The Education Gadfly Weekly

Last month in New York City, I sat through a series of talks and breakout sessions on evidence-based classroom practices at ResearchEd, a burgeoning global series of conferences aimed at instructional diehards like me. I couldn’t help but notice a pattern: Speaker after speaker kept citing educators and authors I’d first encountered in the pages of the American Educator a decade or more ago: Dan Willingham, Barak Rosenshine, E.D. Hirsch Jr., and others. Their names bounced around the auditoriums and classrooms, their ideas on curriculum, instruction, and cognition firing up teachers and principals desperate for what works—or might work—in their classrooms.

Speak, memory!

If you’re not familiar with it, American Educator is a quarterly published by the American Federation of Teachers. That’s right, the nation’s second largest teachers union. For decades, its savvy editors were tuned into evidence-based practice and its leading lights, spotlighting them long before ResearchEd platformed them for a new generation of teachers. If you haven’t heard of it, well, there’s the rub: ResearchEd is battling to make evidence-informed teaching the norm—structured, evidence-backed classroom practice—but the American Educator got there years ago, with much the same vision and many of the same heavy hitters to back it up. So why hasn’t it moved the needle? And what’s happened to it lately?

It’s fashionable in education reform and political circles to blame the unions for all of education’s ills, but I’ve never faulted them for looking out for their members’ interests. The greater sin of the AFT, at least in the decades since Al Shanker’s retirement, has been its failure to lead on curriculum and instruction—or even give it much oxygen at all. Worse, AFT President Randi Weingarten routinely takes to the pages of American Educator to unburden herself of predictable political rants, complaining about the Trump administration’s “chaos, confusion, corruption, and cronyism” in the current issue, for example. Such partisan tub-thumping does little for teachers more eager to learn about cognitive load theory than how “the Biden-Harris administration guided the country to the strongest post-Covid economy in the world.”

I lost track of the number of times I heard ResearchEd presenters name-drop Barak Rosenshine and his “Principles of Instruction,” which first appeared in the magazine’s Spring 2012 issue: ten steps, from reviewing prior learning to checking understanding, all grounded in cognitive science. ResearchEd speakers brandished it like a sword, slicing through “discovery learning” nonsense. Similarly, you can thank the quarterly for making University of Virginia cognitive scientist Dan Willingham a household name—at least in households that prize evidence-based instruction. The American Educator began running his “Ask the Cognitive Scientist” columns in 2002. There were so many PowerPoint slides quoting Dan at ResearchEd that I tweeted one, tagging him and saying “Wish you were here.” He practically was.

I’ve long pointed out to ed reform friends and colleagues that back when they were largely indifferent to curriculum as a lever to improve student outcomes, among the first and most vocal champions of E.D. Hirsch Jr.’s seminal work on background knowledge and reading comprehension was the legendary AFT leader Albert Shanker (1928–1997). American Educator frequently turned its attention to Hirsch’s work including his Spring 2000 (!) cover story titled “You Can Always Look It Up’…or Can You?”—a piece no less relevant in today’s era of AI than it was in the emerging Internet age a quarter-century ago. The list of authors and thinkers the magazine has published or referenced reads like the lineup of a ResearchEd conference: Paul Kirschner, Susan Neuman, Pedro De Bruyckere, Dylan Wiliam, among (many) others.

Teachers unions are a reliable bogeyman—cartoon villains guarding tenure and stagnation and indifferent to children. I’ve never been of the mind to criticize them for doing what unions were created to do. But I do fault the AFT for not leading on classroom practice in recent years. American Educator shows they’ve long had their finger on the pulse of effective practice—they just don’t leverage it. Weingarten likes to remind people that she was a high school teacher but she rarely discusses classroom practice with any seriousness or sophistication. Her Twitter feed is a litany of hot takes on Ukraine, democracy, healthcare, Trump, etc. Effective teaching? Barely a whisper. Worse, her columns cheapen the union’s flagship publication, wasting the platform in its pages on partisan noise: calling Republicans “extremists” responsible for “a coordinated campaign to destabilize and privatize public education”; praising exclusively Democratic governors exclusively for “fixing the climate crisis, for freedom from gun violence and election deniers, for reproductive and LGBTQIA+ rights.” None of these are tools for teachers—they’re shots in the culture wars.

