Archives for category: Research

Recently, superstar journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote a long essay for The New York Times Magazine regretting her decision a decade earlier to put her daughter into a local public school in New York City. Not only was the school segregated, it had a disengaged principal, indifferent teachers, and low-quality academics. She came to realize that she was imposing her ideas on her daughter at the cost of her education. Now that her daughter is in high school, she is attending a highly desirable high school with high standards. Hannah-Jones told her daughter to make her own choice within the public school system. She chose an excellent public school.

There’s hardly a commentator who has not passed judgment on the essay. Right-wingers praised it as an endorsement of school choice or a condemnation of public schools. Former NYC Chancellor wrote in The Wall Street Journal that the persistence of bad public schools was the fault of Randi Weingarten and the teachers’ unions. His article was titled “Nikole Hannah-Jones Vs. Randi Weingarten.” He maintained that it was the unions that preserved bad schools. The solution, he argued, was non-union charter schools.

But his argument dodged the responsibility of school leaders like himself to weed out incompetent principals and replace them with good principals who set high expectations for staff and students. And, of course, he neglected the failure of thousands of charter schools, due to academic failure, misappropriation of funds, or low enrollment.

In the following essay posted on his blog, Cloaking Inequity, scholar Julian Vasquez Heilig presents a different argument. In addition to his professorship at Western Michigan University, he is a founding member of the Network for Public Education.

He writes:

Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay about her daughter’s education is heartbreaking because it poses a question almost every parent understands: Did I make the right choice for my child?

Hannah-Jones made the choice more publicly and politically than most. A decade ago, she and her husband sent their daughter, Najya, to a predominantly Black, high-poverty public school in Brooklyn. They could afford other options. Instead, they wanted their own choices to reflect their belief that privileged families help reproduce educational inequality when they abandon schools serving poor Black children. Then their daughter grew old enough to judge that decision for herself.

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” Najya asked her mother after discovering how her middle school compared with New York City’s most prestigious public schools. Later, she put the question even more painfully: If her parents had the resources to get her a better education, why hadn’t they? That is not really a question about school choice. It is a question about parenthood.

Every parent makes these tradeoffs, although few of us have to explain them in The New York Times. Families choose schools because of academics, income, housing, sports, religion, culture, race, language, safety, disability services, discipline, transportation, friendships, family traditions and often simply what they can afford. Rarely does one school maximize everything a family values.

A parent might choose a Seventh-Day Adventist school with fewer Advanced Placement courses because faith formation matters deeply. Another might choose a suburban school for its academics but watch a Black child struggle culturally. A family might remain in a less prestigious district because grandparents live nearby. An athlete may choose a school because of a coach or a starting opportunity. A parent of a child with disabilities may value services more than test scores. Another family may choose a culturally affirming school where their child feels known. None of those choices can be reduced to a ranking on GreatSchools.

That is partly what makes Hannah-Jones’s conclusion so complicated. Najya did experience serious academic failures. Her elementary school sometimes failed to assess her properly, return graded work or even recognize substantial gaps in her mathematics preparation. Her mother eventually discovered assignments riddled with mistakes that had never been corrected. Those are not imaginary problems created by standardized tests or middle-class expectations. Children deserve competent teachers, rigorous instruction and honest feedback.

My own research has found that teacher preparation and teacher quality matter (Darling-Hammond et al., 2005). Defending public education should never require pretending otherwise. But an educator responding to Hannah-Jones’s essay on Facebook raised the concern that has stayed with me: the article can leave readers “to blame structural problems on the usual scapegoats who never had the power to create them.” That is where I think we need to be careful.

Hannah-Jones herself provides the evidence for a more structural conclusion. Najya’s middle-school principal explains that her school enrolled everyone, including children arriving years behind academically, while selective schools concentrated students already prepared to succeed. More than one-third of students at Najya’s middle school had identified learning disabilities, compared with 17 percent at her selective high school. The school was simultaneously expected to remediate years of lost learning, teach grade-level material, manage social and behavioral needs and prepare its strongest students for elite high schools.

That is not simply a teacher-quality problem. It is institutional sorting. My research has documented versions of this dynamic for two decades. Jennifer Holme and I found persistent racial, economic and linguistic segregation long after Jim Crow formally ended (Vasquez Heilig & Holme, 2013). My colleagues and I later found intense racial segregation in charter schools as well, reminding us that giving families more choices does not automatically dismantle inequality (Vasquez Heilig et al., 2019). Research on accountability similarly showed how schools serving marginalized students can be punished for outcomes produced partly by unequal opportunities to learn (Vasquez Heilig & Darling-Hammond, 2008; Vasquez Heilig et al., 2018).

School finance matters too. Davíd Martínez and I have argued that educational opportunity is fundamentally a civil-rights question because children cannot be held equally accountable when they have not been provided comparable opportunities to learn (Martínez & Vasquez Heilig, 2022). This does not absolve the adults who failed Najya. It changes the scale of the indictment. So Hannah-Jones’s story ultimately demonstrates why the parental decision is harder than “choose the better school.”

Najya eventually chose one of New York City’s highly selective public high schools. Academically, she initially struggled because her previous schooling had left gaps. But there was another cost. She had gone from Black schools where, as Hannah-Jones writes, nobody questioned whether Black children could be smart to an environment where classmates used racial slurs and questioned her intelligence. She briefly wanted to leave.

By the end of the essay, Najya herself recognizes the tradeoff. She tells her mother she is glad she did not spend her early childhood in predominantly white schools because her Black schools helped give her a strong racial identity and the confidence to challenge racism. She had also discovered something important about her more privileged classmates: They were not necessarily smarter or better behaved. “They just had more.” That may be the most important sentence in the essay.

Parents make choices. Systems distribute what there is to choose from. Honestly, I personally understand Hannah-Jones’s regret. When your child says, “I never really got the education I wanted,” intellectual arguments about the common good become painfully inadequate. I have heard that same argument from my children. Parents have a special obligation to their own children, and there is no shame in acknowledging that. But we must resist those who are turning this deeply personal story into another argument that the solution to educational inequality is for parents to make better individual choices via vouchers and charter schools. That road leads exactly where we already are.

