Displaying 241-270 of 1115 results
Commentary
5.5.2023
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

High-achieving middle schoolers fare poorly in U.S. history and civics, finds NAEP, but that’s nothing new

Brandon L. Wright

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.

Commentary
5.4.2023
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Standards, Teachers & School Leaders

History and civics scores still falling, reports NAEP

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Aaargh. Here we go again. The new National Assessment civics and history results are as deplorable as they were predictable. Whether they’ll also serve as the action-forcer that we need is far from certain.

Commentary
5.4.2023
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

How lax grading policies make classrooms chaotic

Meredith Coffey, Ph.D.

Since the return to in-person learning, schools have seen a surge in student misbehavior of many kinds, ranging from minor

Commentary
5.4.2023
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Putting the Core Knowledge study into perspective

Natalie Wexler

A recent study finding dramatic boosts in reading achievement from a knowledge-building curriculum has come in for criticism, some of it well-taken. But the study should be seen as just one more piece of evidence casting serious doubt on standard literacy instruction.

Commentary
4.20.2023
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Character formation is central to a liberal education: The example of Wake Forest University

Jennifer Frey

The movement to reconnect knowledge and virtue is not limited to classical schools that focus on primary and secondary education (K–12). Some institutions of higher education are also taking character education seriously, such as Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 2016, Wake Forest recruited Dr.

Commentary
4.20.2023
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

An early analysis of a one-to-one tutoring model

Jeff Murray

Providing students with tutoring in addition to in-class learning time is an oft-prescribed remedy for both catching up students who are behind and accelerating students who are capable of even higher performance. Two common sticking points to providing that remedy are finding additional time in the day, week, or year for the intervention and finding enough qualified personnel.

Commentary
4.19.2023
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

California must better support its advanced learners

Victoria McDougald

When my son entered kindergarten at our local public school last fall, I never expected I’d have to become an ambassador and advocate for giftedness and gifted education. He has always been an eager, rapid learner—intensely curious and a social butterfly—so we expected his first year of elementary school to be one of mostly excitement, fun and joy.

Commentary
4.14.2023
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Standards, Teachers & School Leaders

Georgia’s laudable addition of Great Works to its English standards

Mark Bauerlein

The Georgia Department of Education has released a new version of proposed English language arts standards for public comment, and they contain a big surprise. If you dig into the “Texts” section and go to grade eleven, you’ll find this requirement:

Commentary
4.14.2023
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Democracy dies without trust and truth: Strengthen civics education

Walter Parker

The two pillars of democracy—trust and truth—are now cracked. Many Americans believe the political system is corrupt (e.g., rigged, racist), and some don’t believe the results of elections, even certifiably fair ones. Related, we have lost a shared standard of truth and, with it, shared criteria for distinguishing fact from falsehood.

Commentary
4.13.2023
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

At long last, E.D. Hirsch, Jr. gets his due: New research shows big benefits from Core Knowledge

Robert Pondiscio

A new study demonstrates unusually robust and beneficial effects on reading achievement among students in schools that teach E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum. The working paper offers compelling evidence to support what many of us have long believed: Hirsch has been right all along about what it takes to build reading comprehension.

Commentary
4.13.2023
Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Private School Choice, Teachers & School Leaders

The extended case for faith-based charter schools

Andy Smarick

A little-noticed event in late 2022 destabilized a pillar of contemporary American K–12 education, namely that all schools considered part of the public system must be secular.

Commentary
4.7.2023
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

States blazing the trail towards mastery instead of seat time

Jonathan Alfuth

In his March 30 Flypaper piece, “Rewrite attendance laws to promote learning, not seat time,” Chester Finn makes the case for reorienting school around student achievement rather than time spent in class.

Commentary
4.6.2023
Charter Schools, Governance, Private School Choice, Teachers & School Leaders

Can we have both school choice and shared institutions?

