The Education Gadfly Show: The loathsome war on exam schools
On this week’s podcast, Fordham’s Checker Finn joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss the growing, misguided war on selective-admissions
On this week’s podcast, Fordham’s Checker Finn joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss the growing, misguided war on selective-admissions
Two big public-school systems in the D.C. area are on the verge of letting their zeal for equity and racial justice lead to consequences they may end up regretting. Fairfax County, which operates one of America’s best known and most esteemed “exam schools,” is may use a lottery, rather than test scores and other quality measures, for admissions. And Loudoun County is considering revising its rules for “professional conduct” by school staff to punish employees—teachers included—in truly Orwellian ways.
Academic acceleration—either through grade skipping or advanced coursework such as Advanced Placement or early college access—is a longstanding practice for primary and secondary students who show above average ability for their age and grade level.
On this week’s podcast, David Osborne, director of the Reinventing America’s Schools Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, joins Checker
Students who have the kinds of talent scientists and engineers need to solve problems by visualizing how objects could be rotated, combined or changed in three dimensions often struggle at school.
The Covid-19 pandemic has further exposed the inequities that have long existed in K–12 education system.
The Fordham Institute recently published an article called “Let’s rebuild special education when schools reopen,” by Anne Delfosse and Miriam Kurtzig Freedman. Reading it prompted both of us to offer our own thoughts, drawn from experience.
As I noted in a recent post, attitudes toward advanced education are cyclical. From gifted education to talent development programs, from honors classes to AP, we have experienced a largely positive stretch of media attention and state-level policy gains.
This spring’s school closures have challenged us to look at many things differently and to be open-minded, creative, and brave about moving toward necessary change. As we consider reopening schools in the fall, let’s hold on to that mindset and ask what should special education become? Does the forty-five-year-old federal law (IDEA) need a thorough redo? We believe it does.
Michael J. Petrilli’s recent article “Half-Time High School may be just what students need” is compelling. Yet proposals to cut school time in half in grades nine through twelve may be only half right.
This week’s podcast guest is John V.
Amid the plague that surrounds us, essential attention is properly getting paid to the education challenges of out-of-school kids: What can their parents, their schools, and their districts do to compensate for missed classroom time and the learning loss that’s bound to occur between now and the resumption of something resemb
On this week’s podcast, Diane Tavenner, co-founder and CEO of Summit Public Schools, joins Mike Petrilli and Da
Parents who will be homeschooling (temporarily) while schools are closed because of COVID-19 can only do so much to keep kids learning, so do your parents a solid and use this time to find subjects that get you excited! There’s only so much Netflix you can watch before you get a funny taste in the back of your mouth.
Any working parent of toddlers or infants will tell you that juggling home and work life isn’t without a slew of unique challenges. From chronic sleep deprivation to daily battles with your toddler to put on pants before leaving the house, the life of a working parent ain’t easy.
A recent working paper from NBER takes the notion of “early intervention” f
With more than half of states closing their schools due to the coronavirus pandemic, hundreds of thousands of parents, grandparents, and other caregivers have become de facto “home schoolers” practically overnight. Students in this situation will likely be spending a fair amount of time on screens—as a lifeline, respite, or both. We have compiled some excellent suggestions—updated several times since initial publication—for making at least some of that time educational.
America’s schools have ceded significant ground to trendy nostrums and policy cure-alls that do little to adequately teach young people the skills and knowledge required to realize their full potential and emerge from school as fully-functioning citizens. The latest round of dire NAEP civics and U.S. history scores underscore our continuing failure on the citizenship front.
That K–12 education in the U.S. has long been plagued by “excellence gaps” is no secret, although the terminology may be just a decade old (and owes much to Jonathan Plucker and his colleagues).
A couple years ago, a high-profile dispute played out between the Texas Education Agency (TEA) and the federal Department of Education, with a January 2019 New York Times headline pronouncing,
This report presents key findings from Learning in the Fast Lane: The Past, Present, and Future of Advanced Placement, by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Andrew E. Scanlan, and published by Princeton University Press in 2019.
Considerable research suggests that “math skills better predict [individuals’] future earnings and other economic outcomes than other skills learned in high school,” report Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann.
A few years ago, as I was wrapping up grad school (where my dissertation was about migrant workers in China, of all things), I came across a bunch of fascinating podcast episodes about education policy and school reform.
Gifted education in the U.S. is too scarce and lacks substance, and that’s especially true for high achieving black and Latino children. A new report by the Education Trust concludes that this gap has “everything to do with policies, adult decisions, and practices and little to do with students’ academic abilities.”
Education is a great equalizer, yet our nation does not consistently support advanced students, especially low-income, and racial and language minority students. Too often, these students are drastically under-challenged in school, leading to boredom, underachievement and incalculable amounts of lost potential.
Most everyone has read by now about the dismal scores on our Nation’s Report Card, which again measured how fourth and eighth graders did in math and reading. Aside from fourth grade math, marks on the 2019 National Assessment of Education Progress were generally flat or down, especially for our lowest-performing children. One prominent official remarked that “the bottom fell out.” But the results among high achievers offer a bright spot that has been mostly overlooked and undercelebrated.
Learning in the Fast Lane: The Past, Present, and Future of Advanced Placement (Princeton, 2019), the new book by Chester Finn and Andrew Scanlan, tells the story of the Advanced Placement (AP) program, widely regarded as the gold standard for academic rigor in American high schools.
Gifted education scholars have long pounded the drum regarding the need to increase racial and ethnic diversity in gifted programs. A recent study we published in the Harvard Educational Review suggests that increasing socioeconomic diversity needs similar attention.
Part I discussed Robert Pondiscio’s “Tiffany Test”: How do high-achieving students fare as they move through a high-poverty elementary school?