The Report Card with Nat Malkus (AEI Podcasts)

During the pandemic, the federal government sent $190 billion in ESSER relief funding to America’s schools. Among other things, ESSER was intended to help students catch up from pandemic learning loss—but did it work? Did ESSER help kids catch up? Did it help some students more than others? And should the federal government spend more to address COVID learning loss? On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions, and more, with Dan Goldhaber.

Dan Goldhaber is the Director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research (CALDER) at the American Institutes for Research and the Director of the Center for Education Data & Research (CEDR) at the University of Washington. Along with Grace Falken, he is also the co-author of a new paper: ESSER and Student Achievement: Assessing the Impacts of the Largest One-Time Federal Investment in K12 Schools.

Show Notes:

ESSER and Student Achievement: Assessing the Impacts of the Largest One-Time Federal Investment in K12 Schools

Impacts of Academic Recovery Interventions on Student Achievement in 2022-23

As we move past the pandemic, many are asking, “What’s next?” Some argue that now is the time for reinventing schooling. Others argue that right now we should simply focus on getting back to normal. But Frederick M. Hess argues for a third option.

In his new book, The Great School Rethink, Rick argues that now is the time for educators, school leaders, and policymakers to become more thoughtful and intentional in the way they approach schooling and potential changes to it. Rick isn’t interested in arguing for any particular reform—indeed, he is generally pretty skeptical of big top-down reform. Rather, Rick is interested in freeing students and teachers from established routines and structures that have worn out their welcome so that schools can offer students richer educational experiences.

Frederick M. Hess is a senior fellow and the director of education policy studies at AEI, an executive editor of Education Next, the author of the Education Week blog “Rick Hess Straight Up,” the founder and chairman of AEI’s Conservative Education Reform Network, and the author of numerous books.

Show Notes:

The Great School Rethink

Spinning Wheels: The Politics of Urban School Reform

Letters to a Young Education Reformer

The Cage-Busting Teacher

Cage-Busting Leadership

The End of School Reform?

To put it lightly, 2021 has been an eventful year in education. From heated school board meetings over class curriculum to fierce (and currently ongoing) debates regarding mask and vaccine mandates in schools, we’ve certainly had no shortage of education headlines over the past year.

For The Report Card with Nat Malkus' last episode of 2021, Nat looked back at these highlights and discussed 2021's biggest stories in education, what stories didn't get that much attention, and what 2022 has in store for us.

Of course, who better to discuss education’s biggest stories in 2021 than those who wrote about them? On this episode, we are joined by three talented reporters, Erica Green, Laura Meckler, and Eesha Pendharkar.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Dylan Wiliam about the latest PISA results, education in the US vs. education in the UK, what tutors might learn that classroom teachers might not, where teacher improvement and professional development tend to go wrong, making learning responsive to students, formative assessment, learning English as a second language, charter schools, why educators should think more about de-implementation, AI in education, and more.

Dylan Wiliam is Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment at University College London.

Show Notes:

Making Room for Impact: A De-implementation Guide for Educators

The Future of AI in Education: 13 Things We Can Do to Minimize the Damage

Creating the Schools Our Children Need

Inside the Black Box

On the latest episode of The Report Card, Nat interviews Emily Morton and Dan Goldhaber about their new paper The Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the Pandemic, which uses testing data from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states to investigate the role of remote and hybrid instruction in widening achievement gaps.

Show Notes:

The Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the Pandemic

A Comprehensive Picture of Achievement Across the COVID-19 Pandemic Years: Examining Variation in Test Levels and Growth Across Districts, Schools, Grades, and Students

Effects of Four-Day School Weeks on School Finance and Achievement: Evidence From Oklahoma

Return 2 Learn Tracker

‘Not Good for Learning’

Are smartphones and social media bad for kids’ mental health? According to a number of recent books, articles, and op-eds, the answer is an emphatic yes: The rise of smartphones and social media corresponded not only to a rise in the incidence of mental health problems but to a decline in academic performance. Indeed, in popular media, there almost seems to be a consensus emerging: It’s the phones, stupid.

But is the popular media consensus correct? What does the research say? And what is the state of the research? On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions and more with Pete Etchells.

Pete Etchells is Professor of Psychology and Science Communication at Bath Spa University in the UK and is the author of Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time (and how to spend it better).

Show Notes:

Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time (and how to spend it better) (Note: Unlocked is not yet available in US stores but can be purchased from UK booksellers and shipped to the US.)

Scroll On: Why Your Screen-Time Habits Aren’t as Bad as You Think They Are

Lost in a Good Game: Why We Play Video Games and What They Can Do for Us

Smartphone Bans, Student Outcomes and Mental Health

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Cass Sunstein about campus free speech. Nat and Cass discuss the legal considerations involved in campus protests, safe spaces, and the removal of sexually explicit books from elementary school libraries; how sectarian colleges should balance religious interests with free speech protections; when it is appropriate for universities to issue statements on world affairs; the difficulty of testifying before Congress; whether governors can intentionally change the ideological character of colleges in their states; designing effective nudges to combat chronic absenteeism; the effects of sludge on academic inquiry; why free speech doesn’t come naturally to people; the complexity of First Amendment law; manipulation; whether we should replace Supreme Court justices with AI; and much more.

Cass Sunstein is the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard, the author of many books on law and behavioral economics, and the most cited legal scholar in America. His most recent book, Campus Free Speech: A Pocket Guide, came out in September.

Show Notes:

Campus Free Speech: A Pocket Guide

Only the First Amendment Can Protect Students, Campuses and Speech

Why have fewer Black and Hispanic students returned to their classrooms for full-time in-person learning relative to white students? And what effect will this have on the nation’s stubborn racial achievement gaps? Vlad Kogan, associate professor of political science at Ohio State, and Chris Stewart, CEO of brightbeam, weigh in on this episode of The Report Card with Nat Malkus.

Read Vlad Kogan's AEI report, "What’s behind racial differences in attitudes toward school reopening (and what to do about them)."

We've talked a lot on the show about school choice. But it's not often we discuss intra-district choice - choice between schools in the same district.

Starting in 2012, Los Angeles' Zones of Choice program creates small local markets with High Schools in neighborhoods throuhgout LA, but leaves traditional attendance-zone boundaries in place. In application, this means that about 30-40% of LAUSD is a Zone of Choice.

Here to discuss the success of LA's Zones of Choice program is Christopher Campos and John Deasy.

Shownotes:

The Impact of Neighborhood School Choice: Evidence from Los Angeles' Zones of Choice Program.

During the pandemic, the federal government sent $190 billion in COVID relief funds to America’s schools. These funds, known as ESSER (or the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund), changed school budgets across the country. But this September, ESSER will come to an end, meaning that—on average—schools will have to reduce their budgets by over $1,000 per student.

How will schools respond? What will get cut? And what should education leaders know to minimize the impacts of the funding cliff? On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions, and more, with Marguerite Roza.

Marguerite Roza is a research professor at Georgetown University and the director of the Edunomics Lab.

Show Notes:

School Boards Face Their Most Difficult Budget Season Ever. Many Are Unprepared

The ESSER Fiscal Cliff Will Have Serious Implications for Student Equity

National Education Resource Database on Schools (NERDS)

How Within-District Spending Inequities Help Some Schools to Fail

The Biden administration's proposed changes to income-driven repayment (IDR) haven't received the same level of attention that student loan forgiveness has, but they are arguably no less significant. Changes to IDR will cost billions of dollars, affect millions of borrowers, and fundamentally change the student borrowing landscape for past, present, and future borrowers.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Matt Chingos and Jason Delisle, both of the Urban Institute, about IDR and some of the eyebrow-raising effects the Biden administration's proposed changes might have on student borrowing.

Show Notes:

Few College Students Will Repay Student Loans under the Biden Administration’s Proposal

How Were Student Loan Borrowers Affected by the Pandemic?

Who Should Pay? Designing a More Equitable Income-Driven Repayment Plan

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Jennifer Frey, associate professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina and the host of Sacred and Profane Love. Nat and Jennifer discuss human happiness and education, what psychology doesn't understand about happiness, why we should care about teaching virtue, the Hillbilly Elegy, the proper ends of education, why it's not such a great idea to let children choose what they read, Catholic education, whether it is old fashioned to teach virtue, Social and Emotional Learning, the liberal arts, and more.

Show Notes:

The Universe and the University

Liberal Education and Human Flourishing

The Jubilee Centre

Virtue and Classic Children's Literature

On the latest episode of The Report Card, Nat interviews Ilana Horwitz, Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Sociology at Tulane, about her new book, God, Grades, and Graduation. Nat and Ilana discuss the impact of religion on student outcomes, why religion helps working class kids get better grades and graduate from college at higher rates, the educational benefits of summer camp, Palo Alto, whether the boys are alright, the academy's understanding of American religious life, why religion helps boys academically more than it helps girls, education in the Soviet Union, why atheists also do better in school, how religion combats despair in working class America, why religious kids might not learn more even though they get better grades, religious girls and undermatching, the trajectory of evangelical Christianity in America, the importance of social capital, the logic of religious restraint, and why Jewish girls do well academically.

Also in this episode? The debut of Grade It.

