Gadfly habitues have seen me grump, criticize, lament and recently brighten over the protract
I was excited to meet a fellow high school teacher at a neighborhood potluck, but when she found out I worked at a charter school, she immediately said, “I don’t support charter schools.”
A recently released report by the Council of the Great City Schools seeks to determine whether urban public schools—including charters—are succeeding in their efforts to mitigate the effects of poverty and other educational barriers.
A recent study in the journal Education Finance and Policy uses quarterly achievement and discipline data on nearly 16,000 seventh through eleventh grade students in an inner-ring suburban California school district to estimate the effect of suspensions on the English language arts and math achievement of non-suspended classmates.
In 2019, my friend Jal Mehta and his colleague Sarah Fine, thinking about whether high schools could adopt some of the best qualities of summer camp, wrote:
Boston just approved sweeping changes to the process by which students are admitted to its three highly-sought exam schools. The idea was to free up more seats for disadvantaged children, some of whom have long been underrepresented at the institutions. Yet in one important aspect, the plan may do exactly the opposite: It’s likely to significantly reduce the number of seats that go to low-income Asian American students.
Editor’s note: This was first published by National Review.
When Mayor de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Meisha Porter recently announced the city would spend more than $200 million dollars to develop a citywide reading and math curriculum, the smart and obvious take was
Myriad stories have emerged of non-school entities providing strong academic support to students during the pandemic disruptions of the past two school years.
A recent CALDER working paper examined links between teacher preparation programs and the chance that their candidates will enter or remain in the public school system for their first two years post-graduation. Its findings can help school systems improve teacher retention—a problem that many districts face, especially those that mostly educate disadvantaged students.
We’re not even midway through the summer and the start of the new academic year is in some cases just weeks away.
When looking for models of ambitious inspiration, Americans often hearken back to President John F. Kennedy’s “moonshot” address at Rice University on September 12, 1962:
As supporters of school choice celebrate a remarkable season of legislative wins across the country, they can also add some research-based evidence to their grounds for satisfaction.
Gone are the days when we could all agree with Ben Franklin’s sunny admonition: “Indeed the general tendency of reading good history must be, to fix in the minds of youth deep impressions of the beauty and usefulness of virtue of all kinds.” Instead, we must cope with political polarization, schools preoccupied with the achievement gap, students who learn from social media, and adults who are t
The prolonged fracas within and far beyond the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) concerning a new “framework” for NAEP’s future assessment of reading has been ominous on several fronts—as I haven’t hesi
Why fight over critical race theory when we can choose? You teach oppression studies; I’ll teach American exceptionalism. It’s a simple and obvious solution. But it’s also a naïve and unsatisfying one. School choice may “solve” the CRT problem for an individual family, but it can’t address the clear interest that every American holds in the education of the next generation.
Today, the Scripps National Spelling Bee finals
Text-message nudges have been a viable tool in early-childhood literacy in recent years, with parents or guardians receiving occasional missives to encourage specific literacy activities with their children.
A new working paper from researchers out of the University of Virginia uses data from the state’s kindergarten literacy assessment, the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening (PALS), to examine how the subsequent achievement trajectories of kindergarteners who enter school with similar literacy levels differ by race and/or SES. The findings are worrying.
A new Heritage Foundation survey of more than 2,000 parents and teachers shows significant divides about teaching critical race theory. But there largely is consensus that civics content should focus on the duties of citizenship, not CRT.
I’ve taught U.S. history to high schoolers for almost twenty years, during which time I’ve worked in multiple states with students of varying personal and cultural backgrounds. Below are the five things that I think I’ve learned. 1) Our students need more exposure to U.S. history.
Fordham’s new report found that twenty states have “inadequate” civics and U.S. history standards that need a complete overhaul. An additional fifteen states were deemed to have “mediocre” standards that require substantial revisions. This fits the lackluster showing of U.S. students on the NAEP exams in these subjects, and suggests that some schools barely teach this content at all. Unfortunately, the obstacles in the way of improving this sad state run up and down the line.
For our constitutional democracy to survive, much rests on our ability to resolve “…differences even as we respect them,” which is The State of State Standards for Civics and History in 2021 report’s definition of the social purpose of civic education.
My 2009 copy of Why Don’t Students Like School by Dan Willingham is among the most dog-eared and annotated books I own. Along with E.D. Hirsch’s The Knowledge Deficit (2006) and Doug Lemov’s Teach Like a Champion (2010), I’m hard-pressed to think of another book in the last twenty years that had a greater impact on my teaching, thinking, or writing about education.
While women have largely erased, and in some areas even reversed, the historic gender gap in educational attainment, some career outcomes can still skew along gender lines.