Families with money purchase tutoring. Families with information navigate admissions systems. Families with mobility purchase homes near preferred schools. Families with social capital advocate successfully. Families without those advantages receive whatever the system leaves behind. The problem is not that parents love their own children too much. The problem is that we have constructed a competitive education system where high-quality education is rationed and doing the best for one’s own child can require leaving other children behind.

The goal should therefore not be to tell parents which sacrifice to make. Choose academics over culture. Choose integration over belonging. Choose religion over coursework. Choose athletics over proximity. Choose the collective over your child. Those are family decisions, and reasonable parents can weigh them differently. Our public responsibility is different. It is to make the consequences of those choices less brutal.

Conclusion

I should also say that I have long admired Nikole Hannah-Jones and her work. I first met her in Oakland in 2017 at the Network for Public Education conference, and I have been a fan of her scholarship and journalism (see photo). That is part of why her essay stayed with me. I read it not as an argument to defeat, but as an extraordinarily difficult question posed by a parent whose choices illuminate the choices millions of families are forced to make.

A Black child should not have to choose between cultural affirmation and rigorous academics. A poor child should not have to attend school with less because her parents earn less. A student should not need admission to a selective school to encounter advanced mathematics. And teachers in high-poverty schools should not be expected to repair years of accumulated inequality while working with fewer resources and then be blamed when they cannot perform miracles.

Hannah-Jones asks whether fighting for every Black child meant betraying her own. I think her essay points to this conclusion: There was never a perfect choice available. That is the real indictment. And it is not an accident. For generations, American education policy has created and maintained systems in which access to rigorous coursework, experienced teachers, enrichment, safety, social capital, and opportunity too often follows race, wealth, and geography. Parents are then asked to make intensely personal choices inside inequalities they did not create.

The question, then, is not whether Hannah-Jones made the right choice for her daughter, or whether another family would have been more virtuous for choosing differently. The harder question is why we continue to tolerate the American education system that makes families choose among things every child should receive together.

Please share.

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, asked the obvious question about “education experts”: what is their own experience in teaching? He was prompted to ask the question by a recent article in The New York Times:

The New York Times asked 37 experts to evaluate 30 ideas for their “impact on academic achievement, which is generally measured by standardized test scores.”

That goal seems to be the reason why the panel concluded that the “Science of Reading,” and the Mississippi Miracle,” and accountability-driven reforms were low-cost approaches that produce the most benefits.

But, what are the costs to students? After all, they have endured a couple of decades of test-driven, competition-driven mandates that started with the No Child Left Behind Act, that was launched in 2002, and the teach-to-the-test culture that many advocates for the Mississippi Miracle want to bring back.

At least, the Times reporters “asked researchers to rate effectiveness ‘when done properly.’ In the real world, a lot can fall apart because of the details.”

And, they noted::

Several experts also said that schools should think beyond test scores and focus on making learning less boring and more engaging — less passive listening and memorizing for tests, for example, and more open-ended research and project-based learning.

But, I experienced the disaster that began around 2004 in Oklahoma City’s schools when the NCLB was fully implemented, and worsened after corporate reforms, like Race-to-the-Top, were fully implemented.

So, a big question jumped out to me.

How many of the panelists had experience in what happened in the “the real world” of the highest-challenged schools? 

And, I was stunned to read the list of the best known experts that were surveyed. 

Around a third of them were smart data-driven people, ranging from economists like  Eric Hanushek and Tom Kane to Marguerite Roza, the Director of the Edunomics Lab, whose “intentially deceitful” spin is documented in Bruce Baker’s “Seventeen Years of Roza-Tinted Glasses.”

Being a former academic, I had communicated with several of them who correctly understood how difficult it would be to scale up systemic reforms. That’s why reformers usually said that is why they pushed the more affordable, simplistic, quick fix of test-driven accountability; “Our kids can’t wait.” 

I understood why so many of them sought quicker, transformative changes, as opposed to the incremental improvements that followed the failed “Nation at Risk” of the Reagan years, his Supply Side economics that wiped out so many blue collar jobs, and the crack and gangs era. 

But, many of the best-known advocates I communicated with, including those who served on the Times survey, seemed like they didn’t know what they didn’t know about public schools. 

Often I was told, maybe you are right, and if you are, we’ll run more controls. 

Yes, many of them now reject the hypothesis that market-driven policies, alone, could replace the complex reforms that traditional educators and their unions, worked for. But, based on my conversations with reformers, then and recently, they still blame us Baby Boomers for supposedly having “low expectations, and accepting “excuses.” 

If those experts had had experience in public schools they might have known that “giving schools a rating, like an A-F letter grade, and requiring underperforming schools to make changes” would create the nightmare that the less-expensive, test-driven, competition-driven reforms produced. 

Again, to be fair to the Times, they reported that “several experts also said that schools should “think beyond test scores and focus on making learning less boring and more engaging — less passive listening and memorizing for tests, for example, and more open-ended research and project-based learning.”

And they quoted Chris Torres, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, who asked, “How do we get an education system that promotes high academic achievement, but is also a place where kids really want to be?” 

And, their reporting prompted numerous readers’ comments advocating for the policies of Scandinavian countries, like Finland, which “has better schools than the United States because its system focuses on equity, high-level teacher training, and student well-being instead of high-stakes testing,” and where “teachers have total autonomy over their lesson plans and methods.

Another commentator also shared her thoughts about how “none of the experts consulted for this project mentioned an evidence-based school improvement approach called community schools.”

I can’t complain when data-driven advocates provide interpretations that educators like me oppose. But, the surveyed group should have included an equal number data-informed, not data-driven researchers, who have done qualitative research, as well as those who listened to the poorest children of color, like my students, who repeatedly complained they had been “robbed of an education,” by standardized testing. 

