The 10 biggest charter school wins in the past year
It being National Charter Schools Week, I thought I would look at the progress that we have made since last year’s celebration.
It being National Charter Schools Week, I thought I would look at the progress that we have made since last year’s celebration.
Join us to discuss the implications of Fordham's recently published report Charter Schools and English Learners in the Lone Star State.
The number of English learners in charter schools has increased markedly in recent years, but our knowledge of how well charters serve these students hasn’t kept pace with that growth. That’s why we conducted our new study, "Charter Schools and English Learners in the Lone Star State." It finds, among other things, that compared to their traditional public school peers, English learners in Texas charters are more likely to graduate high school and enroll in college. They also earn more money in the post-college years.
This year’s state legislative sessions, now coming to a close, have yielded a blizzard of high-profile victories on school choice, from the enactment of universal education savings accounts (ESA) programs, to the expansion of private school choice policies to serve many more families, to fairer funding for charter schools.
When it comes to K–12 education policy, the post-Covid period has become, more than almost anything else, the era of school choice. This success has opened new avenues for its growth and confronted choice supporters—particularly Catholic school supporters—with an important decision.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast,
This study uses nearly two decades of student-level data to explore how charter school enrollment is related to Texas English learners’ achievement, attainment, and earnings.
Editor’s note: This is an edition of “Advance,” a newsletter from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute written by Brandon Wright, our Editorial Director, and published every other week. Its purpose is to monitor the progress of gifted education in America, including legal and legislative developments, policy and leadership changes, emerging research, grassroots efforts, and more.
Aaargh. Here we go again. The new National Assessment civics and history results are as deplorable as they were predictable. Whether they’ll also serve as the action-forcer that we need is far from certain.
How to select students for advanced or elite academic programs has long been controversial. Critics of “holistic” admissions policies argue they often turn to mush—or inject bias into the process. At the other extreme, a few programs use nothing more than a single assessment to determine placement.
There are many reasons to be skeptical of the universal ESA programs that are sweeping the nation, but they are worth rooting for anyway because they’ll likely lead traditional public schools to improve.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Sc
When Tennessee House Republicans expelled, albeit briefly, two young, Black Democratic lawmakers late last week, it raised a number of unsettling questions—not only about the contours of our politics, but also about the future of educat
A little-noticed event in late 2022 destabilized a pillar of contemporary American K–12 education, namely that all schools considered part of the public system must be secular.
If we put all our education hopes in markets, self-interest, competition, and “invisible hands,” will that contribute to the other fissiparous forces that are weakening the valuable shared assets we inherited from earlier generations? Recent surveys certainly suggest that mounting public support for school choice is coinciding with diminishing confidence in shared institutions and public values of all kinds, including patriotism itself.
Despite the expansion of computer-based testing in schools over the last decade—and ongoing concerns about negative impacts
As school accountability systems reset following pandemic disruptions, an opportunity arises to improve their accuracy and make sure the intended responses to data resulting from them are properly tuned. A new study from the U.S.
This school year was supposed to mark the beginning of the comeback. Largely free from pandemic-related disruptions and with coffers flush with Uncle Sam’s Covid cash, states could finally turn their attention toward clawing back what students have lost.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast,
Districts that lose students to charter schools can and ultimately will adjust their behavior. And indeed, recent research implies that, while charters marginally reduce districts’ total revenues per pupil, they also make them more efficient. The challenge for policymakers is managing whatever transition costs may be associated with moving to a more choice-based system in a way that is fair to students and taxpayers.
Here is a list of ideals and values commonly held within a particular group of people in American life. Name the group of people who prize the following things: a belief in personal responsibility and individual merit; a respect for order, rules, and self-discipline; and a personal commitment to vibrant institutions that are critical to civil society.
Opponents of public charter schools claim that they drain resources from traditional public schools. This brief argues that this assertion misses lesser-known realities and ignores obvious truths.
When I started Instruction Partners and began working deeply and regularly with multiple school systems, I was surprised by some patterns. The same motivational quotes were in almost every school hallway. Many teachers' lounges had the same air freshener. There was a similar tension between certain departments in almost every district.
Student effort is the secret sauce at Success Academy charter schools, says their founder and CEO, and they teach and celebrate it religiously. Indeed, after seventeen years of educating tens of thousands of students, careful analysis of homework, classwork, and assessment data has taught the Success Academy team that a large proportion of errors, up to 70 percent, don’t result from not knowing or understanding the content, but from a lack of care and attention to detail.
In the summer of 2015, I sat at my desk and Googled “health savings account providers.” At the time, I had been in states across the country advocating for creation of education savings account (ESA) programs.
Recently, Jo Boaler—a Stanford professor and one of the country’s foremost scholars of mathematics—took to the Hechinger Report to write about pandemic learning loss
Mississippi’s model for improving early literacy has been a standout since 2019, based on its nation-leading achievement growth on the fourth grade NAEP reading test.
The claim that the SAT and ACT drive inequities in higher education feeds the movement against standardized testing and has been at the heart of successful court cases, but this new brief argues that, whether colleges decide to go “test optional” or not, the implications for equity are actually minimal. Read more.
The SAT and ACT hold a controversial place in American education. This brief challenges the notion that college admissions exams drive inequities in college admissions and higher education attainment, as well as worsen broader social disparities.
What does it cost to retain a less-than-proficient student and provide him or her with remediation and additional support?