Show Notes:

God, Grades, and Graduation

I Followed the Lives of 3,290 Teenagers. This Is What I Learned About Religion and Education.

The Future of Higher Education Needs to Embrace Religion

From Bat Mitzvah to the Bar: Religious Habitus, Self-Concept, and Women’s Educational Outcomes

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat interviews Doug Lemov. Nat and Doug discuss cellphones and social media, how they harm the academic and social development of students, how they make schools less inclusive, and what we can do about all of this. Nat and Doug also discuss online learning, school choice, the difficulty of creating schools with a coherent operating philosophy, the state of public schooling, The Scarlet Letter, the pandemic's effects on students, teacher professional development, the relationship between parenting and schooling, the idea that schooling sometimes has to be hard for students, and the crucial role that schools play in shaping students' habits of attention.

Doug Lemov is the author of Teach Like a Champion and the founder of the Teach Like a Champion organization. He was previously the managing director and one of the founders of Uncommon Schools. His new book, Reconnect: Building School Culture for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging, hits shelves next month.

Show Notes:

Take Away Their Cellphones

Reconnect: Building School Culture for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging

Teach Like A Champion 3.0

Teach Like A Champion

iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us

It Was a Mistake to Let Kids Onto Social Media Sites. Here’s What to Do Now.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Larry Berger about the science of reading, education technology, curriculum and high-quality instructional materials, for-profit companies in education, and more.

Larry Berger is the CEO and co-founder of Amplify, an education company that creates K–12 assessments, intervention programs, and core curricula. In 2022, Amplify’s materials were used in over 4,000 US school districts and by over 15 million students worldwide.

We are now entering the fourth school year that will be affected by COVID-19. What can we expect? What have we learned so far? And does anyone still care?

What should we be keeping our eyes on as another year rolls around? Evolving safety protocols? School spending? Student behavior? Potential teacher shortages? New vaccines?

To discuss these questions and more, Nat invited John Bailey onto the podcast for a conversation. At AEI, John studies technology and education, and since the start of the pandemic he has written over 550 COVID-19 Policy Updates on his Substack.

Show Notes:

John's COVID-19 Policy Updates

Nat's Return to Learn Tracker

Reset Strategies Now, Prepare for the Future

A Failure to Respond: Public School Mask Mandates in the 2021–22 School Year

Pandemic Enrollment Fallout: School District Enrollment Changes Across COVID-19 Response

Bush Pandemic Preparedness Plan

2022 School Pulse Panel: Student Behavior

Student achievement in 2021-22: Cause for hope and continued urgency

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Tom Kane, the Walter H. Gale Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the faculty director of CEPR, and one of the project leaders of the Education Recovery Scorecard. Nat and Tom discuss NAEP results, the Education Recovery Scorecard, COVID learning loss, pandemic recovery, and more.

A collaboration of the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard, and Stanford CEPA, the Education Recovery Scorecard links NAEP scores with state assessment results, giving us the first chance to really compare learning loss at the district level across the country.

Show Notes:

The Education Recovery Scorecard

Tom Kane

NAEP

What does a good school look like? How does a good school operate? What does a good school do differently?

There are probably many correct answers to these questions, but on this episode of The Report Card we want to narrow it down and focus on one particular school, Michaela, that has a very particular set of answers to these questions. Located near London’s Wembley Stadium, Michaela is a free school that opened its doors in 2014 and today has the highest GCSE value-added score in all of England. Michaela is known for its strict behavioral practices, its unique school culture, and its unabashed promotion of small-c conservative values.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Katharine Birbalsingh, the founder and head teacher of Michaela Community School. Nat and Katharine discuss school culture, the importance of values in education, school lunches, cell phones in schools, discipline and student behavior, teacher feedback and observation, and more.

Show Notes:

Michaela: The Power of Culture

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way

Britain's Strictest Headmistress

While hybrid education may appear to be an invention of necessity spurred by the pandemic, splitting instruction between traditional brick-and-mortar schooling and homeschooling has been practiced—albeit on a limited scale—for quite some time. On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus talks with Ed Choice's Mike McShane about his recent book on hybrid homeschooling, "Hybrid Homeschooling: A Guide to the Future of Education.”

Nat and Mike are also joined by Kathaleena Edward Monds (Center for Educational Opportunity), Allison L. Morgan (Classical Christian Conservatory of Alexandria), and Antonio Parés (Walnut Hill Workshop).

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Melissa Kearney about her new book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. Nat and Melissa discuss the decline in marriage among non-college-educated parents, why having two parents in the home matters for student outcomes, the stock of marriageable men, whether studying family structure is taboo, what the fracking boom can teach us about the decline in marriage, how marriage became decoupled from raising children, universal basic income for parents, why Asian Americans seem immune from the broader decline in marriage, intergenerational households, the difficulty of parenting, the importance of culture, and more.

Melissa Kearney is the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland and the Director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group.

Show Notes:

The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind

A Driver of Inequality That Not Enough People Are Talking About

The Puzzle of Falling US Birth Rates since the Great Recession

Male Earnings, Marriageable Men, and Non-Marital Fertility: Evidence from the Fracking Boom

The Economics of Non-Marital Childbearing and The “Marriage Premium for Children”

Investigating Recent Trends in the U.S. Teen Birth Rate

Media Influences on Social Outcomes: The Impact of MTV's 16 and Pregnant on Teen Childbearing

Note: This episode originally aired in June 2023.

What does a good school look like? How does a good school operate? What does a good school do differently?

There are probably many correct answers to these questions, but on this episode of The Report Card we want to narrow it down and focus on one particular school, Michaela, that has a very particular set of answers to these questions. Located near London’s Wembley Stadium, Michaela is a free school that opened its doors in 2014 and today has the highest GCSE value-added score in all of England. Michaela is known for its strict behavioral practices, its unique school culture, and its unabashed promotion of small-c conservative values.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Katharine Birbalsingh, the founder and head teacher of Michaela Community School. Nat and Katharine discuss school culture, the importance of values in education, school lunches, cell phones in schools, discipline and student behavior, teacher feedback and observation, and more.

Show Notes:

Michaela: The Power of Culture

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela Way

Britain's Strictest Headmistress

Graduation rates have been rising for over a decade. Indeed, even during the pandemic, as students learned less and chronic absenteeism exploded, graduation rates continued to rise.

One important part of this story might be the rise of credit recovery programs. Each year, credit recovery programs help students who have failed a course continue their schooling without repeating a year. But what exactly are credit recovery programs? How do students who participate in online credit recovery programs fare later in life? Can credit recovery courses be improved? And if so, how?

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions, and more, with Carolyn J. Heinrich.

Carolyn J. Heinrich is a University Distinguished Professor of Leadership, Policy, and Organizations and Political Science and the Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Public Policy, Education and Economics at Vanderbilt University.

Show Notes:

Design Principles for Effective Online Credit Recovery

Failing to Learn from Failure: The Facade of Online Credit Recovery Assessments

Does Online Credit Recovery in High School Support or Stymie Later Labor Market Success?

Mapping the Inequity Implications of Help-Seeking in Online Credit-Recovery Classrooms

We at the Report Card are on break this week, so we are re-upping a conversation from March 2022 that we think is interesting and important.

We've talked a lot on the show about school choice. But it's not often we discuss choice between schools in the same district.

Started in 2012, Los Angeles's Zones of Choice program creates small local markets with high schools in neighborhoods throughout LA, but leaves traditional attendance-zone boundaries in place. In application, this means that about 30-40% of LAUSD is a Zone of Choice.

Here to discuss the success of LA's Zones of Choice program are Christopher Campos and John Deasy.

Show Notes:

The Impact of Neighborhood School Choice: Evidence from Los Angeles' Zones of Choice Program.

School choice is one of the most controversial issues in education, and it has been for some time. Since the 1990s, support for private school choice has become increasingly politicized – with Republicans making it central to their campaign and Democrats largely in opposition. Despite this, Republicans have approached school choice legislation in a bipartisan fashion.

But, does school choice legislation need to be bipartisan, and should it?

On this episode of The Report Card with Nat Malkus, Jay Greene discusses the legislative record of school choice legislation, its meaning, and how legislators can and should approach school choice legislation.

In 2015, Liberia’s school system was in shambles. Years of civil war and a 2014 Ebola outbreak shut down schools nationwide; only radical action could correct course. Then-President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf charged then-Education Minister George Werner with doing just that.

The following year, Werner implemented the Liberian Education Advancement Program (LEAP). This initiative brought in eight independent operators to run a handful of Liberian schools, the most successful of which was Kenya-based Bridge International Academies.

On this episode, host Nat Malkus talks with Werner and Steve Cantrell, Bridge International’s vice president of measurement and evaluation. Join the discussion on the educational landscape of Liberia, Bridge International’s impressive outcomes, and the work yet to be done.

In May, Eric Hanushek and Steven Rivkin joined the podcast to discuss their research on Dallas Independent School District’s Accelerating Campus Excellence program and its Principal Excellence and Teacher Excellence initiatives.

The man who implemented these reforms, Mike Miles, was superintendent of Dallas ISD from 2012 through 2015, and, in May, was serving as the CEO of Third Future Schools.

However, on June 1st, following a state intervention, Miles was named the next superintendent of Houston ISD. Since then, he has made quite the splash.

