When Robert Pondiscio pages, I answer. Yesterday, the Boston Foundation released a study on the efficacy of charter and pilot schools, which had the advantage of including both observational estimates of these schools effectiveness (comparing the performance of students in these schools with those in traditional public schools, net of some control variables) as well as lottery-based estimates of their effectiveness (comparing those who won lotteries with those who did not).

Kudos to the research teams (Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Josh Angrist, Sarah Cohodes, Susan Dynarski, Jon Fullerton, Tom Kane, and Parag Pathak) - this is a well-done, careful study that provides us with a range of estimates of charter and pilot school performance. There is certainly enough positive evidence here to support the creation of more charter schools in Boston, but I want to offer two cautions.

1) Beware of extrapolating lottery-based estimates when only the most successful charter schools had oversubscribed lotteries to being with.The lottery-based estimates of the effects of charters on middle school math performance are simply huge - half of a standard deviation! But only a quarter of charter schools are part of the lottery sample. Zero of the 5 charter elementary schools, 4 of 13 charter middle schools, and 3 of 11 charter high schools are included in the lottery part of the study because other schools were not oversubscribed enough to require a lottery. To be sure, these lottery estimates are important to understanding what the most successful charter schools can do. But I think we will all be disappointed if we expect a charter school expansion to replicate the effects of these middle schools (Academy of the Pacific Rim, Boston Collegiate, Boston Prep, and Roxbury Prep), which are among the highest performing charter schools in the country.

2) Pay careful attention to what elements of these schools can and can't scale. Harvard graduates don't grow on trees. These schools have faculties drawn from the most selective colleges - faculties that are highly atypical of the public school teachers.

Posted by eduwonkette at 11:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (19) | TrackBacks (0)

This is too precious not to comment on: the Center for Education Reform, the organization that sponsored that full page ad slamming the AFT charter study and the Times in 2004, threw this celebratory paragraph into their newsblast today (see background here):

WHAT'S WORKING. D.C. charter schools are succeeding, according to The Washington Post, and "have opened a solid academic lead over those in [the city's] traditional public schools." An analysis of test results for economically disadvantaged students shows that "D.C. middle-school charters scored 19 points higher than the regular public students in reading and 20 points higher in math." D.C. charter school students outscored their conventional public school counterparts in other areas as well. In an online chat, writers discussed some of the reasons charters are thriving in the District: "A culture where the grown-ups trust each makes it a lot easier to teach kids. The experts doing research say high expectations and standards of behavior have to be applied consistently across classrooms. That's a lot more evident at charters than most DCPS schools I've visited. Charter directors were very consistent in saying that they will not hesitate to get rid of teachers who they feel are not performing. On the other hand, they are also very eager to keep the teachers they like, and provide support and encouragement and training to keep them happy."

This is a far cry from the fire-breathing condemnation of that ad, isn't it?: "The study in question does not meet current professional research standards. As a result, it tells us nothing about whether charter schools are succeeding."

You can't make this stuff up.

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Recall the Great Charter School War of 2004: After the NY Times published the results of an AFT report finding that traditional public schools outperformed charters, all hell broke loose. Every charter school advocate and their mother intervened in the name of educational research, arguing that the study was fundamentally flawed and that the Times story was biased against charter schools. Shortly thereafter, charter advocates took out a full page ad in the Times blasting the study and the Times for putting it forward.

To be sure, students are not randomly assigned to charter schools, so these critiques were not without merit. So keep your eyes on the Washington Post over the next week and see if charter school advocates again swoop in to defend educational research from the bad guys who would misuse it for their own purposes. Yesterday, the Post published an almost identical analysis claiming that DC charters, which currently enroll a third of DC students, "have opened a solid academic lead over those in its traditional public schools."

Again, for those who are willing to endure the occasional recycled rant on selection versus treatment effects:

First, that students selected into a charter lottery makes them different from those who did not. It may be that their parents are more involved in their education, that they are having a particularly bad experience at their neighborhood school, or that their parents can no longer pay for private school. Whatever the reason, families selecting in, even if they are all poor and minority kids, are different by virtue of choosing a non-neighborhood school.

