What we're reading this week: January 4, 2024
After a year spent campaigning for the issue, deal cutting, and threats of primary challenges, Greg Abbott failed to pass school choice legislation.
After a year spent campaigning for the issue, deal cutting, and threats of primary challenges, Greg Abbott failed to pass school choice legislation.
This year marked the fortieth anniversary of “A Nation at Risk,” the seminal report that did so much to reshape America’s modern education landscape.
Every week in the Education Gadfly, we flag a handful of news items for our “Cheers and Jeers” section. Here are the ten most fantastic or horrendous developments of the year that was, presented in chronological order. Best
Every week in the Education Gadfly, we flag a handful of articles in our “What We’re Reading” section. Mostly these are opinion pieces, usually from leading newspapers and magazines, or occasionally high-profile Substacks. Here’s our list of our favorites for the year, presented in chronological order.
The venerable hosts of the Education Gadfly show have been winging it for seventeen years.
A new Rand Corporation survey finds that roughly three in ten teachers thinks that their school’s curriculum is too difficult for students. —Education Week
Since the Spring of 2022, I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with Homero Chavez as part of the National Working Group on Advanced Education.
Earlier this year, Jill Kafka, the tireless Executive Director of Partnership Schools, announced that she is stepping down after twenty-seven years of dedicated service.
The welcome rise of the science of reading has been a sober reckoning for teachers and administrators. It also raises uncomfortable questions, seldom asked: How much faith should parents have that their child’s school and teachers understand good literacy instruction? And how much do parents need to know to advocate for their children and raise strong readers?
Many futuristic reformers love to hate the classroom.
Peer effects and social pressure are major factors in the success of high-performing schools like Stuyvesant High School in New York City.
The results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) are in—an international standardized test of fifteen-year-olds and the first look at how countries compare post-pandemic—and the picture they paint of American education is disheartening. Here are four trends that you need to know: 1. U.S. math scores collapsed and reading stagnated.
Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, The Education Daly. They’re coming for the kids’ phones. Who is “they”?
Despite the amount of attention that school choice receives in the media and among policy wonks, politicians, and adult interest groups, the extent of actual competition in major school districts is not well understood. We were curious: Which education markets in America are the most competitive? And which markets have education reformers and choice-encouragers neglected or failed to penetrate?
Nothing about Donald Trump is predictable except unpredictability, so it may be folly to speculate on what his return to the Oval Office would mean for American education. It also needs to be said up front that, faced with all the challenges and risks of another Trump term, K–12 education policy will not likely be the top concern on many minds.
Education in the United States needs to improve and evolve. Too many learners get lost in the current system. Even more are underserved or under-resourced.
Once a de facto means of maintaining within-school segregation, career and technical education (CTE) has, in recent years, experienced a favorable shift in public perception.
“Fueled by worries over the pandemic, equity and learning loss, Republicans and Democrats are rewriting decades’ worth of strict standardized testing and graduation requirements.” —Politico American math scores
Talented and gifted school programs have a well-earned reputation for lacking student diversity.
The science of reading is thankfully supplanting dubious methods of teaching young children to read, as
Recent legislative efforts across the country have strengthened efforts to align reading instruction with the science of reading. These laws typically require teachers to use methods and materials aligned to the solid evidence base on how children best learn to read.
After two decades, private school choice policies in D.C. remain controversial, and both the continuation and benefits of it in D.C. are unclear.
Editor's note: This was first published on Eduwonk, the author's blog.
Five years ago, my team and I set out to understand what goes into effective implementation of high-quality instructional materials. We interviewed leaders and teachers from seventy schools that had moved to higher-quality materials in the last three years. We asked about what went well and what was hard.
Over the weekend, the New York Times published a hard-hitting 2,300-word expose by Dana Goldstein and colleagues asking “Why is the College Board pushing to expand Advanced Placement?” Its primary answer: to rake in tens of millions of dollars a year and to support CEO David Coleman’s exorbitant sal