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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My friend and colleague Mike Petrilli is understandably proud of Fordham’s spanking new Acceleration Imperative: A Plan to Address Elementary Students’ Unfinished Learning in the Wake of Covid-19.
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.
The past grim, difficult year challenged our nation and schools like few others, so it’s important to take the time to appreciate good news when we hear it. New research from EdReports provides just such an opportunity.
In part I of this two-part series, I wrote about three of the most common practices teachers implement in elementary schools that successfully personalize learning: giving each child a learning plan, organizing instruction around class-level and individual mastery, and using grouping an
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.
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.
Structured activities and services provided outside of the regular school day were increasingly the focus of public investment in the U.S. prior to the coronavirus pandemic.
In school districts and charter school networks nationwide, instructional leaders are developing plans to address the enormous challenges faced by their students, families, teachers, and staff over the past year. To help kick-start their planning process, we are proud to present The Acceleration Imperative, an open-source, evidence-based document created with input from dozens of current and former chief academic officers, scholars, and others with deep expertise and experience in high-performing, high-poverty elementary schools.
In a previous Flypaper post, Mike Petrilli described the challenge of personalizing instruction for our youngest learners as the “Mount Everest” of education.
School choice proponents argue that when parents vote with their feet—and dollars—schools listen. But choice is no match for the pandemic of wokeness that has seized K–12 education. The most advantaged, privileged, and powerful parents in America have been cowed into submissive silence when elite schools of choice adopt neoracist practices masquerading as “anti-racism.”
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.
Now that Uncle Sam’s check is in the mail, one of the biggest hopes for schools is that they will be able to leverage the massive infusion of cash to be more creative, imaginative, and innovative.
A substantial research literature supports what many of us know intuitively: Teachers matter, perhaps more than any
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.
One of the best-selling education books of the Covid era is one you’ve probably never read and maybe never even heard of. Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons was written nearly forty years ago by Siegfried Engelmann, who passed away in 2019.
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.
Research and common sense suggest that teachers are the biggest school-based factor influencing student learning.
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.
Bullish but far from sanguine is how I view the ambitious history-and-civics “roadmap” unveiled
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.
