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
Academic skills alone are not enough for students to find success later in life, whether in their career specifically or in their broader participation in s
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Charles Baron
Oregon professor Siegfried Engelmann wasn’t your typical education guru. He didn’t peddle feel-good platitudes or promote classroom fads—he treated teaching like a hard science, and he built Direct Instruction (DI) to prove it.
Earlier this month, the U.S.
Project STAR (Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio) is a widely-known experiment comparing class-size reduction and student achievement outcomes, conducted in the 1980s in Tennessee.
When we talk about achievement and discipline gaps in education, we customarily focus on teaching quality, school funding, and student behavior. But what if some of these disparities have less to do with what teachers or students are doing and more to do with something as basic as air conditioning?
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Jing
Jill Barshay of The Hechinger Report, one of the better education journalists working today, recently raised concerns about the empirical support for knowledge-rich curricula in improving reading comprehension. But the issue is not a lack of compelling evidence—there is prodigious evidence—but rather the difficulty of isolating long-term curricular effects in research.
In recent years, school choice has made impressive strides. Eleven states have codified universal or near-universal private school choice programs.
Scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were released on January 29. How were they?
A valuable recent edition of the Journal of School Choice focused entirely on research around homeschooling, aiming to add useful data and rigorous analysis to this little-studied education sector.
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
Editor’s note: This was first published by The 74.
The gender gap in education is less talked about than many other achievement gaps, but it persists.
While some aspects of the putative
If DOGE actually sought the “government efficiency” in its name, it could help modernize the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. But slashing and burning, as happened the other day, won’t improve matters. It’s just going to weaken the foremost truth squad in American education, the chief sponsor and funder of rigorous analysis, reliable data, and clear-eyed evaluations in a realm that needs more of those things, not less.
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:
Ignite Reading is one of many tutoring interventions unleashed upon America’s schools to try to mitigate learning loss experienced by students in the wake of pandemic-era school closures.
Despite working longer hours and experiencing higher levels of stress
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Tim Daly, CEO of EdNavigator, joins Mike and David to discuss w
Editor’s note: This piece was also published on the author’s new Substack, The Next 30 Years.
When I graduated from high school, the first charter schools in America were just opening their doors. But I have advocated for, worked with, and supported their right to serve families for more than twenty years now.
Remedial courses can soak up time and money (with often poor results), but federal
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 going to give you a reading test. Ready? Say these words out loud: Chip Hill Jars Bep Fod Glork
Allowing families to express their preferences for various schools—whether inside or beyond their geographically-zoned building or district—sounds good in theory. Indeed, we’ve been hearing for decades that a zip code should never determine the quality of a child’s education.
