Introduction

For over half a century, inspired by visions of equity, American education has pursued an intoxicating dream: that with the right policies, the right funding, the right teaching methods, we could make every child learn the same ideas, the same way, at the same pace. We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on that dream. We have oriented every education school in the country around it. We have passed sweeping policy based on it, both national and local. And, step by step, over three generations of determined effort, we have buried that dream under a mountain of failed experiments.

A different vision, though, has lingered around the edges of this system: it is possible and worthwhile for students at all levels to push themselves to their limits. Different learning speeds are not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be embraced. Education is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor through which all should be dragged dully along a single path. It is a never-ending upward climb along which people should be enabled to proceed as far and as fast as they can.

This tension between Equity and Excellence has long defined education, but the dominant frame in education schools has set excellence aside altogether. The time has come for a fundamental reorientation. One-size-fits-all has failed: not once, not twice, but for three generations. Progress in education cannot mean pushing all kids into the same mold and neglecting those who break it. To reignite the flame of progress in schools, we must embrace the pursuit of excellence.

Policy in the No Child Left Behind Era: A Race to the Middle

In 2001, an overwhelming bipartisan majority passed the worst education policy in decades: No Child Left Behind, a bill based on the idea that all children should be expected to learn at the same pace. It doled out punishments and rewards to schools based on what percent of students could meet arbitrary thresholds, asserting on the basis of nothing but a wish that it could get all schools to the same arbitrary thresholds within 12 years. This both punished educators serving disadvantaged students—blaming them for the students’ slower paces—and encouraged the systematic neglect of above-average ones—who, after all, were already past the thresholds schools were told to care about. Year after year, it failed to meet its targets. It did not fail because of complex implementation issues. It did not fail because people did not try hard enough. It failed because it was based on a lie: that all kids should learn at the same pace.

At the same time, “detracking”—forcing fast and slow students into the same classrooms and expecting teachers to somehow differentiate instruction—has become the common wisdom among groups of educators like the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics² and in school districts around the country. San Francisco waged a years-long battle to prevent any of its eighth grade students from learning algebra³. Cities like Seattle⁴ and Boston⁵ dismantled their gifted programs.

Often, objective measures of performance themselves become targets, as educators find it easier to smash the thermometers than to change the temperature. Universities perennially look for excuses to abolish entrance tests, kicking against their own findings that those tests work⁶ before reluctantly slinking back⁷ to them. Activists have waged the same wars against high schools with admissions tests, targeting some of the best free schools in the country—from Thomas Jefferson⁸ in Virginia to New York’s Stuyvesant⁹, Philadelphia’s Masterman¹⁰ to San Francisco’s Lowell High School¹¹. At the same time states weaken these schools, they often ban alternatives altogether, forbidding charter schools from using comparable tests.

A Legacy of Failure

Though this cultural change has accelerated rapidly in the last decade, this is not merely some recent “woke” phenomenon. It is the culmination of generations of policy failure, now entrenched into both law and bureaucracy. Today, the consensus in education schools has diverged far from the goals of students who want to excel and parents who want to help them. Every attack on "gifted" programs or selective schools comes dressed in unobjectionable progressive verbiage and backed with the force of a great hegemony: local groups often weakly protest but can seldom do more than delay the capture. What happened?

In education research, funding, and curriculum design, bad ideas won out.

Fragments of the battles involved go back decades. In the 1960s, the federal government commissioned the most expensive education research project in history¹³, comparing elementary school curricula against each other. One program, Direct Instruction, defied all the conventional wisdom: teachers taught in ability-grouped, orderly classrooms, drilling kids via whole class call-and-answer approaches. When Direct Instruction clearly outperformed the rest on preliminary measures, it was a “horrifying surprise” to many of the established education figures funding the study. As a result of lobbying, the study’s final results aggregated all its programs together, obscuring the success of the most effective approaches and producing a headline result that the study had failed. From there, people moved on.

In 1985, based on the theory that funding would close education gaps, a judge ordered enormous spending increases in Kansas City Schools¹⁴, tripling the district’s budget and enabling them to run through a wish list of everything they could dream of to close the gaps. They built new schools, created a busing plan, and reduced the student-teacher ratio to a record low nationwide, throwing money at the problem for more than a decade. But when the Supreme Court ordered a reversal in 1995, the district’s test scores had not improved, its black-white gap had not closed, and it was no more integrated than when it began.

That same year, a movement to “detrack” schools—removing advanced classes—took off with the release of Jeannie Oakes’s book Keeping Track. Letting stronger students go faster, Oakes alleged, was inequitable, and before long education schools and education policy circles agreed. That the best evidence at the time¹⁵ indicated that ability grouping helped the strongest students and did not harm the weakest ones did not matter. The consensus had been set.

The driving force behind all of these policy adjustments was not empirical: it was ideological. When each failed in turn, the data slipped through the cracks, and people soon forgot. Even now, each time people backtrack after causing damage via detracking¹⁶ or removing standardized tests¹⁷, the results are framed as a surprise from new data: We didn’t know, but it was worth a try. Now we do. But each time, with amnesiac consistency, the same approaches return.

Why Bother?

Here's the cynical take, articulated most persuasively by Freddie deBoer: Education doesn’t work¹⁹. None of it matters. Kids who start ahead stay ahead. Kids who start behind stay behind. No policy fixes it. No funding fixes it. No intervention works. So why bother?

But look closer.

We've spent over fifty years with a system whose core goal is not to lift students, but to close all gaps between them. Education schools have aligned policy and research towards that end, dismissing, deprioritizing, and attempting to discredit everything else. But why would you expect that to work? You can’t eliminate individual human variance with policy any more than you can legislate away height differences.

If your goal is to close all gaps and leave every student at the same level, education doesn’t work, and we have a fifty-year policy graveyard reminding us of that.

But what if, instead of pretending differences don't exist, we built an adaptive, responsive system that embraced them? What if our goal is to raise the ceiling, to see just how high each child can reach? If that’s the goal, we’ve barely begun to imagine how well education can work.

We’re ready to try the policies that education schools don’t like. Direct instruction works²⁰. Acceleration works²¹. Ability grouping works²². Aristocratic tutoring works²³. The pursuit of excellence is not only possible, it is pleading to be tried. We already know what changes to start with—the failure to implement is one of will. We’re ready to do the work.

What Can We Do?

Our purpose is to understand the core features of schools and learning communities that allow students to pursue excellence, to map out and execute a step by step plan to get there, and to tear down every cultural, policy, or information barrier in the way. If you think excellence matters, we want to work with you.

Some fights are defensive. If a school district refuses to provide accelerated classes, if a city pulls support for its brightest students or tears down the standards for the schools it has, or if a university feels pressure to remove admissions tests, we’ll fight the changes adamantly and openly. In a war between a flawed status quo and backsliding, we will fight to defend excellence within the status quo.

But defense isn’t enough. We need to be proactive in building a new corpus and community: a new institution studying the transmission and production of knowledge, skills, and character that education schools have neglected.

Those who study education quickly realize the surprising shallowness and inaccuracy of existing knowledge and practice: the curriculum and research output of education schools are driven by ideologically driven visions and fads. Most of the best information is found on isolated blog posts, within neighboring disciplines like cognitive psychology and behavioral economics, and in books written decades or centuries ago. As our project develops, we will organize and expand this knowledge to create a framework education schools have not.

For example, we see the potential in ability-focused education over age-locked education: curricula and structures tailored to meet kids where they’re at and push those kids as far and as fast as they want to go. Moreover, education and culture are powerful tools of human enhancement. We know some children learn to read at 2 or 3²⁵, much earlier than schools imagine. We see unknown-but-critical periods of development for skills like absolute pitch²⁶ or language, things children have limited windows to learn. We want to discover and publish these various developmental insights, designing interventions to scaffold children’s growth in a way that maximizes their potential.

This also includes defending unpopular but necessary systems of order and discipline. You can’t accelerate kids who aren’t in their seats. When schools ban phones, enforce detentions, or require hall passes, they're not opposing excellence. They're creating the conditions that make it possible, and without them—as our lowest-performing schools remind us daily—teaching itself becomes impossible. The progressive dream of unstructured learning environments has failed our brightest and our most vulnerable students alike.

Our goal is not marginal change. We’re not just here to debate whether algebra belongs in the eighth grade. We’d rather fight to find and support every child capable of learning it in the third grade. We want a world where excellence–and not its opponents–is sitting at the wheel.

To do this, we will focus on both the global and local levels: building a collective frame of research, policy, and advocacy while simultaneously building a network of students, educators, and parents who see potential for local improvements and want to find others to join the fight.

This is not a project of dividing kids into the gifted haves and ungifted have-nots. We will not preselect the chosen ones and let the rest fall by the wayside. Instead, we will ask every child where they are, where they want to go, and what will get them there. We will not pretend aptitude differences do not exist, but our task is to understand and lift them all: not imagining all kids can or should reach the same level, but enabling each to run as far and as fast as they choose.

There is no tradeoff between an excellent education and an excellent childhood. Far too many kids have lost far too much time and spirit in schools that neither knew nor cared what they could achieve.

We’ve tried No Child Left Behind. It’s time for No Child Kept Behind.

Our Principles

These principles guide our work:

Excellence should be accessible, and exceptional outcomes are achievable.

Schools should teach to ability, not age.

Progress is constrained by interest over intelligence.

Growth requires measurement.

Order enables excellence.

Education serves students first.

Get Involved

If you’re reading this, you probably know something’s broken. Maybe you’re a teacher watching bright kids wither, or struggling to give 30 kids at different levels the attention each one deserves. Maybe you’re a parent whose child is miserable in school, or the student learning more from the internet than in class. We want to work with you.

Over the next few weeks, we will begin rolling out articles paving a concrete direction forward. We want to make this a hub for research, advocacy, and debate focused on the best ways to help interested students push farther, faster. The more people get involved, the more we can do to advance those goals.

Here’s how you can join:

1. The first and simplest step: Sign up for our mailing list to get new posts and updates about our work.

2. Join our Discord server.²⁸ We intend to use the server both to coordinate activity between staff and volunteers and to create the most serious online community for people focused on educational excellence. Whether you’re a parent looking to connect with like-minded families, a teacher looking to provide students more than the default, a passionate autodidact looking for people who share your drive to improve, or simply a curious onlooker, you’re welcome to join in.

3. Do you have ideas, relevant skills, or a passion for building a culture of excellence? We want your help. Please fill out this volunteer form²⁹. We’re looking for people interested in writing posts, conducting academic research or examining policy questions, identifying and leading local reform efforts, and all else that may be useful.

4. If you want to see this project flourish, consider donating³⁰. The Center for Educational Progress is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, reliant on independent donations to grow. We intend to expand to four full-time team members and rapidly build out infrastructure for research and policy work. Donations will go to paying guest authors and incoming team members.

5. For other ideas, email us at centerforedprogress@gmail.com.

Excellence in education has received far too little focus for far too long. The time for change is now.

How did we get here?

Neither major party seems to care about excellence in education — not really, not in a way that translates into serious policy. Democrats have abandoned it for equity theater. Republicans have abandoned it for embarrassingly easy culture war wins. And American students are caught in the middle, their education held hostage by a political system that has forgotten what schools are actually for.

This is a story about how we got to this impasse, and what it might take to get out.

Part I: The Democratic Retreat from Excellence

Democrats were once the party Americans trusted on education. That trust has eroded, and it’s worth understanding why.

The progressive education reform movement has become laser-focused on equity — specifically, on closing achievement gaps between demographic groups. On its face, this sounds reasonable. Who could object to helping struggling students catch up? But in practice, this focus has come at the expense of effective pedagogy and educational excellence. Worse, many of the reforms pursued in equity’s name actually reproduce the patterns of injustice they claim to address.

The Moral Logic of Progressive Education Reform

To understand how progressives think about education policy, you have to understand their moral framework. For progressives, excellence measures — absolute gains in student learning — don’t have what Freddie deBoer calls “social justice valence”¹ unless they also address relative disparities. A reform that raises all boats equally leaves the achievement gap unchanged, and therefore fails to address the underlying injustice progressives care about.

This creates a strange asymmetry. Progressives cannot applaud excellence measures unless they also close gaps. But they can applaud apparent equity measures even if they don’t improve learning at all. The social justice framing is morally primary; gifted students are already doing well enough and are not objects of serious concern.

The result? Excellent students get abandoned. Gifted and talented programs are cut. Selective admissions are eliminated. And the focus shifts entirely to reducing disparities — even when the methods used to reduce those disparities don’t actually help anyone learn.

Biting the Hand That Feeds

There’s a bitter irony at work here. The most educated progressives — the ones driving these reform efforts — are themselves insulated from the harms of the bad pedagogy they support.

As the parties have become more polarized by education level, progressives are increasingly those who did well in school, often effortlessly, often because their parents were also highly educated and supported learning at home. It is easy for these reformers to take pedagogy for granted. If they or their children could already read well before entering school, they may not see the failure of whole language instruction for children who don’t learn what they need at home.

This is the central tragedy of progressive education reform: the people making the decisions are precisely the people least affected by them. They can afford tutors when public schools fail. They can move to better districts. They can pay for private schools. The costs of their experiments are borne by the families who have no such options.

Constructivism: The Theory That Sounds Good, But Isn’t

The pedagogical theories progressives are drawn to sound like equity wins that also help improve student learning. They do neither.

Consider Jo Boaler’s approach to math instruction, which deemphasizes memorization of basic facts and promotes open-ended “discovery” learning. Or Lucy Calkins’ whole language approach to reading, which rejects systematic phonics instruction in favor of having students “discover” reading through exposure to literature. Both approaches are marketed as more engaging, more creative, more equitable than traditional methods.

The problem is that they’re not backed by the science of learning. Decades of rigorous research show that explicit instruction — clear, systematic teaching of foundational skills — produces better outcomes than constructivist approaches, especially for struggling students. The students who can “discover” mathematical concepts or “pick up” reading naturally are the ones who already have strong foundations built at home. The students who most need structured instruction are precisely the ones most harmed when it’s withheld.

And so the methods marketed as equitable actually widen achievement gaps. Wealthier students can afford better instruction outside of school; poorer students cannot. The progressive education establishment has spent decades promoting approaches that systematically disadvantage the students they claim to care most about.

When “Equity” Isn’t About Achievement

When progressives aren’t focused on equity in academic achievement, they’re often focused on other kinds of equity in the school setting — which frequently manifest as culture-war issues that are wildly out of touch with median voters.

Discipline. Progressive educators have pushed hard for “restorative justice” practices that minimize suspensions and expulsions. The theory is that traditional discipline disproportionately affects minority students, and that restorative approaches are both fairer and more effective at changing behavior. The reality is much messier. Many restorative justice implementations have led to chaotic classrooms², with teachers unable to remove disruptive students and struggling students unable to learn in the resulting environment. Parents — including minority parents — consistently support stronger discipline³ than progressive reformers advocate.

Curriculum. Progressive educators have pushed for curricular changes involving critical race theory, ethnic studies requirements, and “culturally responsive pedagogy.” Whatever the merits of these approaches in principle, in practice they often arrive as mandates that districts must implement before addressing basic reading and math deficiencies. When parents are worried about whether their kids can do arithmetic, telling them the curriculum now includes mandatory modules on systemic racism reads as tone-deaf, at best. It makes parents question whether the district has their children’s best educational interests at heart.

Admissions. When Harvard’s admissions office described Asian applicants as lacking personality⁴, we saw how elite institutions can violate civil rights while claiming to promote equity. The pattern of discriminating against high-performing Asian students in the name of diversity has been replicated at selective high schools across the country — from Stuyvesant in New York to Thomas Jefferson in Virginia. These policies paper over old racial myths with new ones, all while claiming the mantle of social justice.

The Political Consequences

The political consequences of this approach have been severe. Democrats have hemorrhaged trust on education — an issue that was once a pillar of their electoral coalition. David Shor and other Democratic strategists have warned for years⁵ that the party’s education positions are electoral poison, but the warnings have largely gone unheeded.

The teachers’ unions — major players in Democratic fundraising and organizing — have been consistent advocates for many of the most unpopular progressive positions, from keeping schools closed during COVID to defending curricula that parents find alienating. Democratic politicians, afraid to punch left, have generally deferred to the unions rather than to the median voter.

The result is a doom loop. Progressive education policies alienate parents. Parents flee to charter schools, private schools, or the suburbs. Public school enrollment declines. The political coalition that supports public education weakens. And the institutions that remain double down on the very approaches that caused the flight in the first place.

Meanwhile, the Southern states that have embraced evidence-based literacy instruction are seeing real gains — gains that serve as a political embarrassment⁶ to blue states that should be outperforming them. This is how issues and institutions transform from reliable political architecture into ammunition for one’s opponents. Chris Rufo doesn’t have to be a good batter when Democrats keep serving up wiffle balls!

Part II: The Republican Absence of Vision

Republicans have had easy pickings. Rejecting bad progressive ideas has required no serious thought about what should replace them.

When conservatives reject the DEI focus in education, they can claim to be re-centering excellence as the guiding goal. When they reject progressive culture-war overreaches, they can claim classrooms are for learning, not politics. But this rhetorical positioning allows Republicans to appear pro-excellence without actually advancing the policies, pedagogical techniques, and curricular changes that matter.

Winning by Saying No

Consider the political arithmetic. (I’m sorry this is so clunky, I’m really not a math guy. Metaphors, though!) When Democrats introduce a bad idea, we go from zero to minus-x. When Republicans defeat that bad idea, we go from minus-x back to zero. Republicans can claim victory — they stopped something harmful! — without having accomplished anything positive in a cumulative, genuinely progressive way.

But American education wasn’t some excellence utopia before DEI. The same constructivist pedagogies that progressives now wrap in equity language have been undermining student learning for decades. The same ed-school orthodoxies that produce today’s “culturally responsive” curricula produced yesterday’s “whole language” instruction. Defeating the latest progressive fad is necessary but nowhere near sufficient.

Republicans don’t have to outrun the bear⁷. They just have to outrun Democrats. And right now, Democrats are making that very easy.

The School Choice Escape Valve

The positive vision Republicans do offer is school choice — vouchers, charter schools, education savings accounts. The theory is that market competition will drive improvement: parents will choose better schools, forcing bad schools to improve or close.

There’s something to this. The ability to exit a failing school is valuable, and competition can spur innovation. The One Big Beautiful Bill’s new national voucher program represents a significant expansion of this approach.

But school choice alone doesn’t solve the underlying problems. Charter schools and private schools draw from the same pool of teachers trained in the same ed schools with the same bad pedagogical theories. Many charter schools use the same constructivist curricula as the public schools families are fleeing. The escape valve lets some families get out, but it doesn’t fix the pipeline.

And school choice, as currently implemented, risks abandoning the students stuck in dysfunctional public schools. Not every family can navigate voucher programs or find transportation to better schools. The market vision, in its enthusiasm for choice, can become indifferent to those who have no good choices available.

The Southern Surge as Exception

There is one genuinely positive development on the Republican side: the Southern literacy surge. States like Mississippi and Alabama have adopted evidence-based reading instruction — systematic phonics, explicit teaching, regular assessment — and seen dramatic improvements in student performance. We can thank Karen Vaites for comprehensive coverage⁸ of this genuinely positive development.

This is what a positive vision for education actually looks like: identify what works, implement it systematically, measure the results, and adjust. The Southern states did this not by fighting culture wars but by taking the science of reading and curricula implementation expertise seriously.

If more red states adopt this playbook, it could represent a genuine transformation. But so far, the Southern Surge remains an exception. Most Republican education policy remains defined by what it opposes rather than what it represents.

Part III: The Trump Distortion

Into this already dysfunctional landscape has come the Trump administration, whose approach to education policy has been ... aggressive.

Burning It Down

The administration’s approach to the Department of Education has been less reform than demolition.⁹ DOGE-initiated cuts gutted the personnel needed for basic functions — like producing the annual Condition of Education report that Congress has required since 2002. Whether these cuts were legally valid is now beside the point; you can’t wave a magic wand to reconstitute departed researchers and statisticians.

The administration has conflated two different goals: making government more efficient and eliminating progressive policies. These overlap in places but are not the same thing. Cutting the staff who compile education statistics does nothing to advance any conservative policy goal; it just makes it harder to know what’s happening in American schools.

DEI as the Only Issue

The administration’s fixation on DEI has crowded out attention to everything else. Fighting with universities over diversity statements, investigating admissions policies, threatening funding cuts — these actions dominate the education news cycle.

Meanwhile, the education establishment has responded by doubling down on DEI practices, sometimes openly defying new regulations and state laws. The result is a mutually reinforcing spiral where both sides treat DEI as the only education issue that matters.

The tragedy is that many Americans are sufficiently disgusted with elite education institutions that they’re content with “burn it all down” as a result. When Harvard and Stanford have spent years promoting policies that seem designed to alienate ordinary parents, schadenfreude at their difficulties is understandable. But “own the libs” is not an education policy. The question of what should replace the current system remains unanswered.

Part IV: What’s Being Left on the Table

Both parties are leaving enormous political opportunities on the table.

Polling consistently shows that Americans — including majorities of all minority Americans — support gifted education¹⁰, acceleration for advanced students, and rigorous academic standards. They support discipline policies that keep classrooms orderly. They want their kids to learn to read and do math. These are not controversial positions among actual voters, even if they’re controversial among education policy elites.

The party that credibly commits to evidence-based instruction, high standards, and meeting students where they are — rather than where ideological frameworks say they should be — has a significant political opportunity. The party that actually delivers results, as Mississippi has for reading, will have a compelling case to make.

The Stakes Are Higher for Democrats

The stakes are asymmetric. Democrats control the institutions that drive education policy and research: the ed schools, the teachers’ unions, the professional associations. This gives them both more responsibility for the current mess and more capacity to fix it.

But it also means that the ideological capture of those institutions constrains what Democratic politicians can advocate. Ed schools remain captured by constructivist theories. Unions remain committed to policies that protect member interests over student interests. Critical education theories have become the default framework for thinking about schooling in progressive spaces.

For Democrats to credibly reset on education, they would need to confront these institutional interests. That’s politically difficult — but the alternative is continued erosion of public trust in public education.

The CEP Vision

This is where we come in. The Center for Educational Progress has been developing a positive vision for educational excellence that either party could adopt:

Meet students where they are. This means ability grouping, acceleration for advanced learners, and remediation for those who need it. It means abandoning the “one-size-fits-all” model that holds back fast learners and fails to support struggling ones.

Embrace the science of learning. This means explicit instruction in foundational skills, systematic phonics for reading, practiced fluency for math. It means deferring discovery-based approaches until students have mastered the basics.

Measure what matters. This means regular assessment to inform instruction, honest reporting of results, and accountability for outcomes. It means resisting the temptation to lower standards in the name of closing gaps.

Let every student advance as far and fast as their curiosity and determination will take them. This is the vision we’ve been developing — and it’s a vision either party could champion.

Part V: A Path Forward

Educational excellence should be a bipartisan issue. But right now, both parties have left the field. This creates an opportunity for whichever party is willing to seize it.

For Republicans: “We actually have a positive vision that promotes what we care about — the learning and development of our children. And the pedagogy we support is backed by the research. Democrats claim to be the party of ‘trust the science,’ but in education, that’s clearly false. We are the party you can trust to follow the evidence.”

For Democrats: “We are returning to the positive vision of education that you used to trust us for. Republicans don’t have a positive vision — just criticisms of progressive excesses. We see now that we ignored the science of learning, and that even if our motives were moral, the effects were worse. We still care about disadvantaged children, but now we know the right way to help them learn. We’re righting the ship for all children.”

Either script could work. Everyone seems to be focused on… everything else, though. (And I’m also not a political consultant. Just a lawyer — but not a barred one (yet)!)

American students don’t care about any political posturing. They just want schools that teach them to read, to calculate, to think. They want the chance to advance as far as their talents will take them. Whether they know it or not.

Neither party is currently offering that. But one of them could. Or both! The iron is hot, and the opportunity is there for the taking. Who will strike first?

Thomas Briggs is the (Interim¹¹) Executive Director and Director of Operations at the Center for Educational Progress.

From Life’s April 7, 1958 issue.

When DeepSeek released R1 in early 2025, the model matched OpenAI’s performance at a fraction of the cost. American observers asked how a small Chinese startup could challenge Silicon Valley’s dominance. Last week’s viral Financial Times¹piece² proposed an answer: China’s decades-long investment in its talent development pipeline.

DeepSeek’s team of 100+ engineers were almost all products of China’s “genius class” system — a nationwide network of intensive STEM programs that annually selects roughly 100,000 high-ability teenagers for specialized training. Nearly everyone on the team was an International Science Olympiad medalist. In 2025, of 23 students China sent to the Olympiads, 22 received gold medals.

The pipeline isn’t just producing talent for the AI race. The most recent Critical Technology Tracker³ report, published by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, reveals that China has replaced the US as the global leader in research output: China now leads in 57 of 64 critical technologies, 24 of which are considered⁴ “at high risk of a Chinese monopoly.” Even within the US, tech companies with “leading or strong positions in AI, quantum and computing technologies” employ more researchers who come from China (38%)⁵ than from the US itself (37%).

While continuing to welcome high-skilled immigrants is essential for driving our country’s STEM success, it is not enough for us to settle for only drawing talent from overseas. It is time to get serious about serving the eager gifted students at home.

An education crisis in a Cold War

The launch of Sputnik 1 threw the US federal government into a state of emergency. When the National Science Foundation Act was passed seven years prior, in 1950, the intention had been to advance scientific research and education in order to maintain America’s postwar dominance on the international stage. Now, in 1957, the US felt the urgent need to catch up. Out of this need came the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), which directed federal funding toward providing American students the educational support and rigorous training required to make America a powerhouse of science and technology.

The public was concerned too. Popular media quickly seized on the idea that America’s school system, built around uniform pacing and broad access, was quietly neglecting all students, with the effects most visible among its highest-achieving. Newspapers and magazines warned that students were sitting in classrooms that prioritized fun, frivolity and anti-intellectual coursework over excellence, leaving future scientists, engineers, and innovators under-challenged. Few outlets captured — and amplified — this fear more effectively than Life⁶ magazine, which ran a widely⁷ read⁸ five-part⁹ series¹⁰ examining the educational aims of America’s public schools. The series profiled remarkable young students while sharply questioning whether American schools were capable of developing their potential. Through compelling storytelling and iconic photography, Life¹¹ framed all children as the national asset most in need of intentional investment rather than blithe disregard, with special attention paid to the unmet potential of the nation’s brightest students. The message resonated with a public already rattled by Sputnik: American excellence will not be self-executing.

Yet just one decade later, members of congress wondered where all that initiative had gone. The country’s priorities had shifted; the fears Sputnik had inspired of being left behind had subsided, and were replaced by concerns about students struggling the most in school. While these latter concerns were noble, on the federal level, they came with a forgotten appreciation for the condition and needs of the gifted and talented.

A blueprint ignored: the Marland Report

In 1969, Sen. Jacob Javits (D-NY) introduced legislation, cosponsored by Rep. John Erlenborn (R-IL), that would require the U.S. Commissioner of Education to assess and report on the state of gifted education. His message to the Senate was the following:

“Today, a decade since the passage of NDEA, the Federal effort toward meeting the needs of the gifted and talented has diminished to the point that there is not one single Federal law or program devoting significant resources toward the education of gifted and talented youth, nor does the U.S. Office of Education employ anyone with responsibility in this area.”

It is hard to overstate just how comprehensive the report¹² was — all 50 states were surveyed, numerous leading researchers were consulted, the longitudinal data of Project TALENT’s approximately 450,000 high school students were analyzed, and four thorough case studies were produced of model gifted programs in California, Connecticut, Georgia, and Illinois.

The report’s findings were striking:

• Of the nation’s 1.5-2.5 Million gifted students, only a fraction received appropriate services

• Differentiated gifted education was a low priority at federal, state, and local levels

• Existing state laws were ineffective

• Identification of gifted children was hampered by “apathy and hostility” among teachers and staff

• Most strikingly, gifted children “can suffer psychological damage and permanent impairment of their abilities” equal to or greater than other underserved populations when not put in an appropriate education environment

In response, the report offered a number of specific recommendations:

• Define gifted and talented children in federal law

• Establish dedicated federal leadership and staff for gifted education

• Provide categorical funding and support through existing laws like the Elementary and Secondary Education Act

• Conducting national surveys of effective programs

• Support research, personnel training, model demonstration projects, and state capacity-building

• Prioritize identification and services for underserved groups

• Initiate immediate activities to build infrastructure, including program development and evaluation

As a result, Congress established the Office of Gifted and Talented within the U.S. Office of Education (predecessor to the Department of Education) in 1973. This provided some federal coordination and modest grants for demonstration projects, teacher training, and program development — aligning with recommendations for leadership and model initiatives.

It also began limited categorical funding under the Education Amendments of 1978, with appropriations reaching about $6–18 million cumulatively in some periods, supporting special projects and addressing underserved populations to some degree.

Unfortunately, much of the early infrastructure was dismantled during the Reagan era, when federal education funding shifted from categorical grants to block grants. As a result, federal money for gifted education disappeared overnight.

Years later, in 1988, Sen. Javits introduced the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Act. It provided dedicated funding for research and demonstration projects; grants to states, districts, and institutions; and a national research center on gifted education.

However, the program’s scale remains woefully inadequate. Annual appropriations have typically hovered in the $13–17 million range (e.g., $16.5 million in FY 2024 and similar levels in prior cycles), a minuscule fraction — roughly 0.02% — of the overall federal K-12 education budget. This tiny investment supports only targeted research and grants rather than providing any direct or broad funding to local school districts for gifted programs.

Even more troubling is the fact that it faces perennial threats of elimination: it has been repeatedly targeted for zeroing out in presidential budget proposals (including in FY 2026) and House appropriations bills, and often requires sustained advocacy to keep it alive.

The Javits Act was a welcome win for advanced education. But it’s far from a national talent development policy. It’s a tiny, discretionary grant program that’s perpetually underfunded and repeatedly targeted for elimination in budget proposals.

Untapped potential

The lack of a coherent, intentional talent-development policy causes the US to systematically lose high-potential talent. This is especially true for high-achieving students (HALO) from low-income families.

One of the clearest illustrations of America’s talent loss comes from the landmark “Lost Einsteins” research¹³ by Opportunity Insights. By linking tax records, school data, and patent filings across more than one million individuals, researchers discovered something striking: children from wealthy families are far more likely to become inventors than equally high-performing peers from low-income backgrounds. The gap isn’t driven primarily by ability. It’s driven by exposure. High-achieving students from disadvantaged families often lack access to mentors, enrichment opportunities, and innovation networks that help transform raw academic talent into scientific or entrepreneurial breakthroughs.

The scale of this loss is staggering. The researchers estimate that if children from low-income families invented at the same rate as the wealthy, America’s innovation rate would quadruple.

Education research on high-achieving, low-income students reveals a parallel pattern earlier in the talent pipeline. Recent Fordham Institute research¹⁴ describes a “leaky pipeline” in which HALO students demonstrate academic excellence in early grades, but steadily lose access to the advanced coursework, enrichment, and institutional supports that drive long-term success. In Ohio, for example, HALO students are outnumbered by more affluent high-achieving peers by roughly three-to-one in elementary school, but that gap widens to six-to-one at four-year colleges and ten-to-one at highly selective colleges. These disparities are strongly linked to unequal access to opportunity: HALO students are 26 percent less likely to enroll in advanced middle-school math, 34 percent less likely to take AP, IB, or dual-enrollment courses, and 44 percent less likely to receive gifted services. Yet participation in these advanced opportunities dramatically improves outcomes, with even a single AP or IB course associated with a 29-percentage-point increase in four-year college enrollment among HALO students.

Much of this is the result of HALO students not being identified early-on in school. Research¹⁵ by Jason Grissom, Christopher Redding, and Joshua F. Bleiberg found that a high-achieving student in the top socioeconomic quintile is about twice as likely to receive gifted services as a student in the lowest socioeconomic quintile in the same school even when the students are achieving at similar levels in math and reading.

Taken together, these findings suggest that the United States does not lack talent — it lacks systems that reliably identify, cultivate, and sustain that talent. Countries with explicit talent-development strategies treat high-ability students as a national resource, investing in early identification, accelerated learning pathways, and mentorship pipelines that connect promising students to advanced educational and career opportunities.

A good place to start

To be clear, adopting a China-Style talent development system would likely be far from ideal in the United States. The human cost of China’s high-pressure system is well-documented¹⁶, and it is a highly centralized state. We need something more, though, than the current hodge-podge of state and local policies.

A bill¹⁷, called the Advanced Coursework Equity Act and championed by Rep. Cory Booker (D-NJ), is a good (albeit imperfect) place to start.

At its most basic level, the legislation creates a large federal grant program designed to help states and school districts expand access to advanced academic coursework. That includes Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate, dual enrollment, honors classes, and gifted and talented programs. The legislation strongly encourages universal screening, which means evaluating all students for advanced learning opportunities rather than relying on teacher referrals or parent advocacy — two mechanisms that consistently favor families with greater time, information, and social capital.

The bill also recognizes something policymakers too often overlook: access alone is not enough. Many students who are capable of succeeding in advanced coursework never enroll. Some attend schools that simply do not offer advanced classes, while others face exam fees or tuition costs for dual enrollment that make participation financially unrealistic.

In order to be eligible for grants, states and districts receiving funding would be required to track who is participating in advanced coursework and who is succeeding once they enroll. That kind of data matters. By requiring better reporting, the legislation attempts to move conversations about excellence from rhetoric to measurable outcomes.

None of this makes the bill a silver bullet, though. It focuses heavily on middle and high school coursework rather than earlier talent development, where achievement gaps often begin. It does not fully address the teacher pipeline challenges that limit the availability of advanced coursework, particularly in rural and high-poverty schools. And, like most federal education legislation, it relies on grant incentives rather than establishing a comprehensive national strategy.

Still, progress in education policy rarely begins with sweeping changes. It begins with targeted reforms that address obvious failure points. Legislation like the Advanced Coursework Equity Act is a good first-step towards developing a national talent development policy.

American talent in the 21st century

If there is a single lesson running through America’s history of talent development, it is that we tend to act only when external pressure forces us to confront our complacency. Sputnik jolted the country into recognizing that intellectual excellence required cultivation. Today, the rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence and the emergence of global competitors like China present a similar moment of clarity. The question is not whether the United States has the raw talent to compete; the question is whether we are willing to build systems capable of finding and developing that talent.

The historical record shows that we have repeatedly identified the problem and repeatedly failed to sustain the solution. The Marland Report laid out a remarkably clear blueprint more than fifty years ago, warning that neglecting gifted students would carry both economic and human costs. The research since then has only strengthened.

The Advanced Coursework Equity Act does not solve all these challenges, and it wisely avoids copying the rigid and punishing Chinese talent system. What it does offer is a more balanced path forward — one that expands opportunity while protecting flexibility, local autonomy, and student well-being. By encouraging universal screening, increasing access to rigorous coursework, and demanding real accountability, the legislation sets us on the right path for future wins.

A true American talent strategy will require broader investments in early enrichment, teacher development, and mentorship networks connecting education to innovation and economic growth. But every durable policy architecture must begin with a strong foundation.

The AI era will reward nations that can systematically discover and cultivate their most capable minds. If the US hopes to remain a global leader in innovation and prosperity, it must move beyond episodic bursts of concern and toward a sustained commitment to developing talent at scale.

Niels Hoven is the founder and CEO of Mentava¹, building software for early literacy and accelerated learning. He has also developed one of the strongest pro-excellence public voices in the education space today over on his X feed². We hope you enjoy his article!

In America we claim to value excellence, but it seems that our schools never got that memo. Compare China’s “genius program” with how the US approaches talent in schools.

China identifies kids with extraordinary academic ability early, and nurtures that talent to turn them into founders and senior leaders of some of the country’s top technology companies. In contrast, the US sees giftedness as a problem to be solved: our educational system’s goal is to equalize outcomes, and exceptional children must be held back to allow slower kids to catch up.

There’s a cruel irony at the heart of some of our most well-intentioned education reforms. Meant to help disadvantaged students catch up with their high-achieving peers, a generation of progressive policies have systematically undermined academic excellence in our schools, and eliminated opportunities for the disadvantaged students whose interests they claimed to champion.

Shuttering gifted and talented programs, eliminating accelerated math, and eschewing standardized tests in admissions: across three different initiatives, we see the same dynamic at work. Reformers claimed to be raising the floor, when in reality they were lowering the ceiling.

In a country once fixated on excellence — meritocracy, exceptionalism, counting gold medals³ — one would think this result was intolerable. But despite technology and global competition driving an international arms race for excellence, the excellence of America’s youth has been systematically suppressed by the institutions whose explicit job is to develop it.

The Dismantling of Gifted Programs

In October 2021, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced⁴ plans to phase out the city’s gifted and talented program, which had admitted about 2,500 kindergartners annually based on testing. The program would be replaced with “Brilliant NYC,” which claimed it would accelerate learning for all 65,000 kindergartners. The rationale was straightforward: the existing merit-based program disproportionately served White and Asian students.

de Blasio’s plan was later reversed⁵ by incoming mayor Eric Adams, who instead expanded gifted programs to more schools. Now, however, history is repeating itself.

In early 2026, newly inaugurated Mayor Zohran Mamdani (New York’s first self-described socialist mayor) announced⁶ plans to eliminate gifted and talented admissions for kindergartners, echoing⁷ de Blasio’s earlier effort. Mamdani’s claim is essentially the same: testing five-year-olds for academic talent contributes to racial and socioeconomic inequity in schools. As usual, the administration has framed the change not as an elimination of advanced learning, but as a shift away from separating students early and toward providing “advanced learning for all”.

While gifted programs beginning in third grade would remain for now, the historical pattern is to phase out gifted programs on a cohort basis, i.e. each year, one more grade is eliminated. This minimizes outcry from current program participants who get to finish out their time, but ensures no new kids get the same opportunities.

The impulse behind de Blasio’s and Mamdani’s proposals — and similar efforts in San Francisco, Seattle⁸, Washington D.C.⁹, and elsewhere — reveals a troubling assumption: if a program doesn’t serve all students proportionally, it shouldn’t serve any students at all.

This assumption is wrong on two levels.

First, it confounds equal outcomes with equal opportunity. Our education system’s goal is to maximize opportunity for every student to achieve their potential. Our schools are not intended to be equalizers, holding children back in order to right imagined wrongs.

Second, and more fundamentally, the assumption treats the existence of advanced academic programs as inherently suspect — as though any structure designed to serve high-ability students must be a mechanism of privilege rather than a recognition of genuine differences in academic need. This gets the relationship between excellence and equity exactly backwards.

When New York has eliminated¹⁰ gifted programs in the past, wealthy families enroll their kids in private schools, hire tutors, and find enrichment programs. A family earning $200,000 a year has options¹¹. A family earning $40,000 does not. For a low-income family with a gifted child, a public school gifted program may be the only opportunity that child has for intellectual challenge. Eliminating public gifted programs doesn’t remove opportunities for wealthy kids, it just leaves the poor child with nowhere to go.

Algebra for None

In San Francisco, students used to take algebra in 8th grade. If a student was sufficiently prepared, they could take it in 7th grade.

However, because some students failed algebra in middle school, the district decided that no students should be allowed to take algebra in middle school.

In 2014, San Francisco Unified School District eliminated¹² accelerated middle school math, including the option for advanced students to take Algebra I in eighth grade. Every student, regardless of ability or preparation, would take the same math sequence. The goal was to equalize outcomes, reducing disparities in advanced math course-taking and closing achievement gaps.

It didn’t work.

Wealthy families turned to private tutoring, summer courses, private schools, or moved to other school districts. Rather than supporting the stated goal of “equity”, banning middle school algebra turned academic excellence into a luxury available only to the rich.

The assumption that we should slow down students who are ready for more is hard to justify on any theory of what schools are for. Schools exist to help each student learn as much as they can. Equity means equal opportunity, not artificially engineering outcomes by preventing kids from learning.

It took a decade of activism and an overwhelming vote at the ballot box to convince San Francisco to reverse their disastrous policy of anti-excellence. Math proficiency had declined, and officials acknowledged that the racial gap in advanced math hadn’t closed. The experiment had failed, but not before affecting thousands of students who were ready for more challenging coursework and never got the chance.

The Test-Optional Trap

When elite universities began dropping SAT and ACT requirements during the pandemic, it was hailed as a victory for equity. Standardized tests, critics argued, were biased tools that favored wealthy students. Making them optional would level the playing field.

As usual, the meritocracy critics were wrong. The reality has been exactly the opposite.

A National Bureau of Economic Research paper¹³ published in January 2025, based on Dartmouth’s admissions data from 2017–2022, found that high-achieving applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds who submitted test scores increased their admissions chances by a factor of 3.6x — from 2.9 percent to 10.2 percent. For first-generation college applicants, submitting scores increased their chances by 2.4x.

But many of these students weren’t submitting their scores. Only about 70 percent of first-generation students who scored 1500 or above submitted, compared to 90 percent of other applicants. These high-achieving students from disadvantaged backgrounds were being overly conservative, not realizing that their scores would actually be viewed favorably.

Meanwhile, when admissions officers reviewed applications without test scores, they placed greater weight on essays, extracurriculars, and letters of recommendation — precisely the areas where wealthier applicants have the largest advantages.

MIT¹⁴ found¹⁵ that test scores were one of the most effective tools for identifying socioeconomically disadvantaged students who lacked access to advanced coursework, but were ready for rigorous academic work. Yale’s internal research¹⁶ reached¹⁷ similar conclusions.

For all their flaws, standardized tests provide something crucial: an objective benchmark that cuts through the noise of inflated GPAs, variable school quality, and unequal access to extracurriculars. A low-income student who scores a 1500 despite coming from an under-resourced school signals something important about her academic ability that might not be visible anywhere else in her application.

Test-optional policies removed that signal. And in doing so, they made it harder for talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds to demonstrate what they could do.

The Pattern

These three examples share a common structure. In each case, a program or standard that identified and served high-achieving students was dismantled in the name of equity. In each case, the reform failed to achieve its stated goals. And in each case, the students who lost the most were those with the fewest alternatives.

It is damning enough that these policies have failed on their own terms. Even more pernicious, however, is that these policies reflect a vision of education in which excellence is not the goal but a threat. Progressive reformers claim that they want both equity and excellence. But they have consistently dismantled structures of excellence, choosing to artificially equalize outcomes instead. Rather than help every student reach their potential, they would rather ensure that no student has the opportunity to explore excellence.

When a school district eliminates gifted programs, it is saying it does not believe it’s the school’s job to challenge students who are ahead. When a district forces all students into the same math track regardless of readiness, it’s prioritizing the appearance of equity over the reality of learning. When a university drops testing requirements in admissions, it’s removing one of the few tools that allowed students without resources to prove what they could do.

To be serious about both equity and excellence, the path forward requires expanding access to gifted programs rather than eliminating them. Equity means being fair to all students, even high achievers - telling them that they belong, their academic needs matter, and they deserve the opportunity to be challenged every day in school.

It means investing in better identification methods that find talented students wherever they are, including in populations that traditional screening has missed. It means treating giftedness as a spectrum, rather than a binary. It means maintaining rigorous academic pathways in public schools so that students don’t have to leave the system to be challenged. And it means keeping standardized testing as one tool among several, while providing free test prep and support to students who can’t afford to purchase it privately.

