On this week’s podcast, Jeremy Tate, CEO of the Classic Learning Test, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss what classical learning is and why it’s important. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines whether popular children have an outsized influence on their peers.
On this week’s podcast, Alice Huguet, an associate policy researcher at RAND, joins David Griffith and Adam Tyner to discuss whether and how K–12 schools should teach students media literacy. On the Research Minute, Adam Tyner examines the effects of flipped classrooms.
Ten years ago, then U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan issued a clarion call to turn around 5,000 of the nation’s most distressed schools, serving nearly three million students. It was an audacious goal set by an audacious leader—the likes of which are in terribly short supply these days. A decade later, states have fallen far short of his challenge, and the sticky problem of failing schools refuses to go away. But experience has provided three lessons to those who would make these efforts.
For more than half a century now, back-to-school time has brought another Phi Delta Kappan survey of “the public’s attitudes toward the public schools.” They invariably recycle some familiar questions (e.g., the grades you would give your child’s schools and the nation’s schools). Other topics, however, come and go.
I have been there; every teacher has. The clock is ticking, you've got just fifteen minutes left to wrap up the lesson, and the time is being chipped away by a student who is disrupting the classroom. How you respond to that situation involves the balance of dozens of different factors. It's complicated, and some of that complexity is captured in a new report out this week.
The education solar system is endlessly distorted by the extraordinary presence within it of two separate suns with gravitational fields that tug the policy planets in different directions.
In the last decade, states have experimented with many new assessment systems in math and reading. A new Bellwether brief by Bonnie O’Keefe and Brandon Lewis examines recent innovations used or proposed by states that could serve educators well.
When President Trump rescinded an Obama-era directive pressuring schools to adopt lenient discipline policies, almost every major education advocacy organization united in outrage.
As I belong to the legion of education professionals that’s usually on the receiving end of the term “top-down,” I’m not too keen on the enterprise’s more top-down improvements.
On this week’s podcast, Kate Blosveren Kreamer, deputy executive director of Advance CTE, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss whether we should change the conjunction in “college and career readiness” to “or.” On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines how teachers and principals view social and emotional learning.
This essay is part of the The Moonshot for Kids project, a joint initiative of the Fordham Institute and the Center for American Progress.
The case for content cannot be made too often or too emphatically, but it’s also been made repeatedly for thirty years, to little avail. Natalie Wexler’s new book, "The Knowledge Gap," offers a strong argument for offering a knowledge-rich education to every child, but also documents our frustrating lack of progress. It's one hell of an indictment of American education.
This essay, which first appeared on Marc’s blog at the National Center on Education and the Economy, illumines the problems addressed by The Moonshot for Kids project, a joint initiative of the Fordham Institute and the Center for American
The Fordham Institute’s recent survey of teachers has brought the issue of discipline reform back to the forefront. But even as teachers say that discipline policies are leading to unsafe educational environments, a new federal rule threatens to further exacerbate the issue.
On this week’s podcast Mike Petrilli speaks with David Griffith and Adam Tyner about school discipline reform in America, and their new Fordham study of educators’ views on the issue.
Our newest study, “Discipline Reform through the Eyes of Teachers,” is the first scientifically rigorous and nationally representative survey on the topic to be published in at least a decade and a half. Teachers report that disciplinary protocols are inconsistently observed and that the recent decline in suspensions is at least partly explained by higher tolerance for misbehavior or increased underreporting. And many black teachers say that “exclusionary discipline” should be used more often—despite the likely costs for students who misbehave and their belief that disciplinary consequences are racially biased.
This essay is part of the The Moonshot for Kids project, a joint initiative of the Fordham Institute and the Center for American Progress. It will run in three parts, with the third appearing in future issues of the Education Gadfly Weekly.
Shortly before the Fourth of July, Colin Kaepernick was in the news again for his role in persuading Nike, the company for which he is a paid endorser, to withdraw from the market a new sneaker that featured an American flag circa 1776.
There’s an image I like to use when describing the role of prior knowledge and vocabulary in reading comprehension: Think of a reading passage like a game of Jenga, where you take turns removing one block at a time from a tower of blocks. Imagine that every one of those blocks is a bit of background knowledge or an essential vocabulary word.
A new study published in Justice Quarterly by Thomas Mowen, John Brent, John and Boman tries to quantify the effect of suspensions on students’ odds of criminal justice involvement. However, like its many predecessors, it comes up short.
Headlines about colossal mismanagement issues in Ohio charters—the biggest being the ECOT meltdown—dominate the school choice narrative in the Buckeye State. These stories raise the question: Why are Ohio charters so bad? This query and the dominant narrative that flows from it have long provided cover for charter opponents, even as some of the negative coverage is well-deserved. But it’s the wrong question—and it distracts us from a bigger, far more compelling story.
The debate over school discipline reform is one of the most polarized in all of education. Advocates for reform believe that suspensions are racially biased and put students in a “school-to-prison pipeline.” Opponents worry that softer discipline approaches will make classrooms unruly, impeding efforts to help all students learn and narrow achievement gaps. "Discipline Reform through the Eyes of Teachers" examines this complex issue with a nationally representative survey of more than 1,200 teachers in grades 3–12.
The debate over school discipline reform is one of the most polarized in all of education. Advocates for reform believe that suspensions are racially biased and put students in a “school-to-prison pipeline.” Opponents worry that softer discipline approaches will make classrooms unruly, impeding efforts to help all students learn and narrow achievement gaps.
There’s an old Mark Twain saying that there are “lies, damned lies, and statistics.” But without any statistics to support its point, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has stamped its imprimatur on the central lie of school discipline reform, that “students of color as a whole, as well as by individual racial group, do not commit more disciplinable offenses than their peers.”
Last month, Alabama’s Governor Kay Ivey signed the Alabama Literacy Act into law, making the state the nineteenth to require third grade reading retention.
Are essay-based group competitions good for educational innovation?
Rapidly improving economic conditions among the country’s poorest families during the 1990s may have been responsible for much of the progress in student achievement we saw in the 2000s. It’s a provocative and compelling national picture. But what about at the state level? Were those where child poverty declined the most the same states where the “below basic” rate dropped the most? In a word, no. There’s a clear reformy slant to the list of high-fliers from that era, and from more recent history, too.
On this week’s podcast, Danish Shakeel, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard University, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss how information affects attitudes toward charters in rural America. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines the impact of Boston’s charter schools on students with disabilities and English language learners.
We read Chester Finn’s recent Flypaper column, “Public attitudes toward gifted education: Supportive, complacent, incomplete,” with great interest and painful recognition.
When The New York Times ran an article earlier this month on the “growing backlash” against urban charter schools, Greg Richmond, President of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), offered
