Displaying 1-30 of 636 results
Commentary
8.4.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Lax school discipline is bad for teachers

Jeremy Adams

Teachers’ authority in the classroom is being undermined by policies of “restorative justice”—a non-punitive approach to discipline. But the predictable albeit unintended consequence of these well-meaning policies is that disruptive students get away with previously unacceptable behavior. Outbursts of student vulgarity and incidence of violence have become normalized as something teachers and other students have to endure.

Commentary
8.4.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, High Achievers, Teachers & School Leaders

Gifted students need a “continuum of services” now more than ever

Dina Brulles

Teachers are now planning instruction for the new school year. But very quickly after their pupils arrive, many will realize that some students will not be adequately challenged by the grade-level curriculum typically assigned for the class. Some will already have mastered that material and are ready to move on.

Commentary
8.4.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Impacts of charter school growth on school and neighborhood diversity

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D.

Student demographics in traditional district schools largely reflect patterns of housing availability and affordability within neighborhoods. Much of that is due to strict attendance zoning.

Commentary
8.4.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

More evidence that making school easier does students no favors

Adam Tyner, Ph.D., Christian Eggers

It’s one of those zombie mantras that just won’t die: Letting students cut corners, giving them grades they haven’t earned, and generally lowering the bar is a nice thing to do for vulnerable kids—those living in poverty, often with turbulent home lives or mental health struggles to boot.

Commentary
8.3.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, High Achievers, Teachers & School Leaders

An interview with Janet Kragen, who taught gifted education for four decades

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
7.28.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

When students feel unsafe, absenteeism grows

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D., Christian Eggers

School shootings are profoundly tragic—scarring not only the families whose children become victims, but casting a shadow over the lives, mental health, and outcomes of the surviving students. But evidence is also clear that it’s not only horrific mass shootings that can lead a child to miss school. Any feeling of not being safe can prompt children and teenagers to stay home.

Commentary
7.21.2022
Governance

Ed reformers should rally around the Romney family aid plan

Michael J. Petrilli

A major, though largely unnoticed, development in America’s support for families with children is the recent release of the “Family Security Act 2.0” by Senator Mitt Romney, along with fellow Republicans Richard Burr and Steve Daines. It could and should serve as the starting point for bipartisan negotiations for a new federal investment in families that might stand the test of time.

Commentary
7.21.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

The American family is still coming apart

Kay Hymowitz

In 2004, the late Sara McLanahan published a landmark article called “Diverging Destinies: How Children Are Faring Under the Second Demographic Transition.” The paper was the first scholarly attempt to propose that the decline of the two-parent family in the United States since the 1960’s was intensifying the already unequal l

Commentary
7.21.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Private School Choice, Teachers & School Leaders

In a time of crisis, Catholic schools offered a choice, not an echo

Kathleen Porter-Magee

“New data suggest that the damage from shutting down schools has been worse than almost anyone expected,” the Economist tweeted recently to promote a

Commentary
7.15.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, High Achievers, Teachers & School Leaders

Gifted-student screenings often miss poor students who should qualify

Bich Thi Ngoc Tran, Jonathan Wai, Sarah McKenzie

High-achieving students from low-income backgrounds are half as likely to be placed in a gifted program as their more affluent peers, according to our new study.

Commentary
7.14.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Standards, Teachers & School Leaders

Can we revive standards-based reform?

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Few people have done more to boost academic standards in U.S. schools than Michael Cohen and Laura Slover, coauthors of a new paper offering a bright vision for revitalizing them. But there are reasons to doubt the feasibility of its proposals.

Commentary
7.7.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Private School Choice, Teachers & School Leaders

The swirling private-school universe

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

The universe of private elementary-secondary schooling in America today is diverse and confusing, with innumerable twists and turns in efforts to use public funds to help families access schools that suit them—including private schools of all colors and stripes. But the virtue of these institutions is that they’re different, which also means very different from each other. Which complicates the quest to deploy public dollars to assist families to choose them.

Commentary
7.7.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Does keeping students with the same teacher for multiple years boost outcomes?

Nathaniel Grossman

The relationship between teacher and student has profound effects on learning. A new study explores whether schools can strengthen this relationship over time by keeping students with teachers for more than one year.

Commentary
7.6.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, High Achievers, Teachers & School Leaders

Hope and progress for gifted education

Brandon L. Wright

This is the first edition of “Advance,” a new Fordham Institute newsletter that will monitor the progress of gifted education. Here, Wright recounts recent developments that reinforce two truths: Gifted education is a clear and substantial good, and it can be much better.

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
6.30.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Exit interview: Carey Wright, Mississippi’s State Superintendent of Education

Robert Pondiscio

One of the most unlikely education stories of the last decade has been the rise of Mississippi as a star of NAEP and a science of reading proof point. When looking for models to follow, researchers and policy wonks usually point to places like Shanghai and Finland, even Massachusetts. But Mississippi? Who saw that coming?

Commentary
6.30.2022
School Finance, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

ESSER is fueling one-size-fits-all strategies. Let’s use data to deliver more targeted efforts.

Marguerite Roza, Ellie Roza

States and districts face no shortage of seemingly overwhelming problems, especially the devastating learning loss among vulnerable students from extended pandemic school closures. But leaders do have money: States and districts got $123 billion in federal emergency (ARP ESSER) relief.

Commentary
6.30.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance

Baked in: School quality and home values

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D.

If you want to know which schools are good, ask a realtor—so goes the conventional wisdom—and families often do so.

Commentary
6.23.2022
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Public education’s compensation problem

Don Parker

Great education requires great teachers, but the existing system makes it too difficult to retain the best and replace the worst. Fixing this requires, among other things, more generous pay. Instead we face the profession’s persistent, declining productivity.

Commentary
6.16.2022
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

The mass exodus of teachers isn’t what you think it is. It’s far worse.

Jeremy Adams

Districts across the land are witnessing a mass exit of teachers from classrooms, the likes of which has never been seen. It’s going to get worse, says Adams. And it isn’t about low salaries, paltry pensions, or lack of financial support. Teachers are leaving in droves because so many of our children are utterly broken, student behavior is abhorrent, and accountability is out of vogue in our schools.

Commentary
6.16.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

A “no zeroes” grading policy is the worst of all worlds

Daniel Buck

More and more schools across the U.S. have adopted a new grading fad: Teachers cannot assign a grade lower than 50 percent. If a student doesn’t turn in an assignment? 50 percent. Do they miss every problem on a vocabulary quiz? 50 percent.

Commentary
6.16.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Bus commutes and their academic impacts in New York City

Jeff Murray

Providing transportation for students to and from school is a basic requirement of most public school districts in America. During the 2018–19 school year, nearly 60 percent of all K–12 students nationwide, public and private, were transported by those ubiquitous yellow buses.

Commentary
6.9.2022
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Here’s why all students need agency rather than equity

Ian Rowe

As a charter school leader in the South Bronx for the past decade, Rowe has seen what happens when resources are forcibly removed from the “privileged” and given to the “unprivileged” in the pursuit of “equity” over “equality”—with little regard for students’ uniqueness, humanity, or agency. Better is to teach disadvantaged children to defy, rather than confirm, diminished expectations.

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

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

Michael 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).

Commentary
6.2.2022
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

How to respond sensibly to the Uvalde shooting

Dale Chu

Awful tragedies like the shooting in Uvalde notwithstanding, firearms will remain ubiquitous. The question is whether policymakers can bring measured thinking and nuance to bear in solving the thorny problem of gun violence in schools. This is particularly challenging in a media climate that hypes and distorts the prevalence of what happened in last week, even as schools continue to deal with the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic.