The First Year of Education Progress
2025 in review
Even though 2025 might have been the final year of the mostly-human internet, it will always also be the first year of educationprogress.org. And so over at the Center we’ve been celebrating the end of a long, exciting and surprising first year, and looking forward to an even more exciting 2026.
Because memory is short, and last year so long — Remember DOGE? The wildfires in Los Angeles, supply chain crises, AI ministers and stranded Labubus? (Labubu?) — we wanted to present the highlights of the Center’s first year, for new and returning readers alike.
Happy New Year to all!
Policies and projects
In February, the Center published its Manifesto and Reading List. Both were compelling enough to distract me a bit too much in a busy last semester of law school, and here I am. So make sure to give them a read, too!
The education policy landscape is a mess, as we’re all aware by now. From the start we’ve been carefully prioritizing issues and building model policies and plans for those that share our vision: an excellence-oriented education for everyone. Given the turbulent year for the agency, what better place to start than the Education Department?
The problem isn’t just a policy one, though: student data and performance tracking across the states is also a mess. We were thrilled that Scott Alexander and the ACX Grants team agreed enough to give us a grant. (We’re still waiting on ED to release that nationwide data, though. Get to it, guys!)
The Center's Astral Codex Ten Grant
Our plan to chart the policy landscape of advanced education in America
Charting the Course
Advocating for excellence in education policy and culture is all too often a lonely battle. A primary aim of our Substack, then, is to bring together the most passionate, interesting, and mission-aligned education reformers, researchers, teachers, policymakers, advocates, and officials we can find. And we found some great ones this first year of Charting the Course.
Our most popular article of the year, “The Algebra Gatekeepers,” is truly an important read. It’s not just a technical, policy-oriented explanation of how math assessment and placement aren’t done well. Janet Johnson and John Wittle wrote a story about a system that keeps whole classes of people from reaching their full potential, and about the forces large and small that convince some of the most capable kids they can’t cut it.
We were also thrilled to have an article from Karen Vaites about what many ed reformers — including her city’s new mayor, Mayor Mamdani — get wrong about gifted education policy. Karen’s was one of the first voices online I started to follow after jumping into the education policy world full time, and that proved to be a great decision.
Straight Talk on Gifted Education for Mayor Mamdani – and Everyone Else
Getting rid of public gifted education programs will accelerate the enrollment crisis hitting American public schools
Joshua Dwyer (a recent and very welcome addition to the CEP team!) also drove the point home in his excellent post, on what public polling tells us about the disconnect between public support for advanced learners and the absence of policies actually supporting them.
The Schoolhouse
The most cutting-edge, evidence-based, pro-excellence education reform movement in the world won’t go anywhere if the people with the boots on the ground — teachers, parents, principals, state officials, and school administrators — are not part of the core of the movement. The Schoolhouse is our effort to magnify the voices of the educators and experimenters leading the way in putting excellence-oriented models of education into practice.
Kelsey Piper is another one of our favorite education writers today, and she somehow manages to do that while running a school herself! Her articles in Jerusalem Demsas’ excellent new publication, The Argument, have made me a regular reader of the magazine. We were thrilled to get Kelsey’s story about what she’s learned from running her microschool.
Jessica Berg also contributed a fantastic article about how grouping students by ability transformed her Rockford, Illinois elementary school. Send this to your local ability-grouping-skeptical school principals today!
Deep Dives
We know lots of you crave deep dives into topics both popular and niche. So do we.
This summer, I got to watch my colleague Jack Despain Zhou — TracingWoodgrains, to many of us — research and write his titanic legal and educational history of the desegregation of Washington, D.C. schools. Besides being baffled by how anyone can absorb so many public archives so quickly, I was amazed by the story he told: Of how politics derailed some of the most successfully integrated schools in the Capitol. Of the Herculean figures like Judge Skelly Wright, civil rights activist Julius Hobson, and the unsung, tragic hero of it all, Superintendent Carl Hansen.
David Shuck also knocked it out of the park with his detailed criticism of the ideas and theories of Freddie deBoer, a popular writer and one of the more interesting (and controversial!) education reformers today.
The perfect guest post to top off 2025, in my view, is John Boyle’s article on exceptionally gifted children. The lessons he draws from stories about some of the brightest students in recent history are well worth the read.
Attacks on Excellence
The Attacks on Excellence (AoE) series was one of our first ideas for regular content, and expect to see more issues, more often this coming year. Boston, Seattle, and San Francisco — our eyes are on you! Below are some previous issues of the AoE series.
In October, professor Ben Solomon wrote about how New York’s new statewide plan to teach kids math goes awry, and what could be done to improve it. More updates on this story to come soon.
AoE also went global in 2025, taking us to British Columbia, Canada! It turns out bad grading practices and theories of assessment aren’t a uniquely American problem. Who knew? We do now, thanks to Bryan Joseph.
Finally, our previous AoE roundup posts give a good survey of the kinds of issues we’re keeping our eyes on over at the Center. If you have a story to share, we’re all ears.
See you soon!
Thanks for reading, and one more “Happy New Year” to everyone marching into 2026 with us. The time to transform education and how we study it is long overdue, and we’re glad to have you with us.