Finally, it means recognizing that equity and excellence are not opposing values. A system that refuses to challenge its most capable students is not equitable.

The evidence is increasingly clear. MIT, Yale, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Princeton have all reinstated testing requirements. San Francisco reversed its algebra policy after a decade of failure. The debate over gifted programs continues, but the pattern is unmistakable: leveling down doesn’t work, and the students who pay the highest price are those who can least afford it.

Conclusion

The tragedy of these reforms is that they were born from genuine concern about inequality. But good intentions don’t exempt policies from scrutiny, and the actual effects of these reforms have been clear: they have made it harder for talented students to access the challenges and recognition they need to grow.

Equity in education doesn’t mean artificially engineering equal outcomes. It means ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to explore their full potential. For some students, that means additional support to master grade-level content. For others, it means access to advanced opportunities that will challenge them to grow beyond it.

Both matter. Both are part of genuine equity. And both deserve to exist in our public schools.

The choice isn’t between equity and excellence. It’s between reality and ideology, equalizing opportunity or artificially engineering equal outcomes. It’s between a vision of education that respects the diversity of student ability and one that pretends it doesn’t exist. When it comes to our children’s future, we need to support excellence instead of suppressing it.

Editor’s note: Vocational education may seem, at first glance, to be an incongruous topic for a group focused on excellence in education. It is not. The things worth understanding how to learn, and to learn well, extend well beyond traditional academic subjects. Excellence in education does not mean funneling everyone onto the same narrow path and treating everyone who falls off that path as a failure, but taking education seriously and executing it well no matter what the people involved are learning. With that in mind, we’re delighted to publish Sheela’s guest post on vocational education.

The post-World War II economic boom was the heyday for vocational education. Commonly associated with shop class, voc-ed, now rebranded “career and technical education” (CTE), involves training for careers in the skilled trades as opposed to academic preparation for a four-year college. In the 1950s and 60s, voc-ed enjoyed high participation rates among students, huge demand for skilled workers, bipartisan political support, and training partnerships with labor unions. It also benefited from the widespread cultural acceptance of a non-college pathway to middle-class life. A factory job was a good job, and “good” back then meant that a non-college-educated person could support a family and earn respect.

In the following decades, however, several factors conspired to effect a progressive marginalization of CTE. The 1963 Vocational Education Act linked¹ voc-ed to the needs of underprivileged students, insinuating that it lacked relevance for more capable students. The changing American industrial and manufacturing landscape of the 70s and 80s, meanwhile, sowed apprehension about the value of training for jobs that could become obsolete. Then came the enormous impact of the 1983 “A Nation at Risk²” report, which employed apocalyptic rhetoric to describe what it called a "rising tide of mediocrity" in American education that amounted to "unilateral educational disarmament." The report captured the public imagination and established a story of American educational decline that informs public discourse and policy even now. In doing so, it entrenched an enduring definition for educational excellence: the mastery of traditional academic subjects leading to attendance in a selective, four-year college or university. This definition, in turn, entrenched the era of outsized parental anxiety about selective college admissions, and pressure on children to excel academically.

Before long, CTE was stigmatized as an insidious tool for racial and economic segregation and a dumping ground for those considered less-thans, dead-enders and also-rans. As a result, whole generations have been raised on the notion that one earns cultural prestige, to say nothing of personal dignity, through elite credentialing alone. Ambitious students of all backgrounds, it goes without saying, have been discouraged from considering CTE a worthy life path. Instead, they’ve done as they were told and pursued college. But in another cruelty baked into the system, many who took up the “college for all” call discovered once they arrived on campus that those high school “College Prep” classes had not, in fact, prepared them for college-level work.

In acceding to the de-prioritization of CTE, communities, schools, families and students all bought into the false belief that ambition, high standards and overall excellence do not apply to vocationally directed coursework. As a result, today we are fast approaching a crisis point where the most important members of the CTE work world—our electricians, plumbers, skilled carpenters, HVAC techs and mechanics—are retiring and have nowhere near enough young people to take their places³. While some evidence suggests that the winds are shifting⁴ and students are coming around to the benefits of non-college paths, the pent-up demand for tradespeople is far outpacing these incremental increases in CTE participation⁵ and expansions of programming⁶. We desperately need a nationally-scaled cohort of gifted and talented tradespeople, yet our social norms have browbeaten the students who might have comprised that cohort out of recognizing themselves as gifted and talented.

Mike Rowe, this country’s most famous advocate for the skilled trades, has been collecting evidence on this bleak situation for years. In 2016, Rowe received a letter from a mother describing the experience of her bright, homeschooled son after he applied for the High Voltage Lineman program at Arkansas State University. The school rejected him—for being too smart. “Your grades and test scores are too high and you are too articulate. We ran into this with another kid today. You need to enroll in the university and go into engineering.”

Rowe asks, in response to this story⁷, “What kind of person do the people of Arkansas want to rely upon when the lights go out? An ambitious, hard-working lineman who one day might move on to another opportunity or a less qualified candidate whose primary qualifications for the job were mediocrity and desperation?”

He and his Mike Rowe Works Foundation (Mottos: “Work Smart AND Hard” and “We’ve got a PR problem.”) are playing an outsized role in the good news where excellence and CTE are concerned. His “Work Ethic Scholarships⁸,” offered exclusively for students bound for apprenticeships and trade schools, demand that applicants hold themselves to high standards. One section of the Foundation’s application, in fact, is reminiscent of rules for life that the Stoics might have drawn up for the modern age.

Among the twelve “SWEAT Pledge⁹” commandments that applicants must agree to are these:

I believe there is no such thing as a ‘bad job.’ I believe that all jobs are opportunities, and it’s up to me to make the best of them.

I believe the best way to distinguish myself at work is to show up early, stay late, and cheerfully volunteer for every crappy task there is.

I believe that my education is my responsibility and absolutely critical to my success. I am resolved to learn as much as I can from whatever source is available to me. and I will never stop learning and understand that library cards are free.

Rowe’s is one promising way to confront our national PR problem with CTE schooling and careers, and surely the good money that skilled tradespeople stand to earn will start speaking more loudly for itself, too. Take the emblematic plumber as an example. Depending on factors like location and overtime potential, plumbers today can expect to bring in six figures annually for much of their career. Also, the work of a plumber does not actually involve sloshing around in waste all day. It demands in-depth knowledge of and skill with advanced systems that are in constant technological flux, along with a creative, problem-solving mindset—knowledge, skill, and mindset all rigorously furnished by contemporary CTE programs.

While we’re setting the record straight on plumbers, let’s also correct another popular misperception relating to many of the non-college goers and their non-college-educated families: They don’t reject college because they can’t hack it; they reject it because a culture that prizes intellectual pursuits over other forms of expertise rejected them.

Kids in our system learn as early as elementary school who gets to apply the values of excellence to their work. As David Brooks put it in his November, 2024 cover story on higher education in The Atlantic¹⁰, “The good test-takers get funneled into the meritocratic pressure cooker; the bad test-takers learn, by about age 9 or 10, that society does not value them the same way.” This undervaluing follows the latter students through middle school, four wasted years of high school and into their work lives, and has enormous consequences.

Educationally elite America’s disdain for non-elite workers goes a good way toward explaining the resentment so many voters feel for Democrats, who, fairly or not, today represent the most obvious manifestation of that ethos. Donald Trump has this disdain to thank for his enduring electoral success, and he knows it. "I love the blue-collar workers and they love me,” he stated in his first inaugural address¹¹. “These are the forgotten men and women of our country, and they're forgotten no longer.” To turn back the tide of resentment and repair our national divide, we need to stop behaving as though professional excellence and the self-respect and public admiration that come with it belong only to elite college graduates.

For insight into how to do so, we can look to Great Britain. Walking across London’s iconic Tower Bridge, one’s eyes are drawn down to the Blue Line, where name after name is set in brass and outlined in blue. It is not the English equivalent of the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and neither are they the names of wealthy bridge benefactors. These, rather, are prominent tributes to the workers who made the bridge:

John Buchanon, Bridge Master, 1931-1939

Matthew Kirkland, Plater, 1890-1894

John Chalk, Rivet Boy, 1890-1894

Hannah Griggs, Cook, 1910-1915

It is high time that America rediscovers this lost art of recognition. In the coming years, as the shortage of skilled tradespeople comes into clearer focus, there will be calls to scale up promising training programs and build more CTE-centric schools. That’s all to the good, but the much harder work will be to let go of our insistent, outdated conviction that excellence and the esteem that accompanies it are the sole purview of the mind, and not the hands.

Sheela is a writer and teacher in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. She teaches Italian language and cooking, as well as storytelling, and hosts storytelling events that seek to encourage the airing of difficult truths.

Editor’s note: This entry is the first in an ongoing series of policy proposals that will develop our pro-excellence framework for education policy at the federal, state, and local levels. Our focus in this first Model Policy is to lay out actionable items and workable frameworks that authorities like the Department of Education could implement tomorrow or next week, given sufficient will and support. We hope both to make it easier for officials and lawmakers focused on excellence to take immediate action and, as we move forward, to paint a broader vision of how to run American education with an eye toward raising the ceiling.

For too long¹, the American education system has stubbornly pursued a "one-size-fits-all" model of educating children that conflates sameness with fairness. As a result, too many students remain held back by misguided policy and pedagogical choices that constrain the pace of learning and remove opportunities to excel, while those with money often simply abandon free schools. While robust regulatory, funding, and reporting practices exist to serve other special learning populations — whether under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), or Title VI — virtually no federal support is provided to the Nation’s Gifted and Talented (G&T) students or Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) programs.¹ We cannot wait for national education policy to reform itself, and thus must demand that it prioritize excellence in learning across the spectrum of student ability and need.

Given our prior coverage² of education policymaking³ at the federal level, it made sense to develop our own framework for how the federal government could jump-start a pro-excellence national education agenda. Hence this first Model Policy describes, broadly, the first steps the Department of Education (ED) could take if it were serious about supporting excellence in American K-12 education.

Education policy remains fundamentally state-run and locally controlled in many ways, and federal guidance is a relatively small part of education policy as a whole. The federal level is not often where nuts-and-bolts, granular policies are hammered out, nor should it be. However, it has important roles to play in setting the tone for state and local policymakers and in schools, allocating Congressionally mandated funding in the most effective available ways, and collecting the data that makes clear-eyed analysis of education possible. As such, these levers are our focuses for immediate executive branch action.

Using executive powers to support a national pro-excellence education agenda

In order to orient American education toward excellence — without new legislation — we recommend the Department of Education make use of the following three levers of federal policymaking:

First, policy clarity: Ability grouping is broadly legal and, despite being rarely optimized, is commonly used. Despite that, a cloud of uncertainty hangs around it based on discouraging guidance and generations of cultural skepticism among policymakers. Legal uncertainty kills innovation. We recommend issuing non-regulatory guidance that emphasizes the existing permissive laws around pedagogically appropriate grouping while providing best practices.

Second, incentives: The overwhelming majority of federal education spending goes toward equity-based goals of raising the performance of struggling students, with little funding or interest towards ways to raise the ceiling. Gifted education programs, for example, receive little more than 1/1000 of the federal funding special education programs receive. We recommend balancing discretionary spending in current federal programs, focusing on programs serious about pushing education upwards.

Third, data collection: There are robust practices for tracking the performance of students in IDEA and English as a Second Language (ESL) programs, but limited visibility into how the needs of gifted and high academic performers are met. Most of the relevant data is simply not collected. Therefore, we recommend requiring that states collect and report comprehensive data on Gifted & Talented student enrollment, services, and identification. This requires zero new legislation and zero new funding — just reallocation of existing resources with an eye toward excellence.

1. Issue Pro-Excellence Regulatory and Civil Rights Guidance

Through sub-agencies like the Office for Elementary and Secondary Education (OESE) and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), the Department of Education can issue clear guidance (e.g., through a Dear Colleague Letter) affirming the legality and educational value of proven practices including student tracking and acceleration. This guidance should also clarify how existing frameworks like IDEA and Section 504 can support the specific needs of gifted students, and emphasize how persistently disruptive behavior and disrupted classrooms significantly impede student access to a fair and adequate public education (FAPE), especially in GATE environments.

• Endorsement of Best Educational Practices:

  • Tracking and Acceleration: Adoption of neutral educational screening and recommendation tracks, which place greater weight and emphasis on standardized testing and assessment results over personal recommendations for acceleration.

  • Adoption of Routine Re-Assessment: All students should have the opportunity to participate in reassessment through the Annual Accountability Assessments currently mandated by ESSA. By linking re-assessment to ESSA this creates tangible stakes that allow students to be accelerated when they demonstrate exceptional performance relative to their cohort group.²

  • Advanced Learning Cohorts: Reinforce the legality for states to build and fund advanced learning cohorts in core and enrichment subjects as a research-supported best practice, allowing instruction to be tailored to students’ readiness and potential. At the school level, administrators should be encouraged to implement flexible, subject-specific advanced learning cohorts to maximize learning for gifted and high-achieving students; to reinforce acceleration of skill acquisition; and to develop content knowledge across clearly identified learning outcomes.

• Expanded IDEA / 504 Guidance: All accommodations and modifications for students identified as Twice-Exceptional must not only support their disability-related needs but also address their advanced learning abilities. This should include individualized exceptional-achievement goals, ensuring that students’ strengths are nurtured alongside their areas of challenge. Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) and 504 plans should therefore integrate both support services and enrichment opportunities to provide equitable access to their full potential.

• Most Appropriate Cohorts (MACo): Current federal law under IDEA §1412(a)(5) defines the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE) as educating children with disabilities alongside non-disabled peers to the maximum extent appropriate. While integration remains important, this standard has often been interpreted to prioritize general classroom placement over individualized academic needs. We propose reframing LRE to formally include Most Appropriate Cohorts (MACo), defined as flexible, cohort-based groupings that maximize each student’s educational growth, achievement, and potential. Students with disabilities may be placed in specialized cohorts when the general classroom does not meet their instructional needs, while on-level and advanced students have expanded opportunities for enrichment, acceleration, or advanced learning cohorts. Placement decisions under MACo would continue to consider peer integration but prioritize academic development, rigor, and cohort-based instruction, with state funding and IEP processes ensuring FAPE and alignment with individualized learning goals.

• Disciplinary Guidance: An individual’s right to classroom access cannot extend to disrupting the learning of peers, as all students deserve a safe, supportive, and focused environment. States should adopt strict, tiered frameworks of disciplinary response with enforceable timelines, procedural safeguards, and consistent application to ensure disruptions are addressed quickly and effectively. Students at all levels deserve the opportunity to learn while they’re required to be in classrooms.

• School Choice Programs: Just as current policy provides specialized funding for schools serving students with disabilities, policy should also support expanded access for GATE students. States should establish cross-district choice programs to ensure eligible students can attend magnet schools or advanced programs beyond their home district boundaries. When families independently pursue enrichment opportunities such as CTY or Early College, districts should accommodate these options and provide clear, transparent processes for transferring credit and coursework.

2. Use Discretionary Funding and Federal Grants to Improve GATE Programs, Innovation, and Access

Gifted education programs and services, as mentioned above, receive little more than 1/1000 of the federal funding special education programs receive. In part this reality reflects the general lack of attention paid to G&T students at the state and national policymaking levels, but federal education authorities could do much more with the tools they have to increase GATE program innovation and access.

ED can strategically direct discretionary funds and use the competitive priorities of existing grant programs to spur innovation, research, and the implementation of evidence-based practices in gifted education.

Future grant competitions funded under programs like those listed below could, for example, award priority preference points to applicants who demonstrate how their proposed project will support schools and districts in serving G&T students, particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Key Federal Programs for Supporting Gate

• The Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program: As the only federal program specifically for G&T students and GATE education, ED should use it as a centralized body and engine for research and development in gifted education. Its grants should be prioritized to find and scale effective methods for identifying and serving gifted students.

• The Education Innovation and Research (EIR) Program: ED should create a competitive grant priority for EIR projects that develop and expand programs for high-achieving students, building a national pipeline of proven strategies for accelerating and educating gifted students.

• Title I, Part A of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA): Title I guidance should be amended to emphasize the importance of investing into GATE programs and G&T students and services in high-poverty schools.

• The U.S. Presidential Scholars Program: Though this is mostly a recognition program and not a source of funding, ED should leverage its ability to direct national attention in the education space and direct new efforts to revitalize this program.

3. Mandate State Data Collection and Reporting on G&T Students and GATE Programs

The Department of Education should mandate states collect and report comprehensive data on GATE program enrollment, services, expenditures, and identification methods. It should also adopt a broad paradigm of data collection that prioritizes accurately reporting and recording student characteristics based on service eligibility (IDEA, ESL, and GATE services).

• EdFacts and NCES: We recommend maintaining the existing EdFacts and National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data systems. However, a key change will be requiring states to adopt reporting practices for recipients of GATE services that mirrors the required reporting for special populations, ELL/ESOL, BIE schools, and disabled students. Specifically, ED should mandate the creation of a new subgroup in the EdFacts data initiative to track the “Receipt of Gifted Services.” Make this a requirement for Data Collection by NCES, which includes the data collection for EdFacts, the Education Data Repository.

• SLDS Grants: The executive branch can require states to use existing Statewide Longitudinal Data Systems (SLDS) grants to track GATE student achievement separately from existing populations. This task can be streamlined as states already report assessment and civil rights data, making the addition of these columns of data less arduous.

• Targeted Data Points: States must be required to provide specific data points, including:

  • The number of students enrolled in GATE-affiliated programs, in-school services, and per-pupil spending numbers for those programs. This will allow policymakers to evaluate the relative investment in GATE populations compared to students in IDEA and ESL programs.

  • The percentage of schools and districts funding dual enrollment programs.

  • The specific assessment tools schools and districts use to classify and identify giftedness, which will help standardize these (frequently) subjective and varying determinations across states.

  • The number of gifted programs and opportunities available to students within each state, including magnet schools and immersion programs.

  • The number of disciplinary incidents in GATE-affiliated classrooms.

Revitalizing American Education

The education system in the United States is truly a Leviathan of overlapping and intersecting powers, authorities, systems, and practices. As things stand, though, no single entity rivals the ability of the Department of Education to guide national education policy and priorities. Recently, the major forces shaping its policy have been those aiming to focus it toward equity or those trying to remove it altogether. So our Model Policy begins there, under the conviction that for those who want schools to pursue excellence, no level of policy — especially one of the highest — can be ignored.

Translating values into concrete policies is an essential, challenging task which any successful education reform effort must eventually take on. For the rest of this year and into the next, then, we will be developing our framework for how federal education authorities can promote our values: Test students and teach them where they’re at, make excellence-focused education available to all who want it, and keep no child behind.

Thanks to Thomas Carey and Lillian Tara⁶ for their help with this memo.

When I wrote about Ellis Elementary's shift to grouping students by reading ability instead of grade level for¹The 74²,³ I had no idea how far that story would travel. I didn’t expect lengthy “comment section” conversations or thoughtful questions landing in my Inbox from educators, administrators, and policymakers across the country. It was clear that people were curious and hungry for a blueprint for how we did it.

This follow-up piece is just that: the nuts and bolts of how we made this work at Ellis, and how it might work at your school, as well. It’s for everyone who has asked about the logistics, policy flexibility, cultural shift — and the inherent challenges behind our success. Because when our school decided to stop grouping students by grade level for reading instruction and instead group them by ability, it wasn’t because we had all the answers.

We had run out of excuses. Our reading and math scores were in the bottom 5% of schools in Illinois. The old ways weren’t working. Our students were behind, and COVID only widened the gap. If we wanted different results, we had to do something different. That decision led to dramatic improvements in our students’ reading achievement.

My article generated as much interest as it did questions. Educators and policymakers wanted to know how we did it. What did implementation really look like? What were the pitfalls? How did we get buy-in? Why not replicate it across other subjects? So here’s the follow-up: a deeper dive into how we made subject-specific ability grouping work for reading, what we’re learning as we apply those lessons to math, and what advice I’d give to any school that knows it needs to change but isn’t sure where to start.

A Day in the Life at Ellis

We built our school day on the belief that the right instruction, at the right level, delivered with consistency, makes all the difference. And that curriculum matters. We use Reading Horizons⁴ for phonics instruction and CKLA⁵ for knowledge-building and comprehension.

Here’s what a typical instructional day looks like for students at Ellis:

• Tier 1 Phonics Instruction: 45 minutes

• ELA Small Groups: 60 minutes

• Tier 1 Knowledge-Building ELA: 90 minutes

• Tier 1 Math: 45 minutes

• Flex Math: 30 minutes

Students travel to ability-based groups for Reading Horizons instruction (foundational literacy skills, including phonics and phonological awareness). These groups are not tied to their homeroom, and the teachers rotate accordingly. For the most part, students stay with their homeroom teacher for the rest of the day and receive targeted support in smaller groups (as needed).

Making Ability Grouping Work for Reading

With any ability grouping, the first step is identifying each student's ability level. We started with a student-facing diagnostic to gauge each student's decoding and encoding abilities.

Then came the hard part: organizing the groups. We aimed to avoid moving students more than one grade level below their actual grade for instruction (if possible), both for academic and social-emotional reasons. We stacked each grade level with a lower-skill group so students could stay in a familiar environment. We intentionally kept the lowest-performing groups small to ensure they’d receive more individualized attention. And we embedded the belief that these aren’t "your kids" or "my kids" — they’re all our students.

Routines and expectations were critical. Every classroom follows the same procedures for entering and leaving the room, getting materials, and sharing out, so students know what to expect regardless of which teacher they're with. We made sure every teacher understood the urgency and supported the shift. As I often say, you’re only as strong as your weakest link.

Initially, we didn’t include kindergarten in the ability grouping model. That changed quickly when we realized the value of accelerating our youngest students who were ready for more of a challenge.

So What About Math?

After a few years, we began to see significant momentum and growth in reading, so we shifted our attention to math. Our math data confirmed what we already suspected: most students were at least one grade level behind.

But math posed new challenges. There wasn’t a neatly packaged, small-group curriculum similar to popular choices currently available for ELA; we didn’t have a ready-made scope and sequence for differentiated math instruction.

So we built one.

Within each grade level, using our tier 1 math diagnostic data, we divided students into three groups: two grades below, one grade below, and on grade level. We assigned each group to a specific teacher and provided whole-group instruction on prerequisite skills that aligned with the Tier 1 math lesson they would encounter later in the day. Our goal for both ELA and math is to front-load prerequisite skills with targeted intervention before whole-class Tier 1 instruction, not after. It’s a proactive model, not reactive remediation.

Next year, we plan to introduce a new component called Fluency in Five, inspired by Brian Poncy’s M.I.N.D. resources, which focuses exclusively on math fact fluency.

Although we’ve seen small gains on math state testing, we haven’t yet seen the significant gains we’ve had in reading; however, we’re laying the foundation. In many ways, we’re still building the plane while flying it. We believe that this model, which pre-skills students before Tier 1 instruction, can be effective across various subjects. We just haven’t had our “Sold a Story” moment for math — yet.

Addressing Concerns: Stigma, Staffing, and Student Belonging

I often get this question: What does this do to student self-esteem, especially for third-graders grouped with first-grade-level readers?

Honestly, it hasn’t been the issue some feared. Part of that is because of the way we communicate with students. We don’t make the groupings feel punitive. Part of it is the consistency of instruction across classrooms. But a big part of it is that for many of our kids, this is the first time school has made sense.

And since we’ve been grouping this way since 2019, for many students, this is all they’ve ever known. It’s the norm, and it works for them — so they don’t question it.

In truth, ability-based reading instruction with Reading Horizons is often our students' favorite part of the day. When students feel successful, the need to act out or save face evaporates. We have significant behavior supports at Ellis due to our students’ diverse needs, but we haven’t found that ability grouping creates new discipline problems. If anything, it reduces them.

Yes, there is a staffing demand, but not due to behavioral issues. It’s about group size. The more teachers we have, the smaller and more targeted our groups can be. That requires coordination and support, which brings me to policy.

Ellis is part of a large district with over 30,000 students. The district chooses our curriculum, but we have some autonomy over how we deliver instruction. That policy created the opportunity we needed.

In districts with strict policies, begin with a small, strategic pilot. First, build support from your school leadership by highlighting successful implementations in schools with similar demographics and challenges. Then, identify champions of change within your building and launch the initiative in one grade — or even a single classroom. Establish a clear vision and collect data to track student outcomes. Once you have results, present your findings to district leaders or the school board to advocate for broader adoption.

In our district, with early success, other schools began to take notice. Several have now adopted "walk to learn" models like ours (i.e., students moving to a different classroom to receive ability-based instruction). And our district leadership has been supportive. They’ve let us lead and continue to allow us to go where the data takes us.

What Made This Work

I always get asked about resistance. From school leaders. From teachers. From parents.

And here’s the truth:

We were in the bottom 5% in the state. What did we have to lose?

We built teacher buy-in by building teacher confidence. We showed them data. We provided them with evidence-based curricula and the necessary training to use them. We created consistency. That led to more confident instruction, more consistent student experiences, and results we could be proud of.

If you’re on the fence about trying something like this, here’s my advice: change is scary, but necessary, especially when your most vulnerable learners are at stake.

• You don’t need the perfect packaged solution. We didn’t have one for math, so we made our own. You just need the will to stop doing what isn’t working, the flexibility to find what does, and the humility to keep iterating.

• Identify the areas where your policies permit freedom, even in a large district like Rockford. Start there. Don’t wait for permission (within reason, of course).

• Continue evolving. We’re not done. Our math grouping model is still evolving. We’re exploring ways to enhance fluency and provide better prerequisite support. We’re also opening up our data for deeper analysis, including how different ability groups are growing over time.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: once you stop asking "What if it doesn’t work?" and start asking "What if it does?", the path forward becomes a lot clearer.

Jessica Berg has served as the Instructional Coach at Ellis Elementary School in Rockford, IL for 7 years. She is also trained in both LETRS and Orton-Gillingham (OG). Her passion for education and the Science of Reading was sparked by her son’s diagnosis of dyslexia at age 14.

She also writes on Substack!

And to support more content like this from the Center for Educational Progress…

While many students, parents, and teachers experience education as a local phenomenon, the education policy reforms that manifest locally are often parts of broader, international trends. Bryan Joseph is a Canadian teacher interested in comparing the education policy choices he sees in American media to those he sees firsthand. With this look into familiar fights over quantitative assessment — but in new, friendly territory — an American audience might better appreciate how some of the most pernicious education fads are, perhaps unfortunately, not only found in the United States. Thanks for reading another issue of Attacks on Excellence, and the first venture abroad for the series.

Education in British Columbia, Canada

For over a decade, grading and student assessment in British Columbia have undergone a tragic decline. Under the aegis of noble ideals, the British Columbian Ministry of Education advanced curricular changes that made standardized assessment more difficult, and instead of reversing those changes in the face of pushback, the Ministry introduced assessment requirements that replace letter grades and percentages entirely from Kindergarten through Grade 9. Rather than furthering the Ministry’s ideals, the resulting “Proficiency Scale” has flummoxed parents, stressed teachers, and demoralized students.

The story of how reform efforts culminated in the British Columbian K-12 Student Reporting Policy, enacted in select districts in 2019 and province-wide in 2023, traces an all-too-familiar arc of reformers advancing idealistic ends with maladaptive means while performance² plummets³ and alarm bells⁴ go ignored.

Because Canada does not have a national Ministry of Education or a unifying set of commonly prescribed learning outcomes, each provincial Ministry enjoys total freedom to set its own educational policy and curriculum. For a province with an affinity for heterodox ideas such as British Columbia, this freedom allows the latest pedagogies to be enshrined in policy as rapidly as they come into vogue. In BC, enthusiasm about new approaches to old problems drowned out warnings against forsaking reliable tools. Sadly, the value of content-based curricula and fair, objective, standardized measures of student learning are sometimes only apparent when they’re gone.

This recent history of education reform in BC has important lessons for those south of the Canadian border. BC shares its cultural penchant for new fashions with the states on America’s west coast. American reforms described in previous CEP posts — such as SFUSD's Grading For Equity initiative⁵ — can be better understood through reference to BC's story, both in terms of the motivations that drive them and of the consequences we can expect to follow.

The New Vision

Until the mid-2010s⁶, British Columbian education was grounded in an examination system similar to the A-level qualifications used in the United Kingdom and other commonwealth countries. All students would write provincially standardized Math, Science, and English exams in Grade 10. Students would then choose senior electives and write as few as two or as many as nine subject-specific exams — in Calculus, Literature, Law, etc. — by the end of Grade 12.

As a matter of official record, a student’s “final” course grade was calculated by averaging the provincial exam grade (weighted at 40% for senior exams) with the classroom teacher’s summative grades of in-class tests, projects, and assignments (weighted at 60%). In cases of extreme disagreement between the classroom grade and exam grade, however, the province’s top universities would disregard the classroom grade entirely.¹

Provincial exams provided constraint and direction for assessment. Math 9 teachers looked incompetent if their course grades weren't generally good predictors of success in the Math 10 course, and Math 10 teachers looked incompetent if their course grades weren't generally good predictors of success on the Math 10 exam. Examinations kept the system honest, kept the assessments meaningful, and established fine-grained benchmarks for feedback on student progress.

But in 2010, the BC Ministry of Education began a curriculum redesign process that would chart a dramatic new direction for the province. First unveiled in the 2011 BC Education Plan⁷ and developed in the following years, the Ministry had a vision of an “innovative education system” centered around two key concepts. The first of these was “personalized⁸ learning⁹.” Learning in BC needed to be “focused on the needs, strengths and aspirations of each individual young person”; this meant “acknowledg[ing] that not all students learn successfully at the same rate, in the same learning environment, and in the same ways” and giving students “more of a say in what and how they learn.”

The second key concept was “cross-curricular capacities¹⁰.” To thrive in the “rapidly evolving world,” schools needed to “do more than help students master the sets of knowledge and skills acquired through the standard subject areas.” Instead, students needed to develop the “core competencies” foundational to all subjects; “a curriculum with fewer but higher level outcomes” would “allow deeper learning and understanding.”

This lofty vision set crucial parameters for the budding curriculum. If teachers and students were to cater learning plans to each individual student’s needs and interests, they would need a “flexibility” at odds with enforcing rigid requirements regarding specific content outcomes. Neither could teachers’ assessments be too rigid; part and parcel of personalized learning was giving educators “more ability¹¹ to decide how and when each student is assessed.” The flexibility necessary for the Ministry’s new vision led to major curricular changes:

1. A substantial increase in the number of available senior academic electives.

Whereas previously there had only been one History 12 class for seniors, the new curriculum senior would include scope and sequence for Asian Studies 12, Comparative Religions 12, Economic Theory 12, Genocide Studies 12, etc. In total there would be 15 social studies courses available at the senior level.

2. A focus on allowing place-based differentiation.

Since personalized learning placed a lower premium on content outcomes than “increasing student engagement,” Chemistry 12 teachers working in the province's south-eastern region were encouraged to teach a course that centered on examples and applications drawn from the regionally relevant coal mining industry, while teachers on the northwest coast should instead focus on maritime chemistry.

3. An emphasis on process over product.

Teaching to develop students’ core competencies was separable from teaching specific content outcomes. Accordingly, new curriculum documents would contain half as many prescribed learning outcomes for content and fill the space with descriptions of skills and competencies to be developed. English teachers could substitute personal favorite texts in and canonical classics out, so long as they used those favorite texts to explore standard tools of literary analysis. Students were no longer writing essays about World War II for the sake of learning the events and themes of World War II; rather, they were learning the details of World War II as a useful pretext for learning to write essays.

As teachers opted in piecemeal to the new curriculum over a three-year transition¹², it became readily apparent that continuing the provincial exam system was impossible. The standardized exams stood in tension with the loose place-based, teacher-customized curriculum and the ambition to give educators more say in how their students were assessed. On a practical level, moreover, it would be completely untenable for BC's relatively small Ministry of Education to create quality exams for each and every course semester over semester. As the Advisory Group on Provincial Assessment reported¹³ without irony in 2014,

“As the educational system moves away from ‘knowing things’ toward ‘understanding things,’ then it becomes more difficult to determine what should appear on an examination.”

Some stakeholder groups voiced concerns to the Ministry that scrapping the provincial assessment system could imperil the availability of the high-quality data needed to make informed policy decisions. Yet by the time the Advisory Group released its second report¹⁴ a year later, it had become more confident in the BC Education Plan and less worried about such “external” concerns:

“[S]takeholder groups that are external to the K-12 education system (e.g., employers and post-secondary institutions) have commonly relied on graduation data to inform their decisions. While we recognize these “external” needs, we also acknowledge that meeting the needs and purposes within K-12 must remain the primary drivers for assessment, and that the functions of the K-12 system should not be controlled by external needs.”

And so BC students wrote provincial exams for the last time in 2017. In the years since, the only standard examinations in BC schools have been literacy and numeracy temperature checks divorced from any particular curriculum and graded on 3- or 4-point scales. While these generic assessments arguably provide useful data to schools in general, it remains unclear to what use these data are being put — even a sympathetic case study¹⁵ acknowledges that lower quality data had resulted in an “absence of test-based accountability” for schools and teachers.² Nonetheless, the curriculum persisted, as yet undeterred.

A Crisis of Confidence

The Ministry’s curricular overhaul did not initially change the provincial reporting policy. In the first years without provincial exams, student achievement was still summarized at both course midpoint and end of semester with a percentage score and a corresponding letter grade (e.g., a score between 67% and 73% and an attendant C+). To complement a student’s quantitative marks, teachers were also required to write a brief comment and assign a "work habits" score measuring general conscientiousness. For a time, the curriculum seemed compatible with this combination of comments and traditional marks.

Soon, however, the new curriculum engendered a crisis of confidence in percentage score summary grades, especially at the middle school (Grade 6–9) level. Issues with poorly standardized percentage scores are well understood, both in the literature¹⁶ and by students who’ve been burned by imprecision.

BC teachers were no longer consistent in either the specific content that featured in their lessons or their expectations for how much of that content students needed to remember. When Mr. A covers fewer works and assigns easier projects in his English 9 course than Mrs. B does in hers, our assessments are no longer reliable enough to judge that an 89% from Mr. A indicates greater learning and retention than an 83% from Mrs. B. Once policies and standards came unmoored from clear content requirements, the faith that an “A” or a “B” reflects the same quality of work across schools and time collapsed.

In the US, the Equitable Grading Project¹⁷ watchdog group — which champions the aforementioned Grading for Equity programs — makes an effort to answer these sorts of questions and keep grades transparent, but their methodology depends almost entirely on independent, standardized, subject-specific testing. During the years in which BC enjoyed a standardized provincial examination system, BC teachers could still claim that course grades were intended to be precise and formative predictors of exam performance. Teachers would endeavour to peg their assessment practices to the provincial standard, and over time we got pretty good at this!³

Without the exams, however, course grades on a percentage scale were open to criticism for claiming unjustified levels of precision. With every classroom teacher untethered from a standard, nothing could guarantee that a grade of 83% meaningfully differed from an 81% or 85%.

It was here that BC education reformers faced two paths. The first led back to precisely assessing student achievement: accept that the Ministry’s noble goals had undermined grading and wrought confusion, and, heeding earlier stakeholder pushback, walk back the curricular changes. The second path meant doubling down: hold fast to ideals and, with standardized assessment already destabilized, seize the opportunity to introduce a novel reporting framework that does away with ordinal grades entirely.

Reformers took the second.

The New Reporting Policy

The BC Ministry of Education ultimately determined¹⁸ that the existing reporting policy was a relic that “no longer aligned with key principles of the provincial curriculum.” A new policy had been piloted in some schools and districts since 2017, and — despite a 2021 survey in which nearly 70% of parents and teachers opposed¹⁹ its adoption — it was finally ready in August 2023 to bind every school district in BC.

Under the “K–12 Student Reporting Policy²⁰,” while letter grades and percentages are still used in Grades 10–12, in Grades K–9 teachers are required to assess student learning using a four-point “Provincial Proficiency Scale": "Emerging," "Developing," "Proficient," or "Extending."

The Proficiency Scale was supposed to offer two central benefits over letter grades and percentages. First was clarity: by assigning students a place on the scale and pairing this assessment with “strengths-based descriptive feedback” “in clear and accessible language²¹,” teachers could “clearly” and “meaningfully” communicate to students and parents what they currently understand and what they still need to learn. Second was motivation: by “shift[ing] the focus from getting marks to developing competencies²²” and explicitly setting proficiency as “the goal for all students²³,” the scale would teach students that “learning is ongoing²⁴” and would “lead to increased student engagement and deeper learning.”

Neither benefit has materialized.

Students²⁵ and parents²⁶ have been badly²⁷ confused²⁸ by the four-point scale. While 93% of Canadian parents found an “A” letter grade “clear and easy to understand²⁹,” only 42% say the same for “Extending.” Most parents³⁰ and students struggle to understand what distinguishes the “sophisticated” understanding that earns an “Extending” grade from the merely “complete” understanding warrants a “Proficient.” The lack of clarity in turn makes it hard for parents³¹ to know what their children can do to improve from a “Proficient,” especially when “Proficient” is explicitly presented as “the goal for all students³².”

When it is notimmediately obvious³³ to most parents whether a term like “Developing” is a strong grade or a weak one, the language of the proficiency scale is especially hard to navigate for English Language Learning households. Whereas understanding letter grades and percentages demands only a grasp of alphabetical and numerical order, the Proficiency Scale demands parsing new terms that even fluent speakers struggle to tease apart. While efforts at "educating" parents are underway, most are frustrated that they need to be “educated” in a system they had opposed³⁴ at all.

Because the four-point scale is far less granular than percentages, students and parents find it more difficult to track incremental improvements. While small but steady increases in study time and effort can be captured by small and noticeable increases in percentage points, it takes much more to shift a coarse-grained scale with only four designations. Students whose regular improvements on previous performance do not deviate enough from ‘the expected level of learning’ will continue to see an unchanging, uninspiring "Proficient" again and again. This has made the new policy incredibly demoralizing³⁵ for students. Without a means to benchmark small improvements, and knowing that all work will be met with saccharine, strength-based praise, many students fall into patterns of doing the bare minimum.

Ironically, Proficiency Scale proponents have³⁶ argued³⁷ that letter grades provide little motivation for high performers to improve when they’re “always going to be the A in the class,” but the same reasoning suggests that a scale that changes even less often would provide even less drive to improve. This widespread loss of motivation is even reflected in the declining participation³⁸ rates in the purportedly mandatory province-wide assessments that remain.

At the same time that the scale is demoralizing for high-performing students, the scale also makes it harder for parents to spot warning signs for lower-performing students. Worrying that “Ds,” “Fs,” and low percentages discourage³⁹ low-performing students, policy authors take every opportunity to blunt the edge of the left half of the scale. Parents are reassured⁴⁰ that receiving “a ‘Proficient’ in math and a ‘Developing’ in English” does not mean a child “is ‘good’ at math and ‘bad’ at English,” only that “all students have both strengths and areas they are working on.” Lest students or parents worry that any term denotes “failure,” the “Emerging” indicator intentionally blurs the line by including both⁴¹ failing students and merely low-performing ones in the same category. Yet the effect of this sugar-coating is that parents have been blindsided by the discovery that, after three years receiving an “Emerging” with accompanying strengths-based feedback, their child simplycouldn't read⁴². In BC as elsewhere, education policymakers prefer smashing thermometers rather than the work of changing the temperature.

Teachers⁴³, too, have been frustrated and confused with the Proficiency Scale rollout. By 2023, many of us were embittered that the higher-ups who had first imagined the grand BC Education Plan had left teachers holding the bag.⁴⁴ Ministry survey results in 2021 had shown that 77% of teachers themselves opposed⁴⁵ the shift to a proficiency scale, yet because more administrators⁴⁶were satisfied, the shift had been pushed through. While certain spokesmen today promote it as a virtue that the new system was “meant to take more energy from everybody involved⁴⁷,” demanding more energy from teachers when we were already in short supply was a recipe for further increasing workload, stress, and burnout⁴⁸. Despite aspirations for our communication to be “concise,” the new emphasis on descriptive feedback means some districts now expect longer report cards, meaning even more time and effort spent reframing any negative traits⁴⁹ into strength-based redescriptions. Teachers, moreover, are the ones on the front lines of “educating” disoriented parents about the new terms that we struggle to wield ourselves.

Teacher-facing professional development has stressed that the scale is not simply replacing old grades with new terms. We must not simply assign an “Extending” on the basis of criteria by which we used to assign an A, such as answering at least 90% of problems correctly; rather, “Extending” should be assigned only if, in a teacher's “holistic” evaluation, a student demonstrates true "sophistication" in her understanding of the curriculum. Yet this reliance on “holistic” evaluation invites too much subjectivity for us to be confident in our assessments, and the guideline document⁵⁰ offers little help with easing the inter- and intra-school disagreement on the right way to use the scale.

Consider two examples it presents of how a student could demonstrate the “greater depth and complexity” required for an “Extending.” While a student in environmental science could “Extend” beyond mere proficiency by “tak[ing] on environmental activism in their community,” a student in Physical Education could “take on a lead role in teaching other students dance concepts.” These behaviors may warrant true sophistication in one teacher’s holistic judgment, but in another’s they may simply reflect an extraverted disposition and nothing about learning at all.

Ultimately, the failure of the Proficiency Scale assessment system undercuts the original vision for a modern provincial curriculum. The aspirations of tailoring services to student needs, enhancing student engagement, clearly communicating student learning, and improving student competency have each been thoroughly undermined. The language of the scale is less clear than the marks it was supposed to replace, and the descriptive feedback that accompanies this scale provides less useful feedback than the fine-grained measures now abandoned.

Paving with Good Intentions

The BC Provincial Proficiency Scale disaster was not built in a day. It is the apogee of a series of misguided attempts to realize a seductive vision⁵¹, even as the warnings⁵² ballooned. The vision that enthralled BC involved a host of trenchant education myths that appeal beyond its borders, too. The notion that education could be personalized for every student at such a level without compromising on content is one such myth; the notion that transferable core competencies can be developed without accounting for substantial content⁵³ knowledge⁵⁴ is another. Still another is that standardized tests could be replaced with holistic assessments without sacrificing fairness, objectivity, or informativeness. It would be much more convenient if students could gain “deeper understanding” by spending less time learning facts⁵⁵, and if informative data that can hold educators to account were still abundant in the absence of standardized exams.

It is often tempting to tell a just-so story that lays the blame for bad policy on a particular political project. In American contexts, pushes for radical pedagogy are often tied up in identity politics; policies which flatten assessment results are seen as left-coded. This leads to the conclusion that bad policy can be avoided by electing careful and conservative governments.

But the political players in BC don't easily map to American political dynamics. It was the right-wing BC Liberals party (now BC United⁵⁶), in power from 2001 to 2017, who introduced the BC Education Plan⁵⁷ in 2011. The lodestars of personalized learning and developing cross-curricular competencies were both seen as key pieces of an economically sanguine initiative to spur innovation⁵⁸, increase worker productivity⁵⁹, and complement a BC Jobs Plan that built on “sound fiscal fundamentals⁶⁰.” Indeed, relying on “the best research we have on child learning and teaching practices” was for BC Liberals⁶¹ a matter of fiscal responsibility, as it would “ensure each dollar is being put to the best use in each classroom.”

