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About half of Americans say public K-12 education is going in the wrong direction

About half of U.S. adults (51%) say the country’s public K-12 education system is generally going in the wrong direction. A far smaller share (16%) say it’s going in the right direction, and about a third (32%) are not sure, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in November 2023.

Pew Research Center conducted this analysis to understand how Americans view the K-12 public education system. We surveyed 5,029 U.S. adults from Nov. 9 to Nov. 16, 2023.

The survey was conducted by Ipsos for Pew Research Center on the Ipsos KnowledgePanel Omnibus. The KnowledgePanel is a probability-based web panel recruited primarily through national, random sampling of residential addresses. The survey is weighted by gender, age, race, ethnicity, education, income and other categories.

Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and the survey methodology .

A majority of those who say it’s headed in the wrong direction say a major reason is that schools are not spending enough time on core academic subjects.

These findings come amid debates about what is taught in schools , as well as concerns about school budget cuts and students falling behind academically.

Related: Race and LGBTQ Issues in K-12 Schools

Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say the public K-12 education system is going in the wrong direction. About two-thirds of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (65%) say this, compared with 40% of Democrats and Democratic leaners. In turn, 23% of Democrats and 10% of Republicans say it’s headed in the right direction.

Among Republicans, conservatives are the most likely to say public education is headed in the wrong direction: 75% say this, compared with 52% of moderate or liberal Republicans. There are no significant differences among Democrats by ideology.

Similar shares of K-12 parents and adults who don’t have a child in K-12 schools say the system is going in the wrong direction.

A separate Center survey of public K-12 teachers found that 82% think the overall state of public K-12 education has gotten worse in the past five years. And many teachers are pessimistic about the future.

Related: What’s It Like To Be A Teacher in America Today?

Why do Americans think public K-12 education is going in the wrong direction?

We asked adults who say the public education system is going in the wrong direction why that might be. About half or more say the following are major reasons:

• Schools not spending enough time on core academic subjects, like reading, math, science and social studies (69%)
• Teachers bringing their personal political and social views into the classroom (54%)
• Schools not having the funding and resources they need (52%)

About a quarter (26%) say a major reason is that parents have too much influence in decisions about what schools are teaching.

How views vary by party

Americans in each party point to different reasons why public education is headed in the wrong direction.

Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say major reasons are:

• A lack of focus on core academic subjects (79% vs. 55%)
• Teachers bringing their personal views into the classroom (76% vs. 23%)

In turn, Democrats are more likely than Republicans to point to:

• Insufficient school funding and resources (78% vs. 33%)
• Parents having too much say in what schools are teaching (46% vs. 13%)

Views also vary within each party by ideology.

Among Republicans, conservatives are particularly likely to cite a lack of focus on core academic subjects and teachers bringing their personal views into the classroom.

Among Democrats, liberals are especially likely to cite schools lacking resources and parents having too much say in the curriculum.

Note: Here are the questions used for this analysis , along with responses, and the survey methodology .

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Paul Reville says COVID-19 school closures have turned a spotlight on inequities and other shortcomings

This is part of our Coronavirus Update series in which Harvard specialists in epidemiology, infectious disease, economics, politics, and other disciplines offer insights into what the latest developments in the COVID-19 outbreak may bring.

As former secretary of education for Massachusetts, Paul Reville is keenly aware of the financial and resource disparities between districts, schools, and individual students. The school closings due to coronavirus concerns have turned a spotlight on those problems and how they contribute to educational and income inequality in the nation. The Gazette talked to Reville, the Francis Keppel Professor of Practice of Educational Policy and Administration at Harvard Graduate School of Education , about the effects of the pandemic on schools and how the experience may inspire an overhaul of the American education system.

Paul Reville

GAZETTE: Schools around the country have closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. Do these massive school closures have any precedent in the history of the United States?

REVILLE: We’ve certainly had school closures in particular jurisdictions after a natural disaster, like in New Orleans after the hurricane. But on this scale? No, certainly not in my lifetime. There were substantial closings in many places during the 1918 Spanish Flu, some as long as four months, but not as widespread as those we’re seeing today. We’re in uncharted territory.

GAZETTE: What lessons did school districts around the country learn from school closures in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and other similar school closings?

REVILLE:   I think the lessons we’ve learned are that it’s good [for school districts] to have a backup system, if they can afford it. I was talking recently with folks in a district in New Hampshire where, because of all the snow days they have in the wintertime, they had already developed a backup online learning system. That made the transition, in this period of school closure, a relatively easy one for them to undertake. They moved seamlessly to online instruction.

Most of our big systems don’t have this sort of backup. Now, however, we’re not only going to have to construct a backup to get through this crisis, but we’re going to have to develop new, permanent systems, redesigned to meet the needs which have been so glaringly exposed in this crisis. For example, we have always had large gaps in students’ learning opportunities after school, weekends, and in the summer. Disadvantaged students suffer the consequences of those gaps more than affluent children, who typically have lots of opportunities to fill in those gaps. I’m hoping that we can learn some things through this crisis about online delivery of not only instruction, but an array of opportunities for learning and support. In this way, we can make the most of the crisis to help redesign better systems of education and child development.

GAZETTE: Is that one of the silver linings of this public health crisis?

REVILLE: In politics we say, “Never lose the opportunity of a crisis.” And in this situation, we don’t simply want to frantically struggle to restore the status quo because the status quo wasn’t operating at an effective level and certainly wasn’t serving all of our children fairly. There are things we can learn in the messiness of adapting through this crisis, which has revealed profound disparities in children’s access to support and opportunities. We should be asking: How do we make our school, education, and child-development systems more individually responsive to the needs of our students? Why not construct a system that meets children where they are and gives them what they need inside and outside of school in order to be successful? Let’s take this opportunity to end the “one size fits all” factory model of education.

GAZETTE: How seriously are students going to be set back by not having formal instruction for at least two months, if not more?

“The best that can come of this is a new paradigm shift in terms of the way in which we look at education, because children’s well-being and success depend on more than just schooling,” Paul Reville said of the current situation. “We need to look holistically, at the entirety of children’s lives.”

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard file photo

REVILLE: The first thing to consider is that it’s going to be a variable effect. We tend to regard our school systems uniformly, but actually schools are widely different in their operations and impact on children, just as our students themselves are very different from one another. Children come from very different backgrounds and have very different resources, opportunities, and support outside of school. Now that their entire learning lives, as well as their actual physical lives, are outside of school, those differences and disparities come into vivid view. Some students will be fine during this crisis because they’ll have high-quality learning opportunities, whether it’s formal schooling or informal homeschooling of some kind coupled with various enrichment opportunities. Conversely, other students won’t have access to anything of quality, and as a result will be at an enormous disadvantage. Generally speaking, the most economically challenged in our society will be the most vulnerable in this crisis, and the most advantaged are most likely to survive it without losing too much ground.

GAZETTE: Schools in Massachusetts are closed until May 4. Some people are saying they should remain closed through the end of the school year. What’s your take on this?

REVILLE: That should be a medically based judgment call that will be best made several weeks from now. If there’s evidence to suggest that students and teachers can safely return to school, then I’d say by all means. However, that seems unlikely.

GAZETTE: The digital divide between students has become apparent as schools have increasingly turned to online instruction. What can school systems do to address that gap?

REVILLE: Arguably, this is something that schools should have been doing a long time ago, opening up the whole frontier of out-of-school learning by virtue of making sure that all students have access to the technology and the internet they need in order to be connected in out-of-school hours. Students in certain school districts don’t have those affordances right now because often the school districts don’t have the budget to do this, but federal, state, and local taxpayers are starting to see the imperative for coming together to meet this need.

Twenty-first century learning absolutely requires technology and internet. We can’t leave this to chance or the accident of birth. All of our children should have the technology they need to learn outside of school. Some communities can take it for granted that their children will have such tools. Others who have been unable to afford to level the playing field are now finding ways to step up. Boston, for example, has bought 20,000 Chromebooks and is creating hotspots around the city where children and families can go to get internet access. That’s a great start but, in the long run, I think we can do better than that. At the same time, many communities still need help just to do what Boston has done for its students.

Communities and school districts are going to have to adapt to get students on a level playing field. Otherwise, many students will continue to be at a huge disadvantage. We can see this playing out now as our lower-income and more heterogeneous school districts struggle over whether to proceed with online instruction when not everyone can access it. Shutting down should not be an option. We have to find some middle ground, and that means the state and local school districts are going to have to act urgently and nimbly to fill in the gaps in technology and internet access.

GAZETTE : What can parents can do to help with the homeschooling of their children in the current crisis?

“In this situation, we don’t simply want to frantically struggle to restore the status quo because the status quo wasn’t operating at an effective level and certainly wasn’t serving all of our children fairly.”

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REVILLE: School districts can be helpful by giving parents guidance about how to constructively use this time. The default in our education system is now homeschooling. Virtually all parents are doing some form of homeschooling, whether they want to or not. And the question is: What resources, support, or capacity do they have to do homeschooling effectively? A lot of parents are struggling with that.

And again, we have widely variable capacity in our families and school systems. Some families have parents home all day, while other parents have to go to work. Some school systems are doing online classes all day long, and the students are fully engaged and have lots of homework, and the parents don’t need to do much. In other cases, there is virtually nothing going on at the school level, and everything falls to the parents. In the meantime, lots of organizations are springing up, offering different kinds of resources such as handbooks and curriculum outlines, while many school systems are coming up with guidance documents to help parents create a positive learning environment in their homes by engaging children in challenging activities so they keep learning.

There are lots of creative things that can be done at home. But the challenge, of course, for parents is that they are contending with working from home, and in other cases, having to leave home to do their jobs. We have to be aware that families are facing myriad challenges right now. If we’re not careful, we risk overloading families. We have to strike a balance between what children need and what families can do, and how you maintain some kind of work-life balance in the home environment. Finally, we must recognize the equity issues in the forced overreliance on homeschooling so that we avoid further disadvantaging the already disadvantaged.

GAZETTE: What has been the biggest surprise for you thus far?

REVILLE: One that’s most striking to me is that because schools are closed, parents and the general public have become more aware than at any time in my memory of the inequities in children’s lives outside of school. Suddenly we see front-page coverage about food deficits, inadequate access to health and mental health, problems with housing stability, and access to educational technology and internet. Those of us in education know these problems have existed forever. What has happened is like a giant tidal wave that came and sucked the water off the ocean floor, revealing all these uncomfortable realities that had been beneath the water from time immemorial. This newfound public awareness of pervasive inequities, I hope, will create a sense of urgency in the public domain. We need to correct for these inequities in order for education to realize its ambitious goals. We need to redesign our systems of child development and education. The most obvious place to start for schools is working on equitable access to educational technology as a way to close the digital-learning gap.

GAZETTE: You’ve talked about some concrete changes that should be considered to level the playing field. But should we be thinking broadly about education in some new way?

REVILLE: The best that can come of this is a new paradigm shift in terms of the way in which we look at education, because children’s well-being and success depend on more than just schooling. We need to look holistically, at the entirety of children’s lives. In order for children to come to school ready to learn, they need a wide array of essential supports and opportunities outside of school. And we haven’t done a very good job of providing these. These education prerequisites go far beyond the purview of school systems, but rather are the responsibility of communities and society at large. In order to learn, children need equal access to health care, food, clean water, stable housing, and out-of-school enrichment opportunities, to name just a few preconditions. We have to reconceptualize the whole job of child development and education, and construct systems that meet children where they are and give them what they need, both inside and outside of school, in order for all of them to have a genuine opportunity to be successful.

Within this coronavirus crisis there is an opportunity to reshape American education. The only precedent in our field was when the Sputnik went up in 1957, and suddenly, Americans became very worried that their educational system wasn’t competitive with that of the Soviet Union. We felt vulnerable, like our defenses were down, like a nation at risk. And we decided to dramatically boost the involvement of the federal government in schooling and to increase and improve our scientific curriculum. We decided to look at education as an important factor in human capital development in this country. Again, in 1983, the report “Nation at Risk” warned of a similar risk: Our education system wasn’t up to the demands of a high-skills/high-knowledge economy.

We tried with our education reforms to build a 21st-century education system, but the results of that movement have been modest. We are still a nation at risk. We need another paradigm shift, where we look at our goals and aspirations for education, which are summed up in phrases like “No Child Left Behind,” “Every Student Succeeds,” and “All Means All,” and figure out how to build a system that has the capacity to deliver on that promise of equity and excellence in education for all of our students, and all means all. We’ve got that opportunity now. I hope we don’t fail to take advantage of it in a misguided rush to restore the status quo.

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

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The U.S. Education System Isn’t Giving Students What Employers Need

• Michael Hansen

Companies also need to stop fixating on the four-year degree.

There’s a direct disconnect between education and employability in the U.S., where employers view universities and colleges as the gatekeepers of workforce talent, yet those same institutions aren’t prioritizing job skills and career readiness. This not only hurts employers, but also sets the average American worker up for failure before they’ve even begun their career, as new employees who have been hired based on their four-year educational background often lack the actual skills needed to perform in their role. To create change as an industry, we must provide greater credibility to alternate education paths that allow students to gain employable skills. Now is the time for employers to increase credibility for skills-based hiring, to remove stigmas around vocational education, and to move forward to create equal opportunities for all students.

The Covid-19 pandemic stripped millions of Americans of their jobs. As of April 2021, the economy was still down 4 million jobs compared to February 2020. At the same time, we are seeing unprecedented labor shortages, with 8.1 million jobs open and unfilled across the U.S. Markets that saw explosive growth due to the pandemic, such as cybersecurity and technology , are struggling to maintain the levels of innovation needed to continue that trend, because they can’t find the right talent.

• MH Michael Hansen is the Chief Executive Officer of Cengage, an education technology company serving millions of learners worldwide.

Partner Center

How technology is reinventing education

Stanford Graduate School of Education Dean Dan Schwartz and other education scholars weigh in on what's next for some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom.

Image credit: Claire Scully

New advances in technology are upending education, from the recent debut of new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT to the growing accessibility of virtual-reality tools that expand the boundaries of the classroom. For educators, at the heart of it all is the hope that every learner gets an equal chance to develop the skills they need to succeed. But that promise is not without its pitfalls.

“Technology is a game-changer for education – it offers the prospect of universal access to high-quality learning experiences, and it creates fundamentally new ways of teaching,” said Dan Schwartz, dean of Stanford Graduate School of Education (GSE), who is also a professor of educational technology at the GSE and faculty director of the Stanford Accelerator for Learning . “But there are a lot of ways we teach that aren’t great, and a big fear with AI in particular is that we just get more efficient at teaching badly. This is a moment to pay attention, to do things differently.”

For K-12 schools, this year also marks the end of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding program, which has provided pandemic recovery funds that many districts used to invest in educational software and systems. With these funds running out in September 2024, schools are trying to determine their best use of technology as they face the prospect of diminishing resources.

Here, Schwartz and other Stanford education scholars weigh in on some of the technology trends taking center stage in the classroom this year.

