In May 2022, Tom Kane, an education professor, economist, and director of Harvard's Center for Education Policy Research, wrote in Atlantic magazine to describe the findings of a study he'd helped lead. He and his colleagues had studied test results of 2.1 million students from 10,000 schools in 49 states, comparing their yearly pre-pandemic progress to their progress on the same assessments during the pandemic.

The results were consistent with almost every other serious study: the pandemic had been devastating for student learning, and its disparate impact on students already living in poverty was a double injustice. On net, students had lost 13 weeks of learning in low-poverty schools and 22 weeks of learning in high-poverty schools.

But if the conclusions in Kane's study were in keeping with research, one thing that was different was Kane's ability to put those numbers into context, to explain what they meant relative to interventions schools might take to try to fix the problem.

Twenty-two (or 13) weeks of lost learning was just a number until one understood what it took to catch up from that. Given his position, Kane had about as good a sense of that as anyone.

Assigning students to double math classes for an entire school year had yielded gains equivalent to about 10 weeks of in-person instruction, Kane observed. That would still leave you shy of being halfway to closing the gap the pandemic had created in math (based on what was in many cases insufficient progress anyway, we note). And that was the good news. The data on double reading classes was far less encouraging.¹

High-dosage tutoring is another commonly proposed solution. Generally speaking it's the most aggressive response that's been proposed, but its downside is that it is very expensive and complex to implement.

A year of high-dosage, small-group tutoring, Kane noted, is “one of the few interventions with a demonstrated benefit that comes close” to producing a gain of 22 weeks. It offers a benefit of about 19 weeks of instruction.

This is to say that a trained tutor working with students in groups of one to four at a time, meeting three times a week for a whole year, only partially gets you to the equivalent of 22 weeks of learning.

But, Kane goes on, “The obvious challenge with tutoring is how to offer it to students on an enormous scale.” Even the most ambitious plan so far, Tennessee's, would serve just one out of 12 students in the state in targeted grades. It would require hiring and training thousands of qualified tutors. It's an impressive and ambitious proposal, but at that scale it's logistically daunting. We want to be clear, we are not arguing against high-dosage tutoring. Our point is that the complexity of the endeavor, and the fact that even if everything went well it would still probably leave us short of closing the full gap, puts the size of the problem in context. As Kane noted, “Very few remedial interventions have ever been shown to produce benefits equivalent to 22 weeks of additional in-person instruction.” He concluded, “Given the magnitude and breadth of the losses, educators should not see tutoring as the sole answer to the problem.”

There isn't a single intervention we know of that's robust enough.

We're going to need a bunch of them.

And, as we have tried to point out in this book, among the most productive interventions is much greater effectiveness in the classrooms we're already running. Better teaching with better curriculum in every classroom plus tutoring plus other potential interventions might just work.

But of course “better teaching and better curriculum” is a simple phrase that quickly runs up against reality. It requires a hundred good decisions and well-executed initiatives: better professional development, more flexibility in hiring decisions, and so on, all done quickly and done best in schools that often struggle most to hire and implement effectively.

As a society we've been working on that for a while with marginal results so it's ambitious to think we could make dramatically better progress unless we removed every possible barrier. That applies to every solution we discuss in this book and every solution we don't discuss but which you are perhaps thinking of. Every minute we spend highly focused on better implementation of the core work of schooling helps, and every minute we spend distracted hurts.

Which brings us to the story of a colleague, the principal of a suburban elementary school. She was recently struck by how much bus behavior needed fixing. It wasn't just that otherwise delightful students were often mean or hurtful on the buses that setting or that older students spoke in language (or about topics) that was just not okay for six- and seven-year-olds to hear. The issue in the end was also academic. The time she spent mopping up from bus behavior was time she could be spending on curriculum and instruction, on developing her young teachers. “I just kept thinking, ‘I am not doing what's most important because I am spending time every morning on mundane bus-related things.’ I will never tolerate bullying, so I knew I couldn't just ignore the buses, but I was pretty sure I could fix them in a way that let me spend my time more productively.”

Her first step was assigning seats. She announced the change to parents and the response was…outrage. Or perhaps better put, acquiescence from the great majority of parents and extremely vocal dissent from a small group of outliers. But that was enough. “My whole afternoon was taken up with phone calls with them. First it was about the fact that I had no right to tell their child where to sit on the bus. I was overstepping my authority. Then they wanted me to tell their children they didn't have to follow the rules I'd made for everybody else. Then they announced they were going to tell their children not to obey the rules despite me. The most difficult of them (they were lawyers) threatened to sue me and the district and so then I had to call my superintendent. There were a series of meetings with our lawyers about what I could and could not say to the parents.”

