The Report Card with Nat Malkus

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Melissa Kearney about her new book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind. Nat and Melissa discuss the decline in marriage among non-college-educated parents, why having two parents in the home matters for student outcomes, the stock of marriageable men, whether studying family structure is taboo, what the fracking boom can teach us about the decline in marriage, how marriage became decoupled from raising children, universal basic income for parents, why Asian Americans seem immune from the broader decline in marriage, intergenerational households, the difficulty of parenting, the importance of culture, and more.

Melissa Kearney is the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland and the Director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group.

Show Notes:

The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind

A Driver of Inequality That Not Enough People Are Talking About

The Puzzle of Falling US Birth Rates since the Great Recession

Male Earnings, Marriageable Men, and Non-Marital Fertility: Evidence from the Fracking Boom

The Economics of Non-Marital Childbearing and The “Marriage Premium for Children”

Investigating Recent Trends in the U.S. Teen Birth Rate

Media Influences on Social Outcomes: The Impact of MTV's 16 and Pregnant on Teen Childbearing

Note: This episode originally aired in September 2022.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Doug Lemov about how cellphones and social media harm the academic and social development of students and make schools less inclusive.

Nat and Doug also discuss online learning, school choice, the difficulty of creating schools with a coherent operating philosophy, the state of public schooling, The Scarlet Letter, the pandemic's effects on students, teacher professional development, the relationship between parenting and schooling, the idea that schooling sometimes has to be hard for students, and the role that schools play in shaping students' habits of attention.

Doug Lemov is the author of Reconnect: Building School Culture for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging and Teach Like a Champion.

Show Notes:

Take Away Their Cellphones

Reconnect: Building School Culture for Meaning, Purpose, and Belonging

Teach Like A Champion 3.0

Teach Like A Champion

iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us

It Was a Mistake to Let Kids Onto Social Media Sites. Here’s What to Do Now.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Roland Fryer about incentives and opportunity. Nat and Roland discuss paying students, parents, and teachers; the importance of properly structuring incentives; affirmative action; loss aversion; why certain ideas in education get treated as out of bounds; using machine learning to increase diversity in college admissions; COVID learning loss; whether the Ivy League should create feeder schools for disadvantaged students; using data in the classroom; and more.

Roland Fryer is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He was a MacArthur Fellow and is a winner of the John Bates Clark Medal.

Show Notes:

How to Make Up the COVID Learning Loss

Affirmative Action in College Admissions Doesn’t Work—But It Could

Build Feeder Schools (And Make Yale and Harvard Fund Them)

Enhancing the Efficacy of Teacher Incentives through Framing: A Field Experiment

Parental Incentives and Early Childhood Achievement: A Field Experiment in Chicago Heights

On July 12th, the California State Board of Education adopted a new math framework that will affect the way math is taught for the nearly 6 million students in California’s public schools and has the potential to influence the way math is taught at the national level.

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with two of the framework’s critics, Jelani Nelson and Tom Loveless, about the framework, its intellectual origins, what they think it gets wrong, whether it is equitable, and what it will mean for California's students.

Jelani Nelson is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley.

Tom Loveless is an education researcher and former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.

Show Notes:

California Math Framework

California Adopts Controversial New Math Framework. Here’s What’s in It

California’s New Math Framework Doesn’t Add Up

Analysis and Critique of California Math Frameworks Revisions (CMF)

UC Berkeley, Stanford Professors Face Controversy, Debate State Math Curriculum

California Students Are Struggling in Math. Will Reforms Make the Problem Worse?

The Divider: Jo Boaler of Stanford Is Leading the Math-Instruction Revolution. Critics Say Her Claims Don’t Always Add Up.

On the latest episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus speaks with Laura Meckler about her new book, Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity. Nat and Laura discuss integration, busing, and detracking; the Van Sweringen brothers; the limitations of good intentions; the internet's effect on journalism; the racial achievement gap; belonging; what it's like writing about your hometown; what history can teach us about education policy; and more.

Laura Meckler is a national education writer for The Washington Post.

Show Notes:

Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity

What happened when an Ohio school district rushed to integrate classrooms

In May, Eric Hanushek and Steven Rivkin joined the podcast to discuss their research on Dallas Independent School District’s Accelerating Campus Excellence program and its Principal Excellence and Teacher Excellence initiatives.

