The Education Gadfly Weekly

The idea of “sending education back to the states” is a cornerstone of President Trump’s rhetoric on schooling, and it has strong support from many congressional Republicans. However, as the new administration works to neuter the U.S. Department of Education, the upheaval in Washington obscures a more fundamental question: Are states prepared to assume more responsibility? Many state education agencies (SEAs)—the entities largely left holding the bag if Uncle Sam withdraws—tend to take a passive approach to school improvement, typically following rather than leading state-level reform efforts. Unless these agencies are dramatically reshaped, many states risk being set up for failure, no matter how much the president extols the unalloyed benefits of local control.

Handing over education to the states sounds simple—like pouring coffee into a cup. In practice, however, it’s more akin to pouring it onto a plate. SEAs have been shaped over decades to serve as compliance monitors, not reform drivers—and most of their staff are supported by federal funds. They are constrained by state civil service requirements, red tape, and often entrenched political interests. While some SEAs have taken an active role in reform, most have historically followed the lead of governors and legislators. Now, with Washington poised to pull back, these agencies may find themselves expected to play a more central role in shaping education policy—despite lacking the structure or flexibility to do so. Instead of channeling efforts productively, this shift risks spilling out in all directions, creating confusion rather than progress.

This dilemma isn’t new. Over a decade ago, Rick Hess and others examined the problematic question of SEA capacity. As did Fordham, in a report titled The State Education Agency: At the Helm, Not the Oar, which countered the view—held by some policymakers and advocates—that what SEAs need are more money, more bodies, and more know-how:

Instead of putting the SEA on steroids, we should put it on a diet. The seminal 1993 book Reinventing Government… made the case that government often functions best by “steering” instead of “rowing”—deciding what must be accomplished and then enabling others to execute it. We should apply this approach to state-level K–12 activity. By delegating to the SEA only those functions for which it is well suited, policymakers can create room… [and be] better positioned to lead bold reforms.

One state official is quoted as saying, “SEAs need to go back to their core functions and make sure they get really good at those. They need to get out of the business of doing things like… holding statewide trainings and… [developing and selecting] curriculum.”

Suffice to say that the report’s influence was essentially invisible, as evidenced by today’s captivation with high-quality instructional materials. But the underlying point remains: Simply pushing more responsibility onto SEAs without redefining their role would be a mistake.

Some states aren’t just struggling with capacity—they’re grappling with the essential question of who their SEAs should answer to. In Ohio, for instance, a recent controversy highlighted the fact that the state education agency didn’t answer directly to the governor, causing friction between state leadership and the agency. This raises an important question: If an SEA doesn’t answer to the state’s top leader, can it effectively execute educational policy and manage day-to-day operations? And more broadly, what does “returning education to the states” mean if the state itself is not in control of the agency tasked with overseeing education?

In practical terms, sending education back to the states could involve mechanisms like block grants—federal funding with fewer restrictions, giving states more control over their education spending. However, simply shifting responsibility without ensuring accountability won’t be enough. As former Louisiana state superintendent John White has observed, SEAs must adopt “assertive K–12 oversight” to take ownership of outcomes and ensure that policies are not only implemented but evaluated for effectiveness. Without such leadership, SEAs will remain stagnant, trapped by the very frameworks we need them to transform.

That said, there are different ways to go about being proactive. In Louisiana and Mississippi, it featured a significant overhaul of reading instruction. In Indiana, we took a different approach fifteen years ago by focusing on clear goals and principles. Former state superintendent Tony Bennett challenged district superintendents to meet his “90-25-90” goals—aiming for 90 percent of students passing the state test, 25 percent of high school graduates passing an AP or IB exam or receiving dual credit, and 90 percent of students graduating college and career ready. These ambitious goals were paired with three core principles: freedom, competition, and accountability. No matter what reforms we pursued—which included the state’s first statewide reading test—these goals and principles served as our North Star, guiding every decision and ensuring we stayed on course. What’s more, these efforts were backstopped by a U.S. Secretary of Education with whom our policies were largely aligned.

