Links 2/28

PE Staffing Ratios, Forgotten EdTech, Street Math, Exclusion in Trump's America, Reporting Schools to the Feds

James Shanahan
February 28, 2025

First, some housekeeping. Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly newsletter where I write about education and share a handful of interesting links. We’re at an interesting point in American education, one in which everything we thought we knew about schooling seems to be going away. I want to write about that, and other topics in education that I find interesting. If you’re interested in this kind of thing, please subscribe. I plan to put up the paywall in March. If you do not like Substack as a platform, I will be publishing a parallel version using Beehiiv.

Private Equity Comes for Early Childhood Staffing Ratios

One of the things you realize pretty quickly as a parent is that kids take time. Every process that you do for yourself, you also have to do for your kids and until they’re older (how old? someone tell me, please, when the shift happens) they need much more time than you do for pretty much everything. seriously, go watch the episode of Bluey called Take Away for a good illustration of this principle. We call this growing up and we call parents’ role in growing up many different things: parenting, child rearing, raising kids, etc. We also have another word, well phrase, that refers to someone else raising your children: childcare. When they’re older we also call it school, and recently people have started to remember the importance of the childcare functions of school.

Since parenting is time intensive, it is difficult to do things other than parenting and puts a strain on parents who are working full time. In traditional societies, we might have expected older relatives whose kids are already grown and older children to take on some of the childcare labor. In modern societies, we turn to the paid labor of nannies and daycare, but a surprising (to me) number of young kids are cared for by relatives and most parents said they had no childcare arrangements. In the same census data, 15% of parents who did not work said they did not work because of childcare reasons. As I’ve shared before, support for increasing the availability of childcare is broad and bipartisan, indicating there may be some pathways for political reconciliation. One challenge, though, is the shortage of daycares, early childhood educators, and other caretakers to provide that care.

Here is one proposed solution (via The Family Frontier):

On Friday, an Idaho House committee moved ahead a bill that will eliminate all maximum child-to-adult ratios in child care programs, and at the same time forbid localities from setting any such ratios. The bill, House Bill 243, will instead have each individual provider set whatever they deem a ratio “appropriate to ensure the health, safety, and welfare of all children in attendance.”

One interesting facet of this proposal is that a key lobbyist pressuring legislators in favor of the change is Kate Haas who is working on behalf of the school staffing company, Wonderschool. Wonderschool is, it turns out, is funded by private equity.

Lowering staffing ratios in childcare would enable more kids to be enrolled without needing more staff or more facilities. Childcare crisis solved! No, lower ratios is probably a bad idea, as ChildTrends points out:

Research shows that smaller child-to-staff ratios have been associated with fewer situations that threaten children’s safety. Moreover, when early childhood caregivers are responsible for more children than they can manage, it increases their stress and can result in the loss of the caregiver’s self-control. Indeed, the presence of a second caregiver has been associated with a lower likelihood of child abuse in the child care settings.

In addition to ensuring that young children are cared for in healthy and safe environments, children who are cared for in ECE settings with lower child-to-staff ratios receive more stimulating and responsive care, and engage in more verbal interactions with their caregivers. Such interactions can foster the secure attachments that are critical for children’s socioemotional well-being and lay the foundation for children’s ability to build healthy relationships in the future. Lower child-to-staff ratios and smaller group sizes have also been associated with children’s positive development, including higher social competence, communication and language skills, and cognitive development.

Given private equity’s abysmal track record with two other care-based fields, hospitals and nursing homes, I expect Wonderschool’s advocacy to lead to worse outcomes for children. Of course, this also makes me wonder if the expansion of school vouchers means we’ll soon see private equity run k-12 schools? Seems bad!

(Relatively) Ancient EdTech

What if I told you about an interesting new education product, Cognitive Tutor, that was set to revolutionize the way children learn? The idea is that students use this software and it responds to their performance by providing exactly the instruction that they need at that point in time. It uses specialized algorithms to analyze student performance, deliver and assess instruction, and tailor learning to each child. Moreover, it is put together by researchers at one of the nation’s premier technological universities, Carnegie Mellon, and has been in development by Carnegie Learning since 1998!

