Where teacher evaluation went wrong
Editor’s note: This is the third and final part in a series on teacher evaluation reform.
Editor’s note: This is the third and final part in a series on teacher evaluation reform.
Fordham is among a wee group of reformers that’s paid attention to advanced education over the last twenty-five years. This disregard has resulted, among other problems, in a lack of informative research for the field. Our latest report addresses one of many unknowns: whether districts across the nation have adopted policies and programs to identify, support, and cultivate the talents of all students capable of tackling advanced-level work.
More than a quarter of America’s school-aged children were absent from school 10 percent or more of the time last year. There’s no shortage of explanations on offer for this surge in “chronic absenteeism,” mostly blaming the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath: lockdowns; lowered expectation; health and hardship; bullying and school safety issues.
It may seem tone-deaf to focus on layoffs when the news is fraught with reports of teacher shortages, but much as pandemic recovery funds helped drive these shortages by opening new positions to staff, so too will the end of those funds bring about a painful wave of
While it seems likely that the end of ESSER funding in September will engender a(nother) seismic shift in the school staffing conversation, education leaders are—for the moment—still talking about teacher shortages, long-term vacancies, hard-to-staff specialties, burnout, dissatisfaction, and attrition.
New York State’s budget law weakens mayoral control of the Big Apple’s schools and empowers the United Federation of Teachers. —Michael Bloomberg, Bloomberg Teachers unions are hopping onto the “ban phones” bandwagon.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Adam Tyner, Fordham’s national research director, joins Mike and David to discus
The disparities in gifted education by race and class are well known. For many districts, there is a disconnect between their gifted program demographics and the demographics of the district at large. All too often, those identified for these services skew White and Asian, and Black, Hispanic, and Native American students are underrepresented.
Editor’s note: This was first published by EdNC.org. North Carolina’s charter school movement is at a crossroads.
The conflict over civics education is unnecessary, driven more by cultural combatants and politicians than by vast divides among parents and citizens regarding what schools should teach and children should learn. If those who inflame these debates would hold their fire, we could build on a latent accord among the clients of civics education.
When my daughters were preteens, they came home from school one day alarmed. During a lesson on climate change, the teacher or some part of the lesson, it was never quite clear, had basically stated that, absent radical attention to warming, there would be little hope for survivability on earth after 2030. This was during peak Greta Thunberg–mania.
Editor’s note: This is the second part in a series on teacher evaluation reform. Part one recalled how teacher evaluation became a thing.
As the downsides of a “college for all” perspective become clear, it’
A new survey of American teenagers reveals interesting opinions and trends in cellphone and social media use, bullying in schools, and absenteeism. —EdChoice Vying and jockeying for Trump’s secretary of education have begun.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Joshua Dunn, Executive Director of the Institute of American Civics at the University of T
In the shadow of a national reckoning on racial equity and in the wake of high-profile debates on the future of advanced (or gifted) education, the landscape of advanced education in the United States stands at a critical juncture.
Phone bans are the hottest education policy since banning critical race theory. Districts across the country are strictly limiting their use, locking them in Yondr bags, or confiscating and sealing them away before the first bell. The next step in making classrooms conducive to teaching and learning: limiting the laptops.
Noah Smith, writing in his Substack newsletter last week, argues that Americans are imprudently burying their heads in the sand at the increasing prospect of a global Sino-American clash.
A few weeks ago, I was sitting in an eleventh-grade history class at a high school in the suburbs west of Chicago. Mr. DiTella was firing off questions about the civil rights movement and getting precious little in return, despite the fact that he had assigned a reading on the subject. When we spoke afterwards, Mr.
Across the country, schools are working to help students recover from pandemic learning losses.
High-quality early childhood education (ECE) offers a promising means of boosting both achievement and equity, yet districts and states across the nation face educator
The Supreme Court appears likely to kill “Chevron deference.” What that would mean for the U.S. Department of Education. —Education Next Ed reform has done a poor job defining success, equality of opportunity, and equality of outcome.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at Fordham and the American Enterprise Institute, j
Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, The Education Daly. Are teachers interchangeable parts?
For the past several months, Petrilli been pumping out posts about “doing educational equity right.” This series concludes with a twist by looking at three ways that schools are doing educational equity wrong: by engaging in the soft bigotry of low expectations, tying teachers’ hands without good reason, and acting like equity isn’t just an important thing, but the only thing.
Last weekend, I gave a talk at the U.S.
In the mid-1970s, Ference Marton and Roger Säljö of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden noticed that their students took different approaches to learning.