Search

This project is part of the American School District Panel (ASDP), a research partnership between the RAND Corporation and the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University's Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College (CRPE). This report concludes research on five school systems to reveal the academic, social, and political challenges posed by the pandemic and what leaders and their staff are doing to address student learning loss. This report provides a possible explanation for why lackluster student test scores continue and why school systems struggle to implement and scale targeted student supports. Significant findings in this report include: (1) A crisis in the quality of classroom teaching is, leaders say, diverting time and resources away from targeted supports for students and toward improving classroom instruction; (2) Leaders report less day-to-day chaos, but unexpected challenges in staffing and teacher development have curtailed recovery efforts. As a result, their COVID recovery plans have been difficult, if not impossible, to carry out; (3) Plans for tutoring and other customized help have been undone by leaders' need to build (or rebuild) teachers' core skills; and (4) Millions of dollars and the best of intentions and efforts notwithstanding, leaders are struggling to overcome challenges to providing baseline services to students. [For the preceding report, see "Navigating Political Tensions over Schooling: Findings from the Fall 2022 American School District Panel Survey" (ED626297).]

Public schooling has always been politically fraught, but current disagreements over issues related to race, sexuality, gender, and COVID-19 have reached a tipping point. According to this report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education and RAND, half of school system leaders say that these disagreements are disrupting schooling. Almost one in three district leaders also said their educators had received verbal or written threats about politically controversial topics since fall 2021. The findings come from surveys issued to 300 district and charter network leaders and interviews with superintendents. Their responses shed light on how political polarization has affected classrooms and how districts are responding. This report presents results from the fall 2022 survey of the American School District Panel (ASDP). The ASDP is a research partnership between RAND and CRPE. The panel also collaborates with several other education organizations, including the Council of the Great City Schools and Kitamba, to help improve outcomes for students throughout the United States.

In this report, we update our ongoing research on five school systems to reveal the academic, social, and political challenges posed by the pandemic and what system leaders and their staff are doing to address student learning loss. The report is part of the American School District Panel, a research partnership between the RAND Corporation and the Center on Reinventing Public Education. Key findings include: (1) Student absences and staff shortages have sidelined the adoption of academic acceleration strategies; (2) Districts are working hard to rebuild teacher capacity and collect better data on student performance; (3) Some districts are turning back to familiar instructional strategies developed before the pandemic. Others are offering different types of support for student academic recovery to address learning loss; and (4) The pandemic has changed district priorities and reshaped the work of superintendents and senior administrators. Districts haven't given up on restoring lost learning or improving classroom instruction. But to help students who spent months out of school, they're applying high-dosage tutoring, project-based learning and career-infused education in a piecemeal fashion, rather than pursuing academic acceleration as a comprehensive approach. [For the previous report in the series, "Whack-A-Mole: School Systems Respond to Disrupted Learning in 2021," see ED618897.]

Public education depends on expertise, work, money, and cooperation from multiple actors who have different interests and beliefs. These lead to competition and negotiation--in other words, politics. Failure to consider the politics of reform implementation and sustainability has doomed many promising K-12 school improvement initiatives. This paper analyzes more than 10 years of data on the implementation of the portfolio strategy to identify practical lessons on managing the politics of reform K-12 schools. Sustaining complex reforms like the portfolio strategy in a political environment requires leaders to: (1) Continually seek new supporters and renew the support of existing ones; (2) Expect and prepare for attacks and be alert to the unnecessary harms caused by their own actions, which bolster opposition; (3) Develop information strategies that document intermediate results, alert leaders to emergent problems and actively counter hostile narratives; (4) Be attentive to competing agendas and political liabilities within their own alliances; and (5) Prepare for leadership succession so that reforms have a chance to last long enough to make a difference. These observations challenge the conventional wisdom that sustainable reforms can be built only upon the percolating up of good ideas and initiatives from below. Reform leaders are essential to knitting together fragile coalitions who may be motivated by different goals and aligning new programs and initiatives--and politically reinforcing them over time--so their benefits can accumulate.

This is Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE)'s second consensus panel report on the pandemic and delays in students' learning. Based on the evidence available a year ago, CRPE reported the average K-12 student in America mastered less academic content due to the pandemic and associated disruptions to schooling. Negative impacts were generally larger in math than in reading, substantial across all grade levels, larger where students had less access to in-person instruction, and larger for Black, Hispanic, and low-income students. This year's report, based on 23 studies published since last July, offers even stronger evidence of the pandemic's negative consequences for student growth and development. The pauses to in-person schooling and related changes in family and community life over the past year continued to interrupt most children's academic growth, but the consequences are not evenly distributed. Children whose schools were closed the longest had their learning interrupted the most--and most often, that affected low-income children and children of color in big cities. In 2022 as in 2021, the authors aim to present a coherent baseline of what is known, unknown, and needs to be known at this stage of the pandemic--and the beginning of a recovery from the pandemic. These reports are designed to help system leaders, community leaders, policymakers, researchers, philanthropies, the media, and others to define ambitious goals and clear metrics that ensure our education system meets every student's needs over the coming years. [This report is an update to "How Much Have Students Missed Academically Because of the Pandemic? A Review of the Evidence to Date" (ED614130).]

In this report, we complement our latest fall 2021 survey research from the American School District Panel with in-depth interviews of leaders on the ground in five school systems. Our goal with these interviews was to learn from system leaders about the academic needs of children as they return to school, how districts and charter schools are addressing those needs, and how the pandemic has affected schools. In Brief: (1) Education leaders across the country recognize that students are falling behind academically during the pandemic. Some districts are responding by emphasizing grade-level instruction and just-in-time supports rather than remediation. We interviewed top leaders in five school systems committed to this approach to learn more about its implementation; (2) We found that implementing acceleration required school systems to work with schools in new ways, but the strategy was complicated by a host of factors that made getting to instruction difficult: challenging student behaviors, staffing shortages, and the politicization of health, safety, and education. All these pressures have made leading school districts in 2021-22 like playing a game of Whack-A-Mole; and (3) School districts across the country are working hard to catch students up. But the Whack-A-Mole experience of leading during the pandemic raises questions about how these pressures will affect system leaders and leadership and whether, in the future, schools alone will be able to do enough to help all students get the help they need to recover. [For latest fall 2021 survey research from the American School District Panel, "Flux in the Educator Labor Market: Acute Staff Shortages and Projected Superintendent Departures. Selected Findings from the Fourth American School District Panel Survey. Data Note: Insights from the American Educator Panels. Research Report. RR-A956-9," see ED617372.]

This report is part of the American School District Panel (ASDP), a joint project between the Center on Reinventing Public Education, the RAND Corporation, Chiefs for Change, the Council of Great City Schools, and Kitamba, an education consulting firm. The ASDP's primary work is conducting a series of nationally-representative surveys of school districts. In this report, we complement our survey research with in-depth interviews of leaders on the ground in six school systems. Our goal was to learn how these system leaders approached and managed student learning during this difficult year and to gauge what it means for the future. We found: (1) When it came to instruction, the school systems favored "acceleration" over remediation; (2) School systems that had coherent instructional systems in place before the pandemic had an easier time delivering grade-level content; and (3) In some cases, improving instruction alone may not be enough. Two of the systems that faced deeper inequity and performance challenges before the pandemic were considering more fundamental shifts. What happens next will depend not only on district actions but on the nature and depth of students' academic and social needs, which will only become clear over time. [This report was produced by the American School District Panel (ASDP).]

While state policymakers are ultimately responsible for public schools statewide, their influence over local school districts has always been incomplete at best. State chiefs, the ostensible leaders of state education agencies, have limited powers and local school boards ultimately control most of the money and staff. As a result, when state leaders seek change in local school systems--whether to address financial mismanagement, corruption, or weak outcomes for students--they are often stymied by factors outside of their control. State takeovers of local school districts emerged as one strategy for overcoming these limitations on state authority. State takeovers suspend the powers of local boards and put in place a state-appointed superintendent. They aim to provide states a direct means for influencing the oversight and operation of local schools that does not hinge on gaining local leaders' cooperation. While state takeovers can be powerful, they are never permanent. To understand how state leaders have sought to sustain the hard-won improvements they gained through state takeovers, the authors interviewed a total of 10 current and former senior state officials who had overseen state takeovers or served as state-appointed superintendents. The interviews provide key lessons for states seeking to make improvements in districts and schools navigating a transition to local control, and emphasize the need to focus on sustainability well before state interventions begin. The authors summarize the main themes that emerged from their interviews in three sections: (1) State takeover is an important but limited tool; (2) States must build a local political base for takeover-initiated reforms; and (3) Exit strategies must set the conditions for long-term success.

