The Report Card with Nat Malkus

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

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

Rick Hess is a senior fellow and the director of Education Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Show Notes:

Mend, Don’t End, the Institute of Education Sciences

Hope or Hype? What to Make of Yale’s Report on Trust in Higher Ed

The Trump Administration Has Mostly Dismantled the Ed. Dept. Should You Care?

Reimagining the Institute of Education Sciences

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 the College of Humanities. She writes about AI in higher education on her Substack, Anecdotal Value.

Show Notes:

It's Later Than You Think

Last Mile Education

Teaching Quality

The Two-Minute Mile Problem

What Should a University AI Czar Do?

My AI Thinks Civics Is Black Studies

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 their original promise; and what’s next for Success Academy.

Eva Moskowitz is the founder and CEO of Success Academy Charter Schools, a network of 57 schools in New York City educating 22,000 students. Despite 72% of its students being economically disadvantaged, Success Academy ranked first on the 2024 New York State Grade 3–8 math exam.

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 the University of Texas at Austin, and—along with Rachel L. Nesbit, Nolan G. Pope, and Merrill Warnick—is the author of a new paper: Easy A’s, Less Pay: The Long-Term Effects of Grade Inflation.

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 could it be?

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions, and more, with Jon Star. Nat and Jon discuss conceptual understanding and procedural fluency, whether constructivism has a place in the classroom, the value of worked examples, online curricula and the importance of curricular coherence, what mathematical flexibility is and why it matters, whether students can understand problem-solving strategies more or less well, whether math makes students better problem-solvers more generally, Chinese math education, Jon’s experience teaching middle school math and how being a researcher informs his teaching, whether math education research is sufficiently accessible to teachers, how to improve American math education, and how good American math education could be.

Jon Star is the Carl H. Pforzheimer, Jr. Professor of Teaching and Learning at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a middle school math teacher.

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, whether there is a tension between serving the public and the research missions of universities, the relationship between Washington and universities in the pre-Trump era, how universities can better convey their value to the American people, and the best evidence in favor of affirmative action.

Lee Bollinger is the Seth Low Professor at Columbia University and the author of University: A Reckoning. Previously, he was President of Columbia University and President of the University of Michigan.

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 common schools movement, and more.

Johann Neem is Professor of History at Western Washington University, editor of the Journal of the Early Republic, and the author of Democracy’s Schools: The Rise of Public Education in America.

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 Malkus for a wide-ranging conversation on many of the biggest topics in American education.

Randi Weingarten is the president of the American Federation of Teachers and the author of Why Fascists Fear Teachers: Public Education and the Future of Democracy.

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 can do so without many of the bells and whistles that are typical of education technology.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Jason Roberts and Justin Skycak about how Math Academy works, why many of Math Academy’s users are adults, and whether middle school students can really learn calculus.

Jason Roberts is the co-founder of Math Academy.

Justin Skycak is the chief quant and director of analytics at Math Academy.

Show Notes:

Math Academy

How Math Academy Works

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 Men in College Admission

The Big Fail