The man who implemented these reforms, Mike Miles, was superintendent of Dallas ISD from 2012 through 2015, and, in May, was serving as the CEO of Third Future Schools.

However, on June 1st, following a state intervention, Miles was named the next superintendent of Houston ISD. Since then, he has made quite the splash.

On this episode of The Report Card, Mike Miles joins Nat Malkus to discuss the reforms he is implementing in Houston ISD and his views on district leadership and school reform more broadly.

In the wake of the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, selective colleges, and their admissions practices, have received a lot of scrutiny.

Does going to a highly selective college affect long-term outcomes? How much preference are legacy applicants given? To what extent does socioeconomic background influence chances of admission? And how can highly selective colleges improve social mobility and diversify the American elite?

In a new paper, Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges, Raj Chetty, David Deming, and John Friedman consider these questions and many others.

The paper is full of interesting findings, so on this episode of The Report Card, two of the paper's authors, David Deming and John Friedman, join Nat to break it down.

David Deming is the Academic Dean and Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

John Friedman is the Briger Family Distinguished Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs and the Economics Department Chair at Brown University. He is also a founding co-director of Opportunity Insights at Harvard University

Show Notes:

Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges

Study of Elite College Admissions Data Suggests Being Very Rich Is Its Own Qualification

The Future of Highly Selective College Admissions

Forked Lightning

Optimal Gerrymandering in a Competitive Environment

The Lengthening of Childhood

In the Salary Race, Engineers Sprint but English Majors Endure

Getting In

Ever since No Child Left Behind was signed into law in 2002, assessments have been a fixture of the education landscape—a very divisive one. But assessments have changed a lot over the last twenty years and are still changing to better meet the needs of students, teachers, schools, districts, and states.

But what do these new assessments look like? What are they capable of that the old ones weren’t? And what can we look forward to next on the assessment front? On this episode of The Report Card, Nat Malkus discusses these questions and more with Arthur VanderVeen.

Arthur VanderVeen is the CEO and founder of New Meridian, an assessment design and development company that serves over 2,500 school districts. Arthur was previously the executive director of college readiness at the College Board, and the executive director of assessment and chief of innovation for the New York City Department of Education.

Show Notes:

New Meridian

A Right Turn on Assessments: State-Directed Assessments Using an Interstate Test-Item Bank Cooperative

Can State Tests Be Useful for Instruction and Accountability?

At the end of this past November, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, and, since then, there has been a lot of discussion of what AI will mean for education. Will AI render teachers irrelevant? Should AI be banned in the classroom? Will homework ever be the same again?

Often, though, discussions of these questions can feel very abstract and distant, as if AI in education is some problem off in the future. Today’s guest, however, argues that it is anything but.

Ethan Mollick argues that teachers should already be using AI to better their teaching, that we should already be using AI to accelerate student learning, and that we should already be thinking about the threat AI poses to traditional forms of schoolwork such as the essay and the problem set.

Ethan Mollick is an Associate Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He writes about AI on his Substack, One Useful Thing, and on Twitter. Over the past year, he has co-written three papers with Lilach Mollick on AI in education: Assigning AI: Seven Approaches for Students, with Prompts; Using AI to Implement Effective Teaching Strategies in Classrooms: Five Strategies, Including Prompts; and New Modes of Learning Enabled by AI Chatbots: Three Methods and Assignments.

Show Notes

One Useful Thing

The Homework Apocalypse

Democratizing the Future of Education

Assigning AI: Seven Approaches for Students, with Prompts

Using AI to Implement Effective Teaching Strategies in Classrooms: Five Strategies, Including Prompts

New Modes of Learning Enabled by AI Chatbots: Three Methods and Assignments

On this episode of The Report Card, Nat speaks with Larry Berger about the science of reading, education technology, curriculum and high-quality instructional materials, for-profit companies in education, and more.

Larry Berger is the CEO and co-founder of Amplify, an education company that creates K–12 assessments, intervention programs, and core curricula. In 2022, Amplify’s materials were used in over 4,000 US school districts and by over 15 million students worldwide.