Displaying 1741-1770 of 17774 results
Report
1.13.2021
Accountability & Testing

Bridging the Covid Divide: How States Can Measure Student Achievement Growth in the Absence of 2020 Test Scores

Ishtiaque Fazlul, Cory Koedel, Eric Parsons, Cheng Qian

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit the U.S. last spring, schools nationwide shut their doors and states cancelled annual standardized tests. Now federal and state policymakers are debating whether to cancel testing again in 2021. One factor they should consider is whether a two-year gap in testing will make it impossible to measure student-level achievement growth during this historic period.

Commentary
1.7.2021
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Give disadvantaged children their pandemic year back

Michael J. Petrilli

As the world struggles through some of the darkest days of the pandemic, and more schools shift back to remote learning, we at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute are spending most of our time thinking about what comes next: educational recovery.

Commentary
1.7.2021

Miguel Cardona is a blank slate

Dale Chu

When the news broke last month that Dr. Miguel Cardona had been tapped to be the nation’s next education secretary, a friend of mine texted me asking, “Have you heard of him?” To be honest I hadn’t, but it wasn’t an entirely unreasonable question.

Commentary
1.7.2021
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Explicit teaching vs. constructivism: The misadventures of Bean Dad

Robert Pondiscio

Nearly every day, social media plucks some poor, anonymous face in the crowd from obscurity and makes him famous. If you’re making New Year’s Resolutions this year, one should be never to be that guy.

Commentary
12.23.2020

Fordham’s Best of 2020 Flypaper Posts

Pedro Enamorado

We have had a challenging year with news cycles filled with troubling news about the coronavirus, racial injustices, violent rioting, and polarizing elections. But through all this, we have seen people come together and care for one another, such as how teachers drove by in a motorcade to greet their students.

Commentary
12.23.2020
Charter Schools, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

It’s not news that Miguel Cardona is a charter school authorizer—and that’s worth celebrating

Alex Medler

President-Elect Biden has confirmed that he will nominate Dr. Miguel A. Cardona to serve as the next U.S. Secretary of Education. He appears to be a prudent choice for Biden, earning support from teachers unions and education reform groups, including charter operators. Cardona is the current Connecticut Commissioner of Education.

Commentary
12.22.2020
Personalized Learning

2020 Recap: New research from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute

Pedro Enamorado

As with most years, 2020 has been a busy one for the Fordham research team. We published many groundbreaking studies, adding contributions to the evidence base on literacy, civic education, education funding, school choice, and gifted programs, among others.

Commentary
12.21.2020

Fordham’s ten most-read articles of 2020

Tran Le

As with everything else in the world, American K–12 education was rocked back on its heels only three months into 2020. School closures, reopening, and recovery became the focus of teachers and state, district, and school leaders. Remote learning became the bane of students,’ parents’, and teachers’ existence.

Commentary
12.21.2020
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

What if everything we believe about education is a lie?

Robert Pondiscio

What if we can’t change at scale the distribution of academic outcomes among disparate groups of students? What if our hope that public education can erase inequality is in vain? If these things were true, how would what we ask of schools—and how we measure their success—change?

Commentary
12.17.2020
School Finance, Charter Schools, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Mind the gap: Persistent and growing inequities in charter school funding

Victoria McDougald

Like traditional public schools, charter schools are publicly funded according to student enrollment. But compared to their district counterparts, charters have long received far less per-pupil funding.

Commentary
12.14.2020
Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Do charter schools help new teachers get better faster?

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D., Michael J. Petrilli

Study after study has found that urban charter schools, and non-profit charter networks in particular, tend to be more successful at boosting student achievement than traditional public schools in similar settings. But why?

Report
12.14.2020
Charter Schools, Teachers & School Leaders

Teacher Effectiveness and Improvement in Charter and Traditional Public Schools

Matthew P. Steinberg, Haisheng Yang

Study after study has found that new teachers tend to be less effective than educators with more experience. But despite having more junior staff, charter networks (referred to as CMOs) often outperform their district peers. So what’s their secret? To find out, this study explores how teacher effectiveness varies and evolves across traditional and charter public schools, as well as within the sector’s CMOs and standalone schools.

Commentary
12.10.2020
Accountability & Testing

U.S. students continue to fall short of too many international peers

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

TIMSS is less well known to most American ed-watchers than NAEP and PISA, perhaps because it comes from a private group called the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), but it does a first-rate job of monitoring, comparing, and explaining the educational performance of fourth- and eighth-graders in dozens of countries in the crucial subjects of math and

Commentary
12.10.2020
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Reading comprehension is not a “skill”

Robert Pondiscio

I became a disciple of E.D. Hirsch, Jr. early in my teaching career for one simple reason. His theories about reading comprehension—and his alone—described precisely what I witnessed every day in my South Bronx fifth grade classroom: children who could “decode” (read the words on the page) but struggled to comprehend the words they read.

Commentary
12.10.2020

Teachers’ professional learning should be driven by curriculum

Robert Pondiscio

“Good teaching is rocket science,” write Jim Short and Stefanie Hirsh in a new report from the Carnegie Corporation, titled The Elements: Transforming Teaching through Curriculum-Based Professional Learning. Houston, we have a problem…

Commentary
12.10.2020
Accountability & Testing

Reading and math outcomes during Covid-19

Jessica Poiner

The pandemic has now disrupted two consecutive school years, and its effects are certain to linger for years to come. Unfortunately, some students will be more impacted than others.

Commentary
12.9.2020

What we're reading this week: December 10

The Education Gadfly

“How teachers’ unions are influencing decisions on school reopenings.” —Education Week The closures of preschools during the pandemic will leave many children unprepared for Kindergarten, especially those from low-income backgrounds.