Sound And Fury
Insights, Ideas, Opinions
A New Way to Gauge Schools’ Success Serving Highest-Need Students
We have heard a great deal over the course of the pandemic about “learning loss.”…
A New Bipartisan Education Agenda
After nearly four decades, the bipartisan coalition that pushed higher standards, tests, and accountability systems…
The Hidden Provision Driving Tax Breaks for Private School Tuition
When Betsy DeVos’s term as education secretary ended in January,…
The Case for Closer School-Home Connections Post-Pandemic
In March 2020, public schools across the country closed their doors and embarked on the…
The Post-Pandemic Role of Education Philanthropy
The past 15 months have been tremendously disruptive for the nation’s education system, with students…
How the Biden Administration Should Recast Title IX Regulations
The U.S. Department of Education held public hearings June 7 to 11 to seek input…
The Ingredients of Successful Tutoring Programs
Given the lost instructional opportunities many students experienced during the pandemic, tutoring offers a strategy to not…
Designing Summer Programs That Students Want to Attend
As school districts and states scramble to use federal Covid relief aid to help students…
A Smart Role for State Standardized Testing in 2021
Put yourself in the shoes of a state or school district education leader about to…
In Schools, Black Girls Confront Both Racial and Gender Bias
As schools grapple with longstanding racial inequities brought into sharp focus by recent cases of…
Perspectives on How Schools Should Spend Covid Relief Aid
Billions of dollars in federal Covid recovery funding are flowing to the nation’s schools: money…
Three Lessons for the Post-Pandemic Education Sector
It’s been over 14 months since everyone in my hometown of Brooklyn, New York, was…
Inside Learning Pods for Underserved Students
We didn’t need Covid-19 to tell us that our education system wasn’t working for all…
Why Investing in Ventilation Could Pay Dividends for Learning
Once relegated to those dry, dull school board discussions about facilities, ventilation is having a…
How the Pandemic is Reshaping Teaching
This commentary was published in The Hill. The pandemic relief package that…
Now is the Time to Future-Proof Schools Against Outbreaks
Covid-19 is not the first, the second, or even the third infectious disease to emerge…
The Case for a National Student Tutoring System
The substantial learning loss wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic has spurred calls for scaling tutoring…
The Importance of Meaningful Relationships in Schools
I work for Transcend, a nonprofit that partners with schools and school districts on new…
Tennessee’s Impressive Response to Learning Loss
With President Biden’s signing of the American Rescue Plan, state policymakers are suddenly facing the…
How to Ease Student Debt? More Compassion, Less Forgiveness
Student borrowers in America owe $1.7 trillion and counting. These debts adversely affect the life…
A Key to Student Motivation
Shortly after our daughter started high school, our third-grade son started crying every night while…
The Pandemic and the Teacher Pay Problem
There have been countless headlines about the American education system’s struggles to educate 50…
School-Based Health Care is Key to Helping Student Succeed
This piece was published in The Hill. Healthy students are better learners. They…
The Pandemic Dims a Beacon of School Improvement
For the past decade, Washington, D.C. schools have shone as a success story, with achievement…
The Striking Racial and Gender Bias in Classrooms and How to Address It
This commentary was published in The 74. Education research is replete with studies that…
Don’t Abandon Standardized Testing; Rethink It
This appeared as a commentary piece in The Hill. Not surprisingly, the nation’s 13,300…
The Case for Expanding Pell Grants to Short-Term Jobs Programs
Even as vaccines stop the spread of COVID-19, the pandemic will leave many low-wage workers…
How the Federal Government Can Help Schools Reopen Safely
As the country awaits widespread distribution of COVID-19 vaccines during the coming months—and with President-Elect…
Kamala Harris’s Surprising Evolution on Truancy
Much has been written about Kamala Harris’s decision as San Francisco district attorney to threaten…
Why We Shouldn’t Be So Certain That Schools Should Be Open
With the coronavirus surging again and state and local officials closing down communities for a…
The Families Talking—and not Talking—with Children About Racism
The past year has brought a reckoning on racism in the United States, prompted by…
An Unexpected Zoom Encounter Brings a Teacher and Students Closer
About one month into e-learning this fall, I was exploring with my 9th-grade humanities class…
How Schools and Colleges Are Innovating During the Pandemic
FutureEd partnered with The New York Times for this story that appeared in the Oct.
