Burn It or Break It?

Our school system is in crisis!

What’s Happening in the Market

• DOE AI: The Biden administration signed an executive order requiring agencies to nominate Chief AI Officers. Vijay Sharma will step into the role of Chief AI Officer for the DOE, having been CTO for the past 8 years. The Office of Management and Budget is outlining AI guidelines that these Chief AI Officers will then implement at their respective agencies.

• The Impact of Ending Federal Funding: The expiration of COVID stimulus funding has impacted schools around the country. It’s not just ESSER funding. $24B passed to prop up childcare expired in September, and childcare centers are cutting salaries and benefits. This is straining an already tight wage scale for educators. Senate Democrats have tried to pass bills to extend child care stabilization funding, but it doesn’t have support from Republicans, leaving states on their own to try to find piecemeal funding (Sources: NPR, Hechinger)

What We’re Talking About

• Subsidizing the Wealthy: Arizona gave parents a $7K voucher for private schools--or ‘empowerment scholarship accounts.’ This is part of a broader national trend of supporting parent choice through vouchers. What happened? 50% of private schools hiked their tuition by 10% or more. The ESA essentially subsidized affluent parents and private schools, since the tuition hike ended up being higher than the ESA amount (Source: Hechinger). This isn’t a condemnation per say of voucher programs, but shows what would happen when you give a bunch of parents money to send their kids to private schools: The private schools are going to increase their tuition to capture all that money.

• The Teacher Pipeline is Collapsing: Oklahoma has issued 4,450 emergency teacher certificates this year alone--which allows it to place people who don’t meet state qualifications into the classroom. Meanwhile, the number of people enrolling in university-based teacher education programs is plummeting. To combat this spiral, the state is trying to create their own pipeline through the Inspired To Teach scholarship program. The program will provide participants with $1K their freshman to junior years each, $2,500 in their senior year, and $4K per year for their first five years of teaching (a total $25,500) (Source: EdWeek). This move comes as TFA is faltering as a national pipeline to educators.

One Big Idea

On January 8, 2002, George Bush signed “No Child Left Behind” at Hamilton High School.

Our schools will have higher expectations.  We believe every child can learn.  Our schools will have greater resources to help meet those goals. Parents will have more information about the schools, and more say in how their children are educated.  From this day forward, all students will have a better chance to learn, to excel, and to live out their dreams.

Big oof.

Over the next two decades, academic progress would slow down compared to the decades prior, and then eventually, in 2023, reverse entirely.

This past week, we had dinner with TFA principals and teachers. Almost all of them work in or with low-income districts in the Brooklyn and Bronx. The conversation ultimately turned to what many teachers are aware of (and shouting from the rooftops), but which few of my friends outside of schools seem to grasp: The slow collapse, in real time, of our public educational system.

These educators said that it might be better to dismantle the system entirely and start over, reimagining how to spend $38,000 per student (in NYC) from scratch. I don’t think I’m as pessimistic as them--but these people work in or lead some of the highest need schools in New York City, so their opinions hold more water than my own. 

In our newsletter, we’ve talked about various areas of opportunity and areas of failure in our educational system. But today we’re going to focus specifically on five trends that keep us up at night, and next week five trends that make us optimistic.

I. Decrease in Funding:

The decline in funding for our schools has been underway for a long time. From 2008 to 2017, federal funding for Title I schools dropped 6.2%. About half of our states have less total funding now than they did before the Great Recession in 2008.

This disinvestment has led to a loss of about $600B nationally.

Throwing money at the issue hasn’t been the silver bullet that billionaires have hoped, but it’s no reason to disinvest. In our own analyses, per student spend and teacher salaries still have the highest correlation to academic results (as measured by NAEP scores). Imagine if a state experimented with paying teachers 43% more (to put them on par with their college-educated peers)! We’d attract, keep, and develop more teachers, filling critical vacancies and retaining educators to be talented 3rd year teachers and beyond!

