Podcast
Career & Technical Education, High Achievers, Personalized Learning
Education Gadfly Show #791: Is this the end of gifted education in New York City?
On this week’s podcast, Brandon Wright, Fordham’s editorial director and coauthor of
Podcast
Curriculum & Instruction, Personalized Learning
The Education Gadfly Show #784: Remote learning worked well for some students. What schools can learn from that.
On this week’s podcast, Alyson Klein, assistant editor and education writer at Education W
Commentary
Personalized Learning
Does public preschool benefit students from Kindergarten to college?
A trio of researchers from the University of Chicago, MIT, and UC Berkeley recently released a working paper that indicates a multitude of positive long-term effects—very long term, in fact—associated with attendance at public preschool.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Personalized Learning, Teachers & School Leaders
Lessons learned from 10 years of pioneering blended learning
In 1908, the Ford Motor Company unveiled the Model T and introduced a reliable, affordable automobile for the middle class. While revolutionary, the Model T also took twelve hours and 7,882 tasks to assemble 1,481 parts, and increased production time meant increased costs. In 1913, Ford introduced an assembly line and cut production to ninety-three minutes.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Personalized Learning, Teachers & School Leaders
How any school can personalize learning, part II
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
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Personalized Learning, Teachers & School Leaders
How any school can personalize learning, part I
In a previous Flypaper post, Mike Petrilli described the challenge of personalizing instruction for our youngest learners as the “Mount Everest” of education.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Personalized Learning, Teachers & School Leaders
How elementary schools can address unfinished learning through personalization
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.
Report
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Personalized Learning
The narrow path to do it right: Lessons from vaccine making for high-dosage tutoring
High-dosage tutoring is receiving a lot of buzz as a promising tool to address learning loss in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. But unlike vaccines, successful tutoring programs are challenging to scale with fidelity. In this paper, long-time educators Michael Goldstein and Bowen Paulle explain how leaders can smartly scale promising tutoring programs that can boost student outcomes.
Commentary
Personalized Learning
2020 Recap: New research from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute
As with most years, 2020 has been a busy one for the Fordham research team. We published many groundbreaking studies, adding contributions to the evidence base on literacy, civic education, education funding, school choice, and gifted programs, among others.
Podcast
Curriculum & Instruction, Personalized Learning
The Education Gadfly Show: Another reason for more school autonomy
On this week’s podcast, David Osborne, director of the Reinventing America’s Schools Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, joins Checker Finn and David Griffith to talk about how schools can be given autonomy to adapt to students’ varying needs and to external events.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Personalized Learning
Response to “Let’s rebuild special education when schools reopen”
The Fordham Institute recently published an article called “Let’s rebuild special education when schools reopen,” by Anne Delfosse and Miriam Kurtzig Freedman. Reading it prompted both of us to offer our own thoughts, drawn from experience.
Commentary
Governance, Personalized Learning, Teachers & School Leaders
Let’s rebuild special education when schools reopen
This spring’s school closures have challenged us to look at many things differently and to be open-minded, creative, and brave about moving toward necessary change. As we consider reopening schools in the fall, let’s hold on to that mindset and ask what should special education become? Does the forty-five-year-old federal law (IDEA) need a thorough redo? We believe it does.
Podcast
Career & Technical Education, Personalized Learning
The Education Gadfly Show: The link between location and income
This week’s podcast guest is John V. Winters, Ph.D., associate professor of economics at Iowa State University and author of Fordham’s new report, What You Make Depends on Where You Live. He joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss the report’s findings and implications.
Podcast
Curriculum & Instruction, Personalized Learning, Teachers & School Leaders
The Education Gadfly Show: How schools can personalize instruction when students return next fall
On this week’s podcast, Diane Tavenner, co-founder and CEO of Summit Public Schools, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to offer advice on how schools can help meet students’ individual needs when they return after lengthy closures.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Personalized Learning
Great YouTube channels for middle schoolers and high schoolers for learning from home during COVID-19 school closures
Parents who will be homeschooling (temporarily) while schools are closed because of COVID-19 can only do so much to keep kids learning, so do your parents a solid and use this time to find subjects that get you excited! There’s only so much Netflix you can watch before you get a funny taste in the back of your mouth.
