Would capturing student growth in grades K–2 lead to different school ratings?
In the wake of dismal NAEP reading scores released earlier this year,
In the wake of dismal NAEP reading scores released earlier this year,
On this week’s special, year-end Education Gadfly Show podcast, Mike Petrilli looks back on 2022’
Editor’s note: This is an edition of “Advance,” a newsletter from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute written by Brandon Wright, our Editorial Director, and published every other week. Its purpose is to monitor the progress of gifted education in America, including legal and legislative developments, policy and leadership changes, emerging research, grassroots efforts, and more.
Economic connectedness is among the strongest predictors of upward income mobility—stronger than measures like school quality, job availability, family structure, or a community’s racial makeup.
Editor’s note: This is an edition of “Advance,” a newsletter from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute written by Brandon Wright, our Editorial Director, and published every other week. Its purpose is to monitor the progress of gifted education in America, including legal and legislative developments, policy and leadership changes, emerging research, grassroots efforts, and more.
Recent news articles have heralded a long-term decline in the U.S.
Early in my career, I taught high school in North Carolina. One of the coolest things we did was partner annually with the local Habitat for Humanity team. Each year, students in my school’s construction-trades classes built a modular home from the ground up, doing the masonry, carpentry, electrical work, plumbing—all of it.
Schools don’t typically begin the process of formally identifying students to receive gifted and talented (GT) services until third grade. What if educators started developing in earnest a child’s innate abilities before then?
With rising college costs and sky-high college dropout rates—almost one-third of American undergraduates quit before completing their degree—young people are lookin
America’s high-achieving students in our elementary and secondary schools are more racially diverse today than two decades ago. But Black high achievers in particular have made only incremental gains. Given affirmative action's original purpose, such trends are more than a little disappointing.
Editor’s note: This essay was part of an edition of “Advance,” a newsletter from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute that is published every other week. Its purpose is to monitor the progress of gifted education in America, including legal and legislative developments, policy and leadership changes, emerging research, grassroots efforts, and more.
“In light of this barometer of our kids’ success, there’s no time to waste to catch our kids up. We must continue to pour on the gas in our efforts,” Arizona Governor Doug Ducey said last Tuesday in response to the NAEP results.
This week’s news of sharp declines on the National Assessment of Educational Progress gave partisans yet another chance to relitigate the debate over keeping schools closed for in-person learning for much or all of the 2020–21 school year. We conservatives are eager to identify the teachers unions as the primary culprits, and we’re not wrong. But there is one complication we should acknowledge: the curious case of urban charter schools.
Monday was insane, with everyone and his grandmother (and her pet dog) attempting to make insightful, quotable comments on the avalanche of new data from the Nation’s Report Card. Some of it was indeed insightful, but much was simply self-promoting, as were many attempts to position oneself in advance as an expert to be taken seriously.
Ability grouping—arranging students in a classroom into smaller learning groups based on their aptitude in a given subject—is a common practice among teachers as early as kindergarten.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Checker Finn joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss the
Editor’s note: This is an edition of “Advance,” a newsletter from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute written by Brandon Wright, our Editorial Director, and published every other week. Its purpose is to monitor the progress of gifted education in America, including legal and legislative developments, policy and leadership changes, emerging research, grassroots efforts, and more.
The 2022 results from the “main” National Assessment of Educational Progress will be released October 24. They’ll include fourth- and eighth-grade scores at the national level, as well as state by state and for two-dozen large urban districts. Especially after the Covid shut-downs, it’s a big freakin’ deal. Here are three major storylines to look forward to.
Research is resoundingly clear that regularly reading to and with our children leads to all sorts of positive outcomes.
Amid nonstop controversy, New York City, which runs the nation’s largest school system, is again moving in the right direction when it comes to advancing the education of able students and opening opportunities to more high achievers. This after much retrograde activity during the regime of former Mayor Bill de Blasio.
An analysis in the New York Times last month cheerily assured readers that Covid-related learning losses “look real but sub-catastrophic.” The damage also appears “to not be permanent, with students recovering at least some ground already,” opined David Wallace-Wells, a columnist for the NYT Magazi
One of the most contentious debates in American education focuses on whether to group students into classrooms using some measure of prior achievement.
Since the end of World War II, the world’s population has not only gotten vastly bigger; it has also become vastly more educated. In nearly every country, the total number of years that citizens have attended school has grown faster than the population itself, and the number of college degrees conferred has grown even faster.
Weeks away from the midterms, education apparatchiks in the nation’s most populous state are ramping up the election mischief by playing politics with what are expected to be dismal results from assessments taken by students last spring.
Credentials matter, but maybe not as much as many hope. That seems to be one of the takeaways from Fordham’s latest report by Matt Giani evaluating high school industry recognized credential (IRC) attainment and learner outcomes in Texas.
Nine percent. That’s how many Black boys met expectations in math in D.C.’s traditional public schools in 2022, down from 17 percent before the pandemic. It’s also how many met those expectation in the city’s charter schools, down from 22 percent. The word “disaster” is used a lot lately, but it is absolutely the right fit here. There are, however, lessons we can learn from this catastrophe.
International student assessments are commonplace today, though none existed before 1965, and few countries participated at the outset.
A new Fordham Institute report authored by University of Texas professor Matt Giani finds that industry-recognized credentials (IRCs) are “mostly not transformative” for the high school students who earn them. But the truth is that it’s all about the context.
As money and attention focus on career and technical education (CTE) at ever greater levels, researchers can help gauge program effectiveness by digging into the data.
Editor’s note: This is an edition of “Advance,” a newsletter from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute written by Brandon Wright, our Editorial Director, and published every other week. Its purpose is to monitor the progress of gifted education in America, including legal and legislative developments, policy and leadership changes, emerging research, grassroots efforts, and more.