Increasingly, Catholic elementary schools serve affluent students. After the widespread closures of Catholic schools, which had relatively low tuitions and were concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest, the number of Catholic elementary schools in the U.S. declined by 37 percent between 1970 and 2010. The Catholic elementary schools that remain open are more expensive, with a...

A privatization extremist. A religious zealot. A culture warrior. As President-Elect Donald Trump’s nominee for U.S. secretary of education, Betsy DeVos has been painted as any or all of these things in the fevered weeks between the 2016 presidential election and her confirmation hearings. But a careful look at her record in Michigan and around the country, where she has spent ...

Does free pre-K education have predictable and cost-effective positive impacts on children’s academic success? According to new correlational analyses, the positive associations between NAEP scores and earlier pre-K enrollment are small and typically not statistically significant, and there is no association between differences among states in their gains in state pre-K enroll...

While Washington, D.C. slams accreditors for not holding colleges and universities accountable for their student outcomes, the more insidious failure of accreditation is the stifling effect on innovation at existing institutions. Three case studies from a new paper that I coauthored with my colleague Alana Dunagan that was published originally as a chapter in the new book Accr...

The Arnold Foundation’s Straight Talk On Evidence web site provides a very useful summary of a recently published large RCT on a state-funded pre-K program in Tennessee. Consistent with a previous, nationally representative RCT of Head Start, this study found that students given access to government-funded pre-school by lottery initially score higher than those who lose the lo...

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In an essay in National Affairs, Chester E. Finn, Jr. laments the fact that everyone in K-12 education embraces high standards in principle but nobody actually wants to hold students to those standards. As a result, he says Our K-12 education system has a transparency problem, and our higher-education system is complicit. While some American parents have a decent sense of wheth...

After spending 25 years traveling the country as an education writer I’ve met so many memorable educators it would be hard to come up with a top-five list. Wait, on second thought it’s not that hard. Linda Brown, who this week announced she was stepping down as CEO of Boston-based Building Excellent Schools, would top any imaginable list. The odd thing about my coming across Li...

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For the past 50 years, roughly one in 10 U.S. families has chosen to enroll their children in private school. Historically, private schools have ranged widely in their annual fees; many programs, such as those run by the Catholic Church, were designed to be affordable and offered significant discounts for low-income families. However, the number of Catholic schools has fallen ...