As we move past the pandemic, many are asking, “What’s next?” Some argue that now is the time for reinventing schooling. Others argue that right now we should simply focus on getting back to normal. But Frederick M. Hess argues for a third option.

In his new book, The Great School Rethink, Rick argues that now is the time for educators, school leaders, and policymakers to become more thoughtful and intentional in the way they approach schooling and potential changes to it. Rick isn’t interested in arguing for any particular reform—indeed, he is generally pretty skeptical of big top-down reform. Rather, Rick is interested in freeing students and teachers from established routines and structures that have worn out their welcome so that schools can offer students richer educational experiences.

This episode is a little different than normal: it’s not directly about education. Instead, it’s about peer review, strong- and weak-link problems, and our biases in how we remember the past and look forward to the future. Nonetheless, even though these topics don’t concern education directly, they shed light on important issues in education practice, research, and policy. In particular, the conceptual framework of strong- and weak-link problems provides a helpful apparatus for thinking about the tradeoffs we make in tackling many of the biggest issues in education: school choice, university admissions, accountability, tracking by ability, teacher licensure, and more.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these topics, and others, with Adam Mastroianni. Adam Mastroianni is an experimental psychologist and the author of the biweekly newsletter Experimental History.

During the last decade, Dallas Independent School District overhauled its system for evaluating and compensating teachers and began a new program to attract teachers to hard-to-staff schools. The effects of these changes on student outcomes in one of our nation’s largest school districts are attention grabbing and are documented in two new papers.

The first, The Effects of Comprehensive Educator Evaluation and Pay Reform on Achievement, by Eric A. Hanushek, Jin Luo, Andrew J. Morgan, Minh Nguyen, Ben Ost, Steven G. Rivkin, and Ayman Shakeel, looks at Dallas’s Principal Excellence and Teacher Excellence initiatives. And the second, Attracting and Retaining Highly Effective Educators in Hard-To-Staff Schools, by Andrew J. Morgan, Minh Nguyen, Eric A. Hanushek, Ben Ost, and Steven G. Rivkin, looks at Dallas’s Accelerating Campus Excellence Program.

We at the Report Card are on break this week, so we are re-upping a conversation from March 2022 that we think is interesting and important.

We’ve talked a lot on the show about school choice. But it’s not often we discuss choice between schools in the same district.

Teachers unions are undoubtedly a potent force in American education and politics. But questions about what teachers unions do, and why, are so politicized that the answers you get typically say more about who you ask than about teachers unions themselves.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Michael Hartney, whose new book, “How Policies Make Interest Groups: Governments, Unions, and American Education,” explores these questions and others. Nat and Michael discuss how teachers unions impact students, affect education policy, and became the political powerhouses they are today.

Last Tuesday, OpenAI launched GPT 4, a more advanced version of the large language model GPT 3.5 that the original ChatGPT was built upon. To say the least, it’s impressive. For example, whereas GPT 3.5 scores in the 10th percentile on the Bar Exam, GPT 4 scores in the 90th percentile on the Bar Exam. It’s not hard to imagine that GPT 4 and future, even-more-powerful AIs will have a big impact on education. But what sort of effect will they have?

On the same day that OpenAI launched GPT 4, Khan Academy launched an “experimental AI tool” called Khanmigo, which uses GPT 4 to help students and teachers by acting as either a personalized tutor or a personalized teaching assistant. On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Sal Khan about Khanmigo and AI in education more broadly. Nat and Sal discuss AI’s potential benefits for students and teachers, whether AI will replace teachers, which students AI will help the most, how we can make sure that AI doesn’t serve as a substitute for critical thinking skills, how Khan Academy developed Khanmigo, and more.

Last week, the Supreme Court heard two cases—Biden v. Nebraska and Department of Education v. Brown—concerning the legality of the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness plan. In this episode, Nat speaks with Beth Akers and Adam White about these two lawsuits and their potential ramifications for our higher education system and American democracy.

Beth Akers is a Senior Fellow at AEI, the author of Making College Pay, and the coauthor of Game of Loans: The Rhetoric and Reality of Student Debt.

Recently, there have been a number of big developments on the choice front. Within the last few weeks alone, Iowa and Utah became the 3rd and 4th states, respectively, to adopt universal education savings accounts, or ESAs, and an Oklahoma charter school board met to consider certifying a Catholic school, which, if approved, would become the first religious charter school in the country.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat discusses these developments with Nicole Stelle Garnett, the John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law at Notre Dame Law School, the author of two books, and the co-editor of a new book, “The Case for Parental Choice: God, Family, and Educational Liberty,” coming out in March.

The Biden administration’s proposed changes to income-driven repayment (IDR) haven’t received the same level of attention that student loan forgiveness has, but they are arguably no less significant. Changes to IDR will cost billions of dollars, affect millions of borrowers, and fundamentally change the student borrowing landscape for past, present, and future borrowers.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Matt Chingos and Jason Delisle, both of the Urban Institute, about IDR and some of the eyebrow-raising effects the Biden administration’s proposed changes might have on student borrowing.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Daniel Willingham, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy. Nat and Dan discuss the benefits and limitations of the science of learning, why we don’t spend enough time teaching students how to learn, learning styles and education myths, the potential education benefits of chewing gum, why ed schools need to teach more than just Piaget, education R&D, why students develop bad study habits, how students are different and how they are the same, entrance exams, group assignments, the value of memorization and content knowledge, why students should learn subjects that they will later forget, and more.