The reality is that allowing each state to pursue its own education reforms without any meaningful federal guardrails is a risky bet, though it’s important to recognize that the history of American education policy has long been marked by pendulum swings between state authority and federal intervention. ESSA, for all its good intentions, proved that relinquishing federal control didn’t guarantee improved outcomes. In fact, when the federal government loosened its grip, student achievement took a nose dive. Pandemic-related school closures made matters worse: The bottom has fallen out on NAEP scores, and too many states are looking to lowering cut scores as a remedy.

For SEAs to lead, they must set high expectations and hold schools accountable. Success is most likely when governors and state chiefs are on the same page, as seen with Governor Mitch Daniels and Superintendent Bennett in Indiana. Their partnership created a unified vision, ensuring education policies had both political backing and clear direction. When coordination is lacking, SEAs not only face political friction but also struggle with limited capacity to drive change. Historically, some of the most effective education reforms occurred when state leaders worked in concert, as seen with governors like Jim Hunt in North Carolina and Jeb Bush in Florida. Their accomplishments underscored the importance of state leadership that actively shapes policy rather than merely reacting to federal mandates.

While high-performing SEAs may differ in approach, they share a common thread: leaders who fully embrace their role as stewards of student success. That means not just holding authority but using it productively—establishing clear priorities, maintaining high standards and accountability, and working in tandem with governors and state legislators to drive academic improvements. Strengthening SEAs isn’t simply about shifting responsibility from the federal government; it’s about ensuring they have the vision, capacity, and alignment needed to turn policy into lasting change for students. Without these elements, the promise of a more effective, state-driven education system will remain elusive.

Oregon professor Siegfried Engelmann wasn’t your typical education guru. He didn’t peddle feel-good platitudes or promote classroom fads—he treated teaching like a hard science, and he built Direct Instruction (DI) to prove it. Engelmann, alongside Wes Becker and Doug Carnine, obsessed over precision: every lesson scripted to the word, concepts sequenced like a staircase, each step designed to guarantee that kids master the material and can generalize important concepts. Too often, we’re dazzled by classrooms with kids looking busy and happy, assuming that’s the same as learning. Engelmann knew better, and his work suggests we should, too.

Indeed, the most common criticism of DI, that it’s robotic and stifles creativity in both students and teachers, profoundly misapprehends his work, which instead challenges us to deeply consider the essence of teaching and the optimal use of the one we cannot give teachers more of: time.

Engelmann’s critical insight was “faultless communication”—delivering information with absolute clarity and leaving no room for misunderstanding or misinterpretation. In Reading Mastery, a teacher doesn’t say, “Let’s try some sounds”; she says, “This is /m/. What sound?: /m/. Now this is /a/. What sound?: /a/. Good.” Then the teacher provides practice for all of the sounds that have been previously taught, before having her pupils sound out words with those sounds. It’s explicit, choral, unmistakable.

“Zig focused on teaching big ideas, often through the use of rules. Big ideas are those concepts that can be generalized to several content areas,” explains Marcy Stein, Professor Emeritus of the University of Washington Tacoma, who worked with him and Carnine on Project Follow Through. “For example, he taught, ‘The things at the bottom of a pile go in first.’ He introduced the rule using a pile of clothes, then demonstrated how the rule can be applied to the Earth’s layers, and finally to historical timelines. One rule, multiple subjects,” Stein said.

Every step is spelled out, every concept broken into its smallest teachable unit, every response immediate. It’s not micromanagement—it’s engineering. The data backed him up: Project Follow Through, a large-scale educational experiment conducted from 1967 to 1995, found that kids taught with Direct Instruction outpaced peers in reading, math, and reasoning—especially the ones we’re always fretting about: low-income kids, minority kids, and struggling learners.

Engelmann’s core insight was that learning isn’t a free-for-all—it’s cumulative, interconnected, and unforgiving of gaps. His Theory of Instruction: Principles and Applications isn’t a beach read, it’s a dense, logical blueprint for how humans build knowledge brick by brick. Long before the “science of learning” was a phrase on everyone’s lips, Direct Instruction incorporated its key principles such as cognitive load, interleaving of concepts, and spaced practice. That’s why DI isn’t just a curriculum—it’s a system, coordinated within and across grades, tested iteratively, and refined over decades.

Given all this, why are teachers still hunched over laptops, crafting lessons from scratch or scouring Share My Lesson and Teachers Pay Teachers for curriculum materials? It’s not their fault—blame the expectation that we have unfairly placed on teachers that “best practice” means every classroom with its own bespoke plan to catch and engage students. “Teachers have been sold a bill of goods on student motivation, what it means, and what it takes to motivate kids,” says Stein. “They’ve been led to believe, ‘If I get kids interested, they’ll be engaged, motivated, and learn.’ But that’s never held water in evaluations.” The kids studied in Project Follow Through didn’t just outperform those in other instructional models academically—they also scored higher in self-esteem, meaning that academic success drives self-esteem and ultimately motivation, not the other way around.

Engelmann’s work illustrates why DIY lesson planning and worshiping to excess at the altar of “student engagement” doesn’t cut it. It’s not because teachers are weak, lazy, or unprepared. There are three good reasons that teachers shouldn’t be stuck doing it: they aren’t trained for it, they don’t have time for it, and the task itself—complex and interdependent—demands far more than a single teacher can reasonably deliver, or be expected to:

1. Teachers Aren’t Trained to Be Instructional Designers

Engelmann was an instructional engineer, decades deep in cognitive science, scripting lessons like a coder writes software. Teachers are trained to instruct, not to architect. The skill of instructional delivery is simply not the same as designing an instructional system from the ground up. Asking teachers to match Engelmann’s “faultless communication”—breaking down phonics or fractions into steps so clear there’s no room for confusion—isn’t fair. It’s not that they’re incapable; it’s that the mission requires a specialized toolkit they’re neither handed nor trained to create. Worse, when we force teachers to be instructional designers, it steals time from the critical instructional delivery and diagnostic work that really matter to student success. A 2017 MDR report found that teachers spend seven hours a week on average crafting lessons or chasing materials. That’s seven hours not spent studying student work to see where Sarah’s still tripping over fractions, or giving feedback that turns confusion into clarity—high-yield stuff that only a classroom teacher can do, and that moves the needle for kids.

2. They Don’t Have Time to Tackle It

Engelmann’s team spent years perfecting DI, tweaking scripts so that the language was student-friendly and testing their sequences with kids. Teachers get a weekend, maybe a college class if they’re lucky. That same MDR report pegs them at seven hours a week crafting or scavenging materials—time stolen from refining their craft or analyzing student work, figuring out how to accelerate student performance, or addressing their problems. The job’s already a marathon—grading, parent calls, bringing disruptive kids in for a landing. Now pile on a task that demands more hours than a school day allows and an expertise most don’t have. DI’s programs hand teachers a lifeline: every lesson, every grade, locked and loaded with clarity and content—no guesswork, no wasted motion. Teachers deserve those tools, not a second shift as curriculum writers or scavengers.

3. It’s Too Complex for Solo Practitioners to Pull Off

Instructional design isn’t just about one good lesson—it’s about a web of them, tightly sequenced within grades and across years. Engelmann understood that learning builds on itself—third-grade science preps kids for fifth, fourth-grade math tees up algebra. A single teacher, no matter how sharp, can’t map that in isolation. Imagine Ms. Smith nailing a unit on the water cycle, while next door, Mr. Lee’s kids miss it because he went big on dinosaurs. Come sixth grade, half the class is lost when it’s time to study erosion. Lesson planning whose default mode is “student engagement” inevitably invites gaps and repetition—it’s a patchwork, not a plan. Instructional design aligns every step and every grade with coherence solo acts can’t match. It’s not even that teachers are bad at it; the job’s just too big for one set of shoulders.

