The Covid-19 pandemic has run roughshod over so much of our education system, closing schools, sending students home to try to learn remotely, and obliterating last year’s summative state tests.
Most young children are surrounded by cell phones, tablets, and computers, both for personal use and, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, for school. Studies show that extensive technology use can have negative effects on children’s development and academic achievement, but little research exists to show which children are most likely to become frequent users of technology.
Editor’s note: This is the first post in a five-part series about how to effectively scale-up high-dosage tutoring.
A recent study from Brown University’s Matthew A. Kraft and John P. Papay and Harvard’s Olivia L. Chi uses nine years of administrative data from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina to examine teacher improvement through the lens of principal evaluations.
Before the coming of the pandemic, pre-K was a hot topic.
After the release of a new study I co-authored for the Thomas B.
Proponents of test-based accountability generally believe that robust systems—those that set high bars for achieving success, generate copious and transparent data, and impose substantive awards or consequences based on progress (or lack thereof)—are enough to boost student achievement. Another school of thought posits that more funding to schools does likewise.
If America is serious about wanting kids to become better readers, our elementary schools need to spend more time teaching social studies rather than doubling-down on “reading comprehension.” This may seem counterintuitive, but it’s the key takeaway from our new study. It’s also especially important for girls and those from lower-income and/or non-English-speaking homes.
A new study published last week by Fordham, Social Studies Instruction and Reading Comprehension: Evidence from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, suggests that to become better readers, elementary students should spend more time on social studies.
Ohio legislators recently introduced Senate Bill 358, which proposes to cancel all state testing scheduled for spring 2021. The provision calling for the cancellation of state exams would only go into effect if the state receives an assessment waiver from the U.S.
Michael Petrilli has written that, “when it comes to education, conservatives should stand for excellence.” So should liberals, and I am a longtime activist on the Democrats’ left wing.
The Covid-19 pandemic has caused plenty of problems in education, but a recently published study offers a sliver of good news for schools that—despite recent budget constraints—may soon find themselves in need of additional teachers to make social distancing feasible
Equity need not be pitted against excellence. But let’s not pretend there are no trade-offs. The two are in tension, if not actual conflict, in many matters of policy and practice. We can assume that progressives will always take the “equity” side. So if conservatives don’t make excellence a priority—be it in matters organizational, academic, or related to extracurricular activities and other nonacademic pursuits—nobody will.
Perhaps it is only when we lose something that we realize its true value. A recent study by Matthew Kraft and Manuel Monti-Nussbaum finds that in-person teaching time in the classroom—now a precious commodity that many students and teachers won’t experience again for a while—was not properly safeguarded when we had it.
Between learning loss from an interrupted spring semester and new pandemic-related financial struggles that families are facing, many students are canceling, delaying, or changing their plans to enroll in higher education.
In the Center for Reinventing Public Education’s latest report, I was shocked to read that, “less than a third of reviewed district reopening plans reference intervention strategies to help targeted students make up learning they may have lost during spring or summer.”
The Covid-19 pandemic has further exposed the inequities that have long existed in K–12 education system.
David Steiner:
David Brooks has long been a stalwart supporter of education reform, both the choice-and-charters flavor and the testing-and-accountability variety.
As I noted in a recent post, attitudes toward advanced education are cyclical. From gifted education to talent development programs, from honors classes to AP, we have experienced a largely positive stretch of media attention and state-level policy gains.
As national unrest builds along with the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others at the hands of police officers, people worldwide are responding with marches, protests, critical reflection, and grief. Right now, the Black Lives Matter movement rages on.
The start of a new school year is always filled with challenges. New teachers, new classes, and new expectations can be difficult for both teachers and students. But what if teachers and students haven’t been in school for six months or more? How can schools try and prepare to get back to a sense of normalcy after all of this?
In dozens of fields, federally-supported research and development translates into new ideas, technologies, and actions. Why not in education, particularly as the Covid-19 crisis makes it abundantly clear that our educational systems are severely lacking innovative technologies that could have improved the resiliency and flexibility of our classrooms and facilitated a nationwide shift to remote instruction?
The idea that all postsecondary education on average is good is misleading. The truth is, there’s significant variation in which academic degrees bring workers the most value, and why they do.
1. Problems with models Nobel Physicist Richard Feynman wrote about models: [Physicists have] learned to realize that whether they like a theory or they don’t like a theory is not the essential question.
The COVID-19 pandemic and its economic fallout has yielded yet another cautionary tale about the perils of entering the workforce with nothing but a high school diploma. But that doesn’t mean that everyone needs a four-year college degree, or that we should build our high schools around that singular mission. In many American cities, workers with associate degrees earn middle-class wages.
In January, we had the pleasure of featuring Matthew Steinberg, associate professor of education policy at George Mason University, on the Education Gadfly Show podcast. This episode was the second installment of our Research Deep Dive series, and our big topic of the day was school discipline reform.
Late last month, a remarkable article appeared in AJPM, the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, cautioning that a person’s ACE score is a “relatively crude measure of cumulative childhood stress exposure that can vary widely from person to person.” ACE stands for “Adverse Childhood Experience”; your “A
Three separate analyses were published last week on how the coronavirus might affect children’s learning. Echoing a piece I recently wrote, they all conclude that the current school closures could have a devastating impact on student achievement.
Interesting question. Before I answer, let me ask one: What keeps Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, up at night? You know Amazon, the trillion-dollar corporation that delivers something like a five billion packages a year. I’m at a professional meeting. The chair asks what “levers” we have for improving reading achievement in the U.S.
