Great thoughts here. I wanted to add that Seattle and many west coast public schools are doing the same playbook of trying to end advanced learning programs. What seems to be lost in the messaging is that these programs they are trying to end are really popular. When you threaten popular programs year after year parents start to question if the district is functional and many of them start to pull their kids to private school.
Since most district funding is calculated per-child we end up in a vicious cycle where admission decline leads to funding cuts (music programs, nurses, tutors, aids) and the decline in quality lead to more kids pulled to private school and it begins again. So the policy is hurting the HC kids, but worse they are directly hurting their own funding and that hurts all the kids in the district.
If the per capita funding is the same, why would you expect the quality of Education or the resources available to be different? Why would a school district with 15,000 students be able to provide less than a district with 20,000 students with the same funding per capita? There's of course some efficiency in not being too small, but unless you're coming up against that threshold, it shouldn't make a difference.
It's a mix of course, but state funding is usually the rough equivalent of ebita. Stuff like AP classes is funded on the margins from this, once the other non- classes and yearly expenses are taken care of. You need the right mix (via filtering/selection effects) of kids to see a high proportion of AP classes and kids.
Once a critical core of these people flee you've got a problem where your low cost to provide services to kids are gone, you're getting less money per year and the remaining kids cost more per student to service.
The numbers are surprisingly tight and there is little a local community can do to swing this (for example in Michigan they cannot vote to pay more in local taxes to fund teachers).
How can one verify this from the public financial records? Ie how can I check how much Seattle public schools spend on AP programs + what exactly the spend goes to?
Well the first stop is the financials for the specific district, and then the next step is checking into the exact state specific funding system (they rhyme state to state but are very different).
You'd then need to start digging into the districts condition statements and seeing where the money is being spent and where they have funding shortfalls.
But, at least for any that I've ever looked at, it's not like there is going to be a line item or breakdown of "well we'd love to offer 3 sections of AP calc next year, but we are spending the money on parapros to walk students to and from bathrooms because we can't trust they will come back to class on a bathroom pass".
What’s your estimate as to what % of the marginal spend on education actually goes towards something that increases the future incomes of local students vs just ending up a waste?
I would not view that as the correct metric (do we prepare people to be good citizens with the ability to function/self actualize to their ability level) but taking a gut stab at answering your question: Almost none? 0 (approached from the right)? A gnat's fart?
As Zvi discusses here tangentially and others have argued very well: it's not spending, it's a combination of what we do (frequently nonsense and student ability bands + SES headwinds).
If we increase or decrease marginal spending there is going to be no measurable impact. But, and this is tragic, if we massively increase funding we probably also won't see (IRL) much or any change (of course we may shift results around).
We spend, on a per student basis, piles of money with (strings attached) even more money frequently available for poorer districts to help. And yet for all of this what we have to show for this is that students sort themselves into ability bands, largely stay within those bands and that the best we can do is to stop the bleeding (stuff like "teach phonics" vs "promote people who can't read while having them guess based on pictures" is low hanging fruit that faces/faced intense opposition).
An enjoyable read and it would be really nice if people could separate the idea of tracking for learning from social justice. It is painful to come from a blue area in a blue state and see all the ideas for improving eduction and reducing housing prices that work are coming from Texas or Mississippi.
It makes you wonder about all the "social science" that has emerged in the last 50 years about how to create a more perfect "Great Society", doesn't it?
Are the people who answer counting Substack (or similar blogs) as "reading"?
I am one who as a child - and to a lesser extent as a teenager - would read a lot of fiction, but now I read almost exclusively non-fiction (blogs mostly, but also sometimes actual academic papers!)
What about reading actual books? I only do it for the contests nowadays. Yet, I feel that I "read" more than what I ever did as a teenager. The issue is that is harder to quantify it because I rarely sit down and read up *at once* as you would with a book chapter, but rather I read on my free time between activities.
Also, do you think that there is any difference in retention/understanding between a dedicated "reading session" and reading "in the bus/elevator/etc..."?
You would think that, say, Spain or Italy would have much better education outcomes than Anglophone countries, with the adult population much better at reading, because they don't have this phonics issue at all. I have no idea if it shows up in the data, but they definitely don't seem like exceptionally healthier and more literate societies than the US.
