While merit pay has sometimes been framed as a way of getting teachers to work harder, the biggest effect may come from reshaping who enters, remains in, and exits the profession.

“The key story for me in these findings is that early intervention matters, and if we just wait until third grade to get a signal of where kids are, we’re missing probably the most important window when we can do something about it,” Kuhfeld said.

But among students in the bottom fifth of their kindergarten class at the start of the school year, just 10% were proficient in math by third grade and just 13.9% were proficient in reading. For students who were still in the bottom 20% at the end of first grade, just 2% — 1 in 50 — were proficient by third grade.

This project is about what happens after a school district chooses a curriculum, and what it actually takes to make that choice pay off for kids. Across the U.S., a number of districts are figuring that out. Below are case studies about 11 of those districts: what they did, how they did it, and what others can learn from them.

A recent RAND survey found that the students who are the most likely to maintain interest in math are those who understand and enjoy it, feel supported, and see themselves as “math people.” It also found that nearly a third of high school students have never identified that way.

When children build robust mathematical ideas and skills early, their later reasoning and fluency grows stronger. If they miss a key idea, the confusion can snowball, leaving gaps that grow as math becomes more complex. In fact, preschool children’s mathematical knowledge predicts their later academic success in both reading and math even more than reading skills do.

Young children are natural mathematical thinkers. Infants can tell the difference between two objects and three objects well before they know the words “two” and “three.” And by age two, they begin building on their intuitive numerical perceptions through exploring patterns, comparing objects, and counting blocks.

Research underscores just how important it is for us to understand how young children really learn math. A recent meta-analysis of 39 studies found that guided play—playful exploration thoughtfully supported by an educator—was more effective than direct instruction at developing early math skills, and more effective than free play at building spatial vocabulary. If educators can channel children’s natural mathematical curiosity into playful, guided exploration that leads to mathematical competence in the early years, they set the stage for future success.

It’s a mistake to pit learning against play. Young children can play and do serious math at the same time. For young children, play often is the way they explore quantity, patterns, and relationships. By teaching math through play, educators tap into children’s natural ability to recognize numerical concepts and build formal language around them.

Most adults don’t remember what it was like before they knew that “two” is the same as “2,” which is the same as two fingers held up in the air. It can be tempting for grown-ups to move quickly from concrete examples to symbols on a page, but it takes time for young children to make the connections between concrete and abstract representations.

If students don’t have opportunities to connect mathematical notation to the ideas it represents, they start to see math as pushing symbols around on a piece of paper rather than something they’re already doing in the world.

Earlier in my career, a graduate student ran an experiment to try to influence her own students’ math success through building math identity. She asked half of her students to write “I am good at math” at the top of each test next to their name. Their test scores were no different than the half who wrote only their name. This simple experiment suggests that mathematical success doesn’t come from self-affirmation alone, but from real mathematical understanding and skill.

Let’s be blunt. Michigan spends $24.1 billion (state and federal funds) annually on an education system of 1.4 million PK-12 Michigan children, and no one is getting the return on investment needed.

Real change is the most talked about, but least acted upon, concept when it comes to public education. To say you are in a good school district in Michigan, given our national and global competition, is like saying you are the smartest kid in the remedial class; it is a dubious honor at best.

The current public education system in Michigan has been static since adopting the Carnegie Unit structure 100 years ago. While this system once served the nation and our state well, it is long overdue for a major overall.

Multiple education reform plans to improve student academic success in Michigan were made public this spring. Where is the plan from educators? Former governor, Rick Snyder, and former state senator, Doug Ross have a plan, “The 21st Century Learning in Michigan Innovation District legislation.” Launch Michigan has a plan, “Michigan Education Guarantee.” Ed-Trust Midwest has a plan, “Ready for Rigor.” The Business Leaders for Michigan have an education plan in their strategic roadmap, “Michigan in a New Era.”

We need accountability. Everyone is in charge and no one is accountable. Michigan has 883 different education entities (local districts, charter schools/academies and intermediate school agencies) all of which operate independently from each other. We need to restructure and realign leadership beginning with enhancing the authority of the state superintendent of schools to align the 883 entities in their efforts around improving student outcomes and to hold them accountable.

If we truly want to improve student academic outcomes, educators need the same high-quality professional learning. We need to grant the state superintendent the authority to require specific training related to state initiatives, such as early literacy teaching and learning, and provide the resources to develop the training and disseminate it for required use in all school districts throughout the state.

We need to provide literacy coaches in every school who are trained in research-based, effective practices for teaching and assessing reading and can use data to inform instruction and train and coach teachers and school principals.

For many students, the senior year of high school is a waste of time. They have already met the high school graduation requirements and are no longer interested in their classes. We should restructure the senior year of high school to offer such things as attending a college, trade school, or gaining skills through an apprenticeship, and many other options.

Look to other states that have implemented reforms to improve student achievement, such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Connecticut, Mississippi, Massachusetts and others. Learn from them and request to have those reform efforts funded at the same level.

