Why end-of-course exams are being replaced by the ACT and SAT, and how to reverse that
In the last month, two reports have renewed questions about the current direction of states’ high school assessments.
In the last month, two reports have renewed questions about the current direction of states’ high school assessments.
School closures hurt. While they are relatively uncommon nationwide, they are sometimes unavoidable—and they’re always painful, especially for the students and families who are displaced and who rarely see any educational benefit as a result.
Much of the initial response to Robert’s new book, "How The Other Half Learns," has focused on the winnowing effects of Success Academy’s enrollment process, which ensures that the children of only the most committed parents enroll and persist. But that’s just the start of the story. You have to look at what parent buy-in actually buys: a school culture that drives student achievement, and which can only be achieved when parents are active participants, not unwilling conscripts.
Bellwether Education Partners, long interested in the improvement of school transportation systems, released no less than three papers on the topic this summer.
As part of a national war against school choice, the California teachers union is pouring more than a million dollars a month into anti-charter legislative efforts. Unfortunately, a new “compromise” bill crafted by Governor Gavin Newsom whose language was released this week indicates the union is about to get a big return on its investment. Caprice Young, a Fordham Institute trustee and a leading figure in the state’s charter sector, explains how this painful moment came about—and what it means for California charter schools going forward.
Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Tom Wolf garnered headlines recently when he announced vague plans for taking funding away from the state’s public charter schools.
Summer ’19 is showing its age: My daughter recently returned to school, bright yellow buses are canvassing my neighborhood again, and Pumpkin Spice Latte is back.
Editor’s note: This is the final post in a series looking at whether and how the nation’s schools have improved over the past quarter-century or so (see the others here,
A dozen long years ago, when people were just beginning to take serious stock of what good and not-so-good was emerging from 2002’s enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), we at Fordham, in league with the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), issued a 200-plus page analysis of the “proficiency” standards that states had by then been required to set and test for.
A few weeks back, New York City Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza said that principals would not be required to attend district meetings this coming September.
The past quarter-century has included dramatic progress of America’s lowest-performing students, many of whom are also low-income and children of color. But how’s the vast middle class doing? It’s a mixed bag: They still don’t read very well, but their math skills have improved a bit and they are graduating from college in higher and higher numbers.
During a political campaign, the savviest candidates excel at two things. First, they offer a compelling message that differentiates them from their competitors. Second—which demands true skill and sophistry—they ascribe all their own failings to those very same competitors, forcing them to answer for political, policy and social issues for which they are not responsible.
Ten years ago, then U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan issued a clarion call to turn around 5,000 of the nation’s most distressed schools, serving nearly three million students. It was an audacious goal set by an audacious leader—the likes of which are in terribly short supply these days. A decade later, states have fallen far short of his challenge, and the sticky problem of failing schools refuses to go away. But experience has provided three lessons to those who would make these efforts.
As I belong to the legion of education professionals that’s usually on the receiving end of the term “top-down,” I’m not too keen on the enterprise’s more top-down improvements.
The Fordham Institute’s recent survey of teachers has brought the issue of discipline reform back to the forefront. But even as teachers say that discipline policies are leading to unsafe educational environments, a new federal rule threatens to further exacerbate the issue.
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.
Each year, the Education Commission of the States (ECS), based in my adopted home of Denver, reviews the governors’ State of the State addresses and offers an analysis of their main education components. Mentioned by at least thirty-six governors, this year’s top education priority was school finance, followed by workforce development, teacher quality, early learning, postsecondary financial aid, and school safety.