Lots of choice advocates will spar on this point, and argue that everyone wants a better choice for their children, so there is no selection problem. While rhetorically effective, anyone arguing that families that choose into a charter school are the same as those who don’t is simply wrong. Saying that two-thirds of the kids are poor and that the overwhelming majority are African-American and Hispanic doesn't solve this problem. (Btw, in the small schools context, this is Joel Klein's favorite pasttime.) Even if charter kids had prior test scores identical to their neighborhood school peers, we still couldn't compare charter and neighborhood school kids who didn't opt in with any confidence because there is selection on unobservables - things like motivation and aspirations that are not measured by administrative datasets used to make these comparisons.

The only defensible approach here is to compare students who entered the charter lottery and won with those who entered the lottery and lost. But if the Post wants to extend its logic, here's a free story idea from your friendly neighborhood Secret Santa: go ahead and compare the NAEP results of charters and public schools nationally (and for extra credit, go one step further and compare the outcomes of free lunch kids in charter and traditional public schools), and let's get the Charter War of 2008 started.

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We hear a lot about "gap closing" schools these days, though this term often gets tossed around loosely. Consider Steven Wilson's recent report on "gap closing" Boston charter schools, in which gap closing schools are defined as, "schools that serve students of color from economically disadvantaged families and post achievement levels that rival - and sometimes exceed - suburban school districts."

Gap closing, according to Wilson, refers to proficiency rates on state tests, and herein lies the rub. It's possible for gaps to appear to be closing on state tests if we rely on proficiency levels, even as wide gaps persist when we consider average state tests scores or other measures of performance. And by thrusting these schools onto center stage and making the claim that schools - right now - are entirely eliminating disadvantage, we end up perverting the debate about what it takes to reduce inequality.

Wilson profiles three gap closing high schools - Academy of the Pacific Rim, Boston Collegiate, and the MATCH school - and reports that these schools are exceeding state passing rates on the MCAS test. Hence, they are "gap closers." Surely these schools deserve props, but we continue to see quite substantial gaps between their students and the rest of the state when we look at these schools' SAT scores. (Normal caveats on SAT scores here: Everyone does not take the SAT, but the latent claim in the "gap closing" debate is that students at these high-flying schools walk out as "college ready" as college going students from more advantaged families.)

Below, I list the combined 2007 reading/math score for these schools and a few comparison groups (See Massachusetts SAT scores and school scores here.):

* White Massachusetts students: 1061
* Massachusetts state average: 1035
* MATCH (23 test takers): 988
* Boston Collegiate (14 test takers): 964
* Academy of the Pacific Rim (34 test takers): 932

In short, we've still got a gap - kids at these gap closing schools are lagging behind their more advantaged college-going peers. The two take home points here? Beware of gap claims made based on proficiency rates, and don't count on schools - even great ones - to remedy the substantial disadvantages that have accrued over these students' lifetimes.

Image Credit: E3

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Why is there so much interest in where Barack and Michelle Obama plan to enroll their daughters, Malia Ann and Sasha, in Washington, DC schools? Probably because most observers think that the choice of a school will reveal something meaningful about President-Elect Obama’s views about schooling in the U.S. Is that so? Heck if I know. Up till now, the Obama girls have been attending the University of Chicago Lab School, a private PK-12 school associated with the University of Chicago with annual tuition and fees ranging from $18K-$21K for students in grades 1-12. (Full-time U of C staff are eligible for a 50% tuition remission.) Michelle Obama serves on the Board of Directors of the Lab School, and a couple of skoolboy’s friends, whose children attend the Lab School, say that both Obamas have been visibly involved in the life of the school.

Odds are that the Obamas will send their daughters to a private school in DC. Like most parents, they will likely want to ensure that their children get the best schooling they can. Few parents would be willing to risk sacrificing their children’s futures to make a point about the value of public schooling. We live in an era in which schooling is seen primarily as a vehicle either to move up the social ladder or to maintain the social standing that a family has achieved. As skoolboy’s long-time friend and colleague David Labaree argued in his book How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning, two once-prominent goals of American schooling—producing citizens prepared for life in a democracy and efficiently allocating individuals to work roles, both of which view schooling as a public good—have been overtaken by the objective of schooling as a means for vaulting over others, which construes schooling as a private good. This privatization of the purpose of schooling, Labaree argues, has resulted in a commodification of schooling, and a decoupling of genuine learning from the credentials that so many individuals chase after.

skoolboy invited some of his students to envision strategies to strike a new balance among the schooling goals of democratic citizenship, social efficiency and social mobility. One provocative idea was to eliminate private schooling altogether. Doing so, a student argued, would reduce both the temptation and the capacity for members of privileged groups to use their resources to maintain their advantages. Provocative, but not feasible, I thought. Eliminating private schooling would run headlong into other firmly-held American values, such as freedom of religious expression, the separation of church and state, and the importance of choice as a political value. One can, I believe, support public education and also envision a role for private schooling in the U.S.

