The one place where school choice and ed reform battles are already over
School choice is a done deal in this one place, and we could learn a lot from it.
School choice is a done deal in this one place, and we could learn a lot from it.
My chief mentor, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, occasionally warned against “semantic infiltration,” which he correctly attributed to the late arms-control expert, Fred Ikle.
While education reforms are nearly always won via legislation, rare exceptions do occur—and sometimes they’re significant. The year 2014 has already proven to be a landmark one for education reform thanks to judicial decision. Perhaps the most notable example thus far is Vergara v.
“Nobody expects new surgeons to be any good. It wasn’t until my fortieth or fiftieth bypass surgery that I started feel like I knew what I was doing.” “I wish I could go back and retry those cases from my first year. If I knew then what I know now, they’d never have been convicted.”
The Education Department has been slowly gathering itself together over the past decade to review states’ mandatory annual IDEA “performance plans” on the basis of student outcomes, in addition to bureaucratic compliance with sundry procedural and data-reporting requirements.
Yes, everybody understands that “school leaders matter,” a truism now morphing into a cliché that trips easily from the tongue but typically fails to cause movement anywhere in the worlds of education policy and practice.
School leaders matter enormously. But are districts doing enough to ensure that the best possible candidates end up in these positions?
TEACHER PAYA new Vanderbilt working paper finds that top Tennessee teachers are more likely to continue working in low-achieving schools when given a substantial pay increase. (Teacher Beat)
Results on the spring test of third graders' reading proficiency are in; we take a look at the data and what it means for the Third Grade Reading Guarantee as a policy and for the students and schools working within its confines.
We welcome a guest contributor to take another look at recent legislative changes to Ohio's teacher evaluation protocols.
A brash plan by Common Core detractors ignores a number of likely consequences should the standards be repealed in Ohio.
Just a handful of teacher prep programs across Ohio are held up as providing high-quality training for future teachers.
VOUCHER EXPANSIONGovernor Rick Scott signed a bill expanding Florida’s tax-credit scholarship program. (Pensacola News Journal) TEACHER QUALITY
Note: This post is part of our series, "Netflix Academy: The best educational videos available for streaming." Be sure to check out our previous Netflix Academy posts on
Richard Whitmire is a former reporter and editorialist for USA Today,and the author of The Bee Eater (about Michelle Rhee) and
Fordham has long been a supporter of results-based accountability for private-school choice programs.
Here follow the opinions of four experts on whether states should consider “pressing the pause button” for a couple of years before taking Common Core–aligned assessment results into account in high-stakes decisions on teacher evaluation, school accountability, and student promotion.
Over the past three weeks, Fordham’s Flypaper blog hosted the charter school wonk-a-thon, an exercise in punditry and policy analysis that exceeded all expectations.
STEMNumerous and varied efforts to get kids enthusiastic about STEM jobs thus far have not made much of a difference. (New York Times) TEACHER PAY
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson faced active efforts to dissuade him from his lofty goals in the world of science from the people who should have supported him the most. What about other students who face the tyranny of lowered expectations?
What do the education-policy world and the sports world have in common? For one, Americans are rabidly passionate about both.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute is thrilled to welcome Robert Pondiscio as our senior fellow and vice president for external affairs, effective today. Here's his first of many posts he will pen as a member of the Fordham Institute team.
COMMON COREA nine-year-old struggling with New York City’s new math curriculum highlights challenges in Common Core implementation. (New York Times) THIRD-GRADE READING
Earlier this week, Gates Foundation education chief Vicki Phillips wrote a “letter to our partners” urging that states give students and teachers time to adjust to the new Common Core standards before using those standards as factors “in high-stakes dec
Andy Smarick and Juliet Square recently published a report arguing that state education agencies, or SEAs, lack the expertise needed to implement today’s education reforms.