A new short report from Advance CTE and the Education Strategy Group provides some valuable insights into how state policymakers are thinking about preparing high school students for work. But it also highlights one of today’s big K-12 challenges: finding the right balance between getting students to aim for college or career. Under the new federal education law, states are sub...

NPR conducted a survey of teachers to find out more about the problem of teachers with heavy student debt. As Anya Kamenetz notes, Teachers are paid significantly less than many other highly educated professionals. We decided to take a look at student debt among teachers specifically, because we see it as a crossroads of several big trends: chronic concerns over teacher pay ami...

Marty West and Paul E. Peterson. Should teachers be paid more? Should it be harder for teachers to get tenure? Are teacher evaluation systems working? In this episode of the EdNext podcast, Paul E. Peterson and Martin West take a close look at the differing views of teachers, parents, and the general public on polices that affect teachers, based on data from 2016 EdNext surve...

When the first random-assignment study ever to find a negative effect from a voucher program was released more than two years ago, a debate broke out over what role, if any, the Louisiana Scholarship Program’s regulations played. Some argued that Louisiana’s onerous regulatory environment – particularly its open admissions requirement and state test mandate – drove away better-...

I had the chance to sit down last week with Adam Pisoni and Chris Walsh of Abl, a new San Francisco-based venture seeking to help schools rethink how they use time. Abl’s first big product is a dynamic school-scheduling platform intended to help principals wrestle more effectively with that bane of their existence: the master schedule. Now available, you can find out mor...

In the New York Times, Kate Taylor writes about New York City’s transfer schools and debates over the best way to hold the schools accountable for results. The city’s Education Department now runs 51 such schools, serving 13,000 students. The schools are small, and many of them work with community-based organizations to offer counseling, college and career advising, and i...

“New York State Cracks Down on Jewish Schools: Senator Simcha Felder and Rabbi Chaim Dovid Zwiebel meet the long shadow of Joseph Hodges Choate,” in the Fall 2019 issue of Education Next, prompted a response from the director of policy research at the Jerusalem, Israel-based Kohelet Policy Forum, Yitzhak Klein: To the Editor: A study hall at Yeshiva Darchei Torah in Far Rockaw...

Roughly one-third of the students who took the ACT last year were judged to be ready for college, reports Eric Schulzke in the Deseret News.  The ACT judges college readiness by comparing scores on the ACT to first year college grades. Schulzke talks with Mike Petrilli, who notes that the ACT results which were released last week are similar to results from the SAT and NAEP, wh...

Michael B. Horn, the co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, sits down with Education Next Editor-in-chief Marty West to discuss how to juggle the different paths through college, from the options in traditional higher education to certificate first programs. Horn and co-author Clark G. Gilbert explored certificate-first programs further in an...