And that is why I’m focusing on the dangers of the “Mississippi Miracle” where ideology-driven advocates “in recent years, …  have used a model of accountability that focuses more on student progress,” hoping that will give “underperforming schools support to improve.” Like so many reforms, Mississippi has produced short-lived 4th grade increases, but not increases in 8th grade reading scores, which likely is due to their failure to improve reading comprehension. 

I also googled around twenty members of the survey group who I didn’t know. Several were completely committed to the Science of Reading and/or the Mississippi Miracle. For instance, one claimed that this approach is “affordable, effective, and should be done everywhere.” And another expert that I hadn’t studied before said, “Mississippi’s success offers a proven solution to the reading literacy crisis facing many states – a clear road map for closing early literacy gaps and improving reading outcomes nationwide.” 

Through my googling, however, I concluded that there were more panel members, who I didn’t know about, who opposed the “Miracle.” Also, I couldn’t find what a number of the other experts believed about it.  

Yes, supporters of the “Miracle” often say their 8th grade NAEP reading scores haven’t dropped as much as other states. But, I didn’t see any supporters of the Science of Reading in the Times article who mentioned  the way Mississippi is using NAEP materials for test prep, and the effect of small group tutoring becoming too expensive now  that the Covid money is gone. 

And I didn’t see pro-Science of Reading experts explaining why the Mississippi Miracle is teaching so many kids to reject reading.

Understandably, the debates have focused on the harms vs. the benefits on student retentions. 

But, what I fear will matter the most is the degradation of learning cultures. Increased test prep and placing stats over children could bring back a revival of the destructive school cultures that were, I believe, the most important factor that got us here. 

Finally, the Times’ other cost /benefits analyses raised questions about their excessively quantitative approach. When they minimized the attempts to control cell phones, A.I., and other technologies, did they try to estimate the harms to students that will result from turning the clock back to unregulated use of digital products? When they minimize the test score gains due to better funding for teachers and class sizes, how would they estimate the human costs of continuing to abandon teacher autonomy, and retaining teachers? And, if they minimize the benefits of non-academic supports for students, mental health supports, and pre-k because they are too costly, how will they measure the costs of treating kids as more than a test score?    

The Network for Public Education is dedicated to the preservation and improvement of public schools. Public schools are a foundation stone of our democracy. Nearly 90% of American students are enrolled in public schools.

We urge concerned citizens to write to their Governor and tell them NOT to participate in the federal voucher program!

Every community needs high-quality public schools but diverting public money to private alternatives weakens public schools.

Public money should be spent in public schools.

The Trump administration does not like public schools. It encourages public funding for religious schools, vouchers, charter schools, for-profit schools, and home schools. Research and experience teach that these alternatives choose their students and they discriminate. And they get worse academic results than public schools.

Voucher schools are free to reject students with disabilities. Unlike public schools, students in special education have no rights.

Do not fall for the machinations of the Trump regime against public schools. Their intentions are not good. They loathe public schools, the schools that educated 90% of all Americans and created the greatest nation in the world.

From NPE executive director Carol Burris:

October 2, 2026

The Network for Public Education Urges Governors Not to Opt-in to the Federal Voucher Program

On October 1, the U.S. Treasury Department released regulations for the federal tax creditvoucher program that was slipped into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and pushed through reconciliation.

The rules confirm that this program will advantage sending public dollars to private and religious schools, including schools that freely discriminate. Governors must decide whether to opt-in by January 1.

We make our recommendation that states not opt-in based on the following:

Opting in allows federal tax dollars to fund discrimination against children.

When a state opts in, federal tax dollars can flow to private and religious schools and other providers that discriminate against students based on disability, academic challenges, LGBTQ status, or religion. States are expressly forbidden from adding protections of their own.

Opting in pushes cash-strapped public schools toward “pay to play.”

The regulations allow scholarships for public school students to cover services such as tutoring or extra special education services. However, nothing in the regulations stops public schools from turning programs they now fund into paid services that would require families to scramble to cover with scholarships.

A struggling district could convert elementary band, middle school art, or high school SAT prep into programs paid for with these vouchers. Here is the catch: to do that, the district must first charge parents. Some students will get a voucher. Others will not. Children whose parents cannot pay will be shut out.

This moves us one step closer to libertarian Milton Friedman’s vision, in which parents pay to educate their children and public education disappears. Make no mistake. This has been the far right’s goal for decades.

Opting in now creates a blind commitment to a program designed by those who actively undermine public schools.

At this point, the regulations are not final nor has Treasury released its Guidance regarding what expenses will be eligible under the program. That Guidance is expected “by the end of the year,”according to Kevin Salinger at Treasury. Without the Department’s Guidance for what qualifies as an eligible expense, a governor may opt-in, only to find out that virtually any spending that makes its way to public schools or districts has been disallowed. And then they’re stuck, because it’s clear that once in, states cannot back out until the following year.

Opting in fuels the growth of schools without rules.

As privatization has expanded, NPE has documented the fraud, abuse, and chaos that charter and voucher programs have produced. Dangling more tax dollars with few restrictions will draw more bad actors into education, opening low-cost, experimental schools that mislead parents and shortchange children.

States cannot block money from flowing to schools with poor fiscal or academic records. They cannot require public reporting on how funds are used or which students are served. They cannot add safeguards against waste and fraud.

Opting in adds to an unsustainable federal deficit.

Treasury projects that by 2030 the program could cost $26 billion a year in lost federal revenue.

That is more than Title I or IDEA, the largest federal programs supporting public schools.

Opting in will drain donations from charities American families depend on.

Large, respected charities like St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, and smaller ones that fund suicide prevention centers and domestic violence shelters, will now compete with a program that offers a dollar-for-dollar tax credit instead of a deduction. In an affordability crisis, donors will be drawn to giving that returns their entire contribution.

We encourage friends of public education to act today. Write your governor with a simple message: Do not opt our state into the federal voucher program. Then urge your members of Congress to repeal it. Join the millions of Americans who treasure public education and recognize this voucher program for what it is—a stealth attempt to destroy our beloved public schools.

Bruce Baker is one of the stellar scholars in the field of economics of education. He is currently at the University of Miami. He is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning in Miami’s School of Education and Human Development.

