Education Next

The Impact of School Vouchers on College Enrollment

African Americans benefited the most

Revelations from the TIMSS

Half or more of student achievement gains on NAEP are an illusion

Reform Agenda Gains Strength

The 2012 EdNext-PEPG survey finds Hispanics give schools a higher grade than others do

Is the U.S. Catching Up?

International and state trends in student achievement

Running in Place

Americans are learning more but are not catching up to the rest of the world

Not All Teachers Are Made of Ticky-Tacky, Teaching Just the Same

The true import of the Chetty study

Neither Broad Nor Bold

A narrow-minded approach to school reform

The International Experience

What U.S. schools can and cannot learn from other countries
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Photos: Additional images from the Education Next-PEPG Conference

Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?

 
The latest on each state’s international standing

The Public Weighs In on School Reform

Intense controversies do not alter public thinking, but teachers differ more sharply than ever

The 2011 Education Next-PEPG Survey

Complete Results

Eighth-Grade Students Learn More Through Direct Instruction

Students learned 3.6 percent of a standard deviation more if the teacher spent 10 percent more time on direct instruction. That’s one to two months of extra learning during the course of the year.

The Case Against Michelle Rhee

How persuasive is it?

A Battle Begun, Not Won

The following essay is part of a forum, written in honor of Education Next’s 10th anniversary, in which the editors assessed the school reform movement’s victories and challenges to see just how successful reform efforts have been. For the other side of the debate, please see Pyrrhic Victories? by Frederick M. Hess, Michael J. Petrilli, [...]

Happy 10th Anniversary, Education Next!

Over the decade, we have witnessed—perhaps contributed to—the advance of school reform.

Wasting Talent

Everyone’s local school needs to do better

Teaching Math to the Talented

Which countries—and states—are producing high-achieving students?

We Know Our Schools

All school evaluations, like all politics, are local

Meeting of the Minds

The 2010 EdNext-PEPG Survey shows that, on many education reform issues, Democrats and Republicans hardly disagree

The 2010 Education Next-PEPG Survey

Complete Results

State Standards Rise in Reading, Fall in Math

Most state standards remain far below international level
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View the Underlying Data

Competition and Charters Spur Innovation

School markets are creative, not static

Charter High Schools

Promising results from charters that educate teens

A Courageous Look at the American High School

The legacy of James Coleman

A Recession for Schools

Not as bad as it sounds

What Happens When States Have Genuine Alternative Certification?

We get more minority teachers and test scores rise

Few States Set World-Class Standards

In fact, most render the notion of proficiency meaningless

The Persuadable Public

The 2009 Education Next-PEPG Survey asks if information changes minds about school reform.

Powerful Professors

Research can change the political agenda…if the circumstances are right

The 2009 Education Next-PEPG Survey

Download Complete Results Here (PDF).

Virtual School Succeeds

But can we be sure about the students?

For-Profit and Nonprofit Management in Philadelphia Schools

What kind of management does better than the district-run schools?

What Is Good for General Motors

For years, our public schools have paid as little attention to personnel costs as General Motors has.

The Home-Schooling Special

Today's choicest choice

The Next President Had Many School Choices

Will he provide similar opportunities for others?

The 2008 Education Next-PEPG Survey of Public Opinion

Americans think less of their schools than of their police departments and post offices

Today’s Education-Industrial Complex

Why aren’t schools an issue in the 2008 election?

Excellence Reformers Need to Make a Choice

Is accountability the reform of the past?

Good News for Presidential Candidates

The public supports a wide range of education reforms

A Lens That Distorts

NCLB’s faulty way of measuring school quality

What Americans Think about Their Schools

The 2007 Education Next—PEPG Survey

Politics First, Students Last

A well-heeled commission issues a weak-kneed report

The Entrepreneurs and the New Commission

Changing minds in the education establishment

The NCES Private-Public School Study

Findings are other than they seem

Learning from Catastrophe Theory

What New Orleans Tells Us about Our Education Future

Is Your Child’s School Effective?

Don’t rely on NCLB to tell you

Vouchers in New York, Dayton, and D.C.

Vouchers and the Test-Score Gap

The Supreme School Board

Vouchers on Trial

A view from inside the courtroom

Ticket to Nowhere

In the wake of A Nation at Risk, educators pledged to focus anew on student achievement. Two decades later, little progress has been made

Voucher Research Controversy

New looks at the New York City evaluation

The Brown Irony

Racial progress eventually came to pass—everywhere but in public schools

The Children Left Behind

Now it is certain, on its third anniversary, that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is a monumental achievement. The accountability provisions of the law shine a bright light on the performance of schools across the nation, forcing many of them to attend to long-ignored problems. But new evidence confirms what was known when the law [...]

