By Alan Safran & Susanna Loeb
Alan Safran is the CEO and co-founder of Saga Education, which helps states and districts with tutoring best practices. Susanna Loeb is the founder and executive director of the National Student Support Accelerator at Stanford University and a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education.
American parents care deeply about their local schools and are committed to improving education. That’s because Americans know that education plays a crucial role in shaping our children’s future. So the ultimate question is not “should we improve public schools” but “how”?
While the news headlines about the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress felt grim, bright spots bucked the national trends in exciting and promising ways and beg for our attention. These bright spots point us in the right direction, if we’re willing to learn from them.
NAEP shows that, nationally, student achievement in both math and reading remains below pre-pandemic levels and that the gulf between high- and low-performing students is widening. But it also shows successes. Students in Louisiana have made unexpected gains—performing better than they had in 2019, and the state’s ranking in 8th grade reading has shot up from 42nd to 16th.
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