What you may not know—but should—about the Nation’s Report Card
Download the webinar PowerPoint.
Download the webinar PowerPoint.
How do we see whether achievement gaps between groups of students are widening or narrowing? How can we tell whether eighth graders in Missouri do better or worse in math than their peers in Michigan and Maine? We wouldn’t know these things or much else about K–12 achievement in America without a little-known but vital test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a.k.a. “NAEP” or the “Nation’s Report Card.” Assessing the Nation’s Report Card: Challenges and Choices for NAEP, authored by veteran education participant/analyst Chester E. Finn, Jr., examines the history of NAEP, the issues and challenges that it faces today, and ways to strengthen and modernize it for the future.
Follow the Science to School: Evidence-based Practices for Elementary Education is published by John Catt Educational Press and is available for purchase from the John Catt Bookshop and Amazon.
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 would happen if we invested $1 billion or more in bold education R & D initiatives designed to generate fresh, evidence-backed solutions to some of education’s toughest challenges? On November 5, at 4:00 p.m. ET, online and in Washington, D.C., the Center for American Progress and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute held a a “Shark-Tank” style competition. Ten early-round finalists presented their “billion-dollar Moonshot ideas” to a panel of tough judges, all for a chance to win $10,000 and have their idea propelled to widespread attention and potential major investment.
Career and technical education (CTE) is enjoying its moment in the sun, with policymakers and educational leaders across the ideological spectrum embracing it as a solution to lagging upward mobility and distressed working class communities. On May 14, we posed these and other vexing questions to a panel of CTE experts. Watch the video now.
The Fordham-Hoover “Education 20/20” speaker series continued with our penultimate event on May 1, as we brought you another awesome duo. Rod Paige opened by arguing that tomorrow’s school reform needs to focus not just on changing schools, but even more on boosting student effort. Then Pete Wehner made a forceful, principled case for reviving old-fashioned character education in America’s schools.
The Fordham-Hoover “Education 20/20” speaker series continued on April 11 with another star-studded double feature.
Fordham’s Education 20/20 speaker series kicks off the New Year with a bang on January 9th as we bring you another double header.
The Education 20/20 speaker series resumes on December 11th with another all-star double-header. Ian Rowe will lead off by arguing for the inclusion of family structure in measures of student achievement. Then Michael Barone will explore the educational travails—past, present, and future—of gifted students and what might be done to ease the pain.
For part two of our Education 20/20 speaker series on the purpose of K-12 education, we’re joined by Kay Hymowitz and Nicholas Eberstadt as they discuss parenting, soft skills, the decline of male labor participation, and what schools can (and can’t) do about it.
Join the Thomas B. Fordham Institute on November 8, as we present the findings of Fordham’s latest study, Grade Inflation in North Carolina’s High Schools, and a panel of experts discusses the causes and consequences of inflated grades and possible policy solutions