April 4, 2025
How One State Improved Its NAEP Scores
The most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress results had a lot of bad news, but there were some scattered bright spots. Louisiana was one of them. In fact, the Pelican State was the only state in the nation that outperformed its pre-pandemic 4th grade reading scores on the 2024 NAEP. Over the past two…
March 31, 2025
Reimagining Federal Education R&D: DARPA for Education
Earlier in my professional life, I was the head of the political science department at Stony Brook University. When the chairs of the arts and science met, someone from the physical or life sciences would inevitably argue that the “hard” natural sciences deserved more support than the “soft” social sciences. My rejoinder was one of…
March 28, 2025
Cracking the Code Behind Dismal 8th Grade Reading Scores
The most recent round of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results delivered a familiar gut punch: Just 30 percent of eighth graders in the United States read at or above the proficient level, a number that’s barely budged in decades. Even in states like Mississippi and Louisiana, which have earned national attention thanks to literacy reforms that have…
March 25, 2025
Less Than Half of Student Borrowers Are Paying Their Loans
Student loan payments have been due for six months now—yet no one seems to have told the students. The federal government effectively suspended payments on student loans for four and a half years due to the Covid-19 pandemic, leading many borrowers to lose touch with their loan servicers and disengage from the repayment system. False promises of loan cancellation…
March 25, 2025
Reimagining Federal Education R&D: IES, Workforce Skills, and State Leadership
The Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has taken a hit from DOGE, losing about 90 percent of its workforce. Regardless of the future of the Education Department, we need to continue to improve education R&D and identify what in IES should be preserved, or indeed expanded, to meet the nation’s needs today and in the…
March 20, 2025
To Transform K-12 Education, the Trump Administration Should Measure What Matters
When the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) was first administered in 1969, nearly nine out of 10 American children were born into married, two-parent homes. By 2023, this number had decreased to six out of 10 children on average, with wide variations across racial groups. Stunning disparities in married, two-parent households by race tightly correlate with disparities in child poverty, domestic violence, and father absence—all…
March 19, 2025
What Can We Learn from Louisiana’s Progress in K–12 Education?
The 2024 National Assessment for Educational Progress results revealed a nation in academic decline, with scores “below pre-pandemic levels . . . in ALL tested grades and subjects,” according to the National Assessment Governing Board. Louisiana, however, is an outlier: It was one of only two states that experienced growth over its pre-pandemic levels in fourth-grade…
March 14, 2025
A Historic Opportunity for Higher Education Reform
Once a sleepy policy area on the national scale, higher education is now a central issue making headlines in the overall political discourse. Believe it or not, the education policy divides between mainstream Democrats and Republicans used to be trivial. For example, 10 years ago, Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-Mass.) proposal to lower student loan interest rates to 3.9…
March 12, 2025
Why Alabama Needs The Success Sequence
“The American Dream is beyond my reach.” This is increasingly the view that many young men and women take regarding the long-held belief that anyone can succeed in the United States. In fact, over half of young adults today believe the American Dream is no longer within their reach. What many of them do not know is that…
March 10, 2025
Many Children Left Behind: The 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress Results Indicate a Five-Alarm Fire
Key Points Introduction By now, the awful results from the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)1 have been publicized, chewed over, and digested—and they are already moving into the rearview mirror as states, school districts, and teachers fall back into the comfortable routine of doing the same thing over and over again. But continuing that…