So I queried her about it. Here’s her reply: "We made an adjustment years ago and cut a publication and use my column as the communication to our members. They have a right to know what their leadership is doing.” Fair enough, and it’s Weingarten’s prerogative to use her platform how she sees fit. But the AFT’s history of recognizing and publishing important thinkers in American Educator suggests its capacity to serve not just as a labor union but as something closer to a guild, with equal emphasis on professional development, knowledge-sharing, and maintaining standards within the profession.

The hundreds of teachers, administrators and others who pack ResearchEd conferences show the growing appetite in the field for evidence-based practice. And that appetite is largely apolitical: The only vaguely partisan moment I saw at last weekend’s conference was a ripple of guffaws and comments from the audience when it was announced at the end of the day that the next conference would be in Canada.

So, two cheers for the old AFT and the American Educator. For those who’ve been paying attention, it’s long been a reliable source of first-rate research and practice tips for those who think teaching should run on evidence, not folklore and philosophy. It could still be an important engine of K–12 instructional reform still today. All it would take is for Randi Weingarten and the AFT to give it some attention and visibility. Or failing that, just leave it the heck alone.

Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, The Next 30 Years.

The Trump administration’s K–12 education policy prescriptions typically focus on ways to provide financial support for private schools, including federal vouchers and tax-credit scholarships. These programs require congressional action through new K–12 legislation or modifications to the U.S. tax code.

However, the administration has an additional opportunity to provide families with more K–12 education choices that has received far less attention. This involves existing federal programs, administrative guidance, and regulatory shifts that would not require new legislation. Doing this would create more choices for families, give educators more options to work in different learning environments and unlock more educational opportunities for K–12 students nationwide.

This approach is consistent with the January 29 executive order that focused on helping parents escape the “geographically based school assignments” that constrain “choosing and directing the upbringing and education of their children.” The order requires the secretary of education to issue guidance on how states can use federal formula and discretionary grant programs to do this, consistent with the administration’s desire to return education authority to the states.

Here are five ways the administration should advance K–12 public school choice using existing grant programs and legal authorities.

Charter Schools. Charter schools serve nearly 3.8 million students across forty-five states, the District of Columbia, Guam, and Puerto Rico. They operate with more flexibility than traditional district schools and are governed by independent boards. The federal Charter Schools Program already provides competitive grants in several categories, with a fiscal year 2025 budget of $450 million. The Trump administration could make this program the center of its efforts to expand K–12 public school choice. It could increase funding for this program, streamline grant processes, and create incentives for states to remove caps on charter growth, among other things. The executive order specifies that federal funds for Department of Defense and Bureau of Indian Affairs schools should also be used to support the expansion of K–12 charter schools. 

Magnet Schools. Magnet schools are schools of choice that offer themed curricula—from arts to STEM to language immersion—and serve over 3.5 million students. They promote voluntary desegregation and provide rich learning environments within traditional districts. The federal Magnet Schools Assistance Program has a Fiscal Year 2025 budget of $139 million to help districts replicate successful models. The administration could also investigate how to incentivize states to create magnet schools for low-income, gifted students with high but untapped potential, as recommended by the National Working Group on Advanced Education.

New School Models. The pandemic led parents to seek new learning environments for their children, including microschools and learning pods. Microschools are a modernized version of the one-room schoolhouse, offering intimate, personalized learning environments. Around 6 percent of microschools receive public school funding. Learning pods are small groups of children typically, organized by parents and teachers, who come together to learn and socialize. Consistent with the executive order, the Department of Education could allow states and local districts to utilize existing programs, such as Title I dollars for low-income students, special education dollars under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act or other funding sources, to support these new school models.

Open and Dual Enrollment. Forty-three states allow some form of open enrollment, enabling students to attend public schools outside their assigned zones. Nearly one in three high school students participates in dual enrollment, taking a college-level course before graduation. The administration could use discretionary grant funding to incentivize states to adopt exemplary, transparent, open- and dual-enrollment programs, including stronger coordination between K–12 and higher education systems. They could also allow states and local districts to use Title I, IDEA funds, and other programs to follow students to whichever open and dual enrollment program they attend, in the way public dollars follow charter school students to the school they choose to attend.