AI in the classroom

In 2023, the big story in technology and education was generative AI, following the introduction of ChatGPT and other chatbots that produce text seemingly written by a human in response to a question or prompt. Educators immediately worried that students would use the chatbot to cheat by trying to pass its writing off as their own. As schools move to adopt policies around students’ use of the tool, many are also beginning to explore potential opportunities – for example, to generate reading assignments or coach students during the writing process.

AI can also help automate tasks like grading and lesson planning, freeing teachers to do the human work that drew them into the profession in the first place, said Victor Lee, an associate professor at the GSE and faculty lead for the AI + Education initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning. “I’m heartened to see some movement toward creating AI tools that make teachers’ lives better – not to replace them, but to give them the time to do the work that only teachers are able to do,” he said. “I hope to see more on that front.”

He also emphasized the need to teach students now to begin questioning and critiquing the development and use of AI. “AI is not going away,” said Lee, who is also director of CRAFT (Classroom-Ready Resources about AI for Teaching), which provides free resources to help teach AI literacy to high school students across subject areas. “We need to teach students how to understand and think critically about this technology.”

Immersive environments

The use of immersive technologies like augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality is also expected to surge in the classroom, especially as new high-profile devices integrating these realities hit the marketplace in 2024.

The educational possibilities now go beyond putting on a headset and experiencing life in a distant location. With new technologies, students can create their own local interactive 360-degree scenarios, using just a cell phone or inexpensive camera and simple online tools.

“This is an area that’s really going to explode over the next couple of years,” said Kristen Pilner Blair, director of research for the Digital Learning initiative at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, which runs a program exploring the use of virtual field trips to promote learning. “Students can learn about the effects of climate change, say, by virtually experiencing the impact on a particular environment. But they can also become creators, documenting and sharing immersive media that shows the effects where they live.”

Integrating AI into virtual simulations could also soon take the experience to another level, Schwartz said. “If your VR experience brings me to a redwood tree, you could have a window pop up that allows me to ask questions about the tree, and AI can deliver the answers.”

Gamification

Another trend expected to intensify this year is the gamification of learning activities, often featuring dynamic videos with interactive elements to engage and hold students’ attention.

“Gamification is a good motivator, because one key aspect is reward, which is very powerful,” said Schwartz. The downside? Rewards are specific to the activity at hand, which may not extend to learning more generally. “If I get rewarded for doing math in a space-age video game, it doesn’t mean I’m going to be motivated to do math anywhere else.”

Gamification sometimes tries to make “chocolate-covered broccoli,” Schwartz said, by adding art and rewards to make speeded response tasks involving single-answer, factual questions more fun. He hopes to see more creative play patterns that give students points for rethinking an approach or adapting their strategy, rather than only rewarding them for quickly producing a correct response.

Data-gathering and analysis

The growing use of technology in schools is producing massive amounts of data on students’ activities in the classroom and online. “We’re now able to capture moment-to-moment data, every keystroke a kid makes,” said Schwartz – data that can reveal areas of struggle and different learning opportunities, from solving a math problem to approaching a writing assignment.

But outside of research settings, he said, that type of granular data – now owned by tech companies – is more likely used to refine the design of the software than to provide teachers with actionable information.

The promise of personalized learning is being able to generate content aligned with students’ interests and skill levels, and making lessons more accessible for multilingual learners and students with disabilities. Realizing that promise requires that educators can make sense of the data that’s being collected, said Schwartz – and while advances in AI are making it easier to identify patterns and findings, the data also needs to be in a system and form educators can access and analyze for decision-making. Developing a usable infrastructure for that data, Schwartz said, is an important next step.

With the accumulation of student data comes privacy concerns: How is the data being collected? Are there regulations or guidelines around its use in decision-making? What steps are being taken to prevent unauthorized access? In 2023 K-12 schools experienced a rise in cyberattacks, underscoring the need to implement strong systems to safeguard student data.

Technology is “requiring people to check their assumptions about education,” said Schwartz, noting that AI in particular is very efficient at replicating biases and automating the way things have been done in the past, including poor models of instruction. “But it’s also opening up new possibilities for students producing material, and for being able to identify children who are not average so we can customize toward them. It’s an opportunity to think of entirely new ways of teaching – this is the path I hope to see.”

America’s education system is failing–but a growing school choice movement believes it has the solution

American students are in trouble. About a third of students in the youngest grades are behind on reading. Only 36% of fourth graders are proficient at grade-level math. The newest National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP)–the nation’s report card–shows eighth-graders’ history scores are the lowest on record since the assessment began in 1994. And what’s more, every single state experienced teacher shortages in at least one subject in 2022.

While many of these problems began before COVID-19, there’s no denying that the pandemic paused or reversed academic progress for kids across the country. The NAEP showed that for both fourth and eighth-grade students, reading scores declined in at least 30 states and jurisdictions , and math scores declined nearly everywhere from 2019 to 2022.

Perhaps most troubling is how the pandemic made existing achievement gaps worse. Stanford University researchers conducted a district-by-district analysis of the NAEP results, and found that students in low-income school districts and communities experienced the biggest learning losses.

How do we get American education back on track? A part of the solution will come from increasing the range of options that families have when choosing schools. The NAEP’s wake-up call shows that a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t working for all students.

School choice programs mean that students aren’t locked into attending a district public school based on home address. Instead, they provide parents with funds that can be used toward a broad range of options , including secular or religious private schools as well as charter schools, which are publicly funded schools that have greater autonomy.

School choice makes it possible for all students, regardless of economic background, to get an education that matches their needs and interests. Depending on the student, that could mean a smaller school, one that caters to learning differences, or one that focuses on arts, athletics, or science.

Charter schools generally outperform traditional public schools, especially in urban areas. A report from Stanford University found that students in urban charter schools received, on average, 40 additional learning days in math and 28 additional learning days in reading each year, compared to their counterparts in traditional public schools.

Meanwhile, the NAEP results showed that as a nationwide group, Catholic schools lost less ground during the pandemic than public schools, and even held steady in fourth-grade math and improved in eighth-grade reading . In fourth-grade math, t hey performed better than all state public school systems .

To make sure more students get the best education they can, my organization, the Daniels Fund, has committed to adding 100,000 seats to non-traditional schools by 2030, spread across the four states we serve: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. This big bet will increase the attendance capacity of non-traditional schools in our region by nearly 30%.

Each new seat will allow another student to get an education of their choice. This could be in a charter school, private school, or home-school co-op. Our investment will also allow families to choose micro-schools (small educational programs independent of school districts), learning pods (parent-organized groups that use hired instructors), or hybrid schools (which combine in-person and online learning). We’ve observed that the most significant innovations in education today are happening within these alternative models.

We’re far from alone in our efforts. In 2020, 50CAN, a national educational advocacy organization that has secured 198 policy wins for students in 15 states, provided $335 million in direct aid to families in North Carolina and gave 10,000 more children access to multiple school options in the state. Excel in Ed, an education thought and action organization that develops policy recommendations for leaders around the country, identifies equitable funding for public charter schools as a key directive.

And we know that parents want choice. From 2009 to 2019, Colorado charter schools grew by more than 85% . Nationally, 1.4 million students left district public schools during the 2020-2021 school year, with 240,000 of them choosing charter schools .

This shouldn’t come as a surprise. After Denver began expanding school choice in 2009, graduation rates and achievement in English and math improved , according to a 2021 University of Colorado report.

Too many young people are falling behind in their education. It’s time to give them more options, so they can thrive in the learning environment that’s best for them.

Hanna Skandera is the president and CEO of the Daniels Fund and former Secretary of Public Education of New Mexico.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of  Fortune .

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UN independent human rights experts on Thursday raised alarm over the “systematic destruction” of the Palestinian education system in the Gaza Strip, as Israel’s military operation continues unabated.

