Assorted Links
IDEA, ESSER, pensions, class size, AI, and the social safety net
ICYMI, before the break Samuel Yi and I published a brief for Education Next looking at teacher retention trends over the long term. You might be surprised how stable they have been...
Beth Hawkins has a tour de force for The 74 on the history of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and the lawsuit that drove it.
I’m excited for the Dylan Matthews Substack about the (slowly improving) social safety net.
The Wisconsin Institute for Reforming Government looked at what happened to the $1.49 billion in ESSER money that flowed into Wisconsin schools. TLDR: More staff serving fewer students = financial troubles.
The Equable Institute found that the average full-career public pension benefit tumbled by more than $140,000 in the last 18 years. For teachers specifically, states are still doing a reasonably good job of serving those who stay for a full career, but they do far worse for short-term workers (who serve less than 10 years), and less than half of medium-term workers (those serving 10-20 years) are being served well.
Danyela Souza Egorov writes that New York’s class-size law is already wreaking havoc on the city’s schools and its budget.
Joanne Jacobs writes up research showing that handwriting is linked to memory and learning.
And finally, Rick Hess argues that AI changes NOTHING about what students need to learn. Key quote:
Here’s a hot take: Give students a robust, content-rich education. Make it rigorous and engaging. Teach reading, writing, math, literature, history, geography, science, world languages, and the arts. Teach Civil War battles, Euclidean geometry, dissection, the periodic table, and much else. Sure, cultivate useful skills. But job one for schools should be teaching a broad base of knowledge that will prepare students to be autonomous, thoughtful adults, no matter what the workforce actually looks like in 2046 (when today’s 4th graders turn 30).
The Equable pension findings really underscore a critical gap in our social safety net for public sector workers. The fact that less than half of medium-term teachers (10-20 years) are adequately served means we're essentialy punishing career mobility and creating lock-in effects that hurt both workers and school systems. This connects to the broader safety net evolution you mentioned via Matthews, where we're slowly realizing that rigid, tenure-based systems don't match modern career patterns. The $140k decline in full-career benefits is huge but the real issue is the all-or-nothing structure.
Thanks for including my article on the disastrous class size law in NYC!