The Education Gadfly Weekly: 5 things we learned this school year
Five things we learned this school year
While 2023-24 had the usual ups and downs, on balance, American education seemed to bend towards normality: chronic absenteeism is improving, standardized testing is making a comeback, and phonics has finally won. There’s reason for optimism, but education reformers must be wary of making obvious, if appealing, errors.
Five things we learned this school year
Are poor schools underfunded? It's more complex than you'd think.
America’s education system is a mess, and it’s students who are paying the price
This Maryland “Grow Your Own” teacher program may be a win-win-win
“Teaching to the test” done right? Evidence from Austria.
Cheers and Jeers: May 30, 2024
What we're reading this week: May 30, 2024
Are poor schools underfunded? It's more complex than you'd think.
America’s education system is a mess, and it’s students who are paying the price
This Maryland “Grow Your Own” teacher program may be a win-win-win
“Teaching to the test” done right? Evidence from Austria.
Cheers and Jeers: May 30, 2024
What we're reading this week: May 30, 2024
Five things we learned this school year
School is nearly out, thank goodness.
We had the usual ups and downs. But on balance, our orbit seemed to bend toward normal, didn’t it?
Here’s what we learned:
Lesson #1: We owe the high school class of 2024 an apology.
You got a raw deal. You were born in 2006. We gave you a smartphone for your seventh birthday and made you captive to big tech’s finest algorithms. Your eighth-grade field trip to Six Flags was canceled due to COVID. Ditto for your middle school graduation ceremony. You spent the first half of your freshman year of high school—already a festival of awkwardness—staring at your new classmates on Zoom while we argued amongst ourselves about whether it was safe to re-open buildings. And now, as you are dealing with the stress of applying to college, we messed up the FAFSA. Described in a single New York Times article as “a bureaucratic mess,” “a nightmare,” “convoluted” and “a debacle,” the new application for college aid was so buggy and late, you might have given up completing it altogether. Speaking for the rest of the American adult population, I hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive us because we are counting on you to support us when we are old and infirm. Your childhood—our bad on that one. We will do better.
Lesson #2: We can’t ignore demographic realities forever, but we’re going to try.
School enrollments are down. It’s not an illusion of the pandemic. Some students are never coming back to public schools. Birth rates are sharply lower, too, which guarantees future declines.
Chad Aldeman did a great piece on this for The 74. He shows that just a few years ago, federal agencies were predicting that the number of students would grow modestly over the next decade. Now? Just 13 states are expected to increase enrollment by 2031. The other thirty-seven states (plus D.C.) are slated to shrink.
We might expect that fewer students means fewer schools. Nope.
Sara Randazzo and Matt Barnum of the Wall Street Journal wrote recently that although urban schools have seen a 5.5 percent drop in students since 2019-20, the number of schools is “virtually unchanged.”
Chicago is a prime example. After the closure of fifty schools in 2013 sparked widespread political blowback, city leaders more or less swore off the issue. A coalition of organizations advocated successfully for a state law preventing any more closures. Just this spring, the Illinois House passed an extension of that moratorium until 2027.
In the meantime, Chicago has lost eighty thousand students since 2013.
The city now has dozens of massive buildings that are largely empty. Once-proud Manley High School on the west side has just seventy-eight students this year from grades 9–12. Marshall High School, familiar to fans of the famous Hoop Dreams documentary as the school one of the film’s subjects attended, has 174.
Under the current school funding plan, every school will have “a principal, an assistant principal, a clerk, at least one counselor, and at least one part-time school assistant.” That’s an expensive proposition for schools with fewer than 200 students. And Chicago has about fifty such schools.
The politics of shrinking schools are about to become a big deal. As I’ve written before, doing right by families requires planning ahead and prioritizing transition supports. Pretending closures won’t be necessary makes the eventual harm to vulnerable communities worse.
Now’s the time to ask districts if they are taking appropriate steps.
Lesson #3: If the Adidas Samba can come back into style, so can standardized tests.
For the first two decades of the millennium, there was a slow drip of colleges going test-optional or test-free. It was a thing. COVID forced the cancellation of several SAT/ACT administrations. Every college waived the requirement to submit scores, at least temporarily. A few months into the pandemic, the Times was asking whether the University of California’s plan to end consideration of exams “will spell the beginning of the end for college admissions testing.”
