Editor’s note: A different version of this essay was first published by The 74.
Set aside for a moment the debate about whether Elon Musk’s DOGE is an honest effort to cut waste, fraud, and abuse from the federal government. Let’s ask a different question: What would a serious effort to get more bang from our education buck look like?
For generations, the traditional public school has been a bedrock institution in American life.
Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, Governing Right.
Reflecting on his own Hasidic education, this author argues that, while cultural preservation is important, public officials should ensure that all children gain basic skills to ensure that they have the freedom to choose their future.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Steven Wilson, senior fellow at the Pioneer Institute, joi
Trump administration officials announced on Tuesday that they are laying off 1,300 employees at the U.S. Department of Education. This is on top of nearly 600 people who had already taken early retirement or buyouts, as well as another 60 probationary employees who had already been fired. This brings the agency’s headcount down from about 4,100 to about 2,200, a major reduction. Here are some thoughts on the situation as we understand it now.
When my middle child was in high school, nothing I said or did could keep him from dropping out. But what if I’d tried paying him?
During a January 29 town hall in Washington to discuss dismal new test results, Harvard professor Marty West—who serves as the vice chair of the board that oversees na
Academic skills alone are not enough for students to find success later in life, whether in their career specifically or in their broader participation in s
Can the board game Taboo teach education policymakers an important lesson?
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Charles Baron
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.
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.
Earlier this month, the U.S.
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.
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?
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Jing
Jill Barshay of The Hechinger Report, one of the better education journalists working today, recently raised concerns about the empirical support for knowledge-rich curricula in improving reading comprehension. But the issue is not a lack of compelling evidence—there is prodigious evidence—but rather the difficulty of isolating long-term curricular effects in research.
In recent years, school choice has made impressive strides. Eleven states have codified universal or near-universal private school choice programs.
Scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were released on January 29. How were they?
A valuable recent edition of the Journal of School Choice focused entirely on research around homeschooling, aiming to add useful data and rigorous analysis to this little-studied education sector.
Math instruction deserves the same scrutiny as reading—but the absence of a single, widely discredited teaching method make it harder to drive widespread reform.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, John White, former Louis
Our latest study pilots a new measure of a school’s quality: its contribution to students’ grade point averages at their next school. It sends a clear message to educators that one of their core missions is to help their graduates succeed in their next step—not just in reading and math, but in all subjects—and not just on tests, but on the stuff that tests struggle to capture.
