He once graded papers in a Prince George's County classroom. Now he grades the whole American school system - and brings the data to settle the argument.
Nat Malkus, the man who counts the empty desks
In the spring of 2020, while the country argued about whether schools were open, Nat Malkus quietly built the thing that could answer the question. The Return to Learn Tracker followed the remote-instruction status of roughly 8,600 school districts - about 88 percent of America's public school students - one district at a time. When the White House wanted to know what was actually happening in classrooms, this is the map they pulled up. So did the CDC. So did the Federal Reserve.
Today Malkus is a senior fellow and the deputy director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, an affiliate of its James Q. Wilson Program in K-12 Education Studies. His beat is wide - career and technical education, Advanced Placement, school choice, standardized testing, government contracting - but the through-line is constant: bring the numbers, then argue.
The closures he documented left a hangover he is still measuring. By 2022, chronic absenteeism had passed 28 percent, an 89 percent jump in three years. So the Tracker pivoted. It stopped counting closed schools and started counting the kids who never came back. That is the kind of researcher he is - he follows the problem his own data exposed.
God I trust: all others bring data.— Nat Malkus, professional motto
Most education wonks arrive by way of statistics or economics. Malkus took the scenic route. His undergraduate degree, from Covenant College, is in historical studies - the discipline of reading messy evidence and refusing to be fooled by a tidy story. From 2000 to 2004 he taught middle school in Prince George's County, Maryland, where the abstractions of education policy wear sneakers and forget their homework.
That classroom stint is the part he never fully left behind. It is one thing to model a graduation rate; it is another to have collected the late assignments. He went back to the University of Maryland, College Park - first as a research assistant on the High Quality Teaching Project, then for a PhD in education policy and leadership.
From 2009 to 2015 he was a senior research analyst at the American Institutes for Research, leading teams that pulled apart national datasets: how many college students land in remedial courses, how charter schools really stack up against traditional ones, what happens to achievement and graduation rates when a school is forced through turnaround reform. The questions were unglamorous. The answers were not.
In 2015 he joined AEI. Four years later he published a deep study on the evolution of career and technical education from 1982 to 2013 - the kind of long-horizon, who-actually-reads-the-data work that quietly reshapes how a field talks about itself. Then 2020 happened, and the careful researcher became, briefly, one of the most cited people in American education.
The district-level map of how American schools operated through the pandemic - closures, masking, and now the chronic absenteeism the closures left behind. Federal agencies leaned on it because they had nothing better.
AEI's education podcast, hosted by Malkus. He sits across from the researchers, practitioners, and policymakers running the system and asks the questions a former teacher would. Bring evidence.
The crisis the closures fertilized. More than 1.3 million students walked out of public schools, and the ones who stayed showed up less. He keeps the empty-desk count in front of the public.
School choice, career and technical education, Advanced Placement, standardized testing, government contracting. Different topics, identical discipline - find the dataset, then form the opinion.
In January 2024 he testified before the House on public school pandemic response and post-pandemic challenges - turning years of tracking into testimony.
His work runs in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, USA Today, the LA Times, National Affairs, and National Review. The bylines change; the receipts don't.
For a strange stretch of 2020 and 2021, the most basic fact about American education was missing: nobody could say, with confidence, which schools were actually open. States reported differently. Districts changed plans week to week. National numbers were guesses dressed as statistics. Into that vacuum came a tracker built one district at a time, logging remote, hybrid, and in-person status across roughly 8,600 districts - the closest thing the country had to ground truth.
The findings were not comfortable for anyone. Districts that stayed remote longer saw students struggle more academically. They also bled enrollment. After the first pandemic year, K-12 public school enrollment fell about 2.7 percent, and the districts slowest to reopen were the slowest to recover. More than 1.3 million students left public schools nationwide - some to private schools, some to homeschooling, some simply gone from the rolls. Malkus's point was uncomfortably specific: the choice to stay closed had a cost, and the data could name it.
He carried the same evidence-first posture into the masking debate, asking what the country had actually learned rather than what it wished it had. And when the Nation's Report Card showed the pandemic's academic fallout, his work helped connect the dots between remote learning and the score drops. None of it was offered as ideology. It was offered as measurement - which, in a polarized moment, was its own kind of provocation.
The pandemic work did not come from nowhere. At the American Institutes for Research, Malkus spent six years leading teams through the national longitudinal datasets that most people cite but few actually read. He looked at how many college students get shunted into remedial courses before they can earn credit. He compared charter schools to traditional public schools without flinching at where the comparison landed. He tracked what happens to student achievement and graduation rates when a struggling school is pushed through the machinery of turnaround reform - and whether the reform delivers what its champions promise.
That habit of long-horizon, source-level analysis became his signature at AEI. His 2019 study traced the evolution of career and technical education across three decades, from 1982 to 2013 - the kind of patient accounting that lets a field see how much it has quietly drifted from the story it tells about itself. He works the same way on Advanced Placement, on school choice, on government contracting: find the dataset, respect what it says, then form the opinion. The order matters. Reverse it and you get advocacy. Keep it and you get a witness whose testimony holds up.
It is also why his podcast works. On The Report Card, Malkus brings the same posture to the conversation that he brings to a spreadsheet - curious, unbullied, willing to follow a finding wherever it goes. The guests are the people shaping K-12 and higher education, and the format gives him room to ask the second and third questions, the ones that separate a slogan from a result. Updated semimonthly and carried on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube, it has become a regular stop for anyone who would rather argue from evidence than from the comment section.
Districts' failure to return to in-person learning following the pandemic's first year proved detrimental to their ability to rebound.— Nat Malkus, on the enrollment exodus
His degree is in historical studies, not statistics. He came to education data through a classroom and a history seminar, not a quant track - which may be why he reads numbers like a narrator.
His motto - “God I trust: all others bring data” - is a sharpened riff on the old engineering line, “In God we trust; all others must bring data.”
The Tracker changed its own mission. Built to watch closures, it pivoted to chasing chronic absenteeism - following the very problem the closures created.
When federal agencies needed district-level pandemic data, they used his. The White House, the Department of Education, the CDC, and the Federal Reserve all pulled from the same source.
He spent four years teaching before two decades of studying teaching. The empathy and the skepticism both trace back to the same middle school hallway.
Education debates run on stories - the inspiring teacher, the failing school, the miracle program. Malkus's wager is that the country can do better than vibes. Ground the argument in district-level evidence, keep the public looking at the recovery that isn't finished, and refuse to let chronic absenteeism quietly become the new normal. That is the work. The data is just how he keeps score.