鶹Ӱ

鶹Ӱ

Why Actually Working Isn’t Enough to Defend Effective Education Ideas

Conor Williams: Worthwhile education policies backed by strong evidence are undermined when they can’t solve everything

five bulb on blackboard one bulb bright yellow. idea concept

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

There’s an old conversational set piece in the lively world of early education policy that goes something like this: showing that pre-K programs do a solid job of raising children’s knowledge and skills, and even improve kindergarten readiness, but seem to be less effective at producing higher third-grade reading scores or some other longer-term academic metric. 

As critics pounce, advocates for greater pre-K investments grumble, “Look, the study showed that pre-K was solidly effective at preparing kids for kindergarten. Why are we measuring its value in terms of metrics that come way later? By that logic, we shouldn’t just end pre-K investments … we should also cancel 2nd grade (and maybe the rest of early elementary school).”

To be sure, there’s a showing that early education programs are effective. They’re among we can make! But that doesn’t stop us replaying the aforementioned pattern. 

It’s a weird tendency in education debates: we blame good, tested, and effective ideas for not solving the full extent of U.S. inequities. Even the best ideas — the ones that help students succeed, the ones that close divisions in schools and society — rarely get credit for their efficacy. So pre-K debates have less to do with whether pre-K works at preparing kids for kindergarten, and more with whether it “works” on some other array of distant metrics. 

Folks in education do this all the time. Take charter schools, for example. Over the past several decades, a bevy of studies have shown that when charters are opened and overseen by rigorous authorizers, they can significantly improve academic achievement, particularly for students from historically marginalized communities. In the 2010s, researchers at Stanford’s Center for Research on Educational Outcomes (CREDO) released showing that well-regulated charters tend to be for raising the test scores of English learners, students from low-income families, and African-American students. of charter schools’ academic performance found similarly encouraging results across the country. 

But as a policy idea, charter schools are besieged with criticism for “failing” to fully in all places and at all times. It’s not that there’s no room for criticism of charter schools; indeed, studies have shown that with tend to generally be than comparable public schools. It’s just that, too often, even are regularly blamed for not yet having defeated the full breadth of systemic and economic inequality in American life. 

Why is this? The blame cuts in two directions, but both have to do with how we define effectiveness of particular programs. First: advocates for certain education reforms often set up their ideas for failure. Pre-K advocates spent many years promising that universal pre-K could close achievement gaps before they begin to widen, obviate the need for controversial K-12 reforms by raising academic achievement, increase participants’ future incomes and lower their chances of incarceration as adults, and . Against that backdrop, is it any wonder that pre-K programs that simply prepare kids to succeed in kindergarten feel like flops? 

This kind of overpromising can be useful for drawing attention to a policy idea, but advocates ought to recognize that inflated rhetoric comes with the cost of raising expectations well beyond what they can likely deliver. (Note: there is that pre-K programs with modest short-term academic impacts may still improve participants’ long-term life outcomes.)

Second: policy critiques are almost always driven more by prior political preferences than the facts on the ground. Sure, when new ideas arrive in public education, critics justifiably warn against “experimenting on schools and kids.” But as the evidentiary base gets better for a particular idea over time, critics shift to less honest work—muddying the measurement waters. If pre-K seems to be really effective at improving children’s school readiness and long-term outcomes, critics who loathe public investment in education and pine for traditional one-income households with stay-at-home mothers caring for kids … find it easy to redefine successful pre-K as something else (e.g. ). 

If, with sufficient public oversight, charter schools produce strong academic outcomes for historically marginalized children, critics who worry that charter schools divert resources and attention from traditional school districts … find it easy to frame those successes out of the picture by measuring charters against other benchmarks (even those that also also elude traditional public schools). For instance, it’s frustrating to see refusing to enroll hard-to-serve students who might be at risk of failing to graduate on time, ).

To be sure, the design, implementation, and defense of new education policies are always going to be plagued by politics. That’s a basic element of living in a democracy. But we really need to stop blaming good-faith efforts to improve schools for failing to solve American racism, economic inequality, etc. 

Instead, we ought to think of education reforms as . Nearly every study shows that developmentally appropriate, well-funded pre-K is good for kids—but . Indeed, a system of high-quality pre-K that feeds into an equitably funded system of effective K-12 schools…is also likely to fall short. (Add in , and a , though, and we might really be getting somewhere.) 

But that’s no excuse for doing nothing. The roots of racist inequities against communities of color are centuries deep and systemically wide; undoing them requires sustained reforms at all levels.

Get stories like these delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter

Republish This Article

We want our stories to be shared as widely as possible — for free.

Please view The 74's republishing terms.





On The 74 Today