A debunking debunked, affordability and schools, higher ed’s “vibecession,” and more

Happy New Year and welcome to Chalkbeat Ideas! For those curious about this newsletter’s cadence: The plan is to typically send out a piece on Tuesdays and often on Thursdays. About once a month, I’ll also do a roundup of interesting tidbits, like this one. If you’re not signed up for the newsletter, you can do so here.

A small corner of the internet briefly lit up last month when Columbia statistics professor Andrew Gelman suggested in a blog post that Mississippi’s much-discussed reading gains might have been artificially inflated by holding back struggling readers. 

As avid readers know, I don’t think we fully understand the “southern surge” or "Mississippi miracle,” but this critique doesn’t make much sense. The key point, which I discussed in a 2023 piece, is that retained students eventually move forward and sit for standardized tests. Retention might explain short-run improvements but not the long-run gains seen in Mississippi. Kelsey Piper at The Argument also debunked the debunking. In a follow-up, Gelman partially walked back his initial post.

I’m excited to share the next Chalkbeat Ideas event: a discussion about the future of the Education Department with Lindsey Burke, the department’s deputy chief of staff for policy and programs. Alongside Chalkbeat’s national editor Erica Meltzer, we’ll discuss why the Trump administration is seeking to eliminate the Education Department, how officials are already working to do so, and what all this means for students, educators, and parents. 

I hope you’ll join us. The event is at noon EST on Jan. 14. You can register here and also submit your questions for Burke. 

Substack writer and nonprofit leader Tim Daly has an interesting piece about education and affordability, the hot new political buzzword. 

Daly points to a white paper projecting that recent test score declines will wipe out $90 trillion in economic activity through the rest of this century. While such projections are quite speculative in nature, studies at both the state and country level have linked higher test scores to stronger economic growth. The logic makes sense: Better-educated students become more productive workers, producing a stronger economy. “Affordability begins with better schools,” Daly writes. 

It’s worth thinking about the implications for this present moment, though. It’s basically too soon for learning loss to meaningfully affect the economy. Until recently, scores had been rising for decades. Americans have also been spending more years in school. In other words, right now, we have perhaps the most educated workforce in American history. Despite this, we are still swept up with concerns about affordability. The reason would seem to lie outside of schools. 

The Argument, the new online magazine, released a poll last month showing that voters are about evenly split on which party “better reflects [their] values” on K-12 education. Writer Lakshya Jain suggests this could indicate Democrats have lost their long-standing edge on the issue.

These results are unusual, though. Among 14 other surveys conducted this year, 13 showed Democrats with an edge on education among voters, according to my recent survey of surveys. And in fact yet another less-noticed survey from last month showed Democrats up 8 points on education.

This doesn’t mean that The Argument’s poll is wrong. Different surveys can reach different results for a variety of reasons including question wording, sample selection, timing, and random chance. On its own, though, these results don’t really change the weight of the evidence. In this new year, I’ll continue to track polling on the topic.

Speaking of surveys, new ones from NBC and Politico show that Americans are increasingly disillusioned with the value of college. This aligns with other polling. The typical explanation is falling benefits and soaring costs of a degree. 

Except there’s a problem, notes a Brookings Institution post: “(1) the return to college has not declined, and (2) the cost of college has not risen for years.” The graph below shows one analysis of net college costs in recent years. “It’s tough to fix problems that don’t exist,” writes Dick Startz for Brookings.

I’ve also written about the four-year-college “vibecession,” and I talked about it recently on Fordham Institute’s podcast. 

My recent piece on the new nostalgia for No Child Left Behind elicited many reactions. Thank you to all who sent in comments. I’ve included a few here.

A good number of readers questioned the idea that accountability pressure would improve schools, or at least that it would be sufficient to do so. “Good teachers do not need a stick (high stakes testing) to make them do a quality job,” wrote Sally Augden, a retired educator in Denver.

“When scores are persistently low, states have a responsibility to do more than simply apply pressure on such schools; they must improve conditions in these schools if they want to see outcomes improve,” commented Pedro Noguera, dean of the education school at the University of Southern California.

Researchers Scott Marion, Lorrie Shepard, and Chris Saldaña pointed me to an article they penned that characterized the effects of No Child Left Behind as modest. “Policymakers must consider the opportunity costs associated with these minimal score improvements,” they wrote. For my part, I would describe the apparent impacts of accountability as meaningful in math and small to zero in reading, but with some uncertainty on the exact size.

On that point, Vladimir Kogan, a professor at Ohio State University, noted that existing evidence might underestimate the impact of NCLB. The issue is that while researchers can study particular aspects of the law, it’s very difficult to examine it in totality. I agree that such studies are limited for that reason, though this could overstate the effects of NCLB as well as understate them. 

Are community schools — where students receive various enrichment programs outside regular instruction — a good investment? A Chalkbeat analysis found that such schools in Chicago saw similar trends in test scores and attendance rates compared to similar schools without the extra services.

A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision gave parents the right to opt their kids out of LGBTQ-themed storybooks. Now a group of New York parents is trying to use that precedent to avoid vaccine mandates for their children. An appeals court initially tossed the case, but the Supreme Court recently said it deserves reconsideration, reports Chalkbeat’s Erica Meltzer.

Cities across the country are reconsidering who runs their schools — an elected school board, the mayor, the state? Yet there’s no “strong evidence that any particular system consistently delivers better results for students,” writes Meltzer.

Reach me at [email protected].