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Dear John,

It is week 292 and we are thinking about the long shadow cast by the surge in student absenteeism and the challenges it has created in the push for academic recovery.

In a new report ([link removed]) published by AEI, USC’s Morgan Polikoff and Nicolas Pardo take a deep dive into the trends in North Carolina and Virginia. Here is what they found: “First, chronic absenteeism increased substantially from before to after COVID across all student groups in Virginia and North Carolina. Second, regression analyses indicate that low-income, mobile, and homeless students are especially vulnerable to chronic absenteeism after COVID relative to all other groups. These students’ rates are 10–20 percentage points higher, and they miss 3–8 percent more days of school than other students. Third, comparisons of pre- to post-COVID results indicate that the gap between low-income students and their higher-income peers has grown substantially in absolute terms, as has the gap between gifted and non-gifted students.”

Polikoff and Pardo conclude: “These results should raise considerable concern about absenteeism after COVID. Not only have absenteeism rates gone up, but most gaps have widened.”

At the same time, there is a lot more we could be doing to get kids interested in coming back to school while making sure the time they spend in school is used to catch them back up. As we highlighted in the last Roundup, students are more likely ([link removed]) to show up to school on days when they have tutoring and that tutoring makes a meaningful difference in helping them get back on track.

It is one of the reasons we are thrilled that 50CAN’s Liz Cohen recently published the definitive book on tutoring. The Future of Tutoring ([link removed]) draws upon lessons from Ohio, Louisiana, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Texas, Virginia, and Washington, DC to explore how high-impact tutoring is transforming American education. Now Liz is also launching a newsletter on Substack ([link removed]) also called “The Future of Tutoring,” where she will explore the growing world of tutoring in more depth. In her first interview ([link removed]) for the newsletter, she sits down with Alejandro Gibes de Gac, whose new venture, Paloma, aims to help parents be great tutors for their kids. I hope you will check it out!

Last time ([link removed]) in the New Reality Roundup, we looked at the rapidly-changing school choice landscape across the country and compared diverging student achievement trajectories between southern states and New England. This week, we take note of New Mexico’s long-awaited rise and speak with Emily Oster on a new tool for advocates and policymakers.
Best,

Marc Porter Magee, PhD
50CAN Founder and CEO

@marcportermagee ([link removed])

Share the story that New Mexico is rising
New Mexico has been at the bottom of most education rankings for over a decade. It is something that Amanda Aragon and the NewMexicoKidsCAN team are determined to change. Now, we’re seeing the first signs that their years of advocacy and the resulting changes are translating into tangible progress for New Mexico’s kids. Last week, the New Mexico Public Education Department released 2024–2025 statewide assessment data, revealing ([link removed]) that reading proficiency increased for the second year in a row, climbing from 36% in 2022 to 39% in 2023 to 44% in 2025.
NewMexicoKidsCAN Executive Director Amanda Aragon believes the growth is rooted in two efforts: following the literacy policy playbook of the Southern Surge states and reforms across Albuquerque Public Schools, New Mexico’s largest district.

“First, it’s just so clear that the reading progress is happening because of our state’s investment in early literacy, which is an investment that didn’t happen overnight by snapping fingers, it took real communications and coalition building to drive support for wholesale changes,” Amanda tells us. “We’ve invested in coaching and retraining teachers, working with districts to ensure they’re utilizing high-quality instructional materials and launching a major communications campaign targeting both parents and elected officials to show what’s possible.”

“But this is also about APS finally getting the train on the tracks,” Amanda continues. “The changes we’re making in the state’s largest city and district are reverberating across the state.” These changes have been driven by the leadership of a reform-minded school board, elected with the support of the NewMexicoKidsCAN Action Fund.

For a state that has consistently been at the bottom of national education rankings over the past decade, these early signs of progress are a testament to building progress through local advocacy, brick-by-brick, until the job is done.

* The task this week is to note that if progress is possible in New Mexico, it’s possible everywhere.

Explore Emily Oster’s Education Data Center

Emily Oster, Brown University economics professor and founder of ParentData.org ([link removed]) , has made a mission out of providing parents with accurate, comprehensive and understandable information, in order to offer parents the data-driven collective wisdom that will help them raise their kids. Her project, the Education Data Center, may be of even more use to education advocates and elected officials, however.