Proponents of dropping the tests argued that it would advance equity because tests are biased instruments and wealthy students can earn higher scores by paying for expensive tutors.
This year, momentum shifted abruptly in the opposite direction. A host of elite universities—MIT, Harvard, Yale, Caltech, Dartmouth, etc.—announced that they will now require submission of test scores from applicants.
Once again, the argument centered around advancing equity. Confusing, right?
This time, researchers pointed to data showing that tests help identify lower-income and underrepresented students who can thrive at selective colleges—kids who would otherwise be overlooked.
A second problem is grade inflation at the high school level. In the past, course grades tended to predict college performance at least as well as test scores, if not better. That has changed. At the University of California—the same system that doesn’t use tests—a study of its own students across nine campuses found that tests were a much better predictor of success than grades.
At a practical level, colleges are struggling to make good decisions without the tests. They are flooded with applicants who have perfect or near-perfect GPAs. How can they tell them apart? Besides giving preference to crew rowers, of course.
Tests are playing a key role at the K–12 level in monitoring our recovery (or lack thereof) from COVID learning setbacks. When surveyed, parents have consistently reported that their kids never lost any ground or have already made it up. Grades, as we just noted, have been rising. If we didn’t have test data, we would think everything’s peachy. But that’s far from the case. In fact, national tests show that the steady progress we made over the course of decades was wiped out.
In Massachusetts, a ballot initiative to eliminate state tests as a graduation requirement has attracted public opposition from the Governor and key legislative leaders—all of them Democrats who are typically allies of the state teachers union, which has spent millions backing the initiative.
Tests had a good year. Until grades improve as a signal, they will probably continue their resurgence.
Lesson #4: The quest to curb student absenteeism isn’t hopeless.
I’ll spare you the background. If you are a newer subscriber to this newsletter, we did a series on absenteeism in the fall.
What’s happened since September?
There’s been a notable shift in news coverage. Past stories tended to frame absenteeism in terms of barriers that prevented students from getting to school (e.g., transportation, chronic health conditions) or a lack of belonging. This year, reporters began to focus on how “our relationship with school has become optional,” as a Duke psychologist put it recently. We got some fantastic reporting from Alec MacGillis, among others, that helped us understand ground-level efforts to get students back in class.
The Biden administration has prioritized absenteeism through analysis by the Council of Economic Advisors and a recent summit.
And guess what? We seem to be making progress. Back in September, I profiled the Oakland Unified School District, where 61 percent of students were chronically absent last year. Ouch. This year, as of May 19, it’s about 31 percent. With a strong finish, Oakland might be back to pre-pandemic levels. That’s truly worth celebrating.
How about New Trier? I can’t tell you how many emails I received when I flagged that one of America’s most affluent high schools had a chronic absenteeism problem. Lots of schadenfreude. Well, get the laughs out of your system because New Trier cut absenteeism by two-thirds, from 24 to 8.5 percent, after shifting to tougher policies.
Massachusetts, which has been reporting school-level attendance each March since 2021, announced that the share of students chronically absent dropped from 24.5 percent last year to 19.6 percent this year.
Yes, still a long way to go. But this is important progress. It is not preordained that kids will miss more school forever. Big thanks to all the parents, educators and students out there who have been fighting the good fight.
Lesson #5: The science of reading won.
Emily Hanford’s podcast, Sold a Story, was an immediate hit when it arrived in fall 2022. With investigative flair, Hanford and her collaborators retraced how flawed literacy strategies were adopted by approximately one in four U.S. elementary classrooms—generating piles of profits for textbook publishers.
The central figure in the podcast is Lucy Calkins, a renowned professor at Teachers College. She evangelized for techniques that many researchers consider discredited.
In what was clearly a response to Sold a Story and the rising “science of reading” movement, Calkins announced in a May 2023 Times profile that she was overhauling her curriculum.
The reboot wasn’t enough. The Friday afternoon before Labor Day—a classic spot for dumping bad news—Teachers College pushed Calkins and her reading center out the door—ending forty years of her being one of its most visible stars.
