Uncle Sam goes soft on state tests
Things are getting messy in the world of assessment.
Things are getting messy in the world of assessment.
More than a year into the Covid-19 pandemic, lost instructional time is top of mind for anyone connected to education.
Full-time virtual charter schools received a great deal of attention as schools scrambled to transition classes online back in the Spring of 2020, and have experienced booming enrollments over the past year.
In the song “Ballad of a Thin Man,” Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan penned an iconic refrain that asks: “But something is happening/And ya’ don’t know what it is/Do you, Mister Jones?” That refrain seems an apt way to describe what K–12 education stakeholders are sensing as they reel in response to Covid-19 shock.
This fall, most students will be returning to full-time, in-person instruction after one of the most disrupted years of their lives. All students will be coming back with varying degrees of adverse experiences. Some may have lost loved ones, had a parent lose their job, seen a parent go through illness, or even been sick themselves.
District leaders may be celebrating the $122 billion in stimulus relief Congress approved for K–12 schools last month.
Editor’s note: The Thomas B. Fordham Institute recently launched “The Acceleration Imperative,” an open-source, evidence-based resource designed to aid instructional leaders’ efforts to address the enormous challenges faced by their students, families, teachers, and staff over the past year.
School reopenings in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic are an ongoing, imperfect work in progress, and the science that school leaders and parents are being encouraged to follow is evolving.
Interdistrict open enrollment (OE) is something of an enigma in Texas. It’s up to districts whether to open their borders or to keep them closed to non-resident students.
I have been thinking a lot about the early years of Race to the Top recently. I moved to Nashville in 2011 to work at the Tennessee Department of Education. Tennessee had won one of the first two Race to the Top grants with bipartisan legislation and an ambitious plan, and the state had $500 million to invest in innovative support to advance student learning.
The Biden team has issued its first responses to state requests to waive federal testing requirements because of the pandemic. Dale Chu reads the tea leaves, and concludes that the new Administration is trying to eat its cake and have it too.
In the last year, Congress has now invested nearly $200 billion to support K–12 education. It’s an unprecedented federal infusion of money, but will it lead to an unprecedented recovery effort? It’s worth taking a moment to pause and consider the range of possibilities. Best case
Fordham’s new resource, “The Acceleration Imperative,” aims to give the nation’s chief academic officers a head start on planning for America’s educational recovery, with a focus on high-poverty elementary schools. It’s intentionally a work in progress, and already the product of thoughtful advice from more than three dozen experts. The intention is for it to continue evolving and improving with readers’ help, via a “crowdsourced” initiative on a new wiki site.
Editor’s note: This is the second post in a series that puts the themes of 2020’s Getting the Most Bang for the Education Buck into today’s context, with particular attention to the effects of the pandemic and federal relief dollars.
The CDC’s revised guidelines for pupil spacing in school—three feet under most circumstances rather than six—opened a floodgate of gratitude from superintendents and parents.
Editor’s note: This is the first post in a series that puts the themes of 2020’s Getting the Most Bang for the Education Buck into today’s context, with particular attention to the effects of the pandemic and federal relief dollars.
The Fordham Institute has published a two-part piece by Checker Finn on giving “power to the people,” as well as
Two Americas are emerging from the pandemic. One features well-paid, highly educated, technically adept workers who can do much of their work sitting at a computer at home. The virus forced these people out of their offices and into their homes, but they went right on working and collecting their paychecks.
Editor’s note: This is the fifth and final installment in a series of posts about envelope-pushing strategies that schools might embrace to address students’ learning loss in the wake of the pandemic.
Centering the work of charter schooling and authorizing in communities means listening to the aspirations and needs they have for students—especially communities that have been overlooked and not prioritized, like communities of color, those from lower-income tax brackets, and those with disabilities—and delivering with, not to, them.
Editor’s note: This is the fourth in a series of posts about envelope-pushing strategies that schools might embrace to address students’ learning loss in the wake of the pandemic.
Despite last week’s announcement by the U.S. Department of Education that it won’t grant blanket testing waivers this year, a number of states have decided to push for one anyway.
Yes, I blurbed it—and I like it. Yes, a visitor to our home, a worldly and skeptical sort, hefted it and looked at the title and asked me “Isn’t that awfully thick for a book about optimism regarding American public education?”
States embraced school turnaround efforts in the wake of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act in the early 2000s. These took various forms at first, as each state pursued their own turnaround strategies per NCLB’s requirements.
A lot of us have been confused, angry, and frustrated by the reluctance of some teachers, and particularly their unions, to resume in-person instruction.
In last week’s Gadfly, I shared some misgivings about today’s push for “community control” on the part of many education reformers and philanthropists.
Education funding is sticky. Once dollars are sent to a public school or school system, they tend to stay there.
Generation Z and Millennials are optimistic about their future and confident it will be filled with opportunity, despite the pandemic and other problems they face. Two in three (67 percent) believe they “have the opportunity to achieve the American dream,” with more than one in two (56 percent) saying “all people in my generation” can achieve it.
What will it take for President Biden to make good on his December promise to reopen a majority of U.S. schools within his first one hundred days?
Barely a day goes by without another story reporting the negative effects