Marc Porter Magee

The public education system has engaged in a profoundly unique experiment to take tutoring to scale as part of pandemic recovery efforts.

I had the pleasure of speaking w/ @lizcohen12.bsky.social about what we've learned & where we go from here.

thefutureoftutoring.substack.com/p/q-and-a-ma...

Can progressivism survive when it’s wrapped in a pessimistic wrapper?

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/o...

“Democrats are divided and flummoxed over what to do.” t.co/KLMYla6gCn

Cash alone fails a big test.

Back to education programs and reforms? www.nytimes.com/2025/07/28/u...

‘A lack of political courage’: Why is Chicago avoiding its school enrollment problem? Declining school enrollment has left 30% of Chicago public schools at least half-empty. The city’s failure to address this problem has come at a high cost to the district — and its students.

100 students in a school meant for 1,000: Inside Chicago’s refusal to deal with its nearly empty schools
https://www.chalkbeat.org/chicago/2025/06/13/chicago-public-schools-declining-enrollment-causes-small-schools-high-costs/

Do progressive groups want to look successful more than they want to be successful? www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc...

The WSJ article makes it clear this is a course designed to teach math skills a lot students learned in 8th grade

The lowest level math course isn’t a standard calculus course anymore. It was reorganized to help students remediate algebra conceptions that a test found they hadn’t mastered. They kept the name but changed the content. See the difference below.

This provocative, data-infused essay by James Wyckoff — edworkingpapers.com/ai25-1197 — serves as a reminder that fully understanding the declines in student achievement requires us to look well before the COVID-19 pandemic.

When I was getting my PhD in sociology (1997-2001) we used something called a “position generator” to measure the diversity of people’s social networks. Seems similar to this. Correlated with all sorts of “social capital” measures.

Why did Democrats give up on learning as a priority? How do they get it back? www.nytimes.com/2025/05/10/u...

For the first time in its history, DFER embraces private school choice in its new policy agenda.

substack.com/home/post/p-...

Figure 2 in paper presents the proportion of a campaign’s itemized total from each wealth group in stacked bar charts. Each bar represents a candidate-year, with segments showing the percentage of total dollars that come from each of four wealth bins. In both 2016 and 2020, Trump was much less reliant on the wealthy than Romney. Compared to Romney, Trump’s share of dollars from the bottom 90% is 9 percentage points higher in 2016, and 20 percentage points higher in 2020. In dollar terms, Trump got 2.7 times more dollars than Romney from the bottom 90% (in 2020). Likewise, Trump’s share from the top 1% (the sum of the top two bins) is 9 and 15 percentage points lower than Romney’s. To be sure, most of Trump’s dollars still came from the wealthy. Even in 2020, the wealthiest 10% gave him 55% of his dollars. However, the bottom 90% nearly matched them. To put this in sharp relief, the candidate with a wealth distribution of dollars closest to Trump’s in 2020 is Obama.

In terms of donors, Trump complicates the oligarchy story. While most of his 2020 funding (55%) came from the top 10%, that’s the lowest reliance on wealthy of any candidate we studied. Nearly 45% of 2020 donations came from bottom 90%—a remarkable shift for a Republican. 3/ cup.org/4cfm0Az

“Near the end of the argument, Justice Kavanaugh thanked the school board’s lawyer, Alan E. Schoenfeld, suggesting he had done what he could with hopeless material.”

www.nytimes.com/2025/04/22/u...

Opinion | Why are Democrats pulling their punches on Trump’s disastrous trade war? The party is blowing its chance to mount an offensive against protectionism.

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Biden believed the best way to stop Trump was to give every Democratic interest group a reason to be loyal. It backfired.

“How did Democrats back themselves into this corner? Partly they’re pandering to pro-tariff constituencies (i.e., unions, once reliable Democratic allies).”

In the sense of the stakes of the election. The differences between the two candidates.

When you give a child a laptop and just turn them loose, amazing things happen

Just kidding, it’s a complete bust voxdev.org/topic/educat...

Why is the Democrats’ response to Trump’s tariffs so muddled?

Because Biden left them without a clear stance on free trade. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

What’s the future of NAEP?

www.the74million.org/article/lind...

These are the school districts in the database.

The dots on the far left are San Francisco, Detroit and DC

The dots on the far right are districts in Texas.

How tilted to the left are the staff at universities?

New data from VR Scores. vrscores.org/data-visuali...

The change in US 4th grade math skills by content area on the NAEP

What's going on with geometry?

zarekdrozda.substack.com/p/beyond-the...

Which selective colleges have the most balance between liberal & conservative students?

Answer: Washington & Lee, Notre Dame, University of Miami, Boston College and Wake Forest. fordhaminstitute.org/national/com...

The turmoil at the Ivies continues

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025...

‘If We Don’t Get Our S--t Together, Then We Are Going to Be in a Permanent Minority’ It’s been months since Democrats suffered a devastating defeat at the polls. For all the talk about the party’s need for change, few seem actually willing to make the leap.

“after suffering their biggest defeat in decades, Democrats are deeply fractured, rudderless, and struggling to figure out at the most basic level what their message and strategy should be” www.politico.com/news/magazin...

Ah nuts. My post got cut off. It was supposed to read “they learned less.”

Yes, I assume digital distractions.

edworkingpapers.com/sites/defaul...

This seems like a pretty big finding to understand why inequality in education is increasing:

When high-performing students got broadband in their homes, they learned more.

When low-performing students got broadband in their homes, they learned

Remembering Kevin Drum www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...