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.
The “tripod” of standards, testing, and accountability has taken a real beating in recent years, following decades in which it was accepted dogma within reform circles.
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
Dozens of states and cities provide “college promise” programs.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Matt Beienburg, Director of Education Policy
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.
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.
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.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Daniel Buck, a teacher and a Fordham senior visiting fellow, joins Mike Petrilli to discuss “
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
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?
States and districts face no shortage of seemingly overwhelming problems, especially the devastating learning loss among vulnerable students from extended pandemic school closures. But leaders do have money: States and districts got $123 billion in federal emergency (ARP ESSER) relief.
If you want to know which schools are good, ask a realtor—so goes the conventional wisdom—and families often do so.
In 2016, the U.S. Department of Education launched an offshoot of the Pell Grant program intended to assist low-income high schoolers in accessing college credit through dual enrollment.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, we present the sixth edition of our Research Deep Dive series.
Great education requires great teachers, but the existing system makes it too difficult to retain the best and replace the worst. Fixing this requires, among other things, more generous pay. Instead we face the profession’s persistent, declining productivity.
We know that most American students are suffering from unprecedented learning loss.
Districts across the land are witnessing a mass exit of teachers from classrooms, the likes of which has never been seen. It’s going to get worse, says Adams. And it isn’t about low salaries, paltry pensions, or lack of financial support. Teachers are leaving in droves because so many of our children are utterly broken, student behavior is abhorrent, and accountability is out of vogue in our schools.
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.
Providing transportation for students to and from school is a basic requirement of most public school districts in America. During the 2018–19 school year, nearly 60 percent of all K–12 students nationwide, public and private, were transported by those ubiquitous yellow buses.
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.
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
The clatter that rose in late 2021 over New York City’s plan to phase out its gifted and talented (G/T) programs had much to do with the presumed negative effects of such programs on racial sorting.
Awful tragedies like the shooting in Uvalde notwithstanding, firearms will remain ubiquitous. The question is whether policymakers can bring measured thinking and nuance to bear in solving the thorny problem of gun violence in schools. This is particularly challenging in a media climate that hypes and distorts the prevalence of what happened in last week, even as schools continue to deal with the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.
In recent weeks, I’ve dug into the “excellence gap“—the sharp divides along lines of race
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
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.
Last week, I provided sobering evidence of the “excellence gap” among twelfth grade students—the sharp divides along lines of race and class in achievement at the highest levels.
Many state teacher pension systems are woefully underfunded, impose significant costs on teachers and schools, and shortchange tho
Calls are rising for America’s aging high-school model to modernize, in part by accommodating work experience through hands-on internships or actual employment for students.