Another piece of reading in schools that I think can be improved is the canon of literature that is offered. It persists that much of the required reading is authored by a specific group of writers offering a relatively narrow scope that is difficult to connect with for many kids and young adults. In addition to teaching phonics and reading fundamentals, I wish reading material was better suited to real world interests.
(Also I do think the classical American/Brit Lit is great and foundational, but it can’t exist in a vacuum.)
Do you have any thoughts on what you would add, and what you would take? Last I heard, high schoolers in lower literature classes were reading things like "Holes," "A Child Called It," and "Harry Potter." The teachers would like them to also like small books like "Bless Me, Ultima," but it's like beige children; the adults are more into it than the youth. They'll discuss rap lyrics as poetry if it's fit to be read aloud in a classroom. What more should they do?
The phrase "Principles often want to not do phonics" at the beginning had me rolling on the floor. Maybe your principles but not my principles. I think the problem is principally school administrators.
Principal Skinner's Principle: No, it is the children that are wrong.
The one that always makes me twitch every time I sight it on this site is cite. Not actually confusing in context, unlike potentially interest-bearing principal, but it's like Paris in the the springtime where you almost wonder if the regularity is an on-purpose running gag to see if anyone says something. And if so, does that mean they didn't get the joke? Rarely is the question asked. Should've paid more attention to Hooked On Colonics...
On the last point, about a middle ground for attendance: I have liked, as a student and a TA, policies along the lines of "You get X free absences, which you can take for any reason, without permission required. After that, each absence will deduct Y points from your final grade, regardless of whether you have a good reason for it."
I don't understand why any kind of grade would take into account absences at all. Grade should reflect competence, however aquired. You can miss 100% of the teaching and still be competent; and you can certainly hit 100% attendence and still be clueless. Grades should be assessed by exams and only by exams; nothing else works
It is a form of commitment device. Students who attend do better and learn more, on average, than those who do not. But if it is costless to not attend, students will choose to attend less. Grading attendance provides a concrete incentive to attend, which helps to override students' short-termism.
GREAT to see this argument is being made & accepted more widely than ever before! 👍Anyone who’s been in education for a while knows exactly that explicit teaching & mastery learning work = students learn & continue to learn…
My concern is with the current ways students are learning & how we can keep our next generation learning?
Those students who “offload” writing summaries & reading for technology to do FOR them - they will likely NOT have “learned” what they need to for longer term - much research already suggests this?
From my background, including special education, students who struggle simply need more support for their learning, more scaffolding & guidance = they are able to learn & just need more practice & more repetition! THAT doesn’t happen when they “offload” (and don’t do) these basic learning tasks??
I definitely don’t have any answers or strategies that can help them, yet? And the reason I read posts on Substack is to learn how to support learning in the current technology - that is moving so fast?
this captured institution sits atop the credentialing link in the education pipeline, before any other institution (state, district, school) has a chance to act. The self-sealing loop, radically oversimplified, works like this:
- Ed schools transmit the romantic-constructivist paradigm →
- Credentialed teachers and administrators1 staff districts, state education departments, curriculum providers, and education cultural engines →
- State guidance and available curricula reflect paradigm assumptions (recall the NYSED math briefs!) →
- Districts adopt aligned curricula →
- When outcomes disappoint, everyone just moves back up two bullet points →
- And so state guidance and popular curricula get rewritten by the same people, and we put another 50¢ in the pinball machines
This self-sealing loop ultimately persists because the credentialing institutions do not face meaningful external pressure to evolve into a mature, evidence-based profession.
I referenced that NCTQ study of the 700 teacher programs above to explain a limiting factor on first-image reforms. But the fact that only ~25% of the programs taught all five components of evidence-based reading instruction also evinces the capture and misdirection of the academic institutions as a whole. So does this study from 2020, which examined a flagship product from Columbia’s Teachers College, Units of Study, and found that it was not aligned with the best research on reading. This mismatch is reflected in the outcomes these graduate/credentialing programs generate in the trainees and the districts they teach in. Another NCTQ study, for example, found that budget-crunched districts frequently spend millions on master’s degree premiums that have no measurable impact on student outcomes (Brookings found similar results). Back in 2008 districts were spending ~$15 billion annually on these programs.
One important factor Southern Surge is that teachers are actually trained in delivering the specific curriculum adopted by the districts. I am a primary school literacy teacher and most teachers do know about the benefits of phonics but in my experience nobody is ever trained in the specific curriculum they are are asked to employ. That is a huge deal.
Why aren't teachers trained in those curricula?
1) Curricula change like a revolving door every several years.
2) Teacher training is often too academic and not practical enough, so people are shown underlying theories rather than training on specific in-class practices.
3) There is very little standardization across districts, so teacher's colleges wouldn't know which curricula train even if they wanted to.
4) Once on the job teachers have remarkably little time for training and they're often siloed within their own classrooms.
It's like giving a trainee HVAC technician the laws of thermodynamics and a theoretical model of an air-conditioner and telling them to go out and cool the world.
The mild irony of reading this on my device was not lost on me!
I live in Britain and am fortunate enough to be sufficiently old that I was taught to read with phonics while my sister, a few years younger, was at the very beginning of the idiocy which removed that method. Her reading and spelling has been helped by voracious appetite for reading but has never fully recovered. Now that my son is six and learning to read, it's obvious how much his comprehension is helped by having learned with phonics and I'm delighted to see how easy it is for him.
One of the things very difficult to measure in a timeframe of less than generations is the degree to which improved learning equips children who grow up more successful in life, who then go on to have their own children and so encourage the learning for the next generation. Once the cycle is feeding back into itself, one would hope to see compounded benefits.
I only read the introductory paragraph, I never heard of phonics so I asked chatgpt what it is and immediately thought, huh? that's how to learn how to read, what else is even possible. *a few queries later* Hoo boy! are there bad approaches to teaching reading! let me tell you! insane indeed...
The problem, and I'm not defending "whole language" nutters, is that English is just only mildly phonetic. I've got 1 little kid right now learning to read and you spend literal years going "that's an exception, ohhh yeah you've gotta memorize that one, good try bud but that is actually [something not at all related to the spelling]".
We'll sit down and drill from the top 1k used sight words or sounds and it's rough translating it into actual real world reading that interests him. Thankfully he seems to love reading (so far), but it's rough.
EDIT: Also could YA/Children's authors stop using non-phonetic character names? mofos argh.
I have discovered through helping my dyslexic kid learn to spell that lot of English doesn't look phonetic until you learn the rules. For example, there is a rule that words should not end with "v,," so words like "hav" are not allowed; "have" has an e on the end despite the short a so that the v is not alone at the end. Good luck :)
The Mississippi to Massachusetts comparison is the cleanest version of this. Black students hit the same basic-or-above reading rate at $37,900 median household income versus $67,000. Curriculum change and enforcement, not funding. The story collapses most education spending debates once that pair of numbers lands.
Not really. Massachusetts is about 45% more expensive overall than Mississippi. Those median income numbers are pretty equivalent when comparing what each dollar is worth in their local environment. It also overlooks the increased funding that went on. For example Mississippi increased education spending per pupil by 73% over the last decade. Hard to ignore that investment. Massachusetts did something similar back in the 1990s with adjustments along the way.
Simple answers rarely show a complete picture and mostly just serve to reinforce the bias of the person offering it.
But, but, but, we ALL know that the most important way to increase student learning is to provide them with the best teachers, and the best teachers cost more money, so we MUST pay ALL of the teachers a LOT more money, and then they will automatically become the best teachers, and the students will learn better. And we MUST keep all of the students together, no matter how well they learn, so that the slowest learners do not suffer the trauma of not moving forward with their cohorts. That sort of trauma cannot be allowed to exist. It is too toxic.
Doesn't this make sense? It is validated by many progressive studies in many schools, and those studies cannot be wrong. By definition. It is settled science. Progressive social science.
Great thoughts here. I wanted to add that Seattle and many west coast public schools are doing the same playbook of trying to end advanced learning programs. What seems to be lost in the messaging is that these programs they are trying to end are really popular. When you threaten popular programs year after year parents start to question if the district is functional and many of them start to pull their kids to private school.
Since most district funding is calculated per-child we end up in a vicious cycle where admission decline leads to funding cuts (music programs, nurses, tutors, aids) and the decline in quality lead to more kids pulled to private school and it begins again. So the policy is hurting the HC kids, but worse they are directly hurting their own funding and that hurts all the kids in the district.
