Good jobs don’t always require college
Many contemporary discussions on attending college seem to start with the premise that only folks with bachelor’s degrees have a clear path to good, paying jobs and further economic opportunity.
Many contemporary discussions on attending college seem to start with the premise that only folks with bachelor’s degrees have a clear path to good, paying jobs and further economic opportunity.
A pair of weekend essays heralding two new books point in very different directions regarding childhood, adolescence, and education—and portend tough choices for parents and educators. One is an anthropologist’s look at the spelling bee phenomenon as it has evolved in recent years. The other is a well-documented argument against the kind of youthful single-mindedness displayed by those spelling-bee fanatics (and their fanatical parents). It’s a quandary that inevitably connects to the larger policy issue of liberal education versus professionalism in college—and to the classic array of academic subjects versus CTE during high school.
Earlier this month, Stephen Sawchuk wrote a thought-provoking article in Education Week—part of a project called “Citizen Z,” which aims to examine the current state of civics education—highlighting a skir
The variance across students’ current abilities and interests is an age-old challenge for educators, and one that’s resulted in a long list of proposed solutions.
A recent study uses data from Charlotte-Mecklenberg Schools in North Carolina along with juvenile and adult arrest data to try to isolate the effect of peers on a range of outcomes, including long-term ones.
Florida is celebrating the twenty-year mark of its A+ Plan for Education, which brought accountability, parental choice, and evidence-based practices to the state’s schools. These efforts produced results that put almost every other state to shame, and lifted Florida from the middle of the pack to the top tier. But even more impressive is that these outcomes occurred while the state kept spending per pupil flat as a pancake. This makes Florida a serious outlier, and represents an incredible and laudable return on investment.
This essay is part of the The Moonshot for Kids project, a joint initiative of the Fordham Institute and the Center for American Progress.
A recent study in The Review of Economics and Statistics looks at changes in school funding over the last several decades, a period when courts ordered states to remedy the huge funding inequalities that had resulted from local funding of education by allocating additional state funds to poorer districts.
Early college high schools are those in which students pursue college credits as a requirement for graduation.
This essay is part of the The Moonshot for Kids project, a joint initiative of the Fordham Institute and the Center for American Progress. This is the second of three parts.
To a degree most of us would prefer not to acknowledge, classroom practice tends to run less on research and empirical evidence than on some combination of philosophy, faith, or personal preference.
“Credentials Matter,” a new report released by the Foundation for Excellence in Education and Burning Glass Technologies, joins other recent
Almost every article on gifted education highlights inequity as an issue for the field. Indeed, inequity and large excellence gaps are among society’s most vexing educational problems, and scholars have proposed a variety of approaches to address them.
Good teachers are warm and compassionate people, and like parents, they tend to love all their kids equally. Nevertheless, they also have a special tenderness for the students who struggle in their classrooms and feel a particular urgency about meeting their needs. This often means less attention paid to high flyers. Educators tend to believe these children will be fine no matter what. But they’re are their own “high-needs” subgroup because they’re at the greatest risk for extreme boredom.
As we wrap up Teacher Appreciation Week, I’ve done some reflecting about my own years as a student. There are teachers who have a lasting impact on our lives and on April 2, I lost one of mine. Mr. Murphy wasn’t just special because of how much knowledge of history and politics was crammed into his brain and shared with all of us, but he pushed us in ways that every student deserves to be pushed. He challenged us to think and come to our own conclusions. He may not have agreed with where we all landed but he sure did love to wave his hands in the air and debate us when he didn’t.
Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of speaking on a panel at the Education Writers Association’s (EWA) National Seminar, the largest annual gathering of journalists covering the education beat. With over five hundred education reporters in attendance, it was an opportunity to talk (on the record, of course) about the ins and outs of state accountability systems in the ESSA era, and to meet face-to-face with an assortment of folks I’ve long admired from afar and only previously known through social media.
Things might look very different in education—we might even manage to sustain promising practices and reform initiatives long enough for them to bear fruit—if advocates for various programs and policies were required to temper their pitches with warning labels, akin to pharmaceutical ads. Make your case. Sell yourself as hard as you want to the consumer—but then comes the legally required disclaimers and warnings about potentially harmful side effects. This piece offers some examples to get us started.
This essay is part of the The Moonshot for Kids project, a joint initiative of the Fordham Institute and the Center for American Progress. It will run in three parts, with the second and third appearing in the next two issues of the Education Gadfly Weekly.
In January of this year, we made predictions for Fordham about the future of education reform in Wisconsin under newly elected Democratic Governor Tony Evers.
In the wake of yet another tragedy, the most recent IES report on school crime and safety is a reminder that it gets better, statistically speaking. Among the highlights:
Next year, states will for the first-time report actual school-by-school spending as required under ESSA. This effort represents a quantum leap from the typical practice of tracking and reporting average district per-pupil spending, and is arguably the most complex piece of the law—so much so that states were given an extra year to comply with the new requirement. Marguerite Roza and her team at the Edunomics Lab have ably taken the lead on addressing the many policy related and technical questions involved, but there’s an even larger question of whether we are preparing ourselves for the political challenges that lay ahead.
The first obligation of schools is to keep kids safe, and the second is to create and preserve a calm environment in which those who want to learn are able to do so with minimal interruption. We may empathize with the travails that cause kids to disrupt that environment, but it’s still the school’s responsibility—if it can’t speedily and durably solve the problem within its classrooms—to put disrupters somewhere else. So it’s disheartening to see forces exclude and punish institutions that have high suspension rates, independent of reason and regardless of academic outcomes. They’re warring against the very schools that successfully educate thousands of poor and minority kids.
One of the hallmarks of charter schools is their unique ability to align closely with parents’ values. Every American has fundamental moral and ethical principles, some of which can’t always be accommodated by traditional public schools.
I’ve beaten the drum forever about the importance of building students’ content knowledge if we want to improve their reading comprehension, but another key insight from rigorous research is that kids will read better only if exposed to complex texts. This insight was embedded into the Common Core and other high-quality English language arts standards.
Governors and legislative leaders in almost every state have made expanding and improving career and technical education (CTE) a top priority, yet the importance of quality data is often overlooked. The recent reauthorization of the Carl D.