An interesting dimension to the political valence of issues in BC education policy is the role of the First Nations Education Steering Committee. The FNESC is a lobby pursuing racial justice initiatives that might be compared to similar US groups focused on social justice, and an emphasis on adopting Aboriginal and First Nations perspectives in the classroom was ubiquitous in⁶² Ministry material⁶³ throughout⁶⁴ the transition. Despite its agreements with many of the Ministry’s measures, though, the FNESC remains strongly in favour⁶⁵ of robust standardized testing, writing in 2022⁶⁶ that the provincially standardized Foundational Skills Assessments

“are key to identifying system-wide strengths and weaknesses within the education system, and help us to measure and advance equity for students through planning, intervention, and support.”

The political dynamics underlying misguided education reform efforts seem to vary just as much, if not more than, the number of such reforms themselves. Unfortunately, there is no shortage of ideologically informed education research available to support the popular education reforms du jour. And in thrall to studies that confirm⁶⁷ their priors, administrators end up resisting pushback and casting aside more trusted⁶⁸ methods.

Thankfully, this misdirected assessment reform has never afflicted more than a plurality in British Columbia. Standardized testing is not just fair, objective, and informative compared to subjective assessments — it is popular⁶⁹ among BC parents. Although the Ministry of Education endorses⁷⁰ a false dichotomy between “deeper understanding” and “the memorization of isolated facts and information,” most parents⁷¹ prefer curricula based on firm content benchmarks. Most teachers⁷² were never sold on abandoning letter grades and percentages, either, and had their views held more weight than the administrators’, BC might not have had to learn this lesson the hard way.

Defending excellence in education

Thanks to Bryan Joseph for this first international issue of Attacks on Excellence. Comment below or send us an email if your city, state, town, or school has a tale of anti-excellence you want to tell. You can help us identify national and local threats to educational excellence as we build a record of the policies, practices, and personnel that deserve broader attention. See you next time.

Submit a story idea [here⁷³] or email centerforedprogress@gmail.com (subject: Attack on Excellence)

Read the full analysis below, or start with the key takeaways:

What it is: The first federal tax credit scholarship program. Donors give to nonprofit scholarship organizations (SGOs), get a dollar-for-dollar tax credit up to $1,700, and SGOs award scholarships to students for tuition, tutoring, supplies, and more.

What it isn’t: It’s not a voucher. No public money goes directly to parents. It’s a tax incentive for private giving.

Who’s eligible: Families earning up to 300% of area median income — roughly 85–90% of the population.

What’s new: No aggregate funding cap, nearly universal eligibility, minimal federal regulation of schools and SGOs, and a state opt-in structure with no single entity running the show. Taxpayers in state that don’t opt in can still get the tax credit by donating to SGOs operating in other states.

Where things stand: Five states have formally opted in. Twenty-eight governors say they will. The program starts January 1, 2027, but key rules — including SGO list deadlines and the per-taxpayer vs. per-return question — are still unresolved.

The bottom line: This program will neither save nor destroy American education. It will expand what existing SGOs already do, create incentives for new ones to form, and leave most oversight to the states. The details will determine whether it works.

On July 4, 2025, the first federal tax credit scholarship program in American history was signed into law as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill.

It’s a big deal, and almost nobody is explaining it well. There’s a lot of noise about what it is, what it isn’t, who it helps, who it hurts, and so on. Most of it is wrong, or at least incomplete.

I know this because I was part of the team that passed Illinois’ tax credit scholarship program. I wrote the bill¹ and lobbied for its passage in the state’s capitol. I was also the primary liaison for rulemaking between the coalition of organizations that advocated for the bill and the Departments of Education and Revenue, who shared implementation duties.

Long story short, I know how these programs work and how they’re implemented. So if you want to understand what the federal tax credit scholarship program is actually all about, keep reading.

What It Isn’t and What It Is

Before I explain key parts of the program, it’s best to say what the law isn’t.

It’s not a voucher. A voucher takes public money and sends it to a parent to directly pay for education expenses. It’s also not a personal tax credit. A parent cannot claim it if they incur education expenses for their child.

A tax credit scholarship program is different. It incentivizes private individuals to donate to nonprofit organizations — called scholarship granting organizations, or SGOs — and gives those donors a credit on their taxes in return. The SGOs then turn around and award scholarships to eligible students for eligible expenses.

Most state-based tax credit scholarship programs only provide scholarships for tuition to private or outside-of-district public schools. Only three provide scholarships for additional education expenses. They are located in Florida², Missouri³, and Utah⁴.

It is these programs, which are often called tax-credit ESAs (short for education savings account), that the federal tax credit scholarship program is most like. The only difference is that tax-credit ESAs are only available to students who exit the public school system while federal tax credit scholarships are available to both public and private school students. Eligible expenses under the federal tax credit scholarship program are more expansive than just tuition — they mirror those allowed in the Coverdell Education Savings Account Program. These include tuition and fees; books, supplies, and equipment; special needs services; tutoring; uniforms; transportation; and supplementary items and services.

The Mechanics

Here’s a breakdown of how the money flows through the program:

A taxpayer donates cash to a qualified SGO. Under the new federal program, that donor gets a dollar-for-dollar, nonrefundable tax credit of up to $1,700 — meaning their federal tax bill drops by exactly the amount they donated, up to that cap. It’s not a deduction, which merely reduces your taxable income. It is a credit, which reduces your actual tax liability dollar-for-dollar. It’s one of the most generous federal tax incentives for charitable giving.

The SGO — which must be a 501(c)(3) nonprofit — is then required to use at least 90% of the money it takes in on actual scholarships. It can keep up to 10% for administrative costs. Those scholarships go to students whose household income doesn’t exceed 300% of their area’s median income.

That “area median” piece is important — it’s not a flat national number. It varies by where you live, which means the eligibility threshold in Manhattan ($437,400) looks very different from the threshold in rural Mississippi ($150,000). It also doesn’t adjust for family size, unlike the federal poverty level.

The SGO must also distribute scholarships to at least 10 students who don’t all attend the same school; it has to prioritize renewals and siblings before awarding new scholarships; and it cannot give scholarships to the relatives of board members or significant donors to the SGO.

What Makes the Federal Program Different

If you’ve followed tax credit scholarships at the state level, a lot of the federal program will look familiar. But there are several things about the federal version that break the mold.

First, let’s start with the cap, or rather the lack of one. Most state tax credit scholarship programs have an annual funding cap. Florida’s is over a billion dollars. Illinois’ was $75 million. These caps exist because state legislators want to control how much revenue they’re forgoing. The federal program has no aggregate cap. The $1,700-per-taxpayer credit is capped individually, but there’s no ceiling on how many taxpayers can claim it.

Estimates on how much the program will cost are all over the place. The Joint Committee on Taxation — the body that calculates the cost of federal tax policy — estimates⁵ that the credit will raise $563 million in its first year, and nearly $3.5 billion a year thereafter, resulting in a total $26 billion cost over ten years. Democrats for Education Reform — an advocacy organization that supports the program — estimates⁶ that the tax credit could cost as much as $24 billion a year.

It’s hard to know which of these will be closer to reality once the first year is complete. Most state-based tax credit scholarship programs, save a few, have high caps on individual donations. Illinois’, for example, allowed donations up to $1 million annually. Because of this, most SGOs solicit donations from wealthier individuals. The result? In most state-based programs, between 1–2% of taxpayers give.

The federal tax credit is an entirely different animal. The max a tax filer can get a credit for is $1,700. This means that in order for SGOs to raise significant money, they will need to have much larger scale taxpayer outreach operations. Many SGOs, especially those that only operate in a single state, have never done that before.

Second, the federal program lacks something most mature state programs have built in: a mechanism for directing more resources to the students who need them most. The law says students whose household income is at or below 300% of area median gross income are eligible, and that’s it.

That’s a departure from how many state programs handle it. Illinois’s tax credit scholarship program used a tiered system — families at lower income levels received larger scholarships, and the amount decreased as income went up. It was designed to ensure that the students with the greatest financial need got the most help. Texas’s new Education Freedom Account program — an ESA, not a tax credit, but instructive as a comparison — uses a multi-tiered prioritization system. Students with disabilities from lower-income households get first priority, followed by students from families at or below 200% of the federal poverty level, then those between 200% and 500%. Families above 500% are admitted last and capped at 20% of the program’s total funding.

The federal program makes no such choice. A family earning $290,000 in a high-cost metro area is treated the same as a family earning $40,000 in rural Appalachia. The SGO decides who gets a scholarship, how much they get, and on what basis — within the broad parameters of the law. Some SGOs will prioritize low-income families because that’s their mission and that’s what their donors expect. Others may not.

Third, there’s the eligibility threshold. At 300% of area median income, the pool of families whose children are eligible for a scholarship is significant. Some estimates put it at 85 to 90% of the population. This tracks with what’s been happening at the state level over the past few years, where the trend has been moving decisively toward universal eligibility. States like Florida, Arizona, Arkansas, and Alabama have already opened their programs to all students regardless of income. West Virginia and Iowa went universal out of the gate. While the federal program has a cap, it is nearly universal. This is not the tax credit scholarship program of yore, which focused almost exclusively on working class and low-income families.

Fourth, the federal program doesn’t impose many of the requirements on private schools and SGOs that are present in many state-based programs. An analysis⁷ by the Government Accountability Office in 2019 found that nearly two-thirds of states require schools to be accredited by the state or a state-approved entity and 50% of states require private schools to give their scholarship students the state test or a nationally normed test in order to participate. The federal tax credit scholarship program has no such requirements.

The same is true for SGO regulations. While they do have to ensure that they are giving scholarships to eligible students for eligible expenses, and are not spending more than 10% on administrative costs, SGOs do not have to meet the same requirements found in state-based programs. Case-in-point: 86% of states require SGOs to undergo a financial audit or independent financial review in order to participate in their tax credit scholarship programs. The federal program does not.

Furthermore, there are no regulations on non-school education providers. Who can tutor under the federal tax credit program? The law doesn’t say.

Compare that to Florida. Under Florida law, part-time tutors receiving scholarship funds must hold a valid Florida educator’s certificate, an adjunct teaching certificate, a bachelor’s or graduate degree in the subject area they’re teaching, or certification from a nationally recognized research-based training program approved by the state Department of Education. Full-time private tutors have additional requirements — they must comply with attendance recordkeeping, reporting to the state board of education, and limits on how many students they can serve at once.

Lastly, there’s the opt-in structure. The federal government created the program, but it doesn’t run it. States have to affirmatively choose to participate, and the governor — or whoever state law designates — is the one who makes that call. There’s no federal agency overseeing day-to-day operations. The Treasury Department and IRS handle the tax credit side. The states handle the SGO side. If you’re looking for a single entity that’s solely accountable for the program, you won’t find one.

One final note on the opt-in. If a Governor — or the entity the law designates — decides not to participate in the program, it does not prevent taxpayers in their state from donating to SGOs in other states. It only prevents SGOs in their states from raising donations through the tax credit and giving scholarships under the program. This fact has been a key argument for advocacy groups wanting Democratic governors to opt-in. It’s one that was mentioned by Colorado Governor Jared Polis when he was interviewed⁸ by the 74 about why he chose to have his state opt-in even when other Democratic governors are choosing not the participate:

“I think most, if not all, Democratic governors will get there as they learn about the chance to boost charitable contributions in their state. If there are states that don’t, for some reason, people in those states can still give to charities in states like Colorado. In other words, taxpayers everywhere will be able to get the tax credit. But if a particular state doesn’t opt in, then the donors in that state would be giving out of state. I do believe states will opt in as they see the opportunity for additional donations to help at-risk kids and middle-class kids in their state.”

Where Things Stand

The program doesn’t go live until January 1, 2027, but the machinery is already moving.

On December 12, 2025, the IRS issued Revenue Procedure 2026-6, which created the process for states to make an “advance election” to participate. The mechanism is straightforward: submit IRS Form 15714⁹, a simple one-page form that signals your state’s intent to opt in. The form doesn’t commit a state to anything binding on its own — it’s essentially a statement of intent. To actually activate the program, states must later submit a list of qualified SGOs to the Treasury Department. That second step — the one that actually matters — doesn’t have a deadline yet. The IRS has said it will provide guidance on the timeline and procedures in the future. So right now, we’re in a strange limbo: states are raising their hands, but nobody’s been told when to show up or what to bring.

As of early 2026, five states have formally submitted Form 15714: Virginia, Georgia, Idaho, Mississippi, and Montana. Two more — Alabama and Nebraska — have signed executive orders signaling participation, but haven’t filed the paperwork. Another eight — Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas — have said they plan to participate but haven’t taken official action. In total, 28 governors have indicated they’ll opt in. Four have said they won’t: New Mexico, Oregon, Wisconsin, and Arizona, where the governor vetoed opt-in legislation. The remaining 18 governors and the mayor of D.C. haven’t announced a decision.

The political pattern is roughly what you’d expect. Republican-led states are moving quickly while Democratic governors are more cautious — but, it’s not a clean partisan split. Colorado’s Democratic governor, Jared Polis, has said he plans to opt in, calling it “free money.¹⁰“ North Carolina’s Democratic governor, Josh Stein, vetoed a legislative opt-in bill, but said he’d participate once the federal government issues guidance.

Virginia is the state worth watching most closely right now. Before leaving office, Governor Glenn Youngkin submitted Form 15714 to the Treasury Department. But, he did something extra — he submitted an initial list of SGOs. He started with eight organizations — two Virginia-based, six national — and added five more within a week, bringing the total to 13. The IRS made clear that it wouldn’t actually process any SGO list submitted with the advance election form, so Virginia’s list was more of a political statement than a regulatory action. But, it sets the template for what participation looks like in practice.

What This Will Actually Look Like in Practice

If you listen to the loudest voices on either side of this debate, you’d think the federal tax credit scholarship is either going to save American education or destroy it. It’s going to do neither. What it’s going to do is something much more mundane, more complicated, and more human than either side wants to admit.

Let’s start with what’s probably not going to happen. The nightmare scenario critics love — wealthy donors funneling money to SGOs so rich kids can attend elite prep schools on the public’s dime — doesn’t match how these programs actually work. The families sending their kids to $40,000-a-year private schools aren’t waiting around for a scholarship funded by $1,700 donations. The income eligibility threshold is generous, yes, but the scholarship amounts that SGOs typically award don’t cover full tuition at high-end schools, and most established SGOs specifically target low-income families. The plumbing of this system — the intake forms, the income verification, the partner school networks — is built around families who need help.

What’s more likely is that SGOs are going to keep doing what they’ve already been doing, just with a new funding stream. Organizations like ACE Scholarships and Children’s Scholarship Fund have been awarding private school scholarships for decades. They have infrastructure, staff, partner school relationships, and waitlists. The federal tax credit gives their existing donors a new incentive to give and potentially brings new donors to the table. In states that already have tax credit scholarship programs, the federal credit will layer on top of what’s already there. An SGO in Florida or Alabama isn’t going to reinvent itself. It’s going to use the additional revenue to serve more families off its waitlist or increase award amounts. For these organizations, this is a capacity expansion, not a paradigm shift.

That’s the optimistic version, and in a lot of cases it’ll be accurate. But here’s where my experience makes me nervous. Not every SGO is a well-run nonprofit with a 20-year track record. The federal program is going to create an enormous financial incentive for new SGOs to form, and not all of them will be good actors. When you create a dollar-for-dollar tax credit with no aggregate cap, you are building a magnet for money. And, where money flows, opportunists follow. There will be SGOs that spend too much on overhead and not enough on scholarships. There will be private schools that see this as a revenue stream first and an educational mission second. That’s not a reason to kill the program. But it is a reason to take the oversight question seriously, and right now, the federal law leaves most of that to the states.

An additional question is to what extent public and charter school students will benefit. After all, scholarships can fund tutoring, after-school programs, technology, transportation, and other expenses for these students. That’s technically true. It’s not entirely theoretical either — some of it is already happening. Step Up, Virginia!, one of the SGOs on Virginia’s list, explicitly serves both private and public school students, offering scholarships for private school tuition alongside funding for public school tutoring and assistance. EducationSuperHighway, another organization on the list, has spent its entire existence focused on public school connectivity and infrastructure.

But whether public school participation happens at any meaningful scale is a different question. The vast majority of the SGO ecosystem that exists today was built to serve private school families. That’s what most of these organizations know how to do. They have relationships with private schools. Their donor bases care about private school access. Their application processes, income verification systems, and scholarship distribution models are all designed around private school tuition. The organizations currently serving public school students in this space are the exception, not the rule.

Here’s a possible solution. Nothing in the federal law prevents public school district foundations — the 501(c)(3) nonprofits that already exist to raise private money for public schools — from registering as SGOs. These foundations are already set up to receive tax-deductible donations and distribute funds for educational purposes within their districts. If a district foundation qualifies as an SGO, it could accept donations under the federal tax credit and use those dollars to fund tutoring, after-school programs, technology, and other eligible expenses for students already in public schools. Similarly, nothing prevents public or charter school teachers from serving as tutors under the program. A teacher who tutors students outside of contract hours could be paid with scholarship funds, creating a new revenue stream for educators and a new service channel for families — all within the public school ecosystem. The infrastructure for this already exists in most communities. What’s missing is the awareness that it’s an option and the willingness of district leaders and state officials to build it into their SGO frameworks.

What to Watch Going Forward

There are a handful of things I’d be watching closely if I were a parent, an educator, a state official, or just someone who wants to know whether this program is going to work.

SGO List Deadlines

The IRS still hasn’t announced when states need to submit their finalized SGO lists to solidify their advance elections. That deadline will be the first real pressure point. Filing Form 15714 is easy — it takes 43 minutes to complete, according to the IRS. Building a vetted list of qualified SGOs that meet the statutory requirements is a different animal entirely. States that moved fast to file the advance election may find themselves scrambling when the actual deadline drops. Any state that fails to submit its SGO list in time gets locked out for 2027. No SGO list means no qualified organizations. No qualified organizations means no scholarships. The clock hasn’t started yet, but when it does, it’s going to move quickly.

What States Layer on Top

The federal law is deliberately thin on requirements for participating schools and SGOs. That means the real regulatory framework is going to be written by the states. The Treasury is currently evaluating how to handle this. Will it allow states to add nondiscrimination provisions, financial reporting requirements, academic accountability measures, or limits on who can be served, or will it require governors to serve more of a ministerial function, simply collecting the list of SGOs who qualify and submitting them to the Department?

The Virginia Question

Governor Youngkin opted Virginia in and submitted an SGO list on his way out the door. Governor Spanberger, a Democrat, now owns a program she didn’t choose. Does she leave it alone? Opt-out? Try to slow-walk implementation? What she does — and how the federal government responds — will set a precedent for every other state where a new governor inherits an opt-in decision made by a predecessor.

New SGO Formation

The existing SGOs that are included on Virginia’s list have track records you can evaluate. What I’m watching for is the wave of new organizations that will inevitably form prior to the program going live. A dollar-for-dollar uncapped federal tax credit is a powerful incentive, and it’s going to attract both mission-driven nonprofits and people who see an opportunity to skim 10% off the top of a new revenue stream. The first major scandal involving a poorly run SGO will be a defining moment for the program. How quickly it comes — and how states and the IRS respond — will shape public trust for years.

Donor Math

Here’s something most people haven’t thought about yet. The statute says the credit is up to $1,700 per taxpayer. For a married couple filing jointly, the assumption has been that means $3,400 — one credit per spouse. But that’s not settled. Treasury is currently working through whether the $1,700 limit applies per taxpayer or per return, and the answer has significant implications for the program’s fundraising potential. If it’s per return, you’ve just cut the maximum contribution from married couples in half.

Whatever the limit ends up being, it represents a fundamentally different model from how state-level tax credit scholarship programs have historically worked. Most state programs have relied on a smaller number of larger donors — businesses and wealthy individuals making five- and six-figure contributions. The federal program’s individual cap means it needs volume: millions of small donors each giving $1,700. But will they? Claiming a tax credit requires more effort than dropping money in a collection plate, and most Americans have never heard of a SGO. The program’s reach depends on whether these organizations can market themselves to an entirely new donor base. That’s a massive awareness and logistics challenge, and the answer will determine whether this program is a rounding error or a genuine force in reshaping K-12 education.

The 90/10 Question

The federal law requires SGOs to spend at least 90% of their revenue on qualifying scholarships, keeping no more than 10% for administrative costs. That sounds straightforward until you start asking what counts as revenue. Most established SGOs don’t operate on a single funding stream. They receive money from state tax credit programs, private philanthropy, corporate giving, endowment income, and soon, the federal tax credit. The question the Treasury is working through is whether the 90/10 requirement applies only to qualified contributions received under the federal program, or to the SGO’s entire operating budget.

The distinction is enormous. If it applies only to dollars raised through the tax credit, a SGO can maintain its existing overhead structure funded by other revenue streams and keep the tax credit money almost entirely dedicated to scholarships. But, if the Treasury interprets the requirement to apply to all revenue, it could create a serious problem for SGOs that have been operating sustainably for years. Organizations that spend 20% of their total budget on administration would suddenly be out of compliance, even if every federal dollar they receive goes directly to scholarships. It could force established SGOs to restructure their finances or, worse, discourage them from participating altogether. In addition, it would be particularly punishing for smaller organizations that don’t have the economies of scale to run on a 10% margin.

Where This Leaves Us

The federal tax credit scholarship program is coming. It will begin on January 1, 2027.

Whether the state you live in has opted-out, opted-in, opts in tomorrow, or holds out for final guidance, the federal tax credit scholarship is now a part of the tax code, and it’s going to reshape the K-12 education landscape in ways that aren’t fully predictable yet.

What I know from having done this at the state level is that the details nobody wants to talk about are the ones that matter most, especially the rules. That’s where this program will succeed or fail.

I support states opting-in to the program. I wouldn’t have spent years writing, lobbying for, and passing a tax credit scholarship program in Illinois if I didn’t.

However, I didn’t write this piece to convince you to support it, too. I wrote it because the conversation around the federal tax credit scholarship has been dominated by advocates selling a dream and opponents selling a disaster, and neither version is particularly useful.

If this new program from the One Big Beautiful Bill is going to help students as much as it possibly can, then parents and policymakers need to understand how it works and what it can realistically do.

Read the full article below, or start with the key takeaways:

The question: When teachers unions fight to preserve institutional structures like seniority-based pay, does that actually serve students — or can labor interests and student learning come apart?

The backdrop: The United Educators of San Francisco struck for four days in February 2025, framing the strike as pro-student. Critics called it self-serving. Neither side engaged with the strongest available evidence.

The evidence: Three studies on Wisconsin’s Act 10 paint a complicated picture. Baron (2018) found short-run declines in student achievement after union power was reduced. Biasi (2021) and Biasi & Sandholtz (2025) found that districts replacing rigid union pay schedules with flexible ones saw long-run gains of 0.15–0.21 standard deviations — with the largest gains for disadvantaged students. Foy (forthcoming) found the same positive effects using a different method entirely.

The caveats: These are findings from one state with unusually rigid pay schedules. Flexible pay also widened the gender wage gap. The broader literature on unions and achievement is mixed. Short-run disruptions were real and shouldn’t be dismissed.

The problem: Union advocates pushing to repeal Act 10 aren’t engaging with this research at all. Neither are most critics of the UESF strike, who rely on accusations of bad faith rather than evidence about institutional design.

The bottom line: The equation “supporting unions = supporting teachers = supporting students” has a broken link. That doesn’t mean unions should be abolished — but it does mean they can’t be exempt from scrutiny on student outcomes, especially when the evidence cuts against the structures they’re fighting to preserve.

The strike last week by the United Educators of San Francisco was historic — the first in nearly half a century. Yet the back-and-forth spurred by the strike was nothing if not familiar. When the teachers union and its supporters claim that they strike on behalf of the students, critical parents and observers respond that it’s not about the children’s interests at all¹ — only the union’s own interests.

In the UESF’s strike announcement² on Monday, February 9th, the pro-student framing was front and center: “the growing vacancy and turnover crisis in SFUSD harms students every single day.” The argument was implicit but straightforward. Students need stability; stability means retaining good teachers; and retaining good teachers means higher wages and competitive benefits. Educators will leave if they can’t afford housing in the city or healthcare for their families, and the more who leave, the more those who stay become overloaded and under-resourced. None of this advances student learning. “We will return to our classrooms,” the strikers assure the reader, “the moment the District agrees to the conditions that stabilize our schools and protect the education our students deserve.”

The critics, in turn, claimed this framing was belied by their conduct, which appeared to aim less at stability than at leverage. Even if the worst³ anecdotes were misunderstandings⁴ or outliers,⁵ several well-established actions smacked of bad faith. An independent fact-finding report noted that the union “has not met its burden of proof⁶” that the district could afford its demands. It also called UESF’s combined wage-and-benefits proposal “simply not an option,” and recommended “a conservative approach” to “survive State scrutiny.” The union rejected those findings and struck anyway. It declined Mayor Daniel Lurie’s and Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi’s calls for a three-day delay so schools could remain open during continued negotiations. At 10 p.m. on the second night of the strike, the district had a new health care counter ready but the union left the table without reviewing it.

To union critics, a striking teacher’s sign that asked whether the rain was “Maria Su’s crocodile tears pretending she cares about our kids⁷“ was rich with irony — couldn’t the same be charged of the union?

Now that the dust has settled, we must wait to see whether the $183 million deal can get past state fiscal advisers⁸ or proceed without layoffs.⁹ But the public commentary on the strike raises important questions about how we argue about teachers unions. When cash-strapped parents are suddenly forced to arrange for childcare¹⁰, it’s easy to understand how ‘You don’t really care about students’ becomes a reflexive reaction. But it’s a rare thing for attributions of cynical motives to advance debate. Vanishingly few teachers enter the profession without caring for the well-being of their students. Most want what is best for students, and, to that extent, a teachers union must also ultimately represent what is best for students, so long as it faithfully represents what teachers want. It seems unlikely that UESF believes¹¹ its tactics were, overall, bad for students but good for the union; more likely, they just sincerely believe that what’s good for the union¹²is also¹³ good for the students.

If their goal is not just voicing frustration but successfully changing minds, critics of UESF should set intentions aside and focus on a more specific question: Do the institutional structures that teachers unions fight to preserve actually serve the students? Naturally, the union thinks the answer is yes. But what if the evidence is more complicated?

Act 10 & its Legacy

The most provocative data about the effects of teachers unions, for me, comes from studies on the impact of Wisconsin’s Act 10¹⁴. Act 10 deserves some background. Passed in 2011 — when I was still attending high school in Green Bay, WI — Act 10 was unveiled by Governor Scott Walker as a “budget repair bill¹⁵” aimed at addressing the state deficit; this would be achieved primarily by reducing compensation to public-sector employees. As a product of a progressive family that included multiple government employees, I was enraged. For us, supporting unions was supporting the working class; and
supporting teachers unions was supporting teachers, and supporting teachers was supporting students. The equation was uncomplicated.

That this battle was happening in Wisconsin made it feel especially significant. In 1959, Wisconsin became the first state to grant public employees the right to collectively bargain — a landmark in American labor history. Act 10 was a seismic reversal of that legacy. An existential threat to public-sector unions, the law limited collective bargaining to base wages capped at inflation, required teachers to contribute to their own pensions and healthcare, mandated annual union recertification elections, and prohibited automatic dues collection. More than 100,000 people protested in the Capitol. Fourteen Democratic state senators fled to Illinois to deny the quorum needed for a vote. A recall effort gathered more than 900,000 signatures.

I was angry at being a year too young to vote in that recall election; when the results came in, I was livid. Walker won by a larger margin than he did in his original election; after everyone saw how he’d treated public employees, how could he have even more support?

I carried a settled view of Act 10 for years: the unions and their supporters were right, Walker was wrong, and future data would confirm it. If you’d told me in 2011 that the law would be struck down fourteen years later — as it now has been, in October 2024¹⁶, I would have predicted being thrilled. Recently, however, things got more complicated.

Act 10 offered something of a natural experiment for social scientists. While the law imposed strict limits on collective bargaining agreements, it did not cancel existing ones. Pre-existing CBAs remained in force until they expired, and since expiration dates varied across different Wisconsin school districts, some districts were exposed to the reforms immediately while exposure in others was delayed by months or years. Researchers could compare outcomes across districts with different exposure timings, controlling for the kinds of confounding factors that usually plague evaluations of public policy.

The first notable study exploiting this variation looked like a vindication for teachers unions. In 2018, economist E. Jason Baron found¹⁷ that “the reduction in union power associated with Act 10 reduced composite scores on the state’s standardized exam … by roughly 20% of a standard deviation” — a meaningful decline, and one concentrated in the lower half of the achievement distribution. The explanation appeared straightforward: the law triggered a sharp increase in teacher turnover and a reduction in salaries, both of which had disruptive effects on student achievement.

While Baron’s working paper was quickly cited by union-supportive outlets¹⁸ as evidence for the harms of Act 10, in it he stresses that its findings should be treated as “purely short-run” and “future research” is still necessary:

Importantly, because the identification strategy is structured so that the estimated treatment effects are immediate to the decline in unionization, the findings presented in this study should be interpreted as purely short-run and likely as a transitional effect from an old steady state to a new equilibrium. While I provide evidence that Act 10 had negative, disruptive effects on student achievement, I leave it to future research to fully characterize Wisconsin’s post-Act 10 long-run equilibrium. Nevertheless, declines in test scores, even in the short run, could have lasting effects on students.

Future research into the law’s disruptions did, in fact, complicate the picture considerably. In 2021, Yale economist Barbara Biasi published a (celebrated¹⁹!) paper²⁰ arguing that the Wisconsin school districts that replaced the rigid, seniority-based pay schedules that unions had negotiated with more flexible pay schedules in the wake of Act 10 attracted higher-performing teachers, as measured by their value-added contributions to student test score growth; lower-performing teachers, meanwhile²¹, “either mov[ed] to districts which remained with the salary schedules or le[ft] the public school system altogether. As a result,” Biasi concludes, “the composition of the teaching workforce improved in FP districts. Effort exerted by all teachers also increased and, subsequently, test scores improved.

In 2025 follow-up²², Biasi and co-author Wayne Sandholtz extended the analysis to five years post-implementation and to students grade 3–8, a broader and younger population than the high schoolers in Baron (2018). The results inverted Baron’s findings: after five years, average student test scores increased by 0.15–0.17 standard deviations, and by 0.21 for economically disadvantaged students.

Now, it is important to frame the contrast between these studies carefully. Baron (2018) captured a real transitional disruption: teachers left, schools were destabilized, and students struggled to adjust. However, what Biasi (2021) and Biasi & Sandholtz (2025) capture is also real: when the dust settled, Wisconsin students in the districts that had replaced union-backed pay schedules saw long-run gains — especially the disadvantaged.

Further evidence that Act 10 benefited student achievement comes from a current working paper²³ by economist Morgan Foy, who used a different identification strategy entirely — union decertification elections rather than CBA expiration dates — and found the same positive achievement effects. Foy’s most provocative finding was about the mechanism, which in fact competes with the explanations offered by Biasi (2021) and Biasi & Sandholtz (2025): the gains appeared to come not primarily from replacing low-performing teachers with high-performing ones, but from increased productivity among the very same teachers. Foy also found lower-performing teachers were more likely to be union members. This is, to put it mildly, an uncomfortable finding for uncritical union supporters.

Some Caveats

Let me acknowledge what this evidence does not show. These are findings about one reform in one state; Wisconsin had a particular labor-market, a particular demographic profile, and had unusually rigid seniority-based pay schedules before Act 10. The broader academic literature on unions and student achievement is genuinely²⁴ mixed²⁵. It would be too rash to generalize from Wisconsin to nationwide claims about the effects of weakening teachers unions on student learning.

Moreover, Biasi’s own work shows that, in addition to bringing higher test scores, flexible pay reforms also exacerbate a gender wage gap²⁶, mainly attributable to women being less likely to negotiate aggressively when offered a position. Notwithstanding its dampening effects on student achievement, collective bargaining served a pay equity function that it no longer can after Act 10. Flexible pay reforms also present a double-edged sword: although performance improves for disadvantaged students in the districts that attract high-performing teachers, some disadvantaged students in the districts they leave may lose out²⁷. Baron’s caution, too, remains a live concern: the students whose scores fall in the short term may still suffer lasting effects.

We cannot, then, characterize the impacts of Act 10 in Wisconsin schools in any tidy way. Just as it is unproductive to criticize teachers unions on the basis of alleged unsavory intentions, so is it too hasty to claim that these studies show unambiguously “good” or “bad” outcomes for student learning. But we simply will not make progress in our debates about teachers unions if we continue to ignore the findings that show negative effects on student achievement. Teachers unions will not reckon with the most robust studies until their critics start to rely on them.

In December 2024, a WI circuit judge ruled²⁸ that by exempting all public-safety workers except teachers and other municipal employees from state restrictions on collective bargaining, major sections of Act 10 violated the state’s equal protection doctrine. Although a higher court stayed the ruling²⁹, union³⁰ voices³¹ have celebrated³² the development. Yet absent from these statements is any engagement with the complications introduced by recent research. Studies have moved forward; advocate talking points have not.

Some critics of the Act 10 repeal efforts offer breakdowns of the resulting costs to school districts³³. But the costs that should concern education advocates aren’t just fiscal. They include the potential reversal of gains in student achievement — gains that were largest for the students who can least afford to lose them.

Progressives cannot credibly advocate for repealing Act 10 without at least acknowledging that there is strong evidence that it improved student achievement. Especially insofar as progressives remain committed to equity, they must also grapple with the finding that these benefits were largest for the most disadvantaged students. If you care about educational equity, you have to grapple with this. You may grapple with it and still conclude that restoring collective bargaining is the right call — that the distributional risks, the gender equity costs, the value of institutional worker voice, and the limitations of generalizing from one state outweigh the measured gains. That is a defensible position. But it is not the position the repeal coalition is taking. They are simply not engaging with the evidence at all.

That insight is valuable. But it also doesn’t resolve the deeper structural question for San Francisco and its public schools: even if the pension crisis were solved tomorrow, would union-negotiated pay schedules — the kind that reward seniority over effectiveness and protect lower-performing teachers from accountability — actually serve students? The evidence from Wisconsin suggests the answer is more complicated than anyone on that picket line wants to hear. Demanding that union policies do not harm student learning is not ipso facto anti- teacher; it is at least as “pro-student” as promoting stability in schools. The equation I grew up with — “supporting unions = supporting teachers = supporting students” — has a broken link. Supporting teachers and supporting students are not always the same thing, and the institutional structures of collective bargaining can drive a wedge between them.

I don’t wish for unions to be abolished, and I don’t believe that union leaders are all Evrart Claires³⁴. Unions provide educators real benefits, many of which may be justified independently from any instrumental relationship to student test scores. But those benefits do not exempt unions from scrutiny on student outcomes. And when unions resist the kind of pay flexibility that rigorous research shows improves learning — particularly for disadvantaged kids — they need to explain why, in terms that go beyond “worker dignity” and “the right to bargain.”

Whatever union structure ultimately prevails — in Wisconsin, in San Francisco, or anywhere else — it must not backtrack on the achievement gains the evidence has documented. If the price of restoring collective bargaining is reimposing rigid seniority schedules that drive effective teachers away and shield ineffective ones from accountability, then we are choosing adult interests over children’s learning. And if we do that while claiming it’s “all for the kids,” we should not be surprised when parents stop believing us.

The evidence is strong enough that I can no longer maintain the uncomplicated equation I grew up with. But it is also not strong enough to support the mirror-image certainty that unions are simply bad for kids. What it demands — of anyone who takes student learning seriously — is that we stop treating this as a settled question with tribal answers, and start treating it as what it actually is: a genuinely difficult problem, where the interests of workers and the interests of children can come apart, and where honest people have to decide what to prioritize when they do.

The research is clear: academic acceleration benefits faster learning students academically, socially, and emotionally. Even so, American schools routinely deny it. Guest contributor John Boyle synthesizes findings from Miraca Gross’s 20-year longitudinal study of 60 exceptionally gifted children and Leta Hollingworth’s pioneering work at the Speyer School to show what happens when schools force brilliant children into lockstep education, and what we should do instead.

John Boyle is a programmer for a Silicon Valley data storage company. He has a lifelong interest in education in general and gifted education in particular.

The Exception that Proves the Rule

Adrian Seng was a remarkable boy. He learned to read before age 2 by watching Sesame Street. By age 3, he had the reading, writing, and math abilities of the average 6-year-old. At age 5, he had learned math up through grade 5 at home, all before entering school. An IQ test at age 6 yielded the scores of a 14-year-old (his “mental age”); since 14/6 ≈ 2.3, his “intelligence quotient” was therefore 230.¹

His school’s response? They didn’t make any special effort, but simply let him keep moving up to the grade level that was appropriate for him in each subject. Thus, at age 6.5, he was attending grades 3, 4, 6, and 7 in different subjects, and had friends in each of those grades, with whom he played in the schoolyard. At 7.5, he started spending part of his day in high school, doing grade 11 math; at 8, this became four high school classes and some elementary school; at 8.5, he’d finished elementary school completely, and, at 9, he devoted a quarter of his time to studying math at a local university. As he mastered each high school subject, the fraction of time spent at university grew until, at age 14, he had completely finished with high school. At 15 he had the college credits for a bachelor’s degree, and at 16, he got his master’s.

The result? During high school, he won world records (unbroken today) for the youngest bronze, silver, and gold medals at the International Mathematical Olympiad. Since then, he has won the Fields Medal in 2006, both the Royal Medal and Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in 2014, has authored or co-authored over three hundred research papers, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest living mathematicians. The child’s real name, of course, is not “Adrian Seng.” It is Terence Tao¹.

Tao’s was one of 15 case studies from a book by researcher Miraca Gross, picked from 60 exceptionally gifted children from her landmark 20-year longitudinal study. He was the only one of those 15 children who answered yes to the question, “Do you think you’ve been able to perform at the limits of your abilities during your education?”

What happened to the other 14?

Why This Matters: Beyond the 1 in 10,000

In some sense, exceptionally gifted children like Tao — those who score above 160 IQ, four standard deviations above the mean, about one in 10,000 — are a niche topic. However, I would argue:

• This is a very important 1/10,000th of the population, sitting at the cognitive forefront of the slice that drives technological and economic progress², and a group from which³ Nobel prize-winning scientists are often drawn⁴.

• The extreme case illustrates principles which apply to less-extreme cases. Most importantly, the social isolation caused by mismatch with age peers is common to many gifted children, but it is most acute and clearly seen in the exceptionally gifted.

• The approach that best serves exceptionally gifted children is the same approach the CEP and I support for children at all levels: letting students accelerate to the level of their abilities in each subject. A child need not be a future Terence Tao to benefit from progressing at the pace that best suits their academic abilities, talents, and cognitive capabilities.

That “every student can advance as far and as fast as their curiosity and determination will take them” — a core principle of the CEP — proved a guiding ethos in Terence Tao’s education. And when researchers studied what happens to exceptionally gifted children when placed in different kinds of schooling environments, something striking emerged: acceleration was uniformly good, and retention was uniformly devastating.

Exceptionally gifted children have shown us the benefits of “unrestricted subject acceleration.” It’s academically ideal, of course, to be working at the level appropriate to you. But it’s also socially beneficial to be among peers who match your level, even if they’re a different age. In fact, I suspect it is socially good for most kids to have a few classes with kids 1-2 years older and younger than them; being age-segregated all day is artificial and seems unhealthy. The extreme case makes the lesson clear.

Part I: Who Are These Children?

There are two main sources I’ll be drawing from in what follows. First, Miraca Gross was a researcher who began in 1986 what would become a 20-year longitudinal study on 60 Australian children⁵ of 160+ IQ. In 1993, Gross published Exceptionally Gifted Children⁶, a book focusing on 15 of those children with details about their lives and how they progressed. Gross’s work offers us invaluable insight into how best to raise exceptionally gifted children, and, in particular, into the benefits of radically accelerating their education.

Second, Leta Hollingworth was a psychologist who ran the Speyer School⁷ in 1930s New York City, whose students became the subject of Children Above 180 IQ Stanford-Binet⁸, her published study of profoundly gifted children. With a population of ~7 million people during her tenure, New York was convenient for Hollingworth, offering a decent number of children for someone interested in studying the top 1 in 10,000 of the population to work with.

Early Development: The Pattern Emerges

So, what are these kids like? Among the 15 kids Gross wrote about in her book, the differences show up in very early developmental stages. The age when they sit up unsupported? Normal kids, 7 to 8 months; for these kids, it was 19% earlier. Age when they spoke their first word? Normally, 12 months; for Gross’s batch, 24% earlier. Crawling, walking supported, unsupported, and running: it’s basically 10-40% earlier than normal kids on average.

The biggest difference, though, is with reading, and it’s quite spectacular: 45% earlier. While the average Australian learns to read at age five, among the 15 kids, 5 learned to read at age one, 5 at age two, 2 at age three, 2 at age four, and 1 at age five.

What makes this even more impressive is that, for 9 of the 15, their parents say that they gave their child little to no help with learning to read. These children were picking up the skill naturally, practicing by reading street signs, grocery labels, the names of shops, and, for two of them, watching Sesame Street.

And when they were surveyed about what they enjoyed doing, reading was by far their favorite activity. 5 out of 15 said that reading is the most important thing in their life. All read an enormous amount, liking in-depth science fiction and high fantasy in particular, and of course, they tended to read books written for much older children.

Play: The Complication Instinct

These children like to do complicated things. If there’s a basic game, they like to add rules to make it more interesting and challenging. And the other children tend not to like that very much.

Hollingworth, too, noticed this among her students in the Speyer School, writing that the exceptionally gifted children “were unpopular with children of their own age because they always wanted to organize the play into a complicated pattern with some remote and definite climax as the goal.”

Among Gross’s 15, those who went into sports tended to do well — winning a championship, being offered a position on the state swimming team, a few things like that. Interestingly, however, they tended to pick sports that don’t require them to cooperate with others. Moreover, when asked to order eight activities “from most favored to least favored,” 40% put sports last and 13% second-to-last, including several of the most athletically talented. Given this low rating, Gross suggests that the pursuit of sports for these children may be driven less by enjoyment than by the need for peer acceptance.

The Friendship Mismatch

When gifted children struggle to relate to their peers, Gross says that this stems in part from how quickly their understanding of friendship develops. She argues that children grow through five stages of friendship⁹. Initially, a friend is someone you’ll play with and let borrow your toys; next, someone to talk to about things beyond your play; third, someone you accept help and support from, but without yet thinking you have a duty to help them back; then, this help goes both ways — “We’re friends and we help each other.” Finally, at the fifth stage, this becomes “We can trust and accept each other completely.”

Importantly, Gross’s research shows that it is a child’s mental age (see footnote 1) that determines that child’s progress through these stages. As a result, she observes that extremely gifted children are beginning to seek the friend they can trust completely much earlier, at an age when their normal peers are still just looking for playmates. More than chronological age, socioeconomic status, or any other variable studied, sharing a similar mental age with a peer is the most important factor for children’s friendships.

