Education Gadfly Show #805: High schools didn’t get the memo that college isn’t for everyone
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast (listen on
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast (listen on
Education for high achievers has come under siege in blue cities and states as the national focus has shifted to racial equity in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. But such attacks, even when well-intentioned, are misguided. They target a problem’s symptom rather than its cause, and in doing so, harm students and defy parents.
Gifted education has been a much-debated issue
Mayor de Blasio is axing New York City’s long-standing gifted education programs. He plans to replace them with something else, but his proposal is almost entirely wrong. Fortunately, Eric Adams, who’s almost certain to replace him in January, has a vision of gifted education that’s mostly right, and he’ll enter office in time to fix de Blasio’s blunders.
Far too many high-achieving children are drifting through middle and high school. Despite their potential, they don’t end up taking AP exams, achieving high marks on their ACTs, or going to four-year colleges. This limits their ability to move up the social ladder, threatens U.S. economic competitiveness, and derails our aspirations for a more just society. We must stop buying into the false assumption that high-achieving kids will do fine on their own.
“As a broader mechanism for equity, [Advanced Placement] has fallen short, unable to overcome the powerful structural forces that disadvantage far too many students,” writes Anne Kim in a recent long-form article in Washington Monthly titled “AP’s Equity Face-Plant.” “If the ultimate goal
Boston just approved sweeping changes to the process by which students are admitted to its three highly-sought exam schools. The idea was to free up more seats for disadvantaged children, some of whom have long been underrepresented at the institutions. Yet in one important aspect, the plan may do exactly the opposite: It’s likely to significantly reduce the number of seats that go to low-income Asian American students.
When looking for models of ambitious inspiration, Americans often hearken back to President John F. Kennedy’s “moonshot” address at Rice University on September 12, 1962:
A trio of researchers from the University of Chicago, MIT, and UC Berkeley recently released a working paper that indicates a multitude of positive long-term effects—very long term, in fact—associated with attendance at public preschool.
In 1908, the Ford Motor Company unveiled the Model T and introduced a reliable, affordable automobile for the middle class. While revolutionary, the Model T also took twelve hours and 7,882 tasks to assemble 1,481 parts, and increased production time meant increased costs. In 1913, Ford introduced an assembly line and cut production to ninety-three minutes.
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.
In part I of this two-part series, I wrote about three of the most common practices teachers implement in elementary schools that successfully personalize learning: giving each child a learning plan, organizing instruction around class-level and individual mastery, and using grouping an
In a previous Flypaper post, Mike Petrilli described the challenge of personalizing instruction for our youngest learners as the “Mount Everest” of education.
Editor’s note: This is the fifth and final installment in a series of posts about envelope-pushing strategies that schools might embrace to address students’ learning loss in the wake of the pandemic.
High-dosage tutoring is receiving a lot of buzz as a promising tool to address learning loss in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. But unlike vaccines, successful tutoring programs are challenging to scale with fidelity. In this paper, long-time educators Michael Goldstein and Bowen Paulle explain how leaders can smartly scale promising tutoring programs that can boost student outcomes.
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.
As with most years, 2020 has been a busy one for the Fordham research team. We published many groundbreaking studies, adding contributions to the evidence base on literacy, civic education, education funding, school choice, and gifted programs, among others.
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.
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.
On this week’s podcast, Fordham’s Checker Finn joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss the growing, misguided war on selective-admissions
Two big public-school systems in the D.C. area are on the verge of letting their zeal for equity and racial justice lead to consequences they may end up regretting. Fairfax County, which operates one of America’s best known and most esteemed “exam schools,” is may use a lottery, rather than test scores and other quality measures, for admissions. And Loudoun County is considering revising its rules for “professional conduct” by school staff to punish employees—teachers included—in truly Orwellian ways.
Academic acceleration—either through grade skipping or advanced coursework such as Advanced Placement or early college access—is a longstanding practice for primary and secondary students who show above average ability for their age and grade level.
On this week’s podcast, David Osborne, director of the Reinventing America’s Schools Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, joins Checker
Students who have the kinds of talent scientists and engineers need to solve problems by visualizing how objects could be rotated, combined or changed in three dimensions often struggle at school.
The Covid-19 pandemic has further exposed the inequities that have long existed in K–12 education system.