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.
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.
The International Baccalaureate’s longest-lived and most rigorous iteration, the Diploma Program, remains widely misunderstood and under-covered in the U.S., even among those of us who work in and around advanced education. That’s a problem for a program that exists in almost 1,000 high schools and educates nearly 100,000 teenagers.
Are today’s schools anti-boy? Increasing numbers of people, with various political orientations, seem to believe that the answer is yes. Thanks in large part to Richard Reeves, boys’ educational and other deficits are finally getting deserved attention.
In the education policy world, a “pathway” is typically a sequence of courses and experiences designed to set students up for long-term career success.
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.
“What if the valedictorians in America’s schools were the cool kids?” This is the question Nicholas Kristof posed in his recent column in The New York Times, imagining a culture in the U.S. where academic excellence carries the same social prestige as it does in some East Asian countries.
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.
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
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.
A steady stream of recent research has reported on the pandemic’s disparate effects on education. Unsurprisingly, lost learning time hurt children, particularly those who needed the most support.
Screens have fundamentally shifted how young minds process information, form connections, and understand the world around them. This presents schools with a stark choice: Do we struggle against the current and try to restore traditional expectations? Or do we acknowledge that those ships have sailed and adapt our systems to meet students where they are? The tempting middle path where schools try to do both may be the worst option of all.
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.
Today is one of the most hopeful times for Catholic education since the early 1960s, when tuitions started to rise and enrollments started their long decline. Today’s private-school choice programs solve that problem.
The grownups are fighting harder and louder than they have in years, both in words and deeds, about education, as well as everything else. Across the political spectrum, schools are treated not as civic institutions but as battlegrounds in a broader struggle over identity, power, and national belonging.
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.
In the past few months, there has been much rending of cloths and gnashing of teeth over the decline in classroom book reading (see here, here,
Economist Joel Mokyr, who won the Nobel Prize in 2025, asks why some societies generate sustained economic growth while others, with seemingly similar resources and institutions, do not. At a time of great uncertainty about our social and economic progress, his question feels urgent.
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
