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What was it like to lead a school in Estonia through the school closures? This week, Indrek Lillemägi looks back on his experiences in the pandemic as leader of the Emili Kool (named for Jean Jacques Rouseau’s book Emile, or On Education), a private K-9 school that Lillemägi helped launch in 2016. In the first part of the interview, Lillemägi described how he applied what he learned at the Emili Kool as the founding principal of a new upper secondary school, Tallinna Pelgulinna Riigigümnaasium, that opened in Tallinn in the fall of 2023.

This interview is one in a series exploring what has and has not changed in education since COVID.  Previous interviews and posts have looked at developments in Italy, Poland, Finland, New Zealand, the Netherlands, South Africa, and Vietnam. This interview with Lillemägi was conducted by Thomas Hatch a few months before the Pelgulinna Riigigümnaasium opened. The interview has been edited for length and clarity

Thomas Hatch (TH): When you were the principal at the Emili Kool, you were responsible for guiding the school’s initial response to the spread of COVID-19 and the related restrictions. Can you first tell us about any directions you received about how to handle the emerging situation? 

Indrek Lillemägi (IL): Maybe a week before the government’s decision to close all the schools in Estonia we had a school crisis meeting and made our first decisions then. We had most e-learning systems set up already – Office 365, student accounts, online chats – so, overall, the transition went fairly well, though video lessons were messy at first. Months later, teachers described it as a really smooth transition since we had those systems in place already. We didn’t have to rush to find new solutions. 

TH:   Was it common to have those systems in place in Estonia? I understand that in Finland it varied a lot.

IL:  It was the same in Estonia – some broad government directions but schools invented solutions. Our staff was pretty young so our teachers were very good with technology. They were already tech fans, and they were pretty innovative. But schools were in very different situations. I heard stories about some teachers who just threw up their hands and refused to do video lessons or digital assignments. 

TH: What were the broad government directions about initially – mostly health and safety?

IL: The initial regulations were about health and safety, staying home, things like that. It took time before they gave directions on curriculum and the schedule. Later, the Ministry of Education started publishing some directions about learning and studying, but they were not too directive, especially that first spring. I remember that some of the recommendations included do not leave any student behind and to find out if every student had internet access and a computer access so schools could provide devices to students if needed. As a private school, most of our students had computers, but some bigger families didn’t have enough. I think we only gave out computers to maybe every fourth or fifth student, and we had enough computers to give out ourselves. But many tech companies in Estonia also started helping schools get computers to students who needed them. I think most students who needed a computer got one that first spring.

Initially, schools didn’t have to do video lessons if they didn’t want to. Some teachers decided just to assign individual work and just have a reflection or something once a week. But people found that it didn’t work like that; schools needed to create an online learning environment. We started with video lessons, and then we added more and more lessons. But they were not lessons like in the classroom. It was more like individual work, with a teacher working as a mentor, helping out students one by one and explaining something important. 

TH: How did you make those decisions about instruction for the school? What guidance did you give teachers?

IL: In that first or second meeting we decided that we need to make a decision together, and it’s more important to make a decision than to leave things too flexible or too messy. We had a really solid structure of staff meetings, and we also decided together which apps we would use, how many letters we would send home each week, it was all written down for the teachers. As a small school, we were able to able to make the big decisions together with most teachers. Normally, many decisions are made by the leadership team, but these decisions were more collective, with all of us discussing things together early on.

“We decided that we need to make a decision together, and it’s more important to make a decision than to leave things too flexible or too messy.“

TH: What was the decision on schedule/plan? Did you tell teachers they needed students online 9am-3pm?

IL: In the beginning, all the teachers had to meet their students at least two times per week, so all the students had at least two online lessons per day. And the student from each grade had morning gatherings or morning circles at 9 O’clock every day. The teachers met with the students; they looked at the schedule and their aims; and maybe they talked about their feelings. In some cases, maybe it was important to wake students up. After the online morning meetings, the students had much more free time or autonomous learning time, and then they were brought together again by a teacher at the end of the day teachers and students would gather together again at the end of the day.

TH: That’s interesting that the teachers were talking to the students about their feelings. Was that normal before COVID?

IL: Yes, that was normal. But we wanted to make the online learning as safe, socially and emotionally safe as possible for the students, and part of that was finding things pre-COVID that we could bring to the to the online version, and morning gatherings were one of those things. 

TH: Was the morning circle just for the primary students or all students? 

IL: Both. In the primary school, the students would meet with their homeroom teacher. At the lower secondary school, the students had different subject teachers, but we still have the class teacher system in Estonia so the lower secondary students would meet with their class teacher. The head of studies made the schedule at the beginning and end of the day, but the primary teachers could decide for themselves what do in the middle of the day. 

TH: What about parents? What information did you share with parents? 

IL: I actually have the recommendations that we sent to parents and students that first month. It was a Facebook post, but we also sent it to them directly. It’s from the 17^th of March, 2020 — the first month of home learning. The first recommendation is about organizing a comfortable learning space. The second is to discuss and write down the rules of home studying; make a schedule with resting and active time; make a routine; and at the end of every day write down 3 “success stories.” 

TH: As I understand it, the Estonian government made the decision early on to get students back to school as soon as possible. As you moved into the next phases and particularly as you tried to get most students back in person in the fall, what were some of the biggest issues you had to deal with. 

IL: I think the fears of people was the biggest issue. Teachers had different fears; parents had different fears. Some people were really open to coming back together, learning together, but some people were really scared to come back. Of course, people had different situations. Some had grandparents or sick people at home, and they had to be more scared. Others were thinking about all the economic problems as a lot of the parents either lost their jobs or their businesses went down, so they were much more stressed. And some parents refused to bring their children back to school. I remember there were some mathematicians who sent the calculations and said it’s going to be really bad if we come together, and they had modeled everything out.   

As a private school, there were also lot of economic questions. Lots of people were in an uncertain situation, and they didn’t know if their salaries would be cut. In general, in Estonia not too many people had deep economic problems because the government still supported small businesses and they provided some salary compensation, but still there was a lot of uncertainty. 

We tried to deal with everything through lots of communication, explaining everything, and we tried to be as flexible as we could. Some families wanted their children to stay home, and, in the first year, even after we came back in person, we accepted that, and we developed individual plans for those students to work online. But later on, during the second COVID wave, we said “These are the rules of our school, and we will all come together,” and we didn’t make these individual plans anymore. 

“We tried to deal with everything through lots of communication, explaining everything, and we tried to be as flexible as we could. Some families wanted their children to stay home, and, in the first year, even after we came back in person, we accepted that, and we developed individual plans for those students to work online.”

TH: What were some of the issues you had with online learning? As a private school, since parents were paying, maybe you didn’t have too many issues with students disappearing, but were there issues of mental health and stress? 

IL: We didn’t really have issues with students disappearing, but we had some issues with home routines not being supportive enough – so some student might just sleep in the morning and not show up online.  But no students fully disappearing; we kept parent contacts. 

There were also some students who worked individually with our psychologists or social workers during the closures, and some students came into the school and worked alone in the classroom, while a psychologist worked in the next room. We helped to create routines for those students who couldn’t work at home for some reason. 

When school opened again, we found some increased stress and anxiety among students, but it was not too bad compared to before COVID.  I still remember when we came back to school it was actually like a new positive beginning. There were really positive vibes, particularly in the primary school, where the students’ strong relationships were in their families or in their school; they don’t have friends someplace else. So they came back to school and met their friends again. 

“when we came back to school it was actually like a new positive beginning. There were really positive vibes… they came back to school and met their friends again“

TH:  In the US and other parts of the world there has been a lot of talk about academic “learning loss.” Has there been any talk about “learning loss” in Estonia? 

IL: Yes, of course. For some of the students, their results went down. And for some students home learning actually helped, but that’s only for the academic part. we don’t know about the social part because the social skills and relationships are rarely measured. We thought for about one third of the students, home learning helped their academics; for one third, it didn’t matter; and for one third it was more difficult. Later on, when the students came back, we had the extra support for some students and some extra lessons. We also had summer learning camps. 

TH:  Who paid for the summer learning camps? 

IL: There was government funding for the summer learning camps, but  schools had a lot of autonomy for organizing them. So the camps in some schools were more focused on social skills, but we put the two things together. These were like social learning camps where the students just spent time together, but they could also learn their ABC’s again. 

TH: Were those primarily for the students who were struggling or could anybody come? 

IL: Anybody could come, but I remember we talked a lot about that: That even if a student is doing okay in mathematics and sciences, it doesn’t mean that that he or she doesn’t need this social part, because that was a big loss. 

