Writing lesson plans has traditionally been a big part of a teacher’s job.  But this doesn’t mean they should be starting from a blank slate. Ideally, teachers are supposed to base their lessons on the textbooks, worksheets and digital materials that school leaders have spent a lot of time reviewing and selecting. 

But a recent national survey of more than 1,000 math teachers reveals that many are rejecting the materials they should be using and cobbling together their own.

“A surprising number of math teachers, particularly at the high school level, simply said we don’t use the district or school-provided materials, or they claimed they didn’t have any,” said William Zahner, an associate professor of mathematics at San Diego State University, who presented the survey at the April 2024 annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in Philadelphia. Students, he said, are often being taught through a “bricolage” of materials that teachers assemble themselves from colleagues and the internet. 

“What I see happening is a lot of math teachers are rewriting a curriculum that has already been written,” said Zahner. 

The survey results varied by grade level. More than 75 percent of elementary school math teachers said they used their school’s recommended materials, but fewer than 50 percent of high school math teachers said they did. 

Share of math teachers who use their school’s recommended materials

The do-it-yourself approach has two downsides, Zahner said, both of which affect students. One problem is that it’s time consuming. Time spent finding materials is time not spent giving students feedback, tailoring existing lessons for students or giving students one-to-one tutoring help. The hunt for materials is also exhausting and can lead to teacher burnout, Zahner said.

Related: Education research, condensed. The free Proof Points newsletter delivers one story every Monday.

The other problem is that teacher-made materials may sacrifice the thoughtful sequencing of topics planned by curriculum designers.  When teachers create or take materials from various sources, it is hard to maintain a “coherent development” of ideas, Zahner explained. Curriculum designers may weave a review of previous concepts to reinforce them even as new ideas are introduced. Teacher-curated materials may be disjointed. Separate research has found that some of the most popular materials that teachers grab from internet sites, such as Teachers Pay Teachers, are not high quality. 

The national survey was conducted in 2021 by researchers at San Diego State University, including Zahner, who also directs the university’s Center for Research in Mathematics and Science Education, and the English Learners Success Forum, a nonprofit that seeks to improve the quality of instructional materials for English learners. The researchers sought out the views of teachers who worked in school districts where more than 10 percent of the students were classified as English learners, which is the national average. More than 1,000 math teachers, from kindergarten through 12th grade, responded. On average, 30 percent of their students were English learners, but some teachers had zero English learners and others had all English learners in their classrooms.

Teachers were asked about the drawbacks of their assigned curriculum for English learners. Many said that their existing materials weren’t connected to their students’ languages and cultures. Others said that the explanations of how to tailor a lesson to an English learner were too general to be useful.  Zahner says that teachers have a point and that they need more support in how to help English learners develop the language of mathematical reasoning and argumentation.

It was not clear from this survey whether the desire to accommodate English learners was the primary reason that teachers were putting together their own materials or whether they would have done so anyway. 

Related: Most English lessons on Teachers Pay Teachers and other sites are ‘mediocre’ or ‘not worth using,’ study finds

“There are a thousand reasons why this is happening,” said Zahner. One high school teacher in Louisiana who participated in the survey said his students needed a more advanced curriculum. Supervisors inside a school may not like the materials that officials in a central office have chosen. “Sometimes schools have the materials but they’re all hidden in a closet,” Zahner said.

In the midst of a national debate on how best to teach math, this survey is an important reminder of yet another reason why many students aren’t getting the instruction that they need. 

This story about math lessons was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters. 

The post PROOF POINTS: Many high school math teachers cobble together their own instructional materials from the internet and elsewhere, a survey finds appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Jo Boaler is a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education with a devoted following of teachers who cheer her call to make math education more exciting. But despite all her fans, she has sparked controversy at nearly every stage of her career. Critics say she misrepresents research to make her case and her ideas actually impede students. Now, with a new book coming out in May, provocatively titled “MATH-ish,” Boaler is fighting back. 

“This is a whole effort to shut me down, my research and my writing,” said Boaler. “I see it as a form of knowledge suppression.”

Academic fights usually don’t make it beyond the ivory tower. But Boaler’s popularity and influence have made her a focal point in the current math wars, which also seem to reflect the broader culture wars.  In the last few months, tabloids and conservative publications have turned Boaler into something of an education villain who’s captured the attention of Elon Musk and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz on social media. Critics have even questioned Boaler’s association with a former reality TV star.

“I am the next target,” Boaler said, describing the death threats and abusive email she’s been receiving.

This controversy matters on a much larger level because there is a legitimate debate about how math should be taught in American schools. Cognitive science research suggests that students need a lot of practice and memorization to master math. And once students achieve success through practice, this success will motivate them to learn and enjoy math. In other words, success increases motivation at least as much as motivation produces success. 

Yet, from Boaler’s perspective, too many students feel like failures in math class and hate the subject. That leaves us with millions of Americans who are innumerate. Nearly 2 out of every 5 eighth graders don’t even have the most basic math skills, according to the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). On the international Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), American 15-year-olds rank toward the bottom of economically advanced nations in math achievement. 

Boaler draws upon a different body of research about student motivation that looks at the root causes of why students don’t like math based on surveys and interviews. Students who are tracked into low-level classes feel discouraged. Struggling math students often describe feelings of anxiety from timed tests. Many students express frustration that math is just a collection of meaningless procedures. 

Boaler seeks to fix these root causes. She advocates for ending tracking by ability in math classes, getting rid of timed tests and starting with conceptual understanding before introducing procedures. Most importantly, she wants to elevate the work that students tackle in math classes with more interesting questions that spark genuine curiosity and encourage students to think and wonder. Her goal is to expose students to the beauty of mathematical thinking as mathematicians enjoy the subject. Whether students actually learn more math the Boaler way is where this dispute centers. In other words, how strong is the evidence base?

The latest battle over Boaler’s work began with an anonymous complaint published in March by the Washington Free Beacon, the same conservative website that first surfaced plagiarism accusations against Claudine Gay, the former president of Harvard University. The complaint accuses Boaler of a “reckless disregard for accuracy” by misrepresenting research citations 52 times and asks Stanford to discipline Boaler, a full professor with an endowed chair. Stanford has said it’s reviewing the complaint and hasn’t decided whether to open an investigation, according to news reports. Boaler stands by her research (other than one citation that she says has been fixed) and calls the anonymous complaint “bogus.” (UPDATE: The Hechinger Report learned after this article was published that Stanford has decided not to open an investigation.)

“They haven’t even got the courage to put their name on accusations like this,” Boaler said. “That tells us something.”

Boaler first drew fire from critics in 2005, when she presented new research claiming that students at a low-income school who were behind grade level had outperformed students at higher-achieving schools when they were taught in classrooms that combined students of different math achievement levels. The supposed secret sauce was an unusual curriculum that emphasized group work and de-emphasized lectures. Critics disparaged the findings and hounded her to release her data. Math professors at Stanford and Cal State University re-crunched the numbers and declared they’d found the opposite result.

Boaler, who is originally from England, retreated to an academic post back in the U.K., but returned to Stanford in 2010 with a fighting spirit. She had written a book, “What’s Math Got to Do with It?: How Parents and Teachers Can Help Children Learn to Love Their Least Favorite Subject,” which explained to a general audience why challenging, open-ended problems would help more children to embrace math and how the current approach of boring drills and formulas was turning too many kids off. Teachers loved it.

Boaler accused her earlier critics of academic bullying and harassment. But she didn’t address their legitimate research questions. Instead, she focused on changing classrooms. Tens of thousands of teachers and parents flocked to her 2013 online course on how to teach math. Building on this new fan base, she founded a nonprofit organization at Stanford called youcubed to train teachers, conduct research and spread her gospel. Boaler says a half million teachers now visit youcubed’s website each month.

