Education Gadfly Show #810: College for all or college for some?
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast (listen on
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast (listen on
The media have been full of
As Michael Petrilli wrote in these pages a few weeks ago, the education reform movement has come to the realization that its belief in “college for all,” while well-intended, was misguided.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The proof of a powerful idea is how well it sticks. Once you hear about it “you start to see it everywhere,” as Bari Weiss puts it. She was describing “luxury beliefs,” a phrase coined by Rob Henderson, an Air Force veteran and Ph.D.
While the ubiquitous term “college and career readiness” assumes that twelve years of compulsory education could adequately prepare a student for both postsecondary and workplace settings, we know far more about readiness for the former than the latter.
In 2012, Tennessee lawmakers created the Statewide Dual-Credit program (SDC) to help more students earn college credit while completing high school.
When the University of California began phasing-out college admissions test scores as part of a recent legal settlement, the rationale was “equity.” Lawyers for the students who brought the lawsuit said that “SAT and ACT scores are largely a proxy for a student’s socioeconomic background and race,” rather than measures of ac
Among its many educational impacts, the pandemic has reenergized efforts to expand private school choice. States like Ohio, where it already existed, have expanded eligibility and increased funding.
Covid-19 sent a shock wave through an already changing U.S. job market, provoking “a great reassessment of work in America.”
Under federal law, states must assess students annually in reading and math in grades 3–8 and at least once during high school, as well as testing science once in elementary, middle, and high school.
Much as happened after A Nation at Risk, the U.S. finds itself facing a bleak education fate, even as many deny the problem. Back then, however, the denials came mostly from the education establishment, while governors, business leaders, and even U.S.
The Covid-19 pandemic caused unprecedented disruptions to teaching and learning across America, including school closures, sudden changes to instructional delivery, economic hardship, and social isolation.
For the last half-century, if you read the mission statement of virtually any education reform organization, you will find earnest language about closing the racial or class achievement gaps. Unfortunately, not only have gaps failed to narrow during this multi-decade obsession, overall achievement levels have also remained mostly static.
Researchers at NWEA have been using data from their MAP Growth assessments to predict and analyze learning losses since the start of the pandemic.
Parents across the country are up in arms over their school systems’ equity initiatives. To be clear, this is not “equity” as I came to define it when I started teaching nearly a quarter century ago.
When it comes to career and technical education, there’s one state that seems to be getting things just about right: Connecticut.
The radio show Marketplace recently ran a piece asking, “Can changing home appraisal language help close the wealth gap?” The story examined structural racism in the housing market, specifically the wealth gap that persists as a result of Black and Hispanic families having t
At its simplest, the belief gap is the gulf between what students can accomplish and what others—particularly teachers—believe they can achieve. It is especially pernicious when beliefs around academic competency are fueled by extraneous information such as socioeconomic status, race, or gender.