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As the one-year anniversary of the Los Angeles wildfires passes, rebuilding efforts continue to lag despite assurances to the contrary and many families are still navigating their search for a return to normalcy. For children in particular, the effects of a disaster do not end when the smoke clears or the debris is removed.
As more people’s lives are upended each year due to climate disasters communities — and our political leaders at the local, state and federal levels — must do more to ensure the needs of children and families are met during these emergencies.
During wildfires and other disasters, we continually see the familiar pattern of school closures, child care disruption, families moving into temporary housing and routines essential to children’s sense of safety abruptly severed. Communities and political leaders at every level must confront a hard truth: Our emergency systems were not designed with children in mind.
During wildfires, schools and child care systems are among the first institutions to fail. Children are displaced from classrooms, separated from trusted adults and thrust into shelters or hotel rooms never designed to support their physical, emotional or developmental needs. Studies show that stress brought on by exposure to natural disasters can have an outsized impact on children and lead to lifelong trauma. This trauma can lead to socio-emotional impairments; health-risk behaviors, such as alcohol and drug abuse; and even early death, according to the Adverse Childhood Experiences study published in 2011 by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente.
This past year has made it clear that local jurisdictions can no longer rely on federal disaster systems to carry the full burden of recovery. As the future of entities such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency becomes more uncertain, states, cities and counties must assume greater responsibility for protecting their most vulnerable citizens.
This starts with treating schools as critical infrastructure. While schools became formally recognized as part of critical infrastructure — specifically within the Education Facilities subsector in 2003 under Homeland Security Presidential Directive-7 (HSPD-7) — they are not allocated commensurate resources and protections for security as other designated critical infrastructure.
The Covid-19 pandemic underscored the central role that schools play in economic stability, as widespread closures rapidly disrupted labor markets and productivity. Treating schools as critical infrastructure would align education with other essential public systems that underpin public health, safety and economic performance; as such, it merits long-term investment.
Second, schools need contingency plans that ensure continuity of in-person education when normal operations are disrupted. After the LA wildfires, many schools scrambled to set up alternate sites or transitioned to online learning. Students are still making up learning losses from the pandemic, and it is unclear whether those losses can be stemmed. Online learning should be used only when all other options have been exhausted, given the devastating impacts on student learning. The planning needs to begin now, not after disaster strikes.
Third, practice is key to success. Emergency plans often fail children not because they are poorly written but because they are never written with children in mind. Children experience disasters differently than adults, and procedures designed without them can inadvertently heighten fear and trauma. Age-appropriate drills, school-based tabletop exercises and responder training in developmentally appropriate communication can dramatically improve outcomes.
Local governments can formally integrate school districts, child care providers and pediatric health systems into emergency planning rather than treating them as afterthoughts once a crisis unfolds. Practicing with children builds familiarity, reduces panic and accelerates recovery — not just for young people, but for entire communities.
Finally, funding structures must reflect the realities families face after disasters. While billions are allocated for fire suppression and mitigation, far fewer resources are earmarked for sustaining schools, child care and pediatric mental health in the months and years that follow. Local and state governments should establish dedicated funding streams for child- and family-centered recovery — supporting school continuity, mental health care and family stabilization — since these investments can reduce long-term social and economic costs.
Implementing a family-centric disaster response model isn’t just a moral imperative. Adverse childhood experiences lead to an economic burden of hundreds of billions of dollars annually in the U.S, much of it absorbed by taxpayers through Medicaid and Medicare spending, special education, disability programs and lost lifetime tax revenue. When disaster responses destabilize children, short-term emergencies are converted into long-term public liabilities, driving government inefficiency and reactive spending. These failures also spill into insurance markets, increasing claims, raising premiums and deepening reliance on federal backstops that distort risk pools and shift costs to the public.
In an era of escalating disasters and constrained budgets, policies that protect family stability during crises are not social add-ons but high-return investments: reducing future taxpayer exposure, stabilizing insurance systems and limiting the need for costly federal intervention after the fact.
The one-year mark of the Los Angeles wildfires should not serve as a memorial to what was lost, but as a reckoning with what must change. Disasters will continue to test our systems, but allowing children to bear the brunt of those failures is a policy choice, not an inevitability. Protecting children during emergencies necessitates radical change. If we fail to act, we are not merely accepting risk: We are knowingly passing preventable harm and long-term costs onto the next generation.
