The Report Card with Nat Malkus

What does a good school look like? How does a good school operate? What does a good school do differently? There are probably many correct answers to these questions, but on this episode of The Report Card we want to narrow it down and focus on one particular school, Michaela, that has a very particular set of answers to these questions. Located near London’s Wembley Stadium, Michaela is a free school that opened its doors in 2014 and today has the highest GCSE value-added score in all of England. Michaela is known for its strict behavioral practices, its unique school culture, and its unabashed promotion of small-c conservative values.On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Katharine Birbalsingh, the founder and head teacher of Michaela Community School. Nat and Katharine discuss school culture, the importance of values in education, school lunches, cell phones in schools, discipline and student behavior, teacher feedback and observation, and more.Show Notes:Michaela: The Power of CultureBattle Hymn of the Tiger Teachers: The Michaela WayBritain's Strictest Headmistress

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.Frederick M. Hess is a senior fellow and the director of education policy studies at AEI, an executive editor of Education Next, the author of the Education Week blog “Rick Hess Straight Up,” the founder and chairman of AEI’s Conservative Education Reform Network, and the author of numerous books.Show Notes:The Great School RethinkSpinning Wheels: The Politics of Urban School ReformLetters to a Young Education ReformerThe Cage-Busting TeacherCage-Busting LeadershipThe End of School Reform?

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.Show Notes:The Rise and Fall of Peer ReviewScience Is a Strong-Link ProblemYou’re Probably Wrong about How Things Have ChangedThings Could Be BetterWhen Should You End a Conversation? Probably Sooner than You ThinkPop Culture Has Become an OligopolyIdeas Aren’t Getting Harder to Find and Anyone Who Tells You Otherwise Is a Coward and I Will Fight Them

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.On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus is joined by two of the papers’ authors, Eric Hanushek and Steven Rivkin, to discuss these programs. Eric Hanushek is the Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the winner of the 2021 Yidan Prize for Education Research. Steven Rivkin is the Department Head of Economics at the University of Illinois Chicago.Show Notes:The Effects of Comprehensive Educator Evaluation and Pay Reform on AchievementAttracting and Retaining Highly Effective Educators in Hard-To-Staff SchoolsDoes Regulating Entry Requirements Lead to More Effective Principals?Performance Information and Personnel Decisions in the Public Sector: The Case of School PrincipalsDynamic Effects of Teacher Turnover on the Quality of InstructionGlobal Universal Basic Skills: Current Deficits and Implications for World Development

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. Started in 2012, Los Angeles's Zones of Choice program creates small local markets with high schools in neighborhoods throughout LA, but leaves traditional attendance-zone boundaries in place. In application, this means that about 30-40% of LAUSD is a Zone of Choice.Here to discuss the success of LA's Zones of Choice program are Christopher Campos and John Deasy.Show Notes:The Impact of Neighborhood School Choice: Evidence from Los Angeles' Zones of Choice Program.

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.Michael Hartney is an assistant professor of political science at Boston College, a Hoover Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.  Show Notes:How Policies Make Interest Groups: Governments, Unions, and American EducationTeachers’ Unions and School Board Elections: A ReassessmentRevitalizing Local Democracy: The Case for On-Cycle Local ElectionsTeachers Unions in the Post-Janus World

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.Salman Khan is the founder and CEO of Khan Academy, an online learning platform serving over 150 million users across 190 countries. Sal is also the founder of Schoolhouse.world, Khan Lab School, and Khan World School.Show Notes:Khanmigo AnnouncementKhanmigo DemonstrationKhan Academy Course on AI for Education

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. Adam White is a Senior Fellow at AEI, where he focuses on American constitutionalism, the Supreme Court, and the administrative state. He is also the co-director of the C. Boyden Gray Center for the Study of the Administrative State at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University.Show Notes:Audio for Oral ArgumentsThe Biggest Legal Flaw in Biden’s Student Loan GambitGod Save This Honorable Court—and We Can, TooHigher-Value Higher EdStudent Loan Forgiveness Debacle Has Already Cost $255 Billion in Lost Federal RevenueBiden’s Changes to Student Loans Means the Vast Majority of Borrowers Will Never Repay Their DebtStudent Debt Forgiveness Tracker

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. Show Notes:The Future for Religious Charter SchoolsFrom School Choice to Parent ChoiceSupreme Court Opens a Path to Religious Charter Schools

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.Show Notes:Few College Students Will Repay Student Loans under the Biden Administration’s ProposalHow Were Student Loan Borrowers Affected by the Pandemic?Who Should Pay? Designing a More Equitable Income-Driven Repayment Plan