The National Assessment Government Board made some very good news last week, albeit a decade or two late, when it voted to commence more frequent testing of civics and, especially, to make 12th grade results available at the state level.
From Oklahoma to California, states across the political spectrum are moving to require
It’s commencement season, including for my firstborn son, who graduates high school in less than two weeks. So it’s a good time to check in on the “portrait of a graduate” movement. If that term is unfamiliar to you, CASEL defines it as:
High school graduation season is upon us. Across the U.S., graduation rates are up—whether through grade inflation, credit recovery programs, or genuine persistence—while interest in traditional four-year college attendance wanes.
During the 2024–25 school year, more than 8.2 million students participated in high school sports, with varsity athletes representing an important subset of that group.
Editor’s note: This was first published by The 74. “We want to be good readers. We want to understand, not just get a good score on a test.”
On this week’s solo episode of The Education Gadfly Show, Mike Petril
A new Fordham report estimates the value of earning industry-recognized credentials and certificates as part of high school CTE pathways. The study provides some of the best evidence to date on the economic value of technical education that students can earn during high school. Now, Shaun Dougherty, one of the nation’s leading CTE scholars, puts the Plasman study in the context of the larger research literature.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul has announced her intention to participate in the federal Education Freedom Tax Credit, joining Colorado Governor Jared Polis as the only Democrats thus far to do so. Should those who support school choice in all its varieties but aren’t crazy about the particulars of the federal initiative celebrate these decisions?
One year, I decided to write down bullet-pointed notes on all the chaos, violence, and disorder that occurred in my school: Two students held a peer against a wall while a third pummeled them in the face and stomach; another student beat up a special needs child on the bus; a girl brought a hammer to school but it was confiscated before she could use it.
Over the six years I taught high school, I tried every response to student cellphone use that was available to me: one warning, three warnings, no warnings; reacting to the mere sight of a phone, looking the other way if the use wasn’t conspicuous; calling the front office, calling the counselor, revisiting “classroom norms,” emailing parents, buying
National Charter Schools Week (May 10 to 16) rightly focuses our attention on the millions of students attending public charter schools. Less attention goes to the federal program that helped make much of that growth possible.
Arkansas Education Secretary Jacob Oliva joins The Education Gadfly Show to discuss the
Students can earn more than 1.8 million credentials in the United States today. We know education pays—particularly for those with a bachelor’s degree.
After decades of reading wars, policy stalemates, and children quietly falling behind, teachers across the country are embracing the science of reading. That finding comes from a new Fordham report, which also tells a harder story about what’s left to do.
For much of the past three decades, education reform rested on a surprisingly durable bipartisan foundation, from the standards and accountability movement of the late 1990s and early 2000s through No Child Left Behind and into the Obama-era push for more
Last week, I participated in a meeting with other policy wonks, debating (among other topics) whether all states should follow the lead of the Southern Surge rs and embrace a top-down approach to curriculum reform.
Wide-ranging education reforms in New York City Public Schools in the early 2000s under then-mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools chief Joel Klein ran the gamut from school closures and consolidations to revamping acad
Once you learn to drive a car, you’re better equipped to drive a truck. Knowing how to drive a car might also help you to develop better decision-making skills. That’s because of a phenomenon called “learning transfer”: the application of skills and concepts learned in one context to another.
Christy Wolfe, director of K–12 policy at the Bipartisan Policy C
A few years ago, the “science of reading” was still treated in some quarters as a niche movement—something for literacy specialists, cranky traditionalists, and a handful of obsessives who spent too much time fighting the reading wars on the internet. No longer.
Our schools have a curriculum problem. As states move toward education systems driven by parent choice, our lack of curricular coherence and transparency is increasingly impossible to ignore. For parents to choose, they must know what schools are teaching, yet most schools make this frustratingly difficult for families to discern.
Teacher pay has become a big contender in the education reform space, with growing agreement that paying educators a
We need to talk about accommodations. Like puppies or grandma’s cookies, they are treated as unmitigated goods—at least in my experience. Should we not support all students? Should we not provide differentiated instruction? Who in their right mind could oppose offering accommodations, leveling the playing field, and helping students with special needs?
