The Report Card with Nat Malkus

In a few short days, we’ll be celebrating America’s 250th birthday, but rather than feeling uniformly triumphant and celebratory, America’s Semiquincentennial comes at a time when many worry about the state of our democracy and civic culture.

Schools are central to this worry. Many are concerned that civic education in American schools is insufficient or misguided, and that schools are not doing enough to prepare the next generation of Americans for self-governance. But what would better civic education look like?

What subject matter should it consist of? What should its aims be? And ho...

The Department of Education has said it is trying to return education to the states, but what does that mean for the federal role in education and for the states expected to take on more responsibility?

What is the Department doing now to scale back the federal role in education? How does the Department think about its own education agenda as it tries to return education to the states? And are states ready to have education returned to them—whatever that might mean?

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions an...

Recently, Harvard faculty voted to push back on grade inflation at the institution by capping the proportion of A’s given to students at 20%. But according to a new paper, Harvard’s new policy—and grade caps in general—are not the right solution.

In What Does a Grade Mean? Informativeness and Strategic Manipulation of Grading Systems, Scott Duke Kominers and Joshua S. Gans argue that to create better incentives for students and faculty, we need to change the current grading system itself.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Scott Duke Kom...

Historically, many didn’t consider Alabama to be at the forefront of education, but Alabama’s pandemic recovery may be among the best in the nation.

Perhaps most impressively, Alabama was the only state whose 4th-grade math NAEP scores were higher in 2024 than in 2019, and Alabama reports a chronic absenteeism rate that is the lowest in the nation—and the closest to its pre-pandemic levels of any state.

Are these results part of a broader story about how Alabama has changed the way it thinks about education? What changes have helped produce Alabama’s recent educatio...

Although the Trump administration’s efforts to reform education might not be making national headlines quite as often as they did one year ago, a lot has still happened in education over the last several months.

The Trump administration has continued its push to dismantle the Department of Education. Elite universities are making efforts to reform campus culture. The Department of Education released a major report on the future of the Institute of Education Sciences. And campaigns to limit phone use and, now, screen time in school continue to gain momentum.

To make sense of it...

This podcast has covered AI in K–12 education a fair amount, but how will and how should AI change higher education?

Should any human instructors be replaced with AI? Should universities change what and how they teach to strengthen their value proposition? And in the age of AI, how should universities prepare their students for an unpredictable job market?

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions and more with Hollis Robbins.

Hollis Robbins is a professor of English at the University of Utah, where she was formerly Dean of...

Note: This episode originally aired in April 2025.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Eva Moskowitz, the founder and CEO of Success Academy. Nat and Eva discuss why COVID learning loss is a misnomer; whether chronically absent students should face consequences for their poor attendance; why, despite its strong academic performance, Success Academy decided to overhaul its curriculum; what Success Academy looks for when hiring new teachers; Success Academy’s potential expansion into Florida and Texas; the challenges Success Academy faced in expanding into high school; whether charter schools have lived up to th...

Recently, there has been a lot of handwringing over grade inflation both at the higher education and K–12 levels, but how big of a problem actually is grade inflation?

What sort of effect does grade inflation have on student learning? Does grade inflation help or hurt college enrollment? And what impact, if any, does grade inflation have on lifetime earnings?

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions and more with Jeff Denning.

Jeffrey T. Denning is an associate professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at...

Math is one of the subjects that gets the most attention in American education, but how well do we actually understand what good math instruction should look like?

Should math classes consist of students solving problem after problem, or should math classes also include opportunities for discussion and group work? Should students learn a topic and then move on to the next topic after they have achieved competency, or should teachers strive to teach each topic deeply, giving students many different strategies for solving problems? And if math education in America were dramatically improved, just how good...

Over the past year, the Trump administration has rewritten the playbook for how Washington interacts with higher education, especially elite universities.

How should universities respond to the Trump administration’s efforts? Have the Trump administration’s actions been legal? And how can universities better serve the American public?

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions and more with Lee Bollinger. Nat and Lee discuss the purpose of large university endowments, the meaning of the Ivy League today, university hiring, whether elite universities should double their undergraduate enrollments, the scholarly temperament, whet...

