Michael Petrilli
Bloomberg
Washington, DC, United States
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Past articles by Michael:
Half-Time High School May Be Just What Students Need
For older students, the virus will change how the school day is structured. It’s about time. → Read More
A Decade On, Has Common Core Failed? Assessing the impact of national standards
The Common Core State Standards, released in 2010, were rapidly adopted by more than 40 states. Champions maintained that these rigorous standards would transform American education, but the initiative went on to encounter a bumpy path. A decade on, what are we to make of this ambitious effort? What kind of impact, if any, has it had on the quality of instruction and student learning—or is it… → Read More
Education Policy Helped These States Beat the Socioeconomic Curve
Indiana, Florida, Mississippi show signs of recent progress. → Read More
Perhaps Progress Against Poverty Helped Test Scores Rise
The pattern isn’t perfect. But over the past twenty years, the two lines appear to be moving generally in the same direction. → Read More
Student Outcomes Have Improved in More Than Just Reading and Math
Fourth and eighth graders made progress across the entirety of the academic curriculum from the late 1990s until the Great Recession—especially our lowest performing students and students of color. → Read More
Betsy DeVos and Other Naysayers Are Wrong: Student Outcomes in the U.S. Have Improved Significantly in Recent Decades
A fair assessment of the past twenty-five years, and especially the years before the Great Recession, is that something improved outcomes for students, particularly the most vulnerable students. → Read More
You Might Be Surprised Which States Prioritize Higher Teacher Salaries
The U.S. is spending dramatically more per pupil than in decades past, yet teacher salaries have barely kept pace with inflation. → Read More
The Baby Bust Goes to School: Are falling birthrates a crisis or an opportunity
Are falling birthrates a crisis or an opportunity? → Read More
Abraham Lincoln schools his peers: American presidents ranked by school names
With President’s Day at hand, we at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute wondered how many public schools honor our former chief executives with their names—and what that might tell us about which presidents we revere. → Read More
Instructional Coaches: The Heroes of the Golden Age of Educational Practice
Coaches can build capacity and teachers’ understanding in a way that will alter what they actually do in their classrooms. → Read More
Instructional coaches: The heroes of the Golden Age of Educational Practice
Whether initiated from the bottom-up or the top-down, any effort to help educators align their practice with the best evidence is going to succeed or fail on the strength of its implementation. As my colleague Robert Pondiscio wrote recently: Shifting ed reform’s focus to improving practice is an acknowledgment that underperformance is not a failure of will, but a lack of capacity. It’s a… → Read More
We Can’t Just Invest in Building Great Curricula
We need to invest in marketing them, too. → Read More
Evidence-based products won't sell themselves
In my last post, I described a demand-side approach to bringing evidence-based practices into schools by developing programs and processes that help educators ask the right questions and find new solutions that work for them. Now I’d like to tackle the supply side: the creation and marketing of tools, especially curriculum, that can help drive evidence-based change in the classroom. While the… → Read More
Obstacles to a Culture of Improvement
Our traditional public school system is not always hospitable to teachers or leaders willing to take risks to get better. → Read More
Practicing humility when it comes to evidence-based practice
As I’ve embarked on my weeks-long discussion of how to usher in a Golden Age of Educational Practice, I have heard—often on Twitter, sometimes via email—a clear and compelling message: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, MIKE, DO NOT TURN THIS CALL FOR EVIDENCE BASED PRACTICES INTO ANOTHER EXCUSE FOR SO-CALLED EXPERTS TO TELL TEACHERS WHAT TO DO, OR TO FOIST YOUR OWN PREFERRED PRACTICES UPON THE NATION’S… → Read More
How to Help Schools Use Evidence-Based Practices
Here's how local communities, state education agencies, and philanthropists can help. → Read More
How to get schools to use practices that work
Before the holiday break, I wrote a series of posts discussing how we might turn the “End of Education Policy” (as I see it) into a Golden Age of Educational Practice. It’s time to pick up where I left off. To be honest, much of what I published in late 2018 amounted to throat-clearing, a warm-up before the main event. My basic (and hardly brilliant) argument was this: * It’s possible to… → Read More
Districts should start fresh on school discipline reform in the new year
For the new year to bring a new politics to America—one marked by a pragmatic search for solutions, with good ideas from left, right, and center—it’s going to have to come from the bottom up, far away from the Washington outrage machine. A good place to start would be the contentious challenge of school discipline. As with so many culture war issues, especially those under the gaze of federal… → Read More
Identifying "what works" is still a work in progress
If we are going to take advantage of the End of Education Policy, and usher in a Golden Age of Educational Practice, we need our field to start taking rigorous evidence much more seriously. Getting inside the black box of the classroom is a necessary first step, and launching lots more research initiatives about teaching and learning is second. But the big payoff will come if we can more… → Read More
What the 2018 elections mean for American education
Editor’s note: On Tuesday, November 27, the Albert Shanker Institute and the American Federation of Teachers co-sponsored an event called “The 2018 Elections: What Do They Mean for American Education?” Moderated by Michelle Ringuette, assistant to the president for labor, government & political affairs at the American Federation of Teachers, the panel featured Domingo Morel, assistant… → Read More