From great materials to great instruction
Three years ago, two districts with similar enrollments, proficiency scores, and student demographics—not twenty miles apart—chose the same curriculum for middle school English language arts: Expeditionary Learning. But that is where the similarity in this story ends.
At the wheel of Idaho’s public charter school program
A willfully one-sided and misguided “study” emerged the other day from something that calls itself the “Network for Public Education” that purports to show that the federal government has wasted a lot of money trying to expand and improve America’s public charter schools. This outfit, which appears to get support from the teacher unions and their fellow travelers, cites several states that, in the authors’ view, have mishandled the money and bungled the program.
The misplaced focus on New York City's selective high schools
Brandon L. WrightThe time and energy that Mayor Bill de Blasio and Chancellor Richard Carranza are devoting to revamping admissions for New York's eight selective exam-based high schools are misplaced. Those institutions provide a unique and valuable service that drives excellence and upward mobility. Leaders should instead focus on how the city’s black and Hispanic students are failed by Gotham’s other 1,700 schools, and how the exam schools' diversity problem is exacerbated by the lack of policies that would bolster those kids' achievement.
Five lessons from my time on the Maryland State Board of Education
Chester E. Finn, Jr.This essay, originally published by Education Next, will run in two parts.
A guidebook for high schoolers who want to be teachers
Robert PondiscioWorking for the National Council on Teacher Quality can’t be fun or easy. Since 2003, the organization has set itself to the task of evaluating the nation’s teacher prep programs, which can only be compared to a department-store photographer telling mothers their babies are ugly. No one is glad to hear it, even if it’s observably true.
Strengthening and diversifying the teacher workforce
Jessica PoinerEach year, teacher candidates across the nation take licensing exams designed to check their mastery of pedagogy and of content knowledge. Though each state selects its own licensing tests, the Praxis Elementary Education: Multiple Subjects assessment, created by the Education Testing Service (ETS), is the most widely used elementary content exam.
A moonshot for kids
Michael J. PetrilliOur schools are nowhere close to delivering the learning outcomes that our kids deserve and our country requires. What we need is a Moonshot for Kids. That’s what we at Fordham, in conjunction with the Center for American Progress, now propose to stimulate. During the next twelve months, we will explore the rationale, potential, and possible design of a sizable new investment in basic and applied research and development that leads to innovation on behalf of America’s children. At its heart is an open competition meant to elicit and highlight breakthrough ideas that could best leverage a major public or private investment of $1 billion or more to improve outcomes for school-age kids.
Kamala Harris comes out swinging on education and picks the unions over students and parents
Erika SanziDemocratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris must have been one of the people AFT president Randi Weingarten was referring to when she said on C-Span, in the context of the 2020 hopefuls being “eager for the teachers’ backing”, that her “phone had rung a lot” because Harris has quickly morphed into a union mouthpiece. The language is so familiar it reads like the same old script. Students are nowhere to be found in her comments, parents are absent from her tweets and learning outcomes don’t even get a single mention.
Moms and choice: An interview with Abigail Hasberry from San Antonio, Texas
Erika SanziThis is the third in a series of interviews called “moms and choice,” in which I talk with mothers who—because of issues like bullying, weak academics, poor instr
Liberation theology is no savior for low-income schools
Dale ChuFor better or for worse, hard-left politics continue to cast an outsized shadow over the education sector. Nowhere is this more prevalent than within the echo chamber of ed school thinking, where the tweed-jacketed have their feet firmly planted in midair with regard to the nation’s most pressing education challenges. This goes doubly so for low-income schools, where the academy’s hubris makes for swell sounding monographs, but often has little grounding in the difficult work required to raise student performance.
Achievement quandaries
Chester E. Finn, Jr.An ambitious, important new piece of analysis in Education Next concludes that young Americans across the socioeconomic spectrum have made some progress over the past half century in academic achievement, but that rising tide hasn’t narrowed key gaps among them and hasn’t lifted the high school boats. This raises some really tough questions. How much does gap-closing matter versus tide-rising? Why has the tide stopped rising at the high school door? And—of course—what, if anything, is to be done, besides more of what we’ve been doing, at least since we began to get serious about addressing mediocrity and closing gaps back in the 1960s?
Are grantmakers giving up on education reform?
I’ve been tugging at this issue for twenty years now, going back to the late 1990s when Checker Finn came to speak before the Massachusetts Board of Education. My state had passed ambitious education reform legislation five years earlier, and its controversial high-stakes provision—requiring passage of the tenth-grade MCAS test as a graduation requirement—was scheduled to kick in.
