The Report Card with Nat Malkus

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:The Daily Tar Heel; Volume 131, Issue 16Students Hated ‘To Kill a Mockingbird.’ Their Teachers Tried to Dump It.This Online Tutoring Company Says It Offers Expert One-on-One Help. Students Often Get Neither.Disillusioned: Five Families and the Unraveling of America’s SuburbsThe ‘Science of Reading’ in 2023: 4 Important DevelopmentsWhat I Learned Covering National Education Issues for ChalkbeatReady or Not, AI Is HereAI Can Mimic Students’ Writing Styles. How Are Teachers Supposed to Catch Cheaters Now?

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Brian Jacob and Vladimir Kogan about school board elections. Nat, Brian, and Vlad discuss how effective school board elections are at giving voters local democratic control, whether school board members are rewarded for good performance and punished for bad performance, the margin of victory in school board elections, who runs for school board, how incumbents perform in school board elections, the high rate of school board member turnover, paying school board members, state takeovers, how the pandemic affected school board elections, whether Moms for Liberty has been effective in winning school board elections, school governance, direct democracy, ESSER funding, NCLB, and more.Brian Jacob is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Education Policy and professor of economics at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.Vladimir Kogan is a professor in the department of Political Science at The Ohio State University.Show Notes:How Did the COVID-19 Pandemic Influence School Board Elections? (forthcoming) by Brian JacobDemocratic Accountability or an Electoral Turnstile? Turnover and Competition in Local School Board Elections (forthcoming) by Vladimir Kogan, Stephane Lavertu, and Zachary Peskowitz

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.Show Notes:The Unintended Consequences of Academic LeniencyLenient Grading Won’t Help Struggling Students. Addressing Chronic Absenteeism Will.Designing Field Experiments to Integrate Research on Costs

Nat Malkus interviews Ethan Hutt and Jack Schneider about their book on grades and transcripts in education. They discuss the history of grading, the inaccurate perception of transcripts, the gamification of grades, and ways to improve grading practices for deeper learning.

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. Show Notes:The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling BehindA Driver of Inequality That Not Enough People Are Talking AboutThe Puzzle of Falling US Birth Rates since the Great RecessionMale Earnings, Marriageable Men, and Non-Marital Fertility: Evidence from the Fracking BoomThe Economics of Non-Marital Childbearing and The “Marriage Premium for Children”Investigating Recent Trends in the U.S. Teen Birth RateMedia Influences on Social Outcomes: The Impact of MTV's 16 and Pregnant on Teen Childbearing

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. 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 role that schools play in shaping students' habits of attention.Doug Lemov is the author of Reconnect: Building School Culture for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging and Teach Like a Champion.Show Notes:Take Away Their CellphonesReconnect: Building School Culture for Meaning, Purpose, and BelongingTeach Like A Champion 3.0Teach Like A ChampioniGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of UsIt Was a Mistake to Let Kids Onto Social Media Sites. Here’s What to Do Now.

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.Show Notes:How to Make Up the COVID Learning LossAffirmative Action in College Admissions Doesn’t Work—But It CouldBuild Feeder Schools (And Make Yale and Harvard Fund Them)Enhancing the Efficacy of Teacher Incentives through Framing: A Field ExperimentParental Incentives and Early Childhood Achievement: A Field Experiment in Chicago Heights

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. Jelani Nelson is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley.Tom Loveless is an education researcher and former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.Show Notes:California Math FrameworkCalifornia Adopts Controversial New Math Framework. Here’s What’s in ItCalifornia’s New Math Framework Doesn’t Add UpAnalysis and Critique of California Math Frameworks Revisions (CMF)UC Berkeley, Stanford Professors Face Controversy, Debate State Math CurriculumCalifornia Students Are Struggling in Math. Will Reforms Make the Problem Worse?The Divider: Jo Boaler of Stanford Is Leading the Math-Instruction Revolution. Critics Say Her Claims Don’t Always Add Up.

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 detracking; 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. Show Notes:Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial EquityWhat happened when an Ohio school district rushed to integrate classrooms

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.However, on June 1st, following a state intervention, Miles was named the next superintendent of Houston ISD. Since then, he has made quite the splash. On this episode of The Report Card, Mike Miles joins Nat Malkus to discuss the reforms he is implementing in Houston ISD and his views on district leadership and school reform more broadly.