Are the kids moved to private schools doing better than their peers who stay behind?
Doubtless, though almost certainly mainly from selection effects.
If the per capita funding is the same, why would you expect the quality of Education or the resources available to be different? Why would a school district with 15,000 students be able to provide less than a district with 20,000 students with the same funding per capita? There's of course some efficiency in not being too small, but unless you're coming up against that threshold, it shouldn't make a difference.
It's a mix of course, but state funding is usually the rough equivalent of ebita. Stuff like AP classes is funded on the margins from this, once the other non- classes and yearly expenses are taken care of. You need the right mix (via filtering/selection effects) of kids to see a high proportion of AP classes and kids.
Once a critical core of these people flee you've got a problem where your low cost to provide services to kids are gone, you're getting less money per year and the remaining kids cost more per student to service.
The numbers are surprisingly tight and there is little a local community can do to swing this (for example in Michigan they cannot vote to pay more in local taxes to fund teachers).
How can one verify this from the public financial records? Ie how can I check how much Seattle public schools spend on AP programs + what exactly the spend goes to?
Well the first stop is the financials for the specific district, and then the next step is checking into the exact state specific funding system (they rhyme state to state but are very different).
You'd then need to start digging into the districts condition statements and seeing where the money is being spent and where they have funding shortfalls.
But, at least for any that I've ever looked at, it's not like there is going to be a line item or breakdown of "well we'd love to offer 3 sections of AP calc next year, but we are spending the money on parapros to walk students to and from bathrooms because we can't trust they will come back to class on a bathroom pass".
What’s your estimate as to what % of the marginal spend on education actually goes towards something that increases the future incomes of local students vs just ending up a waste?
I would not view that as the correct metric (do we prepare people to be good citizens with the ability to function/self actualize to their ability level) but taking a gut stab at answering your question: Almost none? 0 (approached from the right)? A gnat's fart?
As Zvi discusses here tangentially and others have argued very well: it's not spending, it's a combination of what we do (frequently nonsense and student ability bands + SES headwinds).
If we increase or decrease marginal spending there is going to be no measurable impact. But, and this is tragic, if we massively increase funding we probably also won't see (IRL) much or any change (of course we may shift results around).
We spend, on a per student basis, piles of money with (strings attached) even more money frequently available for poorer districts to help. And yet for all of this what we have to show for this is that students sort themselves into ability bands, largely stay within those bands and that the best we can do is to stop the bleeding (stuff like "teach phonics" vs "promote people who can't read while having them guess based on pictures" is low hanging fruit that faces/faced intense opposition).
An enjoyable read and it would be really nice if people could separate the idea of tracking for learning from social justice. It is painful to come from a blue area in a blue state and see all the ideas for improving eduction and reducing housing prices that work are coming from Texas or Mississippi.
It makes you wonder about all the "social science" that has emerged in the last 50 years about how to create a more perfect "Great Society", doesn't it?
Re: "Is Our Children Reading?"
Are the people who answer counting Substack (or similar blogs) as "reading"?
I am one who as a child - and to a lesser extent as a teenager - would read a lot of fiction, but now I read almost exclusively non-fiction (blogs mostly, but also sometimes actual academic papers!)
What about reading actual books? I only do it for the contests nowadays. Yet, I feel that I "read" more than what I ever did as a teenager. The issue is that is harder to quantify it because I rarely sit down and read up *at once* as you would with a book chapter, but rather I read on my free time between activities.
Also, do you think that there is any difference in retention/understanding between a dedicated "reading session" and reading "in the bus/elevator/etc..."?
You would think that, say, Spain or Italy would have much better education outcomes than Anglophone countries, with the adult population much better at reading, because they don't have this phonics issue at all. I have no idea if it shows up in the data, but they definitely don't seem like exceptionally healthier and more literate societies than the US.
Another piece of reading in schools that I think can be improved is the canon of literature that is offered. It persists that much of the required reading is authored by a specific group of writers offering a relatively narrow scope that is difficult to connect with for many kids and young adults. In addition to teaching phonics and reading fundamentals, I wish reading material was better suited to real world interests.
(Also I do think the classical American/Brit Lit is great and foundational, but it can’t exist in a vacuum.)
