Episódios
-
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
-
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
-
Estão a faltar episódios?
-
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 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
-
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
-
On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Tom Richards about the Florence Academy of Art, what serious art instruction looks like, how K–12 art education can be improved, the differences between music and art instruction, whether artistic talent is innate or can be taught, how art instruction has changed over the last 200 years, Velazquez, showing children art documentaries, why it's important to teach fundamentals before higher order skills, drawing with pencil and paper, the Zorn palette, the importance of coherence and consistency in an educational program, the management of Italian art museums, the proper age at which to start rigorous art training, and more.
Tom Richards is a painter and the director of the Florence Academy of Art.
Show Notes:
The Florence Academy of Art: Instagram, Website, Drawing and Painting Program, Student Gallery, Alumni Gallery
Tom Richards: Instagram, Website
-
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
-
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 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?
-
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
-
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
-
On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Ethan Hutt and Jack Schneider about their new book, Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don’t Have To). Nat, Ethan, and Jack discuss grades, tests, and transcripts; whether grades do a good job of motivating student learning; how our current grading system came into existence; grading abroad; short-haul and long-haul messages; AP exams; the difficulty of narrative grading; whether transcripts should be updated for the digital age; making grades overwritable; the GED; how teachers can improve their grading practices; and more.
Ethan Hutt is Associate Professor of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Jack Schneider is the Dwight W. Allen Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Show Notes:
Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don’t Have To)
The big problem(s) with grades
Making the grade: a history of the A–F marking scheme
A History of Achievement Testing in the United States, Or: Explaining the Persistence of Inadequacy
A Thin Line Between Love and Hate: Educational Assessment in the United States
-
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 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.
-
On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Roland Fryer about incentives and opportunity. Nat and Roland discuss paying students, parents, and teachers; the importance of properly structuring incentives; affirmative action; loss aversion; why certain ideas in education get treated as out of bounds; using machine learning to increase diversity in college admissions; COVID learning loss; whether the Ivy League should create feeder schools for disadvantaged students; using data in the classroom; and more.
Roland Fryer is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He was a MacArthur Fellow and is a winner of the John Bates Clark Medal.
Show Notes:
How to Make Up the COVID Learning Loss
Affirmative Action in College Admissions Doesn’t Work—But It Could
Build Feeder Schools (And Make Yale and Harvard Fund Them)
Enhancing the Efficacy of Teacher Incentives through Framing: A Field Experiment
Parental Incentives and Early Childhood Achievement: A Field Experiment in Chicago Heights
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
-
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
-
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?
- Mostrar mais
