3 ways to increase choice and decrease polarization in U.S. schools
Editor’s note: This was first published by The 74.
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 a candidate for president in 2020, Kamala Harris introduced a plan to raise teacher salaries by $13,500.
Kamala Harris’s presidential acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention promised Americans “an opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and the chance to succeed.” But working-class Americans are glum about their economic position today and what this promise means for them.
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.
Editor’s note: This was first published by the Manhattan Institute.
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.
Society as a whole has largely bounced back from the dark days of the pandemic, but life inside our schools is arguably worse than ever. Attendance is dismal. Cheating is pervasive. Cell phones are everywhere. Disorder abounds. And for all these reasons and more, kids are learning less than they were back before the plague struck. The right way to respond is to embrace tough love. That means, first and foremost, again holding students accountable for their behavior.
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.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Starlee Coleman, newly named President and CEO of the Natio
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
Fordham’s new study by Paul L. Morgan and Eric Hengyu Hu, "Explaining Achievement Gaps: The Role of Socioeconomic Factors," raises as many questions as it answers. Among them: How can we explain the different patterns for the Black-White achievement gap for reading, on the one hand, and math and science, on the other? Why does SES explain so much more of the Hispanic-White gap than the Black-White gap? And what’s the role of family structure in explaining the Black-White and Hispanic-White gaps?
During the fateful presidential debate between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, there was nary a mention of education. No questions on the topic from the moderators.
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
Racial achievement gaps in schools are well documented and remain a significant cause of concern in education. Troubling too is that the role of socioeconomic disparities in mediating these gaps remains unresolved.
Just when I thought that book ban debates were so last year—gone the way of critical race theory or the Common Core, subsumed by the latest controversy over Title IX or Project 2025—it seems those grouchy conservatives are at it again.
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.