Though an ideal companion for an exceptionally gifted child would likely be an equally gifted child of the same age, when those are one in 10,000, usually there aren’t any available. And so, unsurprisingly, often their best friends and preferred playmates are moderately gifted children 2 to 4 years older.

This creates problems. If an older friend is in a higher grade, then their time together at school is limited. Moreover, older children often face social pressure to not hang out with the wimpy little kid from a lower grade. Exceptionally gifted children face a double bind: classmates of the same age seek different qualities in their friends, and older kids seeking the same qualities grow out of reach.

The Boy and His Books

Nearly a century ago, Hollingworth saw that exceptionally gifted children’s heightened susceptibility to social isolation was not a matter of personality traits, but rather of an all-too-common mutual misunderstanding that develops among their less advanced peers. The tendency of highly gifted kids to play in a solitary way, she notes, can be explained as a coping strategy. They are not “unfriendly or ungregarious by nature,” she writes; “Typically, they strive to play with others, but their efforts are defeated by the difficulties of the case.”

She relates the story of a seven-year-old boy of IQ 178 who brought his favorite books to the class to show the others. “It’s great! Read these, you’ll see how great they are!” The other kids laughed at him, made fun of him, threw the books on the ground, and pulled his hair. The kid cried, “Grandmama, they just won’t read!”

For Hollingworth, his story is illustrative:

Other children do not share their interests, their vocabulary, or their desire to organize activities. They try to reform their contemporaries but finally give up the struggle and play alone since older children regard them as “babies” and adults seldom play during the hours when children are awake. As a result, forms of solitary play develop, and these, becoming fixed as habits, may explain the fact that many highly intellectual adults are shy, ungregarious, and unmindful of human relationships, or are even misanthropic and uncomfortable in ordinary social intercourse.

I suspect many of us know some people like that.

Part II: Tall Poppy Syndrome

At the Speyer School, Hollingworth investigated what approaches worked best for teaching highly gifted kids, moderately gifted kids, and also kids who struggle academically. She says that in the measurements they performed, those of 140 IQ are able to master subjects — described as “getting top marks” in a subject — in half the time that it takes the normal kids. Those of IQ 170, meanwhile, do so in a quarter.

This is a striking mismatch in learning speed between these kids and their normal age peers, and a larger difference than the ratio definition of IQ would predict. Perhaps in their earlier development these gifted children figured out effective study skills? Maybe they have more self-control? Maybe their intelligence manifested as an increased need for mental stimulation, and they were just more likely than normal to read the textbook at home because it’s interesting?

In any case, given the very large mismatch in learning speed, surely the schools will allow them to progress at this 4x speed. Right?

Well, at the same time they struggle relating to peers, gifted children also commonly face pushback from unsupportive educators. Gross offers a discouraging anecdote¹⁰ about one of her 15 subjects:

When the mother of 5-year-old Richard McLeod asked his teacher if he could be permitted to skip the reading readiness program because he had been reading since age two, the teacher angrily accused her of teaching the boy to read. ‘You leave him to me,’ she added. ‘It’s my duty to pluck the tall poppies.’

As mentioned, 14 of Gross’s 15 had learned to read before age five, the age when Australians enter kindergarten. Only a couple were allowed to skip the pre-reading exercises that the other kids were required to do; regrettably, this is usually the way early education goes for highly gifted children.

In another case, Gross discusses a kid who was doing eighth grade math in first grade when a new principal came in and canceled all the gifted programs, including that. He was forced down to second grade math next year.

The new principal was a politically alert young woman who was aware of the hostility of the Australian teachers’ industrial unions towards special programming for the gifted, and the disapproval of gifted programs openly voiced by a number of influential senior administrators in the state education department. She was also made aware by her new staff that they ‘had had enough of gifted children and special programs for the gifted’ which they felt had been foisted upon them by the old principal. [...] It would be ‘political suicide’ for her to establish gifted programs within her school.

Now, this is Australia, known for a strong egalitarian ethos and home to “tall poppy syndrome,”¹¹ but things in the United States aren’t always better. I come from Palo Alto, where over the last decade they’ve cancelled honors classes¹² and tracking.

The Sports Contrast

Gross mentions an interesting contrast with sports. Many educators seem to have no problem with scouting elite athletic talent and providing intensive support — one-on-one coaching, flexible schedules, advanced training opportunities. This treatment is “acceleration” by another name. So why is it different when the abilities are intellectual rather than physical?

Consider the investment: $30-40 billion annually on youth travel sports. Elite club teams costing more than college tuition. Scouts evaluating middle schoolers. High schools with “recruiting coordinators” and million-dollar facilities. Families relocating for better programs. All of this to develop athletic talent is celebrated. But let a mathematically gifted child skip two grades — costing nothing — and suddenly educators worry about things like “social-emotional development.” The hypocrisy is instructive: we already know how to accelerate exceptional talent. We simply choose not to do it for the minds most likely to cure disease, design infrastructure, or advance human knowledge.

Part III: The Results

Despite low support from the schools for doing advanced work, Gross’s subjects still achieved some fairly impressive scores. Of the 15 in her book, all were at least one year ahead in math and reading, with most at least two years ahead in math and three to four years ahead in reading. 5 children even exceeded 500 on the SAT-Math at age 12 or earlier, surpassing the average score for 17-year-olds applying to college!

The optimal environment for exceptionally gifted children is a class of equally gifted children of the same age that is paced for them. If that’s not available, then second-best is a class of moderately gifted kids somewhat older. And if that’s not available, then just skipping grades up to a class of normal kids who at least start the year at the same level. Since gifted children learn faster, they will probably be past these classmates by year’s end, but this is still better than the alternative — a class of normal kids the same age.

So, what was done with all 60 Australian children in Gross’s study? 33 weren’t allowed to skip any grades at all. 5 skipped one grade, 5 skipped two, and 17 skipped three or more grades by the time they left high school. (Given the general attitude toward gifted education down under, Gross herself found this last figure impressive.)

Who was permitted to skip was generally determined by whether a staff member had experience with or knew the literature on gifted education. Those who did tended to support the acceleration.²

And the results are in: Acceleration was uniformly good.

The Radical Accelerands: Three or More Grade Skips

Several cases of successful acceleration Gross discusses in her study are worth reproducing here at length.

17 of the 60 people were radically accelerated. None have regrets. Indeed, several say they would probably have preferred to accelerate still further or to have started earlier.

Gross quotes a 2001 paper by Lubinski, Webb, Morelock, and Benbow¹³ that reports similar findings from a study of profoundly gifted SMPY accelerands³:

Some of the children had an unfortunate start to school before their abilities were recognized. Others were fortunate enough to enroll in schools where a teacher or school administrator recognized their remarkable abilities and almost immediately argued for a strongly individualized program.

In every case, these young people have experienced positive short-term and long-term academic and socioaffective outcomes. The pressure to underachieve for peer acceptance [something one should never have in an educational environment! —JB] lessened significantly or disappeared after the first acceleration. Despite being some years younger than their classmates, the majority either topped their state in specific academic subjects, won prestigious academic prizes, or represented their country or state in math, physics, or chemistry olympiads.

The majority entered college between ages 11 and 15. Several won scholarships to attend prestigious universities in Australia or overseas. All have graduated with extremely high grades and, in most cases, university prizes for exemplary achievement. All 17 are characterized by a passionate love of learning, and almost all have gone on to obtain Ph.D.s.

In every case, the radical accelerands have been able to form warm, lasting and deep friendships. They attribute this to the fact that their schools placed them quite early with older students, to whom they tended to gravitate in any case. Those who experienced social isolation earlier say it disappeared after the first grade skip. Two are married with children. The majority are in permanent or serious love relationships. They tend to choose partners who, like themselves, are highly gifted.

Christopher Otway (pseudonym)

Chris is a young man of truly phenomenal ability. Testing on the Stanford-Binet L-M one month short of his 11th birthday revealed a mental age of 22 [IQ of 200]. Five months later he scored 710 on the SAT-Math. His remarkable talent in math and language was evident from his earliest years. By age four he was capable of fourth grade math.

Fortunately, the principal of Chris’s primary school had visited Johns Hopkins University on a Churchill fellowship. He had met several young people from the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth, the SMPY, who had been radically accelerated [skipped three or more grades] and had familiarized himself with some of the research on acceleration. Accordingly, he was responsive to Chris’s academic and social needs.

While in grade 1, Chris was accelerated to work with fifth grade students for math and sixth grade students for English. The following year, he did math with seventh grade students. This proved so successful that at the end of his second grade year, Chris made a full grade skip to fourth grade, but took math with eighth grade. By age 12, he was theoretically enrolled in 9th grade, but took five subjects: physics, chemistry, English, math, and economics with 11th grade students 5 years older than him. He was extremely happy, loved school, and was popular with his classmates despite the difference in age.

In both his 12th grade years, he was one of the top scoring students in his state. He entered university at 16 years 2 months, graduating with Bachelor of Science (First-Class Honors) in computer science and mathematics at age 20.

Chris won a scholarship to a major British university and graduated with a PhD in pure math at age 24. Since then, based in London, he works for a worldwide consultancy assisting other companies with financial strategies.

Some may have opinions about the career choice in particular, but clearly he’s capable and is able to do what he wants.

Sally Huang

Sally was born in Australia to Malaysian parents. She scored 165 on the Stanford-Binet L-M at 6 years 11 months. Unfortunately, the psychologist stopped the test before Sally had reached her ceiling, and I believe her true IQ is significantly higher than this.

From her earliest years, Sally displayed phenomenal gifts in math and English. Her elementary and high schools, in a large country town, arranged a series of carefully planned and monitored grade skips coupled with subject acceleration. Sally entered second grade at age 6, fourth grade the following year, seventh grade at 9, and compacted the 6 years of high school into 4, graduating at age 13.

Sally’s path through school was assisted by her math teacher and the elementary school principal, who had a strong interest in gifted education, and has since earned a post-graduate degree in this field. She entered university, on scholarship, at 13.5 years old, as one of the top scoring 12th-grade students in her state — again, despite being much younger than the other ones.

Sally’s studies focused on the physical and mathematical sciences, but she also studied Chinese, Japanese, and music. She was allowed to skip first-year university math and enrolled in the science faculty’s second-year pure and applied math classes. Her enrollment in university required her to move to the city, and stay, during the week, in the home of friends of her parents. This gave her access both to the social life of the university and to her family. She gained a Bachelor of Science (First-Class Honors) at 16 years 8 months, and, like Chris Otway, won a full post-graduate scholarship to a major British university.

Sally gained her Ph.D. in theoretical physics at age 21 with five publications in major journals. She participated fully in the academic and social life of the university and had many warm and supportive friendships. She speaks fluent Chinese and Japanese, is an accomplished pianist, and holds a first-dan black belt in Tae Kwon Do.

The following year at a major European university, she completed a postdoctoral MBA aimed specifically at postgraduates with a science and engineering background and in 2004 accepted a management appointment with the firm in which she did her internship.

Sally is certain that acceleration brought her nothing but benefits:

If I had not been accelerated, I feel quite sure that I would have become quite frustrated, as indeed I often did at various stages and still do when I attend things like mixed ability language classes.... But the frustration in that case would have been prolonged and severe, having a detrimental effect not only on my love for learning but also on me as a person. Given the existing educational framework, acceleration was the best option for my particular situation and I certainly don’t feel that I’ve suffered any ill effects as a result; indeed, all the effects have been beneficial. But this is only because of the support and watchful eyes that were kept trained on my progress academically and as a person all throughout.

Certainly, if you’re doing academic acceleration, pay attention to how well it’s going. If the kid is feeling overwhelmed, then pull back. If the kid is feeling bored and finds age peers boring, then go forward, and just pay attention and update the plan as it goes.

Accelerated Two Years

The five young people who accelerated by 2 years report as much or almost as much personal satisfaction with their education as do the radical accelerands, although, like those who skipped three or more grades, the majority say they would have liked to have been accelerated further. Only two have taken Ph.D.s, but the remaining three have taken Bachelor Honors (research) degrees. Like the radical accelerands, they have entered professional careers, many of which utilized their remarkable abilities in math and the sciences.

In general, they have enjoyed satisfactory personal and love relationships. However, those who were retained with age peers until fourth grade or later tend to find socializing difficult. Exceptionally and profoundly gifted students should have their first acceleration in the early years of school before they experience the social rejection that seems to be a significant risk for such students retained in mixed ability classes. The skills of friendship building are first learned in the early years of school, and children who are rejected by their peers may miss out on these early and important lessons in forming relationships.

Accelerated One Year

The five young people who were permitted one grade skip are not deeply satisfied with their education. Their school experience has not been happy, and they would have dearly loved to have been accelerated further. After the euphoria of having new, challenging work, school became just as boring as it had been before the acceleration.

These children’s schools had been reluctant to accelerate them and were afraid that, while the grade skip had been successful, further acceleration might lead to social or emotional damage in later years. [Obviously the opposite of what the research appears to show. — JB] In two cases, the school told the children’s parents that they were concerned for the self-esteem... of other students, because the accelerated student was performing so much better than they were!

This group has tended to take undergraduate degrees and stop there. Because they have not had the experience of pitching themselves successfully and over a period of time at work that is truly challenging and demanding, they have no idea of the full extent of their capacities. Perhaps because of this, they have tended to enroll in undemanding academic courses and have consequently found university intellectually unchallenging.

It is with this group that a serious dissatisfaction with friendships and love relationships starts to appear. Two have had severe problems with social relationships.

The Non-Accelerands: The Tragedy

The remaining 33 young people were retained, for the duration of their schooling, in a lockstep curriculum with age peers in what is euphemistically termed the “inclusion” classroom. The last thing they felt, as children or adolescents, was “included.”

With few exceptions, they have very jaded views of their education. Two dropped out of high school and a number have dropped out of university. Several more have had ongoing difficulties at university, not because of lack of ability, but because they have found it difficult to commit to undergraduate study that is less than stimulating. These young people had consoled themselves through the wilderness years of undemanding and repetitive school curriculum with the promise that university would be different — exciting, intellectually rigorous, vibrant — and when it was not, as the first year of university often is not, it seemed to be the last straw.

Some have begun to doubt that they are indeed highly gifted. The impostor syndrome is readily validated with gifted students if they are given only work that does not require them to strive for success. It is difficult to maintain the belief that one can meet and overcome challenges if one never encounters them.

Several of the non-accelerands have serious and ongoing problems with social relationships. These young people find it very difficult to sustain friendships because having been, to a large extent, socially isolated at school, they have had much less practice in their formative years in developing and maintaining social relationships.

The Social Skills Development Crisis

People often say that children learn social skills in school, as if this were automatic and guaranteed. This is naive, especially for the highly gifted. A crucial part of social skill development is behaving in various ways and getting feedback. You try one thing, it doesn’t go so well; you try another thing, it goes better. You adapt and you iterate.

But if everything you try leads to rejection, then that’s not useful feedback. You’re not going to improve your skills, you’re not going to learn anything. At that rate, you’ll get a gifted child of 12 burdened with the social skills of a 9-year-old, who grows into an 18-year-old with the social skills peers had at 12. That 18-year-old will not thrive; more likely, he’s on track to blow professional opportunities due to interpersonal faults.

And even if you do accelerate the 12-year-old to join the high schoolers he’s naturally inclined to befriend, it may well be too late: he won’t have developed the social skills to relate to them, he’ll face the same rejection in a new crowd, and his social development remains as stunted as ever. Acceleration must begin early.

For gifted children in this situation, the best solution may be some kind of intervention therapy to teach social skills; absent this, the child may just avoid social situations entirely for the rest of his educational career, since they range from boring to painful. As an adult, if he’s fortunate, he can find a group as tolerant of weirdos as the rationalist community, where he can slowly develop his social skills alongside others who’ve faced the same trials.⁴

Giftedness and Success

Synthesizing from many biographies of great mathematicians and scientists, a mentor of mine concluded that three qualities seem to determine success in those fields. The first is just raw intelligence, the variable we try to measure with IQ tests and other proxies. The second he called “obsessiveness,” or more generally, motivation. And the third quality is taste.

And there’s an obvious mathematization of this. Raw intelligence — or some part of it, depending on the task, whether working memory, the ability to make connections, or otherwise — is a force multiplier for the hours of intellectual work that one puts into a subject. Then motivation or obsessiveness determines how many of those hours one put in. And then the operationalization of taste is the expected value per unit of intellectual work of the projects that you choose to work on. For a formula, we can multiply these three together:

Intelligence × Motivation × Taste = (Rate of Value Production by Intellectual Work)

And you can also multiply by the length of a person’s career to get their lifetime output. Don’t die early — it tends to cause your career to go into decline.

Now, some scientific work today can be done by one lone person, a hermit. But a lot of it is working within a team, a lab, a biotech company. When you have to work with other people, social skills matter. They matter for getting good teammates, for getting onto good projects, and for directing the organization’s attention to better research directions over worse ones. This means that for many pursuits, we can add a fourth quality — social skills — for the complete picture of success.

So, if one wants to maximize such things, how do we do it? Raw intelligence seems mostly genetic, but we can avoid things that screw up your brain, the lead in the water and so on. Motivation is much less genetic, and I think has a large upbringing component we should be able to affect. And taste, my mentor believes, can be taught at least to some degree.

And finally, there are social skills. Upbringing is extremely impactful for that, as we’ve seen.⁵ There’s always an element of chance, of course; there are going to be at least a few kids who are in an environment that is not set up well for people like them, who nevertheless turn out well. But usually, when gifted children are stuck with same-age, normal peers most of the time, it’s not good.

It is crucial that we understand the effects of academic acceleration on each of these dimensions. The failure to accelerate exceptionally gifted children can have dramatic consequences for their motivation. Sitting in class with boring material, about things you already know, frustrated that you can’t get the teachers to let you do something else — the short-term effects for gifted children are bad enough, and the long-term negative effects may well be permanent.

Are we maximizing success? Given how important acceleration is to upbringing: Based on the acceleration numbers, I would rate our civilizational competency level: “Not even trying.”

Trying would look like allowing kids to take each subject at their appropriate level based on placement tests; this is the single most important change. One benefit of decoupling students’ progress across different subjects is that, if a student has failed a particular subject, it is less of a problem to hold them back in just that one class, while they can progress in others. That should make everyone involved less tempted to say, “Eh, let’s just shove that problem under the rug and promote them into the next grade anyway.” This in turn will mean fewer students in inappropriately high-level courses who don’t grasp the prerequisite fundamentals, and fewer of the problems that causes.

There are additional improvements that might be made. Taking students at a given level and grouping them by learning speed would be nice. If resources are available, 1:1 tutoring by great people is probably part of the optimal academic environment; AI might make that practical for everyone. But this one change would fix perhaps 80% of the problem.

What can we do as individuals and families? We can create extremely gifted children; some people here are working on that. Having done that, it’s a good idea to live near similar families, and/or create lots of siblings, so that these kids have peers that are similarly gifted that they can play with, be friends and stuff.

Then, once there are people nearby... Setting up microschools¹⁴ seems like a decent idea. I do suspect that online education and AI tutors are able to give you a good education without basically any other input. At the very least, I strongly suspect that telling one of these kids to spend one hour per day on Khan Academy, and then they can do anything else for the rest of their time, will likely give superior results to putting them through normal public school. We’ll see about that.

Given that education is handled, one way or another, then just try to ensure that they have the opportunity to make friends with kids who are amenable to them. If you must do normal school, then, okay; understand the children’s need for acceleration, and be prepared to push hard to get this for the children. And be prepared for the chance of the outcome where the school just refuses. Have some alternative in mind, like one of the above.

Perhaps your ambition is to produce and support exceptionally gifted children out of the hope of creating a world-shaking genius, one who will create medical or industrial advances that are worth billions of dollars to the world and are priceless to the individuals whose lives they transform. You can think of this as your way of impacting the world, and if you want, you can try to maximize this impact.

Yet you can also see the mission of supporting gifted children as simply the work of helping these children with incredible talents grow into happy, healthy adults with fulfilling careers that make productive use of them, and are well-positioned to carry on the mission to the next generation.

Reading through these stories of what befell exceptionally gifted children in schools filled with peers who scorned them and teachers who neglected them is very frustrating, and in some cases downright depressing. These stories are tragedies of untold pain and inestimable wasted potential.

We know enough now to improve gifted education for these children. The degree to which the past has caused them outrage is the degree to which we can enrich their future. That’s what I hope to do, and I hope many of you do as well.

Editor’s Note: I will take a seven-month leave of absence from the Center for Educational Progress and from my online writing starting tomorrow. Please enjoy this account of the investigation that consumed much of my summer. There is more to be said about some of the details, but I wanted to release it in some form before I disappear. Be well while I’m away.

In Washington, D.C.’s history, there were three superlative predominantly black public schools. Two of them were destroyed, one by negligence, one by malice. The third was almost stillborn, strangled in its infancy and neglected in its adolescence, but it persisted.

The first, Dunbar High School, stands out as the crown jewel. From 1870 to 1955, it was Washington, D.C.’s only academic high school for black students—the first and best public black high school in the nation. Its alumni include Charles R. Drew, a prominent surgeon and researcher; William H. Hastie, the first black federal judge; Charles Hamilton Houston, who was dean of Howard University Law School and NAACP first special counsel; and many other black leaders of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A school still bears its name, but it is not the school it once was.

The second, Amidon Elementary School, was built in 1960 as part of an urban renewal project. At the peak of the city’s white flight, it was one of the only schools in the city to maintain a truly integrated student population over several years. It used phonics to teach reading and focused on basic skills, against the popular guidance in education schools of its day. It lasted seven years before being dismantled—not because it failed, but because it worked. The people who dismantled it won a Medal of Achievement at the National Laboratory for the Advancement of Education for their trouble. It has since been almost forgotten to history.

The third, Benjamin Banneker High School, was the subject of a bitter fight, multiple failed votes, and the resignation of arguably the district’s best superintendent in modern history before the school board allowed its creation in 1980. For more than a decade afterwards, the board looked at it with suspicion and starved it of funding, including denying it readily available federal funds. It now ranks consistently among the best high schools in the country.

What follows is the story of those schools and the men and women who fought over them. It stems from a question I couldn’t shake during my study of education law: Why is the only reference to ability grouping in my casebook a 60-year-old court case the book advertises as likely no longer being good law?¹

I assumed, when I started my research into Hobson v. Hansen, that 1967 case on ability grouping in Washington, D.C. schools, that I would find a grim contrast to today, with bigots using tracking as a pretext to keep black students down. What I found instead is a story that cuts right to the heart of every education fight and many public policy fights of the past three generations, a tragic years-long wrestle between two remarkable men and their competing visions for what education ought to be, and the quiet catastrophe in its aftermath.

This is the story of Julius Hobson, Dr. Carl Hansen, and the world their conflict built.

Into the Segregated City: 1907-1947

Carl Hansen was already an experienced hand in education when he got a 1947 letter from the Washington, D.C. superintendent of schools inviting him to accept a position as the superintendent’s executive assistant. He had spent twenty years as an educator in Omaha, Nebraska, first as a teacher, then as the principal of an integrated technical high school. His Omaha superintendent warned him against the position: “Nobody ever succeeds in that school system. He merely holds on until he gets fired or retires.” But Hansen, only a few years out of a venture out to the West Coast to get a doctorate from Southern California University, was ready for another adventure. He accepted the job, packed up with his wife and two young children, and headed east.²

The Washington school system he was headed for was very different from the Omaha system he left: a southern school system, strictly segregated since its creation and managed not by the local city but by a school board appointed by the federal judges (part-time non-specialist volunteers, in charge of setting the overall direction for the school system), a board-appointed superintendent (in charge of carrying out the day-to-day operations of the district in line with the board’s directions), and Congress itself (in charge of funding and apportionment). All clashed repeatedly over questions of control and direction. Since 1906, the Board had been mandated by law to contain a mix of six men and three women; by tradition from that point forward, two of the men and one of the women were black. The superintendent position was usually stable, with Hobart Corning—the superintendent when Dr. Hansen joined—serving for twelve years from 1946 to 1958 and his longest-serving predecessor Frank Ballou serving from 1920 through his retirement in 1943.³

Under Ballou, the district’s segregation was total and its reputation poor. Every administrative position needed duplication between the white schools and the black schools, with coordination and communication strongly discouraged. In 1938, Ballou reprimanded a white administrator for getting lunch with his black counterpart. When famous singer Marian Anderson wanted to give a concert in the auditorium of the district’s Central High School, the Board and superintendent denied the request, drawing intense local and national anger. Anderson went on to instead present a free concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.⁴

The District’s population was transforming by the time Hansen arrived. Its white enrollment had peaked at 59,500 in 1935, when the system had only 33,500 black students. By 1945, the white student population had declined to 50,000, while the black population had grown to 39,000. This led to repeated tensions in the system, particularly around assignment to schools: as white student populations shrunk and black populations grew, administrators would periodically close white schools and reopen them as black schools, as white students protested the loss of their schools while the black community protested the receipt of white hand-me-downs.⁵ By 1947, 45 percent of the district’s population was black, and 72 percent of its construction budget was going towards black schools, with numbers only increasing from there.⁶

Serious efforts at education research were well underway in the early 1900s, and ability grouping was a topic of persistent fascination. Meta-analyses of the 1920s and 1930s noted uncertainty, emphasizing that grouping without curricular changes to match seemed to be ineffective, but grouping that adapted curricula to the pace of students could be promising. “Homogeneous classification,” a 1930 analysis of several studies noted, “may be effective if accompanied by proper adaptation in methods and materials.”⁷

A few years later, the psychologist Ethel L. Cornell cut through the mess. She noted in 1936 that two competing schools of thought had been in conflict in education since the earliest attempts to study it, and that the conflict was evident both in studies and in theory. One theory held that “a democratic education should offer the same content to all.” The other, that “education cannot be democratic unless it varies the educational pattern, the content, and the goal, as well as the speed and the method,” to fit pupils’ varying needs. In the first, people treated ability grouping simply as a refinement of grading, while in the second, people saw it as cutting across and supplanting the traditional grade system. Cornell noted that its results depended less on the fact of grouping, more on its philosophy, its accuracy, and willingness to differentiate content, and that both objective and subjective results favored grouping with adaptations.⁸

Against this backdrop, the white and black schools tended to use various schemes to group students by ability. Most notable within the black system was its decision to run a single academic high school, Dunbar High, for the most academically driven black students from around the District, while sorting those who were less academically inclined into one of the District’s two other black high schools. The decision bore fruit, with the school drawing a highly educated faculty, preparing generations of black leaders, and standing as a national model for black excellence.

Into this system came Hansen, a committed liberal institutionalist who believed in the public schools as America’s most important social institution, a “traditional” educator at a time when traditionalism was already out of fashion, an integrationist and believer in colorblindness in a segregated world. Hansen believed that professional educators should be firmly in charge of schools with outside forces staying out. He championed basic, skills-focused education, ability grouping, and phonics for reading—something he noted had fallen out of favor in the 1920s as having become too highly technical and an end in itself before “revolutionists” rejected it instead of reforming it. When he was later made director of elementary schools, he immediately set about bringing phonics to the white schools that scorned it.⁹

The Foundations for Desegregation: 1947-1954

Upon arrival, Hansen began to lay a foundation for hoped-for integration in a careful, measured way. He focused on avoiding public controversy, aiming to push against segregatory practices “in such a manner that the Board of Education would not be forced to make an adverse ruling on what had been done,” believing that public controversy would set progress back. This included asking for approval before arranging a meeting between PTAs at a black and a white public school to handle a 1952 disciplinary incident.¹⁰

Public controversy came regardless: in 1949, when the Board and Superintendent rejected a proposal for a city-wide championship basketball game between the white and black division champions; in 1950, when an integrated pageant to commemorate the Capital’s 150th year came to white Anacostia high school, which cancelled the presentation; in 1952, when Superintendent Hobart rebuked Hansen for saying the system was “fast approaching practical integration on the administrative and teaching level.”¹¹

One of Hansen’s first assignments was to set up a committee to develop a handbook on intercultural education, warning collaborators he couldn’t guarantee it would move the system closer to integration and that it was only focused on helping people “get along better together within the framework of total separation by race.” Much of the top school staff looked at with some suspicion, one noting that the word “workshop” had “a communist ring to it.” One segregationist Congressman threatened a reduction in appropriations as a result.¹²

At times, Hansen even acted as agent of the segregatory system, as when he stood in a white elementary school’s classroom doorway to block a black reverend from performing a sit-in on behalf of his son. In his memoir, he quoted the reverend’s commentary on the event approvingly: “I feel most strongly that it is undemocratic, unfair, and un-American to deny my son or any other American citizen a right to attend the nearest public school to his residence.”¹³

The inequalities within the segregated system were clear. The 1949 Strayer report, a survey of District schools authorized by the Senate and House district subcommittees, found sweeping problems and inequalities in the system. Black high school teachers taught more hours, black schools had older buildings, and black classes had more pupils than their white counterparts. The Strayer report noted “unnecessary and illogical” redundancies—two separate research and testing departments, two separate Boards of Examiners for applicants for teacher licenses. The district invested $240 in the instruction of each white student and $168 for each black student in 1953, the last year of segregation. Even though by 1953 black elementary students outnumbered white students 31,000 to 21,500, white schools had more than twice as many special education teachers as black ones. “Segregation,” an assistant superintendent in the district, Francis A. Gregory noted, “was a harmful luxury. It hurt not only those who were denied, but also those who were privileged.”¹⁴

Finally, in 1954, the minister and the many others who fought for racial integration won their victory in Brown v. Board of Education and in Washington, D.C.’s parallel decision Bolling v. Sharpe. By that time, the school system’s strict segregation stood in contrast to a gradual tide of desegregation in D.C.: desegregation of picnic areas, playgrounds, and swimming pools between 1941 and 1953,, desegregation of YWCA food services in 1944, merit-based federal appointments in 1948, a trickle of professional associations accepting black members through the ‘40s and ‘50s.¹⁵ Bolling turned the trickle into a flood: de jure segregation in the city was to end.

When the decision came down, unlike in most southern cities, the mandate was clear: President Eisenhower wanted the D.C. school system to become the model of integration in education, the nation’s eyes were on the District, and the administration would desegregate rapidly and without administrative resistance. On May 25, 1954, eight days after the Court’s ruling, the Washington Board of Education adopted a new racial policy: Appointments and promotions would be colorblind and merit-based. No pupil would be favored or discriminated against by race. Students were to attend neighborhood schools. No record would be kept of student or employee race.

Hansen’s time had come.

Miracle of Social Adjustment: 1954-1962

“The question is made about the educational level of children. That has been an administrative detail since we have had public schools. They give tests to grade children so what do we think is the solution? Simple. Put the dumb colored children in with the dumb white children, and put the smart colored children with the smart white children—that is no problem.” — Thurgood Marshall, Brown v. Board of Education oral arguments¹⁶

In what became known as the Corning Plan, the D.C. school district made several decisions: All schools would be desegregated as quickly and completely as possible, each one with new boundaries and the option for students to stay in their currently enrolled schools, school personnel would be appointed and promoted on the basis of merit, and the transition would be accomplished by natural and orderly means. (Miracle 45-46). In September 1954, D.C. students walked into integrated schools for the first time, with a smooth and uneventful first day.¹⁷

Opponents of desegregation sprung into action soon enough, with court petitions, protests, and encouragement of student strikes.¹⁸ Students at formerly white Anacostia High School staged a mass boycott lasting a week, ending only when the Superintendent ordered them to return or lose all honors and eligibility for extracurricular activities.¹⁹

Not every student wound up in a racially integrated school—many neighborhoods remained de facto segregated, such that 33,000 out of 41,000 white students were attending schools with some black classmates, while only 41,000 of 64,000 black students attended schools with some white classmates. Even as late as 1963, four all-white schools and 23 all-black schools remained.²⁰

The clearest tragedy during the early desegregation process was the administration’s decision to turn Dunbar High School, like the rest of the newly integrated high schools, into a local neighborhood school instead of the magnet school it had been. Dunbar teachers faced an uptick in learning and disciplinary problems in their classes, dwindling enrollments in advanced classes and a newfound need for remedial ones. As the Board debated its 1954 plan, it did not spare a thought for what would happen to Dunbar. The idea of preserving some of what made the school special went unmentioned and unconsidered, and so the school went from producing the highest number of black PhDs of any school in the country to being just another neighborhood school.²¹

Hansen, meanwhile, was placed in charge of high schools instead of elementary schools after desegregation. 1955 was the first year white and black students had been tested using a common system, and Hansen saw the results as indicating an urgent need to adjust curricula. Nearly one-fourth of the District’s tenth graders were reading at or below a sixth grade level. In arithmetic, nearly half were at or below that level.

This observation led to Hansen’s first foray onto the public stage around the desegregation process—an exchange during an investigation into D.C. schools led by segregationist Congressman James C. Davis of Georgia. Over nine days of hearings, as Hansen put it, those conducting the investigation staged “an open gossip session in which all the neighborhood scandal was gleefully discussed.”²²

In response to Congressional committees proposing a reduction in high school teaching positions, Hansen—hoping to stir the community and Congress towards more staffing and funding—released school test scores to local papers, advocating for upward equalization via additional funding. Thinking he might be opposed to integration because of his concern about lagging student academic performance, the Davis Committee called him to the stand. There, he expressed the view that the insularity of the segregated system had prevented sharing between the white and black teachers and had kept white teachers unaware of the academic performance of black students, isolating them and robbing them of the chance to learn as much as they could. When asked if he thought integration had carried on smoothly, he replied that it had been a “miracle of social adjustment.”²³

As a result of this, the Anti-Defamation League encouraged him to write a pamphlet, Miracle of Social Adjustment, detailing the history of desegregation in Washington, D.C. He did so, pushing against negative stereotypes of black students and advocating for a sort of colorblind universalism. At the end of the pamphlet, he explained the one “big problem” he saw: many black students, facing environmental deprivation in the segregated inner city, lack the experience of other students and face unique challenges in learning.²⁴

His solution, as he explained it, was focused on his “primary objective:” “the maximum development of every pupil, regardless of race, creed, cultural and economic status, and supposed capacity for learning.” To aid in this objective, he advocated for an increase in homogeneous grouping—what he called the “four-track plan” in high school—alongside a reemphasis on skills programs and subject matter standards, an increase in special education, the reduction of class sizes, and a building program to improve classroom facilities. “The prevailing spirit in the District of Columbia,” he said, “is positive and dynamic. It looks forward to a growing and improving school system, to a betterment of educational opportunities for all children, and is resolved to let no transient troubles prevent the realization of the ultimate goal, a better community through brotherhood.”²⁵

Neither this nor his subsequent tour of Southern cities to give pro-integration speeches endeared him to Southern segregationists.

What was Hansen’s “four-track plan” for high schools? An honors curriculum for top performers, general and regular college preparatory curricula for the bulk of students, and a basic curriculum with smaller class sizes for tenth graders at or below sixth grade reading levels on tests. He envisioned flexible tracks with students encouraged to take the hardest classes they were prepared for.²⁶

From Hansen’s angle, comprehensive high schools aiming to take in almost all high-school-age children were a new and positive development, but each student needed to be placed in classes where they were required to stretch and be met at their level. As he saw it, any public school system aiming to give every child at least twelve years of education faced a need of serious differentiation.²⁷ This meant a certain degree of educational pragmatism: he wanted hard-to-teach students to remain in high school through the full twelve years, no matter the level they ended up at. “Teachers and citizens in general,” he wrote, “had better get a clearer picture of the concept of universal high school education. They are going to have to accept pupils where they are and help them to grow from that point. Their tight grip on the idea that high school is a sacred place to which tickets of admission are necessary needs to be loosened.”²⁸

When he was promoted to Superintendent in 1958, he introduced honors and basic programs to junior highs and in the latter half of elementary schools as well. These were much smaller-scale than the high school program: in practice, some 2-4% of elementary students were in the basic track and another 2% in the honors track, with the numbers going up to 7-15 percent and 5-6 percent respectively by junior high.²⁹

For a while, this all worked pretty well. Test scores rose consistently for black and white students alike in D.C. schools between 1955, the year the District’s independent testing systems properly merged and students were evaluated together for the first time, and 1962.³⁰

Ability grouping remained an object of heated discussion, but Hansen’s position was hardly outside the mainstream. Education theorist John Goodlad summarized the research in 1960, calling it “perhaps the most controversial issue of classroom organization in recent years” and echoing the research problems and conclusions noted by Cornell and others decades earlier. He concluded that “the evidence, of limited value as indicated above, slightly favors ability grouping in regard to academic achievement, with dull children seeming to profit more than bright children in this regard. The advantage to bright children comes when they are encouraged to cover the usual program at a more rapid rate.”³¹

In 1960, Hansen saw the opportunity to put his elementary school ideals into action with the construction of a new school at the heart of a Southwest Washington urban development project. The Amidon School was to be his “put-up or shut-up operation,” a magnet school that would implement his ideal elementary school approach while inviting applications from around D.C. The focus of the Amidon was on teacher-directed, subject-matter-oriented instruction with demanding content, direct instruction, and difficult materials introduced early. Its reading instruction started young and kept phonics as its core, against the prevailing philosophy of education schools of its day.³² If his ideas fail when put to use, he said, he would abandon them. If they were effective, his staff would be willing to implement them more broadly.³³

Hansen announced the program and began accepting applications from parents in March of 1960. The school’s student population was drawn partially from around the city and partially from the new and expensive development around it, but also took around 40 percent of its students from public housing in its local area. Throughout its lifespan, the school kept an enrollment of around 70 percent black students and maintained a racially integrated staff.³⁴

During this timeframe, the greatest complication the administration faced was the rapidly shifting racial composition and rapidly growing population within the city and its schools. While the city’s white population had been declining since 1935 and its black population growing throughout, by the 1950s, the influx of black migrants from Southern farms became a flood as the District’s white population dwindled. The year-over-year changes are stunning: the District schools went from being majority white in 1945 to 50-50 in 1950, up to 64 percent black in 1955 and finally 80 percent in 1960.³⁵

Less visible from raw numbers is the sheer difficulty individual schools had in maintaining integrated enrollment once they had it. School populations would turn over almost completely, with a few schools (like the District’s Eastern High School) going from 100 percent white to more than 90 percent black within a five-year span. Hansen noted that the tipping point seemed to be around 30 percent black, after which white flight almost always became rapid and near-complete.³⁶

As a result of these population shifts, by 1960 white students were overwhelmingly concentrated in the wealthier areas west of the city’s Rock Creek Park, with the city’s Wilson High School remaining overwhelmingly white while more and more of the schools east of the park stayed overwhelmingly black.

The school administration managed to secure more and more money from Congress each year, though never as much as it hoped. The budget went from $26 million in 1953 ($314 million adjusted for inflation) to $63 million in 1962 ($673 million adjusted for inflation).³⁷ With Hansen driving things forward, the decade saw the introduction of new initiatives like a free lunch program in predominantly black schools, going from nothing to 8,220 lunches daily between 1952 and 1964.³⁸ Accompanying this was a rapid expansion of services (librarians, counselors, and others) and special programs like a school for unwed mothers.³⁹ With the District’s black student population more than doubling between 1950 and 1960, though, the schools struggled to keep up with demand.

Through the early 1960s, desegregation advocates regularly cited D.C. as an example of success. A Yeshiva University report on desegregation noted that “the integration of school systems has often been accompanied by a general upgrading of the entire educational enterprise, as in the District of Columbia.”⁴⁰ Multiple 1964 papers on the effects of desegregation in schools cite Hansen’s D.C. numbers approvingly, noting steady gains among both black and white students.⁴¹⁴²

Education historian Larry Cuban, looking back at this era of Hansen’s leadership, recounts it in glowing terms:

Between 1955 and 1962 Dr. Hansen led desegregation forces within the city, creating, in his words, "a miracle of social adjustment." Attacked in 1956 by a Southern-dominated congressional investigating committee, Hansen, then head of secondary schools, aggressively defended desegregation before the Davis Committee. He wrote, for no fee, two best selling pamphlets on desegregation for the Anti-Defamation League. In them he proudly pointed to the increases in black academic achievement and the improvement of interracial contacts.

After 1958, when he became superintendent and introduced first the four-track

organization and later the Amidon Plan, Hansen's prestige as an educational leader peaked. Appearing often at national human relations workshops, in demand as a national speaker on school desegregation, the superintendent was seen as an aggressive, no-nonsense schoolman. Time did two articles on him within six months. He had "begun turning the wreck of Washington's schools into a model that less beleaguered cities may envy." Saturday Review featured him as one of the nation's "movers and shapers of education." These and other articles stressed his achievements in avoiding the worst excess of desegregating schools that appeared to have befallen other cities. If there had been an educational Hall of Fame in the 1960s, Washington's white and black, would surely have installed Hansen because of his desegregation efforts.⁴³

Overall, the atmosphere between 1954 and 1962 was one of guarded optimism: real challenges, a top-to-bottom transformation of the District’s student body, but a general determination to make things work and in Hansen’s case an eagerness to implement his vision.

But towards the end of 1962, everything began to come crashing down.

