Conor Williams

Politicians love ideas. They can talk about them for years. Politicians are somewhat less enamored of implementing ideas, since concrete actions can have (electoral) consequences. Look no further than Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s erstwhile embrace of the Common Core State Standards. Or rather, look no further than my just-published column at Talking Points Memo for […]

If there’s any unifying thread in the story of the last several years of education debates, it’s that policy changes are education reform’s first, not final, steps. Given American education’s unwieldy, chaotic governing institutions, legal and regulatory changes are almost always susceptible to being watered down—or even reversed. For instance, while it seemed like a […]

As I’ve pointed out in recent posts, there are considerable limits to what education research can do on its own—because of political realities and implementation challenges. Of course, that doesn’t mean that we should stop researching education, or that we should ignore existing research findings. It just means that we should: 1) be mindful of […]

As politically polarizing as charter schools can be, doubts about their efficacy are being steadily put to rest. There’s increasing evidence that they can drive impressive academic gains for students—especially in the presence of strong accountability regulations. But because of the polarized politics surrounding them, charter schools are often misrepresented and misunderstood. So I’ve written a piece […]

With the federal government rancorously gridlocked for the last four years, some folks have taken to a familiar—and understandable—way of expressing their frustration. Why, they ask, can’t politicians just “listen to the research?” Why must every policy argument descend into ideological bickering when we already know what works? We especially hear this a lot in […]

Just about no one has a mixed view of former Washington, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. Even the announcement that she’s stepping down from leadership at the education reform organization Students First prompted a firestorm of commentary. So I decided to add a few (quieter) thoughts about Rhee’s departure in a TPM column this week: […]

In a new column at Talking Points Memo, Conor P. Williams points out that, despite the superheated rhetoric, the Common Core State Standards are really pretty boring policy. But we should still stick with them. Common Core standards are neither a curse nor a cure-all. Neither pox nor panacea. But we should still stick with […]

When I was a kid, I got weirdly obsessed with eating breakfast. As I remember it, this was almost entirely a result of this cereal commercial: It wasn’t just the commercial, of course. I have three younger brothers; ours was a raucous house where I did, indeed, have “a lot to do before lunch.” Every. […]

One of the biggest challenges for writing about traditionally underserved demographics in American education is to remember to take an assets-based approach. It can be easy to focus on what students from these backgrounds lack, rather than what they bring to the table. This is a common problem for education policy discussions orbiting Latino students. […]

I attended First Focus’ annual Children’s Budget Summit this week to hear about the latest federal budget trendlines affecting programs that serve children. The accompanying report is full of interesting information on the United States’ budget priorities. Across all programs, inflation-adjusted federal spending on children declined by 13.6 percent from 2010 to 2014. Education is […]