TH:  You also said that the school gave students more individual work during remote learning than they had in the past. Have they continued any of that or have things just gone back to the way it was? 

IL: Yes, after I left, they started doing individual e-learning days about once a month. Of course, everyday life in the school was also affected by the COVID experience because all the online systems became a normal part of learning and studying, so all the online collaboration methods for writing together, for doing video presentations they became part of normal life as well. 

, Estonia in the fall of 2023. Previously Lillemägi was the founding principal of a private school in Tallinn, the Emili Kool (named for Jean Jacques Rouseau’s book Emile, or On Education) that opened in 2016. In the first part of this two part interview, Lillemägi discusses some of the key steps in the development of the upper secondary school and some of the lessons he learned from his earlier experiences in establishing the Emili Kool. In the second part of the interview, Lillemägi describes what it was like to lead the Emili Kool through the first part of the COVID pandemic in Estonia. 

This interview is one in a series exploring what has and has not changed in education since COVID. Previous interviews and posts have looked at developments in Italy, Poland, Finland, New Zealand, the Netherlands, South Africa, and Vietnam. This interview with Lillemägi was conducted by Thomas Hatch in May of 2023, a few months before the Pelgulinna Riigigümnaasium opened. The interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Thomas Hatch (TH): Can you give us a sense of what it’s been like to develop a new upper secondary school in Estonia? What were some key milestones or challenges leading up to your opening in September of 2023? 

Indrek Lillemägi (IL):  We started with a little over 400 students in the 10th grade in the fall of 2023. We will add an 11^th grade this year, and a 12^th grade next year, and we will end up with a school with about 400 students in each grade at the upper secondary level. So it will be a big school, with more than a thousand students.

But this new school is part of a longer story because it’s one of a series of new State-run gymnasiums or upper secondary schools that the Ministry of Education has created in some municipal centers over the past 10 years as populations decreased. But Tallinn is another story because their population is increasing, without enough places in upper secondary schools, so three new gymnasiums were approved. The Ministry of Education then hired me along with two other new headmasters to create the schools together, so I’m not working alone. We worked in the same room every day, and we did a lot of things together. We’ve hired people together. We’ve developed communications together. We’ve done a lot of bureaucracy together. We’ve shared a lot, but we also had our own communities to serve.  Of course, we are also different as principals and as humans, and we have different things we believe in, so the schools are pretty different. But in the process, we were together.

TH: These state-run gymnasiums will function along with the upper secondary schools run by the municipalities? 

IL:  Yes, exactly. We are the extra ones, and none of the municipal schools will close because of us. But, after 5-6 years when student numbers decrease again, the municipality may have to make some tough decisions, and they may have to close some schools.

For the new schools, the Ministry gave us full autonomy. They just said “this is the budget; this will be the new school building of yours; and these are the regulations.” We were given full leadership autonomy to build our schools. It’s enormous trust that they had in us. I don’t think that’s possible in any other country.  We also had the full support from the Ministry of Education. We had all the lawyers, all the experts, helping us. 

“[T]he Ministry gave us full autonomy. They just said, “this is the budget, this will be the new school building, and these are the regulations. We were given full leadership autonomy to build our schools.“

When I first started writing down the strategy for building a new school, I tried to understand what’s going on? What’s going in education in Tallin? Of course I had some knowledge, but I had time to really talk to people, different school heads, different teachers, and parents and also with the local community where my school would be located. I tried to understand what’s missing because I really believe that strong educational systems are heterogeneous. Students and parents should be able to choose their school according to their values or principles. So I  didn’t want to copy the “best school.” 

TH: Were the regulations specific to the new schools or are you referring to the general regulations?

IL: Just the general regulations. But I have to say, we were even pushed to try out the borders of the regulations or touch the “grey zone.” I think the Minister of Education sees us as being able to try out more new things, and then our experience can either be transferred to other places or they can be taken as a lesson. 

TH: How did they push you or encourage you to take those risks? 

IL: It wasn’t anything official, but it was through our weekly meetings with some of the those involved with the management of state schools. The schools include the new state gymnasiums but most of the schools that are managed directly by the state are schools for students with special needs or vocational schools.  

TH: So from there, what was your journey?

IL: From there, I tried to combine three things. One was what I was hearing from the local community in Northern Tallinn where the school would be. They tend to be very socially active, and the local citizens want to be involved. Second, a lot of students told me about the challenges in their lives that do not have any part in their education. Mostly, the students talked about stresses related to climate issues and their mental health. They said, “these are big things in my life, but I don’t deal with these things at school.” These stories from the students really influenced me.  

“A lot of students told me about the challenges in their lives that do not have any part in their education. Mostly, the students talked about stresses related to climate issues and their mental health. They said ‘these are big things in my life, but I don’t deal with these things at school.‘”

Then of course there were my own passions and things that I am interested in. When I started writing down what kind of school I would like to have, I wrote down that the focus of the new school would be about dealing with the problems that do not have easy solutions – questions of climate and the environment and questions of democracy and how to build strong democratic institutions. I set these as the focus points of the school. Of course, I didn’t write down any specific details about the curriculum; I just wrote down the principles for myself. Now, the values of our school are based partly on these principles. 

Then when I was hiring the head teacher, I showed the candidates the paper with the principles, and I asked them: “Would you like to work for that?” A lot of people applied for this position, and I hired someone who had been working last nine years in Netherlands in an International School. After she moved back to Estonia, we started working together and talking together about the curriculum about the learning methods, and about the other focus points of our school. Eventually, we hired a team of eleven people who worked on building everything from the curriculum to the bureaucracy. We then started hiring the rest of the staff when we started dealing with student applications and everything else. 

TH: What are the focus points of the other schools?

IL:  Ours is democracy and environment, solving complex problems. One school that’s located near the Technical University in Tallinn focuses on technology and science, and the third school third focuses on self-expression.

We also met with the heads of the other two new schools to talk about what could bring these three new schools together. We decided that, for all of them, the curriculum would allow students to create their own individual learning paths. We wanted our students to be able to put together their own curriculum and to have much more choice compared to the average school. Because of that, we created a network of courses that could be shared between these three schools. Now, the students of one school can take courses at the other two schools as well. These are elective or “selective” courses. Some are online, but many are in-person. Most of the selective courses are on Thursdays when students can move between schools, and when students can choose which courses to take or what internships or other activities to participate in. That means we have to coordinate our schedules with local universities, vocational schools, and NGOs as well. But now, on Thursdays, our students can move around the city between morning course time and afternoon time. If a student goes to the university, they stay there half the day.  The other days are more conventional with 70-minute lessons. Less conventional is an 80-minute midday break when students again have more responsibility for deciding how to use their time. In addition to lunch, they can use the time to rest, to do group or individual work, or go the gym or on walks. 

TH: Are there other unusual aspects to your school day?

IL: The first two weeks don’t follow the regular schedule. Students go through an onboarding program where we take them through a narrative arc that goes from the Big Bang to civilization’s end. They build relationships and learn about the school’s approach and theory of knowledge – how different fields do research and gain knowledge. It’s a completely different two-week program than most students have had before.  The other two schools have a similar onboarding approach, though it’s slightly shorter. Teachers from all three schools worked together to develop the approach. 

We also have mentoring groups in which a teacher meets with a group of about 18 students which is smaller than the average class size. The mentoring groups have weekly lessons to reflect on social-emotional and group challenges. The mentors are the regular subject teachers, but we also provide them with special training.  These kinds of mentor groups are becoming more common in the state gymnasiums.

TH: What were some of the key lessons from your work founding the Emili School that you brought to your work with this school? 

IL: This may sound like a cliches, but of course, the relationships are the most important. Everything in education starts from building relationships, first with one student. Then building a strong community and strong relationships with the local parents, grandparents, local NGO’s, local businesses, and so on. I knew these things, but I didn’t have the experience of how to involve all these people, how to make them understand everyday life in a school and the challenges in a new school.

TH: What were some of the things you learned to do to help build those relationships?

IL:  One of the key lessons was that I started being more and more honest. In the beginning, I felt responsible for “selling” the school – I talked a lot about the vision and ideas. But, later, I also started talking honestly about the challenges, the  difficulties, even the problems we faced. I began to understand that being honest built much stronger relationships, so people who joined our community were not disappointed later on – they had the transparent view before joining.

“I began to understand that being honest built much stronger relationships, so people who joined our community were not disappointed later on – they had the transparent view before joining.“

TH: What were one or two of the biggest challenges you faced when you were starting that school? 

