The scourge of education malpractice
What if you were told that elementary schools in the United States are teaching children to be poor readers?
What if you were told that elementary schools in the United States are teaching children to be poor readers?
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of posts looking at how two school networks—Rocketship Public Schools and Wildflower Schools—enable their students to master standards at their own pace. See the first post here.
On this week’s podcast, Patrick Corvington, executive director of DC School Reform Now, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to offer advice on how parents can play a role in improving their kids’ schools. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines the academic effects of early interventions for children born at a low birth-weight.
A new study released by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute looks at end-of-course exams (EOCs) and their relationship with high school graduation rates and college entrance exam scores.
As part of a national war against school choice, the California teachers union is pouring more than a million dollars a month into anti-charter legislative efforts. Unfortunately, a new “compromise” bill crafted by Governor Gavin Newsom whose language was released this week indicates the union is about to get a big return on its investment. Caprice Young, a Fordham Institute trustee and a leading figure in the state’s charter sector, explains how this painful moment came about—and what it means for California charter schools going forward.
On this week’s podcast, Martin West, Harvard professor and editor-in-chief of Education Next, joins Mike Petrilli to
Very little previous research has looked at end-of-course exams. Our new study on their relationship to student outcomes helps remedy that. We learned much that’s worth knowing and sharing. Probably most important: EOCs, properly deployed, have positive academic benefits and do so without causing kids to drop out or graduation rates to falter.
Editor’s note: This is the final post in a series looking at whether and how the nation’s schools have improved over the past quarter-century or so (see the others here,
A dozen long years ago, when people were just beginning to take serious stock of what good and not-so-good was emerging from 2002’s enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), we at Fordham, in league with the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), issued a 200-plus page analysis of the “proficiency” standards that states had by then been required to set and test for.
A new study from Georgetown University reaffirmed an uncomfortable but familiar finding: Socioeconomic status has a significant effect on students’ long-term outcomes, regardless of their academic performance in kindergarten or the quality of the schools they attend in K–12.
On this week’s podcast Mike Petrilli and David Griffith talk to Adam Tyner about the new Fordham report he co-authored with Matthew Larsen on end-of-course exams and student outcomes. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines efforts to improve the college application process.
Beginning in the late 1990s, many states took it upon themselves to institute end-of-course exams (EOCs) at the high school level, tests specifically designed to assess students’ mastery of the content that various subject-matter courses covered. But was this testing policy good for students? Find out in our new report.
This report provides a rich longitudinal look at state policies related to end-of-course exams over the past twenty years and the effects of administering EOCs in different subjects on high school graduation rates and college entrance exam scores.
The past quarter-century has included dramatic progress of America’s lowest-performing students, many of whom are also low-income and children of color. But how’s the vast middle class doing? It’s a mixed bag: They still don’t read very well, but their math skills have improved a bit and they are graduating from college in higher and higher numbers.
On this week’s podcast, Jeremy Tate, CEO of the Classic Learning Test, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss what classical learning is and why it’s important. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines whether popular children have an outsized influence on their peers.
Ten years ago, then U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan issued a clarion call to turn around 5,000 of the nation’s most distressed schools, serving nearly three million students. It was an audacious goal set by an audacious leader—the likes of which are in terribly short supply these days. A decade later, states have fallen far short of his challenge, and the sticky problem of failing schools refuses to go away. But experience has provided three lessons to those who would make these efforts.
For more than half a century now, back-to-school time has brought another Phi Delta Kappan survey of “the public’s attitudes toward the public schools.” They invariably recycle some familiar questions (e.g., the grades you would give your child’s schools and the nation’s schools). Other topics, however, come and go.
I have been there; every teacher has. The clock is ticking, you've got just fifteen minutes left to wrap up the lesson, and the time is being chipped away by a student who is disrupting the classroom. How you respond to that situation involves the balance of dozens of different factors. It's complicated, and some of that complexity is captured in a new report out this week.
In the last decade, states have experimented with many new assessment systems in math and reading. A new Bellwether brief by Bonnie O’Keefe and Brandon Lewis examines recent innovations used or proposed by states that could serve educators well.
The debate over school discipline reform is one of the most polarized in all of education. Advocates for reform believe that suspensions are racially biased and put students in a “school-to-prison pipeline.” Opponents worry that softer discipline approaches will make classrooms unruly, impeding efforts to help all students learn and narrow achievement gaps.
A number of New York City public schools recently learned that even though close to 100 percent of their students earned passing grades, less than 10 percent were able to pass the standardized state exams. A common explanation is that teachers are lowering expectations and inflating grades, possibly due to the pressure of the city’s bureaucrats’ desire to achieve equitable racial and socioeconomic outcomes. This has some truth, but it actually misunderstands the problem. The students’ inability to demonstrate their learning stems from the most prominent educational theory by which teachers have been trained over the past fifteen years. In essence, the failure of the students is an internal educational problem.
For better or for worse, hard-left politics continue to cast an outsized shadow over the education sector. Nowhere is this more prevalent than within the echo chamber of ed school thinking, where the tweed-jacketed have their feet firmly planted in midair with regard to the nation’s most pressing education challenges. This goes doubly so for low-income schools, where the academy’s hubris makes for swell sounding monographs, but often has little grounding in the difficult work required to raise student performance.
On this week’s podcast, Celine Coggins, executive director at Grantmakers for Education, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss philanthropy’s shift to the left on education policies. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines America’s persistent achievement gaps.
Twenty-five months after Donald Trump’s inauguration, his administration has just unveiled its big school-choice initiative—yes, the cause that, during his 2016 campaign, he termed the “new civil rights issue of our time,” the very same cause that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has devoted her career to promoting.
The Education Gadfly
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.
Last April, we published a report by Andrew Saultz and colleagues highlighting “charter school deserts” across the country, or high poverty areas that lack charter schools.
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.
Credit recovery, or the practice of enabling high school students to retrieve credits from courses that they either failed or failed to complete, is at the crossroads of two big trends in education: the desire to move toward “competency based” education and a push to dramatically boost graduation rates.
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