The Challenge of Taking Attendance in Remote Learning
This piece ran as a commentary in The 74. In suburban Detroit, a teenage girl was…
Where the Covid-19 Vaccine Meets The Anti-Vax Movement: Schools
This commentary was originally published in The Hill. The long-simmering national debate over childhood…
Solving the Diversity Dilemma at Thomas Jefferson Magnet High School
With Fairfax County’s highly rated magnet Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology…
The Problem With the Way We Use Evidence in Education
An excerpt from the new book: Common Sense Evidence: The Education Leader’s Guide to Using…
This Year, States and Districts Can’t Count on Enrollment Counts
It’s the time of year when schools traditionally take their “enrollment snapshots” to determine the…
Public Health and the Safe Reopening of Schools
This piece was orginally published as a commentary in Politico. The unfolding complexity of school reopening…
What I Learned Teaching in a Remote Classroom
It’s Wednesday morning, and I’m sitting at a desk shoved into the corner of my…
How Preserving Medicaid Helps Sustain School Budgets
K-12 education and Medicaid are often cast as competing state budget priorities. Amid the calamitous…
Teaching Under Quarantine: Results From A New Survey
Studies point to alarming consequences for students of the sudden shift to distance learning…
How Covid-19 Could Doom the SAT and ACT
This initially appeared as a commentary piece in The Hill. One of the…
A Vision for the Next Generation of Testing
When schools were shuttered around the country two months ago, the pandemic did what nearly…
The Discarded International Students Rule and Trump’s Agenda
An earlier version of this commentary piece appeared in The Hill. Forget for a moment…
Who’s Learning Under Quarantine, Who’s Not
Much has been written about how the academic and social disruption from the coronavirus outbreak…
Bringing College Courses to Disadvantaged High Schools
This piece was published in The 74. Leaders at selective colleges and universities often…
Advancing Higher Ed Equity During the Pandemic—and Beyond
In late 2007, I was at a crossroads. Another automobile plant in Michigan was closing,…
How Federal Covid Aid Can Support Students and Schools
Covid-19 has upended, along with everything else, the balance sheets of the nation’s elementary and…
Fighting Coronavirus with National Service
This piece appeared as a commentary in The Hill. This May, more than…
Appraising Teachers Across the Globe: Where the U.S. Stands
We demand a lot from teachers. We expect them to have a deep and broad…
A Teacher’s Message to His Students on the Coronavirus—By Rap
The San Miguel School is an independent, tuition-free Catholic middle school that educates 90 low-income…
Chronic Absenteeism in the Time of Coronavirus
The spread of coronavirus, the need for “social distancing,” and the shuttering of schools in…
The Parental Challenges of Homeschooling During Quarantine
FutureEd Senior Fellow Mike Goldstein is the founder of Match Education in Boston, an organization…
Public School Choice Is Here to Stay. How Can We Make it Fair?
The leading Democratic presidential candidates — liberals Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, but also moderates…
Why are High-Quality Curricula Not Reaching More Students?
Results from the latest round of testing by the National Assessment of Educational Progress are…
From Teacher Pay to Free College, What Governors Want
Governors’ annual State of the State addresses are windows into what’s likely to be at…
Early Childhood Investments Suffer When Kids Are Uninsured
States have worked hard to strengthen early childhood education, child care, and supports for infants…
Can School Climate Surveys Measure School Quality?
This commentary was originally published in The 74. School climate and student engagement…
Reducing Chronic Absenteeism in the Nation’s Capital
This piece was initially published by the D.C. Policy Center. In the two years…
The Case for (Smart) Standardized Testing
These remarks are adapted from the keynote address by Chris Cerf, the former New Jersey…
Accountability Without Testing = Trouble
An unhappy episode in Montgomery County, Maryland, (where I live) reminds us that the quest…
What Free College Could Mean for Small Private Colleges
The occasion was the inauguration of our college’s new president. A friend and I ran…
Retaining Teachers: The View from Washington, D.C.
FutureEd Director Thomas Toch testified before the District of Columbia City Council on Dec. 4…
A Reality Check on the Benefits of Economic Integration
School districts from New York to San Antonio are turning to a new strategy to…
How to Narrow Education Spending Gaps
Any independent observer of educational opportunity in the U.S. could identify three glaring and generally ignored sources…
What LeBron James Can Teach Us About Chronic Absenteeism
Amid the fanfare over the public school that NBA star LeBron James opened last year…
Are Schools Creating Engaged Citizens? How Would We Know?