The current debate about charter schools' effects on school district finances hinges on enrollment loss. Critics claim that the surge in charter enrollment in California since 2000 has driven enrollment loss statewide--cutting districts' income more than their costs, especially in cities where many students attend charter schools. State officials are under pressure to cap the growth of charter schools as a way of stabilizing district enrollments, and thus finances. This brief examines state and district data on district and charter school enrollment trends over the past 10 years. We pay particular attention to Los Angeles, Oakland, and San Diego, where claims of harm done by charter enrollment growth have been made most often. The brief makes three points: (1) Surges and declines in K-12 enrollment have long been a fact of life in California districts. Statewide numbers of school-age children are currently falling and will continue to do so; (2) The growth of charter schools cannot account for all of the enrollment loss experienced by urban school districts; and (3) Charter school enrollment is not currently a major factor in continued district enrollment decline. [To view "Do Charter Schools Cause Fiscal Distress in School Districts?" see ED595169 and "Do the Costs of California Charter Schools Outweigh the Benefits?" see ED595193.]

Much attention has been focused on the costs charter school enrollment imposes on school districts. Getting an honest answer to this question is important for school districts so that they may adjust their expenditures appropriately. However, as Ladd and Singleton, the authors of a North Carolina study attempting to quantify those costs point out, a broader analysis of the societal benefits and costs associated with charter school policy also is needed to help policymakers assess the value of the policy and whether it should be continued or adjusted. This brief offers a discussion of the types of benefit and cost issues that should be considered and points to evidence to inform those considerations. First we consider potential benefits, then costs, and finally how we might compare the two. It is not meant to be a definitive analysis, but rather a way to bring nuanced discussion and debate to politically laden issues. We argue that, on face, the public policy benefits of charter schooling in California are more evident than the costs. However, more data and benefit-cost analysis are needed to make a clear determination. [To view "Charter Schools and District Enrollment Loss," see ED595191 and "Do Charter Schools Cause Fiscal Distress in School Districts?" see ED595169.]

The claim that charter schools cause financial harm to school districts is a major element in the debate around charter schools in California. Critics allege that enrollment in charter schools drains resources from school districts, forcing them to make cuts to staff and services and eventually contributing to fiscal distress. The charge that enrollment loss causes harm to students instead of inspiring school districts to improve is a critical question and requires good evidence to answer. This brief examines the relationship between charter school enrollment and fiscal distress in California. We find no evidence that charter school enrollments increase the likelihood of school districts entering fiscal distress. Prior research suggests a variety of factors contribute to fiscal distress and as a result, state policymakers are unlikely to find resolution to the problem in the charter sector. [For "Charter Schools and District Enrollment Loss," see ED595191. For "Do the Costs of California Charter Schools Outweigh the Benefits?" see ED595193.]

Local superintendents must do an important job while equipped with, at best, modest authority. Superintendents are ultimately responsible for all the schools in their district, and they at least nominally supervise everything that happens in those schools. Yet superintendents cannot count on obedience or even support from the people who work for them, given that both educators and administrators possess wide discretion in implementation. This paper is written to help current and potential superintendents see the full scope of their role and how leaders from various backgrounds can approach it. In a series of studies beginning in the late 1980s, the authors have interviewed superintendents about their successes and failures in building civic support for needed initiatives. The paper draws examples from this earlier work, as well as from Center on Reinventing Public Education's (CRPE's) ongoing tracking of developments in reform-driven cities and the experiences of other public officials whose ability to overcome the structural limitations of their roles offer important lessons for district leadership. Most superintendents, current and aspiring, understand the importance of getting along with other power centers in the school system and the community at large. This paper goes further by attempting to show how superintendents can build coalitions and thereby exercise real power to accomplish things that conventional wisdom would say are beyond them.

State policy plays a critical role in determining whether and how well local education improvement strategies can be implemented. As states rework their education policies under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), state and local leaders need a way to assess their current policy environment and identify the changes needed to encourage local innovation and problem-solving. To identify the legal and regulatory barriers to local autonomy, the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) researched 14 states that already have one or more large cities pursuing local innovation strategies. We find that: The accretion of state law over the years has constrained local education leaders' ability to innovate, improve, and transform their schools; States have set up command-and-control frameworks, viewing districts rather than schools as public education's first responders, which is at odds with school-level efforts to address the particular needs of students and communities; and State policy leads to conflicts and disincentives that play out for worse at the local level. This analysis is intended to help policymakers, education leaders, and advocates understand the changes in state law and policy needed to support local strategies that empower educators, promote new schooling options, and let parents choose.

