Chester E. Finn Jr. — or, as I’ve always known him, Checker — has been a force in American education for more than four decades. (Full disclosure: He’s also a longtime friend, collaborator, and mentor.) The longtime president of the Fordham Institute (now in an active/emeritus role), he’s served in…
Even now, 20 years after the passage of No Child Left Behind, educators regularly voice their frustration with the state tests and accountability systems birthed under NCLB. Teachers and school leaders fume that the tests should be more instructionally useful, that school evaluations are crude and misleading, and that this…
As we’re all too aware, democracy is under threat from hooligans who employ violence or threats of violence against citizens or elected officials. There’s no excuse, period, for this sort of behavior. …
Eric Hanushek, the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University, has long been one of the leading educational economists of our time. He has authored books and hundreds of influential scholarly articles exploring the impact of schooling on national well-being and challenging the received…
After cramming most of the Biden agenda into one massive $3.5 trillion “Build Back Better” bill, it looks like Democrats are going to have to settle for a whole lot less — and possibly nothing. Though equipped with the frailest of congressional majorities, Democrats have opted to take the go-it-alone…
The Biden administration is seeking to provide publicly funded, tuition-free prekindergarten to all 3- and 4-year-olds as part of its $3.5 trillion “build back better” plan. While most education advocates laud this as a terrific thing, others have raised serious concerns. Sue Renner, the executive director of the David and…
Francesca Pickett is the nom de plume of a current senior federal education official who occasionally writes with me for the National Review. She’s an exquisitely trained social scientist, a trenchant observer of the human condition, and a terrific writer. Every so often, she feels compelled to share thoughts on…
Amid the furious debates over critical race theory’s role in the classroom, a slew of new organizations have sprung up. One of these is the Educational Liberty Alliance, which launched this spring with the aim of building a national network of teachers and parents who support freedom of thought and…
Recently, I wrote about how new polling shows the K-12 COVID-19 fights aren’t going anywhere. I can picture plenty of readers seeing numbers like 36 percent of the public opposes mask mandates in K-12 schools and thinking, “Who on earth are these people?” …
