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Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Why conservatives keep losing school boards
“In culture war backlash, Democrats sweep school boards,” Politico proclaimed after 2025’s low-visibility elections. The storyline was already written. The education right had been rejected; the fight, readers were meant to assume, was finished.
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Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
The myth of local control
Earlier this month, I was having a conversation with a state leader I respect about why adoption of high-quality curriculum materials has been slow in their state. “Why not use the muscle of the state agency to speed things up?” I asked. “Because my state isn’t like Louisiana,” they said. “We’re a local-control state. I can’t just tell districts what to do.”
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Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Good schools don’t beat staff turnover. They’re built for it.
Education has never lacked miracle schools and stories. The real challenge isn’t identifying successful schools but learning how to recognize whether their success is institutional or temporary. So if we wanted to predict whether a school’s success will last, what should we look for?
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Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Education in the age of feeling
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.
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Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Can states do anything about grade inflation?
Grade inflation is having a bit of a moment.
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Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Private School Choice, Teachers & School Leaders
Global school choice at a glance
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.
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning
The predictive power of NAEP
Across the United States, a representative sample of thousands of fourth, eighth, and twelfth grade students has begun sitting for the National Assessment of Educational Progress. NAEP is administered independently of state-level standards but presents state- and national-level results.
Podcast
When state curriculum lists go bad | Episode 1007 of The Education Gadfly Show
Karen Vaites, founder of The Curriculum Insight Project, joins us to discuss the evolving debate ove
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Curriculum & Instruction, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders
International Baccalaureate deserves more attention
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.
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Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
We need to prepare boys for school, not schools for boys
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.
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Career & Technical Education, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance
Youth apprenticeships should be connected to high school coursework
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.
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Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Studying successful schools matters. Studying enduring success matters more.
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.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Stop conflating success with moral authority
“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.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Yes, teachers keep improving with time
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.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Standards
Did the Common Core boost students’ labor market outcomes?
The rollout of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in 2010 began as a widely applauded, bipartisan policy aimed at providing an accessible curriculum focused on conceptual understanding that could form the foundation for K–12 education content for the next generation.
Podcast
Mike gives easy A’s a big ole F | Episode 1006 of The Education Gadfly Show
This week on The Education Gadfly Show, Mike Petrilli goes solo to talk about grade inflation—what it m
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Governance
ICE and ed reform
Aggressive immigration enforcement, including around schools, is leading many families to keep their kids home. Is it time for education reformers to join the #Resistance? Or should we work instead to find a narrow consensus around keeping schools open and safe?
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction
AI-assisted learning stumbles on the evidence
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
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Teachers & School Leaders
Why doesn’t the education system study the successful?
It was a big January for my Hoosier family. I grew up in Bobby Knight’s Indiana, so IU’s incredible football National Championship win is a big deal in my home state.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Teachers & School Leaders
First, do no harm: The academic impacts of grade inflation on long-term outcomes
There’s plenty of evidence that average grades,
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Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
What happens when students with disabilities switch to charter schools?
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.
Podcast
Can states build coherent early childhood systems? | Episode 1005 of The Education Gadfly Show
This week on The Education Gadfly Show, we’re joined by Elliot
Report
Wonkathon 2025 Anthology: What comes next for the science of reading?
For eleven years now, we at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute have hosted an annual Wonkathon on our Flypaper blog. Designed to generate substantive conversation around key issues in education reform, we invite policy “wonks” to submit responses to a question.
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