They write that, “inflation outpaced year-over-year wage gains in May for the second month in a row. Inflation-adjusted hourly earnings declined 0.7% on the year in May after dropping 0.3% in April… That means households’ purchasing power isn’t keeping up with increases in the cost of things like rent, groceries and gasoline.”

That’s bad news for lots of workers, but it can be particularly painful for teachers. Unlike many private-sector workers, teachers often work under multi-year contracts that lock in salaries well before anyone knows what inflation will be. That can leave them vulnerable to sudden shocks.

Over the long, long-term, the average teacher salary has mostly kept up with inflation, but no more than that. And teacher salaries tend to lag behind inflation increases. Once inflation comes down, teacher salaries have a chance to catch up.

You can see this in the chart below. Using BLS data that also came out this week, I graphed the change in average teacher salaries versus inflation over the last 10 years. Starting from left to right, you can see that teacher salaries were not growing very fast in 2016 and 2017. But then the “Red for Ed” movement started winning larger salary increases in 2018 and 2019, and those kicked in in 2019 and 2020.

And we all remember what happened next. In the wake of COVID and federal stimulus checks, inflation exploded in 2021-2022, and teacher salaries could not keep up.

As inflation came back down though, teacher salaries were once again rising faster than inflation for the second half of 2023, all of 2024, and most of 2025.

My graph only runs through March of this year, and inflation has ticked up noticeably since then thanks to the war with Iran and the rise in gasoline price.

The good news is that teacher salaries have historically caught up once inflation stabilizes. The bad news is that when inflation rises suddenly, teachers often spend months or even years absorbing the hit before salary schedules have a chance to adjust.

Reading List

Aldeman: High school grade inflation lowers graduation rates, college attainment & future income

Lauren Wagner: How This Oklahoma School Gets Kids Reading at Grade Level

My quick take: Some reasonably good news, especially for 9-year-olds and the lowest-performing students. I’ll have more to say on that soon…

Share

In the meantime, this release updated some important survey data that provides context about how students experience schools. If schools want students to learn more, they're swimming against these powerful currents.

1. Fewer kids are reading for fun

Books continue to lose the battle for attention, for adults and for kids. This week’s data showed that we reached new lows in the percentage of 9-year-olds who read for fun, while the percentage of 13-year-olds reading in their free time held steady.

Why does this matter? Schools can teach reading, but they can't make students choose books in their free time. And there’s research suggesting that books — even children’s books — use more distinct words than the ones that come up in spoken conversations. The more kids read, and the wider variety of books they encounter, the larger their vocabulary is likely to become. And the bigger their vocabulary, the easier it will be for them to access and learn from new material.

2. More kids have no homework

Last month I shared data showing that more kids reported having zero homework. The new results extended that out to 2025, and we saw another big jump. When asked, “How much time did you spend on homework yesterday?” 37% of 9-year-olds and 40% of 13-year-olds said “none.” These figures are at all-time highs since NCES began collecting the data in the 1980s.

Why does homework matter? Because it creates additional opportunities for learning. It’s time for kids to practice the skills they’re learning in school, or to do extra reading they don’t have time to do at school.

Now, the research on homework is mixed, and it’s not always the case that more is better. But there’s some evidence that a small amount of homework that specifically reinforces what kids are learning in school can produce learning gains. It can also help students form productive habits and routines.

3. The rise and fall of 8th grade Algebra

For EduProgress.org, I wrote last year about the rise and fall of 8th grade Algebra. Throughout all of the 1990s and 2000s, the percentage of 8th graders taking Algebra rose steadily.

And then, it peaked and began to fall. Since 2012, the percentage of 8th graders taking Algebra has fallen from 34 to 23%.

Is this good or bad? Well, that depends. My takeaway from the research is that advanced opportunities are very helpful for students who are ready for them. But it can be harmful to accelerate students who are not ready or to just relabel courses without also changing the content students receive.

The trick, then, is to open doors of opportunity for students who are ready to succeed while giving other students more time to get there. That’s why I support automatic enrollment policies.

Whatever the motivation, fewer students today are taking Algebra by 8th grade than they were a decade ago. That’s not a good direction, and, in my view, schools should find ways to identify students who are ready for acceleration opportunities and then give those students a chance to succeed.

None of these trends are determinative on their own. Schools can still help students learn more, read more, and take on challenging coursework. But it's important to recognize the environment educators are operating in. If students are reading less for pleasure, spending less time on homework, and enrolling in fewer advanced classes in middle school, schools will have to work even harder to produce stronger academic outcomes.

Reading List

Aldeman: Oklahoma has a strong charter school sector

New NBER study: The diffusion of the iPhone reduced birth rates

Alex Tabarrok: The Nationalization of American Science

: Tough Times for an Education Budget Hawk

: Obvious, Intuitive, Seductive, and Wrong: Why Education’s “Instructional Illusions” Feel Right

Roland Fryer: “The classic summer job has been disappearing for nearly half a century”

Social Security Trustees: Unless Congress shores up the retirement program, the depletion of reserves would trigger a 22% reduction in benefits in late 2032

Competency-based education is the most promising alternative. Under this model, students only advance when they’ve mastered the material, not when the clock runs out. The logic is intuitive and the motivation is in the right place. But in practice, CBE has largely been confined to the margins, in things like credit recovery or alternative programs, where it often functions as a faster path to a passing grade or a credential rather than a more rigorous one to actual learning. Too often, the practical effect is to accelerate students through material quickly rather than ensure they have learned it deeply.

Moreover, the theory behind competency-based education doesn’t account for how students actually behave. Left to manage their own pace, most students won’t distribute their effort wisely. They’ll defer, delay, and then scramble. In my experience, teenagers are not exactly strong in the planning department, and without external structure, even motivated students will treat a flexible timeline as permission to procrastinate. A system that relies on students to self-regulate their way to mastery will mostly produce last-minute cramming with a competency label stamped on it.

A well-designed competency-based system can get around this issue. It would have students retrieve, apply, and revisit knowledge continuously along the way. By the time students make their way through these types of gateways checks, any endpoint assessment would become a confirmation of learning that’s already happened, not a high-stakes gamble on whether cramming worked.

This structure builds on one of the most replicated findings in learning research. Frequent, low-stakes quizzes and check-ins don’t just measure learning; they help produce it. If those retrieval opportunities are spaced out over time, the benefits will compound into deeper learning. Competency-based models could help students build that type of durable knowledge, but only if they include frequent opportunities to monitor progress along the way.

Reading List

Bruno Manno: AI reinforces the case for strong disciplinary knowledge

: When teachers ditch “productive struggle” for evidence, student performance improves

: Learning Pays More Than Schooling

: Gratitude for (Virginia’s) standardized tests

Pamela Snow: “education has a fraught and not very pretty history when it comes to generating, critiquing, and applying rigorous evidence”

Kerry McDonald: The College Credit Opportunity Few People Know About

Checker Finn is feeling optimistic

3. Redesign schooling so active learning, including project-based, experiential and career-connected learning, is the norm across all grade levels. That means redesigning accountability as well.

4. Ensure students have a solid foundation in literacy, numeracy and civic engagement.

These ideas may sound complementary, but they’re actually in tension with one another. And in the age of AI, schools should prioritize the latter.

For decades, progressive education reformers like Weingarten have argued that schools spend too much time on facts and “rote” memorization and not enough on projects, experiences, and real-world applications. The theory was that, as information became cheap and widely available, students didn’t need to memorize things anymore because they could always look them up.

Artificial intelligence has taken that logic even further. Students can now ask a chatbot to explain a concept, summarize a book, or draft an essay in seconds.

But that’s precisely why foundational knowledge has become more important, not less.

at Chalkbeat sat in on AFT’s AI teacher training, and it suffers from this same disconnect. Here’s the key excerpt from his piece for Chalkbeat:

I sat in on this training, and many teachers I spoke with said they appreciated its message and strategies. But one important idea was largely missing: that critical thinking is directly connected to the content in math, history, and science classes. This is an essential reality often absent from discussions about how schools should respond to the spread of generative AI.

Indeed, the common refrain that teachers should focus on abstract critical thinking skills, disconnected from content, risks de-emphasizing the very thing — fluency with a broad set of facts — that supports critical thinking.

“Domain knowledge is a crucial driver of thinking skill,” wrote University of Virginia cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham in 2020 for the American Educator, a publication of the American Federation of Teachers. “Critical thinking for open-ended problems is enabled by extensive stores of knowledge.”

Project-based learning can be valuable when students already possess a strong foundation of knowledge and skills. Too often, however, schools treat projects as a substitute for content rather than an opportunity to apply content. The result in some cases is that students spend lots of time doing activities without really learning very much.

The students who will benefit most from AI won’t be the ones who know the least. It will be the ones who know enough to ask good questions, evaluate the answers, and then proceed to build on what they learn.

Reading List

Brian Bannon: America is facing a book-reading crisis

: How schools can “re-center” the book

: Can AI bring objectivity to Project-Based Learning?

