The Report Card with Nat Malkus

In a few short days, we’ll be celebrating America’s 250th birthday, but rather than feeling uniformly triumphant and celebratory, America’s Semiquincentennial comes at a time when many worry about the state of our democracy and civic culture. Schools are central to this worry. Many are concerned that civic education in American schools is insufficient or misguided, and that schools are not doing e...

The Department of Education has said it is trying to return education to the states, but what does that mean for the federal role in education and for the states expected to take on more responsibility? What is the Department doing now to scale back the federal role in education? How does the Department think about its own education agenda as it tries to return education to the states? And are sta...

Recently, Harvard faculty voted to push back on grade inflation at the institution by capping the proportion of A’s given to students at 20%. But according to a new paper, Harvard’s new policy—and grade caps in general—are not the right solution. In What Does a Grade Mean? Informativeness and Strategic Manipulation of Grading Systems , Scott Duke Kominers and Joshua S. Gans argue that to create be...

Historically, many didn’t consider Alabama to be at the forefront of education, but Alabama’s pandemic recovery may be among the best in the nation. Perhaps most impressively, Alabama was the only state whose 4th-grade math NAEP scores were higher in 2024 than in 2019, and Alabama reports a chronic absenteeism rate that is the lowest in the nation—and the closest to its pre-pandemic levels of any...

Although the Trump administration’s efforts to reform education might not be making national headlines quite as often as they did one year ago, a lot has still happened in education over the last several months. The Trump administration has continued its push to dismantle the Department of Education. Elite universities are making efforts to reform campus culture. The Department of Education releas...

This podcast has covered AI in K–12 education a fair amount, but how will and how should AI change higher education? Should any human instructors be replaced with AI? Should universities change what and how they teach to strengthen their value proposition? And in the age of AI, how should universities prepare their students for an unpredictable job market? On this episode of The Report Card , Nat...

Note: This episode originally aired in April 2025. On this episode of The Report Card , Nat Malkus speaks with Eva Moskowitz , the founder and CEO of Success Academy. Nat and Eva discuss why COVID learning loss is a misnomer; whether chronically absent students should face consequences for their poor attendance; why, despite its strong academic performance, Success Academy decided to overhaul its...

Recently, there has been a lot of handwringing over grade inflation both at the higher education and K–12 levels, but how big of a problem actually is grade inflation? What sort of effect does grade inflation have on student learning? Does grade inflation help or hurt college enrollment? And what impact, if any, does grade inflation have on lifetime earnings? On this episode of The Report Card , N...

Math is one of the subjects that gets the most attention in American education, but how well do we actually understand what good math instruction should look like? Should math classes consist of students solving problem after problem, or should math classes also include opportunities for discussion and group work? Should students learn a topic and then move on to the next topic after they have ach...

Over the past year, the Trump administration has rewritten the playbook for how Washington interacts with higher education, especially elite universities. How should universities respond to the Trump administration’s efforts? Have the Trump administration’s actions been legal? And how can universities better serve the American public? On this episode of The Report Card , Nat Malkus discusses these...

To commemorate America’s 250th anniversary, The Report Card will be releasing a few episodes on the history of American education—both to discuss how we arrived at the education system we have today and how our education system has shaped America. On this episode, Nat Malkus and Johann Neem cover the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Nat and Johann discuss civics education...

On the right, teachers’ unions are often treated as the bogeyman, and no one today is more synonymous with teachers’ unions than Randi Weingarten. Indeed, in 2022 former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called Weingarten “the most dangerous person in the world.” But who is Randi Weingarten? What does she do on a day-to-day basis? How much power does she actually have? What are her views on topics su...

Can students learn math much faster than they typically do? Can students who feel like they have hit a wall in math instruction make steady progress again? And can math instruction be successfully delivered online through a platform that doesn’t even use video? Math Academy, an online learning platform that is serious about math instruction, is built on the premise that the answer to all of these...

We are now coming to the end of another year. What were the biggest stories in education this year? What stories didn’t get as much attention as they should have? And what can we expect in the coming year? On this episode of The Report Card , Nat Malkus discusses these questions, and more, with three education journalists: Sarah Mervosh of The New York Times , Jill Barshay of The Hechinger Report...

In classrooms across the nation, students and teachers are using AI—but should they be? AI’s advocates argue that it can be used to individualize instruction and provide personalized feedback, but its critics contend that the adoption of AI in the classroom will get in the way of students acquiring critical thinking skills. Who is right here? Can AI reverse a decade of falling test scores, or will...

One of the hottest names in education right now is Alpha School . A network of high-end private schools founded in Texas but with additional locations elsewhere, Alpha School uses AI to implement mastery learning principles and incentives to accelerate student learning. How well the Alpha model works is an open question: Alpha School graduated its first seniors—a class of twelve—just last year, an...

On this episode of The Report Card , Nat Malkus , Rick Hess , and Andy Rotherham discuss what recent elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City mean for education, the Trump administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, the latest in the Jim Ryan saga, and more. ( Note : This episode was recorded on Monday, before the Trump administration announced further plans t...

For decades, there has been research showing that tutoring can be a highly effective mode of instruction, but before 2020, large, in-school tutoring programs were not widespread. Then the pandemic struck, and large tutoring programs cropped up in districts around the nation. In fact, according to the June 2025 School Pulse Panel, 85% of American public schools now offer tutoring, with 42% offering...

In August 2023, right after he took over as superintendent of Houston ISD, Mike Miles came on The Report Card to talk about his plans for Texas’s largest school district. From changing teacher pay to overhauling curriculum, Miles’s plans for Houston were ambitious—and controversial—but would they work? Two years later, Mike Miles comes back on The Report Card to speak with Nat Malkus about the pro...

TikTok. Instagram. Constant notifications. Many worry that phones are destroying students’ ability to pay attention and, in turn, their ability to learn in the classroom. Indeed, even many adults say that they have trouble reading books because of the constant stream of distractions their phones provide. But what does the research say? Are students actually less able to pay attention as a result o...

Earlier this month, 2024 NAEP scores came out for 8th grade science and 12th grade reading and math, and the results were not good, with students losing ground in each subject. But these declines are not new and they are not only the result of the pandemic: Across a number of tests and subjects, scores have been declining for over a decade, especially for low-performing students. Indeed, while ach...

A lot has happened in education over the last couple of months. A new school year started for students across the country. State governors began announcing whether they would be opting in to the new federal tax credit scholarship program. Penny Schwinn, former Education Commissioner of Tennessee, withdrew her nomination to be Linda McMahon’s number two at the Department of Education. A federal jud...

Many school choice proponents today focus on what choice does for the students who use it to leave traditional public schools. But one of the original arguments for choice was that, through competition, it would spur traditional public schools to improve. So: Has it? Do choice programs make traditional public schools better? Does the size of these competitive effects depend on the type of choice p...

Over the past decade, schools increasingly have become a battleground for political fights and culture wars that distract from student learning. But, according to a new book, these political fights and culture wars are just one aspect of a much larger and more longstanding problem: schooling is often shaped by the interests of adults. From school boards to partisan identity, from teacher employmen...

Some say AI is the future of education, but there are reasons for skepticism, especially if we limit the conversation to the US and other wealthy countries. However, for many regions of the world—particularly for many low- and middle-income countries—there is strong reason to believe that AI has the potential to be transformative. At least in theory, AI can democratize access to higher-quality ins...