In this post, he takes issue with the economic prescriptions of Margaret Roza. Her work has been embraced by the privatizers.

Baker begins:

My critiques of Marguerite Roza, the Edunomics Lab, and Education Resource Strategies — with receipts. Every quotation is verbatim from the linked post or article.

24 blog entries, Aug 2009 – Aug 2026 (and counting)

21 taking on Roza, from CRPE to Gates to Georgetown

4 taking on ERS or Karen Hawley Miles

3 on Edunomics graphs, so far

The short version

I’ve spent an embarrassing share of my career, seventeen years and counting, cleaning up after Marguerite Roza. It has come in two waves. The first ran from 2009 to 2014, when she was at the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) and then advising the Gates Foundation, and her work was all over the federal policy conversation. The second started in 2025, when the Edunomics Lab she now runs at Georgetown began handing state policymakers graphs so bad I made a video about them. Education Resource Strategies (ERS) comes up less often, but it keeps turning up in the same places. Its founder, Karen Hawley Miles, co-wrote the Houston/Cincinnati weighted student funding (WSF) “success story” with Roza. Stephen Frank presented ERS slides alongside Roza’s fabricated graph at the 2011 Regents symposium. And ERS graded Baltimore’s Fair Student Funding against Baltimore’s own formula.

It comes down to the same four problems, over and over:

  • Blame the districts. The claim goes like this: states have fixed between-district inequity, so the problem left is within districts, and weighted student funding fixes that. The evidence for that sweeping national claim turns out to be “one or a handful of deeply flawed analyses,” mostly Roza’s Texas Weighted Student Index study. That study checks schools against the district’s own spending priorities, not against what kids actually need.
  • Productivity without the arithmetic. Stretching the School Dollar, Curing Baumol’s Disease, and the USDOE productivity page that showcased them offer spending cuts relabeled as “cost savings,” without a single cost-effectiveness analysis. Hank Levin laid out how to do one back in 1983. It isn’t a secret.
  • Evidence that was simply made up. Roza’s 2011 “productivity curve” had no data, no definitions and no connection to anything real. Researchers in the room said the claims were “simply made up.” ERS’s contribution at the same event: all teacher pay above the starting salary is waste.
  • Money-doesn’t-matter graphics. Edunomics’ long-term trend graphs start the clock in 2013, the one year that all but guarantees spending up and scores down, then skip the cost adjustment and stretch the axes. Their scatterplots throw every school onto one chart with no cost adjustment and call the resulting cloud a finding.

Yes, my tone has changed. In 2011 I called this work “methodologically flimsy” and “hack research.” By 2025 I was calling it “intentionally deceitful,” and I stand by that. Once you’ve been told, repeatedly and in public, exactly why a graph misleads, and you keep putting it in front of legislators anyway, “sloppy” stops being the right word. As I put it on Bluesky: “for anyone still using this kind of garbage, you’ve been on notice for years.”

The peer-reviewed version is politer, but it says the same thing. I’ve never said within-district inequity isn’t real. It is. What I have said, with data (EPAA, 2009), is that the WSF showcase districts were no more responsive to student need than districts without WSF. WSF was sold on advocacy research that “identifies the politically motivated solution then seeks to prove that it works.” And you can’t fix a district its state has starved by rearranging what’s left inside it. My 2013 NEPC review gave ERS’s Baltimore analysis the same treatment: grading a formula against itself isn’t an equity analysis. It’s a tautology.

Please open the link and read the rest of Bsker’s analysis. This post analyzes what happens when economic analysis becomes untethered from the needs of students.

The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) has positioned itself as the think tank that writes trustworthy evaluations of charter schools. In a sense, this is strange because CREDO’s leadership and its funding are not neutral on the subject of charter schools; they are decidedly pro-charter.

Freddie DeBoer argues on his blog that CREDO has consistently reported that charter schools find no gains for charter schools as compared to public schools. But it’s 2023 report was widely reported as the year of the Big Charter Breakthrough. He believes they are honorable in reporting their findings, but they pulled a fast one on the media and public by inventing a new metric that cannot be compared to other measures: “days of learning.”

DeBoer shows how the CREDO metric magnifies charter school results, which are actually small enough to be counted as “no effect.”

DeBoer begins:

In 2023 the Center for Research on Education Outcomes, known as CREDO, released its third national study of charter schools. The research covered 1.8 million students across twenty-nine states plus Washington D.C. and New York City. CREDO’s study purported to offer the most definitive evidence yet about the relative school quality of charter schools as compared to traditional public schools. Certainly our media, political establishment, and the nonprofit sector have acted as though what CREDO has to say is definitive; the 2023 study is, I believe, the most-cited piece of charter research in existence. Every pro-charter politician reaches for it, your Jonathan Chait neoliberal “reform” types treat its findings with near-mythic reverence, people who otherwise have no exposure to educational research wave at it as the final word on the subject. When the average person talks loosely as though there’s some sort of generic charter advantage, they’re usually referencing CREDO research, even if they don’t know they are.

This is all rather surprising, given that CREDO has not produced robust evidence in favor of charter schools, not in the 2023 study or its precursors. As we shall see, even if we assume that CREDO has solved the problem of the fundamentally non-random samples inherent to the task of comparing charter to public – which we should not, because they have not – the evidence supplied by CREDO in the favor of charter schools is so marginal and so noisy as to be meaningless from a policy perspective. And yet the message that the media took and shared from that report – the good news!, the vindication!, the headlines in Education Week and the New York Post!, the press releases from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools! – was that the typical charter student was the beneficiary of a meaningful learning boost compared to their traditional public school counterpart. Why did this message spread so widely and resonate so loudly, if I’m right that even CREDO’s own numbers show very modest differences? Because of a remarkably savvy bit of marketing in how CREDO’s numbers were presented. The report did not show its findings in terms of effect size differences between charter and public, which would be the field’s standard way of sharing results. Rather, the outcome that was shared again and again was that a typical charter school student in the dataset had gained sixteen additional “days of learning” per year in reading and six in math. For a few months there you couldn’t read educational media without running into those numbers: sixteen additional days of learning in reading per year, six in math. It became a bit of holy writ in the endless quest to make bad students good with ACCOUNTABILITY and market reforms.