Boaler also saw math as a lever to promote social justice. She lamented that too many low-income Black and Hispanic children were stuck in discouraging, low-level math classes. She advocated for change. In 2014, San Francisco heeded that call, mixing different achievement levels in middle school classrooms and delaying algebra until ninth grade. Parents, especially in the city’s large Asian community, protested that delaying algebra was holding their children back. Without starting algebra in middle school, it was difficult to progress to high school calculus, an important course for college applications. Parents blamed Boaler, who applauded San Francisco for getting math right. Ten years later, the city is slated to reinstate algebra for eighth graders this fall. Boaler denies any involvement in the unpopular San Francisco reforms.

Before that math experiment unraveled in San Francisco, California education policymakers tapped Boaler to be one of the lead writers of a new math framework, which would guide math instruction throughout the state. The first draft discouraged tracking children into separate math classes by achievement levels, and proposed delaying algebra until high school. It emphasized “social justice” and suggested that students could take data science instead of advanced algebra in high school. Traditional math proponents worried that the document would water down math instruction in California, hinder advanced students and make it harder to pursue STEM careers. And they were concerned that California’s proposed reforms could spread across the nation. 

In the battle to quash the framework, critics attacked Boaler for trying to institute “woke” mathematics. The battle became personal, with some criticizing her for taking $5,000-an-hour consulting and speaking fees at public schools while sending her own children to private school. 

Critics also dug into the weeds of the framework document, which is how this also became a research story. A Stanford mathematics professor catalogued a list of what he saw as research misrepresentations. Those citations, together with additional characterizations of research findings throughout Boaler’s writings, eventually grew into the anonymous complaint that’s now at Stanford.

By the time the most recent complaint against Boaler was lodged, the framework had already been revised in substantial ways. Boaler’s critics had arguably won their main policy battles. College-bound students still need the traditional course sequence and cannot substitute data science for advanced algebra. California’s middle schools will continue to have the option to track children into separate classes and start algebra in eighth grade. 

But the attacks on Boaler continue. In addition to seeking sanctions from Stanford, her anonymous critics have asked academic journals to pull down her papers, according to Boaler. They’ve written to conference organizers to stop Boaler from speaking and, she says, they’ve told her funders to stop giving money to her. At least one, the Valhalla Foundation, the family foundation of billionaire Scott Cook (co-founder of the software giant Intuit), stopped funding youcubed in 2024. In 2022 and 2023, it gave Boaler’s organization more than $560,000. 

Boaler sees the continued salvos against her as part of the larger right-wing attack on diversity, equity and inclusion or DEI. She also sees a misogynistic pattern of taking down women who have power in education, such as Claudine Gay. “You’re basically hung, drawn and quartered by the court of Twitter,” she said.

From my perch as a journalist who covers education research, I see that Boaler has a tendency to overstate the implications of a narrow study. Sometimes she cites a theory that’s been written about in an academic journal but hasn’t been proven and labels it research. While technically true – most academic writing falls under the broad category of research –  that’s not the same as evidence from a well-designed classroom experiment.  And she tends not to factor in evidence that runs counter to her views or adjust her views as new studies arise. Some of her numerical claims seem grandiose. For example, she says one of her 18-lesson summer courses raised achievement by 2.8 years.

“People have raised questions for a long time about the rigor and the care in which Jo makes claims related to both her own research and others,” said Jon Star, a professor of math education at Harvard Graduate School of Education. 

But Star says many other education researchers have done exactly the same, and the “liberties” Boaler takes are common in the field. “That’s not to suggest that taking these liberties is okay,” Star said, “but she is being called out for it.”

Boaler is getting more scrutiny than her colleagues, he said, because she’s influential, has a large following of devoted teachers and has been involved in policy changes at schools. Many other scholars of math education share Boaler’s views. But Boaler has become the public face of nontraditional teaching ideas in math. And in today’s polarized political climate, that’s a dangerous public face to be.

The citation controversy reflects bigger issues with the state of education research. It’s often not as precise as the hard sciences or even social sciences like economics. Academic experts are prone to make wide, sweeping statements. And there are too few studies in real classrooms or randomized controlled trials that could settle some of the big debates. Star argues that more replication studies could improve the quality of evidence for math instruction. We can’t know which teaching methods are most effective unless the method can be reproduced in different settings with different students. 

It’s also possible that more research may never settle these big math debates and we may continue to generate conflicting evidence. There’s the real possibility that traditional methods could be more effective for short-term achievement gains, while nontraditional methods might attract more students to the subject, and potentially lead to more creative problem-solvers in the future. 

Even if Boaler is loose with the details of research studies, she could still be right about the big picture. Maybe advanced students would be better off slowing down on the current racetrack to calculus to learn math with more depth and breadth. Her fun hands-on approach to math might spark just enough motivation to inspire more kids to do their homework. Might we trade off a bit of short-term math achievement for a greater good of a numerate, civic society?

In her new book, “MATH-ish,” Boaler is doubling down on her approach to math with a title that seems to encourage inexactitude. She argues that approaching a problem in a “math-ish” way gives students the freedom to take a guess and make mistakes, to step back and think rather than jumping to numerical calculations. Boaler says she’s hearing from teachers that “ish” is far more fun than making estimates.

“I’m hoping this book is going to be my salvation,” she said, “that I have something exciting to do and focus on and not focus on the thousands of abusive messages I’m getting.”

This story about Jo Boaler was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

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School leaders nationwide often complain about how hard it is to hire teachers and how teaching job vacancies have mushroomed. Fixing the problem is not easy because those shortages aren’t universal. Wealthy suburbs can have a surplus of qualified applicants for elementary schools at the same time that a remote, rural school cannot find anyone to teach high school physics. 

A study published online in April 2024 in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis illustrates the inconsistencies of teacher shortages in Tennessee, where one district had a surplus of high school social studies teachers, while a neighboring district had severe shortages. Nearly every district struggled to find high school math teachers. 

Tennessee’s teacher shortages are worse in math, foreign languages and special education

Economists have long argued that solutions should be targeted at specific shortages. Pay raises for all teachers, or subsidies to train future teachers, may be good ideas. But broad policies to promote the whole teaching profession may not alleviate shortages if teachers continue to gravitate toward popular specialties and geographic areas. 

High school math teacher shortages were widespread in Tennessee

Surpluses of high school social studies teachers were next door to severe shortages

Elementary school teacher shortages were problems in Memphis and Nashville, but not in Knoxville

Some school systems have been experimenting with targeted financial incentives. Separate groups of researchers studied what happened in two places – Hawaii and Dallas, Texas, – when teachers were offered significant pay hikes, ranging from $6,000 to $18,000 a year, to take hard-to-fill jobs. In Hawaii, special education vacancies continued to grow, while the financial incentives to work with children with disabilities unintentionally aggravated shortages in general education classrooms. In Dallas, the incentives lured excellent teachers to high-poverty schools. Student performance subsequently skyrocketed so much that the schools no longer qualified for the bump in teacher pay. Teachers left and student test scores fell back down again. 

This doesn’t mean that targeted financial incentives are a bad or a failed idea. But the two studies show how the details of these pay hikes matter because there can be unintended consequences or obstacles. Some teaching specialities – such as special education – may have challenges that teacher pay hikes alone cannot solve. But these studies could help point policy makers toward better solutions.  

I learned about the Hawaii study in March 2024, when Roddy Theobald, a statistician at the American Institutes for Research (AIR), presented a working paper, “The Impact of a $10,000 Bonus on Special Education Teacher Shortages in Hawai‘i,” at the annual conference of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research. (The paper has not yet been peer-reviewed or published in an academic journal and could still be revised.)