IL: Probably that private education in Estonia is uncommon – less than 5% of students go to private schools. So parents think “private school” means a paradise school with no problems. The challenge was that in the beginning we were a normal school with the same challenges and growing pains all new organizations have. As I started telling a more honest story, with open school days where parents and community members could visit, I think they began to see and appreciate the hard work and emotions teachers go through, and they developed a better appreciation for the work the school was doing.  

TH: Was there a particular issue parents were surprised about, or was it just in general they expected perfection?

IL:  Probably the emotions throughout the school day was something they talked a lot about, especially in primary school. There’s someone crying; someone’s sad; someone’s telling a story about their weekend – it’s full of emotions.  And they saw the teachers trying to be really empathetic, trying to support all the students – the sad ones, the crying ones – and I think that was surprising to them. And I think parents often expect teachers to have free time during breaks. But especially in a starting school with new methods, we were doing a lot of preparation and a lot of reflecting and learning together. Parents expected teachers to have more free time than they actually did.

TH: Can you share a bit about how you planned to assess student outcomes and your progress in developing the school? 

IL: That’s a big topic!  We’re bringing many innovations together like much more collaborative teaching. As an example, in the 10th grade we have two “pillars” – one for natural sciences and one for cultural studies. In the natural sciences, the biology teacher, geography teacher, physics teacher, chemistry teacher, they all work together. We have also changed the national curriculum by changing the order of the learning outcomes so it’s more much more integrated than usual. Teachers often just follow the textbooks but the textbooks in different fields don’t go together very well. Some of the topics are really similar in geography, in physics and chemistry, but they are learned in different times in the different fields so students have trouble putting the big picture together. Our science teachers worked together for almost a year before the school opened, and they’ve done a lot of work reordering the national curriculum learning outcomes. That means they have to design assessments that align to those more interdisciplinary learning outcomes. It all starts from the dialogue and from feedback based on these learning outcomes. 

Besides descriptive feedback, we use percentages from 0-100 rather than letter grades. But what’s different is that the students get one percentage for all the sciences, not a separate percentage for each subject.  All of this influences the learning process because the teachers have to work together to create the final assessment or final project; they assess it together; and they plan together.  

But at the end of 12^th grade, the regulations still require us to give the students marks in each of the subjects. We do use pre-tests in the subjects, some of these are provided by the State, but the pre-tests and final subject tests are just for reflection for the students and teachers, they don’t influence their school marks in each pillar. 

TH: How did other schools in Tallinn react to your planning to develop these new State gymnasiums?

IL: There been different emotions.  We heard that some Directors or Head Teachers told their teams some horror stories about us, but some of them were really supportive. Some of the Directors have asked us to come to their schools to explain everything about the school to the students, so really different approaches. 

Next Week: Leading a school in a context of uncertainty: Indrek Lillemägi discusses the COVID-19 school closures in Tallinn, Estonia

This week, Thomas Hatch  shares pictures and reflections from a recent visit to the Shenzen Education Kindergarten, a public early childhood center in China. This post is the fourth in a series on early childhood education that includes an article describing what Hatch learned about the Sunshine Kindergartens in rural China as well as articles describing approaches to early childhood education in Norway and India.

Last month, in a public kindergarten in Shenzen China, I saw what learning looks like when 300 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds work on their own and together in over 100 different activities in 20 indoor and outdoor play spaces spread over 3 floors in two buildings.

When I walked into the first classroom, a six foot tall tower of blocks greeted me at the door. Spread out beyond that tower, I could see a series of different construction centers the children could work in, each one equipped with metal, wood, Legos, cardboard, bricks, tiles, or another kind of building material.

The construction areas continued past an open wall where children in clear plastic slickers pumped water through a series of pipes in the rain.

That one vast room could have housed three or four of the kindergarten classrooms where I used to work, thirty years ago, in Somerville, Massachusetts. At the time, I was studying how the strengths and interests of four 6-year olds evolved over six months during free play. With Howard Gardner and my colleagues at Project Zero, we sought to equip classrooms with a number of different activities that would enable young children to develop a much wider range of abilities than they normally encountered in school.

But I never imagined anything like this.

Each room of the Shenzen Early Education Center was dedicated to a different pursuit: creativity, music, language, logic, nature, society, drama, and visual arts among others. Walking through each door revealed another treasure trove of paints, yarn, clay, pens, instruments, costumes, games, books, and all manner of materials, tools and resources.

Even the spaces between rooms and buildings overflowed with plants, seeds, microscopes, construction helmets, slides, pulleys, pendulums, giant TV screens, and anything else that might support the students’ explorations.

Clearly, it took significant investments to bring this vision to life. But what I saw relied primarily on two things – materials that are all around us and the time and care to think about how to use them to support young children’s development. Beyond the awe-inspiring facilities and resources, the educational infrastructure that underlay every room and learning center stood out. Although I could not be sure of everything that was said in a quick 2-hour visit, an interpreter and my Chinese friends and colleagues explained that after breakfast, children are given the choice of where to play, and after lunch and outdoor play, the children gather again to discuss and reflect on how they spend the day. I heard about the curriculum that guided the design that of every room and learning center, how it connected to the Chinese national early childhood curriculum, and what kind of scaffolding and support teachers could provide.

As Wang Xiang, head of the education center, explained to me in a letter following the visit:

“In order to let children give full play to their autonomy, imagination and creativity, before the activities, teachers will organize children to have group discussions, introduce the areas and appreciate the works in the areas, share children’s life experiences, and let children discuss and determine the content they want to do and make work plans. Let children collect relevant materials, including books, pictures or video materials. We will also get families involved. Reading, consulting and on-site visits will be carried out at home. The daily conversation activities will help children sort out their activity ideas, encourage them to boldly realize their creative ideas, making each work full of challenges and creativity. Work is a process of continuous in-depth processing. Children’s works always exceed our imagination, bring us a lot of surprises and also make them gain a sense of satisfaction and achievement.“

I heard that many teachers had studied the material, skills and concepts of the centers for which they took responsibility. I was told about the teacher education that all the teachers went through as well as the system of documentation the teachers used to record where the children played, how the children’s skills were developing, and where the children might want to spend more time.

And I heard about the app the school created with a technology firm that enabled the teachers to keep track of what the students were doing, document their development in different areas, and share it all with the parents.

I do not know, exactly how much independence the children have or how much the choices and beautiful products they made were guided by their teachers. I do not know what happens — or how parents respond — if the children are not spending time learning to read or count and are not developing in ways consistent with the traditional Chinese curriculum many of these children will encounter in first grade.

But the experience enabled me to imagine what could be going on anywhere, anytime, if the world once again becomes the place where students of all ages learn when education is no longer confined to school.

It enabled me to see what learning looks like when children have access to so many of the materials and resources that are so often are left outside their classrooms.

What if education was like that for all? What if students have the opportunity, over the years, to gradually, safely, explore more and more of the world around them until school itself is no longer contained in a classroom in a building? Learning can spill out, with support and care, across the landscape, unconstrained.

IEN celebrates the life of Lee Shulman, renowned scholar and mentor, who passed away on December 30^th, 2024. Shulman was a Professor of Education at Michigan State University and Stanford University, before becoming the 8^th President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1996. He also served terms as President of the National Academy of Education and the American Education Research Association where he helped establish the division of Teaching and Teacher Education. Shulman received numerous awards over the course of his career, including the American Psychological Association’s E.L. Thorndike Award for Career Achievement in Educational Psychology in 1995 and the Grawemeyer Award in Education in 2006. Thomas Hatch, who worked with Shulman at the Carnegie Foundation, shares some of his reflections. 

Lee Shulman was an exuberant friend and scholar. Always positive and supportive, whether in his professional advice or as a host as he and his wife Judy welcomed me, my wife (and his graduate student) Karen Hammerness and our young children into his home. Lee’s work and impact cannot be summed up in any one idea or publication, but Those who understand: Knowledge growth in teaching, his 1986 AERA Presidential Address, made clear that teaching involves substantial knowledge and expertise. In the process, he demonstrated that teaching is not just a difficult job, but a demanding profession, worthy of the same kinds of recognition and reward as any other. That work helped to launch a whole new era of research on teaching. Far more than an academic exercise, that work and Lee’s insights were central to the establishment of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, as well as to the advancement of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and to the creation of a host of centers and institutions dedicated to studying and improving the quality of teaching in K-12 as well as higher education.  

Lee worked out his ideas over time in conversations, at meals as well as in seminars, and his ideas often launched new initiatives and new lines of work. In her remembrance, Jill Perry, Executive Director of the Carnegie Project on the Doctorate – one of several projects spawned while Lee was President of the Carnegie Foundation – explained this as “classic Lee:”

“offering a casually delivered suggestion that was, in reality, a deeply considered and insightful idea. He was known for these moments, where his offhanded guidance would leave young scholars or practitioners inspired yet responsible for sorting out the details on their own.” 

I had that experience, sitting in Lee’s office in 1996, in the heart of Silicon Valley with the internet developing all around us.  He declared that he wanted to bring the power of the three great resources of the university – the laboratory, the library, and the museum – and put them online to support faculty in K-12 and higher education who were creating the scholarship of teaching and learning. And then he asked me to do it. Inspired, I returned to my office to stare for hours at the cursor blinking on my computer screen. But, eventually, we established the Carnegie Knowledge Media Lab to support the Carnegie Academy of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (CASTL K-12 and CASTL Higher Education) and began a long line of work that included two books, Into the Classroom and Going Public with Our Teaching, and the development of a whole series of multimedia websites and images of practice that documented the work of exceptional teachers.

Beyond his ability to tell a story and make a powerful point, Lee’s brilliance was in his humanity. Lee was as likely to draw on his experience working at the counter at his parents’ deli on the south side of Chicago as he was to quote Benjamin Bloom or Joseph Schwab, two of his mentors at the University of Chicago. That deli experience, in particular, was evident in a segment he did for NPR’s This I Believe series. What did Lee believe in? He believed in pastrami: 

“I believe that pastrami is a metaphor for a well-lived life, for a well-designed institution and even for healthy relationships. Pastrami is marbled rather than layered. Its parts, the lean and the fat, are mixed together rather than neatly separated.…  Separate layers are much easier to build, to schedule and to design. But I believe that marbling demands that we work with the messy world of people, relationships and obligations in their full, rich complexity. The diet mavens inform us that marbling can be dangerous for our health, but as an educator I’m willing — even obligated — to take the risk. I want to marble habits of mind, habits of practice and habits of the heart with my students — just like pastrami.”

His writings and his talks drew from all his experiences, and, somehow, after a well-known tendency to wait until the last minute, they would burst forth, fully-formed. On one occasion, I remember flying from San Francisco to Washington D.C. for the annual conference of the American Association of Higher Education, where Lee was scheduled to give the keynote address the following day. I happened to be seated in front of him, and as we settled into our seats, I asked him what he would be talking about. He held up a pack of index cards and told me he was going to work on it on the plane. Some six hours later, after the plane pulled into the gate, when we unbuckled our seat belts and stood up, Lee spilled all the cards onto the floor. As I stooped to help him collect his notes, I realized every single card was blank.  

The next morning, seemingly without reference to a script or a single card, Lee delivered a talk, Taking Learning Seriously, that ended in a standing ovation. In that talk, Lee addressed the first question “What does it mean to take anything seriously?” by declaring that “when we take something seriously, we often talk about professing it:” 

“The deepest, oldest meaning of the word “profess” is to take religious orders in a public and visible way. When one professes faith, it means taking on a set of obligations that will serve as the first principles for controlling one’s life, no questions asked. Professing one’s faith, behaviorally and emotionally, is an impressive example of taking something seriously.

Another sense of the word is that we profess our love–for our spouses and partners, our parents, our children, our dearest friends. We profess a kind of commitment that has within it a willingness to sacrifice on behalf of the other. Also in a public manner, we declare our devotion to another. Here is yet another example of taking something quite seriously.

A more contemporary meaning of the word, a meaning more closely associated with the work of those who read this magazine, is to profess one’s understanding, one’s expertise: to be professional, or to be a “professor.” Members of professions take on the burden of their understanding by making public commitments to serve their fellow beings in a skilled and responsible manner. “Professors” take on a special set of roles and obligations. They profess their understanding in the interests of nurturing the knowledge, understanding, and development of others. They take learning so seriously that they profess it.“

Throughout the talk, and especially in the conclusion, Lee’s remarks deftly weaved together the insights of a scholar of science and a man of faith: 

“To be deeply educated, I believe, is to understand both when skepticism and evidence are appropriate, and when faith and suspension of disbelief are appropriate. There are no rules or principles for knowing this distinction. Only through studying the examples in both scientific and humanistic sources -through wrestling with that inherent contradiction between faith and reason–can we and our students come to terms with the essential uncertainties that define our roles as professionals and as human beings.

As professors, we are asked to be rational and empirical, to demand evidence. On the other hand, as teaching professionals, we expect ourselves to believe what much empirical evidence says we shouldn’t: that all our students can learn. We express our faith in our students’ potential and in our ability to teach them. As professors, we do not choose between the skepticism of reason and the hope grounded in faith. Our students demand both. And we must learn, as professional educators, to do both.”

***********

Donations can be made in Lee Shulman’s honor to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and the Camp Ramah Tikvah Program in Ojai, California

AI, cellphones, and security – those are a few of the issues highlighted in this IEN’s scan of the predictions about education in 2025. To see the predictions for previous years, review the scans of the “looking ahead” headlines from 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021 part 1, 2021 part 2, and 2020. To discuss the trends and possibilities for education in the new year join Getting Smart’s annual town hall What’s Next in Learning 2025.

The education sources we follow in the US often provide predictions for schools, students, and teachers in the new year, but it’s been harder to find articles looking ahead from other parts of the world. The Ministry of Education in New Zealand, however, did offer a summary of What’s new for 2025 and the Education Review Office produced a series of best practice guides “to help educators effectively implement incoming changes for 2025.” In the US, to put developments in the new year in context, back in 2017, the National Center for Education Statistics shared Projections of Education Statistics 2025 which can be compared to their Report on the Condition of Education 2024. 

Education predication from the US and around the world

The education revolution: What Nigerian teachers must know for 2025, Business Day

Cleaner and better public schools in 2025 in the Philippines, Sun Star

“As we look forward to 2025, we hope that public schools will be a lot more conducive for learning. This means cleaner and properly ventilated classrooms, better classroom materials, and improved facilities for both teachers and students.“

VAT, small firms, workers, education: Changes in France in 2025, The Connexion

“After disappointing results in maths and French tests at the 2024 rentrée, the Education Ministry announced there would be a “complete overhaul” of the curriculums for these subjects in 2025, ranging from maternelle to troisième (infant school to the fourth year of secondary).”

11 Critical Issues Facing Education at Home and Abroad in 2025, Education Week

5 education stories to watch in 2025, Chalkbeat

“Education leaders should focus on integrating AI literacy, civic education, and work-based learning to equip students for future challenges and opportunities.

Building social capital and personalized learning environments will be crucial for student success in a world increasingly influenced by AI and decentralized power structures.”


4 K-12 predictions to help you lead effectively in 2025, District Administration

K-12 trends to watch in 2025 amid budget, policy shifts, K-12 Dive

“K-12 schools are likely to face several challenges in 2025, including strained budgets due to the expiration of federal aid, cybersecurity threats and staffing shortages, particularly in special education. Additionally, the influx of AI in classrooms and the rise of book bans and curriculum restrictions are key trends to watch for in the upcoming year.”

What Should K-12 Education Focus On in 2025 and Beyond?, US Chamber of Commerce Foundation

Brown Center scholars look ahead to education in 2025, Brookings

Larry Ferlazzo’s 9 Education Predictions for 2025, Education Week

6 Predictions For Education And Workforce In 2025, Michael B. Horn, Forbes

6 Top Education Stories for 2025, Peter Green, Forbes

Five Education Predictions For 2025, Derek Newton, Forbes

 5 education innovation trends to watch in 2025, Julia Freeland Fisher, Christensen Institute

Key Trends to Watch in the Education Market in 2025, Education Week

What 2025 Could Bring for English Learners, Education Week

What’s In, What’s Out for AI, Cellphones, Cybersecurity, and Other Ed-Tech Stuff, Education Week

50 predictions about what 2025 will bring to edtech, innovation, and everything in between, eSchool News

Starring AI, VR, Microlearning and more: ETIH’s 10 predictions for edtech in 2025, EITH

“Campuses will also further embrace AI, the cloud, and mobile credentials to improve effectiveness of lockdowns and guest management efforts.“

Social Media Issues for Kids Shaping Up to Be ‘Unpredictable’ in 2025, Education Week

2025 Predictions for Video Surveillance in Education and Healthcare, Campus Safety

2025 Campus Lockdown, Visitor Management Predictions: More Installations, Integrations, Campus Safety

Driving Change: 5 Predictions Shaping the Future of Student Transportation in 2025, School Transportation News

2025 food trends shaping K-12 cafeterias, Food Service Director

“Chartwells K12 has identified 10 emerging food trends for school cafeterias in 2025, highlighting a shift toward diverse and nutritious options that align with the preferences of younger generations. Customizable bowls, inclusivity in the form of allergen-friendly and plant-based options and crunchy items are a few of the listed trends.”

25 Philanthropy Predictions for 2025, Inside Philanthropy

Seven Chicago education stories to watch in 2025, Chalkbeat

Five bold predictions for Ohio education policy in 2025, Aaron Churchill, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

New year starts in California with new laws impacting education, EdSource

“New California state laws will protect the privacy of LGBTQ+ students, ensure that the history of Native Americans is accurately taught and make it more difficult to discriminate against people of color based on their hairstyles.”

As lawmakers return to Albany, the fate of New York school funding looms, Chalkbeat

IEN’s annual roundup of the end-of-the-year education headlines features stories about efforts to ban books and cellphones in the US, while some of the international stories emphasize the conflicts and crises affecting children around the world. To see how education in 2024 compared to previous years, take a look at IEN’s scans from the end of the year of 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019 part 1, and 2019 part 2. 

Although relatively few of the international education media IEN follows reviewed the biggest stories from 2024, organizations focusing on children highlighted the crises affecting many young people, particularly those caught up in conflicts. In the US, many journalists and educators noted the impact of AI and other technologies and Education Week highlighted the efforts to limit technology use by declaring that “cellphone ban” was the word/phrase of the year (The education word of 2024 is…) Given the number of articles that discussed efforts to ban books and regulate curriculum and other aspects of schooling, just “ban” may have been a more appropriate choice. To get a sense of the extent of book banning, the American Library Association tracked books banned in 2024 and The Guardian reported on a survey rom PEN America showing that more than 10,000 books were banned in US public schools from 2023 to 2024. That same survey suggested that bans of books nearly tripled in the US from 3,362 the previous year (US public schools banned 10,000 books in most recent academic year). But bans were not limited to books or cellphones. The California legislature also passed a number of laws in 2024 banning or restricting a variety of practices including limiting libraries abilities to ban “books based on subject matter focused on race, gender identity, sexual orientation or other characteristics.” The California legislature also banned legacy admissions in private universities in California, and school districts can no longer institute policies requiring teachers or staff to disclose a child’s gender identity to the child’s parent or guardians (Ten things California is banning in 2025).  

Headlines from around the world

2024 in Review – One in three children in conflict and fragile countries out of school, Africa.com

‘Not the new normal’ – 2024 ‘one of the worst years in UNICEF’s history’ for children in conflict, Unicef

“More than 52 million children in countries affected by conflict are estimated to be out of school. Children in the Gaza Strip, and a significant portion of children in Sudan, have missed out on more than a year of school, while in countries such as Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Syria, schools have been damaged, destroyed or repurposed, leaving millions of children without access to learning.”

The Top 15 Education For All Blogs of 2024, GPE

2024 Review of the Year in Comparative International Education: Some reflection on the past year – Gaza, Genocide, Higher Education Crisis and much more, The FreshEdPodcast

Kenya’s 2024 academic year marred by multiple crises, The Eastleigh Voice

“The 2024 academic year in Kenya faced significant disruptions, stemming from funding delays, natural disasters, industrial action, and social unrest, severely affecting learning activities across the country.”

Seven major events in Education Sector in Ghana in 2024, Ghana Web

2024 Review: Major events, reforms that shaped Nigeria’s education sector, Premium Times

Looking back 2024: Education sector in Bangladesh remains neglected, New Age 

“Learning losses to the students of all levels [in Bangladesh] were caused by not only the mass uprising, which began with the student movement against government job quotas, but also natural calamities of cold wave, heatwave and flood that caused the closure of educational institutions several times in 2024.“

The year of interrupted learning in Pakistan, T Magazine

2024 wrapped: The biggest education stories of the year in Singapore, and what’s next, The Straits Times

Norway, IQ Tests and Child Care Deregulation: Our Favorite Early Ed Stories This Year, The Hechinger Report

In the UK From recruitment crisis to class war: 2024 in review, School Management Plus

Headlines from the US

Public Schools by the Numbers: How Enrollment, Funding, and More Changed in 2024, Education Week

The Year in Education: Our Top 24 Stories About Schools, Students and Learning, the 74

2024 in Review, From Your Point of View, Edutopia

Pandemic, Politics, Pre-K & More: 12 Charts That Defined Education in 2024, the 74

The 10 Most Significant Education Studies of 2024, Edutopia

“Warm demanders are teachers who insist on the highest standards but remain sensitive to a student’s need to belong—and to succeed. By bracketing the most frustrating lessons with work that elicits a child’s feelings of competence, teachers can “bolster students’ math motivation and engagement” in a way that does not “involve reducing the rigor of the material that students learn.'”

Jealousy List: 16 Education Articles We Wish We Had Written in 2024, The 74

2024 Must-Reads: 9 Stories About Early Care and Education That We Can’t Stop Thinking About, The 74

A dozen of the best opinion pieces on education that we read in 2024, Michael Petrilli, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

The Best and Worst Education News of 2024, Larry Ferlazzo, Education Week

The best and worst of ed reform in 2024, Thomas B. Fordham Institute

2024 Year-in-Review: Reforming K-12 Education, Hoover Institution

Philanthropy Awards, 2024, Inside Philanthropy

7 Curriculum Trends That Defined 2024, Education Week

How AI Is Changing Education: The Year’s Top 5 Stories

The Best in K-12 EdTech—Last Year and Next, eSchool News

Cellphones in the Classroom: The Year’s Top 5 Stories, Education Week

School Shootings in 2024: More Than Last Year, But Fewer Deaths, Education Week

Local Education News You May Have Missed in 2024 (and Why It Matters), Education Week

Trump’s Education Priorities, Foundation Aid, and Mayoral Control: 2024 in Review, New York Focus

Schools continue to rebound, thanks to influx of funding: 2024 year in review, Cal Matters

Next week: What’s Next for Schools in 2025? Scanning the Headlines for Predictions about Education in the New Year

Nearing the end of 2024, it’s an opportune time for Looking Back to Look Forward. In this case, that means looking back on the standards-based education reforms of the 1990’s through a reflection and report from Mike Kirst. As Dick Jung describes in his book and blog series about Kirst’s career and impact, Kirst is an “uncommon academic;” at the same time that Kirst has been a professor of education at Stanford University he has also been an influential public servant. Kirst has been a trusted advisor to California’s former Governor Jerry Brown, and Kirst served four terms as President of the California State Board of Education. This week, IEN highlights Kirst’s continuing influence by sharing a quote from a blog post Kirst wrote for Policy Analysis for California Education along with excerpts from the latest installment of the “Uncommon academic” blog series. Both the blog post and the 21st installment discuss the Kirst’s latest report for the Learning Policy Institute on some the standards based reforms in which he has been intimately involved. (For a previous post on Mike Kirst’s career see Making public policy work for education: Reflections on the career of Mike Kirst)

“After ending my fourth term as president of the California State Board of Education in 2019, I have begun to reflect, in my sixth decade of education policy, about what I did right and what I should have done differently. In my time on the board, we organized many policies around and integrated them with the state standards in English Language Arts, Mathematics, and Science. California made significant progress toward creating coherent and aligned state policies aimed at helping local districts implement the Common Core State Standards. We coupled these policies with a new, more equitable funding system—the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF)—and a multiple measures accountability system.

Looking back, it was naïve to believe that these policy reforms alone would be enough to achieve the desired impact. We successfully corrected for some of the failures of prior attempts to generate educational improvement by over-focusing on accountability (embodied by policies like No Child Left Behind). I failed, however, to realize the extent to which accountability-focused approaches of the past had underinvested in building the system capacity necessary to support educators in developing the knowledge and skills that would enable them to teach successfully in the new ways that the new standards demanded. Our policies did not do enough to overcome this deficit.”  

— Mike Kirst, Looking Back, Moving Forward: A Vision for Instructional Capacity in California

A Clarion Call for Reform from an ‘Uncommon Academic’ Excerpts from the 21^st installment of the Mike Kirst Biography Project produced by Richard Jung

This installment of the Mike Kirst Biography Project features Mike himself, speaking of his rationale and intentions as he toiled, in his eighties, over the lessons from decades of research and policymaking.  This installment allows you to see and hear, through video and audio clips, Mike’s sense of what is most important for policymakers to know and do toward lifting local education practices to meet high standards (standards-based reform).

He elaborates—in his own words, often with captivating metaphors—the answers to three questions:

• Why has he spent the first five years in his eighties researching and writing this Report?
• Why have many K-12 education reform efforts, including his own, fallen short?
• What should be done differently going forward?

So, let’s take a more personalized plunge into the education policy approach of standards-based K-12 education reform, enhanced by recent interviews with Mike.

Mike’s “More-Focused Heart” Years

In the report’s first sentence, Mike writes that its genesis was when he turned 80. His longtime Stanford colleague, walking partner, and hand-selected successor as California’s State Board of President, Linda Darling-Hammond, then President of Learning Policy Institute (LPI), and he had “discussions.” He agreed with her and others that “[a]after almost 60 years of working full-time in education and doing research, I thought it was a good time for me to reflect on” that previous work in federal and state education reform efforts “and to synthesize the research focusing on the impact of standards-based reforms.”³

As Mike turned 80, he reviewed the current research literature. He saw that there was a much deeper understanding of how difficult it is to change classroom instruction and that California had no master plan or strategy based on that research, particularly for math instruction.

Mike persisted for the next three years, through his early 80s, to gather and reflect on this research at a time when, as he writes in this “Preface,” “the COVID-19 pandemic was the overwhelming focus of education policy.” A series of LPI editors worked with him to refine and polish the Report. And now, some five years after those initial discussions with Linda Darling-Hammond, Mike believes “public attention” might be “more receptive to classroom instruction issues and the core subject matter curricula of k-12 schools.”⁴

Professionally, Mike’s septuagenarian years had hardly been “serene,” unlike those of suffragist Scott-Maxwell noted above. During his stint leading the state board of education and working hand-in-hand with then-Governor Jerry Brown from 2011 through 2019, Mike had led the charge with others to pass and then start to implement one of the country’s most successful school finance and governance reforms, the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF)  which enhanced both quality and equity in the state’s distribution of funds and accountability for their use.⁵

With others, he began working quietly—perhaps less quietly recently—behind the scenes to stir up enthusiasm about the standards-based reform ideas embedded in the LCFF, e.g., that standards-based reform involves setting standards and aligning curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices to those standards to ensure that all students have the opportunity to meet high expectations, thereby enhancing both quality and equity.

By the time he was almost 82, in July 2021, like writer and activist Scott-Maxwell, Mike was becoming “more intense” as he aged. He began publicly to “let the cat out of the bag” about his sense of the critical next steps toward fully implementing standards-based reforms when he delivered his acceptance remarks as he received the prestigious  James Bryant Conant Award from the Education Commission of the States.

In his acceptance speech (this clip below), he begins, as is his wont, with a sports analogy—of “being in the fourth inning of a nine-inning ballgame when we got rained out by Covid”—to summarize California’s complex education policy situation as implementation of the reforms in the LCFF were to roll out. He had already highlighted that “local capacity building” is the place to start and emphasized that again. There’s a lot to unpack from this two-minute clip. Let’s first listen in:

Even amid the COVID-19 shut-down of schools across California and most of the country in 2021, Mike looked into the future and beyond when K-12 schools would be fully operational. He drew upon his decades of education policy research and policymaker experience to note, “States… can’t mandate—we can’t even incentivize very well what teachers and principals and school people do together.” Further, “when the teacher closes the classroom door, she or he has the impact, in effect, of a pocket veto, over whether state policies are implemented or not.”

As a politics of education expert, the pocket-veto power of teachers once the teacher closes the classroom door is a metaphor that Mike has often used to depict that state, federal, or even local policymakers cannot merely “mandate” or require classroom practices to improve instruction.

As you can hear in this clip, Mike had been looking in the U.S. and other countries for ways to build the “massive infrastructure” needed to effect reforms in California. He cites Ontario, Canada, Singapore, Australia, Finland, and some states in America, several of which were sites for his early policy work.⁶ He offers this tease: “I can’t describe all of this to you now, but you’ll be hearing more from me about …”big thinking, big infrastructure, big capacity building, and state-wide scale-up… in the next months and years.”

Now, three years later, Mike has found a more apt metaphor for the complexity of improving classroom instruction; it’s an analogy he picked up from Harvard University’s Richard Elmore.⁷ Mike now observes that “education policy, particularly at the federal and state level, is like a shell of a turtle. The shell’s important for the turtle, but moving and important, complex parts are underneath. Mike believes that “at this time in my career, my focus is on the operating parts of the turtle rather than on the ‘shell’ of finance and governance.”⁸

To illustrate this portrayal of education policy by drawing on the Elmore turtle analogy, he borrows an image from his research colleague Jane David, who calls it “the puzzle of educational change.” Mike explains in the Report, “David’s diagram is daunting in its complexity and helps illustrate why it has taken years of effort even to begin to align the supports for standards-based reform, long after support for the concept itself took hold.” In other words it’s one thing to create strong standards. It’s quite another for “those standards” to make “their way into instruction” inside the classroom.⁹

Massive Infrastructure Needed for Scale-Up

The publication of Looking Back to Look Forward is evidence of Mike’s focus since his Conant Award acceptance speech three years ago. He had been deliberating on the nature of and the necessity for a  “massive” post-COVID standards-based reform of California’s K-12 education system. The word “massive” appears in the Report nine times.

In his “long paper,” he states that all states, “even those…in the midst of piecemeal improvements to instructional capacity-building…would benefit from broader thinking and planning. The objective should be to create a lasting education infrastructure similar to the federal interstate highway system of the 1950s.”¹⁰ Mike’s point with this analogy to the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act is that it took 15 years to pour all the concrete to complete our country’s interstate highway system. With COVID hitting only a few years after the standards reform legislation in California was enacted, much of the “concrete” in terms of essential “capacity-building” for improving instruction had only begun to be “poured” or put in place.

“The key word is ‘capacity-building’  of local educators.”

Recall that in the Conant acceptance speech, he told the audience that “the keyword is ‘capacity building” at the local level, that “this capacity building has many aspects,” and that education reformers in other countries had told him, “we build this capacity building into the districts” and “we build it into every day” and “into the professional work of teachers through expanded professional development.”  Mike details this local capacity effort in other countries and states, including Massachusetts and Louisiana, on pages 69 through 76 of Looking Back to Look Forward.

Mike Notes Two Caveats about the LPI Monograph

Mike’s thinking evolved in several significant ways as the publication of this paper “percolated.” Most notably, he, with other colleagues, now more fully admits “how hard it is to scale up PD [professional development]…to statewide implementation.”¹¹ He also recently reflected on two caveats about the paper, especially its conclusions. Click on the link below to hear more from Mike about the first of these:

Mike Kirst: A limitation of the LPI monograph: “The paper ends very vaguely…” (audio, 35 seconds) 

Mike is delighted that the monograph is now out but laments that it “essentially ends with a plea for a detailed plan with very little detail.”  He continues, “I’ve learned now more than I had in the paper about how hard it is.”¹² after recently working with several groups–including the California Collaboration on District Reform and the California Math Roundtable, which he refers to jointly as the “collaborative” in this interview excerpt.  Voicing some frustration, Mike concludes, “There is no detailed strategic plan in this paper because nobody has ever done one.” 

He asks rhetorically specifically for math, “So what’s your strategic plan for teachers to teach the math curriculum in California when the students are all over the map in math? You have so much diversity, particularly in that subject, even within middle-class and upper-class classrooms. And so that’s why it’s not there.”¹³

The second limitation Mike now sees in his Report is that he failed to more forcefully note that educational policy has been imbalanced too frequently, failing to emphasize capacity-building as much as accountability. Click on the link below to listen to how he explains this limitation in his own words:

Mike Kirst:  I wish I had emphasized more “the ‘accountability-capacity’ imbalance trend in education policy over many years.” (audio, 39 seconds) 

Referring to Harvard’s famed education policy researcher, Richard Elmore—what Mike calls “Elmore’s Law—Kirst notes that for too many years, policymakers have put too much emphasis on accountability up front rather than understanding that successful implementation requires more initial investments in capacity building.¹⁴ Using a scale of justice metaphor, he notes that even a recent California education funding initiative had still made this mistake when it had “ratcheted up accountability but with no real systematic capacity” and that it’s “a common mistake” among policymakers to “lead with accountability and never get around to capacity building.”

Still Living His Mantra 

Before LPI published  Mike’s “long paper,” Kirst was cautious in what he said publicly about his behind-the-scenes efforts to advance his standards-based reform project, which is close to his heart. That didn’t stop others from wanting to hear more about Mike’s education reform ideas. Earlier this year, for example, Dr. Lisa Andrew, President and CEO of Silicon Valley Education Foundation, hosted for Forbes Books a two-part series offering what she summarized as “a unique bird’s eye perspective on education’s challenges and opportunities,” with the impatient foot-tapping title of “They are Waiting For Us”, perhaps unwittingly reflecting Mike’s wanting for the past several years to get out the ideas now appearing in this LPI paper.

Mike begins this Report with more than a hint of that impatience, noting that the COVID-19 pandemic became “the overwhelming focus of education policy for three years.” So, he and LPI leadership decided to “wait until public attention was more receptive to classroom instruction issues and the core subject matter curriculum of K-12 schools ” to release the monograph.¹⁵  With the publication of this Report early in the 2024-25 school year, Mike boldly exhorts, “Now is not the time to give up on state standards.” Instead, he insists, “There is no better time than now to proceed.”¹⁶

We note, however, that Mike’s “now” is tempered in his “long paper’s” closing observation that “providing sufficient capacity-building for teachers in making major instructional shifts is more realistically implemented over a decade or more rather than in… a few years”—cautioning policymakers once again to adhere to his time-proven policy reform mantra  of: “patience, persistence, humility, and continuous improvement.” reiterated in the Report’s concluding sentence.”¹⁷

See 21st Installment: A Clarion Call for Reform from an ‘Uncommon Academic’ for the complete post, notes, and citations.

Do adults have the skills they need to thrive in a changing world? That’s the question OECD asks in its report on the results from the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills.  In many places, the answer seems to be maybe not. 160,000 16 – 65 year olds in 31 participating education systems took the test and only test-takers in Finland and Denmark improved their scores in literacy, with scores in the other participating systems remaining stable or declining since the data collection began in 2011. 8 of the 31 systems improved in math, but in both literacy and math the lowest-performing adults have shown the biggest  decline in scores. Along with the latest scan of the headlines in the education sources we follow, this week’s post provides a brief summary of some of the key take-aways reported. Produced by OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC), this estimate of adult skills comes only a few weeks after the latest release of the results of the Trends in Mathematics and Science Survey (TIMSS), which assesses the skills of 15 year-olds (Around the World in Math and Science: Scanning the headlines on the results of TIMSS 2023).

Key Takeaways from the 2023 Survey of Adult Skills

• Finland, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden excel in the three tested areas of literacy, numeracy, and problem solving, with significant percentages of adults showing “advanced” abilities.
• Finnish high school graduates outperform those with college/tertiary education degrees in several countries, including Chile, Israel and Lithuania.
• Adults who show high levels of skill in numeracy are 11 percentage points more likely to report very good or excellent health compared to those with low numeracy skills
• On average, across participating systems, 18% of adults lack even the most basic levels of proficiency in any of the domains, but the performance of the top 10% has improved, leading to widening skills inequalities within countries
• Adults with highly educated parents outscored those with “low-educated” parents by 50 percentage points in literacy
• Singapore and the United States displayed the largest skills inequalities in literacy and numeracy
• Disparities in educational attainment are largest in Israel, Switzerland, and Hungary (34 percentage points) and smallest in Spain (7 points)

Headlines

Are adults forgetting how to read? The Economist

England

Workers in England more likely to be overqualified than global peers, finds OECD, Financial Times

OECD (PIAAC) Survey: England’s Youth Skills Show Dramatic Improvement Since 2012, FE News

Finland

Finland shines in “adult Pisa” ranking, Yle

Israel

Israeli skills in literacy, math and problem-solving ‘below OECD average’ – report, The Times of Israel

Italy

Italy, a country of functional illiterates, Finestre sull’Arte

Japan

Japan scores high in OECD survey of adult skills, NHK World

Japan again ranks at or near top of survey on adult skills, The Asahi Shimbun

New Zealand

NZ tumbles in international adult literacy, maths rankings, RNZ

Singapore

Singapore improves in OECD ranking of adult skills, but atrophy in literacy a concern, The Straits Times

Spain

30% of Spanish adults do not have minimum skills in mathematics and reading, La Vanguardia

Ukraine

Adults losing edge: Quarter now less skilled than children, RBC Ukraine

United States

In a Test of Adult Know-How, America Comes Up Short, The Wall Street Journal

Survey: Growing number of U.S. adults lack literacy skills, NBC News

U.S. Reading and Math Gap Is Getting Worse for Adults, Too, Education News

ave on schools, on students, and on a number of education issues. In this week’s post, IEN shares some of the headlines as well as those discussing the results of governor’s races and local propositions with particular relevance for education. 

Results: Education Week’s Guide to the 2024 Election, Education Week

Education policy: How it will shift under new administration , District Administration

Trump has won a second term. Here’s what that means for schools., Chalkbeat

Experts expect civil rights enforcement to change and transgender students to lose new protections.

What’s at Stake for Schools as Trump Returns to the White House, Education Week

How Trump’s Second Term Will Affect Education: 4 Things to Know, Education Week

What education could look like under Trump and Vance, Hechinger Report

What a Second Trump Presidency Could Mean for Education in the U.S., The 74

Can Trump Force Schools to Change Their Curricula?, Education Week

Trump pledged to cut federal funding to schools “pushing critical race theory” and “transgender insanity.”

Trump has vowed to push schools to the right on gender and race. Now he can, Washington Post

What will Donald Trump’s 2nd term mean for Title IX?, K-12 Dive

Education Department’s future uncertain under Trump, Education Week

Can Trump Really Dismantle the Department of Education?, Education Week

Will Trump eliminate the federal role in education or weaponize it?, Flypaper

Is the federal role in education slated for elimination or expansion?…There’s no way to be sure today. But there’s ample reason to be unsure, and that’s because the Trump world has long sent exceedingly mixed messages when it comes to K-12 education and the federal role therein.

Trump’s Push to Expand Choice, Nix the Ed. Dept. Takes on New Momentum, Education Week

Would axing the Education Department hurt kids with disabilities? Experts say: It depends, Chalkbeat

Trump has called for abolishing the U.S. Department of Education. How that affects students with disabilities would depend a lot on what happens next.

What will a second Trump term mean for education and libraries?, School Library Journal

How Trump Could Roll Back Access to Free School Lunches, Education Week

A policy that allows schools to serve free meals to all students may be under fire.

Colleges wonder if they will be ‘the enemy’ under trump, New York Times

New Appointees Impact on Education?

Trump picks Linda McMahon to lead, and possibly dismantle, Education Department, Chalkbeat

Trump Taps Linda McMahon, Donor and Former Wrestling Exec, to be Education Chief, The74

Despite championing apprenticeships and workforce development, her main charge may be dismantling the department she’s set to lead.

5 things to know about Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick for Education secretary, The Hill

Betsy DeVos’ Advice for Trump’s Next Education Secretary, Education Week

What Elon Musk’s New Role in the Trump Administration Means for Schools, Education Week

Musk’s new role may have big implications for schools. 

Trump’s Defense Pick Pete Hegseth has an opening to reshape American Classrooms, Politico

Pete Hegseth has pushed for years to steep American education in patriotic principles and Christian theology — and he could implement that vision for thousands of military families if he’s confirmed to lead the Defense Department.

What Could RFK Jr. as HHS Secretary Mean for School Vaccine Requirements?, Education Week

The vaccine skeptic in line to lead Health and Human Services could influence schools’ vaccine rules

How RFK Jr. could shake up school lunches, K-12 Dive

Trump picks Rollins to lead USDA — and thus school nutrition programs, K-12 Dive

What Trump’s pick for FCC chair could mean for E-rate expansion, K-12 Dive

Effects on States, Cities, and Students

What the new Trump presidency could mean for California students and schools, EdSource

California education leaders try to reassure students of protections against Trump policies, EdSource

Many California children and their families, including immigrants, transgender students and Black and Latino students, are feeling fear and uncertainty.

California schools chief pledges to resist cuts in funding if Trump axes U.S. Dept. of Education, EdSource

Here are how Donald Trump’s promised policy changes could be felt in NYC, Gothamist

Eliminating the Department of Education: What it could mean for NYC, PIX11

In wake of Trump win, Chicago Board of Education moves to reaffirm protections for immigrants, Chalkbeat

Philly students walked out of their classes in protest of Trump’s election win, Chalkbeat

High schoolers said they are concerned about the president-elect’s policies about education, climate change, and reproductive rights.

Young Voters Favored Abortion Rights and President-Elect Trump, New Data Shows, The74

“More than a dozen states had ballot measures related to protecting or codifying access to abortion rights, the majority of which passed. But for Gen Z, being pro-reproductive rights did not equate to voting Democratic. In Florida, over half (52%) of young voters favored ending the state’s six-week abortion ban while supporting Trump by a 10-point margin.”