This spring, Hanford released a follow-up episode reporting that the whole affair had taken a wrecking ball to Heinemann, the company that publishes Calkins’ books. Its revenues were down seventy-five percent in 2023 compared to 2019. Pretty stunning.
Now, what? Without Lucy Calkins to kick around anymore, districts are on the clock to show that their new reading strategies can deliver. As we know, nothing can go wrong with a research-informed, politically popular attempt to implement sweeping change nationwide.
We won’t hurry to adopt new curricula with an “EVIDENCE-BASED” stamp and rush the materials into classrooms, leading to a sloppy overcorrection toward all-phonics, all-the-time, will we? Who? Us?
Happy summer vacation to all
There’s a reason we close schools each summer, and it’s not because kids used to work in the fields. Enjoy the break—get some sun and relaxation. You’ve earned it.
This was first published on the author’s Substack, The Education Daly.
Are poor schools underfunded? It's more complex than you'd think.
One of the most persistent myths in K–12 education is the idea that high-poverty schools are near-universally, significantly underfunded. However, the truth is much more complicated. As it turns out, poor districts get more money in almost every state—and school spending has an incredibly weak relationship with school quality in the first place.
This week, USA Today published another example of fearmongering, giving a Thursday article the inexplicable headline, “Enrichment only for the rich? How school segregation continues to divide students by income.” However, the research the article presents doesn’t exactly show the apocalyptic outcomes implied by the headline. In fact, the research it cites concluded that “poverty rates do not have a clear relationship” with local and state funding.
Reporter Alia Wong’s article is filled with heart-wrenching stories of schools with “regular lockdowns and the sound of gunfire in the lobby,” where “classrooms lacked basic supplies and teachers didn’t notice how often [a student] skipped class. Desks tended to be broken and textbooks decades old.”
While these situations are tragic, the reality is a bit more complex. Not only is the funding gap between wealthier and poorer schools found by the researchers smaller than you might think—it disappeared when dividing schools based on their poverty rates. Further, other research shows that school funding, and thus the chaotic, neglectful state of many failing schools, has basically no relationship with school quality.
The study, from education think tank Bellwether, examined schools in 123 metropolitan areas and classified districts into lower, middle, and wealthy based on how much local income and property values differed from the average in their metro area. The researchers did this in order to study funding differences between schools in the same area—meaning that some districts in the lowest category (what they called Opportunity Outsiders) are not actually high-poverty schools.
In all, researchers found that wealthy districts received the most total funding in their metro area just 39 percent of the time. However, they did find a modest, but significant funding gap between wealthier and poorer schools. The median Opportunity Outsider school spent $14,287 per pupil, while the median wealthy school (called Economic Elite) spent $16,702.
However, this gap all but vanished when the researchers reclassified schools not based on relative wealth but on their actual poverty rates. The study concluded that “poverty rates do not have a clear relationship with the amount of state and local revenue that districts receive.”
So, do the schools poor kids actually go to receive less funding? Not according to this study. Only the schools that are among the poorest in their metro area—which includes plenty of schools in wealthy areas, where the relatively poorest school has only average poverty—that face a funding gap.
And that’s only accounting for local and state funding. When you include federal funding, the situation becomes even better for high-poverty schools. According to research from the Urban Institute, when considering “federal, state, and local funding, almost all states allocate more per-student funding to poor kids than to nonpoor kids.” Just three states, Nevada, Wyoming, and Illinois have a “weakly” regressive funding structure.
If so many states allocate more money to poor districts, why do low-income schools have worse results? As it turns out, per-pupil spending doesn’t seem to impact school quality all that much. One 2012 report by Harvard and Stanford researchers, found that, on average, an extra “$1000 in per-pupil spending is associated with an annual gain in achievement of one-tenth of 1 percent of a standard deviation,” an increase the researchers say is “of no statistical or substantive significance.”
This isn’t to say that funding doesn't matter at all. Rather, low-income school districts tend to spend their funding less responsibly.
