The American dream is still alive and can be achieved in just one generation, even among the most economically disadvantaged young people. That finding is among the most promising takeaways from new research produced by Harvard University’s Raj Chetty and his collaborators.
Editor’s note: This was first published by The 74. Say your boss gives you an unexpected bonus at work. Would you save the money, make those home upgrades you’ve been putting off or splurge on a nice vacation?
The macro trend that will have the greatest impact on the American education system over the next decade or two is our declining birth rate and the resulting enrollment crisis facing many public schools. We have too many schools for too few kids and, as a result, thousands of schools are going to need to close. But what we don’t have are enough excellent schools, and therefore the charter sector should keep growing anyway.
Rose Horowitch’s article in The Atlantic is getting lots of buzz.
Rates of student misbehavior remain elevated compared to pre-Covid levels. Pandemic-era disruptions, broader societal disorder and crime rates, and social media are also plausible explanations. But so is “discipline reform,” a set of policies and practices that many schools embraced over the past decade. Its tenets: talk to those kids, pursue “restorative justice,” or ignore their poor behavior. But never impose a consequence.
A few years ago, I taught a high school seminar class in civics and democracy at a New York charter school. My goal for the course was for students to see that the U.S. Constitution isn’t an ancient, dusty document, but an enduring set of principles, deeply woven into their lives and the headlines they read every day.
A 6,000 student Midwestern district recently adopted a budget that would result—if all goes according to plan—in a $13.2 million deficit, or more than $2,000 per student. This follows $10 million shortfalls in each of the previous two years. Cash is dwindling.
Eschewing the traditional September start to the new school year (or, at most, mid-August), some Richmond, Virginia, public schools kicked off the 2024–25 academic calendar on July 22.
Houston’s local ABC news affiliate recently ran a report that the Houston Independent School District, Texas’s largest, has more than 2,000 uncertified teachers (out of a teaching force of approximately 10,000).
Editor’s note: This was first published by The 74.
As a candidate for president in 2020, Kamala Harris introduced a plan to raise teacher salaries by $13,500.
Kamala Harris’s presidential acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention promised Americans “an opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and the chance to succeed.” But working-class Americans are glum about their economic position today and what this promise means for them.
As another school year begins, I have been struck by the many different ways leaders and educators talk about instructional materials. At meet-the-teacher nights or staff meetings to explain the move to a new curriculum or in board meetings to explain plans for the year, educators often talk about the role the curriculum will play with bold claims. I have heard:
For ten years, veteran education reformer Kathleen Porter-Magee led Partnership Schools, an independent charter-like management organization that ran Catholic schools on behalf of the archdiocese of New York and, currently, Cleveland. She recently announced that she was stepping down. Here she discusses the lessons she learned.
Despite an unprecedented infusion of resources, the latest data show that American students are struggling to recover
Society as a whole has largely bounced back from the dark days of the pandemic, but life inside our schools is arguably worse than ever. Attendance is dismal. Cheating is pervasive. Cell phones are everywhere. Disorder abounds. And for all these reasons and more, kids are learning less than they were back before the plague struck. The right way to respond is to embrace tough love. That means, first and foremost, again holding students accountable for their behavior.
Over the past six months, I’ve had an extended conversation about “equitable grading” with Joe Feldman, the author of Grading for Equity (see here,
For years, researchers have pointed to the quality of educators as the key to school performance.
The demographic makeup of America’s K–12 students is steadily changing, with schools nationwide welcoming increasingly diverse cohorts of young learners.
When it comes to the current storm of concern over student cellphones in schools, the conventional wisdom is that it’s educators on one side versus p
Fordham’s new study by Paul L. Morgan and Eric Hengyu Hu, "Explaining Achievement Gaps: The Role of Socioeconomic Factors," raises as many questions as it answers. Among them: How can we explain the different patterns for the Black-White achievement gap for reading, on the one hand, and math and science, on the other? Why does SES explain so much more of the Hispanic-White gap than the Black-White gap? And what’s the role of family structure in explaining the Black-White and Hispanic-White gaps?
Classical education is undergoing a renaissance. According to a recent analysis by Arcadia Education, the classical sector is growing by 5 percent annually with a total projected enrollment of 1.4 million students by 2035.
As a teacher both during and immediately after the pandemic, I was constantly on the receiving end of some version of: “You must be so relieved that the pandemic is over.” My response was always: “Actually, it has only gotten worse.” And it’s not just me.
Racial achievement gaps in schools are well documented and remain a significant cause of concern in education. Troubling too is that the role of socioeconomic disparities in mediating these gaps remains unresolved.
“Come see me in the office.” Uh oh. I probably got caught teaching again.
Just when I thought that book ban debates were so last year—gone the way of critical race theory or the Common Core, subsumed by the latest controversy over Title IX or Project 2025—it seems those grouchy conservatives are at it again.
A recent article in the Boston Globe dug into a controversy that is dogging Massachusetts’s highly-regarded system of regional career and technical education (CTE) high schools.
Despite the growing diversity of American students, the teaching workforce remains disproportionately White. A recent study uses twelve years of administrative data from Maryland to examine the factors contributing to the state's chronic shortage of Black teachers.
As regular readers know, I’m a parent of two children enrolled in Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS).
By now, we’re well familiar with critiques of standardized testing opponents: tests rob schools of critical instructional time, encourage teaching to the test, place undue pressure on students and educators to perform, are educationally irrelevant, only provide a snapshot of student achievement at a specific moment in time, and are largely driven by family income levels, parents’ education, and