:

Early Developments

Early childhood is at an inflection point

Following early childhood policy over the last six years has been a lot like riding roller coaster: The start of the COVID-19 pandemic hit early childhood programs hard, forcing many to close. Even though child care providers reopened much sooner than public schools in many cities and states, they struggled with COVID safety protocols, reduced enrollmen…

Read more

12 days ago · Sara Mead

A whopping 81% of Asian high school graduates immediately enrolled in a four-year college or university. “Immediate” in this case is defined as students who graduated at any point in the first nine months of 2024 and were enrolled in any form of postsecondary institution by October of the same year.

There were also notable gaps by gender. 69 percent of female high school completers immediately enrolled in college compared to 55 percent of males.

Overall, the immediate college-going rate in 2024 was 63 percent, which was down from the 68% in 2014 but not much changed from 2023.

Reading List

Jill Barshay: Inside the latest global research on school cellphone bans

Kunjan Narechania: States are doing both too much and too little on school improvement

The Right to Read Project: “I Was Certified to Teach But Not Prepared To”

University of California math professors: Reinstate the ACT/ SAT requirement for STEM majors

: Ohio 7th graders who have demonstrated readiness deserve advanced math opportunities

A large and growing body of research in cognitive science can give us a clearer picture of what’s happening here and how to learn better. Those findings have real, practical implications for teachers, parents, and coaches.

The Science of Learning report from Deans for Impact unpacks what cognitive science researchers have learned about learning and development. The report was originally written in partnership with cognitive and educational psychologists and is aimed primarily at teacher candidates and early-career educators. Now in its second edition, it was updated this month to reflect the most current research. It also flags common mistakes teachers make when trying to apply the science in practice.

Here are nine of my takeaways from the report.

1. Prior knowledge is the foundation of all new learning

Students don’t absorb new information in a vacuum — they connect it to what they already know. A well-sequenced, knowledge-rich curriculum is essential.

Moreover, teachers shouldn’t assume that just because a student has prior knowledge that they’ll know how to use it. Teachers may need to activate that knowledge through questions, retrieval practice, or analogies.

2. Your brain has limits

The brain can only consciously process so much at one time. When students are overwhelmed with new information, or asked to perform tasks that are cognitively too demanding, learning breaks down. This is why it can be valuable to pre-teach vocabulary words before a lesson and why worked examples are valuable for novices. This “working memory” is a practical constraint teachers must work within every day.

Share

3. Practice is good

Practice is essential for long-term learning, in almost every endeavor we face in life, but the type of practice matters as well. The most effective practice is spaced out over time, requires effortful retrieval from memory, and is woven across different problem types rather than blocked by topic.

Asking students to actively retrieve information rather than simply re-read it is one of the most well-supported study strategies. Crucially, this doesn’t have to feel like a test: think-pair-share, teaching a peer, or fill-in-the-blank exercises all count. As the report puts it, retrieval from memory should be “challenging but doable.”

4. Feedback is also good

Good feedback is one of the highest-leverage tools a teacher has, but not all feedback is good feedback. To be effective, the feedback must be specific and clear, focused on the task rather than the person, and oriented toward improvement rather than just grading in-the-moment performance.

5. Learning is hard

This is an unfortunate one, but if learning feels easy, it probably isn’t sticking. The strategies that produce the strongest long-term retention, such as spaced practice, retrieval, and interleaving, tend to feel more difficult and less satisfying. But they work. Students and teachers alike can mistake how easy something is in the moment for durable learning.

6. Skills may not transfer, at least not automatically

A student can’t just be told to “think critically” and apply that to new domains. In fact, knowledge and skills are deeply tied to specific content areas. A student who learns to identify the main idea in a reading passage won’t automatically apply that habit in a science lab.

Teachers can help this transfer process somewhat by helping students make those connections and recognize when a familiar concept applies in a new setting.

7. Self-regulation is a skill that can be taught

We can learn to actively manage our own learning. The report describes this as a cyclical process of planning, monitoring, and self-reflection.

Teachers can cultivate these skills by asking students to track their own progress, discuss strategies for tackling problems, and reflect on what’s working. When students get stuck, teachers should avoid jumping in with a quick answer. Instead, the report suggests asking students “What else can you try?” or “What resources could you use?” to foster independent thinking.

8. Common myths about learning are still surprisingly widespread

Despite decades of research, several popular ideas about learning turn out to be wrong or misleading. Learning styles — the idea that students are visual, auditory, or kinesthetic learners who need information delivered in their preferred mode — are mostly bogus. The left-brain/right-brain distinction is a myth. The belief that memorization is mere “rote” learning and therefore bad is actively harmful. Instead, building strong knowledge in long-term memory actually frees up the brain’s capacity for deeper thinking.

9. Motivation doesn’t have to precede learning

It might be tempting to assume that students need to be motivated before they can learn. But the relationship runs both ways. When people get better at something, motivation tends to follow.

In other words, teachers can build motivation by breaking complex tasks into manageable steps, sequencing content so early success is likely, and making improvement visible. Teachers don’t always have to manufacture student interest before teaching something.

Those are my takeaways. Read the Deans for Impact report for yourself here.

Reading List

Checker Finn: State leaders should opt in to the 12th grade NAEP tests

SRI Education: Connecting Word Reading to Meaning in Early Literacy

: Why we need both more and less technology

: When “Productive Struggle” Becomes “Destructive Frustration”

Subscribe now

So I asked my friend Michelle Lerner, a communications expert with experience at non-profits and school districts, on how she might draft a more encouraging message.

Here’s what she had to say:

It’s great news that Fairfax County Public Schools implemented automatic enrollment in middle school algebra, especially for students who are economically disadvantaged and students of color, those most frequently left out opportunities like these.

But this smart policy is obscured by less-then-clear communications. It’s a common problem. I write this as a parent of a child in another public school district and an inbox full of district emails I’ve had to read multiple times to understand.

It’s possible for districts to both create and implement great policies and to communicate about them effectively, which families want.

Below is a proposed message that would, for one, make automatic enrollment just that: automatic. The original letter clearly signaled the ways a student could opt out, but didn’t clearly explain the benefits.

In the suggested rewrite below I try to explain the value of the accelerated pathway and some level of personalization. A parent will take a school letter far more seriously if it includes some details about their child and, at a minimum, references their name. The proposed draft also adds excitement about high standards. If schools aren’t geeking about math, who will?

Dear [Student First Last Name’s] Family,

Congratulations! Based on [Student First Name]’s success in Advanced Math, [Student First Name] will be enrolled in Algebra 1 Honors next year. This is a high school-level class that moves at an accelerated pace and will be included on [Student First Name]’s high school transcript and GPA.

Completing algebra in middle school is an important milestone to accessing higher-level math and science in high school, which opens doors for students to find their passion in high school and beyond.

At Fairfax County Public Schools, nearly 85 percent of 8th graders take or already have completed Algebra I, helping to meet our goal that every student has access to high-quality academic programming.

We believe [Student First Name] can be successful in Algebra I Honors so no additional steps are needed to enroll. If you want to learn more about Algebra I Honors, you can find more information online. Please also see the email from Fairfax County Public Schools sent on [DATE].

If you have questions, please contact [Student First Name]’s math teacher at EMAIL ADDRESS, where you can alternatively enroll in Prealgebra Honors.

Thank you for helping us live up to our promise of excellence, equity, and opportunity at Fairfax County Public Schools!

[Sign off by Middle School Principal]

Reading List

Aldeman: North Carolina Has An Implementation Plan to Address Math Gaps

Julie O’Connor: New Jersey schools bought fake ‘Blue Ribbon’ awards

Adam Tyner: Why does it take so long to get Oklahoma school test results?

Will Oremus: Homework Is Starting to Look a Lot Like Candy Crush

: The tech-lash wave has not not peaked yet

: The Global Fertility Crisis Is Worse Than You Think

Jonathan Haidt: Pay Attention

Launched in May 2026, the Opportunity Knocks Scholarship will provide $8,000 annually for 500 students displaced by the Philadelphia school closures, to help families enroll in private schools throughout the city.

This is a clever idea. Janine and Jeff Yass are billionaire philanthropists looking to support education entrepreneurism (mainly in the private sector). By offering these scholarships, they’ll help up to 500 Philadelphia students transition out of one of the 17 public schools currently slated for closure and instead attend a private school they couldn’t otherwise afford. These are potentially vulnerable students. School closures are disruptive and kids can easily get off track socially and academically as they get separated from familiar friends and teachers. It’s a smart move all-around on the Yass’ part.

The Philadelphia public school system is not in a financial position to match their offer. After all, that’s why they’re closing schools!

But you know who could? A new scholarship granting organization could eventually do this for public schools. Thanks to the federal tax credit scholarship program that opens up next year, nonprofits could raise money for “transition scholarships” for students affected by school closures.

Now, this could only happen in Pennsylvania if Governor Josh Shapiro saw the opportunity here and decides to opt his state in to the program. But in states that do opt in, students could use stipends like this to pay for navigators or counselors to help them find new (public) schools, get tutoring, or attend summer or after school programs to make it a smooth transition and meet new people.

I’m probably not being creative enough here, but it could be an interesting use case for some entrepreneurial thinking in the public sector.