Make Teaching Doable

To be clear and emphatic: Teachers aren’t the problem; the problem is the  job’s insane and ever-expanding expectations are. They’re not trained to design curricula, they don’t have time to wrestle with it (let alone to test and refine it) and even the best can’t master by themselves the grade-spanning tapestry that Engelmann nailed. 

Neither is the aim to teacher-proof curriculum and lesson-planning. “What people don't understand is that regardless of the fact that they're scripted, direct instruction lessons are actually harder to teach than most other programs,” Stein points out. “It’s based on a mastery model. If you don't bring kids to mastery of what's taught in every lesson, then you will get to a point down the line where you can't go on.” And equity-minded educators take note: it’s also an approach that demands the success of every child.

Some will inevitably argue that “no published curriculum meets my kids interests or needs!” This isn’t about banishing your social studies debate or the hands-on science projects your students love—keep those gems. They’ll be more satisfying and nourishing when kids aren’t doing projects to learn the content, but have learned the content that enables them to engage in more meaningful projects. It’s about leveraging your strengths as a teacher, diagnostician, and interventionist, while rescuing you from the impossible expectation that you should be an instructional design wizard, too. As I’ve written elsewhere, we’ve unfairly made teaching too hard for mere mortals and in doing so we’ve discounted the exacting work of instructional design. We’ve got to rethink the demands choking teachers’ time and make the job doable. Engelmann handed us a playbook that’s tested, sequenced, and ready. Let’s use it—or something very like it—and let teachers teach.

Editor's note: This piece also appears on the author's Substack, The Next 30 Years.

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education eliminated two major teacher-training programs: the $70 million-a-year Teacher Quality Partnerships program, as well as the $80 million-a-year Supporting Effective Educator Development grants. This is terrific news, not just for the budgetary savings, but because it strikes an emphatic blow at training that has promoted dubious dogmas and politicized classrooms.

The move was met with predictable outrage in the nation’s schools of education and the ranks of left-leaning education associations. But it was a welcome and overdue correction, one that deserves to be celebrated.

The Department of Education noted that many of the teacher preparation and training programs featured social-justice activism, a hyper-fixation on race, and recruiting strategies “implicitly and explicitly based on race.” Grant proposals included programs that instruct teachers to address “systemic forms of oppression and inequity” and pressure trainees to use “abolitionist pedagogies and issues of diversity in classroom management.”

Putting an end to federal support for this stuff is a big deal. After all, it’s a mistake to blame the nation’s teachers for the toxic DEI and gender dogmas that took root in so many schools in recent years. In fact, while I’ve worked with educators for decades, I’ve known precious few elementary teachers eager to discuss gender or make kids fill out privilege worksheets. In fact, even when diversity, equity, and inclusion was flying high in 2022, most teachers said they opposed teaching “the idea of critical race theory.”

In truth, much of the blame for the toxic agendas that have cropped up in schools should be reserved for the education professors, consultants, and bureaucrats who train (and bully) the nation’s teachers. 

Unlike teachers, who actually live in their communities, know their students, and interact with parents, these academics and consultants run campus trainings or do fly-bys in which they promote their personal agendas and then scoot out of town with a paycheck.

While teacher training has long been a subject of concern, a wave of Freedom of Information Act requests in recent years have shone a bright light on the problem.

The Loudoun County Public Schools in Virginia hired trainers from “The Equity Collaborative” to teach educators that “independence,” “individual achievement,” “individual thinking,” and “self-expression” are racist hallmarks of “White individualism.” Trainers in Seattle taught teachers that we live in a “race-based white-supremacist society,” that schools commit “spirit murder” against Black children, and that White teachers must “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgment of [their] thieved inheritance.”

In Buffalo, New York, trainers designed a curriculum requiring schools to embrace “Black Lives Matter principles.” Teachers were told to promote “queer-affirming network[s] where heteronormative thinking no longer exists” and “the disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics.” Kindergarten teachers were directed to discuss “racist police and state-sanctioned violence.”

