To the Editor:
Re “Top Ideas for Fixing Schools, Ranked by the Experts” (The Upshot, Oct. 7):
I have spent 15 years working with schools, nonprofits and foundations on how to improve education outcomes, particularly for young people growing up far from opportunity.
Your article lands on an important conclusion: No single intervention is enough, context matters, and even good ideas depend heavily on implementation.
But ranking 30 interventions by effectiveness and cost still feeds one of education’s most persistent bad habits: the search for a silver bullet.
The cycle is familiar. Poor results create urgency. We ask what works quickly, cheaply and at scale. We identify a promising intervention, implement it unevenly, become disappointed when it falls short and move on.
The problem is not that we lack promising ideas. It is that we keep asking them to work for many different students and in many different contexts, quickly and affordably. Little meets those criteria in any field, much less amid the profound complexities that Nikole Hannah-Jones brought to life in her Oct. 4 New York Times Magazine article about choosing schools for her daughter, Najya.
Instead of asking which intervention will fix education, school leaders might start with a more useful question: What experience do our students need, and how do we align our time, people and resources around delivering it well?
Rob Jentsch Baltimore
To the Editor:
It’s remarkable to read 30 ideas for fixing schools and find that not one involved asking the real experts: the students. The article emphasizes the need for quality of implementation for any idea. This depends not on outside experts or the administration but on those most directly involved: teachers and students.
My research and school reform work with thousands of students have generated a top 10 list of student priorities. Effective results can happen when we partner with students in pressing for change and work with them rather than for them.
Rick Gordon Jackson, Wyo. The writer is working with three colleagues on a book, “10,000 Student Voices: Transforming Schools Together.”
To the Editor:
If you look at a school like a business long enough, you start to see everything through that lens. Test scores become the product, teachers become inputs, and students become something to be measured and improved.
That is the logic behind “Top Ideas for Fixing Schools, Ranked by the Experts.” The article asks researchers to rank reforms by their effect on academic achievement, usually measured by standardized tests and by cost. From there, school accountability (rating schools) emerges as one of the best values.
But such conclusions depend on a very narrow idea of what schools are for. They reflect the same logic of efficiency, competition and measurable outcomes that has shaped decades of failed so-called reforms, including school-choice policies.
In my more than 20 years as a high school teacher and during my doctoral work in education, I have learned to take research seriously without mistaking it for a single settled story. For example, National Research Council research found that test-based incentive systems often produced small or effectively zero gains.
We should expect more from schools than higher scores at lower cost. We should care about whether young people are prepared to meet the needs of an ailing and troubled world marked by real challenges that extend far beyond a score on a standardized test.
Alex Bernstein Chicago
To the Editor:
None of the ideas in this article address the orthodoxy of grade grouping by chronological age, which was started in the 19th century. From the beginning, critics observed that not all students fit their grade. Age grading is the Procrustean bed that causes problems for the less mature as well as the more precocious students in every grade. Age grading is a habit stronger than reason, as George Santayana would say.
Charles H. Hargis Knoxville, Tenn.
To the Editor:
As a founder of a mental health nonprofit and a public-school teacher for more than a decade, I was disheartened that researchers and academics underestimated the importance of mental health for student achievement.
A mountain of studies shows that when young people have mental health issues, they can’t engage in school and have greater absenteeism compared with their peers. Worse, students report alarming rates of hopelessness, and suicide is the second-leading cause of death for young people ages 10 to 24.
On the flip side, research shows that early mental health intervention has lifelong benefits, like more educational attainment and greater lifetime earnings.
Schools must be part of a broader system that fosters well-being, preparing educators to identify mental health and addiction issues.
Amy Kennedy Brigantine, N.J.
To the Editor:
Let’s not kid ourselves that fixing education in this country is as simple as throwing more money at it, or coming up with new approaches like frequent small-group tutoring.
Fixing education has to begin at home.
The root problem is our fundamental cultural lack of respect for education. Do children in this country go to school with the expectation that they will apply themselves to do their very best every day? A resounding no! The preoccupation with cellphones and social media while in school is symptomatic.
Do students even go to school with the expectation that they will respect their teachers and behave as if they are grateful to be offered a publicly funded education? Unfortunately, it’s the opposite.
Let’s contrast that with Malala Yousafzai, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Pakistani girl who risked her life every day to attend school. After recovering from being shot in the head on the bus home from school, she said in an interview: “In some parts of the world, students are going to school every day. It’s their normal life. But in other parts of the world, we are starving for education … it’s like a precious gift. It’s like a diamond.”
How many American children consider public education a “precious gift”?
That’s what needs fixing.
Phoebe Huang Stonington, Conn.
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