The Education Gadfly Weekly

It is decision time for the high school class of 2025, with commitments due to colleges by May 1. Among the many factors that students might consider when deciding whether a college is the right fit for them is the political climate on campus. Simply put, are both liberals and conservatives relatively well represented in the student body? Or are students’ political views lopsided in one direction?

Thankfully, there’s a great source of information about this question: a massive study from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and College Pulse, which includes survey responses from 58,807 students on 257 college campuses. Among many questions about free speech, the organizations asked students to report their own political orientations. Those responses were then turned into a liberal-to-conservative ratio for each school. (Look up every school’s ratio here.)

As the study notes, despite some evidence that Gen-Z may be moving to the right, college students remain overwhelmingly liberal:

Of the students surveyed, 47 percent identified as politically liberal, 21 percent identified as conservative, and 16 percent identified as moderate. The remaining students identified as Democratic Socialists (3 percent), Libertarians (2 percent), something else (4 percent), or said they “haven’t thought much about this” (8 percent). Seven students (0.01 percent) did not provide an answer.

When we zoom out and look at the universe of schools included in the sample—which represent the most selective universities and liberal arts colleges in the country, along with most states’ flagship and tech schools—we see a couple of telling patterns.

First, given students’ overall liberal tilt, it’s unsurprising that liberal-leaning colleges and universities significantly outnumber conservative-leaning ones—228 to 29. Second, as expected, elite, highly selective schools tend to be more liberal than their less selective peers. See Figure 1 for what that looks like, plotting schools’ admissions rates against their liberal-to-conservative ratios. (The figure is interactive; click on a dot to see the name of the school.)

In some cases, schools are politically unbalanced in the extreme. Indeed, you might say that some colleges really put the “liberal” in the liberal arts. From the study:

At two schools—Kenyon College and Pitzer College—only one student identified as conservative. At Macalester College, not a single student identified as conservative. The average liberal-to-conservative student ratio on the 228 predominantly liberal campuses is 7:1, with an extremely unbalanced maximum of 85:1 at Kenyon.

But  good news also awaits students looking for political diversity and well-balanced student populations: there are plenty of schools to choose from, including a handful of the most selective ones.

Specifically, five elite colleges and universities (with acceptance rates of 25 percent or less) have relative parity among liberal and conservative students (with liberal-to-conservative or conservative-to-liberal ratios of 1.5:1 or smaller): Washington and Lee, Notre Dame, University of Miami, Boston College, and Wake Forest. (Villanova just barely misses the cut.)

Table 1: Selective colleges ranked by most liberal to most conservative
(Politically balanced schools in bold.)

Meanwhile, for students looking at less selective colleges or universities, the choices are much more bountiful. The FIRE/College Pulse study identifies almost 50 schools that have relative parity between liberals and conservatives along with admissions rates greater than 25 percent. That includes many large state schools, such as Oklahoma State, South Carolina, Clemson, Mississippi State, Penn State, Alabama, Kentucky, Utah, Arkansas, LSU, West Virginia, Nebraska, Georgia, Purdue, and Washington State.

Table 2: Less selective colleges with politically balanced student populations
(Ranked from most to least liberal)

Given the recent—and ongoing—upheavals at many colleges and universities, lots of people have been calling on higher education to do more to create a welcoming environment for students with widely varying political views. In practice, for most schools, that means making campuses safe for young conservatives. The good news is that there are plenty of colleges and universities that are already doing so.

Special thanks to Fordham Institute Research Associate Heena Kuwayama for her assistance with this article.

Red states are lining up to test just how much leeway they can get from Uncle Sam’s education mandates, with some pushing for block grants that would allow them to consolidate federal aid into a single grant with few spending restrictions. Iowa and Oklahoma are among the first states to formally request such flexibility from U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon.

While D.C. insiders debate whether the administration even has the authority to approve these waiver requests, state leaders aren’t waiting for a legal consensus. Many see them as a long-overdue correction to federal overreach. With enforcement mechanisms weakened by mass staff cuts at the U.S. Department of Education, the outcome is less certain than it would have been in the past, when such requests would have been swiftly shot down. The real question is not whether more states will follow Iowa’s and Oklahoma’s lead, but whether Washington will even resist—or go even further by preemptively granting blanket waivers to states without waiting to be asked.