Trainers in Davis, California, taught teachers how to “decolonize their language and deconstruct that which they’ve been taught about gender.” In Eau Claire, Wisconsin, teachers were told that “parents are not entitled to know their kids’ [gender] identities.”

The trainers who deliver these sessions don’t see the practical consequences for students and families. They treat students as abstractions and schools as laboratories. And educators, fearful of being labeled bigots or racists, have been bullied into playing along.

It’s good news that the Department of Education is going to stop underwriting a lot of this. State officials and local school boards would do well to follow suit.

But this rapid-fire approach to eliminating teacher training programs raises questions. Is zeroing out these programs an excessive response? Isn’t it more sensible to take a scalpel to the troubling stuff while protecting the useful training?

Here’s the thing: There’s hardly any evidence that teacher training actually improves teaching. A massive 2014 meta-analysis by the federal Institute of Education Sciences, for instance, evaluated 643 studies of professional development in K–12 math instruction. Of those, only thirty-two even asked whether professional development caused student improvement and just two found evidence of positive, reliable results.

Linda Darling-Hammond, former president of the American Education Research Association, has acknowledged that the “training [educators] receive is episodic, myopic, and often meaningless.” As the Brookings Institution’s Tom Loveless has politely put it, “In a nutshell, the scientific basis for PD is extremely weak.”

Instead of spending resources on useless training programs, schools should focus on making sure that teachers know the substance of what they’re going to teach and then give them practical support at tasks such as curricular planning and classroom management. Meanwhile, the billions spent on teacher training could be put to better use. The funds could be targeted to provide big pay bumps for educators who do exceptional work, teach high-need subjects, or mentor young colleagues.

Ultimately, defunding teacher training isn’t much of a trade-off after all.

Editor’s note: This was first published by the American Enterprise Institute.

Project STAR (Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio) is a widely-known experiment comparing class-size reduction and student achievement outcomes, conducted in the 1980s in Tennessee. Its oft-cited conclusion was that students in the smallest classes showed significantly higher test scores than their peers in larger classes. Replication efforts over the years, however, have found conflicting results, raising concerns that expensive and labor-intensive class-size reduction schemes in schools across the country are built upon an erroneous premise and are unlikely to result in measurable benefit to students. This study from NBER plunges headfirst into the original research to see if scholars can shed more light on the conundrum.

The researchers—a trio of economists at UPenn and Princeton—begin by enumerating serious concerns about the original methodology. It’s super technical, but I’ll do my best to translate. In a nutshell, they find that the original study design was flawed because it treated the three “class types” (small, regular, and regular-with-a-teacher’-s aide) as synonymous with “class sizes.” But in reality, school principals had discretion in choosing the target size for each class type so they actually didn’t fully comply with the intended class-size reductions.

That’s a big problem since the original analysis of STAR rested in part on a weighted average, such that some schools’ results counted more than others in the final calculation. The weighting was based on how well a school followed the study’s rules about class-size reduction. The experiment called for the treatment group to have 13–17 students and the control group to have 22–25 students.

As it turned out, schools with the largest impacts from smaller classes—whether positive or negative—tended to follow the rules less strictly. The study did not account for these compliance differences among schools, which was related to how effective smaller classes would be in a school. This oversight created biased results because the schools that might have shown the biggest effects weren’t as compliant in following the study rules, so their results ultimately didn’t count as much in the final average.

Specifically, analysts found that many schools under-complied with the intended implementation by having smaller reductions: The average reduction in class size between control and treatment classes was seven students, but those varied across schools from 0 to 12.

Next, the research trio created a new model and applied it to the more accurate version of the original data. This allowed them to model the actual class-size levels for both treatment and control class types. They found that nearly all of the gains from reducing class size in STAR were driven by just twenty-three (out of seventy-nine) schools in the sample (totaling 29 percent). In fact, if those schools had been omitted from the experiment, their model would have failed to detect any causal effect of class size on test scores. What’s more, the schools driving the gains were the ones that didn’t reduce class sizes as much as intended.

