Fiscal Cliff, Learning Loss, Students to the Rescue: 15 Most-Read Essays of 2024

From districts falling off the fiscal cliff and the crisis in STEM to COVID’s tragic lingering effects and the potential end of the U.S. Department of Education, some of the biggest education storylines of the year played out on the opinion pages of The 74 in 2024. The essays we published informed, infuriated and inspired, shining a light on some of the thorniest issues facing America’s schools — and the young people most directly affected. Here, in no particular order, are our 15 most impactful op-eds of the year.

How Does a School District Go Broke With $1.1B in Revenues? When It Spends $1.3B

by Chad Aldeman

This macabre joke is all-too real for San Francisco, where a state panel took over budget decisions until the district balances its spending. In some ways, San Francisco is unique: It spent $40 million to try to fix its payroll system and, to avert a strike, gave teachers 19% raises. California’s school district financial oversight agency is also unusual. But in many ways, San Francisco is a canary in the coal mine for districts nationwide. From declining student enrollment to sustainable student-teacher ratios, contributor Chad Aldeman pointed out some important things to look for.

40 Years After ‘A Nation at Risk,’ Could Curriculum Reform Be the Answer?

by Robert Pondiscio

In this eighth piece published in partnership with the Hoover Institution, looking at the state of American education in the 40 years since the publication of A Nation at Risk, American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Robert Pondiscio reflected on four decades of education reform and asked why most efforts have stopped at the classroom door. “Curriculum reform is the one approach that hasn’t yet been tried to break out of the exhausting cycle of education reforms that consistently fail to move the needle,” he wrote. “Rather than hope that higher pay and merit-based rewards will eventually create a better teaching cohort, we should adopt high-quality instructional materials for all classrooms and train teachers on their effective implementation.”

Richmond Pilot Program Asks: What Happens If School Year Is 200 Days, Not 180?

by Jason Kamras & Taikein Cooper

After shutting down for 500 days during COVID, Richmond Public Schools administrators realized that a once-in-a-century pandemic required a once-in-a-century response. Simply returning to normal with the hope of a quick academic recovery was not going to work. So they did something revolutionary: made the school year longer. Ninety percent of families and 70% of teachers at two elementary schools opted into a pilot program, and at year’s end, literacy and attendance were up. Now, more schools are joining in. Contributors Jason Kamras and Taikein Cooper of Richmond Public Schools explained how it’s working.

America Risks Losing a Whole Generation of Kids. Today’s Schools Can’t Help Them

by Robin Lake

New data from the Center on Reinventing Public Education’s 2024 State of the American Student report revealed that while some students were regaining ground after COVID, the youngest and most vulnerable were falling irreparably behind. In this call to action, CRPE Executive Director Robin Lake addressed COVID learning loss, absenteeism and teacher burnout, and wrote that if the current state of affairs continues, COVID-19 will leave its indelible mark on young people whose potential will go unrealized and whose futures will be constrained by the failures of adults to act.

If the Education Department Can’t Be Closed, at Least Fix It by Breaking It Up

by Mark Schneider

Closing the Department of Education is an evergreen goal for conservatives. The smallest Cabinet-level agency, it has accumulated a grab bag of functions that it doesn’t perform very well and that could — and should, wrote contributor Mark Schneider — be handled elsewhere. Even under a Republican administration, dissolving the department is difficult. But it’s not impossible. The former head of the Institute of Education Sciences and the National Center for Education Statistics suggested ways of rerouting its functions, from research to data management to FAFSA, to other agencies that could do things much better.

Big-City Districts Are Beset by Financial Dysfunction — and Kids Pay the Price

by Marguerite Roza & Maggie Cicco

Financial dysfunction is plaguing many city school districts, from Chicago, Seattle and Milwaukee to Cleveland, St. Louis and Providence, Rhode Island. From our friends at Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, contributors Marguerite Roza and Maggie Cicco dug  into the crises spurred on by the fiscal cliff, union demands, falling enrollment and basic mismanagement, among other factors, and offered some things that districts and states can do. Continuing to look the other way will make things worse, they wrote; city kids need the adults to figure this out.

Tennessee High Schoolers Solve a 40-Year-Old Serial Murder Mystery

by Beth Fertig & Edward Montalvo

Alex Campbell asked his Tennessee high school students to solve a case involving a potential serial killer — responsible for at least six murders of redheaded white women — and they delivered. Over the course of the semester, the students spoke with professional investigators, gathered evidence and pieced together a nearly 40-year-old mystery to identify a suspect. Their work became the subject of a true-crime podcast series, Murder 101. Read XQ Institute’s eye-opening conversation with Campbell.

