Shortages, hiring, and retiring: School leaders answer survey questions on pandemic-era staffing
With schools and districts across the nation said to be reeling from staffing shortages, calls for action are loud and insistent.
With schools and districts across the nation said to be reeling from staffing shortages, calls for action are loud and insistent.
How do we know whether kids in Pennsylvania are better or worse readers at the end of middle school than their peers in Colorado? We wouldn’t know that or much else without a test that may have escaped your notice altogether, unless you’re some sort of education-obsessed policy maker or policy wonk like me. I’m talking about the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Classical education is a holistic approach that is geared toward the cultivation of students’ minds, imagination, perception, and emotions so that they can be equipped with character traits that will help them to flourish and thrive both inside the school community and well beyond.
The Supreme Court decision that overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine in Brown v. Board of Education had a great impact on schools across much of the United States. Even though not every school received the same integration orders, and some did not receive any at all, the desegregation of schools had significant effects on Black students’ outcomes.
Dropping SAT requirements inflated Ivy-league application numbers and made this year’s admissions cycle the most competitive on record.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute is pleased to announce the launch of the National Working Group on Advanced Education. The Working Group’s mission is to promote research, policies, and practices that will develop the full capacities of students with high academic potential, especially Black and Hispanic students and those coming from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
I spent most of my twenties in northeast North Carolina teaching English in a windowless, leak-prone trailer behind an overcrowded high school. Once I got through my first year as a rookie—what fun that was!—subsequent memories are fond (smell of mildew aside).
It’s now fashionable in some circles of the Right to call any teacher who supports sex education a “groomer,” lumping them into the category of pedophile. Christina Pushaw, press secretary to Florida governor Ron Desantis, referred to that state’s new legislation as an “anti-grooming” bill.
Non-test-based pathways to high school graduation raise concerns among accountability hawks as being low in rigor, subject to diminished standards,
Parent Nation, by Dana Suskind, describes how we can build social and policy structures that help parents from all income backgrounds with their youngest children.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Jing Liu, Assistant Professor in Education Policy at the University of Maryla
For many parents and teachers, the Covid experience has confirmed at least two pieces of common sense: It’s hard for kids to learn if they’re not in school, and those who are in school tend to learn more.
As beloved TV personality Fred Rogers once quipped, “Play gives children a chance to practice what they are learning. . . . It’s the things we play with and the people who help us play that make a great difference in our lives.”
This whopping new report from a special committee of the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) is a whopping disappointment.
“Is political engagement contributing to the teen mental health crisis?” —Kristen Soltis Anderson Tennessee’s year-old law on teaching race and gender has led to only one complaint, leaving both sides feeling vindicated.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast (listen on Apple Podcasts and Spotify), Paul Hill
The need to understand how schools can improve student attendance has never been greater. This study breaks new ground by examining high schools’ contributions to attendance—that is, their “attendance value-added.”
Editor’s note: This was first published by the American Enterprise Institute.
Covid-19 and the miseries it caused families, children, and educators around the world over the last two years seems finally to be ebbing. But in Poland where I am writing this, the plague has been followed by a brutal and senseless war in neighboring Ukraine.
With Democrats facing trouble in the midterm elections, the Biden administration has inexplicably decided to try to stave off disaster by doubling down on the teachers unions’ hoary anti-reform agenda. One example is its not-so-sneak attack on charter schools in the form of execrable regulations that could bring charter growth to a standstill. But it’s not the only one.
Last week, Chester Finn used a recent vote of Denver’s anti-reform school board to make three points: first, that the “portfolio” reform there—based on school autonomy, family choice, and chartering out schools where kids aren’t learning—is finished; second, that Denver’s reversal predicts doom elsewhere for complex reform initiatives meant to transform the ways whole public systems operate; an
After living through the transformation of K–12 education in Alberta, Canada, we moved from Calgary to Colorado in 2010. Since then, we have watched the Denver Public Schools story unfold from next door in Jefferson County.
The influence of out-of-school activities such as sports and clubs on school outcomes has been an enduring
Earlier this year, I took to the pages of Education Next to make the case for NAEP to test starting in kindergarten, stating that, “The rationale for testing academic skills in the early elementary grades is powerful.” Therefore, “Starting NAEP in 4th grade is much too late.” I was wrong, and I’m sorry. Kindergarten is much too late. We must begin a program of NAEP testing for newborns.
It’s no secret that Denver’s latest school board is wreaking havoc on the suite of bold education reforms that the Mile High City was known for over the past two decades.
What makes an effective English language arts curriculum? Is it the books and other readings that it includes? The skills that it imparts to students? Something else?