And yet … skoolboy finds it troubling that in so many communities in the U.S., the most advantaged groups choose to opt out of the public schooling system, turning instead to private schools. I analyzed the association between median family income and the percentage of students enrolled in private schools for the 179 census tracts in Washington, DC that had non-zero family incomes in the 2000 Census. At the census tract level, weighted by the total number of students in grades 1-12 in each tract, the correlation between median family income and percentage of students enrolled in private schools was .90. What this means is that in Washington, our Nation’s capital, lower-income families send their children to public schools, and higher-income families send their children to private schools.

The chart below shows this association graphically. DC Census tracts are divided into four quartiles, defined by their median family incomes. In the lowest quartile, median family income is less than about $30K per year; in the second quartile, median family income is roughly between $30K and $43K per year; in the third quartile, it’s between $43K and about $74K per year; and in the top quartile, the median family income is higher than $74K per year. In the lowest quartile, 5% of the children attend private schools, whereas in the top quartile, 55% of the children attend private schools.

President Obama’s salary of $400,000 per year will place the Obama family unambiguously in the top income quartile in the District. I think the only question here is which private school will Malia Ann and Sasha attend.

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Ceci Rouse is a labor economist who teaches at Princeton. She has evaluated the effects of vouchers in Milwaukee, and more recently has studied the effects of accountability in Florida with fellow cool person David Figlio.

With Lisa Barrow, Rouse has a new literature review out (School Vouchers and Student Achievement: Recent Evidence, Remaining Questions) about the effects of vouchers on both the students who receive them and the students who remain in public schools. Basically, the take home story is that we shouldn't expect much from vouchers. No surprises there for those who have watched vouchers closely, but do check out Rouse's great review of the literature:

The best research to date finds relatively small achievement gains for students offered education vouchers, most of which are not statistically different from zero. Further, what little evidence exists regarding the potential for public schools to respond to increased competitive pressure generated by vouchers suggests that one should remain wary that large improvements would result from a more comprehensive voucher system. The evidence from other forms of school choice is also consistent with this conclusion. Many questions remain unanswered, however, including whether vouchers have longer-run impacts on outcomes such as graduation rates, college enrollment, or even future wages, and whether vouchers might nevertheless provide a cost neutral alternative to our current system of public education provision at the elementary and secondary school level.

Here's a very special weekend meditation for voucher die-hards from John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

Posted by eduwonkette at 11:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

If you're not already enjoying Richard Whitmire's new gender blog, you could be. Yesterday he wrote that KIPP "is an important player in the boy troubles" because boys at KIPP start 5th grade behind the girls, but catch up to them by 7th grade.

This may very well be true, but there's another KIPP gender story that has received less attention: many KIPP schools have non-trivial gender imbalances and lose boys at a faster rate than they lose girls. Certainly I'm not the first to point this out, as the San Francisco Schools blog reported a year ago that African-American boys leave Bay Area KIPP schools at alarming rates , a finding that Ed Week followed up on in this article on KIPP attrition.

To check out the gender balance in New York area schools, I looked up the School Report Card data for KIPP Bronx and KIPP TEAM in Newark, the two KIPP schools in the area that were at full scale (i.e. they serve grades 5-8) when the last round of NY and NJ school report cards were released. From the disaggregated test score data, I pulled the number of girls and boys tested in grades 5 and 8. This is a decent proxy for the gender composition by grade, which is not available elsewhere - though it's certainly possible that more boys than girls sat these tests out.

