Education Gadfly Show #797: Why debunked reading practices continue to spread
Contemporary education has become too technocratic and divorced from virtue. This is a disservice to students because it robs them of what a classical education provides: the tools students need to succeed, not just academically and professionally, but in the deep and abiding sense of being able to flourish as free and good human beings.
Two charter networks, Uplift Education and Distinctive Schools, have provided models for supporting social-emotional learning (SEL) that other schools should emulate.
It is not a controversial statement to say that the debate over critical race theory in schools has shed more heat than light. This is not surprising. When a relatively obscure and arcane academic field suddenly becomes a high-profile political football, hotly debated on cable news shoutfests, it is almost certainly because it has been reduced to bumper-sticker simplicity.
Gifted education has been a much-debated issue
Editor’s note: We're happy to introduce Jennifer Frey, who will be writing regularly for the Fordham Institute over the next year. She is an associate professor at the University of South Carolina, where she focuses on virtue ethics.
A story that became a flashpoint in national conversations around the effects of “CRT bans” is reaching its denouement: This past week, a hearing officer appointed to adjudicate the case ruled that the Sullivan County, Tennessee, school board was justified in
Among its many educational impacts, the pandemic has reenergized efforts to expand private school choice. States like Ohio, where it already existed, have expanded eligibility and increased funding.
Schools have been concerned with character formation and values since Plato sat with students under an olive tree. Today’s “social and emotional learning” is consistent with this age-old impulse. But in its form and function it can represent something different—and more worrisome—than its progenitors, especially when employed without full discussion of its priorities and methods.
Under federal law, states must assess students annually in reading and math in grades 3–8 and at least once during high school, as well as testing science once in elementary, middle, and high school.
During the first full school year after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, enrollment in U.S. public schools fell by about 1.1 million students, or 2 percent of prior K–12 enrollment.
Results of a recent survey published by Amazon’s Future Engineer offshoot show several disconnects between the interests, experiences, and aspirations of U.S. students in regard to computer science.
Whether due to the pandemic, political opportunism, popular demand, or a combination, education savings accounts (ESAs) are enjoying much attention and growth
Mayor de Blasio is axing New York City’s long-standing gifted education programs. He plans to replace them with something else, but his proposal is almost entirely wrong. Fortunately, Eric Adams, who’s almost certain to replace him in January, has a vision of gifted education that’s mostly right, and he’ll enter office in time to fix de Blasio’s blunders.
Do students have a right to a high-quality education? A proposed ballot initiative filed in California last Thursday says yes.
As one paper put it, there is a “paucity of robust research” on project-based learning. Yet in the ed-school world and in many journals and professional organizations, it’s often touted as a pedagogical gold standard.
The persistence of racial segregation between and within school districts has motivated some in the school choice community to develop diverse-by-design charters (DBDCs), which are defined as schools without a 70 percent majority of students of any race or ethnicity, plus 30 to 70 percent low-income pupils.
How do we know if a school district is doing one of its most basic jobs—teaching students to read? That’s one of the main questions the California Reading Coalition, which I helped organize earlier this year, set out to answer with the California Reading Report Card, released in September.
A recent Wall Street Journal article set off a pundit-palooza on the topic of the female advantage in higher education, with many suggesting that young men have “given up on college.” But American students who are academically well-prepared for college continue to matriculate and graduate. It’s just that many more of them are female. The reason for that starts in kindergarten.
With a new school year underway, parents, teachers, and children anxiously return to classrooms amidst an ongoing coronavirus pandemic. But this year, school board members, teachers, academics, politicians, and parents continue to argue over critical race theory and how to enact its version of equity.
Education news is pretty depressing these days. Last week’s feed included articles about cafeteria staffing shortages and supply chain concerns, reporting about declining enrollment, predictions about resignations due to vaccine mandates, findings on teacher stress, reporting about an uptick in student fights, and lots of documentation of demonization in adults’ battles over mask policy.
Last month, my colleagues Mike Petrilli and David Griffith had a conversation with Patrick Wolf, a leading school choice scholar at the University of Arkansas, about the impact of voucher programs on the Education Gadfly Show podcast.
On September 12, 1962, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the request of the New York Civil War Commission at the Centennial Celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Far too many high-achieving children are drifting through middle and high school. Despite their potential, they don’t end up taking AP exams, achieving high marks on their ACTs, or going to four-year colleges. This limits their ability to move up the social ladder, threatens U.S. economic competitiveness, and derails our aspirations for a more just society. We must stop buying into the false assumption that high-achieving kids will do fine on their own.
Covid-19 school shock disrupted our way of doing education, unbundling the familiar division of responsibilities among home, school, and community organizations. Nearly every parent of school-age children had to create from scratch a home learning environment using online technology and rebundling school services to meet their needs.
After more than eighteen months of pandemic-induced commotion to education, data continue to roll in regarding various negative impacts on young people.
Increasingly, teachers are not shy about expressing their views on charged racial and political views. This may be a symptom of a profound shift in our relationship with institutions and the role they play in our lives. Where institutions once functioned as molds of our character and behavior, they’re now platforms on which we stand to be seen. And this could be cratering our trust in them.
“As a broader mechanism for equity, [Advanced Placement] has fallen short, unable to overcome the powerful structural forces that disadvantage far too many students,” writes Anne Kim in a recent long-form article in Washington Monthly titled “AP’s Equity Face-Plant.” “If the ultimate goal
A recent study looks at the impact of
The growth in popularity of social and emotional learning (SEL) is bringing with it increased attention to and scrutiny of what exactly SEL means and questions about whether it is something more than just another educational fad or ideological movement.