Displaying 511-540 of 2754 results
Commentary
11.8.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

The future of exam schools

Hilde Kahn

Editor’s note: This essay was part of an edition of “Advance,” a newsletter from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute that is published every other week. Its purpose is to monitor the progress of gifted education in America, including legal and legislative developments, policy and leadership changes, emerging research, grassroots efforts, and more.

Commentary
11.4.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

High expectations in the classroom: When the unlikely becomes the possible

Stuart Kime

For any teacher, administrator, or policymaker who wants to make strong choices that are likely to benefit their students’ outcomes, Seth Gershenson’s recently-published Fordham Institute report on “the power of expectations in district and

Commentary
11.4.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Governors should stop spinning NAEP results and start proposing solutions

Marc Porter Magee, Ned Stanley

“In light of this barometer of our kids’ success, there’s no time to waste to catch our kids up. We must continue to pour on the gas in our efforts,” Arizona Governor Doug Ducey said last Tuesday in response to the NAEP results.

Commentary
11.3.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Lowering expectations for students isn’t the answer to pandemic learning loss

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D., David Griffith

Fordham’s new study, “The Power of Expectations in District and Charter Schools,” seeks to examine the role that high expectations should play in our nation’s academic recovery and supply deeper understanding of whether and how such expectations operate in the traditional public, charter, and private school sectors. It finds, among other things, that teacher expectations have a positive impact on long-run outcomes and that expectations tend to be higher in charter schools.

Commentary
11.3.2022
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Holistic admissions: The good, the bad, the ugly

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

As the Supreme Court weighs the future of race-sensitive affirmative action in admitting students to selective colleges, all manner of ideas are popping up for how to achieve “diversity” in the entering class without explicitly counting by race.

Commentary
11.3.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Governance

How federal charter school grants help marginalized students

Tressa Pankovits

It makes good sense for the federal government to provide grants to high-quality public charter schools seeking to open or expand. That’s the gist of a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released last month.

Commentary
10.27.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Charter schools complicate the narrative on Covid shutdowns and learning loss

Michael J. Petrilli

This week’s news of sharp declines on the National Assessment of Educational Progress gave partisans yet another chance to relitigate the debate over keeping schools closed for in-person learning for much or all of the 2020–21 school year. We conservatives are eager to identify the teachers unions as the primary culprits, and we’re not wrong. But there is one complication we should acknowledge: the curious case of urban charter schools.

Commentary
10.27.2022
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Treating my NAEP hangover

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Monday was insane, with everyone and his grandmother (and her pet dog) attempting to make insightful, quotable comments on the avalanche of new data from the Nation’s Report Card. Some of it was indeed insightful, but much was simply self-promoting, as were many attempts to position oneself in advance as an expert to be taken seriously.

Commentary
10.27.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

Determining the factors that lead to kindergarten ability group placement

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D.

Ability grouping—arranging students in a classroom into smaller learning groups based on their aptitude in a given subject—is a common practice among teachers as early as kindergarten.

Commentary
10.25.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

High-achieving middle schoolers have suffered devastating math losses, finds NAEP

Brandon L. Wright

Editor’s note: This is an edition of “Advance,” a newsletter from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute written by Brandon Wright, our Editorial Director, and published every other week. Its purpose is to monitor the progress of gifted education in America, including legal and legislative developments, policy and leadership changes, emerging research, grassroots efforts, and more.

Commentary
10.20.2022
Accountability & Testing, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Could NAEP affect midterm elections? And other questions about next week’s release.

Michael J. Petrilli

The 2022 results from the “main” National Assessment of Educational Progress will be released October 24. They’ll include fourth- and eighth-grade scores at the national level, as well as state by state and for two-dozen large urban districts. Especially after the Covid shut-downs, it’s a big freakin’ deal. Here are three major storylines to look forward to.

Commentary
10.20.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Must we battle over civics education?

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

In a way, the battles we’ve seen in recent years over what to teach schoolkids in civics class resemble the war in Ukraine: They’re wholly unnecessary—and may be entirely the work of aggressors.

Commentary
10.20.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, School Finance, Governance

Will pandemic learning loss cost $700 billion to fix?

Nat Malkus

A new study released this month by Kenneth Shores and Matthew Steinberg tackles the question of whether federal pandemic relief for public schools was provided in the right way and in the right amount.

Commentary
10.13.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Jubilee for character education

Jennifer Frey

Even educators who recognize the value of character are often deeply skeptical that educators can teach virtue as a matter of practice because—apart from religious contexts--they have never seen it done successfully. For this reason, it is important that we draw attention to successful, non-partisan, secular models of exemplary character education. We find such a model in the UK’s Jubilee Center for Character and Virtues.

Commentary
10.13.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Private School Choice, Teachers & School Leaders

Cultural sensitivity for me but not for thee

Robert Pondiscio, Elli Lucas

Imagine a close-knit community whose members take care of and look out for one another; enjoy strong, tight-knit families with many children, close social ties, and a deep sense of purpose and belonging; and seem mostly exempt from crime, suicide, substance abuse, and other such problems. Are the habits and institutions by which this community prepares its members for adult life successful?

Commentary
10.13.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

The impact of teacher recruiting efforts on student achievement

Jeff Murray

Everyone knows that teachers are the most important in-school factor affecting student achievement, so getting the best ones in front of the neediest students is critical.

Commentary
10.6.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Governance

Why urban charters outperform traditional public schools

Michael J. Petrilli, David Griffith

High-quality studies continue to find that urban charter schools boost achievement and other outcomes by more than their traditional-public-school peers—an advantage that has only grown larger as the charter sector has expanded and matured. Where the research literature is less clear is why urban charter schools consistently, and increasingly, outperform district schools. Still, it does offer some hints and plausible hypotheses.

Commentary
10.6.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

High-achieving middle and high schoolers gain from latest NYC ed reform

Chester E. Finn, Jr., Brandon L. Wright

Amid nonstop controversy, New York City, which runs the nation’s largest school system, is again moving in the right direction when it comes to advancing the education of able students and opening opportunities to more high achievers. This after much retrograde activity during the regime of former Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Commentary
10.6.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Instructional time lost to Covid will likely mean persistent and widening gaps in literacy

Robert Pondiscio

An analysis in the New York Times last month cheerily assured readers that Covid-related learning losses “look real but sub-catastrophic.” The damage also appears “to not be permanent, with students recovering at least some ground already,” opined David Wallace-Wells, a columnist for the NYT Magazi

Commentary
9.29.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

Should schools group students by ability?

Scott J. Peters, Jonathan Plucker

One of the most contentious debates in American education focuses on whether to group students into classrooms using some measure of prior achievement.

Commentary
9.29.2022
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

America’s education crisis as a national security threat

Nicholas Eberstadt, Evan Abramsky

Since the end of World War II, the world’s population has not only gotten vastly bigger; it has also become vastly more educated. In nearly every country, the total number of years that citizens have attended school has grown faster than the population itself, and the number of college degrees conferred has grown even faster.

Commentary
9.29.2022
Accountability & Testing, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

California backtracks on withholding testing data

Dale Chu

Weeks away from the midterms, education apparatchiks in the nation’s most populous state are ramping up the election mischief by playing politics with what are expected to be dismal results from assessments taken by students last spring.