Flypaper

Lately, I’ve seen a meme that keeps popping up on social media: “Telling a teacher to use a boxed curriculum is like forcing a chef to cook hamburger helper.”

I was tempted to like it at first; it seems catchy and does hint at an issue that teachers face regularly: maintaining autonomy and creativity, while using materials that are aligned to academic standards and include challenging activities and content for students. But the meme boils down (pun intended) an important topic—aligned instruction and teachers’ access to high-quality materials—into an “either, or” situation. But, of course, it’s actually more complicated than that.

Indeed, the material we teachers use, and the way we deliver it inside classroom walls, is critically important to our students learning, and the use of low-quality, uninspired materials is, well, a recipe for disaster.

The RAND Corporation recently published a report titled “Changes in What Teachers Know and Do in the Common Core Era.” Using responses from their annual American Teacher Panel survey, they looked at changes in teacher instruction and materials from 2015–17 to find out whether the materials teachers are using in the classroom are aligned to higher standards.

Some of the highlights may...

Out of the 2016 presidential election emerged a struggling and forgotten group eager to voice their needs: working-class Americans. In response to this outcry, Opportunity America, a D.C. think tank focused on economic mobility, united a bipartisan group, cosponsored by the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution, to agree on a set of recommendations to revitalize the working-class.

Over one year, the group conducted four studies and site visits in three locations (Ohio River Valley, Louisville metro area, and southern Indiana) to determine the demographics, educational attainment, household characteristics, and reliance on government programs of the working class. The researchers identified almost sixteen million households containing such adults—individuals between twenty-five and sixty-four years old with at least a high school diploma, but less than a four-year college degree, and a household income between the national twentieth and fiftieth percentile. At the end of their research, the group negotiated which recommendations would best ameliorate some of the negative impacts affecting the working class’s income, employment, education, and family composition. The recommendations are budget neutral and designed to “do no harm” to America’s debt.

The working group concluded that career education offers a substantial opportunity for revitalizing these blue-collar communities. The...

After the recent mid-term election, we published our analysis of newly elected and re-elected governors and where they stand on the issue of private school choice. We also saw changes at the state legislative level that could have implications for educational choice.

What do the election results mean in states that have existing school choice programs in place? What potential effect might they have when it comes to enacting new programs? Now that all the races have officially been called, we break down the states to watch in 2019 and beyond.

Alabama

Governor Kay Ivey, who has long advocated for educational choice, was elected to her first full term after filling a vacancy in 2017. Alabama has an opportunity to expand its existing tax-credit scholarship program, which served more than 3,500 families last year.

Alaska

Alaskans elected Mike Dunleavy as their next governor. As a state senator, Dunleavy sponsored Senate Joint Resolution Nine, which would have allowed for school choice programs to be utilized in Alaska. School choice champions also won a number of state legislative seats that will determine whether the Last Frontier will embrace its first private school choice program in the coming years.

Arizona...

Last week, I argued that the education-policy field has reached a state of homeostasis, “characterized by clearer and fairer but lighter touch accountability systems; the incremental growth of school choice options for families; but no appetite for big and bold new initiatives.” This “end of policy,” as I called it, won’t last forever, but while it’s here, we have a chance to finish what we started and usher in a “Golden Age of Educational Practice.” In other words, to implement the higher standards with fidelity. To improve teacher preparation and development. To strengthen charter school oversight and quality. To make the promise of high quality career and technical education real.

The challenge, I said, is that “while policymakers might be taking a break from education policy, we cannot afford to take a break from educational improvement.”

Unless, that is, we’re satisfied with the results our $650 billion educational system is producing. But we shouldn’t be. It’s not just lackluster student achievement, with barely a third of students reaching “NAEP proficiency” in core subjects. It’s also the 61 percent of students who graduate high school unprepared for what’s next, and the alarming number of young people...