WHAT WE’RE READING
Emily Oster digs into curious data within New York State’s preliminary 2026 assessment results. She walks us through the wonky details of year-over-year test score calibration and identifies a potential error in 2025 that likely inflated that year’s scores—making the apparent drops in the preliminary 2026 data look particularly bad.
And note her two lessons from the exercise:
First: The fact that it’s possible to make so much progress on this question even without asking the people who did this is a testament to the power of having the detailed data at hand. And it’s a reason we need to keep making that data accessible and usable. Making the data available holds people to account.
Second: We should try to train ourselves to be more skeptical of results even if we wish they were true. I, as much as anyone, would love it if introducing phonics would increase proficiency rates by 12 percentage points in a single year. But that number isn’t realistic based on what we know about testing. And this should have been figured out, and fixed, last year.
EXTRA CREDIT:
Chad Aldeman, “Lessons from the First Statewide Mandate on School Start Times”
Daniel Buck, “Can charter schools survive universal school choice?”
Cara Candal, “The Strategies Leaders Need to Deal With Plummeting School Enrollment”
Danny Corwin and Jennifer Dewees, “Amid the Emerging AI Economy, We Need a Skilled Trades Pipeline in High School”
Bill Hansen, “America’s Aging High Schools Need a Vocational Revival”
Nathan Harden, “We’re Teaching Kids Scarcity in an Age of Abundance”
Rick Hess, “Howard Gardner: How AI Will Force Us to ‘Rethink’ Education”
Lynn Jennings, “ESSA Waivers Done the Right Way: D.C.’s Request to Pause School Ratings”
Curtis Palmore and Robert Hiller, “Portrait of a Graduate Initiatives Can Fail, but New York’s Doesn’t Have To”
Nina Rees, “Virginia’s Charter School Paradox: Local Control as Obstacle—and Opportunity”
Jed Wallace, “When Philanthropists Walk Away, and the Need for Narratives that Do Justice to the Progress We’re Making”
Natalie Wexler, “Harnessing Social Studies Instruction to Boost Literacy”
Conor Williams, “The Science of Reading and Teaching English Learners to Read Are Not Incompatible”
Glenn Youngkin, “Dem Governors Across the Country Get a Failing Grade for Standing in the Way of Education Freedom”
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.
