RealClearEducation Articles

For social studies teachers, the founding of the United States and July 4th–particularly this July 4th–presents an array of contradictions. On one hand, July 4, 1776 led to the development of the first modern constitutional republic, which also became the wealthiest, most powerful nation in human history. On the other hand, big city public schools are dominated by low-income black and brown students whose relationship with America is…complicated. Some, obviously, are descendants of victims of slavery, Jim Crow and its legacy. Others are descendants, sometimes immediate...

For decades, disability policy has been fragmented across multiple federal agencies as Congress created new programs. Children receive special education in one system. Young adults transition to the workplace through vocational rehabilitation in another. Community living services are administered somewhere else entirely. Meanwhile, people with disabilities and their families are left navigating a maze of programs that change in the transition from the K12 education system to adulthood. That’s why the decision to move the Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) and the Rehabilitation...

Every year, when the National Charter School Law Rankings are released, the immediate question is often, “Who moved up and who moved down?” That is the wrong question. The more important question is “Why?” Last week, coinciding with the annual National Charter Schools Conference, CER previewed findings from its annual rankings, due out in full this August. The preview alone offers plenty to examine — and plenty for policymakers to reckon with. For nearly 30 years, the National Charter School Law Rankings and Scorecard have provided something rare in...

Analysts have sounded the alarm. Average scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), commonly called “The Nation’s Report Card,” are at multi-decade lows across grades and subjects. The U.S. faces a K-12 learning crisis. But that is only part of the story. Did pandemic learning loss happen across the board or just for low- or high-achievers? Have key achievement gaps grown or shrunk? Are these patterns unique to traditional public schools (TPS) or consistent across school types? Do they vary based on student background factors? Our recent study answers...

Across 423 counties in 13 states, 26 million Americans live with a persistent opportunity gap. It’s not because of a lack of effort, talent, or community commitment, but because big government systems meant to serve them have failed to deliver. At the center of that failure is education. For too long, families in Appalachia have been asked to accept a one-size-fits-all public education system that assigns children to schools based on ZIP code rather than need, fit, or school quality. The results have been predictable. According to the Appalachian Regional Commission’s 2019-2023 American...

When millions of Chicago residents watched news coverage of Chicago Public Schools CEO Dr. Macquline King’s testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on June 10th, you’d have been led to believe it was only a right-wing attack over transgender student policies. Local media framed the federal hearing primarily as a standard culture-war battle, but that’s not all that surfaced. By viewing the proceedings through this hyper-narrow lens, the broader public discussion has missed a much deeper, systemic breakdown occurring within our school system. The hearing...

William Diamond was a young drummer in the Lexington militia when he stood on the town green before dawn on April 19, 1775, and beat the call that summoned his neighbors to assemble. The middle school that bears his name in Lexington, Massachusetts, exists, like every school, to do a version of what he did: to sound a summons, to ready the next generation for the hard things that citizenship asks. Not long ago it did the opposite. After a class of seventh graders sat through a lesson connecting the Holocaust to the antisemitism still around them, some families complained. The lesson, they...

We think of a high school diploma as an indicator of a student’s readiness for their future. The graduation ceremonies in which the diplomas are awarded are also referred to as commencements, a word that contains “commence”, or “to start”. Yet as these ceremonies approach, many students are unsure of what comes next. One in three teenagers say school has not taught them the skills they need for the working world. Nearly 40 percent are unsure about their future career paths. When you consider this data comes from the OECD’s State of Global Teenage Career Preparation...

Since its peak of 3.2 million members in 2009, the National Education Association has slowly but surely shrunk for a decade and a half. While there was a slight increase last year, membership now hovers around 2.8 million. For conservatives, it can seem as though the power of teachers unions continues to grow unabated year after year. But according to a new report from the Fordham Institute, that simply isn’t true. Using 59 different measures—including budgets, membership, political wins and losses, and their perceived strength according to surveys—the authors find that...

