The Report Card with Nat Malkus

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Tom Kane, the Walter H. Gale Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the faculty director of CEPR, and one of the project leaders of the Education Recovery Scorecard. Nat and Tom discuss NAEP results, the Education Recovery Scorecard, COVID learning loss, pandemic recovery, and more. A collaboration of the Educational...

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Po-Shen Loh, professor of mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University and coach of the United States' International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) team. Nat and Po discuss the difference between teaching problem solving and teaching computation, the limitations of mastery learning, the potential of online learning, math outreach, IMO, Hagoromo chalk,...

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Richard Reeves, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It . Nat and Richard discuss redshirting, changing gender disparities, why many education interventions don't help men, Jordan Peterson, conscientiousness, why boys' standardized test sc...

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat interviews Freeman Hrabowski. Nat and Freeman discuss Black students in STEM, the state of free speech on college campuses, university spending and how to keep costs down, whether high schools are doing a good enough job of preparing students for college, the NCAA tournament, campus culture, the value of collaborative teamwork, how to improve graduation rate...

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat interviews Doug Lemov. Nat and Doug discuss cellphones and social media, how they harm the academic and social development of students, how they make schools less inclusive, and what we can do about all of this. Nat and Doug also discuss online learning, school choice, the difficulty of creating schools with a coherent operating philosophy, the state of publ...

We are now entering the fourth school year that will be affected by COVID-19. What can we expect? What have we learned so far? And does anyone still care? What should we be keeping our eyes on as another year rolls around? Evolving safety protocols? School spending? Student behavior? Potential teacher shortages? New vaccines? To discuss these questions and more, Nat invited John Bailey onto the po...

We at The Report Card are on summer break this week, so we are re-upping one of our favorite episodes from the past year: Bleakness in American Schooling with Robert Pondiscio. Over the past few years, American schooling has been on a bumpy road. COVID-19 is the most obvious issue here, but it's not only that. As Robert Pondiscio argued in the March edition of Commentary , American schools have be...

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat interviews Christina Brown and Heather Schofield , two of the authors of Cognitive Endurance as Human Capital . Nat, Christina, and Heather discuss what cognitive endurance is and why it's important, PISA, an elaborate field experiment in India, disparities in American schools, shortening standardized tests, students in Pakistan, mazes and tangrams, what sch...

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat interviews Nate Hilger , author of The Parent Trap: How to Stop Overloading Parents and Fix Our Inequality Crisis . Prior to writing The Parent Trap , Nate was a professor of economics at Brown University, a Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a lead policy consultant on early childhood and non-K12 child development issues for Pe...

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat interviews Kymyona Burk , Senior Policy Fellow at ExcelinEd, and Emily Hanford , Senior Producer and Correspondent at American Public Media. Nat, Kymyona, and Emily discuss the reading wars, what's wrong with balanced literacy, Mississippi's rising reading scores, why reading isn't natural, Lucy Calkins, phonics, HBCUs, the science of reading, spelling bees,...

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat interviews Ian Rowe , senior fellow at AEI, cofounder of Vertex Partnership Academies, and the author of Agency: The Four Point Plan (F.R.E.E.) for ALL Children to Overcome the Victimhood Narrative and Discover Their Pathway to Power . Nat and Ian discuss what the "blame the victim" and the "blame the system" narratives get wrong, Teach for America, the impo...

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat interviews Beth Akers , senior fellow at AEI and the coauthor of Game of Loans: The Rhetoric and Reality of Student Debt . Nat and Beth discuss student loans, student loan forgiveness, why student loan forgiveness might make college more expensive, whether student loan forgiveness would be a good way to address the racial wealth gap, whether it makes sense t...

On the latest episode of The Report Card, Nat interviews Emily Morton and Dan Goldhaber about their new paper The Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the Pandemic , which uses testing data from 2.1 million students in 10,000 schools in 49 states to investigate the role of remote and hybrid instruction in widening achievement gaps. Show Notes: The Consequences of Remote and Hybrid...

On the latest episode of The Report Card, Nat interviews Ilana Horwitz , Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and Sociology at Tulane, about her new book, God, Grades, and Graduation . Nat and Ilana discuss the impact of religion on student outcomes, why religion helps working class kids get better grades and graduate from college at higher rates, the educational benefits of summer camp, Palo Alt...

It's a challenge for school systems to recruit and retain quality teachers, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This challenge has spurred a number of creative solutions. One, announced earlier this year, is Tennessee's Teacher Occupation Apprenticeship program, also known as Grow Your Own. Tennessee's Grow Your Own program is based on 65 already existing Grow Your Own programs within...

Two upcoming court cases, one a Supreme Court case on affirmative action at Harvard and the other a federal court case on financial aid price-fixing schemes at many of the nation's top colleges, promise to rock American higher education. Josh Dunn , professor of political science at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, and Eric Hoover , senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education, j...

Over the course of the pandemic, masking requirements—particularly school masking requirements—have been a flashpoint issue. So: what is going on in schools? Which school districts require masking and which don’t? And what demographic factors might help explain masking policies? Here to discuss is Nat Malkus , with John Bailey as guest host. Show notes: The Return to Learn Tracker: Mask Edition

We've talked a lot on the show about school choice. But it's not often we discuss intra-district choice - choice between schools in the same district. Starting in 2012, Los Angeles' Zones of Choice program creates small local markets with High Schools in neighborhoods throuhgout LA, but leaves traditional attendance-zone boundaries in place. In application, this means that about 30-40% of LAUSD is...

American schooling has been on a bumpy road the past few years. COVID-19 is the obvious issues here, but it's not only that. Students have increasingly faced mental health issues and that preceded the pandemic. All the while, we've seen one polarizing issue after another shaking classrooms across the country. This bumpy road has been eloquently summarized in a new piece by Robert Pondiscio in the...

In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic put a halt to traditional schooling. In response to the, then, relatively unknown threat of COVID-19, Congress sent emergency relief funding to schools. They did so again , sending much more money. Then, they did so again , sending much much more money. These funds, known as the Elementary and Secondary Schooling Emergency Relief funds, or ESSER for short, tota...

The COVID-19 pandemic has seemingly touched everything in education policy, and school choice is no exception. Since the start of the pandemic and, particularly in the 2020-2021 academic year, over 1 million students left their traditional pubic school, charter school enrollment surged, and state-after-state either expanded or created a new school choice programs.     &nbs...

Done well, Career and Technical Education, better known as CTE, provides articled pathways to post-secondary education and high-demand, high-wage careers within specified career clusters. There's certainty a lot to like about CTE, but we still have much to learn about it in terms of its impact on post-K-12 outcomes and, especially, how those outcomes vary among different career clusters that fall...

To put it lightly, 2021 has been an eventful year in education. From heated school board meetings over class curriculum to fierce (and currently ongoing) debates regarding mask and vaccine mandates in schools, we’ve certainly had no shortage of education headlines over the past year. For The Report Card with Nat Malkus ' last episode of 2021, Nat looked back at these highlights and discussed 2021'...

Every year, it seems, national and local press talk a lot about the "teacher shortage," and the reports are often accompanied with words like "emergency" and "crisis." The frequency of these reports might garner skepticism by some but, this year, talks around the teacher shortage are different. After nearly two years of COVID-19, and with the labor markets currently in flux, could it be that repor...

Increasingly, political intolerance and polarization is infiltrating college campuses. The impact of these occurrences are growing in prevalence and, to some, are perverting the original purpose of the university: the pursuit of truth. On this episode of The Report Card with Nat Malkus, Pano Kanelos , a founding trustee of the University of Austin, joins the podcast to discuss.