Now, me, I immediately gravitate to that last bit: what on Earth is a “day of learning,” and since when is that a statistical measure?
“Days of Learning”: A Jury-Rigged Metric Invented for the Purpose of Inflating the Effect
If you share my confusion over that metric, don’t blame yourself. “Days of learning” is not merely an unusual measure of student performance; it’s a boutique metric that CREDO invented themselves for their charter studies. It’s like YouTube changing how views are counted so the numbers look bigger.

This should raise a number of red flags, most importantly when it comes to comparison with other research. We have standardized metrics in social science research for a reason. One core reason among them is mutual interpretability, the ability to compare outcomes involving different interventions that are measured with different instruments and in different units. That’s why effect size exists, and various expressions of effect size have served as the dominant measure of interest in all manner of human research for decades precisely because effect size enables ease of comparison. If you want to compare the influence of the same intervention when one study uses grades as the DV and another used test scores, effect size enables you to do that. If you want to compare two different types of intervention, effect size enables you to do that too. There are some caveats, as there always are, but the basic, elegant logic of effect size makes the measure remarkably flexible and portable: effect size tells us how a given intervention moves average outcomes along the distribution of outcomes. If you want to know more there are plenty of simple explainers of effect size out there; here’s mine. There are some fields where effect size is used less often (economics, for example) but the interpretability and flexibility of effect size metrics like Cohen’s d are powerful advantages. Not surprisingly, then, it’s the dominant reported measure in education research.

So if effect size is both useful and common, and is in fact the dominant measure of interest in the relevant field, why would CREDO come up with its own boutique measure? Why invite the potential for confusion with such consequential research? Occam’s razor suggests a simple answer: because CREDO is a pro-charter organization that’s intent on convincing stakeholders that charters have meaningfully superior outcomes when compared to traditional public schools… and their own research demonstrates the opposite. Their own numbers, in fact, suggest that the returns on charter schools are meager even if we ignore the selection problems that continue to plague charter advocacy.

This is a much longer post about the inadequacy of research on charter schools. It’s well-written and thoughtful. Please open the link and finish reading.

Back in 2011, Harvard Professor Raj Chetty and two esteemed colleagues (John Friedman at Brown University and Jonah Rockoff at Columbia University) published a dazzling study of teachers, asserting that the best teachers are those whose students get improved scores. Those students have a higher income ($250,000 over their lifetimes), and enjoy a multitude of benefits, all because of that one teacher who induced them to have higher scores. President Obama cited Chetty’s research in his 2012 State of the Union address to show how important it was to find the “best” teachers and fire the “worst’ teachers.

Chetty’s work supported the Obama-Duncan Race to the Top plan to encourage evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students. States that evaluated teachers by their students’ scores were eligible to apply for a share of RTTT funding. Those who did not were not eligible.

Most states, eager for a share of the $5 billion prize, agreed to adopt what was called “value-added modeling” or “value-added measurement.” (VAM)

I posted dozens of times about the flaws of VAM, first of all, because the American Statistical Association said that teachers account for only 1-14% of score changes; most changes were attributable to home life and school system issues. Secondly, because the VAM concept is very unstable and is highly affected by student demographics. Only teachers of reading and math in grades 4-9 could even be assessed by the annual tests, which are mandated only in grades 3-8. Schools started attributing scores to teachers not in those subjects and not in those grades, tied to the work of other teachers in the school.

The Los Angeles Times engaged researchers to calculate VAM scores for the district’s teachers, and the newspaper published them alongside the names of teachers. It was humiliating for teachers, but Arne Duncan thought this disclosure was wonderful.

I happened to be in Los Angeles on the day that a fifth grade teacher committed suicide after he received a poor VAM score. No one knows if that was the reason for his suicide, but it may have been. By all accounts, he was a good teacher in a tough school.

The New York Post did the same for New York City teachers. It listed names and scores. The teacher identified by the newspaper as the city’s “worst” teacher was hounded by Post reporters seeking an interview. It turned out that she taught classes of new immigrants, who moved in and then out of her class as they learned enough English to join regular classes. Her students in September were not the same students by June. The VAM scores for her were meaningless, as they were for other teachers. Teachers of the gifted saw few if any gains because their students were at the top year after year. Expert math teacher Gary Rubinstein noticed that some teachers had high scores in one subject, but not in the other. Should half the teacher get a bonus while the other half was fired?

Freddie deBoer, an independent writer who earned a doctorate in English and education assessment, re-evaluated Raj Chetty’s famous study.

It’s a long review, and I won’t post it all. Please open the link and read it.

He begins:

For a long time I’ve been getting some version of the comment, “What about Chetty!” in response to my perspective on education, as in Raj Chetty, the economist who for the past decade has made a lot of waves asserting that our education problems are straightforwardly the product of bad teachers and that replacing them will have implausibly large economic effects. I tend to try and work from a broader perspective than “this is why I think this guy is wrong,” but I get this request so often, here you go. This is why I think Raj Chetty is wrong.

Few empirical claims in modern education policy have traveled farther than Chetty et al’s findings on teacher “value-added.” In his famous 2014 American Economic Review papers, he and his coauthors reported that students assigned to better (excuse me, higher value-added) teachers were more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, save for retirement, and avoid teen pregnancy, and that replacing a teacher in the bottom five percent of the distribution with an average teacher would raise the present value of a single classroom’s lifetime earnings by roughly $250,000. Chetty’s research findings in this domain had been floating around for awhile at the time of publication, and President Obama cited the figure in his 2012 State of the Union address, and the judge who decided Vergara v. California leaned on it to strike down California’s teacher tenure laws. Take that, teachers! The findings are arresting, the dataset is impressive – 2.5 million children, linked to IRS tax records! – and the policy implications are clean: identify and remove bad (pardon me, low “value-added”) teachers, watch outcomes improve. It’s exactlythe kind of story our neoliberal policy establishment is desperate to tell, and was clearly catnip to the Obama administration, which was doggedly attached to a simplistic vision of delivery through better education, where the gutting of the uneducated labor market was ameliorated by turning every last child in the United States into a genius, scaling up the Stanford-to-Google pipeline until every American could pass through it.