Reading List

: The bipartisan tax credit scholarship opt-in chorus grows louder

NBER: Breaking the Early Bell: Lessons from the First Statewide Mandate on School Start Times

: It’s Time for Democrats to Stop Fighting the Schools Their Voters Rely On

A recent mini-study looked at what happened after a subset of schools in Newark, New Jersey adopted Khan Academy as a supplemental math tool. Not only did they see strong usage numbers, but students who used it more frequently saw larger gains, and the gains were particularly large for previously low-performing students.

Across three school years, 13 schools in one part of the district offered Khan Academy as a math supplement to roughly 6,700 students. Of those students, 87% of the students qualified for free- or reduced-price lunch, a proxy measure for income. In the last year of the three-year period, 70% of students met the recommended usage of at least 30 hours minutes per week.

That alone is kind of a big deal. There’s plenty of research suggesting that high-quality apps like Khan Academy are helpful, but only for the kids who actually use them regularly. Laurence Holt dubbed this the “5 percent problem” because so few kids actually engage with the tools enough to see results. So the fact that Newark was able to get 70 percent engagement is quite good.

On average, the Khan Academy supplement helped produce small but noticeably positive gains. The returns were also linear, in the sense that kids who spent more time on the app and completed more lessons learned more. This may sound obvious, but it’s a good reminder that engagement really is the holy grail of learning.

But now look at the right side the chart above. When the authors sorted the effects of Khan Academy implementation across performance levels the largest effects, by far, were for the lowest-performing students (NJSLA level 1).

This is an important finding given that achievement scores across the country have fallen so dramatically for the lowest-performing students. In other words, schools and districts have tools available to address one of their biggest challenges. But students have to actually use those tools to see any benefits.

Reading List

Oreopolous et al: In-school supervised EdTech support produces massive learning gains (in India)

K12 Dive: 12 years later, San Francisco USD to offer Algebra I in 8th grade again

CALDER: The Divergent Paths of High- and Low-Achieving Students in Algebra I After the Pandemic

In threatening to hold students back if they haven’t been taught to read properly, states are warning the adults to make sure each child is on track in literacy.

When you start to see third grade retention policies as less of an intervention and more about how they change adult behavior, you can see it show up in the research literature. For example, a study from Michigan — a state where, thanks to various exemptions and remediation efforts, the number of kids who are actually retained is just 0.5% — found positive effects of its third grade reading law even in districts that did not hold any students back. A Florida study found that flagging a child for retention improved the academic outcomes of their younger siblings. One of the study’s authors speculated that, “the high-stakes retention signal for the older siblings might inform parents and educators about the educational needs of the younger sibling and induce them to act.”

If the actual act of retention were the trick, these results should be impossible. As is, they imply that the laws are forcing adults to change their behaviors in ways that boost reading outcomes even for kids who were not retained.

Read the full piece here.

Share

How is your school district doing?

If you’re reading this, you probably know that national achievement scores have declined over the last 10-15 years. I’ve written a lot about those trends.

The researchers behind the Education Recovery Scorecard have a big new report out breaking down the results for individual school district. The national report is here and their “districts on the rise” list is here.

They also partnered with The New York Times to show district-level trends. They could only make national comparisons for schools 40 states, but it’s a lot. (Try this gift link to look up your district.)

I found a few interesting things, starting with my home district of Fairfax County, VA. Virginia’s math scores weren’t comparable, but reading scores were available, and they do not look pretty. The district’s reading scores fell by 1 full grade level from 2015 to 2025. Woof.

Next I looked up West Des Moines, Iowa, the wealthy (for Iowa) suburb where I grew up. Like Fairfax County, a lot of people move there “for the schools.” And yet, its students fell by 0.9 grade levels in reading and 1.3 grade levels in math.

Across the country, where data were available, 83 percent of school districts suffered declines in reading. In math, 70 percent of districts suffered declines.

But not in Steubenville, Ohio, a district that Emily Hanford and I have both profiled in recent years. Its students gained 1.4 grade levels in reading and 1.2 grade levels in math.

Reading List

Kevin Mahnken: Anatomy of a ‘Learning Recession’: Academic Losses Began in 2013, Report Finds

Melissa Manno: More than 130 New York School Districts Are Using Discredited Reading Curricula

: California Should Do More to Build a Coherent Curriculum Policy

Greg Toppo: Florida Cellphone Ban Promotes Academic Gains … After a Year or So

This is a big deal. These rates are far above the national average.

The context is also important here. I wouldn’t be applauding this move if the district was merely changing the name of its math classes. An “Algebra” class should mean the same thing everywhere. But because the state of Virginia requires all students enrolled in Algebra to take the same end-of-course exam, we can be confident that there’s a backstop on quality.

And thanks to those state tests, we have a good idea of how students are doing. Last year, 31,960 students across the Commonwealth took Algebra I as 8th graders, and 91.9% of them passed the end-of-course test. That’s pretty good!

But some students took it even earlier, and they did even better. 12,245 students took the same test as 7th graders, and 98.9% of those students passed. A select group of students—143—actually took it as 6th graders. 100 percent of those students passed.

Now, there’s almost certainly some selection effects here. But these high pass rates suggest that districts across Virginia may be just a little too choosy about which students get access to advanced math classes. After seeing data like this, both the state department of education and the state legislature pushed districts to open more advanced math opportunities to more students. (Disclosure: I helped implement the former and cheered on the latter.)

The research suggests that advanced math courses are good for kids, particularly girls and students of color who otherwise might not get those opportunities. But acceleration could also be harmful, if students are pushed too far above their skill set. The trick, then, is to open doors of opportunity for students who are ready to succeed while giving other students more time to get there.

But which students should be accelerated?

This question hit home over the last week. My own child received news that they were eligible for acceleration. A neighbor kid did as well, and the parents asked me to help them think through their options.

Fairfax is practicing automatic enrollment with the option for parents to opt out. That’s good. But are they communicating it well? Here’s the email I received (with personal details removed):

Dear Parent or Guardian,

We are reaching out to families of rising […] students who are currently enrolled in Advanced Math...

You should have recently received communication from Fairfax County Public Schools indicating that, based on your child’s current math placement, they will be automatically enrolled in Algebra 1 Honors... This course is a high school-level class that moves at an accelerated pace and will be included on your child’s high school transcript and GPA.

Families have the option to opt out of Algebra 1 Honors. If you choose to do so, your child will be placed in Pre-Algebra Honors, which continues to provide a strong and rigorous math foundation while allowing for a more measured pace.

As you consider this decision, we encourage you to reflect on your child’s academic history, including assessment data, classroom performance, and their readiness for the pace and expectations of an honors-level high school course. This decision should also align with your child’s long-term academic goals and interest in advanced mathematics coursework.

Next Steps:

• Please log into Parent Digital Consent (PDC) to confirm your child’s enrollment or to opt them out of Algebra 1 Honors.

• We are also providing this Google Form as an alternative option to define your student’s math enrollment.

• We kindly ask that families submit any opt-out requests by […].

Please note that families will still have an opportunity to reconsider placement after students have taken the Math SOL and received their scores.

Is this a good message to parents? Having followed this policy professionally, I automatically accepted it and didn’t think anything of it. But my neighbors, whose child received a similar offer, was far more skeptical and had a lot more questions. Why does it matter whether a child takes Algebra in 6th, 7th, 8th, or 9th grade? And if they take Algebra earlier, won’t they eventually run out of math classes to take in high school? Isn’t this too much pressure to put on a child?

These questions get at a larger debate around academic acceleration. Critics worry about stress, burnout, and pushing students too quickly. Advocates argue that schools have historically erred in the opposite direction: keeping too many capable students out of advanced coursework—especially girls and students of color—because access depended on subjective recommendations rather than objective indicators.

To get another perspective, I reached out to Pamela Hobart who runs the Above Grade Level Substack. She argued that Fairfax’s automatic enrollment policy is important precisely because it reduces those barriers. Here’s what she had to say:

Academic acceleration has been established as the gold-standard, research-backed intervention for high-aptitude students since at least the publication of the Templeton report “A Nation Deceived: How Schools Hold Back America’s Brightest Students” in 2004. Yet schools and individual teachers often resist acceleration for some well-qualified candidates - even where the course offerings already exist.

Subjective acceleration choices, like those depending strictly on teacher recommendation, leave too much room for bias and unchecked discretion. Because it is much more noticeable when a student is mistakenly moved up a level rather than quietly kept behind, and because few parents know to challenge the school’s placements, the default recommendation-based system does not correct itself over time.

Automatic, opt-out acceleration policies can serve as an important check on school and teacher anti-acceleration biases. Ideally, automatic enrollment policies set a standardized test-based benchmark for placement in an accelerated track (usually math). Discretion is largely removed from the equation (in a good way) - except for those few parents who feel strongly enough about the placement to opt their students out of the accelerated enrollment. Virginia, where Chad lives, has recently adopted such a policy (HB2868) as has Texas, where I live (SB2124).