Taken together, these findings come close to explaining why replications of Project STAR failed to add up to anything like the original headline-making results. Implementation matters, in experimental designs as well as in education policy—and we do students, parents and teachers a huge disservice by making sweeping changes based on improperly supported premises. Case in point: California’s mammoth class-size reduction effort in 1996 in the wake of STAR ended in lackluster results, largely due to the need to hire tons of unqualified teachers quickly to fill classrooms. The negative impacts of those hiring decisions reverberated in the state for years.

As a former high-school teacher, I can attest that one small group of fifteen students nestled among five other classes of thirty is a sanity saver. In this way, Project STAR “proved” what many on the ground wanted to hear. But we live in a world where we should be targeting resources based on sound evidence, not on poorly executed studies that confirm pre-existing beliefs.

SOURCE: Karun Adusumilli, Francesco Agostinelli, and Emilio Borghesan, “Heterogeneity and endogenous compliance: Implications for scaling class size interventions,” National Bureau of Economic Research (April 2024).

When we talk about achievement and discipline gaps in education, we customarily focus on teaching quality, school funding, and student behavior. But what if some of these disparities have less to do with what teachers or students are doing and more to do with something as basic as air conditioning?

Any teacher can tell you just how difficult it is to hold students’ attention when the classroom is unbearably cold or hot or when students aren’t feeling well. Public health and education research also support these claims.

In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, policymakers directed billions in federal relief funds toward schools through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) program. One approved use of ESSER funding was to upgrade HVAC systems to improve air quality and ventilation—a decision that only some districts prioritized. Now, new research suggests that investing in HVAC improvements may have yielded more than just cleaner air, it may have also improved student outcomes.

In a new study, researchers from SUNY Albany use a decade and a half of data from New York State to explore the impact that replacing or improving heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems had on reading and math scores, as well as absenteeism and suspension rates. To assess HVAC systems, the researchers pulled data from the New York Building Conditions Surveys on cooling and heating systems (which control temperature) and ventilation systems (which control airflow). The HVAC systems were rated as either unsatisfactory or satisfactory. When a system moved from unsatisfactory to satisfactory, it was considered an improvement. They then linked these results with four student outcome measures on NYSED’s report cards: absenteeism rates, suspension rates, math scores, and reading scores. The researchers also examined student performance before and after HVAC systems were replaced.

Overall, the study found that poor HVAC system conditions negatively impact student outcomes, while improvements and replacements in these systems lead to measurable gains in attendance, behavior, and academic performance.

Cooling system replacements boosted math scores by 3 percent of a standard deviation while heating system replacements led to a rise of 4 percent. However, there was no evidence that ventilation system replacements (improving air flow) had a significant effect on student outcomes. The researchers theorize that this outcome may be due to many schools already having functional ventilation systems before they were replaced, resulting in modest impact from the upgrades.

Additionally, improved heating system conditions led to a 3 percent (of a standard deviation) decline in absenteeism, a 6 percent drop in suspension rates, and a 5 percent rise in math scores, all of which were statistically significant. Similarly, better ventilation systems led to a 2 percent reduction in absenteeism and a seven percent drop in suspension rates. Finally, improved cooling systems had no significant effect on absence, suspension, or reading scores, but did lead to a 3 percent increase in math scores.

The authors see at least three explanations for these positive outcomes: First, better ventilation improves air quality, which could reduce illnesses like asthma that contribute to absenteeism. Second, improved heating and cooling systems create more comfortable learning environments, enhancing focus and reducing classroom disruptions. And third, effective ventilation systems help prevent the transmission of airborne diseases, which could lead to fewer absences.

The study also highlights a concerning pattern: Schools serving larger proportions of economically disadvantaged students, as well as those with more Black and Hispanic students, were more likely to have unsatisfactory or non-functional HVAC systems. This disparity suggests that infrastructure shortcomings may reinforce existing achievement gaps, as students in under-resourced schools are likelier to experience the negative effects of poor air quality, extreme temperatures, and increased absenteeism.