Since the brutal 7 October attacks by Hamas and other Palestinian militants on southern Israel, and the ensuing military assault by Israel, over 5,800 students and teachers have been killed and a further 8,575 have been injured across the enclave.

Many others have been arrested, while attacks on places of learning have left more than 625,000 students without any ability to study.

UN schools sheltering civilians displaced from their homes have also come under fire, including some inside Israeli military-designated “safe zones”.

UN_SPExperts

Hopes and dreams destroyed

“With more than 80 per cent of schools in Gaza damaged or destroyed, it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as ‘scholasticide’,” the experts said .

The term “ scholasticide ” refers to the systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure.

The experts called on all parties to respect international humanitarian law and international human rights law, and to protect educational institutions, teachers, and students.

“We remind Israel in particular of its obligations to comply with the provisional measures ordered by the International Court of Justice ( ICJ ) on 26 January,” they said.

Devastating long-term impacts

The experts, including UN Special Rapporteurs on the right to education and on the situation in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, also warned of the far-reaching impacts of attacks on education in Gaza.

“The persistent, callous attacks on educational infrastructure in Gaza have a devastating long-term impact on the fundamental rights of people to learn and freely express themselves, depriving yet another generation of Palestinians of their future,” the experts said.

“When schools are destroyed, so too are hopes and dreams.”

Not isolated incidents

In addition to schools, a further 195 heritage sites, 227 mosques and three churches have also been damaged or destroyed, including the Central Archives of Gaza which catalogued 150 years of history.

Israa University, the last remaining university in Gaza was demolished by the Israeli military on 17 January. 

The experts noted that without a safe place to go to school, women and girls face multifaceted risks, including increased gender-based violence.

More than one million Palestinian children in Gaza are now in need of mental health and psychosocial support and will suffer the trauma of this war throughout their lives.

“These attacks are not isolated incidents. They present a systematic pattern of violence aimed at dismantling the very foundation of Palestinian society,” the experts said.

Independent experts

The human rights experts raising the alarm included several UN special rapporteurs and members of human rights working groups.

Appointed by the UN Human Rights Council , they work on a voluntary basis, are not UN staff and do not receive a salary. They are independent from any government or organization and serve in their individual capacity.

UN food convoys enter Gaza from Israeli port

Meanwhile, the UN emergency food relief agency ( WFP ) reported that two of its convoys crossed into Gaza from Israel’s Ashdod Port , via the Kerem Shalom border crossing point.  

The first convoy on Tuesday was made up of eight trucks, followed by a second seven-truck convoy on Wednesday.  

In total, the World Food Programme (WFP) convoys delivered 374 metric tonnes of wheat flour, UN Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric, told journalists in at the UN Headquarters, in New York.

“Fourteen additional [WFP] trucks are being loaded today and we hope they will depart soon ,” he reported.

“WFP says the sustained use of that port – as well as a smoother movement of convoys via Kerem Shalom into Gaza – will notably reduce the waiting time for cargo to enter the Gaza Strip ,” Mr. Dujarric added.

As part of the emergency response, the agency has shipped some 2,700 metric tonnes of wheat flour to Ashdod Port in southern Israel.

UN Senior Coordinator visits Gaza

In addition, Mr. Dujarric also informed journalists that Sigrid Kaag, the UN Senior Humanitarian and Reconstruction Coordinator for Gaza, has concluded another visit to the Gaza Strip.  

While there, she went to Khan Younis where she witnessed the war’s impact on Palestinian civilians firsthand. She also visited a maternity ward in an International Medical Corps field hospital, as well as the Nasser Medical complex.  

She spoke with the director and medical staff at Nasser about the challenges of securing entry and supplies of urgently needed medical items, Mr. Dujarric said.

“Ms. Kaag [also] went to Tel Aviv following her visit to Gaza and just concluded a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as other Israeli cabinet officials,” the UN Spokesperson added. 

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Most Alaska students are behind in math, science and language arts, latest statewide assessments show

A classroom at Bartlett High School in Anchorage. (Emily Mesner / ADN file)

The majority of Alaska students scored below grade level proficiency in statewide math, science and language arts assessments taken last spring — even after the state lowered the standard for what is considered proficient.

The latest results of the Alaska System of Academic Readiness, known as AK STAR, were released Wednesday by the Alaska Department of Education and Early Development.

The scores showed slight improvements in student achievement from the previous year , though an administrator cautioned that the latest results did not allow for an apples-to-apples comparison to the earlier results because the proficiency metrics had been lowered.

The spring 2023 results released Wednesday “are not comparable to the 2022 results,” DEED assessment administrator Elizabeth Greninger wrote in an email. “This is due to the changes to the achievement levels (cut scores) for English language arts and mathematics assessments, as adopted by the State Board in January 2024.”

[ Dunleavy lays out efforts to preserve ability to spend public funds at private and religious schools ]

Both the Alaska Science Assessment and AK STAR were distributed to most Alaska public students, from elementary to high school. The AK STAR assessment was new last year.

Here’s how students performed:

• 68% of Alaska students tested were not proficient in English language arts.

• 68% of students tested were not proficient in math.

• 63% of students tested were not proficient in science.

• 73% of third-graders were not proficient in English language arts, and 73% of ninth-graders were not proficient in math.

• Less than a fifth of correspondence students participated in the assessments.

• In Anchorage, 36% of students were proficient in English language arts and 37% were proficient in math.

An Anchorage School District spokesperson said the district declined to comment on the results. A DEED spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

In January, the Alaska Board of Education approved lowering the standards of what’s considered proficient, citing the fact that Alaska had set the bar unusually high compared to other states.

The change involved an adjustment to cut scores, which are standardized test results that indicate whether the student has performed above or below grade level. Alaska’s proficiency standards have long been among the highest in the nation, and are still in the top third even after the change, education commissioner Deena Bishop told the state board at the time.

The change drew some pushback from educators who said lowering the bar for student performance wasn’t the answer to improving outcomes.

But despite the change, the latest scores in most categories closely mirrored the previous year.

In 2022, 70% of students were not proficient in English language arts; 77% were not proficient in math; and 62% were not proficient in science.

Last year, education advocates attributed the score drops in part to learning disruptions brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, which set many students behind. However, student performance on standardized tests in Alaska had been low before the pandemic: In 2018, half of the students who took statewide assessments didn’t meet grade-level standards .

Alaska student performance on standardized tests has become a highly politicized topic in Alaska this legislative session as lawmakers have tried to pass a sweeping education reform bill after years of mostly flat education funding.

Some Republican lawmakers have cited lagging student performance as an indication that public schools should be reformed as a condition for receiving additional funding. Education advocates have said the scores are a result of underfunding.

As part of that debate, Gov. Mike Dunleavy touted a national study finding Alaska charter school students far outperformed their peers at other public schools in Alaska and nationwide, which the governor said was evidence that the state needed to expand charter school offerings. That study relied on a single standardized test and drew scrutiny from lawmakers and education advocates.

Meanwhile, some rural educators say standardized tests aren’t the only or best measure of student performance, and that schools off the road system often struggle with poor internet connections that interrupt test-taking.

In an email, Anchorage School Board member Kelly Lessens cautioned against relying too heavily on the standardized test results as a measure of student achievement without considering additional context.

“We know that student achievement (proficiency) is highly correlated with poverty (economic status) in ASD and around Alaska,” she wrote. “We also know that absenteeism rates were extremely high in Alaska last year and that (class sizes) have been growing.”

Lessens said the Anchorage board would likely discuss the results in depth as a way to set reading goals for the district.

