Our 13 Most Read, Most Talked-About And Most Powerful Education Essays Of 2025 The 74

Bright Spots: These Schools Are Beating the Odds in Teaching Kids to Read

Early reading is highly predictive of later-life outcomes, and there’s often a strong correlation between a school’s poverty level and its reading proficiency rate. But around the country, exceptional schools are beating the odds.

Columnist Chad Aldeman and The 74’s art and technology director Eamonn Fitzmaurice crunched the numbers for 10,000 districts, 42,000 schools and 3 million kids to find the schools that are exceeding expectations in teaching kids to read, and plotted the results on an interactive map. Is your school a Bright Spot?

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The Power of Handwriting: Improved Reading, Thinking, Memory and Learning

In a world where digital devices are everywhere, it’s easy to wonder if handwriting still matters. But research keeps confirming what many teachers have known for years: Handwriting is than just penmanship — it’s an important part of a child’s thinking and literacy development, particularly during the formative years of pre-K through fifth grade. Learning Without Tears educators Elizabeth DeWitt, Cheryl Lundy Swift and Christina Bretz explain.

The Inconvenient Success of New Orleans Schools

The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina inadvertently created the conditions for one of the most remarkable education experiments in American history. Today, that experiment has quietly produced results that should be making national headlines.

But Ravi Gupta, creator of theWhere the Schools Wentpodcast, argues that instead, it’s met with a curious indifference that reveals something broken about America’s politics and media. New Orleans, he says, is a rare example of adversaries becoming collaborators, ideology yielding to evidence and a community choosing pragmatic progress over ideological purity.

We Started Grouping Students by Reading Ability vs. Grade. Here’s What Happened

Facing a post-COVID decline in reading proficiency, Ellis Elementary in Rockford, Illinois, tried a new approach: Students were sorted by reading ability, allowing educators to teach skills that every student in the room was ready for, with no watered down instruction, writes the school’s instructional coach, Jessica Berg. The results go beyond test scores, though those have improved: the school has seen an 18 percentage-point gain since the 2021 low and a 25-point drop in the number of students identified as at-risk.

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To Make Sure Gifted Kids Get an Appropriate Education, Why Not Put Them in Special Ed?

New York City parents of gifted-and-talented kids are desperate. In some neighborhoods, half of students score in the top 10th percentile on IQ tests, but a shortage of G&T seats equals thousands of underserved kids.

A number of states offer Individualized Education Programs or similar plans for gifted students, and Kansas goes so far as to bundle giftedness under special education and give all students who qualify an IEP. Alina Adams, a New York-based author, blogger and mother of three, asks some NYC parents what they think.

Gen Z Teachers Are Ready to Reinvent Education. Schools Need to Catch Up

Gen Z teachers, born between the late 1990s and early 2010s, are entering classrooms with fresh energy, says Anajah Philogene, executive director of Teach For America Greater Chicago and Northwest Indiana and a former teacher. They are digital natives, eager to leverage technology. They bring a keen understanding of student needs because they were recently students themselves.

They are naturally inclined to collaborate, provide individualized learning and engage students and their families. That combination makes Gen Z teachers the type of talent that education needs right now. It also means schools must adapt if they hope to keep them.

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The Voices We Don’t Hear: Teachers Who Gave Up

Teaching is among the most optimistic and aspirational professions, drawing idealists who believe education can transform lives. But celebrating only the success stories — teachers who beat the odds, schools that defy demographics — distorts our vision, writes American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Robert Pondiscio.

Other fields learn from failure: medicine from misdiagnoses, aviation from crashes. Here, Pondiscio urges people to invite teachers who quit to speak up — not to shame them, but to learn from them.

The Promise and Peril of America’s School Choice Movement

Will school choice become a lever for equity or another layer of inequality? What happens next depends less on whether choice exists and on how leaders, policymakers and practitioners choose to design, regulate and support it, says education consultant and former high school principal Meagan Booth.

That means dealing with transportation challenges, complicated enrollment systems, the lack of special education services and the need for fair funding and accountability. “Choice without infrastructure only stands to reinforce privilege rather than broaden opportunity,” she writes.

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Across All Ages & Demographics, Test Results Show Americans Are Getting Dumber

Until about a decade ago, student achievement scores were rising. Those gains were broadly shared across racial and economic lines, and achievement gaps were closing. But then something happened, and scores started to fall.

Worse, they fell faster for lower-performing students, and achievement gaps started to grow. And, says contributor Chad Aldeman, similar declines are seen in assessments of adults. Why this is remains a huge unanswered question.

The Remarkable Educational Attainment Gains of the School Reform Era

Conversations about education tend to focus on either the decline in student achievement over the last 12 years or recent progress in some Southern states. But what’s hardly ever noted, writes Michael J. Petrilli, president of the Thomas B.

Fordham Institute, is that the declines since 2013 or so came on the heels of two decades of remarkable progress. Young people made huge gains from the mid-1990s to the mid-2010s, when education reform was at its zenith. We need to celebrate that success often — and get back to making that kind of progress again.

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Free Speech Is a Right. Educators Have a Responsibility to Use It Wisely

Attorney General Pam Bondi’s threatened prosecution of “hate speech” after Charlie Kirk’s assassination shocked many on the right, whose views have been silenced under that label. But in education, the issue isn’t only what teachers and professors can legally say, writes James V. Shuls, head of the Education Liberty branch of the Institute for Governance and Civics at Florida State University — it’s what they are morally and professionally obligated to do.

Academic freedom is a trust extended to those forming minds and shaping citizens. When teachers and professors embrace it, education flourishes. When they abandon it, students and society suffer.

I Just Wrote a Book About Alternative Ed — But My Child Chose a Public School

When Kerry McDonald’s daughter announced she wanted to go to public high school, McDonald’s first response was “no.” After all, McDonald — a senior fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education and host of the LiberatED podcast — was writing a book about the unconventional schools and learning options that have sprouted in recent years. But she soon changed her mind, recognizing that if educational freedom was truly her top value, her daughter deserved it, too. “As parents, we should look at our children’s distinct educational needs and interests, and say ‘yes’ when they want a change,” she writes.

Making HS Grads Pass a Citizenship Test Is Fine. But Civics Ed Must Start Much Earlier

The U.S. Citizenship Test is a straightforward assessment of basic knowledge about America’s government, history, geography and democratic principles. In a number of states, high schoolers must take it to graduate.

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But, says American Enterprise Institute’s Robert Pondiscio, if 17-year-olds are cramming basic facts to fulfill a last-minute requirement, we’ve already missed the boat. He recommends starting in elementary school, and to show how easy that is, he compares the 100 questions on the test with a civics-rich pre-K-8 curriculum to see how they line up, grade by grade.