A 6,000 student Midwestern district recently adopted a budget that would result—if all goes according to plan—in a $13.2 million deficit, or more than $2,000 per student. This follows $10 million shortfalls in each of the previous two years. Cash is dwindling.
We tend to think of schools as simply the place where kids go to learn, but they aren’t only about education. They provide many essential services to students and families, including nutrition, healthcare—and even if simply as a byproduct of mandatory attendance for educational purposes, giving parents a place to send their children while they’re at work.
Forcing students to switch schools can be traumatic and even harmful. Yet closing an underenrolled school can also be beneficial when displaced students land in better alternatives, and when it ensures that innumerable children in future generations are well-served. But how should policymakers identify which schools should be candidates for closure? Our latest study offers some answers.
Of the school choice options available to many U.S. families today, few embody the spirit of “power to the parents” quite like education savings accounts (ESAs).
Houston’s local ABC news affiliate recently ran a report that the Houston Independent School District, Texas’s largest, has more than 2,000 uncertified teachers (out of a teaching force of approximately 10,000).
Schools across the country spend billions of dollars each year on the construction and renovation of their facilities—everything from roof repairs to new science labs and from classroom expansions to whole new buildings. How do these expenditures impact students and the taxpaying community around schools?
Governor Glenn Youngkin is under fire again from Virginia’s education establishment, this time because a new school accountability system his administration is promoting refuses to put lipstick on a pig.
Editor’s note: This was first published by The 74.
Modern States Education Alliance is a non-profit that makes college-level courses and college credit free to any learner anywhere, including high school students interested in advanced coursework. It offers thirty-two online courses free of charge at www.modernstates.org, including all the necessary textbooks and readings.
As school systems around the world continue trying to recover from learning losses caused by the pandemic, a new paper out of Germany gives us some historic context on what to look for and what to be wary of.
As another school year begins, I have been struck by the many different ways leaders and educators talk about instructional materials. At meet-the-teacher nights or staff meetings to explain the move to a new curriculum or in board meetings to explain plans for the year, educators often talk about the role the curriculum will play with bold claims. I have heard:
This summer, the Washington Post’s (fantastic) “Department of Data” columnist, Andrew Van Dam, ran a fun feature about “America’s best decade,” according to public opinion.
In February 2020, California settled a case which alleged that the state was violating the right to an education by sending kids to schools that didn’t teach them how to read.
Many states are struggling to revise their high-school graduation requirements, sometimes up, sometimes down. The most basic is the perennial issue of how hard should it be to earn a diploma. The next is how can high schools can possibly prepare thousands of dissimilar young people for the expectations and prerequisites of hundreds of differing post-graduation options?
Despite an unprecedented infusion of resources, the latest data show that American students are struggling to recover
Education loomed small at both political conventions this summer—a shame considering what dire condition it’s in.
Since 2022, public schools in the District of Columbia have been working to mitigate Covid learning disruptions by establishing and ramping up high-impact tutoring (HIT) efforts.
Indiana’s new proposed legislation on altered diploma requirements redesigns the purpose of a high school education, which I believe will have negative consequences for students across the state, with regard to the diminishing skills of global-mindedness and perspectives.
High-quality studies find that charter schools boost achievement by more than their traditional-public-school counterparts—an advantage that is particularly large for students of color in disadvantaged urban communities, and one that has only grown larger as the charter sector has expanded and matured.
It’s widely acknowledged that a bit of healthy competition is a good thing in most contexts. Among other things, it pushes businesses to create better products and athletes and musicians to train longer and harder. But what about in education?
Over the past six months, I’ve had an extended conversation about “equitable grading” with Joe Feldman, the author of Grading for Equity (see here,
For years, researchers have pointed to the quality of educators as the key to school performance.
The demographic makeup of America’s K–12 students is steadily changing, with schools nationwide welcoming increasingly diverse cohorts of young learners.
When it comes to the current storm of concern over student cellphones in schools, the conventional wisdom is that it’s educators on one side versus p
Classical education is undergoing a renaissance. According to a recent analysis by Arcadia Education, the classical sector is growing by 5 percent annually with a total projected enrollment of 1.4 million students by 2035.
As a teacher both during and immediately after the pandemic, I was constantly on the receiving end of some version of: “You must be so relieved that the pandemic is over.” My response was always: “Actually, it has only gotten worse.” And it’s not just me.
A recent CALDER study by Darrin DeChane, Takkako Nomi, and Michael Podgursky utilizes test data from Missouri’s state assessment, known as MAP, to assess how well these test scores predict
A recent article in the Boston Globe dug into a controversy that is dogging Massachusetts’s highly-regarded system of regional career and technical education (CTE) high schools.
The specific connection between increased school funding and student outcomes remains unclear—regardless of whether the added dollars are blanket or targeted—and the
Despite the growing diversity of American students, the teaching workforce remains disproportionately White. A recent study uses twelve years of administrative data from Maryland to examine the factors contributing to the state's chronic shortage of Black teachers.