The change to the cut scores caused the results, usually released in the fall, to be delayed this year, the state education department said.

Annie Berman

Annie Berman is a reporter covering health care, education and general assignments for the Anchorage Daily News. She previously reported for Mission Local and KQED in San Francisco before joining ADN in 2020. Contact her at [email protected].

Education | No D’s and F’s? No extra credit? Will Bay Area…

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Education | No D’s and F’s? No extra credit? Will Bay Area schools’ switch to equity grading help or harm students?

Dublin unified school district says the public school grading system is unfair.

Hrihaan Bhutani is already thinking about college. The Dublin High freshman is taking four Advanced Placement classes next year and has crammed his schedule with extracurricular activities to better his chances of getting into an Ivy League school.

But a change at the high school designed to get students less focused on grades has done the opposite. Suddenly, in some classes, A’s are almost unachievable, unless you score 100%. And F’s don’t exist. For high-achieving students like Bhutani, the pressure to be perfect is even more of a burden.

“I feel more stressed … now with this new system,” said Bhutani, who is especially sweating his biology class, one of dozens trying a variety of new grading scales under a two-year experiment. “Even if you’re at a 99, you would get moved down to an 85,” he explained, which translates to a world-ending B.

Dublin Unified’s new grading policy will go into effect for all 6th through 12th grade classes next year and is part of a national shift toward “equity grading” – a controversial concept that moves away from traditional grading to better measure how well students understand what they are being taught.

The goal is to lower the impact of things that “fluff” grades – extra credit, class participation and homework – while also making it easier for lower-performing students to bounce back from failing.

Several school districts in the Bay Area have explored similar ideas, including Oakland Unified, Pleasanton Unified, Santa Clara Unified and most recently Palo Alto Unified. But how districts implement the change differs, with some choosing to eliminate D’s and F’s, while others move away from zero grades or eliminate late penalties.

Equitable grading was first coined by Joe Feldman in his 2018 book, “Grading for Equity,” which has become the instruction manual for more than 200 schools across the country. Feldman said he’s partnered with 25 districts and schools in California to guide them as they make the transition.

Liliana Castrellon, an assistant professor in the department of education at San Jose State University whose research focuses on equity in education, said equitable grading practices became more common in school districts after the COVID-19 pandemic.

“If anything, what we learned during the pandemic is that our traditional education system is not working for everyone,” Castrellon said. “So there’s been a lot of conversations around … how do we reimagine and re-envision practices that are more equitable and that are going to benefit all students?”

A task force at Dublin Unified first discussed revising grading policies in 2021. The following year 28 teachers began testing new ways to measure students’ proficiency.

Dublin Unified’s superintendent Chris Funk explained at a board meeting last year that the district’s grading system wasn’t consistent across all schools, which caused issues in the classroom.

“There’s no question that the grading system that’s been around is an inequitable practice. Much of the grading that is involved does not grade anyone’s mastery of the subject content,” he said at the meeting. “Zeros in a grading system do not accurately reflect a student’s proficiency. Awarding zeros as discipline is not an appropriate consequence as they can be almost impossible to recover from.”

But the incremental changes led to widespread pushback among parents, students and teachers – inciting a Change.org petition to stop the practice and a WhatsApp group with more than 400 parents against the policy shift.

Some parents and teachers said they worry the changes will encourage students to slack off and leave them unprepared for college.

“I think the dumbing down of curriculum will lead to our kids failing in college because they’re not going to be prepared on the same level as kids from other districts and other states,” said Dublin parent Olena Stadnyuk.

Skeptics say school districts are implementing no-zero policies and removing failing letter grades to boost graduation rates as they struggle to recover from learning loss caused by the pandemic.

“This will up kids graduating, it will up their numbers,” said Laurie Sargent, an eighth grade English teacher at Cottonwood Creek, a TK-8th grade school in Dublin. “They’ll have fewer kids failing and then that looks good. It’s strategic.”

Some schools have shifted their grading policies in response to the University of California and California State University “A to G” requirements, which mandate students receive a C or better in 15 of their high school courses to qualify for admission.

“Almost all kids in California graduate high school but only about half who graduate are eligible to apply to UC or CSU schools,” said Alix Gallagher, director of strategic partnerships for Policy Analysis for California Education. “In California, grades are the sole determinant … Grades are a gatekeeper for kids.”

Dela Antoinette, a parent of a sophomore at Dublin High, said she worries that equity grading will harm the high-achieving students who are performing well under the current system.

“Instead of pushing this agenda, let’s focus on lifting this particular group up and get them up to the standard of other students that are excelling,” she said. “Not lower the standards, not change the entire system for everyone.”

Bhutani and his biology classmate Bhuvan Krishnamohan, who are just completing their first year of high school, are already thinking about transferring to a school that doesn’t use equitable grading.

“I think the system favors the people that are not doing so well and they want to do well, rather than the people that are doing really well and want to continue that,” Krishnamohan said.

Sargent, the English teacher, said Dublin Unified’s new grading system doesn’t set students up for success in the real world.

“We want to make our students college and career ready,” Sargent said. “Nowhere in college do you get 50% for doing nothing. Nowhere in the world of work do you get 50% for doing nothing…If I don’t show up to work, they don’t pay me 50% of my salary even if I made a reasonable attempt to get there.”

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DeSantis tweaks Florida book challenge law, blames liberal activist who wanted Bible out of schools

FILE - Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis answers questions from the media, March 7, 2023, at the state Capitol in Tallahassee, Fla. DeSantis admits the book challenge law he enacted two years ago is causing problems for school districts. He signed a bill Tuesday, April 16, 2024, that adjusts the law that made it easy for anyone to have any book removed from school libraries and classrooms, either temporarily or permanently. (AP Photo/Phil Sears, File)

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TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — Two years ago, Democrats repeatedly and forcefully warned Republicans and Gov. Ron DeSantis that a new law making it easier to challenge school books was so broadly worded that it would create havoc across the state.

Now they can say, “I told you so.”

DeSantis backtracked on the 2022 law on Tuesday when he signed a bill narrowing its focus. He blamed liberal activists for abusing the law, not the citizens whose objections to certain books account for the majority of book removals from school libraries and classrooms.

“The idea that someone can use the parents rights and the curriculum transparency to start objecting to every single book to try to make a mockery of this is just wrong,” DeSantis said the day before the bill signing. “That’s performative. That’s political.”

Coincidentally, PEN America, a group that fights book bans, issued a report Tuesday saying Florida is responsible for 72% of the books that have been pulled from the nation’s schools in the first half of the current school year.

The organization said liberal activists are not the ones who should be blamed for abusing the law.

“The majority of books that we see being removed are books that talk about LBTQ+ identities, that include characters of color, that talk about race and racism, that include depictions of sexual experiences in the most broadest interpretation of that understanding,” said Kasey Meehan, Pen America’s Freedom to Read program director.

Those challenges are being made by conservative individuals and groups such as Moms For Liberty, Meehan said.

The original law allowed any person — parent or not, district resident or not — to challenge books as often as they wanted. Once challenged, a book has to be pulled from shelves until the school district resolves the complaint. The new law limits people who don’t have students in a school district to one challenge per month.

The PEN America report says Florida is responsible for 3,135 of the 4,349 school book bans in the United States so far this school year. Just this week in conservative Clay County, one person challenged 40 books, Meehan said.

Before dropping out of the Republican presidential primary , DeSantis campaigned heavily on his education platform, including the law giving people more power to challenge books.

“It’s just a big mess that DeSantis created and now he’s trying to disown it, but I don’t know if he’ll be able to distance himself from this because he campaigned on it so hard,” said House Democratic Leader Fentrice Driskell.