Trump pledged to roll back protections for transgender students. They’re flooding crisis hotlines, AP

School Leaders Confront Racist Texts, Harmful Rhetoric After Divisive Election, Education Week

Educators say inflammatory rhetoric from the campaign trail is in schools.

FBI investigating post-election text threats sent to Latino, LGBTQ people, many of them young, Washington Post

Protecting undocumented students: How schools and colleges are responding to Trump’s second term, El País

Governors, States, and Local Issues & Propositions

Where Newly Elected Governors Stand on Education Policies – 2024, ExcelinEd

Eleven newly elected governors have big plans for education in their states, with a focus on key issues including school funding, teacher retention, early literacy, math proficiency, career readiness, and school choice.

Texas will approve school vouchers, boost public education spending, governor says, Hechinger Report

Republican Victories in Texas House Give Governor Abbott a Path to Universal Education Savings Accounts, The74

Clashing with Dems’ Education Plan, Republicans Expand Reach in Arizona’s Legislature, The74

In a huge upset for Democrats hoping to curb growth of private school vouchers, GOP lawmakers to lead both houses.

Democratic frontrunner and former teacher Matt Meyer elected Delaware’s next governor, The74

Mike Braun Wins Governor’s Race in Indiana Against Career Educator, The74

Josh Stein Wins Governor’s Race in North Carolina. What’s Next for the Schools, The74

Former North Carolina Superintendent Defeats MAGA Homeschooler for Schools Chief, The74

How did K-12 fare on state ballots in the 2024 election?, K-12 Drive

Voters largely rejected school choice initiatives but embraced a variety of school funding measures

How Child-Focused Ballot Measures Fared This Election, The74

Child care won at the ballot box, Hechinger Report

A bigger child tax credit could ease child poverty and help students in school. But will it happen?, Chalkbeat

Candidates promised a larger child tax credit. Now a Republican-controlled Congress will decide its fate.

School choice may get its biggest moment yet, Hechinger Report

Advocates ready their plans for a new administration they believe will be friendly to vouchers, charters and other schooling options

Ballot Propositions: Voters in 2 States Reject Private School Choice, The74

Voters in Kentucky and Nebraska said no to private school choice Tuesday, dashing the hopes of advocates who wanted to further advance the movement for vouchers and education savings accounts. 

The Future of School Choice in the States That Rejected It, Governing

Voters in three states rejected ballot measures promoting school choice. But they didn’t reject the legislators who favor it.

In Deep-Red Florida, Voters Reject Partisan School Board Races, Education Week

Did School Battles Hurt Democrats in Liberal Strongholds?, New York Times

Voters in the Virginia suburbs shifted toward Trump. Some said they were still frustrated by pandemic closures and fights over gender, race and testing in schools.

Massachusetts Will Do Away With High School Standardized Testing Graduation Requirement, The74

Holding steady in fourth grade but dropping at 8^th grade sums up some of the key results from the eighth administration of the Trends in Mathematics and Science Study. The results, released on December 4, 2024, show that 8^th graders in only three countries showed an increase in average math scores (Romania, Sweden, UAE) or in average science scores (England, Hong Kong, UAE), but that roughly equal numbers of countries saw increases or decreases in their math or science scores at the 4^th grade level. Top performers in both subjects, as usual, included Asian countries like Singapore, South Korea, and Japan. 650,000 fourth and eighth graders in 64 countries participated in the tests in 2023, which also showed a widening gender gap as boys outperformed girls by significant margins in many education systems. Headlines touted gains in some countries like the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Australia, but highlighted concerns about substantial declines in performance in countries like Israel and the US. In the US, the drop in scores was particularly pronounced for the lowest performing students, with one in five 8^th graders able to demonstrate even a basic level of proficiency. Adding to the concerns, yesterday, December 10, OECD released the latest results of the 2023 administration of the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) which showed US adults are getting worse at reading and math as well, while adults in Finland, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden excelled in literacy, numeracy and adaptive problem-solving. To put the latest international assessment figures in a historical context, see the scan of headlines related to the PISA 2022 results, the PISA 208 results and the results of TIMSS 2015.

Australia

Australian primary students score best ever result in global maths and science test, despite pandemic disruption,The Guardian

‘Interesting and disappointing’: Gap between girls and boys in STEM subjects growing, report shows, ABC

Bulgaria

Bulgaria’s Fourth Graders Score 530 in Mathematics and Science, Outperforming Global Averages in 2023 TIMSS Study, Bulgarian News Agency

Bulgaria’s results place its students roughly 14th or 15th globally… Bulgaria’s 530-point score in mathematics matches Czechia and Sweden, surpasses Finland by one point, and exceeds Australia and Germany by 5 and 6 points, respectively.

England

England moves into top five in global rankings for science, Time & Star

Timss 2023: Year 5 maths declines for first time but science scores surge, TES

France

France ranks last in Europe for math skills as education system ‘plagued by inequality’, Anadolu Agency

Hong Kong

Hong Kong students excel in TIMSS 2023 results, Dimsum Daily

“Hong Kong students have consistently demonstrated high levels of performance in mathematics. Our Primary Four students ranked fourth globally with a score of 594, markedly surpassing the international average of 503. Meanwhile, our Secondary Two students secured fifth place with a score of 575, well above the international average of 478. Notably, 38% of Primary Four and 32% of Secondary Two students achieved advanced levels in mathematics, compared to the international median of just 7%.”

Ireland

Pupils in Ireland among top maths performers in Europe, global study finds, The Irish Times

Performance by girls in maths and science falls, RTÉ

Israel

2+2=5? Israeli student math, science scores plummet, study finds, Ynet News

Japan

Japanese Science, Math Scores Remain High in 2023, Nippon.com

Mystery lies behind gender gap in academic performance, The Asahi Shimbun

Latvia

Latvian pupils’ exam results in maths and natural sciences become worse, Baltic News Network

Macau

Macau’s P4 students excel in math and science in TIMSS 2023, Macau Daily Times

Malaysia

MOE Identifies Challenges In Maths, Science Learning Among Students, BERNAMA.com

Malaysia’s Participation Reflects Effectiveness, Quality Of Mathematics And Science Education, BERNAMA.com

Malta

Maltese students obtain positive results in Mathematics and Science, TVMnews.mt

Morocco

Moroccan Students’ Performance Declines in Mathematics, Science, Morocco World News

New Zealand

NZ school science results improve – but international testing highlights a stubborn socioeconomic gap, The Conversation

Taiwan

Taiwan ranks second in global math study for 2023, TVBS News

Singapore

Singapore students top maths and science in 2023 international study, Straits Times

South Africa

Massive maths and science embarassment for South Africa, BusinessTech

South Africa’s grade 5 learners—who were largely assessed against grade 4 learners from other countries—placed stone last among the 58 nations assessed for both mathematics and science. The grade 9 learners—who were largely assessed against grade 8 learners from other countries—placed slightly better, ranking fifth-last, above Morocco, Brazil, Palestine and Jordan in mathematics, and second-last for science, placing above Morocco.

International maths, science study reveals SA Grade 9’s global maths success amid literacy challenges, News24

South Africa’s Grade 5 pupils have been ranked last out of 59 countries in maths and science in an international standardised test conducted last year. However, the country’s Grade 9 performance in maths in the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) has shown “a remarkable upward trend” after pupils’ scores improved by eight points from 389 in 2019 to 397 last year.

Spain

Los alumnos españoles bajan en matemáticas y ciencias y se agranda la brecha entre niños y niñas (Spanish students are falling behind in maths and science and the gap between boys and girls is widening), El Pais

España, a la cola en matemáticas y ciencias, según el TIMSS 2023 (Spain ranks last in math and science, according to TIMSS 2023), RTVE

“Balearic Islands, Canary Islands, Catalonia and Andalusia, the worst in Mathematics, according to the TIMSS 2023”

Turkey

Türkiye sees big gains in TIMSS 2023 science, math results, Daily Sabah

Türkiye emerges among top 5 in education improvement: TIMSS 2023 report, Hurriyet Daily News

Türkiye tops Europe in elementary science education: TIMSS 2023, Türkiye Today

United Arab Emirates

UAE tops Arab world in TIMSS 2023, The Print

United States

Some countries show improvements in math post-pandemic. Not the United States, Chalkbeat

U.S. students posted dire math declines on international test, New York Times

Math scores plummet, progress ‘erased,’ NCES reports, K-12 Dive

“Average U.S. math scores on the latest Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study reverted to 1995 levels.”

Uzbekistan

Quarter of 4th and 8th graders lack basic understanding of subjects, TIMSS-2023 study reveals, Gazeta.uz