State chiefs have new responsibilities under the Every Student Succeeds Act, but their formal powers are still limited. Despite these constraints, the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) analysis finds that chiefs can make a difference by wielding their powers strategically, to build coalitions and persuade others. While turnover in the field is high, with 70% of current chiefs on the job less than two years, newcomers are taking their seats at a time of opportunity. Drawing on interviews with current and former state chiefs, authors Hill and Jochim identify chiefs' opportunities for influence in light of the ideas in Richard E. Neustadt's 1960 book, "Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership." The analysis and concrete examples are intended to help current and aspiring chiefs understand how to use their authorities as the basis of bargaining, build their professional reputation, and approach decision-making. Key takeaways include: (1) Chiefs should fully understand their own advantages and think hard about how to bargain effectively with others in the state capital and in school districts; (2) Developing new coalitions takes time and sustained attention. By pulling together broader coalitions than normally control education policy, chiefs can expand the horizons of possibility; (3) To build a personal reputation for effectiveness, a chief must have and be known to have strong and specific goals to build something new or to change the status quo--and communicate them to those affected or those who may serve as a source of support; and (4) In order to maximize power, chiefs must approach every decision as an opportunity to strengthen their future effectiveness. This paper is part of a series of publications from CRPE's "Linking State and Local School Improvement" initiative, meant to inform state education leaders, policymakers, and advocacy groups about how to best support promising local school improvement efforts.

Over the past two decades, big cities have been the most consistent focus of investment and controversy in American public education. The challenges for big cities are obvious. Increasing numbers of foreign-born students and students living in poverty, coupled with dramatic declines in the numbers of native-born middle-class students, mean that cities face an unprecedented array of educational needs and great uncertainty about how to meet them. Debates about how to make city public schools effective, particularly about whether to shore up existing arrangements or experiment with new ways of running and overseeing schools, have been intense. While urban schools continue to warrant attention, school districts in many suburbs just outside the central city's limits (inner-ring suburbs) have similar trends but have received less notice. These school districts--from Prince George's County, Maryland, to Reynoldsburg, Ohio, and Aurora, Colorado, to Burien, Washington--have also experienced population changes as dramatic as those in big cities. Some might argue that inner-ring suburbs undergoing population changes have been lucky to avoid the battles over education policy, teacher strikes, and state interventions. But for suburbs with growing numbers of disadvantaged students, neglect has not all been benign. Many suburbs are economically distressed and not well-equipped to handle major new challenges. Even suburban school systems that were effective for the groups that moved there after World War II are likely not prepared to meet the new array of student needs or to find solutions to unprecedented problems. In this essay the authors review the evidence on these points, consider the strengths and weaknesses of inner-ring suburbs when faced with new challenges, and suggest ways leaders--local, state, and philanthropic--can help suburban schools adapt to the challenges they face.

Every sector of the U.S. economy is working on ways to deliver services in a more customized manner. If all goes well, education is headed in the same direction. Personalized learning and globally benchmarked academic standards (a.k.a. Common Core) are the focus of most major school districts and charter school networks. Educators and parents know students must be better prepared to think deeply about complex problems and to have skills that are relevant for jobs that haven't yet been created. Promising school models are showing what's possible, but innovation in the classroom only takes you so far. Twenty-first century learning practices demand twenty-first century systems. This paper goes deep into the question of which system policies are most likely to get in the way of implementing personalized learning at scale. We work outward from the school to define the new capacities and functions districts need to develop. We make the case that districts are currently unwittingly hostile to school-level innovation. For that to change, they must aggressively work to change the incentives, policies, and structures so that they encourage and free up schools to innovate. This is the first of three white papers looking at system redesign from a variety of perspectives. Our next paper, "The Case for Coherent High Schools" [see: ED556237], examines the challenges of high school redesign. Our third and final paper, "Redesigning the District Operating System [see: ED563481], explains why there must be updated central office systems to allow school-level initiative and problem solving.

High school redesign is one of the most elusive reform challenges to date. This paper explains why personalized high schools are hard to get and keep in a traditional school district, and shows how they can be made much more broadly available through changes in policy and philanthropic investments. Drawing from examples of successful and unsuccessful high school redesign efforts, this paper argues that stable leadership, school-level autonomy, and choice for both staff and families are necessary to support high school redesign at scale. One appendix is included: Impediments to Coherency. Endnotes are also included.