Commentary
Personalized Learning
Smiling through: Thirty-two resources for entertaining energetic preschoolers during daycare and preschool closures
Any working parent of toddlers or infants will tell you that juggling home and work life isn’t without a slew of unique challenges. From chronic sleep deprivation to daily battles with your toddler to put on pants before leaving the house, the life of a working parent ain’t easy.
Commentary
Commentary
Personalized Learning
Supporting low birth weight babies helps long after infancy
A recent working paper from NBER takes the notion of “early intervention” for e
Commentary
Personalized Learning
Resources for learning from home during Covid-19 school closures
With more than half of states closing their schools due to the coronavirus pandemic, hundreds of thousands of parents, grandparents, and other caregivers have become de facto “home schoolers” practically overnight. Students in this situation will likely be spending a fair amount of time on screens—as a lifeline, respite, or both. We have compiled some excellent suggestions—updated several times since initial publication—for making at least some of that time educational.
Commentary
Governance, Personalized Learning, Teachers & School Leaders
The harm of special education enrollment caps
A couple years ago, a high-profile dispute played out between the Texas Education Agency (TEA) and the federal Department of Education, with a January 2019 New York Times headline pronouncing,
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, School Finance, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Personalized Learning
The top 10 EconTalk episodes on education
A few years ago, as I was wrapping up grad school (where my dissertation was about migrant workers in China, of all things), I came across a bunch of fascinating podcast episodes about education policy and school reform.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Personalized Learning, Standards
Access, equity, and quality in dual enrollment
Programs that allow high school students the opportunity to earn college credit while still in high school are growing fast. In addition to familiar options like Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate, dual enrollment, concurrent enrollment, and early college high school—otherwise known as college in high school programs–are increasingly popular models in states.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, High Achievers, Personalized Learning
Advanced coursework gets a needed boost
Last week in Austin, at the annual “summit” sponsored by the PIE (“Policy Innovators in Education”) Network, prizes were conferred on a handful of state-based education-reform groups that had accomplished remarkable feats in the previous year, this despite the reform-averse mood that chills much of the nation.
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, ESSA, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Personalized Learning, Teachers & School Leaders
In math, grade-level tests are holding back low-achieving students
Imagine that you’re a sixth-grade math teacher. It’s the first day of school, and the vast majority of your students arrived multiple years behind where they should be. Your job is to teach them concepts such as understanding percentages and dividing fractions.
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, High Achievers, Personalized Learning, Teachers & School Leaders
Why has AP succeeded when so many other reforms have failed?
American K–12 education is awash in reforms, nostrums, interventions, silver bullets, pilot programs, snake oil peddlers, advocates, and crusaders, not to mention innumerable private foundations that occasionally emerge from their endless cycles of strategic planning to unload their latest brainstorms upon the land. Yet when subjected to close scrutiny, not much actually “works.” The six-decade old Advanced Placement program is a rare and welcome exception.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, High Achievers, Personalized Learning, Teachers & School Leaders
Low public support for ability grouping is an opportunity for personalized pacing
The latest Education Next poll asked respondents whether they support ability grouping, whereby students take classes with peers at similar academic achievement levels, and for middle school the majority’s answer was no.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, High Achievers, Personalized Learning, Teachers & School Leaders
How two personalized learning models accelerate the progress of their high-achieving students
Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of posts looking at how two school networks—Rocketship Public Schools and Wildflower Schools—enable their students to meet standards at their own pace.
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Personalized Learning, Teachers & School Leaders
How personalized learning enthusiasts can ensure they aren’t lowering the bar for the kids who are behind
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of posts looking at how two school networks—Rocketship Public Schools and Wildflower Schools—enable their students to master standards at their own pace. See the first post here.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Personalized Learning, Teachers & School Leaders
In most elementary classrooms, kids are all over the map academically. Here’s how two schools cope.
Almost a decade ago, I wrote that “the greatest challenge facing America’s schools today [is] the enormous variation in the academic level of students coming into any given classroom.” Unlike plenty of what I’ve said over the years, this one has stood the test of time.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Personalized Learning, Teachers & School Leaders
Effective social studies interventions for students with emotional and behavioral disorders
Teaching students to engage with history and civics is important in a democratic society. The critical thinking and communication skills taught in social studies classes are all the more essential to students with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders (EBD) because they equip them to overcome difficulties interacting with and relating to peers.