In each of these schools, there were more girls than boys in the 5th grade classes. At KIPP TEAM/RISE in Newark (the two schools' 5th grade numbers are reported together because they're under the same charter), 62% of 5th graders were girls, as were 58% of students at KIPP Bronx. In the same year, the 8th grade composition was 71% female at KIPP TEAM and 68% female at KIPP Bronx. These data don't allow us to trace one cohort through school, but they do suggest that more girls are sticking with KIPP than boys. (KIPP's own report card from this school year also confirms that there's a gender imbalance in these schools; KIPP reports that 57% of students overall at KIPP Bronx are girls, 54% are girls at KIPP TEAM, and 57% are girls at KIPP RISE.)



The boys who stay at KIPP may, as Whitmire wrote, do extremely well. But it appears that at least in some cities, boys are also less likely to attend KIPP schools - and stay there.

Previous posts on KIPP are here:

* Do KIPP Schools Have a Positive Effect on Their Students' Achievement?
* When a Lottery Is Not a Lottery
* Does KIPP Provide a Solution to the Problems of Urban Education?
* What Lessons Does KIPP Offer for Urban School Reform?
* Comment on "Lies My KIPP Teacher Told Me"

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Jeff Henig is a Professor of Political Science and Education at Teachers College. He shares insights from his new book, Spin Cycle, published this month by The Russell Sage Foundation.

Public discussions about education research are often highly polarized. Advocates often wield their own studies and slam their opponents’ devious misuse of science. In my new book, Spin Cycle: How Research Is Used in Policy Debates: The Case of Charter Schools, I explore more the relationship between politics and research as it is - and as it might be.

My example: The 2004 AFT charter school report and its aftermath. The AFT report presented federal data indicating charter schools were not performing as well as traditional public schools serving similar populations. The New York Times covered it on page one (Charter Schools Trail in Results, U.S. Data Reveals.) The pro-school choice Center for Education Reform returned fire, enlisting a group of researchers to sign a full-page advertisement The New York Times ran eight days later. It read like a primer on proper methodology for conducting social science research. Rather than simply recap its pro-charter position, the Center for Education Reform took the The New York Times to task for failing to subject the AFT report to a more rigorous and skeptical review.

Was this evidence that education research had emerged from obscurity? Did it mean research coverage would observe the rules of good science, with attentive referees ready to throw flags at violations? Unfortunately, no. Ensuing rounds of give-and-take featured personalized attacks and an unwillingness to acknowledge the complexity of the phenomenon under review.

One chapter in Spin Cycle describes the media’s role in exacerbating polarization. I focus on mainstream print. The Web and blogosphere play a part, but in my story, the effects are largely negative.

Not so long ago, an article about research had to be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal, reviewed by outside reviewers who didn’t know the author’s identity, then revised according to the reviewers comments. It took six to twelve months from submission to final acceptance, then another nine months or more until publication. There was generally a reluctance to cite research until it had been vetted through this slow, usually meticulous peer review process.

New technologies compressed the time between initial results and public release. Researchers often feel pressure to get their results out there “now,” fearing being scooped and believing that the window of opportunity to influence policy debates is open for shorter and shorter intervals.

When speed becomes critical, processes for refining, checking, and simply deliberating about evidence can be short-circuited. But the pressure to be speedy is often manufactured: “political time” isn’t “policy time.” Politicians may clamor for instant access to new findings. But policy learning takes a slower arc. Sometimes, it makes more sense to slow down, to wait for evidence to accumulate rather than rush to judgment based on the latest study.

Don’t misunderstand me. While new technologies exacerbate the pressure to be speedy and hyper-reactive, I’m not looking to turn back the clock. Fortunately, the blogosphere has the potential to raise the level of public discourse about research in several ways the mainstream media can’t - or won’t:

1) Depth of knowledge and analysis. For journalists, education remains a relatively low- status, high-turnover beat; many who cover it lack the expertise to wrestle with quantitative studies and issues of research design. Others find it hard to convince their editors and producers to give them the time and space for greater depth.

Whether you agree with them, or they agree with one another, bloggers like Eduwonk, Edwize, edspresso, and my gracious host, eduwonkette, know what they’re talking about and are less constrained by space.

2) Breadth and context. The myth of the “killer study” — a single piece of research so strong and unassailable it sweeps the slate clean and triumphs once and for all — blinds us. Science is a collective undertaking. Enlightenment demands sifting through multiple studies conducted at different times and places, using an assortment of defensible measures and designs.