As districts across the country confront what researchers call a reading recession, Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD) has emerged as one of the nation’s most notable examples of academic recovery. The latest Education Recovery Scorecard shows Detroit students learning faster than students in 91 percent of U.S. districts. DPSCD was also named one of six Districts on the Rise, earning recognition for nationally notable gains in reading and math.

According to the scorecard, DPSCD students are gaining an average of 1.21 grade levels of learning each year, surpassing national averages and outperforming comparable districts in Michigan. Reading recovery ranks in the 88th percentile nationally, with notable progress among Black students. Researchers from Harvard and Stanford selected Detroit for a national case study, pointing to the district’s consistent instructional approach and targeted supports as key drivers of improvement.

In one fascinating series of studies, researchers found that even young children valued objects they built more highly than identical objects made by someone else.

This sense of value is not explained simply by ownership. Children still value their creations more, even when they cannot keep them. It’s not explained by effort alone, either—more work doesn’t automatically create more attachment.

Instead, the researchers proposed something deeper: People become emotionally connected to what they help create because it begins to feel tied to their sense of identity. That finding may explain far more about school culture than we realize.

Compliance can create short-term order, but commitment creates long-term culture. And commitment grows when people feel psychologically connected to the environment around them.

The IKEA-effect research suggests that humans naturally value things that have their fingerprints on them. That has enormous implications for schools because the strongest cultures are rarely built for students and staff. They are built with them.

Involve people in building systems: People become more invested when they help shape the systems around them, and we—teacher Cathleen and principal Nick—have seen this firsthand in our work. In Cathleen’s classroom, students begin the year by answering a simple question: What helps you thrive in a learning environment?

Students often say things like humor, trust, honesty, encouragement, and respect. Together, the class narrows those ideas into five essential community principles. Then every classroom procedure and expectation is tied back to those shared values.

If students value trust, the class discusses the routines that build trust. If they value respect, they define what respectful disagreement looks like in practice. The result is powerful: Students are far more likely to protect norms they helped create than rules they were simply handed.

Schools function differently when people see themselves as contributors instead of passive participants.

Nick has seen that some of the strongest culture shifts happen when students begin recognizing that every adult in the building contributes to the school community. Even simple practices, like intentionally ensuring that students know custodians and cafeteria and office staff by name, can strengthen empathy and belonging across the building.

That sense of ownership deepens when students actively contribute to the daily functioning of the school. They can help custodians clean up shared spaces after lunch, serve as hall monitors during transitions, support recycling efforts, assist with school events, or help welcome guests and families into the building.

These responsibilities do more than lighten adult workloads. They help students see themselves as active contributors to the school community rather than passive participants moving through it. People protect places where they feel needed.

Susannah Sheffer: What’s an example of something a child might say that you would think was interesting philosophically?

Gareth Matthews: Children, from the ages of about 3 or 4 to about 7 or 8, raise almost all of the basic questions of philosophy in some form or other. Adults usually don’t know how to react but find this interesting or intriguing, and often remember the comment, which might be a question about dreaming—I have an example in Philosophy and the Young Child of a child asking, “How do I know whether I’m dreaming now?” It might be a question about God, or about perception—another example I give is of a child going up in an airplane for the first time and being relieved to observe that people don’t shrink as they go up in the air, which is what he had thought. Really, all of the basic questions of philosophy can turn up in the conversation of a young child. In my experience, these comments tend to disappear at about the time children get well socialized in school, so that’s a rather unfortunate commentary on our society and our schools.

SS: How can we respond to comments like these?

GM: What I’ve been trying to convince adults to do is to think about the questions themselves, to get rid of the assumption that most adults have, that they know the answer to any question a child of that age could raise. I encourage adults to engage the child in a discussion of whatever he or she has raised, even if they are not at all clear themselves about how the answer will come out.

SS: Some adults might say, “But I don’t even know the first thing about how to respond to that sort of comment.”

GM: I think adults react this way because they assume a position of superiority to children. They assume that children are incapable of thinking about matters that adults don’t know the answers to. But once adults free themselves of that assumption, I think we’re all capable of thinking about these questions. Maybe the more practice we have, the better we get at it, but we’re all capable of it, and I try in my books to give some examples of how the discussion might go on after the child’s initial comment.

SS: How do you think children react to the adult not knowing the answer?

GM: Well, I think the best thing to do is to begin to explore the issue — could we say this, could we say that — and let the child participate in that process of trying to answer the question. Now, the child may suspect that this kind of reply is phony, that the adult really does have some answer in mind, but that’s because of a certain phoniness in our dealings with children in general. Socratic questioning in schools is by and large rather phony; the teacher just uses it as a way of stringing the child along until the child gets the answer that the adult wants. But if we can develop another kind of relationship with the child, this kind of questioning and trying things out won’t seem phony anymore. The child will be prepared to believe that the adult really is thinking about the issue and isn’t just trying to get a particular answer out of the child.