For now, the waiver push is largely a red-state phenomenon, with GOP governors, state legislators, and education chiefs leading the charge. But their arguments—that federal requirements are too rigid, that local leaders know best, and that the alignment of the political stars makes now the time to act—could eventually resonate beyond Republican circles. Whether this movement stays confined to red states or expands to blue ones may depend less on ideology and more on how far McMahon is willing to go. If a waiver on a non-waivable provision (more below) is granted without immediate consequences, other states—regardless of political color or hue—may feel emboldened to put forth similar requests.

A new report from Anne Hyslop (at All4Ed) and Dave Powell (at Education First) enumerates the ten provisions within federal law that the Secretary cannot waive. These span a range of fiscal and civil rights requirements, but the most significant may be the one that prohibits waivers from “any statutory or regulatory requirement relating to the allocation or distribution of funds…” In plain terms, this means the Secretary lacks the authority to rewrite how much Title I money—or other federal formula grants—each state receives. Nor can states use waivers to override the rules dictating how those funds are distributed to districts. These formulas are written into law, and while states and districts do have some flexibility (e.g., ESSA’s transferability rules, which allow states and districts to move money from various streams into Title I), those flexibilities exist within clear statutory limits. But Iowa and Oklahoma want to go further—potentially much further.

Both states have formally requested waivers to convert federal education funds into block grants—an approach explicitly prohibited under federal law. Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds has argued that this shift would be a “gamechanger” in flexibility, while Oklahoma’s request highlights how it would “significantly enhance choice, efficiency, and effectiveness” in education spending.

But what does that really mean in practice? The left’s biggest fear—one not entirely unfounded—is that these waivers could serve as a backdoor to voucherizing federal funds, allowing states to reroute dollars intended for public schools into private school choice programs. That would go well beyond existing flexibilities and inch closer to a fundamental reshaping of federal K-12 funding—albeit one entirely consistent with President Trump’s and McMahon’s policy preferences.

Notably, neither state appears interested in waiving the annual testing requirement dating back to NCLB—a provision the Secretary can legally waive, which prospect has drawn concern in some quarters.

But the real flashpoint is money: Can the department approve waivers that violate statutory limits? On paper, the answer is no. But in practice, the situation is starting to resemble a broader pattern in the Trump administration, where actions proceed in ways that don’t appear to be permitted by existing law—and where there’s little hesitation to ignore court orders halting those actions.

As Hyslop and Powell point out, every administration—both Democrat and Republican—over the last twenty-five years has used its waiver authority to provide states additional flexibility. When I was working in Indiana in 2012, we were among the first ten states to receive waivers getting us out from under some of NCLB’s dated strictures. Even then, the waiver process raised eyebrows—not because of what was being waived, but because of the strings attached by former Education Secretary Arne Duncan. To qualify, states had to adopt common college-and-career ready standards, join one of two assessment consortia, and implement teacher evaluations tied to test scores. That approach sparked a backlash, and when ESSA was passed in 2015, it explicitly prohibited the Secretary from issuing waivers contingent on specific policy choices—an intentional curb on executive overreach championed by Lamar Alexander.

McMahon and her team have until July to respond to Iowa’s and Oklahoma’s requests, so stay tuned. If the department grants these waivers, it could set a precedent that reshapes the allocation of federal education funds, potentially limiting resources for the nation’s most vulnerable students. The decision may mark a pivotal moment in the balance of power between federal oversight and state control, with lasting effects on how education is funded and delivered across the country.

It’s a bleak time in education policy.

Student achievement started falling about a decade ago, slowly at first, and then all at once. Then Covid led to dramatic drops in enrollment and attendance and a decline in trust in public schools. This year, with the expiration of federal relief funds, schools will have a lot less money to spend on staff or new programs.

With all this in mind, with education floundering and in need of direction, I sketched out a list of twelve guiding principles. Some may seem like obvious truisms, but they haven’t always been reflected in policy or classroom practices in recent years. Others may be more controversial and fly in the face of prevailing trends. But America is overdue for a big national reckoning about the current and future state of its public schools, so here’s my attempt to start that conversation:

1. Education is good, but knowledge is better. More schooling leads to more learning, and people who know more stuff tend to lead more successful, productive lives. That’s good for individuals and good for society. But time in school is merely an input measure, and the outcome—achievement—is what will ultimately matter in a child’s life. That lesson can be multiplied over the broader society. As economist Rick Hanushek put it to me back in 2015, “In the long run, the economic well-being of countries depends upon the quality of their workers.”

