The Education Gadfly Show: What the coronavirus resurgence means for reopening schools
On this week’s podcast, Mike Petrilli and David Griffith discuss whether and how schools should reopen in the fall.
On this week’s podcast, Mike Petrilli and David Griffith discuss whether and how schools should reopen in the fall.
David Steiner:
David Brooks has long been a stalwart supporter of education reform, both the choice-and-charters flavor and the testing-and-accountability variety.
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.
As national unrest builds along with the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others at the hands of police officers, people worldwide are responding with marches, protests, critical reflection, and grief. Right now, the Black Lives Matter movement rages on.
The start of a new school year is always filled with challenges. New teachers, new classes, and new expectations can be difficult for both teachers and students. But what if teachers and students haven’t been in school for six months or more? How can schools try and prepare to get back to a sense of normalcy after all of this?
In dozens of fields, federally-supported research and development translates into new ideas, technologies, and actions. Why not in education, particularly as the Covid-19 crisis makes it abundantly clear that our educational systems are severely lacking innovative technologies that could have improved the resiliency and flexibility of our classrooms and facilitated a nationwide shift to remote instruction?
The idea that all postsecondary education on average is good is misleading. The truth is, there’s significant variation in which academic degrees bring workers the most value, and why they do.
1. Problems with models Nobel Physicist Richard Feynman wrote about models: [Physicists have] learned to realize that whether they like a theory or they don’t like a theory is not the essential question.
The COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout has yielded yet another cautionary tale about the perils of entering the workforce with nothing but a high school diploma. But that doesn’t mean that everyone needs a four-year college degree, or that we should build our high schools around that singular mission. In many American cities, workers with associate degrees earn middle-class wages.
In January, we had the pleasure of featuring Matthew Steinberg, associate professor of education policy at George Mason University, on the Education Gadfly Show podcast. This episode was the second installment of our Research Deep Dive series, and our big topic of the day was school discipline reform.
On this week’s podcast, John Bailey, visiting fellow at AEI, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss AEI’s new
On this week’s podcast, Noelle Ellerson Ng, associate executive director of advocacy and governance at AASA, the School
Late last month, a remarkable article appeared in AJPM, the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, cautioning that a person’s ACE score is a “relatively crude measure of cumulative childhood stress exposure that can vary widely from person to person.” ACE stands for “Adverse Childhood Experience”; your “A
Three separate analyses were published last week on how the coronavirus might affect children’s learning. Echoing a piece I recently wrote, they all conclude that the current school closures could have a devastating impact on student achievement.
On this week’s podcast, William Johnston, associate policy researcher at the RAND Corporation, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to
Interesting question. Before I answer, let me ask one: What keeps Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, up at night? You know Amazon, the trillion-dollar corporation that delivers something like a five billion packages a year. I’m at a professional meeting. The chair asks what “levers” we have for improving reading achievement in the U.S.
The National Council on Teacher Quality just released its third review of America’s elementary teacher prep programs, seeking to determine, among other things, whether ed schools provide adequate instruction in scientifically-based reading instruction. The first investigation of this question, back in 2013, resulted in most programs receiving D’s and F’s, and just 35 percent earning A’s and B’s. But this year, slightly more than half of traditional prep programs received honors grades. That’s progress. But there are still miles to go.
Children’s screen-time is an important issue.
For R & D to work in education, we must consistently secure funding from governments and philanthropies. That means presenting them with realistic, sensible ideas that can be adopted and implemented at a reasonable cost—both in money and teachers’ time. Fordham and CAP’s Moonshot for Kids competition yielded proposals for several such tools.
I owe my education career to reader’s workshop, the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, and its founder Lucy Calkins. I started as a mid-career switcher with a two-year commitment to teach fifth grade in a South Bronx public school. Two things about my school are worth knowing: It was the lowest-performing school in New York City’s lowest-performing district.
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.
Education Week’s recent report, Getting Reading Right, found that the most popular reading curricula in the country are not aligned with settled reading science.
Fordham’s recent Moonshot for Kids competition, a collaboration with the Center for American Progress, highlighted the distinction between research and development and “school improvement.” They’re very different concepts. R & D is inherently top-down and school improvement mostly bottom-up. Yet bringing them into productive contact with one another is vital and might be the key to getting student outcomes moving in the right direction once again.
There’s a large gap between the current state of education sector R & D and our aspirations for this research. As sectors, education and medicine have lots in common and analogies are often drawn between the disciplines. However, when it comes to evidence-based practices, there are stark differences between the two fields.
To be clear, I am in favor of building a strong education R & D sector. However, it’s important to acknowledge the serious shortcomings of the current system. It is because of this current state that I am arguing that evidence-based practices don’t work. I’m making two claims.
Hard as it may be to believe, the Knowledge is Power Program, better known as KIPP, is now older than a lot of the people who teach in its schools.
On this week’s podcast, Kim Marshall, author of The Best of the Marshall Memo, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to talk about
The words “American Dream” are shorthand for describing an individual’s pathway to opportunity and a successful life. Historically, K–12 schools provide young people with the foundational knowledge and skills they need for achieving success and the American Dream.