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
Opponents make lots of arguments against education savings accounts, tax-credit scholarship programs, and other forms of private school choice. But the complaint that schools aren’t required to test their students is generally false. We dig in and set the record straight
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 Supreme Court agreed on Friday afternoon to hear a landmark religious charter schools case out of Oklahoma, and it’s a much bigger deal than you might imagine.
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.
President-elect Donald Trump is about to return to Washington with a ragtag coalition, united in their rejection of the status quo. Yet this shared opposition has also led to a rash of infighting over a range of policy issues.
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.
After more than a decade of trying to launch some form of education savings account/tax credit program for parent choice, it looks like Idaho’s legislature is likely to pass legislation this year to get it done.
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—
The Founding Fathers never envisioned that executive orders would be a major policymaking tool, circumventing legislative and executive deliberations, political stalemates, and partisanship. But recent history has deemed them essential levers if there is to be urgent action on the most important matters of the day.
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.
One of the most interesting and significant findings about charter schools in the last decade—outside of the fact that they tend to outperform traditional public schools (TPS)—is that growin
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]