Most of the rigorous research on school performance focuses on reading and math scores simply…
A Better Way to Handle Student Loan Debt
This commentary was initially published in The Hill. When it comes to relieving student…
Tapping Medicaid to Address Mental Health at School
In Florida and New Jersey, public schools are adding mental health classes to their curriculum.
Fulfilling the Promise of Community Colleges
America’s community colleges hold great promise in helping disadvantaged students gain the credentials they need…
Isn’t School for Math and Science and Reading?
One question haunts George Packer’s Atlantic 10,000-word essay that has roiled the education world, and it…
Lessons in SEL from the California CORE Districts
This blog post was originally posted on CASEL’s Measuring SEL blog. Nearly a decade…
Closing the Communications Gap Between Home and School
Most parents know the frustration of asking their early adolescent son or daughter how their…
Tackling the AP Success Gap
Schools across the country have made rapid gains in expanding Advanced Placement courses to traditionally…
The High School Side of the Higher Education Act
With taxpayers shelling out more than $120 billion in federal funds each year on student financial…
What Debate Bingo Says About Education Policy
Democrats ranked education as their No. 2 priority, behind health care, in a recent Pew…
The Case for College Behind Bars
The United States’ criminal justice system is under increasing scrutiny from both sides of the…
How Moving the Poverty Line Could Harm Schools and Students
The Trump administration wants to redefine the way we set the poverty line in this…
What Teachers Think: TALIS and the Future of Teaching
On June 20, FutureEd and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) joined in releasing…
Teacher Mindsets Matter in Higher Education, Too
FutureEd’s recent report on Teacher Mindsets illustrates how adult attitudes, beliefs and behaviors are…
Teaching Needs More Than Pay Hikes
This piece was first published in The New York Times. Democratic presidential…
‘Walking School Bus’ Drives Better Attendance
The first stop on the “walking school bus” route came with a quick rap on…
Giving Employers a Stake in Education Through CTE
What does it mean for students to be “career ready”? It should mean they’re prepared…
How Education and Health Sectors Can Collaborate
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls integrating health and education initiatives “an untapped…
Measuring Social-Emotional Skills, Carefully
In the often-fraught debate over education policy, there is growing agreement that educators should pay…
A New Lever for School Improvement: Student Surveys
This commentary was initially published by RealClear Policy. The survey results shocked the staff…
What Education Leaders Can Do to Stop the Spread of Measles
This piece was published by The 74. The surge in measles cases across the United…
Is Free College Best for Helping Low-Income Students?
From presidential candidates to state legislators, policymakers are talking about “free college” as a way…
After Reforming Public Education, Why Subsidize Private Schools?
This piece was also published in The Tennessean. Update: The bill was signed into…
The Toll That Measles Outbreaks Take on Schools
There is a post circulating on Facebook from a young mother asking for advice on…
Fixing Schools Doesn’t Have to be ‘Disruptive’
There is lots of talk today about new, “disruptive” ways to improve the achievement of…
A New Ally in the Fight Against Absenteeism: Pediatricians
As school districts across the country dig into the hard work of combating chronic…
What a California School Survey Can Tell us About Measuring Social and Emotional Skills
This post was initially published on OECD’s Education and Skills Today blog. Educators across…
Principals as Instructional Leaders
Research makes clear that effective school leaders are key to effective schools. Increasingly, that means…
The School Improvement Gains Nobody’s Talking About
In Houston, high doses of tutoring helped raise test scores at struggling secondary schools. In…
California School Dashboard Redux
The California School Dashboard, the state’s tool for rating schools and identifying those in need…
Why School Ratings Should Stress Learning Gains
Imagine how it might feel to be an educator at a school deemed “failing,” despite…
Giving Districts Guidance on ‘Supplement, Not Supplant’
More than a year later than promised, The U.S. Education Department just released its…
Visiting Families at Home Leads to Better School Attendance
What if you could improve a student’s attendance and achievement by getting to know his…
Tennessee Puts Teacher Prep on Its To-Do List
Improving teaching quality starts with how teachers are trained, but often that’s the last stop…
Nudging Students and Families to Better Attendance
As many as 8 million U.S. public school students struggle academically simply because they miss…
The Path to Professionalizing Teaching
Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the…
Making School Performance Data Work for Families
With a swipe of our smart phone we can find the shortest route to a…
Reducing the ‘Toxic Stress’ of Starting High School
In a few weeks, roughly 4 million students will enter high school for the first…
The Promise of Partnership Schools in Atlanta
Imagine a traditional neighborhood school with a defined enrollment boundary that serves all students within that boundary.
