Common Core: Too little change, not too much
As anyone in education knows, the Common Core debate has become heavily politicized over the past year.
As anyone in education knows, the Common Core debate has become heavily politicized over the past year.
It looks to me as if one of the most acclaimed reforms of today’s education profession—not just in the U.S. but also all over the planet—is one of the least examined in terms of actual implementation and effectiveness.
Michelle Gininger highlights a few moments from the Fordham LIVE discussion State Education Agencies: The Smaller the Better? Watch the full event.
Michael Brickman appeared on Fox News’ “Happening Now” to talk about standards and the Common Core with Joy Pullmann. Michael calls out anti–Common Core groups who offer false choices on standards vs.
Mike McShane and Andrew Kelly of AEI have written a terrific new study commissioned by the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. Everyone interested in the changing ecosystem of K–12 schooling in urban America ought to give it a look.
In 2013, there were a shocking number of charter-school failures across Fordham’s home state of Ohio, including seventeen in Columbus alone—most of them first-year startups.
Indiana's departure from the Common Core was a bold step, but not the end of the story. We take a look at what Indiana's travails might mean for Ohio.
The starting point for charter school improvements should be sound research.
Additional scrutiny reveals weakness in some sponsors' processes.
Like a dog that finally catches the bus he'd been chasing forever, what happens when opponents of the Common Core State Standards finally succeed in getting a state's policymakers to "repeal" the education initiative?
Spring has sprung, and that means lots of great edu-orgs are hiring. Here are some of the most interesting I’ve come across recently. Good luck!
Bright and early yesterday morning, Mike Petrilli joined Steven Scully at C-SPAN to talk Common Core. The good news? The conspiracy theorists weren’t watching—or maybe they had their calls screened out.
As the drumbeat to roll back the Common Core State Standards gets louder, some people are starting to question the value and purpose of academic standards in the first place. Do states really need to set expectations for what all students should learn? Are state standardized tests necessary?
When it comes to state education agencies (SEAs), ed-reformers have fallen into a sorry rut.
How is Common Core implementation faring, four years after these challenging standards were unveiled and embraced? Education Week attempts to answer this with an investigative report covering the key challenges that states and districts face: politics, assessments, teacher preparation, spending, curricula, accommodations, and tests for the severely disabled.
In recent years, policymakers and reform advocates have viewed State Education Agencies (SEAs) as the lead organizations for implementing sweeping reforms and initiatives in K–12 education—everything from Race to the Top grants and federal waivers to teacher-evaluation systems and online schools.
In the era of Race to the Top, waivers, and waivers of waivers, the role of state education agencies (SEAs) has increased dramatically: taking on school turnarounds, teacher-evaluation systems, and now Common Core implementation.
The Carnegie Corporation’s Michele Cahill and Leah Hamilton, veterans of Joel Klein’s Department of Education in New York City, responded to a challenge posed by Petrilli with a thoughtful alternative view.
The Philanthropy Roundtable recently released an exceptional publication produced by an exceptional author.
Some music scholars believe that 50 years ago, the blues—the primordial indigenous American musical form—was on the brink of extinction. Its progenitors were fading away, mainstream America was uninterested, and the unsympathetic forces of musical evolution were marching on.
We know from international data—PISA, TIMSS, and so on—that other countries produce more “high achievers” than we do (at least in relation to the
Of all the responses to my “you’re-not-college-material” essay
More than one million students. Sixteen thousand schools. Nearly 10,000 test items. This spring is a critical milestone, as PARCC states make history by participating in field tests. More than the numbers, however, the successful field tests mark a huge shift in how we do testing in this country.
South Carolina has taken today’s testing drama to new heights. A few years back, the governor, chief, and state board chair all agreed to have the Palmetto State become a governing board member of the Smarter Balanced (SBAC) testing consortia. But as other states withdrew and new testing options emerged, the state legislature no longer saw participation in a consortium as necessary.
The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in 2002 was the apotheosis of the standards-assessments-accountability movement, which had been building for about two decades.
A laudatory event takes a weird turn.
Columbus' newspaper pros try two different ways of looking at one education event.
A very important education reform announcement occurred last week, but you probably missed it because of the surprising and unfortunate paucity of coverage.
I try to avoid reading Paul Krugman’s columns because they almost always make me angry, and anger is not something I particularly enjoy. Yet I couldn’t help myself this morning, and the experience proved my point.
The always-terrific Center for Reinventing Public Education continues to lead when it comes to thinking about and cataloguing the changing nature of urban K–12 delivery.