Dr. Amber Northern, Fordham’s longtime research chief, has been tapped to redesign the Institute of Education Sciences at the U.S. Department of Education. As she begins this important work, Checker Finn outlines the history of IES, highlighting progress, shortcomings, and the challenges she faces in this new role
In a new study, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis use nine years of student-level data from public high schools in St. Louis and the surrounding suburbs to estimate the effects of in-school suspension (ISS) and out-of-school suspension (OSS) on a student’s probability of transferring to another school.
Ask most people where student achievement is strongest, and they’ll point to the Northeast: Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut—the usual suspects. And that’s been mostly true. These states have stronger tax bases and serve (on average) wealthier populations. They have long invested more in public education and built systems to protect it.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott recently signed into law a universal education savings account program, breaking through years of legislative resistance.
If discipline disparities are really driven primarily by bias and systemic racism, we would expect to see the largest disparities in states with the most regressive racial attitudes. Yet mapping the data reveals a strikingly different picture. What if it’s not racism that mostly explains racial discipline disparities, but socioeconomic factors?
What matters more when we evaluate a school’s contribution to a child’s future: reading and math test scores or students’ opinions about its academic environment?
NCES and IES, as we’ve known them, are unlikely to return. While that’s regrettable in many respects, it also opens the door to build something stronger—an independent entity that can carry forward NCES’s essential mission without being subject to political impulses and whims of the day. And importantly, we wouldn’t be starting from scratch.
Can school districts still work to close persistent achievement gaps in an era when race-targeted interventions may violate federal law? That question is no longer hypothetical. The Trump administration now argues that using race—even to expand opportunity—constitutes discrimination under Title VI. This reframing casts efforts like targeted funding or DEI initiatives not as remedies for inequity, but as violations of the very laws once used to justify them.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Scott Marion, Executive Director of the Center for Assessment, joins Mike and
Countless articles have been written about students’ recent bleak performance on the Nation’s Report Card, most of which rightly bemoaned declines in reading and math, compared to 2019 and 2022 scores, especially among lower-scoring students.
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.
