Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction
Using screen-time to boost children’s science and engineering knowledge
Children’s screen-time is an important issue.
Topics
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
The case for focusing SEL on social-network building
While education reform conversations about social and emotional learning (SEL) often include the value of interpersonal skills in creating and maintaining relationships, a new report from the American Enterprise Institute calls for increased emphasis on expanding student access to relationships and networks.
Commentary
Governance, Private School Choice
Espinoza and the myth of values-neutral schooling
The education world was slow on the uptake, but oral argument this week in the case of Espinoza v.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning
What American education could buy with a larger investment in research and development
For R & D to work in education, we must consistently secure funding from governments and philanthropies. That means presenting them with realistic, sensible ideas that can be adopted and implemented at a reasonable cost—both in money and teachers’ time. Fordham and CAP’s Moonshot for Kids competition yielded proposals for several such tools.
Commentary
Rekindling confidence in key institutions, schools included
I haven’t yet got my hands on the much-discussed new book by Yuval Levin, one of the most thoughtful conservative public intellectuals and writers of our time (also editor of National Affairs and head of “social, cultural and constitutional studies” at the American Enterprise Institute).
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction
Reader’s workshop: The science denial curriculum
I owe my education career to reader’s workshop, the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, and its founder Lucy Calkins. I started as a mid-career switcher with a two-year commitment to teach fifth grade in a South Bronx public school. Two things about my school are worth knowing: It was the lowest-performing school in New York City’s lowest-performing district.
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Teachers & School Leaders
D.C. continues to improve its teacher evaluation system
Amid all of the hullabaloo over teacher evaluations, fewer states are now using test scores to assess the quality of their teacher workforce.
Commentary
Accountability & Testing, Governance
School Improvement Grants worked well—at least in these four locales
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 marked a massive federal investment in our schools, with more than $100 billion to shore up school systems in the face of the Great Recession. Along with that largesse came two grant programs meant to encourage reform with all of those resources: Race to the Top and School Improvement Grants (SIGs).
Commentary
Governance
The real history of school desegregation, from 1954 to the present
One of the oddest features of the 2019–20 Democratic primary season has been the return of the busing issue. Half a century ago, it nearly tore the party apart. Judicially mandated reassignment of students to achieve racial balance proved to be the most unpopular policy since Prohibition, opposed by overwhelming majorities of white voters.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, School Finance, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Personalized Learning
The top 10 EconTalk episodes on education
A few years ago, as I was wrapping up grad school (where my dissertation was about migrant workers in China, of all things), I came across a bunch of fascinating podcast episodes about education policy and school reform.
Commentary
School Finance
Edunomics Lab against the tide: Yes, eliminate CRDC finance elements
The U.S. Department of Education recently proposed significant changes to the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC), including eliminating the school finance portion.
Commentary
Governance
Weak board governance weakens K–12 performance
After spending most of my forty-year career working on organizational performance improvement, I have learned that some of the most important causes of poor performance are often the least visible.
Commentary
The top 19 Fordham posts of 2019
2019 was quite a year for education reform. We saw many conversations about what conclusions to draw from NAEP scores, how to help accelerated learners, the ineffectiveness of restorative justice practices, and what it would take to bring research-based literacy instruction into our classrooms.
Commentary
Advanced Education
Students of color lack access to advanced coursework, but there are solutions
Gifted education in the U.S. is too scarce and lacks substance, and that’s especially true for high achieving black and Latino children. A new report by the Education Trust concludes that this gap has “everything to do with policies, adult decisions, and practices and little to do with students’ academic abilities.”
Commentary
Charter Schools, Governance
Fresh fuel for the charter school debate
A mere 6 percent of students are enrolled in charter schools nationwide, but there are sixteen cities in which at least one-third of public school students attend charters. Newark, New Jersey, is one of them.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Digging in the dirt for quality curriculum
A recent Fordham report finds that the quality of lessons that teachers get off the Internet is not very good. That’s no surprise but it obscures a bigger problem. If skilled practitioners in any profession feel compelled to scour the Internet for the basic tools of their trade that should concern us more than the quality of what they unearth. The very existence of a “vast curriculum bazaar” sends troubling signals about our general indifference to curriculum’s central role in learning, and our inattention to coherence and what gets taught.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Why don’t evidence-based practices take hold in schools?
