The Evolution of Charter School Quality
Looking at improvements in Texas charter school performance over the years.
Looking at improvements in Texas charter school performance over the years.
Fordham Institute to evaluate Common Core assessments on quality and content alignmentPARCC, Smarter Balanced, ACT Aspire, and Massachusetts participating in landmark studyMedia Contact:Michelle [email protected]
Their criticisms don’t add up. Robert Pondicio and Kevin Mahnken
The policy implications of a u-shaped curve vs. a rectangular-looking distribution
There’s a wonderfully apt saying about why debates in the U.S.
Get ready for another “Year of School Choice.” Michael J. Petrilli
Joe Sixpack: You’re not paying attention. And much of what you think you know is wrong. Morgan Polikoff
We know RSD. RSD is a friend of ours. EAA, you’re no RSD. Amber M. Northern, Ph.D. and Michael J. Petrilli
What happens when policymakers create statewide school districts to turn around their worst-performing public schools? In Louisiana and Tennessee, Recovery School Districts (RSDs) have made modest-to-strong progress for kids and serve as national models for what the future of education governance might hold.In the Great Lakes State, the story is more complicated.
On Wednesday, CCSSO (the organization of state superintendents) joined with CGCS (the organization of big urban school districts) to announce joint plans to reassess and scale back testing programs.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Metro D.C. School Spending Explorer offers the public a great resource by sharing data on public school spending (at the school level) across the District.
Accountability works. But not in reading, which isn’t a subject or a skill. Robert Pondiscio
I confess I’m somewhat bewildered by the passionate arguments over the Common Core State Standards. Getting in high dudgeon about K–12 learning standards, which say almost nothing about what kids do in school all day, makes no more sense to me than getting apoplectic about food-handling procedures, which I seldom think about when pushing my cart through the grocery store.
Testing works. Federal intrusiveness and poorly designed interventions are the real problem. Andy Smarick
The Education Trust has a proud and distinguished history. When the group got its start in the mid-1990s, achievement for poor and minority children was lagging, and the education policy community largely ignored their needs. Ed Trust changed all that with a single-minded focus on equity, hitched to the relatively new notion of school-level accountability.
[Editor’s note: This is the fifth in a series of personal reflections on the current state of education reform and contemporary conservatism by Andy Smarick, a Bernard Lee Schwartz senior policy fellow with the Thomas B.
Ed reform is dead. Long live ed reform. Chester E. Finn, Jr.
On the whole, the new guidance from the U.S.
There’s more to Common Core than “close reading.” Robert Pondiscio
We need two kinds of high school diplomas. Chester E. Finn, Jr.
There’s a lot of talk about disruptive innovation these days. It seems hardly a month goes by that we don’t see some sort of exciting new innovation that changes an industry. Sometimes it happens over and over again in the same space. First we had paper maps that were replaced by custom driving directions we could print out from MapQuest (remember those?).
Among opponents of the Common Core, one of the more popular targets of vitriol is the standards’ focus on improving literacy by introducing higher levels of textual complexity into the instructional mix.
Every child should be in a school where he or she can learn effectively. That’s not a controversial goal in itself, but the methods meant to accomplish it can become hot buttons.
It was back-to-school night last week at my son’s elementary school in Montgomery County, Maryland, which meant that we moms and dads got a first look at “Learning for the Future: A Parent’s Guide to Grade 1 Curriculum 2.0.”
For over a year, I’ve been encouraging Common Core advocates to stop endlessly re-litigating the standards and instead to focus on getting implementation right. Taking my own advice last week, I traveled to Reno to see first-hand the work of the Core Task Project, the initiative driving implementation of the standards in Washoe County, Nevada.
Over the last month or so, there’ve been a number of notable stories highlighting the passing of the torch from urban districts to urban chartering. The former continue their long, slow decline while the latter experiences the exhilaration and growing pains of emerging adulthood.
On September 9th, the Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli participated in an Intelligence Squared U.S. debate on the Common Core. These are his opening comments, as prepared for delivery.
With the release last month of the latest round test scores, Success Academy founder and CEO Eva Moskowitz is now a bona fide national-education-reform celebrity. She is also the latest in a line of educator-activists—like Michelle Rhee or Diane Ravitch—who embody, for supporters and opponents alike, one “side” of the education-reform debate.
We seemed to have welcomed good manners back to the Common Core debate. That doesn’t mean we’ve seen more advocacy either on behalf of the standards or knocking them, only that the tenor appears to have changed for the better. At least for the time being, detractors are no longer paranoid Neanderthals, and supporters have ceased to be communists on the federal or Gates Foundation dole.