In the fall of 2020, Hawaii began offering all of its special education teachers an extra $10,000 a year. If teachers took a job in an historically hard-to-staff school, they also received a bonus of up to $8,000, for a potential total pay raise of $18,000. Either way, it was a huge bump atop a $50,000 base salary.  

Theobald and his five co-authors at AIR and Boston University calculated that the pay hikes reduced the proportion of special education vacancies by a third. On the surface, that sounds like a success and other news outlets reported it that way. But special-ed vacancies actually rose over the study period, which coincided with the coronavirus pandemic, and ultimately ended up higher than before the pay hike. 

What was reduced by a third was the gap between special ed and general ed vacancies. Vacancies among both groups of teachers initially plummeted during 2020-21, even though only special ed teachers were offered the $10,000. (Perhaps the urgency of the pandemic inspired all teachers to stay in their jobs.) Afterwards, vacancies began to rise again, but special ed vacancies didn’t increase as fast as general ed vacancies. That’s a sign that special ed vacancies might have been even worse had there been no $10,000 bonus. 

As the researchers dug into the data, they discovered that this relative difference in vacancies was almost entirely driven by job switches at hard-to-staff schools. General education teachers were crossing the hallway and taking special education openings to make an extra $10,000. Theobald described it as “robbing Peter to pay Paul.”

These job switches were possible because, as it turns out,  many general education teachers initially trained to teach special education and held the necessary credentials. Some never even tried special ed teaching and decided to go into general education classrooms instead. But the pay bump was enough for some to reconsider special ed. 

Hawaii’s special education teacher vacancies initially fell after $10,000 pay hikes in 2020, but subsequently rose again

This study doesn’t explain why so many special education teachers left their jobs in 2021 and 2022 despite the pay incentives or why more new teachers didn’t want these higher paying jobs. In a December 2023 story in Mother Jones, special education teachers in Hawaii described difficult working conditions and how there were too few teaching assistants to help with all of their students’ special needs. Working with students with disabilities is a challenging job, and perhaps no amount of money can offset the emotional drain and burnout that so many special education teachers experience. 

Dallas’s experience with pay hikes, by contrast, began as a textbook example of how targeted incentives ought to work. In 2016, the city’s school system designated four low-performing, high-poverty schools for a new Accelerating Campus Excellence (ACE) initiative. Teachers with high ratings could earn an extra $6,000 to $10,000 (depending upon their individual ratings) to work at these struggling elementary and middle schools. Existing teachers were screened to keep their jobs and only 20 percent of the staff passed the threshold and remained. (There were other reforms too, such as uniforms and a small increase in instructional time, but the teacher stipends were the main thrust and made up 85 percent of the ACE budget.)

Five researchers, including economists Eric Hanushek at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and Steven Rivkin at the University of Illinois Chicago, calculated that test scores jumped immediately after the pay incentives kicked in while scores at other low-performing elementary and middle schools in Dallas barely budged. Student achievement at these previously lowest-performing schools came close to the district average for all of Dallas. Dallas launched a second wave of ACE schools in 2018 and again, the researchers saw similar improvements in student achievement. Results are in a working paper, “Attracting and Retaining Highly Effective Educators in Hard-to-Staff Schools.” I read a January 2024 version. 

The program turned out to be so successful at boosting student achievement that three of the four initial ACE schools no longer qualified for the stipends by 2019. Over 40 percent of the high-performing teachers left their ACE schools. Student achievement fell sharply, reversing most of the gains that had been made.

For students, it was a roller coaster ride. Amber Northern, head of research at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, blamed adults for failing to “prepare for the accomplishment they’d hoped for.”

Still, it’s unclear what should have been done. Allowing these schools to continue the stipends would have eaten up millions of dollars that could have been used to help other low-performing schools. 

And even if there were enough money to give teacher stipends at every low-performing school, there’s not an infinite supply of highly effective teachers. Not all of them want to work at challenging, high poverty schools. Some prefer the easier conditions of a high-income magnet school. 

These were two good faith efforts that showed the limits of throwing money at specific types of teacher shortages. At best, they are a cautionary tale for policymakers as they move forward. 

This story about teacher pay was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

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Universities, philanthropies, and even the U.S. government are all trying to encourage more young Americans to pursue careers in STEM,  an acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Many business sectors, from high tech to manufacturing, are plagued with shortages of workers with technical skills. In New York City, where I live, the subway is frequently plastered with advertisements carrying the message that STEM fields pay well. But studying STEM requires more than an interest in science or a desire to make good money. Students also need adequate training, even in elementary and middle school.

That’s why it’s concerning that high-achieving students, who’ve received less public attention than lower achieving students, were also set back by remote learning and pandemic uncertainty.  Fewer students with math skills shrinks the pool of people who are likely to cultivate an expertise in science, engineering and technology a decade from now. In other words, the STEM pipeline –  a metaphor for the development of future scientists, engineers and other high tech workers –  likely starts with a narrower funnel in the post-pandemic era.

The stakes are high not only for Gen Z, as they age out of school and enter the workforce, but also for the future of the U.S. economy, which needs skilled scientists and engineers to grow.

The leading indicators of STEM troubles ahead are apparent within the 2022 scores from a national test called the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The immediate headlines from that first post-pandemic test focused on the fact that two decades of academic progress had been suddenly erased. Low-achieving children, who tend to be poor, had lost the most ground. An alarming number of American children – as high as 38 percent of eighth graders  – were functioning below the “basic” level in math, meaning that they didn’t have even the most rudimentary math skills.

Statisticians at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) have continued to dig into the 2022 data, and they’ve been also turning their attention to students at the top. These children are on grade level, but the eighth grade NAEP assessment shows that far fewer of them are hitting an advanced performance level, or even a proficient one. Math scores among top performers dropped as steeply as scores did among low performers. Even the scores of students at Catholic schools, who otherwise weathered the pandemic well, plummeted in eighth grade math. 

We don’t have data for other private schools because they have refused to participate in NAEP testing, but the eighth grade math declines among both high-achieving public school and Catholic school students are not good signs. 

NAEP tests reading and math in both fourth and eighth grades every two years in order to track educational progress. It’s one of the only tests that can be used for comparisons across states and generations. More than 400,000 students are specially selected to represent the regions and demographic characteristics of the nation. 

Among the four NAEP tests, eighth grade math showed the sharpest pandemic drop.  Math took a bigger hit than reading because kids can still read at home, while math is something that students primarily learn at school. If you didn’t read “The Hobbit” in your seventh grade English class because you were out sick with Covid, you can still be a good lifelong reader  But not getting enough practice with rates, ratios and percentages in middle school can derail someone who might have otherwise excelled. 

Why eighth grade math was hit harder than fourth grade math is a bit less obvious. One explanation is that the concepts that students need to learn are more difficult. Square roots and exponents are possibly more challenging to master than multiplication and division. And fewer parents are able to assist with homework as the math increases in complexity.

Yet another explanation is a psychological one. These eighth graders were in sixth grade when the pandemic erupted in the spring of 2020. This is a critical time in adolescent development when children are figuring out who they are and where they belong. A lot of this development occurs through social interaction. The isolation may have stunted psychological development and that ultimately affected motivation, study skills and the ability to delay gratification – all necessary to excel in math.

Let’s walk through the numbers together.

Highest achieving students lost ground in eighth grade math

This chart shows that the highest performing students, those at the top 10 percent and the top 25 percent, lost as much as low-achieving students at the bottom in eighth grade math. These eighth graders were in the spring of sixth grade when the pandemic hit in 2020, and it’s possible that they didn’t master important prerequisite skills, such as rates and ratios. These kids at the top are performing at grade level, but not as high performing as past eighth graders.