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Many adults are breathing a sigh of relief as the 6-7 meme fades away as one of the biggest kid-led global fads of 2025.
In case you managed to miss it, 6-7 is a slang term – spoken aloud as “six seven” – accompanied by an arm gesture that mimics someone weighing something in their hands.
It has no real meaning, but it spawned countless videos across various platforms and infiltrated schools and homes across the globe. Shouts of “6-7” disrupted classrooms and rained down at sporting events. Think pieces proliferated.
For the most part, adults responded with mild annoyance and confusion.
But as media scholars who study children’s culture, we didn’t view the meme with bewilderment or exasperation. Instead, we thought back to our own childhoods on three different continents – and all the secret languages we spoke.
There was Pig Latin. The cool “S” doodled on countless worksheets and bathroom stalls. Forming an L-shape with our thumb and index finger to insult someone. Remixing the words of hand-clapping games from previous generations.
6-7 is only the latest example of these long-standing practices – and though the gesture might not mean much to adults, it says a lot about children’s play, their social lives and their desire for power.
You can see this longing for power in classic play like spying on adults and in games like “king of the hill.”
A typical school day involves a tight schedule of adult-directed activities; kids have little time or space for agency.
But during those in-between times when children are able to stealthily evade adult surveillance – on playgrounds, on the internet and even when stuck at home during the pandemic – children’s culture can thrive. In these spaces, they can make the rules. They set the terms. And if it confuses adults, all the better.
As 6-7 went viral, teachers complained that random outbursts by their students were interrupting their lessons. Some started avoiding asking any kind of question that might result in an answer of 67. The trend migrated from schools to sports arenas and restaurants: In-N-Out Burger ended up banning the number 67 from their ticket ordering system.
The meaninglessness of 6-7 made it easy to create a sense of inclusion and exclusion – and to annoy adults, who strained to decipher hidden meanings. In the U.S., siblings and friends dressed as the numbers 6-7 for Halloween. And in Australia, it was rumored that houses with 6-7 in their address were going for astronomical prices.
Since before World War I, historians have documented children’s use of secret languages like “back slang,” which happens when words are phonetically spoken backwards. And nonsense words and phrases have long proliferated in children’s culture: Recent examples include “booyah,” “skibidi” and “talk to the hand.”
6-7 also coincides with a long history of children revising, adapting and remixing games and rhymes.
For example, in our three countries – the U.S., Australia and South Korea – we’ve encountered endless variations of the game of “tag.” Sometimes the chasers pretend to be the dementors from Harry Potter. Other times the chasers have pretended to be the COVID-19 virus. Or we’ll see them incorporate their immediate surroundings, like designating playground equipment as “home” or “safe.”
Similar games can spread among children around the world. In South Korea, “Mugunghwa kkochi pieotseumnida” – which roughly translates to “The rose of Sharon has bloomed,” a reference to South Korea’s national flower – is similar to the game “Red Light, Green Light” in English-speaking countries. In the game “Hwang-ma!,” South Korean children in the early aughts shouted the word and playfully struck a peer upon seeing a rare, gold-colored car, a game similar to “Punch Buggy” and “Slug Bug” in the U.S. and Australia.
Historically, children have reworked rhymes and clapping games to draw on popular culture of the day. “Georgie Best, Superstar,” sung to the tune of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” was a popular chant on U.K. playgrounds in the 1970s that celebrated the legendary soccer player George Best. And a variation of the clapping game “I went to a Chinese Restaurant” included the lyrics “My name is, Elvis Presley, girls are sexy, Sitting on the back seat, drinking Pepsi.”
One reason 6-7 became so popular is the low barrier to entry: Saying “6-7” and doing the accompanying hand movement is easy to pick up and translate into different cultural contexts. The simplicity of the meme allowed young Korean children to repeat the phrase in English. And deaf children have participated by signing the meme.
Because the social worlds of children now exist across a range of online spaces, 6-7 has been able to seamlessly spread and evolve. On the gaming platform Roblox, for example, children can create avatars that resemble 6-7 and play games that feature the numbers.
The strange words, nonsensical games and creative play of your childhood might seem ridiculous today. But there’s real value in these hidden worlds.
With or without access to the internet, children will continue to transform language and games to suit their needs – which, yes, includes getting under the skin of adults.
A great deal of attention is given to the omnipresence of digital technologies in children’s lives, but we think it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate the way children are using these technologies to innovate and connect in ways both creative and mundane.
