American children are suffering from unprecedented learning loss, and many are not even bothering to show up to school.
Since 2013, thirty states have passed legislation or implemented new policies related to the “science of reading.” Their collective effort to change how early reading is taught in America’s classrooms is the focus of an excellent new project by Education Week’s Sarah Schwartz. There are, however, questions about the sustainability of these massive efforts.
Susie Miller Carello may not be a household name in education, but she’s a household name among those who are.
Parents are often given dubious advice about their children’s reading: Let them read whatever they enjoy, as we must encourage literacy. This is a strangely laissez-faire attitude to take towards such a fundamentally formative activity. No decent school counsels parents to let their children watch or listen to whatever they want, so why is reading different?
Efforts to diversify the roster of students classified as gifted often focus on race and ethnicity.
Editor’s note: This is an edition of “Advance,” a newsletter from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute written by Brandon Wright, our Editorial Director, and published every other week. Its purpose is to monitor the progress of gifted education in America, including legal and legislative developments, policy and leadership changes, emerging research, grassroots efforts, and more.
The latest declaration of education reform’s demise comes from two of Mike’s favorite people: Checker Finn and Rick Hess. But what they actually describe is the end of the bipartisan ed reform coalition—what Mike and Rick used to call the “Washington Consensus.” Even with it gone for now, however, education reform continues apace—and continues to rack up victories for kids. And there are ways to rebuild the coalition.
In the latest issue of National Affairs, Chester Finn and Frederick Hess chronicle the splintering of the school reform movement that lasted from roughly 1983 until Trump’s presidency.
The mental health crisis has been a persistent headline over the last few years, as research and
School systems across the country are training teachers in multi-tiered systems of support (MTSS) to tackle issues like social emotional learning, mental health, and behavioral interventions.
The Covid-19 pandemic altered public confidence in education and left lasting shortages in the workforce. Youth unemployment rates are recovering, but young people are still in need of job opportunities that will create lasting wealth and opportunities for further education.
Teachers’ authority in the classroom is being undermined by policies of “restorative justice”—a non-punitive approach to discipline. But the predictable albeit unintended consequence of these well-meaning policies is that disruptive students get away with previously unacceptable behavior. Outbursts of student vulgarity and incidence of violence have become normalized as something teachers and other students have to endure.
Teachers are now planning instruction for the new school year. But very quickly after their pupils arrive, many will realize that some students will not be adequately challenged by the grade-level curriculum typically assigned for the class. Some will already have mastered that material and are ready to move on.
Student demographics in traditional district schools largely reflect patterns of housing availability and affordability within neighborhoods. Much of that is due to strict attendance zoning.
It’s one of those zombie mantras that just won’t die: Letting students cut corners, giving them grades they haven’t earned, and generally lowering the bar is a nice thing to do for vulnerable kids—those living in poverty, often with turbulent home lives or mental health struggles to boot.
Editor’s note: This is an edition of “Advance,” a newsletter from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute written by Brandon Wright, our Editorial Director, and published every other week. Its purpose is to monitor the progress of gifted education in America, including legal and legislative developments, policy and leadership changes, emerging research, grassroots efforts, and more.
Shouldn’t we all seek to individualize instructions to meet each child’s needs? Who could oppose “differentiation”? Well, I do.
Last week, the Biden administration released new guidance for how schools should handle discipline for students with disabilities.
School shootings are profoundly tragic—scarring not only the families whose children become victims, but casting a shadow over the lives, mental health, and outcomes of the surviving students. But evidence is also clear that it’s not only horrific mass shootings that can lead a child to miss school. Any feeling of not being safe can prompt children and teenagers to stay home.
In 2004, the late Sara McLanahan published a landmark article called “Diverging Destinies: How Children Are Faring Under the Second Demographic Transition.” The paper was the first scholarly attempt to propose that the decline of the two-parent family in the United States since the 1960’s was intensifying the already unequal l
“New data suggest that the damage from shutting down schools has been worse than almost anyone expected,” the Economist tweeted recently to promote a
A few years ago, when I was writing my book about Success Academy and school choice, I had a moment of self-doubt bordering on despair.
Editor’s note: This is an edition of “Advance,” a newsletter from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute written by Brandon Wright, our Editorial Director, and published every other week. Its purpose is to monitor the progress of gifted education in America, including legal and legislative developments, policy and leadership changes, emerging research, grassroots efforts, and more.
One of my favorite quotations comes from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring. When Gandalf the wizard recounts the story of the ring and the havoc that it has brought to Middle-earth to the hero Frodo, Frodo says to him, “I wish it need not have happened in my time.” To which Gandalf replies, “So do I, and so do all who live to see such times.
High-achieving students from low-income backgrounds are half as likely to be placed in a gifted program as their more affluent peers, according to our new study.
Few people have done more to boost academic standards in U.S. schools than Michael Cohen and Laura Slover, coauthors of a new paper offering a bright vision for revitalizing them. But there are reasons to doubt the feasibility of its proposals.
The “tripod” of standards, testing, and accountability has taken a real beating in recent years, following decades in which it was accepted dogma within reform circles.
Back in February, Bloomberg’s Adrian Wooldridge published a column claiming that “America is facing a great talent recession.” He noted that, “today, demand for top talent in the corporate world and elsewhere is exploding just at a time when the supply is t
The universe of private elementary-secondary schooling in America today is diverse and confusing, with innumerable twists and turns in efforts to use public funds to help families access schools that suit them—including private schools of all colors and stripes. But the virtue of these institutions is that they’re different, which also means very different from each other. Which complicates the quest to deploy public dollars to assist families to choose them.
I read Mike Petrilli’s very interesting article “How to narrow the excellence gap in early elementary school” in Fordham’s June 2 Education Gadfly Weekly.
