On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with David Steiner about coherence and fragmentation; why curricula, teacher training programs, and assessments should be aligned (and why they usually aren’t); SEL; where Common Core fell short; E.D. Hirsch and the importance of teaching content; why economics, music, and philosophy should be taken more seriously in secondary education than they usually are; AP exams and CTE; teachers unions, master’s pay premiums, and schools of education; whether school is boring; why American teachers tend to focus more on students and less on subject matter than teachers abroad; the state of the humanities in American education; teaching students Ancient Greek; how not to teach Shakespeare; and more.

David Steiner is Executive Director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy, Professor of Education at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of A Nation at Thought: Restoring Wisdom in America’s Schools. He was previously Dean at the Hunter College School of Education and the Commissioner of Education for New York State.

Over the last couple years, a number of states have enacted new universal education savings account (ESA) programs. Republicans have led these efforts with near universal opposition from Democrats, but should more Democrats support ESAs, especially because ESAs would seem to more greatly benefit the urban areas that Democrats tend to represent than the rural areas that Republicans tend to represent?

On this episode of The Report Card, four Democrats—Marcus Brandon, Ravi Gupta, Bethany Little, and Graig Meyer—debate whether their fellow Democrats should support ESAs. Nat, Marcus, Ravi, Bethany, and Graig discuss whether ESAs are regressive, whether Democratic voters support ESAs, whether Democrats should focus on private school choice instead of public school choice, and more.

During the pandemic, homeschooling rates spiked, reaching unprecedented levels. And although they have fallen some since then, homeschooling rates remain far higher than anything we saw before the pandemic.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Angela Watson about what is driving this change, what we can expect from homeschooling in the coming years, and what we know about homeschooling more broadly.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Tom Richards about the Florence Academy of Art, what serious art instruction looks like, how K–12 art education can be improved, the differences between music and art instruction, whether artistic talent is innate or can be taught, how art instruction has changed over the last 200 years, Velazquez, showing children art documentaries, why it’s important to teach fundamentals before higher order skills, drawing with pencil and paper, the Zorn palette, the importance of coherence and consistency in an educational program, the management of Italian art museums, the proper age at which to start rigorous art training, and more.

Tom Richards is a painter and the director of the Florence Academy of Art.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Mike McShane about education savings account (ESA) programs. Nat and Mike discuss the sudden growth in ESA programs over the past year, how ESA programs work, the differences between ESAs and vouchers, the pandemic’s effects on school choice, whether interest in ESAs solely comes from the right, the difficulty of starting charter schools, single-sex schools, the quality of education surveys, whether ESAs harm public schools in rural districts, the challenges of implementing ESAs, school choice and Catholic schools, how ESAs affect homeschooling, and more.

Mike McShane is the Director of National Research at EdChoice and the author and editor of a number of books on education policy.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus reviews the past year in education with Matt Barnum of The Wall Street Journal, Goldie Blumenstyk of The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Alyson Klein of Education Week. Nat, Matt, Goldie, and Alyson discuss AI in education; DEI in higher education; learning loss, chronic absenteeism, and the ESSER funding cliff; the end of race-based admissions; the state of education journalism; the science of reading; which education stories from the past year were over- and under-reported; the Biden administration’s SAVE plan; culture clashes in Florida; the 2024 elections; what to expect from the coming year; and more.

Show Notes:

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Brooks Bowden about her recent paper The Unintended Consequences of Academic Leniency, co-authored by Viviana Rodriguez and Zach Weingarten. Nat and Brooks discuss how grading policies influence student effort and engagement, whether academic leniency helps low ability students, why North Carolina’s changes to its grading policies led to increased absenteeism, whether making grading policies stricter can ameliorate student achievement, whether increases in academic leniency in the wake of the pandemic are good for students, and more.

Brooks Bowden is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania and the Director of the Center for Benefit–Cost Studies of Education.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Ethan Hutt and Jack Schneider about their new book, Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don’t Have To). Nat, Ethan, and Jack discuss grades, tests, and transcripts; whether grades do a good job of motivating student learning; how our current grading system came into existence; grading abroad; short-haul and long-haul messages; AP exams; the difficulty of narrative grading; whether transcripts should be updated for the digital age; making grades overwritable; the GED; how teachers can improve their grading practices; and more.

Ethan Hutt is Associate Professor of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Ethan Hutt and Jack Schneider about their new book, Off the Mark: How Grades, Ratings, and Rankings Undermine Learning (but Don’t Have To). Nat, Ethan, and Jack discuss grades, tests, and transcripts; whether grades do a good job of motivating student learning; how our current grading system came into existence; grading abroad; short-haul and long-haul messages; AP exams; the difficulty of narrative grading; whether transcripts should be updated for the digital age; making grades overwritable; the GED; how teachers can improve their grading practices; and more.

Ethan Hutt is Associate Professor of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Melissa Kearney about her new book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. Nat and Melissa discuss the decline in marriage among non-college-educated parents, why having two parents in the home matters for student outcomes, the stock of marriageable men, whether studying family structure is taboo, what the fracking boom can teach us about the decline in marriage, how marriage became decoupled from raising children, universal basic income for parents, why Asian Americans seem immune from the broader decline in marriage, intergenerational households, the difficulty of parenting, the importance of culture, and more.

Melissa Kearney is the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland and the Director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group.

Note: This episode originally aired in September 2022.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Doug Lemov about how cellphones and social media harm the academic and social development of students and make schools less inclusive.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Roland Fryer about incentives and opportunity. Nat and Roland discuss paying students, parents, and teachers; the importance of properly structuring incentives; affirmative action; loss aversion; why certain ideas in education get treated as out of bounds; using machine learning to increase diversity in college admissions; COVID learning loss; whether the Ivy League should create feeder schools for disadvantaged students; using data in the classroom; and more.

Roland Fryer is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He was a MacArthur Fellow and is a winner of the John Bates Clark Medal.

On July 12th, the California State Board of Education adopted a new math framework that will affect the way math is taught for the nearly 6 million students in California’s public schools and has the potential to influence the way math is taught at the national level.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with two of the framework’s critics, Jelani Nelson and Tom Loveless, about the framework, its intellectual origins, what they think it gets wrong, whether it is equitable, and what it will mean for California’s students.

On the latest episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Laura Meckler about her new book, Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity. Nat and Laura discuss integration, busing, and de-tracking; the Van Sweringen brothers; the limitations of good intentions; the internet’s effect on journalism; the racial achievement gap; belonging; what it’s like writing about your hometown; what history can teach us about education policy; and more.

Laura Meckler is a national education writer for The Washington Post.

In May, Eric Hanushek and Steven Rivkin joined the podcast to discuss their research on Dallas Independent School District’s Accelerating Campus Excellence program and its Principal Excellence and Teacher Excellence initiatives.

The man who implemented these reforms, Mike Miles, was superintendent of Dallas ISD from 2012 through 2015, and, in May, was serving as the CEO of Third Future Schools.

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, selective colleges, and their admissions practices, have received a lot of scrutiny.

Does going to a highly selective college affect long-term outcomes? How much preference are legacy applicants given? To what extent does socioeconomic background influence chances of admission? And how can highly selective colleges improve social mobility and diversify the American elite?