By archiving reports on earlier studies, linking discussions of new research to reports on similar topics, and adding judgment that comes from observing research debates over a number of years, education bloggers can help deflate the idea of the killer study. The education blogosphere could cultivate an atmosphere that acknowledges that, while some studies are certainly more convincing than others, we can and must learn from imperfect research. More than a “gold standard” is worthy of consideration.

3) Democratization. Many politicians, journalists, and researchers believe they must dramatically simplify discussion of evidence to find any traction. Should we shrink our expectations of democracy? Or should we hold to a high ideal of democratic decision-making and help develop a citizenry that is up to the challenge? Those aren’t easy questions. Dewy-eyed pronouncements about the natural wisdom that bubbles up from the grassroots should be greeted with healthy skepticism.

Yet democracy’s long-term health calls for raising the level of sophistication with which public issues are discussed and resolved, Fortunately, electronic media provide the open forums that can ensure that serious discussion of education research is not an elite, invitation-only event.

Posted by eduwonkette at 11:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Rewind to the conversation you overheard on Sunday, where I’m on the other end of the line with the mother of Madison (MOM), a friend on the brink of a school shopping meltdown. Here’s what I had to say:

1) The school Madison attends is not going to make or break her test scores. When it comes to academics, the more your home is like a high quality school (particularly in the early grades), the less the school matters. That means that if you own Baby Einstein and have oodles of books, maps, and science kits cluttering up the bottom shelf of your coffee table, you are probably worrying more than you need to.

MOM is sure I’ve got this wrong. I tell MOM that she should be more worried about which teachers Madison is assigned than which school attends. More importantly, given that Madison is in school for only 6 hours a day, MOM and I should be talking about what Madison’s going to be doing after school, on the weekend, and during the summer, since they’re going to make up the bulk of Madison’s K-12 life anyway.

2) MOM is down to five schools, and the differences between the schools she’s choosing – whether on teacher quality, approaches to instruction, and peers - are negligible. MOM is drawing strong contrasts, i.e. the school in Dangerous Minds versus the school in Gossip Girl. This masks a more nuanced reality. The schools Madison might attend are not that different in terms of academic quality. I remind MOM that very few parents are choosing between schools on either end of the continuum, though many of them think they are.

MOM brings up my previous post about class size, where I note that there are kindergarten classes in New York with 15 kids and others with 31. I remind her that the some of the schools she’s looking at have classes of 16, and others have classes of 18. (In cities, there are families who are choosing between a wide range of schools, but this is certainly not representative of the parents of America’s school age kids.)

3) MOM sees the Final Five as hierarchically ranked – i.e. School A is better than School B is better than School C – and I suggest that we think about choosing a school as a matching process rather than one where some people win admission to “the best school” and everyone else is screwed. Madison is a delightful kid who’s on the shy side, and probably would be most comfortable in a place that is attuned to the social dimensions of schooling. MOM concedes that all five schools are alike in this regard.

100 million parents aren’t wrong. But particularly in some circles, they are more stressed about schools than they need to be. I buy MOM, and myself, a copy of Judith Warner’s Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety . I’ll let you know how that book is soon.

Enjoy the weekend, everyone!

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Some people protest war. Others protest hunger and suffering. Less discussed, but no less common, is a special class of protest reserved for parents: conscientious objection to their children’s troublesome friends. When parents look out into the world, they see peers whose values and attitudes are contagious. And they are notorious for circling the wagons to keep out unwanted intruders.

Which brings us back to the question of whether the school your kid attends matters as much as you think it does. On Monday and Tuesday, I pointed out that the differences between schools in improving test scores are actually quite small. However, I argued that schools do offer different kinds of opportunities to learn, and parents’ anxiety about where to send their kids to school is partially about their kids’ academic futures.

Amidst all our wonky talk about school choice and academic quality, it’s easy to forget that parents are acutely concerned about what kind of kids are going to be over for play dates. Most parents intuitively buy into the maxim, “You are the company you keep,” and believe that peers are going to affect the person their child turns out to be. Ignoring the emotional dimension of choosing schools leads us to a cookie cutter - and ultimately myopic - understanding of this process.

I’ll give you the bright side of parents’ worries, and then the dark side. Parents reason that their kids are going to spend most of their waking hours surrounded by their peers. They want their child to be flanked by kids who are well-behaved and respectful of the learning process. Parents would also prefer that the other parents at their school share their approach to parenting. For example, they’d like to know that their five year old isn’t watching "Showgirls" and hitting the bottle after they’ve dropped him off.