Johnny Can Read…in Some States

Johnny can’t read … in South Carolina. But if his folks move to Texas, he’ll be reading up a storm. What’s going on? It turns out that in complying with the requirements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), some states have decided to be a whole lot more generous than others in determining whether students [...]

Let the Public In

How Closed Negotiations with Unions Are Hurting Our Schools

Keeping an Eye on State Standards

A race to the bottom?

Of Teacher Shortages and Quality

Good teaching—the kind that can routinely raise student achievement—is the most valuable of all education resources. When a teacher inspires, children learn, even when the building is antiquated, the Internet is missing, and classes are bigger than usual. So teacher quality matters. A lot. Yet the standard measure of quality today, the teaching credential or [...]

U.S. Institute of Education Sciences Weighs In on Voucher Impacts on College Enrollment

The What Works Clearinghouse declared the voucher study to be “a well-implemented randomized controlled trial.”

Middle Class Students Trail Peers Abroad

The America Achieves study reveals in an alternate way an international achievement gap that my colleagues and I have been identifying over the past three years.

Carnoy and Rothstein Disgrace the Honest Marxian Tradition

How do Carnoy and Rothstein manage to raise U. S. educational performance to international standards simply by adjusting for the social-class background of its students?

Did Republicans Win the Fiscal Cliff Battle?

Conventional wisdom says that Obama put one over on the GOP. The real story is quite otherwise.

Predicting the Future of American Education in 2013

Predicting what will happen in 2013 is a fool’s project. Consider 2012.

Sandy Hook

At this holiday season, ordinarily so joyful, all of our hearts are filled with sadness, thoughts, and prayers for the families of those 27 children and adults who lost their lives in the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Charter Schools Top Story of 2012

According to research gathered by the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force, charter schools provided the fodder for more news stories in 2012 than any other educational topic.

If Johnny or Susie Cannot Read or Write … Neither Will Graduate from High School

Do graduation rates from high school have anything to do with student proficiency in reading and writing in 4th and 8th grade?

Are Americans Losing Confidence in Their Teachers?

Poll reveals less trust in teachers, especially among swing voters

Critique of Study of Voucher Impact on College Enrollment Misguided

Several of the issues raised by Goldrick-Rab have no merit and none undermine the primary conclusion of our study.

Vouchers Help African American Students Go to College

Matthew Chingos and I have just released a study that for the first time makes use of data from a randomized field trial to identify the impact of school vouchers on college enrollments.

When It Comes to Student Achievement, States are Changing Big Time

Some states are improving much more rapidly than others

In Remembrance of Elinor Ostrom: the political scientist who won the Nobel prize in economics

Noted Indiana University professor, Elinor Ostrom, died this week at the age of 78. I cannot better express my appreciation for her life and work than by re-posting what I said at the time she became the first woman–and the first political scientist–to win the Nobel prize in economics.

Another Real Winner in Wisconsin—Real Clear Politics

My colleagues and I went out on a limb yesterday when we wrote an op-ed piece saying that teacher unions were in trouble. So I watched the news last night with a worried eye after CNN told me that the exit polls in Wisconsin showed a tight race.

Special New York Whines Report: In times of crisis, private schools stealing public funds

A unique survey of schools by our New York Whines on-the-scene reporters has revealed a misappropriation of public funds for private schooling in schools across most of Europe. 

Dumbing Down the GPA: It’s the Unsophisticated Bright Kid who Suffers

It is not the under-achieving students in urban centers who perpetuate the ongoing crisis in American education. They are simply doing their best to survive the challenges of family, neighborhood and circumstance. The threats come from the mindless educational potentates who have captured control of the best public schools in the country.

Will Stanford Join the Digital Learning World?

Readers interested in digital education should go to the very end of Ken Auletta’s article on Stanford’s president, John Hennessy, in the latest issue of the New Yorker.

Spring Break Is Here: Can I get my unemployement insurance check?

Did you know that school bus drivers and cafeteria workers file unemployment claims whenever schools take a vacation break?

Why Most People Do Their Yoga at Home

Matthew Yglesias concludes that “affluent American parents will continue to foot the bill for their kids to get schooled in person” rather than making use of online learning. But you could conclude that Americans—both affluent and otherwise—will be insisting that their children take their high school classes online so that they are not bullied or embarrassed in the classroom when they are not as skilled as others.

