Largely constrained from enacting its national K–12 agenda, the Biden administration nevertheless made waves in the education world earlier this month by appointing economist Kirabo Jackson to a seat on its Council of Economic Advisers. Jackson, a labor economist and professor at Northwestern University, is far from a household name, but his work has made a significant impact...

What now? That’s the question confronting university administrators, faculty, applicants and their families in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. The 6-3 ruling by the Court’s conservative majority struck down race-conscious admissions policies at both Harvard and the University of North Carolina, overturning the decades-old...

COVID-19’s cataclysmic impact on K–12 education, coming on the heels of a decade of stagnation in schools, has yielded a lost generation of growth for adolescents, new federal data reveal. Wednesday’s publication of scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) — America’s most prominent benchmark of learning, typically referred to as the Nation’s...

Charter school students make more average progress in math and English than their counterparts in traditional public schools, including months of additional learning in some states, according to a new national overview. The authors of the study find that campuses grouped within larger charter management organizations are particularly effective at accelerating student achievement. The report,...

More than two-thirds of public schools saw higher percentages of their students seeking mental health services in 2022 than before the pandemic — but only a slim majority believed they were able to meet children’s heightened psychological needs, according to a federal report released Wednesday. The revelation comes from The Condition of Education 2023, the latest...

Two major players in K–12 education launched a joint effort last month to develop new assessments that could help shift schools’ focus away from traditional “seat time” requirements and toward more accurate measures of mastery over academic content. The new tests, to be created by the Educational Testing Service and the Carnegie Foundation for the...

Eighth graders’ knowledge of both history and civics fell significantly between 2018 and 2022, according to the latest scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Federal officials called the decline an ominous sign for America’s civic culture, with U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona criticizing some states for “banning history books and censoring educators.”...

They might not want to hear it, but it’s true: Students assigned to teachers with tougher grading policies are better off in the long run, research suggests. According to a paper released last fall through Brown University’s Annenberg Institute for School Reform, eighth- and ninth-graders who learned from math teachers with relatively higher performance standards earned better...

By some measures, Sal Khan is the most influential math teacher in U.S. history. The 46-year-old entrepreneur and former financial analyst is the founder of Khan Academy, a nonprofit site offering thousands of free video lessons on a range of K-12 subjects. Since its beginnings as a YouTube channel (which itself grew out of Khan’s...

Funding increases written into the recently passed $1.7 trillion federal omnibus package will provide a substantial jumpstart to education research and statistics this year — and could even evolve into an entity mirroring DARPA, the Pentagon’s storied research and development branch. The law, passed by bipartisan majorities and signed by President Biden in the closing days of...