A study looked at Teach for America (TFA) teacher turnover and contributions to fourth through eighth grade student achievement in New York City public schools between 2012 and 2019. The study finds that, after six years of teaching, TFA teachers continue to improve their contributions to students’ standardized test scores at higher rates than their non-TFA colleagues. The report’s broader conclusions overreach, however. Specifically, it concludes that “the performance of the TFA workforce is strong enough to offset turnover,” and that the “TFA performance advantage is large enough to offset turnover costs.” Unfortunately, the report fails to define the “costs” of turnover or to account for the broader effects of the instability of the labor market on schools and districts—including negative effects on school climate, financial costs to districts, and the disproportionate placement of inexperienced TFA teachers in under-resourced schools.

A report calculates the future economic burden that the pandemic has imposed through reduced student achievement levels. Under a set of assumptions about the link between achievement and earnings, this economic burden is projected to be very large, persistent, and variable across states. From there, the report contends that—to offset this achievement gap—schools need to be “made better” even as the report is silent on how schools can improve or if more funding is needed. Setting aside this exhortation, however, the report actually falls short of a full accounting of the total loss in children’s human capital from the pandemic. It focuses only on achievement deficits, failing to consider the other dimensions of human—and social—capital. Unfortunately, without a full reckoning or understanding of the damage the pandemic imposed on schoolchildren, it is unlikely that any policy responses will be adequate, efficient, or equitable.

A report oversimplifies important equity issues as problems of school zone boundaries. Despite noting mixed research results on how school choice affects housing patterns, the report assumes that eliminating school zone boundaries will necessarily result in wealthy families voluntarily relocating into poorer neighborhoods—ignoring the documented reality that many parents work to ensure that school district boundaries replicate segregation and inequity. In addition, the report offers no solutions to such concurrent problems as transportation for students choosing distant schools or housing for residents displaced by gentrification. The report’s illogical assumptions, lack of evidence, sleight of hand, and improbable leaps of logic make its advice to policymakers useless.

A report considers the chief concerns associated with Ohio’s voucher program: the harm to public school student outcomes through competition, the affect on district financial resources, and increased racial segregation. Finding that Ohio vouchers have had few such harmful impacts, the report concludes that it has effectively dismissed the primary concerns of voucher critics. Yet, while the report is broadly methodologically sound for the narrow questions it poses, the questions it asks are out-of-date with respect to current issues raised by voucher critics, which focus on substantially decreased student achievement among students using vouchers. Thus, the report does little to assuage the primary concerns of those dedicated to serving children through community-based public education.

The fair and adequate funding of schools is at the center of reports from Education Trust and Bellwether. The Education Trust reports focus on the extent to which states and local districts target sufficient resources fairly to students by race, language status and poverty. Policymakers can use these publications to understand which states (and which districts within those states) have the most work to do to improve racial inequality in education funding. In contrast, the Bellwether report focuses on how state finance systems rely on and regulate local property taxes. It contains a collection of state school funding profiles from six states; however, it lacks empirical analyses that link its recommended property tax policies to improved school funding equity or revenue stability. Lacking such analyses, the Bellwether report can provide no useful, validated guidance for policymakers.

This report analyzes changes in academic performance as measured by test scores and graduation rates in the Denver Public Schools versus comparable schools in Colorado over 11 years of the district’s experimenting with the “portfolio” approach to school district management. This approach includes central-office oversight of different school types (such as charter schools, innovation schools, and district-run schools), with widespread parental choice under a single enrollment system. The reported academic gains are dramatic and worth drawing attention to, but attributing them specifically to the portfolio reforms seems premature and thus not useful in showing how other districts could replicate that success.

A report presents data on early care and education trends in Wisconsin and concludes that government regulations have had the effects of limiting supply, decreasing parental choice in providers, and increasing costs. The report recommends increasing regulatory freedom, consolidating state agencies, and increasing parental rights over use of government childcare subsidies. The report should be applauded for continuing to spotlight the need for quality childcare and education. But because of significant methodological flaws and omission of important literature, its recommendations should be treated with extreme caution, if not avoided altogether.

A Heritage Foundation report compares the amount of “wokeness” terminology in parent/student handbooks in charter schools with the level of charter school regulation in their states, and concludes that while charters represent a safe space away from “woke indoctrination” in public schools, further deregulation and less bureaucracy will allow that sector to truly respond to parent desires to avoid “leftist” curriculum. While apparently intended to tap into current turmoil, the report has at least five significant weaknesses. It assumes that parent/student handbooks are good proxies for curriculum; it completely ignores the diversity of parents and relevant research about what large proportions of parents actually want; it conflates correlation with causation; it relies on undefined conceptions of what constitutes “wokeness;” and it possibly uses cherry-picked data and methods that suit ideological bias. These shortcomings render the report useless for understanding or developing policy. 

The Progressive Policy Institute published a report highlighting the emergence of widespread teacher staffing shortages. It describes contemporary “autonomous” school initiatives, which all fall under the umbrella of positioning teachers with greater decision-making responsibilities and authority. It then suggests that such initiatives are effective strategies to remedy shortages because increased autonomy produces greater job satisfaction for teachers. However, supporting evidence for the claims in the report is thin and relies primarily not on empirical literature, but on popular contemporary readings and descriptive surveys. Policymakers and other readers should be aware that what is ignored in this report is far more important to informed policy than what it contains.

A Thomas B. Fordham Institute report examines academic outcomes in Ohio’s nonprofit and for-profit charter schools; in addition, it explores whether differences in contracted services in for-profits appear to correlate with differences in their outcomes. Despite the report's claims, it offers little evidence to remove skepticism from the debate over for-profit status. In addition, the report is limited in its focus on only Ohio, which has substantially more transparency than many states require for school choice options. As a result, the report offers little to inform policy and practice in dissimilar or nationwide contexts.

A Buckeye Institute report recommends sweeping policy reforms in response to COVID-19 academic disruptions and what the report asserts to be declining confidence in public schools. The report recommends the state rapidly expand three types of school choice or voucher-like policies—education savings accounts, public school choice, and tax credits for private school scholarship programs—combined with fiscal transparency. The report does not support its recommendations with evidence or consider potential unintended consequences, such as reduced student achievement, increased racial segregation, and reduced funding for public schools, instead relying on tenuous assumptions about predicted impacts of policy reforms.

A report from Bellwether details what the authors call, “assembly-based education,” a hypothetical ecosystem that removes schools as a central education component. Instead, the plan proposes giving families the ability and funding to choose among varied learning opportunities. The approach is presented as helping to remove some barriers for lower-income families and to facilitate new communities based on shared interests rather than geography. The report also argues that the approach is timely and practical, pointing to the recent growth of school choice and supplemental learning. The concept, however, undermines societal investment in neighborhood schools and therefore runs counter to research demonstrating that many families, youth, and communities work hard to protect and improve their neighborhood schools, especially in marginalized communities. As such, this approach fails to genuinely center equity and educational excellence and instead elevates choice as the greatest good in an education system.

Families across the U.S. experimented during the COVID-19 pandemic with new educational models in response to school closures. This review examines the Center on Reinventing Public Education’s two recent reports on two related strategies that exemplify such experimentation: microschools and learning pods. The first report analyzes engagement patterns and success rates of a digital platform used at one microschool in Nevada. The second report praises learning pods’ staffing features and argues that these approaches might be adopted in traditional schools. Both reports paint the new strategies in positive light, but both have methodological and analytical shortcomings that limit their utility for policymakers. 

A report claims that the Michigan Student Opportunity Scholarship neovoucher program has the potential to create fiscal benefits for the state of Michigan and its school districts. It comes as state policymakers consider both the impact of school neovouchers on student achievement and the financial cost of a neovoucher system. However, the report is more misleading than it is useful, relying overwhelmingly on problematic reports and approaches produced by think tanks that regularly advocate for school choice.

In light of the pandemic which has likely resulted in rampant teacher absences and widespread teacher shortages, a TNTP report offers leaders clearly articulated employment goals and numerous recommendations for short- and long-term staffing plans. Although reliable evidence on the extent of teacher shortages is mixed, the report does provide leaders confronting staffing issues with some helpful questions and potentially useful recommendations. Despite these positive elements, however, the report has several research-related weaknesses. Accordingly, while school and district leaders may find in this report some useful ideas to consider, they should read additional research and reports to independently determine whether recommendations of interest are evidence-based and how local context might affect implementation.

Summit Public Schools reports that its alumni graduated from college at nearly double the national average and self-reported high levels of well-being, fulfillment, and workplace satisfaction. It also reports that alumni from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds now make more than $60,000 per year on average working full time. Although the study may provide some information useful to Summit’s internal decision-making, its serious methodological issues prevent it from having any implications for practice or policymaking in general.

A Mackinac Center report recommends changes to the state’s current approach to financing public and charter schools, to move toward a system where more funding follows the student to either public, charter, or private schools—or to other service providers. The report provides some useful, albeit insufficiently researched, guidance on shifting categorical funding into core funding and modifying the state’s approach to financing programs for children with disabilities. However, several key elements of the report and its proposals are built on false promises and assumptions and are not helpful for policymakers.

An Urban Institute report asserts that private fundraising, which is more likely to exist in advantaged schools, increases educational inequality. The report recommends that state and district policymakers track private fundraising and consider strategies for resource sharing and equalization. While the report’s claims are consistent with other research, problems with the analysis and presentation of the data severely undercut its validity, making it hard to know how much these patterns exist in Illinois schools. Nonetheless, the report’s approach of calculating per-pupil spending to estimate the magnitude of spending by private fundraising organizations could be useful to scholars and policymakers interested in understanding the potential impact of school-specific fundraising organizations. 

Advocates for increased privatization of public schools have long contended that private schools could provide equal or better outcomes at lesser costs. To bolster that argument, this EdChoice report asserts that voucher and voucher-like (tax credit scholarship and education savings account) programs have saved state and local treasuries some $12.4 to $28.3 billion dollars as student “switchers” use those programs to leave public schools and enter private schools. However, the report’s findings do not provide a sound base for policy decisions. Included in this review are suggestions for more detailed accounting procedures and more nuanced methodologies for calculating reliable variable student costs.

A Bellwether report attempts to examine the availability of low-income rental units in school districts to understand whether districts in the largest 200 metropolitan areas are accessible to families in poverty. While the report’s focus on the intersection of housing and education policy for students’ opportunities is commendable, it suffers from significant methodological shortcomings. One problem is that the report’s approach is disconnected from federal housing policy and research. In addition, and particularly problematic, the report is silent on how race and racism relate to housing access and educational opportunity. These concerns and others severely limit the report’s utility for informing social policy.

A report contends that the rise in Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) has led schools to assume powers and responsibilities beyond their core mission of focusing on academic skills, and it claims that teachers are unprepared to take on “therapeutic” responsibilities. In reaching these conclusions, however, the report ignores the empirical evidence documenting the positive influence that SEL has on students’ well-being, academic achievement, and sense of citizenship. Relying instead on a misrepresentation of SEL, the result is a one-sided discussion that does not make an evidence-based contribution and thus is not useful for informing policies.

A policy brief from the Beacon Center of Tennessee describes the state’s K-12 finance formula and makes recommendations for reform. The report asserts that Tennessee should replace its “resource-based” formula with a “student-based” formula more closely resembling the approach used in some other states. However, there is little if any peer-reviewed research to support the report's claims. While the report is commendable in its call to action and emphasis on equity and transparency, it provides limited actionable information. Policymakers should thus read this report with caution and pair their reading with materials that provide more nuanced perspectives.

Schools are currently the center of controversy over whose voices, knowledge, and perspectives should drive curriculum. A New America report argues that curriculum materials have the potential to engage minoritized students academically and teach everyone about America’s diverse peoples. The report provides helpful resources, although it has several limitations. However, taken as a whole, it draws needed attention to the importance of cultural relevance of curriculum materials.

A report from the Heritage Foundation objects to the increasing number of Chief Diversity Officers (CDOs) emerging on public school districts’ administrative teams, and claims that districts with CDOs have failed to close student achievement gaps in standardized testing outcomes. The report also promotes test-driven accountability at the expense of the learning needs of pre-K-12 public school students. The conclusions drawn by the report are based on flawed research, and thus it fails to provide valuable guidance for policy or add to the research base on closing achievement gaps or on diversity, equity, and inclusion in K-12 settings.

Charter School Funding: Dispelling Myths about EMOs, Expenditure Patterns, & Nonpublic Dollars is the latest in a series of reports from the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas that purports to show charter schools are inequitably funded compared to public district schools. The report relies on a proprietary dataset to make its claims; however, the data conflict with publicly reported figures, and the methods used to create the dataset are not documented. The report’s analysis ignores several basics of school finance: Differences in student characteristics and school programming are not accounted for, categorical spending is conflated with potential profit taking from charter management organizations, and philanthropic giving is inadequately evaluated. The sparse documentation of the report’s methods, combined with basic flaws in its analysis frameworks, render it useless in guiding charter school funding policy.