What we're reading this week: April 1, 2021
How can we do more to prevent teen suicides? —New York Times Pandemic pods are less sustainable and are harder to run than many parents thought.
How can we do more to prevent teen suicides? —New York Times Pandemic pods are less sustainable and are harder to run than many parents thought.
Earlier this month on her “Answer Sheet” blog in the Washington Post, Valerie Strauss ran a lengthy rebuttal written by Carol Burris about a study that we recently published. Robbers or Victims?
The CDC’s revised guidelines for pupil spacing in school—three feet under most circumstances rather than six—opened a floodgate of gratitude from superintendents and parents.
School choice proponents argue that when parents vote with their feet—and dollars—schools listen. But choice is no match for the pandemic of wokeness that has seized K–12 education. The most advantaged, privileged, and powerful parents in America have been cowed into submissive silence when elite schools of choice adopt neoracist practices masquerading as “anti-racism.”
The Fordham Institute has published a two-part piece by Checker Finn on giving “power to the people,” as well as
Centering the work of charter schooling and authorizing in communities means listening to the aspirations and needs they have for students—especially communities that have been overlooked and not prioritized, like communities of color, those from lower-income tax brackets, and those with disabilities—and delivering with, not to, them.
Despite last week’s announcement by the U.S. Department of Education that it won’t grant blanket testing waivers this year, a number of states have decided to push for one anyway.
Yes, I blurbed it—and I like it. Yes, a visitor to our home, a worldly and skeptical sort, hefted it and looked at the title and asked me “Isn’t that awfully thick for a book about optimism regarding American public education?”
Education funding is sticky. Once dollars are sent to a public school or school system, they tend to stay there.
The return on investment for four-year college degrees is fairly well-established in terms of graduates’ employment and
Any discussion about “equity” in education that is not first and foremost a discussion about literacy is unserious.
Should President Biden follow through on his campaign promise to grant local school districts veto power over the creation of new charter schools within their borders, on the assumption that their expansion harms traditional public schools?
If the pandemic vanished tomorrow and all U.S. schools instantly reopened in exactly the same fashion as they were operating last February, how many parents would be satisfied to return their daughters and sons to the same old familiar classrooms, teachers, schedules and curricula? A lot fewer than the same old schools and those who run and teach in them are expecting back!
The father testifying before Virginia’s Loudon County school board
Thanks to the No Child Left Behind Act, annual testing in math and reading for students in grades three through eight became mandatory in every state beginning in 2005.
Let’s start with a little game. Trust me, it will be helpful if you play along… Grab a piece of paper and a writing utensil. Complete the following sentence: First-year or early-career teachers typically struggle most with… (Try to come up with a few answers.)
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.
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of posts about envelope-pushing strategies schools might embrace to address students’ learning loss in the wake of the pandemic.
The Covid-19 pandemic has run roughshod over so much of our education system, closing schools, sending students home to try to learn remotely, and obliterating last year’s summative state tests.
This post is adapted from an email conversation between Marc Tucker and Fordham’s Michael J. Petrilli, in which Marc was responding to Mike’s recent article, “The case for urban charter schools.” It also appeared in Fordham’s Flypaper newsletter.
Rhode Islanders just saw their governor, Gina Raimondo, tapped to become President-elect Biden’s Secretary of Commerce.
President-Elect Biden has confirmed that he will nominate Dr. Miguel A. Cardona to serve as the next U.S. Secretary of Education. He appears to be a prudent choice for Biden, earning support from teachers unions and education reform groups, including charter operators. Cardona is the current Connecticut Commissioner of Education.
Like traditional public schools, charter schools are publicly funded according to student enrollment. But compared to their district counterparts, charters have long received far less per-pupil funding.
Study after study has found that urban charter schools, and non-profit charter networks in particular, tend to be more successful at boosting student achievement than traditional public schools in similar settings. But why?
TIMSS is less well known to most American ed-watchers than NAEP and PISA, perhaps because it comes from a private group called the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA), but it does a first-rate job of monitoring, comparing, and explaining the educational performance of fourth- and eighth-graders in dozens of countries in the crucial subjects of math and
The pandemic has now disrupted two consecutive school years, and its effects are certain to linger for years to come. Unfortunately, some students will be more impacted than others.
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.
Two years ago, Seth Gershenson and Fordham published Grade Inflation in High Schools, groundbreaking research examining the relationship between students’ Algebra I course grades and end-of-course (EOC) test results in North Carolina.