The Tracking Wars: 1962-1967

Beginning in 1955 or 1956, the District played host to an annual championship football game between the public school champion team and the parochial school champion. The game drew crowds approaching 50,000 people and was aimed in part at keeping white and black people coming together, celebrating, competing, and sitting in the stands. It became the community’s premier school sporting event of the year.⁴⁴

On Thanksgiving Day of 1962, the predominantly black public high school champion, Eastern, faced off against the predominantly white parochial school champion, St. John’s, in a rematch of the 1961 championship football game in which Eastern won 34-14 in front of a crowd of 49,690. This time, St. John’s won 20-7 in front of a record-setting crowd of 50,033.⁴⁵

But in the final quarter, a fight broke out. The elbow of a St. John’s player caught an Eastern player in the face during a blocking play without the officials seeing, the Eastern player drew back for a punch, and the officials ejected him. The Eastern player rushed back onto the field and began to attack St. John’s players. His teammates moved to restrain him, but new fights broke out between the teams. As the game ended, thousands of spectators rushed from the Eastern stands to the St. John’s stands, with more fights breaking out. The rioting spread to the nearby streets, culminating in hundreds of instances of personal or property damage and 42 officially recorded injuries.⁴⁶

The game was cancelled the following year and all subsequent years but one, a 1972 revival attempt that drew a crowd of only 10,000. For many residents, the riot cemented an “us vs them” mentality, leaving scars on the city’s psyche for years.⁴⁷ In its wake, Hansen commissioned a report from a biracial committee on the causes of the riot and potential solutions, determined to ensure nothing similar would happen again. The report focused on a need for discipline, noting that teachers were unsurprised and faced similar conduct in schools regularly, reporting that “many teachers too often become mass baby sitters for the young and wardens for the older groups” and that “too many pupils are passed upward from grade to grade, not because they have the academic ability, but only because they are getting older,” and called for an increase in various citizenship programs, school counselors, and personnel training.⁴⁸

But of its 22 recommendations, one would stand out: a concern that the system’s basic track had become "a “dumping ground” and a “scrap heap” with inferior instruction, one in which many pupils would drop out and become “social dynamite” in the community. Many of the problems, the report noted, came from the basic groups at the high schools, “because those pupils have little interest or desire to advance.” The report called for a close examination of the track system, particularly the basic track.⁴⁹

At the same time, American social critics, spurred by frustrations with a conservative presidency and a divided Congress, began a focus on urban reform, with the Ford Foundation on the cutting edge. Their funding and interest spurred a wide range of experimental education projects in ten school systems, including Washington’s, in the early ‘60s: team teaching, prekindergarten, community schools, and more. Larry Cuban, who started his career as a teacher within that D.C. reform movement, documents how the election of John F. Kennedy provided an opportunity for the reform movement to use federal money to tackle their priorities, with a new focus on the youth crime and that “social dynamite” of the slums leading Kennedy to establish the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Crime (PCJD) in May 1961.⁵⁰

Washington Action for Youth (WAY), an organization funded by Kennedy’s PCJD, set up shop in early 1963, headed by New York social worker Jack Goldberg. Goldberg was a “dynamic and abrasive” character who believed passionately that institutions—especially schools—needed a confrontational transformation from outside to be set right. WAY believed that the institutions blocked opportunities for low-income kids who aspired to the good life and that they needed to become more relevant, more understanding, and more accepting of those kids—and in particular that schools were one of the chief causes of youth crime. In particular, Goldberg set his sights on the Amidon plan and the track system, Hansen’s signature projects. Both, Goldberg felt, must go.⁵¹

Goldberg chose the District’s Cardozo High School, whose principal was a close personal friend of his and a critic of Hansen’s administration, as the target area for an experimental subsystem of the school in which to try WAY pilot programs. He wanted the area for those reasons—and for the same reasons, Hansen did not. The dispute between Goldberg and Hansen over Goldberg’s goals of reform boiled over in public and private, culminating in Goldberg turning to the attorney general for what was supposed to be an ultimatum (“D-Day for Hansen”) in which things would either be done Goldberg’s way or Hansen could pack his bags and leave.⁵²

But on the day the meeting was supposed to occur, Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy, Jr., and Goldberg was left suddenly rudderless. In place of his push for a confrontational and wide-ranging transformation, he agreed to a milder compromise focused primarily on a series of compensatory programs in the target area. Within six months, Goldberg resigned and went back to New York City. The Model School Division he aimed to create, a semi-autonomous and ultimately disappointing education reform project around the Cardozo High areas, wound up finding a less confrontational person to spearhead it, after which Hansen agreed to it not because he liked the idea but because he seized on anything that would get funds to his schools. While Goldberg left, his stinging critiques of Hansen opened the door for a dramatically more confrontational approach between activists, the press, and the Superintendent.⁵³

And leading that charge was one Julius Hobson.

Julius Hobson was a passionate and focused activist with seemingly endless energy. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1922, he interrupted his studies at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute to become a spotter plane pilot in the army during World War II. He moved up to Harlem after returning from the war, then down to Washington, D.C., where he studied economics at Howard University and found his lifelong passion.⁵⁴ As he tells it:

The attitude was, we’re not going to hire these [n-----]s anyway for a job, so let them study anything they want to study.⁵⁵

And what he wanted to study was Marxism. Recalling his graduate days, he noted that one of his teachers would introduce his courses with the statement that “a capitalist is a capitalist regardless of race, creed, or color,” that racism should be seen as a rationalization for economic exploitation, and that we could not hope to eradicate racism from the United States and at the same time maintain capitalism. As he saw it, black people could either “duplicat[e] the white man's mistakes by attempting to build an equally exploitative and racist black capitalism, or [internationalize] the struggle and mov[e] with the tide of the oppressed peoples of the world toward an economic system based upon the socialist economics of Karl Marx.”⁵⁶

From that point forward, while he found day jobs first as an economic researcher with the Library of Congress, then as an economist and statistician for the Social Security Administration, Hobson lived for the struggle.⁵⁷

Hobson’s most serious activism started when he became president of the Washington, D.C. chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). With them, he would picket automobile dealerships that would sell to black customers but not hire black clerks, stage “lie-ins” in white-only hospital wards, spread rumors that dangerous militants might come to protests. In 1964, his authoritative approach, militancy, and refusal to commit to nonviolence became too much for CORE, which kicked him out.⁵⁸

From that point he started his own organization, effectively a one-man show: Associated Community Teams (ACT). At one point, suggesting Georgetown ought to share in the city’s rat problem, he drove through the city displaying a cage of rats and threatening to release them in Georgetown unless the city did something about the rats in the poorer areas of town. But it was in education activism where he really hit his stride.⁵⁹

After years of increasing pressure against Hansen, Hobson hit the jackpot when his organization, ACT, filed complaints against the school system with the U.S. Office of Equal Educational Opportunities.⁶⁰ This time, instead of being hauled in front of segregationists to explain integration, Hansen would be hauled in front of a committee to investigate whether tracking was discriminatory. After dozens of testimonies and days of hearings, the Congressional task force concluded with a report that recommended either revising the track system or dropping it entirely.⁶¹

When Hansen shrugged the report off, Julius Hobson turned to the courts.

Hobson Goes To Court: 1965-1967

Circuit Court Judge J. Skelly Wright was a formidable man—a lion of the court. Born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1911, he taught high school history while attending law school during the Great Depression. He rose quickly through the ranks of the legal profession after obtaining his law degree, with his uncle appointing him to the staff of the US Attorney. In 271 cases he handled in eighteen months, he obtained 268 convictions. By 1949, President Truman appointed him as the youngest federal trial judge in the nation.⁶²

Wright soon found himself in the middle of one of the most heated segregation fights in the nation, one that would see him issue injunctions against virtually the entire government of Louisiana. In 1956, after Brown v. Board, he ordered the New Orleans school board to come up with a desegregation plan “with all deliberate speed.” The board ignored him, dragging its feet until 1959, when he gave them a deadline of May 1960. When they came back without a plan in May 1960, he presented his own and ordered them to implement it by that fall—the first court-ordered school desegregation in the Deep South. The board members—all committed segregationists—dragged their feet, waiting for Louisiana Governor Jimmie Davis (composer: “You Are My Sunshine”) to save them and filing appeals—all of which were rejected.⁶³

With the deadline approaching, Governor Davis and the legislature attempted to seize the schools from the board five separate times, only for Wright to meet them with restraining orders and injunctions every time. One order restrained 775 state and local officials. On Sunday, November 13, 1960, the day before the schools were to be desegregated, the legislature met for a special session, passing two resolutions aiming to place the entire legislature in direct charge of New Orleans schools. Watching the session on TV, Judge Wright signed papers enjoining the entire legislature and the Governor 45 minutes after the session. The schools desegregated. President Kennedy, seeing Wright torch any prospect of a peaceful future in Louisiana with his principled stand, appointed him to the D.C. Circuit Court in 1962.⁶⁴

Supreme Court Justice William Brennan, a friend of Wright’s, praised him as one who believed that “judicial power should be made creative and vigorously effective,” while Wright personally emphasized that “in the area of equal rights for disadvantaged minorities . . . I remain an uncompromising activist.”⁶⁵

Customarily, a circuit court judge would not hear a federal case until it was appealed. In this case, however, Hobson’s lawsuit included a claim against the system of federal judge–appointed school boards in D.C., making every member of the district court a defendant in the trial. The Court of Appeals appointed Judge Wright to hear the case.⁶⁶

Hobson’s lawyers were similarly larger than life. To bring his case, he turned to the arguably most controversial and well-known lawyer in the country, militant left activist William Kunstler. Kunstler was proudly and explicitly ideological in his choices of client and case, saying, “I only defend those whose goals I share. I’m not a lawyer for hire. I only defend those I love.” Who did he love? During the early Civil Rights movement, Freedom Riders in Mississippi, on behalf of the ACLU. Later, members of the Revolutionary Communist Party, Black Panther Party, Weather Underground, and anyone else he could find in the radical movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s. He had a flair for publicity and a keen eye for opportunities.⁶⁷

His co-counsel on the case, William Higgs, had previously defended freedom riders alongside him in Mississippi. Higgs had been a precocious student who took advantage of acceleration both in high school, when he skipped his senior year to enroll in the University of Mississippi, and in college, when he graduated in three years before heading off to Harvard Law School. He married and divorced within six months before being arrested and disbarred in Mississippi for allegedly having an affair with a 16-year-old boy. Rather than stand trial, he headed off to Washington, D.C., where he played a bit part in drafting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as part of the Washington Human Rights Project before joining Kunstler on Hobson’s case.⁶⁸

In October 1966, attorneys for the school district filed a motion asking Judge Wright to recuse himself from the case, arguing that he would not be able to preside over a fair trial in light of his prior commentary on de facto segregation. In a 1965 speech at New York University law school, Wright spoke against neighborhood schools and white flight, then made it clear that substantial racial imbalance was all the proof he needed to determine unequal educational opportunity. “I am aware, of course,” Wright said at the close of the address, “that what has been said here this evening will not find favor with the advocates of judicial restraint.” Wright declined the invitation to step back.⁶⁹

The case, then, was unique from the beginning. It was “the only important one of its kind in which the NAACP did not participate,” brought by a militant activist with the help of “an equally militant lawyer,” and Hobson was suing over everything he possibly could. He sued because D.C. lacked home rule in appointing its Board, sued due to racial imbalance among teachers, sued because some District schools had “optional zones” where students could choose not to attend their local schools, sued over funding disparities. But most of all, he sued over the four-track system, and he did it all to demand the desegregation of a school system that was more than 90 percent black in the court of arguably the most sympathetic judge in the country.⁷⁰

By 1966, Hansen’s formerly iron-strong hold on the District’s school board collapsed with the appointment of three new board members who explicitly opposed him. Most notable was the appointment of John A. Sessions, a former Cornell English professor and an education specialist for the AFL-CIO union, whose interest in “education parks” and distaste for Hansen set the stage for the destruction of the Amidon School.⁷¹

The argument went as follows: The Amidon School is high-performing and attracts some well-off students to its student body. Nearby Bowen and Syphax Elementary Schools are not. Therefore, we should combine them and make students from all three schools attend two years in each school, so that the well-off parents are inspired to help the other schools. Hansen proposed letting the schools decide; the Board shot him down.⁷²

By November of 1967, reporters already noted that an overwhelming majority of the affluent families who attended Amidon had left. Hobson, reflecting on it, said, “They just don’t want their precious darlings to sit in the same classroom with dirty little slum kids.” 60 percent of Amidon students had been from public housing.⁷³

In 1968, the “Tri-School” was judged “one of the ten best innovative education programs in the Nation” and “awarded a Medal of Achievement on November 19 at the National Laboratory for the Advancement of Education” for “Demonstrating Significant Changes in Teaching Which Measurably Improve the Learning Process.” At the National Laboratory, they showcased “how children in the Tri-School are motivated to learn by the discovery method and to explore and progress, each at his own rate.”⁷⁴

Writing in 1970, the Washington Post’s prizewinning black journalist William Raspberry, considering the Tri-School Plan, called it an example of “hostage theory” in action. “The well-to-do parents would see to it that their children got a good education. All the poor parents had to do was see to it that their children were in the same classrooms. That was the theory. […] Now instead of one good and two bad schools, Southwest Washington has three bad ones.”⁷⁵

“We moved from Virginia into Washington to get our children into the Amidon,” one mother said. “The handful of agitators that proposed combining the Amidon with the two other elementary schools hit below the belt. One of them said on television that the people who objected didn’t want their children to go to school with Negroes. We came to southwest Washington to put our children in an integrated school. We came back to Washington because we wanted our kids to go to school with Negroes—and poor kids.” They left the school.⁷⁶

Judge Wright’s Decision (1967)

“All of the evidence in this case tends to show that the Washington school system is a monument to the cynicism of the power structure which governs the voteless capital of the greatest country on earth.” —J. Skelly Wright, Hobson v. Hansen (1967)⁷⁷

Judge Wright’s decision in Hobson v. Hansen is a sprawling, fact-heavy ruling spanning more than a hundred pages, within which he settles most issues quickly and predictably: Yes, striking racial imbalance in faculty must be corrected. No, no more optional zones. Yes, funding is imbalanced in some schools.⁷⁸

Having dispensed with those, he devotes the bulk of his attention to the track system. Judge Wright concludes that while Hansen was “motivated by a desire to respond - according to his own philosophy - to an educational crisis in the District school system” rather than intended racial discrimination, the district’s ability grouping served as “a denial of equal educational opportunity to the poor and a majority of the Negroes⁷⁹ attending school in the nation’s capital.” In other words, he asserts that while Hansen did not apparently intend to discriminate, the system’s disparate impact made it unconstitutional.⁸⁰

Much of Judge Wright’s decision rests on his objections to tests, which he treats as intended to uncover “the maximum educational potential” of students. “One of the fundamental purposes of track theory,” he claims, “is that students’ potential can be determined.”⁸¹ He condemns the use of aptitude tests on low income black children, because “the impoverished circumstances that characterize the disadvantaged child” make it “virtually impossible to tell whether the test score reflects lack of ability—or simply lack of opportunity.”⁸²

The core piece of evidence Wright presents against these assertions is the “Lorton study,” a 1965 study in which young adult prisoners at the Lorton Youth Center, a D.C.-area prison for people between 18 and 26 years old, received instruction in reading and arithmetic over a one-year period. The inmates had an average IQ score of 78 on the verbal Otis aptitute test used in District schools and an average of 98 on a nonverbal IQ test, the Revised Beta Examination. After a year of focused instruction, the inmates went from average grade-level equivalents of 6.9 (end of sixth grade) to 8.2 (beginning of eighth grade) in reading, and from average grade-level equivalents of 5.6 (middle of fifth grade) to 7.4 (middle of seventh grade) in arithmetic.⁸³

Per Wright, the study “reveals in hard fact that a disadvantaged Negro student with a supposedly low IQ can, given the opportunity, far surpass what might be expected of a truly ‘subnormal’ student,” demonstrating that the tests were poor measures of innate ability.⁸⁴ As a result, he concludes that the administration was incapable of ascertaining the innate learning abilities of students and therefore could not justify placement of students in lower tracks.⁸⁵ “The magic of numbers,” Wright noted, “is strong.”⁸⁶

Wright objects that the track system’s fundamental commitment “is to educate ability, not just the student,” to create a “distinctly competitive atmosphere” that is unfair for students who are “born into a world where the color of their skin makes life an inevitable struggle to simply obtain equality,” and that it reinforces the psychological impact of being judged of low ability.⁸⁷

As a result of all of this, he concludes that the effect of the track system is to unconstitutionally “deny a majority of District students their right to equal educational opportunity” and that it “simply must be abolished,” as must any system which “fails in fact to bring the great majority of children into the mainstream of public education.”⁸⁸

(It’s worth re-emphasizing here that in practice, the track system meant at the elementary school level that some 3 percent of students were in special education and another 2 percent in honors classes, and that at the junior high level 7-16 percent of students were in special education and 6 percent in honors.)

Judge Wright leaves readers with a final thought:

It is regrettable, of course, that in deciding this case this court must act in an area so alien to its expertise. It would be far better indeed for these great social and political problems to be resolved in the political arena by other branches of government. But these are social and political problems which seem at times to defy such resolution. In such situations, under our system, the judiciary must bear a hand and accept its responsibility to assist in the solution where constitutional rights hang in the balance. So it was in Brown v. Board of Education, Bolling v. Sharpe, and Baker v. Carr. So it is in the South where federal courts are making brave attempts to implement the mandate of Brown. So it is here.⁸⁹

I agree with Judge Wright that it was regrettable for him to act in an area so alien to his expertise. In the years since his ruling, scholars have raised serious critiques of his use of social science.

The most serious critique comes from a 1979 law review article by Donald Bersoff, who led joint PhD/JD programs in psychology and law after getting a psychology PhD from NYU and a law degree from Yale, and who would go on to serve as president of the American Psychological Association (APA). Bersoff argues that “from a psychometric point of view the court’s gravest error was its insistence that grouping can only be based on tests that measure innate ability,” something he notes no psychologist who writes on the subject believes.⁹⁰ Bersoff further criticizes Wright’s condemnation of the tests as culturally biased, noting that the consensus view of psychologists is that when properly applied and interpreted, tests have predicted future learning for all segments of society with “modest but significant validity and generalizability.”⁹¹ Tests, Bersoff argues, effectively measures how well students have learned the skills taught by the school system—not measures of cultural or genetic inferiority, but effective documentation of current student understanding and needs. When widely used tests are carefully inspected, he notes, the standard finding is that they contain “legitimate samplings of quite uncontroversial educational goals.”⁹²

Nor is there a free lunch waiting with culture-free tests or, in most cases, reduction of bias. Eliminating thirteen apparently biased items from an elementary reading test did nothing for the performance of schools with high minority populations. Deleting apparently biased items from group ability tests turned out only to make the tests more difficult for everyone, since the items tended to be lower in difficulty than others.⁹³ Per Bersoff, claims of misprediction are not borne out either: studies examining predictivity indicate that “minority groups and people of lower SES are generally predicted just as well as are upper-middle SES Caucasians,” and the tests in fact sometimes overpredict success for minority students relative to white students.⁹⁴

Bersoff was perhaps the best-qualified critic to address the point, but he was not the one closest to the case. That honor goes to David Kirp, founder and then-director of the Harvard Center on Law and Education, who worked alongside the ACLU as part of Hobson’s legal team for a subsequent stage of Hobson v. Hansen in 1971.⁹⁵ In a 1973 law review article, while Kirp noted personal wariness towards ability grouping, he argued for judicial restraint due to its near-universality and its varied connotations.⁹⁶ Per Kirp, “since individuals’ capabilities clearly differ, it would be a cruel hoax, a ‘deceit of equality,’ to premise a challenge to tracking on the argument that tracking caused school failure, implicitly promising that the educational differences would vanish if tracking were done away with.”⁹⁷ Kirp also warned against abolishing tests, calling it “about as sensible as the ancient Greek practice of slaying the messenger who brings bad news,” and echoing the warning that minority children do poorly on “culture-free tests” as well as other ones.⁹⁸

Christine H. Rossell, then a professor of political science at UCLA, in an article warning against careless use of social science research in educational equity cases, echoes Bersoff in drawing attention to Wright’s error in confusing the issues of achievement and innate learning ability for ability grouping. “The premise of tracking,” she noted, “is that, whatever the source of achievement differences, a student body characterized by variation in achievement requires a differentiated curriculum responsive to this variation. Whether or not tracking does serve these needs is the critical question, not whether it accurately sorts students according to innate ability.”⁹⁹

She goes further still, making the single most damning point against Wright’s use of social science: “The court’s opinion […] reads like an exercise in illogic. It even cites as one of its justifications for abolishing tracking a 1967 [1965] research study of low ability, homogeneous (hence tracked) prisoners in Lorton penitentiary who with extensive remedial education showed a significant achievement gain at the end of one year. Not only is this not evidence of the evils of tracking, but indeed demonstrates exactly the reverse.”¹⁰⁰

To repeat her point: as a core piece of evidence against ability grouping in K-12 schools, Judge Wright cited a study showing that adult prisoners in classrooms that were functionally ability grouped learned at a faster pace than one would have naively expected.

In his 2023 article The Magic of Numbers is Strong, psychologist Keith MacNamara, citing these critiques, notes that “any indication that the evidence was incomplete, uncertain, or subject to decades of debate did not register in the confident, often strident, tone of the opinion.”¹⁰¹

These errors are not unique to Wright—they are embedded in the Lorton study itself. The study has a few oddities, in one moment bragging that ninety-nine percent of applicants for the GED in its program are successful in obtaining it after a year of instruction¹⁰², while in another noting that the final reading level of some of its participants is within the range expected for second graders.¹⁰³ It spends no time at all outlining how it actually taught students during that year of instruction while devoting lengthy sections to arguing against intelligence tests and tracking based largely on anecdotes.¹⁰⁴ Reading the study, it comes across less as dispassionate research, more as an advocacy piece with a predetermined conclusion.

The Wright decision, then, stepped into an active and contentious dispute in the social sciences, misrepresenting the consensus of the fields while condemning as unconstitutional a pedagogical decision made on the basis of that same body of research without evidence of racial malice. As his core piece of evidence against the merit of testing and ability grouping, he used a study that used evidence of adults being tested, then learning well inside ability-grouped classrooms.

The Passow Report (1967)

At the same time Hobson v. Hansen was proceeding through the courts, the Passow team was conducting perhaps the most expensive, rigorous on-the-ground study of education in the history of Washington, D.C. schools. The same day the Hobson decision came down, Professor A. Harry Passow gave a press conference about the commissioned report.

A game of telephone has left modern secondary sources muddled as to what the report called for, with MacNamara (2023) claiming it “blamed many of Hansen’s policies for the deplorable condition of the school system” and that it “called for the end of the track system, the bussing of black children to under-enrolled white schools, greater integration of faculty, and an equalization of financial resources.”¹⁰⁵ Reading his work and other secondary sources, I was under the impression that the Passow Report centered around condemnation of the track system. It does not.

Commentary on the Passow Report has, in fact, been so mangled since the day it was released that I believe it’s crucial to look at it in some detail. What did the most rigorous examination of D.C. schools, performed by a team of some of the era’s leading education researchers, have to say?

It’s an exhaustive document stretching well over 600 pages and covering every topic that could conceivably matter for the district, a dream opportunity for a team of researchers to specify exactly what they see as possible for a model school system. It’s not complimentary towards the system, certainly, noting that “the schools are not adequate to the task of providing quality education for the District’s children.” It cites low levels of achievement, a failure in many schools to follow grouping procedures, a high dropout rate, resegregation based on residential segregation, staffing problems, insufficient guidance services, inadequate testing procedures, inadequate teacher training, a weak promotion system, needlessly complex budgetary procedures, aging buildings, poor communication between schools and the community, cumbersome operating procedures in its Board of Education, and poor relationships with other youth-serving agencies. As I say, it’s a thorough report.¹⁰⁶

The report is bleak towards the prospects of integration in the District schools in general, noting that in a system that was already more than 90 percent black, little was left to be done short of a return of the white population, so it advocated instead for a focus on quality instruction in a district serving overwhelmingly black and generally low-income students.¹⁰⁷ In one part that would prove prescient, the report recommends against mandatory transfer of white teachers despite the predominantly white faculty at predominantly white schools and the predominantly black faculty at predominantly black schools, noting that the district’s teaching staff was already 80 percent black, that teachers dissatisfied with transfer may just leave the district, and that there was no evidence to suggest teachers could meaningfully transfer their skills from homogeneous groups to kids from widely different socio-economic and racial backgrounds.¹⁰⁸

What the report does not include is opposition to ability grouping. Quite the opposite, really. “Differentiated instruction based on differentiated needs is at the heart of both equality and quality,” it notes early on.¹⁰⁹ And later:

To live with this conception of equal opportunity, the community must be willing and the schools must be able to furnish unequal education. Unequal education to promote equal opportunity may seem a radical proposal, but it is in fact a well-established practice with respect to the physically and mentally handicapped under the name of “special education.” It must now be broadened to include unequal, exceptional education for every child who needs it.¹¹⁰

And again:

The starting point for good teaching is the recognition of differences, of learning disabilities, whatever their causes or origins, of individual talents and unusual potential for learning, of hidden aspirations and commitments. The fact of individual differences is fact. It cannot be ignored without seriously damaging the quality of education.¹¹¹

And again:

In order to satisfy the youngster who requires compensatory education, the exceptionally talented child who needs greater challenge, the handicapped child with special needs, and the youth whose goal is immediate employment -- the schools would have to implement the long espoused American principle: each child should be educated according to his individual needs. What follows from this is that true equality of educational opportunity cannot result from identical educational treatment. ("The equal treatment of unequals produces neither equality nor justice.")¹¹²

When the report looks at the track system in practice, it is adamant that the District needs something very much like it:

Certainly by grade nine, the extraordinary range of academic performance would have imposed serious burdens on any teacher assigned to classes which included the entire range. The ninth grade Special Academic students seemed to perform four to five years below grade level, while the Honors students performed at about the mean for twelfth graders on both reading and mathematics. To attempt to gear a program to such different levels of functioning seems completely unrealistic.¹¹³

Were kids being left to languish in classes well below where they ought to be? Black and white teachers in the district were skeptical—at every level from elementary school to high school, black and white teachers alike were much more likely to claim the work in their classes was too hard for their students than too easy.¹¹⁴

The report advocates not for the removal of Honors programs but their expansion, lamenting that “too often, the few highly successful scholars are lost in the general population and tend to model themselves according to the aspirations and values of the majority,” and that “destroying the mechanism for challenging the most able students, especially those in the lower SES schools, and failing to reward them for high achievement is likely to lower their incentives for going on to higher education and greater social productivity.” It calls for Honors programs at every school in the District, even if different standards are needed school by school.¹¹⁵

In fact, one of the report’s complaints is that the Honors programs at the schools were insufficiently distinct from regular programs in curriculum and approach. “If honors programs are to serve the needs of talented pupils,” it warns, “they must be more than warmed-over regular courses.” It re-emphasizes this point when talking about math, noting that “one serious deficit in mathematics curricula is the lack of honest opportunities for mathematically talented pupils,” and that while relatively few people in the District were ready for advanced math, those who did warranted “extra attention.”¹¹⁶

The report laments the state of the system’s provisions for gifted students:

Ironically, concern for the disadvantaged and for racial balance has triggered opposition to what had become established and accepted practices for the gifted. Notably, special provisions for the gifted and especially special groupings have become a prime target for attack on the basis of alleged discrimination. […] With respect to both the gifted and the disadvantaged, the perennial question persists: "What sorts of education will best educate?" The provisions for the gifted and the talented have not been well conceived or implemented. The able youngsters in the District's population deserve better.¹¹⁷

In the end, the report sees the system’s tracking program as wholly unremarkable, noting that it “appears to differ little from the kind of ability grouping generally found in metropolitan high schools.”¹¹⁸ Theoretically, it notes that the system is distinguished by “rigid, city-wide criteria,” but in practice individual schools maintained individual criteria for their honors tracks, with the schools adapting to the needs and the reality of their student populations.

What of standardized tests? While acknowledging that “disadvantaged children are often handicapped in the test-taking situation itself by anxieties, lack of scholastic competitiveness and general unfamiliarity with the testing environment” and noting that test validity is affected by sociocultural factors, the report emphasizes that “such tests are still among the most important evaluative and prognostic tools available to educators.”¹¹⁹

So where do people get the impression that it calls for the end of ability grouping?

While the report emphasizes that “tracking practices by no means account for the grave difficulties of the school system,” it notes that Hansen’s system “is as often observed in the breach as it is in adherence to its basic tenets” and so recommends that “any form of a city-wide tracking, based on pre-determined city-wide criteria be abolished and that other plans for coping with the great range of pupil abilities, aptitudes, motivations and intentions be substituted.”¹²⁰

Instead of Hansen’s system, in which schools started Honors and Special (formerly Basic) programs in fourth grade, the report recommended in-class grouping in elementary school and subject-specific ability grouping and honors classes in middle school and high school.¹²¹

That is: after finding that the only unique part of the system was a vision of rigid, city-wide criteria that did not play out in practice, the report advocated for the abolition of those criteria while emphasizing that schools absolutely needed to find some way to narrow the vast ability ranges they faced.

Instead of pointing to tracking as the District’s issue, the report hammers home again and again both the importance and the lack of instructional quality:

To the members of the task forces, one of the most distressing aspects of their experience in Washington was that they usually found themselves liking and respecting the members of the school staff as people of good will and devotion. But when they looked at what the staff was doing, they were often dismayed. It is likely that these same observers would be similarly dismayed if they were to visit other central cities. But Washington, our nation’s capital, deserves better — on behalf of all of us.¹²²

This problem persisted at many levels: in Head Start classes, where children were surrounded by “warm and sympathetic adults” who nonetheless made “very little effort to provide a program that could be regarded as intellectually stimulating.”¹²³ They recommended comprehensive retraining for teachers of young children.¹²⁴

While the task forces liked the broad ideals of the Amidon plan, they noted that teachers were often inflexible and careless in translating those ideals into practice. In one arithmetic classroom, a teacher asked children how they would describe a commonality between a puppy, a chick, and a kitten. The kids unsuccessfully tried “fuzzy,” “farm animals,” and “pets,” which the teacher dismissed as incorrect without explanation, waiting for an answer of “baby animals” that never came. Because misinterpretations of the Amidon plan had been institutionalized, the report recommended abandoning it as a systematic plan and focusing instead on comprehensive redevelopment of basic teaching proficiency, as with teachers of younger children.¹²⁵

The same pattern repeated again and again. On English, the report noted:

It is distressing to find English teachers with master’s degrees mispronouncing words, misexplaining workbook exercises on grammar, misdefining technical terms, and failing to catch consistent gross grammatical errors in oral speech. The observer could not escape the strong impression that a substantial portion of the English teachers were not themselves well enough educated in their own fields.”¹²⁶

And with mathematics:

A principal weakness observed by members of the task force was the relatively low mathematical competence of both the elementary and secondary teaching staffs. With the few exceptions noted above, teachers observed seemed either uncomfortable with the material they were teaching or oblivious to its nuances and implications. Mathematical errors or misconceptions occurred frequently.¹²⁷

What about science?

In many cases, students were carrying on activities in class which they did not understand and for which they could see no reason. Students were being led to believe that they were receiving high quality preparation for college. On the basis of papers the observers collected as a work sample, they doubted that the preparation now being given under the college-bound guise is adequate.¹²⁸

In light of that, the report recommends—you guessed it—more teacher training.¹²⁹

Washington Teachers Union President William H. Simons, seeing the report, noted that “the union takes strong exception to the implication that the District schools have a large number of unsatisfactory teachers.”¹³⁰

Why do I belabor all of this at such length? Again and again in commentary around D.C. schools, the Passow Report and Hobson v. Hansen are treated as saying much the same thing about the schools. But only the most selective, surface-level reading of each can possibly support that. At the same time Judge Wright treated tracking as the original sin of D.C. schools, A. Henry Passow and his team looked at the district more closely than anyone before or since, shrugged at a grouping system that looked more-or-less like that of any other school system, and then pointed out all sorts of deep-running and difficult to fix structural problems that often came down to “it sure would be great if everyone was much better at their jobs.”

To understand what happened next, one must think like a school board. Between two recommendations for how to change schools, which one sounds more actionable?

1. A court order calling to abolish the practice of ability grouping, an approach already controversial among teachers and activists, then call it a day.

2. A 600-page report calling to comprehensively retrain teachers against the will of an unhappy union, overhaul the system’s curriculum, implement honors programs everywhere, provide more attention to disadvantaged and gifted students alike, and to refine the ability grouping program, all while juggling many other major concerns.

You may not be surprised, then, to hear the eventual outcome of the $250,000 ($2.5 million in 2025), two-year Passow Report:

After a year of study and dozens of meetings, the recommendations of the Passow Report and of the study group were quietly filed away.¹³¹

And the schools rolled on.

The Age of Hobson: 1967-1971

“When what you’ve spent a lifetime doing is suddenly being discredited and destroyed, you first begin to assuage your grief with self-pity.” So wrote Hansen as he looked back on the days in the wake of the Hobson decision. He worried about “an unholy alliance” between the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and liberals like Kenneth B. Clark, supporters of voucher programs for dissatisfied parents, that would lead to “farming out” a large portion of public schools to non-public corporations. He wondered whether his absorbing more of the blame for the D.C. school system’s failures might make the system of free public education “somewhat less vulnerable.”¹³² Finally, he elected to plead with the Board to allow him to appeal Judge Wright’s ruling. After the Board voted 7-2 against the appeal, Carl Hansen resigned as Superintendent of D.C. Public Schools at the beginning of July 1967.

Susan Jacoby wrote his career’s eulogy for the Washington Post: “The Superintendent Simply Stood Still.” Hansen had gone from facing segregationists down in the 1950s to becoming the villain of the 1960s, all without moving an inch. “There isn’t any mystery,” Jacoby wrote, “about what has happened with Carl Hansen. Policies that seemed liberal during the 1950s in a city that basically had been a Southern town seem very conservative today.”¹³³ The New York Times added its assessment, noting that “few of Dr. Hansen’s critics seem to doubt his commitment to the cause of constitutional and human equality.”¹³⁴

Despite his resignation, Hansen appealed the ruling alongside the one school board member who remained his staunch ally and twenty parents in D.C. Public Schools. The National Education Association announced it would file an amicus brief in support of Judge Wright’s decision, noting that “the [track] system was based on aptitude tests which are geared to white middle-class standards and thus work against disadvantaged students.”¹³⁵ In its assessment of the case, the Civil Liberties Fund, writing in support particularly of the symbolism of the decision, included an aside that “in the abstract [ability grouping] has much to recommend it,” but that “all of the virtues and benefits of ability grouping upon which its proponents rely (and which one must concede are considerable) can be achieved in a track system modified in accordance with the Hobson opinion.”¹³⁶ On appeal, the circuit court judges affirmed the ruling in a 4-3 decision, but narrowed it to abolishing strictly and specifically Hansen’s track system “as it happened to exist at a moment in time,” noting that the school board had wide discretion to ability group, “in light particularly of the detailed recommendations made in the Passow Report.”¹³⁷

Left with little else to do, Hansen sat down and wrote a memoir, Danger In Washington. It’s not a particularly cheery read, but it is an informative one. From its preface:

What kind of book is this, then, that seems likely to be saturated with anger and shrouded with melancholy? Admittedly, what I have said as a preview here fails to convey my optimism about the capacity of American public education to weather the stormy period through which it is now going. What most encourages me is that in spite of everything, American social history indicates the eventual return to good sense and rational behavior from whatever extreme the educational pendulum may take. The public schools in this country will survive the danger in Washington. They will come through stronger than before, sharper in the services supplied, more fully dedicated to the objective of rational human behavior.

I hope this story of my work in Washington may contribute to the improvement of the public schools, America's most important social institution.¹³⁸

Several dozen students from D.C.’s Western High School, most of them black, pleaded with the School Board and with Judge Wright to let them stay at Western despite the ruling against optional attendance zones. The ruling, they pointed out, would simply force them from a racially integrated school, would disrupt their college plans, and would ruin the school’s football team, yearbook, newspaper, and student council. In response, Hobson said he “sympathized” with the “handsome, nice, affluent colored ladies who sit here and cry about their children. But this is really of no concern. You are concerned your brown and white darlings […] are going to brush up against poor black children.” There will, he declared, be “no more private education in the District of Columbia at the public’s expense,” explaining that his suit “was not to get rid of de facto segregation as the press has reported,” but to “get quality education — it was to get poor black children into this rotten, lousy outfit called the United States.¹³⁹

220 black students and only 35 white ones were impacted by the optional zone policy. Judge Wright relented and allowed the kids to return to their usual schools, which infuriated Hobson: “If the judge wants to back off, that is all right. But, he better realize that he is yielding to the same economic and racist pressure and discrimination he condemned in his decision.” Referring to the predominantly black parents who petitioned the judge, Hobson said, “It’s not the white racists and bigots to watch out, but the black ones.”¹⁴⁰

The next serious conflict came when the Board named its next superintendent: Dr. William R. Manning, a white man from Michigan, after the only black man among the top candidates withdrew his name.¹⁴¹ Hobson and his militants disrupted the meeting with shouted opposition, a pledge of “equal education or equal chaos,” and a demand to “vote black.” “Maybe Mrs. Allen doesn’t know she’s a Negro,” shouted one of Hobson’s militants when she pushed back against the demand. “Maybe she should look in the mirror and find out what she is.”¹⁴² Hobson declared his intent to sue to stop what he called a “racist decision.”¹⁴³ He later made good on his promise, alleging among other things in the suit that Mrs. Allen was ineligible to be a board member because of her work in the Office of Education.¹⁴⁴

The next month, Hobson gave a speech at a Howard University symposium advocating that the students there direct their efforts toward the downfall of capitalism, with revolutionary force if necessary.¹⁴⁵ His revolutionary fervor, though, stayed mostly contained to efforts to disrupt the school district, as when he pressured them to cancel a reception to install Superintendent Manning on the grounds that it used public money for a non-public function.¹⁴⁶

In the wake of the abolition of the track system, former basic track students (of which many were clinically mentally disabled) were simply placed in regular classes. The chairman of Parents United to Help the D.C. Mentally Retarded reached out first to Superintendent Manning, then to Julius Hobson, asking for help. He estimated 10,000 mentally disabled students in the district who had more intense needs than mere slow learners, with the district’s replacement for ability grouping, a pullout program for math and reading, being woefully insufficient. He warned that when those students try to compete in normal classroom situations, they “undergo ridicule, become frustrated and more withdrawn, develop severe emotional problems from being unable to compete, lose all confidence in themselves, and instead of making progress, recede in their learning ability.” Those children, he noted, “have been in effect abandoned for the next 1-5 years.”¹⁴⁷ A mother, crying, told a reporter, “My daughter was doing well in her basic class last year. Now she comes home from school crying every day because she can’t keep up with the other children. I just don’t know what to do.”¹⁴⁸

Noting that the assimilation of former basic track students was “creating real problems,” Superintendent Manning proposed a plan that would separate them into special groups for “reading, writing and arithmetic” that he believed would meet the requirements of the Wright decree.¹⁴⁹

School board members began to pull the schools in nine different directions, having become much more involved in administrative matters while the acting superintendent had had his hands full making plans to carry out the Wright decree.¹⁵⁰ Teacher turnover increased from the 12 percent of prior years to 18 percent.¹⁵¹ By mid-1968, a consensus was growing among Board members that they had made a mistake with Manning and that he was a weak leader, with four of the nine calling for his firing.¹⁵² School principal tenures grew increasingly short, with more than half of secondary school principals in 1968 having been on the job for three years or less.¹⁵³

1968 was also the first year school board members were elected instead of appointed. Julius Hobson swept onto the school board promising to raise hell, aiming to root out “every administrator who is practicing the track system under some other name” and to “be a thorn in the side of the bureaucratic system.”¹⁵⁴ When the new Board met to elect a president in January of 1969, Hobson and Anita Allen butted heads once more, with Hobson supporters gathering at the meeting to shout and give speeches. When the Board elected one Reverend Coates to the presidency, Hobson’s supporters called him an Uncle Tom and shouted for him to give the vice presidency to Anita Allen, “a black traitor who sold out to whites.”¹⁵⁵

School board meetings continued to be acrimonious, with Hobson accusing Allen of acting on “behalf of those crackers west of Rock Creek Park” in a February 1969 board meeting.¹⁵⁶ This time, a crowd of 30 heckling students showed up to the board meeting, following Hobson’s lead and demanding curriculum changes including the teaching of Swahili, clapping and chanting until the board agreed to the demands by a 7-2 vote.¹⁵⁷ In May, Hobson returned with a push to eliminate school suspensions (an “authority hammer” used by teachers to “brutalize students”) unless schools provided mandatory hearings including the principal, the student, the parent, the teacher recommending suspension, and a disinterested party. In response, the board voted to eliminate school suspension, leading to teacher walkouts at three District schools.

At the start of 1969, Hobson began to pepper Manning with demands for data showing compliance with the Wright decree, claiming he needed it to stay out of jail in case he inadvertently cast votes against the decree.¹⁵⁸ By May of 1969, he began to accuse Manning of deliberately attempting to conceal, mislead, and misrepresent data and to pressure Manning to resign.¹⁵⁹ The Black United Front, formerly led by Stokely Carmichael, added its voice to his, demanding Manning’s ouster and replacement with a black superintendent and the resignations of Anita Allen and Rev. Coates to avoid a “total paralysis and disruption of the education system by next fall.”¹⁶⁰ Finally, in July of that year, the board voted 10-1 to strip Manning of duties.¹⁶¹

Hobson’s time on the school board was coming to a close. With a 1-year term, he was up for re-election immediately, which he lost to a little-known challenger. He was philosophical about his loss. “I’m everywhere and always an agitator. I got sidetracked for one year and thought I was part of the power structure. Now I’m back to the old Hobson position, a broken sword and bricks without straw.”¹⁶²

As it turned out, “the old Hobson position” meant filing more stages of Hobson v. Hansen. This time, his allegation was that with the opening of a new elementary school, the new acting superintendent, Benjamin J. Henley, had drawn the lines so the whiter and wealthier population would get the new school. Henley claimed each school would be around two-third black, while Hobson claimed the new one, Leckie, would be 95 percent white and the other, Patterson, 99 percent black, so Wright—seeing a dispute of fact—agreed to hear the claim. As it turned out, the actual boundary line resulted in a Leckie that was 72 percent black and a Patterson that was 88 percent black. Concluding that the Board had relied on inaccurate figures which “may have obscured important constitutional considerations,” Judge Wright ordered them to either redraw the lines, assign students to go three years to one school and three to the other, or to pull first and second graders from a nearby 86 percent white school into the two schools.¹⁶³

Another blow hit District schools in 1970 with the toppling of Sidney Zevin, principal of the District’s last meaningfully integrated public high school. The first boycott Zevin faced was in September, 1954, when white students walked out of the junior high he taught at on the first day of desegregation. But in February 1970, it was no longer white segregationists boycotting him, but black militants. Chaos at the school had escalated—a biracial group of 35 radical teachers out of the 85-member faculty engaging in a prolonged power struggle with him, visits from the Black Panthers and Black United Front, an auditorium break-in with speeches calling for “revolution … by any means necessary,” daily false fire alarms, small fires set around the building, an unlit molotov cocktail in a second-floor classroom.¹⁶⁴

The school’s well-motivated black middle class had all but disappeared, with those who chose to come to Western from its open enrollment zone no longer allowed after Judge Wright’s decree. Classrooms contained students “from a third-grade reading level to the first year of college,” with pressure from critical teachers leading to near-total abandonment of ability grouping. The teacher who led the power struggle was a history teacher who spent his class periods showing Black Panther movies and, when the department head suggested some balance, a speech by the leader of the National Socialist White People’s Party.¹⁶⁵ White parents at the school, when interviewed, said they wanted their kids to go to an integrated school, but not one where they felt resented and unwelcome.¹⁶⁶

Zevin was contemplative about his ouster. “Maybe this is a time in history when a white man has to get out of these positions”—but he didn’t think so, any more than he thought black people should be excluded from jobs in the past. “I wanted integration, and I still do. I was determined to make the thing work.”¹⁶⁷

The Final Lawsuit: 1970-1979

Hobson had one final trick up his sleeve. Aided this time by the Harvard University Center for Law and Education and the local chapter of the ACLU, he brought a continuation of Hobson v. Hansen to Judge Wright, alleging that the handful of predominantly white elementary schools remaining in the district, a cluster of six small schools west of Rock Creek Park, were funded 15 percent more per student than the average school in the District. To remedy this, Hobson asked Judge Wright to restrict the schools such that each one’s per-pupil spending had to be equal, plus or minus 5 percent.¹⁶⁸

This funding disparity was not systematic between white and black schools or rich and poor ones, and some of the best schools in the district had had lower funding per pupil than their worse-off neighbors. Spending less per pupil than nearby Syphax and Bowen Elementary Schools hadn’t saved Amidon from the tri-school plan, nor did lower funding per pupil in predominantly white Wilson High School than in low-income black high schools stop the sense that things were inequitable there. These schools were also ineligible for Title I funds, which did not count towards the considered budgets.¹⁶⁹

In addition, by this point, the District’s elementary schools were 95 percent black.¹⁷⁰
This meant that the remedy Hobson requested would mostly just be shuffling resources around between comparable schools. When the defense pointed this out, Hobson’s team responded with a shrug: “A school system which, without adequate justification, bestows upon one poor black child substantially more objectively measurable educational resources at the expense of another poor black child is just as discriminatory and unfair as a school system which bestows such resources upon a wealthy white child at the poor black child’s expense.”¹⁷¹

As this legal battle (Hobson II) was underway, the school board, spearheaded now in Hobson’s absence by Anita Allen, had its own priorities. Forget the Passow Report—she had a new plan for the system, designed by psychologist Kenneth Clark, whose “doll test”¹⁷² had played a key role in Brown v. Board, and this board wanted to see Clark’s plan executed to the letter.