On this episode of The Report Card, Mike Miles joins Nat Malkus to discuss the reforms he is implementing in Houston ISD and his views on district leadership and school reform more broadly.

What will President Biden do with respect to free college? Should college be free for all students or only some students? Would a free college program supplant our current system of financial aid and student loans, or merely supplement it? On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus talks about the ins and outs of free college with two higher education experts: Kevin Carey of New America and AEI's own Jason Delisle.

Have a comment, question, or topic suggestion? Contact us at ed.podcast@aei.org.

Note: This episode originally aired in September 2022.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Doug Lemov about how cellphones and social media harm the academic and social development of students and make schools less inclusive.

Nat and Doug also discuss online learning, school choice, the difficulty of creating schools with a coherent operating philosophy, the state of public schooling, The Scarlet Letter, the pandemic's effects on students, teacher professional development, the relationship between parenting and schooling, the idea that schooling sometimes has to be hard for students, and the role that schools play in shaping students' habits of attention.

Doug Lemov is the author of Reconnect: Building School Culture for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging and Teach Like a Champion.

Show Notes:

Take Away Their Cellphones

Reconnect: Building School Culture for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging

Teach Like A Champion 3.0

Teach Like A Champion

iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us

It Was a Mistake to Let Kids Onto Social Media Sites. Here’s What to Do Now.

In March, state and local governments were given an unprecedented $350 billion in flexible funding to reduce hardships caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. How can these funds best be used to address the needs of America’s students? In particular, how might these funds be used to send direct payments to students and families for private school tuition, tutoring, learning pods, and other educational expenses?

John Bailey, a nonresident senior fellow at AEI, weighs in on this episode of “The Report Card with Nat Malkus.”

Read John's recent CERN report: Education recovery benefits: Using coronavirus state and local fiscal recovery funds to address children’s academic, social, emotional, and mental health needs.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat interviews Ian Rowe, senior fellow at AEI, cofounder of Vertex Partnership Academies, and the author of Agency: The Four Point Plan (F.R.E.E.) for ALL Children to Overcome the Victimhood Narrative and Discover Their Pathway to Power. Nat and Ian discuss what the "blame the victim" and the "blame the system" narratives get wrong, Teach for America, the importance of mediating institutions in developing agency within the individual, the state of music videos, why young people want to be taught the success sequence, charter schools, Ian's parents' education in Jamaica, what students can learn from investing in the stock market, MLK, why morality must be a part of agency, F.R.E.E., why family and entrepreneurship broadly understood are important for building agency, why it is harmful when teachers overemphasize systemic racism, and much more.

Show Notes:

Agency: The Four Point Plan (F.R.E.E.) for ALL Children to Overcome the Victimhood Narrative and Discover Their Pathway to Power

Here’s why all students need agency rather than ‘equity’

Vertex Partnership Academies

Building Successful High Schools

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Brooks Bowden about her recent paper The Unintended Consequences of Academic Leniency, co-authored by Viviana Rodriguez and Zach Weingarten. Nat and Brooks discuss how grading policies influence student effort and engagement, whether academic leniency helps low ability students, why North Carolina's changes to its grading policies led to increased absenteeism, whether making grading policies stricter can ameliorate student achievement, whether increases in academic leniency in the wake of the pandemic are good for students, and more.

Brooks Bowden is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and the Director of the Center for Benefit–Cost Studies of Education.

Show Notes:

The Unintended Consequences of Academic Leniency

Lenient Grading Won’t Help Struggling Students. Addressing Chronic Absenteeism Will.

Designing Field Experiments to Integrate Research on Costs

There’s a popular narrative according to which the financial benefits of going to college aren’t what they once were. College is increasingly unaffordable. College doesn’t pay off like it used to. And college is only worth it if you go to the most selective schools.

But is this narrative right? Are college costs going up? How do college costs in the US compare with college costs in other countries? What is the return on investment (ROI) like for students at different schools? How does ROI differ by major? And is there a student loan crisis?

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions, and more, with Preston Cooper.

Preston Cooper is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he studies ROI in higher education, student lending, and higher education reform.

Show Notes:

ROI in Higher Education (Estimates ROI for 53,000 different degree and certificate programs.)

On the latest episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Laura Meckler about her new book, Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity. Nat and Laura discuss integration, busing, and detracking; the Van Sweringen brothers; the limitations of good intentions; the internet's effect on journalism; the racial achievement gap; belonging; what it's like writing about your hometown; what history can teach us about education policy; and more.

Laura Meckler is a national education writer for The Washington Post.

Show Notes:

Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity

What happened when an Ohio school district rushed to integrate classrooms

Over the past couple years, the education world has seen a renewed push for phonics instruction, often called “the science of reading.” But how science-based is the science of reading movement? Will the current push for phonics last? And what do kids need so that the reading gains they experience from phonics don’t fade away by the time they reach eighth grade?

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions, and more, with Timothy Shanahan. Nat and Tim discuss the differences between balanced literacy and phonics, how much of an improvement balanced literacy is over phonics, previous efforts to promote phonics and why they went by the wayside, whether the current science of reading movement will be durable, textbook reviews, the extent to which practices promoted by science of reading advocates are science-based, the gap between reading instruction research and reading instruction practice, why many students who can decode well nonetheless have poor reading comprehension, grade-level texts and the importance of giving students texts that aren’t too easy, the relationship between love of reading and reading ability, what skills students acquire as they become better readers, disciplinary literacy, the future of reading instruction, the extent to which reading achievement could improve with better instructional practices, and more.

Timothy Shanahan is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was Founding Director of the UIC Center for Literacy. Previously, he was Director of Reading for the Chicago Public Schools and a member of the National Reading Panel and the advisory board of the National Institute for Literacy.

Show Notes:

What about the Textbook Reviews?

How Do You Know If It Really Is the Science of Reading?

More on Hanford: Phonics Reform and Literacy Levels

Limiting Children to Books They Can Already Read

What Is Disciplinary Literacy and Why Does It Matter?

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, selective colleges, and their admissions practices, have received a lot of scrutiny.

Does going to a highly selective college affect long-term outcomes? How much preference are legacy applicants given? To what extent does socioeconomic background influence chances of admission? And how can highly selective colleges improve social mobility and diversify the American elite?

In a new paper, Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges, Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman consider these questions and many others.

The paper is full of interesting findings, so on this episode of The Report Card, two of the paper's authors, David Deming and John Friedman, join Nat to break it down.

David Deming is the Academic Dean and Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

John Friedman is the Briger Family Distinguished Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs and the Economics Department Chair at Brown University. He is also a founding co-director of Opportunity Insights at Harvard University

Show Notes:

Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges

Study of Elite College Admissions Data Suggests Being Very Rich Is Its Own Qualification

The Future of Highly Selective College Admissions

Forked Lightning

Optimal Gerrymandering in a Competitive Environment

The Lengthening of Childhood

In the Salary Race, Engineers Sprint but English Majors Endure

Getting In

College is expensive. Despite this, every year, millions of students enroll in college. For many, this decision is primarily based on the expectation that they will receive a positive positive return on their investment.

Given this logic, it’d be easy to think that the choice of whether to attend college is the most important predictor of ones’ financial future. But, what if that logic is flawed? What if, instead, which college, and which degree in that college, is actually more important to financial success than the decision to attend college at all?

On this episode of The Report Card with Nat Malkus, Preston Cooper and Carlo Salerno to join Nat to answer this question and more.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (NC), the Republican Leader of the House Committee on Education and Labor. Nat and Dr. Foxx discuss student loan forgiveness, the REAL Reforms Act, community colleges, credentialism, serving on a school board, spelling bees, the role of federal education policy, and more.

Show Notes:

The REAL Reforms Act

Press Release for the REAL Reforms Act

Dr. Foxx Bio

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Brian Jacob and Vladimir Kogan about school board elections. Nat, Brian, and Vlad discuss how effective school board elections are at giving voters local democratic control, whether school board members are rewarded for good performance and punished for bad performance, the margin of victory in school board elections, who runs for school board, how incumbents perform in school board elections, the high rate of school board member turnover, paying school board members, state takeovers, how the pandemic affected school board elections, whether Moms for Liberty has been effective in winning school board elections, school governance, direct democracy, ESSER funding, NCLB, and more.

Brian Jacob is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Education Policy and professor of economics at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

Vladimir Kogan is a professor in the department of Political Science at The Ohio State University.

Show Notes:

How Did the COVID-19 Pandemic Influence School Board Elections? (forthcoming) by Brian Jacob

Democratic Accountability or an Electoral Turnstile? Turnover and Competition in Local School Board Elections (forthcoming) by Vladimir Kogan, Stephane Lavertu, and Zachary Peskowitz

Last Tuesday, OpenAI launched GPT 4, a more advanced version of the large language model GPT 3.5 that the original ChatGPT was built upon. To say the least, it’s impressive. For example, whereas GPT 3.5 scores in the 10th percentile on the Bar Exam, GPT 4 scores in the 90th percentile on the Bar Exam. It’s not hard to imagine that GPT 4 and future, even-more-powerful AIs will have a big impact on education. But what sort of effect will they have?

