Podcast
Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance
The Education Gadfly Show: Emily Oster and Noelle Ellerson Ng answer the big question: Will schools reopen this spring?
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
The effects of social-emotional development on academic achievement
Despite a stampede of interest in students’ social-emotional development (SED), gathering data on—and measuring the success of—such initiatives remain
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Vaccine-making’s lessons for high-dosage tutoring: How to move forward
Editor’s note: This is the final post in a five-part series about how to effectively scale-up high-dosage tutoring.
Commentary
Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Do charter schools help new teachers get better faster?
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?
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Vaccine-making’s lessons for high-dosage tutoring: A respectful disagreement about research
Editor’s note: This is the fourth post in a five-part series about how to effectively scale-up high-dosage tutoring.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Vaccine-making’s lessons for high-dosage tutoring: Cells constantly create “new problems”
Editor’s note: This is the third post in a five-part series about how to effectively scale-up high-dosage tutoring.
Commentary
Accountability & Testing
U.S. students continue to fall short of too many international peers
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
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Reading comprehension is not a “skill”
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.
Commentary
Accountability & Testing
Reading and math outcomes during Covid-19
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.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction
Vaccine-making’s lessons for high-dosage tutoring: Part I
Editor’s note: This is the first post in a five-part series about how to effectively scale-up high-dosage tutoring.
Commentary
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
More ways to expand classical schools
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,”
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Will students recover their Covid-19 learning losses?
Here in Fordham’s pages, I’ve previously written about the challenge of Covid-19 learning losses at the macro level. In this article, I focus on the micro level.
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Testing, accountability, NAEP, and reading
For those of us who still believe that results-based school accountability is an essential part of the education renewal that America sorely needs, not many things are looking great this week.
Commentary
Accountability & Testing
The grading lies we tell our students
Two years ago, Seth Gershenson and Fordham published Grade Inflation in High Schools, groundbreaking research examining the relationship between students’ Algebra I course grades and end-of-course (EOC) test results in North Carolina.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Can we overcome challenges facing the expansion of classical schools?
Clare Basil recently shared some thoughtful observations about the growth of K–12 classical schools, schools that take “a unifying approach to intellectual and moral formation by developing the integrity of mind and heart”—a quote Basil borrows from the Institute for Classical Educat
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Memo to policymakers: Help teachers focus on reading
At the tail end of a recent symposium titled “Why children can’t read—and what we can do about it” hosted by American Enterprise Institute, Margaret Goldberg, a California first grade teacher and founder of the
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
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
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
When excellence isn’t on a school’s menu
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.
Podcast
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Create more autonomous, accountable district schools. Here's how.
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.
Podcast
Accountability & Testing, Charter Schools, Governance
The Education Gadfly Show: What the election means for education reform
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
About those 12th grade NAEP scores: The cake was (mostly) baked years ago
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.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders
Gifted education done right benefits Black and Hispanic children. It’s not inherently racist.
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.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Educating patriots
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.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Teacher improvement during the first ten years
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.
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Don’t place all the blame on our high schools—or Trump—if the 12th-grade test scores disappoint this week
On Wednesday, the government will release the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress scores for twelfth grade students.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Restarting the “science of reading” conversation
Early childhood literacy advocacy has been a quiet casualty of our current annus horribilis.
Event
Curriculum & Instruction
Will more social studies instruction improve students’ reading outcomes?
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.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Partisanship and American education
What are we teaching the children about our country? The short answer: not much.