It’s not the only example of the tough-talking governor having to make adjustments to ideology he championed while seeking the White House.

He also has made concessions in the settlement of several lawsuits involving the state and Walt Disney World. The dispute between them erupted in 2022 after the company spoke out against a DeSantis-backed law that opponents dubbed “Don’t Say Gay.” The law bans classroom lessons on gender identity and sexual orientation.

The Associated Press asked DeSantis’ office for examples of liberal activists abusing the law and it provided one: Chaz Stevens, a South Florida resident who has often lampooned government. Stevens raised challenges in dozens of school districts over the Bible, dictionaries and thesauruses.

The change to the law “ensures that book challenges are limited for individuals, like Chaz, who do not have children with access to the school district’s materials,” DeSantis spokeswoman Julia Friedland said in an email. She didn’t reply to follow-up emails requesting more examples.

Stevens, who 11 years ago made national news when he installed a Festivus pole made out of beer cans across from a nativity scene displayed in the Capitol, was delighted DeSantis’ office singled him out.

“When they need to make stupid stupider, they send me up. I’m part comedian, I’m part activist, I’m part artist. I just want a better society,” Stevens said. “I’m an idiot, but a smart guy at the same time.”

While DeSantis’ predecessor, current Republican Sen. Rick Scott, allowed what was then called the “free speech zone” in the Capitol rotunda, the rules changed under DeSantis and new barriers were put in place to use Capitol space for political expression. The League of Women Voters and Stevens are among the applicants who have been denied access under the new rules.

“I didn’t realize that I have the power of millions!” Stevens said. “I’m just one guy. I’m an agitator. I know my role in this.”

Driskell pointed out that DeSantis was warned there would be problems when the book ban law passed in 2022.

“We told him so. The Florida House Democrats on the floor — in our debate, in our questioning — pointed out the vagueness in the original law and how it could be subject to abuse,” she said. “Chaz is not the problem. It’s the folks who are taking liberties with the law who are the problem.”

• Friday, April 19, 2024

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America’s Education Problem

Hosted by Michael Barbaro; produced by Adizah Eghan and Austin Mitchell; with help from Kelly Prime; and edited by Lisa Chow and Lisa Tobin

How have decades of attempted reform, and billions of dollars, failed to improve students’ performance across the country?

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

Today: For decades, the U.S. has spent billions of dollars trying to close its education gap with the rest of the world. New data shows that all that money made no difference. Dana Goldstein on how that could be.

It’s Thursday, December 5.

Dana, when did the United States start to feel a sense of anxiety around the education levels of our children in relation to the rest of the world?

Well, I think back to 1957.

But the biggest news to come out of Russia was the story of the year, perhaps of our generation.

And that was the year that the Russians beat us to space —

That radio beep signaling not merely a red scientific triumph but the launching of mankind into a new era, the dawn of the age of space. Sputnik and Muttnik, they were called.

— with their Sputnik satellite. And this triggered a sort of national conversation and anxiety in the United States among our political leaders and the public. We were the country that beat back tyranny and saved the world in World War I and World War II. What did it mean that this other nation could outperform us in this new frontier of space? And that was the start of a conversation about our schools, and if they were preparing kids to compete on the global stage. This continues in the 1980s with the rise of Japan and the rise of China and with the reduction of these good factory jobs that used to ensure Americans a middle-class life. So by the 1990s, there’s a consensus among education reformers and politicians who care about this that maybe it would be helpful to have Washington play a role and the federal government got involved. And a few governors, whose names we’ve all heard of, like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, are those that agree.

Now, oftentimes, we talk about our children having self-esteem. You can’t teach self-esteem. But when we teach our children to read, write, add and subtract, they learn self-esteem. They earn it. And that’s the whole vision for America, is that every child gets educated.

When George W. Bush was running for president, this was the conversation that he was immersed in, and, in fact, he makes education reform and the idea of a bigger role for Washington part of his pitch as a different kind of, quote, “compassionate conservative.” That’s how he defines himself. He says he really does care about those that are getting left behind in this new globalized economy. And he says he really does care about helping low-income students and students of color do better academically so they can compete.

Good to meet you all. Thanks. What grade are we in?

Cool, let me ask you a question.

Make it math.

How many of you are going to go to college?

Good. How many of you read more than you watch TV?

Tell the truth.

O.K., good. [LAUGHTER] How many of you practice math more than you watch TV? [LAUGHTER]

And at this moment, what is the relationship between the federal government in Washington and states when it comes to education?

So it’s pretty hands-off. They send money, especially money for schools that serve a lot of low-income children, but they don’t have a lot of requirements attached to that money. They also oversee civil rights in schools, so they’re on the lookout to see if there’s racial discrimination, gender discrimination. But they don’t tell states how they should oversee schools. And all this starts to change when George W. Bush is elected president, and he represents this group of people who think this approach has been too hands-off. And we’re not going to really be able to compete with the rest of the world where education systems are very centralized and much more top-down than our American system if we don’t have some leadership from Washington. And that’s why he proposes and signs into law the No Child Left Behind Act.

And what is No Child Left Behind?

No Child Left Behind is basically a testing law. It asks states to test students in third through eighth grade every year in math and reading and once in high school, and this is totally new.

The federal government has never before asked states to test students. And it’s interesting because I am 35, and my whole education preceded this law. And I have just a few memories in elementary school of taking standardized tests, and they weren’t really something people talked about a lot. It’s completely different now. And I think for a lot of adults who didn’t go through this system, they may not realize how different it really is.

And what was the thinking behind suddenly requiring standardized testing in No Child Left Behind?

I mean, the thinking was pretty simple. If you don’t collect this data, you just can’t know how students are doing. And if you don’t know how students are doing, you can’t help them improve. So with these test scores, you can finally say, how are low-income students doing? How are African-American students doing? How are immigrant students doing? If you don’t collect this data nationally, you don’t know.

So while the data is very helpful to education researchers, the No Child Left Behind Act is widely seen as a failure.

I think two big reasons. The first is that all 50 states had total freedom to define for themselves what was going to be on all these tests.

It wasn’t one test.

No, it was 50 different tests. And so Alabama might have a lot easier of a test than Massachusetts. And so it becomes really hard to compare how kids are doing across the states. And suddenly, it seems like this isn’t actually that helpful of a national tool if the states are basically allowed to set their own yardstick. Each of these governors has an incentive to make themselves look good. And the other big reason why it failed was just the tests were not that high quality, and the teachers were teaching to the test because schools could be declared failing if students were not moving forward on these exams and not scoring well enough.

Thank you. Thank you, everybody.

And when Barack Obama is elected president —

Leadership tomorrow depends on how we educate our students today, especially in math, science, technology and engineering. But despite the importance of education in these subjects, we have to admit, we are right now being outpaced by our competitors.

— Barack Obama agreed with George W. Bush about a lot when it came to education. He believed in a bigger role for Washington. He was deeply concerned about achievement gaps, similar to George W. Bush. They represented sort of the two sides of the coin within this bipartisan consensus.

So make no mistake, our future is on the line. The nation that out-educates us today is going to outcompete us tomorrow.

He comes up with his own policies that he hopes are going to address the flaws of No Child Left Behind while sort of better succeeding in the original goal. He is going to have better tests, basically, and he’s going to hold schools and teachers accountable to more high-quality standards, and they’re going to be shared across the country instead of 50 states.

So what does that solution look like?

So it’s convenient for President Obama that a bunch of governors and education reformers and philanthropists like Bill Gates, they were already kind of together trying to solve this problem. And they had started talking about something that would come to be called the Common Core State Standards, which would be a national effort to write curriculum standards in reading and math that all 50 states could hopefully share. And Obama takes a look at this, and he loves the idea. The Obama administration did give money, through a program called Race to the Top —

We’ve launched a $4 billion Race to the Top Fund.

