Reducing grading bias against Black students
A perennial complaint about holding students accountable through grades and test scores is that these mechanisms are biased against already disadva
A perennial complaint about holding students accountable through grades and test scores is that these mechanisms are biased against already disadva
I knew something was wrong when, during what was supposed to be a full day of remote learning, my thirteen-year-old son announced at 9:30 a.m. that he was free until 11:27 a.m., and then plopped onto the couch and flipped on the television.
At a virtual town hall in Brooklyn about how the pandemic will change admissions to high-performing selective schools, New York City officials got a lecture on systemic racism.
Control of state legislatures is particularly important in a census year, but it’s also an often-overlooked element in driving substantive education policy changes. National politics takes up all the oxygen, but it’s state legislators who make most of the big decisions about how a state’s public-education system operates, is funded, is held accountable (if at all), and much more.
Despite the divisiveness of the past four years, we should give peace a chance and heed President-Elect Biden’s plain but true words: “It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature, see each other again, listen to each other again. And to make progress, we have to stop treating our opponents as our enemies. They are not our enemies, they are Americans.”
Education wasn’t explicitly on the national ballot in 2020, but education is always on the ballot, even when you don’t see it. Now that the election is behind us, education reformers can focus again on states and communities, where most of the important decisions about K–12 education get made.
Divisiveness, anger, frustration, mistrust, and threats. That is the narrative emerging around the 2020 presidential election. What I saw on election day as an Ada County poll worker in Boise, Idaho, couldn’t have been more different. The election I witnessed and served was distinctly positive and hopeful.
As we conclude a particularly fraught and divisive presidential election, most Americans (and even those of us who live in D.C.) welcome a reprieve from the constant onslaught of negative political ads, contentious debates, and around-the-clock election coverage.
Spend a few minutes on education Twitter or listening to the loudest special-interest voices, and you’d think the future of public education hinges on whether Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, and the president can agree to another stimulus deal. That’s just a short-term Washington game—that will likely soon have a new roster of players.
Are schools essential or aren’t they? Are teachers essential workers or aren’t they? How would Americans respond if large numbers of doctors, nurses, policemen, firemen, and postal workers simply opted to stay home—and their unions defended them? If you’re essential, you go to work.
A U.S. Supreme Court decision is introducing a new type of charter school that’s likely to cheer conservatives but alarm many progressives: the religiously-affiliated charter. Those of us in the charter movement need to figure out how to keep them from splitting the charter coalition.
As we previously saw at the 4th grade and 8th grade levels, the just-released 2019 12 grade NAEP results were mostly flat or down. But we already knew from the 2015 results that this cohort of students entered high school performing below their older peers.
As the clock winds down on the 2020 presidential campaign, what seems certain is that the path forward on education reform will not be through whoever wins the White House.
As our country grapples with racial injustice, there are persistent calls to diversify elite institutions at all levels, from corporate and foundation boards to law schools and medical schools to undergraduate programs. All good.
Decades before “equity” became a buzzword in education, E. D. Hirsch, Jr. had his finger on what the word actually means: equal access for all children to the knowledge and verbal proficiency that makes full participation in American life possible.
A recent study from Brown University’s Matthew A. Kraft and John P. Papay and Harvard’s Olivia L. Chi uses nine years of administrative data from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina to examine teacher improvement through the lens of principal evaluations.
On Wednesday, the government will release the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress scores for twelfth grade students.
On paper, it seems like Joe Biden would champion the cause of expanding high-quality charter schools, given his identity as a longtime centrist Democrat. Yet he doesn't. Thankfully for charter supporters, there pragmatic ways to bring him around, should he win the election next month
Early childhood literacy advocacy has been a quiet casualty of our current annus horribilis.
In education, one of the more bizarre debates of the past quarter century has been over whether more money improves students’ outcomes. It’s tough to think of anywhere else in American life where we’d even have that discussion.
The Progressive Policy Institute’s indefatigable David Osborne, a long-time student of and advocate for quality charter schools, now joined by Tressa Pankovits, has penned a valu
On this week’s podcast, Fordham’s Checker Finn joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss the growing, misguided war on selective-admissions
According to the Nation’s Report Card (NAEP), just one-third of U.S. fourth- and eighth-grade students can read proficiently. Among students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, it’s just one in five.
What are we teaching the children about our country? The short answer: not much.
Contrary to much public rhetoric, the evidence for expanding charter schools in urban areas is stronger than ever. To be sure, the research is less positive for charters operating outside of the nation’s urban centers. And multiple studies suggest that internet-based schools and charters that serve mostly middle-class students, perform worse than their district counterparts, at least on traditional test-score-based measures. But charters needn’t work everywhere to be of service to society.
The negative partisanship animating this year’s presidential contest notwithstanding, charter school advocates will have their hands full no matter who prevails.
For a number of years, Ohio’s charter school sector has been more of a punchline than an exemplar in national debates about charters. The criticisms, though sometimes exaggerated, were not entirely unwarranted.
Before the coming of the pandemic, pre-K was a hot topic.