New Mexico lawmakers just ruined the state's strong system for rating schools
Brandon L. WrightEmboldened and empowered by newly elected Democratic Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, efforts to dismantle New Mexico’s many strong education policies are now underway. Last week, as the state’s legislative session ended, lawmakers took their first big step in rolling back years of laudable progress made by former education secretaries Hanna Skandera and Christopher Ruszkowski and many others.
What charter school applications and approvals say about the state of authorizing
Jessie McBirneyRunning a charter school involves more than an independent leader and an alternative learning atmosphere for students—charter quality is supported by several layers of oversight and supervision, even before schools open their doors.
Is teaching's diversity problem getting worse?
Sophie SussmanDecades of research show increases in teacher diversity, encouraging for a profession that’s long been disproportionately white and female.
At a tough time for education reform, Colorado defeat of charter school-defunding bill offers a ray of hope
Michael J. PetrilliLet’s not sugarcoat it: National education reform is in a tough patch, what with the emboldened teachers unions playing offense, a supportive but unpopular education secretary being used as a bogeyman, and internecine squabbles dominating the debate. Yet outside the deep-blue bubbles on the coasts, good things are still happening for kids. This week’s best example comes from Colorado.
This week proved that the media still live in an upper-middle-class bubble
Michael J. PetrilliI won’t deny that the two big news stories of recent days—the tragic crash of a Boeing 737 Max 8 jet in Ethiopia, and the totally bonkers admissions scandal involving several of America’s elite universities—make for compelling reading. Planes dropping from the sky! Rich celebrities paying bribes!
What education reformers believe
Michael J. PetrilliAt conferences and online, there have been conversations of late about what it even means any more to be an “education reformer.” Here, Fordham’s president proposes an answer. Namely, we reformers believe that good schools deliver strong results for students—and all schools should be held to account for their results; our schools as a whole could be delivering much stronger results for all their students, but especially for disadvantaged children; and one size does not fit all, so we should embrace a pluralistic school system.
Cultivating patriotism is the first job of civics education
Robert PondiscioEditor’s note: On March 13, 2019, Thomas B. Fordham Institute senior fellow Robert Pondiscio was a panelist at an event hosted by the Albert Shanker Institute in Washington, D.C., titled “Civic Education: Is There Common Ground.” The following is adapted from his remarks.
To facilitate high-quality CTE, we must transform our education system
In the last two weeks, I explained how other states can learn from Colorado’s success in creating career and technical education programs that works well for students, emplo
The truth about transportation troubles
Jeff MurrayIf you think that student transportation is tricky for school districts—and there are numerous sources broadcasting that
How private school choice affects student character
Jessie McBirneyIn theory, private schools are better positioned to provide moral education than are their public counterparts because they can tailor character lessons to those who choose to attend. A new study from Corey A. DeAngelis and Patrick J.
The limitations of "Learning by the Book"
Michael J. PetrilliThe new study from the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research was clearly a herculean effort, with data collection across six states, surveys of thousands of teachers, and the participation of some of the nation’s leading researchers.
Running successful schools is all about attitude
I met with an architect a few days ago to discuss the needs of GEO Prep Academy’s new building in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His original plan included classroom space big enough for each one of our 650 students. I told him to cut that number in half. He looked puzzled, so I explained that, for our high school to succeed, we really have to have the right attitude from day one.
Creating world-class CTE programs: Five lessons from Colorado
Last week, I explained why career and technical education will make agile learners America's future, and that maximizing their potential requires CTE that works well for students, employers, and school systems.
Is education reform possible in America?
Chester E. Finn, Jr.Since "A Nation at Risk" in 1983, the U.S. has engaged in nonstop efforts to raise K–12 academic outcomes and close tragic achievement gaps. These have produced modest gains. Yet the gaps remain large, and nothing has made close to the kind of positive difference that other nations’ efforts have achieved. This is, in part, because the U.S. lacks three key ingredients: a culture that values education, including learning itself; a conviction that parents, schools, and children themselves are jointly responsible for education; and a governance arrangement that points toward unimpeded and continuous improvement in the delivery system and its performance.
Kids as political props
Robert PondiscioPreparing young people for active and engaged citizenship is an essential and neglected purpose of public education. How best to cultivate these qualities in school, however, is far from settled. In some circles, it takes the form of encouraging children to be directly involved in activism and advocacy, ostensibly student-led. But that’s morphing from a valuable instructional strategy into a manipulative and cynical use of children as political props in the service of causes they understand superficially, if at all. The recent video of young students confronting Senator Dianne Feinstein about the “Green New Deal” is a perfect example.