The “college wage premium” is typically defined as the difference between average wages earned by workers with a four-year degree versus those earned by workers with a high school diploma. For decades, the premium for degree completers has been substantial, and remains so today.
For many years, the conventional wisdom in education reform circles was that teachers stopped improving after a few years on the job. This brief challenges that notion.
Editor’s note: This story was produced by The 74, a non-profit, independent news organization focused on education in America.
The granting of tenure typically occurs after K–12 teachers have worked three years in the classroom. In many places, that’s it, just time-in-harness.
Earlier this month, Dana Goldstein of the New York Times argued that both political parties have abandoned the ed-reform agenda. Michael Petrilli responds, offering a robust agenda that would actually bring marked improvements to public schools.
Earlier this month, I was flattered to be invited to a conference at Marquette University Law School, sparked by an article I’d written making the case that education reform has misfired by prioritizing testing, measurement, accountability, and other structural reforms instead of trying to improve classroom practice. It’s an argument I’ve made elsewhere and the theme of my Substack.
Pandemic school disruptions, frustrations with ineffective reading methods, and sinking test scores lit a fire under the nascent science of reading movement which has borne fruit
If discipline disparities are really driven primarily by bias and systemic racism, we would expect to see the largest disparities in states with the most regressive racial attitudes. Yet mapping the data reveals a strikingly different picture. What if it’s not racism that mostly explains racial discipline disparities, but socioeconomic factors?
On April 23, President Trump signed two executive orders that could significantly impact school discipline policies nationwide, as well as the federal government’s approach to civil rights investigations. The first is directly targets discipline; the second aims more broadly at the use of “disparate impact.” Petrilli has weighed in on these matters before, but given the news, it’s worth doing so again.
Can school districts still work to close persistent achievement gaps in an era when race-targeted interventions may violate federal law? That question is no longer hypothetical. The Trump administration now argues that using race—even to expand opportunity—constitutes discrimination under Title VI. This reframing casts efforts like targeted funding or DEI initiatives not as remedies for inequity, but as violations of the very laws once used to justify them.
On Tuesday, April 29, I gave the keynote presentation at an event titled “New Pathways for Teachers in the Age of School Choice,” hosted by the American Enterprise Institute and the University of Austin.
Early in my tenure at the education policy organization I founded, we barely had any money. No money meant no lobbyist, which left me, a complete stranger to the legislative process, to figure out how to pass meaningful policy.
Over the past few months, a quiet but intense debate has broken out among education-reform Democrats over whether the party should embrace private school choice—particularly the ESAs spreading kudzu-like across the country.
In April of 2022, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute launched the National Working Group on Advanced Education.
Over the past year, publications from Teen Vogue to the Associated Press have bemoaned students’ lack of reading stamina.
Three emerging issues—each unfolding in a different branch of government—offer a telling snapshot of where federal education policy could be headed. They involve religious charter schools, tax-credit scholarships, and ESSA waivers. On their own, each represents a flashpoint. Taken together, they provide a rare glimpse into the full machinery of federal influence—and a timely reminder that education policymaking in Washington still matters.
In this time of uncertainty and divisiveness, I’ll begin by thanking Robert Pondiscio for lifting up the AFT’s magazine, American Educator.
I appreciate and admire Randi Weingarten’s willingness to engage in a discussion about American Educator and the American Federation of Teacher’s role in education.
Ezra Klein’s new book has sparked an important discussion about how the left can provide more housing and transportation. However, one area that particularly needs self-reflection is education. The left has often obstructed the creation of new and innovative schools.
The AFT’s journal, The American Educator, was for many years a reliable source of first-rate research and practice tips for those who think teaching should run on evidence, not folklore and philosophy. It could still be an important engine of K–12 instructional reform today. All it would take is for Randi Weingarten and the AFT to give it some attention and visibility. Or failing that, just leave it the heck alone.
The Trump administration’s K–12 education policy prescriptions typically focus on ways to provide financial support for private schools, including federal vouchers and tax-credit scholarships.
Editor’s note: This is the first of two posts on what students do outside of school hours. For decades, field biologists tried to understand animals by observing them during the day. They’d sit in a jeep, holding a notebook, maybe wearing a funny hat. They observed what lions, elephants, or jaguars did under the sun.
According to a report issued by the OECD in 2018, school closures are an inevitable consequence of declining populations of school-age children across much of the world, and the United States is not im
Countless articles have been written about students’ recent bleak performance on the Nation’s Report Card, most of which rightly bemoaned declines in reading and math, compared to 2019 and 2022 scores, especially among lower-scoring students.
It is decision time for the high school class of 2025, with commitments due to colleges by May 1. Among the many factors that students might consider when deciding whether a college is the right fit for them is the political climate on campus. Simply put, are both liberals and conservatives relatively well represented in the student body?
Red states are lining up to test just how much leeway they can get from Uncle Sam’s education mandates, with some pushing for block grants that would allow them to consolidate federal aid into a single grant with few spending restrictions.
It’s a bleak time in education policy.
The writer Freddie deBoer makes one really important point about the ed reform movement: We have overpromised and underdelivered because we ignore the obvious truth that some kids are smarter than others. Where he’s wrong is in thinking that this one good point makes the whole reform enterprise a waste of time.
The latest Nation’s Report Card dashed hopes that U.S. students might have finally closed pandemic learning gaps. The results show reading scores are down nationally in both fourth and eighth grade, compounding declines on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP.
The pandemic gave the country a chance to rethink how states and school districts deliver quality education.