You might think this is a good alternative to the maze of products on the market today, Surely the educational, cognitive, and computational researchers behind this product are committed to creating the real deal and not some marketing driven vaporware? Unfortunately:

The federal review of Carnegie Learning’s flagship software, Cognitive Tutor, said the program had “no discernible effects” on the standardized test scores of high school students. A separate 2009 federal look at 10 major software products for teaching algebra as well as elementary and middle school math and reading found that nine of them, including Cognitive Tutor, “did not have statistically significant effects on test scores.”

Did you notice that the evaluation was done in 2009? That’s because, as Audrey Waters reminded me this week, we’ve been chasing some form of AI in education for nearly 70 years. The promise, I suppose, is the infamous Two Sigma problem. Benjamin Bloom, of Bloom’s taxonomy fame, provided high individualized tutoring to his college students and saw gains of two standard deviations, an absolutely immense effect. Like taking someone from the 50th percentile to the 98th. Ever since, people have been chasing the dream of computers providing this individualized tutoring, because paying humans is expensive and slow to scale. Bloom’s two sigma effect has never been replicated. It might have something to do with the fact that the tutoring was not the only “treatment.” The students took a narrow test over only the things they were tutored on. They also received extra testing and feedback on top of the tutoring. Tutors received extra training in the subject matter because the tutoring was comprehensive — it was implemented in place of classroom instruction, not as a supplement to it, which is how most tutoring is done. I feel like this is the case every time some intervention shows massive gains. We always want shortcuts and are apparently willing to do sloppy research to make the case for it.

Street Math

If you’re a math teacher, one of the things you may hear from your students is the objection that they won’t use the math they learn in school out in the real world. Often a good reply is to give examples from the real world that demonstrate the usefulness of math concepts they’re learning in school. What if this was wrong? Not wrong in that those math concepts don’t exist in the real world. No, what if it was wrong because the ways in which people “do math” in and out of school are somehow distinct?

It turns out that math skills seem not to transfer between “street” tasks and academic tasks.

we surveyed children in Kolkata and Delhi, India, who work in markets (n = 1,436), to investigate whether maths skills acquired in real-world settings transfer to the classroom and vice versa. Nearly all these children used complex arithmetic calculations effectively at work. They were also proficient in solving hypothetical market maths problems and verbal maths problems that were anchored to concrete contexts. However, they were unable to solve arithmetic problems of equal or lesser complexity when presented in the abstract format typically used in school. The children’s performance in market maths problems was not explained by memorization, access to help, reduced stress with more familiar formats or high incentives for correct performance. By contrast, children with no market-selling experience (n = 471), enrolled in nearby schools, showed the opposite pattern. These children performed more accurately on simple abstract problems, but only 1% could correctly answer an applied market maths problem that more than one third of working children solved (β = 0.35, s.e.m. = 0.03; 95% confidence interval = 0.30–0.40, P < 0.001). School children used highly inefficient written calculations, could not combine different operations and arrived at answers too slowly to be useful in real-life or in higher maths.

I don’t know much of Indian school “maths” so maybe there’s not a lot of applied mathematics in the curriculum? Either way, fascinating!

People with Disabilities are Already Being Excluded in Trump’s America

I noted last week about disability rights as a key battleground for conservatives trying to reduce the government’s role in society. Pamela Herd brings us the story of Vincent, who is no longer able to follow his dream of becoming a lawyer and advocate for people with disabilities. Vincent, who has Type 2 Spinal Muscular Atrophy, has lost a paid internship position and a state grant to pay for his dual MA/JD.

Vincent’s lost internship wasn’t the only bad news, however. His state grant from West Virginia, which helps pay his law school tuition, and effectively helps fund his care provider supports, was being reduced by 75 percent. The state told him this was due to both the ongoing federal funding grant freeze and anticipated cuts by the Trump Administration…

The disabled. The poor. The queer. The female. The black. The immigrant. Each may avoid the law being directly wielded against them only to find it being indirectly wielded against them anyways.

Ratting out schools to the Feds

I received this email from the department of education today:

The enddei.ed.gov is real and is a link to a form you can fill out to tell the federal government to investigate a school or school district for “pushing critical theory, rogue sex education and divisive ideologies”. If I were someone interested in a bit of malicious compliance or some low-energy civil disobedience, I might report some private and charter schools for violations. Maybe I’d report them for excluding kids with disabilities? Perhaps that version of me would use Elon Musk’s personal email at DOGE just to be sure the recipient at the DOE paid extra close attention. This is, of course, only hypothetical musings of someone disappointed in their government’s collapse into ideologically driven witch hunts.