Displaying 1-21 of 21 results
Commentary
6.30.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Teaching virtue in the digital age

Jennifer Frey

Because of social media’s well-documented risks and harms, we must teach teens to exercise good practical judgment in the challenging circumstances of the online spaces they will need to navigate in our digital age. Parents play an important role. But so should schools, which ought to develop curricula that model how to interact online in ways that meet their general standards and expectations of their student’s social lives.

Commentary
6.30.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Exit interview: Carey Wright, Mississippi’s State Superintendent of Education

Robert Pondiscio

One of the most unlikely education stories of the last decade has been the rise of Mississippi as a star of NAEP and a science of reading proof point. When looking for models to follow, researchers and policy wonks usually point to places like Shanghai and Finland, even Massachusetts. But Mississippi? Who saw that coming?

Commentary
6.23.2022
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Public education’s compensation problem

Don Parker

Great education requires great teachers, but the existing system makes it too difficult to retain the best and replace the worst. Fixing this requires, among other things, more generous pay. Instead we face the profession’s persistent, declining productivity.

Commentary
6.16.2022
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

The mass exodus of teachers isn’t what you think it is. It’s far worse.

Jeremy Adams

Districts across the land are witnessing a mass exit of teachers from classrooms, the likes of which has never been seen. It’s going to get worse, says Adams. And it isn’t about low salaries, paltry pensions, or lack of financial support. Teachers are leaving in droves because so many of our children are utterly broken, student behavior is abhorrent, and accountability is out of vogue in our schools.

Commentary
6.16.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

A “no zeroes” grading policy is the worst of all worlds

Daniel Buck

More and more schools across the U.S. have adopted a new grading fad: Teachers cannot assign a grade lower than 50 percent. If a student doesn’t turn in an assignment? 50 percent. Do they miss every problem on a vocabulary quiz? 50 percent.

Commentary
6.16.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Encouraging progress on “high quality instructional materials”

Robert Pondiscio

As a long-time (and often lonely) curriculum enthusiast, I’ve followed the work of the High-Quality Instructional Materials and Professional Development (IMPD) Network for several years.

Commentary
6.16.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Bus commutes and their academic impacts in New York City

Jeff Murray

Providing transportation for students to and from school is a basic requirement of most public school districts in America. During the 2018–19 school year, nearly 60 percent of all K–12 students nationwide, public and private, were transported by those ubiquitous yellow buses.

Commentary
6.9.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Here’s why all students need agency rather than equity

Ian Rowe

As a charter school leader in the South Bronx for the past decade, Rowe has seen what happens when resources are forcibly removed from the “privileged” and given to the “unprivileged” in the pursuit of “equity” over “equality”—with little regard for students’ uniqueness, humanity, or agency. Better is to teach disadvantaged children to defy, rather than confirm, diminished expectations.

Commentary
6.9.2022
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

The coming “second wave” of learning loss in 2023 and 2024

Mike Goldstein

Covid “learning loss” has two causes: the loss of in-person instruction in the spring of 2020 and the reliance on remote learning thereafter (which Tom Kane and colleagues quantify in an article in The Atlantic

Commentary
6.9.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

“Expert” idiocy on teaching kids to read

Robert Pondiscio

Every teacher of struggling readers has experienced the moment when a student says, “I read it, but I didn’t get it.” It can be a bewildering experience. Why don’t they get it?

Commentary
6.9.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

How much do teachers matter in the early grades?

William Rost

A recent CALDER study examines the effects that earlier-grade teachers have on students’ eighth-grade math outcomes by analyzing Washington State administrative data.

Commentary
6.2.2022
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

How to respond sensibly to the Uvalde shooting

Dale Chu

Awful tragedies like the shooting in Uvalde notwithstanding, firearms will remain ubiquitous. The question is whether policymakers can bring measured thinking and nuance to bear in solving the thorny problem of gun violence in schools. This is particularly challenging in a media climate that hypes and distorts the prevalence of what happened in last week, even as schools continue to deal with the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.

Commentary
6.2.2022
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

How to narrow the excellence gap in early elementary school

Michael J. Petrilli

In recent weeks, I’ve dug into the “excellence gap“—the sharp divides along lines of race

Commentary
6.2.2022
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Natalie Wexler goes astray on the NAEP reading test

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Natalie Wexler has done much (along with the likes of Jeanne Chall, Don Hirsch, Dan Willingham, Kate Walsh, and Robert Pondiscio) to establish the fact that there’s science behind the act of reading and the related proposition that real reading (not just “decoding”) is no isolated skill but, rather, a complicated process of making sense of what one reads on the page in the context of what one a

Commentary
6.2.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

How does a child’s religious background affect her choices about higher education?

Nathaniel Grossman

“From Bat Mitzvah to the Bar: Religious Habitus, Self-Concept, and Women’s Educational Outcomes,” a new study by Ilana Horwitz et al., analyzes the college-going rates of women raised by Jewish versus non-Jewish parents.