Matt Barnum
@matt_barnum
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K-12 education reporter @WSJ ; previously @Chalkbeat ; fake stats vigilante; matt.barnum @wsj .com
Brooklyn
Joined April 2013
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NEW: The conventional wisdom is that parents have grown increasingly furious with public schools. But it's actually people without school-age children who are particularly skeptical of public schools, multiple surveys show.
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Some parents recently confronted TN's ed commissioner about "critical race theory" in schools. What specifically were they complaining about? A curriculum teaching elementary school students about school desegregation.
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This is my last week at Chalkbeat — it's been a great run. But I'm thrilled to be joining the Wall Street Journal as a K-12 education reporter!
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And recall that Gallup survey showing satisfaction with public school is at 20-year low — guess what it is a *20 year high*? The gap between parents' perspective of their children's school and the public's views about American schools.
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One innovative idea to improve educational outcomes in our schools is to stop poisoning children with lead.
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You know "equity" has become a buzzword that has lost all meaning when affluent districts are now saying the federal funding has been distributed "inequitably" because most of it is going to high-poverty districts.
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Headline writers, you simply cannot leave out or asterisk away "if community transmission is low" when the *vast majority of the country* would not meet that definition!
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NEW: Stanford economist Eric Hanushek is well known for arguing for decades that most studies show no link between school spending and student outcomes. But now his new summary paper shows the opposite.
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Why I'm Learning Less With Distance Learning Than I Do in School, by a student without the social capital to get published on the NYTimes op-ed page.
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Last week was my last one at
@Chalkbeat
for a while. I'll be on leave for the next nine months on a Spencer Fellowship, exploring the past, present, and future of school funding and the debate over whether money matters for schools.
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One reason this has surprised people is because many news stories have implicitly conflated the public's views on American schools with parents' views of their own children's schools.
NEW: The conventional wisdom is that parents have grown increasingly furious with public schools. But it's actually people without school-age children who are particularly skeptical of public schools, multiple surveys show.
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New: Large-scale experiment shows that students in Houston benefitted from expanded arts education — higher writing scores, more compassionate perspectives, and lower discipline rates
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I think an under-rated part of this year's school disruptions is the amount of staff time being diverted to COVID protocols. Eg, how many school counselors or assistant principals have effectively become full-time contract tracers?
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Excited to share this project I've been working on for months with
@lamarr_lemee
: Ratings from the popular site GreatSchools steer families away from schools with more low-income, black and Hispanic students.
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NEW: 50 years ago the Supreme Court ruled that there is no right in the Constitution to an education or to equal school funding.
I've spent months examining the dubious and disturbing social science that was used to justify the decision.
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New! I review 20+ studies on how direct anti-poverty programs affect kids' performance in school. Consistent takeaway: they boost test scores and likely high school graduation, college enrollment/completion
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A new study finds that universal free lunch in NYC improved school climate across the board — an interesting example of the upsides of a universal rather than means-tested program. via
@PoojaSalhotra
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The vast majority of parents remain satisfied with their child's school, and that has remained true throughout the pandemic. I like to think of this as the parent–pundit gap, and it's a long-standing phenomenon.
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A good reminder that education policymakers tend to be in favor of local control of schools until locals decide to do something they don't like.
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@AstorAaron
it's all parents of school-age children. so this almost certainly slightly underestimates support for public schools among public school parents
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NYC schools got $716.9 million under the federal coronavirus relief package. Now, take a guess how much New York State cut NYC's education budget by.
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We should not be pollyannna-ish at all about the effects of the pandemic on children, but we also should stop calling this generation "lost."
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At this White House event, DeVos saying schools and teachers need things like "grit," "determination," "innovation," and "resilience." I don't believe she commented on whether schools — which face new costs and budget cuts — need money.
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The vast majority of missed school at this particular moment is almost certainly coming from student absences, not school building closures.
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Feels like we're kinda back to square one on data regarding COVID spread and schools. :/
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Major new study in two states, MI & WA, finds school reopening is not linked to COVID cases when community spread is very low, but *is linked* when cases are higher
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If you are a reporter writing a story about teacher turnover/shortages — please, please, please! — seek actual data on the share of teachers leaving and how this compares to prior years. This is crucial for understanding your local context and the national picture.
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If free college is a government takeover of a higher ed, why wouldn't school vouchers (aka "free private school") amount to a government takeover of private K-12 school
We know what “free college” means: a government takeover. Nothing is truly free & the 2/3 of Americans who don’t pursue a 4-year degree will end up footing the bill for the 1/3 who do. Those who paid back their student loans shouldn’t have to subsidize those who didn’t plan/pay.
