🏆 Best Education Journalism of the Week 🏆 (11/14/2025)

Nov 14, 2025

In this week’s newsletter:

📌 UC San Diego students struggle with first-grade math.

📌 How a teacher misconduct reform failed in Wisconsin.

📌 After all that, international student enrollment barely budged!

📌 Your new favorite TV character might be a kind middle-school Spanish teacher.

UNDER-PREPARED AT UC SAN DIEGO

The big education story of the week:

The big education story of the week is a startling new report from a UCSD committee showing that UC San Diego students — ostensibly among California’s best and brightest — perform poorly on elementary and middle school math problems.

At least, it’s the big story in right-wing and center-right outlets as well as some trade publications (Fox News, The Free Press, The Daily Mail, Chronicle ). Kicked off in large part by a blog post in economist Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution blog, most of the mainstream K-12 press have passed on the story so far.

Why the discrepancy? The UCSD faculty report points to issues of loosening standards that conservatives and moderate Democrats have long argued will lead to poor outcomes. However, math scores on admitted students’ GPAs have actually increased (Newsweek, Inside Higher Education). California’s new school dashboard shows improved math and English scores (EdSource). And we’ve seen similar hand-wringing over grade inflation and remediation at Harvard and other elite institutions.

It would be nice to see broader coverage from mainstream and left-leaning outlets to put these data points in perspective — like this thoughtful piece in The Atlantic on grade inflation.

Other big education stories of the week include ongoing fallout from the shutdown (EdSource , KQED, USA TODAY), growing absenteeism and enrollment concerns (Dorchester Reporter, The 74, AZ Family), and a handful of unexpected outcomes from last week’s elections (New York Times, NJ.com).

POSITIVE OUTLIERS, FAILED REFORMS, & UNEQUAL ARRESTS

The best education journalism of the week:

🏆 These Minnesota schools serving low-income students are beating the odds combines two of our favorite things — good data visualization and interesting solutions reporting. Particularly notable is the focus on engagement and student buy-in so that “they love to come.” (Mara Klecker, Anthony Lonetree, Tom Nehil, and MaryJo Webster / Star Tribune)

🏆 How a past effort to curb Wisconsin educator misconduct fizzled shows how state rules on educator misconduct could have been updated years ago, granting broader authority to discipline abusive educators. The state department overseeing education instead pulled the proposal from consideration, even though reporters found most public comments favored it. (Danielle DuClos / The Cap Times)

🏆 Native American children significantly more likely to be arrested, detained in Washington combines good data-driven reporting with extensive interviews to show the impact of those numbers. As with many seemingly intractable policy issues, there are a number of potential solutions — but the story shows lawmakers have so far passed on opportunities to try them. (Melanie Henshaw / InvestigateWest)

Other stories we liked include She wanted to keep her son in his school district. It was more challenging than it seemed (AP), Lessons from a Failed Texas Tutoring Program (The 74), Jewish charter school could reignite Oklahoma legal fight (Oklahoma Voice) and Michigan has $321M for school safety. The catch: Districts must waive rights (Bridge Michigan).

Thanks for reading Alexander Russo’s The Grade, where we take a closer look at education news. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work!

THE DEMOCRATIC CASE FOR PRIVATE SCHOOL CHOICE

So far, at least, there are precious few Democratic officials who are publicly supportive of the wave of private school choice that’s spread among red states and will soon be federal policy.

But in this week’s new interview, DFER’s Jorge Elorza says that progressive schooling options are popping up in blue regions that already have private school choice and that — with the right guardrails in place — private school choice will generate teacher creativity and “provide better options for families.”

Read, listen, or watch here: The Democratic case for private school choice.

PEOPLE, EVENTS, & MORE

Above: Your new favorite TV character might be a kind-hearted middle school Spanish teacher played by a familiar actor (TV Insider).

📰 Job churn: There are tons of job changes on the education beat, including layoffs, dwindling ed labs, and people leaving the beat and the field (along with a few notable bright spots like the hiring of Laura Isensee at the Houston Chronicle). Pour one out for the Dallas Morning News and AL.com education labs. Crossed fingers that the Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and other outlets replace folks who’ve departed for other jobs. Congrats to all the education journalists who’ve found great jobs on other beats. I rounded up the latest staffing news here.

📰 Documentaries, TV shows, & episodes: Are college students getting too many A’s? (NPR). How UCLA is navigating unprecedented demands from the Trump administration (PBS NewsHour). How to survive an active shooter in America (HBO). The Harvard Plan, Season 2 (On The Media) English Teacher canceled after two seasons (Deadline).

📰 “I’ve done a ton of one-off stories about educators who are facing discipline for alleged sexual misconduct,” recalls Kentucky Center for Investigative Journalism’s Jess Clark about the impetus behind her new four-part audio podcast, The Girls. Then in early 2024, Clark saw a group of women protesting outside the board room who told her they were sexually abused by the same educator — who was still employed by the school district. Though they initially seemed like they might be some kind of conspiracy nuts, Clark approached them anyway. “Early in my career someone once told me ‘never write off the crazies,’” says Clark. “It’s some of the best advice I ever got.”

📰 Other series: “This absenteeism series is part of a larger package of stories about Michigan’s education system,” writes Isabel Lohman about Bridge Michigan’s latest work, some of which has been republished by Associated Press. While absenteeism is most pronounced in low-income communities, “it’s an issue that spans the state.”

📰 Numbers: The number of foreign students in the U.S. decreased by less than 1 percent this fall (Washington Post). Ninety-nine percent of teachers in an informal poll say that their schools provide devices for students to use in class (New York Times). Roughly 40 percent of countries bar or restrict student cellphone use, as do more than 30 U.S. states and the District of Columbia (NYT). There’s been a wait list of 1,200 students for virtual school spots in Massachusetts (Boston Globe). The best places to raise children are in the South (Washington Post). Just two out of three school employees are Democrats (Politics At Work). A new study suggests that immigration enforcement appears to hurt test scores, and not just for immigrant students (Chalkbeat). Two N.J. towns average a staggering $16K in school taxes (NJ.com)

📰 Quotes:

“You cannot expect any political entity to be helping you find out their secrets.”

“Maybe it’s easy, when you hear rumors and snippets, to shrug off such stories.”

“’’Believe all women’ replaced due process, and emotion overshadowed hard evidence… Unsurprisingly, everyone involved generally lost.”

“I think somebody misplaced a decimal at first and 4% became 40%. However, as they realized that they couldn’t support the claim, they began the cover up.”

“Shocking. People deciding where to send their own kids to school. Hope someone does something about this.”

“Two years into Florida’s state cellphone ban, Florida’s standardized test scores drop to their lowest in 20 years.”