How Should States Weight Funding for Disadvantaged Students?
Many states are doggedly, sometimes desperately, working to get their state finance policies right. Many…
Past Is Prologue on Common Core Tests
The PARCC and Smarter Balanced state testing consortia set in motion significant improvements in state…
The Educators’ Case for Preserving Medicaid
When Congress considered gutting Medicaid last year, school superintendents and other educators spoke out to…
Another Piece of the School Choice Puzzle: Vaccinations
Campaigns of mass vaccination against infectious diseases represent one of the most successful public health…
The Education Imperative in a Digitized World
Andreas Schleicher, Director for Education and Skills and Special Advisor on Education Policy to the…
Laptops in the Classroom: An Open and Closed Case
A recent commentary piece in the New York Times generated a flurry of debate…
Beyond the Border: Serving English Language Learners
The nation is rightly focused on the plight of thousands of immigrant children who have…
How the Common Core Changed Standardized Testing
When the U.S. Department of Education awarded $350 million to two consortia of states in…
Helping Struggling Job Seekers Via Online Marketplaces
This year’s college graduates are facing one of the best job markets in years. Unemployment…
How Will Reversal of Diversity Guidance Affect Higher Ed?
On July 3, the Trump administration announced it will reverse several policy memos…
Learning How to Measure Social and Emotional Learning
We know that content knowledge alone cannot determine students’ success. This is true in school—where…
What Teacher Protests Can—And Can’t—Accomplish
The wave of teacher protests in the nation’s heartland are turning much-needed attention to the…
The Audacious Ambition of “A Nation at Risk”
It has been 35 years since a federally funded commission charted a bold new course…
Consolidating Without Merging: A New Option for Higher Ed
With nearly 3,000 four-year colleges and universities in the U.S. higher education market—many in difficult…
Graduation Scandal Shouldn’t Overshadow DCPS Reforms
The recent furor over District of Columbia high schools issuing dubious diplomas has …
How Schools Can Help Expand Health Coverage for Children
Despite gains in expanding health coverage to children over the past decade, we still have…
Want to Make School a Safer Place? Stop Paddling Students
Since the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., a month ago, school safety has dominated the…
Let’s Not Miss the Opportunity In Weighted Student Funding Pilot
This year, the federal government is offering school districts the opportunity to change the way…
Closing the Latino Leadership Gap
Representation matters. But for most Latino students across the country, a stark under-representation of Latinos…
Mental Health in High School: The Teacher’s Perspective
The mass shooting in Parkland, Fla., provoked a rash of conversation about what schools could…
How Can Schools Help Lift Health Barriers to Learning?
It goes without saying that a healthier student is a better student, but it’s less…
The Bigger Story Behind D.C.’s Graduation Scandal
Updated 1/30 Education leaders in Washington, D.C., released two reports in recent weeks on…
Getting Teachers On Board With Evaluations
After nearly a decade of teacher evaluation reform, we are in the position to ask…
For Educators: More Lessons from the Gridiron
In a recent blog post, I shared an interview I did with New England…
Reflections on Teacher Leaders: From a Pro Football Coach
It’s 2006 at a Minnesota Vikings practice. Darren Sharper, a ninth-year veteran and star player, is loafing…
What Chile Teaches Us About School Vouchers
Education Secretary Betsy DeVos supports vouchers that allow parents to use taxpayer funds to help…
California Must Set Ambitious Goals to Combat Chronic Absenteeism
This piece was published in EdSource on Dec. 12 and draws on FutureEd’s report…
How One Ohio School District Is Beating the Odds
Steubenville, Ohio has proven to be one of the nation’s highest achieving high-poverty districts. In…
An Economist’s View on Tax Reform and Public Schools
Public K-12 education depends heavily on state and local funding. But the federal government makes it…
5 Myths About Critical Thinking
No one disputes the need for critical thinking in the classroom. Many school districts mention…
Why Net Neutrality Matters for K-12 Education
Last week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) released its plan to dismantle the Obama Administration’s…
Closures and Mergers Aren’t the Only Options for Struggling Colleges
Earlier this month, in an appearance on CNBC, Clay Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor,…
We Can Fix Chronic Absenteeism
Education Week published a joint commentary piece by Attendance Works Director Hedy Chang and…
A Simple Way to Confront School Absences
FutureEd Editorial Director Phyllis W. Jordan partnered with Philip J. Cook, a professor emeritus…
“Fitting In” and Rising Graduation Rates at UT Austin
Senior Fellow Craig Wacker wrote this piece in July. We’re reprising it with the…
Overcoming the Stigma of Voc Ed In Today’s CTE
In this except from their new book, Making College Work, Georgetown University Professor Harry J. Holzer…
For Teachers: The Most Powerful Question
I would argue that the question most likely to result in improvement of a school…
Making College Work: Nudging Student Behavior
In their new book, Making College Work, Georgetown University Professor Harry J. Holzer and Urban…
Piloting a New Way to Fund Schools
Deep within the Every Student Succeeds Act lie a few pages describing a pilot program…
Enemies, Idiots, and Outcomes in the Charter World
When it comes to measuring success in charter schools, there are two well-established camps. In…
Tuition Tax Credits: Boon or Boondoggle?
