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As we wade into 2018, I thought I’d give my not-so-famed prognostication skills a spin. Here’s my best guess at eight education stories we just may be reading in the year ahead: 1. Conference small talk leads to a massive but short-lived pivot in education advocacy. At the NewSchools Venture Fund Summit, Chan-Zuckerberg education honcho Jim Shelton is overheard quie...

James (Lynn) Woodworth has been named the new commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. Woodworth is currently a quantitative research analyst at CREDO. He received his Ph.D. in education policy from the University of Arkansas. CREDO is perhaps best known for its analyses of charter school performance. You can read more about some of its studies here: • R...

Rose and Milton Friedman (pictured in 1976) saw a future with universal school choice, and it had winners and losers. Now, 30 years after they established a foundation bearing their name—and five years after universal choice first became a reality—we can see how accurate their vision of the future was. Thirty years ago last month, Milton and Rose Friedma...

In an important and mostly depressing New Year’s Day column in The Washington Post, veteran education journalist Jay Mathews describes the on-again, off-again “carnival ride” to “raise school standards” that he’s observed over the past half century. “We love making schools more accountable,” Mathews writes. “Then, we hate the idea.” @JIRAIST via Twenty20 He cites a pair of rece...

A major snowstorm is causing schools to close up and down the East Coast today. A study by Josh Goodman published in Education Next challenges the conventional wisdom that the number of school days cancelled due to snow has a significant impact on student learning.  Goodman found that a worse problem was snowy days when schools remain open but many students are absent. The stud...

Advertisements for investment funds always say that past performance is no guarantee of future results; in the case of my forecasting skills, that’s probably a good thing. After all, in 2016 I claimed that Donald Trump would never become president, and a year ago I thought that 2017 might be the year of coming back together again. So in the spirit of third time’s a charm, not t...

Public debate over gifted education tends to focus on fairness. Who gets to be called “gifted” and what sort of extras do they receive? Nationwide, more than 12 percent of Asian students and almost 8 percent of white students are enrolled in gifted programs compared to 3 percent of Black students and 4 percent of Hispanic students—differences that have ...