Wanted: A Science of Reading Comprehension movement
Just in the nick of time for the last days of summer beach reading, there were a pair of big stories about reading instruction in TIME magazine and The New Yorker last month.
Just in the nick of time for the last days of summer beach reading, there were a pair of big stories about reading instruction in TIME magazine and The New Yorker last month.
Whether or not the bipartisan education consensus is dead, one of its most visible and effective reforms lives on: so-called “No Excuses” model schools, institutions famous for their exacting behavioral and academic standards.
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.
Four-day school weeks saw a sharp increase in popularity between 1999 and 2019, then the pandemic added impetus to the already growing trend—with districts seeing shortened school weeks as a way to retain teachers and cut expenses.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show Podcast, Elliot Regenstein joins
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.
Earlier this month, Michael Petrilli wrote about America’s top-quartile students making gains from 2009 to 2019 over their already high baseline—in math, reading, and science—and our lower-quartile kids declining from their already low baseline.
About three-quarters of students in the U.S. take at least one credit in high school linked to career and technical education (CTE). When high school students take multiple CTE credits, they are often encouraged to focus in a specialized career pathway, like business, health sciences, or hospitality and tourism.
The last month has brought both bleak new NAEP results and a deeply researched piece on “a half-century of student progress nationwide.” The former abounds with gloom about the dire and declining state of U.S. educational achievement and widening gaps between groups. The latter is an upbeat rejoinder to the doomsayers and a well-documented celebration of half a century of gains and gap-narrowings. What’s going on here?
New findings released last week from the NAEP long-term trend assessment (LTT) suggest an alarming downswing among U.S. nine-year-olds in both math and reading between 2020 and 2022.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show Podcast, John Bailey, nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute,
For all the welcome attention being paid to the Science of Reading, and literacy in general, there has been little focus in public policy on how to address the learning needs of secondary students who, for whatever combination of reasons, have failed to learn to read in elementary school.
A new Fordham Institute publication by Dr.
In the realm of elementary and secondary education, we so often focus on one or two trees instead of the forest. We go off and argue about the best way to teach reading, about which books belong in the school library, about whether everyone should take “college prep” courses, about how to teach race or evolution or climate change or even algebra.
In 2013, the British government ended the use of “annual progression” pay scales for teachers. These were similar to U.S.-style “step and lane” models but were set at the national level across the pond.
NAGB officials recently reported on U.S. student achievement trends from 2009–19, and what they found was eye-opening. Whereas America’s higher achieving students held steady or even gained ground, our lowest performing kids saw test scores fall, at least in fourth and eighth grades and in reading and math. What might be causing these diverging trends?
Fordham’s newest study finds, among other things, that industry-recognized credentials earned in high school are a net positive for students who earn them but are not game-changers. This raises a lingering question: How else can we transform the high school experience for students so as to significantly boost their wages and career prospects once they are in the workforce? Here are four ideas.
Earlier this month, I argued that “education reform is alive and well, even if the Washington Consensus is dead for now.” What’s more, I wrote that we should stay the course on the current reform strategy:
Does school choice work? That depends on who you talk to and what you mean by “work.” For education researchers and policy wonks, school choice works if it raises math and reading scores for students who take advantage of choice programs or, more broadly, if market competition improves measurable outcomes for all students.
Using data from more than one million students who graduated from public high schools in Texas from 2017 to 2019, this first-of-its-kind study examines how IRCs completed in high school affect college enrollment and workforce outcomes.
In a recent piece about the state of standards-based reform, Dale Chu weighs the benefits and challenges of a district “relinquishment” versus “instructional coherence” approach to improving student learning.
American children are suffering from unprecedented learning loss, and many are not even bothering to show up to school.
Since 2013, thirty states have passed legislation or implemented new policies related to the “science of reading.” Their collective effort to change how early reading is taught in America’s classrooms is the focus of an excellent new project by Education Week’s Sarah Schwartz. There are, however, questions about the sustainability of these massive efforts.
Susie Miller Carello may not be a household name in education, but she’s a household name among those who are.
Parents are often given dubious advice about their children’s reading: Let them read whatever they enjoy, as we must encourage literacy. This is a strangely laissez-faire attitude to take towards such a fundamentally formative activity. No decent school counsels parents to let their children watch or listen to whatever they want, so why is reading different?
Efforts to diversify the roster of students classified as gifted often focus on race and ethnicity.
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.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Checker Finn joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to dis
The American educational system has neglected its duty to provide students with a foundational understanding of social studies for decades. Weak standards for learning were established, primary documents were ignored, and students were allowed to create their own historical truths.
The latest declaration of education reform’s demise comes from two of Mike’s favorite people: Checker Finn and Rick Hess. But what they actually describe is the end of the bipartisan ed reform coalition—what Mike and Rick used to call the “Washington Consensus.” Even with it gone for now, however, education reform continues apace—and continues to rack up victories for kids. And there are ways to rebuild the coalition.