Automatic enrollment in advanced math is a particularly promising intervention due to the observed discrepancy between number of students working above grade level in reading vs. in math. Many bright students are able to race ahead in reading skills due to organic exposure to harder content outside of school. But, unless you come from the kind of family who invests in tutoring, it is less common to encounter advanced math unless that happens at regular school.

Staying one year behind in math when you could have moved ahead won’t literally ruin your life, but it will slow it down. Earlier math achievement leads to an earlier, longer career with more time for productivity and further learning. In last year’s automatic enrollment exposé, The Algebra Gatekeepers, education researchers Janet Johnson and John Wittle point out that the kids who don’t take Algebra 1 by 8th grade rarely catch up (top scorers who took 8th-grade algebra were 3x to 55x more likely to take chemistry and physics than equally capable peers who waited).

If someone offered tutoring that promised a 3x to 55x enhanced chance of giving students a STEM career, parents would be lining up to buy it! But when it’s regular school doing something a tiny bit unusual, skepticism becomes the default response.

Instead of advertising the benefits of accelerated math, Fairfax County invites parents to focus on the risk to their students’ GPA. They insist that the less-accelerated choice moves at a “measured” pace, subtly implying that the faster track must be frantic.

Parents are encouraged to “reflect” upon the accelerated placement, but most of them don’t have enough information or perspective on this choice in order to improve upon the basic screening the school has already conducted. We have ample evidence that responsibly-accelerated students do keep pace with older peers in the next class up. Waiting is a waste.

Viewed optimistically, Virginia HB2868 is a big step in the right direction away from capricious, stereotype-based math placements. Viewed cynically, the Fairfax County memo jeopardizes the spirit of HB2868 by sneakily reframing students’ already-earned advanced placements as a risky bet requiring sophisticated discernment.

My verdict: Kudos to Fairfax County (and Virginia state policymakers). They’re clearly doing something right here, but they may still have some work to do to convince more parents that this is a good thing.

Reading List

: How Many Students Are Above Grade Level?

NWEA: A typical teacher must deal with academically diverse classrooms

Patrick O’Donnell: Indianapolis Already Leads on Charters. Now It’s Going Even Further

: California Is Spending Billions, Learning Nothing

: Undergraduates are flocking towards the most-AI-exposed degrees

: Let Moms Have Waymo

Before jumping in to new content today, don’t forget to join me at 11am ET this morning to talk about the “Mississippi Marathon” and what other states can learn from it. You can register for the conversation here.

Did your kids have any homework last night?

When asked on a set of longitudinal surveys from the National Center for Education Statistics, slightly more than one-third of all 9- and 13-year-olds reported they had no homework.

There are a few things to note about the long-term trends. One is that the percentage of 9-year-olds reporting they had no homework has followed a U-shaped trajectory. In 1984, 35% of students at that age reported having no homework, but those numbers had fallen in half by 2008. That year, 82% of 9-year-olds reported having some homework, with the vast majority reporting less than one hour of work.

As math expert Tom Loveless has noted, the trends started to reverse in 2008. Since then, the percentage of 9-year-olds saying they had no homework surged from 18 to 34%. The percentage reporting they had more than two hours declined by 1 point (5 to 4%), the percentage with 1-2 hours declined 3 points (12 to 9%), and those with less than an hour of work declined 14 points (60 to 46%). We also hit a new high in terms of kids who said they had homework but didn’t do it (7%, up from 5).

That’s for younger kids. 13-year-olds have not followed the same rollercoaster pattern, but they are also doing less homework today than their older siblings and parents did in the past. As of the latest data, nearly two out of every five 13-year-olds reported having no homework.

What should we make of these trends?

One obvious place to start might be asking why homework levels have changed so dramatically over the last 15-20 years. The data don’t tell us, unfortunately, but my suspicion is that it may be tied to broader cultural trends. States and school districts have cut back on accountability in a number of ways, from weakening graduation standards and easing back on school and district accountability requirements to limiting in-school suspensions and expulsions. Some advocates have argued that homework is inequitable because not all kids have the same at-home supports or responsibilities.

Share

However, it’s hard to ignore the comparison between homework levels and achievement scores. As homework expectations ramped up throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, math achievement scores rose. Those increases were broadly shared across the performance spectrum—low achievers got better and so did higher achieving students.

But as homework demands started to drop off, so did student achievement scores. While fewer students were being given homework, the scores for the lowest achievers fell particularly fast.

Now, it’s possible these trends are merely coincidental. After all, the research on homework is mixed, and it’s not always the case that more is better. But there’s some evidence that a small amount of homework that specifically reinforces what kids are learning in school can produce learning gains. It may also lead to better habit formation and responsibility.

The homework of today doesn’t necessarily need to look like it did in the past. For example, the ASSISTments program is a digital platform that lets teachers assign students math problems to work on at home, and it has built-in supports alongside immediate feedback and grading. Research studies have found it can lead to significant gains.

Students would also benefit from more time on learning platforms like Khan Academy, Zearn, or DuoLingo. If the holy grail to learning is the amount of time students spend engaged, homework represents an opportunity for teachers to ask kids to squeeze in just a bit more practice time.

Reading List

and Ben Austin: 4 ways get schools back on track and working for families.

: “If leaders listened more carefully, they would hear a remarkably consistent request from parents: stop turning schools into symbols and start ensuring they deliver what parents, voters, and taxpayers are clearly asking for.”

Doug Lederman: Why MOOCs didn’t work

: How to help your child improve their writing

: School data goes stale after Trump cuts Education Department research arm

That finding comes from a new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. They conducted a nationally representative survey of 1,244 public school K–3 teachers and found that that the winds are shifting on reading instruction. At least 40 states have enacted science of reading laws. Professional development programs like LETRS have reached a third of the nation’s K–3 teachers. And as the Fordham survey makes clear, teachers who have gone through these types of training know more and teach better.

But the report also tells a harder story, about what’s left to do. Because even as progress spreads, it isn’t reaching everyone equally. And the students most likely to be left behind are those who can least afford it.

Four important challenges remain.

Share

Challenge 1: Teacher preparation programs are still failing new teachers

Here’s a finding that should be alarming to anyone involved in training the next generation of educators: teachers who reported learning the most from their preservice college and university training programs scored lower on the science of reading knowledge quiz than teachers who relied on any other source of learning.

Let me say that again. The more a teacher relied on what they learned in their teacher preparation program, the less they knew about evidence-based reading instruction.

Only 2 percent of teachers said their preservice program was where they learned the most about effective reading practices. In contrast, 33 percent said they learned the most on the job, and 21 percent credited in-service professional development. For many teachers, college essentially taught them nothing useful. In some cases, that “preparation” may have actively pointed them toward discredited practices like three-cueing.

This is a fundamental bottleneck. States won’t be able to fix K–3 reading instruction at scale if their colleges of education keep sending new teachers into classrooms with an incomplete or outright misleading foundation. The Fordham report found that in states where licensure exams are aligned with the science of reading, teachers demonstrate meaningfully better knowledge.

Challenge 2: High-poverty kids are at greatest risk

Despite some signs of progress, the survey revealed a troubling gap: teachers in high-poverty schools are, on average, less informed about and committed to reading science than their colleagues in more affluent settings.

The gap is especially pronounced around phonics. Among teachers in high-poverty settings, 43 percent failed to express a clear preference for phonics over cueing, compared to 25 percent in low-poverty schools. That means nearly half of teachers in the schools that serve the most vulnerable children are ambivalent about the single most evidence-supported element of early literacy instruction.

Children who come from under-resourced homes depend on their teachers more than children who have compensating resources at home such as books, educated parents, and other enriching experiences that build background knowledge. When the reading instruction in high-poverty schools is weaker, the children who need the most get the least.

Challenge 3: Teachers still misunderstand reading comprehension

When teachers were asked to choose between two statements about reading comprehension, 58 percent chose the wrong one. They believed that reading comprehension is “a set of generalizable skills (like finding the main idea and making inferences) that can be applied to most texts.” Only 42 percent correctly identified that reading comprehension depends primarily on “what students already know about the topic and the specific vocabulary used in a text.”

This matters enormously. Elementary reading instruction has been dominated by comprehension strategies: teaching children to summarize, make inferences, identify the main idea, visualize, and so on. These strategies feel intuitive — surely if you practice finding the main idea enough, you’ll get better at it? But the research tells a different story. These generic comprehension strategies have very little transferable effect. What actually drives comprehension is knowledge. A child who knows a lot about the American Revolution will understand a passage about Paul Revere far better than a child who was drilled in comprehension “strategies” but who knows nothing about history.

This insight is why history, science, and the arts aren’t luxuries to be cut when reading scores are low — they’re the very substance that makes reading comprehension possible. When children learn about the water cycle, medieval castles, and the civil rights movement, they’re building the cognitive raw material that will make them better readers for life.

The good news: teachers did better when they were asked more specific questions, like the best way to build vocabulary. Seventy percent correctly identified embedding vocabulary instruction in content-rich nonfiction texts as the most effective approach. So the instinct is there. What’s needed is a deeper understanding of the full architecture of what skilled reading actually is.

