The culture wars come for the Nation’s Report Card
Trouble continues at the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), the policy body for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
Trouble continues at the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), the policy body for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
Editor’s note: The Thomas B. Fordham Institute recently launched “The Acceleration Imperative,” a crowd-sourced, evidence-based resource designed to aid instructional leaders’ efforts to address the enormous challenges faced by their students, families, teachers, and staff over the past year.
Editor’s note: The Thomas B. Fordham Institute recently launched “The Acceleration Imperative,” a crowd-sourced, evidence-based resource designed to aid instructional leaders’ efforts to address the enormous challenges faced by their students, families, teachers, and staff over the past year.
Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2021 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to address a fundamental and challenging question: “How can schools best address students’ mental health needs coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic without shortchanging academic instruction?”
Editor’s note: The Thomas B. Fordham Institute recently launched “The Acceleration Imperative,” a crowd-sourced, evidence-based resource designed to aid instructional leaders’ efforts to address the enormous challenges faced by their students, families, teachers, and staff over the past year.
Since 1997, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) has tested students around the globe every three years to determine the educational status of fifteen-year-old students in dozens of countries and economic regions that are part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Editor’s note: The Thomas B. Fordham Institute recently launched “The Acceleration Imperative,” a crowd-sourced, evidence-based resource designed to aid instructional leaders’ efforts to address the enormous challenges faced by their students, families, teachers, and staff over the past year.
In the coming weeks, the House Appropriations subcommittee that decides on education spending will consider how much money to allocate to the federal Charter School Program (CSP).
Think of Michael Petrilli’s bold ideas and the Acceleration Imperative as newly designed Ford(ham) vehicles for K–12 recovery from the pandemic. Happily, there is much to admire in the showroom.
Numerous studies have found that the quality of child care is too low and that we need to do more to
Editor’s note: The Thomas B. Fordham Institute recently launched “The Acceleration Imperative,” a crowd-sourced, evidence-based resource designed to aid instructional leaders’ efforts to address the enormous challenges faced by their students, families, teachers, and staff over the past year.
A suite of technologies that are already widely used in some private-sector testing can and should be embraced by state and national assessments, as well as the private tests that aren’t yet making maximum use of them. Read more.
Editor’s note: The Thomas B. Fordham Institute recently launched “The Acceleration Imperative,” a crowd-sourced, evidence-based resource designed to aid instructional leaders’ efforts to address the enormous challenges faced by their students, families, teachers, and staff over the past year.
The “Does money matter?” debate has been getting boring. The idea that increasing school spending wouldn’t make the schools work at least a little better probably never made much sense to begin with.
If I had to name the most important institution in American life, and the one with the most potential for changing the course of our country, it would be the humble elementary school. Especially the 20,000 or so high-poverty elementary schools in the nation’s cities and inner-ring suburbs, educating millions of kids growing up in poor or working-class families.
If there’s one lesson education policymakers might have learned in the last twenty-five years, it’s that it’s not hard to make schools and districts do something, but it’s extremely hard to make them do it well.
More than a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, lost instructional time is top of mind for anyone connected to education.
Full-time virtual charter schools received a great deal of attention as schools scrambled to transition classes online back in the Spring of 2020, and have experienced booming enrollments over the past year.
In the song “Ballad of a Thin Man,” Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan penned an iconic refrain that asks: “But something is happening/And ya’ don’t know what it is/Do you, Mister Jones?” That refrain seems an apt way to describe what K–12 education stakeholders are sensing as they reel in response to Covid-19 shock.
District leaders may be celebrating the $122 billion in stimulus relief Congress approved for K–12 schools last month.
In the last year, Congress has now invested nearly $200 billion to support K–12 education. It’s an unprecedented federal infusion of money, but will it lead to an unprecedented recovery effort? It’s worth taking a moment to pause and consider the range of possibilities. Best case
Earlier this month on her “Answer Sheet” blog in the Washington Post, Valerie Strauss ran a lengthy rebuttal written by Carol Burris about a study that we recently published. Robbers or Victims?
Fordham’s new resource, “The Acceleration Imperative,” aims to give the nation’s chief academic officers a head start on planning for America’s educational recovery, with a focus on high-poverty elementary schools. It’s intentionally a work in progress, and already the product of thoughtful advice from more than three dozen experts. The intention is for it to continue evolving and improving with readers’ help, via a “crowdsourced” initiative on a new wiki site.
Editor’s note: This is the second post in a series that puts the themes of 2020’s Getting the Most Bang for the Education Buck into today’s context, with particular attention to the effects of the pandemic and federal relief dollars.
Structured activities and services provided outside of the regular school day were increasingly the focus of public investment in the U.S. prior to the coronavirus pandemic.
Editor’s note: This is the first post in a series that puts the themes of 2020’s Getting the Most Bang for the Education Buck into today’s context, with particular attention to the effects of the pandemic and federal relief dollars.
Now that Uncle Sam’s check is in the mail, one of the biggest hopes for schools is that they will be able to leverage the massive infusion of cash to be more creative, imaginative, and innovative.
One of the best-selling education books of the Covid era is one you’ve probably never read and maybe never even heard of. Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons was written nearly forty years ago by Siegfried Engelmann, who passed away in 2019.