Today’s light-speed media cycle means that stories often come and go in an instant, making it difficult to determine how much a piece resonates with readers and whether it has staying power. That’s one of the things that makes lists like this so illuminating and fun to create and peruse. One noteworthy takeaway, for example: We mostly write about policy, but the list is dominated by posts about practice.
These exercises also offer a valuable snapshot of the year that was—what we cared about, how that changed, what we got right, and where we were wrong. And what a year 2024 was, from continued efforts to recover the learning students lost during the pandemic, to big shifts in the way reading is taught, to worries about the role and presence of cellphones in school, to second-guessing permissive approaches to student behavior, to ongoing debates over curriculum and testing—and of course, the presidential election.
All of this is covered in what follows—the Fordham Institute’s twenty most-read articles of 2024.
20. How to implement a cellphone ban in schools, Amber M. Northern, July 25, 2024
A packed session at this year’s National Charter Schools Conference shed valuable light on the difficulties schools are having in their efforts to ban cellphones. Three lessons stood out: over-communicate before you take action, nail down the process by which phones will be collected and returned, and don’t exempt teachers’ phones.
19. Is classical education research-based?, Daniel Buck, June 6, 2024
Classical education has surged in popularity, with at least 264 new schools cropping up since 2019, a host of think pieces analyzing its growth, and state-level policy shifts that bolster its expansion. This approach to schooling has all the right ingredients for a research-backed educational initiative, but the movement would benefit from more close studies of its effectiveness.
17. 7 thoughts about elite college students who can’t read books, Michael J. Petrilli, October 4, 2024
Rose Horowitch’s October article in The Atlantic generated a lot of buzz. Titled “The elite college students who can't read books,” it lays the blame primarily on high schools for not assigning novels to their students, shifting instead to brief excerpts or short-form writing activities. Horowitch certainly identifies a serious cause for concern, but her piece deserves a “close read” nonetheless, especially because it’s already leading some advocates to dunk on education reform, and is based on shaky empirical evidence. Here are seven thoughts about elite college students who can’t read books.
16. Vance vs. Pence: How Trump’s VP picks compare on education, Dale Chu, July 18, 2024
Back in July, Donald Trump chose Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate, signaling a doubling down on his MAGA brand. As far as education is concerned, this meant tapping into broad parental discontent over educational and education-related issues, many of which were turbocharged by the pandemic.
15. Our schools have lost their sense of purpose, Tim Daly, March 28, 2024
Teacher absenteeism epitomizes our failed pandemic recovery, with schools stuck in a downward spiral of achievement and lost purpose. The problem will lessen when schools again become exciting, vibrant, successful places where teachers want to spend their time. Students will also stop missing so many days. It’s been four years. The clock’s ticking.
14. Doing educational equity right: The homework gap, Michael J. Petrilli, February 22, 2024
If we care about doing educational equity right, we need to call the bluff of those who want to lower expectations for students’ effort “because equity.” Those so-called advocates need to do some of their own homework—and penance—as well.
13. America’s education system is a mess, and it’s students who are paying the price, David Steiner, May 30, 2024
The fundamental cause of America’s poor educational outcomes is that policy leaders have eroded the instructional core and designed our system for failure. The unique sense of achievement that a student experiences when she or he masters a rigorous skill, digs into deep knowledge, creates a piece of writing or art, completes a challenging science assignment or piece of music—this is all being washed away. Read more
12. A new lost generation: Disengaged, aimless, and adrift, Robert Pondiscio, May 2, 2024
During the 2023–24 school year, Pondiscio visited schools and talked to educators about faltering attendance and learning loss associated with the pandemic, which vaporized twenty years of achievement gains at a stroke. This left him with a nagging sense that we’re misreading chronic absenteeism almost entirely. It fits a larger pattern of young people absenting themselves not just from school, but from life.