Challenge 4: The culture around reading instruction is a work in progress

Perhaps the most human element of the Fordham report is what teachers say in their own words. Many are converts, enthusiastic ones:

“LETRS changed the way I teach. I am thankful to work in a district and state that is taking the science of reading seriously.”

“We’ve actually started teaching students HOW to decode and read. Before, we used the cueing system (teaching them to guess) and expected students to read novels after 15 minutes of modeling reading, and they couldn’t decode or understand what they were looking at.”

But others are ambivalent, even resistant:

“I learned from a balanced literacy era. I believe asking yourself ‘Did that make sense?’ is important while reading. I think the pendulum swings too far to one side and we need balance. I also think students need exposure to leveled or authentic text instead of constantly reading decodable texts.”

These responses are honest and human. Teachers who spent years building expertise in one approach, and who genuinely believed they were helping children, are being asked to fundamentally reimagine what good reading instruction looks like. That’s not easy. Professional identity is real, and pedagogical habits are deeply ingrained.

And yet the data are unambiguous: teachers who understand the science of reading produce better outcomes for students. The answer to “let us teach” is: yes, absolutely, but let’s make sure that students are learning to read.

The science of reading movement has momentum right now, but cultural change is notoriously slow. The worst outcome would be to declare victory prematurely and let that momentum dissipate before it’s had time to fully reshape how students are taught to read.

Want to talk more about this?

On Friday morning I’ll be moderating a conversation on “Running the Mississippi Marathon” about how it transformed reading outcomes. I’ll be joined by Judge Gray Tollison, former chair of the Mississippi Senate Education Committee, and Rachel Canter, the Director of Education Policy at the Progressive Policy Institute and founder of Mississippi First.

You can RSVP for the 11 a.m. Eastern livestream right here.

Reading List

Rachel Canter: States Are Learning the Wrong Lesson from the ‘Mississippi Miracle’

: Has the Science of Reading really won?

: The Chromebook-as-baby-sitter problem and the edtech abstinence movement

Schools are starting to get more pushback like this—the WSJ had a story recently about YouTube specifically—and policymakers in some states and districts are responding with age-based restrictions on screens and technology.

But I find the technology debate terribly imprecise. Some random YouTube videos are less educational than Mark Rober’s science explanations. Scrolling TikTok or playing Minecraft are less educational than doing Khan Academy math lessons.

In other words, the problem isn’t “screens” in the abstract—it’s what’s on them, how they’re used, and for how long. These distinctions are important for parents evaluating what’s going on in their kids’ schools, for teachers to be thoughtful about what’s happening in their classrooms, and for policymakers to think about how to craft rules carefully.

Subscribe now

Some people would love to have a single bogeyman they can point to for why American student achievements scores have fallen over the last 10-15 years. And “technology” seems to fit the bill. The timing roughly lines up, and there is an obvious logical case to be made about the harms of technology.

But it’s a complicated story, and there are important exceptions. So I’m going to try to make the “it’s the screens, stupid” argument in order to arrive at a more nuanced understanding.

Duh. It’s the screens, stupid.

Like the mom worried about her son’s mindless YouTube consumption, we can all understand why screens are harmful. Whatever your particular technological drug of choice, you’ve probably experienced the feeling of losing track of time. In part we’ve done this to ourselves by becoming heavy users of email and text chats and consuming digital rather than physical entertainment.

The tech companies have played a role here too. They’ve engineered their algorithms to suck us in and keep us on their sites/ in their apps. The longer we’re “engaged” on their platforms, the more ads they can sell.

Schools have played a role here, too, as they bought Chromebooks and iPads and stopped buying physical textbooks and novels.

All of this is bad for our attention spans. And it’s no coincidence that as people have spent more time on digital devices and less time with books, reading scores have gone down (even for adults). Indeed, has lined up the timing of the widescale adoption of technology in schools and noted that it’s relatively close to when reading and math scores started to declines.

The Digital Delusion

When Correlation Repeats Across 50 States: The NAEP Evidence Behind My Senate Testimony

In 1984, several U.S. states introduced mandatory seatbelt laws. Almost immediately, those states reported significant declines in traffic deaths and serious injuries - yet many observers dismissed these trends as coincidence…

Read more

3 months ago · 75 likes · 20 comments · Jared Cooney Horvath

However, I don’t think we should be satisfied with fuzzy correlations like this. In fact, if you look closely at Dr. Cooney Horvath’s graphs, you can see that achievement scores had already started to plateau before what he calls the “digital inflection” point. It’s hard to blame technology for a trend that started beforehand.

It’s Not (Just) the Screens

There are real problems with the simple “it’s the technology” explanation for America’s achievement declines. Just to pick a convenient example from the top of the alphabet, consider Alabama. Cooney Horvath codes 2018 as the year that Alabama passed its “digital inflection” point, “corresponding to the first operational period in which statewide accountability assessments were administered through fully computer-based platforms as the default testing mode.”

And yet, look at Alabama’s 4th grade math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Its scores dipped slightly from 2017 to 2019, but they stabilized and then rose from 2022 to 2024. If technology were the main driver, we’d expect consistent declines after adoption.

You might accuse me of cherrypicking here. But it’s easy to find other counter-examples. Mississippi has bucked the national trends, as have the Department of Defense (DoDEA) schools. Internationally, England’s math scores have risen while the U.S. scores fell.

The harms of technology also don’t seem to be playing out for all students equally. For example, why have higher-performing students mostly been immune to the national trends? I suppose I could weave a compelling story that high-performing students are also the best at avoiding digital distractions—and in fact are the most likely to benefit from digital tools—but that’s not how it’s been sold by the media.

Don’t overthink it

Ultimately, the explanations behind America’s achievement declines are complicated and multi-faceted, and there’s no one right answer. Screens and technology may be part of that story, but they can’t explain everything that’s going on. Rather than going all-in on tech or fully back to the paper era, we should evaluate each use case and ask a simple question: is this helping students learn, or not?

Reading List

Lindsay Dworkin: How technology is used matters more than how much it is used

Jessica Baghian: Don’t Ban EdTech. Do This Instead.

Dana Goldstein: Mixed results on school cell phone bans

: What If Ed Tech Peaked 200 Years Ago?

And what is all the debt buying? It’s not to invest in the future. As I wrote last month, federal spending is mostly going toward retirees rather than children and young adults. And a big portion is going to pay down debt. In fact, about one in every seven dollars that the federal government spends now goes toward interest on the federal debt. So even if policymakers wanted to spend more money on children and families, we couldn’t afford it without making some trade-offs in other places.

Regardless, we’re expecting the children of today to pay off all this debt when they become working adults.

Reading List

Freakonomics: Ten Myths About the U.S. Tax System

: What She’s Doing at Home to Strengthen Her 2nd Grader’s Reading Skills

Joanne Jacobs: Focus on teaching kids to read, not fixing root causes

Lacey Beasley: After a cell phone ban, Dallas students are checking out a lot more books

Chalkbeat: Philadelphia Board of Education approves 17 school closures

Nora Gordon: Budget-makers often have no control over staffing levels or salary amounts

: “Teachers’ work is important and should be well-compensated, but that means paying to retain the people who are good at it, not just arbitrarily paying more for whoever happens to have been in the job longest.”

This is revenues, not expenditures. And it doesn’t back out current expenditures versus debt service. Still, it’s a big, symbolic figure.

The Edunomics Lab team has more about how we got here and how the numbers vary across the states.

One more thing I’ll note: Benefit costs, including health care and retirement costs, now add up to $201.7 billion a year. That means benefits are eating up more than 30% of what public schools spend on annual personnel costs. I don’t think this is a great use of resources, and teachers would be much better off if they got more of their compensation in the form of salaries rather than in-kind benefits.

Reading List

Sarah Schwartz: Are high school graduates ready for college math?

Good Reason Houston: More students are meeting college- and career-ready benchmarks through lower-rigor pathways

Jo Napolitano: Maryland District Sheds Remedial High School Math Courses, Sees Students Soar

Erica Meltzer: Curriculum misalignment may cause students to become “intervention lifers”

Sarah Carr: Early intervention services including occupational, physical and speech therapies can improve children’s test scores, even years down the road

Emily Tate Sullivan: Kids in State-Funded Preschools Hit Record High

Kearney and Levine: “The decline in fertility is… broad-based, with strikingly similar trends across women with and without a college degree.”

: If America Is So Rich, Why Are Americans So Sad?

To learn more about these questions, I sat down with Elliot Regenstein, a Partner at Foresight Law and Policy and the author of a new book called Readiness: Preparing State Early Childhood Systems for a Bright Future. I picked his brain about the book, how early childhood fits within the “abundance” agenda, and how states can better serve parents looking for early childhood services for their children.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Chad Aldeman: You spend time at the beginning of the book talking about the different goals behind early childhood investments. Can you talk about what those are and how casual readers should think about them?

Elliot Regenstein: Sure, there are a few different rationales for early childhood investments. The book talks about how those can overlap and shape public services in different ways.

For example, one of the major arguments is child development, and there’s a fair amount of evidence that high-quality experiences for young children are impactful in both the short and long term. I often say that there’s pretty strong agreement and understanding that the first five years of child development are super important, and that adults influence that development in meaningful ways. What there’s less consensus about is, what exactly should government do about that?

Another major rationale for early childhood investment is keeping parents in the workforce, particularly when unemployment is very low [and workers are in high demand.] This has been a powerful rationale, because the argument is that if parents don’t have somewhere that they trust their kid will be well cared-for during the day, then one parent, usually the mom, will drop out of the workforce, which will reduce the overall pool of potential employees. And so there have been a few examples where business leaders have taken the lead in pushing for early childhood investment, in part because they’re just trying to get more folks in the workforce.

Different folks within the early childhood field have different views about those arguments, but fundamentally, those are the major reasons, and most early childhood services are designed to meet some combination of those two needs.

Aldeman: One takeaway I had from the book is just how fragmented the early childhood system is, if you want to call it a system. In addition to serving multiple goals, it has different funding sources, different pools of kids who are eligible, etc. We’ll get back to that.

But for now let’s set that aside and say you’re talking to a governor in a random state. If they said they wanted to be known as an “early education governor,” what would you recommend they do?

Regenstein: For a governor to show leadership on early childhood, there are a few things that are really important. One is at the state government level, you’ve got to get your act together to administer the system in a coherent way. If the pieces of the system do not work sufficiently well together, you can’t just add money and expect good results. The fragmentation negatively impacts providers and families, and you have to solve for that in some way. Different states have addressed that differently.

It’s also the case that in early childhood, more investment is necessary. In K-12, every child is required to be enrolled and offered a spot at a public school. Neither of those things are true in early childhood. I’m not arguing for mandatory early childhood. No one has argued for that. But even as a voluntary service, there are a lot of families who would take advantage of it if the opportunities were there, and there currently aren’t options available. Strengthening not only the administration of the system, but also the availability of quality services, is key.

And then a final piece is to emphasize the quality of child and family experience in designing the system. Historically, a lot of the measurement of quality in early childhood has been focused on essentially bureaucratic inputs as opposed to the actual experiences of children. There are a couple of states that have led the way in reorienting that conversation. That quality aspect is an important piece as well.

Aldeman: In your book, you write about South Carolina’s Parent Portal. What is it? How does it work? And what are other good examples of making early childhood supports work well for parents?

Regenstein: South Carolina has been a national leader, but there are a lot of states currently working on the issue of how to make it easier for families to access services.

The South Carolina people would tell you is it’s not strictly a technology problem. Technology can certainly help, but it’s really important to get the human systems in place to support families. Because in addition to the statewide technological infrastructure they’ve built, they also have a network of local-level supports to help families in a human way, to supplement the improved technology.

Historically, and still today in most places, if you were interested in finding child care, you had to do the research on your own. There are some websites that aggregate information, but those are not always comprehensive, and it’s not always set up for parents to contact or apply for the services. With South Carolina’s portal, not only could you identify services in your area, but you could apply for those services. Then, if you fill out one application and start on another, it pre-populates that application with all the information you entered to the first one, so that at the very least, you’re not having to repeat yourself over and over again.

Ultimately, what you’re hoping to achieve is a situation where parents can look and not only see what providers are available, but also see if they have spaces. Could I even enroll my child? Just having a child care center close to you, if it’s over-subscribed with a two-year waiting list, doesn’t really help you.

Aldeman: These types of supports could help in many realms. K-12 education is becoming increasingly unbundled. In early childhood, it’s certainly unbundled, and it can be hard for parents to know where to go. Are there places that have funded some sort of navigational support for families?

Regenstein: In fact, that’s been funded for a long time through a network of what are known as “resource and referral agencies” that are generally funded with child care funds. And there are resource and referral agencies in most states across the country.

Aldeman: Are those working well?

Regenstein: Well, some of them are. Some of them are visible and known to families, and have the sort of comprehensive coverage and ability to support families. Not all of them are, and to some degree that’s dependent on state context and the people involved. The need has been identified, and there are some resources going toward it.

It’s also the case the technology matters to this. Historically, a lot of these things were set up as, say, a phone number you would call, but young parents today are not calling phone numbers. They’re looking on the internet, from their phones. So what you need is more sort of app-based, or text-based, and some places are adapting faster than others. But the general gist is that states know that there’s much more to do here, and they are trying to ramp up those efforts.

Aldeman: Another area I’d like to get your feedback on is the so-called “abundance” agenda. There have been several popular books pushing for abundance in the housing space in particular, but also in energy and healthcare.

But those authors have not touched on K-12 education. They have also not touched on early childhood. But it seems like early childhood is ripe for this conversation as well. Parents say they want more of it, and yet the market is not delivering it in the quantities or at the prices parents can afford.

Meanwhile, there’s also a tension between quantity and quality. How do you see this tension playing out in the early childhood space?

Regenstein: I’ve enjoyed those books. As a brief aside, I really enjoyed Why Nothing Works by Mark Dunkelman.

Aldeman: Yes, me too.

Regenstein: Early childhood is easy to square with an abundance agenda, right? If you want children to have positive early experiences, if you want adults to be engaged in the workforce, then early childhood is really important.

But there is a huge market failure, because early childhood is extremely labor-intensive, particularly for the very youngest children who can’t change their own diaper and couldn’t get themselves out of a burning building. For those kids, it’s really important that the adult-child ratios are kept relatively low. You cannot have too many kids in the room or else it becomes a safety hazard.

But it’s also the case that young families don’t have a lot of spare income. In general, people make more money as they get older, and so if you are just a few years out of high school or college, which most first-time parents are, then you haven’t reached your full earning potential. You haven’t had a chance to save up, and now, all of a sudden, you’re hit with this enormous expense, and it’s very difficult to pay for it.

Historically, the market for early childhood has been dependent on a lot of free labor, so the salaries are also very low, with the exception of pre-K teachers employed by public school districts. The percentage of early childhood personnel who are on some form of public assistance is about half. These workers are in the third percentile of income nationally. Anecdotally, you’ll talk to center directors who lose staff to Walmart and Target or who decide to start driving for Uber full time because they can make more money that way.

So you have a couple of problems politically. One is that it is very hard to get people to pay more on a per-unit basis for a service that they’ve gotten used to pricing at a certain level. For state government leaders to say, “We’re going to invest a lot of money, not just so that more kids can have service, but so that that service is going to be much better and that the staff are going to be better paid” becomes a tough sell politically.

On top of that, a lot of the early childhood workforce isn’t particularly powerful politically. It’s low income, over 90% female, more diverse than the K-12 teacher population, and it doesn’t have unions that are making major political donations and mobilizing people to vote. It’s just not a constituency that policymakers have responded to. There are probably some number of abundance-oriented officials who, if you asked them, would say, “of course, we should be paying these folks better and delivering higher quality and expanding services,” but at the end of the day, they’re not going to get punished by voters for failing to do that.

Aldeman: My mind goes to advocates who push for bachelor’s degrees for all early childhood workers, in the hopes of professionalizing the workforce and boosting quality, but which costs more. Or, you note in the book that the Obama Administration passed Head Start regulations that will require them to raise employee wages to match that of local school districts by the year 2031. That’s going to cut the number of seats available at Head Start programs, no? They’ll have to scale back to serve fewer kids. How should we think about this?

Regenstein: There’s actually a point about Head Start that I want to come back to, but this has been a very lively debate within the field.

There’s a group that feels that, for early childhood professionals to be treated on equal footing with K-12 teachers, that’s going to require having the same kinds of credentials that K-12 teachers do. Degrees aren’t the only thing that define a profession, but they’ve historically been an important element. And if we’re going to deliver a quality service and take the field seriously, it needs to have degree requirements.

There’s a competing school of thought that the that degrees are not proven to improve competency. And, particularly in a diverse workforce, when many of the current workers don’t have bachelor degrees, putting in a degree requirement will make it almost impossible to hire, particularly for positions that are so low paid. Moreover, a lot of the skilled people already in the workforce will be pushed out, and there will be no one there to replace them.

There are also concerns about what happens when states or now the federal government start evaluating bachelor’s degree programs by the income of their graduates. At the very moment we’re talking about the need to expand early childhood services, higher ed would have a strong incentive to get out of the business of training people for it. For early childhood, that’s dangerous territory.

I’m not fully resolved on how to navigate these questions, but if I were a leader of that optimal state you described earlier, I would get stakeholders together and have a coherent strategy for what we want this to look like in 5-10 or 20 years. What pieces are we putting in place to make that happen? Because if the state’s not dealing with these questions, no one will.

Aldeman: Last year, the federal government created a tax credit scholarship program for K-12 education. But why not expand that to cover all kids from ages 0 to 18? That could potentially open up funding for scholarships at early childhood programs. What are your thoughts on that way to get money into the system?

Regenstein: Well, I don’t know if I agree with her broader philosophical point, but when Iggy Azalea said, “Never turn down nothing,” I think there was something to that.

As an early childhood advocate, when there are moving trains, there is a value to getting on them. That includes education savings accounts or tax credits from the state or federal levels. These may be imperfect vehicles for the kind of thoughtful system expansion that I advocate for, but it’s also the case that I’d rather have an imperfect world with more money than a perfect one with less.

