🛝 The Catch in Every Fix

Welcome to Playground Post, a bi-weekly newsletter that keeps education innovators ahead of what's next.

This week's reality check: A child who starts kindergarten behind has a 1-in-10 chance of catching up by third grade, and the window slams shut before most schools even start looking. Merit pay, the reform almost everyone had written off, turns out to work, just not because of the money. And the fastest way to move English learners into English may be the one that teaches them the least.

Data Gem

22.6% of students across 44 states and the District of Columbia were chronically absent in the 2024-25 school year, barely down from 23.5% the year before, according to a Chalkbeat analysis of state data.

A Kindergartner Who Starts Behind Has a 1-in-10 Shot at Catching Up

You can tell which kindergartners are headed for trouble before they finish their first year of school. 

The hard part is that almost no one is set up to act on it.

A new study from the research and assessment company NWEA found that a child's reading and math skills at kindergarten entry strongly predict whether they'll reach proficiency by third grade. 

Drawn from MAP Growth test data on more than 400,000 students, the brief put a number on how strong that signal is.

Only 1 in 10 of the lowest-performing kindergartners reached proficiency by third grade.

And the window closes fast. 

By the end of first grade, the odds for students still at the bottom fell to 1 in 50.

Third-grade reading is one of the most studied predictors in education. Children reading at grade level by then are four times more likely to graduate high school by age 19, and a 2018 University of Arkansas study found that students who aren't proficient by third grade are unlikely to ever get there.

"What our data highlighted is that achievement at kindergarten entry provides a meaningful signal about later academic outcomes," said Megan Kuhfeld, NWEA's director of growth modeling and data analytics. She was careful to add that nothing is predetermined: "Adjusting trajectories is possible if early intervention is provided."

That's the catch. 

The intervention has to come early, and most schools can't see the problem in time.

Early-warning systems are common in the later grades. For the youngest students they barely exist, because children that age are rarely tested before second grade and develop at wildly different speeds. 

NWEA found that many states have no way to flag a student who is off track in both reading and math before third grade, which is exactly when the door to catching up has mostly closed.

For education innovators, the finding rewrites where the early-literacy market should sit. Kindergarten-entry screeners that flag at-risk readers and mathematicians in a child's first weeks of school, not their fourth year. Intervention-routing tools that move a flagged student into support automatically, before the window narrows. 

The signal arrives in kindergarten. The response usually doesn't.

Merit Pay Keeps Failing. Except in Texas and South Carolina.

Performance pay for teachers has a long track record of disappointing the people who try it. Teachers tend to dislike competing for bonuses, and the most prominent national push fizzled.

Two new studies suggest that the verdict was too simple.

Research on programs in South Carolina and Texas, released this month, both found that paying teachers for performance produced real gains for students. 

The South Carolina program, studied by University of Michigan researcher Sarah Cohodes, raised 10th-grade test scores and lifted graduation rates by about 4 percentage points, with effects that followed students from middle school into high school.

The Texas program, studied by Texas Tech professor Jacob Kirksey, raised test scores too. 

The gains were small at first and grew over the next few years. Teacher retention rose as well, and the effective teachers were the ones most likely to stay.

That last point reframes what merit pay actually does - it was sold as a way to make teachers work harder. 

The bigger effect may be on who enters the profession, who stays, and who leaves.

But neither study found that a bonus alone does the work.

South Carolina's program bundled the pay incentive with coaching, career-advancement paths, and professional development. Teachers there reported a better school climate, not just bigger paychecks. 

Both programs also came with meaningful new money, which made them easier to launch and sustain.

For education innovators, the lesson is that the payout is the easy part and the system around it is the product. Coaching and PD tools built to ship alongside an incentive plan rather than after it. And retention analytics that show a district whether its best teachers are the ones staying. Merit pay works. The bonus was never the reason.

Schools Rush English Learners Into English

For decades, the common approach to teaching English learners has been to move them into English-only instruction as fast as possible. 

A Texas district tried the opposite and got better results.

Pasadena Independent School District, a Houston-area system where about 35% of its 46,500 students are English learners, began switching its youngest students in 2023-24 from a transitional bilingual model to a sustained one. 

In the transitional approach, students move off their home language and into English fairly quickly. In the sustained model, they keep learning in both languages.

The district asked Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research to check whether the switch was working.

It was. 

First- and second-graders in the sustained dual-language program scored 4 percentile points higher in both reading and math than peers who stayed in transitional classes.

There was one tradeoff, and it's the one that explains everything. Second-graders in the transitional classes scored higher on English proficiency.

That looks like a point against the slower model. It isn't.

The sustained program teaches English at a deliberately gentler pace, so an early English-proficiency lead was expected. The students learning in two languages still came out ahead in the subjects English is supposed to unlock, reading and math. The faster route produced faster English and weaker learning.

For education innovators, a model that works but is hard to implement is a market. Placement and progress-monitoring tools that track English learners across both languages, so a district can tell whether gains come from the model or from shifting demographics. And family-communication platforms that explain to parents why a slower path to English is the faster path to achievement.

⚡️More Quick Hits

This week in education:

• International enrollment is falling, and one university went $45 million into the red and cut 71 programs — international students are 6% of US college enrollment but 12% of revenue, and more than 30% at the institutions most dependent on them

• Enrollment declines could cost states $11.5 billion a year by 2030-31 — a Bellwether and WestEd analysis projects falling enrollment across 40 states and DC, turning fixed costs in staffing, facilities, and transportation into a structural budget problem

• Programs enrolling about 825,000 students would have failed a new federal earnings test — the rule cuts federal loans from programs whose graduates don't out-earn a worker with only a high school diploma, and repeat failures lose access for two years

• 33 states offer free community college, but almost none of it reaches the 22 million adults who could use it — adults are nearly a third of community college enrollment, yet only Tennessee and Michigan extend free-tuition programs to learners 25 and older, per a Milken Institute report

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