New polling on the American education system shows widespread approval of local schools — along with ominous signs of dissatisfaction among both parents and the public at large. In a report published today by PDK International, a professional organization for teachers, over 1,000 adults expressed higher levels of faith in their community’s public schools than have ever...

At the moment in March 2020 when American schools were transitioning to remote instruction — around the time when people were making jokes about Corona beer and commentators still mused about spending two weeks to “flatten the curve” — Anya Kamenetz was making calls. Kamenetz had spent years covering the heaviest stories on the education...

With August underway, America’s kids have begun nervously counting the days until vacation ends, while their parents are eyeing back-to-school sales and carpool schedules. But the education policy world is still soaking in the glories of summer — or, more precisely, summer school. New research released last month has offered persuasive new evidence of the...

Learning loss during the pandemic may have exceeded the damage inflicted on New Orleans students by Hurricane Katrina, according to a recently released study of standardized test scores. Setbacks in math achievement exceeded those for reading, and achievement gaps between comparatively rich and poor schools expanded dramatically. As the United States approaches the end of...

Since the 2020 election, schools have emerged as some of the most contentious venues for American cultural discourse, with debates over the teaching of race, human sexuality, and U.S. history erupting into yelling matches and viral confrontations. The political impact is increasingly seen in state and local elections, where school board members have faced a...

Jonathan Chait has been writing about the fraught politics of education reform for over a decade. The veteran political columnist for New York Magazine is a vigorous advocate for the pillars of liberal education reform: high academic standards, school choice, and test-based accountability for schools and teachers who aren’t meeting expectations. It was an outlook that largely...

Sign up here for LA School Report’s newsletter. A new study suggests that charter schools heavily prioritized student engagement and instruction in the early days of the pandemic, with many navigating a quick transition to online learning and beginning to embrace a hybrid model by the beginning of the 2020-21 school year. This facile response,...

Significant bias has contributed to lower classroom observation scores for thousands of teachers in Tennessee over the last decade, a study published in late December found. Even when controlling for differences in professional qualification and student testing performance, male and African American teachers were rated lower than their female and white colleagues. The paper is one...

During the two years that COVID-19 has upended school for millions of families, education leaders have increasingly touted one tool as a means of compensating for lost learning: personalized tutors. As a growing number of state and federal authorities pledge to make high-quality tutoring available to struggling students, a new study demonstrates positive, if modest, results from...

The SAT will be given to students virtually beginning next year, according to the College Board, the nonprofit organization that owns and administers the test. The change, revealed Tuesday morning, is designed to make the SAT easier to take during a period when hundreds of colleges and universities have dropped the test as an admissions...