— to states that adopted the Common Core.

And how did that work?

The way it worked is states were competing for about $4 billion in federal funding. It was the recession. The states were broke. They were desperate for cash, and they would have done pretty much anything that was asked of them. And Obama gave them a lot of priorities that he wanted them to fulfill to get this money, and one of them was to adopt rigorous shared standards. He did not specifically say the Common Core, but that’s what it was, because the effort was already underway, and all across statehouses across the country, people knew about this.

So, again, as with No Child Left Behind, this is not the federal government mandating one vision of American education, but they’re profoundly encouraging it.

Yes, encouraging it. And right off the bat, within the first year, the vast majority, over 40 of the states, said, O.K., we’re in. We’re going to do the Common Core.

California Board of Education today unanimously approved new and rigorous guidelines.

New uniform educational standards are expected to raise the bar for students in Maryland starting next year — the Common Core Standards program.

This curriculum is really going to be historic, and it’s going to help better prepare our students for this hyper-competitive global economy.

Certainly, the federal government has stepped up with a Common Core Standards and the idea that we develop a national test to test children, really, in all of the skills, not just in the —

And those tests do hit the market, and that does become how many teachers and parents and students first encounter this thing — the Common Core — is through the tests.

So did Obama’s vision here of national standards and incentives for states to adopt them, did it succeed in its goals?

It did not quite work out as intended. It’s actually this incredible, strange moment where people on the far right and the far left agree that they don’t like, in fact, they detest the Common Core. On the left, it’s really about anti-testing fervor. Parents hated that their kids were going to school and being presented with these multiple-choice problems, and the curriculum was narrowing to these math and reading tests, so social studies, arts, even science. The number of minutes per day that kids were encountering all these wonderful things was decreasing because the teachers were so stressed out about these math and reading exams. And what parents on the left were saying is this is not what I want from my child’s public school.

[CHANTING] End Common Core! Our kids deserve more! End Common Core!

Parents, in fact, are deciding to opt out —

There’s the birth of this opt-out movement, which is a movement to encourage parents to opt their kids out of sitting for these exams.

— in places like New York State, where as many as 165,000 students opted out.

So this opt-out movement really reaches a peak in New York State in 2015 when 20 percent of students opt-out, and in some schools, it’s close to 100 percent.

Thankfully, most of us began to listen to the cries for help coming from our children. Parents refuse to allow their children to be part of the Common Core testing machine. [CHEERING] Whoo! Whoo. Whoo-hoo.

At the same time, Tea Party activists on the right are railing against the Common Core.

They see it as a sort of classic big government, federal incursion into local control.

We need to do an education what’s always worked historically and that’s local control.

You have Tea Party darling Michele Bachmann —

I would take the entire federal education law, repeal it. Then I would go over to the Department of Education. I’d turn out the lights, I’d lock the door, and all the money back to the state and localities.

— railing against the Common Core. And all of a sudden, where it had been acceptable for Republicans to join with President Obama and support this thing, all of a sudden, in states across this country, it’s not O.K. anymore. And it’s also not O.K. in many places to be a Democrat who speaks in favor of this because of the opposition on the left. So you see all these states, more than 20 states, start to roll back these laws, and states start to pull out of the agreement to use shared tests and start saying, we’re going to go get our own test and develop our own test.

So there’s a pretty broad-based refusal to adopt this idea of a national set of standards and curriculum. But that would seem to make a system that’s built on the goal of centralization basically impossible.

Yeah, it’s really, really hard to do anything centrally in our system because we don’t have a system that was created to be centralized. Local control was sort of the founding orthodoxy of American public education in the 19th century. Our Constitution does not include the word education. There is no sort of role for the federal government that allows them to reach into schools, reach into classrooms, change practices. It’s all sort of, you know, carrots and sticks, options. And it doesn’t work that well. It’s very, very hard to make change on a national scale when that’s the system that you’ve built.

So whatever consensus had been achieved by this point through the Bush and Obama eras that this was a worthy goal, national standards, a national system, that starts to unravel.

It’s starting to fall apart.

We’ll be right back.

Dana, so bring us up to today. Where are we in this process?

So over the past few weeks, two big new pieces of evidence have come out, and they paint a pretty depressing picture for American education and American kids. The first was the gold-standard tool that researchers use to look at American education. It’s called the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It showed that only one-third of American fourth and eighth graders can be considered proficient readers — just a third. And across the board at every level, students had declining reading scores over the past two years.

Yeah, going down. With all these efforts to make things better, those scores were going down. So this was a very sad day for many in the world of education, the world that I’ve been covering for over a decade. And then just a few days ago, I had another sad story to report, which was on the test that is considered the gold-standard international global test — the Program for International Student Achievement — it showed that there were 20 percent of American 15-year-olds who do not read as well as they should at age 10. So they really are missing very basic reading comprehension skills. And it found that American performance is flat in both reading and math since 2000. So this entire time period —

Wow, 20 years.

— that we’ve been discussing, ever since George W. Bush was elected and No Child Left Behind, through President Obama and Race to the Top and Common Core and effort after effort to try to get American kids to do better on these types of international exams, American performance has not changed. It’s stagnant.

Despite not just all those programs but, I presume, the billions of dollars spent to put them in place.

Many, many billions of dollars — private dollars, public dollars, all of that.

This all sounds quite bad and quite depressing. But I wonder, ultimately, how much the scores you’re describing here, especially comparing U.S. students to international students, really matters? Because the United States very much remains a global superpower. We have one of the strongest economies on the planet. We have low unemployment. So if you kind of swallow your national pride, is this really a crisis?

I think it is. I mean, how can you feel pride when you think about that 15-year-old who can’t read as well as a 10-year-old should? With those types of literacy skills, they’re not going to be suited for work that’s going to pay a living wage in this economy that we’re living in. And just beyond that, beyond what happens to that person on the job market, education is about so much more. That person needs to be a citizen. That’s why we started public education in the United States, so that we could create people who would be good voters and make wise choices about who their leaders should be. And there’s this one statistic from the international exam that just came out that I just keep going back to, because this number upset me, which was that only 14 percent of American students could distinguish, reliably, between fact and opinion.

14 percent is kind of extraordinary. How did they measure that?

So I have a sample question from the exam here in front of me that illustrates what it is that American kids can’t do. And the exercise goes like this. It shows students two pieces of writing. One is a news article about research on milk and whether it has health benefits or health detriments.

So this is classic journalism.

Pretty much. Yeah. And the second is produced by a group that students are told is called the International Dairy Foods Association, and it speaks to all the wonderful benefits of drinking milk.

So this is something from a trade group.

Exactly. Students are then presented with a series of statements based on what they’ve read, and they are asked to determine, is this a fact or an opinion? And I’ll give you an example. “Drinking milk and other dairy products is the best way to lose weight.” Fact or opinion?

Exactly. It’s opinion put forward by people that want the public to purchase more milk products.

The trade group.

Exactly. And these are the types of questions that the majority of American students were not able to get right.

They’re failing to distinguish between fact and opinion, between that which is being told to them by people with specific interests and those that are objectively true, the result of research or investigation by reporters.

Exactly. And think about the implications of this in a world where there’s so much misinformation on social media, political advertisements that are trying to sway your opinion.

Foreign countries interfering in elections.