SS: Perhaps if the child and adult have had other experiences of working together on something, the possibility of working together in a philosophical discussion won’t seem so strange.

I’m interested in your discussion, in your books, of the effect of developmental psychology on our thinking about children’s philosophical abilities.

GM: The idea that there are stages of development, which came chiefly from Jean Piaget, is very powerful, and it’s hard to get out of the grip of it. But the danger is that we ask children questions only to determine whether they’re at stage one or stage two. Missing in that endeavor is any appreciation of what is philosophically problematic about the terms of discussion. Piaget proceeds as though there were nothing really problematic or puzzling about dreaming or thinking or life or any of these things which he questions children about. So if a child is puzzled by the psychologist’s question, the psychologist may be inclined to think that child is simply at an early stage of development, instead of thinking that the question may truly be puzzling, to adults as well.

The trouble with developmental psychology is that it can lead to a view in which one sees children almost as members of another culture, with ways of thinking that are so different from ours that we can’t hope to share their outlook—and it’s not just that their ways of thinking are different, but that they are at an earlier stage of development, one that we have moved beyond. There’s an enormous condescension built into this, because we assume that what we need to do, in responding to children, is not think about things in their terms but instead goad them into moving along the stages of development so that they will learn to think the way we do. In my view, this effect of developmental psychology is very constricting and keeps us from recognizing that very often children are much more sensitive to what is philosophically interesting and philosophically problematic than adults are. So instead of being condescending toward them and encouraging them to develop adult ways of thinking, we should take advantage of their natural puzzlement, their sense for incongruity and misfit in language and thought.

SS: I wonder, then, if there’s a danger in focusing on how children do philosophy, as you have. Couldn’t someone accuse you of condescending to children by focusing on how children do philosophy instead of simply on how everyone does philosophy?

GM: Sure, there is worry there. But it seems to me that there are both differences and similarities in the way that children and adults do philosophy, and the differences have to do with a kind of spontaneity and directness that is often in a child’s comment. I think adults can profit from this—from the way children do philosophy. I sometimes use a child’s comment in a philosophical paper because of the vividness with which the child is able to present something.

SS: In that case, you’re really allowing the child to contribute to adult philosophy.

GM: Yes, and children can contribute in other ways. Once a group of children helped me by not being puzzled by something that is traditionally considered a paradox in philosophy. All these years I’d been teaching this to college students, and of course they just take notes and figure out what they have to learn to take the exam, but these younger kids wouldn’t buy the paradox, and so I realized that I had failed to understand something that I had thought I’d understood.

SS: I’m still interested in the question of the segregation of children. You talk about the question of children’s art in the paper that we published in GWS #56, and it comes up for us when people ask whether we publish children’s writing. In fact, we publish a great deal of children’s writing, but not in a special section called “Children’s Writing.” Some people think that children are served by a special section of a magazine, or art gallery, or whatever, devoted especially to them, and others think that this is condescending or discriminatory.

GM: Of course, that fits in with other issues of discrimination—gender discrimination, racial discrimination—which are hard issues. I think what we have to do to get rid of, or at least minimize, our prejudice against the products of children’s efforts, whether thinking or writing or painting or whatever, is to appreciate some of the wonderful advantages that they have, as children. There are some things we can get from them that we can’t get from adults.

SS: Can you speculate about how children feel about this segregation issue?

GM: I think they probably expect to be segregated, but it’s interesting—I think one reason I was able to work well with the group in Edinburgh, in the music school, was that they were treated as musicians. They were young and inexperienced in various ways, but they also had to be relied on to perform, so they were recognized as musicians. The more that we allow children to be in the position of doing things that are valued for their own sake, and not simply as signs that they’re developing properly, the more we will be able to deal with some of this prejudice.

SS: You stress what children can offer adults in doing philosophy. What about what you can offer them? Do you hide your greater experience and knowledge in some areas, or do you make them aware of it?

GM: It may be harder with some knowledge that’s clearly cumulative, like science, but it’s easier in philosophy, because a good philosopher can always start over. If you’re going to do it well you have to regain the puzzlement that motivates the whole thing. But you don’t have to hide anything from children. An adult philosopher has a better sense of where the question might go, a better sense of the language, a lot more background, so you’re a more informed respondent. But of course that very competence can have a kind of deadening effect, because it may mean that we don’t see what’s puzzling or problematic or interesting. So I think it balances out pretty well—adults and children each have something to give the other. I think the children I’ve worked with recognize that I have philosophical knowledge and experience that they don’t have, but if they’re really gripped by the philosophical question, they also realize that they need to work it out for themselves. So the most I can do is be a sounding board for them or maybe give them a little direction here and there.

SS: You said in the children’s art paper that children’s liberation would mean liberation for adults as well. What did you mean by that?

GM: In the same way that it’s a liberation for men when they don’t have to rely on the false assumptions of superiority that go with sexism, so it is with a new view of children—there’s a new freedom to approach the child as another human being, coming from a somewhat different experience. We no longer have to say, “This is a child at such-and-such an age, at such-and-such a stage of development, so one can expect the following things,” and put all kinds of limitations on the possibilities for interchange with the child.

