In an article in the Wall Street Journal, Israel’s education minister writes that people who look to Israel’s education system to understand why his country is such a high-tech powerhouse are looking in the wrong place. He names a culture of debate, peer-led youth organizations, and the army as institutions where Israeli young people learn entrepreneurship. He expla...

The transcript of President Trump’s State of the Union speech that was released by the White House mysteriously capitalized the phrase “School Choice,” as if it were the title of a law: “To help support working parents, the time has come to pass School Choice for Americans’ children.” Unlike some of the president’s other domestic policy proposals, thoug...

In my last post, I described a demand-side approach to bringing evidence-based practices into schools by developing programs and processes that help educators ask the right questions and find new solutions that work for them. Now I’d like to tackle the supply side: the creation and marketing of tools, especially curriculum, that can help drive evidence-based change in the clas...

It strikes me, and several others with whom I’ve spoken in recent months, that education reform is at a turning point. It’s not just the new federal law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, which sends key decisions back to the states. It’s bigger than that. It’s a feeling of exhaustion with policy as the primary driver of educational change. To be sure, there are many policy battl...

In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that language in democracies is characterized by almost limitless malleability. Democracies turn the concrete into the abstract, and as a result, words become like boxes “with a false bottom”: what you take out can be entirely different from what you put in. There is hardly a better illustration of this linguistic magic tric...

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Last week, Sen. Cory Booker announced that he will enter the 2020 presidential race. In an opinion piece for the New York Daily News, Derrell Bradford writes: It will be interesting to see how the discussion about candidate Booker’s history in education policy evolves, or doesn’t, as the primary escalates. Booker has his own unique personal history. He is himself an educationa...

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