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Dear Colleagues,

With the holiday season underway, we thought we’d share two new FutureEd publications, a selection of our work from the past 12 months, and our reflections on the challenges ahead for the education sector in a final 2023 newsletter.

It has been a tough year for the nation’s schools and colleges. While liberals and conservatives continued to fight pitched battles over race, gender, and free speech in state legislatures, on college campuses, and at thousands of school board meetings, national and international testing revealed startlingly low levels of student achievement, despite billions of dollars of federal pandemic-recovery funding. High rates of student absenteeism undermined the productivity of the nation’s educational enterprise. There was widespread evidence of declining academic expectations in the nation's classrooms. And a dramatic expansion of state policies enabling the use of public monies for private schooling shifted the national school choice landscape and raised the specter of very different education systems in blue states and red.

Bright spots included the spread of research-based methods for teaching reading and a widening commitment to high-quality tutoring. There was an increased willingness among state and local policymakers from both sides of the political aisle to pay teachers for their expertise and their performance in the face of shortages. And a consensus continued to build in the wake of the pandemic that school climate, student mental health, and other non-academic factors should be seen as major contributors to student success.

If learning loss and the culture wars weren’t challenging enough, the emergence of ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence models presented the education sector with a profound new test. Senior Fellow Alina Tugend outlines the contours of the new technology and the opportunities and potential pitfalls it offers educators in a FutureEd analysis ([link removed]) out today.

[link removed] other new work, Policy Analyst Bella DiMarco and Editorial Director Maureen Kelleher provide surprising insights ([link removed]) into how school districts in North Carolina are spending their federal pandemic-response funding to buttress their teaching ranks, our latest ESSER analysis ([link removed]) .

2023 Highlights

FutureEd sought to help policymakers meet the many challenges they’ve faced in 2023 by providing independent analysis and fresh ideas, circulated in more than 150 publications and presentations. We started the year publishing a collection of essays ([link removed]) by half a dozen education thought leaders that presents a post-pandemic agenda for the nation’s schools and colleges, proposing a new way to fund schools, exploring the value and delivery of higher education, and imagining how tutoring on a large scale could become part of everyday life in schools.

We did deep dives on a range of topics.

Senior Fellow Lynn Olson examined promising, evidence-based strategies for increasing educator diversity ([link removed]) and scaling the science of reading ([link removed]) in the nation’s schools.

Policy Director Liz Cohen and Bella DiMarco mapped the complex and fast-expanding landscape of private-school choice ([link removed]) , identifying every major program in the nation enabling students to access public monies for private schooling and analyzing the trends those programs reflect.

DiMarco assembled key research and revealing case studies on the promise and challenges of implementing longer school years, expanded summer schooling, and other strategies for increasing student leaning time ([link removed]) to address learning loss during the pandemic. I provided commentary on the topic in an interview ([link removed]) with the PBS NewsHour.

Former Associate Director Phyllis Jordan and our partners at Attendance Works expanded the suite of research-backed strategies for reducing chronic student absenteeism included in our Attendance Playbook ([link removed]) , including examples of how they are making a difference in schools and school districts.

Senior Fellow Marc Porter Magee, a sociologist by training, did a deep dive into research on community organizing ([link removed]) and surfaced with a basketful of insights into how education advocates can leverage local organizing to improve educational outcomes for young people.

[link removed] a fast-evolving state policy landscape, we tracked the movement of high-profile education trends nationwide, starting with an analysis of governors’ education priorities in their state-of-the-state addresses ([link removed]) and then through surveys of legislation introduced on teacher pay ([link removed]) , private-school choice ([link removed]) , and parents’ rights ([link removed]) . And we published the latest state-by-state student absenteeism rates ([link removed]) .

Conversations

We hosted webinars on the science of reading ([link removed]) , the changing private-school-choice landscape ([link removed]) , teacher diversity ([link removed]) , and other topics. We published interviews with a range of people with valuable insights into education policy, including Laura Meckler ([link removed]) of The Washington Post, who talked about her new book on the remarkable crusade to integrate the neighborhoods and schools of Shaker Heights, Ohio; Greg Richmond ([link removed]) of the Archdiocese of Chicago on the future of Catholic schools; and researcher Bill Gormley
([link removed]) , on his long-running study of the effects of universal pre-kindergarten programs in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

We shared our work on Capitol Hill, at events hosted by the Council of Chief State School Officers, the National Conference of State Legislatures, and the National Association of State Boards of Education, with a wide range of media outlets, and through commentary pieces on student absenteeism ([link removed]) , the science of reading ([link removed]) , tutoring ([link removed]) , and other topics ([link removed]) .

The Year Ahead

In the year ahead, we are going to focus on the core challenge facing the nation’s schools and colleges: that vast numbers of students continue to be undereducated in America. They are disproportionately Black or Brown or English-language learners or from low-income families, students who are increasingly the nation’s future.

There has been much talk in education policy circles about addressing learning loss that students suffered during the pandemic and about catching-up students to pre-pandemic achievement levels. That is arguably the wrong lens through which to view the state of the nation’s schools and the wrong framing for the education agenda ahead. Instead, policymakers needs to recognize that decades of work to bring a far wider range of students into the nation’s education equation in a meaningful way, to give every student a rigorous education rather than just the highly talented and the privileged, has stalled.

There are many reasons and responsibility rests with many actors at every level. But the reality is that recovering losses that occurred during the pandemic is not enough. High absenteeism rates, grade inflation, and sinking achievement predated the pandemic. The challenges ahead are deeper and more systemic than a catch-up framing suggests.

We plan to explore ways to address this crisis (and it is a crisis, if one many wish to ignore), including strategies for making so-called gifted education more meaningful to more students, ways to bring educators together with other child- and family-serving public agencies on behalf of struggling students, and ways to make high-quality tutoring a permanent presence in schools.

We’ll explore what’s working and what isn’t in the decade-long struggle to get more students over the devastating hurdle of college remedial courses. We’ll write about the politics of school improvement and the prospect of bringing leaders together to find common ground for reform. We’ll share ways to strengthen what students are taught and how. And we’ll examine the impact of burgeoning universal private school choice plans on the quality of the education in the nation.

FutureEd, that is, will continue to contribute independent ideas and analysis that further our mission of promoting educational equity and social mobility. We look forward to sharing what we learn in the year ahead.

We wish all of you, our readers and colleagues, a very happy new year.

Tom

Thomas Toch
Director, FutureEd
McCourt School of Public Policy
Georgetown University
[email protected]
@thomas_toch
| @futureedgu ([link removed]) | www.future-ed.org ([link removed])

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