Education Next

Washington Leadership Academy students Drake, David, Terrance, and Bryan collaborate to construct an AI bot that has real-world application during the D.C. charter high school’s annual “Hackathon” last winter. On a Friday morning in early March, about 100 students at Washington Leadership Academy (WLA), a public charter secondary high school in the District of Columbia, gathered in the assembly hall for a “Hackathon,” a hands-on event designed to teach students how generative arti

The Education Exchange · Ep. 456 – Aug. 17, 2026 – What Intact Families Tell Us About Student Outcomes Ian V. Rowe, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss Rowe’s latest research, which investigates the role of family culture in student achievement. “Family Structure, a Key Factor Hidden in Plain Sight: The Case for Federal Reporting in Education,” co-written with Brad Wilcox and Grant Bailey, is availab

The past two weeks have seen a growing ruckus over big changes in the Head Start regs that are reportedly nearing completion by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). First reported by Jonathan Cohn in The Bulwark on July 19 and amplified via weekend coverage by The NewsHour and The New York Times, it appears that the 120+ pages of regulations that now govern this popular, 60-year-old federal program will be slashed to a dozen or so. Amon

What will teen life be like in 10 years? As co-founders of a nonprofit that studies 3 p.m.-to-3 a.m. teen behavior, we often disagree a bit as we try to read the tea leaves. First, to understand what teenagers are like today, we compiled the best available data on five indicators: screen time, teens with part-time jobs, sleep, in-person time with friends, and mood. We’ve extended the trend lines with two sets of predictions—one from Sean and one from Mike—and find that we have cheerfully diverge

In “Straight Talk with Rick and Jal,” Harvard University’s Jal Mehta and I examine the reforms and enthusiasms that permeate education. In a field full of buzzwords, our goal is simple: Tell the truth, in plain English, about what’s being proposed and what it means for students, teachers, and parents. We may be wrong and we will frequently disagree, but we’ll try to be candid and ensure that you don’t need a Ph.D. in eduspeak to understand us. Today’s topic is the tech backlash and what it means

The Education Exchange · Ep. 455 – Aug. 10, 2026 – Democratic Voters Have Been Driven into the Arms of Teachers Unions Michael Hartney, the Bruni Family Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and an associate professor of political science at Boston College, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss how the Democratic Party has embraced teachers unions, and how that could impact education reform moving forward. Hartney recently contributed “How Democrats Stop

Vietnamese-American students study English together at a public middle school in Austin, Texas. Harvard College freshmen Sophie Nguyen and Minh Nguyen look a lot like other first-year students at one of the most selective schools in the country: They work hard, achieve a lot, stay busy, and are usually pretty tired. They are also typical in another way: As children of first-generation immigrants, they’ve had access to educational opportunities their parents didn’t. Stories like th

One of the more promising developments of recent decades in education has been the pendulum swing away from the “college for all” mindset. That focus, which many of us ed-reformers embraced wholeheartedly, turned out to be both bad advice for young people and poisonous politics, sending the unintentional but unmistakable message that people who don’t graduate from college deserve less respect than those who do. This was fuel for the populist fire. So it’s good that today’s debate about college i

The Education Exchange · Ep. 454 – Aug. 3, 2026 – Homeschoolers No Longer on the Margins of Education Choice Dixie Lane joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss Lane’s new book,”Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How It Went Mainstream.” Follow The Education Exchange on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or here on Education Next. — Education Next TranscriptFull transcription PAUL PETERSON, HOST:

A teacher at Peak Preparatory Academy, a charter school in Dallas, laughs with his 7th-grade Spanish students. In my brief time working as a charter school operations director, I was, in my early thirties, one of the oldest members of our staff. Although we could not attract teachers with the promise of higher pay than district schools, we generally hired younger, less experienced professionals who were drawn to our more intentional approaches to academics and student behavior. In

Seemed like a good idea at the time. Earlier this summer, 10 accomplished scholars released their controversial “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.” They had been tapped by the reform-minded presidents of Vanderbilt and Wash U to evaluate the disciplines in question and concluded they had undergone “a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria.” In a gri

The Education Exchange · Ep. 453 – July 27, 2026 – Charters’ “Lost Decade” Found Again? Geoffrey Kocks, a research associate at Blueprint Labs and PhD student at MIT, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss Kocks’ recent report, “Two Decades of Massachusetts Charter School Effects.” Follow The Education Exchange on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or here on Education Next. — Education Next TranscriptFull transcription

In his new book Aftermath, Ted Dintersmith joins a growing chorus of policy wonks, researchers, and advocates who say that the age of calculus is behind us and that future math education should focus entirely on statistics and relevancy to students’ lives. “The tragedy is that 50% of high schools still do offer calculus,” Dintersmith writes. “That we cling to obsolete priorities.” This approach is misguided. Dintersmith writes engagingly about interesting real-world math applications that may we

“The Young Lady with the Shiner,” by Norman Rockwell, 1953 “If men were angels,” James Madison wrote in Federalist No. 51, “no government would be necessary.” The same might be said of student discipline. If children were naturally orderly, patient, truthful, and inclined to subordinate their impulses to the common good, discipline would scarcely be required. Yet a persistent strain of educational thought—from Rousseau to today’s restorative-justice advocates—suggests that disorde

The Browns are emblematic of the type of family that had sent their children to a brick-and-mortar school before 2020 but switched to homeschooling in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and stayed with it. Parents Arlena and Robert are shown leading their kids Jacoby, Felicity, and Riley through math practice in their home in July 2021. In rural North Carolina, one public district is testing a microschool model where middle schoolers study with AI support and learn entrepreneurship

Teach For America recruits participate in a training session in Houston in 2006. When Teach For America launched 36 years ago, one of its pilot sites was Scotlandville High School in Baton Rouge, La., where I happened to teach. So, I’ve observed TFA from its earliest days and been a sometime-friend and sometime-critic over the decades since. A year ago, I chatted with TFA’s longtime CEO Elisa Villanueva Beard as she was stepping down. Now, it seemed like a good time to speak with

Members of a gifted and talented team from Ouabache Elementary School (Indiana) celebrate winning a Battle of the Books competition in 2014. The American education establishment loves to rebrand. Home economics became family and consumer science, while vocational education is now career and technical education. Remedial education is now developmental coursework, economically disadvantaged students are at-risk or underserved, and English as a second language students are English la

Throughout the first quarter of the 21st century, schools built up capacity to accommodate growing student populations, adding classroom space, teacher positions, and the many resources that go into educating a child. The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the build-up through the injection of giant sums of federal money to supplement state and local budgets. In 2025, more students graduated from high school than in any other year in American history. Today, however, the population of young people is

There’s a lot of giddiness about the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit (FSTC), which will launch January 1, 2027. The new federal program lets taxpayers give up to $1,700 to scholarship programs and get a dollar-for-dollar reduction on their federal taxes. It could mean billions each year for educational choice. The legislation even has blue states feeling pressure to open their doors to large-scale school choice. The FSTC is a clever way to do a good thing. Because it’s a tax credit rather than a

The Education Exchange · Ep. 451 – July 13, 2026 – Supreme Court United in Belief that Transgender Athlete Bans Do Not Violate Title IX R. Shep Melnick, the Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr. Professor of American Politics at Boston College, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss the Supreme Court’s recent ruling, which allows states to restrict athletes’ participation in school and collegiate sports based on their biological sex. Follow The Education Exchange on S