Career Pathways Programs. High school students deserve more than a one-size-fits-all college preparation track. Pathway education and training programs enable them to select and earn credentials for high-demand jobs that typically do not require a college degree. These programs are often accompanied by services such as career counseling and flexible entry and exit points. They offer a variety of course choices and work-based learning options, including apprenticeships, internships, career and technical education, career academies, boot camps for acquiring specific skills and staffing, placement, and other support services for those seeking employment. The administration could coordinate the Department of Education’s Perkins Career and Technical Education Act and Labor Department funds to expand these public school career pathways programs. This approach is consistent with the executive order, which directs the secretaries of labor and education to create a plan utilizing discretionary grant programs to expand educational freedom for America’s families and teachers.

One additional suggestion: Giving families and young people K–12 choices without some quality assurance is a false promise. The administration should promote rigorous transparency, data reporting and accountability for all public school options. This would ensure that parents can make informed decisions and that innovative models deliver strong learning results for young people. This would include maintaining the annual testing requirements now part of the National Assessment of Educational Progress and reinventing the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences and its mission, dating to 1867, “to show the condition and progress of education.”

K–12 public school choice isn’t an abstract idea. It’s a set of real, growing options that parents, students, and educators are already embracing. These offer not only freedom but also pathways to stronger outcomes and customized learning.

The Trump administration has an opportunity to champion these choices—and it doesn’t need Congress to get started. By reorienting federal support and reducing bureaucratic barriers, it can provide states and local districts with more options for utilizing current K–12 funds and unlock the full potential of public education in America.

If the goal is to put families first and expand opportunity, then K–12 public school choice deserves a central spot on the administration’s education agenda.

Editor’s note: This was first published by The 74.

Editor’s note: This is the first of two posts on what students do outside of school hours.

For decades, field biologists tried to understand animals by observing them during the day. They’d sit in a jeep, holding a notebook, maybe wearing a funny hat. They observed what lions, elephants, or jaguars did under the sun.

In the late 1990s, though, camera traps caught on. These were motion-activated, infrared cameras. Little memory cards meant you could leave it there for weeks. So the field exploded with new insights. Some ideas were simple: Lions weren’t lazy, they hunted at night! Some were complex: When you watched coyotes creep into farms, you’d better understand components of the “human-animal conflict zones” (as the conservationists call it).

Education is in a trap. Our field studies daylight behavior—8 a.m. to 3 p.m.—in great detail. Classes are observed, schools are visited, test scores are released. We can describe five different math curricula and how they differ.

But we’re missing what happens after dark: the TikTok binge, the fight over putting the phone away, the slow collapse of homework, the late-night texting and gaming that leads to five hours of sleep, the kid whose executive function is so shot he couldn’t get his homework done if he were in an empty jail cell.

Yes, we have the outlines of the story, but not the details. It’s not sufficient to just say “Yeah, phones.” If we had our own version of camera traps for the 6 p.m.-to-midnight hours—qualitative research, family interviews, ethnographic study—we’d finally see the real factors shaping student success or struggle—and how it’s different in 2025 than in 2015, not across a kid here or there, but across enough of them to draw patterns.

Consider NAEP scores. They fell, even before Covid. Pundits explained it with references to daylight behavior, cuts to school spending, weak curriculum, declining teacher quality, and more.

Then along came scholar Nat Malkus of AEI. He observed that adult math and reading skills fell, too, in similar ways as the decline of fourth and eighth graders. Since we know that adults are not on the receiving end of any teachers, curriculum, or “school” experiences, we know that something else is at work.

Now let’s turn to Jonathan Haidt. You all know The Anxious Generation—his thesis is that smartphones have harmed children. What has Haidt changed his mind about in the past year? He just told Ezra Klein, “I think I grossly underestimated the harm that’s happening. Because I focused on mental illness, but the bigger damage, I think, is the destruction of human attention in possibly tens or hundreds of millions of kids around the world.”

Most K–12 people would stipulate that teen flourishing has declined. The good things are down (attention, sleep, in-person friend time, dating, part-time work, sports, happiness). The bad things are up (anxiety, isolation, mental illness).

