Hiring a superintendent is the most important decision a school board makes. Superintendents are not just the district’s CEO. They are (or ought to be) the de facto chief academic officer, responsible for setting the instructional direction of the system.
It’s not often that a conservative education secretary and a progressive teachers union boss see eye to eye.
I’m a longtime zealot for school choice. I think students, families, schools, and communities benefit when we have a variety of education options and parents get to match their kids to learning environments.
2026 is a watershed moment for Chicago Public Schools (CPS).
For the better part of a decade, Natalie Wexler has helped reshape the conversation about American education.
The current system of residential assignment carries a lot of baggage. It also forces families into boxes where their largest investments (i.e., homes) are intrinsically tied to a single public school. This structure lacks the flexibility that should be afforded to students and their parents, especially as K–12 education is a deeply personal experience.
I still remember my elementary music teacher roaming the halls, pushing a cart overflowing with tambourines, recorders, and sheet music. This vibrant world was threatened, however, when I was in fourth grade as the district began discussing cuts to our music program.
High school graduation is often treated as the pivotal moment when one becomes an adult. But for many young people today, adulthood unfolds unevenly over time, through a mix of work, further education, financial pressure, stalled plans, and gradual independence.
Every year, schools invest immense sums of money in sports programs to cultivate the performance of students who show extraordinary athletic promise.
At this year’s SXSW EDU conference, the startup Apprentos stole the show, winning the “Launch Competition” with a slick pitch promising to “de-risk” apprenticeships for employers.
School leaders, teachers, and state policymakers all work to provide information to parents about the quality of education in their schools and about their own children’s academic performance. How do parents receive and—if needed—act on the information provided?
Only a quarter of Texas eighth graders go on to earn a degree or certificate six years after high school. As a former eighth grade teacher, I can’t help but think of my former students seeing these data.
This Thursday, the Montgomery County (Maryland) School Board is slated to vote on a proposal that would begin to address a long-festering problem in the state’s largest school district. The Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) system is, as a whole, wonderfully diverse, and yet for too long, many of its individual schools have been highly segregated.
The Trump administration has been shifting programs from the Department of Education to other parts of the federal government. This may be driven by politics, but it raises an intriguing question. What if the real issue is not whether the Department of Education survives intact, but whether some federal education programs might actually work better outside it?
Next month, my 11-year-old will join her classmates to take the state assessment.
In recent years, states and especially districts have turned to financial incentives to encourage high-performing
“We spend too much time on testing,” is a lament we hear often among Idaho educators. Surely it is a national sentiment as well.
Please don’t call a local public school a “government school.” It is part of the community, and it and its peers are worth celebrating, conserving, and cherishing, now and for years to come.
The simplest, most effective policy for improving U.S. schools and student outcomes might not be an “education policy” at all—but stronger government protections for young people from addictive products and services that now routinely reach adolescents.
I’ve worked at some rough schools. At one, as summer approached, my colleague and I reviewed the staff picture from September and counted that a third of the teachers who began in the fall had quit before the year’s end. We didn’t hold it against them.
March brings my favorite family pastime. Soon, the fanatics and ambivalent among us will fill out NCAA basketball brackets and tape them to the kitchen wall. My teen son will carefully analyze rankings for each team and stats for key players.
With updated reading policies on the books in over 40 states, ed policy advocates and legislators are now turning to math. Fourth grade NAEP math results are just as bad (if not worse), so why not take it on, as well? Bellwether has a nice round up of the current state of affairs.
Within ten years, a successful school or district will almost certainly experience at least one superintendent change, multiple principal transitions, substantial staff turnover, curriculum reviews and technology initiatives, school board elections, and shifts in funding or political priorities.
The United States is in a period of moral fragmentation and decay, and the extended family—the primary historical source of moral education—has given way to a nuclear family that is stretched thin and, in many cases, itself fractured.
Thank you, Amber! My colleague Amber Northern, Fordham’s longtime senior vice president for research, has done American education a great service by recommending a future for the Institute for Education Sciences that goes far beyond undoing the damage done by DOGE a year ago.
“In culture war backlash, Democrats sweep school boards,” Politico proclaimed after 2025’s low-visibility elections. The storyline was already written. The education right had been rejected; the fight, readers were meant to assume, was finished.
Earlier this month, I was having a conversation with a state leader I respect about why adoption of high-quality curriculum materials has been slow in their state. “Why not use the muscle of the state agency to speed things up?” I asked. “Because my state isn’t like Louisiana,” they said. “We’re a local-control state. I can’t just tell districts what to do.”
Education has never lacked miracle schools and stories. The real challenge isn’t identifying successful schools but learning how to recognize whether their success is institutional or temporary. So if we wanted to predict whether a school’s success will last, what should we look for?
If the medieval period was the age of faith, and the Enlightenment qualifies as the age of reason, what era are we living in now? Princeton’s Robbie George has an answer: the age of feeling.
Grade inflation is having a bit of a moment.