Fewer eighth grade students hit advanced and proficient levels

This bar chart shows that before the pandemic 10 percent of the nation’s eighth graders were performing at an advanced level in math. That fell to 7 percent. And the number of students deemed proficient in eighth grade math fell even more, from 24 percent to 20 percent. Before the pandemic, arguably, 34 percent of the eighth grade population was on track to pursue advanced math in high school and a future STEM career if they wanted one. After the pandemic in 2022, only 27 percent were well prepared.

Students at Catholic schools are generally much higher performing than students at public schools. In large part, that’s because of family income; wealthier students tend to have higher test scores than poorer students. Catholic school students tend to be wealthier; their families can afford private school tuition. In recent years, the Catholic Church has closed hundreds of schools that catered to low-income families, leaving a higher income population in its remaining classrooms. 

Catholic schools outperformed public schools but also dropped 

This chart shows that Catholic school students, depicted by the diamonds, outperformed public school students, depicted by the circles, in eighth grade math. But it was still a sharp five-point decline in eighth grade math performance for Catholic school students, almost as large as the eight-point decline for public school students. Scores of white students at Catholic schools declined five points; scores of students at Catholic schools in the suburbs declined seven points. Almost a quarter of Catholic school students are now functioning below a basic level in math for their grade. 

Despite the good academic reputation of Catholic schools and the praise Catholic schools received for resuming in-person instruction sooner, math scores suggest a problem. And it’s a problem that potentially extends to the whole private school universe, where 9 percent of students are enrolled, according to the most recently available data from 2019. 

I talked with Ron Reynolds, the executive director of the California Association of Private School Organizations, who explained that not just Catholic schools, but also many other private schools suffered even if they hadn’t been closed for long. Reynolds said that private schools were still hit by illnesses, deaths and absences and that might have affected instruction.

“Private schools are tightly knit communities in which teachers tend to be more intertwined in the lives of the children and families they serve,” he said. “When you have a crisis, and so many people experiencing stress and loss, that can certainly impact the teacher in some significant ways.”

Unfortunately, we don’t know exactly how other private schools fared during the pandemic because they have refused to participate in the NAEP tests for the past decade. Reynolds, who serves on the governing board that oversees the NAEP exam, has been trying to lobby more private schools to participate, but so far, to no avail.

Together private schools, selective public schools and affluent suburban schools have been important training grounds for the nation’s future scientists and engineers. Of course, it is possible that these high achieving students, now 10th graders, will catch up. Many of them are from wealthier families who can afford tutors, or attend well-resourced schools. But I am not seeing much evidence that schools have had the ability to think about the pipeline of advanced students when many students are so needy. And with post-pandemic grade inflation, students and parents may not be getting the signals they need to seek extra help independently. 

The administration of the 2024 NAEP test wrapped up in March, but results won’t be known for many months. I’ll be keeping an eye on eighth grade math and on SAT, ACT and Advanced Placement scores in the years to come.

This story about math scores was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

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Education journalism is chock full of stories touting some brand new idea that could fix schools. Artificial intelligence is the current obsession. Philanthropic funders often say they want to see fewer stories about problems and more stories about solutions. But the truth is that lifting student achievement is really hard and the vast majority of innovations don’t end up working. 

A February 2024 report about a research-and-development program inside the Department of Education makes this truth crystal clear. The failure rate was 74 percent. Under this program, called Investing in Innovation or i3, the federal government gave out $1.4 billion between 2010 and 2016 to education nonprofits and researchers for the purpose of developing and testing new ideas in the classroom. But only 26 percent of the innovations yielded any positive benefits for students and no negative harms, according to the program’s final report. 

Most of the 172 grants tested ideas about improving instruction or turning around low-performing schools. Almost 150 of them reported results with more than 20 still unfinished. Of the completed ones, a quarter of the innovations hadn’t been properly tested. Doing rigorous research isn’t easy; you need to set up a group of comparison students who don’t get the intervention and track everyone’s progress. Of the 112 properly evaluated grants, the most common result was a null finding, meaning that the intervention didn’t make a difference. Only a small handful left students worse off. The results for each program are hidden in pages 55 through 64 of a separate appendices document, but I have created a pdf of them for you.

The low success rate for new ideas is “psychologically disappointing,” said Barbara Goodson, lead author of the report and an expert in educational research at the consulting firm Abt Global. “You would hope that all this [innovation] would pan out for students and that we would know better how to make education.”

A 26 percent success rate

The original ideas all showed promise and outside reviewers rated applications. But when you try new things and put them to a rigorous test in real classrooms, human behavior and students achievement are influenced by so many things that you cannot control, from struggles at home and poverty to health issues and psychological stress. And it can be difficult to generate downstream results for students on a year-end achievement test when an intervention is targeting something else, such parent engagement.

Some innovations did work well.  Building Assets, Reducing Risks or BARR is the poster child for what this grant program had hoped to produce. The idea was an early warning system that detects when children are starting to stumble at school. Teachers, administrators or counselors intervene in this early stage and build relationships with students to get them back on track. It received a seed grant to develop the idea and implement it in schools. The results were good enough for BARR to receive a bigger federal grant from this R&D program three years later. Again it worked with different types of students in different parts of the country, and BARR received a third grant to scale it up across the nation in 2017. Now BARR is in more than 300 schools and Maine is adopting it statewide.

Related: The ‘dirty secret’ about educational innovation

Some ideas that were proven to work in the short term didn’t yield long-term benefits or backfired completely.  One example is Reading Recovery, a tutoring program for struggling readers in first grade that costs $10,000 per student and was a recipient of one of these grants. A randomized control trial that began in 2011 produced a giant boost in reading achievement for first graders. However, three years later, Reading Recovery students subsequently fell behind and by fourth grade were far worse readers than similar students who hadn’t had the tutoring, according to a follow-up study. The tutoring seemed to harm them.

It can be hard to understand these contradictions. Henry May, an associate professor at the University of Delaware who conducted both the short-term and long-term Reading Recovery studies, explained that the assessment used in the first grade study was full of simple one-syllable words. The tutoring sessions likely exposed children to these words so many times that the students memorized them. But Reading Recovery hadn’t taught the phonics necessary to read more complex words in later grades, May said. Reading Recovery disputes the long-term study results, pointing out that three-fourths of the study participants had departed so data was collected for only 25 percent of them. A spokesperson for the nonprofit organization also says it does teach phonics in its tutoring program.

I asked Abt’s Goodson to summarize the lessons learned from the federal program: 

• More students. It might seem like common sense to try a new idea on only a small group of students at first, but the Department of Education learned over time that it needed to increase the number of students in order to produce statistically significant results. There are two reasons that a study can end with a null result. One is because the intervention didn’t work, but it can also be a methodological quirk. When the achievement benefits are small, you need a large number of students to be sure that the result wasn’t a fluke. There were too many fluke signals in these evaluation studies. Over the years, sample sizes were increased even for ideas that were in the early development stage.

• Implementation. Goodson still believes in the importance of randomized control trials to create credible evidence for what works, but she says one of the big lessons is that these trials alone are not enough. Documenting and studying the implementation are just as important as evaluating the results, she said. Understanding the barriers in the classroom can help developers tweak programs and make them more effective. They might be too expensive or require too many weeks of teacher training. The disappointing results of the i3 program have helped spawn a new “science of implementation” to learn more about these obstacles.

• National scale up. Too much money was spent on expanding new ideas to more students across the nation, and some of these ideas ended up not panning out in research evaluations. In the successor program to i3, the scale up grants are much smaller. Instead of using the money to directly implement the intervention nationwide, the funds help innovators make practical adjustments so that it can be replicated. For example, instead of using expensive outside coaches, a program might experiment with training existing teachers at a school to run it. 

Though the original i3 program no longer exists, its successor program, Education Innovation and Research (EIR), continues with the same mission of developing and evaluating new ideas. Currently, it is ramping up funding to deal with the post-pandemic crises of learning loss, mental health and teacher attrition.

