Education Policy & School Reform News

Twenty years ago, when I was hiring teachers for the private K-12 school I founded, I knew better than to recruit certified teachers. From my previous work as a college history professor, I know that the people least prepared to teach a subject are education majors. Requiring an embarrassingly low minimum of credit hours to be certified…

American institutions of higher education won’t reform on their own. The recent explosion of antisemitism on college campuses has made many Americans—including high-profile donors—turn against modern academia. How could our schools be filled with so many frothing antisemites who hate Jews, hate America, and hate the West? This has prompted many to understand the depth…

Just in time for Christmas, new data finds good news on education: Average graduation rates nationwide are up two percentage points. Before celebrating, though, research reminds us that students still are posting low scores in national and international comparisons, and a troubling share of college students need remedial work. Graduation rates may not represent what…

Our most prestigious institutions of higher education have devolved into know-nothing hate factories operating in an unaccountable cocoon of ideological conformity and reinforcement. That’s what was revealed Tuesday at a House hearing on antisemitism on college campuses. The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were brought before Congress…

It’s quite surprising how much dishonesty and disinformation you can pack into a 27-minute “documentary” film. (Twenty-five minutes, if you don’t count the two minutes of credits at the end.) But the dishonesty and disinformation in “The ABCs of Book Banning”—streaming now on Paramount+—is at least as much an act of omission as one of…

We know from history that Jew-hatred, the world’s oldest and once again most fashionable form of bigotry, is the chameleon of all hates—forever taking on new hues to suit the scapegoating needs of the day. It has always been thus, and it will always be thus. This is a cancer for which there is, sadly,…

Pop quiz time. “Teacher shortages have gotten worse.” True or false? False. And yet, that sentence was part of a recent Washington Post headline. And it’s far from uncommon. In fact, public schools have been on a hiring spree for decades. It began with President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and has continued to the present…

In a nationally televised face-off, Govs. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., and Gavin Newsom, D-Calif., on Thursday night debated, among other things, whether school libraries should carry explicit content on their shelves. When two high-profile state officials spar over an issue on prime-time TV, policies related to that issue are likely to be a topic for other…

Diversity, equity, and inclusion policies have grown so diverse that they now include policies reminiscent of the Jim Crow era. A Chicago-area school district is attempting to boost academic achievement among black and Latino students by offering blacks-only and Latino-only classes. The segregated classes are called “affinity” classes, and they aim to reduce the so-called academic achievement…

Since she began serving on her local school board in Arizona in January, Heather Rooks has made it a practice to begin her meeting comments by reading a Scripture verse she found encouraging. Rooks says citing Scriptures such as Isaiah 41:10—“Do not fear for I am with you; Do not anxiously look about you, for…