I support school choice. I ended my career as a teacher and administrator working in private choice and charter schools. School choice will almost certainly yield net benefits to American education.
The Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) at the City University of New York (CUNY) is a much-studied intervention designed to help low-income community college students overcome barriers to degree completion.
Public charter schools are one of the most enduring—and successful—educational innovations over the past three decades.
Free community college programs are often promoted as a way to expand access to higher education and to reduce student debt for those who attend.
While four-year college degrees are largely viewed as a direct path into career-ladder jobs (AI fears notwithstanding), two-year degrees and shorter-term certificates are seen as less of a sure thing.
The push for no-zero grading policies, which prohibit assigning zeros for class assignments or tests, began during a broader “
Dual enrollment (DE) programs allow students to take college courses for credit—usually at no cost—while still in high school. Students must pass the course in order to earn credit. Efforts to increase DE access mean more high schoolers than ever are taking college courses.
I’m going to be impatient and blunt: Nikole Hannah-Jones’s daughter did not fail to learn fractions because she and her classmates were Black. Her teacher did not repeatedly fail to show up to work because the school was segregated. Neither did her assignments go ungraded because affluent children attended school elsewhere.
For decades, teacher professional learning in middle and high school has prioritized one thing above all else: pedagogy.
A defining feature of charter schools is the oversight structure provided by the authorizer. It is an authorizer’s job to determine whether schools are fulfilling the terms of their charters across numerous areas, not least of which is student outcomes.
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) regularly publishes reports using results from NAEP testing to compare the proficiency standards that states set for their students.
The importance of childhood investments to the trajectory of life is commonly accepted, but less is known about the size and sources of disparities in these investments.
I was recently walking around Austin, Texas. And a block from the new W Hotel, I passed Alpha School, housed in what looked like a tech office. Outside was a sign reading “Kids crush academics in two hours, build life skills, and thrive,” under a big photo of the founder.
High school students report widespread screen distraction, AI misuse, and grading practices that make it easier to earn high marks without mastering the relevant material. A new Fordham survey suggests that we will only solve these problems by restoring the basic conditions for learning: attention, effort, honest work, and adults willing to hold adolescents to high expectations.
In early 2025, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) was largely dismantled.
“If you build it, they will come” makes a great tagline for a mythical baseball movie but a poor strategy for educational improvement. Markets are not magic and are shaped by external factors that encourage or discourage participation.
Approximately half of American adults read at a sixth-grade level or below, according to the Barbara Bush Foundation. The consequences of poor literacy skills are profound: higher unemployment rates, lower-paying work, and struggles with routine tasks such as reading prescriptions or bills.
New York City Schools piloted an external qualitative review (QR) in a subset of its schools for the first time in 2005, intended to expand the definition of school quality via a school inspection-type model and to broaden the scope of educational accountability.
Third-grade proficiency is one of the most consequential milestones in a child’s academic career. Around this time, students transition from learning foundational skills to using those skills to engage with more complex content.
For those of us who have long pushed for charter schools to receive fair funding, progress has been slow, uneven, and hard-won. That’s why we at the Thomas B.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called the CLT the nation’s new “gold standard.” USA Today’s blockbuster investigation, published today, suggests a more accurate label would be “boondoggle.” In Florida, the state that has done more than any other to
In the years since Fordham’s landmark 2012 study on teachers union strength, the education and policymaking landscapes have changed dramatically.
New federal test score data from the long-term trend (LTT) report reveal a remarkable finding: For the first time in the 50 years of the assessment, nine-year-old boys are now scoring equally with girls in reading.
A Crowded Table: Teacher Union Strength in 2026 shows what we have all seen transpire over the last several years, as the Janus decision, the post-Covid rise of right-wing parent advocacy grou
In Philadelphia, a young person leaving Launchpad Philly’s post-high school graduate training track is on pace to earn nearly $30,000 within nine months and $50,000 within one year. That far outpaces the roughly $12,500 a young Philadelphian with only a high school diploma typically earns.
Low-income children face many disadvantages that impede academic success. But how much do those disadvantages matter, and how early do their effects become visible?
Curriculum Associates CEO Kelly Sia recently defended her company’s flagship i-Ready platform to Fordham readers. The program, used by millions of students, has come under fire from teachers, parents, and students as part of an ed-tech backlash sweeping the nation.
In a recent Flypaper post, Dale Chu argues that the promise of a single assessment system doing multiple things well is “too good to be true.” He says that through-year assessments (TYA)—tests administered periodically throughout the school year that culminate in a summative score—are tryi
New York City’s Small Schools of Choice (SSC) program was one of a panoply of education reforms enacted in the early 2000s under then-mayor Michael Bloomberg and schools chief Joel Klein.
Throughout the first quarter of the 21st century, schools built up capacity to accommodate growing student populations, adding classroom space, teacher positions, and the many resources that go into educating a child. The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the build-up through the injection of giant sums of federal money to supplement state and local budgets.