Rebekah Willett, Professor in the Information School, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Amanda Levido, Lecturer, Southern Cross University, and Hyeon-Seon Jeong, Professor of Digital Media Education, Gyeongin National University of Education
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School choice — the idea that American education would function more efficiently and effectively if parents received public funding to send their children to private and religious schools — is commonly traced to an influential essay written in 1955 by conservative economist and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman. It has provoked animated debate between adversaries on the political right and the political left ever since. Less well known is that school choice also has roots in the work of Derrick Bell, considered by many the father of critical race theory.
In 1971, Derrick Bell became the first Black man to be awarded tenure at Harvard Law School. As part of his teaching load, he developed a civil rights course that focused on race. In order to meet its topical requirements, Bell wrote an accompanying textbook, Race, Racism and American Law, which is foundational in critical race theory. It holds that racism is an ordinary and permanent feature of American society. His claim was viewed by many colleagues at the time as a radical statement, and it remains so for many today. Yet, it carries forward a certain truth that the history of school choice persuasively illustrates.
Having served as a federal attorney litigating desegregation cases, Bell had grown skeptical about forced racial integration and whether it would actually improve student learning. The original edition of his 1973 textbook included a chapter outlining “Alternatives to Integrated Schools” by which “black children might receive the long-promised equal educational opportunity — in predominantly black schools.” The chapter included a discussion of tuition vouchers.
Bell argued that for vouchers to work, poor families would need to receive substantially larger grants than the more fortunate. He also mentioned “free schools.” These were small, private institutions in poor areas supported by foundation grants, fundraising and, sometimes, public dollars. Tuition was charged on a sliding scale, and students whose parents could not pay attended for free. Many of these schools began “deep in the black community.” For example, Bell mentioned a system of schools operated by the Black Muslims that emphasized racial pride, self-discipline and self–sufficiency. He explained that such virtues are not commonly celebrated in the neighborhood public schools Black students attended. He pointed out that students at the Muslim schools performed several grade levels above most Black teenagers who attended public schools.
Bell saw school choice as the culmination of a series of disappointments in the fight for educational equality. He understood it as a dramatic manifestation of the ways the Black community was losing confidence in its public schools. After numerous false starts to achieve desegregation and equalized funding, many Black activists turned to demands for community control. In 1968, a group of local parents and residents in Brooklyn’s Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood wrested local control of their school board. When a similar eruption took place in Milwaukee in 1988, those involved issued a call to action — commonly referred to as the Milwaukee Manifesto — demanding that the state allow them to establish an independent school district.
To lend a helping hand, Bell traveled to Milwaukee and wrote an op-ed for the Milwaukee Journal. Published under the headline “Control Not Color: The Real Issue in the Milwaukee Manifesto,” it took issue with the better-off liberal activists who condemned the plan. “Can we whose children are not required to attend the inner-city schools honestly condemn the Manifesto writers and their supporters?” Bell wrote. “After all, when middle-class parents — black and white — lose faith in the administration of a public school, we move to another school district or place our children in private schools. Inner-city black parents who can’t afford our options seek as a group a legislative remedy that may after a long struggle enable them to do what we achieve independently by virtue of our higher economic status.”
Soon after, in 1990, the same Black activists in Milwaukee joined forces with their white Republican governor, Tommy Thompson, and his conservative legislative colleagues to pass the nation’s first school voucher law. The original Wisconsin vouchers were targeted at low-income students stuck in chronically failing public schools. Five years later, Wisconsin became the first state to expand its voucher program to include religious schools.
Bell revisited the topic of school choice in Silent Covenants (2004). By then, vouchers had been adopted in Cleveland and Washington, D.C., among other places. He acknowledged that vouchers were “probably the most controversial of educational alternatives to emerge in the last decade,” but that they were also growing in popularity. He understood that many opponents were liberal Democrats with long histories of civil rights activism. These critics alleged that minority parents were being duped, that the real beneficiaries of such programs were private religious schools gaining enrollment.
Bell recognized these criticisms but was also sympathetic to arguments by free-market advocates who believed that the competition fostered by choice would incentivize floundering public schools in Black communities to improve. He did not deny that the Catholic Church had become a major player in the choice movement to address its own declining school enrollments. But Bell was more impressed with how many Black and Hispanic parents chose Catholic schools over public schools because of their more disciplined learning environments and better academic outcomes. He cited one particular Catholic school in Milwaukee, where 80% of the students were not Catholic and the voucher covered most of the tuition.
