Creating Sustainable Teacher Career Trajectories: A 21st Century Imperative
The greatest challenge to staffing the nation's classrooms with the most motivated, highly qualified teachers is making teaching an attractive profession with career opportunities for those who seek those challenges.
Traversing the Teacher-Evaluation Terrain
Join the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, National Council on Teacher Quality, and School Improvement Network for a double feature on the latest teacher-evaluation research and a lively discussion about the best way forward on teacher-evaluation reform.
Common Core & Curriculum Controversies
Experts empty a barrel of Common Core myths and rumors. Gadfly Studios
Re-Imagining Teaching: Five Structures to Transform the Profession
Teacher preparation, evaluation, and the characteristics of effective teaching are at the center of contemporary education research and policymaking.
What (ed-reformer) parents want
What (ed-reformer) parents want. Read What Parents Want: Education Preferences and Trade-offs and take the quiz to see if you fall into one of our parent categories.
Embracing the Common Core - Panel Discussion
Panelists Include: Stan Heffner - Ohio Superintendent of Public Instruction Michael Cohen - President of Achieve, Inc. Steve Dackin, superintendent of Reynoldsburg City Schools Eric Gordon, CEO of Cleveland Metropolitan Schools Debe Terhar, president of the State Board of Education Deb Tully, director of professionals issues for the Ohio Federation of Teachers Moderated by Chester E. Finn Jr., President, Thomas B. Fordham Institute
Embracing the Common Core - Q&A
Panelists Include: Stan Heffner - Ohio Superintendent of Public Instruction Michael Cohen - President of Achieve, Inc. Steve Dackin, superintendent of Reynoldsburg City Schools Eric Gordon, CEO of Cleveland Metropolitan Schools Debe Terhar, president of the State Board of Education Deb Tully, director of professionals issues for the Ohio Federation of Teachers Moderated by Chester E. Finn Jr., President, Thomas B. Fordham Institute
Driving Quality: Can charter incubators solve the problem of too many mediocre charter schools?
Recorded December 7, 2011 Communities across the country are struggling to meet parental demand for high quality school options, including high-performing charter schools. Yet, with hundreds of new charter schools opening every year, not nearly enough of them offer the quality education that parents crave and kids deserve. Indeed, far too many fail to deliver education any better than the troubled neighborhood schools that they are meant as alternatives to. But a new model for charter school growth has taken root in several cities and it appears to be boosting quality as well as quantity. Charter "incubators" are accelerating the launch and development of top-flight charter schools in communities that need them most. Incubators offer the promise of not only more school choice but schools that reliably deliver academic results. Join us at the Fordham Institute to hear from leaders that are running some of the best of these new organizations. Co-sponsored by the Cities for Education Entrepreneurship Trust (CEE-Trust), this discussion will analyze the key findings from a new policy brief by Public Impact, and provide lessons on how federal, state and local policymakers can help launch new quality charter schools while encouraging the culling of weak ones.
Assuring Highly Effective Teachers for All Ohio Students
A teacher's effectiveness has a tremendous impact on a child's learning and academic trajectory. Ohio has debated for many months about how best to strengthen the quality of its teaching force. The biennial budget adopted in June calls for the state to develop a model teacher evaluation framework by the end of 2011 and to adopt policies tying teacher evaluations to key personnel decisions such as compensation, placement, tenure, and dismissal. Likewise, school districts and charter schools must implement their own local evaluations, based on the state model, starting in 2013-14. It's evident that Ohio schools are about to undergo a major shift when it comes to how teachers are evaluated and developed, a change with great potential to impact student achievement. For this reason, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, along with the Nord Family Foundation and Ohio Grantmakers Forum, are convening this public discussion (and another one in Lorain) on assuring highly effective teachers for students across the state. Featured speakers include: Mike Miles, superintendent of Harrison School District 2 in Colorado, a school system on the cutting edge of teacher compensation reform, will review the teacher-effectiveness work his district is doing and the results they're seeing. Kate Walsh, President of the National Council on Teacher Quality, will discuss the state of teacher effectiveness nationally and what can be learned from research about teacher quality. Eric Gordon, new superintendent of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, will provide an Ohio voice on the panel. Gordon was one of the major architects of CMSD's Academic Transformation plan, which garnered national recognition for its approach to school reform. Chester E. Finn, Jr., president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, moderated the discussion.
