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.
The Fordham-Hoover “Education 20/20” speaker series continued on April 11 with another star-studded double feature.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The provocative Fordham-Hoover “Education 20/20” speaker series resumes on March 26th with another star-studded duo.
