CHEERS
According to newly released data from the Congressional Budget Office, inflation-adjusted household incomes have steadily increased for decades. Reason’s Eric Boehm highlights how “poorer Americans have seen the largest relative gains over the past few decades—a fact that is particularly inconvenient for populists on both right and left.” He’s right that rising incomes are worth cheering, though they make our lackluster student achievement trends look even worse.
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Ohio’s Department of Education and Workforce is seeking more power to intervene in chronically underperforming Title I schools. Districts and the teachers unions may not love it, as the Akron Beacon Journal’s Kelli Weir reports, but over half of the approximately 230 schools on the state’s comprehensive support and improvement list have sat there since 2022. My Fordham Institute colleague Aaron Churchill points out that “when local control has failed, the state has an obligation—on behalf of students—to take more aggressive steps to turn around a low-performing school.”
JEERS
“After the New York State Education Department denied a request from U.S. News for AP scores, perennially top-ranked schools plummeted,” explains Matthew Haag in the New York Times. Jeers to the state for its lack of transparency—especially if the point was to deny Success Academy its well-earned bragging rights.
Editor's note: This was first published on Mike Petrilli's Substack, SCHOOLED, a free Substack and email newsletter restarting the education-reform conversation. Click here to subscribe for sharp analysis of the week’s biggest K–12 debates, curated commentary from across the ed-policy world, and lively discussion—including reader reactions and pushback.
