Keeping the teacher-student feedback loop intact during distance learning
Editor’s note: This blog post was first published by Partnership Schools.
Editor’s note: This blog post was first published by Partnership Schools.
Editor’s note: This blog post was first published by Partnership Schools.
Amid the plague that surrounds us, essential attention is properly getting paid to the education challenges of out-of-school kids: What can their parents, their schools, and their districts do to compensate for missed classroom time and the learning loss that’s bound to occur between now and the resumption of something resemb
This major essay comprises one of the concluding chapters of our new book, "How to Educate an American: The Conservative Vision for Tomorrow's Schools." Levin brilliantly—and soberingly—explains what conservatives have forfeited in the quest for bipartisan education reform. He contends that future efforts by conservatives to revitalize American education must emphasize “the formation of students as human beings and citizens,” including “habituation in virtue, inculcation in tradition, [and] veneration of the high and noble.”
That K–12 education in the U.S. has long been plagued by “excellence gaps” is no secret, although the terminology may be just a decade old (and owes much to Jonathan Plucker and his colleagues).
Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship program has provided more than 780,000 scholarships since its inception in 2001.
Last week, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Espinoza v.
Considerable research suggests that “math skills better predict [individuals’] future earnings and other economic outcomes than other skills learned in high school,” report Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann.
The education world was slow on the uptake, but oral argument this week in the case of Espinoza v.
Gifted education in the U.S. is too scarce and lacks substance, and that’s especially true for high achieving black and Latino children. A new report by the Education Trust concludes that this gap has “everything to do with policies, adult decisions, and practices and little to do with students’ academic abilities.”
At the beginning of the modern ed-reform movement, getting onto four decades ago, urban Catholic schools were everywhere, serving as vital proof points in the debate about what was possible. While too many traditional public schools serving disadvantaged communities were either unsafe, failed to produce graduates with even basic skills, or both, urban Catholic schools stood apart.
When the New York City Council moved the other day to require every one of the city’s thirty-two community school districts to develop a school desegregation plan, it was yet one more example of municipal social engineering that prizes diversity over quality and mandatory over voluntary. If families with means don’t like their new school assignments, they’ll simply exit to charters, private schools or the suburbs, meaning that the city’s social engineers will mainly work their will on those with the least.
Education is a great equalizer, yet our nation does not consistently support advanced students, especially low-income, and racial and language minority students. Too often, these students are drastically under-challenged in school, leading to boredom, underachievement and incalculable amounts of lost potential.
Most everyone has read by now about the dismal scores on our Nation’s Report Card, which again measured how fourth and eighth graders did in math and reading. Aside from fourth grade math, marks on the 2019 National Assessment of Education Progress were generally flat or down, especially for our lowest-performing children. One prominent official remarked that “the bottom fell out.” But the results among high achievers offer a bright spot that has been mostly overlooked and undercelebrated.
Gifted education scholars have long pounded the drum regarding the need to increase racial and ethnic diversity in gifted programs. A recent study we published in the Harvard Educational Review suggests that increasing socioeconomic diversity needs similar attention.
Part I discussed Robert Pondiscio’s “Tiffany Test”: How do high-achieving students fare as they move through a high-poverty elementary school?
What happens to initially high-achieving students from high-poverty families as they move through elementary school? In the opening of his new book, How the Other Half Learns, Robert Pondiscio worries about these students while teaching fifth grade in the South Bronx.
On September 25th, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) issued a report titled “School Choice in the United States: 2019,” which sorely misrepresents the prevalence, value, and impact of school choice over the last twenty years.
When considering the available options for gifted high-school kids, the Advanced Placement (AP) program may not be the first thing that comes to mind. That’s too bad because AP might be America’s most effective large-scale “gifted and talented” program at the high school level.
Advanced Placement (AP) courses are the gold standard for preparing students for college. In fact, studies have found that AP participation correlates with higher rates of college enrollment and completion, even among young people who don’t pass their end-of-year AP exams.
Last week in Austin, at the annual “summit” sponsored by the PIE (“Policy Innovators in Education”) Network, prizes were conferred on a handful of state-based education-reform groups that had accomplished remarkable feats in the previous year, this despite the reform-averse mood that chills much of the nation.
Most states have spent the past decade overhauling their standards, tests, and accountability systems, and finally committing real resources to capacity-building, especially in the form of curriculum implementation. These pieces have only begun to come together in the last year or two, culminating with the release of school ratings as required by ESSA. What’s needed isn’t to spin the wheel of education policy once again, but to show some patience and commitment—and finish what we started.
Imagine that you’re a sixth-grade math teacher. It’s the first day of school, and the vast majority of your students arrived multiple years behind where they should be. Your job is to teach them concepts such as understanding percentages and dividing fractions.
American K–12 education is awash in reforms, nostrums, interventions, silver bullets, pilot programs, snake oil peddlers, advocates, and crusaders, not to mention innumerable private foundations that occasionally emerge from their endless cycles of strategic planning to unload their latest brainstorms upon the land. Yet when subjected to close scrutiny, not much actually “works.” The six-decade old Advanced Placement program is a rare and welcome exception.
The latest Education Next poll asked respondents whether they support ability grouping, whereby students take classes with peers at similar academic achievement levels, and for middle school the majority’s answer was no.
Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of posts looking at how two school networks—Rocketship Public Schools and Wildflower Schools—enable their students to meet standards at their own pace.
Termed by the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews “the most comprehensive book on Advanced Placement, the most powerful educational tool in the country,” this book traces AP’s history from its mid-twentieth-century origins as a niche benefit for privileged students to its contemporary role as a vital springboard to college for high school students nationwide, including hundreds of thousands of poor and minority youngsters. It's a must-read for anyone with a stake in American K–12 education.
In the last month, two reports have renewed questions about the current direction of states’ high school assessments.
Much of the initial response to Robert’s new book, "How The Other Half Learns," has focused on the winnowing effects of Success Academy’s enrollment process, which ensures that the children of only the most committed parents enroll and persist. But that’s just the start of the story. You have to look at what parent buy-in actually buys: a school culture that drives student achievement, and which can only be achieved when parents are active participants, not unwilling conscripts.
A recent report by Eugene Judson, Nicole Bowers, and Kristi Glassmeyer investigates what classroom mechanisms compel students to enroll in Advanced Placement (AP) science and math courses and to complete their associated exams—and how that differs between low- and high-income schools.