Education Innovation and Research (EIR) grants 2017-2023

It’s easy to feel discouraged that the federal government has invested around $3 billion in the last dozen years on educational innovation with so little to show for it. But we are slowly building a good evidence database of some things that do work – ideas that are not just based on gut instincts and whim, but are scientifically proven with a relatively small investment compared to what the government spends on research in other areas.  By contrast, defense research gets over $90 billion a year. Health research receives nearly $50 billion. I wonder how much further we might be in helping students become proficient in reading and math if we invested even a little bit more.

This story about education R&D was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

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A growing chorus of education researchers, pundits and “science of reading” advocates are calling for young children to be taught more about the world around them. It’s an indirect way of teaching reading comprehension. The theory is that what we grasp from what we read depends on whether we can hook it to concepts and topics that we already know. Natalie Wexler’s 2019 best-selling book, The Knowledge Gap, championed knowledge-building curricula and more schools around the country, from Baltimore to Michigan to Colorado, are adopting these content-filled lesson plans to teach geography, astronomy and even art history. 

Makers of knowledge-building curricula say their lessons are based on research, but the truth is that there is scant classroom evidence that building knowledge first increases future reading comprehension. 

In 2023, University of Virginia researchers promoted a study of Colorado charter schools that had adopted E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum. Children who had won lotteries to attend these charter schools had higher reading scores than students who lost the lotteries. But it was impossible to tell whether the Core Knowledge curriculum itself made the difference or if the boost to reading scores could be attributed to other things that these charter schools were doing, such as hiring great teachers and training them well. 

More importantly, the students at these charter schools were largely from middle and upper middle class families. And what we really want to know is whether knowledge building at school helps poorer children, who are less likely to be exposed to the world through travel, live performances, and other experiences that money can buy.

A new study, published online on Feb. 26, 2024, in the peer-reviewed journal Developmental Psychology, now provides stronger causal evidence that building background knowledge can translate into higher reading achievement for low-income children. The study took place in an unnamed, large urban school district in North Carolina where most of the students are Black and Hispanic and 40 percent are from low-income families.

In 2019, a group of researchers, led by James Kim, a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, randomly selected 15 of the district’s 30 elementary schools to teach first graders special knowledge-building lessons for three years, through third grade. Kim, a reading specialist, and other researchers had developed two sets of multi-year lesson plans, one for science and one for social studies. Students were also given related books to read during the summer. (This research was funded by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which is among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)

The remaining 15 elementary schools in the district continued to teach their students as usual, still delivering some social studies and science instruction, but not these special lessons. Regular reading class was untouched in the experiment. All 30 schools were using the same reading curriculum, Expeditionary Learning, which follows science of reading principles and teaches phonics. 

Covid hit in the middle of the experiment. When schools shut down in the spring of 2020, the researchers scrapped the planned social studies units for second graders. In 2021, students were still not attending school in person. The researchers revised their science curriculum and decided to give an abridged online version to all 30 schools instead of just half. In the end, children in the original 15 schools received one year of social studies lessons and three years of science lessons compared to only one year of science in the comparison group. 

Still, approximately 1,000 students who had received the special science and social studies lessons in first and second grades outperformed the 1,000 students who got only the abbreviated online science in third grade. Their reading and math scores on the North Carolina state tests were higher not only in third grade, but also in fourth grade, more than a year after the knowledge-building experiment ended. 

It wasn’t a huge boost to reading achievement, but it was significant and long-lasting. It cost about $400 per student in instructional materials and teacher training.

Timothy Shanahan, a literacy expert and a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago who was not involved in this research or the development of these science lessons, praised the study. “The study makes it very clear (as have a few others recently) that it is possible to combine reading with social studies and science curriculum in powerful ways that can improve both literacy and content knowledge,” he said by email. 

Connecting background knowledge to reading comprehension is not a new idea.  A famous 1987 experiment documented that children who were weaker readers but knowledgeable about baseball understood a reading passage about baseball better than children who were stronger readers but didn’t know much about the sport. 

Obviously, it’s not realistic for schools to attempt to familiarize students with every topic they might encounter in a book. And there is disagreement among researchers about how general knowledge of the world translates into higher reading performance.

Kim thinks that a knowledge-building curriculum doesn’t need to teach many topics. Random facts, he says, are not important. He argues for depth instead of breadth. He says it’s important to construct a thoughtful sequence of lessons over the years, allowing students to see how the same patterns crop up in different ways. He calls these patterns “schemas.” In this experiment, for example, students learned about animal survival in first grade and dinosaur extinction in second grade. In third grade, that evolved into a more general understanding of how living systems function. By the end of third grade, many students were able to see how the idea of functioning systems can apply to inanimate objects, such as skyscrapers. 

It’s the patterns that can be analogized to new circumstances, Kim explained. Once a student is familiar with the template, a new text on an unfamiliar topic can be easier to grasp.

Kim and his team also paired the science lessons with clusters of vocabulary words that were likely to come up again in the future – almost like wine pairings with a meal. 

The full benefits of this kind of knowledge building didn’t materialize until after several years of coordinated instruction. In the first years, students were only able to transfer their ability to comprehend text on one topic to another if the topics were very similar. This study indicates that as their content knowledge deepened, their ability to generalize increased as well.  

There’s a lot going on here: a spiraling curriculum that revisits and builds upon themes year after year; an explicit teaching of underlying patterns; new vocabulary words, and a progression from the simple to the complex. 

There are many versions of knowledge-rich curricula and this one isn’t about exposing students to a classical canon. It remains unclear if all knowledge-building curricula work as well. Other programs sometimes replace the main reading class with knowledge-building lessons. This one didn’t tinker with regular reading class. 

The biggest challenge with the approach used in the North Carolina experiment is that it requires schools to coordinate lessons across grades. That’s hard. Some teachers may want to keep their favorite units on, say, growing a bean plant, and may bristle at the idea of throwing away their old lesson plans.

It’s also worth noting that students’ math scores improved as much as their reading scores did in this North Carolina experiment. It might seem surprising that a literacy intervention would also boost math. But math also requires a lot of reading; the state’s math tests were full of word problems. Any successful effort to boost reading skills is also likely to have positive spillovers into math, researchers explained.

School leaders are under great pressure to boost test scores. To do that, they’ve often doubled time spent on reading and cut science and social studies classes. Studies like this one suggest that those cuts may have been costly, further undermining reading achievement instead of improving it. As researchers discover more about the science of reading, it may well turn out to be that more time on science itself is what kids need to become good readers.

This story about background knowledge was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

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For a few weeks in the spring of 2016, nearly all the eighth graders at a small public school affiliated with Columbia University agreed to stay late after school to study math. They were preparing for a critical test, the New York State’s Regents examination in algebra. Half of the kids came from families that lived below the poverty line in Harlem and upper Manhattan. They attended a selective middle school, and were advanced enough to be taking algebra in eighth instead of ninth grade. Many others were the children of Columbia professors, and none of them – rich or poor – really needed help passing the test.

But researchers set up a review class to test a theory about the best way to study for a test. For the first eight sessions, half the students had a traditional review class. They were given a Barron’s Regents review study guide with lots of practice problems. Their teachers worked through the first half of the problems, explaining how to solve them step by step. 

The other half of their classmates studied the same algebra topics in a different way. They spent the first 45-minute session taking a mini practice test. They received no instruction and worked independently. The following day, their teachers went over the students’ errors. The students had four test-and-review cycles like this, for a total of four mini tests and four sessions of error review. 

Then, the two groups swapped. The kids who had been taught via traditional, explicit instruction switched to reviewing the remaining algebra topics through their errors. And the kids who had been correcting their errors received eight sessions of traditional test prep. Their teachers taught both ways too, so that differences between the two modes couldn’t be attributed to a particular teacher. The following year, the same four teachers repeated the entire experiment with a fresh group of eighth graders. All told, 175 kids participated in the experiment. 

