Displaying 2491-2520 of 17774 results
Commentary
4.10.2019

The sorry state of career and technical education in America

Fordham’s newest study on career and technical education finds that, although students take more CTE courses in fields for which there is local demand, this is less true when those available jobs are in higher-wage industries. Perhaps the reason is that those lower-wage jobs also require less expertise. They include exactly the kind of low-skill work for which America’s inadequate CTE apparatus prepares students. We need to fix this, which will require better collaboration between local employers, high schools, and community colleges.

Commentary
4.10.2019

The corruption continuum

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

I’m as appalled and disgusted as anyone over the Varsity Blues admissions scandal, and it’s fine with me if those parents end up in prison. But I also worry about hypocrisy. So many of us now throwing up our hands in outrage have tiptoed in our own ways onto a continuum at the far end of which is the bribery and conspiracy that’s recently been revealed.

Commentary
4.10.2019

The civic education crisis

Perhaps George Orwell was thinking of a moment like this when he said, “We have now sunk to a depth at which restating the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” The obvious now is that the Republic faces a seemingly overwhelming number of crises.

Commentary
4.10.2019

College graduation or bust

Jeff Murray

For the last seven years, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC) has published data on college completion rates.

Commentary
4.5.2019
Governance

The year’s best State of the State address for education reform

Dale Chu

Each year, the Education Commission of the States (ECS), based in my adopted home of Denver, reviews the governors’ State of the State addresses and offers an analysis of their main education components. Mentioned by at least thirty-six governors, this year’s top education priority was school finance, followed by workforce development, teacher quality, early learning, postsecondary financial aid, and school safety.

Commentary
4.4.2019

Can we stop pretending fraud in education is victimless?

That line comes from a lawyer who interviewed witnesses in a major education scandal. No, it wasn’t the recent college bribery bombshell that led to dozens of federal indictments. It was in relation to an epidemic of cheating in Atlanta Public Schools that came to light more than a decade ago.

Commentary
4.3.2019
Career & Technical Education

Are career-tech students preparing for jobs that actually exist?

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

To our knowledge, no study has empirically examined the degree to which CTE course-taking in high school aligns with the kinds of work available in local labor markets, as our newest report does. It shows that the country needs local business, industrial, and secondary and postsecondary education sectors to join hands. At the top of their to-do list should be better integration of what is taught in local high school CTE programs with the skills, knowledge, and positions needed in area labor markets, both now and in the future.

Commentary
4.3.2019

Slouching toward aristocracy

Robert Pondiscio

A little over a year ago, Education Week ran an op-ed arguing for “gradeless classrooms” and an “end to the perpetual lies” that numbers and letters tell about learning. “Honor and merit rolls would disappear.

Commentary
4.3.2019
Curriculum & Instruction

The prevalence and effects of math anxiety

Jeff Murray

In the U.S. we call it “math phobia”; in the U.K. they call it “maths anxiety.” Either way you dub it, a negative emotional reaction to mathematics, which can manifest as a fear of or aversion to doing math-related work, is a real threat to mathematical competency. A new summary of research from the University of Cambridge adds a huge amount of detail to the picture of what causes math phobia in young people and what if anything can be done to mitigate its effects.

Podcast
4.3.2019

The Education Gadfly Show: CTE and local labor markets

On this week’s podcast, Cameron Sublett, associate professor of education at Pepperdine University, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss the findings of Fordham’s newest report, How Aligned is Career and Technical Education to Local Labor Markets?, that he and Griffith coauthored. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines how the New Leaders’ Aspiring Principals Program prepares school leaders for success.

How Aligned is CTE
Report
4.3.2019
Career & Technical Education

How Aligned is Career and Technical Education to Local Labor Markets?

The recent reauthorization of the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act—the principal federal education program supporting career and technical education (CTE)—expressly aims to “align workforce skills with labor market needs.” Our latest report examines whether students in high school CTE programs are more likely to take courses in high-demand and/or high-wage industries, both nationally and locally.

How Aligned is CTE
Commentary
4.2.2019

Acclaimed Princeton professor to America’s high schools: Please send us students who can think for themselves

The Education Gadfly

Last week, as part of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s and the Hoover Institution’s Education 20/20 speaker series, renowned Princeton University professor of jurisprudence Robert P. George addressed the importance of “viewpoint diversity” in American colleges and universities. Are you a high school teacher or administrator, a school board member, parent or state education leader? Please watch the eight minute segment now.

Commentary
4.2.2019

Re-weaving the fabric of character

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

As I gird my loins for several upcoming events where we will wrangle over the “social and emotional learning” approach to educating-the-whole-child, I benefited—and perhaps you could, too—from a conceptual reset, courtesy of a fine new book by Anne Snyder, who leads the “character initiative” at the Philanthropy Roundtable, of which Fordham is a member and where I once had the honor of serving on the board.

Commentary
3.29.2019
Curriculum & Instruction

From great materials to great instruction

Three years ago, two districts with similar enrollments, proficiency scores, and student demographics—not twenty miles apart—chose the same curriculum for middle school English language arts: Expeditionary Learning. But that is where the similarity in this story ends.

Commentary
3.29.2019
Charter Schools

At the wheel of Idaho’s public charter school program

A willfully one-sided and misguided “study” emerged the other day from something that calls itself the “Network for Public Education” that purports to show that the federal government has wasted a lot of money trying to expand and improve America’s public charter schools. This outfit, which appears to get support from the teacher unions and their fellow travelers, cites several states that, in the authors’ view, have mishandled the money and bungled the program.

Commentary
3.27.2019

The misplaced focus on New York City's selective high schools

Brandon L. Wright

The time and energy that Mayor Bill de Blasio and Chancellor Richard Carranza are devoting to revamping admissions for New York's eight selective exam-based high schools are misplaced. Those institutions provide a unique and valuable service that drives excellence and upward mobility. Leaders should instead focus on how the city’s black and Hispanic students are failed by Gotham’s other 1,700 schools, and how the exam schools' diversity problem is exacerbated by the lack of policies that would bolster those kids' achievement.