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Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
We’ve been treating college as a career plan, but it’s failing too many students
In one of Denver’s wealthiest suburbs, where median family income tops $150,000 and nearly every kid is expected to go to college, students are now lining up for trade certifications. Their parents aren’t worried; in fact, most of them are championing the move.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
What teachers should learn: An alternative graduate school curriculum
Earlier this month, I released a report reviewing coursework at ten graduate schools of education across the country. I won’t rehearse the findings at length here.
Commentary
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
College or career? On false positives and negatives
The backlash against “college for all” was overdue, but policymakers shouldn’t replace one flawed approach with another. Academic performance in high school can predict whether students will succeed in college, but it cannot tell us whether college—or another pathway—will leave a particular student better off. Better advising can help teenagers weigh each route’s tradeoffs.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Student AI use is about much more than school rules
“The turbulent AI era is here.
Commentary
Facilities, Governance, Private School Choice
The quickest way to expand school choice is to fill empty private school seats
Private-school choice advocates, particularly in red states, have a lot to be excited about right now.
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Governance
What state standards look like on the NAEP scale
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) regularly publishes reports using results from NAEP testing to compare the proficiency standards that states set for their students.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
How money and time shape children’s early advantages
The importance of childhood investments to the trajectory of life is commonly accepted, but less is known about the size and sources of disparities in these investments.
Podcast
Accountability & Testing
AI in schools: Ban it or embrace it? | Episode 1034 of The Education Gadfly Show
Mike Petrilli is back on the mic solo this week to weigh the case for and against banning AI in scho
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Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
The strange education legacy of 9/11
The strange education legacy of 9/11 was, in many ways, an accident of history. The attacks helped propel an ambitious national education agenda into law, even as the political coalition behind it eventually unraveled. Twenty-five years later, the pandemic revealed just how far the country had moved from the consensus that once united reformers.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Private School Choice, Teachers & School Leaders
Alpha School’s Theranos problem
I was recently walking around Austin, Texas. And a block from the new W Hotel, I passed Alpha School, housed in what looked like a tech office. Outside was a sign reading “Kids crush academics in two hours, build life skills, and thrive,” under a big photo of the founder.
Commentary
School Finance, Governance
An updated agenda for America’s school finance reforms
For decades, education funding equity has been a primary aim of K–12 finance reform efforts.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Screens, AI, and grade inflation are hollowing out the American high school experience
High school students report widespread screen distraction, AI misuse, and grading practices that make it easier to earn high marks without mastering the relevant material. A new Fordham survey suggests that we will only solve these problems by restoring the basic conditions for learning: attention, effort, honest work, and adults willing to hold adolescents to high expectations.
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
What Massachusetts’s portrait of a learner gets right (and New York’s doesn’t)
When I taught high school in Virginia in the early 2020s, I was only vaguely aware of the existence of something called “portrait of a graduate.” Whatever this portrait was, it didn’t seem to impact my daily work, so it didn’t capture my attention. On the other hand, I knew my IB courses and our state assessments backward and forward. Those shaped what we did in the classroom.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Is this the post-homework era?
In Fordham’s new survey of American high school students and recent graduates, less than half believe their school has realistic AI policies that keep up with the times.
Commentary
School Finance, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Fewer students, more dollars, and harder choices
At the beginning of the movie The Big Short, there is a title card with the epigram, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” It attributes the quote to Mark Twain. Ironically, there isn’t any proof that Twain actually said or wrote that.
Commentary
Advanced Education
I parented the opposite of “Young Sheldon.” Here’s how that worked out.
A little over two years ago, I wrote about how “I watched the parenting on ‘Young Sheldon’—and did the exact opposite.”
Podcast
Curriculum & Instruction
Too much tech, too little learning? | Episode 1033 of The Education Gadfly Show
Brian Fitzpatrick, research manager at the Thomas B.
Report
Curriculum & Instruction
High Tech, Low Standards: High School in the Age of Distraction
A new national survey finds that school-issued devices, AI misuse, and grade inflation are undermining learning and leaving many students feeling unprepared for the future.
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Curriculum & Instruction, Private School Choice, Teachers & School Leaders
America’s oldest school model may be its future
Many of the qualities that will matter most for students going forward are those that cannot be automated: judgment, self-command, compassion, and courage. They are also traits that Catholic schools have spent generations cultivating. In an age hungry for meaning, Catholic schools understand what humans need to flourish.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance
Don’t just defend or destroy the National Center for Education Statistics. Rebuild it.
In early 2025, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) was largely dismantled.
Commentary
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Education got there first? The breakdown of traditional left-right delineations.
Education is rarely accused of being ahead of the curve. We’re usually the last to get the memo. Just consider how K–12 education delivery has been one of the few large sectors of the American economy not really disrupted by technology—it’s an open question whether that will even happen in the AI era. We treat things that are long settled in the literature as “who knows” jump balls.
Commentary
School Finance, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Examining outcomes-based contracting in eight pilot districts
Contracted or purchased services (tutoring, professional development, after-school care, etc.) constitute the second-largest category of school district expenditures after staff compensation. They add up to tens of billions of dollars each year.
Commentary
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
The three prongs of education reform success: Policy, programs, and political perseverance
Mississippi’s ongoing early literacy success was originally dubbed a miracle. Now we’re calling it a marathon. That’s a more accurate description, but it still doesn’t do justice to the years and years of sustained work it’s taken to catapult the state from the back of the pack to leading on reading—and to keep those results going strong.
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