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The research on elite high schools — that they have little if any effect on measurable outcomes — suggests we should rethink how we judge school quality
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Teachers worked more hours than usual in the '20-'21 school year, and saw their hours rise more than those in other professions.
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Very excited to be part of a great group of fellows and dig deep into the past, present, and future of school funding, including the debate over whether "money matters."
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1/At the very least, more articles need to engage with the fact that *throughout the pandemic* parents have reported fairly high levels of satisfaction with their child's school. People find this hard to believe, but it's true!
The *causality* presented here as to what's behind the parent revolt is utterly nonsensical and yet article after article after article rehashes the same claims
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Scoop: Last week, I started a new role at Chalkbeat as the interim national editor. Excited to play more of a role overseeing our coverage and continuing to work with
@kalynbelsha
! Don't worry — I'll still be writing and reporting regularly.
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NEW: Across a number of states, there really was a sharp increase in teachers leaving the classroom after last school year, according to new data I compiled.
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FYI If you hear the claim that Americans' satisfaction with public schools is at a "20 year low," this is the basis for it. Look closely!
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Private schools are much more likely than district schools to have opened their buildings. But charter schools are the *least likely* to be in person. This really complicates the narrative that teachers unions are to blame for closed buildings.
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I can only aspire to grow up to be a major political columnist, the best part being I would no longer need to check my claims with specific facts or data.
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The new funding amounts to over $2K per student, but it's largely being distributed through the Title I formula. That means high-poverty districts will get a lot more than the average.
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New: The most common way of measuring schools — overall proficiency scores, used by governments, media, and school rating sites — is biased and often inaccurate, a new study study.
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In NYC, for instance, a third of students were absent yesterday.
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Big news: In a case involving Detroit public school students, a federal circuit court just ruled that the U.S. Constitution guarantees the "fundamental right" to a "basic minimum education"
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1/So if you read this NYTimes op-ed from a few days ago, you might have been taken aback by this line. "Half of kids have an A- average?? Kids these days! Schools these days! Where are the standards?"
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1/The masking and schools discussion is so frustrating because everyone is pretending it's about "science" but really it's about values and priors and common sense in the face of uncertain science.
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So much about American education and its associated politics is neatly summarized in this graph.
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@MichaelPetrilli
@MCPS
maybe they are persuaded by the research on the benefits of universal free meals
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1/So long-time followers know I'm a bit of an obsessive about the "future of work" conversations and myths in education. Gonna elaborate a little on why, beyond this piece
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Well, today I learned, via
@beckpeterson
's reporting, that the Emerson Collective apparently stopped funding Chalkbeat in part because they weren't happy with a couple of our stories about XQ, their big education project.
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England is funding a national tutoring program to make up for likely learning loss
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It's important to remember that *all* public school segregation is also "de jure" because public school sorting patterns are, by definition, determined by government-created school assignment rules.
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Historians may look back with great puzzlement at the fact that during a time when education policy's mantra was "teachers are crucial for student learning!" teacher salary was stagnant or declining.
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New: NYC study finds that housing vouchers — like other anti-poverty programs — boost student test scores.
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The results of this
@dynarski
et al study are genuinely impressive: clearly communicating large financial aid packages to low-income students meaningfully boosts college enrollment *and* persistence
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Something we don't really need right now from researchers is an impact estimate based on wild extrapolations and host of unproven assumptions
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In education, we often think about child poverty as a given, but we should always keep in mind that the existence and degree of child poverty is a policy choice
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College graduates who go into K-12 education make less than in nearly every other field
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If schools end up getting billions of dollars for infrastructure, there are improvements they could make — air conditioning, air quality, lead-free water — that have been tangibly linked to students' academic success
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Exciting news! I'll be joining
@Chalkbeat
as a national reporter, covering education research, trends across states, and federal policy.
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New: There's been an important but largely unanswered question in the school opening debate: What share of children are getting the type of instruction that their parents want? Here's what the latest polling shows
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Paying teachers large bonuses to work in high-needs, low-achieving schools in Dallas led to large gains in student achievement.
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NEWS: The U.S. Department of Education will not let states cancel federally required standardized testing this year
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Last week, Betsy DeVos used a common but misleading graph to suggest that school spending doesn't matter for student outcomes. Here's a point by point explanation of what's wrong with it
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The school voucher eligibility expansion has lost (seemingly badly) in Arizona.
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There's a lot of focus on school-by-school racial segregation. But this new study suggests that classroom-by-classroom segregation is nearly as severe in high schools
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A remarkable 20 percent of credits awarded to middle and high schoolers in Milwaukee Public Schools came via online courses in 16-17. But when researchers visited classes they found disengaged students and little evidence of learning
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@The74
Takeaway: After MIT researchers found negative results in LA's voucher program, they were denied access to more data
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Schools' COVID relief money is just "sitting" there. And by "sitting" we mean:
—being spent but reported on a lag
—being spent as part of multi-year plan
—desperately trying to be spent but contending with a nationwide staffing shortage.
