Displaying 1-30 of 238 results
Book
5.10.2022
Accountability & Testing

Assessing the Nation’s Report Card: Challenges and Choices for NAEP

Chester E. Finn, Jr.

How do we see whether achievement gaps between groups of students are widening or narrowing? How can we tell whether eighth graders in Missouri do better or worse in math than their peers in Michigan and Maine? We wouldn’t know these things or much else about K–12 achievement in America without a little-known but vital test, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a.k.a. “NAEP” or the “Nation’s Report Card.” Assessing the Nation’s Report Card: Challenges and Choices for NAEP, authored by veteran education participant/analyst Chester E. Finn, Jr., examines the history of NAEP, the issues and challenges that it faces today, and ways to strengthen and modernize it for the future.

Report
4.13.2022
Accountability & Testing

Imperfect Attendance: Toward a fairer measure of student absenteeism

Jing Liu, Ph.D.

The need to understand how schools can improve student attendance has never been greater. This study breaks new ground by examining high schools’ contributions to attendance—that is, their “attendance value-added.”

Book
3.21.2022
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction

Follow the Science to School: Evidence-based Practices for Elementary Education

Michael J. Petrilli, Kathleen Carroll, Barbara Davidson

Follow the Science to School: Evidence-based Practices for Elementary Education is published by John Catt Educational Press and is available for purchase from the John Catt Bookshop and Amazon.

Report
12.8.2021
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

America’s Best and Worst Metro Areas for School Quality

Thomas B. Fordham Institute

"America’s Best and Worst Metro Areas for School Quality" is the first analysis to use nationally comparative data to evaluate the effectiveness of large and mid-size metro areas on school quality. Use our interactive data tool to see how your metro area stacks up.

Report
8.11.2021
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

How to Sell SEL: Parents and the Politics of Social-Emotional Learning

Adam Tyner, Ph.D.

This report examines parents’ opinions on SEL and pitfalls in communicating about it. It finds overwhelming support for the essence of SEL and its place in schools, but differences by political party and challenges in getting the terminology right.

Report
6.23.2021
Standards

The State of State Standards for Civics and U.S. History in 2021

Jeremy A. Stern, Ph.D., Alison E. Brody, José A. Gregory, Stephen Griffith, Jonathan Pulvers

Is America a racist country? Or the greatest nation on earth? Such a divisive question leaves little room for the complexity, richness, and nuance of our country’s past and present. But it’s the sort of question that often seems to get asked in today’s polarized environment. Small wonder, then, that the tattered condition of civics and U.S. history education constitutes a national crisis.

Report
3.23.2021
Curriculum & Instruction, Standards, Teachers & School Leaders

The Acceleration Imperative: A Plan to Address Elementary Students’ Unfinished Learning in the Wake of Covid-19

In school districts and charter school networks nationwide, instructional leaders are developing plans to address the enormous challenges faced by their students, families, teachers, and staff over the past year. To help kick-start their planning process, we are proud to present The Acceleration Imperative, an open-source, evidence-based document created with input from dozens of current and former chief academic officers, scholars, and others with deep expertise and experience in high-performing, high-poverty elementary schools.

Report
3.10.2021
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Personalized Learning

The narrow path to do it right: Lessons from vaccine making for high-dosage tutoring

Michael Goldstein, Bowen Paulle

High-dosage tutoring is receiving a lot of buzz as a promising tool to address learning loss in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. But unlike vaccines, successful tutoring programs are challenging to scale with fidelity. In this paper, long-time educators Michael Goldstein and Bowen Paulle explain how leaders can smartly scale promising tutoring programs that can boost student outcomes.

Report
2.9.2021
School Finance, Charter Schools

Robbers or Victims? Charter Schools and District Finances

Mark Weber

Opponents of charters contend that they drain district coffers, while proponents argue that it is charters that are denied essential funding. Yet too often, the claims made by both sides of this debate have been based on assumptions rather than hard evidence.