Silent Covenants also delves into the topic of charter schools. Bell lauded them as innovative institutions that give options to all students, not just the wealthy who can afford private school tuition. He rejected claims by liberals that the institutions would become bastions for middle-class families who were better prepared to work the system, citing evidence that two-thirds of charter students nationwide were nonwhite and more than half were from low-income families. Critics had also raised concerns that charter schools would discriminate, become racially isolated and drain resources from regular public schools. Bell, unmoved by these claims, was more concerned that charters were receiving 15% less funding than other public schools.
Now, 30 years after the Milwaukee breakthrough, the school choice movement has taken off in a new direction. Republicans who once allied with Black advocates to demand better options for low-income students now rally behind appeals for universal choice, which provides such benefits to all students regardless of family income. Eighteen states have enacted such programs. When awards do not cover the entire cost of tuition, they end up subsidizing better-off families and neglecting those unable to make up the difference. As demands for private and religious schools grow, so does the competition for seats and the incentive to raise tuition. Yielding larger numbers of applications from a stronger pool of students, these initiatives can function more to enhance the choices available to school admissions officers than the most needy students.
A law that President Donald Trump signed this year allows a tax deduction of up to $1,700 for anyone who donates to an organization that gives scholarships for students to attend private or religious schools. Like the state-level universal choice programs, the federal initiative does not target low-income students. Assistance will be available to any family whose income is below 300% of the average for their area.
Here is the underlying political irony to the choice debate: For years, when programs were designed to help the most vulnerable students, the major opponents were activists who historically have identified with progressive causes. Now, conservatives are spending with abandon — in many cases, with limited public accountability — on programs that can create opportunities for students who need them the least. In either case, those who get hurt remain the same, and they are disproportionately under-resourced students of color. Derrick Bell would not be surprised.
In 1980, Bell wrote an article for the Harvard Law Review advancing a concept referred to in the scholarly literature as the “interest convergence dilemma” that is fundamental to critical race theory. It holds, “The interest of blacks in achieving racial equality will be accommodated only when it converges with the interests of whites.” Not very trusting of white collaborators hailing from either the left or right, it deems political alliances temporary and subject to the competing priorities of all pertinent parties, anticipating eventual abandonment.
And so, that’s the way it is.
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Right now, tomorrow’s workforce is on TikTok and Instagram, looking at “influencer” or “crypto genius” as an exciting career option — not so different, really, from a previous generation wanting to be a pop star or win Shark Tank.
Like those old-school dream gigs, today’s hot online careers are mostly unattainable and unstable. For some young people, they’re also a capitulation: “My job feels like a dead end and business school isn’t in my future. Maybe people will watch me unbox purchases.”
The next generation, a huge reservoir of talent, is rarely challenged to set a higher bar — and they get a lot more advice about building a personal brand than about building a career. Those of us leading organizations owe it to them to demystify professions and create new pathways.
Here are three promising practices for the new workforce, especially for young people without traditional access: intensive mentoring, cross-organizational cohorts, and early experiences with professional environments.
The traditional approach to mentoring is the “old boy network.” Since the 1990s, more workers have also benefited from informal networks such as alumni associations or sometimes nonprofits that serve this purpose. However, young people may need more formal mentoring within the workplace to thrive and persist.
Many companies assign mentors to brand new employees, but not generally for the long term. The next generation needs ongoing mentoring. First-gen professionals, especially, can find it difficult to seek guidance. They may not want to appear vulnerable; they may not know what they don’t know. Online courses — valuable for a population that has grown up watching videos — can help. But there are a million; which ones are useful? And perhaps the new employee fears being caught trying to learn their job. To address such needs, they need more than a mentor. They need a navigator.
Beyond knowledge gaps, some young employees also need help with organizational culture. I know a recent college graduate in a start-up job where colleagues regularly drink at work. She felt she had to participate to be taken seriously. Some other, more senior colleagues who had opted out could have helped her find another way to engage. It’s on us to assist young coworkers struggling with fit.
These new members of the workforce also need encouragement to find ongoing mentoring and keep seeking engagement. For many of them, an elevator ride with the CEO would be a terrifying moment, rather than an opportunity. A lack of guidance leads to frustration, and ultimately nonpersistence.
