It’s worth paying attention to what readers of the Education Next blog are drawn to each year. At a time when all manner of short-form articles and videos are competing for people’s attention, the blogs that manage to cut through the noise and command an audience deserve another look. They might just be a weathervane pointing in the direction where the winds of school reform are blowing.
One throughline in the EdNext blog in 2025 was curiosity about why some things work in education and others do not. Two edtech startup founders, Abdirahman Guleed and Kedaar Sridhar, posited one reason for American students’ lackluster math performance may be inscrutable language that impedes comprehension of math concepts. In matters of history, charter school founder and blogger Matthew Levey noted how the popularity of content producers like Joe Rogan and Ken Burns point to a hunger for knowledge about the American story that traditional classrooms just aren’t providing. Serial education entrepreneur Michael Goldstein took note of philanthropist John Arnold’s growing pessimism about K–12 school reform efforts—and explained why he nonetheless remains optimistic about the potential for creative problem solving to alter young people’s long-term trajectories.
Education Next executive editor Rick Hess claimed several spots in our annual list again this year by virtue of his weekly opinion column “Old School with Rick Hess.” With a unique blend of insight, wisdom, and wit, OSRH (as we refer to it colloquially) has gained a faithful following in the two years since it debuted. Readers turned to the blog to make sense of the titanic changes in the federal government’s role in education, first as DOGE effected heavy cuts to personnel and research funding at the Department of Education, and later as ED announced agency partnerships to offload its bureaucratic commitments. Even as Hess remained doubtful that the changes would amount to much in the long run, he welcomed the agency’s renewed scrutiny on higher education.
Although the country continued to stumble through another lackluster showing in NAEP results, readers appreciated the attention Hess drew to one positive outcome: the so-called Southern Surge of impressive gains in scores from Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee. But in the absence of other bits of good news, OSRH resorted to satire, and readers responded enthusiastically. (A special point of pride at EdNext is that the top blog post of the year, which lampooned a speech by the president in an unlikely place, garnered the attention of the fact-checking site Snopes.)
From bad news to good, gravity to levity, readers can continue to count on the Education Next blog for thoughtful and engaging commentary about K–12 education.
The full top ten list is here:
