Commentary
Five lessons from my time on the Maryland State Board of Education
This essay, originally published by Education Next, will run in two parts.
Commentary
A guidebook for high schoolers who want to be teachers
Working for the National Council on Teacher Quality can’t be fun or easy. Since 2003, the organization has set itself to the task of evaluating the nation’s teacher prep programs, which can only be compared to a department-store photographer telling mothers their babies are ugly. No one is glad to hear it, even if it’s observably true.
Commentary
Strengthening and diversifying the teacher workforce
Each year, teacher candidates across the nation take licensing exams designed to check their mastery of pedagogy and of content knowledge. Though each state selects its own licensing tests, the Praxis Elementary Education: Multiple Subjects assessment, created by the Education Testing Service (ETS), is the most widely used elementary content exam.
Podcast
School Finance
The Education Gadfly Show: Are schools ready for an economic downturn?
On this week’s podcast, Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab and a research associate professor at Georgetown University, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to remind schools to prepare for a rainy day, which is likely coming soon. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines students’ reading habits, and which books are most popular from K to 12.
Commentary
A moonshot for kids
Our schools are nowhere close to delivering the learning outcomes that our kids deserve and our country requires. What we need is a Moonshot for Kids. That’s what we at Fordham, in conjunction with the Center for American Progress, now propose to stimulate. During the next twelve months, we will explore the rationale, potential, and possible design of a sizable new investment in basic and applied research and development that leads to innovation on behalf of America’s children. At its heart is an open competition meant to elicit and highlight breakthrough ideas that could best leverage a major public or private investment of $1 billion or more to improve outcomes for school-age kids.
Commentary
Kamala Harris comes out swinging on education and picks the unions over students and parents
Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris must have been one of the people AFT president Randi Weingarten was referring to when she said on C-Span, in the context of the 2020 hopefuls being “eager for the teachers’ backing”, that her “phone had rung a lot” because Harris has quickly morphed into a union mouthpiece. The language is so familiar it reads like the same old script. Students are nowhere to be found in her comments, parents are absent from her tweets and learning outcomes don’t even get a single mention.
Commentary
Moms and choice: An interview with Abigail Hasberry from San Antonio, Texas
This is the third in a series of interviews called “moms and choice,” in which I talk with mothers who—because of issues like bullying, weak academics, poor instr
Commentary
Accountability & Testing
Liberation theology is no savior for low-income schools
For better or for worse, hard-left politics continue to cast an outsized shadow over the education sector. Nowhere is this more prevalent than within the echo chamber of ed school thinking, where the tweed-jacketed have their feet firmly planted in midair with regard to the nation’s most pressing education challenges. This goes doubly so for low-income schools, where the academy’s hubris makes for swell sounding monographs, but often has little grounding in the difficult work required to raise student performance.
Commentary
Achievement quandaries
An ambitious, important new piece of analysis in Education Next concludes that young Americans across the socioeconomic spectrum have made some progress over the past half century in academic achievement, but that rising tide hasn’t narrowed key gaps among them and hasn’t lifted the high school boats. This raises some really tough questions. How much does gap-closing matter versus tide-rising? Why has the tide stopped rising at the high school door? And—of course—what, if anything, is to be done, besides more of what we’ve been doing, at least since we began to get serious about addressing mediocrity and closing gaps back in the 1960s?
Commentary
Are grantmakers giving up on education reform?
I’ve been tugging at this issue for twenty years now, going back to the late 1990s when Checker Finn came to speak before the Massachusetts Board of Education. My state had passed ambitious education reform legislation five years earlier, and its controversial high-stakes provision—requiring passage of the tenth-grade MCAS test as a graduation requirement—was scheduled to kick in.
Commentary
New Mexico lawmakers just ruined the state's strong system for rating schools
Emboldened and empowered by newly elected Democratic Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, efforts to dismantle New Mexico’s many strong education policies are now underway. Last week, as the state’s legislative session ended, lawmakers took their first big step in rolling back years of laudable progress made by former education secretaries Hanna Skandera and Christopher Ruszkowski and many others.
Commentary
What charter school applications and approvals say about the state of authorizing
Running a charter school involves more than an independent leader and an alternative learning atmosphere for students—charter quality is supported by several layers of oversight and supervision, even before schools open their doors.
Commentary
Is teaching's diversity problem getting worse?
Decades of research show increases in teacher diversity, encouraging for a profession that’s long been disproportionately white and female.
Podcast
Accountability & Testing
The Education Gadfly Show: Education’s philanthropic shift
On this week’s podcast, Celine Coggins, executive director at Grantmakers for Education, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss philanthropy’s shift to the left on education policies. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines America’s persistent achievement gaps.
