Education 20/20: Mona Charen and Ramesh Ponnuru
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.
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.
The preferences, opinions, and predilections of millennials have already reshaped American office culture, news consumption, and taxi-hailing. But what (if anything) do their opinions portend for education and ed reform?
Research confirms what common sense dictates: Students learn less when their teachers aren’t there. According to multiple studies, a ten-day increase in teacher absence results in at least ten fewer days of learning for students.
Now that states have submitted their ESSA plans and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos begins to issue her stamp of approval, what happens next? It's time to put these plans into action; which states are most likely to see significant achievement gains in the coming years?
What are the pitfalls to the typical comprehensive high school that high schools of choice can better remedy?
The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) grants states more authority over their school accountability systems than did No Child Left Behind (NCLB)—meaning that states now have a greater opportunity to design improved school ratings. Rating the Ratings: Analyzing the First 17 ESSA Accountability Plans examines whether states are making the most of the moment.
Among high school students who consider dropping out, half cite lack of engagement with the school as a primary reason, and 42 percent report that they don’t see value in the schoolwork they are asked to do.
See the attached PDF for an unedited transcript of the event. What if every child in American schools had the equivalent of an IEP, i.e. we customized the education of every unique student?
It’s well established that some charter schools do far better than others at educating their students. This variability has profound implications for the children who attend those schools. Yet painful experience shows that rebooting or closing a low-performing school is a drawn-out and excruciating process.
Since Donald Trump’s election and Betsy DeVos’s selection as Secretary of Education put private-school-choice programs in the national spotlight—after years of steady growth at the state level—advocates across Twitter and the blogosphere have been offering ideas on what a big push at the federal level might look like.