If New York politics were sane and rational—if our elected officials were serious about the pursuit of educational excellence and what’s best for children—the city’s charter school sector would be a point of civic pride.
Tracking in our high schools is simply a fact, and we would do well to stop pretending otherwise or believing that it could be any other way. At the very least, we should allow for diverging paths after tenth grade, and we need to completely rethink our approach for our lowest-performing kids.
Editor’s note: This essay is adapted with permission from the cover story of the March issue of Commentary, “The Unbearable Bleakness of American Schooling.” The middle school two blocks from my New York City apartment is named for Jonas Salk.
Since the beginning of the common school movement in the 1800s, we have valued our institutions of public education for their unifying nature, and the creation of a literate populace is an essential element of that goal. But much modern-day English instruction accomplishes neither. These middle school and high school classrooms barely resemble what you or I remember from our school years.
School choice is on the rise. In the last few decades, families have benefited from an explosion of educational options.
When schools went online at the beginning of the pandemic, it was unclear how the sudden and disruptive shift would impact student behavior. Would cyberbullying, for example, increase with students spending more time on their devices? And would time away from other students increase bullying when students returned to buildings?
Editor’s note: This was first published by Fox News.
In many ways, the educational failures of the past several years—including those caused by the pandemic—were far worse than they needed to be because of long-standing characteristics of American public education. Namely, the tendency to place employees’ interests first, the disempowering of parents, and the failure to innovate.
The school board in McMinn County, Tennessee, voted 10-0 to remove Maus, a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel by cartoonist Art Spiegelman, from its eighth grade curriculum last month, citing concerns about explicit language and disturbing illustrations.
Amid the raging culture fires engulfing our politics and schools comes a concerted push among some conservative groups to codify a “parents’ bill of rights.” House minority leader Kevin McCarthy rolled out
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast (listen on
One of the biggest shifts in education reform in recent years has been widening acknowledgment that the “college for all” mantra was misguided. Yet so far our commitment to “multiple pathways” to opportunity is almost all talk accompanied by very little action. High school course requirements and accountability systems continue to push almost all students into the college-prep track.
Fordham’s new study, based on data from 400 metropolitan statistical areas and 534 micropolitan statistical areas, finds that an increase in total charter school enrollment share is associated with a significant narrowing of a metro area’s racial and socioeconomic math achievement gaps. With the country reeling from a pandemic that’s caused widespread learning loss, especially for disadvantaged students, getting more children into charter schools could help reverse those dire trends.
Editor’s note: This essay was first published by The 74.
Confessions of a School Reformer, a new book by emeritus Stanford education professor Larry Cuban, still going strong at eighty-eight, combines personal memoir with a history and analysis of U.S.
A recent release from the Education Commission of the States reminds us that the term “virtual school” refers to several different types of educational options, and that the ecosystem—more important now than ever before—requires specific attention and support from policymakers.
In the wake of the biggest education crisis in living memory, the need for transformational change is palpable and urgent. This report asks: Can a rising tide of charter schools carry students in America's largest metro areas—including those in traditional public schools?
A letter seeking federal law enforcement intervention into threats aimed at school board members has caused a hullabaloo one year into U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona’s otherwise unremarkable tenure. Though his role in soliciting the letter is unclear, some Congressional Republicans would love nothing more than to see him become the fall guy. They would do well to consider how their thirst for blood might cut both ways.
In recent days, American students have been learning about Martin Luther King Jr. and his leadership in the American civil rights movement.
Way back in the late 1960s, when federal officials and eminent psychologists were first designing the National Assessment of Educational Progress, they probably never contemplated testing students younger than nine. After all, the technology for mass testing at the time—bubble sheets and No.
Research (as well as common sense and folk wisdom) has shown that “parental investments” are critical
Any day now, Catherine Lhamon, the assistant U.S. secretary of education for civil rights, is expected to release new guidance for school districts that’ll reinstate an Obama-era policy limiting the use of suspensions and the like in the name of reducing racial disparities in “exclusionary discipline.” It couldn’t come at a worse time.
Education in the classical sense is padeia: a holistic approach to student formation that is geared towards the cultivation of the student’s mind, imagination, perception, and emotions so that they become the type of person who can flourish and thrive inside the school community and well beyond.
The Nation ran quite a headline last month: “To Reduce Inequality in Our Education System, Reduce Class Sizes.” Surely we might expect substantive evidence to follow such a pronouncement, especially in the midst of a staffing shortage.
Spurred in large part by an infusion of over $4 billion in federal Race to the Top funds, beginning in 2009, nearly all states and the District of Columbia implemented major reforms to their teacher evaluation systems.
While it’s no secret that pandemic-induced remote learning was a disaster for almost all students in 2020 and 2021, we must remind ourselves that in-person education models weren't so great
A decade ago, most charter school authorizers agreed it was not their job to help struggling charter schools. But times have changed, and best practices in charter school authorizing are evolving.
For those of us old enough to remember, the “Rock the Vote” campaign in the 90’s showcased many celebrities—including Madonna in a red bikini and American flag—trying to convince young people to participate in elections.
Most of our founding fathers believed that a democracy is only as good as its citizens, since democracy only flourishes with citizens who are capable of governing themselves. But we have lost our understanding of the connection between virtue, self-government, and democracy. Indeed, few students today learn anything about virtue, let alone see any connection between it and the fate of our republic.
This school year was supposed to be the one when things returned back to normal. If only that were true.
