Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance
Beyond free tuition: How college promise scholarships are perceived by awardees
Dozens of states and cities provide “college promise” programs.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Private School Choice, Teachers & School Leaders
The swirling private-school universe
The universe of private elementary-secondary schooling in America today is diverse and confusing, with innumerable twists and turns in efforts to use public funds to help families access schools that suit them—including private schools of all colors and stripes. But the virtue of these institutions is that they’re different, which also means very different from each other. Which complicates the quest to deploy public dollars to assist families to choose them.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Teachers & School Leaders
On the persistence of the achievement gap
I read Mike Petrilli’s very interesting article “How to narrow the excellence gap in early elementary school” in Fordham’s June 2 Education Gadfly Weekly.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Does keeping students with the same teacher for multiple years boost outcomes?
The relationship between teacher and student has profound effects on learning. A new study explores whether schools can strengthen this relationship over time by keeping students with teachers for more than one year.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders
Hope and progress for gifted education
This is the first edition of “Advance,” a new Fordham Institute newsletter that will monitor the progress of gifted education. Here, Wright recounts recent developments that reinforce two truths: Gifted education is a clear and substantial good, and it can be much better.
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Building better evidence on pre-K by strengthening assessments of children’s skills
Research has found that high-quality pre-K programs can have positive impacts on children’s learning and development, improving outcomes like literacy and math skills in the short-term and even increasing
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Teaching virtue in the digital age
Because of social media’s well-documented risks and harms, we must teach teens to exercise good practical judgment in the challenging circumstances of the online spaces they will need to navigate in our digital age. Parents play an important role. But so should schools, which ought to develop curricula that model how to interact online in ways that meet their general standards and expectations of their student’s social lives.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Exit interview: Carey Wright, Mississippi’s State Superintendent of Education
One of the most unlikely education stories of the last decade has been the rise of Mississippi as a star of NAEP and a science of reading proof point. When looking for models to follow, researchers and policy wonks usually point to places like Shanghai and Finland, even Massachusetts. But Mississippi? Who saw that coming?
Commentary
School Finance, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
ESSER is fueling one-size-fits-all strategies. Let’s use data to deliver more targeted efforts.
States and districts face no shortage of seemingly overwhelming problems, especially the devastating learning loss among vulnerable students from extended pandemic school closures. But leaders do have money: States and districts got $123 billion in federal emergency (ARP ESSER) relief.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance
Baked in: School quality and home values
If you want to know which schools are good, ask a realtor—so goes the conventional wisdom—and families often do so.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance
Complicating factors: Evaluating a federal program to increase access to dual enrollment
In 2016, the U.S. Department of Education launched an offshoot of the Pell Grant program intended to assist low-income high schoolers in accessing college credit through dual enrollment.
Commentary
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Public education’s compensation problem
Great education requires great teachers, but the existing system makes it too difficult to retain the best and replace the worst. Fixing this requires, among other things, more generous pay. Instead we face the profession’s persistent, declining productivity.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Revisiting “The Case Against the Zero”: A response to Daniel Buck
In a recent Fordham article, Daniel Buck makes several thoughtful critiques of the practice of schools that have replaced the mark of zero on a 100-point scale with a minimum grade of fifty.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Let’s not get reckless with grading: Replying to Douglas Reeves
As a conservative, part of my job is to stand athwart rapid education changes yelling “is this really a good idea?” I did just that in a recent piece for the Fordham Instit
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
The state of high-quality instructional materials
We know that most American students are suffering from unprecedented learning loss.
Commentary
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
The mass exodus of teachers isn’t what you think it is. It’s far worse.
Districts across the land are witnessing a mass exit of teachers from classrooms, the likes of which has never been seen. It’s going to get worse, says Adams. And it isn’t about low salaries, paltry pensions, or lack of financial support. Teachers are leaving in droves because so many of our children are utterly broken, student behavior is abhorrent, and accountability is out of vogue in our schools.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
A “no zeroes” grading policy is the worst of all worlds
More and more schools across the U.S. have adopted a new grading fad: Teachers cannot assign a grade lower than 50 percent. If a student doesn’t turn in an assignment? 50 percent. Do they miss every problem on a vocabulary quiz? 50 percent.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Encouraging progress on “high quality instructional materials”
As a long-time (and often lonely) curriculum enthusiast, I’ve followed the work of the High-Quality Instructional Materials and Professional Development (IMPD) Network for several years.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Bus commutes and their academic impacts in New York City
Providing transportation for students to and from school is a basic requirement of most public school districts in America. During the 2018–19 school year, nearly 60 percent of all K–12 students nationwide, public and private, were transported by those ubiquitous yellow buses.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Here’s why all students need agency rather than equity
As a charter school leader in the South Bronx for the past decade, Rowe has seen what happens when resources are forcibly removed from the “privileged” and given to the “unprivileged” in the pursuit of “equity” over “equality”—with little regard for students’ uniqueness, humanity, or agency. Better is to teach disadvantaged children to defy, rather than confirm, diminished expectations.
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
The coming “second wave” of learning loss in 2023 and 2024
Covid “learning loss” has two causes: the loss of in-person instruction in the spring of 2020 and the reliance on remote learning thereafter (which Tom Kane and colleagues quantify in an article in The Atlantic
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
“Expert” idiocy on teaching kids to read
Every teacher of struggling readers has experienced the moment when a student says, “I read it, but I didn’t get it.” It can be a bewildering experience. Why don’t they get it?
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders
Do gifted and talented programs contribute to racial imbalances in elementary school?
The clatter that rose in late 2021 over New York City’s plan to phase out its gifted and talented (G/T) programs had much to do with the presumed negative effects of such programs on racial sorting.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
How much do teachers matter in the early grades?
A recent CALDER study examines the effects that earlier-grade teachers have on students’ eighth-grade math outcomes by analyzing Washington State administrative data.
Commentary
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
How to respond sensibly to the Uvalde shooting
Awful tragedies like the shooting in Uvalde notwithstanding, firearms will remain ubiquitous. The question is whether policymakers can bring measured thinking and nuance to bear in solving the thorny problem of gun violence in schools. This is particularly challenging in a media climate that hypes and distorts the prevalence of what happened in last week, even as schools continue to deal with the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders
How to narrow the excellence gap in early elementary school
In recent weeks, I’ve dug into the “excellence gap“—the sharp divides along lines of race
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Natalie Wexler goes astray on the NAEP reading test
Natalie Wexler has done much (along with the likes of Jeanne Chall, Don Hirsch, Dan Willingham, Kate Walsh, and Robert Pondiscio) to establish the fact that there’s science behind the act of reading and the related proposition that real reading (not just “decoding”) is no isolated skill but, rather, a complicated process of making sense of what one reads on the page in the context of what one a
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
How does a child’s religious background affect her choices about higher education?
“From Bat Mitzvah to the Bar: Religious Habitus, Self-Concept, and Women’s Educational Outcomes,” a new study by Ilana Horwitz et al., analyzes the college-going rates of women raised by Jewish versus non-Jewish parents.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
The core conflict of interest in public education
In my work on the teaching staff of a master’s level class in public policy, I am regularly dismayed by how often our students propose only governmental solutions to public problems.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Exit interview: NCTQ’s Kate Walsh
Few people in education reform have had greater impact than Kate Walsh, who recently handed over the reins of the National Council on Teacher Quality, which she led for twenty years. No one has done more to make raising the level of teacher preparation a focus of reform efforts. Here, Robert Pondiscio talks to her about her past, the present, and her views on what’s to come.
