Displaying 31-60 of 246 results
Commentary
10.14.2021
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

Bill de Blasio is decimating gifted education in New York. Will Eric Adams save it?

Brandon L. Wright

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.

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Commentary
10.14.2021
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Sorry Edutopia, the research base on project-based learning remains weak

Daniel Buck

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.

Getty Images/monkeybusinessimages
Commentary
10.14.2021
Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

How well do diverse-by-design charter schools work?

William Rost

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.

Commentary
10.8.2021
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

How well are schools teaching disadvantaged students to read? In California, it depends where you live.

Todd Collins

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.

Commentary
10.7.2021
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

The college gender gap begins in kindergarten

Michael J. Petrilli

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.

Commentary
10.7.2021
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Critical race theory distracts from academic underachievement

Bob Woodson, Ian Rowe

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.

Commentary
10.5.2021
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

There’s more to the education story than what’s in the news

Emily Freitag

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.

Commentary
10.1.2021
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Private School Choice, Teachers & School Leaders

The impact of voucher programs: A deep dive into the research

Pedro Enamorado

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.

Commentary
9.30.2021
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

We are squandering the talents of too many low-income high achievers

Aaron Churchill , Michael J. Petrilli

Far too many high-achieving children are drifting through middle and high school. Despite their potential, they don’t end up taking AP exams, achieving high marks on their ACTs, or going to four-year colleges. This limits their ability to move up the social ladder, threatens U.S. economic competitiveness, and derails our aspirations for a more just society. We must stop buying into the false assumption that high-achieving kids will do fine on their own.

Commentary
9.30.2021
School Finance, Charter Schools, Governance, Private School Choice, Teachers & School Leaders

Use pandemic recovery funds to empower both schools and families

Bruno V. Manno

Covid-19 school shock disrupted our way of doing education, unbundling the familiar division of responsibilities among home, school, and community organizations. Nearly every parent of school-age children had to create from scratch a home learning environment using online technology and rebundling school services to meet their needs.

Commentary
9.30.2021
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Measuring the social, emotional, and academic toll of remote learning

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D.

After more than eighteen months of pandemic-induced commotion to education, data continue to roll in regarding various negative impacts on young people.

Commentary
9.23.2021
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Performative teaching is undermining trust in schools

Robert Pondiscio

Increasingly, teachers are not shy about expressing their views on charged racial and political views. This may be a symptom of a profound shift in our relationship with institutions and the role they play in our lives. Where institutions once functioned as molds of our character and behavior, they’re now platforms on which we stand to be seen. And this could be cratering our trust in them.

Commentary
9.23.2021
Curriculum & Instruction, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

Rigorous courses are a good thing—and good for equity

Brandon L. Wright

“As a broader mechanism for equity, [Advanced Placement] has fallen short, unable to overcome the powerful structural forces that disadvantage far too many students,” writes Anne Kim in a recent long-form article in Washington Monthly titled “AP’s Equity Face-Plant.” “If the ultimate goal

Commentary
9.17.2021
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Five crucial considerations to protect social and emotional learning

The Master Teacher, Inc.

The growth in popularity of social and emotional learning (SEL) is bringing with it increased attention to and scrutiny of what exactly SEL means and questions about whether it is something more than just another educational fad or ideological movement.

Commentary
9.16.2021
Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Private School Choice, Teachers & School Leaders

School choice is a better instrument for racial justice than critical race theory

Daniel Buck

The outlook has gotten bleak for the anti-racist and CRT movements in U.S. classrooms, as Americans saw these ideas in action and largely recoiled from them. But there's another K–12 strategy for achieving racial justice: school choice.

Commentary
9.16.2021
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Blinding ourselves to America’s achievement woes

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Much as happened after A Nation at Risk, the U.S. finds itself facing a bleak education fate, even as many deny the problem. Back then, however, the denials came mostly from the education establishment, while governors, business leaders, and even U.S.

Commentary
9.9.2021
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

What 9/11 means for America’s schools twenty years later

Dale Chu

This week, we remember and reflect upon an unforgettably tragic day. This comes amid throes of national conflicts over information, misinformation, even the nature of facts and truth themselves. Schools can’t fix all this, but they must reclaim their vital role in ensuring that Americans understand their history and the interconnectedness of today’s world.

Commentary
9.9.2021
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Seven questions about September 11

Lamar Alexander

This advice from my friend Lamar Alexander for teaching about 9/11 was published twice by Fordham, first in 2003 and again (lightly revised) in 2011.

Commentary
9.9.2021
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

From the personal to the political, for the love of freedom

William Damon

This superb short essay by Stanford professor Bill Damon is a hard-hitting piece from a gentle, thoughtful, and learned psychologist, and (as with Senator Alexander's contribution) was first published by Fordham in 2003

Commentary
9.9.2021
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Alternative certification policies and teacher recruitment outcomes

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D.

A recent study published in Educational Policy is a timely look at the ways in which states’ alternative certification (or AC) policies for teachers have impacted the composition of the corps of novice educators.

Commentary
9.2.2021
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

A commonsense alternative to critical race theory bans

Robert Pondiscio, Tracey Schirra

There are good arguments to be made in favor of so-called critical race theory “bans” that have now been considered in some form by more than half of all US states.