On the same day that OpenAI launched GPT 4, Khan Academy launched an "experimental AI tool" called Khanmigo, which uses GPT 4 to help students and teachers by acting as either a personalized tutor or a personalized teaching assistant. On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Sal Khan about Khanmigo and AI in education more broadly. Nat and Sal discuss AI's potential benefits for students and teachers, whether AI will replace teachers, which students AI will help the most, how we can make sure that AI doesn't serve as a substitute for critical thinking skills, how Khan Academy developed Khanmigo, and more.

Salman Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, an online learning platform serving over 150 million users across 190 countries. Sal is also the founder of Schoolhouse.world, Khan Lab School, and Khan World School.

Show Notes:

Khanmigo Announcement

Khanmigo Demonstration

Khan Academy Course on AI for Education

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with David Steiner about coherence and fragmentation; why curricula, teacher training programs, and assessments should be aligned (and why they usually aren’t); SEL; where Common Core fell short; E.D. Hirsch and the importance of teaching content; why economics, music, and philosophy should be taken more seriously in secondary education than they usually are; AP exams and CTE; teachers unions, master’s pay premiums, and schools of education; whether school is boring; why American teachers tend to focus more on students and less on subject matter than teachers abroad; the state of the humanities in American education; teaching students Ancient Greek; how not to teach Shakespeare; and more.

David Steiner is Executive Director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, Professor of Education at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of A Nation at Thought: Restoring Wisdom in America's Schools. He was previously Dean at the Hunter College School of Education and the Commissioner of Education for New York State.

Show Notes:

A Nation at Thought: Restoring Wisdom in America's Schools

Arguing Identity: Session Three

Make Sense of the Research: A Primer for Educational Leaders

Don’t Give Up on Curriculum Reform Just Yet

Every year, it seems, national and local press talk a lot about the "teacher shortage," and the reports are often accompanied with words like "emergency" and "crisis." The frequency of these reports might garner skepticism by some but, this year, talks around the teacher shortage are different.

After nearly two years of COVID-19, and with the labor markets currently in flux, could it be that reports around the teacher shortage this year are different than before? Here to discuss is Dan Goldhaber and Gema Zamarro.

Gema is a Professor in Education Reform and Economics at the University of Arkansas and the author of a recent report, titled: Understanding how COVID-19 has Changed Teachers’ Chances of Remaining in the Classroom.

Dan is the Director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data (CALDER) in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research and the author of a new report on school district staffing, titled: School District Staffing Challenges in a Rapidly Recovering Economy.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Eva Moskowitz, the founder and CEO of Success Academy. Nat and Eva discuss why COVID learning loss is a misnomer; whether chronically absent students should face consequences for their poor attendance; why, despite its strong academic performance, Success Academy decided to overhaul its curriculum; what Success Academy looks for when hiring new teachers; Success Academy’s potential expansion into Florida and Texas; the challenges Success Academy faced in expanding into high school; whether charter schools have lived up to their original promise; and what’s next for Success Academy.

Eva Moskowitz is the founder and CEO of Success Academy Charter Schools, a network of 57 schools in New York City educating 22,000 students. Despite 72% of its students being economically disadvantaged, Success Academy ranked first on the 2024 New York State Grade 3–8 math exam.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat interviews Christina Brown and Heather Schofield, two of the authors of Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital. Nat, Christina, and Heather discuss what cognitive endurance is and why it's important, PISA, an elaborate field experiment in India, disparities in American schools, shortening standardized tests, students in Pakistan, mazes and tangrams, what schools can do differently to build cognitive endurance in students, AP exams, long medical shifts, whether an extra year of schooling makes a difference for cognitive endurance, the ideal age to build cognitive endurance, and more.

Christina Brown is a development economist who will be joining the University of Chicago’s Economics Department as an Assistant Professor in 2023, and Heather Schofield is an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is currently an Assistant Professor in the Perelman School of Medicine and The Wharton School. Their coauthors on Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital are Supreet Kaur and Geeta Kingdon.

Show Notes:

Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital

Inducing Positive Sorting through Performance Pay: Experimental Evidence from Pakistani Schools

The Economic Consequences of Increasing Sleep Among the Urban Poor

Ramadan Fasting and Agricultural Output

Just about any parent could attest that remote learning hasn’t exactly been a one-to-one substitute for in-person learning. But just how far behind have students fallen over the past ten months? On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus talks with two experts: Megan Kuhfeld, a senior research scientist at NWEA, and McKinsey and Company's global education practice manager Emma Dorn.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat interviews Freeman Hrabowski. Nat and Freeman discuss Black students in STEM, the state of free speech on college campuses, university spending and how to keep costs down, whether high schools are doing a good enough job of preparing students for college, the NCAA tournament, campus culture, the value of collaborative teamwork, how to improve graduation rates, multibillion-dollar university endowments, and more.

Freeman Hrabowski served as president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) from 1992 until earlier this year. Under his leadership, UMBC became the nation’s number one college in terms of the number of Black students it graduates who later earn a Ph.D. in the natural sciences and engineering—an especially impressive feat when you consider that UMBC’s undergraduate enrollment is only about 11,000 and that Black students make up slightly less than 20% of that number. During Hrabowski's tenure, UMBC also more than doubled graduation rates, earned the #1 ranking in US News's list of up and coming universities for six consecutive years, and won the biggest upset in the history of March Madness.

Show Notes:

Meyerhoff Scholars Program

Replicating Meyerhoff for Inclusive Excellence in STEM

Meyerhoff at Berkeley and UCSD

Freeman Hrabowski on 60 Minutes

The Empowered University

Holding Fast to Dreams

Overcoming the Odds

Beating the Odds

UMBC Upsets UVA

In just a few short weeks, Joe Biden will take office amid some of the most trying circumstances faced by an incoming president in modern history. What does it take to lead successfully in a time of crisis? Governor Jeb Bush weighs in on this rebroadcasted episode of The Report Card with Nat Malkus.

In March of 2023, shortly after Khan Academy launched Khanmigo, its AI tutor and teaching assistant, Sal Khan came on the podcast to discuss Khanmigo and his hopes for AI in education more generally. On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Sal Khan again to hear what he has learned since launching Khanmigo and how his thoughts on AI in education have changed over the last year.

Sal Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, a nonprofit educational organization with over 165 million registered users in more than 190 countries, and the author of Brave New Words: How AI Will Revolutionize Education (and Why That's a Good Thing).

Show Notes:

GPT-4o Math Demo

Khanmigo Essay Tool

Increasingly, political intolerance and polarization is infiltrating college campuses. The impact of these occurrences are growing in prevalence and, to some, are perverting the original purpose of the university: the pursuit of truth.

On this episode of The Report Card with Nat Malkus, Pano Kanelos , a founding trustee of the University of Austin, joins the podcast to discuss.

Americans have long viewed education as something that primarily happens in schools, and for good reason; since the introduction of the common school, most formal education has taken place in schools. But that all changed when the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered school buildings in March 2020, forcing the locus of education to switch from the classroom to the home.

So, how has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted homeschooling?

On this episode of The Report Card with Nat Malkus, Kerry McDonald discusses the homeschooling movement, its rise during the COVID-19 pandemic, and her book, Unschooling: Raising Curious, Well-Educated Children Outside the Conventional Classroom.

American schooling has been on a bumpy road the past few years. COVID-19 is the obvious issues here, but it's not only that. Students have increasingly faced mental health issues and that preceded the pandemic. All the while, we've seen one polarizing issue after another shaking classrooms across the country.

This bumpy road has been eloquently summarized in a new piece by Robert Pondiscio in the lead essay for the March issue of Commentary Magazine, titled: The unbearable bleakness in American schooling.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Daniel Willingham, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy. Nat and Dan discuss the benefits and limitations of the science of learning, why we don't spend enough time teaching students how to learn, learning styles and education myths, the potential education benefits of chewing gum, why ed schools need to teach more than just Piaget, education R&D, why students develop bad study habits, how students are different and how they are the same, entrance exams, group assignments, the value of memorization and content knowledge, why students should learn subjects that they will later forget, and more.

Show Notes:

Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy

Why Don't Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for the Classroom

Raising Kids Who Read: What Parents and Teachers Can Do

Last week, more than 1,300 individuals at the Department of Education were laid off, including over 300 at Federal Student Aid, nearly 250 at the Office for Civil Rights, and over 100 at the Institute of Education Sciences. All told, since Trump took office, the workforce at the Department of Education has been cut nearly in half.

What is the operating strategy behind these cuts? What effect will these cuts have on schools? And what do these cuts tell us about the Trump administration’s plans? On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions, and more, with Andy Rotherham and Rick Hess.

Andrew J. Rotherham is a co-founder and senior partner at Bellwether and the author of the Eduwonk blog.

Frederick M. Hess is a senior fellow and the director of education policy studies at AEI.

Show Notes:

Wednesday's Department Of Education Is Full Of Woe. SCOTUS Religious Charter Schools Action. It's OK To Say Diversity. Plus Frozen Fish Pics!

The Incredible Shrinking Department of Education

Running Down DOGE’s Department of Education Receipts

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Po-Shen Loh, professor of mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University and coach of the United States' International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) team. Nat and Po discuss the difference between teaching problem solving and teaching computation, the limitations of mastery learning, the potential of online learning, math outreach, IMO, Hagoromo chalk, how to make math instruction simultaneously more engaging and more challenging, whether educators should discuss the usefulness of math, a scalable program to teach problem solving to advanced students live online, calculators, and more.

