I owe Education Gadfly readers an apology. Dylan Wiliam’s excellent and eminently sensible book was published nine months ago and has been sitting on my desk since then. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Creating the Schools Our Children Need deserves your immediate attention.
A recent Pew Research study found that by 2016, half of all Millennial women—those born between 1981 and 1996—were mothers.
In April, we published a report by Andrew Saultz and colleagues—along with an interactive website—that mapped the locations of “charter school deserts” across the country.
In my new book, The Forgotten Americans, I revisit what has come to be called “the success sequence.” That’s the idea that if a young person gets a decent education (at least high school), works full-time, and finds a committed partner to marry before having children, that person’s chances of achieving the
The NCAA cares a great deal about college readiness, access, and success. As we work to stay current on trends and issues in education, one of our greatest challenges is maintaining an open mind to innovation in the field of education, while also guarding against propensities for shortcuts. Nowhere is this more difficult than with online learning and credit recovery (CR).
By Dan Goldhaber and Umut Özek
I’m in the middle of a series of posts looking at how we might usher in a “Golden Age of Educational Practice” now that big new policy initiatives appear to be on ice.
Last May, Slate ran an eight-part series exploring the rise in online learning for high school students who had failed a course.
College-level courses taken while in high school have never been more popular. Chief among these sources is Advanced Placement (AP), whose five million exams were taken by almost three million students in 2018.
Journalists are told to “follow the money,” and it seems only fair the same adage be applied to education.
As an educational community, we are constantly analyzing our strengths and weaknesses to determine how well we are meeting the needs of all students. Often, we measure our performance in terms of ‘growth’ and ‘gaps’.
Credit recovery, or the practice of enabling high school students to retrieve credits from courses that they either failed or failed to complete, is at the crossroads of two big trends in education: the desire to move toward “competency based” education and a push to dramatically boost graduation rates.
Out of the 2016 presidential election emerged a struggling and forgotten group eager to voice their needs: working-class Americans. In response to this outcry, Opportunity America, a D.C.
There’s a terrific story about the late Frank McCourt, who became famous as the author of Angela’s Ashes and other books, but who was Mr. McCourt the English teacher to a generation of students at Stuyvesant High and other New York City schools. One day a student asked what possible use a particular work of literature he assigned would have in his life.
Lately, I’ve seen a meme that keeps popping up on social media: “Telling a teacher to use a boxed curriculum is like forcing a chef to cook hamburger helper.”
There’s much about Montgomery County, Maryland, that I appreciate—starting with the fact that it’s been a fine home for me and my family for forty-plus years.
“They already made up in their mind that they’re not going to give [my children] back. I feel as though they want me to say, ‘F**k it, let me just sign, take ’em.’ I get to that point. I get there. That’s why I’ve been late. I can be on time. But when I’m at home getting ready, I don’t see an end to this tunnel, I don’t see a light, it’s just pitch black.
After the recent mid-term election, we published our analysis of newly elected and re-elected governors and where they stand on the issue of private school choice. We also saw changes at the state legislative level that could have implications for educational choice.
You might think the executive director of an organization called the National Center for Special Education in Charter Schools would place the interests of children seeking the best possible special ed that charter schools can provide for them ahead of the policy preferences of IDEA (the federal special-ed law).
Some state charter school laws create the opportunity to open schools specifically for students with disabilities. Such schools may appeal to families who have not experienced success in their local public school and who simply cannot afford to wait for the reality of inclusion to catch up with the ideal.
School choice can only thrive when families are well-informed about their options. Unfortunately, good information about different schools in a district can be hard to come by, and even when it is accessible, how it is presented and the level of detail provided can heavily influence the decisions parents make.
Among postsecondary students who began their studies in 2003–04, 68 percent of those at public two-year colleges and 40 percent at public four-year colleges took at least one remedial course during their enrollment between 2003 and 2009. Of course, we’d prefer that students not need remediation in the first place.
Critics of standardized testing say scores merely reflect family income and other factors beyond schools’ control—while also narrowing the curriculum and warping instruction. Still, the tests have value, and there’s much more that schools could do to address the inequities they reveal.
Last week, the Twin Cities was the epicenter of gifted education policy and practice as Minneapolis hosted the sixty-fifth NAGC Annual Convention. The convention provided a time for reflection about how Minnesota and the nation fare in supporting the needs of advanced students—and what we can do better.