Earlier this summer, we published a blog post by Carl Davis of the Institute…
Op-Ed: The Weakness in D.C.’s Voucher Program
FutureEd Director Thomas Toch and Editorial Director Phyllis W. Jordan turned our report on…
A President’s Commitment to the Common Good
Georgetown University President John J. DeGioia shared the following letter with the university community at…
The Don’t Do It Depository
We have known for quite a while that schools engage in all manner of tricks…
School Finance is Coming Out of the Dark Ages
An unprecedented trove of fiscal data is coming our way—let’s make the most of it…
The Challenge of Paying for a New Kind of Learning
Wouldn’t it be great if we had to pay for instruction only when we had…
Let’s Not Panic About Growth Mindset
Growth mindset, the belief that intelligence can be developed, has become a central tenet of…
What’s at Stake for Schools in the Health Care Bill?
With the Senate agreeing to vote on a bill that could repeal Obamacare and restructure Medicaid, schools superintendents have…
Some New Teacher Evaluation Systems Do Make a Difference
When Education Next paired my recent article, “A New Era for…
A New Era for the Battle Over Teacher Evaluations
The Obama administration has worked hard to strengthen public-school teaching—a $400 billion-plus workforce,…
Voucher Research Shows Decline, Rebound in Scores
Two studies released Monday confirm that students who use vouchers to move to private schools initially lose…
California Accountability: An ESSA Bellwether?
California has released a pilot version of its long-awaited school and district performance dashboard…
Tuition Tax Credits Let Private School Donors Turn a Profit
State and federal lawmakers interested in steering public funds toward private and religious schools have…
Between District and Charter: The Middle Path
School districts across the country are grappling with how to respond to their growing charter…
To Find the Value a Teacher Adds, Look Beyond Test Scores
A few years ago, a young economist at Northwestern University named Kirabo Jackson decided he…
What’s Next for the Common Core and Its Assessments?
Millions of dollars and thousands of development hours have been spent creating a…
Measuring Teacher Performance More Meaningfully
For most of public education’s history, teacher evaluation was an after-thought. Despite the centrality of…
Bursting the Bubbles in American Testing
They were designed to move American education into the next generation of assessment,…
How Did Chronic Absenteeism Become a Thing?
If you look at the accountability systems states are developing to meet federal requirements, you’ll…
The Smart Money: Designing A School Budget
In this hands-on workshop presented at NAIS national conference in March 2017 school leaders dove…
Proficiency vs. Growth: Toward a Better Measure
When Education Secretary Betsy DeVos famously stumbled in her confirmation hearing over a question about measuring…
Exploring The Human Side of Teacher Evaluation
Over the past decade we have learned a tremendous amount about measuring teaching effectiveness, but…
Being There Matters: Tracking Student & Teacher Attendance
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires all states to include at least one non-academic…
In Defense of the Common Core and Its Tests
As everyone in the education community knows only too well, the Common Core State Standards…
A Better Way to Compensate Teachers
By most accounts, teachers aren’t paid enough. On an annual basis, teacher salaries lag…
Keeping Teacher-Pension Debt Under Control
Unfunded pension liabilities for U.S. teachers are massive—nearly $325 billion in 2012—and only one-fifth of…