Parents also know, especially when the kids are young, that the parents of their kids’ friends are going to become their friends. So parents need to be able to see themselves in the other parents at the school. As Ryan, the husband of a San Francisco mom who’s blogging about her school search, said, “I liked the [parent] tour guides. I could see myself being their friends. We're going to be spending a lot of time at Alice's school, and we want to be in a place where we feel like we can connect with the other parents.”

Here’s the dark side. NCES Commissioner Mark Schneider tracked parents' use of a school search website in DC (DCschoolsearch.com), and documented which features of the schools parents looked at, and in what order. Guess what the heaviest hitter was? Demographics. Socioeconomic and racial composition play a large role when parents are choosing schools. (More on whether parents choose school quality or school racial/class composition; see also Mark Schneider's book - Charter Schools: Hope or Hype?).

Economists might argue that this is “statistical discrimination” – essentially using group averages about performance when we have insufficient information. Certainly, on average, learning conditions are worse at schools with high proportions of poor and minority kids. A less cheerful take, of course, is that this is animus-based discrimination.

Regardless of your interpretation, my point is that parents’ choices are as much about "the company" as they are about school quality.

Image credit: 4th grade, Linwood Elementary School.

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It's no "Juno," but this video of a Caroline Hoxby talk on charter schools in NYC is well worth watching. Hoxby discusses her evaluation of NYC charter schools, which compares students who win charter lotteries with those enter but don't win. The charter effect on math scores is .09 standard deviations, while the effect on reading scores is .04 standard deviations (for a year spent in a charter school). Of particular interest in her description of the programmatic differences between these schools, the most central of which is a longer school day and school year. More on this study coming soon.

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Ask your companions at a dinner party about their elementary or high school, and you will learn that everyone has a theory about what made it “good” or “bad.” The amazing teachers. The decrepit building. The souped up science labs. The pungent cafeteria food. Unique extracurricular activities. The football team’s reign of terror. And the lists go on. When it comes to our schools, we all fashion ourselves as mini-experts. Most of us are convinced that some schools are better and others worse. And above all, we are certain that which school our kids attend matters.

What does it mean to say that schools matter, i.e. to claim that there are “school effects?” Essentially, this is a claim that, all else equal, going to one school versus another makes a substantial difference in a child’s outcomes. We all suspect that there are real quality differences between schools. But the trouble is that many studies find that differences between schools are dwarfed by differences within schools.

When the outcome in question is test scores, researchers have found that school effects are quite small. For example, once family characteristics are taken into account, private schools don’t come out ahead of public schools. (Catholic schools are a notable exception, though the most convincing studies find test score effects only on the students who are least likely to attend these schools.) Though city parents fight for their kids to get into selective elementary schools precisely because they are assumed to be “better schools,” economists Julie Cullen and Brian Jacob found that kids winning a kindergarten lottery to attend selective schools in Chicago don’t end up with higher test scores. (More details here.)

Does this mean that all schools are the same? Could 100 million parents be wrong? I don’t think so. These parents are only wrong if their sole goal is to pump up their kids’ test scores. But parents have a broad range of goals for their kids, and it’s not clear that test scores are the top priority. For example, Richard Rothstein and Rebecca Jacobsen found that parents, when asked to prioritize the goals of public schools, collectively value social skills and work ethic, citizenship and community responsibility, and emotional health more than the acquisition of basic academic skills. If we researchers took our heads out of the sand and studied the many goals of education, we might find that schools matter more than we think.

This is not to say that parents aren’t in it for academics – they are – but perhaps that parents see academic growth more broadly than the acquisition of test scores. Parents visit schools, and they discover that some kids are dissecting pig hearts, while others read out of textbook. They see that some schools require their students to write frequently in a variety of different styles, and provide their teachers with reasonable workloads that allow them to provide meaningful feedback. They notice that some schools offer art and music, while others have cut out these “extras.” And they know that some schools get their kids excited about learning, while others are passing out worksheets.

We’re so used to equating test scores with educational quality now that it’s easy to forget the big picture. Schools may not matter much for test scores. But that doesn’t mean that schools don’t matter.

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