From the statehouse to the classroom: The effects of early literacy policies on student achievement
The science of reading is thankfully supplanting dubious methods of teaching young children to read, as
The science of reading is thankfully supplanting dubious methods of teaching young children to read, as
Recent legislative efforts across the country have strengthened efforts to align reading instruction with the science of reading. These laws typically require teachers to use methods and materials aligned to the solid evidence base on how children best learn to read.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Tim Daly, the CEO of Ed Navigator, joins Mike to discuss the causes and harms of grade inflation—
Editor's note: This was first published on Eduwonk, the author's blog.
Over the weekend, the New York Times published a hard-hitting 2,300-word expose by Dana Goldstein and colleagues asking “Why is the College Board pushing to expand Advanced Placement?” Its primary answer: to rake in tens of millions of dollars a year and to support CEO David Coleman’s exorbitant sal
In my previous post, we defined grade inflation and reviewed (lots of) new evidence suggesting that it is a barrier to pandemic recovery—especially for less privileged students. Today, we will identify solutions.
“Excellence gaps,” or disparities in advanced academic performance between student groups, have important implications for both academic equity and American economic competitiveness.
After handily defeating his Republican rival for the governorship of red-hued Kentucky, Democrat Andy Beshear is having a moment as a center-left moderate who could run for president in 2028. But we education reformers should curb our enthusiasm because Beshear’s stances are alien to ours.
Since 2020, we’ve heard quite a lot about families’ growing influence over public schooling.
Editor’s note: This was first published by The Liberty Fund.
Previous literature on school quality and teacher quality largely assumes that good schools and good teachers are beneficial for all enrolled children, which means that a school’s “value added” is typically calculated as the average effect on students.
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.
Editor's note: This was first published on the author's Substack, The Education Daly.
The impact of school choice on traditional school districts, what scholars call its “competitive effects,” is an area in which there is much high-quality research. A new book critical of choice fails to wrestle with this fact.
Post-pandemic learning loss is a lot like the national deficit. It is huge, it is exacerbated by political divisions, and nothing that’s currently being done about it will come close to solving the problem.
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
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Natalie Wexler, host of the Knowledge Matters podcast, joins Mike to discuss the
Washington schools must now screen every elementary student for advanced education services, thanks to a law
Smartphones and social media are likely at least partly to blame for the teenage mental health epidemic that started around 2013. Is it possible that phones and social media might also be behind the plateauing and decline of student achievement that we’ve seen in America, also starting around 2013?
Welcome to the latest installment of the Regulation Wars, a long-running family quarrel that centers on the perceived tensions between two of the charter school movement’s founding principles: innovation and execution (or, if you prefer, autonomy and accountability).
Maybe it’s premature for an election that’s still a year away, and perhaps it’s archaic to expect to find any serious discussion of issues and policies in candidates’ campaign websites. Old-fashioned plodder that I am, however, I went foraging on those websites to see what I could find about their policy positions on education.
Schools across America continue struggling to help their students catch up following unprecedented learning losses resulting from pandemic school closures beginning in March 2020. It is vital—both to address current needs and to stash away for future use—to determine which methods work to boost student achievement.
Hysteria over students cheating via ChatGPT and other generative AI applications is so last year. This season’s hyperventilation-initiator is the potential for bias in AI. And well, there’s actually a lot to be worried about.
The New York Times recently covered the extraordinary academic achievement of Department of Defense schools, noting several factors that contribute to their success. But one important contributor—common values—was not mentioned.
Data indicate that, nationwide, roughly 20 percent of schools change principals in any given year, and that urban schools see a larger share of such changes.
In a new report and accompanying factsheet, authors Jason Bedrick, Jay Greene, and Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation look into
This summer the National Working Group on Advanced Education reported what many educators in the United States already know and experience: that the United States has been wasting an enormous amount of human potential and that man
One of the most important efforts in American education today is the project to displace the Carnegie Unit as the fundamental unit of measurement in high schools.
The claims from the field of education technology—“ed tech” to insiders—could hardly be more grandiose.
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.