11. The evidence for phone bans mounts, Daniel Buck, May 9, 2024
Countless districts, states, and even entire countries have announced and tried to implement phone bans. After a few semesters with these policies, researchers have now had sufficient time to study their effects, and results from those studies are starting to roll in.
10. Teachers are fed up with no-consequence discipline, Daniel Buck, January 18, 2024
PBS ran a story last year in which teachers raised serious concerns about school discipline: “Hitting, biting, spitting, throwing furniture” are common in too many classrooms nowadays. The causes of this misbehavior spike are multi-faceted. They include pandemic-era disruptions, screen addictions, trends in permissive parenting, and more. Fixing this requires many solutions. Here are six.
9. How to ban phones effectively, Daniel Buck, January 11, 2024
Whether schools should ban phones has been a hot topic of debate recently, and the growing consensus is that the correct answer is a resounding “yes.” A hundred different policies for such bans can be imagined. But if it’s to succeed, any such policy must be based on three fundamental precepts: universality, enforcement, and a concurrent explanation to both students and parents—a PR campaign of sorts.
8. The rise and fall of Finland mania, part two: Why did scores plummet?, Tim Daly, January 18, 2024
Part one of this series demonstrated how a streak of outstanding results on international assessments in the early 2000s made Finland the education world’s envy. Waves of besotted visitors soaked up Finnish wisdom. But then it got weird. This second part retraces the decline of the world’s most celebrated school system and sort through explanations and lessons.
7. The “case for curriculum” is about reducing teachers’ workload, Robert Pondiscio, April 11, 2024
We need nearly four million women and men to staff America’s K–12 classrooms, and a number that large means teachers will be, by definition, people of average abilities. The case for curriculum is therefore in equal measure the case for making the classroom teacher’s job doable by the teachers we have—not, as Donald Rumsfeld might have put it, the teachers we wish we had or hope to have someday.
6. How Kamala Harris can move to the center on education, Michael J. Petrilli, July 24, 2024
This was written when the Democratic Party switched it presidential nominee to Vice President Harris. Petrilli argued that she—despite being your typical progressive Democrat from California—had an unusual opportunity to shed some of that political baggage. Indicating that she will be open to education reform would have been one of the best ways to do so.
5. Why are teachers missing so much school?, Tim Daly, March 15, 2024
Local and national news outlets have binged on coverage of student absenteeism. But teacher absenteeism—which is arguably more important because of its broader effect on student learning—is the problem that shall not be named. The drivers of this absenteeism are interwoven with a passel of other pandemic-era problems, however, and it’s unlikely we can solve any of them in isolation.
4. We’ve made teaching impossible or: What I learned talking to 200 teachers, Daniel Buck, April 4, 2024
In March, Buck asked teachers to send him direct messages on X to vent their frustrations. Within hours, he received almost 200 of them, expressing not just frustration but also hope, humor, fatalism, and quite a bit of hesitancy to converse with a complete stranger on the internet. These messages represent a very thin slice of the teaching workforce, but a thin slice supplies at least a taste of the whole pie.
3. What’s wrong with boys in school?, Tom Sarrouf, Jr., July 11, 2024
Boys are not faring as well as girls in school, who outperform them in terms of readiness in kindergarten, GPA, and increasingly, college enrollment and degree attainment. When it comes to grades, for example, two-thirds of the top 10 percent are girls, while two-thirds of the bottom 10 percent are boys. What’s going on?
2. The case for standardized testing, Victoria McDougald, August 1, 2024
For decades, we’ve used standardized tests to measure student achievement and progress in U.S. schools. And that’s because they offer a host of important benefits to students, parents, educators, and policymakers. Here are six.
1. The latest math fad is another excuse to teach nothing, Daniel Buck, June 27, 2024
In the previous half-decade, American education has had to reckon with the reality that generations of students struggled to read because pseudoscientific approaches to early literacy proliferated; teachers just didn’t gel with the explicit nature of phonics instruction. Fordham’s most-read post of 2024 argued that we’re about to repeat those same mistakes in with math instruction.
