RealClearEducation Articles

After I published a reflection on Vice President Dick Cheney’s passing, one of my former students—now at Brown University—sent me a note that stopped me cold. “Your students’ perception of him,” he wrote, “is exactly what many people had with Secretary Rice. Many expected a war criminal but were surprised to find a humorous genius.” My former student had just attended Condoleezza Rice’s Ogden Lecture at Brown. His words captured something I’ve seen again and again as an educator: when young people meet real public servants instead of...

Higher education's latest moral compact shows how far it has drifted from real inquiry. Earlier this fall, the president of Sarah Lawrence College shared that the school had signed the Higher Education's Compact with America: Shared Principles for the Common Good, a new declaration released by the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and Phi Beta Kappa with barely 50 other presidential signatories. The message was polished and earnest - the kind of prose that now defines higher education's administrative voice. Sarah Lawrence, she wrote, "remains committed to...

The education tax credit included in the “One Big Beautiful” act has the potential to drive tens of billions of dollars toward private school scholarships, as well as tutoring programs in public and charter schools. That’s because, starting in 2027, taxpayers may direct up to $1,700 toward qualified Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs) and write off the entire amount from their federal tax returns. But what’s missing so far from that gusher of cash is much quality control. That’s bad for kids, taxpayers, and the cause of school choice—and might sink...

Higher education institutions are confronting surging health plan rates and costs that erode revenues and exacerbate tuition pressures. Colleges and universities allocate billions of dollars annually to student and employee coverage, often mired in inefficiency and unchecked inflation. Projections for 2026 forecast premium escalations of close to 10 percent nationally for employer-sponsored plans, while some carriers issue renewal quotes exceeding 18 percent. This means that a mid-sized university insuring 400 full-time employees, and averaging $27,000 annually per family, will now face costs...

This past October, the Trump administration invited nine universities to respond to a proposed White House Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. The proposal includes both foundational principles and actions that will impact university finances. Our purpose here is not to comment on the pros and cons of the Compact or its overall desirability but rather on means for estimating the financial effects. Twenty-five years ago, with Hong Kong-based video game designer Trevor Chan, we developed and released the first numerical simulation of the American university, Virtual U. ...

Last week, the Massachusetts House unanimously passed a bipartisan literacy reform bill, 155-0, that would mandate the evidence-based, “science of reading” approach that has swept the country. The state, additionally, has a $35 million grant program called Literacy Launch that is dedicated to helping districts transition their curriculum to science-based literacy materials. After years of ineffective “balanced literacy,” a discredited approach to reading instruction that does not teach children how to sound out words, the Massachusetts vote is the latest sign that...

Most high school seniors and their parents currently have college at the top of mind. Early application deadlines are approaching, and students are frantically writing their application essays. But it’s not just families who are focused on getting in. Perhaps it even seems natural that everyone from college admissions officers to the media focuses on who gets in, too. But this focus on who gets to sit behind the wheel of a given car has caused everyone to neglect asking who gets to their destination safely and on time. While it should be the job of colleges to focus on outcomes, not...

In an online discussion about educational testing, an exasperated education professional interjected that the whole discussion was moot. Had there ever been even a single study showing any benefit accruing from testing students? I sent him a copy of my 2012 meta-analysis of several hundred studies estimating the effects on student achievement from testing, and never heard back. I have since discovered hundreds more such studies. All one had to do was look for them. Psychology professors from the early 20th century on produced one of the most common study types—randomly assigning their...

“In class, the professor was discussing binaries, but I didn't really understand what they were. I asked ChatGPT about it, and it helped me figure it out.” This is probably one of the most unsettling reflections I have ever read from a student. Yet as we struggle in higher education to figure out how to integrate AI into our classrooms, it is also one of the most exciting. I want to tell you how I have finally – after three long years of experimentation and wanting to give up – figured it out: I’ve basically made AI my...

It’s been almost 250 years since those first Revolutionaries declared that “all men are created equal .” This summer offers the unique chance to celebrate a momentous birthday and reconnect with our rich history. What better place to do that than at one of the many historic sites scattered throughout this exceptional nation? With the recent publication of the Heritage Guide to Historic Sites: Rediscovering America’s Heritage, parents now have a resource that not only identifies but also evaluates significant battlefields, presidential homes, museums, and the...