She ended up spending the time she was hoping to spend improving teaching and learning on the phone with her least aligned parents. She didn't get much time back to do what she thought was most important for the overwhelming majority of families. She rapidly came to realize that wrestling with unaligned parents could be immensely time consuming.

On net she wondered whether she had gained anything at all. The capacity of the few to take her time away from the needs of the many was no small thing. A generation ago, maybe fewer parents would have presumed to make such a big issue out of the buses. Those who did would have been more likely to call, register their disagreement, and then accept the principal's decision if it went against them. “Part of being in school is accepting the rules,” they might have told their kids. Nowadays almost everything is an issue for somebody, and in the echo chamber of social media it is easy for people to whip themselves and a small group of peers into a state of high dudgeon. People trust their schools to decide appropriately far less and—reflecting the rise of individualism—feel less obliged to accept what is in the group's interest if they don't agree. That's tricky calculus for running schools.

We want to be clear, lest our comments be read as a criticism of one side or the other of the political spectrum. We're not referring to any specific group or ideology. Frankly, it's a broader change. All parts of the political spectrum are more likely to dissent more vocally at more cost to schools, and so are a lot of other people who aren't especially political but who have issues of overwhelming importance to them and who don't think they should have to compromise on them. And of course we're not immune either. If you scratched the surface with the four of us, we'd each have our own (probably different) issues that we'd be willing to call the principal over.

In other words, we are describing a larger societal trend that we have not yet addressed as a sector. Disagreement in and about schools is expensive, far more frequent, and far more pronounced. It is increasingly unlikely to be resolved quickly. It distracts schools from focusing on the core work—reading, science, math, music—which is already plenty hard. And the bottom line is this: time spent arguing is time not spent on other tasks. A bit consensus building is fine—a good thing—but too much of it makes schools far less effective for everybody.

Again, please don't misunderstand us. Schools are democratic institutions. They must listen and respond to the citizens and the society they serve. The process of listening can often make them better and more responsive. It's a question of degree in a fractious society—in all likelihood one that is not temporarily fractious but will likely remain that way as social media polarizes and emboldens us. How much dissent is worth having, and what do we do when there's so much of it that it becomes even more difficult to accomplish the institution's social purpose?

There are a lot of circles to square in running a school, and for some of them the price of squaring can be prohibitive. The era of social media and the culture of outrage it fosters have created a new layer of collective action problems for schools to deal with at exactly the time they need to be thinking about things like reading, science, orderly and productive learning environments, and inclusive cultures of belonging.

For this reason we think expanded school choice deserves to be part of the conversation.

The importance of allowing parents to choose schools based on their quality is something the four of us all believe in. Though we work with schools in every sector—district, charter, private, public, rural, urban, and suburban, in the US and in other countries—and though our goal is to help every teacher succeed and every student thrive, no matter the school, many readers will know that we all have worked in the charter school sector, where choice is implicit.²

We have done that because we believe that every American family deserves access not just to good schools but to great ones: safe and happy and radically better academically.³

But we have come to see the potential benefits to the idea that parents (and teachers) should also be able to choose schools based on beliefs. We hadn't seen that as clearly before. Of course we can't have choice on every single issue but there are big ones to be made where we simply aren't all going to agree. Or where the benefits of letting us agree to disagree (in reasonable ways) can let us focus on doing rather than arguing.

Would it help us to get to more important decisions if, say, each school shared its core instructional principles and its core principles for school culture and values, and then parents and teachers chose?

School A might say: We stress gratitude, consideration, and civility in a high-text, low-tech atmosphere.

School B might say: We stress student autonomy and prefer limited rules so that students make their own decisions about their behavior and their use of technology.

It's no secret which school we would choose, but we know other parents would choose differently. We respect that. It's their children they are deciding for. And if lack of choice hurts everyone because more time spent negotiating and stake building and less time spent implementing means overall school quality is lower, then greater choice potentially provides parents, teachers, schools, and just maybe society, with broader benefits.

