#925: We need more curriculum oversight, with Robert Pondiscio
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at Fordham and the American Enterprise Institute
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at Fordham and the American Enterprise Institute
The Texas Education Agency has spent roughly three years piloting a promising set of ELA materials, which became freely available late last month: a structured and sequenced knowledge- and vocabulary-rich K–5 curriculum. The Lone Star State seems to well and truly understand the ingredients of language proficiency.
Texas is back in education news. In late May, The 74 reported that the state education agency is proposing to supplement its existing English instruction with lessons that include Biblical references.
Poland has been the economic tiger of Europe in recent decades and one of the fastest growing economies in the world over that time. In 1990, when I taught high school in a rural Polish town located in Silesia between Poznan and Wroclaw, Poland’s GDP was less than Ukraine’s.
As excitement grows around tutoring as a strategy to combat learning loss, advocates have rightly been encouraged by the growing
Forty-five percent of U.S. public schools report feeling understaffed, 70 percent report that too few candidates are applying to teaching vacancies, and 86 percent report challenges hiring teachers in the 2023–24 school year.
Editor’s note: This was first published by Forbes.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, David Houston, an assistant professor at George Mason University, joins Mike
In his recent column “Let’s Talk About Bad Teachers,” Michael Petrilli fearlessly seized the third rail of U.S. K–12 education.
A child’s age is only a crude proxy for their academic readiness, yet it’s the primary means by which we group children in school. More age variety in classrooms could allow for greater academic consistency; grade retention and grade acceleration could help us get there. So too could a new idea from Petrilli: transitional kindergarten–5.
For thirty years, most education reformers have hung their hats on test-based accountability. Let's kick the tail of traditional public schools on standardized tests, as the thinking goes, and much else will take care of itself.
In April, Tim Daly penned an incisive three-part series on the trials and tribulations of teacher evaluation reforms.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Alex Spurrier, an associate partner at Bellwether, joins Mike and David to discuss w
The drumbeat for a more nuanced treatment of the Science of Reading got louder last week with a hard-hitting new Fordham Institute monograph, Think Again: Should Elementary Schools Teach Reading Comprehension? In it, author Daniel Buck chronicles the recent history
While 2023-24 had the usual ups and downs, on balance, American education seemed to bend towards normality: chronic absenteeism is improving, standardized testing is making a comeback, and phonics has finally won. There’s reason for optimism, but education reformers must be wary of making obvious, if appealing, errors.
One of the most persistent myths in K–12 education is the idea that high-poverty schools are near-universally, significantly underfunded. However, the truth is much more complicated. As it turns out, poor districts get more money in almost every state—and school spending has an incredibly weak relationship with school quality in the first place.
“Math and reading scores for 13-year-olds have hit their lowest scores in decades.” When the recent NAEP long-term trend results for 13-year-olds were published, the
In the effort to expand and diversify the teacher pipeline, states and districts have invested millions in actively recruiting and training teachers from local communities.
In 2010, Katharine Birbalsingh gave a speech at Britain’s Conservative Party conference, after which the school where she was employed asked her not to return. She eventually established her own school, which now regularly boasts the highest growth scores of any K–12 educational institution in England. Buck recently spoke with her about her school's success.
Editor’s note: This was first published on the author’s Substack, “citizen stewart,” which covers race, education, and democracy.
Editor’s note: This was first published by EdChoice.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Daniel Buck, Fordham’s policy and editorial associate, joins Mike and David
Tim Daly, a friend with whom I usually and enthusiastically agree, recently published a three-part series autopsying the teacher-evaluation reforms of the 2010’s.
According to national data, children from low-income families and students of color do not have the same access to advanced courses as their more advantaged peers.
In his new book, “The Parent Revolution,” school choice advocate Corey DeAngelis explains the notable plummet in the public’s trust of public education, especially in the past five years. By his telling, school choice is the answer to all that ails us. But he’s likely overselling its healing powers.
As we observe another National Charter School Week, one fact is clear: Families are voting with their feet for charter schools.
I’ve made no secret of my fervent belief that curriculum is the overlooked lever in education reform. Replacing the slapdash, incoherent, and under-nourishing mélange of materials to which the typical U.S.
In an effort to avoid prescriptive top-down mandates, the school accountability provisions in the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) allow states flexibility in determining what measures they’ll use to assess school quality, how much “weight” they carry, and over what time periods they’re calculated.
The issue of bad teachers is the proverbial Gordian Knot, and pulling on a single thread won’t untie it. If we want to get serious about ridding our schools of bad teachers, we must attack many difficult issues all at once—including low teacher pay, collective bargaining agreements, pension systems, and teacher evaluations. Alternatively, we might just focus on weeding out ineffective rookies.
It seems every day that yet another story hits the headlines about a school banning phones. Of course, the large majority of schools had nominal prohibitions previously, but they left enforcement up to teachers, which meant most students still slipped them out during class, at lunch, and in the halls.