“More money can help schools succeed, but not if they fritter those extra resources in unproductive ways,” Jay Greene, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, told Reason last year. “There are many common ways that schools blow resources. Wasteful schools tend to hire more non-instructional staff while raising the pay and benefit costs for all staff regardless of their contribution to student outcomes.”
Despite the headlines pointing to the contrary, high-poverty school districts aren’t generally underfunded and funding gaps aren't responsible for lackluster academic performance. That’s not to say we shouldn't be concerned when poorer schools receive lower funding, but rather that the issues in underperforming schools almost certainly won’t be fixed by throwing more cash at the problem.
Editor’s note: This was first published on Reason.com.
America’s education system is a mess, and it’s students who are paying the price
“Math and reading scores for 13-year-olds have hit their lowest scores in decades.” When the recent NAEP long-term trend results for 13-year-olds were published, the reactions were predictable: short pieces in the national press and apologetics in education blogs. COVID-19, we were told, was continuing to cast its long shadow. Despite nearly $200 billion in emergency federal spending on K–12 schooling, students are doing worse than a decade ago, and lower-performing students are today less capable of doing math than they were thirty-five years ago.
What is striking has been the pervasive weariness evident in the commentaries on the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The news was heralded as “alarming,” “terrifying,” and “tragic.” As for responses? At the end of his piece on the results, AEI’s Nat Malkus concludes that “nothing less than Herculean efforts will make up for such shortfalls”—but on just what those efforts should be, he was silent. Writing for The 74, political scientist Vladimir Kogan concludes that “the new federal data send a clear message that we must do better”—but, once again, nothing about how.
Other responses have been predictable. In her blog, Diane Ravitch wrote: “Will politicians whip up a panicked response and demand more of what is already failing, like charter schools, vouchers, high-stakes testing, and Cybercharters? or [sic.] will they invest in reduced class sizes and higher teacher pay?” Her response points to a familiar split in the education policy community: On the one hand, the defenders of public education blame chronic underfunding of schools and of teacher salaries in particular, and an overreliance on teaching to the test. On the other, their conservative critics point to lack of school choice, poor teacher preparation programs, and (more recently) the woke invasion of classrooms.
Both sides are partially correct, of course: In multiple states, a heavy reliance on local property taxes to pay for education creates regressive per-pupil funding, meaning that more dollars go to the education of more affluent students. Teacher preparation still relies too much on textbook theory instead of clinical practice (a vital switch the medical profession made a century ago). Tests, especially in reading, are poorly designed (e.g., “Hamlet was confused because… A, B, C or D—circle the right response”). Too many parents are stuck sending their children to underperforming schools.
But these are just symptoms. Factors beyond the schoolhouse door—the legacy of race-based redlining, the underfunding of health care for the worst off, the lack of support for child care and parental leave, and other social and economic policies—remain hugely impactful. But inside the education system itself, the fundamental cause of poor outcomes is that education policy leaders have eroded the instructional core and designed our education system for failure.
Pre-K is a wild West, with the result that students enter kindergarten with large gaps in their readiness to learn. Children aren’t seriously assessed until they are 8, by which time it’s too late for sustained intervention; the gaps never close. Meanwhile, curricula, tests, and teacher education programs exist in deep silos, creating a fragmented system where teachers aren’t trained to teach the materials their schools use and tests don’t test students’ mastery of those materials (with a tiny exception in Louisiana).
Almost uniquely among advanced industrialized nations, U.S. school systems disconnect testing from student incentives. State tests are used to evaluate schools but are often irrelevant to students: Only eleven states still require high school exit exams for graduation, and there are often alternative pathways for those who fail the test. We don’t link the results of high school exit exams to college admissions—instead, using grade-point averages and tests like the ACT and SAT, which are disconnected from course curricula. Speaking of GPA, we have steadily inflated grades at school and college; We simply call success what was once failure.
We have also created a preferential ranking of subjects. Student achievement in reading and math, and, to a lesser extent, science, get all the attention, while students who are drawn to robotics, graphic design, the arts, environmental science, etc., can’t take high school assessments that count for entry into higher education. At the same time, with a few shining counterexamples, our career and technical learning options are a pale shadow of the world’s best: While Switzerland designs exacting pathways from school to employment with options for a return to higher education, America shunts millions of students into dead-end experiences, where they discover that their CTE has failed to provide an employment-ready credential. Many of these same students end up at community colleges with extraordinarily low graduation rates.