Show Notes:

Po's Personal Website

Po's Academic Website

International Mathematical Olympiad

Live.PoShenLoh

Po on Quadratic Equations

NOVID

Po's Speaking Tour

College is expensive. How can students and parents make sure that it pays off? On this episode of The Report Card with Nat Malkus, Beth Akers, resident scholar in education policy at AEI, discusses her new book, Making College Pay: An Economist Explains How to Make a Smart Bet on Higher Education (Penguin Random House, 2021).

You can purchase Making College Pay at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or your local bookstore.

The COVID-19 pandemic has seemingly touched everything in education policy, and school choice is no exception. Since the start of the pandemic and, particularly in the 2020-2021 academic year, over 1 million students left their traditional pubic school, charter school enrollment surged, and state-after-state either expanded or created a new school choice programs.        

The growing enrollment and expansion of these programs over the past year has led some to refer to 2021 as “The Year of School Choice.” So, why was school choice so popular in 2021, and what did its rise look like?

Here to discuss is Nina Rees and Patrick Wolf.

Nina is the President and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Previously, Nina served as the first Deputy Under Secretary for Innovation and Improvement at the Department of Education.

Patrick Wolf is a Distinguished Professor of Education Policy and the 21^st Century Endowed Chair in School Choice at the University of Arkansas’ Dept. of Education Reform.

During the last decade, Dallas Independent School District overhauled its system for evaluating and compensating teachers and began a new program to attract teachers to hard-to-staff schools. The effects of these changes on student outcomes in one of our nation’s largest school districts are attention grabbing and are documented in two new papers.

The first, The Effects of Comprehensive Educator Evaluation and Pay Reform on Achievement, by Eric A. Hanushek, Jin Luo, Andrew J. Morgan, Minh Nguyen, Ben Ost, Steven G. Rivkin, and Ayman Shakeel, looks at Dallas’s Principal Excellence and Teacher Excellence initiatives. And the second, Attracting and Retaining Highly Effective Educators in Hard-To-Staff Schools, by Andrew J. Morgan, Minh Nguyen, Eric A. Hanushek, Ben Ost, and Steven G. Rivkin, looks at Dallas’s Accelerating Campus Excellence Program.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus is joined by two of the papers’ authors, Eric Hanushek and Steven Rivkin, to discuss these programs. Eric Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the winner of the 2021 Yidan Prize for Education Research. Steven Rivkin is the Department Head of Economics at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Show Notes:

The Effects of Comprehensive Educator Evaluation and Pay Reform on Achievement

Attracting and Retaining Highly Effective Educators in Hard-To-Staff Schools

Does Regulating Entry Requirements Lead to More Effective Principals?

Performance Information and Personnel Decisions in the Public Sector: The Case of School Principals

Dynamic Effects of Teacher Turnover on the Quality of Instruction

Global Universal Basic Skills: Current Deficits and Implications for World Development

Back-to-school 2020 didn’t go as smoothly as hoped. Many districts that were slated to offer in-person learning abruptly changed to their reopening plans only weeks before the start of the year, and many of those that did reopen for in-person learning were forced to close for weeks at a time as Covid rates increased. With back-to-school 2021 just around the corner, what should parents and students expect schooling to look like this fall?

Dr. Joseph Allen, an associate professor of exposure assessment science at Harvard University, discusses the CDC's recently updated reopening guidance for schools, the importance of ventilation as a Covid mitigation strategy, and solutions for America's "sick" school buildings on this episode of The Report Card with Nat Malkus.

Over the course of a weekend last March, students saw their day-to-day routines completely upended. Now, eleven months into the pandemic, how are students holding up?

On this episode of "The Report Card," Nat Malkus talks with two school counselors about their work supporting students during the pandemic: 2020 School Counselor of the Year Laura Ross, the lead school counselor at Five Forks Middle School in Lawrenceville, Georgia, and 2016 School Counselor of the Year Kat Pastor-Lorents, a school counselor at Flagstaff High School in Flagstaff, Arizona.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Mike McShane about education savings account (ESA) programs. Nat and Mike discuss the sudden growth in ESA programs over the past year, how ESA programs work, the differences between ESAs and vouchers, the pandemic's effects on school choice, whether interest in ESAs solely comes from the right, the difficulty of starting charter schools, single-sex schools, the quality of education surveys, whether ESAs harm public schools in rural districts, the challenges of implementing ESAs, school choice and Catholic schools, how ESAs affect homeschooling, and more.

Mike McShane is the Director of National Research at EdChoice and the author and editor of a number of books on education policy.

Show Notes:

Implementing K–12 Education Savings Accounts

What is an Education Savings Account (ESA)?

The School Choice Movement Needs To Get Boring

AEI's 2024 Summer Honors Program

Exceptional students often become exceptional adults who help drive scientific progress and economic growth. But without mentors to identify and develop their talents, many of these exceptional students will not make good on their potential. So: How can we make sure that more exceptional students have access to the mentors they need? How exceptional do these mentors need to be? And how many exceptional students are we currently missing out on? On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions, and more, with Ian Calaway.

Ian Calaway is a PhD candidate in Economics at Stanford University and the author of the recent paper Early Mentors for Exceptional Students. He is currently on the academic job market.

Show Notes:

Early Mentors for Exceptional Students

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus reviews the past year in education with Matt Barnum of The Wall Street Journal, Goldie Blumenstyk of The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Alyson Klein of Education Week. Nat, Matt, Goldie, and Alyson discuss AI in education; DEI in higher education; learning loss, chronic absenteeism, and the ESSER funding cliff; the end of race-based admissions; the state of education journalism; the science of reading; which education stories from the past year were over- and under-reported; the Biden administration's SAVE plan; culture clashes in Florida; the 2024 elections; what to expect from the coming year; and more.

Show Notes:

The Daily Tar Heel; Volume 131, Issue 16

Students Hated ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ Their Teachers Tried to Dump It.

This Online Tutoring Company Says It Offers Expert One-on-One Help. Students Often Get Neither.

Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s Suburbs

The ‘Science of Reading’ in 2023: 4 Important Developments

What I Learned Covering National Education Issues for Chalkbeat

Ready or Not, AI Is Here

AI Can Mimic Students’ Writing Styles. How Are Teachers Supposed to Catch Cheaters Now?

We at The Report Card are on summer break this week, so we are re-upping one of our favorite episodes from the past year: Bleakness in American Schooling with Robert Pondiscio.

Over the past few years, American schooling has been on a bumpy road. COVID-19 is the most obvious issue here, but it's not only that. As Robert Pondiscio argued in the March edition of Commentary, American schools have become overcome by bleakness.

"We want children to grapple with 'honest history' starting in elementary school and to discover the power of their voices by writing authentic essays about their personal problems. Small wonder, then, that children are more depressed and medicated than ever before. A half-century of psychological research indicates that our beliefs about the world shape behavior and our sense of well-being. Whether one views the world as good or bad, safe or dangerous, enticing or dull, is correlated with outcomes such as life satisfaction or depression. We may think that we are doing children a good service by being 'real' with them, refusing to spare them from the unpleasant facts of the tired world they will soon inherit, thus inspiring them to seize the day and set the world right. But strong evidence is emerging that we are mostly succeeding in creating a generation of overwhelmed young people paralyzed into learned helplessness."

In this episode, Nat and Robert discuss this bleakness—its sources, its effects, and how we might overcome it.

Show Notes:

The Unbearable Bleakness of American Schooling

How The Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice

The Changing Face of Social Breakdown

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with David Figlio about school choice, accountability, and peer effects. Nat and David discuss how school choice programs affect students who remain in traditional public schools; what other choice mechanisms can tell us about universal ESAs; the effects of school accountability on life outcomes; holding students back; the teaching quality of non-tenure-track professors; the importance of cultivating researcher-district relationships; whether peer effects are understudied; and boys named Sue.

David Figlio is the Gordon Fyfe Professor of Economics and Education at the University of Rochester. Previously, he was provost at the University of Rochester and dean of the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University.

Show Notes:

Competitive Effects of Charter Schools

Effects of Maturing Private School Choice Programs on Public School Students

School Accountability, Long-Run Criminal Activity, and Self-Sufficiency

Boys Named Sue: Disruptive Children and their Peers

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat reviews the past year in education with Laura Meckler of the Washington Post, Linda Jacobson of The 74, and Goldie Blumenstyk of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Nat, Laura, Linda, and Goldie discuss affirmative action, school masking, ChatGPT, the top pieces of education journalism from the past year, higher education labor strikes, enrollment shortages, book bans, how education journalists use Twitter, COVID recovery, learning loss, sports gambling on college campuses, what education stories audiences want, income driven repayment, technology in schools, student mental health, what we can expect from the coming year, and more.

