Teachers & School Leaders

Displaying 481-510 of 1450 results
Teacher speaking to a student
Commentary
1.18.2024
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Doing educational equity right: School discipline

Michael J. Petrilli

If school funding is the issue around which it’s easiest to find common ground across left and right, school discipline might be the hardest. That shouldn’t be surprising, given how divisive our country’s debate has been on the related issue of criminal justice and law enforcement. But we can begin to bridge these ideological differences if we commit to “doing educational equity right.”

Teacher speaking to a student
Commentary
1.18.2024
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Teachers are fed up with no-consequence discipline

Daniel Buck

I used to judge teachers who quit midyear. How could they abandon their students? Didn’t they sign a contract? Could they just really not cut it? Well, now I get it. Midyear quitting may be unseemly, but it’s understandable.

Finland
Commentary
1.12.2024
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

The rise and fall of Finland mania

Tim Daly

Editor's note: This was first published on the author's Substack, The Education Daly.

Finland
Commentary
1.11.2024
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

How to ban phones effectively

Daniel Buck

Shortly before schools—and Fordham—shuttered their doors for the holiday break, Tim Daly asked a simple question in these pages: Should schools ban smart phones?

Commentary
1.11.2024
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Alternative classroom models don’t have to threaten “traditional” ones

Meredith Coffey, Ph.D., Jeanette Luna

As former teachers in a variety of settings—charter, traditional public, and “transfer” schools—we read with great interest our colleague Daniel Buck’s recent piece, “In defense of the traditional classroom

Commentary
1.5.2024
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Remembering Linda Brown

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

The education world lost a true reformer on Christmas Day—and the charter-school world lost one of its true heroes—when Linda Brown passed away at eighty-one at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Commentary
1.4.2024
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

When school becomes optional

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

“Truancy” may no longer be the right word for it, maybe not even “absenteeism,” for both imply being missing from a place where one is supposed to be. “Truancy,” with its overtone of misbehavior and illegality, suggests willfulness, i.e., that one is intentionally missing, while “absenteeism” is a more neutral term with no suggestion of motive.

Commentary
1.4.2024
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

How pandemic-era emergency teaching licenses diversified the teaching profession

Kate Kerin

The Covid-19 pandemic created innumerable disruptions to the education system. Among them were challenges faced by teacher candidates trying to complete licensure requirements. In response, those requirements got waived in many places.

Commentary
12.15.2023
Teachers & School Leaders

3 lessons in transformational leadership

Kathleen Porter-Magee

Earlier this year, Jill Kafka, the tireless Executive Director of Partnership Schools, announced that she is stepping down after twenty-seven years of dedicated service.

Commentary
12.14.2023
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

In defense of the traditional classroom

Daniel Buck

Many futuristic reformers love to hate the classroom.

Commentary
12.8.2023
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

4 takeaways from the PISA results

Daniel Buck

The results from the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) are in—an international standardized test of fifteen-year-olds and the first look at how countries compare post-pandemic—and the picture they paint of American education is disheartening. Here are four trends that you need to know: 1. U.S. math scores collapsed and reading stagnated.

students on phones
Commentary
12.8.2023
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Should schools ban cellphones?

Tim Daly

Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, The Education Daly. They’re coming for the kids’ phones. Who is “they”?

students on phones
Commentary
11.30.2023
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

State licensure tests and science of reading instruction

Jeff Murray

Recent legislative efforts across the country have strengthened efforts to align reading instruction with the science of reading. These laws typically require teachers to use methods and materials aligned to the solid evidence base on how children best learn to read.

Commentary
11.21.2023
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

High-quality instructional materials change instructional leaders’ job

Emily Freitag

Five years ago, my team and I set out to understand what goes into effective implementation of high-quality instructional materials. We interviewed leaders and teachers from seventy schools that had moved to higher-quality materials in the last three years. We asked about what went well and what was hard.

Commentary
11.20.2023
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

9 thoughts on the Advanced Placement takedown in the Times

Michael J. Petrilli

Over the weekend, the New York Times published a hard-hitting 2,300-word expose by Dana Goldstein and colleagues asking “Why is the College Board pushing to expand Advanced Placement?” Its primary answer: to rake in tens of millions of dollars a year and to support CEO David Coleman’s exorbitant sal

testing
Commentary
11.20.2023
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Teachers & School Leaders

Grade inflation is locking in learning loss, part 2: Solutions

Tim Daly

In my previous post, we defined grade inflation and reviewed (lots of) new evidence suggesting that it is a barrier to pandemic recovery—especially for less privileged students. Today, we will identify solutions.

testing
Commentary
11.17.2023
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

How to bridge racial and socioeconomic gaps in advanced education

Abigail Hamilton

“Excellence gaps,” or disparities in advanced academic performance between student groups, have important implications for both academic equity and American economic competitiveness.

ddms image
Commentary
11.16.2023
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Liberty and civic education

David Davenport, Mark C. Schug

Editor’s note: This was first published by The Liberty Fund.

ddms image
Commentary
11.16.2023
Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Do schools provide equal value to all their students?

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D.

Previous literature on school quality and teacher quality largely assumes that good schools and good teachers are beneficial for all enrolled children, which means that a school’s “value added” is typically calculated as the average effect on students.

Commentary
11.9.2023
Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

School choice isn’t killing traditional public schools. It’s making them better.

Michael J. Petrilli

The impact of school choice on traditional school districts, what scholars call its “competitive effects,” is an area in which there is much high-quality research. A new book critical of choice fails to wrestle with this fact.

Commentary
11.9.2023
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Standards, Teachers & School Leaders

Grading standards and student effort: Short-run versus long-run effects

Adam Tyner, Ph.D.

A simple observation: In the U.S., high school graduation rates have increased while other measures of academic achievement—from college entrance exam scores to high school

Commentary
11.2.2023
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Smartphones and social media are leading to depression and anxiety for our students. Are they depressing test scores, too?

Michael J. Petrilli

Smartphones and social media are likely at least partly to blame for the teenage mental health epidemic that started around 2013. Is it possible that phones and social media might also be behind the plateauing and decline of student achievement that we’ve seen in America, also starting around 2013?

Commentary
10.26.2023
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Bias in AI is a real problem

Daniel Buck

Hysteria over students cheating via ChatGPT and other generative AI applications is so last year. This season’s hyperventilation-initiator is the potential for bias in AI. And well, there’s actually a lot to be worried about.