2. Teachers are incredibly important. Educators are still the most important in-school factor for student learning, and the best teachers also improve students’ attitudes and behaviors. As a policy matter, schools should hold teachers to high standards and pay them like professionals.

3. Incentives matter. Students and educators are rational actors and will respond to incentives. When states and school districts—especially those in Democratic-controlled areas—retreat from school and student accountability, that will have consequences in the form of reduced academic effort and lower achievement. Teachers as a group are well-intentioned and mission-oriented, but they naturally tend to flock toward easier jobs with less challenging students. Deliberate policy nudges in the form of extra pay for working in high-need schools and hard-to-staff roles can help reverse these normal human tendencies.

4. Testing and high expectations are good. They give people targets to shoot for, hold them accountable for results, and provide a tool for diagnosing what needs to improve.

5. Parents deserve honest, timely information about their child’s performance. The nonprofit group Learning Heroes has found that 90 percent of parents believe their child is on grade level, while the reality is about half that. This has fed into an urgency gap, where educators warn the public that kids are behind even as they struggle to enroll students in tutoring or summer school or convince students to take those programs seriously.

States have been mostly indifferent to this disconnect. They take months to process and distribute the results of their annual spring tests. Those exams are meant to present parents with the objective reality of their child’s performance, but that check on the system can’t happen given the current delays. In response, Ohio now requires school districts to share results with parents no later than June 30 of each year, and Virginia will soon give parents their child’s results no more forty-five days after the testing window closes. More states should follow Ohio and Virginia’s lead.

6. All children should get a fair opportunity to be educated to the best of their ability. A noble pursuit for “equity” has sometimes meant that schools hold higher-achieving students back. That’s a mistake, and schools would be better off with a clear focus on developing all kids’ talent. Automatic enrollment, in which students qualify for accelerated courses based on their demonstrated performance, is one simple policy that’s starting to spread across the country. Similarly, more places could adopt individual learning plans, as Mississippi did in reading, or what some states do for gifted students.

7. Public education can take many forms. The current system of delivering public K–12 education through residential school districts is a weird artifact of history. It’s not how pre-K or higher ed work, it leads to economic segregation, and it distorts the housing market. Plus, as Johns Hopkins researcher Ashley Rogers-Berner has pointed out, it makes the U.S. an outlier internationally.

8. Choice is good, but it doesn’t guarantee better results. Within education, choice makes people happier with their schools and helps students (and teachers) find the right fit. Charter schools, within-district choice programs, voluntary desegregation programs, and open enrollment can all boost outcomes for kids. There should be fewer wait lists and more options.

Still, choice is no guarantee of quality, and a well-functioning market requires oversight. As economist Doug Harris and others have noted, the logic of the free market doesn’t apply neatly in the K–12 context, given the lack of information parents have about their choices and the limited options they may have available depending on where they live. In other words, policymakers can’t just assume parents voting with their feet will automatically lead to systemwide improvements.

9. Beginners need to be explicitly taught to master the basics. In basically every human endeavor, beginners need to follow carefully sequenced steps to learn the fundamentals and make progress. For example, kids won’t learn to read well unless they can decode letters into words. That requires teachers to patiently break down the forty-four distinct phonemes used in the English language, and that can feel boring or unimportant to adults who don’t remember how they learned to read. Too many education fads suffer from this “expert’s curse” and assume that kids will just figure things out on their own.

10. Knowledge is specific to particular domains. We all want kids to be creative and to be able to read with comprehension. But these are not generic skills. Instead, they are tied up with what someone already knows and can do. For example, the most creative people in any field are those who have mastered the basics and can apply those in new ways. Similarly, people’s ability to read and understand something new depends on what they already know. People don’t retain knowledge they don’t continue to refresh, and there is very little transferability across skills and subjects. Learning chess won’t make you smarter, and most adults have forgotten much of what they learned in school. As such, schools should seek to help students develop deep knowledge in specific content areas, rather than taking a skills-based approach.

