On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Dale Chu, senior visiting fellow at Fordham and independent education consultant, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to make the case for K–2 standardized testing. He wrote about this same topic earlier this month, noting that widespread distaste for such assessments would make implementing this change challenging. But he argued that the alternative is to continue burying our heads in the sand about our children’s most formative years, which would be unfair to students and teachers. Then on the Research Minute, Amber Northern discusses a CALDER study examining the effects of remedial English language arts courses in middle school on postsecondary outcomes.
Amber's Research Minute:
Umut Özek, “The Effects of Middle School Remediation on Postsecondary Success: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Florida,” CALDER Working Papers (September 2021).
Recommended content:
- Follow Dale on Twitter at @Dale_Chu.
- Dale’s points summarized his Flypaper post, “The case for K–2 testing.”
- For why we need better data on kindergarteners, see Mike’s Fordham article on literacy gaps, “The college gender gap begins in kindergarten,” and also a previous podcast episode, “The Education Gadfly Show: Early warning: Kindergarten readiness skills are trending downward.”
- The study that Amber reviewed on the Research Minute: Umut Özek, “The Effects of Middle School Remediation on Postsecondary Success: Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Florida,” CALDER Working Papers (September 2021).
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