Do you have any thoughts on what you would add, and what you would take? Last I heard, high schoolers in lower literature classes were reading things like "Holes," "A Child Called It," and "Harry Potter." The teachers would like them to also like small books like "Bless Me, Ultima," but it's like beige children; the adults are more into it than the youth. They'll discuss rap lyrics as poetry if it's fit to be read aloud in a classroom. What more should they do?
Also:
The phrase "Principles often want to not do phonics" at the beginning had me rolling on the floor. Maybe your principles but not my principles. I think the problem is principally school administrators.
Just a phonetical typo, ironically
Principal Skinner's Principle: No, it is the children that are wrong.
The one that always makes me twitch every time I sight it on this site is cite. Not actually confusing in context, unlike potentially interest-bearing principal, but it's like Paris in the the springtime where you almost wonder if the regularity is an on-purpose running gag to see if anyone says something. And if so, does that mean they didn't get the joke? Rarely is the question asked. Should've paid more attention to Hooked On Colonics...
On the last point, about a middle ground for attendance: I have liked, as a student and a TA, policies along the lines of "You get X free absences, which you can take for any reason, without permission required. After that, each absence will deduct Y points from your final grade, regardless of whether you have a good reason for it."
I don't understand why any kind of grade would take into account absences at all. Grade should reflect competence, however aquired. You can miss 100% of the teaching and still be competent; and you can certainly hit 100% attendence and still be clueless. Grades should be assessed by exams and only by exams; nothing else works
It is a form of commitment device. Students who attend do better and learn more, on average, than those who do not. But if it is costless to not attend, students will choose to attend less. Grading attendance provides a concrete incentive to attend, which helps to override students' short-termism.
In California public schools, X = 3, after that you could be declared a truant.
GREAT to see this argument is being made & accepted more widely than ever before! 👍Anyone who’s been in education for a while knows exactly that explicit teaching & mastery learning work = students learn & continue to learn…
My concern is with the current ways students are learning & how we can keep our next generation learning?
Those students who “offload” writing summaries & reading for technology to do FOR them - they will likely NOT have “learned” what they need to for longer term - much research already suggests this?
From my background, including special education, students who struggle simply need more support for their learning, more scaffolding & guidance = they are able to learn & just need more practice & more repetition! THAT doesn’t happen when they “offload” (and don’t do) these basic learning tasks??
I definitely don’t have any answers or strategies that can help them, yet? And the reason I read posts on Substack is to learn how to support learning in the current technology - that is moving so fast?
MANY THANKS for your post! 👍♥️♥️
Best root cause analysis I have read: https://www.educationprogress.org/p/anarchy-and-overregulation-in-american . An excerpt:
this captured institution sits atop the credentialing link in the education pipeline, before any other institution (state, district, school) has a chance to act. The self-sealing loop, radically oversimplified, works like this:
- Ed schools transmit the romantic-constructivist paradigm →
- Credentialed teachers and administrators1 staff districts, state education departments, curriculum providers, and education cultural engines →
- State guidance and available curricula reflect paradigm assumptions (recall the NYSED math briefs!) →
- Districts adopt aligned curricula →
- When outcomes disappoint, everyone just moves back up two bullet points →
- And so state guidance and popular curricula get rewritten by the same people, and we put another 50¢ in the pinball machines
This self-sealing loop ultimately persists because the credentialing institutions do not face meaningful external pressure to evolve into a mature, evidence-based profession.
I referenced that NCTQ study of the 700 teacher programs above to explain a limiting factor on first-image reforms. But the fact that only ~25% of the programs taught all five components of evidence-based reading instruction also evinces the capture and misdirection of the academic institutions as a whole. So does this study from 2020, which examined a flagship product from Columbia’s Teachers College, Units of Study, and found that it was not aligned with the best research on reading. This mismatch is reflected in the outcomes these graduate/credentialing programs generate in the trainees and the districts they teach in. Another NCTQ study, for example, found that budget-crunched districts frequently spend millions on master’s degree premiums that have no measurable impact on student outcomes (Brookings found similar results). Back in 2008 districts were spending ~$15 billion annually on these programs.
