The Report Card with Nat Malkus

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 school...

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; w...

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...

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 hometo...

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. Ho...

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 mob...

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’...

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. To...

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 use...

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 s...

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 a...

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 conce...

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 E...

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,...

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,...

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...

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, t...

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 e...

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 Rep...

In 2015, Liberia’s school system was in shambles. Years of civil war and a 2014 Ebola outbreak shut down schools nationwide; only radical action could correct course. Then-President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf charged then-Education Minister  George Werner  with doing just that. The following year, Werner implemented the  Liberian Education Advancement Program (LEAP) . This initiative bro...

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Daniel Willingham , Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia and the author of Outsmart Your Brain: Why Learning is Hard and How You Can Make It Easy . Nat and Dan discuss the benefits and limitations of the science of learning, why we don't spend enough time teaching students how to learn, learning styles and education myths, the po...

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat reviews the past year in education with Laura Meckler of the Washington Post, Linda Jacobson of The 74, and Goldie Blumenstyk of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Nat, Laura, Linda, and Goldie discuss affirmative action, school masking, ChatGPT, the top pieces of education journalism from the past year, higher education labor strikes, enrollment shortages,...

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Jennifer Frey , associate professor of philosophy at the University of South Carolina and the host of Sacred and Profane Love . Nat and Jennifer discuss human happiness and education, what psychology doesn't understand about happiness, why we should care about teaching virtue, the Hillbilly Elegy, the proper ends of education, why it's not such a...

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Melissa Arnold Lyon and Matthew Kraft about perceptions of the teaching profession. Nat, Mimi, and Matt discuss why the status and prestige of the teaching profession are at their lowest points in fifty years, why this matters for student learning, how perceptions of the teaching profession have changed over time, the extent to which current decl...

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Congresswoman Virginia Foxx (NC), the Republican Leader of the House Committee on Education and Labor. Nat and Dr. Foxx discuss student loan forgiveness, the REAL Reforms Act, community colleges, credentialism, serving on a school board, spelling bees, the role of federal education policy, and more. Show Notes: The REAL Reforms Act Press Release...