If there is the opportunity to bring new resources into the system to serve families, I wouldn’t want to reflexively say, “No.”

And, if a state has a coherent thesis and strong leadership, they’re going to be able to figure out how to work an ESA or a tax credit into the existing fabric in a way that is additive. If a state doesn’t have that strong leadership, it may be more of a struggle, but one way or another, if there are opportunities to get more money, I think we should at least be open to that and be part of those conversations.

Aldeman: You wanted to go back to Head Start?

Regenstein: Yeah, and it’s about a tension within the early childhood field, which is, what age range should we focus on?

When Pre-K Now did its big campaign roughly 20 years ago, the focus was mainly on 4-year-olds. But there are a lot of people in the field whose emphasis is on birth through age three, because developmentally, that’s the most critical time period. But for the most part, when states have invested, they invest more in those later years than the earlier years.

One of the things that’s happened in Head Start is that in some of the states with very large state-funded pre-k programs for 4-year-olds, Head Start has adapted and started serving 3-year-olds, or even converted to Early Head Start to serve kids 0-3. Even though converting from a Head Start slot to an Early Head Start slot is a process that’s not easy or automatic, in most cases, the federal money is more flexible than the state money when it comes to serving infants and toddlers. So where states invest in 4-year-olds, Head Start often adjusts to serve other children.

If you look at the data on Georgia and Oklahoma, for example, those Head Start programs have de-emphasized 4-year-olds to focus on younger children. That is incrementally more expensive on a per-child basis, but it’s positive from a system perspective. The idea that these programs should be complementary rather than in conflict is a really powerful notion, and it would be great to see a future iteration of Head Start that accounts for changes at the state level.

Aldeman: For my last question, let’s go back to my hypothetical. If you could build a Frankenstein model of elements from multiple states, what core components would you like to see?

Regenstein: Well, I’m not a deep expert on every state, so my answer is going to potentially omit some good work happening in some places…

But I’ve actually been using Virginia as one of my primary examples. First of all, it emphasizes just how bipartisan this work is. There are a lot of blue states that have done great work in this area. There are a lot of red states that have done great work too. But in Virginia it’s been both. A Democrat brought in Jenna Conway and her team, Republican Governor Youngkin promoted them, and then {newly elected} Democratic Governor Spanberger promoted them all again.

There are a few things that are really core to Virginia’s success. One is they have unified state leadership. They have the core programs under the same roof. And in Virginia’s case, it’s not a standalone agency, it’s the Department of Education. They made the choice to bring the programs together so that they can be run as a holistic unit, not as multiple different things administered by different mid-level managers.

They also have a relentless focus on data and quality. They are one of the states that has a definition of quality focused on child experience, and more importantly, when it comes to both quality and access, they are scarfing up all the data they can and analyzing it to inform their decisions in a way that a number of states are working toward, but that not everybody is there yet. Notably, Virginia has also increased its investment in the last few years.

It’s also important to give credit to the states like Oklahoma and Georgia and West Virginia, which have had a longstanding commitment to access and quality. Alabama, Rhode Island, and Michigan are also known for their focus on quality. These states insist on ensuring quality in their pre-k programs. So again, there are a lot of different states that are doing some aspect well.

We’ve clearly made enormous progress in the last 10-20 years, in terms of access and quality and system design. And my hope is that when we look back in another 20 years, we’ll see that we’ve continued to make substantial progress, because there is still a long way to go.

Aldeman: That’s a great point to end on, Elliot, and hopefully your book will help lead us in that direction.

Reading List

Chalkbeat: Indiana restarts child care vouchers with one-time $200 million boost

Urban Institute: DC’s Early Childhood Educator Compensation Program Helps Stabilize Child Care Businesses

That framing is misleading, or at least incomplete.

The program is not a direct spending initiative that pulls money out of public school budgets. It operates through the tax code, offering credits to donors who contribute to scholarship-granting organizations. Left on its own, the program may well tilt toward private school tuition. But policy design—not just intent—will determine whether that’s the only outcome. That distinction matters, and its effects will ultimately depend heavily on how the program is structured, regulated, and used.

And that’s where the repeal effort falls short. By treating the program as nothing more than a traditional voucher, critics risk overlooking how it could be deployed to support a broad array of educational services, including tutoring, afterschool programs, and summer learning opportunities that benefit students in public or private schools. With some slight entrepreneurial thinking on the part of Democrats, this program could direct substantial new resources into those areas.

The question, then, is not whether the program should exist at all, but whether leaders of all political stripes will be willing to step up and use it in ways that align with their priorities. Right now, too many Democrats are focused on repeal. That could backfire and leave a lot of money and opportunities on the table. A more productive approach would be to utilize the policy and improve it so it better targets need, protects students, and expands access to high-quality learning opportunities.

Subscribe now

As currently designed, the program falls short on several of those fronts. But those shortcomings point to opportunities for reform, not reasons to abandon the effort altogether. Here are four areas where policymakers could focus their attention:

Prevent discrimination by scholarship-granting organizations

Right now, the law is silent on which types of programs are eligible for funding. But we’re talking about a federal tax credit here that could cost the Treasury billions of dollars a year in foregone revenue—the least Congress can do is require that scholarship granting organizations (SGOs) not discriminate based on a student’s race, religion, sex, national origin, and disability status. You want a tax credit? You can’t discriminate.

Target scholarships to families with financial needs

When drafting the original legislation, the Republican Congress did set an income limit, but it’s laughably high. Recipients must be able to document that they earn within “300 percent of the area median gross income.” In Northern Virginia, where I live, the maximum cutoff is someone earning $491,700 per year. That is far too high. People earning that much money shouldn’t qualify for a federally subsidized education “scholarship.” That’s not a wise use of tax dollars, and Democrats should work to lower the income cap to focus on truly needy families.

Expand eligibility to cover early childhood services

The current program focuses on K-12 educational expenses. It’s a broad list of allowable expenditures including tutoring and other supplemental services, but it is limited to K-12. But why stop there? Many of the largest gaps in access occur earlier in a child’s life. Extending eligibility to cover early childhood services—from birth through age five—would open up a new stream of funding for childcare providers and early learning programs. That would not only support children’s development but also help more families afford care and participate in the workforce.

Give states the flexibility to adjust the program as they see fit

The law was written in such a way that the Treasury Department could have allowed states flexibility about the types of SGOs they wanted to let operate in their state. The Trump Administration interpreted it more rigidly and seem to be taking an “all-or-nothing” approach. We’re still waiting on the final rules, but Democrats could demand that states get a say. Federal rules could allow states greater flexibility to define eligible providers, set accountability standards, and direct funds toward priority areas. Some states may choose to emphasize private school options, while others might prioritize tutoring, summer learning, or evidence-based interventions within public school choice systems. Allowing that variation would enable states to align the program with their own policy goals while maintaining appropriate guardrails.

Lawmakers and advocates can continue to debate the program in familiar, polarized terms, or they can engage with the details and shape it into something that better serves students. Focusing exclusively on repeal risks ceding that ground.

A more constructive path would be to treat the program as a starting point—one that can be refined to better target need, expand opportunity, and ensure that public resources are used responsibly. Democrats who ignore those possibilities are doing a disservice to the children in their states.

Reading List

Jeb Bush: State leaders need to eat more broccoli

Rachel Canter: States can’t pursue Mississippi-lite versions and expect the same results

Before I show you the graph, take a moment to envision where you think new teachers come from. Are they 22-year-olds coming directly from a teacher preparation program at a college or university?

And take a moment to think about the number of newly licensed teachers versus the number of new teacher hires. Which one would you expect to be higher?

You might assume that these lines would run pretty much in tandem. Or maybe you might think that the state’s teacher preparation programs are preparing a few more teachers each year than eventually get hired. That is, not every teacher preparation candidate can end up with a teaching job in-state.

Now look at the chart below, from the Texas Education Agency. It compares the number of newly certified teachers in Texas (in blue) versus the number of new teachers hired by public schools (in gray).

Not only are there more new teacher hires, the numbers aren’t particularly close! In fact, the gap has been widening more over time.

Who are these people? Is this just unique to Texas? Yes and no.

The next chart comes from the same state dashboard. As you can see, the largest source of new hires are actually re-enterers. These are people who taught for a while, took some time off, and then came back into the profession. Having a large number of re-entrants is not unique to Texas and is often a large source of teachers for schools all across the country.

But the second biggest source of new hires was unique to Texas. These are people with “No Texas Certification/Permit.” This source of 12,000 teachers is unique to Texas, which, for a few years, allowed schools to hire teachers without any prior certification. The state has recently pulled this back due to research suggesting these teachers weren’t as effective in the classroom and tended to have higher turnover rates. Still, it will be interesting to watch how Texas schools fill that gap in the future.

Before I leave off, take a moment to look at all the other categories here. More teachers enter Texas schools with an alternative “intern” certificate than a “standard” teacher preparation program. The remainder of the list includes things like teachers who were working part-time, who came from out of state, or who earned a certification in the past but hadn’t found a teaching job yet (“lagged” entrants).

Again, Texas is unique in some ways, but the next time you think about the teacher preparation pipeline in your state, I hope you’ll remember that it often looks different than the standard story of college—>teacher certification—>teaching job.

My quote of the week award goes to Andy Rotherham, near the end of this passage on AI and education:

So for schools, whether you like AI or think it’s good for education matters less than how you respond to it. In the same way that whatever you think about cold matters a lot less than dressing appropriately when it’s going to be freezing out.

The second is carpentry. I’m a mediocre carpenter. I have friends who do it professionally or as serious hobbyists and they’re not mediocre. They take shortcuts, move quickly, and can skip steps. I can’t do those things. I take my time, I follow the sequence. The same is true of cooking: amateurs follow exact recipes, pros can improvise. To some extent this is also true in music, which is why pros can sit in and play together in ways amateurs cannot.

You can see where I’m going. The same logic applies to learning in school. If you already know how to write, you can sometimes skip steps. If you’re a skilled reader, the same is true. And in areas where you’ve accumulated a lot of knowledge, you develop a kind of “horse sense” that translates to efficiency and allows you to use some tools differently. But none of that is helpful while you’re still learning. You need to follow the steps — and the shortcutting we now call “cognitive offloading” doesn’t help you learn. It makes you worse off.

…

The idea that we live in such revolutionary times that you don’t need to know anything — you can just look it up — is a seductive, stubborn, and bad, idea that lives zombie-like across the sector.

Subscribe now

Reading List

Aldeman: When Students Earn a High School Diploma But Still Can’t Do Math

Jessika Harkay: High-Need Connecticut School District Doing ‘Things People Don’t Believe Are Possible’

Upshot: What New Federal Loan Caps Will Mean for Graduate Students

: Will tutoring save us?

: Education research is weak and sloppy.

Jed Wallace: Three Policy Changes to Accelerate the Marginal Revolution

: “you have to actually build up a teen’s Real Life Substitutes for screentime”

I have this (perhaps irrational) hope that as student enrollment continues to fall (which it almost certainly will, given the recent significant drops in births), state and local budgets will be able to free up resources to invest in early childhood.

Is it crazy? So far, district leaders have mostly tried to hide from enrollment losses. They have been reluctant to close under-enrolled schools and have used financial windfalls to boost staffing numbers. But can they be more proactive and actually divert some of that money to invest in younger kids? What would that take?

Theresa and I sat down recently to talk about her idea. What follows is a lightly edited version of our conversation.

Chad Aldeman: We’re talking today about the problem, or opportunity, of communities with declining enrollment thanks to declining birth rates. If they’re serving fewer kids, can funds be put to better uses? You came to me with this idea. Can you explain what you’re thinking?

Theresa Hawley: As I look at it, we’ve seen a dramatic decline in births in this country, and that’s going to translate over the next couple of years into dramatic declines in the number of school-age children, especially in the early grades. Depending on the state, we’re talking about declines of 15% over the last 10 to 15 years of the number of kids being born. That’s the equivalent of more than a grade’s worth of children.

We also have a financing system for K 12 education based on local property taxes and state investments. That’s likely not going to go down in terms of the revenue stream that’s available to the system, but the number of kids that need to be served is going to go down a lot.

So I look at this as an opportunity for early care and education to say, “How can some of those resources be put towards serving more children at younger ages? How can we use some of those resources to meet the age-old problem in early childhood, which is that we need to start educating our children younger?” We absolutely need to invest more in early care and education. My whole career I’ve been told, “Unfortunately, we just don’t have the resources.”

Aldeman: As additional context, could you also talk about your team’s comparison of spending in K 12 education versus early childhood?

Hawley: Unfortunately, no matter how much we believe that it’s important to invest in the earliest years, our country doesn’t. We spend 21 cents on the dollar for preschoolers and only 11 cents on the dollar for infants and toddlers compared to what we spend on kids once they enter the door at kindergarten.

That ranges quite a lot across different states, but even the very best states are spending a fraction on kids at age four that they’re spending on them when they turn age five and enter kindergarten.

This is an opportunity for us to widen our frame a little bit and see the education system starting a bit younger, and getting resources into the system to invest earlier. We know that would make a positive impact on kids’ long-term development.

Aldeman: What you’re asking is for governors and mayors to look out a little bit further in the future than they’re normally accustomed to. Rather than just looking at two- or three-year enrollment projections, they should be looking five, 10, or even 15 years out. My fear is, if they don’t do that, they’ll continue to be reactive. They’ll just keep doing short-term fixes. Does that sound right to you, and how do we change that mentality?

Hawley: This is absolutely my fear. These [enrollment shifts] are going to be slow and gradual, 1% a year, 2% a year. In that scenario, the resources that are in the K-12 system will just continue to be absorbed by K-12 schools, and there won’t be any room for investments in early childhood.

So I think it’s important for us to zoom out and to make the case. If we’re serious about the need for our country to invest in kids at younger ages, we have to look at the revenue systems we already have and opportunities that might be coming in them to be able to make new investments.

Aldeman: Talk to me about some of the benefits of doing this. One might be just that more parents would have a place for their child to go. Potentially, you could also have better alignment from early childhood into K-12. And three, we could see better services for kids. Is that right, or what else would you add to the list?

Hawley: I think there are two big questions here. One is the question of the money, and the other is the question of which entity should provide the services to children and families.

Let’s start with the money. Just because I’m saying that the resources may be there thanks to a shrinking need in K-12, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the public schools must be the ones who have to serve even younger children.

We’ve seen a lot of really good models out there. Many schools do a great job of providing pre-K education to 4-year-olds, sometimes to 3-year-olds. But public schools could also partner with community-based organizations and pass funding through to those organizations so that they can serve kids with full-day, year-round services, in settings that are a little bit smaller in scale and more intimate and more conducive to the needs of young kids. Those kids are more likely to have to take a nap in the middle of the day than your average elementary students would be.

There are benefits to seeing early care and K-12 services as part of a larger education system. That includes aligning the curriculum that’s used in a 3-year-old and 4-year-old program with what that child is going to encounter when they enter kindergarten and first grade. Ideally that becomes a seamless continuum, so that kids are building up language skills that move straight into reading readiness, they are building up quantitative skills that lead right into math readiness.

There’s tons of research that shows that the partnership between public schools and community-based settings where younger kids are being served makes a huge difference in how effective those investments are in shaping the long-term trajectory of child development.

Aldeman: Are there any models here that you’re thinking of? What places have done this well already?

Hawley: Yes, you can look at Washington, D.C. as a city that led early on in terms of investing in 3- and 4-year-old education. They’ve been taking that seriously for more than a decade now. Kids receive services not just in schools but also in community-based settings, and in charter schools. Regardless of the different kind of settings that kids might be in, they have universal access to those services.

New York City is has made tremendous strides as well. Again, it uses a mixed delivery system across multiple settings, but the city and the school system is investing in those younger grades.

Aldeman: I appreciate the point about being neutral to who is actually providing the services.

I also want to throw in a new study out of the Urban Institute that looked at universal pre-k in D.C. They found that it actually boosted enrollment for the K-12 schools as well, because the families were more committed to the system. So there’s another upside for the systems that are part of it.

Hawley: For sure, and actually I think that’s why a lot of cities do invest in 3- and 4-year-olds.

It’s part of why cities have been in the vanguard of this, because there’s an understanding that if they can get kids into the school system and keep families in the city when their kids are three and four, they may be able to keep them when their kids are five, six, seven, and eight. Or, if a younger sibling is three or four and receiving services, that may keep those kids and families in city schools. You see that in Washington, D.C., for sure, and I think you’ll see it in New York over time as well.

Aldeman: Are there any downsides here? Who would oppose this?

Hawley: I think exactly what you first said. Someone needs to actually see the opportunity for what is as a long-term play, because this transition is going to be pretty gradual as the younger grades start losing children. The temptation is going to be to keep the funding for all of the K-12 parts of the system exactly the same, regardless of the smaller number of kids that are being served.

There is also a fear on the part of some folks in early childhood that if the public schools become too involved in the funding of early care and education, then that will crowd out the providers that are serving families now. In particular, I don’t think many people believe that the schools are going to be a great place for infants and toddlers. The funding system right now is set up in a way that in order to serve infants and toddlers, you have to serve preschoolers too, because you can only make money on the preschoolers, and that helps subsidize the infants and toddlers.

If we’re going to take this approach and capitalize on the opportunity, we’re going to need to do it in a way that comes up with strategies for funding the entire birth-to-five system. The investments that schools may be able to make, especially in 3- and 4-year-olds, could be an important part, but it can’t be the whole thing.

Reading List

Melissa Kearney: More on that misleading NYTimes piece about fertility delays

Nat Malkus and Sam Hollon: Participation in structured, voluntary extracurricular activities improves attendance

Sarah Mervosh: “Mississippi is one of the best places in the country for a poor child to get an education.”

Vlad Kogan: How the Columbus, OH school district went broke

Andrew Goldman: Is AI improving learning—or just performance?

Tom Toch: How Democrats Can Win on Education Again

Parents: 58 activities for kids who say “I’m bored”