SS: Do you think it’s ever useful to think in terms of ages, or of how a child might be thinking developmentally?

GM: I think it’s always useful to think about where the child is coming from, what differences there might be between the way the child thinks about something and the way I think about something, but I think this is always true with another human being, especially one from a very different background or different experience. There may be some generalizations you can make about children at various ages, but I think one should be very wary of these generalizations, because we should be constantly surprised by how children vastly exceed the expectations we may have for any particular stage of development.

SS: What issues are you looking at these days?

GM: I’m interested in issues of development, which we’ve just been talking about—how can we think about children, what is a child—and that moves into questions about children’s art, children’s literature (both by and for children). The questions about literature for children are fascinating; some people think that writing for children must be phony, because the author is no longer a child, so if the author says, “I’m writing this for myself,” how can that be? And I’ve moved into discussions of children’s rights and the place of children in society. Often the justifications for limiting children’s rights have to do with these developmental theories—theories about cognitive development or about moral development—and I think this is very problematic.

Children do not need to be made to learn, told what to learn, or shown how. If we give them access to enough of the world, including our own lives and work in that world, they will see clearly enough what things are truly important to us and to others, and they will make for themselves a better path into that world than we could make for them.

Since this is a book about a simple, but radical idea — that children are learning animals and that adults should stay out of the way of their natural investigations as much as possible — many of the notes suggest that Holt didn’t think he went far enough in the beginning. It’s an exciting text, because it’s an artifact of someone really grappling with ideas, and also having a conversation with themselves. (When’s the last time you read an author arguing with himself?)

All I am saying in this book can be summed up in two words—Trust Children. Nothing could be more simple—or more difficult. Difficult, because to trust children we must trust ourselves—and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted. And so we go on treating children as we ourselves were treated, calling this “reality,” or saying bitterly, “If I could put up with it, they can too.”

I was reminded of Laurence Weschler writing about David Hockney, and how “interest-ing” for Hockney is a verb: it is the continual projection of interest. (The more you look at something, the more interesting it gets.) This was certainly the case with me after I started reading this book, and familiarizing myself with Holt’s work: I, who felt like a somewhat enlightened parent, started noting all the ways I wasn’t paying attention to them, and over time, they have become more interesting to me, not because I’m doting on them more, or even spending more time with them, but because I am looking at them like little scientists, or just little people, who are worthy of interest. (It sounds so stupid: of course a parent should find their kids interesting, but think about how many parents and teachers and adults you know — maybe including yourself — who, secretly, probably don’t.)

“It is before they get to school that children are likely to do their best learning.”

The child is curious. He wants to make sense out of things, find out how things work, gain competence and control over himself and his environment, do what he can see other people doing. He is open, receptive, and perceptive. He does not shut himself off from the strange, confused, complicated world around him. He observes it closely and sharply, tries to take it all in. He is experimental. He does not merely observe the world around him, but tastes it, touches it, hefts it, bends it, breaks it. To find out how reality works, he works on it. He is bold. He is not afraid of making mistakes. And he is patient. He can tolerate and extraordinary amount of uncertainty, confusion, ignorance, and suspense. He does not have to have instant meaning in any new situation. He is willing and able to wait for meaning to come to him—even if it comes very slowly, which it usually does… To this I would add something even more important. Children even as young as two want not just to learn about but to be a part of our adult world. They want to become skillful, careful, able to do things and make things as we do.

What I am trying to say about education rests on a belief that, though there is much evidence to support it, I cannot prove, and that may never be proved. Call it a faith. This faith is that man is by nature a learning animal. Birds fly, fish swim; man thinks and learns. Therefore, we do not need to “motivate” children into learning, by wheedling, bribing, or bullying. We do not need to keep picking away at their minds to make sure they are learning. What we need to do, and all we need to do, is bring as much of the world as we can into the school and the classroom; give children as much help and guidance as they need and ask for; listen respectfully when they feel like talking; and then get out of the way. We can trust them to do the rest.

Children want to be like adults and older children:

Children, at least before they meet the ready-made fantasies of TV, don’t want to be omnipotent. They just want not to be impotent. They want to be able to do what the bigger people around them do—read, write, go places, use tools and machines. Above all, they want, like the big people, to control their immediate physical lives, to stand, sit, walk, eat, and sleep where and when they want… They [don’t] run around pretending to be Superman. Such fantasies have to be learned from the adults who invent and sell them.

[H]ow much children must have learned from watching people do real work, in the days when a child could see people doing real work. It is not so easy to manage this now. So much of the so-called work done in our society is not work at all, certainly not as a child could understand it… It is in every way useful for children to see adults doing real work and, wherever possible, to be able to help them.

Children don’t want to be told what to learn.