11. Practice is good. Educators sometimes speak derogatorily about “rote” memorization or “drill and kill.” No one talks like that in sports or the arts, even though, in those fields, it’s obvious that deliberate practice leads to improvement. Within education, kids need to master their times tables before they can handle more advanced math, and they need to spend plenty of time immersed in books to build up their vocabulary and reading stamina. It doesn’t all need to happen during the school day, but kids need lots of time to practice academic skills.

12. Individual policies matter, but they are not a guaranteed recipe. Researchers have documented a number of variables associated with improvements in student outcomes. For example, it’s true that more money generally helps schools produce better results and that smaller classes are easier to work with than bigger ones. But sometimes, advocates take these lessons too far. They assume there are no trade-offs to these policies or lose sight of the ultimate goal of education. For example, states like California and Florida spent billions of dollars reducing class sizes to little effect, perhaps in part because it led to a decline in teacher quality. Maine spends about twice as much per pupil as Mississippi does, yet students in Mississippi outperform those in Maine, once you factor in demographics.

Education is complicated, and policymakers need to focus on the end goal—or they can get lost chasing the wrong things. By remembering the principles I’ve outlined here, they have a better chance of getting American education back on track and helping all students reach their full potential.

Editor's note: This was first published by The 74. 

As a recent edition of the Journal of School Choice makes abundantly clear, modern homeschooling has changed from the traditional—perhaps even stereotypical—model of the past. Equally important: The reasons families opt for homeschooling also appear to be changing. Surveys are finding that, rather than faith or even academics, concerns about school safety are key motivators. But what exactly does this mean? New research, also from that journal edition, aims to provide details on the specific issues driving parents to embrace homeschooling today.

The research team starts with a quantitative analysis, whose findings are further illuminated via qualitative means. Quantitative data come from a long-running survey program administered by Morning Consult and the education policy nonprofit EdChoice. The program has, since January 2020, conducted monthly and nationally representative surveys of American adults on a range of issues and trends about “K–12 education ecosystems.” Among other questions, these surveys ask parents to identify the school type their children attend (options include public district, public charter, private, and homeschool). EdChoice publishes regular high-level reports on the results, but this research uses raw, individualized responses from June 2022 through March 2024. The survey began including questions on parent perceptions of school safety in June 2022, hence the specific start date. The full sample comprises 26,708 respondents who were parents with at least one child enrolled in kindergarten through twelfth grades. Among these parents, 20,057 identified themselves as having at least one child enrolled in a public school within their assigned school district, 3,052 with at least one child in private school, 2,124 with homeschooled students, 1,521 with charter school students, and 2,051 with at least one child enrolled in a public school outside their assigned district. These subcategories are not nationally representative, which is important to the findings.

The researchers obtain the qualitative data via focus groups held virtually in April 2024 with a total of thirteen participants. All were located in the same unnamed large urban metropolitan region of the southeastern United States and all had homeschooled their child (or children) for multiple years. However, only two parents had exclusively homeschooled, with the rest indicating a mix of public and private schooling. It is unclear whether any focus group participants were part of the survey sample; but as they were all recruited independently of the survey, likely not.

Quantitative findings first: Nearly half (48 percent) of the homeschooling parents surveyed selected “safe environment” as one of their three most important reasons for choosing that mode of education for their child. This number matches that of private school parents, but is nearly twice the rate of in-district public school parents who named a safe environment as a top-three reason for choosing that school type. It also is significantly larger than the number for charter school parents and out-of-district public school peers. Homeschooling parents also strongly cited individual/one-on-one attention as a factor in choosing that school type, far exceeding the rate of parents in any other school type. In deeper/more-specific responses, homeschool parents indicated less concern with physical safety (bullying, school shootings, etc.) than their peers in other sectors, but more concern with mental health and wellbeing safety issues (such as stress and anxiety), as well as what could be termed “academic deprivation.” Parents who reported having switched a child from another school type into homeschooling overwhelming cited excessive stress, bullying, and academic needs not being met—almost equally—as the primary reason for the switch. Switchers into/between non-homeschooling options cited a larger and more diffuse list of primary reasons for their switch.

