After-school and summer programs seem like obvious ways to help close educational gaps and improve student learning. They are especially relevant given the current post-pandemic challenges facing our K-12 educational system, which includes the largest drops in student learning ever documented in the United States. The potential benefits of these…

One underutilized tool in education is the large amount of public data on student outcomes. …

Schools believe that family engagement is important. For proof, any parent doesn’t have to look any further than their email inbox overflowing with messages from teachers, principals and district administrators. …

We recently wrapped up our 2021–22 school year — you can read the summary here. One of the items the summary called out for future discussion was what drove differences in student growth rates: in other words, what causes some students to learn faster than others? From a very practical…

The goal of The Math Agency is to close educational gaps in elementary school math for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. We do that via small-group coaching and family engagement. If you are looking for some more background, this Seattle Times article is a reasonable place to start. We recently wrapped…

In principle, standardized tests offer one of the best ways to measure the impact of educational programs and interventions, where our basic question is: how much did students in a program learn compared to their peers who are not in the program? …

When it comes to increasing how much students learn, there are two fundamental paths: Increase the time spent learning. Increase the efficiency of learning (amount learned per unit time). Just about any approach to increasing student academic growth falls into one of these two categories. In this post, we’ll examine…

There is a lot of debate about standardized testing in schools these days, but one thing seems clear: they are one of the best yardsticks we have today for measuring many of the inequalities in our education system. That being said, there many issues with how standardized tests get used…

In a previous post, we looked at whether it is theoretically possible to fully close the education gaps in public schools using our current education “technology” (which includes software, interventions, etc.). Encouragingly, the answer was yes, with a few critical assumptions. …