TOP TASKS

Feed the Opportunities, Starve the Problems

We live in an age that continually draws our attention towards the negative: small mistakes, outright failures and everything in between. But as we reflect on the year in education, it’s worth taking stock of the sage advice of Peter Drucker in his 1966 classic The Effective Executive:

Effective leaders do not seek “to minimize weaknesses but to maximize strength … In every area of effectiveness within an organization, one feeds the opportunities and starves the problems.”

That’s good advice for movements, too.

We have tremendous opportunities ahead of us as we chart our path forward in 2024, including:

• Pandemic-era innovations that are working. Over the past three years we have seen an unprecedented investment in tutoring, summer camps, microschools and more. We have an enormous opportunity to build upon these experiments by making the best of them a permanent feature of the education system of the future.
• Families voting with their feet. The school closures of 2020 continue to reverberate throughout American education including at the most basic level on where parents send their kids to school. Big shifts towards charters, independent schools, homeschooling and more show no signs of returning to pre-2019 levels and advocates have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to lean into these shifts by making funding much more family-friendly and working with instead of against parental choice.
• A resurgent grassroots. After decades of expert-driven, top-down advocacy, a more grassroots approach to change is resurgent. We see this close to home in the campaign strategies and tactics used at 50CAN, where over the past decade community organizing has grown into a central element of the majority of our campaigns and we see this in dozens of partners across the country as well. This advocacy energy will be critical in 2024 and beyond.

Making the most of these opportunities must be central to our plans for the year ahead. “Courage rather than analysis dictates the truly important rules for identifying priorities,” Drucker reminds us. “Pick the future as against the past; Focus on opportunity rather than on problem; Choose your own direction—rather than climb on the bandwagon; and Aim high, aim for something that will make a difference, rather than for something that is ‘safe’ and easy to do.”

Key Resources

Our favorite resources from 2023, one from every month of the year:

January: A report from Urban Institute found that, as a result of pandemic learning loss, average annual wages for current K-12 students will be 3.2% lower at age 30.

February: Chad Aldeman with the data in the 74 Million: schools are adding teachers despite seeing year-over-year drops in student enrollment.

March: FutureED published a national analysis of the wave of private school choice bills over the past two years, noting that lawmakers in 32 states have sponsored legislation to increase access to vouchers, scholarships or ESAs.

April: The American Enterprise Institute highlighted charter schools that provided students with college credentials upon graduation.

May: Brookings Institution reported on high-schoolers’ unequal access to extracurricular activities concludes that there are deep disparities in the current system.

June: Garrett Ballengee wrote for Education Next that passing ESAs is only the base camp and not the summit, with work for advocates to continue to do in the realm of public relations, case management and coalition building.

July: yes. every kid. put a spotlight on states that allow all students–including homeschooled students–to access public school courses and extracurriculars, along with strong examples of legislative language.

August: Research by the World Bank’s Harry Anthony Patrinos found that for every week that schools were closed learning levels declined by 1% of a standard deviation, meaning that a 20 week closure would reduce learning outcomes by 0.20 standard deviation or almost one year of schooling.

September: The Economist reported on new research that finds that schools are the least economically integrated institutions in the United States.

October: A Ed Working Paper suggested that academic leniency leads to not only inflated GPAs, but also wider achievement gaps and more missed school days by low income students.

November: Writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Lynette Hazelton and Nate File looked into why so many Philly kids still aren’t going to school regularly.

December: The winner of the Fordham Institute’s Policy Wonk-a-Thon was none other than 50CAN National Voices alumnus Alex Spurrier, who along with Bellwether colleague Amy Chen Kulesa, wrote on the promise and potential of AI for learners.