What you may not know—but should—about the Nation’s Report Card
Download the webinar PowerPoint.
Download the webinar PowerPoint.
Like the cicadas now infesting the mid-Atlantic, debates over how to present American history and civics to our children come around with striking regularity. In the early 1990s, the focus was on proposed national standards for U.S. history, which the Senate eventually condemned with a vote of 99–1. A few years ago, the dust-up was over the Advanced Placement U.S. History course.
According to the Nation’s Report Card (NAEP), just one-third of U.S. fourth- and eighth-grade students can read proficiently. Among students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, it’s just one in five.
America’s schools have ceded significant ground to trendy nostrums and policy cure-alls that do little to adequately teach young people the skills and knowledge required to realize their full potential and emerge from school as fully-functioning citizens. The latest round of dire NAEP civics and U.S. history scores underscore our continuing failure on the citizenship front.
Learning in the Fast Lane: The Past, Present, and Future of Advanced Placement (Princeton, 2019), the new book by Chester Finn and Andrew Scanlan, tells the story of the Advanced Placement (AP) program, widely regarded as the gold standard for academic rigor in American high schools.
What would happen if we invested $1 billion or more in bold education R & D initiatives designed to generate fresh, evidence-backed solutions to some of education’s toughest challenges? On November 5, at 4:00 p.m. ET, online and in Washington, D.C., the Center for American Progress and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute held a a “Shark-Tank” style competition. Ten early-round finalists presented their “billion-dollar Moonshot ideas” to a panel of tough judges, all for a chance to win $10,000 and have their idea propelled to widespread attention and potential major investment.
The Fordham-Hoover “Education 20/20” speaker series continued with our penultimate event on May 1, as we brought you another awesome duo. Rod Paige opened by arguing that tomorrow’s school reform needs to focus not just on changing schools, but even more on boosting student effort. Then Pete Wehner made a forceful, principled case for reviving old-fashioned character education in America’s schools.
The Fordham-Hoover “Education 20/20” speaker series continued on April 11 with another star-studded double feature.
The provocative Fordham-Hoover “Education 20/20” speaker series resumes on March 26th with another star-studded duo.
The second half of our Education 20/20 speaker series begins on February 12th as we bring you another double header. Eliot Cohen will argue for civic education that promotes patriotic history, one that not only educates and informs but also inspires. Yuval Levin will make the case for reasserting the role of education in character formation.
Fordham’s Education 20/20 speaker series kicks off the New Year with a bang on January 9th as we bring you another double header.
The Education 20/20 speaker series resumes on December 11th with another all-star double-header. Ian Rowe will lead off by arguing for the inclusion of family structure in measures of student achievement. Then Michael Barone will explore the educational travails—past, present, and future—of gifted students and what might be done to ease the pain.
Our Education 20/20 speaker series continues with a double-header event. First up, Naomi Schaefer Riley discusses the limits of school choice. Then Jonah Goldberg argues that civics education need to reclaim the ideals of American democracy.
Join the Thomas B. Fordham Institute on November 8, as we present the findings of Fordham’s latest study, Grade Inflation in North Carolina’s High Schools, and a panel of experts discusses the causes and consequences of inflated grades and possible policy solutions