Which method worked best? 

On the surface, it was a tie. Students improved by about the same amount – 12 percent – whether they learned through explicit instruction or error review. Students had taken tests before and after the test prep course. Noting how much they improved on various algebra topics, researchers were able to trace those gains back to whether students learned that topic through explicit instruction or through their errors.

There was one big difference, however. Learning through errors was twice as powerful based on instructional time. Teachers had to teach all eight sessions in the traditional instruction condition, totaling 360 minutes of instructional time. But teachers only had to teach every other session when students learned through errors, adding up to only 180 minutes.

“You get more bang from your teacher buck, if you will, from the learning from errors condition,” said Janet Metcalfe, a psychologist at Columbia University who led the study, which was published online in the British Journal of Educational Psychology in January 2024. (The Hechinger Report is an independent news organization based at Teachers College, Columbia University, but has no relationship with the middle school or the researchers involved in the study.)

Of course, students might not see it that way. They still had to be in class for the full 360 minutes after school, with half the time spent taking practice tests in order to generate the errors.

The study is not a repudiation of explicit instruction. The students were also taking an algebra class during the school day where they had likely had a lot of explicit instruction and were already familiar with the concepts. Metcalfe said that having this background knowledge is critical for learning by errors to work. The students aren’t just guessing, but they’re making common mistakes. 

“They’re just doing one little thing wrong,” said Metcalfe. “And once they understand what that one little thing is, and remember not to fall into a habit where they’ll make the same mistake, they can overcome it.”

Metcalfe offered the example of fractions. A student might mistakenly think that a large denominator means it’s a large number, but then remembers discussing the error in a review session and knows that a fraction with a large denominator might actually be a tiny number. The memory of discussing the error stops the student from making it again, she explained.

Learning from errors, however, was inconsistent. One of the four teachers produced more than twice the test score gains for students than a colleague. It’s not that this teacher was much better than the others. All four teachers produced almost identical test score gains when they taught explicitly how to solve problems. They were all good explainers. 

But being a good explainer is not always the same thing as being a good teacher. Metcalfe and her team analyzed videos and transcripts of the review sessions to understand what the teachers were doing differently. And it turns out there are multiple ways to teach through errors. 

The teacher who got the best results employed a sort of Socratic method. “Okay, you guys got this wrong? Why would somebody get this wrong?” recalled Metcalfe. “And he did very little lecturing, almost none.” 

This teacher asked his students to talk about how they had solved the problem and why they did it that way.  He asked them to talk about what they found difficult. Students would often explain their thinking to each other. Finally, the teacher would ask his students to come up with ideas on how to recognize and avoid such mistakes in the future. This teacher had a knack for maintaining a fast pace and getting through a lot of problems from the previous day’s mini test. His students’ test scores jumped by far more than 12 percent when he taught this way.

By contrast, the teacher who produced the lowest test score gains tended to lecture students on the correct way to solve the problems that they had gotten wrong. The focus was on the corrections, not the errors. His classes weren’t very interactive.  His students’ test scores improved by only 6 percent instead of 12 percent. Still, on a per minute basis, he was as effective teaching through errors as he had been teaching traditionally. 

Another teacher was extremely slow paced. “I was convinced when I was watching the teachers that the second teacher would have no success at all,” recalled Metcalfe. “He would take five minutes on one problem, and just let them mull over it.”

Her prediction was wrong. “His students did really well,”  Metcalfe said, laughing. Perhaps this is an error that Metcalfe won’t make again. Like the star teacher, he didn’t lecture.

It’s worth emphasizing again that these were highly motivated, high-achieving students who cared about their Regents exam scores. This method might not work with less motivated students who are struggling in school.  

Even with ideal students, it also seems like it takes a special teacher to pull off this kind of teaching. It reminds me of other progressive teaching approaches, from inquiry learning to project-based learning, for which researchers have documented remarkable results with masterful teachers. But maybe it’s asking too much of the average teacher to teach this way, thinking of questions on the fly that will magically steer students to the right answers. Should we be promoting ways of teaching that only a small minority of teachers can realistically do well? 

My big takeaway from this study is for students. When preparing for a math exam, they should take a practice test, go over mistakes and make sure they understand why they made them. 

This story about test prep was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

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Educators around the country have embraced the “science of reading” in their classrooms, but that doesn’t mean there’s a truce in the reading wars. In fact, controversies are emerging about an important but less understood aspect of learning to read: phonemic awareness. 

That’s the technical name for showing children how to break down words into their component letter sounds and then fuse the sounds together. In a phonemic awareness lesson, a teacher might ask how many sounds are in the word cat.  The answer is three: “k,” “a,” and “t.” Then the class blends the sounds back into the familiar sounding word: from “kuh-aah-tuh” to “kat.” The 26 letters of the English alphabet produce 44 phonemes, which include unique sounds made from combinations of letters, such as “ch” and “oo.” 

Many schools have purchased scripted oral phonemic awareness lessons that do not include the visual display of letters. The oral lessons are popular because they are easy to teach and fun for students. And that’s the source of the current debate. Should kids in kindergarten or first grade be spending so much time on sounds without understanding how those sounds correspond to letters? 

A new meta-analysis confirms that the answer is no. In January 2024, five researchers from Texas A&M University published their findings online in the journal Scientific Studies of Reading. They found that struggling readers, ages 4 to 6, no longer benefited after 10.2 hours of auditory instruction in small group or tutoring sessions, but continued to make progress if visual displays of the letters were combined with the sounds. That means that instead of just asking students to repeat sounds, a teacher might hold up cards with the letters C, A and T printed on them as students isolate and blend the sounds.

Meta-analyses sweep up all the best research on a topic and use statistics to tell us where the preponderance of the evidence lies. This newest 2024 synthesis follows three previous meta-analyses on phonemic awareness in the past 25 years. While there are sometimes shortcomings in the underlying studies, the conclusions from all the phonemic meta-analyses appear to be pointing in the same direction. 

“If you teach phonemic awareness, students will learn phonemic awareness,” which isn’t the goal, said Tiffany Peltier, a learning scientist who consults on literacy training for teachers at NWEA, an assessment company. “If you teach blending and segmenting using letters, students are learning to read and spell.” 

Phonemic awareness has a complicated history. In the 1970s, researchers discovered that good readers also had a good sense of the sounds that constitute words. This sound awareness helps students map the written alphabet to the sounds, an important step in learning to read and write. Researchers proved that these auditory skills could be taught and early studies showed that they could be taught as a purely oral exercise without letters.

But science evolved. In 2000, the National Reading Panel outlined the five pillars of evidence-based reading instruction: phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. This has come to be known as the science of reading. By then, more studies on phonemic awareness had been conducted and oral lessons alone were not as successful. The reading panel’s meta-analysis of 52 studies showed that phonemic awareness instruction was almost twice as effective when letters were presented along with the sounds. 

Many schools ignored the reading panel’s recommendations and chose different approaches that didn’t systematically teach phonics or phonemic awareness. But as the science of reading grew in popularity in the past decade, phonemic awareness lessons also exploded. Teacher training programs in the science of reading emphasized the importance of phonemic awareness. Companies sold phonemic programs to schools and told teachers to teach it every day. Many of these lessons were auditory, including chants and songs without letters.

Researchers worried that educators were overemphasizing auditory training. A 2021 article, “They Say You Can Do Phonemic Awareness Instruction ‘In the Dark’, But Should You?” by nine prominent reading researchers criticized how phonemic awareness was being taught in schools. 

