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.
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
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.
Back in 2015, three Ohio community colleges launched The Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP), a comprehensive suite of supports meant to help new community college students persist in school and complete a degree in three years or less. Across three studies, evaluation partner MDRC has tracked longer-term outcomes via a randomized controlled trial. It just released a fourth.
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?
It’s a bleak time in education policy.
Education savings accounts (ESAs) are taxpayer-funded spending accounts with differing eligibility requirements and usage guidelines depending on the state. Between the 2021–22 and 2022–23 school years, participation in them nearly tripled nationally, rising to roughly 489,000 total students.
Academic skills alone are not enough for students to find success later in life, whether in their career specifically or in their broader participation in s
Oregon professor Siegfried Engelmann wasn’t your typical education guru. He didn’t peddle feel-good platitudes or promote classroom fads—he treated teaching like a hard science, and he built Direct Instruction (DI) to prove it.
Earlier this month, the U.S.
Project STAR (Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio) is a widely-known experiment comparing class-size reduction and student achievement outcomes, conducted in the 1980s in Tennessee.
When we talk about achievement and discipline gaps in education, we customarily focus on teaching quality, school funding, and student behavior. But what if some of these disparities have less to do with what teachers or students are doing and more to do with something as basic as air conditioning?
Jill Barshay of The Hechinger Report, one of the better education journalists working today, recently raised concerns about the empirical support for knowledge-rich curricula in improving reading comprehension. But the issue is not a lack of compelling evidence—there is prodigious evidence—but rather the difficulty of isolating long-term curricular effects in research.
In recent years, school choice has made impressive strides. Eleven states have codified universal or near-universal private school choice programs.
Scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were released on January 29. How were they?
A valuable recent edition of the Journal of School Choice focused entirely on research around homeschooling, aiming to add useful data and rigorous analysis to this little-studied education sector.
Editor’s note: This was first published by The 74.
The gender gap in education is less talked about than many other achievement gaps, but it persists.
While some aspects of the putative
If DOGE actually sought the “government efficiency” in its name, it could help modernize the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. But slashing and burning, as happened the other day, won’t improve matters. It’s just going to weaken the foremost truth squad in American education, the chief sponsor and funder of rigorous analysis, reliable data, and clear-eyed evaluations in a realm that needs more of those things, not less.
The data are out, and as everybody now knows—and as Mike Petrilli foresaw—they’re pretty grim. Here’s the short version, straight from the National Center for Education Statistics:
Ignite Reading is one of many tutoring interventions unleashed upon America’s schools to try to mitigate learning loss experienced by students in the wake of pandemic-era school closures.
Despite working longer hours and experiencing higher levels of stress
Editor’s note: This piece was also published on the author’s new Substack, The Next 30 Years.
When I graduated from high school, the first charter schools in America were just opening their doors. But I have advocated for, worked with, and supported their right to serve families for more than twenty years now.
Remedial courses can soak up time and money (with often poor results), but federal
The forthcoming results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress—due out on January 29—are likely to be bad, bad, bad. The term we may hear a lot is that “the bottom is falling out,” if the scores for low-performing students in particular continue to plummet.
