the authority from “learning science.”

The very nature of what is seen as valid evidence for policy and practice is up for grabs, seemingly throwing into question the evidence-based education evaluation methods and standards that have sedimented in the sector over the last couple of decades.

Second, this represents a struggle over evidence governance in which business interests are a key factor for many of the participating actors. Evidence is now taken as a source of feedback and actionable intelligence for companies. Where government departments are involved, such as in England, they also tend to privilege these business-oriented approaches, most notably by prioritizing the production of evidence for scaling.

For the think tankers at Brookings, conventional educational research methods and standards simply cannot keep pace with AI. As such, AI companies and their advocates are becoming knowledge governors that can control debates over what counts as appropriate evidence of Ai impacts, what methods of knowledge production are suited to measuring AI’s impacts, and who has the adequate resources and expertise to generate the scientific “facts” of AI in education.

A third issue, then, is that these practices involve the implementation of previously untested early-stage technologies in schools, as clearly signified by the Brookings emphasis on Implementation R&D as the ideal methodology for testing AI in real-world school settings. Students become subjects of implementation research and sources of feedback. For example, in Estonia students are treated by OpenAI as experimental subjects in an experiment that might influence how schools adopt AI worldwide, even though it is reported that “the student response has been mixed” owing to concerns among some about the detrimental impacts of AI.

Fourth, these forms of implementation-based experimentation privilege engineering solutions to the social problems of schooling. AI and edtech companies are treated—by governments, consultancies and think tanks—as exceptional educational actors with the engineering expertise to implement, test and refine technologies for teaching and learning—tasks which also authorize them to redesign the very conditions of educating and being educated. Schools, meanwhile, are reduced to testing sites for the purposes of innovation R&D.

Finally, the production of evidence is now reimagined through an engineering lens as requiring revision to keep pace with AI itself. Because AI development moves at speed, it is argued by Brookings, new methods and evidence standards are required. This also makes AI appear as an exceptional kind of intervention in education that is exempt form the kinds of laborious evidence-based practices that have been deployed to generate evidence about other interventions.

These developments in evidence experimentation in AI evaluation in education are important to track and unpack as they are likely to become the epistemic basis on which future decisions about AI in schools will be made. Much of this experimentation is underpinned by clear commercial interests, and cannot be considered neutral or impartial.

It also demonstrates how specific kinds of design experiments such as AI prototype tests, implementation R&D, and evaluation measurements conducted by technology vendors themselves have been centred as authoritative evidence practices, challenging or replacing independent evaluation methodologies based on wider and multi-dimensional measures of educational impact.

All this experimentation in evidence generation coincides with growing public and student backlash over AI in education too. Huge asymmetry in who can shape the direction of AI in education is developing, with tech companies increasingly enabled by governments to produce evidence while educators, parents and students can only protest the rapid transformation of their schools and classrooms into sites of live AI experimentation.

elaine October 19, 2026

Source

Code Acts in Education

David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing: What Schools Can’t Do

elaine — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 02:21:49 +0000

David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing: What Schools Can’t Do

This post is the text of a lecture I gave in 2009 at the University of Berne. It was originally published in the Swiss journal Zeitschrift für Pädagogische Historiographie and then found its way into my 2010 book, Someone Has to Fail. Here is the link to the first published version.

It’s about a longstanding problem in American educational policy: We ask schools to pursue goals that are beyond their capabilities. Schools are simply not very good at a lot of things we ask them to do. They can’t promote equality, they can’t end poverty, they can’t create good jobs, they can’t drive economic growth, they can’t promote public health. Yet we expect them to do all this heavy lifting for us.

Part of the story is about why schools aren’t good at these things. Another is why we keep giving them such assignments anyway. The answer to the second, I suggest, is that we pass off on schools social problems that we are unwilling to accomplish through the political process, where the capability for success actually resides. Instead of addressing these problems directly through political action, we foist them off on schools and then blame them for continually falling short of the desired goal. Herein lies the reason why school reform has been such steady work. Read and weep.

Even if you’ve read this before, don’t miss the cartoons that I tucked into the text this time. They’re worth a post all by themselves.

WHAT SCHOOLS CAN’T DO:

UNDERSTANDING THE CHRONIC FAILURE OF AMERICAN SCHOOL REFORM

Americans have a long history of pinning their hopes on education as the way to realize compelling social ideals and solve challenging social problems. We want schools to promote civic virtue, economic productivity, and social mobility; to alleviate inequalities in race, class, and gender; to improve health, reduce crime, and protect the environment. So we assign these social missions to schools, and educators gamely accept responsibility for carrying them out. When the school system inevitably falls far short of these goals, we initiate a wave of school reform to realign the institution with its social goals and ramp up its effectiveness in attaining them. The result, as one pair of scholars has put it, is that educational reform in the U.S. is “steady work.” In this lecture, I want to tell a story: What history tells us about what schools cannot do.

At its heart, this is a story grounded in paradox. On the one hand, American schooling has been an extraordinary success. It started as a small and peripheral enterprise in the 18th century and grew into a massive institution at the center of American society in the 21st, where it draws the lion’s share of the state budget and a quarter of the lives of citizens. Central to its institutional success has been its ability to embrace and embody the social goals that have been imposed upon it. Yet, in spite of continually recurring waves of school reform, education in the U.S. has been remarkably unsuccessful at implementing these goals in the classroom practices of education and at realizing these goals in the social outcomes of education.

America, I suggest, suffers from a school syndrome. We have set our school system up for failure by asking it to fix all of our most pressing social problems, which we are unwilling to address more directly through political action rather than educational gesture. Then we blame the system when it fails. Both as a society and as individuals, we vest our greatest hopes in an institution that is manifestly unsuited to realizing them. In part the system’s failure is the result of a tension between our shifting social aims for education and the system’s own organizational momentum. We created the system to solve a critical social problem in the early days of the American republic, and its success in dealing with this problem fooled us into thinking that we could redirect the system toward new problems as time passed. But the school system has a mind of its own, and trying to change its direction is like trying to do a U-turn with a battleship.

Today I will explore the failure of school reform to realize the central social goals that have driven it over the years. And at the end I explore the roots of schooling’s failure in its role as an agent of social reform.

The social missions of schooling in liberal democracies arise from the tensions that are inherent in such societies. One of these tensions is between the demands of democratic politics and the demands of capitalist markets. A related issue is the requirement that society be able to meet its collective needs while simultaneously guaranteeing the liberty of individuals to pursue their own interests. In the American setting, these tensions have played out through the politics of education in the form of a struggle among three major social goals for the educational system. One goal is democratic equality, which sees education as a mechanism for producing capable citizens. Another is social efficiency, which sees education as a mechanism for developing productive workers. A third is social mobility, which sees education as a mechanism for individuals to reinforce or enhance their social position.