Twenty years after the reading panel’s report, a second meta-analysis came out in 2022 with even fresher studies but arrived at the same conclusion. Researchers from Baylor University analyzed over 130 studies and found twice the benefits for phonemic awareness when it was taught with letters. A third meta-analysis was presented at a poster session of the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading.  It also found that instruction was more effective when sounds and letters were combined.

On the surface, adding letters to sounds might seem identical to teaching phonics. But some reading experts say phonemic awareness with letters still emphasizes the auditory skills of segmenting words into sounds and blending the sounds together. The visual display of the letter is almost like a subliminal teaching of phonics without explicitly saying, “This alphabetic symbol ‘a’ makes the sound ‘ah’.” Others explain that there isn’t a bright line between phonemic awareness and phonics and they can be taught in tandem.

The authors of the latest 2024 meta-analysis had hoped to give teachers more guidance on how much classroom time to invest on phonemic awareness. But unfortunately, the classroom studies they found didn’t keep track of the minutes. The researchers were left with only 16 high-quality studies, all of which were interventions with struggling students. These were small group or individual tutoring sessions on top of whatever phonemic awareness lessons children may also have been receiving in their regular classrooms, which was not documented. So it’s impossible to say from this meta-analysis exactly how much sound training students need. 

The lead author of the 2024 meta-analysis, Florina Erbeli, an education psychologist at Texas A&M, said that the 10.2 hours number in her paper isn’t a “magic number.” It’s just an average of the results of the 16 studies that met her criteria for being included in the meta-analysis. The right amount of phonemic awareness might be more or less, depending on the child. 

Erbeli said the bigger point for teachers to understand is that there are diminishing returns to auditory-only instruction and that students learn much more when auditory skills are combined with visible letters.

I corresponded with Heggerty, the market leader in phoneme awareness lessons, which says its programs are in 70 percent of U.S. school districts. The company acknowledged that the science of reading has evolved and that’s why it revised its phonemic awareness program in 2022 to incorporate letters and introduced a new program in 2023 to pair it with phonics. The company says it is working with outside researchers to keep improving the instructional materials it sells to schools. Because many schools cannot afford to buy a new instructional program, Heggerty says it also explains how teachers can modify older auditory lessons.

The company still recommends that teachers spend eight to 12 minutes a day on phonemic awareness through the end of first grade. This recommendation contrasts with the advice of many reading researchers who say the average kid doesn’t need this much. Many researchers say that phonemic awareness continues to develop automatically as the child’s reading skills improve without advanced auditory training. 

NWEA literacy consultant Peltier, whom I quoted earlier, suggests that phonemic awareness can be tapered off by the fall of first grade. More phonemic awareness isn’t necessarily harmful, but there’s only so much instructional time in the day. She thinks that precious minutes currently devoted to oral phonemic awareness could be better spent on phonics, building vocabulary and content knowledge through reading books aloud, classroom discussions and writing.

Another developer of a phonemic awareness program aimed at older, struggling readers is David Kilpatrick, professor emeritus at the State University of New York at Cortland. He told me that five minutes a day might be enough for the average student in a classroom, but some struggling students need a lot more. Kilpatrick disagrees with the conclusions of the meta-analyses because they lump different types of students together. He says severely dyslexic students need more auditory training. He explained that extra time is needed for advanced auditory work that helps these students build long-term memories, he said, and the meta-analyses didn’t measure that outcome.

Another reading expert, Susan Brady, professor emerita at the University of Rhode Island, concurs that some of the more advanced manipulations can help some students. Moving a sound in and out of a word can heighten awareness of a consonant cluster, such as taking the “l” out of the word “plant” to get “pant,” and then inserting it back in again.* But she says this kind of sound subtraction should only be done with visible letters. Doing all the sound manipulations in your head is too taxing for young children, she said.

Brady’s concern is the misunderstanding that teachers need to teach all the phonemes before moving on to phonics. It’s not a precursor or a prerequisite to reading and writing, she says. Instead, sound training should be taught at the same time as new groups of letters are introduced. “The letters reinforce the phoneme awareness and the phoneme awareness reinforces the letters,” said Brady, speaking at a 2022 teacher training session. She said that researchers and teacher trainers need to help educators shift to integrating letters into their early reading instruction. “It’s going to take a while to penetrate the belief system that’s out there,” she said.

I once thought that the reading wars were about whether to teach phonics. But there are fierce debates even among those who support a phonics-heavy science of reading. I’ve come to understand that the research hasn’t yet answered all our questions about the best way to teach all the steps. Schools might be over-teaching phonemic awareness. And children with dyslexia might need more than other children. More importantly, the science of reading is the same as any other scientific inquiry. Every new answer may also raise new questions as we get closer to the truth. 

*Clarification: An earlier version of this story suggested a different example of removing the “r” sound from “first,” but “r” is not an independent phoneme in this word. So a teacher would be unlikely to ask a student to do this particular sound manipulation.

This story about phonemic awareness was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

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Why is it that only 15 percent of public school leaders say they’re “extremely concerned” about student absences, according to a recent Education Department survey? 

This question gnawed at me as I wrote my Feb. 12, 2024 column about how chronic absenteeism remains stubbornly high in elementary, middle and high schools. Defined as missing at least 10 percent of the school year, or 18 out of 180 days, chronic absenteeism doubled from about 15 percent of students before the pandemic to about 30 percent in the 2021-22 school year. Attendance has failed to snap back and recovered only a bit during the 2022-23 year, according to data from 38 states and the District of Columbia collected by FutureEd, a think tank based at Georgetown University. More than one out of four students remain chronically absent. 

By any measure, this level of absenteeism is alarming. It’s why test scores are sliding and why schools are struggling to help students catch up from pandemic learning losses. Mass absenteeism also affects students who are attending school because teachers cannot keep pace with the lessons they’re supposed to teach when so many classmates have missed core concepts.

Why don’t more principals understand the crisis that is happening inside their school buildings?

The answer is not because absenteeism affects only a small number of high-poverty schools. Sixty-five percent of all schools had at least 20 percent of their students chronically absent in 2021-22, according to the most recent federal data. The surge is widespread across the nation, affecting not just cities and rural areas, but the suburbs, too. One small example: the number of chronically absent students more than doubled in Simsbury, Conn., a wealthy suburb of Hartford, from 6 percent in 2018-19 to 14 percent in 2021-22 and remained elevated above 12 percent in 2022-23. 

The complacency about absenteeism may have to do with the attendance data that school leaders see everyday, which is typically a list of absent students. Each day, this can seem like a reasonable number – perhaps 30 students in a school of 300. And yet alarmingly high absenteeism rates can lurk beneath attendance rates that seem fine. 

“Ninety percent sounds like good attendance, but it is not,” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, who has been studying the post-pandemic surge in absenteeism.

Malkus showed me spreadsheets of 2022-23 attendance data from three states, Illinois, Ohio and Florida. In the districts where 90 percent of the students showed up every day, the chronic absenteeism rate ranged from 28 percent to 46 percent. Think about this. There are many schools where an overwhelming majority of students are present on any given day, but more than two out of five students are still missing big chunks of the school year.

Here’s a more current example from a middle school in Nashville, Tennessee. Its principal told me that his average daily attendance rate is currently 93.5 percent, an improvement from last year. But as of February 2024, chronic absenteeism is already 22.9 percent – more than one in five students. 

How can this be? At first glance it seems the combination of high attendance and high absenteeism is a paradox.

Dave Moyer, an education data analyst in Portland, Oregon, who has been studying absenteeism for more than a decade, helped me solve the puzzle. 

Consider a school with 90 percent attendance and 100 students. Imagine that in September, 90 kids have perfect attendance and the same 10 kids are absent for the entire month. Already 10 percent of the students have missed more than 18 school days, crossing the threshold of chronic absenteeism. 