Unfortunately, the Chetty story is ultimately another neoliberal just-so story, that is to say, a fable, a legend, a myth. The closer you look at what the “value-added” construct actually measures, how stable those measurements are, and how the Chetty results have fared under replication, the more reason there is to doubt both the magnitude of the claimed effects and, more fundamentally, whether “teacher quality” as the literature operationalizes it is a coherent, measurable attribute at all. (Spoiler: it is not.) Let us count the problems.

The construct itself puts the thumb on the scale. The first problem is conceptual. In the Chetty et al. studies, a teacher’s “value-added” is the residual variation in a student’s standardized test scores that remains after controlling for prior achievement and some demographic covariates. It’s not a measure of pedagogical skill, content knowledge, classroom climate, the cultivation of curiosity, or any other property normally meant by “good teaching.” It’s a statistical residual on a narrow set of assessments, usually math and reading tests in grades three through eight. That residual is then defined as quality. I want to be clear about this: any portion of variability in student outcomes that Chetty et al cannot or will not identify otherwise is assumed to be a product of teacher inputs. Since Chetty’s whole project is to argue that educational outcomes are the result of teacher quality, this is what we used to call begging the question – that is, he’s assuming the point he wants to prove, asserting the desired conclusion as a premise, by acting as though any uncaptured variation is necessary evidence of teaching quality. And it gets worse in the telling. When advocates and journalists and politicians summarize his work, the construct expands silently from “the part of test-score gains Chetty cannot otherwise explain” to “good teachers,” and the slippage is rarely flagged. But that’s the whole game, you guys.

Open the link and enjoy!

Despite appearances, the most powerful person in the Trump administration is not Donald Trump: it’s Russell Vought, Director of Office of Management and Budget. He is the brains of this administration. Vought was at the Heritage Foundation and was one of the writers of project 2025. He controls the budget and makes the decisions about which government programs should live or die. Trump has impulses, whims, and passing fancies; Vought is methodical and determined to impose his rightwing views on the entire federal government. Every federal grant, Vought believes, should align with Trump’s anti-woke, anti-DEI agenda.

Tony Romm wrote about Vought’s strategy in The New York Times:

The White House is seeking to exert more control over billions of dollars in annual government grants, aiming to restrict a vast swath of funding — in health, housing, science and transportation — so that it primarily serves the purposes and organizations politically aligned with President Trump.

While the administration says that its primary goal is to safeguard taxpayer money, its proposal amounts to a major escalation in its attempt to reimagine the nation’s spending, even as Congress and the courts continue to rebuke the president for abusing such powers.

Mr. Trump’s ambitions were made clear in a roughly 400-page blueprint that was released to little fanfare on Friday. If finalized, it would require all federal grants to be approved by the president’s political appointees, who must ensure that the money would “demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities.”

For the agencies that issue those awards and the nonprofit groups, local governments, universities and other entities that receive the money, the Trump administration would also impose a set of highly prescriptive and political criteria.

The government could not issue grants to projects or groups that “deny the biological reality of sex or the sex binary in humans,” for example. Nor could it seek to fund initiatives that “promote anti-American values,” contribute to illegal immigration, advance diversity, equity and inclusion or assist in voter registration.

The rules would further limit the ability of grant recipients to engage in some “issue advocacy.” Those that are funded would be scrutinized for their compliance with “religious liberty laws” and their “memberships and affiliations” with outside groups. And they could face the outright termination of their grants if the Trump administration someday determines that their actions are not in the “public interest.”

The restrictions echo the string of executive orders that Mr. Trump signed shortly after returning to office, many of which have been challenged or blocked in court. This time, however, the White House has pursued its restrictions by proposing a regulation, which is expected to become final after the government solicits public comment. The result could be applied far more broadly, and perhaps in ways that are harder to fight legally or undo later, according to budget experts.

The consequences could fall hardest on health and science, a field in which Mr. Trump has pursued some of the steepest cuts in his second term.

In exchange for federal assistance, researchers would face limits on the subjects that they can explore, the foreign labs with which they may collaborate and even the conferences at which they can appear. Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, the chief executive of the American Public Health Association, a professional organization and advocacy group, said the policy could “devastate innovation, science and research” in the United States.

Paul L. Thomas of Furman University has been a persistent critic of the narrative about the “Mississippi Miracle.” The story gained great traction when New York Times‘ columnist Nicholas Kristof took it national on September 1, 2023, in an article titled: “America Has a Reading Problem. Mississippi Has a Solution.” The “miracle” supposedly was accomplished without doing anything to improve the lives of children and their families, without even raising teachers’ salaries. The “science of reading” did the trick; that, plus holding back third graders who didn’t pass the final reading test.

Many articles have been written since then recycling the claim that the “science of reading” was largely responsible for the impressive growth in Mississippi’s fourth grade reading scores on NAEP (the National Assessment of Educational Progress), which is administered every two years. If only states forced teachers to teach the “science of reading,” there would be no failure in reading (except, of course, for the students who were retained in third grade and not participants in the fourth grade testing.)

The “Mississippi Miracle” allegedly occurred within the context of a “Southern Surge,” where low-spending, non-union states like Alabama and Louisiana also participated in a miraculous increase in reading scores. These professors complexified that claim recently.

The most recent article confirming the “miracle” appeared in The Atlantic and was written by Rachel Canter, who participated in the Mississsippi reforms as leader of Mississippi First and is now at the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.

Paul Thomas writes on his Substack blog:

“No story has caught the imagination of education reformers this decade quite like the ‘Mississippi miracle,’” Rachel Canter asserts in The Atlantic, adding:

Other states are now trying to emulate what Mississippi did. Those efforts largely revolve around adopting what’s known as the “science of reading”— a set of principles and teaching techniques, including phonics, that are grounded in decades of empirical research.