Democratic equality represents the political side of our liberal democratic values, focusing on the role of education in building a nation, forming a republican community, and providing citizens with the wide range of capabilities required to take part in democratic decision-making. The other two goals represent the market side of liberal democracy. Social efficiency captures the perspective of employers and taxpayers, who are concerned about the role of education in producing the job skills (human capital) that are required by the modern economy and that are seen as essential for economic growth and social prosperity. From this angle the issue is for education to provide for the full range of productive skills and forms of knowledge required in the complex job structure of modern capitalism. Social mobility captures the perspective of educational consumers and prospective employees, who are concerned about the role of educational credentials in signaling to the market which individuals should get the jobs with the most power, money, and prestige.

The collectivist side of liberal democracy is expressed by a combination of democratic equality and social efficiency. Both aim at having education provide broad social benefits, with both conceiving of education as a public good. Investing in the political capital of the citizenry and the human capital of the workforce benefits everyone in society, including those families who do not have children in school. In contrast, the social mobility goal represents the individualist side of liberal democracy. From this perspective, education is a private good, which benefits only the student who receives educational services and owns the resulting diplomas. Its primary function is to provide educational consumers with privileged access to higher level jobs in the competition with other prospective employees.

So let me look at how well – or rather, how poorly – American schools have done at accomplishing these three social missions.

Democratic Equality

School systems around the world have been more effective at accomplishing their political mission than either their efficiency or mobility missions. At the formative stage in the construction of a nation state, virtually anywhere in the world, education seems to have an important role to play. The key contribution in this regard is that schooling helps form a national citizenry out of a collection of local identities. One country after another developed a system of universal education at the point when it was trying to transform itself into a modern state, populated by citizens rather than subjects, with a common culture and a shared national identity. For the U.S. in the early 19th century, the key problem during this transitional period was how to establish a modern social order based on exchange relations and democratic authority out of the remnants of a traditional social order based on patriarchal relations and feudal authority. A system of public education helps to make this transition possible primarily by bringing a disparate group of youths in the community together under one roof and exposing them to a common curriculum and a common set of social experiences. The result was to instill in students social norms that allowed them to emerge as self-regulating actors in the free market while still remaining good citizens and good Christians. Creating such cultural communities is one of the few things that schools can consistently do well.

So the evidence shows that at the formative stage, school systems in the U.S. and elsewhere have been remarkably effective in promoting citizenship and forming a new social order. This is quite an accomplishment, which more than justifies the huge investment in constructing these systems. And building on this capacity for forming community, schools have continued to play an important role as the agent for incorporating newcomers. This has been particularly important in an immigrant society like the United States, where – from the Irish and Germans in the mid-19th century to the Mexicans and South Asians in the early 21st century – schools have been the central mechanism for integrating foreigners into the American experience.

But the ability of schooling to promote democratic equality in the U.S. has had little to do with learning, it has faded over time, and it has been increasingly undermined by counter tendencies toward inequality. First, note that when schools have been effective at community building, this had little to with the content of the curriculum or the nature of classroom teaching. What was important was that schools provided a common experience for all students. What they actually learned in school was irrelevant as long as they all were exposed to the same material. It could have been anything. It was the form of schooling more than its content that helped establish and preserve the American republic.

Second, the importance of schooling in forming community has declined over time. The common school system was critically important in the formative days of the American republic; but once the country’s continued existence was no longer in doubt, the role of the system grew less critical. As a result, the more recent ways in which schools have come to promote citizenship have been more formalistic than substantive. This is now embedded in classes on American history, speeches at school assemblies, pilgrim pageants around Thanksgiving, presidential portraits on classroom walls, and playing the national anthem before football games. What had been the system’s foremost rationale for existence has now retreated into the background of a system more concerned with other issues.

Third, and most important, however, the role of schools in promoting democratic equality has declined because schools have simultaneously been aggressively promoting social inequality. One of the recurring themes of my book is that every move by American schools in the direction of equality has been countered by a strong move in the opposite direction. When we created a common school system in the early 19th century, we also created a high school system to distinguish middle class students from the rest. When we expanded access to the high school at the start of the 20th century, we also created a system for tracking students within the school and opened the gates for middle class enrollment in college. When we expanded access to college in the mid-20th century, we funneled new students into the lower tiers of the system and encouraged middle class students to pursue graduate study. The American school system is at least as much about social difference as about social equality. In fact, as the system has developed, the idea of equality has become more formalistic, focused primarily on the notion of broad access to education at a certain level, while the idea of inequality has become more substantive, embodied in starkly different educational and social trajectories.

Social Efficiency

In the current politics of education, the goal of social efficiency plays a prominent role. One of the central beliefs of contemporary economics, international development, and educational policy is that education is the key to economic development as a valuable investment in human capital. Today it is hard to find a political speech, reform document, or opinion piece about education that does not include a paean to the critical role that education plays in developing human capital and spurring economic growth – and the need to reform schools in order to fix what’s wrong with the economy.

Economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz have made a strong argument for the human capital vision of education in their recent book, The Race Between Education and Technology. They argue that the extraordinary expansion of the American economy in the 20th century was to a large degree the result of an equally extraordinary expansion in educational enrollments during this period. It is no coincidence, they say, that what turned out to be the American Century economically was also the Human Capital Century for the U.S.

The numbers are indeed staggering. In the United States education levels rose dramatically for most of the 20th century. For those born between 1876 and 1951, the average number of years of schooling rose a total of 6 years, which is an increase of 0.8 years per decade. This means that the average education level of the entire U.S. population rose from less than 8 years of grade school to two years of college in only 75 years. The authors estimate that the growth in education in the U.S. accounted for between 12 and 17 percent of the growth in economic productivity across the 20th century, with the average educational contribution at 13.5 percent. Put another way, they argue that increased education alone accounted for economic growth of about one-third of one percent per year from 1915-2005.

One problem with this claim, however, is that the size of the human capital effect they show is relatively small. On average they estimate that the growth in educational attainment accounted for less that 14 percent of the growth in economic productivity over the course of the 20th century. That’s not negligible but it’s also not overwhelming. This wouldn’t be a concern if education were a modest investment drawing a modest return, because every little bit helps when it comes to economic growth. But that’s clearly not the case. Education has long been the largest single expenditure of American state and local governments, which over the course of the 20th century devoured about 30 percent of their total budgets. In 1995 this came to almost $400 billion in direct payments for elementary, secondary, and higher education. In short, as costly as education is, it would seem that its economic benefits would need to be more substantial than they are in order to justify these expenses as a solid investment in the nation’s wealth instead of a large drain on this wealth.

