On Monday, World Teachers’ Day, friends and relatives of the late Rod Paige released the trailer for a forthcoming film about his remarkable life and career. Titled Paragraphs of a Paige, the appetite-whetting trailer can be viewed here.
If you’ve paid even general attention to Texas education news over the past few years, you’ve likely heard some version of the phrase “local school districts being taken over by the state.” Maybe it registered as a Houston story, since that made statewide headlines.
The latest PISA results were mostly grim.
A defining feature of charter schools is the oversight structure provided by the authorizer. It is an authorizer’s job to determine whether schools are fulfilling the terms of their charters across numerous areas, not least of which is student outcomes.
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) regularly publishes reports using results from NAEP testing to compare the proficiency standards that states set for their students.
Mike Petrilli is back on the mic solo this week to weigh the case for and against banning AI in scho
When I taught high school in Virginia in the early 2020s, I was only vaguely aware of the existence of something called “portrait of a graduate.” Whatever this portrait was, it didn’t seem to impact my daily work, so it didn’t capture my attention. On the other hand, I knew my IB courses and our state assessments backward and forward. Those shaped what we did in the classroom.
New York State is replacing its Regents high school exit exams with a yet-to-be-defined “portrait of a graduate” framework. It’s a terrible decision, as it exchanges clear academic standards for mush.
New York City Schools piloted an external qualitative review (QR) in a subset of its schools for the first time in 2005, intended to expand the definition of school quality via a school inspection-type model and to broaden the scope of educational accountability.
Third-grade proficiency is one of the most consequential milestones in a child’s academic career. Around this time, students transition from learning foundational skills to using those skills to engage with more complex content.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called the CLT the nation’s new “gold standard.” USA Today’s blockbuster investigation, published today, suggests a more accurate label would be “boondoggle.” In Florida, the state that has done more than any other to
New federal test score data from the long-term trend (LTT) report reveal a remarkable finding: For the first time in the 50 years of the assessment, nine-year-old boys are now scoring equally with girls in reading.
A few weeks ago, my colleague Robert Pondiscio argued convincingly that the accountability policies of the No Child Left Behind era did not work as effectively as they could have because schools did not know how to respond to the pressure they felt to improve instructional practice and deliver str
Curriculum Associates CEO Kelly Sia recently defended her company’s flagship i-Ready platform to Fordham readers. The program, used by millions of students, has come under fire from teachers, parents, and students as part of an ed-tech backlash sweeping the nation.
In a recent Flypaper post, Dale Chu argues that the promise of a single assessment system doing multiple things well is “too good to be true.” He says that through-year assessments (TYA)—tests administered periodically throughout the school year that culminate in a summative score—are tryi
Mike Petrilli takes the mic to consider whether America’s schools need a renewed sense of urgency around
As Americans are discovering during this summer’s World Cup, soccer often produces an outcome that is unsatisfying to our domestic sports sensibilities: a tie. One team controls possession while the other creates better scoring chances. Both leave the pitch claiming vindication, but neither gets to declare victory.
Mike Petrilli flies solo to discuss the latest Long-Term Trend NAEP results and why the bounce-back amo
More than a dozen states are designing, piloting, or implementing some form of through-year assessment as a replacement for the traditional end-of-year test used for federal accountability. But their enthusiasm rests on a shaky assumption: that a single assessment can simultaneously satisfy accountability requirements, improve instruction, provide timely feedback, reduce testing burden, preserve local flexibility, and produce valid statewide comparisons.
Editor’s note: This is the second in a three-part series written by Elainah Elkins and Jill Hoppe, born in 1999 and 2000, respectively. There is growing discourse surrounding Gen Z, but the voices of Gen Zers themselves are often missing from the conversation. This is their response.
The National Assessment Government Board made some very good news last week, albeit a decade or two late, when it voted to commence more frequent testing of civics and, especially, to make 12th grade results available at the state level.
We need to talk about accommodations. Like puppies or grandma’s cookies, they are treated as unmitigated goods—at least in my experience. Should we not support all students? Should we not provide differentiated instruction? Who in their right mind could oppose offering accommodations, leveling the playing field, and helping students with special needs?
When 20 percent of Harvard and Brown students and 38 percent of Stanford’s are eligible for accommodations even as just 3–4 percent of students in community colleges are, we have a crisis of trust in testing, fairness, and equity.
Editor’s note: This is the first in a three-part series written by Elainah Elkins and Jill Hoppe, born in 1999 and 2000, respectively. There is growing discourse surrounding Gen Z, but the voices of Gen Zers themselves are often missing from the conversation. This is their response.
Next month, my 11-year-old will join her classmates to take the state assessment.
“We spend too much time on testing,” is a lament we hear often among Idaho educators. Surely it is a national sentiment as well.
Thank you, Amber! My colleague Amber Northern, Fordham’s longtime senior vice president for research, has done American education a great service by recommending a future for the Institute for Education Sciences that goes far beyond undoing the damage done by DOGE a year ago.
Education has never lacked miracle schools and stories. The real challenge isn’t identifying successful schools but learning how to recognize whether their success is institutional or temporary. So if we wanted to predict whether a school’s success will last, what should we look for?
Across the United States, a representative sample of thousands of fourth, eighth, and twelfth grade students has begun sitting for the National Assessment of Educational Progress. NAEP is administered independently of state-level standards but presents state- and national-level results.
Over the past decade or so, as the education reform movement has increasingly splintered along partisan lines, the number of people who support both charter schools and private school choice has shrunk to almost nothing. One cause of the growing divide is that some private school choice advocates are making demands that are increasingly outlandish.
