When I started researching The B.A. Breakthrough, I had no idea that a college admissions scandal would erupt, exposing how rich families can game the system—shenanigans low-income families can’t play.
More than most fields and professions, education has a remarkably poor grasp of its own history. One of the reasons we are so susceptible to fads is because so few of us recognize that the Shiny New Thing is so often a recycled idea and a Ted Talk.
Social and emotional learning (SEL), which focuses on teaching children soft skills like self-awareness, self-discipline, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making, has gained popularity, with advocates pushing for curriculum changes in schools.
Alberta, Canada, is a fascinating model for educational improvement. Like the United States, the province jettisoned intellectual content in the early twentieth century, local property values drove school funding, and “public schooling” was narrowly defined.
When I was five years old and living in Decatur, IL, we were reached by a signal from a St. Louis television station, KPLR. If memory serves, color test bars gave way to programming at 6:00am each morning.
There’s little doubt that math and reading outcomes strengthened dramatically for the lowest-performing students and for children of color from the mid-1990s until the onset of the Great Recession. But could these gains be seen in writing, science, and other areas, too? To answer that, this post looks at results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. It finds, among other things, that at least at the fourth and eighth grade levels, progress in student achievement went well beyond reading and math.
I’m a fan and faithful listener of EconTalk, a podcast hosted by Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.
A cottage industry of studies shows the critical relationship between having a same-race teacher and a host of short- and long- term educational outcomes, including test scores, expectations,
School quality can vary drastically within districts, so district-wide averages of ratings often leave out important information. This can cause problems for stakeholders, such as parents who use these data to choose communities in which to live. But just as individual school grades vary, the range of good versus bad schools may be substantially larger in some districts than in others.
Teach For America (TFA) has been recruiting and placing college graduates into underserved classrooms since 1989. Throughout this thirty-year tenure, the program’s teacher-training methods and recruitment strategies have evolved.
In a full employment economy, there are many options for purpose-driven, socially astute, and smart people.
Last fall, Jonathan Plucker and I lauded Montgomery County, Maryland, for improving and expanding its elementary school programs for the “highly gifted,” especially for minority students.
Career technical education (CTE) programs at community colleges are a promising way to prepare the workforce for jobs in growing occupations. But the programs with the best outcomes for students often have limited capacity or very low completion rates. One solution: Start students on a path towards high-returns fields early, through efforts such as high school CTE programs.
The most demonized game in the annals of grade school physical education is back in the news.
This is the first in a series of summer posts that will examine whether America’s schools have, despite charges to the contrary, improved over the past quarter-century of reform. That is a big, daunting question—but there’s no doubt that student outcomes have improved during the education reform era.
Last week, we at Fordham released a new study called Student-Teacher Race Match in Charter and Traditional Public Schools.
Start with two unlovable but immutable realities:
A trio of researchers, Joanne W. Golann and Anna Lisa Weiss of Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College; and Mira Debs of Yale, set out to explore “what discipline means to Black and Latinx families” at two commonly available school choice options: a so-called “no excuses” charter school, and a pair of public Montessori magnet schools. This is a rich vein of ore to mine.
Education policy is rife with references to developing suitable “career pathways” that presumably start in high school and extend through college.
If you happen to be wondering what’s on tap for America’s next pity party, look no further than the Facebook video entitled “If someone doesn't understand privilege, show them this.” This four-minute tear-jerker has been viewed a staggering 112 million times.
A new report by Seth Gershenson sparks fresh ideas about new directions for the literature on student-teacher matching along demographic characteristics.
Fordham’s newest study finds that black students in charter schools are about 50% more likely to have a same-race teacher than their black counterparts in traditional public schools, that the impact of having a same-race teacher is twice as large in charters, and that the effect of having a same-race teacher in charters is about twice as large for nonwhite students as for white students. They're doing a better job of recruiting diverse teachers, which gives kids of color a greater chance at having a teacher of their same race.
Try this experiment. At your next professional development session, conference, or perhaps on social media, mention the famous “30-million-word gap” study, which demonstrated that low-income children hear far less spoken language before their first day of school than their affluent peers, setting in motion dramatic differences in vocabulary attainment and academic achievement.
To borrow from the familiar quip about the weather, everybody complains about special education, but nobody does anything about it. Why such policy neglect despite the dismal outcomes for the vast majority of the nearly seven million students in special education and the suffering of their anguished parents?
Sarah Tantillo is an accomplished teacher, author, and battle-scarred veteran of the charter-school wars, particularly in New Jersey, where she taught for years at acclaimed North Star Academy and led the state charter school association.
As I observe health care rise to the top of the policy debates foreshadowing the 2020 election—seems to be second only to Donald Trump among the twenty-three Democrats now seeking the Oval Office—as K–12 education sinks lower on the policy horizon (such that several observers declare ed-reform
In April, the Fordham Institute and the Center for American Progress announced a
Many contemporary discussions on attending college seem to start with the premise that only folks with bachelor’s degrees have a clear path to good, paying jobs and further economic opportunity.
A pair of weekend essays heralding two new books point in very different directions regarding childhood, adolescence, and education—and portend tough choices for parents and educators. One is an anthropologist’s look at the spelling bee phenomenon as it has evolved in recent years. The other is a well-documented argument against the kind of youthful single-mindedness displayed by those spelling-bee fanatics (and their fanatical parents). It’s a quandary that inevitably connects to the larger policy issue of liberal education versus professionalism in college—and to the classic array of academic subjects versus CTE during high school.
Earlier this month, Stephen Sawchuk wrote a thought-provoking article in Education Week—part of a project called “Citizen Z,” which aims to examine the current state of civics education—highlighting a skir