First, parents would be more likely to get a school more aligned with what they wanted. A bit of the social contract we agree to has been made more explicit. An agreement on purpose and methods at the highest level mean a big step forward in fixing the “trust in institutions” issue. It will still have to build consensus—we can't have a school for every micro issue; people will still disagree and compromise—but we've reduced the proportion of time all schools spend convincing stakeholders that their chosen direction is valid.

When a school's leadership has made a promise, it's public and transparent. When the least aligned parent calls and says, “You have no right to take away my child's phone,” the answer is simple—or at least simpler. “I understand your concerns. But we have tried to be clear that we offer a screen-reduced learning environment. We perceive this to be in keeping with what we have promised other parents in the school and so this has to be our decision.”

It is easier to defend decisions when you can refer back to an agreement it serves. It's also easier for families to hold the school accountable for doing what it has promised. They can cite the promise too. “You said you were about student autonomy; why are there all these mandates?” If it comes down to it, they can vote with their feet.

This is also true for staff. One of the biggest benefits of school choice is that it allows—and just maybe requires—teachers to choose.

Imagine our colleague striving to bring order to the buses. Let's say she no longer has to argue with her least aligned parents. They've either chosen to send their children to a school that reflects their vision or they understand that her decision is in keeping with what the school has committed to and have accepted it. Now at last, with time to focus on improving teaching and learning, she chooses to make the school writing-intensive.

In each class, every day, she believes, students should put pencil to paper and write at least one well-crafted sentence to explain a core idea from the lesson. She announces this to the staff, but not everyone likes it. Mr. J thinks this writing-across-the-curriculum business is another fad. He's been teaching math for 20 years and doesn't like fads. In the professional development sessions, he folds his arms and is barely engaged. He creatively non-complies with efforts to get him to use writing in his classroom. “Oh, yeah, I'm doing my own version of that,” he says. He knows he can wait it out.

As he says this, he winks at his colleague, Ms. K, who's in her second year as a teacher and wasn't sure of what to make of the writing idea at first. Mr. J will explain after faculty meeting that most of the stuff they tell you in professional development is a waste of time, that she doesn't really need to do it. Suddenly the school is struggling to implement even this simple idea with fidelity and consistency.

Everyone is losing in this scenario.

Imagine if, when Mr. J applied, the school had said, “There are three foundational things we believe in and one of them is writing. Please only take this job if you agree.” In that case Mr. J would have seen his disagreement with the school coming and could teach somewhere where he'd be left alone to do what he loves.

Who, in the end, wants to spend their time working for an organization they are at odds with, folding their arms in meetings and passively resisting initiatives? That does not sound like a recipe for connection and belonging among teachers. As discussed in Chapter 1, feeling a clear sense of mission, Martin Seligman found, is critical to happiness.

Much better to know at the outset. Yes, much easier and fairer for the school to hold Mr. J accountable, but also perhaps far less necessary. With a room full of teachers who are down for writing, the norms in the staff room—as important as those in the classroom—will be all about action, about shared purpose.

When we don't allow (and encourage) teachers to make informed choice on principles, we risk getting a culture of crossed arms and waited-out initiatives. We get schools that soon enough realize that under those conditions they can't really implement any idea with fidelity. They will always be pushing a rock up a slope. And so in many cases they stop trying.

The result is a great many schools that are a muddy mix of poorly implemented ideas. And one cost of that is that we never learn much.

If two educators disagreed about whether schools should be writing-intensive, they could wage a running ideological battle. They could write and argue and post on Twitter about who was right and who was wrong. They could wage that battle for years. In fact they have, on a thousand topics, and now years later we still don't know much more about either idea, and under what conditions they are likely to work.

But if one could run a writing-intensive school and the other could run a not-so-writing-intensive school that focuses on something else, and a hundred other people did the same, in five years we'd have a pretty good idea of who was right in what circumstances and what caused that success. We'd learn a lot.

When organizations don't explicitly choose, in other words, it is hard to implement and then test and learn from ideas. This detracts from the larger endeavor of learning.

Let's choose instead, we say, and both implement with fidelity and intention and see what it teaches us. If it turns out you were right and we were wrong, so be it—all the better, in fact. If it turns out we're both right for certain kids under certain conditions, also great. Now we're smarter.

Any outcome that makes us smarter about how to serve our young people, especially in a time of need, is better than fighting, which is what we spend a lot of time doing in education. That, often, is a waste of time for everybody. And right now, we have no time to waste.