Dear John,
It’s week 246 of our new reality and we are taking a moment in this last Roundup of the year to both recognize how far we have all come this year and recommit to the journey ahead in the new year.
We’ve had a lot to celebrate at 50CAN this year. We’ve been busy with a lot of great new projects from the launch of a new website in the winter to the release of our first video series in the spring to the publication of our first AdvocacyLabs book in the summer to our first ever 50-state survey in the fall. But at the heart of our work is our state advocacy campaigns.
As detailed below, our local teams secured 25 policy wins for kids across the five pillars of Believe in Better. That means millions more kids will have real choices to find the education that is right for them, small group tutoring if they fall behind, free summer camp for new friends and new experiences, the opportunity to learn new skills on the path to the career they choose and so much more. We are proud of these big leaps forward this year in building the education system of the future.
At the same time, every new international, national and state test points to the same conclusion: far too many kids have fallen behind and we aren’t on track right now to catch them back up. We are moving fast, but we have to move faster. We are aiming high in our goals, but we have to aim higher. We have a growing movement in many states but it has to be everywhere. In 2025, we will aim to be the catalyst for the sweeping changes our kids need and deserve.
We are so proud to be on this journey with you. This is the work we have been preparing for our whole lives and it couldn’t be any more important to the future of our country and the future of the world. We have an amazing 2025 planned that will start off with a bang in January. We can’t wait to share it with you in the New Year.
As one of our dedicated readers, we hope you’ll share the Roundup with colleagues and friends. Newcomers can sign up for this newsletter to be sent to your inboxes twice a month.
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Commit to an Education Comeback
Here’s a resolution for all of us: 2025 needs to be the year of the Education Comeback. Of course, the first step in recovery is to be clear about where we stand. Let’s start with the facts on learning loss:
Kids lost a lot of ground the past four years. The most recent results come from Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey (TIMSS), which The 74’s Kevin Mahnken summed up by writing, “In the United States, fourth and eighth graders performed much worse in math last year than students at the same age levels did in 2019; average scores in the subject fell to the level seen in 1995, the first time TIMSS was conducted."
Chad Aldeman, in a piece titled “Math Scores Have Fallen Off a Cliff,” drew readers’ attention to another troubling trend from TIMSS: the brunt of those losses are being suffered by the most struggling students, and the losses continue to grow four years after the pandemic.
This is really well visualized in a chart created by AEI’s Nat Malkus, which shows the change in scores relative to the high point of 2011. “We can see from this graph that the absolute achievement gap was widening well before the pandemic but that in certain cases the pandemic made the achievement gap even worse,” Nat writes. “Since 2011, the score gap between the 75th and 25th percentiles in fourth-grade math grew by 35 points—over a year’s worth of progress in learning for the average student. Similarly, the gap between the 90th and 10th percentiles grew by 58 points—about two years of learning—during that same period.”
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TIMSS is just the latest warning sign from the past two years, and joins PISA, NAEP and NWEA in painting an alarming portrait of learning loss in America.
The ESSER money is nearly gone and its effect was very modest. The country’s response to the learning loss crisis was centered around $190 billion of funding that made it from the federal government to local education associations with little oversight or accountability. Those funds have now nearly run dry with learning loss yet to make a sharp recovery.
This was well visualized in a story by Matt Barnum and Rosie Ettenheim for the Wall Street Journal. “The money helped students gain some academic ground and made the biggest difference for the nation’s poorest schools, which received the most money,” they write. “But the overall impact of the federal money was modest, and the remaining dollars won’t be enough to get students back to where they were before the pandemic.”
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“Districts got all this new money, and some of them did indeed spend more money on the vendors that have good products across the board,” Marguerite Roza told EdSurge. “But they're not necessarily buying the best products, or getting what they need, or making the most of what they bought, or checking if it even worked.”
