Western Governors University has earned praise for its innovative model of competency-based learning. But the U.S. Department of Education’s Inspector General has called for the government to bar WGU students from federal student aid programs. In this episode, Michael Horn of the Christensen Institute joins EdNext Editor-in-chief Marty West to discuss the WGU model and w...

Robert E. Lee High School in San Antonio, Texas, pictured in 2017, was named for the Confederate general. The name has since been changed to Legacy of Educational Excellence (L.E.E.) High School. As the world has paused to analyze the deficiencies of police departments, it is not enough. All aspects of America have to examine areas of systemic injustice. That includes schools, ...

Reinventing America’s Schools: Creating a 21st Century Education System by David Osborne Bloomsbury USA, 2017, $30.00; 432 pages. As reviewed by Andy Smarick The 25th anniversary of chartering is an opportunity to take stock of this policy innovation’s greatest contribution: changing our understanding of what constitutes a public-education system. For a century, that term meant...

An associate professor in Boston University and Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, Marcus Winters, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss Winters’ new study, which presents test-score evidence about whether charter schools harm traditional public schools. “We haven’t seen big negative effects really for anyone,” Winters says. “It puts the burden ...

As I’ve said before, higher education reform increasingly feels like a rerun of the past two decades of K-12 reform—only on a 15 year time delay. In the past few years, President Obama and now Hillary Clinton have issued proposals that would give Washington unprecedented sway over higher ed, and these are gaining traction. It looks increasingly like we’re on the cus...

New research in the latest issue of Education Next does an elegant job of capturing the perils of ed tech. Researchers Susan Payne Carter, Kyle Greenberg, and Michael Walker report intriguing but disquieting findings from a randomized controlled classroom experiment conducted at West Point (for the in-the-weeds version of their study, check out the February 2017 Economics of Ed...

There are good reasons to assume that teachers’ beliefs and expectations can influence student success—an idea that has been embraced by parents, students, teachers, and policymakers. During graduation season each year, proud valedictorians thank the nurturing adults in their lives for pushing them to do their best. President George W. Bush famously criticized the “soft bigotry...

The U.S. Department of Education is urging states and school districts to expand their school voucher programs. In this episode of the podcast, Paul talks with Dennis Epple, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon and one of the co-authors of a paper that reviews the literature on voucher programs and comes up with recommendations for practitioners. Follow The Education Excha...

Executive Summary Congressional leadership and the Trump administration have put forward a plan (Framework) to “significantly” increase the amount of the Child Tax Credit, which is currently worth up to $1,000 per child to qualifying families. The credit presently phases out for higher income families and is partially refundable for some low-income families. I place the Child ...