Links and Commentary 2/27/26

AZ Voucher Accountability, Nontraditional Students, Teaching Context Matters,

Author

James Shanahan
February 27, 2026

Hi! This is Scholastic Alchemy, a twice-weekly blog where I write about education and related topics. Wednesday posts are typically a deep dive into an education topic of my choosing and Fridays usually see me posting a selection of education links and some commentary about each. If Scholastic Alchemy had a thesis, I suppose it would go a little like this: We keep trying to induce educational gold from lead and it keeps not working but we keep on trying. My goal here is to talk about curriculum, instruction, policy, public opinion, and other topics in order to explain why I think we keep failing to produce this magical educational gold. If you find that at all interesting, please consider a paid subscription here, or at the parallel publishing spot on Beehiiv. (Some folks hate the ‘stack, I get it.) That said, all posts are going to remain free for the foreseeable future. Thanks for reading!

Busy week, only three links today.

Arizona Voucher Accountability

If you need a reminder as to why local journalism is an essential tool for informing the public and holding leaders accountable, look no further than Arizona’s 12 News. I’ve shared their reporting on AZ’s voucher system before and they continue to do a good job of asking very basic questions and getting terrible responses. It turns out that about 1 in 5 voucher purchases is fraudulent, even though state officials insist that there is only minimal fraud.

A newly obtained Department of Education memo covering ESA spending from December 2024 through last September found that of 385,000 ESA purchases the department reviewed, nearly 84,000 were deemed unallowable.

That’s just more than 20 percent of all transactions that should have been banned.

One major spending category — “Marketplace” — showed nearly the same rate: almost one in five purchases flagged for improper purchases.

Now, officials say they’re working to recover those funds, but one interesting part of the problem is that AZ’s superintendent of schools had a policy of blanket acceptance of all purchases less than $2000 and is refusing to change that policy even as the state’s Attorney General is launching an investigation of the use of voucher funds. It really seems like pro-voucher proponents don’t want anyone looking too closely at how taxpayer dollars are being spent. I’m glad Arizona’s AG may be part of changing AZ’s culture of unaccountability.

“Nontraditional” Students Are the Norm

One of my pet peeves is the notion that nontraditional students in high education are somehow rare edge cases. Our discussions of higher education policy are dominated by considerations related to selective admissions, Ivy+ undergraduate demographics, and concerns about various kinds of activism on elite campuses when the vast majority of students spend their college experience in a very different context. I think that assumption is downstream from the tendency of policymakers, journalists, professors, and other people of influence in higher ed to have attended selective four-year residential universities, enrolled full-time, and graduated in those four years. Elites were mostly traditional students attending somewhat prestigious unis so that’s all they think about when thinking about higher ed.

Meanwhile, more than a quarter of undergraduates do not attend college full-time (a roughly similar proportion report being employed so they’re working and in college). About half of undergraduates are white, indicating an increasingly diverse college-going population (compare that to my selective alma mater which is about 70% white-identifying students). You would expect a traditional student to graduate at age 21 or 22 depending on their birthday but a full 1/3rd of undergraduates in the US are over the age of 25 with 18% being over the age of 35.

And, I learned this week from the Washington Post that 10% of undergraduate students in the US are in high school. They are using dual enrollment programs to take college courses while still in high school. I know it’s not perfect math but let’s just combine those percentages a bit and recognize that, if ~45% of undergraduates are outside of the typical age band and a quarter are working while in school, we should really change our perspective on who college is for and what kinds of policies we are implementing. Continuing to focus higher ed on the smallest schools with the most elite students means we continue to underserve the vast majority of higher education students.

Teaching Context Matters

Let’s say you’re a policymaker who wants to help kids in poor communities succeed in school. You’ve noticed that they have low graduation rates, low rates of college attendance, poor scores on state exams, and lots of disciplinary problems. You may say to yourself, you know, a good teacher can make all the difference in a student’s life. They can motivate and inspire, educate and evaluate, and generally just make a success out of the kids they encounter. One of the challenges this poor school faces is that they can’t attract the kinds of teachers you think would have the greatest impact. Primarily, they lack money. Money is something you have! So you devise a plan. Identify the best teachers and then offer them $20,000 if they go teach in low performing schools. Someone did this and studied the outcomes.

It kinda works, but a lot less than your theory of action anticipated. The teachers who accept the transfer see a big performance drop at their new school and only recover some of that performance in subsequent years. Changing to the new school context meant the highly effective teachers were no longer highly effective.

Some policies designed to improve teacher effectiveness rest on the assumption that teacher performance is largely invariant across work environments. Our study illustrates that this assumption does not hold in all contexts. Instead, we find that the estimated effectiveness of high-performing teachers working at higher-achieving schools declines substantially when they transfer to low-achieving schools. This suggests, at the least, that estimated teacher effectiveness is not always fully portable.

And

Schools are critical in supporting or constraining teacher effectiveness, and teachers are substantially less effective in less supportive schools. These patterns suggest that improving teacher effectiveness requires attention not only to identifying teachers with the skills and capacities to be effective, but also to how teacher effectiveness can differ across settings and how organizational conditions affect teachers’ work.

This really calls into question the idea that there is some inherent quality that makes a teacher good or bad and all that’s needed is to find that quality and hire those teachers. Rather, it’s the environment in which they find themselves and how well they can adapt that makes a teacher “quality”.

Of course, anyone in schools on a regular basis knows this. There’s a reason teachers gravitate toward wealthy suburban schools and to teaching advanced placement or gifted or honors. They want an easier classroom and school environment.

Thanks for reading!