Conservatives: Let’s focus on winning policy, not just winning politics
There’s been lots of jabber lately about what the upset win by Glenn Youngkin in the recent Virginia gubernatorial race means for education policy.
There’s been lots of jabber lately about what the upset win by Glenn Youngkin in the recent Virginia gubernatorial race means for education policy.
Recent years have seen a move to eliminate homework and relax grading standards, and struggles by teachers and students to do their work during the pandemic have accelerated this trend. Some educators and commentators, however, fret that these new practices amount to lowering standards.
Editor’s note: This was first published by Newsweek.
Education for high achievers has come under siege in blue cities and states as the national focus has shifted to racial equity in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. But such attacks, even when well-intentioned, are misguided. They target a problem’s symptom rather than its cause, and in doing so, harm students and defy parents.
Once a year, parents of young children can look forward to their kids coming home from school with turkeys drawn by hand and heartwarming lists of what they are grateful for, with loving parents and helpful teachers usually at the top of the list. This happens just before families pack up and travel to be together and give thanks for all the blessings of the year.
I’m a rather dreadful cook. Nonetheless, in the summer, with easy access to farm-fresh vegetables and the internet’s profusion of recipes, my wan table occasionally turns into something resembling a feast. And this phenomenon works in reverse.
In 2012, Tennessee lawmakers created the Statewide Dual-Credit program (SDC) to help more students earn college credit while completing high school.
In early November, the Code.org Advocacy Coalition, the Computer Science Teachers Association, and the Expanding Computing Education Pathways Alliance teamed up to release the 2021 State of Computer Science Education.
Contemporary education has become too technocratic and divorced from virtue. This is a disservice to students because it robs them of what a classical education provides: the tools students need to succeed, not just academically and professionally, but in the deep and abiding sense of being able to flourish as free and good human beings.
Two charter networks, Uplift Education and Distinctive Schools, have provided models for supporting social-emotional learning (SEL) that other schools should emulate.
It is not a controversial statement to say that the debate over critical race theory in schools has shed more heat than light. This is not surprising. When a relatively obscure and arcane academic field suddenly becomes a high-profile political football, hotly debated on cable news shoutfests, it is almost certainly because it has been reduced to bumper-sticker simplicity.
Gifted education has been a much-debated issue
Editor’s note: We're happy to introduce Jennifer Frey, who will be writing regularly for the Fordham Institute over the next year. She is an associate professor at the University of South Carolina, where she focuses on virtue ethics.
A story that became a flashpoint in national conversations around the effects of “CRT bans” is reaching its denouement: This past week, a hearing officer appointed to adjudicate the case ruled that the Sullivan County, Tennessee, school board was justified in
Schools have been concerned with character formation and values since Plato sat with students under an olive tree. Today’s “social and emotional learning” is consistent with this age-old impulse. But in its form and function it can represent something different—and more worrisome—than its progenitors, especially when employed without full discussion of its priorities and methods.
Under federal law, states must assess students annually in reading and math in grades 3–8 and at least once during high school, as well as testing science once in elementary, middle, and high school.
During the first full school year after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, enrollment in U.S. public schools fell by about 1.1 million students, or 2 percent of prior K–12 enrollment.
Results of a recent survey published by Amazon’s Future Engineer offshoot show several disconnects between the interests, experiences, and aspirations of U.S. students in regard to computer science.
Mayor de Blasio is axing New York City’s long-standing gifted education programs. He plans to replace them with something else, but his proposal is almost entirely wrong. Fortunately, Eric Adams, who’s almost certain to replace him in January, has a vision of gifted education that’s mostly right, and he’ll enter office in time to fix de Blasio’s blunders.
Do students have a right to a high-quality education? A proposed ballot initiative filed in California last Thursday says yes.
As one paper put it, there is a “paucity of robust research” on project-based learning. Yet in the ed-school world and in many journals and professional organizations, it’s often touted as a pedagogical gold standard.
The persistence of racial segregation between and within school districts has motivated some in the school choice community to develop diverse-by-design charters (DBDCs), which are defined as schools without a 70 percent majority of students of any race or ethnicity, plus 30 to 70 percent low-income pupils.
How do we know if a school district is doing one of its most basic jobs—teaching students to read? That’s one of the main questions the California Reading Coalition, which I helped organize earlier this year, set out to answer with the California Reading Report Card, released in September.
A recent Wall Street Journal article set off a pundit-palooza on the topic of the female advantage in higher education, with many suggesting that young men have “given up on college.” But American students who are academically well-prepared for college continue to matriculate and graduate. It’s just that many more of them are female. The reason for that starts in kindergarten.
With a new school year underway, parents, teachers, and children anxiously return to classrooms amidst an ongoing coronavirus pandemic. But this year, school board members, teachers, academics, politicians, and parents continue to argue over critical race theory and how to enact its version of equity.
Education news is pretty depressing these days. Last week’s feed included articles about cafeteria staffing shortages and supply chain concerns, reporting about declining enrollment, predictions about resignations due to vaccine mandates, findings on teacher stress, reporting about an uptick in student fights, and lots of documentation of demonization in adults’ battles over mask policy.
On September 12, 1962, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the request of the New York Civil War Commission at the Centennial Celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Far too many high-achieving children are drifting through middle and high school. Despite their potential, they don’t end up taking AP exams, achieving high marks on their ACTs, or going to four-year colleges. This limits their ability to move up the social ladder, threatens U.S. economic competitiveness, and derails our aspirations for a more just society. We must stop buying into the false assumption that high-achieving kids will do fine on their own.
After more than eighteen months of pandemic-induced commotion to education, data continue to roll in regarding various negative impacts on young people.