While the effects of better HVAC systems are modest, they are consistent enough to support the argument that investments in school infrastructure—particularly HVAC systems—would boost educational outcomes and address longstanding inequities. The findings also align with a growing body of research that shows school building conditions, including air quality, temperature regulation, and overall maintenance, have positive effects on student success.

As policymakers and school districts decide where to allocate scarce funds, it’s important to note that school facility upgrades are not just about comfort, but also about educational equity and student success.

SOURCE: Lucy C. Sorensen, Moontae Hwang, and Marzuka Ahmad Radia, “The Effects of School Building HVAC System Conditions on Student Academic and Behavioral Outcomes,” nnenberg Institute at Brown University, EdWorkingPaper: 24 -1093 (2024).

Cheers

• By reclaiming oversight of federal agencies, Congress can counterbalance Elon Musk’s "DOGE" reforms and restore its authority. —Brendan Buck, The New York Times
• Teacher preparation programs have the opportunity to strengthen education by equipping new educators with the skills to use high-quality curricula and ensure that students thrive academically. —Julia Kaufman, The 74
• Virginia is raising academic standards to align with national benchmarks, aiming to better prepare students for long-term success. —Virginia Mercury
• The Department of Education is eliminating barriers and empowering states to expand high-quality charter schools, increasing educational opportunities for students and families. —The Center Square
• A new study shows that fourth graders, taught through an innovative curriculum, excel at civil discourse and critical thinking. —Science Blog

Jeers

• The abrupt removal of long-time NAEP chief Peggy Carr raises concerns about political interference in student assessment data, as critical education research faces budget cuts and uncertainty. —The 74
• New York’s Catholic schools are in a steep decline, with closures accelerating and little leadership or political will to save these once-thriving institutions. —City Journal
• Researchers scramble to preserve essential education datasets as DOGE budget cuts threaten NCES, risking data losses, undermining transparency, and potentially disrupting federal funding allocations like Title I. —Jill Barshay, Hechinger Report

What We’re Reading

• The National Forum on the Future of Assessment and Accountability highlighted strong support for maintaining federal testing requirements—but advocates must prepare to defend them in case the Trump administration moves to dismantle these guardrails. —Charles Barone, National Parents Union
• Declining public school enrollment actually increases per-student funding, allowing districts to allocate more resources to remaining students without the need for bailout. —RealClearEducation
• A new NAEP score analysis reveals that Southern states (like MS, LA, and FL) outperform their wealthier counterparts, highlighting the impacts of strong leadership, curricular reforms, and accountability measures in driving academic success. —The 74
• Some states are approaching the civic literacy crisis facing the U.S. by requiring students to take a citizenship test, but experts advocate for a more comprehensive curriculum (like ASU’s Civic Literacy Curriculum) to prepare students for democratic participation. —Elizabeth Evans, RealClearEducation

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Jing Liu (University of Maryland) and Seth Gershenson (American University), authors of our latest report, Ready or Not? A New Way to Measure Elementary and Middle School Quality, join Mike and David to explore how tracking students’ future GPAs could offer a clearer measure of school quality. Then, on the Research Minute, Amber reviews a new study on young children’s evolving media consumption habits and their effects.

Recommended content:

• Jing Liu, Ph.D. Seth Gershenson, Ph.D. and Max Anthenelli, Ready or Not? A New Way to Measure Elementary and Middle School Quality, Thomas B. Fordham Institute (February 20, 2025).
• David Griffith and Amber Northern, “Make room, test scores: Introducing “indicators of high school and middle school readiness,” Thomas B. Fordham Institute (February 20, 2025).
• Supreet Mann, Angela Calvin, Amanda Lenhart, and  Michael Robb, The 2025 Common Sense Census: Media Use by Kids Zero to Eight, Common Sense Media (2025)

Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to Stephanie Distler at sd[email protected].