Matt Barnum is Chalkbeat's ideas editor. Previously, Matt covered K-12 education for the Wall Street Journal.
Ideas
Dec 16, 2025
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10 min read
A Q&A with the education historian turned critic of testing and charter schools.
Dec 9, 2025
8 min read
It’s concerning that some students at top colleges struggle with basic math, but simply changing admissions standards could backfire.
Dec 2, 2025
11 min read
No Child Left Behind likely improved math scores, but it also brought about widespread frustration from teachers and parents.
Nov 25, 2025
9 min read
A Chalkbeat Ideas roundup
Nov 20, 2025
The effect on schools will probably be small, but it represents something big.
Nov 18, 2025
Yet the party faces challenges on the issue, including greater learning loss in blue states.
Nov 13, 2025
We’ve got answers to that and other questions from a new tranche of state testing data.
Nov 11, 2025
Reports of the death of the bachelor’s degree have been greatly exaggerated.
Nov 6, 2025
Adeel Khan says special education teachers can do their jobs better if they use AI to draft IEPs. And he responds to concerns that AI can’t be a math tutor and is used as a shortcut for students.
Nov 4, 2025
The cheating problem isn’t going away. More teachers will use AI as an assistant. But AI won't be a supertutor.
Oct 30, 2025
Margaret Spellings, who led the department under George W. Bush, says scrapping it would be "inefficient."
Oct 28, 2025
There have been some Southern success stories, though we're still figuring out what drove them.
