The harm of special education enrollment caps
A couple years ago, a high-profile dispute played out between the Texas Education Agency (TEA) and the federal Department of Education, with a January 2019 New York Times headline pronouncing,
A couple years ago, a high-profile dispute played out between the Texas Education Agency (TEA) and the federal Department of Education, with a January 2019 New York Times headline pronouncing,
In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes of a rally held for communist leader Josef Stalin. At the event’s end, a tribute to Stalin was called for. As Solzhenitsyn writes, “Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name)....
Fordham’s newest report, "Great Expectations," delves into high school grading practices and the impact they have on student outcomes. Turns out that higher standards benefit students of all types and in all kinds of schools. Whether black, Hispanic, white, male, or female, students learn more when taught by teachers with higher expectations. Unfortunately, American schools are gradually making it harder, not easier, for teachers to keep standards high.
Achievement gaps between affluent and low-income students are caused by much more than what happens in the classroom. Poverty is associated with a litany of social consequences that make learning more difficult, such as unstable housing, poor healthcare, and greater exposure to violence and other traumas.
Interesting question. Before I answer, let me ask one: What keeps Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, up at night? You know Amazon, the trillion-dollar corporation that delivers something like a five billion packages a year. I’m at a professional meeting. The chair asks what “levers” we have for improving reading achievement in the U.S.
One indicator of teachers’ expectations is whether they subject students to more or less rigorous grading practices. Unfortunately, “grade inflation” is pervasive in U.S. high schools, as evidenced by rising GPAs even as SAT scores and other measures of academic performance have held stable or fallen. A “good” grade is no longer a clear marker of knowledge and skills. This report examines how teachers’ grading standards affect student success.
The National Council on Teacher Quality just released its third review of America’s elementary teacher prep programs, seeking to determine, among other things, whether ed schools provide adequate instruction in scientifically-based reading instruction. The first investigation of this question, back in 2013, resulted in most programs receiving D’s and F’s, and just 35 percent earning A’s and B’s. But this year, slightly more than half of traditional prep programs received honors grades. That’s progress. But there are still miles to go.
Partisans of social-emotional learning are wont to make their case in utopian terms: Create better learning environments and good things will happen to kids, to academic achievement, to the society in which we live, etc. From the home page of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL):
Children’s screen-time is an important issue.
While education reform conversations about social and emotional learning (SEL) often include the value of interpersonal skills in creating and maintaining relationships, a new report from the American Enterprise Institute calls for increased emphasis on expanding student access to relationships and networks.
On this week’s podcast, Mike Magee, CEO of Chiefs for Change, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss National School Choice Week. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines how teachers who specialize instead of teaching all subjects affect elementary school outcomes.
For R & D to work in education, we must consistently secure funding from governments and philanthropies. That means presenting them with realistic, sensible ideas that can be adopted and implemented at a reasonable cost—both in money and teachers’ time. Fordham and CAP’s Moonshot for Kids competition yielded proposals for several such tools.
I owe my education career to reader’s workshop, the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, and its founder Lucy Calkins. I started as a mid-career switcher with a two-year commitment to teach fifth grade in a South Bronx public school. Two things about my school are worth knowing: It was the lowest-performing school in New York City’s lowest-performing district.
Amid all of the hullabaloo over teacher evaluations, fewer states are now using test scores to assess the quality of their teacher workforce.
A few years ago, as I was wrapping up grad school (where my dissertation was about migrant workers in China, of all things), I came across a bunch of fascinating podcast episodes about education policy and school reform.
A recent Fordham report finds that the quality of lessons that teachers get off the Internet is not very good. That’s no surprise but it obscures a bigger problem. If skilled practitioners in any profession feel compelled to scour the Internet for the basic tools of their trade that should concern us more than the quality of what they unearth. The very existence of a “vast curriculum bazaar” sends troubling signals about our general indifference to curriculum’s central role in learning, and our inattention to coherence and what gets taught.
Education Week’s recent report, Getting Reading Right, found that the most popular reading curricula in the country are not aligned with settled reading science.
Fordham’s recent Moonshot for Kids competition, a collaboration with the Center for American Progress, highlighted the distinction between research and development and “school improvement.” They’re very different concepts. R & D is inherently top-down and school improvement mostly bottom-up. Yet bringing them into productive contact with one another is vital and might be the key to getting student outcomes moving in the right direction once again.
Fordham has produced The Supplemental Curriculum Bazaar: Is What’s Online Any Good? Worth reading! Are popular materials offered on Teacher Pay Teachers, and similar sites, useful?
There’s a large gap between the current state of education sector R & D and our aspirations for this research. As sectors, education and medicine have lots in common and analogies are often drawn between the disciplines. However, when it comes to evidence-based practices, there are stark differences between the two fields.
To be clear, I am in favor of building a strong education R & D sector. However, it’s important to acknowledge the serious shortcomings of the current system. It is because of this current state that I am arguing that evidence-based practices don’t work. I’m making two claims.