The vibes for career-tech programs are great. But they’re too rare.
Education loomed small at both political conventions this summer—a shame considering what dire condition it’s in.
Education loomed small at both political conventions this summer—a shame considering what dire condition it’s in.
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.
Everyone who cares about racial justice should be focused on doing what’s best for students and their learning—not on school buildings or the employment impact of closing some of them.
School closures and remote learning led to widespread relaxation of student accountability at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Lax requirements to turn in work, fewer graded assignments, and—most perniciously—policies mandating “no zeros” or “no failing grades” were adopted (or accelerated) to lighten the load of young people whose worlds had been turned upside down.
This essay focuses on A Republic, If We Can Teach It: Fixing America’s Civic Education Crisis, a new book by Jeffrey Sikkenga and Hoover research fellow (emeritus) David Davenport.
The conventional wisdom is that school closures are bad—not the temporary pandemic-era variety, but the permanent shuttering of underenrolled school facilities.
Red-state governors like Ron DeSantis, Brian Kemp, and Greg Abbott deserve credit for taking the political risk to reopen schools quickly during the pandemic, over the objections of officials in Democratic cities. They decided that education was too important to leave to the left. Now the country faces a different wave of school closings, and conservative governors must step up again.
Peter Liljedahl opens his wildly popular book on mathematics instruction, Building Thinking Classrooms, with a bold gambit.
“Math and reading scores for 13-year-olds have hit their lowest scores in decades.” When the recent NAEP long-term trend results for 13-year-olds were published, the
It’s been more than two decades since Congress passed and President Bush (43) signed the Education Sciences Reform Act (ESRA), giving birth to the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) as we know it.
Khaya Njumbe enrolled at GEO Academies’ 21st Century Charter School, in Gary, Indiana, when he was eleven years old. By age thirteen, he’d become the youngest student in state history to earn an associate degree.
The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Education and the Workforce ended 2023 with some tidings of potential joy for America’s workforce by approving two proposed bills on a strong bipartisan basis. Committee approval in one chamber is just a start, of course, but bipartisanship in the current House is a good sign.
Once a de facto means of maintaining within-school segregation, career and technical education (CTE) has, in recent years, experienced a favorable shift in public perception.
College for all has been the goal of K–12 schools for at least twenty-five years. This has meant that America’s schools typically do not provide young people with work experience. This experience gap has young people leaving high school with little understanding of work and practical pathways to jobs and careers.
A simple observation: In the U.S., high school graduation rates have increased while other measures of academic achievement—from college entrance exam scores to high school
Microschools exist as a midpoint between homeschooling and traditional schools. Typically, the entire school will only have twenty-five students and one or two teachers—often parents, sometimes former educators looking for a more personal classroom, and occasionally local community members like doctors who have expertise to share.
There is plentiful research suggesting that, among in-school factors, teachers consistently matter the most when it comes to student testing outcomes.
Data show that America’s current manufacturing workforce is aging and retiring as the sector is expanding exponentially and its
A new study from a pair of Penn State University researchers finds that passing the U.S. Citizenship Test as a high school graduation requirement does nothing to improve youth voter turnout. Within the last decade, more than a third of U.S.
Not since former Governor Scott Walker bludgeoned the unions in my home state of Wisconsin has there been such national outrage over state-level education policies. Historically, state-scale education has been a secondary affair, rarely topping the list of people’s substantive or political priorities, and most decisions have been left to local decision-making.
One of the biggest shifts in education in recent years has been a gradual move away from the “college for all” mantra, and hard numbers show a concurrent decline in the proportion of high school students matriculating directly to college. Far from something to deplore, this trend is a positive development—but only so long as the right teenagers are choosing to enter the labor market rather than pursue college.
For folks who question the value of a traditional four-year college degree—whether they have done so for ages or have only recently lost faith—apprenticeships seem like a promising alternative for young people leaving
Aaargh. Here we go again. The new National Assessment civics and history results are as deplorable as they were predictable. Whether they’ll also serve as the action-forcer that we need is far from certain.
This April marks forty years since the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued its blockbuster report “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform.” The commission, which worked for eighteen months, was created in August 1981 by U.S. Secretary of Education Terrel Bell early in his tenure with President Ronald Reagan’s administration.
The Georgia Department of Education has released a new version of proposed English language arts standards for public comment, and they contain a big surprise. If you dig into the “Texts” section and go to grade eleven, you’ll find this requirement:
When Tennessee House Republicans expelled, albeit briefly, two young, Black Democratic lawmakers late last week, it raised a number of unsettling questions—not only about the contours of our politics, but also about the future of educat
The ongoing debate over when students shoul
Within a few years of their 2010 rollout, the Common Core State Standards for math and English became a popular scapegoat for a host of perceived ills in K–12 education.
What does it mean to “prepare young people for adult work,” an oft-used saying to describe one of schooling’s primary goals? Though it surely means that we prepare them to earn a living and move up the income ladder, work is more than a financial way to provide for ourselves and those we love.
We were glad to function in that capacity for Virginia as we’ve done for many other states over the years. But it’s also been implied by some that we tried to inject the draft standards with conservative bias, even to “whitewash” history, and that is completely false.