National Assessment of Educational Progress

[00:01] Announcer:

Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.

[00:13] SPEAKER_01:

I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Michael Petrilli. Michael is President of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Executive Editor of Education Next, and Research Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. An award-winning writer, he's the author of The Diverse School's Dilemma, editor of the book Education Through Upward Mobility, and co-editor of How to Educate an American and Follow the Science to School. An expert on charter schools, school accountability, evidence-based practices, and trends in test scores and other student outcomes, Petrilli has published many pieces in the New York Times, Washington Post, and his Education Gadfly column and podcast at Fordham, and appears frequently on television and radio. truly helped to create the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Innovation and Improvement and the Policy Innovators in Education Network and serves on the board of the Association of American Educators Foundation.

[01:02]

He lives with his family in Bethesda, Maryland.

[01:05] Announcer:

And now, our feature presentation.

[01:08] SPEAKER_01:

Michael, welcome to Principal Center Radio. Hey, it's great to be with you, Justin. Well, thanks for sitting down with me today to do something that's a little bit unusual for our show, which is to talk about something that is in the news lately, and that is the NAEP scores. Tell us just briefly what NAEP is and why it has your attention at the moment.

[01:28] SPEAKER_00:

Sure. So that stands for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, otherwise known as the Nation's Report Card. So these are the national tests. They now happen every two years, reading and math, fourth and eighth grade, state by state. There's also other subjects that get tested from time to time. There's the long-term NAEP.

[01:47]

There's a version of this that goes all the way back to the early 1970s. But this state by state version goes back to the No Child Left Behind Act, so about 25 years ago. And it has our attention because, you know, as your listeners know, the news is not good out there. Our students are really struggling. That's not a surprise after the pandemic, the lengthy school closures. But really what is remarkable if you dig into the data, and I would encourage everyone to do so and do that for the national data and state by state, you know, is just how low the scores have gotten.

[02:23]

compared to where we were before the pandemic, certainly compared to where we were about a decade ago. As a lot of the press has reported, scores started trending down in the 2010s before the pandemic and then really went over a cliff. And they particularly have gone down dramatically for our lowest performing students. So kids at the 10th percentile, 25th percentile, students that are not at basic. These are kids we made huge progress with back in the 1990s and 2000s. You know, two or three grade levels of progress that has been all but wiped out after the pandemic.

[03:00] SPEAKER_01:

So three different tiers to this story that I'm hearing. One is that scores were trending downward before the pandemic. This was not a phenomenon that the pandemic kicked off, but one that it accelerated, correct? Correct. That is right. And then second, we are seeing kind of as expected, a big drop in scores, but especially among lower income students.

[03:22]

And it seemed, I mean, it makes a certain amount of sense to me that higher income students are have a lot more protection against falling behind and learning more parental resources to keep them caught up. So the impact of the pandemic on student learning, on student test scores is disproportionately affecting lower income students, correct?

[03:40] SPEAKER_00:

Well, let me issue a little bit of a correction there. It's really among the low achieving students that we've seen these big declines. Now, for sure, if you dig in, those kids are disproportionately likely to be low income. Unfortunately, that's part of that achievement gap we have in this country around socioeconomics, but it's actually not the same. And I'm working on some analysis where you can see that there's certainly non-poor kids that are in that mix that are also at the 10th percentile, the 24th percentile. So yeah, it's disproportionately poor kids, but not entirely.

[04:13]

There's some wealthier kids that are in that mix as well.

[04:16] SPEAKER_01:

I appreciate the clarification there, yeah, because we certainly want all of our students, regardless of socioeconomics, to get the learning they need, to get the support they need. And one of the clear conclusions to me from this data is that what we tried to do during the pandemic did not work. Zoom kindergarten did not work and it worked the worst for our lowest achieving students.

[04:39] SPEAKER_00:

Is that your read as well? That's very well said. And I'm glad you actually mentioned Zoom kindergarten because if you look at how the cohorts line up, it actually was the kids who were in kindergarten when the pandemic started, they were the ones who sat down for the fourth grade test last year. So literally, those were the kids who had their kindergartens interrupted by the school closures and then came back in the fall. And many of them were doing Zoom first grade, right, with teachers they had never met. I mean, this was so hard.