Show Notes:

How Colleges and Sports-Betting Companies ‘Caesarized’ Campus Life

Young and Homeless in Rural America

Sold a Story

As AI Writing Gets Better, Teachers Work to Stop the Inevitable Cheating

Virtual Nightmare: One Student’s Journey Through the Pandemic

A 'Blanket Approach' Won't Win Adults Back

In the spring, campuses saw a wave of protests erupt over the war in Gaza. These protests, along with the controversial ways in which universities handled them, raised important questions about free expression on campus, the role that university administrations play in maintaining and fostering a culture of free expression, and the role of university presidents.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions, and more, with John W. Boyer. Nat and John discuss parallels and contrasts between recent campus protests and Vietnam War protests; the challenges university administrations face in dealing with protests; the Chicago Principles and the origins of the University of Chicago’s culture of free expression; what it takes to actually develop a robust culture of free expression on campus; the extent to which university administrations shape campus culture; the role of university presidents; the presidencies of William Rainey Harper, Robert Maynard Hutchins, and Robert Zimmer; why many university presidents today seem to lack a strong vision for what their universities should look like; why so few universities are started today; donor activism; the politicization of the university; the German research university; core curricula and the aims of liberal education; how the University of Chicago increased enrollments in and applications to the College over the last thirty years; balancing institutional history and institutional change; and more.

John W. Boyer is Senior Advisor to the President and the Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of History at the University of Chicago, where he served as Dean of the College from 1992 through 2023. He is also the author of The University of Chicago: A History, the second edition of which comes out in August.

Show Notes:

The University of Chicago: A History (Note: This is a link to the first edition. A link to the updated second edition will be provided when it becomes available.)

John W. Boyer, Dean of the College for 30 Years, in His Own and His Colleagues’ Words

At the end of this past November, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, and, since then, there has been a lot of discussion of what AI will mean for education. Will AI render teachers irrelevant? Should AI be banned in the classroom? Will homework ever be the same again?

Often, though, discussions of these questions can feel very abstract and distant, as if AI in education is some problem off in the future. Today’s guest, however, argues that it is anything but.

Ethan Mollick argues that teachers should already be using AI to better their teaching, that we should already be using AI to accelerate student learning, and that we should already be thinking about the threat AI poses to traditional forms of schoolwork such as the essay and the problem set.

Ethan Mollick is an Associate Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He writes about AI on his Substack, One Useful Thing, and on Twitter. Over the past year, he has co-written three papers with Lilach Mollick on AI in education: Assigning AI: Seven Approaches for Students, with Prompts; Using AI to Implement Effective Teaching Strategies in Classrooms: Five Strategies, Including Prompts; and New Modes of Learning Enabled by AI Chatbots: Three Methods and Assignments.

Show Notes

One Useful Thing

The Homework Apocalypse

Democratizing the Future of Education

Assigning AI: Seven Approaches for Students, with Prompts

Using AI to Implement Effective Teaching Strategies in Classrooms: Five Strategies, Including Prompts

New Modes of Learning Enabled by AI Chatbots: Three Methods and Assignments

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Mark Schneider, who recently finished up his six-year tenure as Director of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES). Nat and Mark discuss the past, present, and future of IES; what’s wrong with the What Works Clearinghouse; student privacy protections; NAEP; the state of special education research; why education research isn’t replicated; scalability; whether most education research is useful, usable, and used; why we need a DARPA for education; whether education research should be profitable; the incentive structures in education research; and more.

Mark Schneider is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Political Science at SUNY Stony Brook. He was previously Director of the Institute of Education Sciences, a visiting scholar at AEI, a vice president and Institute Fellow at the American Institutes for Research, and Commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat interviews Nate Hilger, author of The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis. Prior to writing The Parent Trap, Nate was a professor of economics at Brown University, a Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a lead policy consultant on early childhood and non-K12 child development issues for Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign.

Nat and Nate discuss why disparities in life outcomes are not mainly attributable to disparities in schools, why relying too heavily on parents to develop skills in children will perpetuate inequalities, big data in education, the lessons of Perry Preschool and Abecedarian, skill transmission in Asian American communities, why we need to spend more on education R&D, Cora Hillis, what a study about the management practices of businesses in India can teach us about parenting, the IRS databank, Childcare with a capital 'C', the decision to have five or more kids, universal pre-k, and more.

Show Notes:

The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis

Why do we provide so much more support to the old than the young?

The 100-year legacy of America’s first big national investment in families

How Does Your Kindergarten Classroom Affect Your Earnings? Evidence from Project Star

Parental Job Loss and Children's Long-Term Outcomes: Evidence from 7 Million Fathers' Layoffs

In 2022, Sold a Story debuted, bringing renewed attention—and scrutiny—to literacy instruction. Indeed, since Sold a Story came out, at least 25 states have passed reading laws.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Emily Hanford, host of Sold a Story. Nat and Emily discuss why Sold a Story took off, the impact Sold a Story has had on the literacy landscape, the state of investigative journalism in 2025, the pros and cons of podcasting, common misunderstandings of Sold a Story, and more.

Emily Hanford is a senior correspondent and producer at APM Reports and the host of Sold a Story, which was the second most shared show on Apple Podcasts in 2023. New episodes of Sold a Story will be coming out in February.

Show Notes:

Sold a Story

'There's a thoughtfulness about reading in the country today'

New Reading Laws Sweep the Nation Following Sold a Story

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Brian Jacob about the ways in which the pandemic changed the grammar of schooling. Nat and Brian discuss the pandemic’s effects on student technology use, parent-teacher communication, and individualized instruction; why pandemic-era changes seem more durable in high schools and middle schools than in elementary schools; whether charter schools changed as much during the pandemic as conventional public schools did; what the pandemic’s effects on schools can teach us about how schools will use AI; whether changes to schooling are driven by students’ needs or by other factors; whether teachers are optimistic about the state of schooling; hybrid education, ESSA, and the juvenile detention system; and more.

Brian Jacob is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Education Policy and Professor of Economics at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

Show Notes:

Did COVID-19 Shift the “Grammar of Schooling”? (coauthored with Cristina Stanojevich)

The Lasting Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on K-12 Schooling: Evidence from a Nationally Representative Teacher Survey

When the coronavirus pandemic hit late in the 2019-2020 school year, its impact on student learning didn’t take a summer vacation. One year later, with Covid retreating and vaccination efforts well underway, what does summer learning look like? And what effect might summer programing this year have on remediating Covid learning loss?

Christine Pitts, a resident policy fellow at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, discusses these questions and more on this episode of The Report Card with Nat Malkus.

Shownotes

Read Christine's analysis of summer learning programs at The 74.

Read CRPE's report on summer learning programs.

Visit CPRE's school district response tracker.

During the pandemic, homeschooling rates spiked, reaching unprecedented levels. And although they have fallen some since then, homeschooling rates remain far higher than anything we saw before the pandemic.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Angela Watson about what is driving this change, what we can expect from homeschooling in the coming years, and what we know about homeschooling more broadly.

Angela Watson is a senior research fellow at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy and an assistant research professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education. She is also the creator of The Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy’s Homeschool Hub and the director of the Homeschool Research Lab.

Show Notes:

Homeschool Hub

Parent-Created "Schools" in the US

Investigating Declining Trends in Arts Field Trip Attendance

This episode is a little different than normal: it’s not directly about education. Instead, it’s about peer review, strong- and weak-link problems, and our biases in how we remember the past and look forward to the future. Nonetheless, even though these topics don’t concern education directly, they shed light on important issues in education practice, research, and policy. In particular, the conceptual framework of strong- and weak-link problems provides a helpful apparatus for thinking about the tradeoffs we make in tackling many of the biggest issues in education: school choice, university admissions, accountability, tracking by ability, teacher licensure, and more.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these topics, and others, with Adam Mastroianni. Adam Mastroianni is an experimental psychologist and the author of the biweekly newsletter Experimental History.

Show Notes:

The Rise and Fall of Peer Review

Science Is a Strong-Link Problem

You’re Probably Wrong about How Things Have Changed

Things Could Be Better

When Should You End a Conversation? Probably Sooner than You Think

Pop Culture Has Become an Oligopoly

Ideas Aren’t Getting Harder to Find and Anyone Who Tells You Otherwise Is a Coward and I Will Fight Them

Ever since No Child Left Behind was signed into law in 2002, assessments have been a fixture of the education landscape—a very divisive one. But assessments have changed a lot over the last twenty years and are still changing to better meet the needs of students, teachers, schools, districts, and states.

But what do these new assessments look like? What are they capable of that the old ones weren’t? And what can we look forward to next on the assessment front? On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions and more with Arthur VanderVeen.

Arthur VanderVeen is the CEO and founder of New Meridian, an assessment design and development company that serves over 2,500 school districts. Arthur was previously the executive director of college readiness at the College Board, and the executive director of assessment and chief of innovation for the New York City Department of Education.

Show Notes:

New Meridian

A Right Turn on Assessments: State-Directed Assessments Using an Interstate Test-Item Bank Cooperative

Can State Tests Be Useful for Instruction and Accountability?

Done well, Career and Technical Education, better known as CTE, provides articled pathways to post-secondary education and high-demand, high-wage careers within specified career clusters.

There's certainty a lot to like about CTE, but we still have much to learn about it in terms of its impact on post-K-12 outcomes and, especially, how those outcomes vary among different career clusters that fall under the CTE umbrella. Here to discuss these issues with Nat are Walt Ecton and Shaun Dougherty.

