The Texas Education Agency has spent roughly three years piloting a promising set of ELA materials, which became freely available late last month: a structured and sequenced knowledge- and vocabulary-rich K–5 curriculum. The Lone Star State seems to well and truly understand the ingredients of language proficiency.
Texas is back in education news. In late May, The 74 reported that the state education agency is proposing to supplement its existing English instruction with lessons that include Biblical references.
Poland has been the economic tiger of Europe in recent decades and one of the fastest growing economies in the world over that time. In 1990, when I taught high school in a rural Polish town located in Silesia between Poznan and Wroclaw, Poland’s GDP was less than Ukraine’s.
As excitement grows around tutoring as a strategy to combat learning loss, advocates have rightly been encouraged by the growing
Forty-five percent of U.S. public schools report feeling understaffed, 70 percent report that too few candidates are applying to teaching vacancies, and 86 percent report challenges hiring teachers in the 2023–24 school year.
Pandemic-era school closures explain only one-fifth of the rise in chronic absenteeism. —David Wallace-Wells, New York Times Education reform is challenging because it’s unclear what “better schools” or “challenge the teachers unions” even means.
Editor’s note: This was first published by Forbes.
In his recent column “Let’s Talk About Bad Teachers,” Michael Petrilli fearlessly seized the third rail of U.S. K–12 education.
A child’s age is only a crude proxy for their academic readiness, yet it’s the primary means by which we group children in school. More age variety in classrooms could allow for greater academic consistency; grade retention and grade acceleration could help us get there. So too could a new idea from Petrilli: transitional kindergarten–5.
For thirty years, most education reformers have hung their hats on test-based accountability. Let's kick the tail of traditional public schools on standardized tests, as the thinking goes, and much else will take care of itself.
In April, Tim Daly penned an incisive three-part series on the trials and tribulations of teacher evaluation reforms.
The nation’s graduation rate rebounded after a Covid-era slump. —K12 Dive Major reforms make for splashy headlines, but small, incremental policies win achieve lasting improvements.
Editor’s note: This was first published by Education Next.
The drumbeat for a more nuanced treatment of the Science of Reading got louder last week with a hard-hitting new Fordham Institute monograph, Think Again: Should Elementary Schools Teach Reading Comprehension? In it, author Daniel Buck chronicles the recent history
While 2023-24 had the usual ups and downs, on balance, American education seemed to bend towards normality: chronic absenteeism is improving, standardized testing is making a comeback, and phonics has finally won. There’s reason for optimism, but education reformers must be wary of making obvious, if appealing, errors.
One of the most persistent myths in K–12 education is the idea that high-poverty schools are near-universally, significantly underfunded. However, the truth is much more complicated. As it turns out, poor districts get more money in almost every state—and school spending has an incredibly weak relationship with school quality in the first place.
“Math and reading scores for 13-year-olds have hit their lowest scores in decades.” When the recent NAEP long-term trend results for 13-year-olds were published, the
In the effort to expand and diversify the teacher pipeline, states and districts have invested millions in actively recruiting and training teachers from local communities.
Falling enrollment thanks to demographic trends means that many districts will soon have to make hard decisions about school closures.
In 2010, Katharine Birbalsingh gave a speech at Britain’s Conservative Party conference, after which the school where she was employed asked her not to return. She eventually established her own school, which now regularly boasts the highest growth scores of any K–12 educational institution in England. Buck recently spoke with her about her school's success.
Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, “citizen stewart,” which covers race, education, and democracy.
Editor’s note: This was first published by EdChoice.
Grades continue to rise even as attendance rates and test scores drop. —Wall Street Journal Some 300 “segregation academics,” private schools founded after Brown v. Board of Education to educate white children, still exist in the South today.
Reading comprehension depends on the acquisition of decoding, vocabulary, and knowledge, not “comprehension skills” as such. Yet the instructional practices and curricula that are the foundation for many English classrooms assume otherwise.
Tim Daly, a friend with whom I usually and enthusiastically agree, recently published a three-part series autopsying the teacher-evaluation reforms of the 2010’s.
According to national data, children from low-income families and students of color do not have the same access to advanced courses as their more advantaged peers.
