The Report Card with Nat Malkus

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? In a new paper, Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges, Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman consider these questions and many others. The paper is full of interesting findings, so on this episode of The Report Card, two of the paper's authors, David Deming and John Friedman, join Nat to break it down. David Deming is the Academic Dean and Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School. John Friedman is the Briger Family Distinguished Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs and the Economics Department Chair at Brown University. He is also a founding co-director of Opportunity Insights at Harvard UniversityShow Notes:Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private CollegesStudy of Elite College Admissions Data Suggests Being Very Rich Is Its Own QualificationThe Future of Highly Selective College AdmissionsForked LightningOptimal Gerrymandering in a Competitive EnvironmentThe Lengthening of ChildhoodIn the Salary Race, Engineers Sprint but English Majors EndureGetting In

Ever since No Child Left Behind was signed into law in 2002, assessments have been a fixture of the education landscape—a very divisive one. But assessments have changed a lot over the last twenty years and are still changing to better meet the needs of students, teachers, schools, districts, and states. But what do these new assessments look like? What are they capable of that the old ones weren’t? And what can we look forward to next on the assessment front? On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions and more with Arthur VanderVeen. Arthur VanderVeen is the CEO and founder of New Meridian, an assessment design and development company that serves over 2,500 school districts. Arthur was previously the executive director of college readiness at the College Board, and the executive director of assessment and chief of innovation for the New York City Department of Education.Show Notes:New MeridianA Right Turn on Assessments: State-Directed Assessments Using an Interstate Test-Item Bank CooperativeCan State Tests Be Useful for Instruction and Accountability?

At the end of this past November, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, and, since then, there has been a lot of discussion of what AI will mean for education. Will AI render teachers irrelevant? Should AI be banned in the classroom? Will homework ever be the same again? Often, though, discussions of these questions can feel very abstract and distant, as if AI in education is some problem off in the future. Today’s guest, however, argues that it is anything but.Ethan Mollick argues that teachers should already be using AI to better their teaching, that we should already be using AI to accelerate student learning, and that we should already be thinking about the threat AI poses to traditional forms of schoolwork such as the essay and the problem set.Ethan Mollick is an Associate Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He writes about AI on his Substack, One Useful Thing, and on Twitter. Over the past year, he has co-written three papers with Lilach Mollick on AI in education: Assigning AI: Seven Approaches for Students, with Prompts; Using AI to Implement Effective Teaching Strategies in Classrooms: Five Strategies, Including Prompts; and New Modes of Learning Enabled by AI Chatbots: Three Methods and Assignments.Show NotesOne Useful ThingThe Homework ApocalypseDemocratizing the Future of EducationAssigning AI: Seven Approaches for Students, with PromptsUsing AI to Implement Effective Teaching Strategies in Classrooms: Five Strategies, Including PromptsNew Modes of Learning Enabled by AI Chatbots: Three Methods and Assignments

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Larry Berger about the science of reading, education technology, curriculum and high-quality instructional materials, for-profit companies in education, and more.Larry Berger is the CEO and co-founder of Amplify, an education company that creates K–12 assessments, intervention programs, and core curricula. In 2022, Amplify’s materials were used in over 4,000 US school districts and by over 15 million students worldwide.

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