However, K–12 people treat this decline in teen flourishing as an adjacent issue. For good reason: Schools don’t execute their basic assignments very well, like literacy. But other jobs are foisted upon schools anyway, like mental health. The idea of pushing one more job—to somehow observe or improve 6 p.m. to midnight—is therefore a bad one.

The K–12 sector has had some recent, mostly unsuccessful brushes trying to act on teen flourishing (“Promise Neighborhoods,” social and emotional learning, Character Lab, etc.). So we’re conditioned to avert our eyes when the topic comes up.

But just because schools can’t easily address the 6 p.m.-to-midnight issue doesn’t mean we in the education policy sector shouldn’t devote some serious energy to understanding it. The problem is that each leader and organization is caught up in their favorite topics and targets, be it achievement, whole child, budgets, choice, etc. They have little appetite for field notes on the 6 p.m.-to-midnight window: “We already know enough not to waste time on gaining precision there.”

And yet, Malkus is right: These academic declines are probably not caused, at least not solely, by what’s happening during the school day. And Haidt is right: Not only do we see mental health issues affecting outliers, the ability of the median kiddo to concentrate is declining.

We—Sean and Mike—are appealing to the sector we know best, K–12, to step up here.

Over the past months, the two of us have been observing teenage humans in their natural habitats (futons), via Zoom, often for a couple hours at a time. The trade is: We coach them up on executive function, and as a result, we get to hear their stories and notice their patterns. We’re not proposing any 6 p.m. to midnight policy or intervention right now. We just want to enlist more nighttime field biologists to join us, to help us build a taxonomy.

In part two, coming soon, we’ll discuss the lessons we have learned during these observations.

According to a report issued by the OECD in 2018, school closures are an inevitable consequence of declining populations of school-age children across much of the world, and the United States is not immune to the trend. Inevitably, this reality will require more and more closures in the fastest-shrinking regions and states. State, district, and local leaders would do well to plan ahead, utilizing as much high-quality data as possible to inform their efforts. A study out of Texas gives us a good idea of how closures impact students while also waving cautionary flags.

Jeonghyeok Kim, a researcher from the University of Houston, looks at a sample of 470 public school closures in the Lone Star State between 1998 and 2015. Data on schools include grade levels served, student performance on the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) and its successor (the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS)), disciplinary actions, absenteeism, and high school graduations. These data are observed for three years before and two years after the closure of each school in the sample. Student-level data include enrollment (or not) at a Texas four-year college; earning a bachelor’s degree (or not) from a Texas institution by age twenty-six; and employment status, industry sector, and earnings.

Kim uses two difference-in-differences models to compare the changes in outcomes among students affected by school closures with those who were not. The control schools share similar observable characteristics on twelve NCES variables with the closed schools at time of closure, then they are matched by group using a “nearest-neighbor” matching method, which also matches schools on their share of Black, Hispanic, and low-income students. Short run analyses track the same students over five years to see immediate impacts while long-run analyses (through age twenty-seven) examine how closures affect entire graduating classes. They compare cohorts that experienced closure with older cohorts from the same school that graduated within the last three years, relative to cohorts at matched control schools that didn’t close.

In the short run, there was a small decline in students’ standardized math and reading scores following school closure, both of which subsequently recover within three years. There is also a 0.2 day increase in student absences immediately after closure, which persists for four years post-closure. Closures also result in a 0.3 day increase in the duration of disciplinary actions right after closure, which further rises to 0.9 days four years post-closure.

Kim looks to see how school quality may play a role, as determined by the average math and reading scores of each school over the four years preceding closure. Looking at the difference in quality between a closed school and the nearest school, he finds that students displaced to worse-performing schools experience a larger drop in test scores (0.06 of a standard deviation, or SD), while students displaced to better-performing schools experience a smaller, statistically insignificant drop in test scores.

Next, he excludes from the analysis those students new to a school after being displaced from their now-closed school. He found that the scores of peers in “receiving” schools decreased by about 0.18 SD right after closure (and improve but do not fully recover after three years).

Finally, Kim compares younger cohorts who experience school closures to older cohorts who do not. These long-run analyses show that the cohorts saw overall negative effects on several post-secondary education and labor market outcomes. For instance, experiencing school closure decreased the likelihood of graduating from high school by 1 percentage point and enrolling in a four-year college by 1.2 percentage points. It also led to $793 (3.6 percent) lower annual earnings at ages twenty-five to twenty-seven. Adverse effects were less pronounced for students at the high end of the grade band, who tended to be in the terminal grade and would have experienced a school move even in the absence of closures.

While these effects are statistically modest, their cumulative impact on individuals makes them significant in the real world. For instance, an annual earning loss of roughly $800 over a decade amounts to $8,000 in lost income per individual.

So, if future closures are inevitable due to enrollment decreases, district leaders must learn to mitigate the harm to both displaced students and students at receiving schools. First, they should provide ample notice—ideally a year in advance—so that families have time to explore alternatives and prepare for the transition. Whenever possible, assign students from closed schools to higher-performing schools. And last, think about how to move students. Perhaps soon-to-close middle schools could hold onto their youngest students longer but allow the oldest students to age out and move on organically. Honestly, any strategy is preferable over resisting the inevitable until financial ruin compels you to move quickly and without forethought.

SOURCE: Jeonghyeok Kim, “The long shadow of school closures: Impacts on students’ educational and labor market outcomes,” Annenberg Institute at Brown University (May 2024).

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Scott Marion, Executive Director of the Center for Assessment, joins Mike and David to discuss why states should maintain annual assessments—even if the Trump Administration waives some federal testing requirements. Then, on the Research Minute, Adam reviews a study comparing surveys and test scores as measures of school quality and predictors of long-term student success.

Recommended content:

• The Case for State Testing, The National Center for the Improvement of Education Assessment, Inc., (March 2025).
• The Case for Statewide School Accountability Systems, The National Center for the Improvement of Education Assessment, Inc., (March 2025).
• Victoria McDougald, “The case for standardized testing,” Thomas B. Fordham Institute (August 1, 2024).
• Michael J. Petrilli, “The best colleges for political diversity,” Thomas B. Fordham Institute (April 3, 2025).
• Joshua Angrist, Peter Hull, Russell Legate-Yang, Parag A. Pathak and Christopher R. Walters, Putting School Surveys to the Test, NBER (2025)

Feedback Welcome: Have ideas for improving our podcast? Send them to Stephanie Distler at [email protected]. 

Cheers

• Colorado is the rare blue state where charter school enrollment continues to grow. —Chalkbeat
• Yascha Mounk makes a strong case for ditching the college essay. —Yascha Mounk, Substack
• School closure expert Manny Barbara’s approach to helping districts navigate declining enrollment and financial crises—which includes early planning, community engagement, and strategic consolidation—saves money while preserving educational quality. —John Fensterwald, EdSource

Jeers

• New York City schools are planning to shrink class sizes this fall, requiring a hiring spree that will lower teacher standards and prioritize quantity over quality. —Chalkbeat
• As national test scores plummet, states are gutting graduation standards and the federal government is slashing data collection, leaving parents in the dark and students at risk. —Jessica Grose, The New York Times
• A surge in violent assaults against Massachusetts educators highlights a school safety crisis that districts are ill-equipped to handle, leaving teachers traumatized, unsupported, and increasingly driven out of the job. —The Boston Globe
• Weakened accountability, reduced funding, and societal shifts like increased screen time have caused low-performing students to fall behind since well before the pandemic. Now, federal cuts threaten the nation’s ability to track and respond to these disparities. —The New York Times

• Students with Indiana’s new Enrollment Honors Plus diploma, which requires advanced coursework and work experience, will gain automatic admission to state colleges, while those on career or military tracks will receive guaranteed job or enlistment opportunities. —Chalkbeat Indiana
• “A Conservative Vision of Education” argues that education should focus on moral, intellectual, and civic formation, rejecting the idea of neutrality and instead promoting parental choice, cultural transmission, and a return to America’s founding principles. —Ryan Anderson, The Heritage Foundation
• As funding cuts, staffing shortages, and paused contracts put NAEP at risk, experts warn that eliminating or replacing the assessment could erase decades of valuable trend data and undermine educational accountability nationwide. —Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report
• “The Education Department’s approach to civil rights enforcement is changing.” —K–12 Dive