Report
1.13.2021
Accountability & Testing

Bridging the Covid Divide: How States Can Measure Student Achievement Growth in the Absence of 2020 Test Scores

Ishtiaque Fazlul, Cory Koedel, Eric Parsons, Cheng Qian

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit the U.S. last spring, schools nationwide shut their doors and states cancelled annual standardized tests. Now federal and state policymakers are debating whether to cancel testing again in 2021. One factor they should consider is whether a two-year gap in testing will make it impossible to measure student-level achievement growth during this historic period.

Report
12.14.2020
Charter Schools, Teachers & School Leaders

Teacher Effectiveness and Improvement in Charter and Traditional Public Schools

Matthew P. Steinberg, Haisheng Yang

Study after study has found that new teachers tend to be less effective than educators with more experience. But despite having more junior staff, charter networks (referred to as CMOs) often outperform their district peers. So what’s their secret? To find out, this study explores how teacher effectiveness varies and evolves across traditional and charter public schools, as well as within the sector’s CMOs and standalone schools.

Report
8.25.2020
Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Schooling Covid-19: Lessons from leading charter networks from their transition to remote learning

Gregg Vanourek

Last spring, the Covid-19 pandemic upended routines for over 56 million students and challenged more than 3.7 million teachers in over 130,000 schools nationwide to continue educating kids in an online format. This transition to “virtual learning” was understandably trying for all educators, schools, and districts, but some managed to do far better than others.

Book
8.7.2020
School Finance, Governance

Getting the Most Bang for the Education Buck

Brandon L. Wright

We spend too much time talking about how much to spend on schools but not enough on how those dollars are spent. Covid-19 has made this situation worse, as schools confront massive, looming budget shortfalls and the challenges of remote learning and public health. That’s on top of familiar issues like pensions, special education, technology, and all the rest. This book offers a workable path through this maze.

Report
6.9.2020
Standards

The State of the Sunshine State's Standards: The Florida B.E.S.T. Edition

Solomon Friedberg, Tim Shanahan, Francis Fennell, Douglas Fisher, Roger Howe

A decade ago, states across the nation adopted the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) in an effort to raise the academic bar for their students. This has provoked countless political battles since then—including an especially intense one in Florida.

Report
5.19.2020
Career & Technical Education

What You Make Depends on Where You Live: College Earnings Across States and Metropolitan Areas

John V. Winters, Ph.D.

Yes, what you make depends on what you know and what credentials you carry. But it also depends on where you live. That's what we find in our new report by John V. Winters. The first-of-its-kind analysis compares mean earnings for full-time workers with different levels of education in all 50 states and D.C., over 100 metro areas, and rural America. Read it to learn more.

Book
2.24.2020
Governance

How to Educate an American: The Conservative Vision for Tomorrow's Schools

Michael J. Petrilli, Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Featuring essays by twenty leading conservative thinkers, and anchored in tradition yet looking towards tomorrow, this book should be read by anyone concerned with teaching future generations to preserve the country’s heritage, embody its universal ethic, and pursue its founding ideals.

Report
2.4.2020
Accountability & Testing

Great Expectations: The Impact of Rigorous Grading Practices on Student Achievement

Seth Gershenson

One indicator of teachers’ expectations is their approach to grading—specifically, whether they subject students to more or less rigorous grading practices. Unfortunately, “grade inflation” is pervasive in U.S. high schools, as evidenced by rising GPAs even as SAT scores and other measures of academic performance have held stable or fallen. The result is that a “good” grade is no longer a clear marker of knowledge and skills. This report examines to what extent teachers’ grading standards affect student success.

Report
12.10.2019
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

The Supplemental Curriculum Bazaar: Is What's Online Any Good?

Morgan Polikoff, Jennifer Dean

Nearly all teachers today report using the Internet to obtain instructional materials, and many of them do so quite often. And while several organizations now offer impartial reviews of full curriculum products, very little is known about the content and quality of supplemental instructional materials.

Report
9.26.2019
Charter Schools

Rising Tide: Charter School Market Share and Student Achievement

David Griffith

Plenty of studies have compared the progress of students in charter schools versus traditional public schools. And more than a dozen have examined the “competitive effects” of charters on neighboring district schools.

Book
9.17.2019
Curriculum & Instruction, High Achievers

Learning in the Fast Lane: The Past, Present, and Future of Advanced Placement

Chester E. Finn, Jr., Andrew Scanlan

Termed by the Washington Post’s Jay Mathews “the most comprehensive book on Advanced Placement, the most powerful educational tool in the country,” this book traces AP’s history from its mid-twentieth-century origins as a niche benefit for privileged students to its contemporary role as a vital springboard to college for high school students nationwide, including hundreds of thousands of poor and minority youngsters. It's a must-read for anyone with a stake in American K–12 education.

Book
9.10.2019
Charter Schools

How the Other Half Learns: Equality, Excellence, and the Battle Over School Choice

Robert Pondiscio

Five years ago, in an op-ed in the New York Daily News, Fordham senior fellow Robert Pondiscio looked at yet another round of jaw-dropping tests scores achieved by Eva Moskowitz’s network of Success Academy charter schools and urged educators and policymakers to sit up and take notice.

Report
8.27.2019
Accountability & Testing

End-of-Course Exams and Student Outcomes

Adam Tyner, Ph.D., Matthew Larsen

Beginning in the late 1990s, many states took it upon themselves to institute end-of-course exams (EOCs) at the high school level, tests specifically designed to assess students’ mastery of the content that various subject-matter courses covered. But was this testing policy good for students? Find out in our new report.

Report
7.30.2019
Accountability & Testing, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders

Discipline Reform through the Eyes of Teachers

David Griffith, Adam Tyner, Ph.D.

The debate over school discipline reform is one of the most polarized in all of education. Advocates for reform believe that suspensions are racially biased and put students in a “school-to-prison pipeline.” Opponents worry that softer discipline approaches will make classrooms unruly, impeding efforts to help all students learn and narrow achievement gaps.

Report
6.4.2019
Charter Schools, Teachers & School Leaders

Student-Teacher Race Match in Charter and Traditional Public Schools

There’s mounting evidence that, for children of color especially, having one or more teachers of the same race over the course of students’ educational careers seems to make a positive difference. But to what extent, if any, do the benefits of having a same-race teacher vary by type of school? Existing “race-match” studies fail to distinguish among the traditional district and charter school sectors. This study fills that gap and finds that the effects of having a same-race teacher appear stronger in charter schools than in the traditional district sector—and stronger still for nonwhite students.

How Aligned is CTE
Report
4.3.2019
Career & Technical Education

How Aligned is Career and Technical Education to Local Labor Markets?

The recent reauthorization of the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act—the principal federal education program supporting career and technical education (CTE)—expressly aims to “align workforce skills with labor market needs.” Our latest report examines whether students in high school CTE programs are more likely to take courses in high-demand and/or high-wage industries, both nationally and locally.

How Aligned is CTE
Report
3.14.2019
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders

Toward a Golden Age of Educational Practice

Michael J. Petrilli

In recent years, we have reached a homeostasis in education policy, characterized by clearer and fairer but lighter-touch accountability systems and the incremental growth of school choice options for families—but little appetite for big and bold new initiatives.

Report
11.29.2018
Accountability & Testing, ESSA, Curriculum & Instruction, Standards

Gotta Give 'Em Credit: State and District Variation in Credit Recovery Participation Rates

Adam Tyner, Ph.D., Nicholas Munyan-Penney

Credit recovery, or the practice of enabling high school students to retrieve credits from courses that they either failed or failed to complete, is at the crossroads of two big trends in education: the desire to move toward “competency based” education and a push to dramatically boost graduation rates.

Report
9.19.2018
Accountability & Testing

Grade Inflation in High Schools (2005–2016)

Although the vast majority of American parents believe their child is performing at or above grade level, in reality two-thirds of U.S. teenagers are ill-prepared for college when they leave high school.