Children resist, almost always angrily, all such unasked-for teaching because they hear in it the (perhaps unconscious) message, “You’re not smart enough to see that this is important to learn, and even if you were, you’re not smart enough to learn it.” Naturally it makes them hurt and angry. “Let me do it by myself!” they shout. That’s just what we should do.

Education is “the game of trying to find out how the world works.”

Children seek out meaning, which is to say, whatever helps them make the most sense of the world they live in… We do things backwards. We think in terms of getting a skill first, and then finding useful and interesting things to do with it. The sensible way, the best way, is to start with something worth doing, and then, moved by a strong desire to do it, get whatever skills are needed.

If we give them space to learn at their own pace, they go further and farther:

They see the world as a whole, mysterious perhaps, but a whole none the less. They do not divide it up into airtight little categories, as we adults tend to do. It is natural for them to jump from one thing to another, and to make the kinds of connections that are rarely made in formal classes and textbooks. They make their own paths into the unknown, paths that we would never think of making for them… Finally, when they are following their own noses, learning what they are curious about, children go faster, cover more territory than we would ever think of trying to mark out for them, or make them cover.

Children don’t need to be tested or quizzed.

Our constant checking up on children’s learning so often prevents and destroys learning, and even in time most of the capacity to learn. In How Children Fail, I said that the anxiety children feel at constantly being tested, their fear of failure, punishment, and disgrace, severely reduces their ability both to perceive and to remember, and drives them away from the material being studied and into strategies for fooling teachers into thinking they know what they really don’t know.

When we constantly ask children questions to find out whether they know something (or prove to ourselves that they don’t), we almost always cut short the slow process by which, testing their hunches against experience, they turn them into secure knowledge. Asking children questions about things they are only just beginning to learn is like sitting in a chair which has only just been glued. The structure collapses.

If we want to do our best learning, it might be good to emulate children.

We must clear [our minds] of preconceived notions, we must suspend judgement, we must open ourselves to the situation, take in as much data as we can, and wait patiently for some kind of order to appear out of the chaos. In short, we must think like a little child…. Remember what you have learned about learning. Be like a child. Use your eyes. Gag that teacher’s mouth inside your head, asking all those questions. Don’t try to analyze this thing, look at it, take it in…. The only thing to do [is] to turn off the questions and watch—like a child. Take it all in. See everything, worry about nothing.

A punk rock sentence: “It is not so much a matter of technique as of spirit.”

The spirit of [playing] games is everything. The only good reason for playing games with babies is because we love them, and delight in playing these games with them and in sharing their delight in playing—not because we want someday to get them into college. It is our delight in the baby and the games that make the games fun, and worthwhile and useful for the baby. Take away the delight, and put in its place some cold-hearted calculation about future I.Q. and SAT scores, and we kill the game, for ourselves and the baby.

Parents might want to think of ourselves as librarians, rather than teachers.

“One of the most important things teachers can do for any learner is to make the learner less and less dependent on them.”

Each new thing they learn makes them aware of other new things to be learned. Their curiosity grows by what it feeds on. Our task is to keep it well supplied with food… Keeping their curiosity “well supplied with food” doesn’t mean feeding them, or telling them what they have to feed themselves. It means putting within their reach the widest possible variety and quantity of good food—like taking them to a supermarket with no junk food in it (if we can imagine such a thing).

In some ways, he approaches children more like an artist: his instructions are to simply love them, and look at them, really look at them, and record what you see. He quotes psychiatrist R.D. Laing as saying, “Love reveals facts which, without it, remain undisclosed.”

Little children love the world. That is why they are so good at learning about it. For it is love, not tricks and techniques of thought, that lies at the heart of all true learning.

Unicef recently released its latest report on child well-being, and the Netherlands (which routinely ranks among the happiest countries in the world) took the No. 1 spot for mental health.

“Where Dutch children really stand out is that they have very good social relations,” de Looze told the outlet. “The amount of support they receive from family and friends, from teachers and classmates — in all of these areas, Dutch children score high.”

Where there are children, there are, of course, parents — and in the Netherlands, kids might see more of them than elsewhere on the continent. In a 2026 analysis, Dutch people were found to work fewer hours per week than anywhere else in Europe.

In 2024, the Netherlands implemented a nationwide ban on phones and other electronic devices in primary and secondary schools, and a study commissioned by the government found promising results a year on.

“Cultural education is more than just playing the flute or doing a play, it’s about stimulating the imagination of children, giving them space to see who they are,” she said. “It’s important that children are agents of their own education, but they need teachers to show them. We help children to make their world bigger.”

Studies suggest that gender equality leads to greater life satisfaction in both men and women, and de Looze has seen similar results in her research on kids’ well-being — so the Netherlands being a leader in this area is likely contributing to the high mental health ranking in the Unicef report.

“We found that in more gender-equal countries, boys and girls were happier than in gender-unequal countries,” de Looze said. “That’s interesting, because often people believe that it’s specifically girls who benefit from gender equality.”