Show Notes:

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat reviews the past year in education with Laura Meckler of the Washington Post, Linda Jacobson of The 74, and Goldie Blumenstyk of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Nat, Laura, Linda, and Goldie discuss affirmative action, school masking, ChatGPT, the top pieces of education journalism from the past year, higher education labor strikes, enrollment shortages, book bans, how education journalists use Twitter, COVID recovery, learning loss, sports gambling on college campuses, what education stories audiences want, income driven repayment, technology in schools, student mental health, what we can expect from the coming year, and more.

Show Notes:

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat reviews the past year in education with Laura Meckler of the Washington Post, Linda Jacobson of The 74, and Goldie Blumenstyk of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Nat, Laura, Linda, and Goldie discuss affirmative action, school masking, ChatGPT, the top pieces of education journalism from the past year, higher education labor strikes, enrollment shortages, book bans, how education journalists use Twitter, COVID recovery, learning loss, sports gambling on college campuses, what education stories audiences want, income driven repayment, technology in schools, student mental health, what we can expect from the coming year, and more.

Show Notes:

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Jennifer Frey, associate professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina and the host of Sacred and Profane Love. Nat and Jennifer discuss human happiness and education, what psychology doesn’t understand about happiness, why we should care about teaching virtue, the Hillbilly Elegy, the proper ends of education, why it’s not such a great idea to let children choose what they read, Catholic education, whether it is old fashioned to teach virtue, Social and Emotional Learning, the liberal arts, and more.

Show Notes:

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Melissa Arnold Lyon and Matthew Kraft about perceptions of the teaching profession. Nat, Mimi, and Matt discuss why the status and prestige of the teaching profession are at their lowest points in fifty years, why this matters for student learning, how perceptions of the teaching profession have changed over time, the extent to which current declines preceded the pandemic, Mimi and Matt’s own job satisfaction when they were teachers, how the prestige of K-12 teaching compares with the prestige of college teaching, the effectiveness of teacher strikes, teachers unions, teacher pay, what can be done to improve the status of the teaching profession, and more.

Show Notes:

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (NC), the Republican Leader of the House Committee on Education and Labor. Nat and Dr. Foxx discuss student loan forgiveness, the REAL Reforms Act, community colleges, credentialism, serving on a school board, spelling bees, the role of federal education policy, and more.

Show Notes:

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Tom Kane, the Walter H. Gale Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the faculty director of CEPR, and one of the project leaders of the Education Recovery Scorecard. Nat and Tom discuss NAEP results, the Education Recovery Scorecard, COVID learning loss, pandemic recovery, and more.

A collaboration of the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard, and Stanford CEPA, the Education Recovery Scorecard links NAEP scores with state assessment results, giving us the first chance to really compare learning loss at the district level across the country.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Po-Shen Loh, professor of mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University and coach of the United States’ International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) team. Nat and Po discuss the difference between teaching problem solving and teaching computation, the limitations of mastery learning, the potential of online learning, math outreach, IMO, Hagoromo chalk, how to make math instruction simultaneously more engaging and more challenging, whether educators should discuss the usefulness of math, a scalable program to teach problem solving to advanced students live online, calculators, and more.

Show Notes:

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Richard Reeves, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It. Nat and Richard discuss redshirting, changing gender disparities, why many education interventions don’t help men, Jordan Peterson, conscientiousness, why boys’ standardized test scores are better than their grades, Bernard Williams, meritocracy, the modern male’s need for a better life script, the prefrontal cortex, monarchy, the feminization of schooling, and more.

Show Notes:

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat interviews Freeman Hrabowski. Nat and Freeman discuss Black students in STEM, the state of free speech on college campuses, university spending and how to keep costs down, whether high schools are doing a good enough job of preparing students for college, the NCAA tournament, campus culture, the value of collaborative teamwork, how to improve graduation rates, multibillion-dollar university endowments, and more.

Freeman Hrabowski served as president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) from 1992 until earlier this year. Under his leadership, UMBC became the nation’s number one college in terms of the number of Black students it graduates who later earn a Ph.D. in the natural sciences and engineering—an especially impressive feat when you consider that UMBC’s undergraduate enrollment is only about 11,000 and that Black students make up slightly less than 20% of that number. During Hrabowski’s tenure, UMBC also more than doubled graduation rates, earned the #1 ranking in US News’s list of up and coming universities for six consecutive years, and won the biggest upset in the history of March Madness.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat interviews Doug Lemov. Nat and Doug discuss cellphones and social media, how they harm the academic and social development of students, how they make schools less inclusive, and what we can do about all of this. Nat and Doug also discuss online learning, school choice, the difficulty of creating schools with a coherent operating philosophy, the state of public schooling, The Scarlet Letter, the pandemic’s effects on students, teacher professional development, the relationship between parenting and schooling, the idea that schooling sometimes has to be hard for students, and the crucial role that schools play in shaping students’ habits of attention.

Doug Lemov is the author of Teach Like a Champion and the founder of the Teach Like a Champion organization. He was previously the managing director and one of the founders of Uncommon Schools. His new book, Reconnect: Building School Culture for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging, hits shelves next month.