Running a charter school involves more than an independent leader and an alternative learning atmosphere for students—charter quality is supported by several layers of oversight and supervision, even before schools open their doors.
Decades of research show increases in teacher diversity, encouraging for a profession that’s long been disproportionately white and female.
Let’s not sugarcoat it: National education reform is in a tough patch, what with the emboldened teachers unions playing offense, a supportive but unpopular education secretary being used as a bogeyman, and internecine squabbles dominating the debate. Yet outside the deep-blue bubbles on the coasts, good things are still happening for kids. This week’s best example comes from Colorado.
I won’t deny that the two big news stories of recent days—the tragic crash of a Boeing 737 Max 8 jet in Ethiopia, and the totally bonkers admissions scandal involving several of America’s elite universities—make for compelling reading. Planes dropping from the sky! Rich celebrities paying bribes!
At conferences and online, there have been conversations of late about what it even means any more to be an “education reformer.” Here, Fordham’s president proposes an answer. Namely, we reformers believe that good schools deliver strong results for students—and all schools should be held to account for their results; our schools as a whole could be delivering much stronger results for all their students, but especially for disadvantaged children; and one size does not fit all, so we should embrace a pluralistic school system.
Editor’s note: On March 13, 2019, Thomas B. Fordham Institute senior fellow Robert Pondiscio was a panelist at an event hosted by the Albert Shanker Institute in Washington, D.C., titled “Civic Education: Is There Common Ground.” The following is adapted from his remarks.
In the last two weeks, I explained how other states can learn from Colorado’s success in creating career and technical education programs that works well for students, emplo
If you think that student transportation is tricky for school districts—and there are numerous sources broadcasting that
In theory, private schools are better positioned to provide moral education than are their public counterparts because they can tailor character lessons to those who choose to attend. A new study from Corey A. DeAngelis and Patrick J.
The new study from the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research was clearly a herculean effort, with data collection across six states, surveys of thousands of teachers, and the participation of some of the nation’s leading researchers.
I met with an architect a few days ago to discuss the needs of GEO Prep Academy’s new building in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His original plan included classroom space big enough for each one of our 650 students. I told him to cut that number in half. He looked puzzled, so I explained that, for our high school to succeed, we really have to have the right attitude from day one.
Last week, I explained why career and technical education will make agile learners America's future, and that maximizing their potential requires CTE that works well for students, employers, and school systems.
Since "A Nation at Risk" in 1983, the U.S. has engaged in nonstop efforts to raise K–12 academic outcomes and close tragic achievement gaps. These have produced modest gains. Yet the gaps remain large, and nothing has made close to the kind of positive difference that other nations’ efforts have achieved. This is, in part, because the U.S. lacks three key ingredients: a culture that values education, including learning itself; a conviction that parents, schools, and children themselves are jointly responsible for education; and a governance arrangement that points toward unimpeded and continuous improvement in the delivery system and its performance.
Preparing young people for active and engaged citizenship is an essential and neglected purpose of public education. How best to cultivate these qualities in school, however, is far from settled. In some circles, it takes the form of encouraging children to be directly involved in activism and advocacy, ostensibly student-led. But that’s morphing from a valuable instructional strategy into a manipulative and cynical use of children as political props in the service of causes they understand superficially, if at all. The recent video of young students confronting Senator Dianne Feinstein about the “Green New Deal” is a perfect example.
Efforts to define what it means to be college and career ready have advanced research about the types and the complexity of materials that students should be reading.
Since charter school legislation was introduced in New York State in 1998, the sector has grown at a steady clip.
New Mexico’s legislative session ends next week, but the local education lobby’s effort to dismantle the state’s education reform edifice is just getting underway. It's important we do whatever we can to help hold the line there. As a movement, we owe a debt of gratitude to Hanna Skandera, Christopher Ruszkowski, and many others who took it in the teeth in the fight for their students. Let’s not squander their legacy and hard work.
Prominent Democrats running for president or considering mounting a bid are already finding themselves pressured to atone for their records on education.
Twenty-five months after Donald Trump’s inauguration, his administration has just unveiled its big school-choice initiative—yes, the cause that, during his 2016 campaign, he termed the “new civil rights issue of our time,” the very same cause that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has devoted her career to promoting.
A “good enough” school isn’t adequate or average, much less mediocre, but rather one that, by design, helps to prepare kids for life’s endless frustrations. And public schools, thanks to their oft-exasperating rules and frequently-unruly students, tend to do this better than their elite counterparts. Academic learning might happen more efficiently and effectively with homeschooling or private schools. But maybe that shouldn’t be all we’re after. Read more.
Everybody knows that teacher quality matters hugely in education, indeed may be the single most potent variable in a classroom, school or system. Yet it’s also an exceptionally elusive and inherently contentious quality.
Seventeen-year-old Sandra can’t wait for school to start each day. Perhaps that’s because her school day looks nothing like what most of us envision a classic high school schedule to be.
“On strike for our students.” “Our kids deserve more
We here at Fordham love a good school rating system, and one of the most popular independent rating platforms is GreatSchools. Once a California-specific hub for school quality information, GreatSchools went national in 2003 and now provides ratings for over 100,000 public schools around the country.
When I visit classrooms with the principals I coach in urban, suburban, and private schools, it’s obvious how hard most teachers are working, how much care they put into setting up their classrooms, and how much gumption it takes to work with young people six hours a day. I see lots of effective teaching—practices that one might rate as level 3 or 4 on a four-point rating scale—and very little that’s horrible, or level 1. But I do see a fair amount of mediocre, level 2 practices—for example, teachers giving out low-rigor, fill-in-the-blanks worksheets, calling only on students who raise their hands, or failing to answer kids’ unspoken question, “Why are we learning this?”
This weekend saw the passing of Siegfried “Zig” Engelmann. He was a giant among educators and a true social justice warrior. By that, I mean that he dedicated his life to improving outcomes for the disadvantaged, not that he was some great wet lettuce who opined about emotional labor and set his critics three books to read before he would discuss anything with them.
It’s a shame that the arts need to justify their continued presence in schools, but if that’s a fact, this new study should help. Kids exposed to expanded arts education opportunities in Houston experienced “a 3.6 percentage point reduction in disciplinary infractions, an improvement of 13 percent of a standard deviation in standardized writing scores, and an increase of 8 percent of a standard deviation in their compassion for others.” Read more.
One of the ways the U.S. Department of Education is supposed to facilitate student success is by awarding federally funded grants to various state and local programs, then independently assessing the performance of those grantees. Doing the latter job well will be increasingly important and challenging under the Every Student Succeeds Act, which allows for significantly more flexibility on how grantee programs can be designed and ran than under No Child Left Behind, the law’s predecessor.
The long-awaited report of Maryland’s Commission on Innovation and Excellence in Education—aka Kirwan Commission—was released last week. I had the honor (and sometimes pleasure) to serve on this body for the past two years as it strove with fair success to develop and recommend a coherent package of bold changes intended to transform K–12 schools in the Old Line State.
By Michael J. Petrilli