II. Collapsing Enrollment

Public school enrollment declined by 1.2M from 2019 to 2020 (NCES), from 50.8 to 49.4M.

In Illinois, public school enrollment has declined by 7.5%, or 147,000, since 2019 alone. Jefferson County, Colorado, closed 16 schools in February.

Below you can see Boston Public School enrollment declines, but look at data for most public school districts in the country and you’ll probably see something similar—except for in states like Texas, whose enrollment declines have been softened by immigration (although Texas’ public school enrollment is still 10% below their 2019 numbers).

In NYC, it’s fallen by 120,000 in the past five years. LA saw a 15% decline, about 100,000 students, from last year alone. Declining enrollment compounds decreases in funding.

III. White Flight and Segregation

14% of students attend schools where almost the entirety of the student body is of a single race/ethnicity. Compounding this is white flight of public schools: Declining enrollment is predominantly driven by white students leaving.

In NYC, 16% of white students did not return to the public school system after Kindergarten this past year. Suburban schools lost about 5% of their white students during the pandemic, vs. about 1-2% for other races and ethnicities. But this was a phenomena even before COVID. From 2018 to 2021, white students in NYC were the only ethnicity to have retention decreases in every grade Pre-K for every year (IBO).

School segregation is largely reflective of our neighborhood segregations and the fact that public school funding comes from local income tax revenue. Poor schools will get poorer, and parents who can afford to pull their students out--to private schools, to the suburbs, to charter schools, through vouchers, etc--will. 

Source: Government Accountability Office

IV. No One Wants to be a Teacher:

Vacancies are up 35% vs last year alone (36K to 49K). College programs that historically provided teachers are closing. The College of Saint Rose, part of the Teacher Pipeline Initiative in NY, just announced their closure due to steep drops in enrollment. We’ve written about this in the past, but regional colleges and universities are closing in record numbers, and these have historically been the pipeline to teachers. It’s not just a supply-side problem: No one wants to be a teacher anymore: Both perceptions of teacher prestige and job satisfaction are the lowest they’ve been in 50 years (Source: NYT). The proportion of college graduates going into teaching is at a 50 year low, too--and has declined by about 30% in the past decade (source: NYT). Teacher turnover is also increasing--estimated to be the highest it’s ever been, with most states seeing a >10% turnover rate (e.g., 16% in North Carolina, up from 12% pre-pandemic).

V. Schools are Unsafe

The US has had 783 school shootings since 2000, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That’s about 60x the average of other industrialized nations. 40% of educators and students don’t feel safe in their schools. Can you imagine that? Imagine not feeling safe in your workplace. Schools should be the safest place in the world! Our gut reaction as a society has been to put police officers in schools. 1% of schools had police officers in 1975. Now 48% do. 10 million students are in schools with police officers but no social workers. 

The Result? Declines in Performance:

The National Assessment of Educational Progress is called the Nation’s Scorecard, and is given every four years to 4th and 8th graders. In 2023, NAEP scores declined by their widest margin, erasing decades of learning gains. Long term scores started to slow down or slip starting in 2012, however, and can’t be attributed entirely to COVID learning loss and disruption.

Source: NAEP

We’re seeing the impact of disinvestment following The Great Recession. At their oldest, those students would be 15. These are the kids taking NAEP scores now: Students whose rise through their public school grades has coincided with the defunding of their schools, rising turnover and worsening stability among their teachers. Remember when you had the same art teacher for 20 years? Or checked books out at the library? Or had to go to the school nurse after scraping your knee in sports? When you and your sibling both when through Mr. Dembowsky’s shop class?

It does feel like a lot of things are breaking. Next week we’ll highlight some of the things that are going well--some of the promising policy changes happening (such as California’s experiment changing the Local Control Funding Formula to give lower performing schools more funding), etc. But we want to voice real worries we have about the future of this country. The fixes we need will require coordinated efforts on so many levels, and coordination is hard and seemingly getting harder.

But hey, maybe we’ll walk out of next week’s newsletter feeling a little more positive!