Perhaps in response to two decades of disappointing results, academic achievement itself is increasingly out of fashion. Critical thinking, metacognition, grit and positive mindset, and “21st century skills” are in—competence in mathematics, not so much. It seems to have escaped us that students cannot think critically about nothing in particular; mastery of content is a prerequisite.
The turn away from academics is rocket-propelled by a genuine problem. American teenagers stare at social media on a screen almost nine hours every day, with one result being surging loneliness and depression. Many American school systems have reacted by putting social and emotional learning at the top of the agenda. Few would argue that students shouldn’t be given effective support; putting mental health counselors in large high schools, for example, makes sense. But the pretense that there is a new science of SEL is largely pablum. When you chase it to ground, what it means is that teachers should encourage, not discourage, students. A poor test result calls for more effort, not the conclusion that the child is bad at math. Such wisdom has been available for two thousand years.
To top it all off, the American K–12 education system spends at least $30 billion per year on educational technology with essentially nothing to show for it. As it was for the introduction of radio, then TV, then computers, so it is likely to be for artificial intelligence—the latest great hope to circumvent and supplant effective, inspiring teaching of children by a human being.
As we have sown, so shall we reap. The unique sense of achievement that a student experiences when she or he masters a rigorous skill, digs into deep knowledge, creates a piece of writing or art, completes a challenging science assignment or piece of music—this is all being washed away. We are tired of bad news, and our instinct is now to punish, or at least ignore, the messenger. But our students are desperately the worse for the mess we have made of their schooling.
Editor’s Note: This was first published in The 74.
This Maryland “Grow Your Own” teacher program may be a win-win-win
In the effort to expand and diversify the teacher pipeline, states and districts have invested millions in actively recruiting and training teachers from local communities. Such “Grow Your Own” (GYO) programs exist in an estimated nine hundred school districts and in forty-nine states (Wyoming is the exception). Despite this growth, little research to date has examined the impact of GYO programs. Now, however, a new study by researchers from the University of Maryland and American University investigates how a Maryland GYO program affects the state’s teacher workforce, as well as educational and economic outcomes for students enrolled in schools with the program.
Like most but not all GYO programs, the Teacher Academy of Maryland (TAM) aims to draw high school students into teacher preparation pathways. (Other GYO programs target college students, education paraprofessionals, or other community members.) A Career and Technical Education (CTE) option, TAM offers a four-course sequence aligned with the requirements of the Maryland Associate of Arts in Teaching degree. After high school, TAM completers may take a special assessment to become immediately eligible for an educational support job, or they may transfer their credits toward a two- or four-year degree. The most recent statewide data indicate that nearly two thousand students participate in TAM at forty-three schools throughout seventeen of Maryland’s twenty-five school districts.
Using data from the state Department of Education and the Maryland Longitudinal Data System Center, the study examines professional, educational, and economic outcomes for 226,000 students who began ninth grade between 2008-09 and 2012-13. Using a research design called difference-in-differences, the researchers compare outcomes for students at high schools that implemented TAM during this period—not necessarily students who participated in TAM—to outcomes for students at schools without TAM. They control for gender, race/ethnicity, eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch, English language learner status, disability status, eighth-grade test scores, high school enrollment, and other system changes enacted during this period. The methodology allows us to infer causation, and the researchers conduct numerous robustness and sensitivity checks to confirm the validity of their findings.
The results were good news for TAM. First and foremost, attending a high school with TAM made students more likely to become public school teachers in Maryland by the age of twenty-five. Overall, this likelihood increased by 0.6 percentage points (pp), or 47 percent. The effect was largest for White and Black girls. The percentage point increase was higher for White girls (1.4 pp) compared to Black girls (0.7 pp), but because White girls already become teachers at much higher rates than any other subgroup, the percentage increase in teaching was much larger for Black girls (80 percent) than White girls (39 percent).
