Charter schools cultivate knowledge, nurture social capital, and build civil society
As we observe another National Charter School Week, one fact is clear: Families are voting with their feet for charter schools.
As we observe another National Charter School Week, one fact is clear: Families are voting with their feet for charter schools.
I’ve made no secret of my fervent belief that curriculum is the overlooked lever in education reform. Replacing the slapdash, incoherent, and under-nourishing mélange of materials to which the typical U.S.
In an effort to avoid prescriptive top-down mandates, the school accountability provisions in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) allow states flexibility in determining what measures they’ll use to assess school quality, how much “weight” they carry, and over what time periods they’re calculated.
Demographic changes have left America with too many half-full schools for too few students, and closures could dominate debates for the next decade.
In a special National Charter Schools Week Education Gadfly Show podcast, B
The issue of bad teachers is the proverbial Gordian Knot, and pulling on a single thread won’t untie it. If we want to get serious about ridding our schools of bad teachers, we must attack many difficult issues all at once—including low teacher pay, collective bargaining agreements, pension systems, and teacher evaluations. Alternatively, we might just focus on weeding out ineffective rookies.
It seems every day that yet another story hits the headlines about a school banning phones. Of course, the large majority of schools had nominal prohibitions previously, but they left enforcement up to teachers, which meant most students still slipped them out during class, at lunch, and in the halls.
November’s all-but-settled presidential rematch bears many of the trappings of 2020, except that Donald Trump will pick a new running mate. Who will it be?
A columnist recommends a reading list for ambitious teenagers to counter group think. —Ross Douthat, New York Times The El Paso School District plans to close and consolidate several schools due to declining enrollment.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Marian Tupy, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the founder and
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 state of advanced education in America’s school districts is mediocre. Most districts neglect valuable policies that could expand access and improve student outcomes, resulting in a broken pipeline in advanced education.
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