For the better part of a decade, Natalie Wexler has helped reshape the conversation about American education.
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.
As teachers embrace and incorporate AI tools, the technology poses a number of risks. But there is also hope that forward-thinking teachers may uncover replicable, scalable strategies for deploying it to make the job more manageable and free up time to build the relationships with students that matter so much for learning.
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.
For teachers, artificial intelligence can be a boon as well as a challenge.
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.
The rise of AI has caused anxiety about the future of writing instruction. If the technology can write—or help people write—quickly and coherently on nearly any topic, and will likely get better and better at this, do we still need to teach students how to write?
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.
Like many other teachers, I took the traditional route into the profession, pursuing an undergraduate degree in education.
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.
Teen cinema has always laughed at the try-hard.
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.
Principals play a crucial role in managing teacher quality, including hiring, developing, and retaining effective staff while also addressing low-performing teachers.
The end of race-based affirmative action and persistent gaps in enrollment and degree attainment among students from low-income backgrounds have intensified
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.
