We have had a challenging year with news cycles filled with troubling news about the coronavirus, racial injustices, violent rioting, and polarizing elections. But through all this, we have seen people come together and care for one another, such as how teachers drove by in a motorcade to greet their students.
President-Elect Biden has confirmed that he will nominate Dr. Miguel A. Cardona to serve as the next U.S. Secretary of Education. He appears to be a prudent choice for Biden, earning support from teachers unions and education reform groups, including charter operators. Cardona is the current Connecticut Commissioner of Education.
As with most years, 2020 has been a busy one for the Fordham research team. We published many groundbreaking studies, adding contributions to the evidence base on literacy, civic education, education funding, school choice, and gifted programs, among others.
As with everything else in the world, American K–12 education was rocked back on its heels only three months into 2020. School closures, reopening, and recovery became the focus of teachers and state, district, and school leaders. Remote learning became the bane of students,’ parents’, and teachers’ existence.
What if we can’t change at scale the distribution of academic outcomes among disparate groups of students? What if our hope that public education can erase inequality is in vain? If these things were true, how would what we ask of schools—and how we measure their success—change?
Long before Covid-19 hit, far too many students were struggling to stay engaged, experiencing the effects of learning loss, and had inequitable access to high quality educational opportunities.
Despite a stampede of interest in students’ social-emotional development (SED), gathering data on—and measuring the success of—such initiatives remain
Like traditional public schools, charter schools are publicly funded according to student enrollment. But compared to their district counterparts, charters have long received far less per-pupil funding.
“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” —Albert Camus
Editor’s note: This is the final post in a five-part series about how to effectively scale-up high-dosage tutoring.
Study after study has found that urban charter schools, and non-profit charter networks in particular, tend to be more successful at boosting student achievement than traditional public schools in similar settings. But why?
Study after study has found that new teachers tend to be less effective than educators with more experience. But despite having more junior staff, charter networks (referred to as CMOs) often outperform their district peers. So what’s their secret? To find out, this study explores how teacher effectiveness varies and evolves across traditional and charter public schools, as well as within the sector’s CMOs and standalone schools.
Editor’s note: This is the fourth post in a five-part series about how to effectively scale-up high-dosage tutoring.
Editor’s note: This is the third post in a five-part series about how to effectively scale-up high-dosage tutoring.
In the first semester of the 2019–20 school year, the San Diego Unified school district board discovered that 20 percent of Black students had received a D or F grade. In comparison, 7 percent of White students earned the same failing marks.
TIMSS is less well known to most American ed-watchers than NAEP and PISA, perhaps because it comes from a private group called the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), but it does a first-rate job of monitoring, comparing, and explaining the educational performance of fourth- and eighth-graders in dozens of countries in the crucial subjects of math and
I became a disciple of E.D. Hirsch, Jr. early in my teaching career for one simple reason. His theories about reading comprehension—and his alone—described precisely what I witnessed every day in my South Bronx fifth grade classroom: children who could “decode” (read the words on the page) but struggled to comprehend the words they read.
“Good teaching is rocket science,” write Jim Short and Stefanie Hirsh in a new report from the Carnegie Corporation, titled The Elements: Transforming Teaching through Curriculum-Based Professional Learning. Houston, we have a problem…
The pandemic has now disrupted two consecutive school years, and its effects are certain to linger for years to come. Unfortunately, some students will be more impacted than others.
Editor’s note: This is the second post in a five-part series about how to effectively scale-up high-dosage tutoring.
“How teachers’ unions are influencing decisions on school reopenings.” —Education Week The closures of preschools during the pandemic will leave many children unprepared for Kindergarten, especially those from low-income backgrounds.
Editor’s note: This is the first post in a five-part series about how to effectively scale-up high-dosage tutoring.
Editor’s note: This is the second article in a two-part series. Part I urges readers to "listen more, empathize more, and demonize less" in these divisive times.
A long simmering feud between Denver’s school board and superintendent finally burst into the open last week following months of tensions and mutual distrust.
The federal government should provide states with new funds that target students who struggled the most to adapt to remote learning.
In part one of this two-part essay, published last week, I reflected on Clare Basil’s “definitional” challenge to the growth of classical schools—schools that take “a unifying approach to intellectual and moral formation by developing the integrity of mind and heart,”
