Governance

Displaying 1-30 of 1405 results
Student outside school with a backpack
Commentary
10.2.2026
Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

My son needed to leave his school, but I did not: A reflection on Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay

Selim Tlili

“What we’re going to do for our kids’ education” might be the single most common discussion I have had in my social life as a parent. Like many parents in NYC and across the country, I was captivated by Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay in the New York Times. Parents are constantly asking themselves, “Have I done right by my kid” when it comes to education.

Student outside school with a backpack
Rocky terrain
Commentary
10.1.2026
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

The uneven ground of the no-zero grading policy landscape

Kennedy Sundberg

The push for no-zero grading policies, which prohibit assigning zeros for class assignments or tests, began during a broader “

Rocky terrain
Nikole Hannah-Jones
Commentary
10.1.2026
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

The lessons we’re not learning from Nikole Hannah-Jones

Robert Pondiscio

I’m going to be impatient and blunt: Nikole Hannah-Jones’s daughter did not fail to learn fractions because she and her classmates were Black. Her teacher did not repeatedly fail to show up to work because the school was segregated. Neither did her assignments go ungraded because affluent children attended school elsewhere.

Nikole Hannah-Jones
Teacher and student with a laptop
Commentary
9.28.2026
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Bans aren’t the answer

Emily Freitag

I have heard a number of leaders start discussions about AI with the question, “Are you for or against AI?”

Teacher and student with a laptop
Empty classroom
Commentary
9.24.2026
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Teach For America was once a movement. What happened?

Dale Chu

This year, Teach For America marks its 35th anniversary. Few organizations have shaped education reform so profoundly. It produced not only achievement gains among students, but also an elite talent pipeline of TFA alumni. In recent years, however, those laudable outcomes have receded as the organization shifted its mission into more ideological terrain. Recent trends present an opportunity for Teach For America to rediscover what once made it so effective.

Empty classroom
Contract signing
Commentary
9.24.2026
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Governance

How long should charter school contract terms be?

Jeff Murray

A defining feature of charter schools is the oversight structure provided by the authorizer. It is an authorizer’s job to determine whether schools are fulfilling the terms of their charters across numerous areas, not least of which is student outcomes.

Contract signing
Slow road sign
Commentary
9.22.2026
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

How states can slow the staffing surge

Aaron Garth Smith

Public school funding is at record levels, but not enough money is making its way to teacher paychecks.

Slow road sign
U-turn
Commentary
9.18.2026
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

We’ve been treating college as a career plan, but it’s failing too many students

Patrick O’Donnell

In one of Denver’s wealthiest suburbs, where median family income tops $150,000 and nearly every kid is expected to go to college, students are now lining up for trade certifications. Their parents aren’t worried; in fact, most of them are championing the move.

U-turn
Fork in the road
Commentary
9.17.2026
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

College or career? On false positives and negatives

Matthew Carr

The backlash against “college for all” was overdue, but policymakers shouldn’t replace one flawed approach with another. Academic performance in high school can predict whether students will succeed in college, but it cannot tell us whether college—or another pathway—will leave a particular student better off. Better advising can help teenagers weigh each route’s tradeoffs.

Fork in the road
C grade on a chalkboard
Commentary
9.17.2026
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Governance

What state standards look like on the NAEP scale

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) regularly publishes reports using results from NAEP testing to compare the proficiency standards that states set for their students.

C grade on a chalkboard
Clock and money jar
Commentary
9.17.2026
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

How money and time shape children’s early advantages

Kendall Rogers

The importance of childhood investments to the trajectory of life is commonly accepted, but less is known about the size and sources of disparities in these investments.

Clock and money jar
9/11 Memorial
Commentary
9.11.2026
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

The strange education legacy of 9/11

Dale Chu

The strange education legacy of 9/11 was, in many ways, an accident of history. The attacks helped propel an ambitious national education agenda into law, even as the political coalition behind it eventually unraveled. Twenty-five years later, the pandemic revealed just how far the country had moved from the consensus that once united reformers.

9/11 Memorial
Alpha School
Commentary
9.11.2026
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Private School Choice, Teachers & School Leaders

Alpha School’s Theranos problem

Van Schoales

I was recently walking around Austin, Texas. And a block from the new W Hotel, I passed Alpha School, housed in what looked like a tech office. Outside was a sign reading “Kids crush academics in two hours, build life skills, and thrive,” under a big photo of the founder.

Alpha School
Graduate
Commentary
9.10.2026
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

What Massachusetts’s portrait of a learner gets right (and New York’s doesn’t)

Meredith Coffey, Ph.D.

When I taught high school in Virginia in the early 2020s, I was only vaguely aware of the existence of something called “portrait of a graduate.” Whatever this portrait was, it didn’t seem to impact my daily work, so it didn’t capture my attention. On the other hand, I knew my IB courses and our state assessments backward and forward. Those shaped what we did in the classroom.

Graduate
Empty school desk
Commentary
9.10.2026
School Finance, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Fewer students, more dollars, and harder choices

Mike McShane

At the beginning of the movie The Big Short, there is a title card with the epigram, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” It attributes the quote to Mark Twain. Ironically, there isn’t any proof that Twain actually said or wrote that.

Empty school desk
Hands shaking
Commentary
9.3.2026
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Education got there first? The breakdown of traditional left-right delineations.

Andrew J. Rotherham

Education is rarely accused of being ahead of the curve. We’re usually the last to get the memo. Just consider how K–12 education delivery has been one of the few large sectors of the American economy not really disrupted by technology—it’s an open question whether that will even happen in the AI era. We treat things that are long settled in the literature as “who knows” jump balls.

Hands shaking
Graduation
Commentary
9.3.2026
School Finance, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Examining outcomes-based contracting in eight pilot districts

Jeff Murray

Contracted or purchased services (tutoring, professional development, after-school care, etc.) constitute the second-largest category of school district expenditures after staff compensation. They add up to tens of billions of dollars each year.

Graduation
3 checkmarks on a chalkboard
Commentary
8.28.2026
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

The three prongs of education reform success: Policy, programs, and political perseverance

Patricia Levesque

Mississippi’s ongoing early literacy success was originally dubbed a miracle. Now we’re calling it a marathon. That’s a more accurate description, but it still doesn’t do justice to the years and years of sustained work it’s taken to catapult the state from the back of the pack to leading on reading—and to keep those results going strong.

3 checkmarks on a chalkboard
Child upset while reading
Commentary
8.27.2026
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

The loophole quietly undoing America's third-grade reading laws

Harry Anthony Patrinos

More than a dozen states now require that third graders who can’t read at grade level repeat the grade rather than advance to fourth, where every subject assumes literacy. The theory is sound. But in state after state, exemptions meant for a narrow set of students are being granted so widely that the policies aren’t benefiting the students they were designed for.  

Child upset while reading
Students walking to school
Commentary
8.27.2026
Evidence-Based Learning, School Finance, Charter Schools, Governance, Private School Choice

The supply side of school choice: Who participates? Who doesn’t?

Mike McShane

“If you build it, they will come” makes a great tagline for a mythical baseball movie but a poor strategy for educational improvement. Markets are not magic and are shaped by external factors that encourage or discourage participation.

Students walking to school
Classroom
Commentary
8.20.2026
Charter Schools, Governance, Private School Choice

Can charter schools survive universal school choice?

Daniel Buck

Echoing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s sentiments distancing herself from wokeness, a common sentiment among reformers seems to be that the bipartisan education reform era was “craazzy.” Standardized testing pep rallies, the glorified grant writing beauty pageant called Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, guarantees of

Classroom