What was in the Clark plan?

Its core conviction was that all students, aside from those with diagnosed disabilities, could learn the same material in the same classrooms to grade level performance or above if effectively taught. The plan called for high teacher expectations, strictly heterogeneous grouping (initially via a random number system until that proved too confusing), and teacher incentive pay based on class performance on standardized tests.¹⁷³

Allen would brook no discussion and no dissent on the Clark Plan, so her highest priority in finding a new superintendent was someone who would implement the plan. She interviewed all the front-running candidates, including leading contender Hugh J. Scott, making a failed last-minute attempt at stopping him and winding up as the only vote against his appointment to Superintendent.

The only problems? The teacher’s union disliked it because of its focus on standardized tests and teacher incentives. Scott disliked it because he was skeptical it was a sensible idea to measure a poor urban district against the national median as its required benchmark. And the looming Hobson II decision clashed with it because merit pay wouldn’t play nicely with precisely equal funding.

In a 1975 retrospective about the plan, its proponents lamented everyone else’s inability to pick it up: “Leaving aside for the moment the issue of timing, it’s difficult to see what was wrong with it or how changing it might have made a difference.” When it failed to gain traction, they blamed Scott and his low expectations: “If one subscribes to the racist view on issues of education which assumes that black children present special educational problems because, in the words of Superintendent Scott, they had been forced by society into abnormal external environments which handicapped their growth and development, then the District of Columbia schools might indeed have seemed to be a difficult terrain for [the program].”¹⁷⁴

The era after Hobson II is documented brilliantly by Joan Baratz.¹⁷⁵ The Board and Superintendent were torn about the new Hobson lawsuit. While their lawyers concluded it would most likely make things worse, three Board members supported the motion and disassociated from the defense. (54) The defense was in some ways exceptionally unserious—late to submit a defense, they initially submitted a Washington Post op-ed they found, then hired the husband of one of its writers to prepare a brief on the same topic. (56)

Of the Board, the most personally passionate on the topic may have been Edward L. Hancock, a black Navy veteran and father of children in the District’s public schools. At one board meeting, he burst out in fury:

• We are being victimized by a group of real smart cookie types of Nader’s Raiders, who have no person whatsoever other than to project themselves into the public image so that they can sound off in the legal profession and say, “I am punishing the public schools.” Let’s not kid ourselves, this is the point. This involves the survival of the public school system. I have seen the administrators of this school system devote thousands of valuable hours to answering Judge Wright’s petition, by a group of these so-called Nader Raider types, including our own Julius Hobson. […]

  “I don’t know what the administration is going to recommend, but I am a father of a teenage daughter who attended five junior high schools. This school system has ruined my daughter emotionally, educationally, and I have one of the [d---]est problems right now in my house that you have ever seen in your life! That is, because of something similar to this. You cannot move children up and down the street to suit Judge Wright and Julius Hobson. […] I will tell Judge Wright or anybody, it is high time that this school system stopped playing games with 9 kooks who attempt to upset these 21 children. Now I don’t care whether these children are white, black, rich, poor or anything. Kids are kids. This school system has played games with these children, and particularly these black children. They went to Gordon; they snatched them out of Gordon. After one year, they put my child in Evans, and she hasn’t learned a [d---] thing since. I charge this school system with the responsibility for it. I raised [h---] all up and down the street before I came on this Board of Education about it. As a result of that, I have a daughter that has been educationally damaged because somebody is trying to comply with some Wright Decree – something Julius Hobson Did! And Julius Hobson’s children have access to options: they can go to schools in Pennsylvania or anywhere they want to go. I have no options. I am a public school person. I have to be in public schools. […] If this school system […] does not have guts to stand up to Judge Wright on this issue, and any issue, involving children – you have no right to even have the job you have. You have a responsibility for children’s lives.”¹⁷⁶

Superintendent Scott, she notes, was “ambivalent” about appealing the order. He suspected the ruling would do more harm than good and doubted they could comply on time, but he “was reluctant to appeal because he felt that a majority black Board and a black superintendent would look bad appealing a decision that was intended to right past alleged discrimination against poor, black children.” (63)

They did not appeal. Instead, they rushed to hire consultants to figure out how to redirect school faculty to be in compliance by the deadline, made particularly challenging because they were unsure about the accuracy of enrollment projections and a difference of a few students was enough to knock a school out of compliance. (64-65, 69). In the end, they elected to involuntarily transfer hundreds of teachers around the district, beginning years of a mad teacher shuffle. (65).

Most—including Hobson himself—were unsatisfied with the plan, as Hobson felt that “just switching teachers would make teachers unhappy and not cause anybody to be more educated.” (76).

Some of the projected enrollments for 1971-72 were inaccurate, leaving the schools technically out of compliance and Hobson threatening to go back to court. Scott had to scrape together another plan in April 1972, while noting that it could only go into effect a few weeks before the end of the school year. Hobson shrugged the concern off, and at the end of April, with seven weeks left in the term, the district reshuffled more than a hundred teachers. (80).

In 1973, the district began to shuffle special subject teachers around to remain in compliance with the orders, with little consideration for whether they were needed. Instrumental music teachers were sent to schools with no instruments. Teachers who were supposed to assist in lesson prep were thrown into classrooms to allow teachers to have union-mandated free planning periods. To rectify this, schools set up a sort of “market” to bid on special subject services. (82-83).

Compliance became routine by 1973-74, with the focus instead on the district’s new Mills decree focused on requiring an expansion of handicapped services. (85) More creative and better-connected principals learned to use the new system by expressing the most compelling resource demand. (117). Schools with more highly educated (and thus higher-paid) teachres found themselves needing to cut staff and even at times move into classes of more than one grade level and end special subject services. (170). Teachers at the schools that lost staff were frustrated—they supported equalization in the abstract, but did not think of their schools as being “overprivileged.” (171). Meanwhile, student performance became increasingly difficult to measure as the administration mostly abandoned school-wide standardized tests. (163).

Perhaps worst of all, the District needed to comply with two competing sets of equalization requirements, with different formulas. Hobson II considered only teacher salaries. Title I, which the District counted on for millions of dollars of funds, examined all instructional staff. Hobson II considered longevity pay. Title I did not. Title I cared about instructional materials. Hobson II did not. This led to mad scrambles to rearrange resources first for Hobson II, then for Title I, once managing to compile their Title I report only 72 hours before the District would have lost funds. (183). Baratz examined the orders to consider whether it was even hypothetically possible to comply with both at once, with little success outside highly artificial scenarios. (195).

Baratz gives her postmortem: “Discussions with teachers, principals, administrators, board members, community representatives, and indeed, Julius Hobson, reveal a general feeling that a kind of fairness has been achieved, but it has not been particularly valuable educationally.” (175).

Superintendent Scott and the board, frustrated by his three years there, parted ways. Afterwards, people were less than optimistic about their search. “We need so much,” board member Mattie G. Taylor noted sardonically, “we’re almost looking for the second coming of Christ.” Looking from afar at the search, California’s state superintendent of public instruction Wilson Riles, the highest-ranking black public educator in the nation, concurred. “It would be helpful if the person they find could walk on water, and more helpful if he could heal the sick and raise the dead besides.”¹⁷⁷

After a search, they found Barbara Sizemore. Her resumé was not precisely the traditional sort people look for to run a school system with 132,000 pupils and a $186 million ($1.35 billion adjusted for inflation)—she had previously only run three experimental schools with a total of 3,400 pupils on Chicago’s South Side—but she brought a certain energy to the position, promising to “raise the anxiety level” in the District and “revolutionize” the schools.¹⁷⁸

Sizemore’s tenure with D.C. schools was brief and mostly unhappy. Her supporters frequently disrupted board meetings, and after she feuded with the board over funding sources and claims of incompetence, they dismissed her after a long, drawn-out “trial.”¹⁷⁹

With administrative jobs vacant, teachers’ contracts yet to be negotiated, and the next year’s budget not yet sent to Congress, the search seemed yet more grim than before. Quipped school budget director Ed Winner: “If this board found Jesus Christ under a bushel basket, he would have trouble here next year.”¹⁸⁰

The Reed Era and Beyond: 1976-1990s

The board did not find Jesus Christ under a bushel, but for once, they found just the person they needed. Vincent Reed was homegrown District talent, who had gone from being a “strong, effective, and respected assistant principal,” in the words of one parent¹⁸¹, to serving as a high school principal and then a “top lieutenant” to the three ill-fated superintendents before him. Reed was a capable and popular administrator who wanted to build student capacity in basic skills, to end social promotion in the schools and to require minimal levels of competency to advance.¹⁸²

Gifted education came peeking cautiously back into the district for the first time in a decade under Reed’s administration. A tiny set of pilot programs launched during the 1978-79 school year supported by a handful of $4,000 one-year grants and serving approximately 500 students.¹⁸³

In August 1977, a decade after Hansen’s resignation and several months after Hobson’s death, Reed’s administration filed a motion to vacate the cost equalization order the district had struggled under. Hobson’s legal team opposed the motion¹⁸⁴, but the court modified the order to allow balancing of teacher-pupil ratios instead of teacher salaries, to remain in place for the next decade.¹⁸⁵

Reed, however, retired abruptly after five years as superintendent, saying he found the board difficult to work with. What happened? Reed supported the creation of a “model academic high school” for college-bound students, one that could help students who “want to address themselves to some advanced courses. In acrimonious meetings, opponents on the Board argued that it was an “elitist” plan to drain other schools of their best students and teachers, a plan to serve only white students, a plan that raised the spectre of tracking once more.¹⁸⁶

Edward C. Smith, the first tenured black professor at American University, argued for Banneker by evoking the post-Brown, pre-Hobson era, acnowledging that the schools had plenty of problems back then but that “there was a strong sense of purpose, sustained by performance, and a belief that academic achivement was not only important, but attainable,” and arguing that the end of ability grouping in 1967 marked the exodus of the middle class from the city.¹⁸⁷

“The agony of what I’ve been through,” Reed said, “is something I can’t explain. It’s something I can’t stand anymore.”¹⁸⁸

A year later, though, after two failed votes, a compromise version balancing Reed’s ideal of academic standards with the District’s racial and economic politics snuck through. Each of the city’s four regions would get a balanced number of slots at the school. The school would limit seats to a maximum of 500 so it “would not drain the city’s other high schools of their best students,” and its admissions requirement was lowered from top 15 percent to top 18 percent. One board member noted that it was public pressure that really pushed things through—“something about the model high school which touched the people of this city.”¹⁸⁹

Seven years later, Banneker was “chronically short of funds, facilities, and followers,” with an uncertin place in the school system. The high school occupied a 50-year-old junior high school building with no biology lab, a tiny library with no librarian, and only scraped-together amenities. Its name quickly changed from “Banneker Model Academic High” to merely “Banneker High.” School board members sneered at it: “Sure, the parents are grateful that their kids are out of the mainstream and put in that nice atmosphere with high standards, but I never saw the need for an academic school. […] Don’t create an alternative, fix the regular school.” “I still don’t want a showcase school. Every school should be a showcase.”¹⁹⁰

The school board was extremely cautious about committing money to Banneker. According to one board member, “This is public education and we are not in the business of creating private public schools. If you want a purely academic experience for your kids, go to a nice little house in the suburbs.” One time, the board even turned down federal money for Banneker, claiming it did not deserve more than other schools. Even its principal hated the “elite” label, emphasized that it was open to top 18 percent instead of top 10 percent, pointed out subjective elements in admissions “designed to free the process from the tyranny of tests.” Despite the board’s fears, there had only been two white students upon the school’s opening. Seven years later, there were four.

The controversy continued into the nineties, when Banneker appeared on the new superintendent’s list of 40 schools he might close or consolidate. As all 97 members of its 1992 graduating class were accepted into college, people in the system asked: is it fair to provide a rigorous program for only some students? mightn’t they raise the caliber of their local classes instead? To defend against allegations of elitism, Banneker’s principal noted things like how few National Merit Scholar semifinalists the school produced compared to a school like Thomas Jefferson High School, emphasized that admissions standards were minimal. That wasn’t enough for board members, who saw it as an “elitist school serving that segment of the community who had their children in private school and can no longer afford it and bring them back to essentially a private school at the public expense” and who pushed it to open its admissions process more since not doing so was a class issue.¹⁹¹

Despite their best efforts, Banneker survived. William Raspberry celebrated it a decade later, calling it “an important source of pride for both the school system and the city.” Excellence, when preserved, speaks for itself.¹⁹²

What of the system as a whole by the 1990s? Even the thought of caring about student performance had become almost anachronistic by the ‘90s. Its student population peaked in 1970 before entering a precipitious decline, leaving it with far more schools than it needed after a massive building program. By the 1980s, the District spent more money per student than in every other major school system. By the time they were considering closing Banneker, the city’s student population had dropped 50,000 from its peak while central office positions doubled and the District’s per-student budget swelled, with the superintendent at the time unsure even how many employees he had. Ever since Hansen’s time as superintendent, nobody else has led DC schools for as long, and very few for more than a few years.¹⁹³

There is no happy ending here. The system broke and it never, ever recovered.

We live in the shadow of the 1960s.

Guest Author Bio: Aaron Salt is the founder of ChalkForge, a school board consulting firm. He has founded a charter school, been elected to his school board, and worked in district administration. Aaron is the author of Govern Differently, in which he outlines his framework for academics-focused governance.

At the start of the 2025–26 school year, the San Francisco Unified School District told its teachers something that shouldn’t have been controversial: keep personal politics out of public classrooms.¹ While the District’s restrictions on political expression are longstanding policy², its emphasis on enforcement is both new and overdue. Past SFUSD teacher trainings have commonly passed over these restrictions, and the prior school year saw numerous controversies involving staff political activism, including a misguided February resolution³ signed by 31 UESF members claiming that “educators who utilized their democratic rights to speak out against the [Israel-Palestine] war were repressed or harassed by school authorities.”

The District’s response to this resolution was unambiguous:

In the classroom, the District has a responsibility to regulate classroom activities and discussion to ensure that information is related to academic curriculum and that staff do not create undue pressure on students to agree with a staff member’s political views. When at work, our employees hold a unique position of influence over students in their care, and this influence is a privilege.

San Francisco is not a conservative district. That this guidance emerged there — and was treated as a reasonable clarification rather than a culture-war assault on teachers — suggests a growing recognition of something that should have been obvious all along: when teachers use public classrooms to advocate contentious views, they compromise their ability to educate.

As a charter founder, an elected board member, and upper-level district administrator, I have spent many hours walking the halls of primary and secondary schools and observing teachers engaging students across numerous classroom environments. One thing that has grabbed my attention is just how often the term “intellectual freedom” is used to justify all manner of classroom displays — political signs, religious symbols, band posters, inspirational quotes — that are wholly irrelevant to the curriculum. That these displays compete for students’ limited working memory is objectionable enough⁴, but they do more than distract from instruction. They signal to students what their teacher believes, and students notice.

I’ve heard directly from students who were concerned about grade retaliation because their teachers were overtly displaying opinions different from their own. Whether the teachers would have actually retaliated is beside the point — the students’ perception created a barrier to genuine discourse and exploration. When exposed to political and religious content, students infer the “right” beliefs in a given classroom and modify their behavior accordingly. Teachers must build rapport with their students to engage them in meaningful instruction. Yet when, in the name of self-expression, a teacher promotes a cause or candidate that students do not support, that rapport erodes, and the classroom now disincentivizes the agency and independence of thought for which we prize in public education in the first place. That’s the opposite of intellectual freedom.

Here lies the great irony and central confusion: what many call “intellectual freedom” in these contexts is really the freedom of teachers to express themselves. But genuine intellectual freedom in K-12 education should mean the freedom of students to learn, explore, and form their own views without undue pressure. And when schools allow teachers to invoke the former sense of “intellectual freedom” for themselves, they actually make it increasingly difficult for them to accomplish their jobs as educators.

The catalyst for upholding the intellectual freedom we care about is promoting neutral classrooms in public schools. Neutrality avoids the conflict between teachers’ expression and students’ intellectual freedom, actually protecting the latter rather than stifling it. To foster civil discourse in line with its mission, public education must give students the freedom to learn, study, and think about things in different ways and from multiple angles. There must be freedom to investigate and draw differing conclusions for us to have the opportunity to disagree civilly. The commitment to genuine neutrality ensures that we are training students’ capacities for judgment, not tipping the scales of what those judgments should be.

This approach isn’t radical or impossible to implement. When my board worked in partnership with the district administration to establish neutral classroom guidelines — limiting displays to U.S. and state flags — we received fewer than five comments over three months. No media controversy, no teacher rebellion. It was a non-issue because the guidelines were presented correctly: as a way to promote student success by removing barriers to learning.

When teachers fail to internalize the value of neutrality for intellectual freedom, they risk putting undue pressure on students to endorse views on the basis of influence rather than reasoned reflection. When public schools themselves fail to internalize the value of neutrality, we risk a case like Mahmoud v. Taylor⁵.

When Montgomery County, MD — one of the nation’s most religiously diverse school districts — introduced LGBTQ+-inclusive storybooks into its elementary curriculum in Fall 2022, the district offered families an opt-out policy, which is common for sex education instruction nationwide. Families would be notified in advance when lessons would feature this material, and parents could opt their students out of those lessons. Then, in March 2023, citing administrative burden from the volume of requests, it revoked that opt-out policy.

The volume of requests alone should have signaled to the district that it was betraying the nonsectarian spirit of public education. The plaintiffs — a diverse collection of Muslim, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox families — objected not to the books’ mere presence in school libraries, but to mandatory instruction using materials they believed promoted contested moral conclusions: teacher guidance explicitly instructed educators to “disrupt” children’s “either/or thinking” about biological sex. These parents weren’t trying to ban the books or prevent other children from reading them. They were asking for the same opt-out accommodation they’d been offered before, an accommodation that — again — is commonplace for sex ed instruction.

The Court ruled 6–3 that the district’s refusal to allow opt-outs violated the parents’ right to free exercise of religion. Justice Alito, writing for the majority, found the books “unmistakably normative” — “designed to present certain values and beliefs as things to be celebrated, and certain contrary values and beliefs as things to be rejected.” By rescinding its opt-out policy, Montgomery County schools were stifling students’ intellectual freedom by mandating morally prescriptive instruction unrelated to curriculum. Had the District appreciated the value of neutrality for fostering critical inquiry unburdened by influence, this case would never have reached the Supreme Court.

Parents trust that their impressionable children are learning to read and do math in an environment where political and religious views are not thrust upon them. When schools and teachers betray that trust, classrooms cease to honor their mission.

If we want students to grow and learn, we must return public classrooms to a neutral state. The best support we can offer teachers in completing their mission as educators is to break down the barriers that would put them in conflict with their students or distract those students from what they need to learn. Likewise, the best support we can offer students on their path to academic success is to encourage them to read about different topics, investigate all sides of an issue, and draw their own conclusions. We don’t need to choose between intellectual freedom and ordered classrooms — neutrality gives us both. When classrooms become spaces where ideas are explored rather than prescribed, where students aren’t decoding their teacher’s politics or navigating ideological minefields, we create the conditions for genuine learning. We should strive to support true, authentic intellectual freedom from a foundation of institutional neutrality. The goals of public education warrant nothing less.

Written by an anonymous Stuyvesant High School teacher.

The story of New York City’s Stuyvesant High School is a story about changing public perceptions of excellence in education. For decades, Stuyvesant has offered extraordinary educational opportunities to the students who pass its objective, standardized admissions test, yet it remains completely free of tuition. On account of its exceptionally bright students, the competitive spirit they instill in each other, and the rigorous standards to which they are held, Stuyvesant has produced four Nobel Laureates, numerous prize-winning scientists, and countless luminary alumni. Yet in recent decades, perceptions of Stuyvesant’s mission and admissions have soured. Prioritizing performance has fallen out of vogue, and the school has faced mounting political pressure to relax or even eliminate its competitive admissions test for the purpose of racial parity. As admissions standards have been loosened, students have suffered—both the accelerated students, whose opportunities are being limited by the need for faculty to cater to students who arrived unprepared, and the unprepared students themselves, who fall ever further behind. Stuyvesant demonstrates that the commitment to competitive admissions and demanding expectations are not incidental to academic achievement but foundational. It also, sadly, demonstrates the remarkable challenges now facing the schools that still deem excellence worth celebrating.

Special Beginnings

Stuyvesant High School officially opened in 1904 as the flower of a growing national interest in public schools aimed at “manual training.” While the concept of manual training included the teaching of skilled trades, New York City superintendent William H. Maxwell’s conception was expansive and ambitious. In Maxwell’s vision², a manual training high school was not only “the best preparation for life” for the future craftsperson, but “the keenness of observation, deftness of hand, and mental ingenuity developed by work of the manual training high school constitute the best possible preparation for entrance to a medical school or one of the great scientific schools.” From the very beginning, Maxwell, an Irish immigrant himself, imagined Stuyvesant as a ticket for poor and immigrant students into prosperous careers, so long as they could seize the opportunity.

While it would still be three years before construction finished on its new building at East 15th Street, the school was so beset by new enrollees that it needed two annexes at the new site to house them all. After its grand opening, The New York Times ran³ a glowing endorsement of the project:

“With the same care and circumspection that a chemist exercises in studying a new element, the educators have planned this institution. … New York has provided a school which excels anything of a similar nature in the country. … [O]wing to their superior training, they [the graduates of Stuyvesant] will make their influence felt, and will contribute liberally to the prosperity of the nation.”

Already, the paper of record was taking pride in Stuyvesant’s students, whose “superior training” would soon increase the “prosperity” of the whole country.

Following the arrival in 1908 of a new principal, the eminent physicist Dr. Ernest von Nardoff, Stuyvesant began to champion a new curriculum of intensive math and science. The sense of purpose was becoming more palpable by the day, and Stuyvesant students were beginning to stand out. Already in 1909, an estimated 84%⁴ of Stuyvesant graduates were proceeding to college, while other manual training schools were sending fewer than half. The yearbook editor in 1911 would perfectly crystallize the optimistic atmosphere pervading the new school, writing⁵ that “Stuyvesant High School has a mission to perform in this city…. For the elementary school graduate who is of a mechanical, mathematical, or scientific mind, the Stuyvesant High School is truly ‘The Door of Opportunity.”

And how many students would knock on that door! Now with even stronger allure, pupils from all over the city flocked to ‘Stuy’ to learn, and by 1920 Dr. Nardoff had placed the school on double session to accommodate them. Stuyvesant soon established a reputation as one of New York City’s finest high schools, and from 1920 began offering admission only to those students with the sterling academic records to match. The impressive high school continued in the interwar years to introduce more new courses in math and science, and to educate more classes of talented, driven young people. Finally in 1934, Stuyvesant began using a standardized admissions exam to select the brightest and best-prepared minds from the ever-growing number of interested students.

For striving New York City youth of all classes, regardless of their country of origin or family name, Stuyvesant was a powerful center of opportunity—especially because it came without a price tag. But Stuyvesant was not the only beacon for young minds in New York. Townsend Harris High School, Brooklyn Technical High School, and the Bronx High School of Science were likewise exceedingly difficult and held their students to the highest academic standards. The curriculums at these competitive schools emphasized mastery of math and science, and legions of stories depict the iron rigor demanded from their students. With high standards came an intense workload, and not just any pupil could keep up. Strong students by the usual metrics regularly found themselves to be just average at these incubators of excellence. One student worked so hard that he could barely get four hours of sleep a night and yet would see his classmates “racing through their homework during the lunch hour.”⁶ However, the frenzied clip of assignments and the ubiquity of stronger peers instilled a fraternal competitive ethos that motivated students to push each other even further. For those who could manage the accelerated pace, the work more than paid off. Thanks to selective admissions and high expectations, the students at these specialized schools were leading the nation in scholarships and awards, and excellence was prized as these schools’ guiding mission.

Fragile Beacons

Excellence was ubiquitous in these New York gems, but the city quickly learned how fragile such cultures of achievement were. Citing strains of a wartime budget, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia determined that Townsend Harris, a standout institution even among the specialized schools, was not a public priority and would have to face the ax.

The New York Times came out strongly in opposition to La Guardia’s decision, taking a stance that the paper’s readers today would surely find taboo:

“The most widely admitted defect in our school system is that the gifted are frequently held back by the dullards. Townsend Harris is the one high school in the city where this obstacle is not permitted to arise. To abandon the educational ideal which it embodies would be a regrettable step, limiting opportunity for gifted children of the future.”¹

While perhaps surprising to the contemporary subscriber, the sentiment of the Times was not unusual. Such a position was wholly consistent with its celebration in 1907 of Stuyvesant as “a school which excels” its influences and provides “superior training” of which the city should be proud. Throughout this period, the Times was perfectly amenable to seeing excellence as the goal of education. It would not be until many years later that we would see this sentiment fade.

In a desperate outcry against La Guardia’s actions, students rallied to save the school, calling a sit-in of over 850 people during the Easter vacation of 1941. But despite the motions of the Borough Presidents of the Bronx, Manhattan, Staten Island (then “Richmond”), and Queens, the Board of Estimates refused to modify La Guardia’s decision. The final vote was 9-7 in favor of the closure, and the 97th anniversary of Townsend Harris marked its last. The school would lie dormant until it reopened on the campus of Queens College in 1984.²

The other three specialized schools–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, and Bronx Science–managed to survive unchallenged until a wave of disturbances hit the city in the late 1960s. In September of 1968, as tensions about school segregation reached a boiling point in New York City, frustrated protestors from the heavily minority and impoverished Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district of Brooklyn rose up and demanded the removal of various teachers whom they deemed incompetent. The protestors were backed by the legitimacy and money of the Ford Foundation, and eventually Mayor John V. Lindsay sided with them, forcing the Board of Education to hand off increasing control of the school system to local community boards.³

Soon the entire city school system was controlled by community boards composed of local parents. By 1970, Vermont educator and decentralization specialist Dr. Harvey Scribner was appointed to lead the system in the newly created position of Schools Chancellor. Under the new regime, it was not long before the specialized schools fell under scrutiny.

Forged by Fire: The Birth of the SHSAT

On January 21, 1971, Alfredo Mathew, the first Puerto Rican Superintendent in New York City history and a man who owed his rise to decentralization, accused Bronx Science (and, by extension the other specialized schools) of using the admissions test to deliberately screen out minorities and create segregated schools. Figure 1 provides the ethnic breakdown of the specialized schools in 1971 as seen through the eyes of the Times. Mathew was appalled at the difference between the share of Black and Puerto Rican students at Bronx Science–9.7% and 3.9% respectively–and their share in the city’s public high schools generally–29.5% and 15.1%.

Mathew and his community board urged Chancellor Scribner to abolish the admissions test,⁴ and by February 23, 1971, Scribner had convened a panel to scrutinize the exam. Although Scribner found that the admissions exam did indeed test for the advanced skills that were crucial for success at the specialized schools, he sowed dissent with his suspicion that “any test of achievement tends to be culturally biased.”⁵

Mathew’s attacks provoked a furious reaction from the students and principals of all the specialized schools, who came before the New York State Legislature and invoked the name of the fallen Townsend Harris. In their defense, two Bronx legislators, Republican Senator John D. Calandra and Democratic Assemblyman Burton G. Hecht, sponsored a bill that would make a uniform, competitive admissions test the only criterion for entry into the specialized schools. No other considerations – not donations, not recommendations by powerful relatives, not politically motivated statistical manipulation – would interfere with objective, selective admissions based on aptitude alone.

Distressed, the New York City Board of Education called on the legislature to vote down the Hecht-Calandra bill, stating that “[i]t would be most unfortunate for legislation to be enacted on matters of educational policy and administration that should be decided by officials of the school system.”⁶ But despite the Board’s objections, the bill passed the State Assembly and saved selective admissions at the specialized schools.

The New York Times encouraged the Senate to scuttle the measure. In an editorial entitled “Petrifying the High Schools?” contradicting their 1940’s stance, the Times noted of the specialized schools that “neither their admissions process nor their curriculum is sacrosanct. Enactment of the bill by the State Senate would be a flagrant violation of educational home rule.”⁷ But enact it they did, and the Hecht-Calandra Act came into effect that year. The Act specifically stated that:

Admissions to the Bronx High School of Science, Stuyvesant High School and Brooklyn Technical High School and such similar further special high schools which may be established shall be solely and exclusively by taking a competitive, objective and scholastic achievement examination, which shall be open in the eighth or ninth year of study, in accordance with the rules promulgated by the N.Y.C. Board of Education, without regard to any school district wherein the child may reside.⁸

As a result of the Hecht-Calandra Act, the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT) was formally established as the sole mechanism for entry into Stuyvesant High School, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech. By the time the Scribner panel eventually did call for the removal of the test, the Act had made doing so impossible, barring further state legislation. Since the passage of the Act, while the test has changed over the years, as a selective admissions instrument it has excelled⁹ at filling all these schools with diligent, high-achieving students who thrive in college and beyond.

As the years progressed, Stuyvesant, Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech came under occasional assault, and at other times they were praised. During the mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg, the city actually created four more specialized schools: in 2002 the High School for Math, Science and Engineering at City College, the High School of American Studies at Lehman College and the Queens High School for the Sciences at York College, and later Brooklyn Latin in 2006. Like Stuy, Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science, these new schools have also only used the SHSAT for admission and have also produced exceptional graduates grateful for the unique environment that objective, meritocratic admissions continue to provide.

Recent Developments, Old Grievances

The SHSAT faced mounting challenges as social justice discourse intensified in the 2010s. When he was elected mayor of New York in 2013, Bill de Blasio pledged¹¹ to dismantle test-based admissions at the specialized high schools in the name of racial equity. Alumni and parents defended the test as the surest way to keep subjectivity out of admissions and warned¹² that relaxing admissions standards would undermine the schools. Yet public sentiment was¹³ turning¹⁴on these centers of excellence.

In 2018, de Blasio’s efforts to fundamentally reshape the schools came to a head. Just as Mayor Lindsay had imported Scribner, de Blasio brought his own myrmidon, Richard Carranza, to eliminate test-based admissions. Formerly superintendent for the San Francisco Unified School District, Carranza had argued that the admissions test for that city’s most prestigious high school, Lowell High, was racially exclusionary. Under Carranza’s superintendency, Lowell High was made to replace their merit-based admissions with a lottery. Now in New York, de Blasio and Carranza’s plan was to scrap the SHSAT to reconfigure the racial makeup of the specialized schools in favor of Black and Hispanic students.

By the time Carranza was made Chancellor in 2018, although the rates of Black and Hispanic students at Stuyvesant were trailing their rates in public schools citywide, the Asian population at Stuyvesant’s population had been growing for years. If the problem were only the historic overrepresentation of white students in the specialized high schools, the growth in the Asian population at Stuyvesant would be an amazing success story! In 1976, white students were 70% of the student body, and Asian students were 16%. By 2018, the numbers had flipped¹⁵ – white students were down to 19%, and Asian students were up to 74%. This change took place as the SHSAT remained the only method of admission, and continued to select for high-achieving, highly passionate students, and the mission was clearly working. These Asian students were largely from immigrant families who sought a fair way for their children to succeed in America. But for de Blasio and Carranza, despite the consistent excellence of Stuyvesant’s graduating classes, the admissions test was irredeemably flawed. If it did not admit Black and Hispanic students at the desired rate, the SHSAT needed to go.

De Blasio and Carranza presented a two-part scheme¹⁶. The first part was a striking expansion of the Discovery program, a provision written into the Hecht-Calandra Act that permitted students who scored below the SHSAT cutoff to earn admission to a specialized school, so long as they were economically underprivileged and attended a summer institute. Although Hecht-Calandra specifically stipulated that Discovery could not base admissions decisions on race, de Blasio and Carranza projected that an increase in the number of Discovery students from 5% to 20% of each class would bring a corresponding increase of Black and Hispanic students from 9% to 16%.

The second part of the plan was the full dissolution of the SHSAT over the course of three years. In the place of test-based admissions, de Blasio and Carranza proposed that the top 7% of public middle school graduates would automatically gain admission to the specialized high schools. Because of the de facto segregation of New York City’s public middle schools, this approach would push the total proportion of Black and Latino students to an estimated 45%¹⁷.

Now, a major problem with the dissolution scheme is that the top 7% of performers at many public middle schools still lag far behind the advanced level of students admitted to Stuyvesant and the other specialized high schools under the SHSAT. When the plan was being promoted, at almost a fourth of public middle schools there was not a single seventh-grade student¹⁸ who had scored advanced marks on the State Mathematics Exam. If not one student at these schools was proficient at advanced math, how could even the top 7% of them meet the rigorous standards of Stuyvesant, where advanced comprehension in math is necessary for the coursework? Rather than face up to such obvious issues, proponents of the plan preferred just to avert their gaze.

Of course, the mayor also faced another major problem. Under the Hecht-Calandra Act, the second piece of the initiative was straightforwardly illegal: de Blasio and Carranza were trying to eliminate a test that was formally enshrined in state law. Ultimately the state proved unreceptive to de Blasio’s push, and the two-part scheme collapsed into one. Expanding the Discovery program was no longer a part of the solution, but became the whole solution.

In expanding the Discovery program, de Blasio and Carranza wanted to tweak the criteria for financial need so that more Black and Hispanic students were selected than students from other groups, particularly Asians. Carranza wasn’t shy about his motives, even uttering veiled threats against Asian families as when he infamously noted¹⁹ ”I don’t buy into the narrative that any one ethnic group owns admission to these schools." Many who denigrate Asian representation at Stuyvesant, however, are surprised to learn that Asians consistently rank with Blacks and Hispanics as among the poorest ethnic groups²⁰ in New York City, and insome years are the poorest²¹ demographic of all. The modal Asian student at Stuyvesant is a working-class kid in a family struggling to make ends meet. Yet the mayor’s office considered such students a lower priority; indeed, many Asian New Yorkers were deeply offended by how de Blasio and Carranza unapologetically cast the admissions debate as “a zero-sum race based on race.”²²

Yet in an ironic twist, de Blasio’s expansion of the Discovery program has had precisely the opposite effect as intended. Most students who have gained entry to the specialized schools under the expanded Discovery have been Asian; in fact, Asian students represent an even higher²³ percentage of Discovery admissions than of admissions by SHSAT scores alone. As it turns out, the demographics of students scoring just below the SHSAT cutoff look very similar to the demographics of those above it. De Blasio and Carranza did not succeed in rebalancing the racial makeup of Stuyvesant and the other specialized schools. All they have done is to admit more kids into advanced classrooms who are struggling to do the work.

Since 1971, admission to the specialized schools has always been based on whether the student reaches the cutoff score on the SHSAT. Traditionally Stuyvesant has the highest cutoff and Brooklyn Latin has the lowest. Accordingly, Stuyvesant maintains the most rigorous standards–standards that can overwhelm even kids who pass the SHSAT, but who pass at lower cutoffs. In 2024, the cutoff for Stuy was 561, while Latin was 492; an SHSAT score that qualifies a student for the workload at Latin does not yet qualify them for the workload at Stuy. But the Discovery Program ignores this limitation altogether, taking kids who scored below a 492 and sending them all the way through to Stuyvesant. Unsurprisingly, these students have suffered.

Stuyvesant’s administration has been coy about releasing data about the Discovery students, but as a teacher I have done my own tracking. While a small number has thrived, the vast majority has struggled—particularly in math and science. This is significant because the more math teachers that are needed to teach students at a lower level, the fewer are available to teach high-level classes like multivariate calculus. From the very beginning, the mission of Stuy has been to offer high-level educational opportunity to any students who can reach it. But when teachers are forced to delay an entire class for the sake of remediating students whom the SHSAT already predicted would struggle to keep pace, we are badly failing this mission. The students best positioned to grasp the opportunities Stuyvesant offers are being held back through no fault of their own. The entire school has faced difficulty because the Discovery students—a full fifth of the class—trail significantly behind. Indeed, many veteran teachers claim that the quality of the student body has degraded significantly since the days when objective SHSAT results alone held sway over admissions decisions.

Especially regrettable is how Discovery has brought back the very specter of racial stigma it was intended to dispel. Prior to its reintroduction, for any Black or Hispanic student enrolled at Stuyvesant, there was no question that he or she had passed the SHSAT just like every other student. Now, however, many students assume that the increasing number of Black and Hispanic students they see have been selected because of demographic parity and not likelihood of success – whether or not this is the case. Many Discovery students are white and Asian students, and yet it is Black and Hispanic students who are facing the stigma. In exploiting the Discovery program to promote racial representation, de Blasio and Carranza reintroduced the discriminatory suspicions that the SHSAT had silenced for decades.

The Torch We Carry

There are better–and fairer–approaches to racial representation at Stuyvesant and its peers than relaxing admissions standards. A simple lack of awareness that the SHSAT exists is an obstacle for many students in New York City schools, and this obstacle is easily overcome simply by administrators and teachers spreading the word to parents and students in the district.

Tragically, one important approach that Black and Hispanic students themselves advocate is regularly demonized by the very education “reformers” who claim to support them. When The New York Times spoke to a collection of Black and Hispanic Stuyvesant students as part of the paper’s non-stop²⁵ reporting²⁶ on²⁷ the²⁸ school’s²⁹ demographics³⁰, the students emphasized³¹the importance of “expanding gifted and talented classes, which many of them had benefited from, to low-income neighborhoods.” Yet just two years later, their supposed champion de Blasio tried to eliminate gifted and talented programs³² altogether! The opponents of competitive admissions appear far too busy trying to break down the foundations of excellence in education to listen to what students are actually saying.

De Blasio and his ilk insist that the SHSAT is a problem with public education in New York, but the test comes onto the stage late in a student’s educational trajectory. The SHSAT is a prediction tool used–with reliable success³³–to identify which students have the combination of intellect and preparation to thrive in an environment of intensive study, accelerated coursework, and demanding expectations. When the test shows that a young student scores below the cutoff, where is the finger-pointing at the failures of schooling and policy to better prepare that student? Test-based admissions policies are far downstream of deeper problems in New York’s elementary and middle schools, yet it is easier for politicians and activists to break the thermometer than to succeed at changing the temperature.

Still, we at Stuyvesant are lucky. Thomas Jefferson, our friend and rival in the DC area just had its admissions policy changed to reduce the number of Asian students. The result is a collapse in academic performance. In San Francisco, the levelers finally got to Lowell during Covid, replacing their merit-based test with a lottery. The city is now trying to return to a merit-based admissions approach, but many parents have already fled the system entirely rather than wait untold years for change.

Despite carrying the weight of the Discovery Program, Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Brooklyn Tech and the four newer specialized schools carry on like majestic dinosaurs. The SHSAT has consistently produced an amazing student body. What is immediately obvious when meeting these students is the fact that it is the student body itself that makes the school special. It is a constant refrain: “The students make Stuy what it is.”⁹ The faculty is good but not amazing (they need not pass the SHSAT to get hired), and while the building is nice today, the school was in a crumbling heap for decades until 1992 with no ill effects on student achievement. If the “reformers” of the future ever do succeed in dismantling the SHSAT, they will destroy the very thing that made the school great.

What was the vision we at Stuyvesant once championed? That we provide the children to whom we entrust the future every opportunity to learn and excel. Stuyvesant would cultivate competent industrial and scientific minds to serve their city and country, and New York would be better off thanks to their contributions. Yet we have grown lax with the standards to which we hold these students. At the same time that we have loosened our criteria for admission, we have also lowered our expectations for what they can achieve. Public sentiment too often seems to favor selection based on demographic representation, rather than merit. Politicians can call this “justice” all they want, but no one is doing a favor to students by putting them in advanced schools where they simply cannot keep up. Instead, they are only preventing the flourishing of the students who can. The SHSAT asks a great deal of these kids, just as Stuyvesant asks a great deal of them when they arrive. As our students are being tested here, so too are we being tested by a new education policy orthodoxy that wants to throw away everything on which the specialized schools’ stellar records were built. When we start tipping the scales for political reasons, we have entirely lost the plot. When we turn our backs on objective measures of merit, we turn our backs on excellence itself.

More than half of students predicted to succeed in advanced math are denied access to those classes.

Our research firm evaluates federally funded education programs in K-12 schools. In the early to mid-2000s, these grant-funded program evaluations began requiring measurable objectives and pre- and post-data comparisons. During this period, federal grants aimed at getting more low-income and minority students into advanced STEM courses became a common trend.

These program evaluation requirements led to a striking discovery. Tens of thousands of high-scoring students in North Carolina were not enrolled in advanced math courses. When staff working on the grant-funded programs (typically school counselors, school improvement teams, and administrators) discovered they already had hundreds of top-scoring, academically successful students in a single middle or high school who were not in advanced math, they usually wanted to enroll them. More often than not, they were told by their math departments that they couldn't enroll these students because students needed a teacher recommendation.

Educators involved in these grant-funded programs became curious about who was actually enrolled in advanced math and how those students had gained access. They asked us to examine the data to find out, as they had simply assumed that the students with the highest math scores were the ones in advanced math classes. Very few low-income and minority students were enrolled in advanced math, and the school counselors and administrators assumed this was because these students didn't score high on assessments. This incorrect assumption led them to write objectives for their grant-funded programs focused on increasing the number of low-income and minority students who scored high in math, believing there were virtually none. They had also incorrectly assumed that if their grant-funded services resulted in these students scoring higher that they would enroll in advanced math.

When academic achievement and advanced enrollment diverge

In 2009, North Carolina administrators were becoming more aware that enrollment in advanced math classes was not done by academic achievement, largely due to the new trend of federal grants aimed at increasing enrollment of low-income and minority students. The North Carolina Association of School Administrators hired us to work with SAS to investigate how math placement related to math achievement in all school districts in the state.

SAS Institute analyzed academic scores and math course enrollment patterns for all of North Carolina and for each school system. SAS Institute² is a leading global provider of advanced analytics and statistical software, with over 12,000 employees and more than 80,000 customer sites in 140 countries, making it a major player in enterprise data solutions across industry and academia. Their analysis revealed the extent of these placement gaps. Among 7th graders with strong statistical predictions for success in advanced math, fewer than 50% were actually placed in 8th-grade algebra. At the same time, many students in those advanced classes had lower success predictions than students who were not recommended for the class.

