More than Overdue: Special Ed 2.0 - A conversation with Miriam Kurtzig Freedman
See the attached PDF for an unedited transcript of the event. What if every child in American schools had the equivalent of an IEP, i.e. we customized the education of every unique student?
Three Signs That a Proposed Charter School Is at Risk of Failing
Anna Nicotera, David A. StuitIt’s well established that some charter schools do far better than others at educating their students. This variability has profound implications for the children who attend those schools. Yet painful experience shows that rebooting or closing a low-performing school is a drawn-out and excruciating process.
A $20 Billion School Choice Tax Credit Program: Yes, No, Maybe, How So?
Since Donald Trump’s election and Betsy DeVos’s selection as Secretary of Education put private-school-choice programs in the national spotlight—after years of steady growth at the state level—advocates across Twitter and the blogosphere have been offering ideas on what a big push at the federal level might look like.
Leveraging ESSA to Support Quality-School Growth
Nelson Smith, Brandon L. WrightUnder the Every Student Succeeds Act, the federal School Improvement Grants program is gone, but the goal of school improvement remains. States must now use seven percent of their Title I allocation for these efforts, but are no longer constrained by a prescribed menu of intervention options.
The Right Tool for the Job: Improving Reading and Writing in the Classroom
Melody Arabo, Jonathan S. Budd, Shannon Garrison, Tabitha PachecoAlthough it’s been almost seven years since many states took the important step of elevating their academic standards by adopting the Common Core, teachers and administrators across the country still bemoan the lack of reliable information about which instructional materials are high-quality and best aligned to the new standards.
(No) Money in the Bank: Which Retirement Systems Penalize New Teachers?
A new teacher’s pension is supposed to be a perk. The truth is that for the majority of the nation’s new teachers, what they can anticipate in retirement benefits will be worth less than what they contributed to the system while they were in the classroom, even if they stay for decades.
Undue Process: Why Bad Teachers in Twenty-Five Diverse Districts Rarely Get Fired
Victoria McDougald, David GriffithCountless studies have demonstrated that teacher quality is the most important school-based determinant of student learning, and that removing ineffective teachers from the classroom could greatly benefit students.
High Stakes for High Schoolers: State Accountability in the Age of ESSA (Part II)
Michael J. Petrilli, David Griffith, Brandon L. WrightEleven weeks ago, in High Stakes for High Achievers: State Accountability in the Age of ESSA, the Fordham Institute reported that current K–8 accountability systems in most states give teachers scant reason to attend to the learning of high-achieving youngsters.
Charter Schools at the Crossroads: Predicaments, Paradoxes, Possibilities
Chester E. Finn, Jr., Bruno V. Manno, Brandon L. WrightOver the past quarter-century, charter schools have gone from an upstart education experiment to a prominent, promising, and disruptive innovation in K–12 education. Indeed, few observers present at the creation of the first charter schools could have predicted how rapidly this movement would spread or how thoroughly it would come to dominate the education-reform agenda.
Charter School Boards in the Nation's Capital
Juliet Squire, Allison Crean DavisTens of thousands of individuals across the United States volunteer their time, energy, and expertise as members of charter school boards. Yet as the charter sector has grown, we’ve learned remarkably little about these individuals who make key operational decisions about their schools and have legal and moral responsibilities for the education of children in their communities.
High Stakes for High Achievers: State Accountability in the Age of ESSA (Part I)
Michael J. Petrilli, David Griffith, Brandon L. Wright, Audrey KimNo Child Left Behind meant well, but it had a pernicious flaw: It created strong incentives for schools to focus all their energy on helping low-performing students get over a modest “proficiency” bar. Meanwhile, it ignored the educational needs of high achievers, who were likely to pass state reading and math tests regardless of what happened in the classroom.
Enrollment and Achievement in Ohio's Virtual Charter Schools
June Ahn, Ph.D.This Fordham study, conducted by learning technology researcher June Ahn from NYU, dives into one of the most promising—and contentious—issues in education today: virtual schools. What type of students choose them? Which online courses do students take? Do virtual schools lead to improved outcomes for kids?
Common Core Math in the K-8 Classroom: Results from a National Teacher Survey
Jennifer M. Bay-Williams, Ann Duffett, David GriffithIn Common Core Math in the K-8 Classroom: Results from a National Teacher Survey, Jennifer Bay Williams, Ann Duffett, and David Griffith take a close look at how educators are implementing the Common Core math standards in classrooms across the nation.
Career and Technical Education in High School: Does It Improve Student Outcomes?
