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When reading No Adult Left Behind: How Politics Hijacks Education Policy and Hurts Kids , I was struck not by what the book got wrong, but by what it left unsaid. Like many contemporary education books, it builds a compelling case about how adult incentives distort public schooling—but in doing so, it largely misses a quieter, more hopeful story: the thousands of places where education policy is actually working . While both the education establishment and its fiercest critic

I need to confess that I have not completed my reading of the The Handbook for Assessment in the Service of Learning . However, after 10...

Open enrollment has become one of the most consequential features of Colorado’s education system, and its impact is growing more urgent by the year. As districts face post-pandemic enrollment declines, rising pressure to consolidate schools, and debates over how best to serve families across lines of income and geography, open enrollment sits at the center of Colorado’s policy crossroads. It promises families access to better-fit schools and creates market incentives for dist

Introduction: Time, Experience, and My Own Path into Teaching Time is the most precious, non-renewable resource in education. How we use...

The Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Program has released a powerful new resource: the Toolkit to Support Evidence-Based Writing...

The U.S. Department of Education has released its FY 2025 Education Innovation and Research (EIR) Expansion Grant  competition ,...

This spring I had the opportunity to peer review a new study from the Regional Educational Laboratory (REL) Northeast & Islands: The...

Regional Educational Laboratories as the secret bards of U.S. schools Prologue: The Song Beneath the Noise On an ordinary day in an...

For years, as a classroom teacher, I combed resources on the in dusty old textbooks for lesson plan ideas. Certainly, published...

A Wickedly Complex Puzzle Full scale program evaluations in K12 education are key to understanding what works, where, and how to...

I had an excellent conversation with Josh about everything from school evaluations to the current state of educational research.

The landscape of education research is changing—rapidly. With the new administration’s priorities shifting, we are entering a period...

The REL Program Evaluation Toolkit, developed by REL Central under the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES), provides a clear, structured pathway to design and conduct meaningful evaluations.