[05:15]

And I know our educators out there tried hard to make it work. But how do you possibly teach kids to read when you're trying to do it over a screen, when you're talking about six-year-olds, when you're talking about kids you've never met in person? Well, we see it did not work well. And especially for those lowest performing students, it probably didn't work at all. And so we're still struggling. And the recovery has not been as fast as we had hoped.

[05:40]

I think that none of us expected to see this huge spike in absenteeism that we've seen after the pandemic. Major challenge. So we continue to lose ground instead of making up ground, at least in many cases, and especially for those kids at the low end of achievement.

[05:57] SPEAKER_01:

And you said in the article that I was reading just now that you expect those dips to remain with that cohort, that this cohort as they move through school is probably not going to catch up. They're probably going to, you know, to remain behind. Do you say that because you're just a pessimist in general? That's dark.

[06:17] SPEAKER_00:

That's dark, man. No, that's the thing, Justin. People who know me, I'm not a pessimist in general. I'm the glasses half full guy. But look, unfortunately, in this case, it is hard to be super optimistic. I mean, even years ago, you could predict that these kids, they had lost so much ground that they were going to struggle.

[06:35]

And if you look at these cohorts, and this is an important point, when we're looking at these national test scores, we cannot follow individual kids over time like administrators can do for their own students using district data or even using the state assessment data and if you can look at kids over time you can start to see okay how much progress is the rate of progress faster than it used to be and therefore kids are starting to chip away at that learning loss we can't do that with the nape data because it's just a snapshot of different cohorts and so we just know how this cohort did versus from a couple years ago These cohorts that got hit hardest, the ones that were in kindergarten, that cohort, I suspect, is going to struggle. We know from other studies that we have made some gains. The federal funding that flowed, this $190 billion had some impact, but unfortunately, it was pretty modest.

[07:31]

It's like Maybe it helped to raise 10% of the learning loss, but 90% of that learning loss is still there. So we have not gotten anywhere close to doing what we've needed to do to help these kids get to where they need to be. One last thing I'd say, Justin, is, look, some of us were trying to make the case when the COVID pandemic happened that it might make sense for that cohort of kids, especially the little kids that missed a year of school, because they were at home, to just have them do that whole grade over. Don't pretend they did first grade. They didn't really, right? So let's just let them all come back and let's do first grade the proper way.

[08:07]

That was not a popular idea. To my knowledge, nobody did it, at least at scale. And so here we are. We just keep moving kids along and they continue to be further and further behind.

[08:18] SPEAKER_01:

And the gap makes sense to me in terms of what some people call the Matthew effect, right? Those who have will be given more. Learning is cumulative. If you already knew how to read at the beginning of the pandemic, if you already had resources, then probably things are going okay for you. But if you were starting with very little academically and didn't get it when you were supposed to in kindergarten, first grade, it's going to be very hard to close those gaps, right?

[08:44] SPEAKER_00:

Yep. That's absolutely right. And for the youngest kids who didn't get the basics, who, again, were trying to learn the phonics and phonemic awareness and reading over Zoom or their basic math facts over Zoom, we see those deficits seem to be piling up. Now, I think we all have to wrestle with the fact that some of this was starting before the pandemic. And this is a great mystery. I mean, nobody knows for sure why that was happening.

[09:10]

There are some hypotheses out there, you know, that it could be because around that same time, we stepped back from as much accountability as we used to have back in the No Child Left Behind days. So there was less pressure on schools. There was the move to the Common Core standards, which I was a big supporter of, I still think was the right thing to do. But look, these are tougher standards. Is it possible that these standards are so much higher that we haven't done a good job helping educators, helping teachers know how to scaffold instruction to help their lowest performing kids reach these high standards? It's a really tough challenge.

[09:46]

The other one people talk about, and look, I think there's a lot of credence to this, is about phones and screen time. I mean, it really seems that right around the time that we started seeing test scores go down, especially for low performing kids, it's when suddenly, you know, every child in America had a phone and was spending hours and hours on social media and other things. So, you know, maybe it's some combination of these factors. Now we got to figure out what can we do in our schools as policymakers to address this challenge, especially for the low performing kids.

[10:20] SPEAKER_01:

Well, speaking of policy, let's talk about accountability a little bit, because as you said, starting in the 2010s, some of the accountability that had the sharpest teeth under No Child Left Behind started to be scaled back. There were waivers, there were various things that states could do to continue to comply with the law, but maybe in ways that were not as strenuous as before. And I think to many educators, that was a relief because certainly we had seen some distortions that came from excessively narrow focuses on reading, not teaching other subjects, and maybe some of the pressures that get put in place. To what extent did accountability work for our lower achieving students?

