D.C. continues to improve its teacher evaluation system
Amid all of the hullabaloo over teacher evaluations, fewer states are now using test scores to assess the quality of their teacher workforce.
Amid all of the hullabaloo over teacher evaluations, fewer states are now using test scores to assess the quality of their teacher workforce.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 marked a massive federal investment in our schools, with more than $100 billion to shore up school systems in the face of the Great Recession. Along with that largesse came two grant programs meant to encourage reform with all of those resources: Race to the Top and School Improvement Grants (SIGs).
One of the oddest features of the 2019–20 Democratic primary season has been the return of the busing issue. Half a century ago, it nearly tore the party apart. Judicially mandated reassignment of students to achieve racial balance proved to be the most unpopular policy since Prohibition, opposed by overwhelming majorities of white voters.
A few years ago, as I was wrapping up grad school (where my dissertation was about migrant workers in China, of all things), I came across a bunch of fascinating podcast episodes about education policy and school reform.
After spending most of my forty-year career working on organizational performance improvement, I have learned that some of the most important causes of poor performance are often the least visible.
On this week’s podcast, Mike Petrilli, Robert Pondiscio, and David Griffith discuss the latest news from the 2020 election debate and what it p
A mere 6 percent of students are enrolled in charter schools nationwide, but there are sixteen cities in which at least one-third of public school students attend charters. Newark, New Jersey, is one of them.
A recent Fordham report finds that the quality of lessons that teachers get off the Internet is not very good. That’s no surprise but it obscures a bigger problem. If skilled practitioners in any profession feel compelled to scour the Internet for the basic tools of their trade that should concern us more than the quality of what they unearth. The very existence of a “vast curriculum bazaar” sends troubling signals about our general indifference to curriculum’s central role in learning, and our inattention to coherence and what gets taught.
Education Week’s recent report, Getting Reading Right, found that the most popular reading curricula in the country are not aligned with settled reading science.
Fordham’s recent Moonshot for Kids competition, a collaboration with the Center for American Progress, highlighted the distinction between research and development and “school improvement.” They’re very different concepts. R & D is inherently top-down and school improvement mostly bottom-up. Yet bringing them into productive contact with one another is vital and might be the key to getting student outcomes moving in the right direction once again.
Fordham has produced The Supplemental Curriculum Bazaar: Is What’s Online Any Good? Worth reading! Are popular materials offered on Teacher Pay Teachers, and similar sites, useful?
There’s a large gap between the current state of education sector R & D and our aspirations for this research. As sectors, education and medicine have lots in common and analogies are often drawn between the disciplines. However, when it comes to evidence-based practices, there are stark differences between the two fields.
To be clear, I am in favor of building a strong education R & D sector. However, it’s important to acknowledge the serious shortcomings of the current system. It is because of this current state that I am arguing that evidence-based practices don’t work. I’m making two claims.
Almost all American teachers supplement their core curriculum (if they even have one) with materials they gather from the internet. National surveys show that supplementation is a growing phenomenon, and that many teachers use supplementary materials in large proportions of their lessons.
Online courses have produced mixed results. They can be good tools for motivated students. But many struggling students use online courses to gain course credit without realizing they aren’t preparing them for college.
On this week’s podcast, Daniel Showalter, associate professor of math at Eastern Mennonite University and author of
Editor’s note: This article is the second in a two-part series written by the expert review team from Fordham’s recent study, The Suppleme
The best grant I ever made? It’s a tough question after ten years in philanthropy.
Amazon unveiled a new online “storefront” called Amazon Ignite that will allow educators to earn money by publishing—online, of course—their original lesson plans, worksheets, games, and more. The entry into the curricular marketplace is obviously motivated by a perceived market opportunity—and that’s not wrong. The vast majority of teachers are supplementing their core curriculum or don’t have one to start with. Yet we know almost nothing about the quality of such supplementary materials. Our new study helps fill that void.
In her compelling new book, The Knowledge Gap, Natalie Wexler relates a story about a young girl in an elementary school in Washington, D.C., who, for over ten minutes during reading class, is busy drawing a picture on her reading worksheet. When Wexler asks what she’s doing, the little girl replies that she’s drawing clowns. “Why are you drawing clowns?” Wexler asks.
Civics education has been a problem forever, or so it seems, and if that problem feels more urgent today it’s because so many are dismayed by the erosion of civility and good citizenship in today’s America, as well as mounting evidence that younger generations are both woefully ignorant in this realm—check out
Hard as it may be to believe, the Knowledge is Power Program, better known as KIPP, is now older than a lot of the people who teach in its schools.
Nearly all teachers today report using the Internet to obtain instructional materials, and many of them do so quite often. And while several organizations now offer impartial reviews of full curriculum products, very little is known about the content and quality of supplemental instructional materials.
In the latest episode of what promises to be a protracted saga in the Lone Star State, the Houston Federation of Teachers (HFT) recently filed a federal lawsuit to halt the state’s takeover of the Houston school district, one of the largest in the country.
Author’s Update, August 5, 2022: Analysis of NAEP demographic data shows that retaining students was in fact not a major contributor to Mississippi’s improved fourth grade NAEP results in the last few years—at least not the way this article suggested.
When the New York City Council moved the other day to require every one of the city’s thirty-two community school districts to develop a school desegregation plan, it was yet one more example of municipal social engineering that prizes diversity over quality and mandatory over voluntary. If families with means don’t like their new school assignments, they’ll simply exit to charters, private schools or the suburbs, meaning that the city’s social engineers will mainly work their will on those with the least.
There’s been a lot of talk about racial equity in Montgomery County as of late.
“It’s like some bullsh-t way to get kids to pass.” That’s the cynical description of high school “credit recovery” programs an eleventh grader gave to the New York Post last year. But cynicism appears to be in order.
The student teaching experience is a crash course in lesson planning, organization skills, and classroom management—and also in learning from and gelling with the teacher who is in charge of teaching you these things. That can be challenging, especially since cooperating teachers (CTs) are recruited in multiple ways, none of which is all that thoughtful or organized.
On this week’s podcast, Kim Marshall, author of The Best of the Marshall Memo, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to talk about