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Dear Colleagues,

The education sector is understandably focused on helping students recover academic ground lost during the pandemic. That’s an important goal. But that work has masked what is arguably a larger challenge that predates the Covid crisis: the dissolution of the national commitment to educational rigor, to ensuring that schools have high expectations for every student.

The need to return educational excellence to the top of the nation’s agenda is reflected in a decade-long decline in national test scores and measures of college readiness. And it’s reflected in public education’s failure to provide advanced learning opportunities to many highly capable low-income students and students of color. High-achieving students from the wealthiest 20 percent of U.S. families are six time more likely to receive gifted-and-talented services than high-performing students from the poorest 20 percent.

The paucity of advanced programs has embroiled school boards, state legislatures, and the U.S. Supreme Court in battles over access to the scarce resource and has led, ironically, for calls to abandon advanced learning altogether in the name of equity. But in a handful of states and school districts, new models of advanced education are emerging that have sought to bridge the debate by being both rigorous and inclusive.

[link removed] Excellence with Equity: The Case for Rethinking Gifted Education ([link removed]) , a new report written by FutureEd senior fellow and New York Times-bestselling author Peg Tyre, we examine the current landscape of gifted education and profile three school districts that have embraced this third way in advanced learning, working to tap the talents of many more students than in the past: Gadsden Elementary District #32 in Arizona, the New York City Department of Education, and Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools. And we summarize the research on a range of advanced-learning strategies.
Read the Report ([link removed])
Breaking the Mold on ESSER Spending
In the latest FutureEd report ([link removed]) on state and local pandemic-response spending, Policy Analyst Bella DiMarco explains why many school districts serving low-income communities have approached the massive infusion of federal pandemic-recovery funding for schools very differently than their wealthy counterparts, using Mississippi as a case study.

Commentary
The nascent tutoring movement in public education could be a silver lining to the Covid crisis. The challenge now is sustaining the movement’s momentum. Policy Director Liz Cohen explores how to do that in a new piece ([link removed]) for The 74, drawing on a year’s research that culminated in FutureEd’s recent report Learning Curve: Lessons from the Tutoring Revolution in Public Education ([link removed]) .

Editorial Director Maureen Kelleher wrote a smart piece ([link removed]) on what the new African American Studies Advanced Placement course has in common with the Oscar-nominated film The Holdovers, starring Paul Giamatti as a cantankerous boarding-school civilizations teacher. Answer: More than one might think.

In another essay for The 74, Liz Cohen makes the case ([link removed]) that school districts can save money and get better results when they pay vendors based on student performance. Outcomes-based contracts, she writes, incentivize companies to produce results and save public money when they fall short.

Statehouse Updates
Bella DiMarco started the 2024 state legislative season by analyzing 38 governors’ state-of-the-state addresses ([link removed]) and budget proposals to gauge the state leaders’ evolving education policy priorities, in a project we co-produced with The 74.

[link removed] we have been tracking 2024 bills on two key education issues: private-school choice ([link removed].) and chronic student absenteeism ([link removed]) . To date, we have identified 114 private-school-choice measures in 34 states, most of them introduced by Republicans and aiming to broaden private-school-choice options ([link removed].) .

We have found 58 bills in 25 states, introduced by both Republicans and Democrats, that would establish new initiatives to identify, prevent and address chronic student absenteeism ([link removed]) .

FutureU Podcast
On the FutureU podcast ([link removed]) , co-hosts Jeff Selingo and Michael Horn explore a range of timely higher education topics, from the challenged rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid ([link removed]) to students’ changing post-pandemic campus needs ([link removed]) , and the future of test-optional admissions ([link removed]) .
Finally, we continue to track leadership moves in the education sector in The Churn ([link removed]) and provide a listing of upcoming in-person and virtual education events ([link removed]) . Send your leadership news and events to [email protected] (mailto:[email protected]) , and we’ll be happy to post them.

Thanks and best wishes,

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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