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Displaying 1-30 of 336 results
Commentary
1.31.2023
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Toward a broader conception of student success—and a broader conception of accountability

Gene Pickard

I have held firm to this belief since my early days of teaching: Getting students to proficiency and above in reading and math is a commitment to social justice and democracy. Education can empower students to change the world, especially when it counters cycles of poverty.

Commentary
1.27.2023
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, School Finance, Governance

Interpreting the Covid impact on achievement

David Armor

The release of “The Nation’s Report Card” on October 24, 2022, created shock waves though out the country’s education and policy establishments.

Commentary
1.6.2023
Accountability & Testing, Facilities, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

We need to prepare now for the school closures that are coming

Tim Daly

School closures are awful. I won’t argue otherwise.

Commentary
1.5.2023
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, High Achievers, Teachers & School Leaders

The typical gifted program is likely to become even less equitable

Scott J. Peters, Meredith Langi

By now the unfinished learning that resulted from the Covid-19 pandemic is old news.

Commentary
12.22.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Would capturing student growth in grades K–2 lead to different school ratings?

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D.

In the wake of dismal NAEP reading scores released earlier this year,

Podcast
12.20.2022
Accountability & Testing

Education Gadfly Show #850: 2022’s most important education stories, with Marc Porter Magee

  On this week’s special, year-end Education Gadfly Show podcast, Mike Petrilli looks back on 20

Commentary
11.17.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, High Achievers, Teachers & School Leaders

With affirmative action before the Supreme Court, here’s the state of diversity among high achievers

Michael J. Petrilli

America’s high-achieving students in our elementary and secondary schools are more racially diverse today than two decades ago. But Black high achievers in particular have made only incremental gains. Given affirmative action's original purpose, such trends are more than a little disappointing.

Commentary
11.8.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, High Achievers, Teachers & School Leaders

The future of exam schools

Hilde Kahn

Editor’s note: This essay was part of an edition of “Advance,” a newsletter from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute that is 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.

Commentary
11.4.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Governors should stop spinning NAEP results and start proposing solutions

Marc Porter Magee, Ned Stanley

“In light of this barometer of our kids’ success, there’s no time to waste to catch our kids up. We must continue to pour on the gas in our efforts,” Arizona Governor Doug Ducey said last Tuesday in response to the NAEP results.

Commentary
10.27.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Charter schools complicate the narrative on Covid shutdowns and learning loss

Michael J. Petrilli

This week’s news of sharp declines on the National Assessment of Educational Progress gave partisans yet another chance to relitigate the debate over keeping schools closed for in-person learning for much or all of the 2020–21 school year. We conservatives are eager to identify the teachers unions as the primary culprits, and we’re not wrong. But there is one complication we should acknowledge: the curious case of urban charter schools.

Commentary
10.27.2022
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Treating my NAEP hangover

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Monday was insane, with everyone and his grandmother (and her pet dog) attempting to make insightful, quotable comments on the avalanche of new data from the Nation’s Report Card. Some of it was indeed insightful, but much was simply self-promoting, as were many attempts to position oneself in advance as an expert to be taken seriously.

iStock/Getty Images Plus/Ridofranz
Podcast
10.25.2022
Accountability & Testing

Education Gadfly Show #843: Halloween a week early with NAEP results in

  On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Checker Finn joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss the

iStock/Getty Images Plus/Ridofranz
Commentary
10.25.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, High Achievers, Teachers & School Leaders

High-achieving middle schoolers have suffered devastating math losses, finds NAEP

Brandon L. Wright

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.

Commentary
10.20.2022
Accountability & Testing, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Could NAEP affect midterm elections? And other questions about next week’s release.

Michael J. Petrilli

The 2022 results from the “main” National Assessment of Educational Progress will be released October 24. They’ll include fourth- and eighth-grade scores at the national level, as well as state by state and for two-dozen large urban districts. Especially after the Covid shut-downs, it’s a big freakin’ deal. Here are three major storylines to look forward to.