Show notes:

Link to Walt and Shaun's report, titled: Heterogeneity in High School Career and Technical Education Outcomes.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat interviews Beth Akers, senior fellow at AEI and the coauthor of Game of Loans: The Rhetoric and Reality of Student Debt. Nat and Beth discuss student loans, student loan forgiveness, why student loan forgiveness might make college more expensive, whether student loan forgiveness would be a good way to address the racial wealth gap, whether it makes sense to forgive student loans in order to encourage entrepreneurship, the dangers of working during college, how to fix income-driven repayment, the benefits of income share agreements, whether for-profit colleges can be good, and what President Biden should do on student loans.

Show Notes:

Making College Pay: An Economist Explains How to Make a Smart Bet on Higher Education

Game of Loans: The Rhetoric and Reality of Student Debt

FAQ: Student Loan Cancellation Edition

Student Loan Cancellation Will Backfire Without Additional Reform

Anticipated Executive Order Cancelling Student Loans Unpopular on Right and Left

Another Extension of the Student-loan-repayment Freeze Is Bad Policy

On July 12th, the California State Board of Education adopted a new math framework that will affect the way math is taught for the nearly 6 million students in California’s public schools and has the potential to influence the way math is taught at the national level.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with two of the framework’s critics, Jelani Nelson and Tom Loveless, about the framework, its intellectual origins, what they think it gets wrong, whether it is equitable, and what it will mean for California's students.

Jelani Nelson is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley.

Tom Loveless is an education researcher and former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Show Notes:

California Math Framework

California Adopts Controversial New Math Framework. Here’s What’s in It

California’s New Math Framework Doesn’t Add Up

Analysis and Critique of California Math Frameworks Revisions (CMF)

UC Berkeley, Stanford Professors Face Controversy, Debate State Math Curriculum

California Students Are Struggling in Math. Will Reforms Make the Problem Worse?

The Divider: Jo Boaler of Stanford Is Leading the Math-Instruction Revolution. Critics Say Her Claims Don’t Always Add Up.

It's a challenge for school systems to recruit and retain quality teachers, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This challenge has spurred a number of creative solutions. One, announced earlier this year, is Tennessee's Teacher Occupation Apprenticeship program, also known as Grow Your Own. Tennessee's Grow Your Own program is based on 65 already existing Grow Your Own programs within the state.

Here to discuss Grow Your Own with Nat are Penny Schwinn, Tennessee Education Commissioner, and Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality.

Show Notes:

Grow Your Own

Uptick but no exodus: Despite stress, most teachers stay put

Over the last couple years, a number of states have enacted new universal education savings account (ESA) programs. Republicans have led these efforts with near universal opposition from Democrats, but should more Democrats support ESAs, especially because ESAs would seem to more greatly benefit the urban areas that Democrats tend to represent than the rural areas that Republicans tend to represent?

On this episode of The Report Card, four Democrats—Marcus Brandon, Ravi Gupta, Bethany Little, and Graig Meyer—debate whether their fellow Democrats should support ESAs. Nat, Marcus, Ravi, Bethany, and Graig discuss whether ESAs are regressive, whether Democratic voters support ESAs, whether Democrats should focus on private school choice instead of public school choice, and more.

Marcus Brandon is the executive director of CarolinaCAN and was previously a state representative in the North Carolina House of Representatives.

Ravi Gupta is founder of The Branch and was previously the founder and CEO of RePublic Schools, a network of charter schools in the South. 

Bethany Little is a principal at EducationCounsel. She has spent twenty years working in government and non-profit organizations, including the White House and the U.S. Department of Education.

Graig Meyer is a state senator in North Carolina and previously served in the North Carolina House of Representatives.

Note: This episode is adapted from the most recent installment of the American Enterprise Institute’s Education Policy Debate Series, which was held at AEI on February 29. A video recording of the debate can be found here.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Marty West and Mark Schneider about 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results in 4th and 8th grade reading and math. Nat, Marty, and Mark discuss why math scores went up or stayed flat while reading scores declined; potential bright spots in the 2024 results; whether recent score declines should be attributed to factors external to schooling; what makes NAEP the gold standard assessment of US students; what the Florida Commissioner of Education’s recent critique of NAEP gets wrong (and right); how NAEP compares to state assessments; NAEP Proficiency and the increasing number of students performing Below Basic; potential lessons from 2024 NAEP results; and more.

Martin West is the vice chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees NAEP. He is also the academic dean and Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the editor-in-chief of Education Next, and a member of the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Mark Schneider is a nonresident Senior Fellow at AEI. Previously, he was commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which administers NAEP, and was later the director of the Institute of Education Sciences, which houses NCES.

Show Notes:

NAEP Math Results

NAEP Reading Results

States’ Demographically Adjusted Performance on the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress

Make the National Assessment of Educational Progress Great Again

State assessments from this past spring are slowly coming out and, so far, they’ve all painted a similar picture: students are far behind where they should be in reading and math, and some student groups are further behind than others.

On this episode of The Report Card with Nat Malkus, Dr. Vlad Kogan and Dr. Stéphane Lavertu discuss their recent report on Ohio student test scores.

Read Dr. Kogan and Dr. Lavertu's report, How the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected Student Learning In Ohio: Analysis of Spring 2021 Ohio State Tests.

What does President-elect Joe Biden’s selection of Miguel Cardona suggest about what we might see in education in the next four years? And what are the chances Cardona will be able to accomplish Biden’s agenda? On this episode of the Report Card, Nat Malkus talks with two education mavens about the challenges and prospects facing Secretary-designate Cardona: AEI's own Rick Hess and Andy Rotherham of Bellwether Education Partners.

Enrollment in preschool and kindergarten programs has dropped significantly over the past year. What's behind Covid enrollment drops and how might they affect students, schools, and systems in the coming years? UVA post-doc Anna Shapiro and Virginia's Chief School Readiness Officer Jenna Conway discuss on this episode of The Report Card with Nat Malkus.

To learn more about Covid enrollment drops, read Daphna Bassok and Anna Shapiro's recent Brookings Institute analysis, "Understanding COVID-19-era enrollment drops among early-grade public school students."

In just three years, 45 states adopted the Common Core State Standards. By that metric alone, one might argue that the Common Core was a huge success. But on this episode of The Report Card with Nat Malkus, Tom Loveless and Morgan Polikoff argue that the Common Core has failed to move the needle on student learning and discuss the potential of standards-based reform going forward.

Read Tom and Morgan's recently released books on the Common Core and content standards:

Between the State and the Schoolhouse: Understanding the Failure of Common Core (Loveless, Harvard Education Press, 2021)

Beyond Standards: The Fragmentation of Education Governance and the Promise of Curriculum Reform (Polikoff, Harvard Education Press, 2021)

Teachers unions are undoubtedly a potent force in American education and politics. But questions about what teachers unions do, and why, are so politicized that the answers you get typically say more about who you ask than about teachers unions themselves.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Michael Hartney, whose new book, "How Policies Make Interest Groups: Governments, Unions, and American Education," explores these questions and others. Nat and Michael discuss how teachers unions impact students, affect education policy, and became the political powerhouses they are today.

Michael Hartney is an assistant professor of political science at Boston College, a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.  

Show Notes:

How Policies Make Interest Groups: Governments, Unions, and American Education

Teachers’ Unions and School Board Elections: A Reassessment

Revitalizing Local Democracy: The Case for On-Cycle Local Elections

Teachers Unions in the Post-Janus World

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Rick Hess and Mike McShane about their new book, Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K–12, and College. Nat, Rick, and Mike discuss what principles a conservative vision for education should be grounded in, whether No Child Left Behind was conservative, why family policy should be part of a conservative vision for education, why now is an opportune time for conservatives to take the lead on education, the pandemic’s effects on the politics of schooling, the culture wars, where conservatives have come up short on education in the past, the value of bipartisanship in education, where civics education has gone wrong, the state of education research, parental rights and parental responsibilities, and more.

Frederick M. Hess is a senior fellow and the director of education policy studies at AEI.

Michael McShane is the Director of National Research at EdChoice.

Show Notes:

Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K–12, and College

Parents’ Rights, Yes. But Parent Responsibilities, Too

The Party of Education in 2024

Four States That Are Leading the Charge for Conservative Education

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Richard Reeves, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It. Nat and Richard discuss redshirting, changing gender disparities, why many education interventions don't help men, Jordan Peterson, conscientiousness, why boys' standardized test scores are better than their grades, Bernard Williams, meritocracy, the modern male's need for a better life script, the prefrontal cortex, monarchy, the feminization of schooling, and more.

Show Notes:

Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It

Redshirt the Boys

Dream Hoarders: How the American Upper Middle Class Is Leaving Everyone Else in the Dust, Why That Is a Problem, and What to Do About It

Ilana Horwitz on the Impact of Religion on Student Outcomes

Truth and Truthfulness

Students are months behind where they should be in their learning. Could a nation-wide tutoring program catch them up to speed? Moreover, what would it take to equalize access to high-quality tutoring over the long term? Matt Kraft of Brown University and Josh Goodman of Boston University discuss on this episode of "The Report Card with Nat Malkus."

Read the working papers discussed on this episode:

"A Blueprint for Scaling Tutoring Across Public Schools" by Matt Kraft and Grace Falken.