Commentary
At a tough time for education reform, Colorado defeat of charter school-defunding bill offers a ray of hope
Let’s not sugarcoat it: National education reform is in a tough patch, what with the emboldened teachers unions playing offense, a supportive but unpopular education secretary being used as a bogeyman, and internecine squabbles dominating the debate. Yet outside the deep-blue bubbles on the coasts, good things are still happening for kids. This week’s best example comes from Colorado.
Commentary
This week proved that the media still live in an upper-middle-class bubble
I won’t deny that the two big news stories of recent days—the tragic crash of a Boeing 737 Max 8 jet in Ethiopia, and the totally bonkers admissions scandal involving several of America’s elite universities—make for compelling reading. Planes dropping from the sky! Rich celebrities paying bribes!
Report
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Toward a Golden Age of Educational Practice
In recent years, we have reached a homeostasis in education policy, characterized by clearer and fairer but lighter-touch accountability systems and the incremental growth of school choice options for families—but little appetite for big and bold new initiatives.
Commentary
What education reformers believe
At conferences and online, there have been conversations of late about what it even means any more to be an “education reformer.” Here, Fordham’s president proposes an answer. Namely, we reformers believe that good schools deliver strong results for students—and all schools should be held to account for their results; our schools as a whole could be delivering much stronger results for all their students, but especially for disadvantaged children; and one size does not fit all, so we should embrace a pluralistic school system.
Commentary
Cultivating patriotism is the first job of civics education
Editor’s note: On March 13, 2019, Thomas B. Fordham Institute senior fellow Robert Pondiscio was a panelist at an event hosted by the Albert Shanker Institute in Washington, D.C., titled “Civic Education: Is There Common Ground.” The following is adapted from his remarks.
Commentary
To facilitate high-quality CTE, we must transform our education system
In the last two weeks, I explained how other states can learn from Colorado’s success in creating career and technical education programs that works well for students, emplo
Commentary
The truth about transportation troubles
If you think that student transportation is tricky for school districts—and there are numerous sources broadcasting that
Podcast
Charter Schools
The Education Gadfly Show: Richard Whitmire is all about the B.A.
On this week’s podcast, veteran education writer Richard Whitmire joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss his forthcoming
Commentary
How private school choice affects student character
In theory, private schools are better positioned to provide moral education than are their public counterparts because they can tailor character lessons to those who choose to attend. A new study from Corey A. DeAngelis and Patrick J.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction
The limitations of "Learning by the Book"
The new study from the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research was clearly a herculean effort, with data collection across six states, surveys of thousands of teachers, and the participation of some of the nation’s leading researchers.
Commentary
Charter Schools
Running successful schools is all about attitude
I met with an architect a few days ago to discuss the needs of GEO Prep Academy’s new building in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His original plan included classroom space big enough for each one of our 650 students. I told him to cut that number in half. He looked puzzled, so I explained that, for our high school to succeed, we really have to have the right attitude from day one.
Commentary
Career & Technical Education
Creating world-class CTE programs: Five lessons from Colorado
Last week, I explained why career and technical education will make agile learners America's future, and that maximizing their potential requires CTE that works well for students, employers, and school systems.
Commentary
Is education reform possible in America?
Since "A Nation at Risk" in 1983, the U.S. has engaged in nonstop efforts to raise K–12 academic outcomes and close tragic achievement gaps. These have produced modest gains. Yet the gaps remain large, and nothing has made close to the kind of positive difference that other nations’ efforts have achieved. This is, in part, because the U.S. lacks three key ingredients: a culture that values education, including learning itself; a conviction that parents, schools, and children themselves are jointly responsible for education; and a governance arrangement that points toward unimpeded and continuous improvement in the delivery system and its performance.
Commentary
Kids as political props
Preparing young people for active and engaged citizenship is an essential and neglected purpose of public education. How best to cultivate these qualities in school, however, is far from settled. In some circles, it takes the form of encouraging children to be directly involved in activism and advocacy, ostensibly student-led. But that’s morphing from a valuable instructional strategy into a manipulative and cynical use of children as political props in the service of causes they understand superficially, if at all. The recent video of young students confronting Senator Dianne Feinstein about the “Green New Deal” is a perfect example.
Podcast
The Education Gadfly Show: How KIPP-DC develops and retains teachers
On this week’s podcast, Susan Schaeffler, founder and CEO of KIPP DC, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss the Capital Teaching Residency and other efforts to build an effective and sustainable teacher corps. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines whether targeted text messages to parents can improve literacy in pre-kindergarteners.
Commentary
Instructional practices and classroom ability level
Efforts to define what it means to be college and career ready have advanced research about the types and the complexity of materials that students should be reading.