To commemorate America’s 250th anniversary, The Report Card will be releasing a few episodes on the history of American education—both to discuss how we arrived at the education system we have today and how our education system has shaped America.

On this episode, Nat Malkus and Johann Neem cover the period between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Nat and Johann discuss civics education in early America, why some educators cared so much about imagination and self-culture, Horace Mann, pushback against education reformers, the difficulties of schooling in the young republic, the spread of the...

On the right, teachers’ unions are often treated as the bogeyman, and no one today is more synonymous with teachers’ unions than Randi Weingarten. Indeed, in 2022 former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called Weingarten “the most dangerous person in the world.”

But who is Randi Weingarten? What does she do on a day-to-day basis? How much power does she actually have? What are her views on topics such as pensions, curriculum, and teacher autonomy? And is she actually the most dangerous person in the world?

On this episode of The Report Card, Randi Weingarten joins Nat Malk...

Can students learn math much faster than they typically do? Can students who feel like they have hit a wall in math instruction make steady progress again? And can math instruction be successfully delivered online through a platform that doesn’t even use video?

Math Academy, an online learning platform that is serious about math instruction, is built on the premise that the answer to all of these questions is yes: An adaptive learning platform that carefully determines what students already know and what they don’t know yet can radically improve math instruction for many students—and ca...

We are now coming to the end of another year. What were the biggest stories in education this year? What stories didn’t get as much attention as they should have? And what can we expect in the coming year?

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions, and more, with three education journalists: Sarah Mervosh of The New York Times, Jill Barshay of The Hechinger Report, and Eric Kelderman of The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Show Notes:

The Improbable Warrior

Trump’s Attacks on DEI May Hurt...

In classrooms across the nation, students and teachers are using AI—but should they be?

AI’s advocates argue that it can be used to individualize instruction and provide personalized feedback, but its critics contend that the adoption of AI in the classroom will get in the way of students acquiring critical thinking skills.

Who is right here? Can AI reverse a decade of falling test scores, or will it only exacerbate this trend? And even if AI in the classroom is the future, does that mean schools should adopt AI in the classroom today?

One of the hottest names in education right now is Alpha School. A network of high-end private schools founded in Texas but with additional locations elsewhere, Alpha School uses AI to implement mastery learning principles and incentives to accelerate student learning.

How well the Alpha model works is an open question: Alpha School graduated its first seniors—a class of twelve—just last year, and most of Alpha’s students come from wealthier families. That said, for anyone who complains about a lack of experimentation in the education sector or wonders what it might look like if school...

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus, Rick Hess, and Andy Rotherham discuss what recent elections in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City mean for education, the Trump administration’s Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, the latest in the Jim Ryan saga, and more.

(Note: This episode was recorded on Monday, before the Trump administration announced further plans to dismantle the Department of Education.)

Andrew J. Rotherham is a co-founder and senior partner at Bellwether and the author of the Eduwonk blog.

Frederick M. Hess is a senior fe...

For decades, there has been research showing that tutoring can be a highly effective mode of instruction, but before 2020, large, in-school tutoring programs were not widespread. Then the pandemic struck, and large tutoring programs cropped up in districts around the nation. In fact, according to the June 2025 School Pulse Panel, 85% of American public schools now offer tutoring, with 42% offering high-dosage tutoring.

Has this COVID-era experiment been successful? Should these tutoring programs stick around as the pandemic recedes further from view? And what might AI mean for the future of tutoring? On this episode of The Report Card...

In August 2023, right after he took over as superintendent of Houston ISD, Mike Miles came on The Report Card to talk about his plans for Texas’s largest school district.

From changing teacher pay to overhauling curriculum, Miles’s plans for Houston were ambitious—and controversial—but would they work?

Two years later, Mike Miles comes back on The Report Card to speak with Nat Malkus about the progress Houston has made and whether Houston’s bold reform agenda has gone according to plan.

F. Mike Miles is the superintendent of Houston Independent School Dis...

TikTok. Instagram. Constant notifications. Many worry that phones are destroying students’ ability to pay attention and, in turn, their ability to learn in the classroom. Indeed, even many adults say that they have trouble reading books because of the constant stream of distractions their phones provide.

But what does the research say? Are students actually less able to pay attention as a result of their phones? On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions and more with Dan Willingham.

Daniel Willingham is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia an...