[10:59] SPEAKER_00:

Well, look, there are some good studies that did find that in the late 1990s, early 2000s, when states first put accountability systems in place, you did see this big bump in student achievement, especially in math and especially for low performing kids, disproportionately low income, Hispanic, black students. So it does seem to have had a big impact. Now, there's some reason to think it was kind of a one-time impact, that there was something about the shock to the system, the fact that we were going to, for the first time, break out the scores for these different subgroups, really put pressure on schools. You saw schools make some progress at the low end. But then it did seem to phase out over time. And it might have been because of the reasons you talked about.

[11:40]

It was too narrow of a focus. Maybe the level of instruction that we were encouraging was not very good. So I still think it made sense to try to say, okay, that worked one time. Now, what do we do next to try to keep progress going and trying to move to higher standards and a broader definition around accountability? I think that all that made sense at the time. I just wonder, looking back now, if possibly that left some of the lowest performing kids behind.

[12:08]

I mean, there was that moment where we were just so narrowly focused on what they needed, and then we moved away from that.

[12:16] SPEAKER_01:

And I'm a big fan of Natalie Wexler's analysis of some of what happened to reading in the first decades of this century when we de-emphasized content, especially science and social studies content, and tried to focus on skills that it may not even really be possible to directly teach around comprehension, finding the main idea, and things like that. And I really appreciated Natalie's book, The Knowledge Gap. and have appreciated in recent years how some states, especially Louisiana, have really started to pay attention to curriculum, which was a big missing piece in that No Child Left Behind era accountability that we're accountable for outcomes, but every state, and this continues to be the case, every state is essentially free to do whatever they want on curriculum. And I wonder your take on that as far as where things stand today. Like on a scale of one to 10 or apples to bananas, how crazy is it that we have absolutely no national curriculum in this country?

[13:13] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, look, a couple of things. First of all, the national curriculum idea, that's not going to go anywhere, right? I mean, it's just too much of a hot button issue. I mean, you see even right now with the new administration talking about dismantling the Federal Department of Education. You know, there's a lot of strong feelings in this country about decisions being made closer to home. That said, there is much more commonality in our curriculum, and I would argue higher quality curriculum now than ever before.

[13:41]

And that is because of the Common Core standards. And then, you know, after those standards, a lot of work being done to build high quality instructional materials, including the Core Knowledge Language Arts program that Natalie certainly is a fan of and Witten Wisdom and Eureka Math and some of these other ones that came out of the Common Core years that now have gained a lot of market share around the country. And you see some states starting to say, hey, the state is going to take a stronger role around curriculum. That used to be something that we said, oh, that's all about local control. Well, there's some states, including Louisiana, also Mississippi, which is one of those states that bucks the trends in terms of the negative results over the last decade, where you saw state education secretaries taking ownership for improving teaching and learning. and rolling up their sleeves and saying, hey, we're gonna get involved in at least encouraging local districts to choose good curricular products.

[14:37]

We'll make it easier for them. Maybe we'll help pay for it. We're gonna get more involved in the professional learning experience. We're gonna put real money and resources and expertise into this. And look, in a lot of states, Local school districts are tiny. They don't have the capacity.

[14:53]

They may not have the staff. They don't have a curriculum and instructional person because they're too small for that. And so having the states take a more active role has been something that seems to be actually working. And I think other states are starting to do more of that as well.

[15:08] SPEAKER_01:

Yeah. So as you mentioned, Louisiana and Mississippi are... really beating the odds, right? They're outperforming what you would expect for states that have a fairly high degree of poverty and historically have not been at the top of the rankings, but they're making ground.

[15:22]

Would you say because of those investments in curriculum is accountability part of it? What's the whole picture there?

[15:28] SPEAKER_00:

Well, it's a great question. Nobody knows for sure. That's my honest answer. We look at these test score trends, but it's correlation, not causation. Now, people close to these states think that, yes, it's because of this focus on curriculum and instruction and the effort from the state to provide a lot more expertise and resources around teaching and learning than used to happen. And You know, Mississippi's story is remarkable.