Another problem is that it is hard to establish that in fact education was the cause and economy the effect in this story. The authors make clear that the growth in high school and college enrollments both exceeded and preceded demand for such workers from the economy. Employers were not begging high schools to produce more graduates in order to meet the needs for greater skill in the workplace; instead they were taking advantage of a situation in which large numbers of educated workers were available, and could be hired without a large wage premium, for positions that in the past had not required this level of education. So why not hire them? And once these high school graduates were on the job, the employers may have found them useful to have around (maybe they required less training), so employers began to express a preference for high school graduates in future hiring. But just because the workforce was becoming more educated didn’t mean that the presence of educated workers was the source of increases in economic productivity. It could just as easily have been the other way around.

Producing a large increase in high school graduates was enormously expensive, especially considering that the supply of these graduates was much greater than the economic demand for them. But strong economic growth provided enough of a fiscal surplus that state and local governments were able afford to do so. In short, it makes sense to think that it was economic growth that made educational growth possible. We expanded high school because we could afford to. And we wanted to do so not because we thought it would provide social benefits by improving the economy but instead because we hoped it would provide us with personal benefits. The authors point out that the growth of high school enrollments was not the result of a reform movement. Instead, the demand for high school came from educational consumers. Middle class families saw high school and college as a way to gain an edge – or keep their already existing edge – in the competition for good jobs. And working class families saw high school as a way to provide their children with the possibility of a better life than their own. The demand came from the bottom up not the top down. Administrative progressives later capitalized on the growth of the high school by trying to harness it for their own social efficiency agenda, as expressed in the 1918 Cardinal Principles report. But by then the process of high school expansion was already well under way, with little help from them.

The major accomplishment of the American school system was not necessarily that it provided education but that it provided access. The system may or may not have been effective at teaching students the kinds of skills and knowledge that would economically useful, but it was quite effective at inviting students into the schools and keeping them there for an extended period of time. Early in their book, Goldin and Katz identify what they consider to be the primary “virtues” of the American educational system as it developed before the civil war and continued into the 20th century. In effect, these virtues of the system all revolve around its broad accessibility. They include: “public provision by small, fiscally independent districts; public funding; secular control; gender neutrality; open access; and a forgiving system.”

Note that none of these virtues of the American school system speaks to learning the curriculum. Instead all have to do with the form of the system, in particular its accessibility and flexibility. I thoroughly agree. But for the human capital argument that Goldin and Katz are trying to make, these virtues of the system pose a problem. How was the system able to provide graduates with the skills needed to spur economic growth when the system’s primary claim to fame was that it invited everyone in and then was reluctant to penalize anyone for failing to learn? In effect, the system’s greatest strength was its low academic standards. If it had screened students more carefully on the way in and graded them more scrupulously on their academic achievement, high school and college enrollments and graduation rates never would have expanded so rapidly and we would all be worse off. This brings us to the third goal of education, social mobility.

Social Mobility

In liberal democracies in general, and in the United States in particular, hope springs eternal that expanding educational opportunity will increase social mobility and social equality. This has been a prime factor in the rhetoric of the American educational reform movements for desegregation, standards, and choice. But the evidence to support that hope simply doesn’t exist. The problem is this: In the way that education interacts with social mobility and social equality, both of these measures of social position are purely relative. Both are cases of what social scientists call a zero sum game: A + B = 0. If A goes up then B must go down in order to keep the sum at zero. If one person gets ahead of someone else on the social ladder, then that other person has fallen behind. And if the social differences between two people become more equal, then the increase in social advantage for one person means the decrease in social advantage for the other. Symmetry is built into both measures.

Although social equality is inherently relative, it is possible to think of social mobility in terms of absolute rather than relative position. During the 20th century in the U.S., the proportion of agricultural, manufacturing, and other blue collar workers declined while the proportion of clerical, managerial, professional, and other white collar workers rose. At the same time the proportion of people with a grade school education declined while the proportion with more advanced education rose. So large numbers of families had the experience in which parents were blue collar and their children white collar, parents had modest education and their children had more education. In absolute terms, therefore, social mobility from blue collar to white collar work during this period was substantial, as children not only moved up in job classification compared to their parents but also gained higher pay and a higher standard of living. And this social mobility was closely related to a substantial rise in education levels. This was a great success story, and it is understandable why those involved would attribute these social gains to education. For large numbers of Americans, it seemed to confirm the adage: to get a good job, get a good education. Schooling seemed to help people move up the ladder.

At the individual level, this perception was quite correct. In the 20th century, it became the norm for employers to set minimum educational qualifications for jobs, and in general the amount of education required rose as one moved up the occupational ladder. Youths overall had a strong incentive to pursue more education in order to reap social and economic rewards. Economic studies regularly demonstrate a varying but substantial return on a family’s investment in education for their children. For example, one estimate shows that males between 1914 and 2005 earned a premium in lifetime earnings for every year of college that ranged from 8 to 14 percent. That makes education a great investment for families – better than the stock market, which had an average annual return of about 8 percent during the same period.

What is true for some individuals, however, is not necessarily true for society as a whole. As I explained about social efficiency, it is not clear that increasing the number of college graduates leads to an increase in the number of higher-level jobs for these graduates to fill. To me it seems more plausible to look at the connection between education and jobs this way: The economy creates jobs, and education is the way we allocate people to those jobs. Candidates with more education qualify for better jobs. What this means is that social mobility becomes a relative thing, which depends on the number of individuals with a particular level of education at a given time and the number of positions requiring this level of education that are available at that same time. If there are more positions than candidates at that level, all of the qualified candidates get the jobs along with some who have lower qualifications; but if there are more candidates than positions, then some qualified applicants will end up in lower level positions. So the economic value of education varies according to the job market. An increase in education without a corresponding increase in higher level jobs in the economy will reduce the value of a degree in the market for educational credentials.

This poses a problem for the chances of social mobility between parents and children. After all, children are not competing with their parents for jobs; they’re competing with peers. And like themselves, their peers have a higher level of education than their parents do. In relative terms, they only have an advantage in the competition for jobs if they have gained even more education than their peers have. Educational gains relative to peers are what matter not gains relative to parents. As a result, rates of social mobility have not increased over time as educational opportunity has increased, and societies with more expansive educational systems do not have higher mobility rates.

