This year’s Wonkathon is over, and the results are in! 2024’s Wisest Wonks: “Everything, everywhere, all at once” solutions to chronic absenteeism, by Kelly James and Brad Bernatek Second place:
Watching the debate last night, all I could think about was my time spent on the playground with my toddler. Her wobbly legs ever close to tumbling down the ladder and causing me constant low-grade anxiety. I felt the same watching Biden fumble through answers, stare into space, and exhibit all the hallmarks of an aging man in cognitive decline.
Amid intense polarization and concerns for America's youth, Carnegie Corporation of New York’s
Last month, Louisiana issued a series of common-sense recommendations titled, simply and winningly, “Let Teachers Teach.” The report hasn’t received nearly enough attention. It deserves to be studied closely in every state and school district if we’re serious about improving teacher job satisfaction, effectiveness, and raising student achievement.
Peter Liljedahl opens his wildly popular book on mathematics instruction, Building Thinking Classrooms, with a bold gambit.
You remember the six-foot rule. How could you forget?
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, the importance of digital literacy can hardly be overstated. But what can schools do to help students acquire these skills? And how does access to computer courses impact students’ futures?
Oklahoma’s supreme court blocked what would have been the nation’s first religious, charter school. —New York Times A record number of children required special education services last year, and schools are scrambling to hire staff to meet that need.
In many states and districts, post-pandemic learning recovery began with literacy. Not only had students fallen behind in reading, but a new body of research pointed to deep flaws in the way reading had been taught for decades. Now, policymakers and education leaders are beginning a pivot to math, where drops in scores on both the PISA and NAEP exams have been far more acute.
Classical education has surged in popularity, with 264 new schools cropping up since 2019, a host
Ten years ago, when Florida launched the nation’s second education savings account program, a beautiful thing happened. Friedrich Hayek would have called it “spontaneous order.” Parents, within days, began forming a multitude of Facebook groups where they traded advice on how to access the accounts, how to use them, and what learning options were available in their area.
Tennessee lawmakers adopted a new school funding formula in 2022, moving from a staffing-based to a per-pupil-based model with the intent of directing more state dollars to students who need them most.
Kudos to the Strada Education Foundation for its brand new State Opportunity Index, designed to gauge how well post-secondary education in each state prepares graduates to join the workforce and earn a living wage.
Cheers A fundamental change is sweeping American education wherein public tax dollars fund private, home-, and micro schools. —New York Times Jeers
A solid program for advanced education should focus on both acceleration and enrichment. —Education Week In the aggregate, “gifted” individuals tend to live lives just like everyone else.
“The Big Bang Theory” premiered September 2007. My husband has a nuclear engineering degree from MIT. Our younger son, then four, was a budding scientist. (Sample conversation: Him: Can’t come out of the bath. Working on surface tension and light refraction. Me: You mean splashing?)
The Texas Education Agency has spent roughly three years piloting a promising set of ELA materials, which became freely available late last month: a structured and sequenced knowledge- and vocabulary-rich K–5 curriculum. The Lone Star State seems to well and truly understand the ingredients of language proficiency.
Texas is back in education news. In late May, The 74 reported that the state education agency is proposing to supplement its existing English instruction with lessons that include Biblical references.
Poland has been the economic tiger of Europe in recent decades and one of the fastest growing economies in the world over that time. In 1990, when I taught high school in a rural Polish town located in Silesia between Poznan and Wroclaw, Poland’s GDP was less than Ukraine’s.
As excitement grows around tutoring as a strategy to combat learning loss, advocates have rightly been encouraged by the growing
Forty-five percent of U.S. public schools report feeling understaffed, 70 percent report that too few candidates are applying to teaching vacancies, and 86 percent report challenges hiring teachers in the 2023–24 school year.
Pandemic-era school closures explain only one-fifth of the rise in chronic absenteeism. —David Wallace-Wells, New York Times Education reform is challenging because it’s unclear what “better schools” or “challenge the teachers unions” even means.
Editor’s note: This was first published by Forbes.
In his recent column “Let’s Talk About Bad Teachers,” Michael Petrilli fearlessly seized the third rail of U.S. K–12 education.
A child’s age is only a crude proxy for their academic readiness, yet it’s the primary means by which we group children in school. More age variety in classrooms could allow for greater academic consistency; grade retention and grade acceleration could help us get there. So too could a new idea from Petrilli: transitional kindergarten–5.
For thirty years, most education reformers have hung their hats on test-based accountability. Let's kick the tail of traditional public schools on standardized tests, as the thinking goes, and much else will take care of itself.
In April, Tim Daly penned an incisive three-part series on the trials and tribulations of teacher evaluation reforms.
