#871: The severity of pandemic learning loss, with Tom Kane
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Tom Kane of Harvard University joins Mike Petrilli to discuss his findings from The Education Recovery Scorecard Project.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Tom Kane of Harvard University joins Mike Petrilli to discuss his findings from The Education Recovery Scorecard Project.
Editor’s note: This article was first published by The 74.
There’s a lot of buzz right now about the potential for the Institute of Education Sciences to finally get the resources and authority to support major breakthroughs in teaching and learning via an “ARPA-ED,” modeled after the Defense Department’s DARPA program. Petrilli wants something more fundamental: basic information about what the heck is going on in America’s classrooms. Enter his (admittedly far-fetched) “Mars rover for schools” idea.
Since the release of Chat GPT last year, the professional classes have suffered an existential dilemma.
A few weeks ago, I finally sat down with Joe Feldman’s Grading for Equity (2018), expecting to nod my head along with every page. I loved teaching at an alternative school, considered myself flexible about deadlines, and frequently encouraged students to revise their writing.
This year’s state legislative sessions, now coming to a close, have yielded a blizzard of high-profile victories on school choice, from the enactment of universal education savings accounts (ESA) programs, to the expansion of private school choice policies to serve many more families, to fairer funding for charter schools.
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.
Aaargh. Here we go again. The new National Assessment civics and history results are as deplorable as they were predictable. Whether they’ll also serve as the action-forcer that we need is far from certain.
Since the return to in-person learning, schools have seen a surge in student misbehavior of many kinds, ranging from minor
A recent study finding dramatic boosts in reading achievement from a knowledge-building curriculum has come in for criticism, some of it well-taken. But the study should be seen as just one more piece of evidence casting serious doubt on standard literacy instruction.
Most American public school teachers are paid according to a fixed salary schedule that determines their income based only on their years of education and classroom experience.
How to select students for advanced or elite academic programs has long been controversial. Critics of “holistic” admissions policies argue they often turn to mush—or inject bias into the process. At the other extreme, a few programs use nothing more than a single assessment to determine placement.
The National Commission on Excellence in Education’s release of a report titled “A Nation at Risk” in 1983 was a pivotal point in the history of American education.
The movement to reconnect knowledge and virtue is not limited to classical schools that focus on primary and secondary education (K–12). Some institutions of higher education are also taking character education seriously, such as Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 2016, Wake Forest recruited Dr.
Providing students with tutoring in addition to in-class learning time is an oft-prescribed remedy for both catching up students who are behind and accelerating students who are capable of even higher performance. Two common sticking points to providing that remedy are finding additional time in the day, week, or year for the intervention and finding enough qualified personnel.
When my son entered kindergarten at our local public school last fall, I never expected I’d have to become an ambassador and advocate for giftedness and gifted education. He has always been an eager, rapid learner—intensely curious and a social butterfly—so we expected his first year of elementary school to be one of mostly excitement, fun and joy.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Sc
The Georgia Department of Education has released a new version of proposed English language arts standards for public comment, and they contain a big surprise. If you dig into the “Texts” section and go to grade eleven, you’ll find this requirement:
The two pillars of democracy—trust and truth—are now cracked. Many Americans believe the political system is corrupt (e.g., rigged, racist), and some don’t believe the results of elections, even certifiably fair ones. Related, we have lost a shared standard of truth and, with it, shared criteria for distinguishing fact from falsehood.
A new study demonstrates unusually robust and beneficial effects on reading achievement among students in schools that teach E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum. The working paper offers compelling evidence to support what many of us have long believed: Hirsch has been right all along about what it takes to build reading comprehension.
When Tennessee House Republicans expelled, albeit briefly, two young, Black Democratic lawmakers late last week, it raised a number of unsettling questions—not only about the contours of our politics, but also about the future of educat
A little-noticed event in late 2022 destabilized a pillar of contemporary American K–12 education, namely that all schools considered part of the public system must be secular.
The ongoing debate over when students shoul
In his March 30 Flypaper piece, “Rewrite attendance laws to promote learning, not seat time,” Chester Finn makes the case for reorienting school around student achievement rather than time spent in class.
If we put all our education hopes in markets, self-interest, competition, and “invisible hands,” will that contribute to the other fissiparous forces that are weakening the valuable shared assets we inherited from earlier generations? Recent surveys certainly suggest that mounting public support for school choice is coinciding with diminishing confidence in shared institutions and public values of all kinds, including patriotism itself.
I read with interest Daniel Buck’s recent piece, “The agonizing individualism of progressive education.” In his view, progressive schools fail to uphold communitarian values by overemphasizing individualism.
Despite the expansion of computer-based testing in schools over the last decade—and ongoing concerns about negative impacts
As school accountability systems reset following pandemic disruptions, an opportunity arises to improve their accuracy and make sure the intended responses to data resulting from them are properly tuned. A new study from the U.S.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Car
Until my oldest child entered elementary school last fall, I was blissfully ignorant about giftedness and the extent to which it colors and affects a young child’s educational experience. My husband and I have always been amazed at our son’s busy brain and body, as well as exhausted by his limitless energy, boundless curiosity, and never-ending questions.