As a premed student in college, I grew accustomed to being evaluated on just a handful of marks—two midterms and a final exam made up the entire grade. With so few assignments, the stakes to do well on each test were high. But there were a couple of professors who upped the ante even more. They’d toss out your shoddy midterm grades if you aced the final, no questions asked.
There’s a lot of talk about disruptive innovation these days. It seems hardly a month goes by that we don’t see some sort of exciting new innovation that changes an industry. Sometimes it happens over and over again in the same space. First we had paper maps that were replaced by custom driving directions we could print out from MapQuest (remember those?).
DEPARTMENT OF GOOD NEWS:Hispanic children, the fastest growing group of young people in the U.S., are seeing improvements on many academic measures, including increased math proficiency and lower dropout rates.
Among opponents of the Common Core, one of the more popular targets of vitriol is the standards’ focus on improving literacy by introducing higher levels of textual complexity into the instructional mix.
Every child should be in a school where he or she can learn effectively. That’s not a controversial goal in itself, but the methods meant to accomplish it can become hot buttons.
On Monday, Paul Peterson penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed arguing that American politicians ought to stop exploiting the common, mistaken belief that most schools are getting by on a shoestring.
Blended learning, a teaching model in which students learn from both online sources and traditional instruction, has recently seen tremendous growth. Advocates say it can improve brick-and-mortar schools and increase students’ curricular options.
To answer the questions in its title, this NBER study analyzes administrative and test score data in the upper elementary grades from one of the country’s largest school districts (not identified).
Our earliest thinkers about education—men like Benjamin Rush, Noah Webster, and Horace Mann—would have found our current obsession with preparing children for college or a career a trifle odd. Given the uncertain prospect of ordinary Americans running their own affairs, they were focused on an entirely different “C”—citizenship.
It was back-to-school night last week at my son’s elementary school in Montgomery County, Maryland, which meant that we moms and dads got a first look at “Learning for the Future: A Parent’s Guide to Grade 1 Curriculum 2.0.”
In this installment of the Education Next book club, host Mike Petrilli talks with Dana Goldstein about her new best-selling book.
Since the beginning of the No Child Left Behind era, most schools in all 50 states have been given an evaluation of student performance and an overall rating.
Over the last few years, there has been a growing awareness of the need to incorporate character development into school curricula, and various efforts to do so have received wide attention. Perhaps the best-known effort is the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, which has been implemented in close to 150 charter schools across the country.
For over a year, I’ve been encouraging Common Core advocates to stop endlessly re-litigating the standards and instead to focus on getting implementation right. Taking my own advice last week, I traveled to Reno to see first-hand the work of the Core Task Project, the initiative driving implementation of the standards in Washoe County, Nevada.
Common Core just had its best week in recent memory. The Intelligence Squared U.S. CCSS debate showcased strong arguments in favor of the standards, including from our own Mike Petrilli. William J.
In many school districts, classroom observations make up as much as 75 percent of teachers’ evaluation scores, according to a new study published in Education Next. And these scores predict a teacher’s ability to raise student test scores the following year, as measured by value-added models.
In The Teacher Wars, reporter Dana Goldstein offers a stirring account of the 175-year history of the public school teaching profession. The book, which ought to be required reading for education reformers and status-quo defenders alike, notes some obvious but oft-overlooked realities.
An important, first-of-its kind Brookings Institution study asks whether school superintendents improve outcomes for students. The answer, according to authors, is no. They find that student achievement in particular districts doesn’t improve as superintendents stay longer, nor is there a bump when districts hire new ones.
Here’s a rare bit of good news from K–12 education: Every state—all fifty of ‘em plus the District of Columbia—have improved academically since the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation (USCCF) released its initial “Leaders & Laggards” report in 2007. But let’s not get giddy.
Over the last month or so, there’ve been a number of notable stories highlighting the passing of the torch from urban districts to urban chartering. The former continue their long, slow decline while the latter experiences the exhilaration and growing pains of emerging adulthood.
Many people tune out when education discussions turn to data and statistics. For whatever reason, some folks just don’t like numbers. So a discussion about the development of education data is likely to attract an audience rivaling that of a paint-drying contest.
On September 9th, the Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli participated in an Intelligence Squared U.S. debate on the Common Core. These are his opening comments, as prepared for delivery.
The Florida Education Association, state school boards, and the Florida PTA have filed a lawsuit in a Florida court challenging the state’s Tax Credit Scholarship P
