Last week, Petrilli identified three rules for “doing educational equity right” that will result in smart policy designs and make it likelier that the political right will get on board the equity train. Now let’s apply those rules to the topic of school finance.
Shortly before schools—and Fordham—shuttered their doors for the holiday break, Tim Daly asked a simple question in these pages: Should schools ban smart phones?
As former teachers in a variety of settings—charter, traditional public, and “transfer” schools—we read with great interest our colleague Daniel Buck’s recent piece, “In defense of the traditional classroom
Whether school discipline falls differently on students from different racial groups is an ongoing concern for families, school and community leaders, and policymakers.
The education world lost a true reformer on Christmas Day—and the charter-school world lost one of its true heroes—when Linda Brown passed away at eighty-one at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“Suitcase words” have different meanings for different people. They’re everywhere in our political conversations and in K–12 education, and they include “social justice,” “parental rights,” and “accountability.” But the granddaddy of them all is surely “educational equity.” In coming weeks, this series will aim to unpack this phrase, and discuss what it would mean to do educational equity right.
“Truancy” may no longer be the right word for it, maybe not even “absenteeism,” for both imply being missing from a place where one is supposed to be. “Truancy,” with its overtone of misbehavior and illegality, suggests willfulness, i.e., that one is intentionally missing, while “absenteeism” is a more neutral term with no suggestion of motive.
A new report from the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice adds to the robust literature on school choice in New Orleans, shedding light on the ways in which the centralized enrollment system in the Crescent City has grown and evolved, as well a
The Covid-19 pandemic created innumerable disruptions to the education system. Among them were challenges faced by teacher candidates trying to complete licensure requirements. In response, those requirements got waived in many places.
Earlier this year, Jill Kafka, the tireless Executive Director of Partnership Schools, announced that she is stepping down after twenty-seven years of dedicated service.
Many futuristic reformers love to hate the classroom.
The results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) are in—an international standardized test of fifteen-year-olds and the first look at how countries compare post-pandemic—and the picture they paint of American education is disheartening. Here are four trends that you need to know: 1. U.S. math scores collapsed and reading stagnated.
Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, The Education Daly. They’re coming for the kids’ phones. Who is “they”?
Despite the amount of attention that school choice receives in the media and among policy wonks, politicians, and adult interest groups, the extent of actual competition in major school districts is not well understood. We were curious: Which education markets in America are the most competitive? And which markets have education reformers and choice-encouragers neglected or failed to penetrate?
Nothing about Donald Trump is predictable except unpredictability, so it may be folly to speculate on what his return to the Oval Office would mean for American education. It also needs to be said up front that, faced with all the challenges and risks of another Trump term, K–12 education policy will not likely be the top concern on many minds.
Education in the United States needs to improve and evolve. Too many learners get lost in the current system. Even more are underserved or under-resourced.
Talented and gifted school programs have a well-earned reputation for lacking student diversity.
The science of reading is thankfully supplanting dubious methods of teaching young children to read, as
Recent legislative efforts across the country have strengthened efforts to align reading instruction with the science of reading. These laws typically require teachers to use methods and materials aligned to the solid evidence base on how children best learn to read.
Editor's note: This was first published on Eduwonk, the author's blog.
Five years ago, my team and I set out to understand what goes into effective implementation of high-quality instructional materials. We interviewed leaders and teachers from seventy schools that had moved to higher-quality materials in the last three years. We asked about what went well and what was hard.
Over the weekend, the New York Times published a hard-hitting 2,300-word expose by Dana Goldstein and colleagues asking “Why is the College Board pushing to expand Advanced Placement?” Its primary answer: to rake in tens of millions of dollars a year and to support CEO David Coleman’s exorbitant sal
In my previous post, we defined grade inflation and reviewed (lots of) new evidence suggesting that it is a barrier to pandemic recovery—especially for less privileged students. Today, we will identify solutions.
“Excellence gaps,” or disparities in advanced academic performance between student groups, have important implications for both academic equity and American economic competitiveness.
After handily defeating his Republican rival for the governorship of red-hued Kentucky, Democrat Andy Beshear is having a moment as a center-left moderate who could run for president in 2028. But we education reformers should curb our enthusiasm because Beshear’s stances are alien to ours.
Since 2020, we’ve heard quite a lot about families’ growing influence over public schooling.
Editor’s note: This was first published by The Liberty Fund.
Previous literature on school quality and teacher quality largely assumes that good schools and good teachers are beneficial for all enrolled children, which means that a school’s “value added” is typically calculated as the average effect on students.
College for all has been the goal of K–12 schools for at least twenty-five years. This has meant that America’s schools typically do not provide young people with work experience. This experience gap has young people leaving high school with little understanding of work and practical pathways to jobs and careers.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Chad Aldeman, the founder of Read Not Guess and a columnist for The 74,
