The “big quit” is an opportunity to fix our broken education system
Covid-19 sent a shock wave through an already changing U.S. job market, provoking “a great reassessment of work in America.”
Covid-19 sent a shock wave through an already changing U.S. job market, provoking “a great reassessment of work in America.”
Schools have been concerned with character formation and values since Plato sat with students under an olive tree. Today’s “social and emotional learning” is consistent with this age-old impulse. But in its form and function it can represent something different—and more worrisome—than its progenitors, especially when employed without full discussion of its priorities and methods.
Under federal law, states must assess students annually in reading and math in grades 3–8 and at least once during high school, as well as testing science once in elementary, middle, and high school.
During the first full school year after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, enrollment in U.S. public schools fell by about 1.1 million students, or 2 percent of prior K–12 enrollment.
Results of a recent survey published by Amazon’s Future Engineer offshoot show several disconnects between the interests, experiences, and aspirations of U.S. students in regard to computer science.
Last week brought the latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s Long Term Trend series, and they were sobering. Just before the pandemic kicked in, U.S. thirteen-year-olds saw statistically-significant declines in both math and reading—a first in the study’s nearly 50-year history. Black, Hispanic, and low-achieving students saw the largest declines. Here’s the case that the Great Recession was largely at fault.
With the effects of the pandemic dragging on for another year, labor markets are acting strange and organizations are struggling to find qualified workers. Schools are no different. The teacher pipeline has slowed to a trickle as teacher preparation programs see fewer and fewer candidates. Teachers have been leaving the profession early.
Mayor de Blasio is axing New York City’s long-standing gifted education programs. He plans to replace them with something else, but his proposal is almost entirely wrong. Fortunately, Eric Adams, who’s almost certain to replace him in January, has a vision of gifted education that’s mostly right, and he’ll enter office in time to fix de Blasio’s blunders.
Do students have a right to a high-quality education? A proposed ballot initiative filed in California last Thursday says yes.
As one paper put it, there is a “paucity of robust research” on project-based learning. Yet in the ed-school world and in many journals and professional organizations, it’s often touted as a pedagogical gold standard.
The persistence of racial segregation between and within school districts has motivated some in the school choice community to develop diverse-by-design charters (DBDCs), which are defined as schools without a 70 percent majority of students of any race or ethnicity, plus 30 to 70 percent low-income pupils.
How do we know if a school district is doing one of its most basic jobs—teaching students to read? That’s one of the main questions the California Reading Coalition, which I helped organize earlier this year, set out to answer with the California Reading Report Card, released in September.
A recent Wall Street Journal article set off a pundit-palooza on the topic of the female advantage in higher education, with many suggesting that young men have “given up on college.” But American students who are academically well-prepared for college continue to matriculate and graduate. It’s just that many more of them are female. The reason for that starts in kindergarten.
With a new school year underway, parents, teachers, and children anxiously return to classrooms amidst an ongoing coronavirus pandemic. But this year, school board members, teachers, academics, politicians, and parents continue to argue over critical race theory and how to enact its version of equity.
Angry citizens, enraged over everything from mask mandates to “critical race theory,” have been storming school board meetings, threatening members, and driving some to quit, reports a
Education news is pretty depressing these days. Last week’s feed included articles about cafeteria staffing shortages and supply chain concerns, reporting about declining enrollment, predictions about resignations due to vaccine mandates, findings on teacher stress, reporting about an uptick in student fights, and lots of documentation of demonization in adults’ battles over mask policy.
Last month, my colleagues Mike Petrilli and David Griffith had a conversation with Patrick Wolf, a leading school choice scholar at the University of Arkansas, about the impact of voucher programs on the Education Gadfly Show podcast.
On September 12, 1962, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the request of the New York Civil War Commission at the Centennial Celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation.