Evidence-Based Learning

Displaying 511-540 of 837 results
Commentary
12.8.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance

Is military enlistment a pathway to upward mobility?

Jeff Murray

Of the three main postsecondary pathways for American high school graduates—college enrollment, job employment, and military enlistment—the last is arguably least studied in terms of outcomes for those who follow it. A team of analysts led by West Point’s Kyle Greenberg helps fill the void with newly-published research drawing on thirty years of data.

Commentary
12.8.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, School Finance, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

How some states are fixing problems with early childhood education

William Rost

A FutureEd report released earlier this year analyzes the problems facing early childhood education offerings across the country and how some states have tackled them.

Commentary
12.6.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

The case for gifted education

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
12.1.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Career & Technical Education, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

How rethinking industry-recognized credentials could boost student success

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D.

Early in my career, I taught high school in North Carolina. One of the coolest things we did was partner annually with the local Habitat for Humanity team. Each year, students in my school’s construction-trades classes built a modular home from the ground up, doing the masonry, carpentry, electrical work, plumbing—all of it.

Commentary
12.1.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

The noose tightens around failed reading programs in schools

Robert Pondiscio

There was a remarkable moment near the end of last week’s ExcelinEd conference in Salt Lake City—one that I never would have thought possible and might have scoffed had someone predicted it, even a few short years ago.

Commentary
12.1.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Advanced Education

A curricular trial (and error) to develop giftedness

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D.

Schools don’t typically begin the process of formally identifying students to receive gifted and talented (GT) services until third grade. What if educators started developing in earnest a child’s innate abilities before then?

Commentary
11.22.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Career & Technical Education, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

The case for career and technical education

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D., Jeanette Luna

With rising college costs and sky-high college dropout rates—almost one-third of American undergraduates quit before completing their degree—young people are lookin

Commentary
11.17.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

With affirmative action before the Supreme Court, here’s the state of diversity among high achievers

Michael J. Petrilli

America’s high-achieving students in our elementary and secondary schools are more racially diverse today than two decades ago. But Black high achievers in particular have made only incremental gains. Given affirmative action's original purpose, such trends are more than a little disappointing.

Commentary
11.10.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Why homework matters

Eva Moskowitz

Homework is the perennial bogeyman of K–12 education. In any given year, you’ll find people arguing that students, especially in elementary school, should have far less homework—or none at all. Eva Moskowitz, the founder and CEO of Success Academy charter schools, has the opposite opinion. She’s been running schools for sixteen years, and she’s only become more convinced that homework is not only necessary, but also a linchpin to effective K–12 education.

Commentary
11.10.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Impacts of a content-rich literacy intervention

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D.

Teaching young children to read fluently by the end of third grade is fast becoming a national priorit

Commentary
11.10.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

School choice and parental compromise

Jeff Murray

What parents are looking for in an ideal school choice scenario is often very different from what they settle for in the real world. Cost, distance, academic quality, safety, extracurricular options, and a host of other factors are all at play, meaning trade-offs are unavoidable. Recently-published research findings try to capture the matrix of compromises being made.

Commentary
11.8.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

The future of exam schools

Hilde Kahn

Editor’s note: This essay was part of an edition of “Advance,” a newsletter from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute that is 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
11.4.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

High expectations in the classroom: When the unlikely becomes the possible

Stuart Kime

For any teacher, administrator, or policymaker who wants to make strong choices that are likely to benefit their students’ outcomes, Seth Gershenson’s recently-published Fordham Institute report on “the power of expectations in district and

Commentary
11.4.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Governors should stop spinning NAEP results and start proposing solutions

Marc Porter Magee, Ned Stanley

“In light of this barometer of our kids’ success, there’s no time to waste to catch our kids up. We must continue to pour on the gas in our efforts,” Arizona Governor Doug Ducey said last Tuesday in response to the NAEP results.

Commentary
11.3.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Lowering expectations for students isn’t the answer to pandemic learning loss

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D., David Griffith, Ph.D.

Fordham’s new study, “The Power of Expectations in District and Charter Schools,” seeks to examine the role that high expectations should play in our nation’s academic recovery and supply deeper understanding of whether and how such expectations operate in the traditional public, charter, and private school sectors. It finds, among other things, that teacher expectations have a positive impact on long-run outcomes and that expectations tend to be higher in charter schools.

Commentary
11.3.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Governance

How federal charter school grants help marginalized students

Tressa Pankovits

It makes good sense for the federal government to provide grants to high-quality public charter schools seeking to open or expand. That’s the gist of a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released last month.

Commentary
10.27.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Charter schools complicate the narrative on Covid shutdowns and learning loss

Michael J. Petrilli

This week’s news of sharp declines on the National Assessment of Educational Progress gave partisans yet another chance to relitigate the debate over keeping schools closed for in-person learning for much or all of the 2020–21 school year. We conservatives are eager to identify the teachers unions as the primary culprits, and we’re not wrong. But there is one complication we should acknowledge: the curious case of urban charter schools.

Commentary
10.27.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

Determining the factors that lead to kindergarten ability group placement

Amber M. Northern, Ph.D.

Ability grouping—arranging students in a classroom into smaller learning groups based on their aptitude in a given subject—is a common practice among teachers as early as kindergarten.

Commentary
10.25.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders

High-achieving middle schoolers have suffered devastating math losses, finds NAEP

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
10.20.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Must we battle over civics education?

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

In a way, the battles we’ve seen in recent years over what to teach schoolkids in civics class resemble the war in Ukraine: They’re wholly unnecessary—and may be entirely the work of aggressors.

Commentary
10.20.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, School Finance, Governance

Will pandemic learning loss cost $700 billion to fix?

Nat Malkus

A new study released this month by Kenneth Shores and Matthew Steinberg tackles the question of whether federal pandemic relief for public schools was provided in the right way and in the right amount.

Commentary
10.13.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

The impact of teacher recruiting efforts on student achievement

Jeff Murray

Everyone knows that teachers are the most important in-school factor affecting student achievement, so getting the best ones in front of the neediest students is critical.

Commentary
10.6.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Governance

Why urban charters outperform traditional public schools

Michael J. Petrilli, David Griffith, Ph.D.

High-quality studies continue to find that urban charter schools boost achievement and other outcomes by more than their traditional-public-school peers—an advantage that has only grown larger as the charter sector has expanded and matured. Where the research literature is less clear is why urban charter schools consistently, and increasingly, outperform district schools. Still, it does offer some hints and plausible hypotheses.

Commentary
10.6.2022
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Instructional time lost to Covid will likely mean persistent and widening gaps in literacy

Robert Pondiscio

An analysis in the New York Times last month cheerily assured readers that Covid-related learning losses “look real but sub-catastrophic.” The damage also appears “to not be permanent, with students recovering at least some ground already,” opined David Wallace-Wells, a columnist for the NYT Magazi