Weekend To-Do List
10/7 - 10/8
1. What Happened at CZI?
READ: After the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative laid off 48 employees in its education department this summer, Chalkbeat’s Matt Barnum took a closer look at the philanthropic organization’s failed education strategy. CZI spent almost ten years investing at least $200 million in Summit Learning as part of a quest to champion online tools and personalized learning as key levers for educational transformation. But the innovations failed to produce the gains once promised:
Reich says the apparently varied experience of schools using Summit shows how contextual factors, like strong leadership or community buy-in, can make or break a school regardless of the technology. “Without all of the other things that the Summit Public Schools were doing to make that platform work, they were not scaling or transporting the most important parts of Summit,” he said.
Read more here.
2. New York City Reverses Course on AI
READ: After banning ChatGPT this spring, New York City Public Schools announced a new Artificial Intelligence Policy Lab this week. District spokeswoman Nicole Brownstein said the lab will guide the district’s updated approach to AI as part of the City’s effort to remain at the forefront of changes in technology. InnovateEDU executive director Erin Mote previewed the lab’s initial priorities:
The lab will “think about: under what conditions could AI use be safe, accountable, fair, and efficacious?” Mote said. “We’re going to have to tackle some sticky issues here around [reconciling] the technology and existing policy.”
Read more from Alyson Klein at Education Week here.
3. California’s Math Doesn’t Add Up
READ: California released its 1,000-page Mathematics Framework two years ago under the premise that it could produce better outcomes for groups traditionally underrepresented in STEM. But Brian Conrad, director of undergraduate mathematics studies at Stanford, says the proposal contains research that wasn’t peer-reviewed, mischaracterizes conclusions from multiple papers, and makes sweeping generalizations. Conrad took to the pages of The Atlantic to warn that adopting any version of this framework could have long-lasting adverse effects for the same groups the state says it wants to support:
Armed with trendy buzzwords and false promises of greater equity, California is promoting an approach to math instruction that’s likely to reduce opportunities for disadvantaged students—in the state and wherever else educators follow the state’s lead.
Read more here.
4. New Podcast Spotlights Culture Wars Influence
LISTEN: NBC News reporters Mike Hixenbaugh and Antonia Hylton debuted a new podcast this week that will investigate how the culture wars reached the front door of the American schoolhouse. The first episode of Grapevine focuses on a religious mother in Grapevine, Texas, who accuses her child’s English teacher of convincing students to identify as transgender.
Listen here.
5. Ohio’s Leadership Fight Continues
READ: Moriah Balingit at The Washington Post reported on the ongoing battle between Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and the state’s elected education board. DeWine signed a bill in July to strip the board of its governing authority and replace it with a new Department of Education and Workforce. The new agency, led by a governor-appointed board, launched this week despite a temporary restraining order put in place amid a lawsuit between the state and elected board members:
“This injunction is not helping our kids,” DeWine said. “We have things to do. We want every child to be able to read. We want every child to live up to their God-given potential.”
Now it’s unclear which body is in charge of overseeing the education department as it shapes curriculums, selects textbooks and performs a variety of other essential tasks, like facilitating school funding and approving private school voucher applications.
Read more here.
6. The Transformation of Ryan Walters
READ: Unlike Ohioans, Oklahomans know exactly who’s in charge of education in their state – or they thought they did. Linda Jacobson took to the pages of The 74 to profile the rise of State Superintendent Ryan Walters. A former Oklahoma Teacher of the Year finalist, Walters was known for making LGBTQ students feel seen and heard and encouraging nuanced debates in his history classes. But since ascending to Oklahoma’s top education post last November, he’s become the leader who pressured a school to fire a principal who performed as a drag queen and recently threatened to take over Tulsa Public Schools due to its spending on DEI programs. Walter’s former students say they no longer recognize him:
“In his classroom, there was no black and white. It was all shades of gray. Now it’s, ‘I’m right and you’re wrong,” [said Shane Hood]. That reticence in the classroom stood out in a town where 74% of voters chose former President Donald Trump in 2016. Some teachers, Hood remembers, wore MAGA hats in the classroom and let student slurs like “libtard” go unchallenged. But not Walters. Some students even questioned if he was a “closeted Democrat,” Edge said.
Read more here.
7. New Archive Highlights Black Educators
READ: Harvard’s Graduate School of Education launched the Black Teacher Archive this week. The collection includes more than 50,000 pages of material, such as educator journals, from former Colored Teachers Associations. The School says the archive “centralizes the intellectual, political, and cultural contributions of a thriving community of Black educators throughout the 20th century, from the Jim Crow era and beyond.”
Check it out here.
8. Polis: Public School Choice Works
READ: Colorado Governor Jared Polis reflected on Colorado’s educational accomplishments in a new brief for Education Reform Now. Polis celebrated the impact of the state’s virtual, charter, and innovation schools, and encouraged others to follow Colorado’s lead and implement cross-district enrollment policies:
In a country where housing patterns are linked with historically racist practices of our country such as redlining, it is imperative that we weaken the link between residential address and school assignment. Strong open-enrollment policies like the one we have in Colorado, supplemented by strong charter, virtual, and innovation laws, can decouple the link between school assignment and home address.
Read more here.
9. Open Enrollment Can Lead to Greater Outcomes
READ: Colorado isn’t the only state celebrating more flexible enrollment policies. Jude Schwalbach wrote for Reason Foundation about the effect of open enrollment in Arizona, where roughly 10% of students attended a public school outside their assigned zone or district in 2021-2022. Schwalbach says the move is particularly beneficial for rural students, as the policies can promote more competition and improvement:
Open enrollment, combined with Arizona’s universal education savings account policy and charter schools, means that school district boundaries matter less in school selection. Instead, Arizona’s student-centered education marketplace lets students from all walks of life access an education that is the right fit.
Read more here.
10. AFT Membership Increases, Sort Of
READ: The American Federation of Teachers added 30,000 new members during the last school year. So is the union growing? Mike Antonucci at The 74 found that the gains were largely attributable to retired members and new affiliations with existing unions. In fact, AFT collected $23M less in dues this year, although the organization has found ways to mitigate the loss:
But there’s no need to fear for the union’s finances. AFT is putting its money to fruitful use. It greatly increased investments in stocks, corporate bonds, mutual funds and U.S. Treasury notes, leading to a net growth of $28.2 million in its portfolio.
AFT spent $61.1 million on payroll and benefits for its 342 employees last year. Read more here.
11. Degree Attainment Leads to Longer Lives
READ/LISTEN: Yascha Mounk penned a piece in The Atlantic about education’s rise as a marker for social standing and how degree attainment became one of the most accurate predictors of socioeconomic outcomes and life expectancy. But is the gap between those with and without a college degree reflective of actual skillsets? Mounk spoke with economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton to find out:
“We have increasingly come to believe,” they conclude in their new paper, that a college degree “works through often arbitrary assignation of status, so that jobs are allocated, not by matching necessary or useful skills, but by the use of the BA as screen.” In an email to me, Deaton was more blunt: Both he and Case believe that the college degree is most important as “a route to social standing.”
Read more here. I’ll discuss this and more with Yascha on Lost Debate next week, so follow the show wherever you get your podcasts. I also spoke with Todd Rose this week about whether a college degree is still part of how Americans define a successful life, and the answer might surprise you after reading Mounk’s piece. Listen here.