50CAN VP of Policy Liz Cohen sat down with Emily to explore the data and understand ParentData’s aims with the project. Here’s that conversation:

Liz Cohen, 50CAN VP of Policy: Over the past couple years, your team has gathered state assessment data from every state, and built this public database, the Education Data Center ([link removed]) , with it. What inspired this project, and who do you hope is going to use the data?

Emily Oster, Brown University economics professor and founder of ParentData.org: We started doing this because we had pulled down all this data to look at [pandemic learning loss] recovery. We were using the state test score data to look at recovery. And then there was a moment where it's like, well, actually, like, this data was potentially useful for more people.

It seems we’ve invested a lot in sort of two things. One, is the infrastructure around the data, and the second is the relationships with states. We had spent all this time building relationships with state education offices. So we decided, “let’s try to pivot this and see if we can build a database of the assessment data that might be useful to a broader set of people.”

Then, who are we hoping this would be useful for? A combination of users–obviously researchers, but also anyone who is doing work with school districts or for school districts or for states. I think in many cases there’s a desire if you’re digging into the specific data of a school district to compare more broadly, or let’s compare my state to another state.

LC: We’re excited that you’ve created this tool because we also want people to make data-informed policy and data-informed decisions. But a lot of your work is really focused on parents, right? Do you see an overlap of what parents want to know with the kinds of information that districts or states have with test data?

EO: When we initially launched this, I thought we would get more parent interest, but I was probably not quite right about that! Partly it’s that I’m not sure parents know what question they’re asking. Parents mostly ask, “what’s the right school for my kids to go to?” Or “what’s the value of these different schools?” And that’s not entirely answered by looking just at assessment data. For me, this serves a parent audience because it’s serving a school district audience. Parents will benefit if our schools get better.

LC: That makes sense. In the 2024 50CAN Educational Opportunity Survey ([link removed]) , we asked parents about the information they find most trustworthy about how their child is doing academically. And the most trusted source was conversations with the teacher. Not report cards, not test scores. So maybe it makes sense that parents aren’t turning to a database of system-wide test scores.

EO: I’m not even sure I would tell parents to make choices about schools based on these data. There’s a lot more to those choices than test scores.

LC: But you did build this tool and it has all this great data in it. So as you and your team are looking at the data, are there questions you’re trying to ask?

EO: We’ve been pulling out information about recovery. How are different places doing in this post-pandemic recovery phase? I think having all of the states together has some value because in the context of recovery, it may start to help us understand some things about which places are doing better and which places are not doing as well.

I always think that states are not talking to each other enough about what they’re doing. I like that now we have this substack because I think it means that people are reading it from the education office in Ohio but I know they’re also reading about what’s happening in South Carolina or Massachusetts.

One thing I would like people to do with the data is use it to figure out who’s outperforming their income. By seeing all the states together, maybe you get a larger sample of over-performing or under-performing districts relative to their demographics, where you could ask, “what’s happening there?”

LC: When you look down the road three or five years from now, are you continuing to update this tool, and how are you hoping people are using it? Is there a time when we stop being interested in pandemic recovery?

EO: There’s probably a place where we exit the interest in recovery, but we’re not losing interest in how kids are doing. And we’re not going to stop being interested in trends. Whether we’ll think about it as recovery or not, I’m not sure. There’s a lot of value in continuing to have people understand the value of data. I want to make sure that we keep the existence and importance of this data on people’s minds.

So I want to keep the tool updated but also expand the scope of the data. We can add things like enrollment, more test scores for older kids, and that will make an even more useful database.

LC: We hope state leaders and advocates will use your tool. But to turn to your primary audience of parents, what are the questions you hear most from parents about K-12 education?

EO: ‘How do I know if my kid’s school is good?’ It’s a really hard question. And that’s almost exactly how it’s always phrased. It’s far too vague to be something we could answer. Good for who? In what way? What’s the outcome?

And the other question that comes up all the time is this question of redshirting or what is the right kindergarten entry age. The issue with boys in school has re-upped this–should we be red-shirting every boy?

