WHAT WE’RE READING
“Birthrates are down. Families are leaving New York City. So educators, especially at charter schools, are expanding their marketing efforts on social media and in subway stations.” —Troy Closson, Matthew Haag, and Jeff Adelson, The New York Times
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Molly Worthen, professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill, wades into the conversation on ed tech in classrooms, calling the decision to give all children devices and gamify learning “the greatest blunder in the past decade of K–12 education,” and arguing that schools can’t fix the problem without a clear vision of what education is for. —The New York Times
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Interest in the skilled trades is growing fast, and some programs go beyond job training, aiming to give young people—especially men—a sense of purpose in addition to employment possibilities. In The New Yorker, Emma Green shares a fantastic look into Steubenville, Ohio’s College of St. Joseph the Worker, where a promising new model for post-high school education is changing young lives and trying to build hope in a city fallen on tough times.
It’s good to highlight programs like the one in Steubenville, and to look beyond well-intentioned efforts to push all kids toward traditional colleges. Still, the “learn to code” era reminds us that we are generally terrible at picking the jobs of the future, and many careers in skilled trades require backbreaking work for mediocre pay—covered by River Page this week in The Free Press. Acceptance into the best training programs, particularly those covered by future employers through apprenticeship models, is highly selective, and affordable programs like high school vocational pathways and public community colleges struggle to keep up with demand for spots. And as Te-Ping Chen and Lauren Weber show in The Wall Street Journal this week, choosing a career in the trades can still lead to debt with no credential to show for it.
Editor's note: This was first published on Mike Petrilli's Substack, SCHOOLED, a twice-weekly free Substack and email newsletter restarting the education-reform conversation.
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Sharp analysis of the week’s biggest K–12 debates
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Curated commentary from across the ed-policy world
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Lively discussion—including reader reactions and pushback