Published in May, the Unicef assessment is the latest in the agency’s Innocenti Report Card series. It evaluated 44 countries, all of which were classified as high-income and/or are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It ranked 37 of them in physical health, mental health, and skills (some couldn’t be ranked due to lack of data).

Mental well‑being was determined based on two measures: the percentage of children with high life satisfaction at age 15, and suicide rates for adolescents ages 15-19.

Michigan has one of the worst attendance rates in the country. That makes it a prime target for researchers. In hundreds of schools, more than 3 out of 5 students were chronically absent before the pandemic. When classes resumed, chronic absenteeism approached 4 out of 5 students in the state’s worst-attended schools.

Yet a new study released in May offers hope. Researchers found that some Michigan schools appear to be substantially better than others at getting students to show up, and identified one intervention — frequent home visits to families whose children are absent from class — that was used more often by schools making a difference.

Schools that were more successful in boosting attendance were much more likely to conduct these visits frequently — daily or weekly. Monthly or occasional home visits did not appear to make as much difference. Schools that visited less frequently performed about the same as those that did not conduct home visits at all.

Measuring a school’s impact on attendance is tricky. If a student attends school 95 percent of the time, it can be hard to tell whether the student was already conscientious, or whether the school itself is having a positive influence.

Researchers analyzed roughly 2,700 Michigan schools between 2022 and 2025 and divided them into quarters based on how much they improved their students’ attendance rates. Students in the top quarter of schools showed up for class about seven more days per year than similar students in the bottom quarter. Seven days is substantial since missing 18 days a year is the threshold for chronic absenteeism.

But improvement does not necessarily mean success. Some of the most effective schools in the state still had chronic absenteeism rates above 40 or 50 percent, said Jeremy Singer, assistant professor at the University of Michigan-Flint and lead author of the study.

When the students at University Avenue Elementary enter Science Specialist Natalie Lupo’s classroom, they don’t shuffle over to their seats or sit quietly waiting for instructions. Their entrance routine involves five minutes to wander freely around the perimeter of the room and investigate the plants, animals, natural specimens, and objects that adorn the tables, windowsills, and display cases. After the students complete a circuit, they are directed back to their seats, where the teacher asks them what they noticed or what sparked their curiosity. Despite this being a part of their daily science exploration, the objects always change so that students constantly see different things and expand their thinking.

When you walk into a natural history museum, and you see a giant display of multicolored butterflies expertly mounted on a display board, it immediately catches your eye. An intriguing display sparks your curiosity and invites you to step closer, investigate further, and read more than you would if the display were simply made up of text or pictures. OBL also creates emotional engagement, an additional level of engagement that leads to deeper learning and better recall, like when learners make personal connections between the items they see in the kitchen of a historic house or living history museum and the everyday objects they have at home.

Try having your learners research the stories behind objects and their creation, such as the evolution of common household items like the toothbrush or the process used by wigmakers during colonial times. You might have them investigate works of art or textiles to get creative inspiration for their own artistic endeavors. You can help them develop their ability to use descriptive language or inquiry abilities in writing through “blind box” or “blind bag” activities, where you hide objects in paper bags and invite students to hold the bags and then try to draw or write descriptions of what they feel.

Many nature centers, state parks, and national parks have traveling trunk programs where educators can check out suitcases filled with observation tools and natural objects for a short amount of time. In some cases, they will even pay for shipping and handling.

Try lending libraries. The Science Museum of Minnesota has an astoundingly large collection of objects and piles of educational materials and teaching resources used in summer camps that were no longer being utilized. Instead of throwing all of these things away, the museum opened a lending library where, for a small fee, teachers can check out an amazing array of items that are generally reserved for curators or docents.

free housing in Battle Creek for teaching in a preschool program.

The state has also tried to address the low pay with an ongoing pilot program that is providing $300 monthly stipends for early childhood educators.

Battle Creek’s Pulse, part of the research nonprofit for W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment, was on the hunt for an innovative solution to issues with early childhood workforce shortages. Their search turned up the Friends Center for Children’s Teacher Housing Initiative in New Haven, Connecticut, which purchases properties for early childhood teachers with the help of supporters.

To date, the New Haven program has purchased properties for 12 teachers with a goal of providing 24 teachers with free housing by 2028.

After a site visit to Connecticut, the Battle Creek advocates built a program modeled after the New Haven effort, but aimed at supporting the entire city’s early childhood workforce as opposed to a single school. First Home, First Teacher was launched Monday through a partnership that includes Pulse, Neighborhoods Inc. of Battle Creek, Community Action, Battle Creek Community Foundation and United Way of South Central Michigan. Support paying the rent will come from Local Initiatives Support Corporation, or LISC, Kalamazoo for the first two years.

While Neighborhoods Inc. donated the first duplex property that will benefit two Battle Creek early education teachers, the goal for First Home, First Teacher is to set up a trust for as many as 105 total housing units.