Digital Learning in Utah: Devil is in the Details

Can school districts be vehicles for introducing a choice-based system of digital education?

The President’s Bully Pulpit and School Reform

Should presidents talk about student achievement or jobs for teachers?

You Can Deny the Truth of My Critique of Broader, Bolder Theory, But Why Can’t You At Least Spell My Name?

In an ill-considered rebuttal, blogger Valerie Strauss denies that BBA disparages the value of school reform. She even denies that either BBA or Ladd ever meant to say that income had much of an impact on achievement.

Rich and Poor—Both Can Learn

Family income is associated with student achievement, but careful studies show little causal connection. School factors—teacher quality, school accountability, school choice—have bigger causal impacts than family income per se.

In the Digital World, Every District Can Compete with Every Other

In Utah, new legislation has given school districts the opportunity to attract high school students from throughout the state to their online course offerings.

The Right Role for the Federal Government

Give parents the information they need to pick their school of choice

Teacher Unions, Mac the Knife, and Dollar Power

During the 2010-11 fiscal year, the NEA invested $18.8 million dollars in a bewildering array of grateful non-profit groups and organizations

Resist Those Calls for the Formation of a Third Party

A lot of people, unhappy with both the Obama Administration and the Republican alternative, are searching for a middle way.

What Do the Latest NAEP Scores Tell Us about NCLB?

Did the federal law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), close the education gap?  Now that Congress is talking about reauthorizing NCLB, it struck me that it would be worthwhile to see what the latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tell us about the direction the nation has moved in the years since the law was passed.

Views of EdNext Readers In Line With Those of General Public (except on Teachers Unions)

Ed Next readers—or at least those who participate in our polls—are not all that different from the public at large, except that they seem to know more about the issues and are thus more inclined to take a position on them. That’s what we discovered when we asked the same questions of readers as were posed to a representative cross-section of the public as a whole in 2011.

Jeb Bush, Melinda Gates, Sal Khan and the Coming Digital Learning Battle

The debate between blended and online learning will continue. Too much politically is at stake for it to be otherwise.

Regardless of Who is to Blame, Accountability and Merit Pay are Taking Some Heat in Texas

I am encouraged when Sandy Kress tells me that the moves away from accountability and merit pay that have taken place recently in Texas were forced upon Governor Rick Perry and Robert Scott, the state’s education commissioner, by legislative pressures beyond their control.

Is Rick Perry Abandoning School Accountability and Merit Pay?

Texas Education Commissioner Robert Scott was in enemy territory recently, telling the folks at Massachusetts’s Pioneer Institute (including some who favor Romney, such as myself [full disclosure] ) about the virtues of the Texas education system, a topic of national significance now that Rick Perry’s chariot has leaped to lead position in the Republican presidential nomination race.

Do Rich People Know What’s Going On in Their Local Schools?

The savvy, well-heeled people who populate our affluent suburbs are expected to know what is going on. Those who send their children to public school settle only for the best. Not surprisingly, most are happy with what they get. Yet it turns out that many, probably most, of the schools in affluent neighborhoods deserve no better than a “C.”

Public Wants Single-Sex School Option, Even Though Professors Do Not

If there is no evidence as to which type of schooling is to be preferred, why not let parents choose which type of schooling is best for their child?

Power to the Principals

Podcast: Paul Peterson and Chester Finn discuss a study of Chicago principals who were given the power to choose which teachers to fire.

Obama’s Jobs Bill Takes from States and Cities as Much as It Gives Them

Now that President Obama has let both the expenditure and revenue-raising shoes drop, it is clear that the costs to state and local governments of the new jobs bill could very well equal—perhaps exceed—the benefits they might receive.

An Easy Way to Calculate the Rising Cost of Schooling

Information on the cost and performance of the Wellesley Public Schools may be available somewhere else in the vast reaches of the internet, but to quickly access accurate information you have to go to education.com

A Year Late and a Million (?) Dollars Long—the U. S. Proficiency Standards Report

The U. S. government just provided the public with much the same information Education Next shared with readers a year ago: A comparison of state standards in reading and math at the 4th and 8th grade levels.

With a Math Proficiency Rate of 32 Percent, U.S. Ranks Number 32

Thirty-two percent of U.S. students in the class of 2011 were proficient in mathematics when they were in 8th grade. Coincidentally, that places the United States in 32nd place among the 65 nations of the world that participated in PISA, my colleagues and I report today.