The Education Gadfly Show: Are screens to blame for NAEP’s bottom falling out?
On this week’s podcast, Sarah Sparks, a reporter and data journalist for Education Week, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to
On this week’s podcast, Sarah Sparks, a reporter and data journalist for Education Week, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to
The past decade’s shift to significantly higher academic standards and more rigorous assessments means that many more students are now far below grade-level expectations. In recent months and years, there’s been much debate about how best to help such students catch up.
What can be done to rescue failing schools?
Stereotype threat is when people inadvertently conform to negative stereotypes about a group they are in, for example their race or gender. A recent meta-analysis on the effects of stereotype threat has important implications for equity in the education system, the validity of standardized tests, and for teacher preparation.
The bad news from the latest Nation’s Report Card has us analysts wearing out our thesauruses. The good news is that a handful of states managed to make gains or stand pat on the assessment as their peers went backwards. Most noteworthy are D.C. and Mississippi, the only two locales where low achievers made gains. But several other states deserve credit for maintaining their scores in the face of adversity.
In our work with schools at CenterPoint, we often are asked to help design or support the implementation of research-based, high quality curriculum. Almost invariably, discussions with school leaders turn to the connections among and between the core curriculum and the tiered supports for students who are off grade level and struggling to advance.
By the time struggling students reach middle school, it’s pretty obvious it took time for them to get several grade levels behind. It’s also obvious we have numerous ways to help these students. I’m guessing many other submissions to Wonkathon 2019 describe these strategies and approaches. What isn’t so obvious, however, is what’s causing some students to struggle.
National data indicate that approximately three of every five students begin the school year below grade level, with those numbers even higher for low-income students and students of color.
Every year on Veterans Day, we show our gratitude to the men and women who have served our country in uniform. We reach out to a loved one who has served, we thank a soldier in the airport, or we honor them through a variety of free meals.
Editor’s note: This was the second-place submission, out of nineteen, to Fordham’s 2019 Wonkathon, in which we asked participants to answer the question: “What’s the best way to help students who are several grade levels behind?”
Research and our personal experience tell us that the single most important factor affecting student achievement is the quality of the teacher in the classroom. No technology, tool, or other seemingly magic program can help students who are several grade levels behind get back on track and ultimately thrive.
In previous posts and in comments to the media, I’ve been making the case that the lingering effects of the Great Recession might partially explain the disappointing student achievement trends we’ve seen as of late, both on the Nation’s Report Card and on state assessments.
In the last two decades, since states began implementing standardized testing under No Child Left Behind, there has been much debate about the value of those assessments. In Louisiana, where I serve as an Assistant Superintendent, we know measurement of student learning is critical, and tests hold the power to define the academic bar for all students.
Historically, literacy instruction in the United States privileges the privileged. It starts in the earliest grades, when less systematic approaches favored in many early literacy curricula privilege students who arrive at school more comfortable with language and books.
During this past summer, Family Engagement Lab facilitated a gathering of parents to discuss parent-teacher partnerships at their elementary school. During the discussion, the group moderator pulled us aside to let us know that a parent was there because her child had been retained a grade and she did not know why.
I want that quiet rapture again. I want to feel the same powerful, nameless urge that I used to feel when I turned to my books.
With less than a year to go until the 2020 presidential election, Elizabeth Warren’s ascendancy to ostensible Democratic frontrunner, and the release of her voluminously noxious education proposal, I fell into a fever dream of the same stra
A new study published in AERA Open investigates whether and to what extent racial discipline gaps are associated with racial achievement gaps in grades three through eight in school districts across the U.S. It also examines if these relationships persist after accounting for differences across districts.
On this week’s podcast, Marty West, a Harvard professor of education, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to talk about last week’s NAEP results and their relationship to the Great Recession. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines how graduation requirements affect arrest rates.
My thirty-plus years in teaching have taken me on an unplanned path from Plato to Play-doh. When I taught Advanced Placement English to seniors three decades ago, I would have confidently bet against finding myself twenty-five years later teaching kindergarteners how to read.
Standards are written to reflect the instructional path that students should follow throughout their educational journey. In math, that includes concepts such as basic algebraic thinking in the early elementary grades, multiplying fractions in the fifth grade, working with ratios and rates in the sixth grade, and so forth. Let’s call this the “standard instructional path.”
Learning in the Fast Lane: The Past, Present, and Future of Advanced Placement (Princeton, 2019), the new book by Chester Finn and Andrew Scanlan, tells the story of the Advanced Placement (AP) program, widely regarded as the gold standard for academic rigor in American high schools.
What’s the best way to help students who are several grade levels behind?
Editor’s note: This was the third-place submission, out of nineteen, to Fordham’s 2019 Wonkathon, in which we asked participants to answer the question: “What’s the best way to help students who are several grade levels behind?”
What’s the best way to help students who are several grade levels behind? We can’t answer that question without first understanding what “grade level” means. Math and reading are quite different when it comes to assessing grade level, and I’m going to focus on reading.
The obvious but fundamental question is: Why are the students several grade levels behind? Undoubtedly, the answer is complex and will include, inter alia, insufficient preparation (student and teacher), poor teaching, poverty, inadequate foundation, behavior, and other psycho-social factors.
This week, the federal government released the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—known colloquially as “the Nation’s Report Card.” As always, the results are the subject of intense scrutiny, and are fodder for arguments on both sides of the political aisle and all sides of education debates.
Editor’s note: This was the first-place submission, out of nineteen, to Fordham’s 2019 Wonkathon, in which we asked participants to answer the question: “What’s the best way to help students who are several grade levels behind?”
This year’s NAEP results are bleak. But they were foreseeable, with the Great Recession's effects still impeding progress. Demography need not be destiny though: A few jurisdictions bucked the overall trends and showed improvement. D.C. deserves much of the praise, given its ability to demonstrate sustained and significant progress over time, and its decade-plus commitment to fundamental reform. As does Mississippi, which has been on an upward trajectory for the last decade, especially in reading. Despite the dismal results, there’s hope if we can follow the lead of these notable locales.
The content of K–12 education is a minefield for conservatives. Over the past thirty years, education reformers who wanted parents to have choices for their children have tended to focus more on the creation of new public charter schools, or on private school scholarships, than on curriculum and classroom content.