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Explaining Achievement Gaps: The Role of Socioeconomic Factors
Racial achievement gaps in schools are well documented and remain a significant cause of concern in education. Troubling too is that the role of socioeconomic disparities in mediating these gaps remains unresolved.
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Developing School Leaders: What the U.S. Can Learn from England's Model
The myriad challenges facing school principals in the United States have been well documented, including limited opportunities for distributed leadership, inadequate training, and a lackluster pipeline for new leaders. Recently, the Fordham Institute teamed up with the London-based Education Foundation to seek a better understanding of England’s recent efforts to revamp school leadership.
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Common Core and America's High-Achieving Students
Gadfly editorial by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Amber M. Northern
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Education for Upward Mobility
At the Education for Upward Mobility conference, the Thomas B.
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Building a Lattice for School Leadership
Over the past decade, the English government has revamped that country’s approach to school leadership. At the center of the reform is the sensible idea that school leadership needs to be a team endeavor. While not a new idea—there’s been for years plenty of discussion about “distributed leadership” on both sides of the pond—the Brits got busy actually making it happen as opposed to jawboning about it. Central to their leadership structure is the formalization of three levels of school leaders, each with distinct roles and responsibilities: headteachers who lead schools (equivalent to the principal’s role in the U.S.), senior leaders or deputy heads who assist the headteacher (similar to the vice principal role in American education but...
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Redefining the School District in Michigan
What happens when policymakers create statewide school districts to turn around their worst-performing public schools?
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Metro D.C. School Spending Explorer
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute set out to answer a basic (yet complicated) question: how much does each school in the D.C. metro area spend on day-to-day operations for each student it enrolls? In the Metro D.C.
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The Hidden Half: School Employees Who Don't Teach
The number of non-teaching staff in the United States (those employed by school systems but not serving as classroom teachers) has grown by 130 percent since 1970. Non-teachers—more than three million strong—now comprise half of the public school workforce. Their salaries and benefits absorb one-quarter of current education expenditures.
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Lacking Leaders: The Challenges of Principal Recruitment, Selection, and Placement
A school’s leader matters enormously to its success and that of its students and teachers. But how well are U.S. districts identifying, recruiting, selecting, and placing the best possible candidates in principals’ offices? To what extent do their practices enable them to find and hire great school leaders? To what degree is the principal’s job itself designed to attract outstanding candidates?
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State Accountability in the Transition to Common Core
The Common Core is at a critical juncture. While many surveys show that support for the standards themselves remains strong, implementation has not been without major challenges.
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Expanding the Education Universe: A Fifty-State Strategy for Course Choice
After twenty years of expanding school-choice options, state leaders, educators, and families have a new tool: course choice, a strategy for students to learn from unconventional providers that might range from top-tier universities or innovative community colleges to local employers, labs, or hospitals.
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The State Education Agency: At the Helm, Not the Oar
In recent years, policymakers and reform advocates have viewed State Education Agencies (SEAs) as the lead organizations for implementing sweeping reforms and initiatives in K–12 education—everything from Race to the Top grants and federal waivers to teacher-evaluation systems and online schools.
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Does School Board Leadership Matter?
Are the nation’s 90,000-plus school board members critical players in enhancing student learning? Are they part of the problem? Are they harmless bystanders? Among the takeaways are the following: