Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of posts about envelope-pushing strategies that schools might embrace to address students’ learning loss in the wake of the pandemic.
Despite the burgeoning interest in “high-quality instructional materials” (HQIM) and energetic efforts in recent years to incentivize their use, “evidence is mixed on how much teachers actually use the materials that districts or schools adopt,” note the authors of a new research report from the RAND Corporation.
A few months ago, I wrote an article about Covid-19 learning loss and t
Among the many reasons equity advocates are celebrating new leadership in Washington is the hope that President Biden and Secretary of Education-designate Cardona will do more to help students with disabilities. These kids struggled mightily in school before the pandemic, and no group of students has suffered more from remote and hybrid learning.
Still reeling from the assault on the Capitol and the subsequent impeachment effort against Former President Trump, the education sphere’s attention has understandably returned to the need to resuscitate the teaching of civics and history. If schools did a better job of grounding our students in the principles of a free society and a basic understanding of U.S.
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of posts about envelope-pushing strategies schools might embrace to address students’ learning loss in the wake of the pandemic.
History, well taught, equips students with the ability to see through current crises. Civics, well taught, fosters in every heart an investment in democratic processes and a respect bordering on reverence for the rule of law.
As the world struggles through some of the darkest days of the pandemic, and more schools shift back to remote learning, we at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute are spending most of our time thinking about what comes next: educational recovery.
Nearly every day, social media plucks some poor, anonymous face in the crowd from obscurity and makes him famous. If you’re making New Year’s Resolutions this year, one should be never to be that guy.
Despite a stampede of interest in students’ social-emotional development (SED), gathering data on—and measuring the success of—such initiatives remain
Editor’s note: This is the final post in a five-part series about how to effectively scale-up high-dosage tutoring.
Study after study has found that urban charter schools, and non-profit charter networks in particular, tend to be more successful at boosting student achievement than traditional public schools in similar settings. But why?
Editor’s note: This is the fourth post in a five-part series about how to effectively scale-up high-dosage tutoring.
Editor’s note: This is the third post in a five-part series about how to effectively scale-up high-dosage tutoring.
I became a disciple of E.D. Hirsch, Jr. early in my teaching career for one simple reason. His theories about reading comprehension—and his alone—described precisely what I witnessed every day in my South Bronx fifth grade classroom: children who could “decode” (read the words on the page) but struggled to comprehend the words they read.
Editor’s note: This is the first post in a five-part series about how to effectively scale-up high-dosage tutoring.
In part one of this two-part essay, published last week, I reflected on Clare Basil’s “definitional” challenge to the growth of classical schools—schools that take “a unifying approach to intellectual and moral formation by developing the integrity of mind and heart,”
Here in Fordham’s pages, I’ve previously written about the challenge of Covid-19 learning losses at the macro level. In this article, I focus on the micro level.
For those of us who still believe that results-based school accountability is an essential part of the education renewal that America sorely needs, not many things are looking great this week.
Clare Basil recently shared some thoughtful observations about the growth of K–12 classical schools, schools that take “a unifying approach to intellectual and moral formation by developing the integrity of mind and heart”—a quote Basil borrows from the Institute for Classical Educat
At the tail end of a recent symposium titled “Why children can’t read—and what we can do about it” hosted by American Enterprise Institute, Margaret Goldberg, a California first grade teacher and founder of the
A perennial complaint about holding students accountable through grades and test scores is that these mechanisms are biased against already disadva
I knew something was wrong when, during what was supposed to be a full day of remote learning, my thirteen-year-old son announced at 9:30 a.m. that he was free until 11:27 a.m., and then plopped onto the couch and flipped on the television.
Education wasn’t explicitly on the national ballot in 2020, but education is always on the ballot, even when you don’t see it. Now that the election is behind us, education reformers can focus again on states and communities, where most of the important decisions about K–12 education get made.
As we previously saw at the 4th grade and 8th grade levels, the just-released 2019 12 grade NAEP results were mostly flat or down. But we already knew from the 2015 results that this cohort of students entered high school performing below their older peers.
As our country grapples with racial injustice, there are persistent calls to diversify elite institutions at all levels, from corporate and foundation boards to law schools and medical schools to undergraduate programs. All good.
Decades before “equity” became a buzzword in education, E. D. Hirsch, Jr. had his finger on what the word actually means: equal access for all children to the knowledge and verbal proficiency that makes full participation in American life possible.
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.