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I humbly accept
@alexanderrusso
's nomination as worst journalist of the year, because it has brought out so many kind words from others, so thank you!
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Telling principals they have to hastily spend a large chunk money by end of the school year or else they lose it, does not seem conducive to good spending decisions!
NYC restored funding to schools that lost students. Will principals be able to spend it in time?
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Cardona v. Romney on class size research is really microtargeted content for me.
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The idea that there is a *consensus* that school reopening is safe even *community spread is high* ... I don't think that is backed up by the data we have to date. Eg
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NEW: Teacher turnover is up. Morale is down. Fewer people want to become teachers. High-needs schools face persistent teacher shortages.
I take a data-driven look at the confluence of challenges — some new, some old — facing the teaching profession.
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8/A January poll asked parents who were frustrated what their top concern was. The number one response: schools *not doing enough* to limit COVID spread. (Ponder: why have those parents gotten such little attention?)
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Just saw DeVos leaving and asked what she thought about the recent studies on school vouchers. She responded "we're not taking questions"
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I'm skeptical that the "best teachers" can be scaled to hundreds or thousands of students because much of what makes a good teacher is about relationships with students and their families.
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Despite a handful of success stories, the overall effect of Obama-era teacher evaluation reforms on student outcomes appears to have been ~zero.
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One narrative that has emerged is that parents want school buildings to fully reopen but teachers have stood in the way over health concerns. The polling data does not support this — most parents also have big concerns abut the safety of reopening
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The Supreme Court is apparently interested in a case on whether charter schools are "state actors" — you might say, whether they're "public" — and is asking the US government to provide its view on the question. This could be a very big deal!
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A newly published study based on several states shows that in the long run school spending increases substantially boost test scores and graduation rates
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A funny thing is how people in education turn "poll finds parents want schools reimagined" into "parents want schools reimagined in the exact same way as what my advocacy organization is pushing for."
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What has teacher turnover look like in California during the pandemic? No one knows! A spokesperson for the California Department of Education tells me that it "does not collect teacher turnover or retention data." Neither does the state's Commission on Teacher Credentialing.
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It's remarkable how quickly DeVos has pivoted from preaching the virtues of local control and virtual education to saying that school buildings across the country need to reopen
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A meta-story of COVID and schools is how parent polls have stubbornly refused — over and over — to confirm the narrative that is preferred in much of the Discourse.
A new poll shows that 58% of parents are concerned about how schools are handling COVID cases. Of those, 44% say schools aren't doing enough to monitor COVID exposure, while only 34% say schools are too quick to quarantine students.
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@AlexNowrasteh
@JimSwiftDC
here are a couple with time series — not much evidence of declining satisfaction among parents, but some evidence for the public writ large
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New: There are a lot of warnings signs about the American teaching force right now. So what should policymakers do?
I offer nine big, research-informed ideas.
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New: There is a legitimate and growing debate about how schools should approach masking. But so far, polls have shown strong support for masking in schools among both parents and the public.
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I don't think people realize how much of a charade state testing is going to be in some places
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What if "free college" was rebranded "college choice" and "private school vouchers" were rebranded "free private schools." Would the politics change?
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Fun to FOIA for basic information in a bunch of school districts and get such varied responses. Including "here you go" (two hours later), "we'd love to provide you that info! just send us a check for $830," and "see you in 1-5 years" (namely,
@NYCSchools
).
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The majority of white school-aged children in NYC attend private school
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The obvious question after reading this is why segregation isn't called "social engineering" too
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This is definitely concerning data, but to be clear the share of students getting an F in two or more classes went from 6% ---> 11%. (Be careful taking a percent change on a low baseline.)
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So much of the school reopening debate is a confusing word game without shared definitions, especially the definition of "safe" — for whom, when, to what degree, by what measure?
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After an amazing experience
@FellowsSpencer
, I am back on the education beat
@Chalkbeat
. Excited to return to regular reporting. Send tips and story ideas!
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Rather remarkable exchange in an interview Betsy DeVos did with Fox News' Brian Kilmeade, who refers to children of unauthorized immigrants as "illegals." DeVos does not seem to accept the premise of his question, but doesn't explicitly reject it either
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Have recently been reading about how a basic misinterpretation of SAT scores in the '80s led to a panic about school performance. Fortunately we're too smart now to fall for that sort of thing again— oh.
The average score on the ACT, a college admissions test, fell to its lowest level in more than three decades
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