Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Education is progressive. Schools are conservative.
Editor’s note: This was first published by Newsweek.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders
Attacking gifted education is bad policy and bad politics
Education for high achievers has come under siege in blue cities and states as the national focus has shifted to racial equity in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. But such attacks, even when well-intentioned, are misguided. They target a problem’s symptom rather than its cause, and in doing so, harm students and defy parents.
Commentary
Career & Technical Education, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Redesigning early college credit to reach underserved students
In 2012, Tennessee lawmakers created the Statewide Dual-Credit program (SDC) to help more students earn college credit while completing high school.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
The state of computer science education
In early November, the Code.org Advocacy Coalition, the Computer Science Teachers Association, and the Expanding Computing Education Pathways Alliance teamed up to release the 2021 State of Computer Science Education.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Stop pestering education leaders to “follow the evidence.” Instead, host forecasting tournaments.
Education leaders—principals, superintendents, state chiefs, philanthropy heads—make lots of decisions, and we exhort them to “use evidence” when they do. But we should stop doing that for at least four reasons.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
What is virtue and why does it matter?
Contemporary education has become too technocratic and divorced from virtue. This is a disservice to students because it robs them of what a classical education provides: the tools students need to succeed, not just academically and professionally, but in the deep and abiding sense of being able to flourish as free and good human beings.
Commentary
School Finance, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
In almost every state, funding gaps between rich and poor schools have been closed
The conventional wisdom is that American students from poor families are mostly stuck in sorely underfunded public schools while more affluent families have access to well-resourced ones. For decades, this was largely true.
Podcast
Governance
Education Gadfly Show #796: What Glenn Youngkin’s election says about education politics today
On this week’s show, Andrew Rotherham, cofounder and partner at Bellwether Education partners, joins Mike Pet
Commentary
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Communicating the “learning” in social-emotional learning
Editor’s post: This post was originally published on November 8, 2021, by the Learning Policy Institute as part of its “Educating the Whole Child“ blog series.
Commentary
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
The fall of the yellow-school-bus system requires swift modernization
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.” —Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Effectively implementing social-emotional learning means getting the terminology right
Two charter networks, Uplift Education and Distinctive Schools, have provided models for supporting social-emotional learning (SEL) that other schools should emulate.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
How media coverage of critical race theory misses the point
It is not a controversial statement to say that the debate over critical race theory in schools has shed more heat than light. This is not surprising. When a relatively obscure and arcane academic field suddenly becomes a high-profile political football, hotly debated on cable news shoutfests, it is almost certainly because it has been reduced to bumper-sticker simplicity.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders
A descriptive look at the structure of gifted programs in Washington State
Gifted education has been a much-debated issue
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Would eliminating college admissions tests really make education more equitable?
When the University of California began phasing-out college admissions test scores as part of a recent legal settlement, the rationale was “equity.” Lawyers for the students who brought the lawsuit said that “SAT and ACT scores are largely a proxy for a student’s socioeconomic background and race,” rather than measures of ac
Commentary
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Want your kids to thrive in school? Call the pediatrician.
The pandemic has provided a stream of unsettling headlines reminding us that our kids are not OK. They have grappled with surges in loneliness, anxiety, and depression.
Commentary
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
2021 election recap: How four key school board races shook out
While the gubernatorial upset in Virginia drew the brightest spotlight, Tuesday’s election featured an unusual surge in the number of school board candidates vying for thousands of seats all over the country. Four races were especially noteworthy, both for the charged political rancor leading up to November 2, as well as the potentially broader implications from the results.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Reconnecting knowledge and virtue
Editor’s note: We're happy to introduce Jennifer Frey, who will be writing regularly for the Fordham Institute over the next year. She is an associate professor at the University of South Carolina, where she focuses on virtue ethics.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Lessons on protecting viewpoint diversity in classrooms
A story that became a flashpoint in national conversations around the effects of “CRT bans” is reaching its denouement: This past week, a hearing officer appointed to adjudicate the case ruled that the Sullivan County, Tennessee, school board was justified in
Commentary
Career & Technical Education, Governance
The “big quit” is an opportunity to fix our broken education system
Covid-19 sent a shock wave through an already changing U.S. job market, provoking “a great reassessment of work in America.”
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Not everyone’s on board with turning schooling into therapy
Schools have been concerned with character formation and values since Plato sat with students under an olive tree. Today’s “social and emotional learning” is consistent with this age-old impulse. But in its form and function it can represent something different—and more worrisome—than its progenitors, especially when employed without full discussion of its priorities and methods.
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
The case for K–2 testing
Under federal law, states must assess students annually in reading and math in grades 3–8 and at least once during high school, as well as testing science once in elementary, middle, and high school.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance
The fault in our genes: Should education policies consider DNA?
Kathryn Paige Harden is a behavioral genetics rock star at UT Austin. Unsurprisingly for a college professor in a liberal town, she identifies as progressive. The seeming contradiction between her research interests and her political views has drawn broad attention to her first book, The Genetic Lottery.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
How reopening decisions affected public school disenrollment
During the first full school year after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, enrollment in U.S. public schools fell by about 1.1 million students, or 2 percent of prior K–12 enrollment.
Commentary
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Declining NAEP scores are flashing red lights for the Covid generation
Last week brought the latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s Long Term Trend series, and they were sobering. Just before the pandemic kicked in, U.S. thirteen-year-olds saw statistically-significant declines in both math and reading—a first in the study’s nearly 50-year history. Black, Hispanic, and low-achieving students saw the largest declines. Here’s the case that the Great Recession was largely at fault.
Commentary
School Finance, Governance, Private School Choice
How do parents use education savings accounts?
Whether due to the pandemic, political opportunism, popular demand, or a combination, education savings accounts (ESAs) are enjoying much attention and growth
Commentary
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Reforming licensing policies will help alleviate teacher shortages
With the effects of the pandemic dragging on for another year, labor markets are acting strange and organizations are struggling to find qualified workers. Schools are no different. The teacher pipeline has slowed to a trickle as teacher preparation programs see fewer and fewer candidates. Teachers have been leaving the profession early.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders
Bill de Blasio is decimating gifted education in New York. Will Eric Adams save it?
Mayor de Blasio is axing New York City’s long-standing gifted education programs. He plans to replace them with something else, but his proposal is almost entirely wrong. Fortunately, Eric Adams, who’s almost certain to replace him in January, has a vision of gifted education that’s mostly right, and he’ll enter office in time to fix de Blasio’s blunders.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Seeking a constitutional shortcut to educational excellence
Do students have a right to a high-quality education? A proposed ballot initiative filed in California last Thursday says yes.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
How well are schools teaching disadvantaged students to read? In California, it depends where you live.
How do we know if a school district is doing one of its most basic jobs—teaching students to read? That’s one of the main questions the California Reading Coalition, which I helped organize earlier this year, set out to answer with the California Reading Report Card, released in September.