LC: Do you have an answer?

EO: I have two answers to the redshirt question. One is that people are often very focused on academic skills when they ask this question and I think that’s misplaced. The question should be whether your kid is ready to sit still, and how that’s aligned with the school you’re sending them to. That’s for individual parents. And then there’s a policy answer, which is that I am very uncomfortable with the space where rich people are red-shirting their kids which exacerbates existing inequalities.

If you told me I could have a magic wand with the school system, I would want every kid to have quality pre-K, or 4-K, whatever you call it. And then at the end of that year we decide, are you going to kindergarten or are you going to another year of flexible pre-kindergarten. Some kids are ready and some kids are not ready and some kids would really benefit from that additional year, but it’s not really reasonable for that choice to be made by parents who are thinking, “how do I get my kid to be big so they’re good at hockey.”

LC: Do you wish parents of older kids were asking more questions?

EO: Often the way parenting works is that it’s super, super stressful at the beginning, pregnancy and little babies. Then your kid goes to school and you’re like, “I figured it out, I made all these decisions.” It’s quiet for a while. And then your kids hits 13, 14, and you have a bunch of questions about screens and why my kid is suddenly a jerk to me.

LC: Any last thoughts on the Education Data Center work?

EO: There’s a core element in every organization in which you ask, “what are we good at?” And with this work, the thing we are really good at is producing this data and making it look nice. I’m a researcher, but this isn’t my core research area. I think there are so many other people who could do interesting stuff with the data and I want to see what they’re doing.

Fundamentally, there are open questions about what’s going on in school right now. Current third-graders who are performing below where third-graders were in 2019 were 3 years old during the pandemic, so they weren’t missing school. I don’t think we have great answers about what’s happening, but we can and should find some.

* The task this week is to explore ([link removed]) the Education Data Center and Zelma AI to gain new insights into learning loss recovery in your state.


ConnCAN turns 20! Current and former staff, including numerous former Executive Directors, will convene later this week in New Haven, Connecticut to celebrate 20 years of student-centered advocacy and the community partnerships that have powered a revised student-funding formula, learning loss recovery and new school options across the state. For out-of-staters that would still like to contribute ([link removed]) to the anniversary, the ConnCAN team is grateful for support.

October has been a month of connecting parents with elected leaders. Transform Education Now’s parent leaders in Colorado and HawaiiKidsCAN’s student advocates met with US Senator Michael Bennett and US Senator Mazie Hirono, respectively, to discuss their aspirations and needs.
GeorgiaCAN will be hosting a community conversation on the future of special education in Clayton County this Friday with elected state representatives and members of the district.

Fordham Institute reveals ([link removed]) that school board members often hold skewed views compared to the public, from being more hostile toward charter schools to viewing their own districts’ performance through “rose-colored glasses.”

Havala Hanson and Lauren Bates present ([link removed]) new research on tutoring at EdWorkingPapers, finding that pairing tutoring with a foundational literacy curriculum results in large gains in student achievement for English learners at an average cost of $665 per pupil.

Are chronic absenteeism rates increasing ([link removed]) because of students working jobs during school hours? That’s the suggestion from researchers at SUNY Albany, who find “a 10-percentage-point increase in the local share of employment in high child labor violation industries leads to a 7-percentage-point decline in public school attendance for children and youth aged 6 to 17.”

Brookings’ Center for Universal Education hosts ([link removed]) a virtual event this Friday on “real skills for the real world,” focusing on building skills in students that will not be easy for AI to replace.

New CTE programs in high school are yielding ([link removed]) benefits, including a 5% rise in four-year college completion for female students and Black and Latino students, according to a new paper at EdWorkingPapers from Yerin Yoon and Shaun Doughtery.


“Families want after-school programming for about 30 million school-aged children, according to an analysis by the Afterschool Alliance, an organization that promotes after-school programs. But only 7 million children are currently enrolled in such programs,” reports ([link removed]) Evie Blad for EdWeek, in a story on the demand for after school programs outstripping supply. Parents are hungry for programs like San Francisco’s Mode to Code, taught by Jacob Schaul, pictured here.

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