Now, many districts, including those in Tennessee and Louisiana, are turning to state funding bills in order to ensure that tutoring programs and other supports remain an accessible opportunity for students. Other districts will have tougher choices; the US Chamber Foundation shared last month that over 50% of ESSER funds went to recurring labor costs, including hiring new teachers and salary increases.
Parents know the system is off-track and have an appetite for change. The newest national poll from yes. every kid. challenges the myth that education isn’t a top priority for Americans. On the contrary, when asked to rank the importance of education in their votes for President and Congress, the public ranked education as third most important, right behind the economy and health care. Parents of K-12 students ranked education as the second most important, behind only the economy. (Also within the poll, which is well worth your time: strong majority support for open enrollment, universal ESAs and a desire for more customization and autonomy.)
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Politicians of both parties are now indicating that education is a priority for them. As Washington begins to take on the work of cabinet confirmations and preparing for the inauguration, Reuters reports that President-Elect Trump is considering a national school choice tax-credit, which as 50CAN President Derrell Bradford noted after the election, stands a far better chance of advancing than ending the US Department of Education.
Democrats, meanwhile, are considering what they need to do differently to get back on track. Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin urged them to take K-12 education problems more seriously: “Democrats would be wise to listen to parents … a substantial percentage of parents do harbor concerns about learning loss caused by the pandemic.”
One promising sign: a growing desire among party leaders to reconnect with voters and ignore the special interests that often dominate policy debates. Take, for example, last week’s Rogé Karma’s piece on the Latino vote in The Atlantic, where he writes, “The job of politicians and parties is to understand what their constituents want, and to say no when those desires don’t match up with activists’ demands. Over the past decade, Democratic leaders appear to have lost the ability to distinguish between the two categories. They seem to have assumed that the best way to represent Latino voters would be to defer to the groups who purported to speak for those voters. The problem is that the highly educated progressives who run and staff those groups, many of whom are themselves Latino, nonetheless have a very different set of beliefs and preferences than the average Latino voter.” One issue where Latino voters diverge from these progressive interest groups: their strong support for school choice.
Listening directly to parents has been the focus of our work at 50CAN from the beginning, and the major reason that we launched the Education Opportunity Survey earlier this year and it will be the foundation for everyone we do in the coming year.
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As 2024 comes to a close, we are thrilled to share that the state campaigns of the 50CAN network achieved 25 policy victories over the course of the year, with each goal bringing us closer to our Believe In Better vision for the education all kids deserve.
For a complete list of wins in 2024, we encourage you to visit our results page on the 50CAN website. Below are a few highlights from the year.
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The Education That's Right for You
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CarolinaCAN built on last year’s win of a statewide ESA by passing an over $450 million expansion of the program to provide access to the 55,000 students on the waiting list and recurring funding for the program.
DelawareCAN gave charter schools greater flexibility to hire the school leaders that work best for their school through SB311, legislation that provides charter schools autonomy in hiring administrators.
GeorgiaCAN expanded educational opportunities so that more families could access the education that’s right for their children by passing SB233, the state’s first ESA, which provides $6,500 for students in the bottom 25% of schools.
In order to deliver every family the educational choice that best fits their needs, Louisiana Kids Matter passed the first universal ESA Program in the state. The ESA award is based on a scale, with low-income and students with special needs receiving more than the affluent, and the program also requires participating schools to ensure students take the state assessment or a norm-referenced test.
NewMexicoKidsCAN successfully defeated efforts to revert the state’s educational governance from a governor appointed secretary of education back to an elected state board of education - which would have caused chaos, increased politicization and spurred misalignment across the state’s education systems.
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Tutoring and Care for All
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JerseyCAN continued a multi-year effort to align New Jersey’s literacy approach to the science of reading by passing a package of bills that establish a statewide literacy screener, professional development for teachers and a reading intervention program for struggling students based on foundational literacy.
As a result of Louisiana Kids Matter’s advocacy, Louisiana became the first state to pass a K-3 math universal screener and a $30M statewide tutoring program embedded in the school day for students not achieving mastery in literacy or math, with over 300,000 students eligible for participation. The team also passed the Steve Carter Tutoring Program to provide students with $1,500 for tutoring in reading and math after-school or over the summer, with $5 million invested and 19,000 students already enrolled.
