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Displaying 61-90 of 18421 results
Graduate
Commentary
9.10.2026
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

What Massachusetts’s portrait of a learner gets right (and New York’s doesn’t)

Meredith Coffey, Ph.D.

When I taught high school in Virginia in the early 2020s, I was only vaguely aware of the existence of something called “portrait of a graduate.” Whatever this portrait was, it didn’t seem to impact my daily work, so it didn’t capture my attention. On the other hand, I knew my IB courses and our state assessments backward and forward. Those shaped what we did in the classroom.

Graduate
School backpack
Commentary
9.10.2026
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Is this the post-homework era?

Alicia Anderson

In Fordham’s new survey of American high school students and recent graduates, less than half believe their school has realistic AI policies that keep up with the times.

School backpack
Empty school desk
Commentary
9.10.2026
School Finance, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Fewer students, more dollars, and harder choices

Mike McShane

At the beginning of the movie The Big Short, there is a title card with the epigram, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” It attributes the quote to Mark Twain. Ironically, there isn’t any proof that Twain actually said or wrote that.

Empty school desk
Catholic school
Commentary
9.3.2026
Curriculum & Instruction, Private School Choice, Teachers & School Leaders

America’s oldest school model may be its future

Stephanie Saroki de Garcia

Many of the qualities that will matter most for students going forward are those that cannot be automated: judgment, self-command, compassion, and courage. They are also traits that Catholic schools have spent generations cultivating. In an age hungry for meaning, Catholic schools understand what humans need to flourish.

Catholic school
Hands shaking
Commentary
9.3.2026
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Education got there first? The breakdown of traditional left-right delineations.

Andrew J. Rotherham

Education is rarely accused of being ahead of the curve. We’re usually the last to get the memo. Just consider how K–12 education delivery has been one of the few large sectors of the American economy not really disrupted by technology—it’s an open question whether that will even happen in the AI era. We treat things that are long settled in the literature as “who knows” jump balls.

Hands shaking
Graduation
Commentary
9.3.2026
School Finance, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Examining outcomes-based contracting in eight pilot districts

Jeff Murray

Contracted or purchased services (tutoring, professional development, after-school care, etc.) constitute the second-largest category of school district expenditures after staff compensation. They add up to tens of billions of dollars each year.

Graduation
3 checkmarks on a chalkboard
Commentary
8.28.2026
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

The three prongs of education reform success: Policy, programs, and political perseverance

Patricia Levesque

Mississippi’s ongoing early literacy success was originally dubbed a miracle. Now we’re calling it a marathon. That’s a more accurate description, but it still doesn’t do justice to the years and years of sustained work it’s taken to catapult the state from the back of the pack to leading on reading—and to keep those results going strong.

3 checkmarks on a chalkboard
Child upset while reading
Commentary
8.27.2026
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

The loophole quietly undoing America's third-grade reading laws

Harry Anthony Patrinos

More than a dozen states now require that third graders who can’t read at grade level repeat the grade rather than advance to fourth, where every subject assumes literacy. The theory is sound. But in state after state, exemptions meant for a narrow set of students are being granted so widely that the policies aren’t benefiting the students they were designed for.  

Child upset while reading
Students writing with pencil and paper
Commentary
8.27.2026
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Students should only use AI for things they already know how to do well

Daniel Willingham

Most educators agree that there should be some guardrails regarding how students use AI in their independent work. Here, I argue for this guiding principle: Students should only use AI for things that they already know how to do well.

Students writing with pencil and paper
Students walking to school
Commentary
8.27.2026
Evidence-Based Learning, School Finance, Charter Schools, Governance, Private School Choice

The supply side of school choice: Who participates? Who doesn’t?

Mike McShane

“If you build it, they will come” makes a great tagline for a mythical baseball movie but a poor strategy for educational improvement. Markets are not magic and are shaped by external factors that encourage or discourage participation.

Students walking to school
Classroom
Commentary
8.20.2026
Charter Schools, Governance, Private School Choice

Can charter schools survive universal school choice?

Daniel Buck

Echoing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s sentiments distancing herself from wokeness, a common sentiment among reformers seems to be that the bipartisan education reform era was “craazzy.” Standardized testing pep rallies, the glorified grant writing beauty pageant called Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, guarantees of

Classroom
Upset student
Commentary
8.20.2026
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Education’s ambulance-at-the-bottom problem

Dale Chu

There’s an old adage that it’s better to build a sturdy fence at the top of a cliff than station an ambulance at the bottom.

Upset student
Student and book
Commentary
8.20.2026
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Ohio’s implementation of the science of reading

Aaron Churchill

Approximately half of American adults read at a sixth-grade level or below, according to the Barbara Bush Foundation. The consequences of poor literacy skills are profound: higher unemployment rates, lower-paying work, and struggles with routine tasks such as reading prescriptions or bills.

Student and book
Teacher observation
Commentary
8.20.2026
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning

Expanded review process for determining school quality leads to minimal improvement

Jeff Murray

New York City Schools piloted an external qualitative review (QR) in a subset of its schools for the first time in 2005, intended to expand the definition of school quality via a school inspection-type model and to broaden the scope of educational accountability.

Teacher observation
Student test results
Commentary
8.20.2026
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning

What early test scores can tell us about a student’s future

Kennedy Sundberg

Third-grade proficiency is one of the most consequential milestones in a child’s academic career. Around this time, students transition from learning foundational skills to using those skills to engage with more complex content.

Student test results
Multiple pathways
Commentary
8.19.2026
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Personalized Learning, Teachers & School Leaders

Why it’s finally time to rethink age-based schooling

Jonathan Barazzutti

The past century has seen enormous developments in virtually all areas of life, from medicine to transportation to living standards and even to social and cultural attitudes. Yet our education system has not followed suit. One of the greatest illustrations of this is in the continued emphasis on age as the primary determinant of educational placement.

Multiple pathways