This is not a small problem affecting a few students. This analysis revealed a systematic failure affecting tens of thousands of children across North Carolina alone, wasting human potential on a massive scale. The study done in 2009 showed that about 35,000 North Carolina middle school students were predicted to be successful in 8th-grade algebra but were not enrolled. They went on to take 9th-grade algebra, and more than 25,000 of them scored at the highest level on the 9th-grade algebra end-of-grade test. Yet despite this demonstrated high performance, they remained in the standard track rather than advancing to more rigorous mathematics courses, such as Honors, Advanced Placement, or IB math classes.¹

In some schools that we worked with, either evaluating their grants or helping them with their school improvement plans, principals overrode the typical placement requirement of teacher recommendations and enrolled all high-scoring students into the advanced math track. If we were working on the evaluation of a grant-funded program we would follow the students’ progress over several years. Nearly all students who were moved to the advanced math track based on their academic scores were successful in earning As or Bs in the courses and remained on the advanced track. In some schools the students stayed where they were, in standard or even remedial classes, regardless of their academic scores. The educators in those schools held onto the idea that no level of academic success should give students access to advanced math. They instead used teacher recommendations exclusively.

The enrollment process created additional barriers for students and families. When students went online to select their courses, in many school districts they could not see classes that required teacher recommendations and may not have known those courses existed. Students who requested placement in advanced classes were frequently told they could not enroll, even when they had strong academic credentials. Students had no pathway to demonstrate their readiness or earn their way into these courses through their academic performance. They had to be recommended by a teacher.

We also found that mathematics placement decisions in middle school have profound consequences for students' academic trajectories. Students who took algebra in 8th grade continued to advanced high school mathematics, while those who didn’t rarely took an advanced math class in high school. The statewide data that we analyzed with SAS showed that students who took 9th-grade Algebra were far less likely to take the most challenging and rigorous math and science classes in high school compared with equally high-scoring students who took 8th-grade Algebra. Specifically, the students who scored at the top level who took 8th grade-Algebra were three times more likely to take physics and chemistry than equally scoring students who took 9th-grade Algebra. The students who scored at the second highest level were 55 times more likely to take chemistry and physics if they took 8th-grade Algebra. This pattern held true even when students were successful and high-scoring in 9th-grade Algebra. A study in one of North Carolina's largest districts found that although honors math courses were theoretically open to students who did not take 8th-grade Algebra, very few students who had not done so enrolled in the honors courses, and none of these students took calculus.² They didn't have a written rule preventing these students from advancing, but the data showed almost no one moved to the advanced track in high school.

The scale of this issue is significant. The consequences extend beyond course-taking patterns to actual achievement. The federal grant, GEAR UP,³ funds school districts for seven years to implement services designed to increase the number of students in advanced math and science courses. To evaluate this grant, we had to report achievement scores and course enrollment numbers for students in 11 school districts each year. We followed a cohort of students from middle school through their first year of post-secondary education. North Carolina high schools offer Math I/Algebra 1 three different ways. One way is to slow the pace and stretch the material over two courses. Our analysis of course-taking data showed that many of the highest-scoring students were enrolled in slower-paced math courses. When we compared Math 1/Algebra standardized test scores of top-scoring mathematics students (Levels 4 or 5 on 8th-grade math standardized tests), those who took the standard course significantly outperformed those in the slower-paced course, with 82% versus 41% scoring at the college ready level.

These outcomes align with earlier research showing that top-scoring students who enroll in the most rigorous version of Algebra 1/Math I score significantly higher on college entrance math assessments.³ SAS Institute conducted an analysis comparing the long-term outcomes of students who took 8th-grade algebra versus those who waited until high school. The following figure shows SAT math scores for students in the top two quartiles.⁴ The results demonstrate that even among the highest-achieving students, those who took 8th-grade algebra significantly outperformed their equally capable peers who delayed algebra until high school, with score differences ranging from 25 to 35 points.

The broader implications are troubling. Although North Carolina requires students to earn credits in four math classes that meet minimum requirements for UNC system colleges and community college pathways, the majority of students not in advanced math tracks graduate unprepared for post-secondary mathematics. In 2014, about 60% of students graduating from GEAR UP high schools did not meet the Minimum Admission Requirements for the University of North Carolina System or Multiple Measures Requirements for the North Carolina Community College System. In 2017, nearly 72% of all North Carolina juniors failed to score the ACT college-ready benchmark in math. Of students who graduated from high school in 2013 and immediately enrolled in a North Carolina community college, 52% were required to take up to 10 remedial math modules that covered arithmetic and beginning algebra.⁵

We were working with one of North Carolina's largest school districts that had several grants and school improvement plans with the objective of getting more students into top math tracks, and they discovered they didn't know what actually got a student into these tracks. They had previously assumed everything was working as it should until they had these grants, and consequently saw the data. They asked us to review their data on math tracking and help them learn what was going on. We found that the percentage of students who scored at the highest level in 7th-grade math and then were enrolled in 8th grade algebra varied dramatically by school in this district, ranging from 3% to 80%. We also found that 6th-grade placement determined both 7th and 8th-grade math course placement. Only students who took advanced 6th-grade math took pre-algebra in seventh grade, and only students from those classes took 8th-grade algebra.

Further investigation revealed that 5th grade teachers were making placement decisions before test scores were available, but the recommendation forms included test scores as if decisions were based on them. They had us survey and interview the 5th grade teachers and ask how they made placement decisions. When we asked teachers what their score predictions were based on, most said "gut feelings." Their placement rationales varied wildly. Some avoided placing students in advanced math because they "hated math" and didn't want to "torture" students. Others placed high-scoring students in standard tracks for "better foundations." Some placed high-scoring minority students in standard math because they believed research showed minorities would struggle in advanced classes.

We compared teachers' predicted scores to actual test results once they were available and found systematic bias. We published these findings showing that teachers correctly predicted performance for only 60% of students, with prediction errors "not equally correct across ethnic groups."⁶

Here are results of this research published in this paper. At this time, Level 4 was the highest level on the math standardized tests.

This district had seven middle schools that received a federal grant to teach all 6th-grade math classes the way they traditionally only taught their advanced 6th-grade math, including conceptual understanding in addition to learning how to compute. The fifth-grade teachers had made recommendations, which were ignored due to this new program. When students completed this rigorous math course, sixth-grade teachers recommended 15% more students for advanced tracks than fifth-grade teachers had. Seeing students actually perform in challenging mathematics changed teachers' perceptions. However, although teachers recommended more students for pre-algebra, there were not more students who went on to take 8th grade algebra. We were evaluating this grant-funded program. It seemed to be successful, yet it didn’t lead to more students in 8th-grade algebra, even though they had more high scoring students. When we asked why more students didn’t enroll in algebra, they said this was because they had a fixed number of 8th-grade algebra classes and could not accommodate more students. When we asked why they didn't add a class, they said there were not more teachers who could teach the rigorous version of algebra and they were already struggling to have enough top track high school math teachers and therefore could not bring any more to the middle school level.

One middle school we worked with had a principal who took control after he saw the data. He moved 103 6th-grade students who had been recommended by 5th grade teachers to be in standard math into advanced math instead. All but a few earned A or B grades. This was a magnet school with a bimodal population of high-income and very low-income students. The high-scoring students who had been recommended for the low track were low-income. After their success, the high-income parents pressured the principal to move these successful low-income students back into standard math. He refused. He was then moved to a different school, and the new principal moved these students back to standard math. We published this in a peer-reviewed journal.⁷

A national problem

The patterns we were discovering were so startling to us and to the school counselors and principals we worked with that we began to wonder if this situation was unique to North Carolina or to the specific schools in our studies. We decided to review the research literature to see if similar patterns had been documented elsewhere. We found that this was not unique at all. These inequitable placement practices had been extensively documented across the United States for decades.⁵

McGrath and Kuriloff found that upper-middle-class parents actively worked to maintain educational advantages for their children while blocking access for others, revealing how social class perpetuated tracking inequities.⁸ The research literature showed consistent patterns spanning from the 1980s through the 2010s⁶. In the 1980s, studies revealed that when controlling for demonstrated proficiency, non-Asian minority students had about a 50% chance of being recommended for advanced mathematics compared to white and Asian students.⁹ Research in the 1990s found that in California, Latino students scoring above the 90th percentile on standardized tests had only about a 50% chance of being placed in college preparatory classes, while Asian and white students with similar scores had more than a 90% chance.¹⁰ A study of 6,000 students found that students from wealthier families were three times more likely to be placed into algebra than low-income students of equal ability.¹¹ The 2000s brought evidence that sixth grade placement was the strongest predictor of 8th grade math placement, with race being one of the most significant social factors determining placement among equally high-scoring students.¹² Even into the 2010s, research continued to document these patterns, including a statewide North Carolina study where educators admitted using free or reduced lunch status as "academic data" to determine student placement, and when that wasn't available, relying on race to identify students with perceived barriers to learning.¹³

We worked with other schools where the principal embraced the data and moved significant numbers of high scoring students into the advanced track and they stayed there and succeeded. We were working with School Improvement Teams in NC to help them interpret their academic data and use it to meet objectives in their School Improvement Plans. Wake Forest Rolesville Middle School’s data showed more than 100 minority students with top test scores had been recommended for remedial math.⁷

When these high-scoring students were finally placed in advanced math, many of them excelled. One student who'd been destined for the bottom track became the highest-scoring math student in the entire school. The principal, Elaine Hanzer, presented about this at the annual conference for Superintendents, and our co-founder presented these findings at a national conference for math teachers⁸.

The No Child Left Behind era brought sophisticated data systems to schools. North Carolina purchased EVAAS (Education Value-Added Assessment System), developed by SAS Institute. EVAAS is a statistical tool that could predict with remarkable accuracy which students would succeed in advanced courses.

The following table provides evidence of the system's predictive validity. EVAAS uses students' prior test scores in both math and reading to calculate the probability that they will achieve proficiency (Level III or higher) on future assessments, such as 8th-grade Algebra I. These predictions assume students receive an average schooling experience for the state.

The table demonstrates a strong correlation between EVAAS predictions and actual student performance. Students were grouped into probability ranges based on their predicted likelihood of success in 8th grade Algebra I, and their actual performance was then tracked. The results show remarkable accuracy: among students with at least a 70% probability of earning Level III or higher, 95.9% actually achieved that level of performance.

The data also reveals the precision across different probability ranges. Students with lower predicted probabilities performed as expected. Those in the 0-10% range had only a 10.5% success rate, while those in the 10-20% range achieved 12.5% success. The progression is consistent, with success rates climbing steadily through each probability range. This systematic correlation between predicted and actual performance demonstrates that EVAAS provides highly reliable predictions for student achievement, making it a valuable tool for identifying students who are ready for advanced coursework.

As more and more people became aware that math placement was not done by objective criteria, and because of countless examples of principals or others not allowing more students or more qualified students into advanced math, the arbitrary nature of placement decisions became increasingly problematic. Essentially, it was up to each individual school how to make placement decisions, leading to wildly inconsistent practices across districts and schools.

Counted out

In 2017, the Raleigh paper News and Observer published a series of investigative reports called the "Counted Out¹⁰," examining practices of labeling students as gifted in several large school districts in North Carolina. The analysis found that qualified economically disadvantaged students were less likely than their affluent peers to be placed in advanced courses, despite having similar levels of preparedness because they weren’t labeled “gifted.” (We were the source for that investigative report. At the time, we wanted to be anonymous because of all the backlash we were getting from school systems that wanted to maintain control of access to advanced courses.)

In response to mounting evidence of these inequitable practices and the resulting disparities in student opportunities, and partially in response to the "Counted Out" series, the North Carolina General Assembly took legislative action to address the issue systematically. In 2018, North Carolina passed House Bill 986, Session Law 2018-32, which included Part II: Enrollment in Advanced Mathematics Courses. This legislation established § 115C-81.36,¹¹ requiring that "any student scoring a level five on the standardized test for the mathematics course in which the student was most recently enrolled shall be enrolled in the advanced course for the next mathematics course in which the student is enrolled." The law further specified that "a student in seventh grade scoring a level five on the seventh grade mathematics end-of-grade test shall be enrolled in a high school level mathematics course in 8th grade" and that "no student who qualifies under this subsection shall be removed from the advanced or high school mathematics course in which the student is enrolled unless a parent or guardian of the student provides written consent for the student to be excluded or removed from that course."

The North Carolina General Assembly asked the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction to report on the academic levels of students who were in 8th-grade algebra. The Department's report revealed that more than half the students already in advanced math classes had not scored at the highest level on standardized tests, yet no one had expressed concern about these lower scoring students being enrolled. Meanwhile, SAS’ Institute’s study showed that more than half of students who did score at the highest level were excluded from these same classes.

In the meantime, California was going through the same issue, and someone had finally achieved some success at fixing the sort for 8th-grade algebra… only to find that the students who’d gotten in based on test scores instead of teacher recommendations were simply placed back into the standard track in the ninth grade, regardless of the success¹² they achieved in 8th-grade algebra. In 2014, CA passed additional legislation¹³ to say students who had completed 8th-grade algebra with a B or better could not be made to retake algebra in the ninth grade.

Before the North Carolina legislation, we volunteered with churches in North Carolina to help parents advocate for their high-scoring children to get them enrolled in advanced math when their teachers did not recommend them. We accompanied families to school meetings because administrators often used "data-word salad" to confuse parents, claiming that high scores and good grades somehow didn't indicate future success.

For example, we attended a meeting with the parents of a middle school girl who had earned an A in 7th-grade pre-algebra but was denied enrollment in 8th-grade algebra despite her and her parents' wishes. The teachers argued that her formative assessments didn't align with her summative performance, suggesting her previous success didn't guarantee future outcomes. The language arts teacher claimed the student had "appeared to struggle" during benchmark activities and that earning an A seemed "harder for her than for other students who achieved similar summative data results." The math teacher who had given her an A pointed to C grades on some earlier formative assessments, arguing that despite her subsequent A performance on chapter tests and other summative data points, these initial benchmark scores indicated she "sometimes struggles with foundational concepts during the formative assessment process."

The administrators nodded knowingly as teachers referenced "inconsistent performance across benchmark measures" and "concerns about the gap between formative and summative data trends." They suggested that while her final grades represented solid summative data, the formative assessment patterns revealed "areas of concern" that made advanced placement inadvisable, regardless of what the summative data actually showed about her mastery of the subject matter. This is just an example of the kind of talk the parents encountered, so the church advocacy group started bringing someone from our staff to the meetings to help them cut through this.

This type of circular reasoning, where success was reframed as evidence of potential failure, was typical of how schools justified excluding qualified students from advanced courses.

Administrators would routinely promise that students could move to advanced tracks "later, in high school," but our analyses and other research we found indicate students rarely moved to the advanced track after the eigth grade. The tracking system created rigid pathways where missing 8th-grade algebra typically meant students couldn't reach calculus by graduation, limiting their college and career options. This pattern was consistent across multiple schools we worked with, where the barrier wasn't just about having enough years to reach calculus, but about how the entire mathematics sequence was structured to funnel students into separate tracks with little opportunity for movement between them.

One fifth grader exemplified the problem. He had scored at the highest level on every test, had a 98% EVAAS prediction for success, and straight As on his report card. He was also officially classified as Academically Gifted by the school. When a new advanced math class was created, he wasn't invited. When he asked to join, his parents were told no, he needed to be "recommended." School officials told us, with straight faces, that his consistent past success was no indication he could succeed in advanced math, that they were keeping him out for his own good. (This was prior to the NC legislation.) His case was used as an example in the book¹⁴ about math placement, written by the NCSU professors who were working with us, helping to advocate for this and other students.

It took advocacy from his church community and our presence to counter the data doublespeak, but we got him in. We, the team from the church, and an NCSU math education professor met monthly with the school staff to check on his progress. We feared they would try to orchestrate his failure to prove their point. In the first meeting, his teacher showed us a graph where he had labeled the x-axis slightly above the line instead of at the point of the arrow. She said this indicated he was not advanced material. We said we would work with him, rather than let them move him out of the class. We kept meeting monthly about his progress. After a few months, instead of showing us evidence of his inability, they were singing his praises and telling us that he was the top scoring student and that he helped others in the class when they were struggling. He stayed in advanced math through graduation. Years later, his parents sent me a photo of him graduating from Yale with an economics degree, thanking us for helping him gain access to this pathway in fifth grade. (Following is the email. The late Marvin Pittman was head of their church’s parent advocacy committee.)

A two-tier educational system

The NC math legislation didn't create an equal or fair system. It simply replaced one two-tier system with another. Students with social capital could still access advanced math regardless of their test scores, just as they always had. The difference was that now students without social capital could also earn their way in, but only if they scored at the highest level. While this represented progress by creating an objective pathway for some previously excluded students, it maintained the fundamental inequity where privilege continued to override academic merit for those with advocates, while those without advocates faced a higher bar for entry.

They could have based the legislation on EVAAS predictions, to which every school has access. While understanding how EVAAS works may require specialized statistical knowledge, we routinely rely on complex systems created by experts. Most people don't understand how their smartphones, GPS navigation, or medical imaging equipment work, yet we trust these technologies because they've been validated and proven effective. EVAAS was developed by Dr. William Sanders, a highly respected statistician who earned his Ph.D. in statistics from the University of Tennessee and served as a senior education research manager at SAS Institute, one of the world's leading statistical software companies. His work in educational value-added modeling has been peer-reviewed and widely adopted across multiple states.

Using EVAAS would have provided even more students with the opportunity to learn advanced math concepts, since EVAAS predictions take into account multiple factors beyond just test scores, including teacher quality, student growth trajectories, and other contextual variables. In the schools we worked with, EVAAS had proven remarkably accurate at predicting student success, as demonstrated in the validation data showing 95.9% accuracy predicting success in 8th-grade algebra for students with 70% or higher probability predictions.

The State Board of Education's response to the legislation and the requirement for accountability? They changed the scoring system. They did this in August 2019.¹⁵ (They would not have been able to change the EVAAS predictions.) In their repor¹⁶t, they claimed they were trying to better align with national standards, but there was no discussion of how this would affect the legislation's effectiveness. No one addressed the tremendous decline in math scores statewide that resulted from this change. They also altered how scores were reported to schools, combining Level 4 and Level 5 into a single "proficient" category, which meant most schools didn't even notice the dramatic drop in high-achieving students.

A significant advantage of using EVAAS is its stability and objectivity. Unlike test score cut points that the State Board of Education can arbitrarily change, EVAAS uses sophisticated statistical modeling that remains consistent. The Board could theoretically adjust cut scores so that no students score at any proficiency level, but EVAAS would still identify those most likely to succeed in advanced courses. The system is updated annually with new data, making it more responsive and reliable than static test score thresholds. Instead, the legislation relied on this single test score metric, which was more politically palatable but less comprehensive in identifying student potential.

The law was intended to help high school students who excelled in their math classes move into the advanced track. Before the scoring change, 11% of high school students statewide scored at Level 5, the highest level, with some districts seeing rates as high as 25%. The EVAAS Prediction vs. Performance table (above) showed that in 2009, 42,144 students were predicted to be successful in 8th-grade algebra, and only 18,670 students were enrolled. Using EVAAS prediction as the metric would have given 23,474 more students access to advanced math.

After the law passed, which required schools to admit all Level 5 students to advanced classes, and the state changed the scoring scale, fewer than 1,500 (too few to report) high school students in the entire state achieved Level 5.

The schools had technically complied with the law while completely subverting its intent. These charts are from the NC School Report Cards.¹⁴ After 2019, the Math 1 Performance charts show no Level 5 and very little Level 4, similar to this.

The following chart shows the State Board's revised reporting format for schools, which combines Level 4 and Level 5 students into a single "Career and College Ready" category for all years shown. Before 2019, these levels were reported separately to schools. Even with the categories combined, you can see the dramatic decline: Level 4-5 performance dropped from around 50% to just 10% after the scoring changes in 2019. The actual Level 5 population—those scoring at the highest level—fell from about 11% of 9th-grade students to too few to report statewide,¹⁷ but this decrease in Level 5 is invisible in the combined reporting. Schools reviewing this data would see a decline but not realize that their highest-achieving students had essentially disappeared.

It's not about lazy teachers or incompetent administrators. It's about a system with enormous inertia that actively resists change, even when that change would help thousands of children.

When educators claim they lack resources for more advanced sections, they're often telling the truth. But this explanation falls apart when higher-scoring students are actively excluded from existing advanced classes while lower-scoring students fill those seats.

Expanding the advanced mathematics teaching pipeline

The uncomfortable truth is that fixing the sort would expose the real problem: that we don't have enough teachers capable of teaching advanced mathematics. It's easier to pretend the qualified students don't exist than to admit we can't serve them.

Some states are trying different approaches:

• Texas¹⁹passed SB 2124²⁰, mandating that the top 40% of students be placed in advanced math

• Virginia²¹passed HB 2686²², which created multiple pathways into advanced tracks. For example, students who score in the statewide, grade-level upper quartile on the Standards of Learning mathematics assessment must be automatically enrolled in advanced or accelerated mathematics, provided the course is available(§22.1-207.9.A.1). The bill permits parents to opt their child out of automatic enrollment, recognizing parental discretion (§22.1-207.9.A.2). The bill also requires school boards to establish multiple additional pathways for students to enter advanced math. These include:

  • Teacher recommendations

  • Parental recommendations

  • Student preference

  • Demonstrated aptitude through grades, other standardized tests, portfolios, or observations (§22.1-207.9.A.3)

• Indiana, Illinois, and Washington have similar bills under consideration

Perhaps in response to California's legislation,¹⁵ (or maybe it was a coincidence) which required objective measures from 8th-grade algebra for 9th-grade math placement, San Francisco eliminated 8th-grade algebra altogether in the following school year. There was a public outcry that they were eliminating the rigorous math track, probably because that track is known to begin in eighth grade. I have not seen anyone ask whether they eliminated Honors and Advanced Placement math classes. It is possible that some of the 9th-grade algebra classes were taught more rigorously and led to the advanced high school math classes. This would be easy to check. Doing this would subvert the law and maintain the status quo.

Without addressing the fundamental resistance to objective placement criteria, these efforts may meet the same fate as North Carolina's, that is, technical compliance that maintains the inequitable practices these policies were designed to correct. Data-driven placement isn't a panacea, but when properly implemented, it can serve as a tool to reduce the arbitrary decision-making that has historically excluded qualified students from advanced coursework based on demographics rather than academic readiness.

Every year, tens of thousands of students who could excel in advanced mathematics are relegated to standard courses that don't provide the pathway to calculus or Honors and Advanced Placement math in high school.

The solution starts with acknowledging that qualified students exist, admitting we're failing them, and then marshaling the resources to do better. The data is there. The technology exists. What's missing is the will to act.

For those who believe America must cultivate its brightest minds to remain competitive, consider that we're systematically excluding many of our most talented students from advanced mathematics. The fifth grader with a 98% success prediction who needed church advocates to access advanced math? He graduated from Yale with an economics degree. How many others with his ability never got that chance?

When we analyzed the data, we found students in remedial classes who scored higher than their peers in advanced tracks. We are actively holding back high-achieving students who have demonstrated their mathematical ability. In an economy increasingly driven by technical innovation, we're leaving our best mathematical minds to languish in standard courses that don't provide access to the advanced mathematical reasoning and college-preparatory coursework they need to reach their potential.

The crisis in mathematics education extends far beyond 8th-grade algebra placement. The ultimate goal must be ensuring high-achieving students gain access to advanced mathematics and science throughout high school. Any serious accountability effort must track whether students with demonstrated mathematical ability are reaching Honors mathematics, Advanced Placement mathematics, IB mathematics, physics, and chemistry by graduation. North Carolina reported²³ how many students enrolled in Math I/Algebra 1 in middle school, but not how many students enrolled in these advanced STEM courses in high school. For accountability, NC reports the number of students who scored at the highest level²⁴ in mathematics and then were placed in the most advanced math. They do not report how many students total are in advanced math.

Districts must conduct longitudinal analyses comparing students with similar mathematical abilities. The data may reveal thousands of mathematically gifted students never accessing advanced coursework they've proven capable of mastering. This isn't about advanced math for all; it's about advanced math for students who have already demonstrated advanced ability.

Multiple states have passed legislation forcing schools to allow qualified students to enroll in advanced courses. When laws are necessary to ensure that students scoring at the highest levels can access appropriate mathematics instruction, the system is fundamentally broken.

Parents and policymakers must demand transparency. Can students choose to enroll in advanced courses, or do they need teacher recommendations? How many high-scoring students are excluded from advanced tracks? How many qualified math teachers does the district have? If teacher shortages prevent qualified students from accessing advanced courses, this must be documented and reported publicly. Communities need to know when lack of teachers, not lack of student ability, limits advanced course offerings.

We are wasting mathematical talent on a massive scale. In an era of technological innovation, we deny our brightest students the mathematical foundation they need. Every year represents thousands more students whose STEM pathways are blocked not by ability, but by a system that refuses to recognize their talents.

The data exists. The tools are available. Ask the hard questions. Demand transparency. Document the barriers. Don't accept explanations that high-achieving students are being excluded "for their own good." Their futures depend on getting this right.

Editor’s note: This story previously contained an example of a story from a universal screening program in Broward County, Florida reported in the New York Times²⁵ and Washington Post²⁶ as having led to a sharp increase in Black and Hispanic enrollment in gifted programs. While universal screening is laudable, the news articles omitted that the program admitted English language learners and free-or-reduced price lunch students at a lower threshold than others, adding complexity that makes the story awkwardly suited to a passing reference. The Broward County story remains worth understanding, and you can read the original study here²⁷. Thanks to 3rdMoment²⁸ for bringing the details to our attention.

Janet Johnson is the President of Edstar Analytics, a North Carolina-based research firm specializing in the evaluation of K-12 education programs. She holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics Education with a minor in Statistics from NC State University. Dr. Johnson has led major federally funded research and evaluation projects focused on mathematics placement, STEM education, dropout prevention, and college readiness. Her work has helped school systems across the country use data to identify and support high-achieving students, ensuring they are placed in appropriately rigorous academic pathways.

John Wittle serves as the Chief Technology Officer at Edstar Analytics, where he designs and maintains secure data systems used in large-scale evaluations of K-12 educational initiatives. With a background in systems administration and certification from the Linux Foundation, he has created tools that support school counselors, collect sensitive data for education programs, and deliver online professional development. John ensures that Edstar’s technology infrastructure meets the standards for cybersecurity and performance, helping transform educational data into actionable insights for schools and policymakers.

Editor’s Note: This article discusses a New York petition asking Commissioner Rosa to retract the NY math briefs. You can find the petition and associated letter here¹.

The refrain has been broadcast widely: New York math achievement, as measured on a respected national test, is in the dumps. On the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 37% of New York 4^th graders scored proficient relative to 39% overall for the nation.¹ The situation was worse for 8^th graders, with only 26% of students scoring at or above the proficiency cut-off, again below average for the nation.¹ All other Northeastern states performed better. The highest performing state, Massachusetts, outperformed New York by 17 and 13 standard points, respectively, for the two grades sampled.¹ Results were even more disappointing for students historically ranking below the 50^th percentile for the test: those above recovered pandemic losses, while those below yielded worse scores than they did pre-pandemic. That is, disproportionality between the haves and have-nots continued to grow between 2022 and 2024. On the average, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Kentucky outperformed New York in 4^th grade math, even before adjustments based on differences in student’s socioeconomic status.

A frustrating backdrop for these findings is that New York outspends all other states on education, with per pupil expenditures exceeding $36k annually.² Importantly, averages don’t tell the full story; some New York districts are financially stressed, as funding is uneven and comes from multiple sources.³ The cost of living in New York is high, and school funding supports more than math and literacy instruction, although these are obvious priorities. Nevertheless, the data suggests that funding isn’t the crux of the problem. An alternative explanation is that math instruction, on the average, is poor across the state, driven by New York State Department of Education (NYSED) state standards which do not align with empirical research.⁴ These invalid state standards drive the selection of poor curriculums and teaching methods, frustrating teachers and fueling a downward spiral.

This brings us to the New York Numeracy Initiative. New York Governor Hochul rightly made the decision to draw attention to unacceptable student math outcomes in the spring of 2025. As part of this math initiative, NYSED commissioned a set of eight numeracy briefs, authored by Dr. Deborah Ball and colleagues out of the University of Michigan.⁵ The briefs were described as summarizing the state of the science regarding how to deliver top quality “evidence-based” math instruction. After publication, the briefs were shared widely and were a focal point of statewide professional development sponsored by NYSED in May of 2025.

This sounds all well and good, except that the recommendations put forward in the briefs are entirely antithetical to the published science on math instruction. Both national and international scholars have raised concerns about the briefs, highlighting the authors’ disregard of high quality peer-reviewed evidence. Rather, the briefs double-down on long discredited theories of instruction. Several of the debunked theories endorsed in the briefs overlap with educational myths toppled by the Science of Reading movement, which is a grassroots initiative to compel curriculum writers, administrators, and state leaders to acknowledge the very large body of evidence supporting the use of comprehensive explicit instruction to teach literacy, including phonics-based instruction.⁶ The authors of the New York numeracy briefs ignored large bodies of empirical research in (a) cognitive science, (b) school and educational psychology, (c) special education, and (d) various other learning sciences which inform best practice in teaching mathematics to diverse audiences.

Recently, my colleagues and I authored a letter explicitly outlining³ a sampling of the mischaracterizations, factual inaccuracies, and omissions in those briefs. In a later podcast episode of Chalk and Talk with Dr. Anna Stokke, I stated that the degree of inaccuracies is such that the briefs can be best described as pseudoscientific. One of my favorite definitions of pseudoscience, from Lilienfeld and colleagues, describes it as a “false or sham science” that “possess[es] the superficial appearance of science but lack its substance.”⁷ The briefs fit these criteria because they advance discredited myths about learning while portraying themselves as evidence-based and scientific.

Here are some takeaways about the more egregious aspects of the briefs, from our letter:

• The briefs disparage “explicit instruction,” a broad term for the family of instructional routines found to be highly effective in conferring knowledge to students through use of clear modeling, demonstration, and practice. In contrast to messaging in the briefs, predominant use of explicit instruction works well for both disabled and non-disabled students alike.^8,9

• Mischaracterizing the use of short, timed tests to assess student competence as unnecessary or harmful. Research shows such brief timed tests which emphasize fluent responding, such as math curriculum-based measurement, are critical to inform teaching and are far more accurate than untimed quizzes, surveys, or informal teacher appraisal.¹⁰ Further, such tests do not cause math anxiety.¹¹

• Claims that deliberate practice and recall activities centered around basic facts and procedural algorithms aren’t helpful. In contrast, research shows repeated practice of fundamental math procedures and facts is essential to complex problem solving, as it is to master any skill.

• That discovery learning should be prioritized over explicit instruction and occur early in the learning sequence. Research states the exact opposite: teachers should engage in explicit instruction first, and then only use discovery learning principles after students have the tools to manage their own learning, thus minimizing frustration and supporting early successes.¹²

How could this be? How could university affiliated professional development providers double-down on practices shown decades ago to be ineffective, ignoring hundreds of published empirical studies and meta-analyses? Shouldn’t our universities be our most trusted sources of information? The Reading Wars provides a helpful context. As highlighted by Emily Hanford’s “Sold a Story,” vendors and professors pushing reading pseudoscience flourished for decades despite an enormous body of widely accessible research showing such practices were ineffective, seemingly operating in a self-constructed research vacuum. It took a grassroots movement and an unignorable reading crisis to finally bring the battle to a tipping point, spilling over to the public with the aid of journalists, community advocates, and politicians. This now needs to happen for math.

The central dichotomy of The Reading Wars was, on one side, carefully planned, scripted instruction focusing on the core elements of decoding and language, and on the other side, an emphasis on constructivist learning centered on authentic literacy experiences. The science of math shows that many of the lessons gleaned from the science of reading cross over, such as (a) explicitly teaching and modeling fundamental principles, (b) ensuring fluency in core skills, (c) measuring to inform instruction, and (d) saving exploratory and “hands on” learning for when students are ready for such. The skills and targets are different; the means to attain them the same.

In practice, this includes having students memorize their core math facts using brief speeded activities; providing quick timed tests of fluency; explicitly modeling standard algorithms up front; promoting engaging teacher-directed learning dense with student responses; and minimizing student confusion whenever possible.¹³ This isn’t to say these are the sole practices that should be emphasized across a given instructional arc. Rather, the science of math (and the science of learning more generally) dictates these practices must occur first, and “discovery” and “experiential” activities occurring after demonstrated mastery of fundamentals.¹⁴ We wouldn’t ask a baseball pitcher to experiment with novel throws prior to mastering a fastball, curveball, and changeup through extensive practice, nor a novice chess player to “discover” strategy prior to explicit instruction in piece movement through modeling and rehearsal. It should come as no surprise that math and literacy are the same. Just like The Reading Wars, one problem may be that many educators, including many academics, still see stiff and boring instruction as synonymous with explicit instruction, a belief perhaps rooted in some philosophies or personal opinions, but not science. As The Reading Wars tells us, doubling down on mistaken philosophical beliefs yields very real and harmful outcomes for students; in New York’s case, for millions of children, reverberating across generations in the form of lost social and financial opportunities.

The numeracy briefs are hardly the first instance of latching onto philosophical, as opposed to scientific, reasoning at the expense of New York students. Many curriculum authors have taken great license with their programs, often operating in a research vacuum. For example, the lead author of Illustrative Math — the program adopted citywide by New York City — recently stated that there are no “magic bullet” curriculums and that their program operates by situating teacher modeling and instruction last, not first, in the instructional routine, rather emphasizing multiple strategies and discovery initially.¹⁵ During the program’s five year rollout, New York City test scores have decreased. Meanwhile, programs have existed for decades that have driven robust math achievement, all of which share common features of teacher-directed explicit instruction, refined over iterations. For example, a 2018 meta-analysis conducted by Stockard and colleagues concluded Direct Instruction programs (a suite of programs founded upon explicit instruction learning principles) significantly improved math achievement with moderate to large effects.¹⁶ The authors of the New York math briefs do not acknowledge this research.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can embrace the science of learning and math right now for the benefit of New York students. In doing so, we can save unnecessary frustration and nurture a generation of students who are ready to use math competitively in different ways across fields. While not everyone will aspire to be a mathematician, demonstrating strong vocational skills requires traditional math competency as well.¹⁷ We can reduce teacher frustration, burn-out and attrition, reestablish confidence in our public education system, and save the state millions in remediation costs, lost income, and endless policy and curriculum cycles. We can truly address educational inequity by shrinking worsening achievement gaps, rather than dressing poor instruction up in equity language.

New York is not the only state to forward questionable recommendations for math instructional practices and curricula. As an example, recent guidelines from the California Department of Education reflect very similar inaccuracies and mistaken beliefs,¹⁸ again camouflaged in the language of evidence-based practice and equity. 2024 NAEP scores revealed widespread concerns across states, and invalid standards, guidance, materials, and instruction are likely causes — and thankfully fixable ones, too. If New York can pivot toward evidence-based practice, as defined by empirical findings reported in rigorous experimental studies published in peer-reviewed journals and/or through publicly funded research, the state can serve as a model of adoption.

It will require more than just changing standards and recommendations, though. As demonstrated by Mississippi,¹⁹ change also requires well-organized hierarchical coaching structures and specific materials that offer examples and routines at each step. More recently, the work of Sir Nicolas Gibb⁴, who is credited with turning around the United Kingdom’s math performance, has been well publicized. His approach included adopting many of the evidence-based recommendations I describe above.²⁰

If you’d like to assist, please sign my petition⁵. Ask your local state leadership to support the use of evidence-based practices to inform math instruction in schools. Bring attention to the inaccuracies in the briefs. Highlight the problem with your local school board. Resolving The Reading Wars took a grassroots movement; literacy researchers couldn’t do it alone. Help us do it for math.

Let’s start with some good news. In her January State of the State address, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced her “Back to Basics” proposal¹ for math instruction. Hochul plans to require the New York State Education Department (NYSED) to “provide instructional best practices to school districts” that “equip teachers across the state with evidence-based teaching techniques and materials².” And in NYC, new Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels is pledging a renewed focus on automaticity with basic math facts. “Knowing your times tables is very, very important in math,” Samuels told CBS³. “You can’t factor on your fingers.” Even as Samuels helped roll out the city’s discovery-based⁴ math curriculum, NYC Solves, he now seems to acknowledge the value of prioritizing clear instruction that ensures fluency.

Now for the bad news. Even as Hochul and Samuels tout a return to fundamentals, the statewide education apparatus remains committed to the opposite message.

Back in October, we featured a guest post by professor Ben Solomon⁵ about his petition to retract the NYSED numeracy briefs. Commissioned as part of NYSED’s “Numeracy Initiative⁶“ and written by Dr. Deborah Loewenberg Ball, the University of Michigan education professor behind TeachingWorks, the briefs were supposed to “highlight the evidence-based features and best practices of effective mathematics instruction⁷.”

Yet despite their “evidence-based” framing and purported scientific rigor, the briefs stunned many educators by ignoring key research and regurgitating pernicious inaccuracies about effective math instruction. On October 10, Solomon’s petition⁸ (boasting 216 signatories at time of writing) was sent to Commissioner Betty Rosa. Then, on October 22, NYSED released its response⁹. This response, written by Ball with an introduction by Assistant Commissioner JP O’Hare, doubled down on the contents of the briefs and accused the petitioners of politically motivated “misinformation.” Three months later, the briefs remain unchanged; under the aegis of “peer-reviewed, evidence-based research¹⁰,” NYSED is marketing contested pedagogy as settled science.

In his piece, Solomon asked how it was possible that “university-affiliated professional development providers double-down on practices shown decades ago to be ineffective, ignoring hundreds of published empirical studies and meta-analyses.” Today, we explore how it is possible for the purveyors of bad pedagogy to defend their ideas with the imprimatur of a state’s education agency.

Ball’s response is disappointing, but it is also instructive. It shows us how advocates of these ideas continue to dodge criticism, and it shows us what arguments to expect when we see this happen again elsewhere.

Ball’s Defense

The petition to retract the numeracy briefs identifies key ways in which they depart from recommendations grounded in rigorous research. As Solomon explained¹¹, good, evidence-based briefs would emphasize:

1. Ensuring fluency in core skills through practiced repetition and timed exercises;

2. Measuring student learning with regular, timed assessments to inform instruction;

3. Explicitly teaching and modeling fundamental principles; and

4. Deploying exploratory, inquiry-based learning only¹²after¹³explicit instruction¹⁴ and only for students who are competent with the basics.

The reasoning behind each of these points is straightforward and well-supported. Later math proficiency requires mastery of basic math facts¹⁵ to the point of fluency or automaticity¹⁶; without these basics committed to memory, students will struggle with more complicated work. Deliberate practice with brief, timed exercises¹⁷ is among the most effective ways to ensure this basic fluency¹⁸, and brief, timed assessments are a reliable gauge of how much students have learned. Moreover, clear, explicit instruction¹⁹ consistently leads²⁰ to higher learning gains than competing approaches²¹, especially for struggling students²². While inquiry-based “discovery” approaches can benefit students who already grasp the fundamentals, they leave students without sufficient prior knowledge even further behind²³.

The NYSED briefs diverge from the research consensus on every one of these points.

A comprehensive response to the petition would need to justify why the best-supported instructional practices are not highlighted in due proportion to their effectiveness, why less effective practices are emphasized disproportionately, and why the research base on which the briefs rely omits the highest-quality evidence. Specifically, Ball would need to explain what basis she has for deemphasizing basic fluency, practiced repetition, timed assessment, and explicit instruction, while at the same time promoting inquiry-based approaches without cautioning about their limitations.

To be convincing, Ball would need to show either that the evidence in favor of the practices highlighted in the petition is contradicted by competing high-quality evidence, or that the evidence favoring the recommendations in the briefs is at least strong enough to warrant emphasizing them at the expense of those highlighted in the petition.

Ball’s response offers no such convincing justification. Although her response is structured as a point-by-point rebuttal to three discrete criticisms and four alleged inaccuracies, this structure obscures more than it clarifies. Ball’s responses to the first three criticisms all deploy the same argumentative move. Call it the “Scope-and-Methods Two-Step”: first, she defines mathematical proficiency broadly enough to claim that the petition’s evidence only addresses one component (procedural fluency), and is thus too narrowly scoped. Then she claims studying the remaining components of math proficiency require entirely different research methods — methods that conveniently cannot be held to the same exactly empirical standards as those in procedural fluency research.

This two-step strategy allows Ball, on the one hand, to dismiss any rigorous evidence as “narrow” without engaging with it directly, and on the other, to exempt the recommendations in the briefs from proper scrutiny. In doing so, she makes her position unfalsifiable by any evidence brought to bear in the petition, and only then responds to the individual charges of inaccuracy.

Let’s see the Two-Step in action.

Dancing the Two-Step

“Criticism #1: The recommendations are not based on research.”

Consider Ball’s argument against what she identifies as the first criticism from the petition. The petition charges that the briefs fail to cite “the results of rigorous empirical studies”; the studies they do cite include “only 2 experimental studies and 2 meta-analyses,” and of the research they cite that is actually peer-reviewed, that research “is overwhelmingly articles reflecting personal experiences and opinions.” Given the briefs’ repeated framing as “evidence-based,” this is a serious charge.

How does Ball respond? She asserts that the petition only cites studies addressing how to develop “speed and accuracy,” which are only one component of math proficiency, whereas the NYSED briefs cite studies that address ways to develop all the components of math proficiency; and since, moreover, studies of different components appeal to “different methods,” the studies cited in the petition cannot contradict recommendations based on studies cited in the briefs:

[Although] the petition claims that only two experimental studies and two meta-analyses were used as the basis for the briefs, ... such methods are not the only kinds of research that are appropriate for decisions about mathematics instruction. Brief 1 … specifies … different methods and kinds of studies appropriate for different questions and components of mathematics instruction. For example, while … the development of speed and accuracy, may be appropriately studied through randomly controlled trials, other aspects, such as the development of the use of mathematical representations, language, and proving, require investigation in particular contexts of classroom learning across time. Similarly, issues related to grouping students, classroom discourse, and the use of manipulatives require close analysis of teaching in order to produce usable knowledge for instruction. … In contrast to this broad application of evidence, the citations included with the letter represent a narrow segment of the research ... [and] are not enough to address the complexity of mathematics teaching and learning.

Notice what this response does not do. This response does not refute, or even address, the petition’s claim that “performing fluently or automatically all the foundational skills” is the necessary foundation for “advanced math performance” (p. 3); neither does she show that we have reason to doubt the validity of the rigorous studies that support that claim. Instead, she uses the Two-Step to escape the responsibility to address the claim at all: “the development of speed and accuracy” is simply one among multiple “different … components of mathematics instruction,” and because these different components require “different methods,” the rigorous research cited in the petition has no bearing on her recommendations or the validity of the research they spring from.

Here we see the first core problem with the Two-Step: saying that there are other components of math proficiency besides the fluent, automatic performance of basic operations — “procedural fluency” in the briefs — says nothing about the necessary relation between procedural fluency and those other components.¹ The petition, too, identifies and stresses the importance of other components of math proficiency, such as “the rapid mastery of new concepts which then enables creative and generative problem solving” (p. 2). But procedural fluency is not merely one strand among others — it is necessary for building these other highly valuable, higher-order skills²⁴. This is precisely why the petitioners take issue with its unacceptable de-emphasis in the briefs, and it is precisely this claim that Ball would need to refute for a convincing response.

The Two-Step’s second problem also appears in this excerpt: when appealing to “evidence,” Ball cannot have it both ways. The entire selling point for why educators should care about the NYSED numeracy briefs is that they offer “Evidence-Based Practices for Teaching Mathematics²⁵” grounded in “substantial peer-reviewed, evidence-based research²⁶” — a label that, in other fields, means that the recommendations are informed by the kind of “rigorous, controlled studies of cause and effect²⁷” that best signal expertise and credibility.