Notably, the mechanism by which White and Black girls later entered the profession differed. White girls exposed to TAM tended to complete the program and then obtain a traditional teaching license through a college degree. Black girls, on the other hand, were more likely to start the four-course sequence without completing it, then obtain a non-teaching college degree, and eventually earn an alternative teaching license. These differences deserve further investigation, as they suggest that TAM improved White girls’ access to traditional pathways, but for Black girls, it provided compelling information without necessarily improving that access.
Another notable set of findings reveals that the educational benefits of TAM extend beyond widening the teacher pipeline. Attending a school with TAM increased the overall high school graduation rate by 0.8 pp, or 1 percent. Among student subgroups, graduation rates improved most for Black girls (2.2 pp, or 3 percent), but they also grew for Black boys (1.3 pp, or 2 percent) and White girls (1 pp, or 1 percent). Exposure to TAM also increased overall enrollment in a four-year college by 1.7 pp (6 percent). This effect was largest for girls, with a 2.6 pp (8 percent) increase, and for Black boys, who experienced a 2.3 pp (11 percent) increase. Black boys and Asian girls exposed to TAM also completed BAs at higher rates than peers at schools without TAM (1.7 pp or 15 percent, and 5.8 pp or 10 percent, respectively).
The study also found long-term economic benefits to attending a school offering TAM. Overall, wages at age twenty-five were 5 percent higher, with the largest benefits for Black girls and Asian girls (each 18 percent higher). As the study’s authors point out, the increase in wages may undermine the popular narrative that a teaching career necessarily translates into lower pay. The mechanisms here are complicated—Asian girls’ economic gains, for example, seem to come from higher educational attainment, rather than a teaching career—but the researchers hypothesize that a school setting with TAM may encourage students to think more strategically about their career plans.
In sum, TAM benefits different students in different ways, but that makes it a win on several fronts: recruiting more teachers, improving academic outcomes for teacher-candidates, and improving earnings. The program has room for improvement—for example, by addressing the finding that TAM likely improves access to teacher pathways more for White girls than for Black girls—and GYO initiatives remain understudied, especially given the rate of their expansion and the variation among programs. Nonetheless, these findings provide encouraging evidence that GYO programs have the potential to make a difference for students present and future.
“Teaching to the test” done right? Evidence from Austria.
“Teaching to the test” is a common pejorative term that touches on a number of hot-button education policy issues—top-down mandates to schools, shrinking curriculum, hamstringing teacher autonomy and creativity, and dampening student interest in learning to name just a few. A new report from Austria puts those negative implications under the microscope and, despite limitations of the methodology, finds some valuable insights from the field.
The context is a change in the structure of school-leaving exams in mathematics, which are required of all Austrian students prior to high school graduation. Traditionally, the tests were designed by the teacher of the final class in each school. Although there were minimal design strictures, each exam was required to consist of four to six tasks to be solved independently of one another. Tasks had to include calculation exercises, argumentation, representation, interpretation, and “the application of mathematics in non-mathematical areas.” Students were allowed only a calculator, a formula booklet, and a normal distribution table as aids. Proposed exam tasks were sent to the local education authority for approval before administration, but were rarely challenged. As a result, every classroom of seniors took a different exam every year, with minimal comparability even within the same school building.
In 2014, following nationwide calls for a common test that would reduce subjectivity, allow for comparability, and ensure students had acquired basic mathematical competencies, schools began administering the standardized school leaving exam (SSLE). The SSLE format has changed a bit over the years, but today it covers four general content areas—algebra and geometry, functional dependences, analysis, and probability and statistics—with standalone and inter-related problem sets created annually by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science, and Research. In addition to the goals listed above, more emphasis was placed on student aptitude with technology, and so they are allowed to use higher level technological aids (such as GeoGebra and graphing calculators) without restriction during testing.
Data on teachers’ experience of the testing change come from interviews with ten upper secondary math teachers who had significant teaching experience covering both the teacher-created and standardized exam eras. They were conducted from March to May of 2023. This is obviously a very small subset of all math teachers in Austria, and all of them volunteered to participate in the questionnaires, but even the limited anecdotal evidence obtained is valuable.
