Seeking a constitutional shortcut to educational excellence
Do students have a right to a high-quality education? A proposed ballot initiative filed in California last Thursday says yes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
After more than eighteen months of pandemic-induced commotion to education, data continue to roll in regarding various negative impacts on young people.
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.
“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
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.
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.
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.
The Covid-19 pandemic caused unprecedented disruptions to teaching and learning across America, including school closures, sudden changes to instructional delivery, economic hardship, and social isolation.
The Washington Post and Ipsos recently surveyed fourteen to eighteen year olds on their attitudes toward the state of the U.S.
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.
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.
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
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.
Our recent study of states’ U.S. history and civics standards attracted some constructive criticism from both the left and the right. It was, after all, explicitly bipartisan. Here are our responses to four critiques.
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.
For the last half-century, if you read the mission statement of virtually any education reform organization, you will find earnest language about closing the racial or class achievement gaps. Unfortunately, not only have gaps failed to narrow during this multi-decade obsession, overall achievement levels have also remained mostly static.
It is no exaggeration to say that very little good can likely come from a global pandemic, especially in the short term. And while the “term” of the current pandemic seems to lengthen every day, we are still firmly in the realm of the immediate when discussing impacts.
Researchers at NWEA have been using data from their MAP Growth assessments to predict and analyze learning losses since the start of the pandemic.
The past eighteen months have been some of the most tumultuous in the history of our nation. The twin pandemics of Covid-19 and social injustice have highlighted how today’s students face very different expectations than students encountered in previous generations.
At Partnership Schools, we believe that one thing that separates effective turnaround efforts from failed experiments is the ability of the leader to articulate a clear, coherent, and actionable vision for change.
Black Lives Matter protests, raging wildfires, a monumental election, and the global pandemic. As a seventeen-year-old growing up in Portland, Oregon, these past eighteen months have been the craziest I have ever experienced. Never would I have thought that I would essentially miss the entirety of my junior year of high school, forced into taking classes in a solely online environment.