The Education Gadfly Show: How assessment data can drive instruction this fall
On this week’s podcast, Mike Petrilli, Tran Le, Amber Northern, and David Griffith discuss Fordham’s new
On this week’s podcast, Mike Petrilli, Tran Le, Amber Northern, and David Griffith discuss Fordham’s new
Editor’s note: This article was first published by the Overdeck Family Foundation.
David Steiner:
David Brooks has long been a stalwart supporter of education reform, both the choice-and-charters flavor and the testing-and-accountability variety.
On this week’s podcast, Nina Rees, President and CEO of the National Alliance for Public
As I noted in a recent post, attitudes toward advanced education are cyclical. From gifted education to talent development programs, from honors classes to AP, we have experienced a largely positive stretch of media attention and state-level policy gains.
Great Minds creates curricula in math, English language arts, and science for grades PK–12. I’m its founder and CEO, and when Covid-19 hit, we were ill-prepared for digital distance learning, like most everyone else.
At least we have stopped pretending that we’re making high school more modern.
On this week’s podcast, Checker Finn, Mike Petrilli, and David Griffith discuss what it takes for real change to happen in America.
As national unrest builds along with the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others at the hands of police officers, people worldwide are responding with marches, protests, critical reflection, and grief. Right now, the Black Lives Matter movement rages on.
The start of a new school year is always filled with challenges. New teachers, new classes, and new expectations can be difficult for both teachers and students. But what if teachers and students haven’t been in school for six months or more? How can schools try and prepare to get back to a sense of normalcy after all of this?
In dozens of fields, federally-supported research and development translates into new ideas, technologies, and actions. Why not in education, particularly as the Covid-19 crisis makes it abundantly clear that our educational systems are severely lacking innovative technologies that could have improved the resiliency and flexibility of our classrooms and facilitated a nationwide shift to remote instruction?
The Institute for Classical Education, a recently established research center based in Arizona, announced its ambitious mission of bringing classical education to an additional 50,000 students by 2025.
Michael J. Petrilli’s recent article “Half-Time High School may be just what students need” is compelling. Yet proposals to cut school time in half in grades nine through twelve may be only half right.
As quickly as the NBA put its season on hold and the summer Olympics rescheduled, schools across America switched to “school from home.” It happened almost overnight. Regardless of teacher training, parent comfort, or students’ technology access—remote learning was the new reality.
On this week’s podcast, Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, talks with Mike Petrilli and David Griffith about how well school districts handled remote learning this spring. On the Research Minute, Olivia Piontek joins Mike and David to examine how data on how academic growth affects parents’ perception of school quality.
With the school year ending and the start of summer, the usual fanfare to kick off freedom and fun has been muffled by Covid-19—not only for children but also for parents.
All over the country, states, districts and task forces of every sort are wrestling with the question of how to safely reopen schools. This scenario planning is daunting, as schools must navigate a minefield of health, safety, legal, and instructional issues, and do so blindfolded by ever-changing and imperfect understanding of the virus itself.
The idea that all postsecondary education on average is good is misleading. The truth is, there’s significant variation in which academic degrees bring workers the most value, and why they do.
America’s schools could learn a lot about how to handle two hot-button issues from Joe Biden’s comments in response to George Floyd’s horrific murder: how to model and cultivate empathy for our fellow citizens, and how to teach an inclusive version of history. He carved a middle path between right and left that is anything but the mushy middle.
1. Problems with models Nobel Physicist Richard Feynman wrote about models: [Physicists have] learned to realize that whether they like a theory or they don’t like a theory is not the essential question.
The pandemic forced schools across the country to close and institute some form of remote learning, but their methods varied widely. To see just how much, analysts at the American Enterprise Institute and the Center on Reinventing Public Education have been examining how different public school districts and charter school networks have responded.
On this week’s podcast, Michael McShane, the director of national research at EdChoice, joins Mike Petrilli to discuss how Catholic
The sudden shift to remote learning this spring demanded that schools innovate and adapt with incredible speed. The entire education world is trying to serve millions of suddenly home-bound students, and there’s simply no precedent for a challenge on that scale.
The shutdown of America’s high schools has deprived millions of students of rites we previously took for granted. Coursework can be transferred online to some degree, but no virtual environment can replace football games, choir concerts, musicals, and so much more that’s part of the American high school experience.
In early 2019, the Aspen Institute released the findings of the National Commission on Social, Emotional, and Academic Development. The report concluded that non-academic factors—such as managing emotions, goal setting, empathy, interpersonal relationships, self-regulation, and more—were vital ingredients to boosting academic achievement for all students.
There’s a long list of policy problems we should have solved before a global pandemic turned almost everything into a crisis.
Conservatives are right to be leery of bailing out profligate state and local governments, especially for needs that bear little relationship to—and pre-date—the virus crisis and its economic consequences. A well-crafted bill would base the amount of funding for state and local governments upon an estimate of the actual costs and losses incurred as result of the pandemic. It cannot be a blank check to fund every item on a state’s wish list. But telling states to “make hard decisions” is not going to cut it.
All over the country, states, districts, and task forces of every sort are wrestling with the question of how to safely reopen schools. This scenario planning is daunting, as schools must navigate a minefield of health, safety, legal, and instructional issues, and do so blindfolded by our ever-changing yet imperfect understanding of the virus itself.
Editor’s note: This blog post was first published by Partnership Schools.