Displaying 1081-1110 of 1505 results
Commentary
9.9.2020
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Months without play dates, hugs from grandma, and trips to the library

Victoria McDougald

Around six months ago, stay-at-home orders and school closures upended normal life for children of all ages across the United States. The loss of academic learning has been a huge concern, but we’re not talking enough about the implications of long-term “social distancing” for babies, toddlers, and preschoolers.

Commentary
9.9.2020
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Rural districts’ Covid-19 response

Jessica Poiner

The National Center for Rural Education Research Networks (NCRERN) is a recently established organization out of Harvard that studies and supports a network of rural school districts in New York and Ohio.

Commentary
9.2.2020
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance

Donald Trump, patriotic history, and the federal role

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

The Republican party has no 2020 platform. They refer people looking for one to the 2016 version. That goes for education along with everything else. The Trump-Pence campaign website doesn’t display policy positions, either, though there’s a section on “promises kept” that includes one skimpy page on education.

Commentary
8.28.2020
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance

The renewal of a bipartisan national bargain on education reform

Kalman R. Hettleman

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.

Commentary
8.26.2020
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Lessons on remote learning from leading charter networks

Michael J. Petrilli

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

Commentary
8.26.2020
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

A mad dash to the curriculum bazaar

Dale Chu

If you do a quick search on Teacherspayteachers.com, one of the most popular sources for online teaching materials, you’ll see that “distance learning resources” are now front and center.

Commentary
8.26.2020
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Let's evaluate schools on the assignments they ask students to complete

Michael J. Petrilli

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.

Commentary
8.26.2020
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

How the coronavirus recession may improve teacher quality

Jessica Poiner

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

Commentary
8.25.2020
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Listen to parents about when and how to reopen schools

Bruno V. Manno

Lost in the political noise of the debate on reopening schools is what parents think about this complicated puzzle. While their varied responses reflect this complexity, there is important consensus on many issues—though significant disagreement on one.

Report
8.25.2020
Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Schooling Covid-19: Lessons from leading charter networks from their transition to remote learning

Gregg Vanourek

Last spring, the Covid-19 pandemic upended routines for over 56 million students and challenged more than 3.7 million teachers in over 130,000 schools nationwide to continue educating kids in an online format. This transition to “virtual learning” was understandably trying for all educators, schools, and districts, but some managed to do far better than others.

Commentary
8.19.2020
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

When it comes to education, conservatives should stand for excellence

Michael J. Petrilli

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.

Commentary
8.19.2020
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance

Why conservatives should care about curriculum

Robert Pondiscio

Editor’s note: This was first published as part of the American Enterprise Institute’s Sketching a New Conservative Agenda Series.

Commentary
8.19.2020
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Short classroom interruptions add up to big time losses

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D.

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.

Commentary
8.19.2020
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Most parents want to cancel school until the spring, finds a new Harris Poll study

Brandon L. Wright

A newly released study by The Harris Poll fielded during the first week of August finds that 57 percent of parents of school-age children “wish schools would just cancel this fall and re-open in the spring.” An even higher percentage of fathers—63 percent—say so.

Commentary
8.18.2020
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

The ACT and SAT don’t just measure learning. They drive it, too.

Travis Koutsoubos-Miles

Following numerous Covid-19-related testing cancellations, over 50 percent of four-year colleges and universities have, for fall 2021, gone “test-optional,” an admission policy providing the choice to applicants of whether to submit their ACT and SAT scores.

Commentary
8.18.2020
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

A test for the test: Moving the AP exams online

Jeffrey Olson, Trevor Packer

For more than sixty years, Advanced Placement exams have been an “in person” affair. AP exams have always been administered in schools with paper test booklets, then hand-graded at massive gatherings of teachers and college professors.

Commentary
8.18.2020
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Shine a light on paths to postsecondary opportunity

Paige Kowalski, Ryan Reyna

Between learning loss from an interrupted spring semester and new pandemic-related financial struggles that families are facing, many students are canceling, delaying, or changing their plans to enroll in higher education.

Commentary
8.17.2020
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

6 ways districts can deliver quality virtual instruction

Nik Osborne

The Covid-19 pandemic brought sudden and near total disruption to the K–12 system. Almost every single school in the country had to figure out how to serve students at home. Few succeeded.

Commentary
8.13.2020
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Covid-19 learning losses: Dark days lie ahead

Tom Coyne

In the Center for Reinventing Public Education’s latest report, I was shocked to read that, “less than a third of reviewed district reopening plans reference intervention strategies to help targeted students make up learning they may have lost during spring or summer.”

Commentary
8.12.2020
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Reopening decisions are mostly a matter of trust

Michael J. Petrilli

Many low-income parents and parents of color are in solidarity with most teachers in not wanting their children to return to school buildings until the pandemic has passed. One obvious explanation is that low-income communities and communities of color have been much harder hit by the virus than their more advantaged peers. But there’s likely something else: Many low-income and working-class parents simply don’t trust their kids’ schools to keep them safe.

Commentary
8.12.2020
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Another indictment of America’s approach to reading instruction

Dale Chu

The tremor that you felt last week was the dropping of a new Emily Hanford radio documentary, “What the Words Say: Many kids struggle with reading—and children of color are far less likely to get the help they need.” Since she started reporting on reading several years ago, Hanford has kept up the pressure on the

Commentary
8.12.2020
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Private School Choice, Teachers & School Leaders

Teacher unions vs. private schools

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

The private schools in Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live, are breathing a sigh of relief that, after much sturm und drang this past week, they’re back in charge of their own decisions about whether and how to re-open.

Commentary
8.12.2020
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Schools’ responses to Covid-19 in spring 2020

Jeff Murray

Research on education during the coronavirus pandemic has been robust. Much of it is table setting for longer-term analysis on virtual curricula, teaching effectiveness, and student achievement. But there is also important ephemera being studied that will form a more immediate image of a difficult and chaotic time.

Commentary
8.11.2020
Governance

Kamala Harris and education reform

Dale Chu

Today, in what ended up being a somewhat anticlimactic announcement, Joe Biden tapped California Senator Kamala Harris to be his running mate. Back in May, I examined Harris’s views on education, along with other top prospects, and here’s what I had to say about hers:

Book
8.7.2020
School Finance, Governance

Getting the Most Bang for the Education Buck

Brandon L. Wright

We spend too much time talking about how much to spend on schools but not enough on how those dollars are spent. Covid-19 has made this situation worse, as schools confront massive, looming budget shortfalls and the challenges of remote learning and public health. That’s on top of familiar issues like pensions, special education, technology, and all the rest. This book offers a workable path through this maze.

Commentary
8.7.2020
Facilities, Teachers & School Leaders

Seven steps to design safe and healthy school drop-off and entry routines

Eric Tucker, Sarah Haga, Aaron Daly, Sarah Pactor

As we prepare to reopen our schools, school administrators must examine our back-to-school rituals and upgrade plans for re-entry to account for the challenges presented by Covid-19. In particular, schools must create and clearly communicate the processes for school drop-off and arrival that support social distancing and wellness measures.