It doesn’t always take a senior person to help a new employee navigate. Peer cohorts can also help. Most young workers are already comfortable traveling in packs socially. An ongoing professional conversation with their peers can benefit both them and the company, and shared responsibility for problem-solving can be liberating. Women in particular have a stereotypical but real inclination to be useful, and they are more apt to receive if they can also give. Cohorts offer a way to do that.
Even for midlevel employees, there is value in connecting across silos. I know one organization where colleagues from different departments meet monthly to catch up on their work. Individuals offer each other expertise, and departments pitch in together, which creates efficiencies.
Engaging like this especially helps employees who are more reticent. Helping as well as being helped creates social glue — and it can also build organizational loyalty, as employees see themselves in a bigger picture.
“Summer camp” experiences on college campuses are a common way to create access and persistence for first-generation students. When middle schoolers visit campuses, they can imagine college life. Similarly, Take Your Child to Work Day has, since the 1990s, offered glimpses of the working world—at least, for children of white-collar professionals.
But when parents work in a meatpacking plant, their children have no opportunity to get to know office culture. More and more next-gen workers lack a vision of how to belong in a corporate or institutional setting. Yet that is the most powerful element: the vision of oneself in a new context, and permission to be there.
To get the farm team ready and overcome the sense of “not for me,” employers must invite them in early. Google, for example, invites school groups to its campus. If these young people eventually land an interview, the campus already feels familiar.
If these promising practices seem self-evident to you, consider where you learned about your work environment. If the answer is “in college” or “from relatives,” you might ask: Who in my workforce did not get that experience? And if the answer is “I learned the hard way,” can you help someone else not to have to learn the hard way, too?
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Some Australian universities handle student attrition rates very well, and model examples all institutions should undertake to retain students.
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Chronic absenteeism is a longstanding problem that has surged to troubling levels. Recent data show that in 20 states, more than 30% of students are chronically absent, about twice the rate seen before the pandemic. Absenteeism is a multifaceted problem, and the reasons students stop showing up aren’t always academic. Sometimes it’s because they don’t feel connected to their school, or they are not engaged in the curriculum. Other times, they face adversity outside the classroom. While the problem is complicated, it’s easy to overlook one of its simplest, most effective solutions: What if the key to keeping students is a performance stage, a music room or an art studio — a creative outlet to shine?
Despite decades of research, arts education is still treated as a “nice-to-have” when education budgets allow. From 2015 to 2019, the NAMM Foundation conducted a four-year study across 1,700 New York City public schools serving over 1.1 million students. They found that schools offering music and arts programming had lower rates of chronic absenteeism and higher overall school-day attendance than those that didn’t. Similarly, a comparison of cohort data over seven years found that dropout rates fell from 30% to just 6% among students participating in consistent arts programming.
Clearly, the arts are a powerful tool for academic engagement, resilience and, most importantly, graduation. For example, after tracking more than 22,000 students for 12 years, the National Dropout Prevention Center found that those with high levels of involvement in the arts were five times more likely to graduate from high school than those with low involvement.
But while over 90% of Americans feel the arts are important for education, only 66% of students participate, and access remains uneven. Charter schools, the fastest-growing segment of public education, have the lowest availability of arts courses: Just 37% of public charter high schools offer arts instruction. Students in charter schools, military families and homeschool programs are too often the ones with the fewest opportunities to engage with the arts, despite needing them most.
This is an issue that the Cathedral Arts Project in Jacksonville, Florida, is trying to solve.
In partnership with and with funding from the Florida Department of Education, our program piloted a year-long arts education initiative during the 2024-25 school year, reaching more than 400 students in charter schools, homeschools, military families and crisis care. Our teaching artists visited classrooms weekly, providing instruction in dance, music, visual arts and theater. Throughout the year, students in kindergarten through high school found joy, confidence and connection through creative learning. Homeschool students brought history to life through art projects, children from military families found comfort and stability during times of deployment and young people in crisis discovered new ways to express themselves and heal. Each moment affirmed the power of the arts to help children imagine what’s possible.
To better understand the impact of this work, we partnered with the Florida Data Science for Social Good program at the University of North Florida to analyze reports and survey evaluations collected from 88% of program participants. Here’s what we found:
Students grew not only in artistic skill, but also in self-confidence, teamwork, problem-solving and engagement. After completing the program, over 86% of students said they “like to finish what they start” and “can do things even when they are hard” — a key indicator of persistence, which is a strong predictor of long-term academic success. Students rated themselves highly in statements like, “I am good at performance.”
Families noticed, too. In the age of screens, nearly three-quarters reported that their child had increased in-person social interaction since beginning arts programming and had improved emotional control at home. Nearly one-third saw noticeable gains in creative problem-solving and persistence through challenges.
According to the State of Educational Opportunity in America survey conducted by 50CAN, parents view the arts as a meaningful contributor to their child’s learning, and they want more of it. In Florida, where families have been given the power of school choice, they’re increasingly seeking out programs that inspire creative thinking and meaningful engagement while promoting academic success. But finding them isn’t always easy. When funding allows, traditional public schools may offer band or visual arts, but these options are often unavailable to families choosing alternative education options for their children.
Now in its second year, our program fills this critical gap by working directly with school choice families across northeast Florida, bringing structured arts instruction to students who otherwise wouldn’t have access.
What makes the arts such an effective intervention? It’s structure, expression and connection. When students learn through the creative process, they navigate frustration, build resilience and find joy in persistence. These are not soft skills — they’re essential for survival, and increasingly important in today’s workplaces.
Arts education is a necessary investment in student achievement. It’s time for other states to treat it that way and follow Florida’s lead.
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In September, The 74 published Robert Pondiscio’s opinion piece discussing how people without strong reading skills lack what it takes “to effectively weigh competing claims” and “can’t reconcile conflicts, judge evidence or detect bias.” He adds, “They may read the words, but they can’t test the arguments.”
To make his case, Pondiscio relies on the skill level needed to achieve a proficient score or better on National Assessment of Educational Progress, a level that only 30% of tested students reached on 2024’s Grade 8 reading exam. Only 16% of Black students and 19% of Hispanics were proficient or more.
Yet naysayers argue that the NAEP standard is simply set too high and that NAEP’s sobering messages are inaccurate. There is no crisis, according to these naysayers.
So, who is right?
Well, research on testing performance of eighth graders from Kentucky indicates that it’s Pondiscio, not the naysayers, who has the right message about the NAEP proficiency score. And, Kentucky’s data show this holds true not just for NAEP reading, but for NAEP math, as well.
Kentucky offered a unique study opportunity. Starting in 2006, the Bluegrass State began testing all students in several grades with exams developed by the ACT, Inc. These tests include the ACT college entrance exam, which was administered to all 11th grade public school students, and the EXPLORE test, which was given to all of Kentucky’s public school eighth graders.
Both the ACT and EXPLORE featured something unusual: “Readiness Benchmark” scores which ACT, Inc. developed by comparing its test scores to actual college freshman grades years later. Students reaching the benchmark scores for reading or math had at least a 75% chance to later earn a “C” or better in related college freshman courses.
So, how did the comparisons between Kentucky’s benchmark score performance and the NAEP work out?
Analysis found close agreement between the NAEP proficiency rates and the share of the same cohorts of students reaching EXPLORE’s readiness benchmarks.
For example, in Grade 8 reading, EXPLORE benchmark performance and NAEP proficiency rates for the same cohorts of students never varied by more than four percentage points for testing in 2008-09, 2010-11, 2012-13 or 2014-15.
The same, close agreement was found in the comparison of NAEP grade 8 math proficiency rates to the EXPLORE math benchmark percentages.
EXPLORE to NAEP results were also examined separately for white, Black and learning-disabled students. Regardless of the student group, the EXPLORE’s readiness benchmark percentages and NAEP’s proficient or above statistics agreed closely.
Doing an analysis with Kentucky’s ACT college entrance results test was a bit more challenging because NAEP doesn’t provide state test data for high school grades. However, it is possible to compare each student cohort’s Grade 8 NAEP performance to that cohort’s ACT benchmark score results posted four years later when they graduated from high school. Data for graduating classes in 2017, 2019 and 2021 uniformly show close agreement for overall average scores, as well as for separate student group scores.
It’s worth noting that all NAEP scores have statistical sampling errors. After those plus and minus errors are considered, the agreements between the NAEP and the EXPLORE and ACT test results look even better.
The bottom line is: Close agreement between NAEP proficiency rates and ACT benchmark score results for Kentucky suggests that NAEP proficiency levels are highly relevant indicators of critical educational performance. Those claiming NAEP’s proficiency standard is set too high are incorrect.
That leaves us with the realization that overall performance of public school students in Kentucky and nationwide is very concerning. Many students do not have the reading and math skills needed to navigate modern life. Instead of simply rejecting the troubling results of the latest round of NAEP, education leaders need to double down on building key skills among all students.