Canter, the Director of Education Policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, released as well a report on Mississippi reading and education reform, noting:

I personally spent 17 years helping state leaders run that race. As the head of Mississippi First, a nonprofit I founded in 2008, I played a hand in, and sometimes led, many of the state’s key education policy conversations with the legislature while also working with the Mississippi Department of Education to implement the reform agenda. This is my insider’s view of what policymakers, philanthropists, and pundits should know about what really happened.

Both Canter’s article and her report are lessons themselves in how education reform in the US works, specifically during this cycle driven by the “science of reading” and “science of learning.”

Notably, Canter mentions “empirical research,” yet neither a magazine article nor a think tank report meet the standards of “scientific” championed by “science of” reformers—experimental/quasi-experimental research published in peer-reviewed journals [1].

Also, Canter’s article introduces on a larger scale one of the many multiverses of the “science of reading” existing currently.

The article and report express what Mississippi officials have been arguing for a while: Mississippi reform is not a miracle; it is many years of hard and complex work.

Canter, in fact, seems to double-down on Mississippi reform is effective due to high-stakes accountability (the core of education reform since Reagan, reform that has never worked but perpetuated a permanent cycle of crisis and reform in the US).

I will return to Canter’s argument about Mississippi’s reform success, but I think the criticism of overly simplistic stories about the Mississippi “miracle” are valid and many are beginning to acknowledge that news articles and podcasts have driven reductive and misguided reading reform, policy, and classroom practice [2].

In short, a lesson we should learn, finally, is to reject “miracle” narratives in education. 

Lessons Ignored (And Questions Unanswered)

The problem with Canter’s article and report (beyond that they lack experimental rigor) is that her claims are just as misleading and often just as incomplete as the media stories being sold.

One lesson ignored in the Mississippi story is that it suffers from “the moment” syndrome. I have been asking since the start of the “miracle” narrative: Why haven’t we looked at the historical increase in grade 4 NAEP reading scores, including an ignored spike well before the 2019 christening of “miracle”?:

A bigger lesson, however, is taking greater care when deciding if reforms work as well as what causes that success. Related, as well, is assuring that the data used to decide success or failure represents learning.

Here the Mississippi story is much different that the media “miracle” or Cantor’s argument that high-stakes accountability has worked in the state.

Several questions must be answered.

If Mississippi’s reform has worked, why does the state have the same wealth and race gaps as in 1998?

If Mississippi’s reform has worked, why does the state continue to retain about 9000 K-3 students per year?

  • 2014-2015 – 3064 (grade 3) – 12,224 K-3 retained/ 32.2% proficiency
  • 2015-2016 – 2307 (grade 3) – 11,310 K-3 retained/ 32.3% proficiency
  • 2016-2017 – 1505 (grade 3) – 9834 K-3 retained / 36.1 % proficiency
  • 2017-2018 – 1285 (grade 3) – 8902 K-3 retained / 44.7% proficiency
  • 2018-2019 – 3379 (grade 3) – 11,034 K-3 retained / 48.3% proficiency
  • 2021-2022 – 2958 (grade 3) – 10,388 K-3 retained / 46.4% proficiency
  • 2022-2023 – 2287 (grade 3) – 9,525 K-3 retained/ 51.6% proficiency
  • 2023-2024 – 2033 (grade 3) – 9,121 K-3 retained/ 57.7% proficiency
  • 2024-2025 – 2132 (grade 3) – 9250 K-3 retained/ 49.4% proficiency

And most significantly, if Mississippi reform has worked, do the test score increases in grade 4 represent greater student learning?

There is little scientific evidence on this important question, but the evidence is suggesting a principle by Gerald Bracey: “Rising test scores do not necessarily mean rising achievement.”

First, an analysis of reading reform and a statistical analysis of Mississippi test score increases suggest that those increases are statistical manipulations caused by grade retention and not student learning.

When grade 8 data are compared to grade 4, those analyses seem accurate since states behind Mississippi in grade 4 catch and pass by grade 8 (include the subgroup of Black students):

The irony here is that in 2019 when Hanford declared Mississippi reading reform a “miracle,” many uncritically jumped on that bandwagon.

The Atlantic article is receiving the same uncritical and effusive response—although it is no more credible.

Canter offers just a different compelling but ultimately misleading story.

As of 2026, there simply is no empirical evidence Mississippi’s reading reform has worked.

There remains no “science” in the multiverse of “science of reading” stories.


[1] One frustrating aspect of the “science of reading” movement has been the demand for “science” while advocates tend to use anecdotes, cherry pick evidence, and ignore research counter to their stories. Note the expectations, often ignored, for “scientific” by The Reading League:

https://radicalscholarship.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/scientifically-based-research.jpg

[2] I have four open-access articles in English Journal, documenting with research that the media stories (specifically by Emily Hanford) are misleading and inaccurate.


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P.L. Thomas, Professor of Education (Furman University, Greenville SC), is the poetry editor for English Journal. NCTE named Thomas the 2013 George Orwell Award winner. Follow his work @plthomasEdD.

So-called reformers continue to pursue a fantasy: they believe that changing the governance of public schools will lead to improvement in the education of children.

And so they advocate for mayoral control, state takeovers, charter schools, vouchers.

They choose to ignore the overwhelming consensus among education researchers that the home lives of children has a far greater impact on children’s school performance than the governing structure.

Here is a case in point, offered by In the Public Interest.

If you’re worried about corporations taking over public schools, this next sentence will not allay your worry: The state of Indiana just turned over much of the responsibilities for the city of Indianapolis’ schools–public and charter–to something called the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation (IPEC).

“This new organization will be charged with building and transportation management for both charter and traditional public schools,” reports Governing. “It will also be charged with creating a single set of evaluation criteria for both types of schools.”

Admittedly, it’s a nonprofit corporation and its nine board members are appointed by the mayor with statutes to determine the corporate board’s membership: three come from the Indianapolis Public Schools [IPS] board of commissioners–which still exists, three from the charter school industry, and three with administrative and financial expertise. 