But the briefs do not rely on studies using such rigorous research methods, and Ball’s response gives us no reason to doubt the findings of the petition’s studies, which do. The charge against the briefs was that they minimize the importance of the instructional practices best supported by the preponderance of rigorous evidence for teaching math effectively; they minimize the practices that best develop mastery of basic facts, including practiced repetition and timed tests, and they minimize the importance of explicit instruction, instead promoting “inquiry and discovery approaches to teaching and learning²⁸” out of proportion to what the evidence suggests.

Ball does not engage with these studies when making her rebuttals, nor does she offer competing evidence or critical responses. Instead, she uses the Two-Step to bypass these duties entirely: “studying different components requires different methods.”

Saying that there are other research methods besides RCTs and meta-analyses, however, is not yet demonstrating that these other methods and the studies that use them are rigorous enough to give us good evidence.

Fields with good epistemic hygiene rank the quality of their research methods²⁹ based on how well they account for factors like confounding and bias, and the reason RCTs and meta-analyses are such respected methods is that well-conducted ones do this very well. As in any field — but particularly in education — much research that is cited as evidence is not good evidence because it accounts for confounding variables and bias poorly. For a piece of education research to give good evidence that an instructional practice is effective, that research has to give us good reasons to believe that practice will reliably promote student learning and retention for a wide variety of students when performed by a wide variety of teachers. Practices fail to meet this bar of reliable, wide applicability for many reasons, and high-quality education research is rigorous about controlling for factors that might explain why a practice that works in one context doesn’t in another, or why another practice that seems to be working may not be what’s causing the effect at all. If research is not sufficiently rigorous, the reasons it gives us for favoring one practice over another are not going to be good reasons.

The fact that one study uses different research methods or investigates different targets than another does not simply release that study or those methods from the demands of rigor. The methods by which astronomers determine the age of a star are different from the methods by which geologists determine the composition of a sample, but each is accountable to standards of rigor when they conduct and publish their studies. While the natural sciences are held up as paragons of methodology, this accountability is not unique to such fields.

Brief 1 offers “conceptual analysis” and “ethnography” as “different kinds and methods of inquiry” that can result in “valuable insight.” But different methods will still have internal standards of rigor, and crucially will also have different limits. Uses of conceptual analysis are better or worse based on, e.g., the quality of logical reasoning, the extent of engagement with critics, and ease of accounting for counterexamples; ethnographers that incorporate less data, take fewer meticulous notes, and follow the literature irregularly will be worse ethnographers.

But methods like conceptual analysis and ethnography are less equipped to offer rigorous, controlled, falsifiable explanations for phenomena than experimental methods that make and rigorously analyze testable, replicable predictions. That one uses “different methods” means neither that those methods are equivalent in rigor nor equivalent in explanatory power — and it certainly does not mean one has an excuse to discount the findings of multiple, rigorous, replicated studies that converge on conclusions that don’t fit one’s vision.

Moreover, unless those wildly underspecified, alternative research methods Ball mentions — like “investigation in particular contexts of classroom learning” and “close analysis of teaching” — measure up to exacting standards of clarity, testable predictions, meticulous observation, and corroboration by multiple data sources, those methods cannot provide good evidence for the kinds of claims Ball makes. Even if they did offer insights into “different components of math instruction,” that would not suffice to refute the evidence cited in the petition calling for retraction of her briefs.

All this is to say that if Ball is going to convince a methodologically literate reader by citing studies that use “different methods” for “different components,” she had better have the right receipts.

As we see from her next two responses, she does not.

Rinse and Repeat

“Criticism #2: The briefs advance an approach to teaching mathematics that has been shown to be ineffective in developing students’ mathematical competence.”

Ball avoids responding to the substance of this criticism, too:

Brief 1 explicitly rejects ‘an’ approach [to teaching mathematics].... [R]ather than advocating for one approach or arguing against another, the brief ties mathematics teaching to specific aspects of mathematics … Learning to attend to mathematical structure, prove the completeness of a solution, or justify a geometric transformation requires different mathematical skills than does correctly solving … calculations. Each of these components of mathematical competence are specifically identified … [and] instructional methods cannot be generalized across these different forms of mathematical capability and skill.

Again, the charge in the petition is that the weight of the evidence shows specific approaches — explicitly teaching and modeling core principles, ensuring fluency in the basics, deferring discovery exercises until students are ready — are better for developing math proficiency than competing approaches, since a solid grasp of the basics is necessary to build proficiency in higher-order skills.

Ball’s response is a dodge: the “mathematical skills” required for “correctly solving … calculations” are different from the skills required for other math tasks, and the “instructional methods” that teach one skill “cannot be generalized across” different skills; accordingly, she concludes the briefs do not promote ineffective approaches, but rather promote approaches effective for different skills.

But Ball gives us no evidence or reason to believe that different instructional approaches are needed to teach different skills. Conversely, as Solomon wrote in October³⁰, the overwhelming research consensus gives us terrific reason to believe not only that the same approaches that build procedural fluency build math competence generally, but also that the same approaches that help students build literacy help them build numeracy:

The science of math shows that many of the lessons gleaned from the science of reading cross over, such as (a) explicitly teaching and modeling fundamental principles, (b) ensuring fluency in core skills, (c) measuring to inform instruction, and (d) saving exploratory and “hands on” learning for when students are ready for such. The skills and targets are different; the means to attain them the same. [Emphasis added.]

The briefs do not promote these evidence-based best practices for math instruction, and, in her response, Ball nowhere justifies her claim that “instructional methods cannot be generalized.” She simply asserts it. Where is her evidence that different methods are needed for the different components? Where is the evidence that Ball’s methods do better for these strands than explicit instruction and timed tests? Where is the evidence that Ball’s methods are better for different learners?

This last question is particularly important. Rigorous research finds that students who struggle with math and students with disabilities are even more in need of explicit instruction than students who are proficient. Yet Ball gets away with claiming, without justification, that the briefs “provide evidence-based guidance” for teaching “students with special needs and multilingual learners, as well as students who are denied opportunities to engage in mathematically challenging work.”

At this point, the reader should be able to predict what happens in her next response.

“Criticism #3: The briefs do not align with the ‘science of math’ and the ‘science of reading.’”

Ball asserts that “the ‘science of math’ is not ‘settled science’ and scholars … continue to research, develop, and critique the evidence base for each.” She continues:

The work conducted by psychologists focuses on particular versions of direct instruction and on basic arithmetic skills. These studies do not provide evidence related to the learning goals in the standards for mathematics learning. […] New York’s standards […] specify goals for mathematics learning that include but go beyond arithmetic computation with speed and accuracy [...] includ[ing] conceptual understanding and mathematical reasoning.

This is the Two-Step as usual. Ball first narrows the scope of her opposition: the work of “psychologists on particular versions of direct instruction and basic arithmetic skills” only concerns “speed and accuracy.” She then denies that studies or methods germane to speed and accuracy could also be germane to the recommendations in her briefs: “these studies do not provide evidence related to the learning goals” beyond speed and accuracy, such as conceptual understanding and mathematical reasoning. She does not mention that the petitioners also value conceptual understanding and mathematical reasoning, but stress that those goals are out of reach without sufficient procedural fluency. Neither does she allow that the studies themselves could be relevant; the evidence base is simply different.

The “not-settled-science” gambit offers one novel twist on the Two-Step, but no one claims the science is “settled” in some final sense. All education researchers — including Ball herself — are more than welcome to conduct and publish new rigorous research revealing data incompatible with the current consensus, or revealing that they tried and failed numerous times to replicate landmark experiments. These would be incredible findings; if such revolutionary studies stood up to scrutiny, they would be cited with alacrity and could certainly secure a tenure-track position for a junior co-author.

This is how healthy, evidence-based science works: the scientific consensus shifts when multiple rigorous studies produce results inconsistent with that consensus. What makes “the science of math” and “the science of reading” so impressive is that rigorous studies keep piling up that converge on the same results. But Ball cannot provide research that disproves that consensus on equal footing, so she deflects by mischaracterizing the goalposts of scientific inquiry instead.

Setting the Facts Straight

After two pages spent poisoning the well, the final section of Ball’s response addresses the briefs’ alleged factual inaccuracies. The petition draws particular attention to four issues and the briefs where they occur:

1. The myth of math anxiety and timed testing being a cause of math anxiety (Brief 2);

2. The myth of explicit instruction (or direct instruction) being a selective instructional strategy, mostly useful for the disabled (Brief 2, 4, 7);

3. The myth that structured repeated practice of math facts and standard algorithms isn’t useful (Brief 2, 3, 7); and

4. The myth that discovery learning should be prioritized in the early stages of acquisition (Brief 2, 4, 7).

Because Ball’s approaches to myths 1 and 3 share a similar structure, as do her approaches to myths 2 and 4, it is helpful to treat them in these pairs.

Timed Tests and Repeated Practice (Myths #1 and #3)

The research consensus highlights two important functions for timed tests and assessments. First, they are essential for academic screening and formative assessment — assessment that informs teachers of how best to respond to students’ needs. Second, timed assessments are a valuable form of structured, repeated practice, which is highly effective for training students’ fluency and automaticity with basic math facts.

To the charge of perpetuating myth 1, Ball responds that “Brief 2 does not say that timed tests are the sole cause of math anxiety.” Instead, the brief merely “challenges the claim that such drills are the only way to develop fluency,” since although they do accomplish this, “they can raise anxiety, and … there are other approaches to develop fluency.”

To the charge of perpetuating myth 3, Ball responds in a similar way:

Brief 2 points out that timed practice of isolated facts is not the only way for students to develop fluency and procedural skill. It cautions that such methods can have negative effects and recommends considering other kinds of practice that involve quick repetition along with reasoning.

Notice the rhetorical sleight of hand. The petition does not accuse the briefs of saying that timed tests are the sole cause of math anxiety, nor that structured repeated practice is the only way to develop fluency. The accusation is that the briefs minimize the value of timed tests and repeated practice — practices that are among the very best supported by the evidence. Ball now spins this minimization as merely “challenging” the idea that these practices are the “only” way, a claim no one made. This is the classic motte-and-bailey³¹: state strong claims, then when challenged, retreat to weaker, more defensible versions of those claims. Yet these more defensible versions still completely miss the point.

The petition makes clear that evidence-based timed tests are essential for formative assessment. It also addresses the true cause of math anxiety: poor math comprehension, which the best practices directly address. Teaching students the basics³² effectively reduces³³math anxiety³⁴, because students who understand math have less to be anxious about. Moreover, when Ball suggests “other approaches to develop fluency,” she cites no high-quality studies demonstrating that her alternatives are as effective as timed practice. The petition’s criticism stands: the briefs deemphasize what works in favor of what sounds good.

Explicit Instruction and Discovery Learning (Myths #2 and #4)

The research consensus also highlights the importance of explicit instruction, which the briefs disparage, and cautions of the limits of discovery learning for early instruction, which the briefs contravene. Ball responds that the briefs merely “challenge the universal recommendation that all mathematics is best taught through explicit and highly directed instruction.” Moreover, she claims, Brief 2 does not recommend “pure discovery,” but “guided discovery,” which purportedly does not suffer the same pitfalls as “pure discovery.” The brief “makes clear the need for structured and scaffolded instruction as well as for inquiry that is carefully set up and guided.”

Here in her response, finally, Ball concedes that explicit instruction is appropriate — a concession that any educators reading the briefs themselves would struggle to find. After diminishing the research on the effectiveness of explicit instruction, Brief 2 suggests it is often not “grounded in meaning” — whatever that means. Later, Brief 4 alleges that explicit instruction assumes students are “empty vessels³⁵” and not “sense-makers”; no evidence is offered to support this, nor is the construct “sense-making” ever defined. In Brief 7, this allegation is echoed with warnings (again without citations) that teachers must “consider with care whether explicit instruction guidance is mathematically accurate and not just getting students to get right answers” and that “explicitness … might constrain students’ sensemaking.”

In stark contrast to the now skeptical, now denigrating treatment of explicit instruction, discovery-based approaches are introduced enthusiastically and without similar caution.³⁶ A teacher relying on the briefs for guidance would reasonably conclude that discovery learning is the preferred approach and explicit instruction a fallback for struggling students.

But Ball’s response ignores the petition’s central criticism: “Discovery learning is important, but it should occur for mastered concepts and skills … not when a new skill is being introduced….” The research is clear³⁷ that discovery approaches work best³⁸after³⁹students⁴⁰ have already developed fluency through explicit instruction⁴¹ — not before.

The briefs also fail to warn teachers about the significant limitations of discovery-based methods. Teachers must be extremely skilled to implement discovery methods effectively; discovery takes far longer than explicit instruction, meaning less material can be taught in the same time; and children can “discover” the wrong rules and go uncorrected, ingraining misconceptions that are difficult to undo. None of this appears in the briefs. A document claiming to offer “evidence-based” guidance should at minimum acknowledge these well-documented pitfalls.

Neither is Ball’s appeal to “guided discovery” a convincing defense. The extent that “guided” is better than “pure,” she says, is because “structured and scaffolded instruction” is important and “inquiry” should be “carefully set up and guided.” But these are precisely the virtues of explicit instruction! The more structured, the more scaffolded, the more carefully guided — the closer we get to explicit instruction by another name. At what point does “guided discovery” become simply explicit instruction with a progressive gloss?

This is not a minor terminological quibble. In any rigorous field, methods must be specified clearly enough to be replicated. “Guided discovery” fails this test. It functions less as a well-defined instructional method than as a rhetorical escape hatch — capacious enough to absorb any criticism by claiming to include whatever element the critic finds missing. If a study shows pure discovery fails, defenders claim they meant guided discovery. If explicit instruction outperforms inquiry methods, they claim guided discovery includes explicit elements. The term operates much like “balanced literacy” did in the reading wars: a catch-all that can never be pinned down, never be falsified, and never be held accountable for poor results.

Until Ball specifies what “guided discovery” involves concretely — what teachers should do, in what sequence, with what safeguards — it is not a method. It is an evasion.

The Equity Contradiction

Three months after the petition was sent, the briefs remain in place. NYSED was sold a bill of goods: they trusted that “expert” recommendations were “evidence-based” without knowing how to evaluate the claim, and they have dismissed the concerns of the petitioners who pointed it out. One might wonder how Ball and her supporters at NYSED justify promoting pedagogical approaches that the best evidence shows are less effective. The answer lies in how they frame their goals.

Advancing equity is a core theme of the numeracy briefs, not merely a goal of math instruction but as a lens through which all instructional decisions must be filtered — curriculum⁴² content selection⁴³, assessment⁴⁴, representations⁴⁵, leadership⁴⁶. In practice, this lens consistently tilts in one direction: away from measuring whether students have mastered specific skills, and toward ensuring they feel affirmed and positively identified with mathematics. Brief 2⁴⁷ warns that “poor performance on timed tests” could lead students to be “labeled as ‘below’ or ‘behind.’” Brief 3⁴⁸ instructs teachers to “acknowledge” the “competence” of all “students’ mathematical ideas” so they can disrupt “patterns of inequity that position students as ‘struggling,’ a pattern that disproportionately affects students of historically marginalized identities.” Brief 5⁴⁹ cautions that identifying what students don’t know “can contribute to the reinforcement of deficit orientations associated with marginalized identities,” and when performance differences appear across demographic groups, tells teachers to “interrogate” whether “their results are accurate” — the implication being that the assessment, not the instruction, may be at fault. A teacher reading these briefs would learn to be suspicious of rather than responsive to her own assessments, and she would trust that the recommendations help her disadvantaged students on the basis of reassurances, not evidence of effectiveness.

This framing does not come from nowhere. TeachingWorks⁵⁰, Ball’s organization, markets itself as having “evolved to explicitly support teachers and teacher educators to disrupt persistent patterns of injustice⁵¹.” A visitor to the Approach & Impact page⁵² is immediately assured that “Equitable practice is always at the core” of the TeachingWorks mission; their P–12 programs and services⁵³ are “based in research that aim to disrupt injustice and advance equity in teaching and teacher learning.” These are each admirable goals. But in the briefs, “equity” and “evidence-based” are treated as though they mean the same thing. Brief 8⁵⁴ four times uses the phrase “equitable and impactful mathematics teaching” as a single concept — as though a practice cannot be equitable yet ineffective, or effective yet inequitable. The effect is to make the briefs’ recommendations unfalsifiable: if evidence-based instruction and equitable instruction are the same thing by definition, then no evidence can show that the briefs’ preferred methods fail disadvantaged students. The briefs simply beg the question that their approach is equitable because they intend it to be.

Ball and NYSED reinforce this insulation by framing their critics as politically motivated. O’Hare’s introduction to Ball’s response notes that the petition was publicized by the “conservative Manhattan Institute” and accuses critics of “politic[izing]” the work. But the petition opens by stating that its diverse signatories want to “equip all children with mathematical knowledge” and “close opportunity gaps” — hardly a conservative attack on equity. By dismissing critics as ideologically motivated, Ball and NYSED avoid engaging with their substantive arguments. This is an ad hominem defense, not an intellectual one.

And the substance matters, because the empirical evidence points in the opposite direction from the briefs’ assumptions. Explicit instruction⁵⁵significantly⁵⁶outperforms constructivist approaches⁵⁷ for struggling students and students from disadvantaged backgrounds. When students lack background knowledge or foundational skills, they benefit most from clear, direct instruction that builds competence step by step. Discovery-based approaches tend to widen achievement gaps: students who already have strong foundations can “discover” new concepts, while those without the requisite fluency are left to flounder⁵⁸. As Carl Hendrick has written, there is a painful irony⁵⁹ in progressive educators championing methods that further privilege already-privileged students while disadvantaging those most in need of structured support.

We have seen this pattern before. Whole-language instruction was promoted as more authentic and engaging than phonics, but it was students from disadvantaged backgrounds who suffered most when schools abandoned systematic reading instruction. Ball explicitly resists comparisons to “balanced literacy” and “the science of reading,” and for good reason: public sentiment has finally caught up to the reading reformers, and whole-language approaches are now broadly discredited. Ball knows where this story⁶⁰ ends.

The briefs tell teachers that identifying struggling students reinforces “deficit orientations” and that assessments may reflect bias. But a child who cannot fluently add and subtract does not need her identity affirmed. She needs to be taught.

Conclusion

Recall the good news: leaders like Governor Hochul⁶¹ and Chancellor Samuels⁶² are beginning to recognize the importance of evidence-based math instruction and automaticity. Yet they face an uphill battle against a throng of institutions — the education department, the associated ed schools, the professional development providers — committed to approaches that the evidence doesn’t support.

The point isn’t just that more math teachers in New York are going to be misled by the content of Ball’s math briefs. We may take some solace in knowing that these sorts of statewide instructional materials often go unread by many teachers; they are not the be-all-end-all for teaching kids, and even when poorly made likely can’t derail an entire state’s math instruction. But the briefs are an endorsed artifact of a state education agency. And not just any state’s, but New York’s. That means there are system-level issues with how we produce and signal educational expertise, on the one hand, and how we hold education agencies and officials accountable, on the other.

The emperor who has no clothes should be embarrassed, and the subjects who don’t speak up should be ashamed. So let’s keep the pressure on. The petition to retract the NYSED briefs⁶³ has 216 signatories and counting, and it deserves even more attention — from parents, teachers, and the policymakers now pledging a “back to basics” approach. Every educator who reads the petition and Ball’s response can see the bad arguments and clichéd dodges for themselves. Public accountability matters, even when public pressure doesn’t produce immediate results. The embrace of science by the American education establishment is long overdue, it is only through that pressure that the “experts” who guide education policy will grow to deserve that title⁶⁴.

American students deserve math instruction grounded in the best available evidence, not meager reassurances that poor methods are just “different” from ideologues dressed in lab coats. The path forward is the same one the reading reformers eventually won: explicit instruction, practiced fluency, and honest assessment. The only question is how long it will take for the institutions to catch up.

David Shuck is a contributing writer and editor at the Center for Educational Progress.

Samantha Lippert is a third-grade teacher and the author of an awesome Substack¹ herself. We came across this piece and thought it was one of the clearest practitioner accounts we’ve read of what happens when classroom instruction is actually aligned with learning science — so we asked if we could share it with our readers. She said yes!

This past week I was standing at my classroom’s small-group table, surrounded by nine students leaning forward in their chairs, eyes fixed on me, waiting for the next lesson.

What struck me in that moment wasn’t just their attention, but it was what they were ready to learn.

Every student sitting around that table had already mastered the core math facts traditionally taught in third grade. Addition and subtraction facts were automatic. Multiplication facts to 81 and division from 81, skills many students don’t master until much later in the year, were already fluent. Now, they were moving on to more complex mathematical work together, eager for the next challenge.

They weren’t asking if the work would be hard.

They were asking what came next.

Before beginning instruction, I paused and said, “I want you all to know how proud I am of you. You’re working on math skills above third-grade level. I’ve never had a group of students who mastered their facts like this and were still so excited to keep doing harder and harder things.”

Their faces lit up with smiles, not because the work was easy, but because they knew they had earned their way there.

That moment captured something powerful: students experiencing success not by chance, but through instruction intentionally aligned with how learning actually works.

The Question That Changed My Thinking

In math education, we often say students need “more practice.” More worksheets. More repetition. More time.

But this year, my classroom data pushed me to ask a different question: what if the problem isn’t the amount of practice, but the design of it?

At the beginning of the year, Acadience Math data showed wide variability in my third-grade class, with 44% of my students performing below benchmark. What stood out wasn’t a lack of understanding. Students often knew what to do. The issue was how much mental energy basic computation required. Counting strategies lingered, simple calculations took time, and by the time students reached problem-solving, their cognitive resources were already depleted.

Learning science explains this clearly: when foundational skills aren’t automatic, working memory is consumed before reasoning can even begin. Instead of asking students to try harder, I needed to change the instruction itself.

The Instructional Shift

This year, my classroom implemented a program developed by Brian Poncy, called Facts on Fire, a structured math fluency system grounded in cognitive science. The daily routine took just about four minutes, but it was intentionally designed. Students practiced skills at their individual instructional level, advanced only after demonstrating mastery, and engaged in brief, timed retrieval practice with ongoing progress monitoring .

The goal was never speed.

The goal was automaticity — effortless recall that allows students to focus on thinking rather than calculating.

Those four minutes became a protected part of Tier 1 instruction within my classroom. Differentiation was embedded into the structure itself, allowing students to access the same core instruction while progressing along individualized learning paths for their math facts.

Why This Works

Facts on Fire reflects how the brain actually learns. Students retrieve information from memory rather than reviewing it passively, strengthening neural pathways and making learning more durable. Since practice is brief and consistent, it is spaced rather than massed, leading to stronger retention and less forgetting.

Students work at the edge of their competence — challenged but not overwhelmed — which maximizes growth without cognitive overload. As automaticity develops, cognitive load decreases, freeing students to focus on problem solving, reasoning, and conceptual understanding.

Fluency doesn’t replace thinking. Fluency supports thinking.

What The Data Showed

By mid-year, the classroom data has told a clear story. In September, most students had mastered only basic addition facts, subtraction mastery was limited, and no students demonstrated mastery of advanced computation. By February, nearly all students had mastered foundational facts, subtraction skills expanded significantly, and many students progressed into multi-digit computation. Growing numbers reached multiplication and division fluency, and some advanced into higher-level algorithms.

This growth occurred within a heterogeneous classroom that included four students receiving special education services for Specific Learning Disabilities (SLD) in mathematics. These students participated fully in the same structured fluency routines as their peers as part of Tier 1 instruction, with individualized placement and mastery-based progression embedded into the system itself.

Automaticity develops through efficient retrieval. When practice is untimed, students can rely on compensatory strategies that allow completion without strengthening memory. Timed retrieval, when used intentionally, in short intervals and paired with mastery-based advancement, supports the neurological processes required for fluent recall.

For this reason, students with IEPs participated in the same timed instructional practice as their peers, while extended time remained available for assessments and evaluative tasks. This approach aligns with both learning science and the intent of accommodations: supporting access to learning rather than removing essential components of instruction.

Acadience Math benchmark data reflected the impact of this inclusive, science-aligned approach. From the beginning of the year to the middle of the year, students averaged approximately 63 points of growth, with individual gains ranging from modest increases to growth exceeding 100 points. Nearly every student demonstrated positive movement, and several transitioned from well-below benchmark into approaching or benchmark ranges. The percent of students below benchmark on Acadience went from 44% in September, to only 19% in February.

Notably, students who began the year with the lowest scores, including students receiving special education services, often demonstrated the largest gains. Systematic fluency instruction functioned as an equity lever, reducing opportunity gaps rather than reinforcing them.

What The Growth Revealed

The most important change wasn’t higher scores.

It was growth — academic and internal.

Students weren’t just getting faster at the same skills. They were advancing into increasingly complex mathematics. As automaticity increased, cognitive effort decreased, allowing students to take on harder problems with greater confidence and stamina. This progression mirrors exactly what learning science predicts when instruction includes retrieval practice, spaced repetition, mastery-based advancement, and immediate feedback.

Math fact fluency is often misunderstood as memorization. In reality, it functions as a cognitive support system. When foundational knowledge becomes automatic, persistence increases, frustration decreases, reasoning improves, and confidence grows. Automaticity doesn’t replace thinking, it creates the space for understanding.

That is why the growth didn’t stop at performance.

The biggest surprise wasn’t academic, it was emotional and motivational. As progress became visible and predictable, effort reliably led to success. Math stopped feeling like guessing and started feeling learnable.

That shift was most evident in the questions students began to ask. Instead of asking whether they were finished or how much time was left, students started asking, “What will I move onto next?” — often before they had fully mastered their current skill. They weren’t rushing the work. They were anticipating what came after it.

Those questions revealed something deeper. Students no longer viewed learning as a pass-or-fail moment. They understood it as a progression. Mastery wasn’t the finish line — it was a gateway.

That is what I later saw at the small-group table. The students leaning forward, eager for the next challenge, weren’t unusually motivated children or a “high” group by chance. They were students who had experienced success so consistently that they trusted the process. In learning-science terms, their self-efficacy had increased, and the expectation that effort leads to growth had become internalized.

They didn’t ask if they would grow.

They asked what came next.

And when students come to expect growth rather than fear failure, the classroom itself begins to change.

Coming Back to That Table

Later that day, I found myself thinking again about the nine students gathered around the small-group table — the same students working beyond third-grade expectations, leaning forward, asking for harder problems, eager for what came next.

That moment didn’t happen by accident.

It was the result of small, consistent instructional decisions grounded in learning science. Four intentional minutes a day. Clear goals. Immediate feedback. Practice designed to match how the brain actually learns.

Over time, those decisions changed more than skill level. They changed how students saw themselves. These students weren’t just faster with math facts. They had become learners who trusted the process of learning, who expected growth because they had experienced it again and again.

Standing there with them, the pattern was impossible to ignore. When instruction is aligned with learning science, success stops feeling like a surprise.

It becomes predictable.

I was standing at our small-group table, surrounded by nine students leaning forward in their chairs, eyes fixed on what they were ready to learn next.

Final Reflection

Educational improvement doesn’t always require sweeping reforms or longer lessons. Sometimes transformation begins with small routines grounded in strong evidence.

In our classroom, four intentional minutes a day changed how students experienced mathematics and, more importantly, how they experienced themselves as learners.

Editor’s Note: This post is part of a new series highlighting research that offers meaningful and thought-provoking contributions to the broader public discussion of how student learning needs are not being met, and how we can solve such issues. We consider the work valuable and worthy of careful consideration, but the interpretations and conclusions presented here should not be understood as the official positions or endorsements of this organization.

Dr. Daniel Long is a Senior Research Scientist at NWEA, and one of the authors of a new report, “Unequal Access to 8th-Grade Algebra: How School Offerings and Placement Practices Limit Opportunity,” which you can find here¹.

We look forward to reading future research from Daniel and the NWEA!

“Algebra in eighth grade” isn’t just another math class; it’s a key gateway. Students who take Algebra early are more likely to succeed² in advanced high school math³, pursue STEM⁴ majors⁵ in college, and earn more⁶ over their lifetimes. However, these benefits of early Algebra are not equally available to all high-achieving students.

New NWEA research⁷ finds persistent inequalities in access to and placement in 8th-grade Algebra classes. This brief draws on recent NWEA data from 162,000 eighth-graders across 22 states to show that access to 8th-grade Algebra¹ remains highly inequitable. Fewer than half of high-poverty and majority-black and Latino schools offer Algebra in eighth grade, closing off access to advanced math pathways for students in those schools. And even among high-achieving students in schools that do offer Algebra, black students are systematically less likely to be placed in it. Placement practices — and not ability — are often a key driver of these inequities. Policies like universal screening, however, can help.

Who gets placed in Algebra when it’s available

In schools that do offer Algebra courses, enrollment isn’t equitable. More than half of Asian students enrolled when the course was available, compared to just 22% of Latino students and 17% of black students. These gaps show that availability alone doesn’t guarantee access where appropriate. For many students, especially black and Latino ones, the barrier is not whether their school offers Algebra, but whether they are given the chance to take it.

Among high-achieving students, the enrollment gaps cannot be explained by differences in academic preparation across student groups. The inequities persist even when we limit the analysis to just the highest-achieving 20% of 5th-graders. Among top-quintile students, 84% of Asian students and 68% of white and Latino students were enrolled in Algebra, compared to only 60% of black students. In other words, high-achieving Asian students are likely to enrolled in 8th-grade Algebra at more than 1.4 times the rate of similarly prepared black students.

Figure 1: Among top-quintile students, black students are the least likely to be enrolled in Algebra

Note: Each box shows a group of 20 students of each racial/ethnic group. The blue figures show 8th-grade students enrolled in Algebra in schools that offer 8th-grade Algebra. The grey figures show the group of students within each racial/ethnic group denied access.

These disparities within the top of the achievement distribution suggest that ability isn’t the barrier for high-achieving students; placement practices are. When high-achieving black students have lower access to advanced math opportunities, schools effectively close doors to future STEM opportunities.

Placement practices matter

The persistence of access gaps even among well-prepared students points to a clear explanation: the way schools make placement decisions. When Algebra access depends on subjective or inconsistent criteria, even students who are ready for advanced math can be left out.

Most schools use a mix of standardized test scores, teacher recommendations, and parent requests to decide who gets placed⁸ in Algebra. While these methods may seem fair on the surface, research shows they can introduce bias⁹. For instance, teachers have rated¹⁰ white students as higher achieving than black and Latino students, even when test scores are similar. Parent referrals¹¹ are also more common among white and affluent families, which can widen gaps in access. Together, these practices reinforce existing inequities rather than expand opportunity for all.

Universal screening can prevent otherwise qualified students from being left out

One promising approach to reduce bias in placement decisions is to use universal screening and automatically enroll high-achieving students into advanced math pathways. This approach¹² ensures that placement decisions are based on readiness, not on referrals or resources.

Universal screening is not only a fairer approach, but a more efficient one as well. It reduces the administrative burdens of subjective placement decisions, saves staff time, and ensures more students get the opportunities they deserve.

Several states — including Colorado¹³, Nevada¹⁴, North Carolina¹⁵, Texas¹⁶, and Washington — have made progress in identifying and supporting high-potential students from low-income and minority backgrounds through universal screening.

North Carolina¹⁷ implemented an automatic enrollment policy that placed top-scoring students from state math tests into advanced math classes for grades 3 and higher. These policies have reduced the misalignment of high-scoring students from 10% to 3%. These policies have also increased the percentage of high-achieving black students enrolled in advanced math. For example, the rate of black students enrolled in advanced math increased from 88% to 92% between the 2022–2023 and 2023–2024 school years.

Texas also has seen increased equity in Algebra placement through universal screening and automatic enrollment. In central Texas¹⁸, from 2014 to 2021, the percentage of high-achieving black students taking 8th-grade Algebra rose from 40% to 70%, and for high-achieving Latino students, from 50% to 70%. Recognizing the success of these initiatives, Texas passed¹⁹ a law in 2023 requiring that students who score in the top 40% statewide in fifth grade receive advanced math instruction to prepare for Algebra in eighth grade.

In total, these efforts help ensure that students who show strong academic potential are not overlooked.

What policymakers and education leaders can do to expand Algebra access

Closing Algebra access gaps requires action at both the state and local levels.

Policymakers can work to advance all qualified students by supporting state-level universal screening²⁰ policies and policies to expand Algebra course offerings, especially in rural and high-poverty schools. This may require additional resources²¹ for hiring²² qualified math teachers²³, as well as providing professional development.

School and district leaders can improve placement practices by adopting universal screening²⁴ to identify students ready for advanced coursework that might have otherwise been overlooked. In addition, expanding targeted academic supports²⁵, such as increased tutoring or double-dose instruction, can help more students build the key skills²⁶ needed to succeed in Algebra. Research shows²⁷ that targeted instruction on these foundational skills can dramatically improve students’ ability to learn new Algebra content.

Editor’s note: Kelsey Piper has quickly become one of our favorite education writers for the rigor, conviction, and clarity of her reporting. We are excited to get to share her experiences launching Oakland LEARN, a microschool in Oakland, California. Be sure to head over and subscribe to The Argument to find more of Kelsey’s work — we especially recommend her recent piece on how grading went awry, right below.

As our kids approached school-aged I found myself wanting three probably-contradictory things out of their education. The first was freedom and autonomy. It seemed tragic to me to ask young kids to sit still all day. Our oldest daughter loved to learn at home; she’d spend hours giggling her way through a book of math brainteasers or lost in Percy Jackson. I wanted her school experience to foster that instead of crushing it.

I have no idea what skills the job market is going to need by the time our kids are old enough to need to worry about it, but autonomy and self-directedness seem like obvious qualities to foster in our children’s growth.

I wanted them to learn things that interested them, and to grow into stewards of their own education. My ideal system was one where kids set goals and adults helped them get there.

I’d flirted with ‘unschooling’: the idea that the best thing to do is offer kids a knowledge-rich environment, and then just trust that what they do is what they should be doing. But the more I read unschooling blogs and discussions, the more I came away dissatisfied with the unschooling community’s disinterest in pedagogy — in how kids best learn something — and in how to make sure kids were developing the basic competencies that’d allow them to fully explore whatever did interest them. Some kids will learn to read without being taught, but some won’t. To not provide kids with however much support they need to learn to read strikes me as among the most profound possible failures as a parent. Fostering freedom and autonomy could not possibly mean taking them so far that you allow a student to remain illiterate — which ends up curtailing their autonomy for life. And once I’d acquired this conviction on the subject of reading, it crossed my mind that other subjects and skills might be the same — some kids might need deliberate structured instruction to master them, and they might be necessary prerequisites for other things the kids will want to do.

So, pedagogy. This is a topic where lots of people have lots of strong opinions, many of them have a mediocre research study or two in their favor, and none feel fully satisfying. Discovery-based learning? Project-based learning? Mastery-based learning? I never felt qualified to have my own opinion here, or evaluate anyone else’s, until I had taught children at a wide range of ability levels.

Once I did that, I immediately formed a lot of strong opinions of my own and felt more qualified to take a stand on other peoples’ opinions. Giving my full takes on all of pedagogy would be a book, not a part of an article, but to highlight the most important places where I’ve changed my thinking on this topic briefly: I have become skeptical of a lot of clever pedagogy and feel positively about direct, focused instruction at a student’s level on a topic they care about and want to master, done in a regular and structured way until they’ve mastered it.

This is not the current fashion. You might have heard instead (if like me you follow elite private schools in the Bay Area) that students should instead learn through discovery, with projects that help deeply appreciate the reason behind a concept rather than merely teaching the concepts. This is true when it’s done well but I have come to believe it’s virtually never done well.

It is incredibly valuable, where it’s possible, to motivate a new concept by introducing a challenge and helping the kids discover the approach that will solve the challenge. Textbooks and activities that do this are precious and valuable.

Unfortunately a lot of things marketed as discovery-based learning or project-based learning don’t actually do this, because it is extraordinarily difficult to do. Instead, they end up amounting to arts and crafts projects with only a distant conceptual connection to the topic, or just to a slower, more frustrating lesson plan which ends up at the same result. These days I am instinctively suspicious that many things marketed as discovery-based or project-based learning are in this category: we don’t know how to guide a child down the stepping stone of inferences that’d let them discover the technique completely from first principles, and so we’re instead selling a lesson that’s thematically related but won’t actually teach them. Some kids may love to spend some time exploring and trying it out for themselves, but a lot of kids will smell busywork, and get impatient. Most students benefit from direct explicit instruction, where you teach a technique by giving an example of how to solve the problem and then letting them try it themselves. Direct explicit instruction is almost never our romantic ideal of how students learn best, but in practice many students learn really well from it, enjoy learning material presented this way, and are much faster to attain the mastery they need to use that skill for other skills.

So these days I think that learning should be highly differentiated, with no two kids progressing at the same pace. I think it should be mastery-oriented, it should often involve explicit instruction, and it should respect students’ time by generally trying to teach them whatever it is they want to learn in the most effective manner we know of to teach it.

That’s enough of a bind all by itself — freedom, autonomy, and direct, explicit, mastery-based instruction. But I also think that education should teach values and character, and that is the third thing I hoped to figure out how to get. Here, again, I wanted a bunch of contradictory things. I wanted my kids to learn to question authority, to tell the teacher if the teacher is wrong and hear “oh, you’re right, thanks for correcting me.” I also wanted them to learn to be respectful and learn to function in unfamiliar situations. I hoped they wouldn’t spend much time bored, but I wanted them to learn how to gracefully cope with boredom. (This doesn’t mean ‘by suffering through it’ — pulling out a book is a great way to cope with boredom!)

One thing I wanted — while understanding that if we succeeded at all our kids would form their own values and priorities, and hopefully surpass us — was to make sure they understood the values and priorities that I hold dear. I wanted to teach them liberal individualism and principled tolerance. I wanted their school environment to build and cherish the commonalities between classmates whatever their background. I wanted to make sure they thoroughly understood how bad the past was and how hard-won our progress. I wanted them to be inoculated against five-minute internet outrages without becoming jaded and cynical about the ability of hard work and honest advocacy to fix horrendous evils in the world around them.

All of this made it apparent to me that I wanted to play a significant role in their school. I wanted to help read books and talk about if they were a fit for the curriculum. I wanted to help organize ways for the kids to give to kids who were poorer than them. Schools teach a lot more than reading and math. If you have an articulation of what makes for a good American, a good human being, a good neighbor, a good friend, this doesn’t just get passed on by osmosis! It often gets taught by example more than by explicit instruction. But it needs to get taught, or it won’t happen.

A major focus in schools in my area right now is social-emotional learning, which is a really broad category that includes some stuff that’s obviously really important and good, and also some stuff that strikes me as silly, misguided, or counterproductive. I am emphatically in favor of teaching kids emotional skills. How to calm down, how to bounce back, how to react when something is too hard, how to cope with stressful situations or competition or disappointment, how to respond to cruelty and how not to be cruel (even kids who are not trying to be cruel can really hurt each other just out of sheer interpersonal incompetence. And also, some kids will be trying to be cruel!). I think some teachers have extraordinary skill in projecting a kind of emotional steadiness which students can emulate and grow in the presence of. I don’t have that skill myself, but I aspire to it.

So a lot of stuff in the social-emotional learning bucket is really good. But I’m skeptical of some of the implementations I’ve seen. One is a tendency to treat all issues as social-emotional learning issues. For a concrete example: I saw a parent whose middle schooler was really struggling with math. They asked for advice. The responses were overwhelmingly from the SEL toolkit. How is the kid’s relationship with the teacher? Has the kid been screened for anxiety? Does the kid do negative self-talk? Does the kid experience too much pressure from peers to be ‘smart’?

I followed up with the parent to ask — has the kid gotten routine drilling in foundational arithmetic? (That is, times tables and so on?) Because kids who have not gotten routine drilling in foundational arithmetic will very frequently fall apart, in exactly that way, when they reach harder middle school math. The kid had not, it turns out, gotten routine drilling in foundational arithmetic.

A lot of cases are like that, in my experience. Something is attributed to emotional issues, but it’s really about academic ones: Whether a child is bought in on a subject area. Whether they are being taught challenging material at their level in an effective way. Whether they are getting good instruction. Of course it causes emotional issues when a child is in a classroom learning nothing, because they never learned the prerequisite skills! But the emotional issues aren’t the cause, and you’ll get a lot more mileage out of doing a good job of instruction.

I also think the SEL considerations for kids are very individual. My oldest daughter is competitive, and does her best work when I offer to race her, or when the class is competing to win a paper crown that reads ‘queen of math’ (or ‘king of math,’ of course).¹ My son, three years younger, has a yearning for meaning; he learns best when the lesson is directly connected to his current career aspiration. He’ll ask “do doctors need to know subtraction?” and then happily learn it if persuaded they do. My next oldest kid seems to yearn more than anything to be among the big kids. She demanded to be taught to read and do math because she sees them doing it. Each of them have some social-emotional skills that come naturally and some that are a huge fight. It’s an area that demands nuanced and evolving models of each child, and where I want to see low turnover and sustained relationships so that the teachers can be candid with me about what my kids need and how to deliver it.

So. That is the impossible set of conditions I’d set myself. I wanted a highly differentiated school with good pedagogy and lots of student freedom and autonomy where kids learn to think for themselves but also get a morally and intellectually serious presentation of my worldview and values and individualized support in developing as people. It’s not shocking that I had to start my own thing to get that. And so three years ago I joined with some other families and hired a friend who was a teacher to run Oakland LEARN.

These days I’m excited about how well we’ve squared all these circles. Classes at Oakland LEARN are optional; you can always walk out, to the playroom or outside. Kids can and do leave any class they don’t feel excited about. But usually almost all the kids join me for Oakland Strict, where we pretend to be a much stricter old-fashioned school for an hour and get in our times tables, spelling, group reading and composition practice.

Students learn at their own pace. Most of them are very advanced, in some cases ludicrously so, but not all of them; I take as much pride in helping a student who joined us unable to read get to reading at grade level as I do helping a student who we’ve had for three years take Algebra II in third grade. Most of the kids only spend an hour or two a day working — less, for the younger students — and the rest of their time playing or reading.

But there’s also a bunch I’d want to change. I’d like the school to be bigger. I think the kids would benefit from more kids to play with; we’re a microschool because it was easiest to start a microschool, not because we think the ‘micro’ is a key part of the formula. I constantly daydream that a sympathetic billionaire will drop ten million dollars on us and we can buy and outfit the perfect venue and grow over the next five years to serve a couple hundred students. We are also constantly changing what we’re doing. The kids’ needs change, our best understanding of how to serve them changes, and frankly I think sometimes kids benefit from change itself, learning whether the waters of a new activity or new dynamic really suit them. The parts of the program that I’m pretty sure will stay consistent are 1) highly differentiated students (kids are not all the same and do not all benefit from the same instruction), 2) mixed-grades (this makes differentiation easier and I think reduces pressure to be the ‘best,’ though I’d ideally split the K-1 or maybe K-2 out from the older elementary kids), and 3) an environment oriented towards freedom and autonomy. The rest we will vary as we go, as part of trying to do a very complicated vision justice.