On this week’s podcast, Mora Segal, CEO of Achievement Network, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss the organization’s lat
Editor’s note: This post was first sent as an email in The Bulwark’s newsletter “The Triad: Three things to read, from JVL.” 1. School?
Pass-fail ratings in schools are widespread this pandemic-stricken spring. But when “passing” denotes anything that’s not “failing,” what signifies excellence? What distinguishes a first-rate research paper or book review or math proof from one that’s barely serviceable? Where’s the recognition for a student whose class participation is well-prepared, attentive, thoughtful and articulate versus the pupil who yawns, smirks, whispers, peeks at his phone and responds to direct questions with surly, one-word answers? Grades surround us and we depend on them in one realm of our lives after another.
Today, Michigan became the first state to formally seek federal permission to suspend standardized testing in 2021 because of learning disruptions caused by the coronavirus.
Illness. Family emergencies. In-service training requirements. On average, classroom teachers in the U.S.
In the past twenty years, every state and the District of Columbia has passed state-level anti-bullying laws (ABLs), requiring school districts to develop policies that define bullying, encourage students to report victimization, and punish offenders.
On this week’s podcast, Mike Petrilli, Tran Le, Amber Northern, and David Griffith discuss Fordham’s new
We’ve reached the mop-up phase at the end of the fractured school year, the worst that most of us have ever seen. The consensus view, unsurprisingly, has been that the past few months have been a disaster. School districts were caught flat-footed and unprepared for the pandemic.
Editor’s note: This article was first published by the Overdeck Family Foundation.
David Steiner:
David Brooks has long been a stalwart supporter of education reform, both the choice-and-charters flavor and the testing-and-accountability variety.
On this week’s podcast, Nina Rees, President and CEO of the National Alliance for Public
A legitimate grievance against Confederate monuments has degraded into something deeply troubling. Statues of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Theodore Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and the like are now getting removed, toppled, or vandalized. It’s a threat to our history based on disapproval of some actions and practices of past individuals, never mind how central—even heroic—their roles were to the history that we want our kids to learn more about. Few young Americans are learning American history as it is. We shouldn’t want them to learn even less.
As I noted in a recent post, attitudes toward advanced education are cyclical. From gifted education to talent development programs, from honors classes to AP, we have experienced a largely positive stretch of media attention and state-level policy gains.
Great Minds creates curricula in math, English language arts, and science for grades PK–12. I’m its founder and CEO, and when Covid-19 hit, we were ill-prepared for digital distance learning, like most everyone else.
The publication date for this admirable book is Tom Sowell’s ninetieth birthday (June 30, 2020), and I doubt that’s entirely coincidental. Though Jason Riley reported three years ago that Sowell was “putting down his pen,” that obviously didn’t happen. And we’re better off as a result.
At least we have stopped pretending that we’re making high school more modern.
On this week’s podcast, Checker Finn, Mike Petrilli, and David Griffith discuss what it takes for real change to happen in America.
America faces three urgent challenges right now: beating Covid-19, reforming law enforcement in the wake of the George Floyd's killing, and rebooting K-12 education. Each creates the opportunity for major, lasting change. Yet that won’t happen without successful models to view, sustained leadership with a modicum of centrism or bipartisanship, and—toughest of all—cultural shifts that demand and entrench those changes.
Last month, I examined nine of the top candidates for Democratic VP nominee and their views on education. The upshot was that there wasn’t much to get enthused about.
This spring’s school closures have challenged us to look at many things differently and to be open-minded, creative, and brave about moving toward necessary change. As we consider reopening schools in the fall, let’s hold on to that mindset and ask what should special education become? Does the forty-five-year-old federal law (IDEA) need a thorough redo? We believe it does.
As national unrest builds along with the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and too many others at the hands of police officers, people worldwide are responding with marches, protests, critical reflection, and grief. Right now, the Black Lives Matter movement rages on.
The start of a new school year is always filled with challenges. New teachers, new classes, and new expectations can be difficult for both teachers and students. But what if teachers and students haven’t been in school for six months or more? How can schools try and prepare to get back to a sense of normalcy after all of this?
A few years ago, a close friend and colleague made a surprising confession. Even though we worked at a charter school network devoted to civic education, she admitted to me that she’d never voted and wasn’t even registered. She felt guilty and hypocritical. How could she promote the virtue of voting to children starting in kindergarten but not vote herself?
Today the Thomas B. Fordham institute and the Center for American Progress published Moonshot For Education: A Federal Policy Proposal to Spur Effective Research and Development for K-12 Education.
In dozens of fields, federally-supported research and development translates into new ideas, technologies, and actions. Why not in education, particularly as the Covid-19 crisis makes it abundantly clear that our educational systems are severely lacking innovative technologies that could have improved the resiliency and flexibility of our classrooms and facilitated a nationwide shift to remote instruction?
Earlier this month, John Winters, associate professor from Iowa State University, released a study, What You Make Depends on Where You Live: College Earnings Across States and Metropolitan Areas, which examined the economic premium of earning different college credentials across all fif
The Institute for Classical Education, a recently established research center based in Arizona, announced its ambitious mission of bringing classical education to an additional 50,000 students by 2025.
Michael J. Petrilli’s recent article “Half-Time High School may be just what students need” is compelling. Yet proposals to cut school time in half in grades nine through twelve may be only half right.
Most people agree that a college education is a worthwhile investment for a young person. For example, across the U.S., bachelor’s degree holders earn on average 55 percent higher salaries than those with no education beyond high school. However, it is less well understood that there are stark geographical differences in how much return one gets on their educational investment.