Raymond Boudon and others have shown that the problem is that increases in access to education affect everyone, both those who are trying to get ahead and those who are already ahead. Early in the 20th century, working class parents had a grade school education and their children poured into high schools in order to get ahead; but at the same time, middle class parents had a high school education and their children were pouring into colleges. So both groups increased education and their relative position remained the same. The new high school graduates didn’t get ahead by getting more education; they were running just to stay in place. The new college graduates didn’t necessarily get ahead either, but they did manage to stay ahead.

So school reform in the U.S. has failed to increase social mobility or reduce social inequality. In fact, without abandoning our identity as a liberal democracy, there was simply no way that educational growth could have brought about these changes. School reform can only have a chance to equalize social differences if it can reduce the gap in educational attainment between middle class students and working class students. This is politically impossible in a liberal democracy, since it would mean restricting the ability of the middle class to pursue more and better education for their children. As long as both groups gain more education in parallel, then the advantages of the one over the other will not decline. And that is exactly the situation in the American school system. It’s the compromise that has emerged from the interaction between reform and market, between social planning and consumer action: we expand opportunity and preserve advantage, both at the same time. From this perspective, the defining moment in the history of American education was the construction of the tracked comprehensive high school, which was a joint creation of consumers and reformers in the progressive era. That set the pattern for everything that followed. It’s a system that is remarkably effective at allowing both access and advantage, but it’s not one that reformers tried to create. In fact, it works against the realization of central aims of reform, since it undermines social efficiency, blocks social mobility, and limits democratic equality.

These three goals, however, have gained expression in the American educational system in at least two significant ways. First, they have maintained a highly visible presence in educational rhetoric, as the politics of education continuously pushes these goals onto the schools and the schools themselves actively express their allegiance to these same goals. Second, schools have adopted the form of these goals into their structure and process. Democratic equality has persisted in the formalism of social studies classes, school assemblies, and the display of political symbols. Social efficiency has persisted in the formalism of vocational classes, career days, and standards-based testing. Social mobility has persisted in the formalism of grades, credits, and degrees, which students accumulate as they move through the school system.

Roots of the Failure of School Reform to Resolve Social Problems

In closing, let me summarize the reasons for the continuing failure of school reform in the U.S.

The Tensions Among School Goals: One reason for the failure of reform to realize the social goals expressed in it is that these goals reflect the core tensions within a liberal democracy, which push both school and society in conflicting directions. One of those tensions is between the demands of democratic politics and the demands of capitalist markets. A related issue is the requirement that society be able to meet its collective needs while simultaneously guaranteeing the liberty of individuals to pursue their own interests. As we have seen, these tensions cannot be resolved one way or the other if we are going to remain a liberal democracy, so schools will inevitably fail at maximizing any of these goals. The result is going to be a muddled compromise rather than a clear cut victory in meeting particular expectations. The apparently dysfunctional outcomes of the educational system, therefore, are not necessarily the result of bad planning, deception, or political cynicism; they are an institutional expression of the contradictions in the liberal democratic mind.

The Tendency Toward Organizational Conservatism: There is also another layer of impediment that lies between social goals and their fulfillment via education, and that is the tension between education’s social goals and its organizational practices. Schools gain their origins from social goals, which they dutifully express in an institutional form, as happened with the construction of the common school system. This results in the development of school organization, curriculums, pedagogies, professional roles, and a complex set of occupational and organizational interests. At this more advanced stage, schools and educators are no longer simply the media for realizing social aspirations; they become major actors in the story. As such, they shape what happens in education in light of their own needs and interests, organizational patterns, and professional norms and practices. And this then becomes a major issue in educational reform. Such reforms are what happens after schooling is already in motion organizationally, when society seeks to assign new ideals to education or revive old ones that have fallen into disuse, thus initiating an effort to transform the institution toward the pursuit of different ends. But at that point society is no longer able simply to project its values onto the institution it created to express these values; instead it must negotiate an interaction with an ongoing enterprise. As a result, reform has to change both the values embedded in education and the formal structure itself, which may well resist. As I have shown elsewhere, three characteristics of the American school system – loose coupling, weak instructional control, and teacher autonomy – have made this system remarkably effective at blocking reforms from reaching the classroom.

Reformer Arrogance: Another problem that leads to the failure of school reform is simple arrogance. School reformers spin out an abstract vision of what school and society should be, and then they try to bring reality in line with the vision. But this abstract reformist grid doesn’t map comfortably onto the parochial and idiosyncratic ecology of the individual classroom. Trying to push too hard to make the classroom fit the grid may destroy the ecology of learning there; and adapting the grid enough to make it workable in the classroom may change the reform to the point that its original aims are lost. Reformers are loath to give up their aims in the service of making the reform acceptable to teachers, so they tend to plow ahead in search of ways to get around the obstacles. If they can’t make change in cooperation with teachers, then they will have to so in spite of them. They see a crying need to fix a problem through school reform, and they have developed a theory for how to do this, which looks just great on paper. Standing in the state capital or the university, they are far from the practical realities of the classroom, and they tend to be impatient with demands that they should respect the complexity of the settings in which they are trying to intervene.

The Marginality of School Reform to School Change: Finally, we need to remind ourselves that school reform has always been only a small part of the broader process of school change. Reform movements are deliberate efforts by groups of people to change schools in a direction they value and to resolve a social problem that concerns them. We measure the success of these movements by the degree to which the outcomes match the intentions of the reformers. But there’s another player in the school change game, and that’s the market. By this I mean the accumulated actions of educational consumers who are pursuing their own interests through the schooling of their children. From the colonial days, when the expressed purpose of schooling was to support the one true faith, consumers were pursuing literacy and numeracy for reasons that had nothing to do with religion and a lot to do with enhancing their ability to function in a market society.

That very personal and practical dimension of education was there from the beginning, even though no one wanted to talk about it, much less launch a reform movement in its name. And this individual dimension of schooling has only expanded its scope over the years, becoming larger in the late 19th century and then dominant in the 20th century, as increasingly educational credentials became the ticket of admission for the better jobs. The fact that public schools have long been creatures of politics – established, funded, and governed through the medium of a democratic process – means that they have been under unrelenting pressure to meet consumer demand for the kind of schooling that will help individuals move up, stay up, or at least not drop down in their position in the social order. This pressure is exerted through individual consumer actions, such as by attending school or not, going to this school not that one, enrolling in this program not some other program. It is also exerted by political actions, such as by supporting expansion of educational opportunity and preserving educational advantage in the midst of wide access.

