Author: BelieveAgain
Tomorrow, I’ll be unveiling the 2025 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, recognizing the 200 university-based scholars who had the biggest influence on educational practice and policy last year. This will be the 15th annual edition of the rankings. Today, I want to run through the methodology used to generate those rankings.The list is comprised of university-based scholars who focus primarily on educational questions (with “university-based” meaning a formal university affiliation). Scholars who do not have a formal affiliation on a university website are ineligible.The 150 finishers from last year automatically qualified for a spot in this year’s Top 200, so…
On Thursday, I’ll be publishing the 2025 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, tracking the 200 education scholars who had the biggest influence on the nation’s education discourse last year. Today, I want to take a few moments to explain the nature of the exercise. (I’ll reveal the scoring formula tomorrow.)I start from two simple premises: 1) Ideas matter, and 2) People devote more time and energy to those activities that are valued. The academy today does a passable job of acknowledging good disciplinary scholarship but a poor job of recognizing scholars who move ideas from the pages of barely read…
Hundreds of rural school districts nationwide will soon have to ponder laying off employees, cutting programs, and raising local taxes after Congress missed the end-of-2024 deadline to renew a key stream of federal funding.For most of the last 25 years, the Secure Rural Schools Act has supplied hundreds of millions of dollars to counties where a large share of land consists of federally owned forests. Counties send a big chunk of that money to school districts for everything from paying teachers to replacing HVAC systems. Counties also get to spend some of the funds on vital public services like emergency…
Former President Jimmy Carter, who died Dec. 29 at 100, is best known in education for overseeing the creation of a federal department of education. But his long life was full of intersections with education policy and a personal history with the nation’s struggles over race and schools.These are highlights of Carter’s life and record of public service with respect to education. They are drawn from Education Week’s longer obituary of Carter, which among other things details his efforts, and some of the drama, behind the creation of the U.S. Department of Education. Carter grew up on his father’s farm,…
Jimmy Carter campaigned for president on a promise of establishing a federal department of education and, after some hedging on his part and multiple internal and external political battles, finally delivered on that pledge late in his one term in office. The creation of the Cabinet-level agency elevated the federal government’s role in education for decades to come.Carter, the 39th chief executive and the longest-living former president, died Dec. 29 in Plains, Ga., at age 100, some 19 months after going into hospice care. Carter, the first former U.S. president to reach age 100, passed away just over a year…
President Joe Biden is abandoning his efforts to provide some protections for transgender student-athletes and cancel student loans for more than 38 million Americans, the first steps in an administration-wide plan to jettison pending regulations to prevent President-elect Donald Trump from retooling them to achieve his own aims.The White House expects to pull back unfinished rules across several agencies if there isn’t enough time to finalize them before Trump takes office. If the proposed regulations were left in their current state, the next administration would be able to rewrite them and advance its agenda more quickly.Even as the Biden administration…
School funding in the United States is wildly complex, perennially inequitable, and frequently misunderstood. A slew of reports and data published in recent weeks offer fresh evidence.Districts annually get funding—roughly $900 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars, according to the most recent federal data—from three main sources: local taxpayers, state appropriations, and the federal government. The policies, formulas, and political conditions informing dollar amounts vary significantly from source to source and from place to place.Nationwide figures tell one important story about K-12 school funding—how much money schools are spending in the aggregate. But digging deeper reveals far more stories that vary from…
Title: Language Barriers for Spanish-speaking Parents Participating in School Activities: 201819 Description: This Data Point examines the barriers due to speaking a language other than English faced by Spanish-speaking families of enrolled students when they try to participate in their students school activities. it also explores the language services that are provided by schools to Spanish-speaking parents. This Data Point uses data collected from the Parent and Family Involvement Survey of the National Household Education Surveys Program (PFI-NHES:2019). Online Availability: Cover Date: …
I’ve been making annual education predictions for well over a decade now, and nobody would be rich if they bet on their accuracy.However, just as my basketball-playing motto (to the chagrin of my teammates) is “I only remember the baskets that I make,” I continue to make these predictions because I only really remember the ones that are accurate.Here’s what my crystal ball tells me for 2025 (and it’s not a pretty picture). Let me know what you think and make your own predictions, too, by responding to me on Twitter (now X) @Larryferlazzo, on BlueSky larryferlazzo.bsky.social/, or via email…
Whew. Presidential pinch-hitting, brat summer, literacy lawsuits, DEI drama, awful TIMSS scores. . . . It’s been quite a year. Before we turn the page, it’s always worth taking a moment to reflect on some of the highs and lows. In that spirit, I like to revisit the RHSU columns I penned during the year and surface the top 10—as determined by readership, feedback, and personal preference.There are always a few pieces that don’t necessarily make the cut of “top 10” but still seem to deserve a mention. This year, those include How Bad Journalism Encourages Bad Education Research (March…