Teachers almost universally viewed the goal of standardization as positive, and reported that they believed that the competencies emphasized by the SSLE are valuable to students. They were less positive, however, regarding what they view as a change in their roles from a traditional instructor to more of a “trainer” who pursues a common goal with the students—as if they all needed to work together to pass somebody else’s test. All teachers felt that they needed to focus the curriculum they covered in class on those areas to be tested, thereby “teaching to the test.” Whether they were able to include more concepts depended on how long the SSLE material took. Two teachers noted with some dissatisfaction that they regularly needed to justify to their students any time spent on non-SSLE content. A majority of teachers reported ditching most or all of the official textbook in favor of old SSLE problem sets, and using the advanced technological aids at least weekly after the switchover to the new test. While some teachers expressed negativity about the loss of technology-free teaching, others reported working without the aids at first to build competency and then introducing them later as test time approached.
A majority of teachers reported increased cooperation with one another after SSLE was introduced, especially within schools. This likely reflected the fact that creating individual tests was no longer required, and every math teacher now had to equip their students to pass the same test. Interestingly, the new comparability of scores led to some teacher-reported competition between schools. Teacher satisfaction with SSLE—and all the changes the test has wrought—has increased in the years since it was introduced, reflecting both a growing familiarity in and comfort with what is required, and (in a few cases) resignation that the old-school exams aren’t ever coming back. Some ongoing logistical issues as reported by individual teachers include continual tweaks in aspects of the SSLE (more are scheduled between now and 2030), inconsistent and short-notice communication about changes to the exam, and a perceived lowering of rigor in some aspects of exam questions and tasks.
The scope of this survey data is small and limited, but feels useful all the same. There’s no denying that the switch to a standardized test resulted in a shrinkage of the core curriculum and an increase in “teaching to the test” in most math classrooms in Austria. But there appears to be no organized effort to remove SSLE after nearly ten years, and predictable negative responses to the change, often stated loudly and preemptively in other places, were muted here by several important factors.
First, a majority of teachers surveyed understood and accepted the goals of the standardized exam even before it was implemented, and saw them as positive for students. SSLE was, in fact, a test worth teaching to. Second, many teachers found ways to exercise their own autonomy and creativity while the official curriculum contracted—even if it took a few years to learn the ins-and-outs of SSLE before they could do so. Third, the increase in cooperation that arose among math teachers who had previously been systematically siloed was seen as a positive outcome despite any lingering concerns they may have had about the testing changes.
This is a small subset of teachers; surely there were many with other viewpoints. But the fact that these few tolerated the switch and found numerous positive aspects feels like proof that more could manage it with enough buy-in, support, and concrete evidence showing that “teaching to the test” isn’t the end of the world.
SOURCE: Christoph Ableitinger and Johanna Gruber, “Standardized school-leaving exam in mathematics: manifold effects on teaching, teacher cooperation and satisfaction,” Frontiers of Education (March 2024).
Cheers and Jeers: May 30, 2024
Cheers
- So-called Renaissance Schools in Camden, New Jersey, which allow charter networks to take on failing schools, are pushing dramatic learning gains. —The 74
- "Teach your children to love America." —Peggy Noonan, Wall Street Journal
- Dorothy Jean Tillman II just became the youngest person ever to earn a doctoral degree. —New York Times
- Pre-school provides a prime, early opportunity to begin building the knowledge requisite for reading comprehension in later grades. —Susan B. Neuman and Lily Wong Fillmore, The 74
- Texas House runoffs have given Governor Abbott enough votes to pass school choice legislation. —Texas Tribune
Jeers
- A new study claims that the science of reading has sucked the joy out of reading, overlooking the fact that not being able to read is pretty darn joyless. —Nick Morrison, Forbes
- Teachers report parents, students, and administrators all pressuring them to alter grades higher. —Education Week
What we're reading this week: May 30, 2024
- Falling enrollment thanks to demographic trends means that many districts will soon have to make hard decisions about school closures. — Marguerite Roza and Aashish Dhammani, The 74
- A surprising topic, algebra, has remained controversial, prompting ballot measures, tough family conversations, lawsuits, and protests across the country. —New York Times, New York Times, and EdSurge
- Confidence in the ROI of a college degree has decreased even as the wage premium for degree holders persists. —USA Today