Shaun M. DoughertyFordham’s latest study, by the University of Connecticut's Shaun M. Dougherty, uses data from Arkansas to explore whether students benefit from CTE coursework—and, more specifically, from focused sequences of CTE courses aligned to certain industries.
Education for Upward Mobility
Michael J. PetrilliIn Education for Upward Mobility, editor Michael J. Petrilli and more than a dozen leading scholars and policy analysts seek answers to a fundamental question: How can we help children born into poverty transcend their disadvantages and enter the middle class as adults? And in particular, what role can our schools play?
Evaluating the Content and Quality of Next Generation Assessments
Evaluating the Content and Quality of Next Generation Assessments examines previously unreleased items from three multi-state tests (ACT Aspire, PARCC, and Smarter Balanced) and one best-in-class state assessment, Massachusetts’ state exam (MCAS). The product of two years of work by the Thomas B.
America's Best (and Worst) Cities for School Choice
Priscilla Wohlstetter, Ph.D., Dara Zeehandelaar Shaw, Ph.D., David GriffithMore than twelve million American students exercise some form of school choice by going to a charter, magnet, or private school——instead of attending a traditional public school.
Is Detente Possible? District-charter school relations in four cities
Daniela Doyle, Christen Holly, Bryan C. HasselWhether you think the end game of the current “mixed economy” of district and charter schools should be an all-charter system (as in New Orleans) or a dual model (as in Washington D.C.), for the foreseeable future most cities are likely to continue with a blend of these two sectors. So we wanted to know: Can they peacefully co-exist? Can they do better than that?
Failing Our Brightest Kids: The Global Challenge of Educating High-Ability Students
Chester E. Finn, Jr., Brandon L. WrightIn Failing Our Brightest Kids, Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Brandon L. Wright argue that for decades, the United States has focused too little on preparing students to achieve at high levels.
Schools of Thought: A Taxonomy of American Education Governance
Dara Zeehandelaar Shaw, Ph.D., David GriffithQuestions of education governance are often considered moot by policymakers, who typically assume that the governance challenges plaguing their local schools are both universal and inevitable. Given the ubiquity of everything from local school boards to state superintendents, this seems to be a logical assumption.
Who Should Be in Charge When School Districts Go into the Red?
Dara Zeehandelaar Shaw, Ph.D., Victoria McDougald, Alyssa SchwenkSchool districts across the land are contending with rising education costs and constrained revenues. Yet state policies for assisting school districts in financial trouble are uneven and complex. Interventions are often haphazard, occur arbitrarily, and routinely place politics over sound economics.
Pre-K and Charter Schools: Where State Policies Create Barriers to Collaboration
Sara Mead, Ashley LiBetti MitchelIn Pre-K and Charter Schools: Where State Policies Create Barriers to Collaboration, authors Sara Mead and Ashley LiBetti Mitchel examine thirty-six jurisdictions that have both charter schools and state-funded pre-K programs to determine where charters can provide state-funded pre-K.
Redefining the School District in America
Nelson SmithIn Redefining the School District in America, Nelson Smith reexamines existing recovery school districts (RSDs)—entities in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Michigan charged with running and turning around their state’s worst schools—and assembles the most comprehensive catalog of similar initiatives underway and under consideration elsewhere.
Turnaround Districts: Lessons from Louisiana, Tennessee, and Michigan
So-called “turnaround school districts,” inspired by Louisiana’s Recovery School District and its near-clone in Tennessee, have been gathering steam, with policymakers calling for them in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and other states scattered from coast to coast.
Uncommonly Engaging? A Review of the EngageNY English Language Arts Common Core Curriculum
Elizabeth Haydel, Sheila Byrd CarmichaelThe need for standards-aligned curricula is the most cited Common Core challenge for states, districts, and schools. Yet five years into that implementation, teachers still report scrambling to find high-quality instructional materials. Despite publishers’ claims, there is a dearth of programs that are truly aligned to the demands of the Common Core for content and rigor.
Developing School Leaders: What the U.S. Can Learn from England's Model
Mark TonerThe myriad challenges facing school principals in the United States have been well documented, including limited opportunities for distributed leadership, inadequate training, and a lackluster pipeline for new leaders. Recently, the Fordham Institute teamed up with the London-based Education Foundation to seek a better understanding of England’s recent efforts to revamp school leadership.
Common Core and America's High-Achieving Students
Jonathan PluckerGadfly editorial by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Amber M. Northern
Education for Upward Mobility
At the Education for Upward Mobility conference, the Thomas B.