The upside of the downward trend in college enrollment
The media have been full of
The media have been full of
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Fordham’s editorial director, Brandon Wright, joins Mike Petrilli
As Michael Petrilli wrote in these pages a few weeks ago, the education reform movement has come to the realization that its belief in “college for all,” while well-intended, was misguided.
Tracking in our high schools is simply a fact, and we would do well to stop pretending otherwise or believing that it could be any other way. At the very least, we should allow for diverging paths after tenth grade, and we need to completely rethink our approach for our lowest-performing kids.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast (listen on
One of the biggest shifts in education reform in recent years has been widening acknowledgment that the “college for all” mantra was misguided. Yet so far our commitment to “multiple pathways” to opportunity is almost all talk accompanied by very little action. High school course requirements and accountability systems continue to push almost all students into the college-prep track.
While the ubiquitous term “college and career readiness” assumes that twelve years of compulsory education could adequately prepare a student for both postsecondary and workplace settings, we know far more about readiness for the former than the latter.
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.
In 2012, Tennessee lawmakers created the Statewide Dual-Credit program (SDC) to help more students earn college credit while completing high school.
Gifted education has been a much-debated issue
Covid-19 sent a shock wave through an already changing U.S. job market, provoking “a great reassessment of work in America.”
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
When it comes to career and technical education, there’s one state that seems to be getting things just about right: Connecticut.
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:
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.
The return on investment for four-year college degrees is fairly well-established in terms of graduates’ employment and
Beware the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” President George W. Bush’s trenchant warning resonated across the political spectrum when he voiced it to the NAACP in 2000, and it has more or less driven federal education policy ever since. For many, educators and noneducators alike, it remains a touchstone of how to think about racial equity.
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.
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.