These actions by consumers and voters have brought about significant changes in the school system, even though these changes have not been the aim of any of the consumers themselves. They have not been acting as reformers with a social cause but as individuals pursuing their own interests through education, so the changes they have produced in schooling by and large have been inadvertent. Yet these unintended effects of consumer action have often derailed or redirected the intended effects of school reformers. They created the comprehensive high school, dethroned social efficiency, pushed vocational education to the margins, and blocked the attack on de facto segregation. Educational consumers may well keep the current school standards movement from meeting its goals if they feel that standards, testing, and accountability are threatening educational access and educational advantage. They may also pose an impediment to the school choice movement, even though it is being carried out explicitly in their name. For consumers may feel more comfortable tinkering with the system they know than in taking the chance that blowing up this system might produce something that is less suited to serving their needs. In the American system of education, it seems, the consumer – not the reformer – has long been king.

elaine October 7, 2026

Source

David Labaree on Schooling, History, and Writing

Second Breakfast: Who Is Ed-Tech For?

elaine — Wed, 07 Oct 2026 17:26:46 +0000

Second Breakfast: Who Is Ed-Tech For?

Who is ed-tech for?

The marketing copy -- whether on websites or in PowerPoint or in TED Talks and the like -- will all insist that ed-tech is, at the end of the day, for "the students." Even the products that are pitched to make teachers' and principals' and professors' lives easier do so with the promise that, at the end of the day, it's all in the service of helping students learn better -- making education, in the words of Daft Punk, "harder, better, faster, stronger," although we'd sure want to add in "cheaper" as well.

But ed-tech has largely and consistently failed to do that. The reasons are many. But one of them may just be that ed-tech isn't actually designed or built for students (or teachers); it isn't often bought by students (or teachers). While the stories about what ed-tech can do might appeal to lots of people -- ah, that genial robotic rhythm: "harder, better, faster, stronger" -- there's often a massive gulf between the ed-tech imaginary and a real educational experience.

Who is ed-tech for?

I haven't stopped thinking about this question lately -- in part because it gets at the heart of what I think* is going to be the history I cover in my next book. (More to come on that soon / someday, LOL.)

I haven’t stopped thinking about this question since I read the story about the "lifelike" robot teacher purchased by Salamanca Central School District -- I wrote about this in last week's newsletter: a classroom technology built by a company that previously sold sex- and companion robots.

Who sat in the meeting where this idea was pitched? Who thought that this was a good idea? Who looked at the mock-ups for Sally the sexbot and thought “great idea!” “Let’s do this for the children!”

Who is ed-tech for?

I haven’t stopped thinking about this question since the release of Claude for Teachers, which has been received with a fair amount of pushback and derision -- and in the case of one district, blocking it altogether.

Indeed, it’s right there in the name of the product, isn’t it: this is for teachers. But as Ben Riley asks, “why?” Why, particularly when much of Anthropic’s success has come from a pitch made to “the enterprise,” to the managerial imagination of big business, do this for teachers -- that is, why build for and market to individual teachers? Why bypass district decision-making and district governance? And importantly here, why make teachers (and not schools or districts as the law dictates) be the ones responsible for protecting student data and student privacy?

Of course, we might read Ben’s question “why” in a more existential light too: like, why does this even exist? And we might channel my friend David Golumbia -- may he rest in peace -- and answer, with full confidence, that it should not.

But here, as with so much of ed-tech (and arguably almost all of “AI”), we can see that this effort really only works for the company itself. This is about gaining access to public funding but more importantly to classroom data, as the “AI” industry needs to continually aggregate and extract more and more realms of human-created data so that their models don’t collapse. This is about cornering a market (or preventing their competitors from doing so); this is about trying to establish the ultimate in vendor lock-in, one that is not simply the cultivation of brand loyalty but of cognitive dependence as well.

Who is ed-tech for?

As it stands, “AI” has yet to find its killer app, in education or anywhere. (Other than plagiarizing essays and cheating on homework, I suppose.) We’re years into this so-called revolution, and there really isn’t anything other than a bunch of anecdotes about how so-and-so found a nifty way to do such-and-such a bit faster, a lot wordier (although certainly not more cheaply). These stories of small bureaucratic victories -- and golly, congrats if that’s you, LOL -- aren’t really enough for an industry that has promised to change everything forever, to do everything forever.

In schools, “AI” promises to be the teacher, the tester, the grader, the therapist, the librarian, the researcher, the administrator, the security officer, the bus driver, the office secretary, the coach, and the student. Anyone who knows anything about education knows that that means this technology actually works for no one but the storyteller (the hustler) himself.

Elsewhere...

“Some Kids Will Never Think AI Is Cool,” Elana Klein reports in Wired

“I think that [AI] should stand for artificial idiot” – Marian Agnew, age 9

“Can you rewire your brain?” -- what the “brain is a computer” metaphor gets wrong
“When A.I. Is a Member of the Family” -- well, this piece by Jessica Contrera in The New Yorker was just wildly depressing
Also depressing: “AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making” by Nikhil Suresh -- “Fight the good fight, and don't let the bastards grind you down. Godspeed.”
Sometimes it’s the cooing over “AI” in education that drives me to despair; other times, it’s when someones starts a sentence with the phrase “I listened to a podcast called Sold A Story...” Anyway, please “Stop Saying Kids Can’t Read” writes Megan Greenwell in Wired

“The effect of ChatGPT on educators’ lives is catastrophic. Whether you intended to do it or not, you’ve made every teacher’s life infinitely more difficult than it was two years ago. So, just let that settle in . . .

“If students are using it to compose, which is the biggest tragedy of all, they’ll never learn to write. And their voice is stolen from them. They’ll never have the ability to say their truth and tell their own story. And that’s silencing an entire generation or two.” -- Dave Eggers, speaking truth to power to their faces at OpenAI

“AI” is just a symptom of a much deeper rot that’s wearing away at trust and accountability and yes, democratic education. It’s a rot bound up in white supremacy and imperialism and fraud. It plays out in ways big and small, such as in the National Civics Contest, as Sam Fortier writes about in NOTUS
“‘We Started Calling It Baby Prison’ -- A pattern of horrific alleged child abuse has marred Bright Horizons’ image. Why are parents still signing up?” – what privatization, and particularly private equity, does to education. But yeah, I'm sure this time things'll be different with ed-tech

(Image credits)

Today’s bird is the laughing gull. So named for its call, this bird is an opportunistic scavenger. And I’m not pointing fingers or naming names here, but yeah. Maybe I am.

elaine October 7, 2026

Source

Second Breakfast

Nancy Bailey's Education Website: The Many Ways to Set Kindergartners Up to Hate Math!

elaine — Tue, 06 Oct 2026 17:55:40 +0000

Nancy Bailey's Education Website: The Many Ways to Set Kindergartners Up to Hate Math!

