Student engagement is a hot topic with many teachers despairing that students display an alarming degree of disinterest and disengagement in school. More than 130 studies in this meta-analysis revealed that engagement and academic achievement are very related.

Take Care when Implementing the Science of Reading.

The science of reading has taken the nation by storm, with more than half the state legislatures mandating adopting a curriculum based on the science of reading.

In this April 29, 2025, article in Education Week, Scott Gaynor, the head of an independent school, suggests caution in several areas.

While the Thomas Fordham Foundation has been critical of me, especially about my writing on grading policies, I always try to learn from them, and this week was an especially good report on math education. Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin (Matt Giani, Ph.D., Franchesca Lyra, Adam Tyner, Ph.D.) studied the impact on students who took calculus or statistics. 

Here is a quick excerpt from my new book, Fearless Leadership, that might be useful in your discussions with school and district leaders. It has to do with how leaders and governing board members can deal with public participation in board meetings:

We follow the principle to first seek to understand, and then seek to be understood.

The continued impact of chronic absenteeism:

A terrific report (January 16, 2025) from researchers at Johns Hopkins demonstrates that the lingering effects of school closures during the pandemic remain years after schools reopened. Chronic absenteeism overwhelms faculty and staff, and the negative effects are not only on those students who fail to come to school, but also on students who attend school. 

This week’s research comes from the University of Chicago which studied the impact of broadband access during the pandemic on 80,000 students. Not surprisingly, students that were high-performing before the pandemic benefited from broadband access. But the reverse was true of low-performing students.

I have attempted to separate these updates from politics, but this week’s news went over the line. The Administration is asking the Supreme Court to approve the Administration’s decision to cancel professional development for teachers that has already been approved by Congress.

I am always humbled when I read thoughtful researchers who disagree with me.  Yale Professor Paul Bloom writes in his controversial book “Against Empathy” that the pendulum has swung too far from overly demanding parents (see his “Tiger Mom” colleague also at Yale) to the snowplow parents of today. 

This week’s evidence focuses on the fact that real reading requires real books, and it’s not too late to stop the madness of technology substitutes. The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress results are miserable – and we can’t just blame it all on COVID and TikTok. Students spend 8 hours a day on screens, and some schools are succumbing to the siren song of letting tech substitute for reading literacy.

This week’s evidence comes from Trump Administration statements regarding the dismantling of the US Department of Education. Although these announcements have created considerable anxiety among school districts that depend on USDOE funds – especially schools with high percentages of high-poverty students and high percentages of special education students – there are some hopeful signs on the horizon. 

This week’s evidence comes from the recently released National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) scores, often called the “Nation’s Report Card.” Cuts in the US Department of Education, especially in research, may make this the last NAEP report we’ll see for a while. Therefore, it is worth taking a hard look at the data.

Today’s research update has surprising (at least to me) findings. It’s from The Johns Hopkins University's “Best Evidence in Brief” series and always features a variety of US and international research. This study of 1,000 11 to 12-year-old low-income students found that when they had access to e-readers at home (their home access to books was very limited), the students selected their own books and received recommendations from teachers. The

This week’s evidence discusses how the social sciences – including educational psychology, economics, political science, and many other fields students need – are under attack. This is not a new development, but the enthusiasm for diminishing scientific inquiry of all sorts has accelerated with the recent election results.

This week’s evidence shows how a solid research finding can have a global impact. A new study from the UK about how students study. The results are remarkably similar to what our friend and neighbor Pooja Argawal (Powerful Teaching) has found. The bottom line is that we know what study strategies work, and yet students are stubbornly indifferent to these strategies. 

This week’s evidence is a timely reality for far too many. What should schools do if ICE agents arrive at the door?  This thoughtful New York Times offers examples of how several school districts are developing protocols for this eventuality. 

This week’s evidence is a disappointing report on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Years after students returned to school, the evidence suggests that a combination of absenteeism and the failure of distance learning had a particularly adverse impact on high-poverty families. 

This week’s evidence comes from the US Department of Education Awards for research. I offer this with the caveat that much of the publicity for artificial intelligence is overblown. I’m the eternal optimist, but please be a critical consumer of this and ask our school leaders and teachers to do the same.

This week’s evidence comes from the New York Times about a topic of central concern for many teachers, administrators, and board members – constraints on what is taught in schools. 

This week’s evidence comes courtesy of Jodi Anderson, who found this fascinating article on the origin of grading in the 1700s at Yale. I’ve attached it, and it is worthy of study.

This week’s evidence, an article from a Harvard student, is courtesy of Kim Marshall: AWOL from Academics | Harvard Magazine.