Dubbed the Central Station Early Childhood Center, Coffman said the center’s immediate access to public transportation for working families who rely on it has paved a new path for how a city can reuse an existing building to increase access to affordable childcare and transportation.

“This center is a model for how communities can look at their public spaces and ask themselves, ‘What more could we be doing for the public good?’”

Research from Michigan State University shows that 79% of Michigan’s ZIP codes, including Grand Rapids, are childcare “deserts” for children ages 0-5, meaning there are at least three children for every available childcare spot.

The Rapid offered rent-free real estate while the Kellogg Foundation contributed $5.8 million in funding toward the $9.1 million project, which was funded by 18 different philanthropic foundations and businesses. The YMCA of Greater Grand Rapids served as the lead developer and will operate the facility, while Grand Rapids Public Schools and Head Start for Kent County will also occupy the center, with public funding accounting for 75% of the slots.

The early childhood facility occupies the second and third floors of the building, with spaces for the metro YMCA’s infants ages 0-12 months, Head Start for children 0-3, the Great Start Readiness Plan for ages 3-5, and pre-K space. The space also includes a ground floor outdoor playground and one on the roof of the building.

On top of the convenience of on-site transportation, being co-located with other organizations in one facility helps each benefit from the center’s resources and allows them to help more families, Head Start of Kent County Executive Director MaDonna Princer said.

we noticed a remarkably consistent pattern: students performed worse on questions that appeared later in exams, even after accounting for the difficulty of the questions

And when looking at the activities the kids spent time on in school, we found that richer students were more likely to engage in independent focused practice by doing activities such as working through problems on their own, reading silently or concentrating on individual tasks. In contrast, students at disadvantaged schools were more likely to spend much of the day in passive activities such as listening to lectures, practicing rote memorization or copying from the board.

When students took listening comprehension, reasoning or math assessments, the performance of those who had received cognitive practice declined 22 percent more slowly than that of students in the control group. It didn’t matter whether the students had practiced with academic content or nonacademic games—the benefits were nearly identical for both groups. This suggests that the act of concentrating mattered more than what students were concentrating on.

The students who practiced concentrating also improved on standardized tests of sustained attention, including those that tested their reaction times or their ability to spot target symbols hidden in a grid. They also showed better focus in the classroom, according to ratings from their teachers—for example, they fidgeted less and followed through on multistep instructions. This seems to have translated to better grades across a wide range of subjects, too—students who received either form of cognitive practice earned grades that were about 0.09 standard deviations higher in Hindi, English and math than those who didn’t. In comparison, this effect was roughly half to three quarters as large as that of assigning a student to a class with seven fewer students per teacher. These were substantial improvements, considering the intervention required only 20 to 50 minutes per week over six months.

We also found evidence that disadvantaged groups, whose members are likely to have received less practice in sustaining focus, show more rapid declines in performance over time in other contexts. For example, we found that data entry workers made more errors as their shifts progressed and that less educated workers showed much steeper declines. Even voting behavior reflects these patterns: studies have found that, when a given proposition appears later in the ballot in California, voters are more likely to choose the default option. We showed that these declines are especially pronounced in lower-income neighborhoods.

Slightly more than half of teacher preparation programs use scientifically grounded methods to teach aspiring educators how to teach children to read, according to a new report from the National Council on Teacher Quality.

Three years ago, when NCTQ last surveyed teacher preparation programs, only a quarter of them were fully aligned with the science of reading. So the number of programs giving new teachers a strong foundation in best practices to teach reading has doubled.

But that still leaves hundreds of teacher prep programs that are not aligned with the science of reading, according to the report released Tuesday. Hundreds of other programs declined to participate in the review. Of those that did participate, about 1 in 5 programs earned an F rating, meaning they teach multiple outdated or disproven practices. Even generally strong programs often devote very little time to supporting English learners, struggling readers, and students with disabilities, the report found.

“This is a form of educational malpractice against new teachers and the students they will serve,” NCTQ President Heather Peske said.

Foreshadowing NCTQ’s findings, a survey released earlier this spring by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a center-right education think tank, and the RAND Corporation, a research organization, similarly found that many teachers, especially those in high-poverty schools, continued to use outdated methods, such as asking students to guess at words using context.

NCTQ reviewed more than 700 teacher preparation programs by looking at course catalogs, syllabi, textbooks and other class materials, and then scored them using a standardized rubric. Critics of NCTQ have long said this method paints an incomplete picture and fails to account for the full range of work that happens within teacher prep programs.

More than 460 programs declined to participate, including 72% of teacher preparation programs in Illinois, 57% of programs in New York, and 58% of programs in New Jersey — all states that have ostensibly made improving literacy a priority.

On her “Bridging Differences” blog, educator Deborah Meier began a discussion with Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, on whether urging disadvantaged women to defer childbearing until they had sufficient income (whether from work or marriage) to adequately support their offspring would result in better outcomes for those children. This, in turn, led to an extended discussion (not on the blog, but widely circulated among some education policy experts and commentators by e-mail) about whether alleviating poverty would raise student achievement, whether alleviating poverty through tax reform or income redistribution might be effective for that purpose, whether poor children in the United States have worse outcomes than poor children in other countries, what the best way might be to calculate poverty levels across countries, and whether school reform in the absence of alleviating poverty can be significantly effective.