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A World of Open and Connected Learning
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Transform Education Now expanded direct aid to families for outside-the-classroom learning and extracurricular opportunities by securing $5 million from the Denver City Council to expand afterschool and the MySpark program.
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A Family's Right to Know What's Working
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GeorgiaCAN also ensured the state maintains a high-quality system of assessments and evaluation by requiring the state to produce “single score grading” in its school accountability system, making it easier for parents to interpret scores.
TennesseeCAN successfully advocated for the release of an A-F grading scale for school performance, adding to the comparative information available to parents. The team also supported parents having an understanding of how their school is spending money by ensuring their access to spending data, which has now been released to all Tennesseans.
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ConnCAN worked to clarify school funding allocations for agricultural and vocational-technical schools by passing legislation that ensures these schools will receive clear financial data from the Department of Education on how much money they will receive per student.
GeorgiaCAN strengthened career pathways by enacting a suite of four career pathways bills that came out of a study commission on dual-enrollment. Collectively, the bills make it easier for companies to hire apprentices, allows more students to fast-track their education through dual-credit courses, improves the alignment of courses with high-demand jobs, and ensures that higher-education credits are transferable between institutions.
HawaiiKidsCAN achieved a win in their efforts to guarantee a year-round counsellor for college and career by passing HR 170, a resolution requiring the Board of Education and Department of Education to explore best practices for year-round counselling, which will lay the groundwork for 2025 and higher rates of FAFSA completion.
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Our favorite resources from 2023, one from every month of the year:
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January:
NiemanLab discussed a study published in Nature which had over 1,000 participants judge the veracity of fake news stories by researching on Google and found that participants’ research often led them further from the truth than closer to it.
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February:
The Christensen Institute and VELA are out with a new report on the growing parental demand for microschools and other alternative forms of schooling.
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March:
Brookings finds that outside of student government activities, schools are failing to offer a set of extracurricular clubs, activities and events focused on civics and civic engagement.
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April:
An Ed Working Paper study finds that small-group tutoring results not only in positive short-term effects but that “about 60% of the effect persists 3.5 years later.”
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May:
AEI hosted a debate on federal spending for learning loss recovery, with experts asking if $190 billion was sufficient enough to address the educational setbacks caused by the pandemic and if more money is warranted.
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June:
The 74 Million featured Kerry McDonald sharing how Maine is in the midst of a microschooling renaissance that’s bringing new founders and new models to the Pine Tree State.
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July:
Urban charter schools in Massachusetts boosted college enrollment, college preparation and college graduation rates according to a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
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August:
Rhode Island’s chronic absenteeism rate is down 10 points over the past two years due to a combination of community initiatives and sports in this deep dive from FutureEd.
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September:
Manhattan Institute’s Ray Domanico looked at the legal and legislative victories for school choice and examined different approaches to accountability.
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October:
Fordham Institute published a research report that analyzed the impact of an innovative program that gave extra money to charter schools that met performance criteria, finding the initiative boosted academics and reduced chronic absenteeism.
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November:
The time has come for career and technical education for every student, write Michael B. Horn and Daniel Curtis for Education Next, presenting several case studies of bright spots that policymakers and other operators can learn from.
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December:
The 74 Million looks at why as the “college-educated workforce has diversified, teachers haven’t kept pace.”
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Students at Ronald E. McNair Elementary School in Chicago, Illinois were surprised on Tuesday by members of the Chicago Police Department who came with a wagon full of gifts and pizza for the students before the holiday break. Funded through the Daisie Foundation and corporate sponsors, the school was selected after being nominated by 15th Director Commander Morse, who recognized the immense needs in the community. “At the end of the day, it’s really about the kids. Anything we can do, you can sign me up. I’ll work overtime,” he told NBC news.
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