The qualitative findings shed further light on parental concerns about safety. Even if they don’t have recent experience with formal education in school buildings or direct experience with physical violence occurring in them, all homeschool parents interviewed for the focus groups were well aware that events such as in-school fights, student bullying, and online threats occur. By their personal estimates, negative events are more likely to happen in those congregant settings than in smaller and more controlled settings such as meet-ups in a park or a fellow homeschooling family’s home—although participants did recall some instances of threats within such groups. The control aspect was a common refrain among parents, covering numerous areas of children’s educational experience. For one example, homeschool parents appreciated that a larger ratio of adults to children was likely to be present at any kind of student gathering than would be typical of a public or private school, thus providing a strong deterrent to misbehavior or violence. For another example, meeting special learning needs was fully in the control of homeschool parents, many of whom recounted numerous failings by public and private schools in carrying out individualized education programs. The desire for “student safety” was ubiquitous among focus group participants but was revealed as a wide-ranging and highly-personal term without common definition.

The researchers cite a few important limitations to their work, including the over-representation of students with special educational needs in both the quantitative and qualitative data, the over-representation of urban families, and the possibility that students’ perceptions of various school settings differ from their parents’ perceptions. However, it seems very clear that what is driving changes comes from experiences in and perceptions of formal schooling environments. Families are not moving toward some homeschooling paradise—but away from public and private schools whose environments are seen as uncontrolled and unsafe, no matter how those terms are defined.

SOURCE: Christy Batts, John Kristof, and Kelsie Yohe, “‘That Percentage of Safer’: A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Homeschool Parents’ Perspectives of School Safety,” Journal of School Choice (December 2024).

Direct admissions (DA) programs—where colleges proactively (and preemptively) admit high school students to their institutions without the need to apply—are growing across the country. From an institutional point of view, DA serves as a buzzy recruiting tool, and it is not surprising that such programs are burgeoning in a time of reduced applications and enrollment. DA is also commonly touted as a benefit to students—especially those who would be first-generation college-goers, those lacking the “social capital” needed to navigate a complex college search, and those for whom fees or administrative requirements could be an insurmountable barrier. Does direct admission boost the likelihood that students will actually take the shortcut, accept an unsolicited admission offer, and enroll in that college? A new working paper aims to test the efficacy of DA from the student perspective.

Rather than investigating existing DA efforts, researchers Taylor Odle and Jennifer Delaney recruited six universities to participate in a new program of their own devising. The four-year schools are all anonymous but include both public and private non-profit institutions; capture a range of institutional types; and include two historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and two Hispanic-serving institutions. They are located in four states in the southern and mid-Atlantic regions. All are moderately-selective to open-access institutions (60–90 percent acceptance rate across them) and serve considerable numbers of Pell-eligible students (30–80 percent of all undergraduate students, depending on the school). Average annual tuition ranges from $13,000 to $27,000. Their six-year bachelor’s degree graduation rates range from 40-70 percent. The smallest school has an undergraduate population of less than 1,000; the largest has nearly 27,000.

Participating institutions were allowed to choose a grade point average (GPA) threshold for high school students who would receive a direct admission offer (the ranges selected by the institutions varied from a 2.50 to 3.30 on a standard 4.00 scale) and how many direct admissions they would be willing to provide (these ranged from 2,000 students at one institution to an effectively unlimited number at another). No other criteria were placed on students’ admissions eligibility. All students receiving DA also received tailored information about the college, including majors available and financial aid options, a simplified form to confirm acceptance, and an automatic waiver of any fees associated with admission or enrollment.

The universe of potential college recruits came from users of the Common App online service in each of the four states. (While many DA programs are homegrown and community-centric, Common App is leading the way in expanding DA to a wider swath of states and students.) To be included in the available DA population for this experiment, students had to be high school seniors; have reported their GPA, zip code, and e-mail; have opted-in to receive communications from the Common App; and not be participating in any other Common App experiments or interventions. One third of all Common App users are first-generation college-goers, and 43 percent are from racial and ethnic minority groups. Thus these populations were widely-represented in the researchers’ samples. However, they were required to dig deeper to make sure that students from low-income backgrounds were properly represented, as the average Common App user does not fit that demographic. They ultimately identified 35,473 eligible students across the six institutions and four states, with 17,704 randomly assigned to receive treatment (a direct admission to one of the participating colleges) and the rest randomly assigned to control.

Official college acceptance letters were sent to treatment group students (and their parents or guardians if that information was available) in January of the treatment year, along with the aforementioned school information, FAQ links, and instructions on simplified next steps. Every effort was made to let officials in students’ high schools know about the authenticity of these offers to forestall concerns over a scam. Control group students received no special communication related to this experiment and pursued their application and enrollment processes (or not, as the case may be) in an organic manner. Odle and Delaney observed students’ actions through May.