Math is a wonderful subject! It opens doors to incredible careers in science and to life’s great mysteries. But if it’s not approached right, early learners could become frightened of it. I’ve known students who dread the sound of the word math. Of course, dozens of books offer help to conquer math anxiety.

For teachers, getting math instruction right is critical, starting early. The way math instruction is handled could make or break a child’s spirit and teach them to either love or hate math. Here are a few points I hope you’ll consider.

High-stakes testing and the word rigor have no place in kindergarten.

Rigor hearkens back to NCLB and no-excuses. It goes even further back to A Nation at Risk, which falsely made public schools appear unsuccessful. It implies that teachers fail.

Rigor has no place in kindergarten or introducing math to a five-year-old. States shouldn’t hop on the rigor train.

California is an example. Concerned with children failing math in third grade, the focus there is on a math test to see if they [kindergartners] can face the rigors of first grade!

But throwing assessment at California’s kids isn’t new. Kindergartners there haven’t exactly been rambunctiously enjoying play in the California sunshine. They’re not test-deficient, as California frameworks from 2023 show, and the state had standards long before this.

So let’s say children aren’t understanding math or doing well in it. Does it make sense to get tougher? Wouldn’t it be wiser to revisit the standards?

If Californians already know their students aren’t doing well in math, why not learn if students like it and, if not, why? It seems like it’s time to look closer at the standards for age appropriateness.

How are girls treated when it comes to learning math?

Gender gaps have existed in schools for years. Concerns still flourish that teachers hold biases that girls have lower mathematical ability than boys. Today’s anti-women climate doesn’t help.

Who’s considering this issue in public schools? If expectations are a concern, where’s the change in schools to encourage and help females better understand math?

What about the effects of Common Core State Standards?

Standards in general have focused primarily on reading and math, and mostly reading, ignoring many other subjects that children would find interesting.

The Overview of California’s Approach to Mathematics from 2024 shows that California implemented the Common Core State Standards for Mathematics in 2010. It was updated in 2013.

Remember, 500 early childhood specialists originally described the CCSS as developmentally inappropriate (Strauss, 2013). If students aren’t doing well, why aren’t so-called experts reconsidering the CCSS?

Not all children get preschool, setting up differences in math understanding.

A critical point across the country is that not all students have been attending preschool or kindergarten. It’s obvious that some children will know counting and math concepts better than others when they have earlier exposure to math.

California is working to offer Transitional Kindergarten to more children, which could raise math skills as long as it involves age appropriate math and consideration of student ability.

Children who understand various math concepts when they enter kindergarten should not have to relearn those skills (Engel et.al, 2013). But that’s what might happen if teachers teach direct math instruction to the whole class.

Then again, if students miss preschool and later in kindergarten or first grade are identified as behind, when they simply haven’t learned the material, they could be seen unjustly as math failures.

Reardon and Galindo (2009) found that first and second generation immigrants from mostly non-English speaking homes, might start kindergarten with low math and reading skills, but showed the greatest improvement with assistance.

Also note, just because preschoolers learned math concepts early, doesn’t mean that they enjoyed it.

Help children see math in other subjects.

Over the years the separate and heavy focus on reading and math has been detrimental to children’s learning of other subjects. While each subject deserves its own serious study, showing children how math fits in other subjects makes it more real.

How many books that children can read celebrate math like, Michael Whaite’s 100 Cats and Norman Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth? If children don’t have access to reading books they enjoy, math too could suffer.

Do children get the kind of science instruction that creates curiosity, or is there just pressure to master skills for tests?

How many children face screens to learn math?

Many math programs involve online instruction. While some online math programs might be fun for early learners, a little goes a long way. And it doesn’t appear to help children do better in math or reading.

A 2025 report from JAMA showed that higher parent-reported total screen time and TV and digital media time were associated with lower reading and math achievement on standardized tests in elementary school.

What’s meant by developmentally appropriate for kindergarten?

The problem with stating that early learners can do higher level mathematics is that it may be true for some children, but not all. Standards that sweep all children up with the same expectations to understand higher level math concepts earlier than ever will find many children failing.

How can a child be behind if they are doing the developmental work that used to be the norm for kindergarten ?

It’s wrong to expect all children to be at the same point in learning and aligned with standards, and it certainly isn’t a reason to disgrace California’s kids by plastering headlines about their dismal scores!

Kindergarten math should be flexible, permitting children to move along at their developmental rate of speed.

The Science of Math emphasizes explicit instruction aligning to standards.

Controversy surrounds the Science of Reading, used to sell many unproven usually online programs.

Now there’s the Science of Math which will likely align standards to children even further and sell more online programs.

Will such negative attention to learning math so early create math anxiety?

Math anxiety is real for young children, and once they build up fear it will be hard to generate their interest in math in the future. Children hear adults and they understand when all they hear is math crisis talk. No one likes a subject they suck at.

This is especially true for students with generalized anxiety, who could develop anxiety surrounding math, especially girls (Svraka et. al., 2024).

______________________

Standards have dominated public education for years. Instead of being a simple guide to steer children’s learning, they’ve been used negatively, aligning children to the tests and pretending there is one right way to learn at X time for all.

Children who don’t align with the standards may be forced to undergo remediation, made to feel like they are lacking, where they were simply working according to their age and development.

What are math activities that match a child’s development, that kindergarteners will respond positively to, and which will help them to learn more math in the future? Ask a qualified early childhood educator who has studied child development and how young children learn from a reputable university education school. They will be able to tell you.

References

Engel, M., Claessens, A., & Finch, M. A. (2013). Teaching Students What They Already Know? The (Mis)Alignment Between Mathematics Instructional Content and Student Knowledge in Kindergarten. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 35(2), 157–178. https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373712461850

Svraka, B., Álvarez, C., & Szücs, D. (2024). Anxiety predicts math achievement in kindergarten children. Frontiers in Psychology, 15, 1335952. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1335952

Reardon, S. F., & Galindo, C. (2009). The Hispanic-White Achievement Gap in Math and Reading in the Elementary Grades. American Educational Research Journal, 46(3), 853–891. https://doi.org/10.3102/0002831209333184

Strauss, V. (2013, January 29). A Tough Critic of Common Core on Early Childhood Education. The Washington Post, Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/01/29/a-tough-critique-of-common-core-on-early-childhood-education/

elaine October 6, 2026

Source

Nancy Bailey's Education Website

Curmudgucation: The Mystery of Eighth Grade Test Results

elaine — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 18:18:42 +0000

Curmudgucation: The Mystery of Eighth Grade Test Results

Jill Barshay at Hechinger took a look at the Mississippi "Miracle," specifically the question of why the miraculous 4th grade test results have not been matched by the 8th grade. She shared many theories about what might help, a conversation that Mike Petrilli continued in his substack. But I think, as always, the discussion of this topic skips an important point. I'm going to skip my usual Big Standardized Test rant and save the Mississippi thing for another day. Let's just talk about the 8th grade test scores and what they tell us about 13-year-olds and testing.