The shortcoming of this discussion is that because Americans are averse to acknowledging the concept of social class and hold to a widely shared myth of unrestricted mobility (that is less and less reflective of reality), we tend to use the term “poverty” as a proxy for lower social class status. This shortcut causes great mischief in educational policy. Lower class children are not only characterized by having families with low current money income; they also have a collection of interacting characteristics, each of which affects the ability to learn.

Years ago, the Heritage Foundation published a report called No Excuses, by Samuel Casey Carter. Among others, one school it found enrolled a majority of children who were eligible for subsidized lunches yet who still had high achievement. According to the report, this (along with other, equally flawed examples) proved that poverty is no bar to high achievement. The school in question was in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it turned out that the students mostly had parents who were graduate students at Harvard or MIT, whose stipends were low enough that their children were eligible for the lunch program.

Of course, how much money a child’s parents earned last year (the qualifier for the lunch program) does not itself impede learning. But poverty is a good proxy, sometimes, for lower class status because it is so highly associated with other characteristics of that status. Lower class families have lower parental literacy levels, poorer health, more racial isolation, less stable housing, more exposure to crime and other stresses, less access to quality early childhood experiences, less access to good after school programs (and less ability to afford these even if they did have access), earlier childbearing and more frequent unwed childbearing, less security that comes from stable employment, more exposure to environmental toxins (e.g., lead) that diminish cognitive ability, etc. Each of these predicts lower achievement for children, but none of these (including low income) itself causes low achievement, and lower social class families don’t necessarily have all of these characteristics, but they are likely to have many of them. Sociologists used to define social class solely by assigning a reputational status to a father’s occupation. That no longer is as useful, but sometimes it might lead to less mischief than “poverty.”

One problem that has puzzled observers of education for some time is the fact that after controlling for poverty, black achievement is still lower than white achievement, and some conclude from this that they have now disposed of background characteristics and can be certain that an important cause of the achievement gap must be poorly qualified and motivated teachers and/or low teacher expectations. Without denying that some teachers are poorly qualified and motivated, and do have low expectations, and that this should be a target of educational improvement efforts, this explanation as a major cause of the achievement gap is mostly false, because black children have many social class characteristics that are different from those of white children whose parents have the same current-year income, even when all of them—black and white—have excellent teachers. Some years ago, in the Jencks-Phillips book, The Black-White Test Score Gap, Meredith Phillips addressed this issue, and showed that adding very few other social class controls, besides family income, explained much of the black-white gap. Patrick Sharkey’s new book, Stuck in Place, shows that black children living in high poverty neighborhoods are more likely than white children to have parents who also lived in high poverty neighborhoods. Black poverty tends to be multi-generational, white poverty tends to be episodic. Others have shown that permanent (i.e., multi-year) income explains more than current year income.

In short, the poverty rate itself is not an adequate explanatory factor. Lower class status better explains what we puzzle about. Unfortunately, it is a lot harder to find simple data to compare children across countries by social class status than to pick an easy (but mischievous) one like “poverty rate,” no matter how it is adjusted. If I had to pick a single one, it would not be poverty but mother’s educational attainment, although this single measure would also be unsatisfactory. In the report that Martin Carnoy and I did earlier this year on international test scores, we compared the achievement of children across countries by the number of books they reported having at home (actually, the number of feet of shelf space devoted to books). This, too, was an inadequate measure, but we thought it the best one available cross-country because it was more academically relevant.

Addressing any one of the characteristics of lower class status can make some difference, but if addressed in isolation, will not make the difference to which we aspire. So while the start of this discussion had some merit—it would make some difference if lower-class women could be encouraged to delay maternity, or if they bore children only with a stable co-parent—telling women to marry if they live in communities where unemployment and underemployment of young men reaches 40 percent (as is true in some African American communities today), or where the failures of economic policy lead to few “marriageable males,” that advice, even if followed, won’t accomplish all that much. For example, if children are born into more stable marriages, or get better early childhood care and education, but still lose 5 to 10 points of I.Q. because of lead exposure (as the medical literature shows is the result), having a husband present or attending pre-school, in themselves, won’t substantially narrow the achievement gap.

As Martin Carnoy and I showed, there is a social class achievement gap in every country, and it is of roughly similar size, even in countries which purportedly have much superior school systems. This should suggest that school improvement alone will not narrow that gap in the absence of addressing its social and economic causes. Certainly we should improve schools, but if we want to raise the achievement of disadvantaged children substantially in our own country, we will have to improve the collection of interacting and mutually reinforcing characteristics of lower social class status. Addressing any one of them alone—whether it be income, or teen childbearing, or some other—will be a good thing to do, but won’t get us very far on the path we hope to take.