Education Week’s recent report, Getting Reading Right, found that the most popular reading curricula in the country are not aligned with settled reading science.
Commentary
Commentary
In the Arena: A tribute to John White
It takes a lot of bravery to enter the arena; it takes even more to stay there. That’s what I admire so deeply about John White, Louisiana’s state superintendent of education.
Commentary
Unless something changes, the 2020s will be bleak for education reform
The New Year, let alone the new decade, barely has its diapers on, but it’s not too early to put finger to the wind on where the next ten years might lead.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Governance, Teachers & School Leaders
Where R & D and school improvement meet, good things happen
Fordham’s recent Moonshot for Kids competition, a collaboration with the Center for American Progress, highlighted the distinction between research and development and “school improvement.” They’re very different concepts. R & D is inherently top-down and school improvement mostly bottom-up. Yet bringing them into productive contact with one another is vital and might be the key to getting student outcomes moving in the right direction once again.
Commentary
The power of the two-parent home is not a myth
Among several disturbing elements of Christina Cross's New York Times op-ed, “The Myth of the Two-Parent Home,” is the author’s seeming belief that unless growing up with married parents has the same effect on black children as on white youngsters, it is not worthy of endorsement.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Watch the movie, don’t just read the script: Teaching vs. curriculum
Fordham has produced The Supplemental Curriculum Bazaar: Is What’s Online Any Good? Worth reading! Are popular materials offered on Teacher Pay Teachers, and similar sites, useful?
Commentary
Accountability & Testing
Those that live by the scores…
We are endlessly tempted—and strongly encouraged by OECD’s Andreas Schleicher—to infer policy guidance from PISA results. If a country’s score goes up, maybe other countries should emulate its education practices and priorities, as they surely must be what’s causing the improvement.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning
Why evidence-based practices don’t work: Part II
There’s a large gap between the current state of education sector R & D and our aspirations for this research. As sectors, education and medicine have lots in common and analogies are often drawn between the disciplines. However, when it comes to evidence-based practices, there are stark differences between the two fields.
Commentary
Evidence-Based Learning
Why evidence-based practices don’t work: Part I
To be clear, I am in favor of building a strong education R & D sector. However, it’s important to acknowledge the serious shortcomings of the current system. It is because of this current state that I am arguing that evidence-based practices don’t work. I’m making two claims.
Commentary
Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Lessons educators can heed from the grim findings of “The Supplemental Curriculum Bazaar”
Almost all American teachers supplement their core curriculum (if they even have one) with materials they gather from the internet. National surveys show that supplementation is a growing phenomenon, and that many teachers use supplementary materials in large proportions of their lessons.
Commentary
Ed reform’s lost decade: Twilight of the technocrats
Ed reform circa 2010 was playing offense and on the march, energetically aligned against an intransigent blob, armed with moral authority, bracing and seemingly durable bipartisan support, and a strong faith in the ability to wrest broad student gains from higher standards, a muscular testing and accountability regime, and enhanced choice, mostly in the form of charter schools. Ten years later, nearly all of this has been reversed or in retreat. Big reform is dead.
Commentary
A roaring decade for school choice
As 2019 comes to an end, so does a significant decade for education reform. For all the Sturm und Drang over the lack of improvement, the education policy landscape is no longer the same.
Commentary
Private School Choice
Why Catholic schools have regained their place in education reform
At the beginning of the modern ed-reform movement, getting onto four decades ago, urban Catholic schools were everywhere, serving as vital proof points in the debate about what was possible. While too many traditional public schools serving disadvantaged communities were either unsafe, failed to produce graduates with even basic skills, or both, urban Catholic schools stood apart.