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When I go to my son’s football games, I can tell you which team will win — most of the time — just by watching them warm up. It’s not necessarily having the flashiest uniforms or the biggest player; it’s about the discipline, the focus and the precision of their routines.
A school is no different.
In my Texas school district, I can walk into a classroom and, in the first five minutes, tell you if effective reading instruction is happening. I don’t need to see the lesson plan or even look at the teacher. I just need to look at the kids. Are they engaged? Are they in a routine? Are they getting the “reps” they need?
For too long, districts have been losing the game before it starts. They buy a new playbook (i.e., a curriculum) as a “hail Mary,” hoping for a fourth-quarter miracle. Still, they ignore the fundamentals, practice and team culture required for sustainable success.
Chapel Hill Independent School District is committed to educating all children to compete in an ever-changing world. To that end, we’ve made literacy a nonnegotiable priority across all campuses. We anchor our approach in research-based practices and a culture of continuous learning for both students and staff.
We’re building for the long run: a literacy dynasty. But our literacy success hasn’t come without putting in the work. We have a relentless focus on the fundamentals and, most importantly, a culture where every player — every teacher and administrator — fits our system.
In reading instruction, we can’t make assumptions; all instruction has to start with the fundamentals. For decades, instruction was based on gut feelings, like an old-school coach deciding whether to go for it on fourth down or punt based on a hunch. But today, the best coaches trust the analytics, not their gut. They watch the game film.
Chapel Hill is an analytics district; we do our research. And our game film is the science of reading.
Many years ago, we started using structured literacy for a small group of students with dyslexia. It worked so well that we asked ourselves: If structured literacy is effective for a small group of students with dyslexia, shouldn’t it be essential for all students?
We didn’t just adopt a new curriculum; we redesigned our literacy infrastructure — from structured literacy professional development for every teacher to classroom coaching and a robust tiered system of support to ensure no student falls through the cracks.
That logic is our offensive strategy. It’s why we use tools like the Sold a Story podcast to show our staff why we’ve banned the strategies of a bygone era, like three-cueing. We have to be willing to reprogram the brain to align with what research proves works. But having the right playbook is only half the battle.
A great playbook is useless without the right team to execute it.
This is the most crucial part: “First who, then what.” In the NFL draft, teams don’t always draft the most talented player available. They conduct interviews and personality assessments and ultimately draft the player who best fits their system—the cultural fit.
Tom Brady is arguably the greatest quarterback of all time, but he couldn’t run a read-option offense, which requires a fast, running quarterback. He wouldn’t fit the system, and the team would fail. But put Brady in a play-action offense, sit back and watch the magic happen.
We operate the same way. When we interview, we’re not just looking for a teacher with excellent credentials and experience; we’re looking for a “Chapel Hill Way” teacher. It’s a specific profile: someone who believes in our philosophy of systematic, explicit, research-based instruction.
This culture starts with our team captains: our campus principals. We need them to believe in our playbook, not just buy in because the district office said so. We invest in their development so they can champion literacy daily, monitor instruction and ensure every classroom executes our playbook with fidelity. It’s their conviction that turns a curriculum on a shelf into a living, breathing part of our culture.
Talented teams win games. Disciplined, team-first organizations build dynasties.
Building a dynasty requires sacrifice. When an educator joins our team, whether they’re a rookie or a seasoned veteran, we ask them to let go of the “I’ve always done it this way” mindset. That’s the equivalent of a player prioritizing their personal stats over a team win.
It’s a team-first mindset. It’s about a willingness to put personal preference aside to build a championship team. For Chapel Hill ISD, our championship is ensuring every child learns to read.
Our team-first philosophy has translated into measurable results: Across campuses, students are gaining the foundational skills they need, and data shows growth for every subgroup, including students with dyslexia and multilingual learners. We want students to become a product of our expectations, rather than their environment. Our district, which serves a diverse population, including a high percentage of students classified as low socioeconomic status, consistently scores above the state average in third-grade reading.
At Wise Elementary, our largest campus[MOU1] , 56% of third graders met grade-level standards, and 23% scored above grade level on the 2023-2024 STARR assessment. And we had similar results across the district.
So to my fellow education leaders: Before you shop for a new playbook, ensure you have the right team culture in place. Define your culture. Draft the right players. Build your team. Coach your captains. And obsess over the fundamentals.
That’s how you win.
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