RealClearEducation Articles

For the past few years, higher education has been in the midst of a heated debate about transparency and whether faculty should share with the public what they are teaching in their classrooms. This comes at a moment when higher education also has a trust problem. Telling people that our classrooms are open, intellectually serious, and welcoming of different ideas is one thing. Showing them is another. I have long argued that there are both pedagogical and public-policy benefits to sharing our course materials and, as the new academic year is only a few weeks away, I figured I would say...

The next phase of education federalism should be judged not by how much authority Washington returns to the states, but by whether states use that authority to improve student outcomes. "The governors are ready for some old-fashioned horse trading. We'll regulate less, if schools and school districts will produce better results." That was the Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander's blunt summary of the bargain governors proposed to strike with Washington forty years ago. He was then chair of the National Governors Association, co-chaired with Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton. It's worth revisiting...

Students head back to classrooms this month. Many arrive already convinced their future is hopeless. In a Lancet Planetary Health study of 10,000 young people across ten countries, 75% said the future is frightening and 56% said they believe humanity is doomed. A 2025 PNAS study found one in five Americans aged 16 to 24 is afraid to have children because of the climate. That gloom has deepened over time. In Yale's long-running survey, the share of Americans 18 to 34 who say global warming is already harming this country rose from 40% in 2012 to 64% in 2022. What's causing such...

American teenagers start their school day too early. Medical experts have been clear for years: sleep cycle changes during puberty make it hard for teenagers to learn in the early morning. Later school start times have been linked to better sleep, improved mental health, stronger academic performance and even safer driving. Most school district leaders know about this problem and care about fixing it. But changing the schedule can feel operationally impossible. First, pushing back the school day at just one school means rescheduling the many activities that bookend the day, from band practice...

For years, the campus free-speech debate has focused on the rules. Universities were criticized for vague harassment policies, restrictive speech codes, bias-response systems and other regulations that could chill student expression. Legislatures intervened. Advocacy organizations applied pressure. Administrators rewrote policies. That work appears to be producing results. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s newly released 20th annual Spotlight on Speech Codes report finds that restrictive campus speech policies have reached their lowest level since FIRE began tracking...

In a move that I find completely and utterly shocking, but not truly unexpected, the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education staff list is now offline. Try to access it and you get a simple message: “You are not authorized to access this page.” While this is hugely important to me as a professor, it wouldn’t be odd to ask why should anyone in America care that the faculty directory of an education school at a British university has disappeared? My answer is that what is going on with a former professor at the University of Cambridge represents a much bigger...

For much of my adult life, I believed America’s energy future was obvious. Like many people, I supported what I thought was the only responsible path forward: an “all green, all the time” approach. I believed that if we simply invested enough in renewable energy, we could quickly replace conventional energy sources while making our nation cleaner, safer, and more prosperous. I never questioned whether the vision was technically achievable or whether there might be unintended consequences. It simply seemed like common sense. Looking back, I realize that I was...

As families get ready for the new school year, nearly 22 million students in 23 states can use universal open enrollment laws to choose a traditional public school other than their residentially assigned school. This critically important form of school choice grew during the COVID-19 pandemic and has been adopted in 11 states since 2021. This year, three states, Iowa, Nebraska, and Vermont, modestly improved their K-12 open enrollment laws, strengthening transparency or making them more family-friendly. However, similar reform attempts in New Hampshire and Tennessee stalled despite passing...

Certificates, licenses, and other non-degree credentials appear to be the fastest-growing programs in American higher education. Millions of workers now pursue them in place of, or to supplement, a traditional college degree. The National Student Clearinghouse recently reported that certificate enrollment at community colleges grew by more than 12 percent year over year, which is well ahead of increased enrollment in associate's degree programs. Working people seem to view these non-degree credentials as valuable. The harder question: is there evidence regarding which non-degree credentials...

