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.
School choice has expanded and diversified over the last 30 years. No longer is it just “public vs. private” or even “district vs. charter vs.
In the education policy world, a “pathway” is typically a sequence of courses and experiences designed to set students up for long-term career success.
Aggressive immigration enforcement, including around schools, is leading many families to keep their kids home. Is it time for education reformers to join the #Resistance? Or should we work instead to find a narrow consensus around keeping schools open and safe?
Over the past decade or so, as the education reform movement has increasingly splintered along partisan lines, the number of people who support both charter schools and private school choice has shrunk to almost nothing. One cause of the growing divide is that some private school choice advocates are making demands that are increasingly outlandish.
Mississippi has earned well-deserved plaudits for its outsized literacy gains in recent years, ranking first
Texas is once again at the center of a familiar but unresolved debate about literacy, culture, and the proper role of schools.
When high schoolers pass Advanced Placement (AP) exams, they can earn college credits, making them more likely to complete college within four years and likely increasing their earnings in adulthood.
Over the next several weeks, more than 500,000 students across the country will take an updated version of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) in math and reading, but more improvements may be on the way.
Screens have fundamentally shifted how young minds process information, form connections, and understand the world around them. This presents schools with a stark choice: Do we struggle against the current and try to restore traditional expectations? Or do we acknowledge that those ships have sailed and adapt our systems to meet students where they are? The tempting middle path where schools try to do both may be the worst option of all.
Dear governor, Do you want to be remembered for your leadership on education? Your state may be spending nearly half its budget on schools, and yet test scores continue to fall, especially for the students who need the most help.
A recent study offers a new look at charter schools’ special education performance. The Michigan findings show that special education students performed better in charter schools than in traditional public schools.
Traditional school districts have increasingly embraced giving students more options within their systems in recent decades, in response to growing charter and private school competition and the desire of district parents for more specialized programs and services for their children.
Editor’s note: This was first published in SCHOOLED, Mike Petrilli’s Substack, which hosts weekly education-reform conversations around K–12’s biggest topics.
Today is one of the most hopeful times for Catholic education since the early 1960s, when tuitions started to rise and enrollments started their long decline. Today’s private-school choice programs solve that problem.
The grownups are fighting harder and louder than they have in years, both in words and deeds, about education, as well as everything else. Across the political spectrum, schools are treated not as civic institutions but as battlegrounds in a broader struggle over identity, power, and national belonging.
With more than 40 states having passed science-of-reading legislation, what comes next? What will make such laws succeed? Last month, we gathered a team of literacy and implementation experts to get their take. Here’s some of what we learned.
As 2025 drew to a close, the nation lost two leaders whose careers spanned very different worlds—but whose legacies converged around a shared conviction.
Last month, pundits debated the validity of Mississippi’s remarkable gains in student achievement.
2025 will be remembered for a lot of bad news outside of education, but inside our little sandbox of ed-reform, there’s plenty to be grateful for—and more light than darkness
In the 1990s, Sweden overhauled its public education system. Previously run almost entirely by local governments, public schools could now be operated either by districts or by private providers—similar to U.S. charter schools.
Our society is failing its most important task: fostering human flourishing. And schools aren’t helping. Far too many students graduate unprepared to think critically, navigate community, or develop the resilience needed to face life’s challenges.
Like the other elections that took place last month, the one that decided who would serve on the Albuquerque Public Schools Board was characterized by record turnout.
