Editor’s note: This is the second article in a two-part series. Part I urges readers to "listen more, empathize more, and demonize less" in these divisive times.
A long simmering feud between Denver’s school board and superintendent finally burst into the open last week following months of tensions and mutual distrust.
In part one of this two-part essay, published last week, I reflected on Clare Basil’s “definitional” challenge to the growth of classical schools—schools that take “a unifying approach to intellectual and moral formation by developing the integrity of mind and heart,”
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.
Clare Basil recently shared some thoughtful observations about the growth of K–12 classical schools, schools that take “a unifying approach to intellectual and moral formation by developing the integrity of mind and heart”—a quote Basil borrows from the Institute for Classical Educat
At the tail end of a recent symposium titled “Why children can’t read—and what we can do about it” hosted by American Enterprise Institute, Margaret Goldberg, a California first grade teacher and founder of the
Nothing better evokes education reform’s predicament today than what occurred in late July when the National Basketball Association restarted its 2020 season. Players were given the option of featuring on the back of their jerseys one of about thirty messages.
A perennial complaint about holding students accountable through grades and test scores is that these mechanisms are biased against already disadva
I knew something was wrong when, during what was supposed to be a full day of remote learning, my thirteen-year-old son announced at 9:30 a.m. that he was free until 11:27 a.m., and then plopped onto the couch and flipped on the television.
Charges of financial blunders have taken out district leaders before. Think the pandemic inoculates leaders from that possible fate? Think again.
At a virtual town hall in Brooklyn about how the pandemic will change admissions to high-performing selective schools, New York City officials got a lecture on systemic racism.
Control of state legislatures is particularly important in a census year, but it’s also an often-overlooked element in driving substantive education policy changes. National politics takes up all the oxygen, but it’s state legislators who make most of the big decisions about how a state’s public-education system operates, is funded, is held accountable (if at all), and much more.
Education wasn’t explicitly on the national ballot in 2020, but education is always on the ballot, even when you don’t see it. Now that the election is behind us, education reformers can focus again on states and communities, where most of the important decisions about K–12 education get made.
Spend a few minutes on education Twitter or listening to the loudest special-interest voices, and you’d think the future of public education hinges on whether Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, and the president can agree to another stimulus deal. That’s just a short-term Washington game—that will likely soon have a new roster of players.
Are schools essential or aren’t they? Are teachers essential workers or aren’t they? How would Americans respond if large numbers of doctors, nurses, policemen, firemen, and postal workers simply opted to stay home—and their unions defended them? If you’re essential, you go to work.
A U.S. Supreme Court decision is introducing a new type of charter school that’s likely to cheer conservatives but alarm many progressives: the religiously-affiliated charter. Those of us in the charter movement need to figure out how to keep them from splitting the charter coalition.
As we previously saw at the 4th grade and 8th grade levels, the just-released 2019 12 grade NAEP results were mostly flat or down. But we already knew from the 2015 results that this cohort of students entered high school performing below their older peers.
As our country grapples with racial injustice, there are persistent calls to diversify elite institutions at all levels, from corporate and foundation boards to law schools and medical schools to undergraduate programs. All good.
Decades before “equity” became a buzzword in education, E. D. Hirsch, Jr. had his finger on what the word actually means: equal access for all children to the knowledge and verbal proficiency that makes full participation in American life possible.
On this week’s podcast, Karen Hawley Miles, CEO and president of Education Resource Strategies, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith
A recent study from Brown University’s Matthew A. Kraft and John P. Papay and Harvard’s Olivia L. Chi uses nine years of administrative data from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina to examine teacher improvement through the lens of principal evaluations.
On Wednesday, the government will release the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress scores for twelfth grade students.
Early childhood literacy advocacy has been a quiet casualty of our current annus horribilis.
In education, one of the more bizarre debates of the past quarter century has been over whether more money improves students’ outcomes. It’s tough to think of anywhere else in American life where we’d even have that discussion.
The Progressive Policy Institute’s indefatigable David Osborne, a long-time student of and advocate for quality charter schools, now joined by Tressa Pankovits, has penned a valu
On this week’s podcast, Fordham’s Checker Finn joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss the growing, misguided war on selective-admissions
What are we teaching the children about our country? The short answer: not much.
Contrary to much public rhetoric, the evidence for expanding charter schools in urban areas is stronger than ever. To be sure, the research is less positive for charters operating outside of the nation’s urban centers. And multiple studies suggest that internet-based schools and charters that serve mostly middle-class students, perform worse than their district counterparts, at least on traditional test-score-based measures. But charters needn’t work everywhere to be of service to society.