In summer of 2014, two groups of scholars and policy experts met separately to rethink educational accountability. These groups came from what most would consider different "camps" on school reform--one focused on transforming teaching for "deeper learning" and the other focused on choice as a means for leveraging school improvement. However, both were motivated by concern that accountability as enacted under No Child Left Behind had begun to create a strait jacket for schools that was undermining the goals of improvement and equity. At the same time, both groups felt it important to maintain the law's goals of focusing the nation on raising achievement for all children and closing the achievement gap. Both believed the federal government still must play a role in ensuring that states and localities work seriously and effectively to improve options for children at risk. The papers resulting from these separate sets of discussions agreed on many important points, including that: (1) Parents and the public need to know whether children are learning what they need to graduate high school, enter and complete four-year college, or get a rewarding, career-ladder job; (2) Student test scores can provide valuable information, but they should be used in combination with other valid evidence of school effectiveness and student progress (e.g., course completion, progress toward graduation, and more); (3) Assessment of schools should focus on meaningful learning, not just on what is easiest to test. Measures should be tightly linked to the knowledge and skills needed for college and career readiness, including students' abilities to learn and solve problems independently, and apply knowledge; (4) Because a student's level and pace of learning in any one year depend in part on what was learned previously and on the efforts of many professionals working together, the consequences of high and low performance should attach to whole schools, rather than to individual educators; (5) School leaders must have sufficient authority, flexibility, and resources to lead their schools and must take affirmative responsibility for fostering school-wide collaboration aimed at continuous improvement in teaching and learning; and (6) States and school districts must have and exercise multiple options when children learn at low rates that threaten their adult opportunities, including remedying resource shortfalls, supporting teacher and leader improvement, changing school staffing, redesigning or replacing chronically ineffective schools, assigning schools to new managers, and allowing families to choose other school options. This paper shows that these agreements have important implications for the design of accountability systems at the local, state, and federal levels, particularly: (1) The need for evidence, judgment, and action, used in combination to ensure that all children learn effectively and that schools continuously improve; (2) The importance both of testing with high-quality instruments used appropriately, and of considering multiple sources of evidence in judging student, educator, or school performance; (3) The need for sophisticated judgment systems that put data in context and weigh and balance evidence to determine constructive actions; (4) The need for a clear and sensible delineation of the roles of different levels of government; and (5) The need for continued capacity building and experimentation with approaches to accountability. This paper ends with five implications for the reauthorization of the "Elementary and Secondary Education Act" (ESEA).

The lack of productivity of school systems stems from a number of reasons, including the way in which schools are governed. The author explains in this paper that policies from on high often work against campuses being more productive. His list includes state policies that stop districts from hiring experts to teach subjects that other educators aren't prepared to teach. As with the other papers in this series, Hill explains how to change the bias against productivity. This paper ends with definite recommendations about how new governance arrangements can promote productivity.iii Many of these ideas are already present, in at least rudimentary form, in leading school districts including New York City, New Orleans, and Denver. These are pursuing a "portfolio strategy" of continuous improvement.iv However, districts following this strategy are exceptions to the norm in K-12 public education. This paper will show how, in the vast majority of localities, current governance arrangements encourage little effort on behalf of productivity. It will also lay out preconditions for productivity, which will establish premises for a proposed new governance system. [A list of resources is included.]

This brief outlines how new K-12 public education governance proposals--relinquishment, smart districts, and the urban school system of the future--are complements, not alternatives, to the portfolio strategy. The portfolio strategy defines the role of government, or how it can steer in public education; the other proposals show how, once government's role is redefined, independent organizations will develop capacity to row (provide schools, assist schools, develop teacher skills, etc.). The portfolio strategy needs mechanisms for operating and improving schools, such as those provided by the other reforms. The other reforms, reciprocally, depend on the portfolio strategy to provide preconditions that they cannot create by themselves. (Contains 2 tables and 8 footnotes.)

America's system for financing K-12 education is not neutral about innovation and the use of new technologies. Indeed, that system is stacked against them. To remedy this, our education-funding system needs to shift dramatically. Instead of today's model--which rigidly funds programs, staff positions, and administrative structures, instead of schools and students--we need an approach in which funding follows the student. At present, America's charter school finance structure provides the best prototype, but even it does not go far enough. An appropriate school-finance system must also be able to defend ineffective schools and provide space and incentives for online providers to bring their products to the marketplace. (Contains 1 table and 13 endnotes.)