Research supports having classrooms keep only three feet of social distancing. In fact, more kids in school may prevent spread more than hybrid models. —Washington Post How will the forthcoming distribution of vaccines impact schooling?
I knew something was wrong when, during what was supposed to be a full day of remote learning, my thirteen-year-old son announced at 9:30 a.m. that he was free until 11:27 a.m., and then plopped onto the couch and flipped on the television.
Charges of financial blunders have taken out district leaders before. Think the pandemic inoculates leaders from that possible fate? Think again.
At a virtual town hall in Brooklyn about how the pandemic will change admissions to high-performing selective schools, New York City officials got a lecture on systemic racism.
When the 116th Congress adjourns, sometime before January 2021, Tennessee’s eighty-year-old senior senator, Lamar Alexander, will retire after three full terms. No one living today has had more far-reaching influence on American K–12 education. As we wish him many glorious years of retirement, we do well to recognize that his legacy will last even longer.
Control of state legislatures is particularly important in a census year, but it’s also an often-overlooked element in driving substantive education policy changes. National politics takes up all the oxygen, but it’s state legislators who make most of the big decisions about how a state’s public-education system operates, is funded, is held accountable (if at all), and much more.
“The pandemic has caused deep, ‘horrifying’ learning losses for Dallas children, and underscored the disparities among Black students, according to new Dallas Independent School District results.” —Dallas Morning News Indianapoli
Despite the divisiveness of the past four years, we should give peace a chance and heed President-Elect Biden’s plain but true words: “It’s time to put away the harsh rhetoric, lower the temperature, see each other again, listen to each other again. And to make progress, we have to stop treating our opponents as our enemies. They are not our enemies, they are Americans.”
Education wasn’t explicitly on the national ballot in 2020, but education is always on the ballot, even when you don’t see it. Now that the election is behind us, education reformers can focus again on states and communities, where most of the important decisions about K–12 education get made.
Divisiveness, anger, frustration, mistrust, and threats. That is the narrative emerging around the 2020 presidential election. What I saw on election day as an Ada County poll worker in Boise, Idaho, couldn’t have been more different. The election I witnessed and served was distinctly positive and hopeful.
As we conclude a particularly fraught and divisive presidential election, most Americans (and even those of us who live in D.C.) welcome a reprieve from the constant onslaught of negative political ads, contentious debates, and around-the-clock election coverage.
Spend a few minutes on education Twitter or listening to the loudest special-interest voices, and you’d think the future of public education hinges on whether Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi, and the president can agree to another stimulus deal. That’s just a short-term Washington game—that will likely soon have a new roster of players.
Are schools essential or aren’t they? Are teachers essential workers or aren’t they? How would Americans respond if large numbers of doctors, nurses, policemen, firemen, and postal workers simply opted to stay home—and their unions defended them? If you’re essential, you go to work.
A U.S. Supreme Court decision is introducing a new type of charter school that’s likely to cheer conservatives but alarm many progressives: the religiously-affiliated charter. Those of us in the charter movement need to figure out how to keep them from splitting the charter coalition.
The winner of this election won’t resolve our nation’s deep-rooted social problems. For that, we need local, personal action. —Yuval Levin Parents are reconsidering schooling decisions as they weigh worsening Covid rates against the costs of isolation and disrupting routines for their children.
As we previously saw at the 4th grade and 8th grade levels, the just-released 2019 12 grade NAEP results were mostly flat or down. But we already knew from the 2015 results that this cohort of students entered high school performing below their older peers.
As the clock winds down on the 2020 presidential campaign, what seems certain is that the path forward on education reform will not be through whoever wins the White House.
As our country grapples with racial injustice, there are persistent calls to diversify elite institutions at all levels, from corporate and foundation boards to law schools and medical schools to undergraduate programs. All good.
Decades before “equity” became a buzzword in education, E. D. Hirsch, Jr. had his finger on what the word actually means: equal access for all children to the knowledge and verbal proficiency that makes full participation in American life possible.
On this week’s podcast, Karen Hawley Miles, CEO and president of Education Resource Strategies, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith
A recent study from Brown University’s Matthew A. Kraft and John P. Papay and Harvard’s Olivia L. Chi uses nine years of administrative data from Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in North Carolina to examine teacher improvement through the lens of principal evaluations.
School districts in Texas are reporting troubling percentages of students failing remote courses, causing educators and parents to push for a return to in-person instruction.
On Wednesday, the government will release the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress scores for twelfth grade students.
On paper, it seems like Joe Biden would champion the cause of expanding high-quality charter schools, given his identity as a longtime centrist Democrat. Yet he doesn't. Thankfully for charter supporters, there pragmatic ways to bring him around, should he win the election next month
Early childhood literacy advocacy has been a quiet casualty of our current annus horribilis.
In education, one of the more bizarre debates of the past quarter century has been over whether more money improves students’ outcomes. It’s tough to think of anywhere else in American life where we’d even have that discussion.
The Progressive Policy Institute’s indefatigable David Osborne, a long-time student of and advocate for quality charter schools, now joined by Tressa Pankovits, has penned a valu
On this week’s podcast, Fordham’s Checker Finn joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss the growing, misguided war on selective-admissions