The 8th grade test dip is not news to anyone who has been paying attention. One of the great unstudied effects of the BS Test era is just how many districts reorganized their elementary, middle, or high schools in order to put their 8th graders under the same roof as another test group and hopefully blunt the effects of their lousy grades on the specific school. (If your middle school is just grades 6-8, then your 8th grade scores are the school scores, but if, say, your high school is grades 7-12, then the 8th grade scores get lumped in with 11th grade scores).

But any discussion of 8th grade scores needs to consider the Giving A Shit factor.

8th grade is the year when everything breaks loose for students. Their bodies betray them, becoming ungainly and hard to manage. They have whole new sets of feelings, whole new drama-fraught social lives to manage. They have to work out how to deal with their parents, who have somehow become way more dumb and obnoxious than they used to be. School gets hard because learning gets hard, harder than in elementary school when it just sort of happened, and it begins to dawn on students that adults are not always reliable or trustworthy.

Testing has, of course, given rise to a new set of springtime traditions. The pre-test pep rally. The pre-test hype video. The pre-test earnest talk. The elementary students may still get some inspiration from these, but now you've got eighth graders who have been through this year after year, test after test, practice test after practice test.

The entire foundation of test-based accountability is the assumption that students will sit down to take the test and actually care and actually try. Elementary kids? They are game to throw themselves at whatever you give them to do. 11th graders? They have learned that there is some senseless baloney you have to work through in the adult world. But 8th graders? Nobody has fewer shits to give about your adult nonsense than an 8th grader.

Every time this discussion comes up, I just imagine some bureaucrat in a suit standing in front of a bunch of 8th graders telling them, "I know every one of you is going to do their very best, because while this test has no stakes at all for you, how else will researchers and policy makers and academics be able to have data-based discussions about the educational effects of instructional techniques and curricular policies?"

Don't get me wrong. 8th graders can be awesome, the energy and heart of elementary students combined with the knowledge and sense of high schoolers. 8th graders will absolutely give their blood and guts and hearts to an endeavor when they can see an authentic, real reason, a reason they can see and feel in their bones.

Where in the battery of the Big Standardized Test do you think they'll find that?

All the discussions of other factors-- the screens, the social media, the knowledge-based learning, the high-quality instructional materials, test designs, the leveling of reading materials-- that's all worth having. But I wish everyone worked up about testing would--well, you know what I wish when it comes to testing, but at least I would like them to ask themselves one question:

You want students to give their best, most intense and serious effort when it comes time to take the test.

Why should they want to do that?

elaine October 5, 2026

Source

Curmudgucation

Diane Ravitch's Blog: Freddy DeBoer: No, American Schools Are Not Failing

elaine — Fri, 02 Oct 2026 18:43:53 +0000

Diane Ravitch's Blog: Freddy DeBoer: No, American Schools Are Not Failing

Freddy DeBoer challenges the oft-repeated claim that American schools are failing. We have heard the same lament since 1983, when the Reagan administration published a pamphlet titled “A Nation at Risk.” That publication, the work of the National Commission on Educational Excellence, proclaimed that America’s schools, once the envy of the world, were caught in “a rising tide of mediocrity.” The report gathered every possible negative statistic about public schools and turned them into a jeremiad.

Governors formed task forces and agreed that what the nation needed most was lots more testing, which eventually turned schools into a cash cow for the testing industry. Worse, it made test scores the goal of education, not a measure.

George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, passed in January 2002, made the pursuit of higher test scores a federal mandate, accompanied by harsh and punitive measures for schools that were unable to produce the ever higher test scores.

NCLB was followed by Obama’s equally punitive Race to the Top in 2010. Not only were schools targeted for not raising test scores, but individual teachers were singled out and punished. Schools were closed, teachers were fired, charter schools became a new panacea–which failed as panaceas tend to do.

The Bush brothers–President George W. and Florida Governor Jeb–claimed that accountability was the ultimate key to success.

But in the absence of dramatic test score gains, Jeb and other Republicans decided that vouchers were the ultimate panacea: no accountability, just choose any school you want, be it religious, private, online, or homeschooling. Quality no longer mattered. Accountability no longer mattered (except for the majority of students who continued to enroll in public schools and continued to take the standardized tests). Just choice.

Go back to the beginning: that infamous report called “A Nation at Risk.” One of the staff members who wrote the report was a young man named James Harvey. In 2023, on the 40th anniversary of the release of that influential report, James Harvey wrote an article declaring that the conclusions of the report were vastly overstated. He wrote an article in The Washington Post about “how we cooked the books.”

Freddy DeBoer probably didn’t read James Harvey’s brilliant and disturbing article. But he writes from the same perspective. Our public schools have been the target of a huge smear job. The smear was a fake. It was used to promote charter schools and vouchers. Many of our public schools are excellent. Some are in desperate need of desperate measures, like reduced class sizes, wraparound services for students and families. They are not worse than they used to be. Ninety percent of our population attended public schools. Their graduates created the most powerful nation in the world. Can we do better? Of course, especially for children with the greatest needs. Are public schools failing? No.

This is what DeBoer thinks:

The belief that American public schools are an international embarrassment, sites of endless failure, is one of the few things our polarized political system seems to agree on. After all, the transition from George W. Bush’s presidential education policy to that of Barack Obama was one of remarkable continuity, based on a shared premise: Our schools were in a broad state of emergency. Today, politicians of both parties still tell that story, as do op-ed pages and nonprofit organizations and bipartisan cable panels. The notion has hardened into an axiom, a claim so familiar that the people making it no longer feel obligated to back it up with evidence. But we don’t have to buy this narrative, and we shouldn’t — because the evidence tells us that the narrative just isn’t true.

The best way to consider a country’s educational performance is in relation to the performance of international peers, and the most authoritative international benchmark is the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam, which tests 15-year-olds across 81 education systems. In the most recent results, from 2022, American students tested better in reading than 68 of the 80 other systems and well above the international average. In science, they bested 56 of 80. Math is our weakest subject, but even there we outscore 43 systems and tie with a dozen more, meaning that on our worst day we still do better than more than half the developed world. Our top performers look particularly good on the PISA; for example, 14 percent of American teenagers scored at the highest level in reading, double the OECD average.