[15:56]

In the 2010s, where as the rest of the country, we were seeing these declines, especially at the low end, Mississippi was making these huge gains. And if you adjust for poverty, and it is a very poor state, Mississippi's at the top of the list now. Incredible. Louisiana was doing a lot of good stuff in the 2010s, and it was only now recently in the last couple of years that we're starting to see good, strong improvements on their NAEP scores. But that's, you know, the state superintendents who were in the charge at the time certainly believe that it's this work they're doing around curriculum, capacity building, support. And look, Justin, it makes sense, right?

[16:34]

I mean, if you want to actually improve student learning, you got to find a way to improve teaching. in the classroom. And that's not easy. State officials are pretty far away from the action, but I think we're starting to come up with some ways of doing it.

[16:49] SPEAKER_01:

I want to ask about a different angle on support that doesn't necessarily involve the classroom teacher, and that is tutoring. And I had the privilege of speaking with Robert Slavin of Success for All in what turned out to be his final weeks. He actually passed away before we published the interview, but he was at the end of his life advocating very forcefully for tutoring. And this is kind of early in the pandemic situation. And now that we have possibly a permanent dip in the learning of these cohorts that suffered from the pandemic, tutoring has continually been suggested as not a total solution, but perhaps part of the equation for helping students to catch up. What's some of your thinking around tutoring and its potential?

[17:29] SPEAKER_00:

Yeah, well, and we are going to miss Dr. Slavin quite a bit. He just made incredible contributions. Look, he's right, of course, that there's very good studies showing that very high quality tutoring programs can make a huge difference for kids. Problem is figuring out how to make those programs the norm at scale, like everything else in education or any other field. I mean, you know, you can do a pilot program and it's great.

[17:54]

taking it to the whole school or district, that's another challenge. And, you know, what we're seeing is the effort to scale up tutoring with the pandemic relief money. You can look at some success stories in a few places, but it's not as easy to find those as we might have thought, because it really turned out to be hard. You know, you got to figure out When are you going to do the tutoring? Well, if you don't do during the school day, the kids don't show up. Right.

[18:20]

So you got to do it during the school day. Well, where do you find the tutors? Maybe you can do some online tutoring during the school day, but, you know, you've got to have a system for vetting those people. You know, how do you make sure they're using the same curriculum as what you're using in the classroom? It is hard. It takes people inside a school system who are really good at implementation, at getting those nuts and bolts right.

[18:42]

And, you know, look, I think we're going to continue to see some outliers, some examples of exemplars of places that really nailed it and got some great results. But it's not a magic solution because implementation is tough.

[18:54] SPEAKER_01:

It's interesting. I don't hear that phrase very much. It works, but it's hard. And implementation is the sticking point. That's very well said. Well, I wanted to ask if you could wave a magic wand at two different levels.

[19:06]

If you could get school leaders to focus on or do one particular thing, what would that be? And at the national level, if you could wave a magic wand and get us as a country to do something in particular, what would be at the top of your list?

[19:19] SPEAKER_00:

Oh, my gosh. Do I have to pick just one or can I get to lots of things? Look, in our schools, I'll say this both for policy and practice. I think the big mistake we have made over time is we have chosen quantity over quality. When it comes to educators, I think it's not hard to argue that we do not pay our teachers enough in this country. We clearly do not.

[19:43]

And yet, if we had just kept the teacher pupil ratios the same over the recent decades, we could easily be paying teachers well over $100,000 a year. But what we keep doing is choosing to hire more and more staff instead. For a while, that was more teachers to get class sizes down. But then it's now other kinds of instructional people. You know, we've got coaches and we've got support people. We've got, of course, folks helping with special needs kids.

[20:09]

But more recently, the tutors and, you know... I think we need to step back and say, hey, is this strategy working? And if not, can we figure out how to try to use our budget in a way to get those teacher salaries up dramatically? Now, have part of the deal be that those teachers are going to be willing to be treated like professionals and held accountable and get good results and try to really go in that direction, especially at a time when everybody in every sector is fighting for for talent, right?

[20:40]

I mean, we have a country where the workforce is not growing very strong anymore. It's going to start shrinking. There's just not as many workers. We're going to have to out-compete other sectors for talent. And we're not going to do that if our strategy is let's keep paying people terrible salaries and then try to fix that by throwing other bodies at the problem. I think a new approach to that could go a long way.

[21:04] SPEAKER_01:

Michael Petrilli, thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. This has been a blast. It's been my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

[21:11] Announcer:

Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at principalcenter.com slash radio.