Why Teachers Don’t Use High-Quality Instructional Materials They’re Given

by David Steiner

An increasing number of districts are procuring high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) for their schools — a huge improvement, wrote contributor David Steiner, on the home-grown curricula many educators cobble together. But most teachers don’t use them, because they don’t believe their students can manage the rigor of grade-level instruction. They’re not wrong: If you had a class of 13-year-olds whose knowledge of math and English was one to three years below grade level, would you readily teach materials that assumed grade-level competence?  Steiner offered up one way to address that disconnect.

NYC Public High School Students Challenge an Ineffectual Teacher — and Win!

by Alina Adams

Students at one of New York City’s top screened public high schools recently protested how they were being taught pre-calculus/trigonometry. Not only did they win their case, but they taught some adults a lesson. Contributor Alina Adams’s daughter was one of the students — and Adams was one of the adults who required educating. Here, she described how the class took on an ineffective educator, escalating their complaints from the teacher to the guidance counselor to the principal — and getting a replacement who, “Makes sense when he talks!”

Emergency-Hired Teachers Do Just as Well as Those Who Go Through Normal Training

by Chad Aldeman

When schools shifted online in spring 2020, it limited traditional teacher training. In response, states instituted short-term waivers allowing candidates to teach without fulfilling the normal requirements. This helped candidates who would have otherwise been prevented from teaching, while aiding school leaders in filling open positions. Were teachers worse for this lack of training? Contributor Chad Aldeman came upon research that suggested maybe not; educators who entered the profession during COVID without completing the full requirements performed about the same as their normally trained peers. So, Aldeman asked, why not make the waivers permanent?

Americans Have Yet to Accept COVID’s Tragedy — and Are Taking It out on Schools

by Conor P. Williams

For contributor Conor Williams, the pandemic shutdown was preceded by a sweet high note: His kid had just won the school’s bilingual spelling bee on March 13, 2020. Taking stock four years later, Williams found an unwillingness to reckon with COVID’s true cost or recognize its inevitable harm to learning. “This anniversary should also be an invitation to extend a modicum of grace to ourselves, our peers and our schools,” he wrote. “These were four punishing years. Pretending they can be quickly shaken off is yet another effort to shuffle the pandemic away without really grappling with it.”

Why the Adult Education World Is Overdue in Embracing the Science of Reading

by Larissa Phillips

“In my 15 years of working with adults who can’t read, I’ve seen and heard countless examples of the limitations that low literacy skills impose on adults,” wrote Larissa Phillips. “But while educators … bemoan the reading crisis and call for the heads of Balanced Literacy icons, the discourse entirely avoids the adult education world.” The Volunteer Literacy Project founder reflected on her struggles in helping adults to read and the lack of support or materials to scale solutions for this growing population.

Study: State Report Cards Need Big Improvements in Tracking COVID Learning Loss

by Morgan Polikoff

When contributor Morgan Polikoff partnered with the Center on Reinventing Public Education to study how transparent state report cards are in reflecting COVID-19 learning loss and recovery, he expected they would contain broad information in user-friendly form. He was wrong; the vast majority of report cards from the 50 states and Washington, D.C., couldn’t answer even basic questions about the effects of COVID on student outcomes. Read Polikoff’s overview of the  report’s findings and recommendations for what states should consider moving forward.

Too Many Students Say School Isn’t Relevant. It’s Time to Listen to Them 

by Elisa Villanueva Beard

Everyone from President Joe Biden on down is recommending high-quality, high-dose, small-group tutoring to help students make up for COVID learning loss. In this essay, contributor Elisa Villanueva Beard introduced a tutoring program her organization, Teach For America, instituted in 2020 using college students that has grown to include more than 1,500 tutors virtually partnering with more than 4,500 kids across 14 states. She described how the program works, some of its successes — and how it is diversifying the pipeline of prospective teachers.

There’s Already a Solution to the STEM Crisis: It’s in High Schools

by Michele Cahill, Anne Mackinnon & Talia Milgrom-Elcott

How can we get more young people to pursue careers in STEM? Our friends at Beyond100K and XQ laid out some solutions, including creating a sense of joy and belonging in the classroom and making the high school schedule less rigid so schools can collaborate with industry partners.

  

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