Some critics note that our education system is expensive and say that we should demand better results for our money. But this demand implies that there’s a straightforward relationship between per-pupil spending and test scores; decades of evidence demonstrate that there is not. And the results show that we produce many sterling students for our money.GLOBE STAFF; ROB Z/ADOBE

Indeed, the students at the top of our system aren’t merely fine; they’re the best on earth. American teams have placed in the top three at the International Mathematical Olympiad every year for a decade and won or tied for first in 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2024. In 2025, all five members of the US physics team won gold at the International Physics Olympiad, making the United States the only country to sweep gold that year. Our chemistry, biology, informatics, linguistics, and other teams collect medals year after year. These are overwhelmingly public-school kids from ordinary suburban and urban districts, outcompeting the best academic talent the world can produce. You rarely read about them because their success doesn’t fit the declinist story.

But scores are dropping, aren’t they? Yes, and that’s exactly why international context matters. The 2022 PISA results showed an unprecedented worldwide collapse, with average scores across the OECD falling roughly 10 points in reading and 15 in math. When students in Germany, Norway, and New Zealand decline in lockstep with students in Arizona and Connecticut, the cause is plainly not American teachers, unions, or curricula. (My own guess is that the smartphone is to blame, but I can’t prove it.) Even as our raw scores fell, our international rank rose in all three subjects because our peers’ scores fell further. Again, when was the last time you heard that in our media?

None of this is to deny that some American schools are in crisis. But those failures aren’t spread evenly across our system; they’re concentrated in a small number of places suffering from poverty, structural racism, and institutional decline. The United States has the highest child-poverty rate in the OECD (roughly a quarter of our children live in poverty, versus less than 10 percent in top-scoring nations like Finland and Denmark) and our socioeconomic and demographic stratification is pronounced. As such, our aggregate scores on assessments like PISA are weighed down disproportionately by disadvantaged students.

In Detroit, which sits at the bottom of every large urban US district tested, two-thirds of students were chronically absent in a recent year, speaking to a lack of stability and resources at the family level. What teachers could succeed in those conditions? Cleveland, Baltimore, districts in the impoverished rural areas of West Virginia — they all tell a similar story. The American schools that struggle the worst share no common curriculum, union contract, or pedagogy. What they share is extreme poverty, segregation, and decades of disinvestment — in local labor markets, transportation, and health care.

Imagine swapping the students of Detroit with those of wealthy Bloomfield Hills next door, where the schools have excellent performance metrics. Does anyone believe the students from Detroit would suddenly excel?

Simply shoveling money at urban schools is not the answer. In fact, poorer, higher-minority schools in the United States receive significantly more per-pupil funding than richer and whiter schools. As it stands, the teachers in the Detroit public school system are asked to achieve similar results to the ones in the Bloomfield system, despite the vast disparities in living and learning environments of the students they teach.

I’m known to be very skeptical about the influence of schools and teachers on test scores, which tend to reflect the socioeconomic conditions of groups and the variation in talent levels between individuals. But you don’t have to share my views in that regard to acknowledge that our worst-performing schools face conditions that no amount of teaching quality can overcome. And consider a fact that’s almost never reported: America’s most disadvantaged students, those in the bottom international decile in socioeconomic status, rank sixth out of 64 comparable nations in math. In other words, even in the midst of all that poverty and dysfunction, our poorest kids outperform almost all of the world’s other poorest kids. The problem is not that our schools fail poor children at an unusual rate. It is that some of our communities are deprived to a scandalous degree.

In sum, our median student does just fine, our best students are the envy of the world, but our worst-performing students drag down our averages in a way that makes our overall performance look much worse than it is — and those extreme negative outliers are almost universally found in communities with intense socioeconomic challenges.

This resolves a puzzle that has baffled pollsters for 40 years. American parents consistently rate the nation’s schools quite poorly while giving their own children’s schools high marks. Average grades for the American school system writ large typically fall in the C or D range, but more than three-quarters of parents typically give their own kids’ schools an A or B. Often this is regarded as a kind of cognitive bias, of irrationality on the part of those parents; surely, they must be viewing their own schools with rose-colored glasses, or so the conventional wisdom has long held. In fact, that attitude makes perfect sense when you reflect on the quantitative reality I’ve described: Most American K-12 schools and students really are doing quite well, which is reflected in the high marks parents give to their own local schools, but like all of us, parents have heard the relentless doomsaying about the country’s schools. Parents judge their own schools from direct experience and the national system from what they see on television. That is, on the question they actually know something about, about which they have the best evidence, they’re quite positive, and they have every reason to be.

The myth of universal failure didn’t come out of nowhere, and for the record I don’t think it was born entirely in bad faith. Some of the people who spread it were no doubt animated by a real and decent impulse to improve the lives of American children, saw the awful conditions in our inner cities, and overextrapolated their impression of school failure. Others were likely so motivated to attack public schools for ideological reasons that they didn’t care much about misrepresenting the data. Whatever the motives, over time it became far too common for politicians, pundits, and members of the media to take data that showed a handful of distressed communities dragging down otherwise strong averages and present it as proof that American education was rotten from root to branch. An honest reading pointed toward investing in poor places and pursuing avenues for shared prosperity other than just schooling; the sensationalist reading pointed toward dismantling public schools. Many people chose the sensationalist one and repeated it until it became something “everybody knew.”

The stakes are significant. If the failures of American education really are systemwide, the response has to be wholesale reform — new national mandates and perhaps a federal takeover of local education policy; even more standardized testing; the criminalization of teacher unions; private school vouchers for all. But the reality is that our educational failure is concentrated, and it’s concentrated in predictable places, which means the remedy must be too: Serious investment for the communities where poverty has done its damage, not merely for the schools that sit inside them, along with an effort to build more pathways to middle class stability for those who are not academically motivated.

There is some evidence that such investment, for example in environmental cleanup or direct financial assistance for poorer families, can improve learning outcomes. There too, though, the evidence is contested and the effects unclear. But this investment offers obvious advantages: Even if bringing more money and development into poor communities does not close academic gaps, the direct economic advantages will endure.

These efforts are both harder and more expensive than yet another round of complaining about teachers and their unions, but they have the advantage of potentially solving real problems. If we have a moral duty to improve our schools, as the school reformers insist, then that begins with a moral duty to tell the truth.

elaine October 2, 2026

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Diane Ravitch's Blog