Earlier this month, 2024 NAEP scores came out for 8th grade science and 12th grade reading and math, and the results were not good, with students losing ground in each subject. But these declines are not new and they are not only the result of the pandemic: Across a number of tests and subjects, scores have been declining for over a decade, especially for low-performing students. Indeed, while achievement for the top 10 percent of students has remained roughly flat, achievement for the bottom 10 percent of students has fallen precipitously—on many assessments, by well over a year.

What mi...

A lot has happened in education over the last couple of months. A new school year started for students across the country. State governors began announcing whether they would be opting in to the new federal tax credit scholarship program. Penny Schwinn, former Education Commissioner of Tennessee, withdrew her nomination to be Linda McMahon’s number two at the Department of Education. A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration’s shutdown of the Comprehensive Centers and Regional Educational Laboratories was unlawful. And the Trump administration continued waging its battles with elite universities.

On this episode of The...

Many school choice proponents today focus on what choice does for the students who use it to leave traditional public schools. But one of the original arguments for choice was that, through competition, it would spur traditional public schools to improve.

So: Has it?

Do choice programs make traditional public schools better? Does the size of these competitive effects depend on the type of choice program? And what other factors might matter for the amount of competitive pressure that choice programs exert on traditional public schools?

On this episode of The Report Card...

Over the past decade, schools increasingly have become a battleground for political fights and culture wars that distract from student learning. But, according to a new book, these political fights and culture wars are just one aspect of a much larger and more longstanding problem: schooling is often shaped by the interests of adults. From school boards to partisan identity, from teacher employment to property values, in No Adult Left Behind, Vlad Kogan traces the many ways in which the concerns of adults get in the way of student outcomes.

On this episode of The Report Card...

Some say AI is the future of education, but there are reasons for skepticism, especially if we limit the conversation to the US and other wealthy countries.

However, for many regions of the world—particularly for many low- and middle-income countries—there is strong reason to believe that AI has the potential to be transformative. At least in theory, AI can democratize access to higher-quality instruction in a wide range of subjects and provide individualized feedback in overly large classrooms.

But does this reasoning hold up in practice? How much of a difference can AI make...

A lot has happened in education over the last few weeks. Among other things, Congress passed a national school choice program and reshaped the student loan system. The Justice Department pressured the University of Virginia’s president to step down. And the Trump administration began withholding nearly seven billion dollars in education funds that were set to go out by the beginning of July.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these developments, and more, with Andy Rotherham and Rick Hess.

Note: Since this episode was recorded, twenty-four states have sued the Tr...

About one month ago, the House passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a massive bill aimed at advancing President Trump’s domestic policy agenda. Now, the bill is with the Senate.

Included in the bill are huge changes to student lending. In particular, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act would make drastic changes to loan limits, repayment plans, and the rules for which programs are eligible to participate in the student loan program.

What is the rationale behind these changes? How would these changes affect students and schools? And will the One Big Beautiful Bi...

When schools went remote during the pandemic, internet access became essential, but not all students had access to a high-quality connection. So, in the summer of 2020, Chicago launched Chicago Connected to provide free broadband for students in the city who needed it most. But, according to a recent paper, Chicago Connected did not help all students equally.

In Heterogeneous Effects of Closing the Digital Divide During COVID-19 on Student Engagement and Achievement, authors Jared N. Schachner, Nicole P. Marwell, Marisa de la Torre, Julia A. Gwynne, and Elaine Allensworth find that participation in Chicago Connected actually “reduced en...

A lot has happened over the past couple of weeks. The Trump administration announced that it would go after Harvard’s ability to enroll international students. A judge ordered the Department of Education to rehire the employees it had fired. And the Supreme Court split 4–4 on Oklahoma’s religious charter school. —And all of that was just on May 22.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these developments, and more, with Andy Rotherham and Rick Hess. Nat, Andy, and Rick discuss the advantages and potential drawbacks of universities enrolling large numbers of international students; what the...

Kids spend hours a day on their phones scrolling through social media. Many have debated whether all this social media use is bad for mental health, but there’s a more basic question that needs to be asked: Does all this social media use promote healthy development?

Does it help kids develop into well-formed adults? Does it help kids become resilient to the challenges they will face in their lives? And does it help kids learn how to interact constructively with their peers?