BASIS DC Symposium - Looking Inside Fully Integrated Schools
BASIS DC held a symposium on the new charter school they hope to open in the fall 2012. Panelists include DC At-Large Councilmember Sekou Biddle, Richard Kahlenberg, Senior Fellow at the Century Foundation, Jeanne Allen, President of Center for Education Reform, and Sam Chaltain, a DC-based educator and former chair of Inspired Teaching School. Fordham's Executive Vice President Mike Petrilli will moderate. For More information about BASIS DC, please contact Mary Siddall, [email protected]
Terry Ryan on Collective Bargaining in Ohio
Terry Ryan talks about his testimony on Senate Bill 5 and what it means for Ohio.
ESEA Briefing Book: "Reform Realism" Explained
Mike and Checker explain how NCLB got it backwards, and what "reform realism" would look like in practice.
Reform School: Tim Kitts
Tim Kitts of Florida's Bay Haven Charter Academy explains his "plus" model of school improvement, and the axes of curriculum and department structures.
Opt-Out or Cop-Out? A Debate on 'New' Accountability Systems
Growing numbers of parents, educators, and school administrators are calling for a local "opt-out" from state tests and accountability systems. Is this opt-out a cop-out? Or would students benefit from a system that their own teachers and principals devised? Should all schools be offered an opt-out alternative, one in which they propose to be held accountable to a different set of measures? What about opt-outs for high-achieving schools or schools with good reason to be different? Would such a system move us toward or away from the goals of the Common Core? As for charter schools, must they continue to be tethered to uniform statewide accountability systems? Or should we rekindle the concept of customizing each school's charter and performance expectations?
Don't jump the NGSS bandwagon yet
Chester E. Finn, Jr. breaks down why Fordham does not support implementation of the NGSS.
A Crash Course in Teacher Pensions
Dara Zeehandelaar, author of The Big Squeeze: Retirement Costs and School District Budgets, explains teachers pensions and the difference between defined benefits and defined contribution plans that states offer teachers.
A Nation At Risk: 30 Years Later
Thirty years ago, A Nation at Risk was released to a surprised country. Suddenly, Americans woke up to learn that SAT scores were plummeting and children were learning a lot less than before. This report became a turning point in modern U.S. education history and marked the beginning of a new focus on excellence, achievement, and results. Due in large part to this report, we now judge a school by whether its students are learning rather than how much money is going into it, what its programs look like, or its earnest intentions. Education reform today is serious about standards, quality, assessment, accountability and benchmarking—by school, district, state and nation. This is new since 1983 and it’s very important. Yet we still have many miles to traverse before we sleep. Our students still need to learn far more and our schools need to become far more effective. To recall the impact of A Nation at Risk these past three decades and to reflect on what lies ahead, watch this short retrospective developed by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the American Enterprise Institute: A Nation at Risk: Thirty Years Later.
Unnecessary Censorship: Ed-Reform Edition
Featuring (in order of appearance): Michael Petrilli - Executive Vice President, Thomas B. Fordham Institute Amber Winkler - Vice President for Research, Thomas B. Fordham Institute John Chubb - Interim CEO, Education Sector Anne L. Bryant - Executive Director, National School Boards Association Gene I. Maeroff - Founding Director, Hechinger Institute Mike Miles - Superintendent, Dallas ISD Christopher S. Barclay - President, Montgomery County Board of Education, Maryland Geoffrey Jones - founding principal, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology Chester E. Finn, Jr. - President, Thomas B. Fordham Institute Rick Hess - Resident Scholar and Director of Education Policy Studies, American Enterprise Institute
Assessing the President's Preschool Plan
In his State of the Union address, President Obama called for making preschool available to every child in America. But questions abound: Is universal preschool politically and fiscally feasible—or even educationally necessary? Should we be expending federal resources on universal pre-K or targeting true Kindergarten-readiness programs for the neediest kids? How robust is the evidence of lasting impacts? And what exactly is the president proposing?
