🛝 What If Schools Are Solving the Wrong Problems?

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

This week's reality check: Summer learning loss is a math problem, not a reading problem. CTE students are more likely to go to college, not less. And the main driver of chronic absenteeism isn't illness. It's disengagement. In each case, the money and the programs are pointed in the wrong direction.

Data Gem

Harvard, Stanford, and Dartmouth researchers analyzed 5,000+ districts across 38 states and found the reading decline started in 2013 for 8th graders and 2015 for 4th graders, years before COVID. Harvard's Thomas Kane called the pandemic "the mudslide that followed seven years of steady erosion."

Learning Loss Is a Math Problem. Not a Reading Problem.

Every summer, students lose ground. Schools respond with summer reading programs, book drives, and literacy camps.

The data says they're targeting the wrong subject.

NWEA analyzed spring and fall 2023 testing data and found K-8 students' math scores dropped 2 to 7 RIT points over the summer. 

That's equivalent to 10% to 30% of what students learn in a typical school year.

Reading scores?

Less than 1 RIT point. Essentially unchanged.

The finding held across a separate study examining four different assessment tools: MAP Growth, i-Ready, Star, and the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study. 

Three of four showed math drops. All four showed reading flat or nearly flat.

The data comes from NWEA's 2025 MAP Growth norms, built from roughly 30% of all U.S. public schools and 13.8 million students.

"What causes this huge variation is the million dollar question," said Megan Kuhfeld, director of growth modeling at NWEA.

One possible explanation: students are more likely to read outside of school than to practice math.

For education innovators, the data reframes the entire summer learning market. Most summer programs are reading-focused. The evidence says math is where the loss happens.

Education needs summer math tutoring, adaptive math practice apps, family-facing math fluency tools, and diagnostic platforms that identify which procedural skills faded over the break target the actual problem. The question is whether districts will reallocate summer dollars from reading to math before the next school year starts.

CTE Students Are More Likely to Go to College

For 30 years, the assumption in high school design has been simple: career and technical education is the alternative to college prep. 

You pick one track or the other.

A new SRI International report studying Los Angeles Unified says that assumption is wrong.

Students who completed CTE pathways graduated at higher rates, completed college-preparatory curriculum more often, and enrolled in college at higher rates than their peers.

"The findings combat some of those lingering stereotypes around CTE and who it's for," said lead author Miya Warner.

California invests $400 million per year in CTE, plus $300 million approved for new CTE facilities in 2025. 

LAUSD raised pathway completion from 18% to nearly 25% between 2022 and 2025 and expanded Linked Learning pathways from 43 to 100.

But access is a key barrier.

Counselors sometimes place seniors into the first year of a CTE sequence they can't possibly complete. 

And freshmen had access to an average of nine pathways but many didn't learn about them early enough to enroll.

"The more the word can get out about the value of completion versus just a one-off course, the more that all the staff at the school can support students in meeting that goal," Warner said.

About half of students in Linked Learning pathways completed their programs. Only about a quarter completed traditional CTE pathways.

For education innovators, the "CTE or college" binary is a product design problem, not a student problem. Pathway management platforms that integrate CTE sequencing with college-prep scheduling solve the conflict that's blocking completion. And work-based learning marketplaces that connect students to employers at scale address the capacity constraint.

Disengagement Is Driving Chronic Absenteeism

Chronic absenteeism remains stubbornly high. Districts have responded with messaging campaigns, transportation fixes, and health screenings.

But USC researchers surveyed parents and teenagers and asked them to account for every missed day during the 2024-25 school year, choosing from 23 specific reasons.

Nearly all students miss school occasionally for illness. That's normal.

But illness alone isn't what makes students chronically absent.

The less common reasons, suspensions, caregiving, transportation, mental health, and "just didn't want to go," produce two to three times as many missed days per student as routine illness.

Teens who reported struggling with emotional or psychological well-being missed an average of 12 more days than peers who didn't.

One student described it: "There's times when it's really hard for me to even get ready, and I can already kind of tell that I'm really anxious, and I know that I wouldn't be able to handle it if I went to school."

On the other side: students who said they care "a lot" about how they do in school missed 10 fewer days per year.

The researchers identified a fundamental problem with how schools track absences. Most systems classify days as "excused" or "unexcused." 

That distinction satisfies reporting requirements but reveals nothing about why students are missing school.

For education innovators, the USC data shifts the market from "detect absences" to "diagnose causes." Attendance systems that track the 23 specific reasons, not just excused versus unexcused, give schools the information they need to intervene effectively. Engagement platforms that measure whether students feel connected before they start missing school. The current tools count absences. The market needs tools that explain them.

⚡️More Quick Hits

This week in education:

• Texas lost 76,000 students in a single year, first non-pandemic decline in roughly 40 years — Hispanic enrollment dropped by 61,781 students, accounting for 81% of the total decline, with demographers projecting a 500,000-student drop over the next four to five years

• Automatic EL reclassification made students 35 percentage points more likely to exit English learner status — Michigan's 2020 switch from manual to automatic reclassification for students meeting criteria reduced disparities affecting Spanish-speaking students, and California is now considering a similar approach

• Maine's durable skills badge system operates in 94 high schools, Kansas expanding to 120 — Jobs for Maine Graduates created 30 microcredentials bundled into 8 larger credentials covering digital literacy, financial literacy, leadership, and career readiness, serving primarily at-risk students across two-thirds of the state

• Colorado lost 30,000+ students to multi-district online schools as districts launch their own alternatives — About half of Colorado's 44 multi-district online schools draw 90% or more of enrollment from outside their authorizing district, with Delta County alone losing 138 students and $1.6 million in per-pupil funding

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