The last decade’s political shifts have banished many previously popular education reforms to the proverbial wilderness. Charter schools, perhaps the most successful and lasting education reform in recent history, are not immune to these changes.
Pandemic school disruptions, frustrations with ineffective reading methods, and sinking test scores lit a fire under the nascent science of reading movement which has borne fruit
President Trump’s AI mandate for education raises concerns about data privacy, human connection, and critical thinking. —Jessica Grose, New York Times A rural Wyoming community decided to establish a charter school for students otherwise facing hour-long commutes.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Genevieve Collins, Texas State Director for American
Note to readers: This essay is adapted from a presentation I gave to policy advocates last week; I thought you might find it helpful as well.
Are Dana Goldstein and I watching the same state of education politics? She claims in the pages of the New York Times that, presently, “neither party, nor even a single major political figure,” wants to claim the mantle of education reformer.
If discipline disparities are really driven primarily by bias and systemic racism, we would expect to see the largest disparities in states with the most regressive racial attitudes. Yet mapping the data reveals a strikingly different picture. What if it’s not racism that mostly explains racial discipline disparities, but socioeconomic factors?
Over the past month, the Trump administration terminated $773 million in National Science Foundation (NSF) grants supporting STEM education research and innovation.
What matters more when we evaluate a school’s contribution to a child’s future: reading and math test scores or students’ opinions about its academic environment?
Many teachers see Chromebooks as a major source of off-task behavior in class, proving our point.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Starlee Coleman, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public
On April 23, President Trump signed two executive orders that could significantly impact school discipline policies nationwide, as well as the federal government’s approach to civil rights investigations. The first is directly targets discipline; the second aims more broadly at the use of “disparate impact.” Petrilli has weighed in on these matters before, but given the news, it’s worth doing so again.
Editor’s note: This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news outlet focused on education.
NCES and IES, as we’ve known them, are unlikely to return. While that’s regrettable in many respects, it also opens the door to build something stronger—an independent entity that can carry forward NCES’s essential mission without being subject to political impulses and whims of the day. And importantly, we wouldn’t be starting from scratch.
Can school districts still work to close persistent achievement gaps in an era when race-targeted interventions may violate federal law? That question is no longer hypothetical. The Trump administration now argues that using race—even to expand opportunity—constitutes discrimination under Title VI. This reframing casts efforts like targeted funding or DEI initiatives not as remedies for inequity, but as violations of the very laws once used to justify them.
On Tuesday, April 29, I gave the keynote presentation at an event titled “New Pathways for Teachers in the Age of School Choice,” hosted by the American Enterprise Institute and the University of Austin.
Early in my tenure at the education policy organization I founded, we barely had any money. No money meant no lobbyist, which left me, a complete stranger to the legislative process, to figure out how to pass meaningful policy.
Back in 2015, three Ohio community colleges launched The Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP), a comprehensive suite of supports meant to help new community college students persist in school and complete a degree in three years or less. Across three studies, evaluation partner MDRC has tracked longer-term outcomes via a randomized controlled trial. It just released a fourth.
As Trump's first 100 days usher in deep education budget cuts, federal layoffs, and a push for school choice, debates over the future role of government in schools intensify.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, former Education Week reporter Erik Robelen j
Over the past few months, a quiet but intense debate has broken out among education-reform Democrats over whether the party should embrace private school choice—particularly the ESAs spreading kudzu-like across the country.
In April of 2022, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute launched the National Working Group on Advanced Education.
We’ve gone nearly a decade without a president who prioritized education reform—and the country is worse for it. If the issue is going to have a meaningful place in the next presidential race, the groundwork must begin now.
Over the past year, publications from Teen Vogue to the Associated Press have bemoaned students’ lack of reading stamina.
State-level school funding reforms are common means by which state policymakers can make broad changes in the flow of money to districts, schools, and students—usually aiming for increased funds to students with the most need in a quest for improved student outcomes. Still, research on the impacts of statewide funding reforms is not clear cut.
A fair but tough appraisal of Trump’s first 100 days in education. —Rick Hess Straight Up
