The latest Nation’s Report Card dashed hopes that U.S. students might have finally closed pandemic learning gaps. The results show reading scores are down nationally in both fourth and eighth grade, compounding declines on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP.
During a January 29 town hall in Washington to discuss dismal new test results, Harvard professor Marty West—who serves as the vice chair of the board that oversees na
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Charles Baron
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Jing
Scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were released on January 29. How were they?
Our latest study pilots a new measure of a school’s quality: its contribution to students’ grade point averages at their next school. It sends a clear message to educators that one of their core missions is to help their graduates succeed in their next step—not just in reading and math, but in all subjects—and not just on tests, but on the stuff that tests struggle to capture.
A new report from the Collaborative for Student Success aims to refocus attention on the “honesty gap” in the wake of the latest (and disastrous) NAEP results.
The third iteration of the Education Recovery Scorecard, compiled by Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research, was released hot on the heels of 2024 NAEP test scores and is an
The data are out, and as everybody now knows—and as Mike Petrilli foresaw—they’re pretty grim. Here’s the short version, straight from the National Center for Education Statistics:
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Tim Daly, CEO of EdNavigator, joins Mike and David to discuss w
The forthcoming results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress—due out on January 29—are likely to be bad, bad, bad. The term we may hear a lot is that “the bottom is falling out,” if the scores for low-performing students in particular continue to plummet.
The Advanced Placement (AP) program, celebrating its seventieth anniversary this year, has largely lived up to the promise of encouraging and rewarding ambitious high school students looking to prepare themselves for college rigor.
I’m no “tech bro,” nor a fan of Ramaswamy (or Musk), but Vivek was right this time:
The recently released results from Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2023 highlight a concerning decline in U.S. students’ performance in science and mathematics, with the country falling further behind peer countries. But it isn’t just America.
Emergency school closures aimed at minimizing the impact of the coronavirus pandemic disrupted the education trajectory of over one billion children worldwide starting in March 2020. However, the length and manner of closures varied greatly from country to country and education system to education system.
Virginia’s new accountability system incentivizes schools to provide valuable middle-school math pathways, resulting in more opportunities for Virginia students, especially the most underprivileged.
With the number of states requiring students to pass exams in order to earn a diploma now down to the single digits, this feels like the end of an era. What should we do now? Let’s start by getting the gang back together—a bipartisan group of governors and state education chiefs—to work on a rational set of high school graduation requirements reflecting the multiple pathways to upward mobility and post-secondary success.
Recently my daughter asked me to describe my job. I had to think for a minute. Statistical interpreter? Results translator? None worked. I needed an elevator pitch, one my quasi-curious teen would understand easily, without too much side eye.
AEI’s foremost and very distinguished demographer, my long-ago colleague Nick Eberstadt, joined by several colleagues, has released a devastating analysis/critique of the much-cited OECD assertion that China’s K–12 education performance—based on PISA scores—
At peak enrollment in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, our local school system educated over 70,000 children. Now, in essentially the same facilities, it serves just over 34,000 children. The district has been experiencing a steady decline in student enrollment since the early 2000s, losing around 2 percent of our student population each year on average.
Ah, David Brooks. Ordinarily, I’d start a piece in which I plan to (partially) disagree with him by stating that he’s a very smart guy—but what I’m going to push back at this time is his much-disseminated contention that America needs to rethink what “smart” means. Even though his own qualities would likely still qualify under his new formulation, I ought not take chances.
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series about Montgomery County [Maryland] Public Schools (MCPS), the fifteenth largest district in the country. Part one covered curricular and related issues and is available here.
Around the turn of the millennium, Florida was widely regarded as a pace-setter in education reform.
Yes, choice itself is a form of accountability, but “customer satisfaction” isn’t enough when tax dollars are in play—even for private-school choice programs. The public has a right to know that participating students are gaining essential skills. To that end, this post discusses four tiers of escalating accountability and where state policy should land, depending on the amount of taxpayer dollars provided to individual schools, among other considerations.
In 1990, 48 percent of our nation’s eighth graders had very weak math skills. How did we know? They scored in the lowest performance category, Below Basic, on the national test given to a sample of American students every two years.[1]
The Greek poet Archilochus wrote that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Finn’s experience has made him more like the fox: as keen as ever to overhaul and revitalize American education, but having come to “knows many things” about that enterprise, is more a wary realist regarding its difficulty.
There is a large literature linking the quality of education to economic growth, and numerous economists and development agencies, including the
Rose Horowitch’s article in The Atlantic is getting lots of buzz.
Of the school choice options available to many U.S. families today, few embody the spirit of “power to the parents” quite like education savings accounts (ESAs).
Governor Glenn Youngkin is under fire again from Virginia’s education establishment, this time because a new school accountability system his administration is promoting refuses to put lipstick on a pig.
