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What we’re reading this week: March 20, 2025
Reflecting on his own Hasidic education, this author argues that, while cultural preservation is important, public officials should ensure that all children gain basic skills to ensure that they have the freedom to choose their future.
Podcast
#961: How “No Excuses” charter schools went off the rails, with Steven Wilson
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Steven Wilson, senior fellow at the Pioneer Institute, joi
Commentary
Governance
11 thoughts about the massive layoffs at the U.S. Department of Education
Trump administration officials announced on Tuesday that they are laying off 1,300 employees at the U.S. Department of Education. This is on top of nearly 600 people who had already taken early retirement or buyouts, as well as another 60 probationary employees who had already been fired. This brings the agency’s headcount down from about 4,100 to about 2,200, a major reduction. Here are some thoughts on the situation as we understand it now.
Commentary
School Finance, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Should schools pay students to attend remediation programs?
When my middle child was in high school, nothing I said or did could keep him from dropping out. But what if I’d tried paying him?
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Teachers & School Leaders
The return of accountability
During a January 29 town hall in Washington to discuss dismal new test results, Harvard professor Marty West—who serves as the vice chair of the board that oversees na
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Barriers to teaching and assessing “soft skills”
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
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What we’re reading this week: March 13, 2025
Can the board game Taboo teach education policymakers an important lesson?
Podcast
Accountability & Testing
#960: Why Secretary McMahon shouldn’t waive federal testing requirements, with Charles Barone
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Charles Baron
Commentary
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Are states ready to lead on education? Could Trump’s policies set them up to fail?
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.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Three good reasons teachers shouldn’t D.I.Y. their lessons (and shouldn’t be asked to)
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.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Defunding the teacher trainers
Earlier this month, the U.S.
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Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction
Did the most well-known and influential study in K–12 education get it wrong?
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.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Facilities
How school HVAC systems affect learning
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?
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Podcast
Accountability & Testing
#959: Are GPAs the key to measuring school quality? with Jing Liu and Seth Gershenson
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Jing
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction
There is proof that knowledge works. And it’s overwhelming.
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.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Open enrollment deserves bipartisan support
In recent years, school choice has made impressive strides. Eleven states have codified universal or near-universal private school choice programs.
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Hard lessons from the NAEP results
Scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) were released on January 29. How were they?
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction
Examining a new method of estimating homeschool participation
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.
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What we’re reading this week: February 27, 2025
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.
Podcast
#958: Louisiana’s NAEP gains and the power of a strong curriculum, with John White
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, John White, former Louis
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Make room, test scores: Introducing “indicators of high school and middle school readiness”
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.
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Mind the honesty gap
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.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
A bold state move to improve reading
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.”
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
The state of pandemic learning loss recovery
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
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