In 2019, my friend Jal Mehta and his colleague Sarah Fine, thinking about whether high schools could adopt some of the best qualities of summer camp, wrote:
Is America a racist country? Or the greatest nation on earth? Such a divisive question leaves little room for the complexity, richness, and nuance of our country’s past and present. But it’s the sort of question that often seems to get asked in today’s polarized environment. Small wonder, then, that the tattered condition of civics and U.S. history education constitutes a national crisis.
This year’s Wonkathon is over, and the results are in! 2021’s Wisest Wonk:
The overriding problem with President Biden’s education scheme, as presented in his grandiose “American Families” package, is its focus on more schooling rather than more learning.
On this week’s podcast, Doug Tuthill, president of Step Up for Students, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss the potential impact of and lessons from Florida’s new school choice expansion. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines how users engage with professional learning that takes place online.
Eli Broad, who passed away late last month at the age of eighty-seven, long sought to rectify the excessively bureaucratic, overly politicized, and woefully underperforming big city school district. But should he have pivoted instead to charter schools?
According to U.S. Census data, 23 percent of students in America’s K–12 schools were either first- or second-generation immigrant children in 2015. That was up from 11 percent in 1990 and 7 percent in 1980.
Here’s what these high school students went through as they tried to weather life during the pandemic. —New York Times Universal preschool, if not implemented correctly, could have unintended, negative consequences.
Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2021 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to address a fundamental and challenging question: “How can schools best address students’ mental health needs coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic without shortchanging academic instruction?”
Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2021 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to address a fundamental and challenging question: “How can schools best address students’ mental health needs coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic without shortchanging academic instruction?”
Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2021 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to address a fundamental and challenging question: “How can schools best address students’ mental health needs coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic without shortchanging academic instruction?”
Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2021 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to address a fundamental and challenging question: “How can schools best address students’ mental health needs coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic without shortchanging academic instruction?”
A growing body of evidence indicates that many students will enter the 2021–22 school year with a substantial amount of unfinished learning. The tendency of educators may be to use benchmark assessments to determine the extent of unfinished learning and then group those students according to how far below grade level they’ve fallen.
Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2021 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to address a fundamental and challenging question: “How can schools best address students’ mental health needs coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic without shortchanging academic instruction?”
Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2021 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to address a fundamental and challenging question: “How can schools best address students’ mental health needs coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic without shortchanging academic instruction?”
The resistance of teachers unions to return to the classroom in urban areas, despite early signals from health agencies that it was relatively safe to reopen schools and the knowledge that in-person learning is essential to the success of our children, has brought attention to what many astute observers have noticed for some time.
Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2021 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to address a fundamental and challenging question: “How can schools best address students’ mental health needs coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic without shortchanging academic instruction?”
Now more than ever, high-ability students from low-income families will need specialized attention and guidance from their parents and teachers. Many less-resourced families have experienced illness or personal and financial instability, and low-income students’ schooling may have experienced long interruptions due to a lack of resources at home.
Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2021 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to address a fundamental and challenging question: “How can schools best address students’ mental health needs coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic without shortchanging academic instruction?”
Two decades into what was supposed to be a two-year public service stint in education, I’ve learned a few lessons as a teacher, a writer, and an ed reformer. They include the following: teaching has to be a job that ordinary people can do well; innovation is an overrated virtue; and there’s no such thing in education as a magic bullet—but there might be magic buckshot. Read more.
After a fantastic seven-year run at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, our colleague Robert Pondiscio is heading to the more spacious pasture of the American Enterprise Institute, where he will join Rick Hess and many of our other friends, colleagues, and partners.
As U.S. schools reopen in the fall, a year and a half after nearly all of them closed due to the pandemic panic, what should be different? What needs to change if kids are actually to catch up? What’s important to retrieve from pre-Covid days? And what other changes, changes that should have been made pre-Covid, is there now a rare opportunity to initiate?
Between 1940 and 2018, the number of public school districts in the U.S. declined from 117,108 to 13,551 due to consolidation, whereby smaller districts merged with each other or with a larger neighbor to boost economies of scale in the resource-intensive business of running schools.
Ever since their creation and adoption over a decade ago, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) have been hotly debated and intensely villainized. The backlash to the CCSS initially took many advocates and supporters by surprise, as state education standards have existed in the U.S.
On this week’s podcast, Howard Husock, adjunct scholar in Domestic Policy Studies at AEI, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss his new report, “The case for breaking up big urban school systems.” On the Research Minute, Ambe
Here are some thoroughly debunked—but hard-to-kill—myths about schooling. —Educational Leadership Federal education policy needs to give teachers the tools and flexibility to address pandemic learning loss through acceleration and remediation.
Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2021 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to address a fundamental and challenging question: “How can schools best address students’ mental health needs coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic without shortchanging academic instruction?”
Meeting the needs of the diverse and growing number of English learners (ELs) is a pressing challenge for many schools, districts, and charter management organizations. Although many general education programs and curricula do not provide all of the specific supports ELs need, pull-out programs for most students generally do more harm than good.
