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June 12, 2025
Lingering Absence in Public Schools: Tracking Post-Pandemic Chronic Absenteeism into 2024
Key Points Chronic absenteeism spiked during the pandemic and remains a serious problem. In 2024, rates were 57 percent higher than they were pre-pandemic and only 2 percentage points lower…
June 5, 2025
Measuring the Value of Nondegree Credentials
…a conversation between BGI President Matt Sigelman and Dr. Schneider, in which they gave context to the discussion by introducing an upcoming report and website, complete with a web demo….
May 15, 2025
The Pandemic Is Over. It’s Time for Schools to Get the Message.
More than five years after the covid-19 pandemic began, the havoc it wreaked on American students and schools is alarmingly clear by nearly every measure. But there is one glaring…
May 14, 2025
Graduation in the Time of COVID: The Weakened Relationship with Chronic Absenteeism
…and graduation rates weakened by half during the pandemic. That is, a district’s chronic absenteeism rate seems to matter less to its graduation rate than it did before the pandemic,…
May 12, 2025
To Improve Student Outcomes, Focus On Classroom Practice, Not Policy
…policy succeeds if it doesn’t improve classroom instruction. Look at Mississippi and Louisiana, which have posted historic gains in reading and math by focusing on classroom practice, investing in teacher…
April 25, 2025
Trump Administration Announces Plan to Get Borrowers Paying Student Loans Again
…matter of if, but when. The current student loan mess The federal government suspended student loan payments in March 2020 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic; this meant that payments…
April 4, 2025
How One State Improved Its NAEP Scores
…through school. This cannot continue to be the case. We must go back to teaching foundational skills in math and place a greater emphasis on mathematical fluency. Society talks about…
March 31, 2025
Reimagining Federal Education R&D: DARPA for Education
…work to improve student achievement is harder. I once estimated that only about 15 percent of the math interventions the Institute of Education Science (IES) supported over many years were…
March 28, 2025
Cracking the Code Behind Dismal 8th Grade Reading Scores
…or materials. A recent RAND research survey of teachers in grades 3-8 found that 44 percent of their students “always or nearly always experience difficulty” reading the content of their instructional materials….
March 20, 2025
To Transform K-12 Education, the Trump Administration Should Measure What Matters
…states saw a decrease in scores from 2019 to 2024 in 8th-grade math. Tennessee, the sole exception, showed no change at all. To help analyze results, NAEP is legally required to collect…