National Curriculum & Instruction

Displaying 241-270 of 1592 results

Commentary

5.8.2025

Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Private School Choice, Teachers & School Leaders

Dear Democrats, Republicans are eating your lunch on education. What are you going to do about it?

Rachel Canter

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.

Commentary

5.8.2025

Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction

The long-term impacts of an Ohio community college student support program

Jeff Murray

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.

Commentary

5.2.2025

Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

Creating optimal conditions for advanced learners

Jackie Drummer

In April of 2022, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute launched the National Working Group on Advanced Education.

Commentary

5.1.2025

Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Want high schoolers to read books? Support teachers to make it happen.

Meredith Coffey, Ph.D.

Over the past year, publications from Teen Vogue to the Associated Press have bemoaned students’ lack of reading stamina.

Commentary

4.17.2025

Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Meeting the moment: A response to Robert Pondiscio’s essay on AFT’s "American Educator"

Randi Weingarten

In this time of uncertainty and divisiveness, I’ll begin by thanking Robert Pondiscio for lifting up the AFT’s magazine, American Educator.

Commentary

4.17.2025

Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Answering Randi Weingarten

Robert Pondiscio

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.

Commentary

4.11.2025

School Finance, Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Private School Choice, Teachers & School Leaders

Can the left deliver education abundance?

Danyela Souza Egorov

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.

Commentary

4.10.2025

Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

How the AFT could have changed teaching and learning (and maybe still can)

Robert Pondiscio

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.

Commentary

4.10.2025

Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Short- and long-term impacts of school closure on student outcomes

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D.

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

Commentary

4.3.2025

Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

12 guiding principles for the future of American education

Chad Aldeman

It’s a bleak time in education policy.

Commentary

3.27.2025

Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Freddie deBoer is right about one thing, not everything

Michael J. Petrilli

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.

Commentary

3.27.2025

Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

New Nation’s Report Card disappoints—but shouldn’t surprise

Martin R. West

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.

Commentary

3.27.2025

Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

The pandemic was a Sputnik moment for rethinking education, and we blew it

Robin Lake, Paul T. Hill

The pandemic gave the country a chance to rethink how states and school districts deliver quality education.

Commentary

3.21.2025

Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

Should special education include advanced students?

Alina Adams

Editor’s note: A different version of this essay was first published by The 74.

Commentary

3.12.2025

School Finance, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Should schools pay students to attend remediation programs?

Alina Adams

When my middle child was in high school, nothing I said or did could keep him from dropping out. But what if I’d tried paying him?

Commentary

3.12.2025

Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Barriers to teaching and assessing “soft skills”

Heena Kuwayama

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

Commentary

3.6.2025

Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Three good reasons teachers shouldn’t D.I.Y. their lessons (and shouldn’t be asked to)

Robert Pondiscio

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.

Commentary

3.6.2025

Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Defunding the teacher trainers

Frederick M. Hess

Earlier this month, the U.S.

Commentary

3.6.2025

Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction

Did the most well-known and influential study in K–12 education get it wrong?

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D.

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.

Students raising their hands in a school classroom

Commentary

2.27.2025

Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction

There is proof that knowledge works. And it’s overwhelming.

Robert Pondiscio

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.

Commentary

2.27.2025

Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction

Examining a new method of estimating homeschool participation

Jeff Murray

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.

Commentary

2.20.2025

Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

A bold state move to improve reading

Emily Freitag

When I started teaching in Louisiana in 2004, I was told that the state was expanding annual assessments of students to all grades 3–8 because Louisiana ranked forty-ninth in the country for reading proficiency. I started to hear a gutting phrase that I’ve since learned is common across the southeast, “the only state behind us is Mississippi. Thank goodness for Mississippi.”

Commentary

2.20.2025

Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

The state of pandemic learning loss recovery

Jeff Murray

The third iteration of the Education Recovery Scorecard, compiled by Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research, was released hot on the heels of 2024 NAEP test scores and is an

Commentary

2.13.2025

Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

The impact of advanced education on underprivileged boys

Adam Tyner, Ph.D.

The gender gap in education is less talked about than many other achievement gaps, but it persists.

Commentary

2.6.2025

Curriculum & Instruction

A new picture of modern homeschooling in America

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D.

A special issue of the Journal of School Choice is now out, focusing entirely on homeschooling research. It includes 16 studies from 23 authors at more than a dozen institutions. Hard data on homeschooling has long been scarce, so this issue is worthy of attention.

Podcast

2.5.2025

Curriculum & Instruction

#955: Critical race theory: The student perspective with Brian Kisida

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Brian Kisida, Associate Professor at

Commentary

1.30.2025

Curriculum & Instruction, Governance

Trump should stay out of what students learn in school

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Though President Trump’s new executive order “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” contains many elements that resonate with me philosophically and educationally, I’m having trouble reconciling it with the longstanding statutory prohibition on Uncle Sam mucking with

Commentary

1.30.2025

Curriculum & Instruction

The case for storytelling in the history curriculum

Matthew Levey

From its founding, the lodestone of the Knowledge Matters Campaign has been evidence-based, content-rich English language arts (ELA) curricula. A possible unintended consequence of the success of this movement has been reduced instruction in science and social studies.

Commentary

1.30.2025

Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Outcomes of a virtual literacy tutoring intervention in Massachusetts

Jeff Murray

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.

Commentary

1.30.2025

Evidence-Based Learning, School Finance, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Can setting a teacher salary floor improve student performance across a state?

Heena Kuwayama

Despite working longer hours and experiencing higher levels of stress