"Kumon In: The Recent, Rapid Rise of Private Tutoring Centers" by Edward Kim, Josh Goodman, and Martin West.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat interviews Kymyona Burk, Senior Policy Fellow at ExcelinEd, and Emily Hanford, Senior Producer and Correspondent at American Public Media. Nat, Kymyona, and Emily discuss the reading wars, what's wrong with balanced literacy, Mississippi's rising reading scores, why reading isn't natural, Lucy Calkins, phonics, HBCUs, the science of reading, spelling bees, three cueing, the importance of proper teacher education, and more.

Show Notes:

In the Fight Over How to Teach Reading, This Guru Makes a Major Retreat

Hard Words: Why aren't kids being taught to read?

Comprehensive How-To Guide: Approaches to Implementing Early Literacy Policies

New research shows controversial Reading Recovery program eventually had a negative impact on children

Struggling readers need standards and structure based on the science of reading

Influential authors Fountas and Pinnell stand behind disproven reading theory

What the Words Say: Many kids struggle with reading – and children of color are far less likely to get the help they need

Since the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in NCAA v. Alston paved the way for universities to pay student-athletes, college sports have changed dramatically. Now, the NCAA is asking for an antitrust exemption to help navigate these changes.

The NCAA is surely facing a complex set of challenges, but an antitrust exemption is a big ask. This raises the question: Is an antitrust exemption a reasonable response to the current challenges facing college sports, a uniquely American institution?

Val Ackerman is the commissioner of the Big East Conference. Previously, she was the founding president of the WNBA.

Jim Cavale is the founder of Athletes.org.

Ross Dellenger is a senior college football reporter at Yahoo Sports.

Matthew Mitten is the executive director of National Sports Law Institute at Marquette University.

Katherine Van Dyck is the founder of KVD Strategies.

Note: This episode is adapted from the most recent installment of the American Enterprise Institute’s Education Policy Debate Series, which was held at AEI on February 27. A video recording of the debate can be found here.

A lot has happened in the education world over the last few weeks. President Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education. The Trump administration has taken aggressive actions targeting elite universities and has threatened to withhold funding from K–12 schools over DEI programming. And the Department of Education said that states would lose nearly $3 billion in COVID relief funds after prior extensions on spending deadlines were rescinded.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these developments, and more, with Andy Rotherham and Rick Hess.

Andrew J. Rotherham is a co-founder and senior partner at Bellwether and the author of the Eduwonk blog.

Frederick M. Hess is a senior fellow and the director of education policy studies at AEI.

Show Notes:

These Things Happen In Threes, Plus SCOTUS Incoming For Schools.

What Did You Expect to Happen? How DEI Wound Up in Trump’s Crosshairs

Higher Ed Is the New Big Oil

A Memo to College Presidents

It's been 12 months since the coronavirus pandemic sent the nation's students home. How many have returned to classrooms? That's a straightforward question, but one that's proven exceptionally difficult to answer.

On this episode of "The Report Card," Nat Malkus discusses his newly launched Return to Learn Tracker (R2L), which monitors the instructional status of over 8,500 school districts on a weekly basis. Chris Marsicano, an assistant professor at Davidson College and the founding director of the College Crisis Initiative (C2i), also joins to share his work tracking colleges and universities' responses to Covid.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Carey Wright about her tenure as State Superintendent of Education in Mississippi and the work ahead of her as State Superintendent of Schools in Maryland. Nat and Carey discuss the Mississippi Miracle; how to get teachers to buy in to major interventions; professional development; the purpose of grade retention policies; math instruction; the importance of the education leadership environment in a state; why some state leaders may care less about student achievement than others; state-district relationships; the importance of education data; teacher coaches; the education press; Maryland’s recent NAEP declines; the Blueprint for Maryland's Future; accountability; the relationship between education spending and student achievement; overcoming learning loss; post-pandemic chronic absenteeism; and more.

Carey Wright is State Superintendent of Schools in Maryland. Previously, from 2013 to 2022, she served as State Superintendent of Education in Mississippi.

Over the past couple weeks, as campus protests and crackdowns on campus protests have captured the nation’s attention, it has become increasingly clear that something is wrong with the civic culture at universities.

But how do we change course? How do we create a healthier civic culture on campus? And how can we train the next generation of Americans both to respect freedom of speech and be respectful in disagreement?

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions, and more, with Paul Carrese. Nat and Paul discuss the proper content and aims of civic education, why civic education matters, whether civic education is too boring, how individuals benefit from civic education, whether civic education is conservative, why universities have turned away from civic education, whether civic education is indoctrination, Arizona State University's School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership, when it is appropriate for state governments to get involved in deciding what courses college students should take, why private universities should create schools of civic thought, and more.

Paul Carrese is a professor in the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University and served as its founding director from 2016–2023.

Show Notes:

How Civics Can Remedy Higher Education’s Decline

A New Birth of Freedom in Higher Education: Civic Institutes at Public Universities

Civic Thought and Leadership: A Higher Civics to Sustain American Constitutional Democracy

How did Critical Race Theory (CRT)—once relegated to graduate school seminars and academic journals—become one of the most hotly debated K-12 issues, seemingly overnight? What exactly is CRT? Should states be banning it from K-12 classrooms? AEI's Robert Pondiscio and Ian Rowe join Nat Malkus to discuss these questions and more on the latest episode of The Report Card.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Melissa Arnold Lyon and Matthew Kraft about perceptions of the teaching profession. Nat, Mimi, and Matt discuss why the status and prestige of the teaching profession are at their lowest points in fifty years, why this matters for student learning, how perceptions of the teaching profession have changed over time, the extent to which current declines preceded the pandemic, Mimi and Matt's own job satisfaction when they were teachers, how the prestige of K-12 teaching compares with the prestige of college teaching, the effectiveness of teacher strikes, teachers unions, teacher pay, what can be done to improve the status of the teaching profession, and more.

Show Notes:

The Rise and Fall of the Teaching Profession: Prestige, Interest, Preparation, and Satisfaction over the Last Half Century

Sustaining a Sense of Success: The Protective Role of Teacher Working Conditions During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Elevating Education in Politics: How Teacher Strikes Shape Congressional Election Campaigns

Can We Tutor Our Way out of Covid Learning Loss?

Many education researchers spend a lot of time studying how students learn, but if their findings don’t make their way into the classroom, they are only so useful. For example, researchers have known about the benefits of phonics for decades, but despite these benefits, many teachers were not using phonics in their classrooms.

So: Why don’t research-based practices make their way into the classroom? What research-based practices that aren’t currently well-known among teachers should teachers try to implement? And if a school wants to promote a research-backed approach among its teachers, how should it go about doing that?

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions, and more, with Greg Ashman. Nat and Greg discuss why many teachers in education programs learn about learning styles, but not phonics or behavior management; the many different meanings of explicit teaching and direct instruction; cognitive load theory and the importance of understanding the constraints of working memory; how schools can approach curriculum and teacher training more systematically; field trips, group work, and spaced repetition; the importance of creating a coherent school culture; and how to get interventions to stick.

Greg Ashman is the Deputy Principal at Ballarat Clarendon College in Ballarat, Australia, and the author of three books on instructional practice. His Substack is Filling the Pail.

Show Notes:

Filling The Pail

A Little Guide for Teachers: Cognitive Load Theory

The Power of Explicit Teaching and Direct Instruction

The Truth About Teaching: An Evidence-Informed Guide for New Teachers

Principles of Instruction: Research-Based...

Two upcoming court cases, one a Supreme Court case on affirmative action at Harvard and the other a federal court case on financial aid price-fixing schemes at many of the nation's top colleges, promise to rock American higher education.

Josh Dunn, professor of political science at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, and Eric Hoover, senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, join Nat Malkus to discuss these cases and their potential implications.

Show Notes:

Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College

568 Presidents Group Lawsuit

As college students around the country wrap up a tumultuous semester, debates about whether colleges should be in-person or remote rage on. About a month ago, Nat Malkus hosted an AEI web event centered on this issue. Panelists included Christopher Marsicano, assistant professor at Davidson College; Bridget Burns of the University Innovation Alliance; Robert Kelchen of Seton Hall University; and Elwood Robinson of Winston-Salem State University. You can catch the panel discussion on this episode of The Report Card or watch the web event in its entirety at AEI.org.

The College Board is one of the most influential education organizations in America: The SAT plays a large role in determining what college many students attend, and the AP program shapes what many students study both in high school and in college.

This is a lot of power for one company to have, and naturally raises some questions. How does the College Board understand its role in the college admissions process, and how does it think about the college admissions landscape? What is the purpose of the AP program, and who determines what gets made into an AP course?

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions, and more, with David Coleman. Nat and David discuss why many colleges are requiring the SAT once again; the effects of test optional policies on boys; how the rise of AI affects the college admissions process; why high school students are so bored; how to make college admissions less cutthroat; whether we should abolish grading and replace it with standardized testing; AP scoring recalibration; whether 6 and 7 should be added to the AP scoring scale; the redesigned SAT; how the AP program balances its goals of promoting access and encouraging excellence; and the extent to which the College Board determines what gets taught in American classrooms.

David Coleman is the CEO of the College Board.