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

If we put all our education hopes in markets, self-interest, competition, and “invisible hands,” will that contribute to the other fissiparous forces that are weakening the valuable shared assets we inherited from earlier generations? Recent surveys certainly suggest that mounting public support for school choice is coinciding with diminishing confidence in shared institutions and public values of all kinds, including patriotism itself.

Commentary
4.6.2023
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Progressive schools aren’t the problem

Ethan Gray

I read with interest Daniel Buck’s recent piece, “The agonizing individualism of progressive education.” In his view, progressive schools fail to uphold communitarian values by overemphasizing individualism.

Commentary
4.5.2023
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

The wonderful but weighty challenges of parenting a gifted child

Victoria McDougald

Until my oldest child entered elementary school last fall, I was blissfully ignorant about giftedness and the extent to which it colors and affects a young child’s educational experience. My husband and I have always been amazed at our son’s busy brain and body, as well as exhausted by his limitless energy, boundless curiosity, and never-ending questions.

Commentary
4.2.2023
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Yes, good schools matter for low-income kids

Chad Aldeman

As someone who’s had firsthand experience in the ups and downs of the education reform movement, I agree with Matthew Yglesias calling it a “strange death.” Reformers did over-promise, and they did fail at scaling up once-promising ideas.

Commentary
3.30.2023
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Rewrite attendance laws to promote learning, not seat time

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Two depressing developments of the past couple years have given birth to a radical idea: Let’s rethink state “compulsory attendance” laws so that they’re phrased in terms of kids learning rather than years in school. First is evidence that lots of students who need it don’t avail themselves of high-dose tutoring when available. Second is the growing number of districts and schools that are moving to four-day weeks.

Commentary
3.30.2023
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

The agonizing individualism of progressive education

Daniel Buck

Perhaps my favorite moment teaching this year came as my class finished reading Of Mice and Men. In the final moments of the story, one character executes his friend to save him from a far worse fate. It’s sudden and thus shocking. I set them to read this final scene silently. The faster readers finished first. I watched eyes widen and flit faster from word to word.

Commentary
3.30.2023
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

High schoolers don’t graduate with the learning habits to succeed in college

Nathaniel Grossman

Much of my work as a kindergarten teacher was teaching young children how to be students. Even the routine for “circle time” on the carpet required days, if not weeks, of explicit practice. Making eye contact, waiting one’s turn to speak, and ignoring distractions are skills so basic that it’s easy to forget that they don’t come naturally to many kids.

Commentary
3.24.2023
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

How the “math wars” are different from the “reading wars”

Natalie Wexler

Debates over how to teach math echo the conflicts over reading instruction, and some issues are similar. But unlike math, reading—in its full sense—draws on everything a person has been able to learn.

Commentary
3.22.2023
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

States can improve equity and outcomes in gifted education, but too many aren’t trying

Brandon L. Wright

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.

Commentary
3.17.2023
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Keep the tests, but reform the test prep

Emily Freitag

When I started Instruction Partners and began working deeply and regularly with multiple school systems, I was surprised by some patterns. The same motivational quotes were in almost every school hallway. Many teachers' lounges had the same air freshener. There was a similar tension between certain departments in almost every district.

Commentary
3.16.2023
Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

We know student effort matters, so let’s start acting like it

Eva Moskowitz

Student effort is the secret sauce at Success Academy charter schools, says their founder and CEO, and they teach and celebrate it religiously. Indeed, after seventeen years of educating tens of thousands of students, careful analysis of homework, classwork, and assessment data has taught the Success Academy team that a large proportion of errors, up to 70 percent, don’t result from not knowing or understanding the content, but from a lack of care and attention to detail.

Commentary
3.16.2023
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

We must return to the core mission of education: academic learning

David Steiner

It’s a familiar and dreary tale. For twenty years, the math and reading learning outcomes of our nation’s twelfth graders have been flat. More recently, the performance gap between the wealthiest and poorest students has widened, while between Black and White students the previous gap-closing has stalled.