In reality, however, four board members are from the charter industry. Its board chairman is David Harris, who founded the Mind Trust-Indianapolis, the driving force pushing the charterization of the district. Harris is the President and CEO of Christal House International that operates the Christal House Academy charter chain. According to the organization’s 990 tax form, in 2025, Harris received $554,148 in compensation.

But IPEC inserts a layer of control and bureaucracy beyond–or, better put, around–Indianapolis’ elected school board. At least as troubling as that is the fact IPEC was given the authority to levy property taxes that it can use to fund–with public money–charter schools. This puts charter schools on equal footing–and funding–with public schools–a dangerous precedent that is certain to be attempted elsewhere. 

One of IPEC’s first orders of business is likely to be placing on the November ballot an operating referendum since IPS’ expires at the end of this year. While Indianapolis Public Schools expects a $40 million deficit for the year, that might have been addressed if IPS’s attempt to place an operating referendum on the 2023 ballot hadn’t been derailed by the charter school industry and the Greater Indianapolis Chamber of Commerce. 

For public school advocates, the implications of the new, non-elected board are clear–and disturbing.

“What is occurring in Indianapolis is part of a growing movement to destroy the neighborhood school governed by the community and replace it with a corporate vision of schooling that sees the marketplace and competition as the primary drivers of quality,” Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education, tells In the Public Interest. “We are now more than thirty years into the charter school experiment, and we have yet to see the miracle.”

Jeff Hagan
Communications Director

Paul Thomas is a professor at Furman University. He has taken a leading role in refuting claims for the “science of reading.”

There are many successful ways to teach reading. some children arrive at school knowing how to read, because a parent read with them every day. Phonics is important. The joy of reading is important. Comprehension is important. Legislatures should not mandate one way to teach.

In his latest post, he writes:

If you pay attention to the non-stop moral panicking around reading fanned by mainstream media, you may have seen this click-bait headline: Did New York blow $10 million on reading instruction that doesn’t work?

The article repeats tired and misleading (often false) stories about the failures of balanced literacy, NAEP reading scores, the “success” of Mississippi and Louisiana, the promise of structured literacy, and the National Reading Panel as well as the one research study on phonics that is linked.

Let’s consider these:

*No scientific studies identify a reading crisis in the US causally linked to balanced literacy, reading programs, lack of phonics instruction, or inadequacy of teacher education. (Aydarova, 2025; Reinking, Hruby, & Risko, 2023).

*The media hyper-focuses only on grade 4 NAEP reading scores, but notice how the story changes once we consider grade 8—states behind MS in grade 4 catch and pass MS by grade 8 (primarily because MS inflates their grade 4 scores by excessive grade retention, like FL):

*Structured literacy (scripted curriculum) is whitewashing the reading curriculum and restricting teacher autonomy and professionalism. (Khan, et al., 2022; Parsons, et al., 2025; Rigell, et al., 2022).

*The linked research suggests it replicates findings of the NRP; however, the NRP did not prove systematic phonics outperformed whole language or was a silver bullet. As Diane Stephens explains about the findings on phonics: “Minimal value in kindergarten; no conclusion about phonics beyond grade 1 for ‘normally developing readers’; systematic phonics instruction in grades 2-6 with struggling readers has a weak impact on reading text and spelling; systematic phonics instruction has a positive effect in grade 1 on reading (pronouncing) real and nonsense words but not comprehension; at-risk students benefit from whole language instruction, Reading Recovery, and direct instruction.” Further, while the article quotes from the research report, it doesn’t include this much more tentative hedge: “These findings suggest that SL approaches may yield larger positive effects on student learning compared to BL approaches.” At best, structured literacy is no better or worse than whole language or balanced literacy, but to be clear, there is no “settled science” that is works.

But the bigger problem is not that mainstream media continues to repeat misinformation, but that it fails to offer the full story.

Note that the “literacy experts” quoted in the article are supporting structured literacy programs (scripted curriculum), and some of those experts are co-authors of those programs.

Further, these experts are promoting a different teacher training program than the one being attacked in the article, and many states are spending 10s of millions of dollars on that program—LETRS. (My home state of SC a few years ago allocated $11 million for one year, for example.)

What’s missing in this story?

There are two high-quality studies that were released in 2025 on the effectiveness of LETRS, but so far, there have not been click-bait scare headlines about those findings:

*A review (Rowe & Thrailkill, 2025) of reading policy in North Carolina concludes:

Despite LETRS’ claim that it helps educators “distinguish between the research base for best practices and other competing ideas not supported by scientific evidence” (Lexia Learning, 2022, p. 4), we noticed a pattern of misinterpretation, selective inclusion, and omission of literacy research. LETRS is a prime example of a common problem with the deployment of research for educational policy and instructional decision-making, in that multiple claims are not substantiated by a close reading of the original research cited (cf. Hodge et al., 2020).

*And Gearin, et al. (2025) found:

[Abstract] We investigated whether Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading and Spelling: 3rd Edition (LETRS) was related to student reading ability by comparing the average third-grade reading achievement of schools that used LETRS to that of schools that used exclusively other professional development experiences in the context of Colorado’s Read Act. Guided by What Works Clearinghouse Standards, we conducted a quasi-experiment with propensity score matching and an active comparison group. We supplemented our primary intent-to-treat analysis with three sensitivity analyses designed to demonstrate the robustness of our claims. Effect estimates for completing a LETRS volume on educator knowledge ranged from 0.82 to 0.94. Students’ third-grade reading achievement did not statistically differ for schools that adopted LETRS compared with other professional development experiences in any model, suggesting that LETRS was comparable to the other programs at improving third-grade reading achievement at the school level.

The “science of reading” movement is a political, ideological, and market-based attack on teachers and public education, and the only people profiting off yet another moral panic are the media, political leaders, education reformers, entrepreneurs, and of course, the education market place.

The full story is never covered, because the real story about reading simply isn’t that profitable.

To get the links to research, open the article.