On average, receiving a DA offer increased the likelihood a student applied to any college by 2.7 percentage points (or 12 percent) and by 2.8 percentage points that they applied specifically to the college that sent the DA. To put it in raw numbers: 308 control students applied to one of the researchers’ partner institutions following the distribution of DA offers (completing a full, formal, and detailed application on their own steam), compared to 829 treatment students (clicking a single button to accept the DA offer and later filling out a pared-down application document). Individual colleges saw increased likelihood of application ranging from 1.1 percent to 6.1 percent. Larger impacts on applications were seen for Black, Hispanic, and multi-racial students, as well as first-generation and low-income students who received DA offers, both to DA-offering institutions and to any college.

However—and this should be the headline—likelihood of enrollment in college (as opposed to mere application) was unchanged between treatment and control group students no matter how the data were sliced.

The null impact on enrollment underlines an important point: Attending college is a human-centric process with a lot of moving parts, not a video game that can be “cheated” with a shortcut. Any institution that is serious about boosting enrollment overall or in terms of specific subsets of students can’t stop at the equivalent of a Konami Code that jumps over admissions hoops and calls it a day. They must put in the work to meaningfully remove administrative, informational, economic, and college-going cultural barriers from the entire postsecondary experience, not just admissions. Clearly, that takes more than “click here to claim your place in college.”

SOURCE: Taylor K. Odle and Jennifer A. Delaney, “Experimental Evidence on ‘Direct Admissions’ from Four States: Impacts on College Application and Enrollment,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (March 2025).

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Jim Blew, co-founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute, joins Mike and David to talk about his work on the Educational Choice for Children Act—a federal proposal that could expand educational options for families through school vouchers. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber examines a study on how expanding broadband access for Chicago families during the pandemic benefitted high achieving students but hurt their lower-performing peers.

Recommended content:

• Children’s Tuition Fund,  Federal Tax Credit: What You Need to Know About the Educational Choice for Children Act (2025).
• Michael J. Petrilli, “Education reform in red versus blue states,” Thomas B. Fordham Institute (January 9, 2025).
• Dale Chu, “Education at an inflection point,” PPI (March 20, 2025).
• Jared N. Schachner, Julia A. Gwynne, Nicole P. Marwell, Elaine Allensworth, and Marisa de la Torre, Heterogeneous Effects of Closing the Digital Divide During COVID-19 on Student Engagement and Achievement, Annenberg Institute at Brown University (2025)

Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to Stephanie Distler at sdistler@fordhaminstitute.org.

Cheers

• Beginning next school year, Virginia will automatically place top-performing students in accelerated math as part of a nationwide push to restore high expectations and rigor in public schools. —Todd Truitt, RealClearEducation
• Schools are supporting teachers and other school staff by turning empty classrooms into childcare micro-centers —The 74

Jeers

• Massachusetts Education Secretary Patrick Tutwiler's blanket rejection of all charter school expansion proposals underscores a growing partisan shift among Democrats away from school choice. —CommonWealth Beacon
• After their beloved all-girls Catholic school was closed, Bronx students found refuge at a different local parochial school—only to face yet another devastating shutdown, emblematic of the financial freefall facing urban Catholic education in states without school choice. —The New York Times
• Black male enrollment at four-year colleges—especially HBCUs—is rapidly declining, just as the Trump administration rolls back federal efforts to support these students. —The New York Times
• The new Netflix series "Adolescence" highlights how violence and misogyny on social media can have dark consequences for our schools, particularly female students and teachers. —The New York Times

• Prolonged school closures and shifting rhetoric have undermined Democrats' once-clear commitment to education as a transformative force. To regain their edge, Democrats must refocus on student learning and outcomes, rather than just education spending. —Matthew Yglesias, Slow Boring
• To counter recent funding and staffing cuts to the Institute of Education Sciences, the leader of Alliance for Learning Innovation suggests a new blueprint for the federal role that emphasizes support for evidence-based state efforts, improved data systems, and innovation to enhance student outcomes. —Sara Schapiro, Forbes
• The University of Virginia's Partnership for Leaders in Education helps struggling schools improve their academic performance, attendance, and school culture by emphasizing data-driven decision-making and systemic change. —The 74