Education’s “CRIKT” is “CUSS”
With school reform seemingly stuck in reverse, helpful hints on the path forward might lie beyond education’s boundaries.
With school reform seemingly stuck in reverse, helpful hints on the path forward might lie beyond education’s boundaries.
It’s a bit of an education cliché to say “every teacher is a literacy teacher.” Since background knowledge is a fundamental building block of language proficiency, it’s technically true: A teacher in any subject can’t help but be a literacy teacher, even if the effects are diffuse.
Flipped classroom in K–12 and higher education have been popular for years.
Imagine that you’re a sixth-grade math teacher. It’s the first day of school, and the vast majority of your students arrived multiple years behind where they should be. Your job is to teach them concepts such as understanding percentages and dividing fractions.
Shawn Hardnett knows education. And he knows schools. And after working in public education for twenty-five years and visiting upwards of two hundred schools, one truth became impossible for him to ignore: A staggeringly low number of black boys are going to college.
American K–12 education is awash in reforms, nostrums, interventions, silver bullets, pilot programs, snake oil peddlers, advocates, and crusaders, not to mention innumerable private foundations that occasionally emerge from their endless cycles of strategic planning to unload their latest brainstorms upon the land. Yet when subjected to close scrutiny, not much actually “works.” The six-decade old Advanced Placement program is a rare and welcome exception.
The latest Education Next poll asked respondents whether they support ability grouping, whereby students take classes with peers at similar academic achievement levels, and for middle school the majority’s answer was no.
Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of posts looking at how two school networks—Rocketship Public Schools and Wildflower Schools—enable their students to meet standards at their own pace.
Charters schools are often criticized for not enrolling enough or not adequately serving special student populations, particularly students with special needs. A new study by Tufts University’s Elizabeth Setren evaluates this claim with a unique dataset in Boston.
A new report by Ulrich Boser and The Learning Agency investigates what K–12 educators know—or mistakenly believe—about effective learning strategies and where they obtain information about learning research.
Today, the Center for American Progress and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute announced the selection of ten finalists in its joint “Moonshot for Kids” contest.
In the last month, two reports have renewed questions about the current direction of states’ high school assessments.
School closures hurt. While they are relatively uncommon nationwide, they are sometimes unavoidable—and they’re always painful, especially for the students and families who are displaced and who rarely see any educational benefit as a result.
Much of the initial response to Robert’s new book, "How The Other Half Learns," has focused on the winnowing effects of Success Academy’s enrollment process, which ensures that the children of only the most committed parents enroll and persist. But that’s just the start of the story. You have to look at what parent buy-in actually buys: a school culture that drives student achievement, and which can only be achieved when parents are active participants, not unwilling conscripts.
What if you were told that elementary schools in the United States are teaching children to be poor readers?
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of posts looking at how two school networks—Rocketship Public Schools and Wildflower Schools—enable their students to master standards at their own pace. See the first post here.
A new study by Matt S. Giani, Paul Attewell, and David Walling uses unemployment insurance data from 2015 to estimate the effect of completing some college on labor market outcomes of more than 200,000 Texas students who graduated high school in in the year 2000.
Bellwether Education Partners, long interested in the improvement of school transportation systems, released no less than three papers on the topic this summer.
This essay, which first appeared on Marc’s blog at the National Center on Education and the Economy, illumines the problems addressed by The Moonshot for Kids project, a joint initiative of the Fordham Institute and the Center for America
A new study released by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute looks at end-of-course exams (EOCs) and their relationship with high school graduation rates and college entrance exam scores.
As part of a national war against school choice, the California teachers union is pouring more than a million dollars a month into anti-charter legislative efforts. Unfortunately, a new “compromise” bill crafted by Governor Gavin Newsom whose language was released this week indicates the union is about to get a big return on its investment. Caprice Young, a Fordham Institute trustee and a leading figure in the state’s charter sector, explains how this painful moment came about—and what it means for California charter schools going forward.
Almost a decade ago, I wrote that “the greatest challenge facing America’s schools today [is] the enormous variation in the academic level of students coming into any given classroom.” Unlike plenty of what I’ve said over the years, this one has stood the test of time.
Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Tom Wolf garnered headlines recently when he announced vague plans for taking funding away from the state’s public charter schools.
A recent report by Eugene Judson, Nicole Bowers, and Kristi Glassmeyer investigates what classroom mechanisms compel students to enroll in Advanced Placement (AP) science and math courses and to complete their associated exams—and how that differs between low- and high-income schools.
Teaching students to engage with history and civics is important in a democratic society. The critical thinking and communication skills taught in social studies classes are all the more essential to students with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders (EBD) because they equip them to overcome difficulties interacting with and relating to peers.
Summer ’19 is showing its age: My daughter recently returned to school, bright yellow buses are canvassing my neighborhood again, and Pumpkin Spice Latte is back.
Very little previous research has looked at end-of-course exams. Our new study on their relationship to student outcomes helps remedy that. We learned much that’s worth knowing and sharing. Probably most important: EOCs, properly deployed, have positive academic benefits and do so without causing kids to drop out or graduation rates to falter.
Editor’s note: This is the final post in a series looking at whether and how the nation’s schools have improved over the past quarter-century or so (see the others here,
A dozen long years ago, when people were just beginning to take serious stock of what good and not-so-good was emerging from 2002’s enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), we at Fordham, in league with the Northwest Evaluation Association (NWEA), issued a 200-plus page analysis of the “proficiency” standards that states had by then been required to set and test for.
A new study from Georgetown University reaffirmed an uncomfortable but familiar finding: Socioeconomic status has a significant effect on students’ long-term outcomes, regardless of their academic performance in kindergarten or the quality of the schools they attend in K–12.