Barry Garelick, a veteran educator and author, is one of the nation’s savviest observers of math education. Earlier this year, I wrote about his most recent book, Out on Good Behavior, and regular readers have encountered his occasional guest posts. Well, prompted by Liz Cheney’s brave role in the January…

A decade ago, back in 2012, when the Common Core was still riding high, I penned a cautionary piece imagining how the effort would look a decade hence — in 2022. In this imagined “future,” I conjured up an excerpt from a book supposedly written by my friend, the education…

Forty years ago, A Nation at Risk sounded a grave warning about the threat of educational mediocrity and gave rise to a bipartisan school reform movement focused on academic achievement, educational choice, and accountability. Today, that coalition has unraveled and given way to a series of heated culture clashes over…

For those looking at college as a path to a career rather than a four-year pit stop, the lack of inexpensive, speedy options is a big problem. For huge numbers of high schoolers, it can be a deal breaker. Moreover, unlike in K-12, the higher ed. accreditation system makes it…

Serious education research rarely shows big effects. That’s why results are celebrated so enthusiastically when credible research shows that some intervention seems to boost learning even modestly, say by adding a month or two worth of learning over the course of a school year. This all makes the recent “gold…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, otherwise known as “the nation’s report card,” is the federal test taken every couple years by a sample of students in 4th, 8th, and 12th grades. NAEP has come to serve as the authoritative gauge of school performance in the U.S. How did NAEP…

Of late, I keep getting asked why social and emotional learning got so political. “I don’t get what people are even worried about,” is how one superintendent put it. And yet, The Washington Post has proclaimed SEL the “new target” of critical race theory critics, and Salon has termed it…

There’s a lot to like about preschool. Over the years, my kids have used several different preschools — from a cheerful church basement to a hard-core Montessori — and had a number of really positive experiences. …

We’ve dealt with concerns of a teacher-staffing shortage for most of the past few decades, although much of the blame should perhaps be reserved for licensure systems that create roadblocks to professional entry without ensuring professional competence. The challenge has taken on heightened significance as schools deal with learning loss…