The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) just published Will Flanders’ The FORT Gap: How Inconsistent Teacher Preparation Is Fueling Wisconsin’s Literacy and Educator Crises, a report on how results on Foundations of Reading Test (FORT) show that Wisconsin’s teacher candidates aren’t sufficiently prepared in the Science of Reading, which is the gold-standard in reading instruction. That’s bad news for Wisconsin teachers—and worse for Wisconsin’s students, who won’t have teachers properly prepared to them how to read....

As our nation approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the celebration should be more than fireworks, speeches, and commemorations. It should force us to confront a more important question: Are we still preparing responsible citizens capable of sustaining constitutional self-government? Americans have given a clear answer about where that preparation should begin. In a 2025 national survey of 1,447 adults conducted by the Institute of Governance and Civics at Florida State University and the Institute of American Civics (IAC) at the University of Tennessee, 84...

There is widespread agreement that higher education is politicized, but there is disagreement over who is to blame. The left argues President Trump and various red states enacting policies are injecting conservative dogma into teaching and research. The right argues that the left politicized academia over the past several decades, and that the new policies are merely trying to reverse the current politicization. There is some truth to both stories. Yet universities really are dominated by the left, and their domination has grown over time. Surveys of faculty reveal that left-leaning...

The future of K-12 Education is at a crossroads, and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is on the cusp of becoming a central focus in America’s classrooms. But declining reading and comprehension scores raise an important question about AI’s ability to help students learn. Can AI and other technologies improve student critical thinking and writing when students are lacking in foundational skills and fundamentals? In October 2025, The Atlantic published an article that highlighted falling student reading scores. They tried to connect declining scores to cell phone use and funding but found...

For me, the path into the teaching profession – and my local teacher union – was not a typical one. Neither was my exit. When I started my journey into education, I never thought I’d be expelled from a union for asking for basic records to which I’m legally entitled. Thankfully, the Florida Public Employees Relations Commission ruled I’d been wrongfully expelled. The union filed an appeal just before the deadline, but the Commission’s clear ruling confirmed what should have been obvious from the start: that my expulsion was unlawful. As a licensed attorney, I had worked for a...

The just-released Nation’s Report Card presents two different stories. One carries measured good news. The other warns that time is running out to act. Together, they give an honest snapshot of where American education stands and what needs to happen to improve the life prospects of young people. The test results come from the Long-Term Trend edition of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, which has measured student achievement in reading and math since the early 1970s. Unlike the main NAEP, which tests 4th and 8th graders every two years, the long-term trend...

In a recent RCE op-ed piece, author Cliff Smith advocated for a bill currently before the United States Senate by seriously mischaracterizing a quote from our organization’s analysis of a new Department of Education online resource. The author twisted AAU’s words to argue the precise opposite of what our analysis actually concluded. In reality, we believe that the DETERRENT Act (which has already passed the House) has serious problems – not for what it seeks to do, but rather for how it proposes to do it – and that passing it would amount to an “own...

More than 1,100 mathematics and science professors across the University of California system recently issued an extraordinary warning. They urged university leaders to reconsider the elimination of SAT and ACT testing for students seeking admission into STEM fields, arguing that many incoming students lack the mathematical preparation necessary to succeed in rigorous science and engineering coursework. The professors' concerns extend far beyond standardized testing. They reflect a growing tension in American education between equity and excellence. For more than a decade, policymakers and...

James Madison once remarked that “A well-instructed people alone can be permanently a free people.” As America celebrates the 250th anniversary of its Declaration of Independence, how fares the state of civic education today? Unfortunately, not great. In recent decades, there has been a noticeable decline in effectively teaching civic literacy and history at the K-12 and collegiate levels as part of the challenge. Many of America’s students are intellectually adrift—at sea and far from America’s shores, rarely hearing her virtues or the noble stories of her past. Numerous studies...

For a long time, people have been heralding the “crisis in the humanities”: low student enrollment, perceived professional irrelevance, and insufficient funding. I, however, do not believe that the crisis comes from external forces, but from an institutional aversion to anything external. Professors in the Humanities seem to be suffering from an allergy to reality that has created a bubble in which the norms, mores, and expectations of the real world are not just neglected, but shunned. There is no crisis in the Humanities. The crisis is the Humanities. First, I want to...