August 29, 2023
How to Reengage Parents in Their Children’s Schooling
I wrote recently about the opportunity (and need) to rethink the parent-educator partnership. Inevitably, a bunch of practical questions arise about how to do that. After all, for every frustrated parent who feels unwelcome or out of the loop, there’s an equally frustrated teacher who has stories of parents not showing up for meetings or not responding…
August 28, 2023
Where Does School Time Go?
As the new school year gets underway, there’s a lot of talk about programs, technology, and staffing challenges. But one opportunity for school improvement seems to consistently get overlooked: time. Three decades ago, the National Education Commission on Time and Learning observed, “Learning in America is a prisoner of time. For the past 150 years, American…
August 24, 2023
The Hill that Public Education Dies on: Transgender Policies’ Utter Contempt for Parents
An unmistakable fault line is emerging between much of public education and many of those it serves, particularly parents, on transgender issues. Put bluntly, a strong majority of Americans—57 percent in a recent poll conducted by the Washington Post and Kaiser Family Foundation—simply don’t buy the idea that a person can be a gender other than the one…
August 14, 2023
The Narcissism of Small Diffidences
Catherine, a mother living in the New York City suburbs, has a son who flunked out of college. Her story is one of the cautionary tales offered up in Jennifer Breheny Wallace’s Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic—And What We Can Do About It. Catherine left the workforce to raise her two children. The…
August 13, 2023
‘The Death of Public School’ Review: Find a Place to Learn
What is a public school? Is it an institution that is paid for by the public? One staffed by government employees? One that teaches a publicly approved curriculum? One that educates a broad swath of the public’s children? In the view of Cara Fitzpatrick, the author of “The Death of Public School,” it possesses all…
August 10, 2023
The Rowe Show
On today’s Remnant—which happens to be more than a year in the making—Jonah’s joined for the first time by Ian Rowe, a senior fellow at AEI and the author of Agency (2022), which explores how young people can build strong families and take control of their destiny. Much of their conversation focuses on one of Ian’s primary interests,…
July 31, 2023
Biden’s Under-the-Radar Budget Bomb: A New Student Loan Repayment Plan
The Biden administration hasn’t been shy about spending money, and spending on higher education policy has been no exception. The most obvious channel for (attempted) spending was the illegal plan to cancel $10,000 to $20,000 in student debt for most borrowers that was halted by the Supreme Court. But there’s another plan in the works…
July 18, 2023
The Education Community’s Views on School Improvement Have Fundamentally Changed
A few months back, I reflected on the 40th anniversary of “A Nation at Risk,” the landmark 1983 report. But there’s one important point that I didn’t really address: that the report was characterized by confidence in the DNA of Horace Mann’s familiar schoolhouse, whereas the momentum today is moving in a decidedly different direction. This struck…
July 15, 2023
Yonkers’ Only Charter School Illustrates Just How Broken the System Is
To what lengths will teachers’ unions and their allies go to destroy charter schools? Eduardo LaGuerre and Sobeida Cruz are in the process of finding out. The couple raised their three children in Yonkers. It wasn’t the best public school district, but they hired tutors to fill in the gaps. Two decades ago — when…
July 12, 2023
Rethinking the Impact of the Lockdowns
We are only beginning to make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic and the implications of the lockdowns that forced people to stay home. It is an endeavor that will take years to flesh out. Eszter Hargittai’s Connected in Isolation is one of the first large-scale attempts to do just that and looks at how the United States…