Exactly. And we can’t even agree, for example, in this country whether it is Ukraine or Russia that influenced our election in 2016, even though we know it was it was Russia that meddled — there really is no question on the facts. So when I hear that, you know, only 14 percent of American students are getting this type of question correct, I think it raises big questions not just about our economic competitiveness, or are these kids well-suited to the workforce, but about our country, our future. Are they being prepared to be citizens? And how will that affect all of us?

So these questions about education performance are very deep. They go to the core of who we are as Americans and what our future will hold.

And it makes me think that some of our core American values of American exceptionalism and individualism and local control, these orthodoxies which we’re proud of and rightfully so in many ways because they’ve contributed to what’s different about the United States and driven local innovation, but they’re also now contributing to this intractable, difficult, important problem to solve, which is how do we truly prepare our kids to succeed, not just as workers but also as human beings and as citizens of this country?

Dana, thank you very much.

Thank you so much, Michael.

Here’s what else you need to know today.

If what we’re talking about is not impeachable, then nothing is impeachable. This is precisely the misconduct that the framers created a Constitution including impeachment to protect against.

During testimony on Wednesday, three law professors told the House Judiciary Committee that President Trump’s attempts to pressure Ukraine into investigating his political rivals crossed constitutional lines and amounted to impeachable conduct. One of them, Stanford Law professor Pamela Karlan, was asked whether the president’s conduct was grounds for impeachment even if the investigations he requested were never carried out.

Imagine that you were pulled over for speeding by a police officer. And the officer comes up to the windows and says, you were speeding. But, you know, if you give me 20 bucks, I’ll drop the ticket. And you look in your wallet and you say to the officer, I don’t have the 20 bucks. And the officer says, O.K., well, just go ahead, have a nice day. The officer would still be guilty of soliciting a bribe there, even though he ultimately let you off without — without your paying.

But a law professor called by Republicans on the committee, Jonathan Turley of George Washington University, testified that Democrats had not sufficiently proven their case against the president.

I’m concerned about lowering impeachment standards to fit a paucity of evidence and an abundance of anger. I believe this impeachment not only fails to satisfy the standard of past impeachments but would create a dangerous precedent for future impeachments.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

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Listen and subscribe to our podcast from your mobile device: Via Apple Podcasts | Via RadioPublic | Via Stitcher

For decades, the United States has spent billions of dollars trying to close its education gap with the rest of the world. New data shows that all that money made little difference. Today, we investigate how that could be.

On today’s episode:

Dana Goldstein , a national correspondent covering education for The New York Times.

Background reading:

The past three presidents have tried to help the American education system compete with other countries’. Test scores haven’t improved .

The “Nation’s Report Card” came out this fall. It indicated that two-thirds of children in the U.S. are not proficient readers .

Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at [email protected] . Follow Michael Barbaro on Twitter: @mikiebarb . And if you’re interested in advertising with “The Daily,” write to us at [email protected] .

Dana Goldstein contributed reporting.

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New major crosses disciplines to address climate change

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Lauren Aguilar knew she wanted to study energy systems at MIT, but before Course 1-12 (Climate System Science and Engineering) became a new undergraduate major, she didn't see an obvious path to study the systems aspects of energy, policy, and climate associated with the energy transition.

Aguilar was drawn to the new major that was jointly launched by the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) in 2023. She could take engineering systems classes and gain knowledge in climate.

“Having climate knowledge enriches my understanding of how to build reliable and resilient energy systems for climate change mitigation. Understanding upon what scale we can forecast and predict climate change is crucial to build the appropriate level of energy infrastructure,” says Aguilar.

The interdisciplinary structure of the 1-12 major has students engaging with and learning from professors in different disciplines across the Institute. The blended major was designed to provide a foundational understanding of the Earth system and engineering principles — as well as an understanding of human and institutional behavior as it relates to the climate challenge . Students learn the fundamental sciences through subjects like an atmospheric chemistry class focused on the global carbon cycle or a physics class on low-carbon energy systems. The major also covers topics in data science and machine learning as they relate to forecasting climate risks and building resilience, in addition to policy, economics, and environmental justice studies.

Junior Ananda Figueiredo was one of the first students to declare the 1-12 major. Her decision to change majors stemmed from a motivation to improve people’s lives, especially when it comes to equality. “I like to look at things from a systems perspective, and climate change is such a complicated issue connected to many different pieces of our society,” says Figueiredo.

A multifaceted field of study

The 1-12 major prepares students with the necessary foundational expertise across disciplines to confront climate change. Andrew Babbin, an academic advisor in the new degree program and the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Associate Professor in EAPS, says the new major harnesses rigorous training encompassing science, engineering, and policy to design and execute a way forward for society.

Within its first year, Course 1-12 has attracted students with a diverse set of interests, ranging from machine learning for sustainability to nature-based solutions for carbon management to developing the next renewable energy technology and integrating it into the power system.

Academic advisor Michael Howland, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Assistant Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, says the best part of this degree is the students, and the enthusiasm and optimism they bring to the climate challenge.

“We have students seeking to impact policy and students double-majoring in computer science. For this generation, climate change is a challenge for today, not for the future. Their actions inside and outside the classroom speak to the urgency of the challenge and the promise that we can solve it,” Howland says.

The degree program also leaves plenty of space for students to develop and follow their interests. Sophomore Katherine Kempff began this spring semester as a 1-12 major interested in sustainability and renewable energy. Kempff was worried she wouldn’t be able to finish 1-12 once she made the switch to a different set of classes, but Howland assured her there would be no problems, based on the structure of 1-12.

“I really like how flexible 1-12 is. There's a lot of classes that satisfy the requirements, and you are not pigeonholed. I feel like I'm going to be able to do what I'm interested in, rather than just following a set path of a major,” says Kempff.

Kempff is leveraging her skills she developed this semester and exploring different career interests. She is interviewing for sustainability and energy-sector internships in Boston and MIT this summer, and is particularly interested in assisting MIT in meeting its new sustainability goals.

Engineering a sustainable future

The new major dovetail’s MIT’s commitment to address climate change with its steps in prioritizing and enhancing climate education. As the Institute continues making strides to accelerate solutions, students can play a leading role in changing the future.   

“Climate awareness is critical to all MIT students, most of whom will face the consequences of the projection models for the end of the century,” says Babbin. “One-12 will be a focal point of the climate education mission to train the brightest and most creative students to engineer a better world and understand the complex science necessary to design and verify any solutions they invent."

Justin Cole, who transferred to MIT in January from the University of Colorado, served in the U.S. Air Force for nine years. Over the course of his service, he had a front row seat to the changing climate. From helping with the wildfire cleanup in Black Forest, Colorado — after the state's most destructive fire at the time — to witnessing two category 5 typhoons in Japan in 2018, Cole's experiences of these natural disasters impressed upon him that climate security was a prerequisite to international security. 

Cole was recently accepted into the  MIT Energy and Climate Club  Launchpad initiative where he will work to solve real-world climate and energy problems with professionals in industry.

“All of the dots are connecting so far in my classes, and all the hopes that I have for studying the climate crisis and the solutions to it at MIT are coming true,” says Cole.

With a career path that is increasingly growing, there is a rising demand for scientists and engineers who have both deep knowledge of environmental and climate systems and expertise in methods for climate change mitigation.

“Climate science must be coupled with climate solutions. As we experience worsening climate change, the environmental system will increasingly behave in new ways that we haven’t seen in the past,” says Howland. “Solutions to climate change must go beyond good engineering of small-scale components. We need to ensure that our system-scale solutions are maximally effective in reducing climate change, but are also resilient to climate change. And there is no time to waste,” he says.

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• Course 1-12: Climate System Science and Engineering
• Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences

Related Topics

• Civil and environmental engineering
• Education, teaching, academics
• Climate change
• Sustainability
• Undergraduate
• Renewable energy

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