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.
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.
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?
Across the United States, a representative sample of thousands of fourth, eighth, and twelfth grade students has begun sitting for the National Assessment of Educational Progress. NAEP is administered independently of state-level standards but presents state- and national-level results.
In this first entry in a three-part series, Pondiscio tackles American education’s failure to learn from its success stories. The problem is not that we’re incurious about successful schools—it’s which models we seek to learn from and the lessons we take from them.
Like many people, when I entered the world of education policy, I encountered a trove of education research that was new to me but that largely tracked with my prior experiences as a teacher.
The rollout of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in 2010 began as a widely applauded, bipartisan policy aimed at providing an accessible curriculum focused on conceptual understanding that could form the foundation for K–12 education content for the next generation.
Five months after the launch of ChatGPT, Sal Kahn, the founder of the online learning giant Kahn Academy, predicted that, “We’re at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen.” As of now, this appears to have been an aspirational proclamation made with
It was a big January for my Hoosier family. I grew up in Bobby Knight’s Indiana, so IU’s incredible football National Championship win is a big deal in my home state.
There’s plenty of evidence that average grades,
Students with disabilities make up almost 15 percent of K–12 students in the U.S. These students have long been underrepresented in charter schools, which may offer different (or fewer) special education services than traditional public schools.
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.
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.
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.
It is no secret that the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted K–12 education in the United States.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Across the country, tens of thousands of high-achieving children are sitting at their desks, waiting for the challenge they deserve. But for many—and above all for those from low-income families—that wait won’t end.
There is a widely-held belief that the foremost mission of American public education is to provide a pathway to success for every student, including those who face considerable life obstacles. However, persistent achievement gaps along dimensions of race, income, family education level, and other factors challenge the truth—or at least the practicality—of this conviction.
As states continue to confront abysmal post-pandemic attendance patterns, understanding why students miss school has become increasingly impo
