Faculty in the Media

"For parents, our well-being is often tied to how well our kids are doing. When you're anxious and depressed, it's harder to be emotionally available to your teen and patient and steady in the way the teens often really need."

"Going into higher education is very expensive, and what is particularly expensive is not finishing. These students take on loans but do not get the economic benefit of a four-year degree."

"Every child has the right to read well. Every child has the right to access their full potential. This society is driven by perfectionism and has been very narrow-minded when it comes to children who learn differently, including learning disabilities."

"For Jamaican society, it has the impact of pulling away scarce talent, thus perpetuating the challenge of raising education quality in Jamaica and similar countries and increasing the gaps in student learning between high- and low-income societies."

David Deming joins EconoFact Chats to highlight that even though standardized tests can be gamed by more privileged students through extensive test preparation, and retaking of tests, they remain less biased than other factors that can help students stand out in the admissions process.

"We could take this moment of confusion and loss of certainty seriously, at least in some small pockets, and start thinking about what a different kind of school would look like. Five years from now, we might have the beginnings of some very interesting exploration."

"Kim thinks that a knowledge-building curriculum doesn’t need to teach many topics. Random facts, he says, are not important. He argues for depth instead of breadth."

"Yes, SAT and ACT scores do strongly correlate with parental income levels. But when colleges take tests off the table, the remaining measures used to assess applicants are even more biased."

"Academic achievement is incredibly important, but I certainly think it’s just as important to prepare kids to be moral, to love, to have hope, and to have meaning and purpose in their lives. We’re tending to sideline those things."

"The U.S. is a society in which skills really do matter for economic success. What that means is that the impact of learning loss on individual students through their earnings is going to be larger in the U.S. than it might be in a society like Sweden."

"The skills required to use evidence well are in short supply, and districts and states vary tremendously in their capacity."

"We’ve got to be smart about these tools. It’s the glue that holds everything together. So you’ve got to do a little bit of that connection piece. The tools can’t create the relationship." 

"When we focus only on moments of shock and crisis, we miss the long-term nature of what it means for kids to learn and become part of new schools."

"Anyone who cares about the pursuit of truth, the importance of critical thinking, and the future of education should be alarmed by these attacks. These folks are waging war on our schools and they are using all the familiar weapons, including race-baiting and fearmongering, to do so."

"[This] research shows that [SATs] are a good predictor of college success. They're a better predictor than grades or teacher recommendations."

"School leaders must navigate with a new set of people on the outside, to pull in resources for the new school. Heading up a merged school is like launching a start-up. You’re building a whole new culture."

"States were in the back seat, watching districts make decisions on how to spend the money. They’ve been slow to get in the front seat. As the recovery dollars are tapering down, it’s clear students won’t have caught up."

“Legacy kids have lived, on average, some of the most advantaged lives of all of these applicants. They don’t need a thumb on the scale."

"Professor Kane, one of the researchers, advised schools to notify the parents of all children who are behind, in time to sign up for summer school. Despite setbacks on standardized tests, report card grades have remained stable, and polling indicates most parents believe their children are on track."

"For children from birth to age five ... we invest less in education than we do at any other stage of life, including not just K-12 but also higher education. Yet these children are going through the most important and fastest period of brain development that they’ll ever experience, a time when high-quality early education and care can significantly boost their chances for success both in school and in life."

"I’m totally sympathetic to trying to use language that will feel inclusive. I [just] hope that this kind of inclusivity is not accompanied by leaving certain concepts or conversations just off to the side and not having those because they are perceived as being politically divisive."

"Somehow, we got caught up in thinking that kids would pick up that sound-symbol correspondence … and the science is very, very, very clear. That instruction needs to be explicit and intentional."

"While today’s technologies can undercut adolescents’ digital agency through efforts to tether them to their devices, teens are not helpless against the draw of technology."

"The takeaway [from this study] is that there is potential in using AI to help teachers. It's like having an intern to do tasks for you ... so you can focus more on learners and their struggles."

"How do we balance the needs of individual students in our classroom with the needs of the group? This is a small thing, but it has profound consequences for everyone’s learning."

"[Rest] allows us to take stock of what’s going on inside and shatters the myth that the only real social justice work happens outside of us. Rest forces us to reconcile the close relationship between our inner journey and how we show up in the world on the outside."

"We have been focused so much on academic freedom and free speech that we have neglected to set standards for a culture of mutual respect. It is necessary to do both."

"Those of us in higher education cannot fix everything, but we can at least try — we had better at least try — to begin to fix ourselves."

"We now know that some kids who step into kindergarten on their first day, with their little backpacks, have a heightened risk for struggling with learning to read. That’s a really important distinction in terms of policy and how early we should find these kids and intervene."

"My worry is that if we get rid of the SAT, you’re getting rid of the only way that a low-income student who’s academically talented has to distinguish themselves. Getting rid of the SAT means those people don’t have the opportunity to be noticed. I don’t think the SAT is perfect, but I think the problem isn’t the test. The problem is everything that happens before the test."