“When the Gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.” —Oscar Wilde
Everywhere you look, the science of reading is the toast of the town.
Bipartisanship is in tatters, and that’s a big problem for education. Yet it’s also an opportunity for conservatives to recognize that the gains made with bipartisanship’s help meant suppressing some important differences and neglecting some vital elements of schooling. It’s time to lean into those differences, understand what’s been neglected or distorted, address some troubling voids, and see if we can renegotiate terms.
Editor’s note: What follows is a reprinting of the preface to an important new book, How to Educate an American: The Conservative Vision for Tomorrow’s Schools, edited by Fordham’s Michael J. Petrilli and Chester E.
America’s schools have ceded significant ground to trendy nostrums and policy cure-alls that do little to adequately teach young people the skills and knowledge required to realize their full potential and emerge from school as fully-functioning citizens. The latest round of dire NAEP civics and U.S. history scores underscore our continuing failure on the citizenship front.
Featuring essays by twenty leading conservative thinkers, and anchored in tradition yet looking towards tomorrow, this book should be read by anyone concerned with teaching future generations to preserve the country’s heritage, embody its universal ethic, and pursue its founding ideals.
As a center-right think tank, we whole-heartedly support turning prescriptive federal programs into block grants. Among other things, they reduce bureaucratic inefficiency and trust states to decide what’s best for their unique circumstances. But there are exceptions to our adoration, and one of them is the Trump Administration’s proposal to include the federal Charter Schools Program in a new mega-block-grant.
With Iowa and New Hampshire in the rearview mirror, the original field of nearly thirty Democratic presidential candidates has now been winnowed down to eight. Six of them will face off on the debate stage this evening in Las Vegas.
The Trump administration’s proposed budget takes the Education Department’s $440 million program of financial assistance for charters and melds it with twenty-eight other programs into a big new K–12 block grant. Although there’s scant political likelihood that Congress will adopt the plan, the proposal itself will be interpreted and welcomed by charter foes as a sign that even Trump and his allies and supporters have lost their enthusiasm for these independent public schools of choice.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about the reading crisis in U.S. schools.
A couple years ago, a high-profile dispute played out between the Texas Education Agency (TEA) and the federal Department of Education, with a January 2019 New York Times headline pronouncing,
In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes of a rally held for communist leader Josef Stalin. At the event’s end, a tribute to Stalin was called for. As Solzhenitsyn writes, “Of course, everyone stood up (just as everyone had leaped to his feet during the conference at every mention of his name)....
No sooner had Senator Lamar Alexander released his statement last Thursday on the impeachment witness vote than the handwringing began.
Partisans of social-emotional learning are wont to make their case in utopian terms: Create better learning environments and good things will happen to kids, to academic achievement, to the society in which we live, etc. From the home page of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL):
The education world was slow on the uptake, but oral argument this week in the case of Espinoza v.
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.
The U.S. Department of Education recently proposed significant changes to the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), including eliminating the school finance portion.
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.
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.
Several candidates in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary have criticized the inequities created by school funding formula
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 past decade’s shift to significantly higher academic standards and more rigorous assessments means that many more students are now far below grade-level expectations. In recent months and years, there’s been much debate about how best to help such students catch up.
