A new look at the question of the effectiveness of school turnarounds
Turnaround efforts for low performing schools have been the subject of research interest since their advent in the No Child Left Behind era.
Turnaround efforts for low performing schools have been the subject of research interest since their advent in the No Child Left Behind era.
Editor’s note: This was the second-place submission, out of twenty-five, in Fordham’s 2021 Wonkathon, in which we asked participants to answer the question, “How can schools best address students’ mental-health needs coming out of the
Now more than ever, high-ability students from low-income families will need specialized attention and guidance from their parents and teachers. Many less-resourced families have experienced illness or personal and financial instability, and low-income students’ schooling may have experienced long interruptions due to a lack of resources at home.
As U.S. schools reopen in the fall, a year and a half after nearly all of them closed due to the pandemic panic, what should be different? What needs to change if kids are actually to catch up? What’s important to retrieve from pre-Covid days? And what other changes, changes that should have been made pre-Covid, is there now a rare opportunity to initiate?
Trouble continues at the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), the policy body for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
Editor’s note: The Thomas B. Fordham Institute recently launched “The Acceleration Imperative,” a crowd-sourced, evidence-based resource designed to aid instructional leaders’ efforts to address the enormous challenges faced by their students, families, teachers, and staff over the past year.
Since 1997, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) has tested students around the globe every three years to determine the educational status of fifteen-year-old students in dozens of countries and economic regions that are part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
A recent study uses data from math and reading tests conducted between 1954 and 2007 to explore long-term trends in American students’ achievement.
You wouldn’t expect a conservative Republican like former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour to turn into a facsimile of Chairman Xi as muzzler of dissent and monitor of communications, but something of the sort has reared its head at the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), which Barbour chairs. (He’s a DeVos appointee, and last I looked, those terms run a year at a time.
A suite of technologies that are already widely used in some private-sector testing can and should be embraced by state and national assessments, as well as the private tests that aren’t yet making maximum use of them. Read more.
Things are getting messy in the world of assessment.
The Biden administration recently approved Colorado’s request to ease the burden of administering state assessments because of the pandemic.
The Biden team has issued its first responses to state requests to waive federal testing requirements because of the pandemic. Dale Chu reads the tea leaves, and concludes that the new Administration is trying to eat its cake and have it too.
How can we do more to prevent teen suicides? —New York Times Pandemic pods are less sustainable and are harder to run than many parents thought.
The CDC’s revised guidelines for pupil spacing in school—three feet under most circumstances rather than six—opened a floodgate of gratitude from superintendents and parents.
Despite last week’s announcement by the U.S. Department of Education that it won’t grant blanket testing waivers this year, a number of states have decided to push for one anyway.
Any discussion about “equity” in education that is not first and foremost a discussion about literacy is unserious.
Thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act, annual testing in math and reading for students in grades three through eight became mandatory in every state beginning in 2005.
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of posts about envelope-pushing strategies schools might embrace to address students’ learning loss in the wake of the pandemic.
Gifted education is usually thought of as comprising separate classrooms that participating students attend for part of the day, and that move faster through curricular material or examine it at greater depth than “regular education” classrooms. This, of course, is only possible because all of the students in gifted classrooms are up to the challenge of this enhanced instruction.
Last week, NY1 reported that the New York City Department of Education will end its elementary-level gifted and talented test after administering it in person this April.
I’ll miss the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation now that it has closed its research and evaluation department, where I served as director from 2011 to 2020. After almost a decade examining challenges faced by high-ability students, I’ve learned a lot. I want to share with you ten of the key takeaways.
The Covid-19 pandemic has run roughshod over so much of our education system, closing schools, sending students home to try to learn remotely, and obliterating last year’s summative state tests.
TIMSS is less well known to most American ed-watchers than NAEP and PISA, perhaps because it comes from a private group called the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), but it does a first-rate job of monitoring, comparing, and explaining the educational performance of fourth- and eighth-graders in dozens of countries in the crucial subjects of math and
The pandemic has now disrupted two consecutive school years, and its effects are certain to linger for years to come. Unfortunately, some students will be more impacted than others.
Here in Fordham’s pages, I’ve previously written about the challenge of Covid-19 learning losses at the macro level. In this article, I focus on the micro level.
For those of us who still believe that results-based school accountability is an essential part of the education renewal that America sorely needs, not many things are looking great this week.
Two years ago, Seth Gershenson and Fordham published Grade Inflation in High Schools, groundbreaking research examining the relationship between students’ Algebra I course grades and end-of-course (EOC) test results in North Carolina.
A perennial complaint about holding students accountable through grades and test scores is that these mechanisms are biased against already disadva