Only a quarter of Texas eighth graders go on to earn a degree or certificate six years after high school. As a former eighth grade teacher, I can’t help but think of my former students seeing these data.
Bibb Hubbard, founder and CEO of Learning Heroes, joins the Education Gadfly
This Thursday, the Montgomery County (Maryland) School Board is slated to vote on a proposal that would begin to address a long-festering problem in the state’s largest school district. The Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) system is, as a whole, wonderfully diverse, and yet for too long, many of its individual schools have been highly segregated.
The Trump administration has been shifting programs from the Department of Education to other parts of the federal government. This may be driven by politics, but it raises an intriguing question. What if the real issue is not whether the Department of Education survives intact, but whether some federal education programs might actually work better outside it?
The rise of AI has caused anxiety about the future of writing instruction. If the technology can write—or help people write—quickly and coherently on nearly any topic, and will likely get better and better at this, do we still need to teach students how to write?
Next month, my 11-year-old will join her classmates to take the state assessment.
In recent years, states and especially districts have turned to financial incentives to encourage high-performing
“We spend too much time on testing,” is a lament we hear often among Idaho educators. Surely it is a national sentiment as well.
Please don’t call a local public school a “government school.” It is part of the community, and it and its peers are worth celebrating, conserving, and cherishing, now and for years to come.
The simplest, most effective policy for improving U.S. schools and student outcomes might not be an “education policy” at all—but stronger government protections for young people from addictive products and services that now routinely reach adolescents.
Like many other teachers, I took the traditional route into the profession, pursuing an undergraduate degree in education.
I’ve worked at some rough schools. At one, as summer approached, my colleague and I reviewed the staff picture from September and counted that a third of the teachers who began in the fall had quit before the year’s end. We didn’t hold it against them.
March brings my favorite family pastime. Soon, the fanatics and ambivalent among us will fill out NCAA basketball brackets and tape them to the kitchen wall. My teen son will carefully analyze rankings for each team and stats for key players.
Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, joins the Education Gadfly Show to disc
With updated reading policies on the books in over 40 states, ed policy advocates and legislators are now turning to math. Fourth grade NAEP math results are just as bad (if not worse), so why not take it on, as well? Bellwether has a nice round up of the current state of affairs.
Teen cinema has always laughed at the try-hard.
Within ten years, a successful school or district will almost certainly experience at least one superintendent change, multiple principal transitions, substantial staff turnover, curriculum reviews and technology initiatives, school board elections, and shifts in funding or political priorities.
The United States is in a period of moral fragmentation and decay, and the extended family—the primary historical source of moral education—has given way to a nuclear family that is stretched thin and, in many cases, itself fractured.
Principals play a crucial role in managing teacher quality, including hiring, developing, and retaining effective staff while also addressing low-performing teachers.
The end of race-based affirmative action and persistent gaps in enrollment and degree attainment among students from low-income backgrounds have intensified
Thank you, Amber! My colleague Amber Northern, Fordham’s longtime senior vice president for research, has done American education a great service by recommending a future for the Institute for Education Sciences that goes far beyond undoing the damage done by DOGE a year ago.
