Displaying 91-120 of 201 results
Commentary
7.21.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

The American family is still coming apart

Kay Hymowitz

In 2004, the late Sara McLanahan published a landmark article called “Diverging Destinies: How Children Are Faring Under the Second Demographic Transition.” The paper was the first scholarly attempt to propose that the decline of the two-parent family in the United States since the 1960’s was intensifying the already unequal l

Commentary
7.21.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Private School Choice, Teachers & School Leaders

In a time of crisis, Catholic schools offered a choice, not an echo

Kathleen Porter-Magee

“New data suggest that the damage from shutting down schools has been worse than almost anyone expected,” the Economist tweeted recently to promote a

Commentary
7.21.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

The bravest man in education reform

Robert Pondiscio

A few years ago, when I was writing my book about Success Academy and school choice, I had a moment of self-doubt bordering on despair.

Commentary
7.21.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction

Chatbot nudges boost student outcomes

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D.

“Nudges” to induce specific actions take many forms in education.

Commentary
7.20.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

Balancing equity and excellence in selective high schools

Brandon L. Wright, Paula Olszewski-Kubilius, Evan Glazer

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.

Commentary
7.15.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

How do teachers spend their time?

Mike McShane

One of my favorite quotations comes from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. When Gandalf the wizard recounts the story of the ring and the havoc that it has brought to Middle-earth to the hero Frodo, Frodo says to him, “I wish it need not have happened in my time.” To which Gandalf replies, “So do I, and so do all who live to see such times.

Commentary
7.14.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Standards, Teachers & School Leaders

Can we revive standards-based reform?

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Few people have done more to boost academic standards in U.S. schools than Michael Cohen and Laura Slover, coauthors of a new paper offering a bright vision for revitalizing them. But there are reasons to doubt the feasibility of its proposals.

Commentary
7.14.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

Stop neglecting gifted students’ social and emotional needs

Susan Miller, Tom Coyne

Back in February, Bloomberg’s Adrian Wooldridge published a column claiming that “America is facing a great talent recession.” He noted that, “today, demand for top talent in the corporate world and elsewhere is exploding just at a time when the supply is t

Commentary
7.7.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Private School Choice, Teachers & School Leaders

The swirling private-school universe

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

The universe of private elementary-secondary schooling in America today is diverse and confusing, with innumerable twists and turns in efforts to use public funds to help families access schools that suit them—including private schools of all colors and stripes. But the virtue of these institutions is that they’re different, which also means very different from each other. Which complicates the quest to deploy public dollars to assist families to choose them.

Commentary
7.7.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Does keeping students with the same teacher for multiple years boost outcomes?

Nathaniel Grossman

The relationship between teacher and student has profound effects on learning. A new study explores whether schools can strengthen this relationship over time by keeping students with teachers for more than one year.

Commentary
7.6.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

Hope and progress for gifted education

Brandon L. Wright

This is the first edition of “Advance,” a new Fordham Institute newsletter that will monitor the progress of gifted education. Here, Wright recounts recent developments that reinforce two truths: Gifted education is a clear and substantial good, and it can be much better.

Commentary
7.1.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Building better evidence on pre-K by strengthening assessments of children’s skills

Meghan McCormick

Research has found that high-quality pre-K programs can have positive impacts on children’s learning and development, improving outcomes like literacy and math skills in the short-term and even increasing

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
6.16.2022
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
6.9.2022
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
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.

Commentary
5.31.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

The core conflict of interest in public education

Don Parker

In my work on the teaching staff of a master’s level class in public policy, I am regularly dismayed by how often our students propose only governmental solutions to public problems.