This back-to-school season, children are not safe from teachers steeped in woke ideology. Many teacher training programs are riddled with far left politics parents do not want and children do not need.  Red states are not immune, Texas is one such state, having prohibited public school employees in 2021 from teaching lessons marinating in race and sex discrimination. Under Texas law, a teacher may not instruct students that people living today bear historical blame, or deserves to be treated differently, because of his or her race or sex. Someone needs to tell the University of Texas at...

This spring, the U.S. Department of Education invited education leaders from all fifty states to discuss the future of K-12 assessment. More than 40 state chiefs flew in for the two-day summit. Many took advantage of the offer to include their actual test developers as their “plus one.” For those of us who have spent careers trying to make student testing work, it felt like the beginning of something genuinely different.We come to this conversation from different vantage points. One of us led a Red state education system through the exhausting cycle of testing transitions, vendor...

At 11 years old, I refused a smartphone—not because my parents said no, but because I was afraid I would become addicted.I couldn't really explain my hesitation at the time. I simply watched people my age—and often twice or three times my age—reach for their phones whenever they encountered boredom, loneliness, or discomfort. Something about that dependence felt wrong.Only years later did I realize what my decision gave me. Boredom. That decision may have spared me from becoming part of what psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls “the anxious generation.”Today,...

The university classroom is where the West decides what it believes, and for two decades, on the subject of the Jews, it has often been deciding wrong, largely uncontested. We lost the classroom quietly, course by course. This week, eleven professors in Touro University’s new Teaching Fellowship to Combat Campus Antisemitism begin the work of taking it back.The campus eruptions after October 7 were not spontaneous. Somebody assigned the readings, framed the questions and graded the papers for years. Many of the students in those tents could not have told you which river or which sea....

The traditional model of pushing every student into four-year college degrees needs a course correction, and America has the labor shortage to prove it. With innovative new policies like Workforce Pell, Congress took a crucial first step in closing the skills gap, broadening opportunities in education, and preparing more workers for the 21st century economy. The evidence is everywhere that workforce development in America needs an overhaul. Retirements are outpacing new entries into the workforce. And crucial industries like health care, construction, and manufacturing often lack the workers...

The president of Sarah Lawrence College, Cristle Collins Judd, recently posted a photograph of her Harvard faculty badge to Instagram and LinkedIn, noting that it was her third year serving on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Seminar for New Presidents. It was the sort of cheerful, unremarkable post that college presidents share all the time. I have taught at Sarah Lawrence for nearly two decades and I saw something else. The story is not the social media post - it was Harvard's decision to keep inviting Judd back to help prepare the next...

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Thomas Jefferson’s warning remains timely today. A free people will not remain free if they do not understand the ideas that protect freedom. As we continue to celebrate America's 250th anniversary this year, it’s an important time to reflect on the past and look ahead to the future. As we consider the future of our country, it is imperative that our nation evaluates the education of its citizens. How we educate our next generation will...

It’s been one month since the Supreme Court’s recent decision in B.P.J. v. West Virginia and Little v. Hecox, which confirmed that states can protect women’s sports. My colleagues at Alliance Defending Freedom had the honor of representing female athletes in those cases and serving as co-counsel with West Virginia Attorney General JB McCuskey and Idaho Attorney General Raúl Labrador. Much of the ongoing national debate about women’s sports, biological sex, and equal protection has focused on protecting girls’ safety and opportunity in athletics,...

At their convention earlier this month, the National Education Association (NEA) — the nation’s largest teachers union — elected a team of social justice advocates, experienced agitators, and associates of the Democratic Socialists of America as their new leaders.Along with the fresh faces, the union also passed a broad swath of amendments, resolutions, legislative initiatives, and new business items. The content varied from an amendment endorsing bell-to-bell bans on students using their cell phones in classrooms, to a directive mandating that...

Two years ago, I left academia as an associate professor of rhetoric and composition. I still love rhetoric. I just stopped trusting a field that increasingly treated reason, argument, and ideological disagreement as forms of oppression, and consistently policed my behavior based on identity. Now the field’s flagship organization, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), has been de-chartered (euthanized?) by its parent organization, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). NCTE cites years of declining participation, fiscal instability, and...