Say their parents lure them back to the classroom and a different group of 10 students is absent for all of October. The chronic absenteeism rate doubles to 20 percent. In November, the October absentees return to school and a fresh group of 10 kids play hooky: chronic absenteeism jumps to 30 percent. 

If this extreme pattern continues, where a fresh group of 10 kids stops attending each month, you’ll reach 40 percent chronic absenteeism halfway through the year. In theory, the chronic absenteeism rate could grow to 90 percent during a nine-month school year, equaling the 90 percent daily attendance rate. 

Of course, most chronically absent kids aren’t missing for a whole month at once, and those who are out for weeks at a time tend not to have perfect attendance when they return. But this stylized example of a rotating cast of absent students helps explain why chronic absenteeism isn’t simply the opposite of attendance. Chronic absenteeism isn’t just 10 percent when attendance rates are 90 percent. It’s a lot higher.

Chronic absenteeism manifests itself in different patterns, Moyer said. Some kids will be out for a week or two in a row, and school leaders know who those kids are. Others miss three or four days every month. Those absences add up, eventually crossing the chronically absent threshold after several months, but they’re not as obvious.

It’s unclear how many principals are able to monitor their chronic absenteeism data on a regular basis. The state of Rhode Island recently built a public data dashboard to track chronic absenteeism at every school and it’s updated daily. Connecticut updates its absenteeism dashboard monthly.

For schools, it’s trickier to keep track of chronic absenteeism than it is to take attendance. It’s like remembering how many days each of your children has forgotten to do the dishes during the year. 

Schools generally don’t calculate chronic absenteeism in house. Typically, schools upload their attendance rolls to the district, and a computer in a back office does it. Sometimes chronic absenteeism calculations are conducted only once at the end of the year, for required state reporting to the Department of Education, which began collecting data on chronic absenteeism in 2015. By the time this data filters back down to school leaders, if it does filter down, it is old information and it’s too late for school leaders to do much about it.

Kevin Armstrong, the principal of the Nashville middle school mentioned above, read aloud his high chronic absenteeism figures from a computer dashboard purchased by his school district. He counts himself among the minority of principals who are extremely concerned about these numbers. His eighth graders, he said, have the highest rates: already 29 percent of them are chronically absent. But not all principals across the country have access to current attendance data like Armstrong does.

Armstrong said he’s put a team of teachers and staff on the problem. They are calling parents to find out why students aren’t coming. Chronic absenteeism has improved since last year, but it’s still much higher than before the pandemic. And it’s hard, as a school leader, to be judged by a metric that schools can’t control.  “I’m not the alarm clock,” he said. “We need to have parents at the table to figure out why they’re allowing their kids to miss 30, 40, 50 days of school.”

 “I’m frustrated,” he said. “We just want our kids to be here.” 

This story about absenteeism dashboards was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

The post PROOF POINTS: The chronic absenteeism puzzle appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Chronic absenteeism has surged across the country since the pandemic, with more than one out of four students missing at least 18 days of school a year. That’s more than three lost weeks of instruction a year for more than 10 million school children. An even higher percentage of poor students, more than one out of three, are chronically absent. 

Nat Malkus, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, calls chronic absenteeism – not learning loss – “the greatest challenge for public schools.” At a Feb. 8, 2024 panel discussion, Malkus said, “It’s the primary problem because until we do something about that, academic recovery from the pandemic, which is significant, is a pipe dream.” 

One district in the Southeast tried to tackle its post-pandemic surge in absenteeism with a computer dashboard that tracks student data and highlights which students are in trouble or heading toward trouble. Called an early warning system, tracking student data this way has become common at schools around the country.  (I’m not identifying the district because a researcher who studied its efforts to boost attendance agreed to keep it anonymous in exchange for sharing the outcomes with the public.) 

The district’s schools had re-opened in the fall of 2020 and were operating fully in person, but students could opt for remote learning upon request. Yet nearly half of the district’s students weren’t attending school regularly during the 2020-21 year, either in person or remotely. One out of six students had crossed the “chronically absent” threshold of 18 or more missed days. That doesn’t count quarantine days at home because the student contracted or was exposed to Covid. 

The early warning system color coded each student for absences. Green designated an “on track” student who regularly came to school. Yellow highlighted an “at risk” student who had missed more than four percent of the school year. And red identified  “off track”  students who had not come to school 10 percent or more of the time. During the summer of 2021, school staff pored over the colored dots and came up with battle plans to help students return. 

A fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research studied what happened the following 2021-22 school year. The results, published online in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis on Feb. 5, 2024, were woefully disappointing:  the attendance rates of low-income students didn’t improve at all. Low-income students with a track record of missing school continued to miss as much school the next year, despite efforts to help them return. 

The only students to improve their attendance rates were higher income students, whose families earned too much to qualify for the free or reduced price lunch program. The attendance of more advantaged students who had been flagged red for “off track” (chronically absent) improved by 1 to 2 percentage points. That’s good, but four out of five of the red “off track” students came from low-income families. Only 20 percent of the pool of chronically absent students had been helped … a bit.

The selling point for early warning systems is that they can help identify students before they’re derailed, when it’s easier to get back into the routine of going to school. But, distressingly, neither rich nor poor students who had been flagged yellow for being “at risk” saw an improvement in attendance.

Yusuf Canbolat, the Harvard fellow, explained to me that early warning systems only flag students. They don’t tell educators how to help students. Every child’s reason for not coming to school is unique. Some are bullied. Others have asthma and their parents are worried about their health. Still others have fallen so behind in their schoolwork that they cannot follow what’s going on in the classroom. 

Common approaches, such as calling parents and mailing letters, tend to be more effective with higher-income families, Canbolat explained to me. They are more likely to have the resources to follow through with counseling or tutoring, for example, and help their child return to school. 

Low-income families, by contrast, often have larger problems that require assistance schools cannot provide. Many low-income children lost a parent or a guardian to Covid and are still grieving. Many families in poverty need housing, food, employment, healthcare, transportation or even help with laundry. That often requires partnerships with community organizations and social service agencies. 

Canbolat said that school staff in this district tried to come up with solutions that were tailored to a child’s circumstances, but giving a family the name of a counseling center isn’t the same as making sure the family is getting the counseling it needs. And there were so many kids flagged for being at risk that the schools could not begin to address their needs at all. Instead, they focused on the most severe chronic absence cases, Canbolat said.

Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a nonprofit that is working with schools to improve attendance, said that a case management approach to absenteeism isn’t practical when so many students aren’t coming to school. Many schools, she said, might have only one or two social workers focusing on attendance and their caseloads quickly become overloaded.  When nearly half of the students in a school have an attendance problem, system-wide approaches are needed, Chang said.

One systematic approach, she said, is to stop taking an adversarial tone with families — threatening parents with fines or going to court, or students with suspensions for truancy violations. “That doesn’t work,” Chang said. 

She recommends that schools create more ways for students to build relationships with adults and classmates at school so that they look forward to being there. That can range from after-school programs and sports to advisory periods and paying high schoolers to mentor elementary school students. 

“The most important thing is kids need to know that when they walk into school, there’s someone who cares about them,” said Chang.

Despite the disappointing results of using an early warning system to combat absenteeism, both researchers and experts say the dashboards should not be jettisoned. Chang explained that they still help schools understand the size and the scope of their attendance problem, see patterns and learn if their solutions are working. 

I was shocked to read in a recent School Pulse Panel survey conducted by the Department of Education in November 2023 that only 15 percent of school leaders said they were “extremely concerned” about student absences. In high-poverty neighborhoods, there was more concern, but still only 26 percent. Given that the number of students who are chronically absent from schools has almost doubled to 28 percent from around 15 percent before the pandemic, everyone should be very concerned. If we don’t find a solution soon, millions of children will be unable to get the education they need to live a productive life. And we will all pay the price.

This story about school early warning systems was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Proof Points newsletter.

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