Commentary
What we're reading this week: October 28, 2021
On March 2020, Massachusetts issued a scathing review of Boston’s public school system. With problems worsened by pandemic closures, can the district reform itself?
Topics
Commentary
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Declining NAEP scores are flashing red lights for the Covid generation
Last week brought the latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress’s Long Term Trend series, and they were sobering. Just before the pandemic kicked in, U.S. thirteen-year-olds saw statistically-significant declines in both math and reading—a first in the study’s nearly 50-year history. Black, Hispanic, and low-achieving students saw the largest declines. Here’s the case that the Great Recession was largely at fault.
Commentary
School Finance, Governance, Private School Choice
How do parents use education savings accounts?
Whether due to the pandemic, political opportunism, popular demand, or a combination, education savings accounts (ESAs) are enjoying much attention and growth
Commentary
What we're reading this week: October 21, 2021
“What research tells us about gifted education.” —Hechinger Report A celebration of the late Mike Rose and his contribution to writing instruction.
Commentary
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning
5 lessons in education policy from newly-minted Nobel laureates
This week the Nobel committee announced that the 2021 Nobel Prize in economics would go to Joshua Angrist (MIT), David Card (UC Berkeley), and Guido Imbens (Stanford).
Commentary
Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Reforming licensing policies will help alleviate teacher shortages
With the effects of the pandemic dragging on for another year, labor markets are acting strange and organizations are struggling to find qualified workers. Schools are no different. The teacher pipeline has slowed to a trickle as teacher preparation programs see fewer and fewer candidates. Teachers have been leaving the profession early.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders
Bill de Blasio is decimating gifted education in New York. Will Eric Adams save it?
Mayor de Blasio is axing New York City’s long-standing gifted education programs. He plans to replace them with something else, but his proposal is almost entirely wrong. Fortunately, Eric Adams, who’s almost certain to replace him in January, has a vision of gifted education that’s mostly right, and he’ll enter office in time to fix de Blasio’s blunders.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Seeking a constitutional shortcut to educational excellence
Do students have a right to a high-quality education? A proposed ballot initiative filed in California last Thursday says yes.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Sorry Edutopia, the research base on project-based learning remains weak
As one paper put it, there is a “paucity of robust research” on project-based learning. Yet in the ed-school world and in many journals and professional organizations, it’s often touted as a pedagogical gold standard.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools
What do parents value in a school? An education choice experiment
As supporters celebrate and opponents dissect the Year of School Choice, a timely new report tries to make sense of the way parents value, assess, and act upon avail
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Charter Schools, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
How well do diverse-by-design charter schools work?
The persistence of racial segregation between and within school districts has motivated some in the school choice community to develop diverse-by-design charters (DBDCs), which are defined as schools without a 70 percent majority of students of any race or ethnicity, plus 30 to 70 percent low-income pupils.
Commentary
Commentary
What we're reading this week: October 14, 2021
Americans increasingly embraced school choice during the pandemic, testing the country’s historical commitment to traditional public education.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
How well are schools teaching disadvantaged students to read? In California, it depends where you live.
How do we know if a school district is doing one of its most basic jobs—teaching students to read? That’s one of the main questions the California Reading Coalition, which I helped organize earlier this year, set out to answer with the California Reading Report Card, released in September.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
The college gender gap begins in kindergarten
A recent Wall Street Journal article set off a pundit-palooza on the topic of the female advantage in higher education, with many suggesting that young men have “given up on college.” But American students who are academically well-prepared for college continue to matriculate and graduate. It’s just that many more of them are female. The reason for that starts in kindergarten.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Critical race theory distracts from academic underachievement
With a new school year underway, parents, teachers, and children anxiously return to classrooms amidst an ongoing coronavirus pandemic. But this year, school board members, teachers, academics, politicians, and parents continue to argue over critical race theory and how to enact its version of equity.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Do experts share responsibility for pitchfork-wielding mobs?
Angry citizens, enraged over everything from mask mandates to “critical race theory,” have been storming school board meetings, threatening members, and driving some to quit, reports a
Commentary
What we're reading this week: October 7, 2021
The science of reading is strong, but not unassailable, and would benefit from some healthy skepticism. —Education Week Stories are how humans find meaning and identity. Has America lost its story?
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
There’s more to the education story than what’s in the news
Education news is pretty depressing these days. Last week’s feed included articles about cafeteria staffing shortages and supply chain concerns, reporting about declining enrollment, predictions about resignations due to vaccine mandates, findings on teacher stress, reporting about an uptick in student fights, and lots of documentation of demonization in adults’ battles over mask policy.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Governance, Private School Choice, Teachers & School Leaders
The impact of voucher programs: A deep dive into the research
Last month, my colleagues Mike Petrilli and David Griffith had a conversation with Patrick Wolf, a leading school choice scholar at the University of Arkansas, about the impact of voucher programs on the Education Gadfly Show podcast.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Inspire a reverence for liberty by teaching the full story of American slavery
On September 12, 1962, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the request of the New York Civil War Commission at the Centennial Celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders
We are squandering the talents of too many low-income high achievers
Far too many high-achieving children are drifting through middle and high school. Despite their potential, they don’t end up taking AP exams, achieving high marks on their ACTs, or going to four-year colleges. This limits their ability to move up the social ladder, threatens U.S. economic competitiveness, and derails our aspirations for a more just society. We must stop buying into the false assumption that high-achieving kids will do fine on their own.
Commentary
School Finance, Charter Schools, Governance, Private School Choice, Teachers & School Leaders
Use pandemic recovery funds to empower both schools and families
Covid-19 school shock disrupted our way of doing education, unbundling the familiar division of responsibilities among home, school, and community organizations. Nearly every parent of school-age children had to create from scratch a home learning environment using online technology and rebundling school services to meet their needs.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Measuring the social, emotional, and academic toll of remote learning
After more than eighteen months of pandemic-induced commotion to education, data continue to roll in regarding various negative impacts on young people.
Commentary
Commentary
What we're reading this week: September 30, 2021
A study by Jay Greene and James Paul finds that courting Democrats has been a lost cause—and a costly one—for school choice legislation.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Performative teaching is undermining trust in schools
Increasingly, teachers are not shy about expressing their views on charged racial and political views. This may be a symptom of a profound shift in our relationship with institutions and the role they play in our lives. Where institutions once functioned as molds of our character and behavior, they’re now platforms on which we stand to be seen. And this could be cratering our trust in them.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Advanced Education, Teachers & School Leaders
Rigorous courses are a good thing—and good for equity
“As a broader mechanism for equity, [Advanced Placement] has fallen short, unable to overcome the powerful structural forces that disadvantage far too many students,” writes Anne Kim in a recent long-form article in Washington Monthly titled “AP’s Equity Face-Plant.” “If the ultimate goal
Commentary
School Finance, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
There’s a fiscal cliff coming, and some districts appear hell-bent on making it worse
We’ve been polling district finance leaders about their biggest concern in this moment, and the most common answer is financial problems down the road.
