Look beyond test scores to gauge the impact of teacher performance pay
Most American public school teachers are paid according to a fixed salary schedule that determines their income based only on their years of education and classroom experience.
Most American public school teachers are paid according to a fixed salary schedule that determines their income based only on their years of education and classroom experience.
This April marks forty years since the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued its blockbuster report “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform.” The commission, which worked for eighteen months, was created in August 1981 by U.S. Secretary of Education Terrel Bell early in his tenure with President Ronald Reagan’s administration.
How to select students for advanced or elite academic programs has long been controversial. Critics of “holistic” admissions policies argue they often turn to mush—or inject bias into the process. At the other extreme, a few programs use nothing more than a single assessment to determine placement.
Countless studies on education incorporate measures of socioeconomic status (SES). But this metric is, perhaps surprisingly, rather ill-defined and has incorporated many varying components since its inception in the early twentieth century.
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.
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.
When Tennessee House Republicans expelled, albeit briefly, two young, Black Democratic lawmakers late last week, it raised a number of unsettling questions—not only about the contours of our politics, but also about the future of educat
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.
The ongoing debate over when students shoul
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.
In 2022, seventeen states mandated that schools hold back students who aren’t meeting reading standards by the end of third grade, and eight others allowed it.
Despite the expansion of computer-based testing in schools over the last decade—and ongoing concerns about negative impacts
As school accountability systems reset following pandemic disruptions, an opportunity arises to improve their accuracy and make sure the intended responses to data resulting from them are properly tuned. A new study from the U.S.
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.
In some circles, education research has a bad reputation.
Districts that lose students to charter schools can and ultimately will adjust their behavior. And indeed, recent research implies that, while charters marginally reduce districts’ total revenues per pupil, they also make them more efficient. The challenge for policymakers is managing whatever transition costs may be associated with moving to a more choice-based system in a way that is fair to students and taxpayers.
One way education systems have tried to raise the performance of Black and Brown children is by matching students with teachers of the same 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.
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.
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.
Once inside, it doesn’t take long to soak up the climate of a school. A simple walk down the hallway can give you clues. Is it clean? Are the bulletin boards up to date? Can you hear the energetic buzz of learning versus the cacophony of bad behavior? Do students and teachers greet you with a smile or a cold shoulder?
The latest report from UVA’s Partnership for Leaders in Education is breathlessly upbeat about the opportunities for radical, disruptive changes in K–12 education.
In recent years, research on the relationship between content knowledge and reading a
Recently, Jo Boaler—a Stanford professor and one of the country’s foremost scholars of mathematics—took to the Hechinger Report to write about pandemic learning loss
School transportation problems have been big news
Mississippi’s model for improving early literacy has been a standout since 2019, based on its nation-leading achievement growth on the fourth grade NAEP reading test.
The claim that the SAT and ACT drive inequities in higher education feeds the movement against standardized testing and has been at the heart of successful court cases, but this new brief argues that, whether colleges decide to go “test optional” or not, the implications for equity are actually minimal. Read more.
In an effort to expand educational opportunity, several large urban school districts—including Boston, Chicago, New York City,
Recent national test data paint an alarming picture of middle school math achievement post-Covid, with eighth grade math scores on the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) having the largest decrease of any other subject or grade.
Much of the conventional wisdom in education policy is sacrosanct, circulated so long that it is no longer up for debate. From firm beliefs about school funding to assumptions about what drives unequal educational outcomes, our field is rife with outdated ideas long overdue for updates.