Since the Spring of 2022, I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with Homero Chavez as part of the National Working Group on Advanced Education.
The welcome rise of the science of reading has been a sober reckoning for teachers and administrators. It also raises uncomfortable questions, seldom asked: How much faith should parents have that their child’s school and teachers understand good literacy instruction? And how much do parents need to know to advocate for their children and raise strong readers?
Many futuristic reformers love to hate the classroom.
The results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) are in—an international standardized test of fifteen-year-olds and the first look at how countries compare post-pandemic—and the picture they paint of American education is disheartening. Here are four trends that you need to know: 1. U.S. math scores collapsed and reading stagnated.
Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, The Education Daly. They’re coming for the kids’ phones. Who is “they”?
Despite the amount of attention that school choice receives in the media and among policy wonks, politicians, and adult interest groups, the extent of actual competition in major school districts is not well understood. We were curious: Which education markets in America are the most competitive? And which markets have education reformers and choice-encouragers neglected or failed to penetrate?
Education in the United States needs to improve and evolve. Too many learners get lost in the current system. Even more are underserved or under-resourced.
Once a de facto means of maintaining within-school segregation, career and technical education (CTE) has, in recent years, experienced a favorable shift in public perception.
Talented and gifted school programs have a well-earned reputation for lacking student diversity.
The science of reading is thankfully supplanting dubious methods of teaching young children to read, as
Recent legislative efforts across the country have strengthened efforts to align reading instruction with the science of reading. These laws typically require teachers to use methods and materials aligned to the solid evidence base on how children best learn to read.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Tim Daly, the CEO of Ed Navigator, joins Mike to discuss the causes and harms of grade inflation—
Five years ago, my team and I set out to understand what goes into effective implementation of high-quality instructional materials. We interviewed leaders and teachers from seventy schools that had moved to higher-quality materials in the last three years. We asked about what went well and what was hard.
Over the weekend, the New York Times published a hard-hitting 2,300-word expose by Dana Goldstein and colleagues asking “Why is the College Board pushing to expand Advanced Placement?” Its primary answer: to rake in tens of millions of dollars a year and to support CEO David Coleman’s exorbitant sal
“Excellence gaps,” or disparities in advanced academic performance between student groups, have important implications for both academic equity and American economic competitiveness.
After handily defeating his Republican rival for the governorship of red-hued Kentucky, Democrat Andy Beshear is having a moment as a center-left moderate who could run for president in 2028. But we education reformers should curb our enthusiasm because Beshear’s stances are alien to ours.
Editor’s note: This was first published by The Liberty Fund.
Previous literature on school quality and teacher quality largely assumes that good schools and good teachers are beneficial for all enrolled children, which means that a school’s “value added” is typically calculated as the average effect on students.
Campus radicalism is easy to spot—and condemn.
A simple observation: In the U.S., high school graduation rates have increased while other measures of academic achievement—from college entrance exam scores to high school
Washington schools must now screen every elementary student for advanced education services, thanks to a law
Smartphones and social media are likely at least partly to blame for the teenage mental health epidemic that started around 2013. Is it possible that phones and social media might also be behind the plateauing and decline of student achievement that we’ve seen in America, also starting around 2013?
Schools across America continue struggling to help their students catch up following unprecedented learning losses resulting from pandemic school closures beginning in March 2020. It is vital—both to address current needs and to stash away for future use—to determine which methods work to boost student achievement.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Tim Donahue, an English teacher at the Greenwich Country Day School, joins Mike to discu
Hysteria over students cheating via ChatGPT and other generative AI applications is so last year. This season’s hyperventilation-initiator is the potential for bias in AI. And well, there’s actually a lot to be worried about.
The New York Times recently covered the extraordinary academic achievement of Department of Defense schools, noting several factors that contribute to their success. But one important contributor—common values—was not mentioned.
This summer the National Working Group on Advanced Education reported what many educators in the United States already know and experience: that the United States has been wasting an enormous amount of human potential and that man
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Umut Özek and Louis Mariano, researchers at the Rand Corporation, join Mike to d
One of the most important efforts in American education today is the project to displace the Carnegie Unit as the fundamental unit of measurement in high schools.
The claims from the field of education technology—“ed tech” to insiders—could hardly be more grandiose.