The Education Gadfly Show: Interview with John Kirtley
Following the release of Fordham's report, School Choice Regulations: Red Tape or Red Herring?, Mike Petrilli and Adam Emerson sat down with John Kirtley of Step Up for Students to talk about when private schools choose to participate in choice programs. While Fordham found that Catholic schools were less likely to be deterred by accountability regulations, Kirtley took a slightly different tack. Watch to find out more!
School Choice Regulations: Red Tape or Red Herring?
Many proponents of private school choice take for granted that schools won't participate if government asks too much of them, especially if it demands that they be publicly accountable for student achievement. Were such school refusals to be widespread, the programs themselves could not serve many kids. But is this assumption justified? A new Fordham Institute study provides empirical answers. Do regulations and accountability requirements deter private schools from participating in choice programs? How important are such requirements compared to other factors, such as voucher amounts? Are certain types of regulations stronger deterrents than others? Do certain types schools shy away from regulation more than others? These are just some of the questions that David Stuit, author of the Fordham study, will discuss with a panel featuring John Kirtley of Step Up for Students (Florida), Larry Keough of the Catholic Conference of Ohio, and Paul Miller of the National Association of Independent Schools.
Operating in the Dark
The United States faces a shortage of high-quality school leaders at a time when it is more apparent than ever that principals are key to attracting and retaining teacher talent and driving the improvement of student learning. While districts hire principals, states control the entry point to the principalship, overseeing the preparation and licensure of school leaders. Yet, to date, there has been no one central repository of information on state policies impacting principal preparation, licensure, tenure, and data collection to monitor the outcomes of those policies. The Bush Institute's new report, Operating in the Dark: What Outdated State Policies and Data Gaps Mean for Effective School Leadership, is a first-of-its-kind compilation of state-reported data on how the 50 states and the District of Columbia are using their authority to increase the supply of high-quality principals. Please join us for a presentation of the study's findings and a panel discussion, moderated by Fordham's Chester E. Finn, Jr., on how states can strengthen the rigor of the principal preparation program approval process and establish licensure requirements that validate and confirm that principals are indeed ready for the job and effective once employed as school leaders. The panelists will also discuss the role of the states in collecting data on principal effectiveness once school leaders are on the job and using that data to increase the supply of high-quality principals available for hire.
State of Education, State Policy Report Card 2013
StudentsFirst's much-awaited (and plenty contentious) 2013 State Policy Report Card awarded its highest rankings (B-minuses) to Louisiana and Florida; a dozen states earned an F. After California was flunked, chief deputy superintendent Richard Zeiger took his ire to the New York Times: “‘This group has focused on an extremely narrow, unproven method that they think will improve teaching—and we just flat-out disagree with them.’” This video's panel discussion digs into the new report card, the future of education reform, and how to bridge the divide between policy and practice.
Doing More with Less in K-12 Education: Cleveland State University
Nate Levenson and other experts discuss smarter ways to stretch school dollars.
Turnaround Merry-go-round: Is the music stopping?
In November 2012, the U.S. Department of Education released an analysis of the federal School Improvement Grants program, which invests in persistently underperforming schools with the expectation that they will turn around. The early results of its most recent $3-billion infusion, as described by Education Week: "mixed" (http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/campaign-k-12/2012/11/initial_school_imp…). Two-thirds of the schools made gains in math or reading scores, but the other third saw achievement decline. Program supporters contend that one year of data is not enough to draw conclusions about the program. Critics ask whether taxpayers should expend a single cent more on what they deem a failed experiment. Who's right? The Fordham Institute is bringing together three leading voices on urban schooling for a debate on the future of turnarounds: Bellwether Education and Fordham edu-wonk Andy Smarick; the Department of Education's Carmel Martin; and former Chicago schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard.