Education 20/20 Speaker Series
Twenty years ago, conservative ideas were gaining traction in K–12 education.
Twenty years ago, conservative ideas were gaining traction in K–12 education.
There’s mounting evidence that, for children of color especially, having one or more teachers of the same race over the course of students’ educational careers seems to make a positive difference. But to what extent, if any, do the benefits of having a same-race teacher vary by type of school? Existing “race-match” studies fail to distinguish among the traditional district and charter school sectors. This study fills that gap and finds that the effects of having a same-race teacher appear stronger in charter schools than in the traditional district sector—and stronger still for nonwhite students.
Our Fordham-Hoover Education 20/20 speaker series will host its grand finale on June 13, when we bring you another major thinker about American education: William J. Bennett, U.S. Secretary of Education and Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities under President Ronald Reagan, and later director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Career and technical education (CTE) is enjoying its moment in the sun, with policymakers and educational leaders across the ideological spectrum embracing it as a solution to lagging upward mobility and distressed working class communities. On May 14, we posed these and other vexing questions to a panel of CTE experts. Watch the video now.
The Fordham-Hoover “Education 20/20” speaker series continued with our penultimate event on May 1, as we brought you another awesome duo. Rod Paige opened by arguing that tomorrow’s school reform needs to focus not just on changing schools, but even more on boosting student effort. Then Pete Wehner made a forceful, principled case for reviving old-fashioned character education in America’s schools.
The recent reauthorization of the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act—the principal federal education program supporting career and technical education (CTE)—expressly aims to “align workforce skills with labor market needs.” Our latest report examines whether students in high school CTE programs are more likely to take courses in high-demand and/or high-wage industries, both nationally and locally.
The Fordham-Hoover “Education 20/20” speaker series continued on April 11 with another star-studded double feature.
In recent years, we have reached a homeostasis in education policy, characterized by clearer and fairer but lighter-touch accountability systems and the incremental growth of school choice options for families—but little appetite for big and bold new initiatives.
The provocative Fordham-Hoover “Education 20/20” speaker series resumes on March 26th with another star-studded duo.
The second half of our Education 20/20 speaker series begins on February 12th as we bring you another double header. Eliot Cohen will argue for civic education that promotes patriotic history, one that not only educates and informs but also inspires. Yuval Levin will make the case for reasserting the role of education in character formation.
Fordham’s Education 20/20 speaker series kicks off the New Year with a bang on January 9th as we bring you another double header.
The Education 20/20 speaker series resumes on December 11th with another all-star double-header. Ian Rowe will lead off by arguing for the inclusion of family structure in measures of student achievement. Then Michael Barone will explore the educational travails—past, present, and future—of gifted students and what might be done to ease the pain.
For part two of our Education 20/20 speaker series on the purpose of K-12 education, we’re joined by Kay Hymowitz and Nicholas Eberstadt as they discuss parenting, soft skills, the decline of male labor participation, and what schools can (and can’t) do about it.
Credit recovery, or the practice of enabling high school students to retrieve credits from courses that they either failed or failed to complete, is at the crossroads of two big trends in education: the desire to move toward “competency based” education and a push to dramatically boost graduation rates.
Our Education 20/20 speaker series continues with a double-header event. First up, Naomi Schaefer Riley discusses the limits of school choice. Then Jonah Goldberg argues that civics education need to reclaim the ideals of American democracy.
Join the Thomas B. Fordham Institute on November 8, as we present the findings of Fordham’s latest study, Grade Inflation in North Carolina’s High Schools, and a panel of experts discusses the causes and consequences of inflated grades and possible policy solutions
Join us on Thursday, September 27th, when Heather MacDonald, author of The Diversity Delusion, kicks off the series with her perspective on race-based discipline reform, including why it hurts the children it purports to help and how it cuts against one of the core purposes of schooling.
Although the vast majority of American parents believe their child is performing at or above grade level, in reality two-thirds of U.S. teenagers are ill-prepared for college when they leave high school.
Eight years ago, we compared states’ English language arts (ELA) and mathematics standards to what were then the newly-minted Common Core State Standards. That report found that the Common Core was clearer and more rigorous than the ELA standards in thirty-seven states and stronger than the math standards in thirty-nine states.
Since 2010, when most states adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), the Thomas B. Fordham Institute has been committed to monitoring their implementation.
Charter schools have historically garnered support from across the political spectrum, but President Trump and Secretary of Education DeVos—by their very support—may be narrowing that broad base. Last year’s Education Next poll found a steep drop in charter support among Democrats.
Regardless of where you stand on the debate currently raging over school discipline, one thing seems certain: Self-discipline is far better than the externally imposed kind.
2016–17 was one of the slowest growth years for charter schools in recent memory.
2016–17 was one of the slowest-growth years for charter schools in recent memory. Nobody knows exactly why, but one hypothesis is saturation: With charters having achieved market share of over 20 percent in more than three dozen cities, perhaps school supply is starting to meet parental demand, making new charters less necessary and harder to launch.
This month, the U.S. Department of Education released the latest results of the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), which told us how fourth- and eighth-grade students are faring nationally, in every state, and in most big cities in math and reading. This month also marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of A Nation at Risk.
Schools have long failed to cultivate the innate talents of many of their young people, particularly high-ability girls and boys from disadvantaged and minority backgrounds. This failure harms the economy, widens income gaps, arrests upward mobility, and exacerbates civic decay and political division.
In recent years, the school discipline pendulum has swung wildly, as policymakers, opinion-shapers, and interest groups have struggled over an inherently difficult problem. Today, the “zero tolerance” policies that were popular at the end of the last century are widely viewed as unfair, heavy-handed, even discriminatory.
One important question about school discipline is whether it helps or harms those being disciplined. But a second, equally important question is whether a push to reduce the number of suspensions is harmful to the rule-abiding majority.
The Every Student Succeeds Act grants states more authority over their accountability systems than did No Child Left Behind, but have they seized the opportunity to develop school ratings that are clearer and fairer than those in the past?
Massachusetts produces the best educational outcomes in the country. Its reading and math scores have long topped the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It’s the only U.S. state that competes with the planet’s strongest-achieving countries on international tests. And it’s the first U.S. state in which a majority of the workforce holds a four-year degree.