Reading and math outcomes during Covid-19
The pandemic has now disrupted two consecutive school years, and its effects are certain to linger for years to come. Unfortunately, some students will be more impacted than others.
The pandemic has now disrupted two consecutive school years, and its effects are certain to linger for years to come. Unfortunately, some students will be more impacted than others.
Editor’s note: This is the first post in a five-part series about how to effectively scale-up high-dosage tutoring.
Here in Fordham’s pages, I’ve previously written about the challenge of Covid-19 learning losses at the macro level. In this article, I focus on the micro level.
For those of us who still believe that results-based school accountability is an essential part of the education renewal that America sorely needs, not many things are looking great this week.
Two years ago, Seth Gershenson and Fordham published Grade Inflation in High Schools, groundbreaking research examining the relationship between students’ Algebra I course grades and end-of-course (EOC) test results in North Carolina.
A perennial complaint about holding students accountable through grades and test scores is that these mechanisms are biased against already disadva
Education wasn’t explicitly on the national ballot in 2020, but education is always on the ballot, even when you don’t see it. Now that the election is behind us, education reformers can focus again on states and communities, where most of the important decisions about K–12 education get made.
As we previously saw at the 4th grade and 8th grade levels, the just-released 2019 12 grade NAEP results were mostly flat or down. But we already knew from the 2015 results that this cohort of students entered high school performing below their older peers.
A recent study from Brown University’s Matthew A. Kraft and John P. Papay and Harvard’s Olivia L. Chi uses nine years of administrative data from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina to examine teacher improvement through the lens of principal evaluations.
On Wednesday, the government will release the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress scores for twelfth grade students.
Contrary to much public rhetoric, the evidence for expanding charter schools in urban areas is stronger than ever. To be sure, the research is less positive for charters operating outside of the nation’s urban centers. And multiple studies suggest that internet-based schools and charters that serve mostly middle-class students, perform worse than their district counterparts, at least on traditional test-score-based measures. But charters needn’t work everywhere to be of service to society.
Before the coming of the pandemic, pre-K was a hot topic.
After the release of a new study I co-authored for the Thomas B.
Two big public-school systems in the D.C. area are on the verge of letting their zeal for equity and racial justice lead to consequences they may end up regretting. Fairfax County, which operates one of America’s best known and most esteemed “exam schools,” is may use a lottery, rather than test scores and other quality measures, for admissions. And Loudoun County is considering revising its rules for “professional conduct” by school staff to punish employees—teachers included—in truly Orwellian ways.
Proponents of test-based accountability generally believe that robust systems—those that set high bars for achieving success, generate copious and transparent data, and impose substantive awards or consequences based on progress (or lack thereof)—are enough to boost student achievement. Another school of thought posits that more funding to schools does likewise.
If America is serious about wanting kids to become better readers, our elementary schools need to spend more time teaching social studies rather than doubling-down on “reading comprehension.” This may seem counterintuitive, but it’s the key takeaway from our new study. It’s also especially important for girls and those from lower-income and/or non-English-speaking homes.
A new study published last week by Fordham, Social Studies Instruction and Reading Comprehension: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, suggests that to become better readers, elementary students should spend more time on social studies.
There are two aspects of standardized testing to which opponents tend to object: The testing itself and how the results are used.
Ohio legislators recently introduced Senate Bill 358, which proposes to cancel all state testing scheduled for spring 2021. The provision calling for the cancellation of state exams would only go into effect if the state receives an assessment waiver from the U.S.
On this week’s podcast, Colin Sharkey, executive director of the Association of American Educators, joins Mike Petril
On this week’s podcast, Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, joins Mike Petrilli to discuss why politics seems to be
In the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic, a group of researchers at Arizona State University (ASU) surveyed students at that school to determine the impact of Covid-19 on their current and future plans—including their enrollment decisions, study habits, remote learning experiences, labor market participation, and more.
Michael Petrilli has written that, “when it comes to education, conservatives should stand for excellence.” So should liberals, and I am a longtime activist on the Democrats’ left wing.
Remote learning did not go well in the spring. What we need, then, are concrete recommendations for how to significantly improve the remote learning experience for students, teachers, and families. Fordham’s new report, Schooling Covid-19, provides just that, with ideas culled from educators who achieved striking success in the face of the viral challenge this spring—educators from some of the nation’s leading charter school networks
Eventually we’ll learn whether our mass experiment in “remote learning” leads to durable changes in the U.S. education system, such as more students taking some of their courses online or opting out altogether from school as we know it. In the meantime, the massive digital footprint this experiment is creating can provide fresh insights into how students spend their days.
The Covid-19 pandemic has caused plenty of problems in education, but a recently published study offers a sliver of good news for schools that—despite recent budget constraints—may soon find themselves in need of additional teachers to make social distancing feasible
Equity need not be pitted against excellence. But let’s not pretend there are no trade-offs. The two are in tension, if not actual conflict, in many matters of policy and practice. We can assume that progressives will always take the “equity” side. So if conservatives don’t make excellence a priority—be it in matters organizational, academic, or related to extracurricular activities and other nonacademic pursuits—nobody will.
Perhaps it is only when we lose something that we realize its true value. A recent study by Matthew Kraft and Manuel Monti-Nussbaum finds that in-person teaching time in the classroom—now a precious commodity that many students and teachers won’t experience again for a while—was not properly safeguarded when we had it.