The Education Gadfly Show: Does Biden have the right tack on school reopenings?
The return on investment for four-year college degrees is fairly well-established in terms of graduates’ employment and
Any discussion about “equity” in education that is not first and foremost a discussion about literacy is unserious.
If the pandemic vanished tomorrow and all U.S. schools instantly reopened in exactly the same fashion as they were operating last February, how many parents would be satisfied to return their daughters and sons to the same old familiar classrooms, teachers, schedules and curricula? A lot fewer than the same old schools and those who run and teach in them are expecting back!
The father testifying before Virginia’s Loudon County school board
Thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act, annual testing in math and reading for students in grades three through eight became mandatory in every state beginning in 2005.
Beware the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” President George W. Bush’s trenchant warning resonated across the political spectrum when he voiced it to the NAACP in 2000, and it has more or less driven federal education policy ever since. For many, educators and noneducators alike, it remains a touchstone of how to think about racial equity.
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of posts about envelope-pushing strategies schools might embrace to address students’ learning loss in the wake of the pandemic.
The Covid-19 pandemic has run roughshod over so much of our education system, closing schools, sending students home to try to learn remotely, and obliterating last year’s summative state tests.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit the U.S. last spring, schools nationwide shut their doors and states cancelled annual standardized tests. Now federal and state policymakers are debating whether to cancel testing again in 2021. One factor they should consider is whether a two-year gap in testing will make it impossible to measure student-level achievement growth during this historic period.