The “à la carte education” accountability conundrum
Of the school choice options available to many U.S. families today, few embody the spirit of “power to the parents” quite like education savings accounts (ESAs).
Of the school choice options available to many U.S. families today, few embody the spirit of “power to the parents” quite like education savings accounts (ESAs).
Houston’s local ABC news affiliate recently ran a report that the Houston Independent School District, Texas’s largest, has more than 2,000 uncertified teachers (out of a teaching force of approximately 10,000).
Governor Glenn Youngkin is under fire again from Virginia’s education establishment, this time because a new school accountability system his administration is promoting refuses to put lipstick on a pig.
Editor’s note: This was first published by The 74.
As a candidate for president in 2020, Kamala Harris introduced a plan to raise teacher salaries by $13,500.
Kamala Harris’s presidential acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention promised Americans “an opportunity economy where everyone has the chance to compete and the chance to succeed.” But working-class Americans are glum about their economic position today and what this promise means for them.
As another school year begins, I have been struck by the many different ways leaders and educators talk about instructional materials. At meet-the-teacher nights or staff meetings to explain the move to a new curriculum or in board meetings to explain plans for the year, educators often talk about the role the curriculum will play with bold claims. I have heard:
For ten years, veteran education reformer Kathleen Porter-Magee led Partnership Schools, an independent charter-like management organization that ran Catholic schools on behalf of the archdiocese of New York and, currently, Cleveland. She recently announced that she was stepping down. Here she discusses the lessons she learned.
This summer, the Washington Post’s (fantastic) “Department of Data” columnist, Andrew Van Dam, ran a fun feature about “America’s best decade,” according to public opinion.
Despite an unprecedented infusion of resources, the latest data show that American students are struggling to recover
Society as a whole has largely bounced back from the dark days of the pandemic, but life inside our schools is arguably worse than ever. Attendance is dismal. Cheating is pervasive. Cell phones are everywhere. Disorder abounds. And for all these reasons and more, kids are learning less than they were back before the plague struck. The right way to respond is to embrace tough love. That means, first and foremost, again holding students accountable for their behavior.
Over the past six months, I’ve had an extended conversation about “equitable grading” with Joe Feldman, the author of Grading for Equity (see here,
For years, researchers have pointed to the quality of educators as the key to school performance.
The demographic makeup of America’s K–12 students is steadily changing, with schools nationwide welcoming increasingly diverse cohorts of young learners.
In 2003, as part of a broader education reform package, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts began requiring high school students to pass Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exams in math, English language arts, and science in order to earn a diploma.
When it comes to the current storm of concern over student cellphones in schools, the conventional wisdom is that it’s educators on one side versus p
Fordham’s new study by Paul L. Morgan and Eric Hengyu Hu, "Explaining Achievement Gaps: The Role of Socioeconomic Factors," raises as many questions as it answers. Among them: How can we explain the different patterns for the Black-White achievement gap for reading, on the one hand, and math and science, on the other? Why does SES explain so much more of the Hispanic-White gap than the Black-White gap? And what’s the role of family structure in explaining the Black-White and Hispanic-White gaps?
Classical education is undergoing a renaissance. According to a recent analysis by Arcadia Education, the classical sector is growing by 5 percent annually with a total projected enrollment of 1.4 million students by 2035.
As a teacher both during and immediately after the pandemic, I was constantly on the receiving end of some version of: “You must be so relieved that the pandemic is over.” My response was always: “Actually, it has only gotten worse.” And it’s not just me.
A recent CALDER study by Darrin DeChane, Takkako Nomi, and Michael Podgursky utilizes test data from Missouri’s state assessment, known as MAP, to assess how well these test scores predict
“Come see me in the office.” Uh oh. I probably got caught teaching again.
Just when I thought that book ban debates were so last year—gone the way of critical race theory or the Common Core, subsumed by the latest controversy over Title IX or Project 2025—it seems those grouchy conservatives are at it again.
A recent article in the Boston Globe dug into a controversy that is dogging Massachusetts’s highly-regarded system of regional career and technical education (CTE) high schools.
Despite the growing diversity of American students, the teaching workforce remains disproportionately White. A recent study uses twelve years of administrative data from Maryland to examine the factors contributing to the state's chronic shortage of Black teachers.
As regular readers know, I’m a parent of two children enrolled in Maryland’s Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS).
By now, we’re well familiar with critiques of standardized testing opponents: tests rob schools of critical instructional time, encourage teaching to the test, place undue pressure on students and educators to perform, are educationally irrelevant, only provide a snapshot of student achievement at a specific moment in time, and are largely driven by family income levels, parents’ education, and
According to a Goldman Sachs analysis of federal data, the college graduating class of 2024 is having a tough time finding attractive jobs.
School closures and remote learning led to widespread relaxation of student accountability at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Lax requirements to turn in work, fewer graded assignments, and—most perniciously—policies mandating “no zeros” or “no failing grades” were adopted (or accelerated) to lighten the load of young people whose worlds had been turned upside down.
Read the winning entry in Fordham’s 2024 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to answer this question: “How can policymakers and practitioners radically reduce chronic absenteeism—at least below pre-pandemic levels and preferably much further?”
Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2024 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to answer this question: “How can policymakers and practitioners radically reduce chronic absenteeism—at least below pre-pandemic levels and preferably much further?”