Whatever you think of AI’s potential upsides, the most urgent questions around artificial intelligence in education have to do with minimizing harm. But the most important questions have to do with the future of work.
Public charter schools are one of the most enduring—and successful—educational innovations over the past three decades.
Schools cannot fix themselves unless society fixes segregation first.
Mary Lynn Pruneda, director of education and workforce policy at Texas 2036, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss Texas’s Teacher Incentive Allotment (TIA), a performance-based teacher pay program that rewards great teachers with higher pay, especially in high-need schools.
Over the summer, Edunomics Lab predicted that, once up and at scale, the federal tax credit scholarship (FSTC) could generate some $1,000 per public school student. However, now that Treasury has released its long-awaited draft regulations, we’re downgrading that prediction. It all comes down to an onerous requirement that public school participants prove they are not super rich.
On Monday, World Teachers’ Day, friends and relatives of the late Rod Paige released the trailer for a forthcoming film about his remarkable life and career. Titled Paragraphs of a Paige, the appetite-whetting trailer can be viewed here.
If you’ve paid even general attention to Texas education news over the past few years, you’ve likely heard some version of the phrase “local school districts being taken over by the state.” Maybe it registered as a Houston story, since that made statewide headlines.
If you want to be a faster runner, research says you should run more often and farther. I used this “run more” strategy over the past year and, I kid you not, my performance has improved quite drastically. Sometimes plain ol’ common sense is the answer to life’s many problems.
“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.
The push for no-zero grading policies, which prohibit assigning zeros for class assignments or tests, began during a broader “
Dual enrollment (DE) programs allow students to take college courses for credit—usually at no cost—while still in high school. Students must pass the course in order to earn credit. Efforts to increase DE access mean more high schoolers than ever are taking college courses.
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.
During my school years, I was often called a student who “could do better.” I took feedback seriously and tried to act on it. But one teacher had already made up his mind about me. He thought I was lazy and naughty. There was a reason for it, but somehow that single incident became my identity, and it showed up in my grades. I kept wondering how to get out of his bad books. I never did.
I have heard a number of leaders start discussions about AI with the question, “Are you for or against AI?”
When Nikole Hannah-Jones writes that her daughter finally told her, “Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me,” every parent who works in education should stop and sit with those words. I did.
My son is an NYC Teaching Fellow. This September, he is teaching special education middle school math in the Bronx.
For decades, teacher professional learning in middle and high school has prioritized one thing above all else: pedagogy.
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.
Public school funding is at record levels, but not enough money is making its way to teacher paychecks.
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.
Earlier this month, I released a report reviewing coursework at ten graduate schools of education across the country. I won’t rehearse the findings at length here.
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.
“The turbulent AI era is here.
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.
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.
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.
High school students report widespread screen distraction, AI misuse, and grading practices that make it easier to earn high marks without mastering the relevant material. A new Fordham survey suggests that we will only solve these problems by restoring the basic conditions for learning: attention, effort, honest work, and adults willing to hold adolescents to high expectations.
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.
In Fordham’s new survey of American high school students and recent graduates, less than half believe their school has realistic AI policies that keep up with the times.
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.