In the years since Hamas’s October 7 attack, America’s universities have become moral barometers, and many have failed the test. At Columbia, encampments replaced classrooms. At Harvard, statements multiplied while courage evaporated. At Elon University, a small private college in North Carolina, something different happened: people talked. A recent feature in The Forward praised Elon as one of the few campuses where Jewish students felt secure and respected after October 7. The Anti-Defamation League gave Elon an “A” in its inaugural campus antisemitism report card -...

The war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza is over — at least for now — but you wouldn’t know that if you asked America’s largest and most influential teachers’ union. The National Education Association (NEA) sent a mass email to the union’s three million members that included a map labeling all of Israel as “Palestine” to recognize “indigenous land,” a link to an article defending Hitler as someone pushed into “the genocide option” by stubborn Jews who “enabled” him, and materials...

Americans are uncertain about the value of higher education, and recent polls and surveys on public confidence, trust, and perceived value reflect that uncertainty. The rising cost of attendance, increasing automation, and an ever-shifting labor market still leave many families wondering whether a degree will pay off.  Higher education remains one of the country’s most powerful engines for upward mobility, but in an era clouded by economic disruption and stubborn underemployment, that promise is harder to see. If institutions hope to regain public confidence, they must clearly...

A second‑grader learns more math in hours than most kids learn in weeks. By lunch, she’s done with academics and heads to a workshop where she operates a food truck, trains for a 5K, or builds a drone. That isn’t science fiction. It’s a day at Austin’s Alpha School, where students finish core academics with AI tutors in about two hours and spend the rest of the day on truly hands-on projects. A recent profile says Alpha’s K–2 students scored in the top 0.1 percent on MAP tests last year. Now the founders are trying to scale the model through a...

The most exciting example of AI’s potential in education isn’t a chatbot or digital tutor–it comes from a large language model named Centaur.  Recently published in Nature, Centaur is trained on over 10 million human decisions across 160 classic cognitive psychology tasks. After training, the model could predict what people would do better than existing cognitive models and also generalize to novel tasks it hadn’t seen before. Centaur wasn’t built for education, but it hints at what could be possible. If a large language model can simulate adult reasoning...

As with so much in 2025, the Trump administration’s proposed “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” provoked predictably tribal reactions from college leaders and politicians. As predictable? What risks getting lost is the opportunity to find fruitful common ground on what’s needed to improve higher education in a sustainable way. Last week, nine high-profile colleges and universities received a letter from Education Secretary Linda McMahon and two White House officials. The letter invited leaders to sign onto a “Compact” in return for...

During my second tour as a U.S. Navy officer, I served as a navigator aboard a test warship in San Diego. In port, navigators often have little to do other than prepare for the next deployment. But not every military job is created equal. On warships, even when tied to a pier, something always breaks, and it’s the Navy’s enlisted men and women who are called upon to fix it. The Navy’s most impressive asset isn’t aircraft carriers, it’s these young servicemembers who, often barely out of high school, roll up their sleeves in the middle of the night to repair a gas...

Jewish students at the University of Maryland just endured one of the most brazen acts of religious discrimination our campus has ever seen. On Yom Kippur—the holiest day of the Jewish year, when Jews fast and gather in synagogue—our student government voted on and passed a resolution accusing Israel of genocide. With Jewish students absent for religious reasons, the measure sailed through: twenty-eight in favor, none opposed, and only one abstention. This wasn’t a scheduling accident. It was intentional. Anti-Israel activists first tried to schedule the vote for Rosh...

As California school districts discuss how to implement opt outs due to the U.S. Supreme Court decision affirming parents’ right to withdraw children from discussions on LGBTQ+ issues that conflict with their “sincerely held religious beliefs,” it’s important to understand how California parents have historically been misrepresented, which has resulted in the creation of unconstitutional state laws. I witnessed this firsthand as a school board member in Orange County. In 2018, while serving on the Orange Unified School Board, I reviewed the new Teen Talk, considered...