New data show that rates of adolescent mental health emergencies are still high but falling compared to 2021. —Education Week Eric Hanushek’s previous four decades of research suggested that there was no clear link between school funding and performance.
It being National Charter Schools Week, I thought I would look at the progress that we have made since last year’s celebration.
The number of English learners in charter schools has increased markedly in recent years, but our knowledge of how well charters serve these students hasn’t kept pace with that growth. That’s why we conducted our new study, "Charter Schools and English Learners in the Lone Star State." It finds, among other things, that compared to their traditional public school peers, English learners in Texas charters are more likely to graduate high school and enroll in college. They also earn more money in the post-college years.
This year’s state legislative sessions, now coming to a close, have yielded a blizzard of high-profile victories on school choice, from the enactment of universal education savings accounts (ESA) programs, to the expansion of private school choice policies to serve many more families, to fairer funding for charter schools.
When it comes to K–12 education policy, the post-Covid period has become, more than almost anything else, the era of school choice. This success has opened new avenues for its growth and confronted choice supporters—particularly Catholic school supporters—with an important decision.
While life is more normal now than it was two years ago, pandemic lockdowns and school building closures that once kept young people inside and online have likely altered behavior for the foreseeable future.
High-dosage tutoring is the most effective way to combat learning loss, and schools have the ESSER funds to pay for it. —Washington Post “Serious research on poverty must contend with basic facts.
Marshall S. (“Mike”) Smith passed away the other day at eighty-five after a long battle with cancer. He was a wonderful human being and deeply influential education thinker and leader, who will be much missed.
Editor’s note: This is an edition of “Advance,” a newsletter from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute written by Brandon Wright, our Editorial Director, and published every other week. Its purpose is to monitor the progress of gifted education in America, including legal and legislative developments, policy and leadership changes, emerging research, grassroots efforts, and more.
Aaargh. Here we go again. The new National Assessment civics and history results are as deplorable as they were predictable. Whether they’ll also serve as the action-forcer that we need is far from certain.
Since the return to in-person learning, schools have seen a surge in student misbehavior of many kinds, ranging from minor
A recent study finding dramatic boosts in reading achievement from a knowledge-building curriculum has come in for criticism, some of it well-taken. But the study should be seen as just one more piece of evidence casting serious doubt on standard literacy instruction.
Most American public school teachers are paid according to a fixed salary schedule that determines their income based only on their years of education and classroom experience.
American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten has politicized her union and inserted herself into America’s culture wars.
This April marks forty years since the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued its blockbuster report “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform.” The commission, which worked for eighteen months, was created in August 1981 by U.S. Secretary of Education Terrel Bell early in his tenure with President Ronald Reagan’s administration.
The culture war matters, it’s popular, and it’s inevitable, argues Buck. In fact, it matters a lot—as much if not more than the technocratic squabbles over testing metrics, data analysis, teacher accountability, charter policies, or pay scales. These policies adjust the dials and doohickies on the ship of state. The culture war is the rudder that determines its direction.
Note: On April 13, AEI’s Robert Pondiscio spoke at Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance’s Colloquium Series, responding to Dr. Danielle S.
How to select students for advanced or elite academic programs has long been controversial. Critics of “holistic” admissions policies argue they often turn to mush—or inject bias into the process. At the other extreme, a few programs use nothing more than a single assessment to determine placement.
Countless studies on education incorporate measures of socioeconomic status (SES). But this metric is, perhaps surprisingly, rather ill-defined and has incorporated many varying components since its inception in the early twentieth century.
“Altering how teachers are evaluated and paid remains a powerful lever for improving student outcomes.” —Martin R.
The National Commission on Excellence in Education’s release of a report titled “A Nation at Risk” in 1983 was a pivotal point in the history of American education.
There are many reasons to be skeptical of the universal ESA programs that are sweeping the nation, but they are worth rooting for anyway because they’ll likely lead traditional public schools to improve.
The movement to reconnect knowledge and virtue is not limited to classical schools that focus on primary and secondary education (K–12). Some institutions of higher education are also taking character education seriously, such as Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. In 2016, Wake Forest recruited Dr.
Editor’s note: This was first published in The 74. The education culture wars on issues like critical race theory and how to teach history create a false narrative and collective illusion on K–12 issues among Americans
Providing students with tutoring in addition to in-class learning time is an oft-prescribed remedy for both catching up students who are behind and accelerating students who are capable of even higher performance. Two common sticking points to providing that remedy are finding additional time in the day, week, or year for the intervention and finding enough qualified personnel.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) paints a bleak picture of student achievement in social studies. According to the most recent report from 2018, just 24 percent of eighth graders were proficient or advanced in civics.
