Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Liberty and civic education
Editor’s note: This was first published by The Liberty Fund.
Topics
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Do schools provide equal value to all their students?
Previous literature on school quality and teacher quality largely assumes that good schools and good teachers are beneficial for all enrolled children, which means that a school’s “value added” is typically calculated as the average effect on students.
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What we're reading this week: November 16, 2023
Preferring half measures, states must go all-in for universal education savings accounts if school choice is to truly revolutionize education. —Roland Fryer, Wall Street Journal School vouchers fail to create the conditions necessary for effective markets to function.
Commentary
An overlooked application for AI: The city as a Montessori shelf
Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2023 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to answer this question: “How can we harness the power but mitigate the risks of artificial intelligence in our schools?”
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Reimagined: AI can be a catalyst for a more learner-centered system of education, if done right
Read the winning entry in 2023's Wonkathon, which asked contributors to answer this question: “How can we harness the power but mitigate the risks of artificial intelligence in our schools?”
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How we can use AI to increase access and equity in science education
Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2023 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to answer this question: “How can we harness the power but mitigate the risks of artificial intelligence in our schools?”
Commentary
Robot teachers
Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2023 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to answer this question: “How can we harness the power but mitigate the risks of artificial intelligence in our schools?”
Commentary
School Finance, Career & Technical Education, Governance
Apprenticeships are the new learning campus
College for all has been the goal of K–12 schools for at least twenty-five years. This has meant that America’s schools typically do not provide young people with work experience. This experience gap has young people leaving high school with little understanding of work and practical pathways to jobs and careers.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Grade inflation is locking in learning loss, part 1
Editor's note: This was first published on the author's Substack, The Education Daly.
Commentary
Why AI doesn’t worry me in the classroom, and why it does
Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2023 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to answer this question: “How can we harness the power but mitigate the risks of artificial intelligence in our schools?”
Commentary
Using artificial intelligence to measure the effectiveness of professional learning
Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2023 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to answer this question: “How can we harness the power but mitigate the risks of artificial intelligence in our schools?”
Commentary
Accountability will be the bedrock of AI in education
Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2023 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to answer this question: “How can we harness the power but mitigate the risks of artificial intelligence in our schools?”
Commentary
Transformative for the motivated and mere meh for the unmotivated: How AI will and won’t affect learners
Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2023 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to answer this question: “How can we harness the power but mitigate the risks of artificial intelligence in our schools?”
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
School choice isn’t killing traditional public schools. It’s making them better.
The impact of school choice on traditional school districts, what scholars call its “competitive effects,” is an area in which there is much high-quality research. A new book critical of choice fails to wrestle with this fact.
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Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Schools aren’t up to the task of teaching students about the Israel-Hamas War
Campus radicalism is easy to spot—and condemn.
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Governance
State education departments are cheerleading mediocrity
Post-pandemic learning loss is a lot like the national deficit. It is huge, it is exacerbated by political divisions, and nothing that’s currently being done about it will come close to solving the problem.
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Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Standards, Teachers & School Leaders
Grading standards and student effort: Short-run versus long-run effects
A simple observation: In the U.S., high school graduation rates have increased while other measures of academic achievement—from college entrance exam scores to high school
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Commentary
What we're reading this week: November 9, 2023
Some schools and districts are trying to better align college credits earned in high school with the potential majors of their students.
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Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders
How Washington State passed a universal-screening law: An interview with Austina De Bonte
Washington schools must now screen every elementary student for advanced education services, thanks to a law
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Smartphones and social media are leading to depression and anxiety for our students. Are they depressing test scores, too?
Smartphones and social media are likely at least partly to blame for the teenage mental health epidemic that started around 2013. Is it possible that phones and social media might also be behind the plateauing and decline of student achievement that we’ve seen in America, also starting around 2013?
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Governance
A new paper fails to prove that accountability impedes innovation in charter schools
Welcome to the latest installment of the Regulation Wars, a long-running family quarrel that centers on the perceived tensions between two of the charter school movement’s founding principles: innovation and execution (or, if you prefer, autonomy and accountability).
Commentary
Governance
Where do the Republican candidates stand on education?
Maybe it’s premature for an election that’s still a year away, and perhaps it’s archaic to expect to find any serious discussion of issues and policies in candidates’ campaign websites. Old-fashioned plodder that I am, however, I went foraging on those websites to see what I could find about their policy positions on education.
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Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction
The effects of a virtual literacy-tutoring program
Schools across America continue struggling to help their students catch up following unprecedented learning losses resulting from pandemic school closures beginning in March 2020. It is vital—both to address current needs and to stash away for future use—to determine which methods work to boost student achievement.
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What we're reading this week: November 2, 2023
Inequalities in access and questions about its utility make calculus one of the most controversial courses in high school. —Education Week Homeschooling is America’s fastest growing form of education.
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Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Bias in AI is a real problem
Hysteria over students cheating via ChatGPT and other generative AI applications is so last year. This season’s hyperventilation-initiator is the potential for bias in AI. And well, there’s actually a lot to be worried about.
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
What the Defense Department can teach us about schooling
The New York Times recently covered the extraordinary academic achievement of Department of Defense schools, noting several factors that contribute to their success. But one important contributor—common values—was not mentioned.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Teachers & School Leaders
Shake it up or mess it up: The impact of principal transitions on school quality in New York City
Data indicate that, nationwide, roughly 20 percent of schools change principals in any given year, and that urban schools see a larger share of such changes.