One important factor Southern Surge is that teachers are actually trained in delivering the specific curriculum adopted by the districts. I am a primary school literacy teacher and most teachers do know about the benefits of phonics but in my experience nobody is ever trained in the specific curriculum they are are asked to employ. That is a huge deal.
Why aren't teachers trained in those curricula?
1) Curricula change like a revolving door every several years.
2) Teacher training is often too academic and not practical enough, so people are shown underlying theories rather than training on specific in-class practices.
3) There is very little standardization across districts, so teacher's colleges wouldn't know which curricula train even if they wanted to.
4) Once on the job teachers have remarkably little time for training and they're often siloed within their own classrooms.
It's like giving a trainee HVAC technician the laws of thermodynamics and a theoretical model of an air-conditioner and telling them to go out and cool the world.
The mild irony of reading this on my device was not lost on me!
I live in Britain and am fortunate enough to be sufficiently old that I was taught to read with phonics while my sister, a few years younger, was at the very beginning of the idiocy which removed that method. Her reading and spelling has been helped by voracious appetite for reading but has never fully recovered. Now that my son is six and learning to read, it's obvious how much his comprehension is helped by having learned with phonics and I'm delighted to see how easy it is for him.
One of the things very difficult to measure in a timeframe of less than generations is the degree to which improved learning equips children who grow up more successful in life, who then go on to have their own children and so encourage the learning for the next generation. Once the cycle is feeding back into itself, one would hope to see compounded benefits.
I only read the introductory paragraph, I never heard of phonics so I asked chatgpt what it is and immediately thought, huh? that's how to learn how to read, what else is even possible. *a few queries later* Hoo boy! are there bad approaches to teaching reading! let me tell you! insane indeed...
זעט זשע, קינדערלעך, געדענקט זשע טייערע,
וואס איר לערנט דא;
זאגט זשע נאך א מאל, און טאקע נאך א מאל:
קמץ־אלף: אָ!
See, children, remember, dear ones,
What you learn here;
Repeat and repeat yet again,
"Komets-alef: o!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyfn_Pripetshik
The problem, and I'm not defending "whole language" nutters, is that English is just only mildly phonetic. I've got 1 little kid right now learning to read and you spend literal years going "that's an exception, ohhh yeah you've gotta memorize that one, good try bud but that is actually [something not at all related to the spelling]".
We'll sit down and drill from the top 1k used sight words or sounds and it's rough translating it into actual real world reading that interests him. Thankfully he seems to love reading (so far), but it's rough.
EDIT: Also could YA/Children's authors stop using non-phonetic character names? mofos argh.
I have discovered through helping my dyslexic kid learn to spell that lot of English doesn't look phonetic until you learn the rules. For example, there is a rule that words should not end with "v,," so words like "hav" are not allowed; "have" has an e on the end despite the short a so that the v is not alone at the end. Good luck :)
The Mississippi to Massachusetts comparison is the cleanest version of this. Black students hit the same basic-or-above reading rate at $37,900 median household income versus $67,000. Curriculum change and enforcement, not funding. The story collapses most education spending debates once that pair of numbers lands.
Not really. Massachusetts is about 45% more expensive overall than Mississippi. Those median income numbers are pretty equivalent when comparing what each dollar is worth in their local environment. It also overlooks the increased funding that went on. For example Mississippi increased education spending per pupil by 73% over the last decade. Hard to ignore that investment. Massachusetts did something similar back in the 1990s with adjustments along the way.
Simple answers rarely show a complete picture and mostly just serve to reinforce the bias of the person offering it.
But, but, but, we ALL know that the most important way to increase student learning is to provide them with the best teachers, and the best teachers cost more money, so we MUST pay ALL of the teachers a LOT more money, and then they will automatically become the best teachers, and the students will learn better. And we MUST keep all of the students together, no matter how well they learn, so that the slowest learners do not suffer the trauma of not moving forward with their cohorts. That sort of trauma cannot be allowed to exist. It is too toxic.
Doesn't this make sense? It is validated by many progressive studies in many schools, and those studies cannot be wrong. By definition. It is settled science. Progressive social science.
Progressive logic at work. /sarc
Overall great article.
One important note after phonics, you need to move on to a content rich curriculum.This really needs to be emphasized.
Also not everything EdReports says is good is good. Wonders for example sucks.
See Natalie Wexler