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
Can the board game Taboo teach education policymakers an important lesson?
The idea of “sending education back to the states” is a cornerstone of President Trump’s rhetoric on schooling, and it has strong support from many congressional Republicans.
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.
Math instruction deserves the same scrutiny as reading—but the absence of a single, widely discredited teaching method make it harder to drive widespread reform.
Our latest study pilots a new measure of a school’s quality: its contribution to students’ grade point averages at their next school. It sends a clear message to educators that one of their core missions is to help their graduates succeed in their next step—not just in reading and math, but in all subjects—and not just on tests, but on the stuff that tests struggle to capture.
A new report from the Collaborative for Student Success aims to refocus attention on the “honesty gap” in the wake of the latest (and disastrous) NAEP results.
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.”
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
“The bad new bipartisan consensus behind falling test scores.” —Matthew Yglesias, Slow Boring A Massachusetts high school’s partnership with a trade union provides students with hands-on experience and pathways to union apprenticeships, addressing the skilled labor shortage while promoting inclusivity
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
Trump’s crusade against DEI aims to restore meritocracy—but to do so, he must also address disparate-impact theory, which prohibits “neutral” practices that disproportionately impact specific groups (e.g., testing requirements that disqualify black applicants at higher rates), but often ends up harming the groups it intends to protect.
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.
Conservative criticism of Penny Schwinn’s nomination as Deputy Secretary of Education has so far focused on her bona fides in fighting “culture wars” in schools. But other important elements are at stake right now. Specifically, prioritizing competence and effectiveness in teachers, administrators, and leaders. Our students deserve no less. Schwinn’s nomination is an opportunity to refocus on what truly matters.
Opponents make lots of arguments against education savings accounts, tax-credit scholarship programs, and other forms of private school choice. But the complaint that schools aren’t required to test their students is generally false. We dig in and set the record straight