Commentary
10.6.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Instructional time lost to Covid will likely mean persistent and widening gaps in literacy

Robert Pondiscio

An analysis in the New York Times last month cheerily assured readers that Covid-related learning losses “look real but sub-catastrophic.” The damage also appears “to not be permanent, with students recovering at least some ground already,” opined David Wallace-Wells, a columnist for the NYT Magazi

Commentary
9.29.2022
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

America’s education crisis as a national security threat

Nicholas Eberstadt, Evan Abramsky

Since the end of World War II, the world’s population has not only gotten vastly bigger; it has also become vastly more educated. In nearly every country, the total number of years that citizens have attended school has grown faster than the population itself, and the number of college degrees conferred has grown even faster.

Commentary
9.29.2022
Accountability & Testing, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

California backtracks on withholding testing data

Dale Chu

Weeks away from the midterms, education apparatchiks in the nation’s most populous state are ramping up the election mischief by playing politics with what are expected to be dismal results from assessments taken by students last spring.

Commentary
9.22.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Charter school achievement in D.C. was decimated by the pandemic. Here’s what we can learn from that.

Marc Porter Magee

Nine percent. That’s how many Black boys met expectations in math in D.C.’s traditional public schools in 2022, down from 17 percent before the pandemic. It’s also how many met those expectation in the city’s charter schools, down from 22 percent. The word “disaster” is used a lot lately, but it is absolutely the right fit here. There are, however, lessons we can learn from this catastrophe.

Commentary
9.22.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance

High-quality schooling is a necessary component of economic growth, according to 60 years of international test data

Harry Anthony Patrinos

International student assessments are commonplace today, though none existed before 1965, and few countries participated at the outset.

Commentary
9.13.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Explaining NAEP math “haves”: Software and private tutoring?

Mike Goldstein

Earlier this month, Michael Petrilli wrote about America’s top-quartile students making gains from 2009 to 2019 over their already high baseline—in math, reading, and science—and our lower-quartile kids declining from their already low baseline.

Commentary
9.8.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Beware of whiplash from clashing achievement results

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

The last month has brought both bleak new NAEP results and a deeply researched piece on “a half-century of student progress nationwide.” The former abounds with gloom about the dire and declining state of U.S. educational achievement and widening gaps between groups. The latter is an upbeat rejoinder to the doomsayers and a well-documented celebration of half a century of gains and gap-narrowings. What’s going on here?

Commentary
9.8.2022
Accountability & Testing, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

It’s far too early to declare victory over Covid-era learning loss

Dale Chu

New findings released last week from the NAEP long-term trend assessment (LTT) suggest an alarming downswing among U.S. nine-year-olds in both math and reading between 2020 and 2022.

Commentary
9.1.2022
Accountability & Testing, School Finance, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

What happens when school leaders are allowed to abandon “step and lane” pay scales

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D.

In 2013, the British government ended the use of “annual progression” pay scales for teachers. These were similar to U.S.-style “step and lane” models but were set at the national level across the pond.

Commentary
8.31.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Standards, Teachers & School Leaders

What national test scores tell us about American education before the pandemic

Michael J. Petrilli

NAGB officials recently reported on U.S. student achievement trends from 2009–19, and what they found was eye-opening. Whereas America’s higher achieving students held steady or even gained ground, our lowest performing kids saw test scores fall, at least in fourth and eighth grades and in reading and math. What might be causing these diverging trends?

Commentary
8.31.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, High Achievers

Pre-pandemic, more U.S. students were excelling in math

Brandon L. Wright

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.

Commentary
8.25.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Career & Technical Education, Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Standards, Teachers & School Leaders

The evolving education reform agenda

Michael J. Petrilli

Earlier this month, I argued that “education reform is alive and well, even if the Washington Consensus is dead for now.” What’s more, I wrote that we should stay the course on the current reform strategy:

Commentary
7.1.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Building better evidence on pre-K by strengthening assessments of children’s skills

Meghan McCormick

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
6.9.2022
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

The coming “second wave” of learning loss in 2023 and 2024

Mike Goldstein

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).

Undefined
6.8.2022
Accountability & Testing

Education Gadfly Show #823: How detrimental was remote learning?

On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Tom Kane, Harvard economist and director of its Center for Education Policy Research, explains the

Commentary
6.2.2022
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, High Achievers, Teachers & School Leaders

How to narrow the excellence gap in early elementary school

Michael J. Petrilli

In recent weeks, I’ve dug into the “excellence gap“—the sharp divides along lines of race

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