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions an...

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus, Andy Rotherham, and Rick Hess break down the latest on the education policy landscape. Nat, Andy, and Rick discuss budget reconciliation, what the creation of a national tax credit scholarship program would mean for school choice, how potential changes to student lending would affect borrowers and schools, why Republicans are interested in increasing the endowment tax, whether DOGE is done for, and why the education research establishment is struggling to adapt to a changed political landscape.

Andrew J. Rotherham is a co-founder and senior partner at Bellwether and...

Five years ago, schools shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic. Schooling was remote for the rest of the year, and many schools would remain remote for much of the following year.

Europe took a different approach.

In many European countries, schools reopened that first pandemic spring, only weeks after closing. Schools, officials determined, were safe to reopen.

So: Why did American schools stay closed so long? Why did America not follow Europe’s lead? And why did Europe and the US respond so differently to the same evidence?

On this episode of...

It’s day 107 of the second Trump administration, and a lot has happened over the last two weeks. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two cases that sit at the intersection of schooling and religious liberty. Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed a massive ESA bill into law. President Trump signed a raft of executive orders on education. And the Trump administration continued its fight with Harvard.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these developments, and more, with Andy Rotherham and Rick Hess.

Andrew J. Rotherham is a co-founder and senior pa...

On April 30, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School v. Drummond, in which a virtual school in Oklahoma is attempting to become the nation’s first religious charter school.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus and four experts discuss and debate the case and the many questions it raises: Can religious charter schools be constitutional? What would religious charter schooling mean for American education? Are religious charter schools good for school choice? And what might Oklahoma’s religious charter school mean for the future of religious educ...

It’s day 93 of the Trump administration, and the education landscape hasn’t yet calmed down. The Trump administration has gone after Harvard, and Harvard is fighting back. The Trump administration has revoked the visas of hundreds of international students. NAEP is being scaled back. Iowa requested a waiver from the Department of Education to exercise more flexibility in how it spends federal funds. And two Supreme Court cases might alter the relationship between religion and public education.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these developments, and more, with Andy Rotherham and Rick Hess...

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Eva Moskowitz, the founder and CEO of Success Academy. Nat and Eva discuss why COVID learning loss is a misnomer; whether chronically absent students should face consequences for their poor attendance; why, despite its strong academic performance, Success Academy decided to overhaul its curriculum; what Success Academy looks for when hiring new teachers; Success Academy’s potential expansion into Florida and Texas; the challenges Success Academy faced in expanding into high school; whether charter schools have lived up to their original promise; and what’s next for Success Acad...

A lot has happened in the education world over the last few weeks. President Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education. The Trump administration has taken aggressive actions targeting elite universities and has threatened to withhold funding from K–12 schools over DEI programming. And the Department of Education said that states would lose nearly $3 billion in COVID relief funds after prior extensions on spending deadlines were rescinded.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these developments, and more, with Andy Rotherham and Rick Hess.

Andrew J. Rotherham is a...

In the education world over the past few years, a lot of attention has been paid to phonics and balanced literacy and the ways in which reading instruction practices often don’t align with what we know about how students learn to read.

Are there any obvious parallels in math instruction?

Are there bad ideas about how students learn math that prevent students from learning more? Is there a disconnect between math education research and classroom practice? And what does the evidence say about what good math instruction looks like?

On this episode of...

Last week, more than 1,300 individuals at the Department of Education were laid off, including over 300 at Federal Student Aid, nearly 250 at the Office for Civil Rights, and over 100 at the Institute of Education Sciences. All told, since Trump took office, the workforce at the Department of Education has been cut nearly in half.

What is the operating strategy behind these cuts? What effect will these cuts have on schools? And what do these cuts tell us about the Trump administration’s plans? On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions, and more, with An...

Since the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in NCAA v. Alston paved the way for universities to pay student-athletes, college sports have changed dramatically. Now, the NCAA is asking for an antitrust exemption to help navigate these changes.

The NCAA is surely facing a complex set of challenges, but an antitrust exemption is a big ask. This raises the question: Is an antitrust exemption a reasonable response to the current challenges facing college sports, a uniquely American institution?

Val Ackerman is the commissioner of the Big East Conference. Previously, she was the founding president of the WN...