Moms and choice: An interview with Abigail Hasberry from San Antonio, Texas
This is the third in a series of interviews called “moms and choice,” in which I talk with mothers who—because of issues like bullying, weak academics, poor instr
This is the third in a series of interviews called “moms and choice,” in which I talk with mothers who—because of issues like bullying, weak academics, poor instr
For better or for worse, hard-left politics continue to cast an outsized shadow over the education sector. Nowhere is this more prevalent than within the echo chamber of ed school thinking, where the tweed-jacketed have their feet firmly planted in midair with regard to the nation’s most pressing education challenges. This goes doubly so for low-income schools, where the academy’s hubris makes for swell sounding monographs, but often has little grounding in the difficult work required to raise student performance.
An ambitious, important new piece of analysis in Education Next concludes that young Americans across the socioeconomic spectrum have made some progress over the past half century in academic achievement, but that rising tide hasn’t narrowed key gaps among them and hasn’t lifted the high school boats. This raises some really tough questions. How much does gap-closing matter versus tide-rising? Why has the tide stopped rising at the high school door? And—of course—what, if anything, is to be done, besides more of what we’ve been doing, at least since we began to get serious about addressing mediocrity and closing gaps back in the 1960s?
I’ve been tugging at this issue for twenty years now, going back to the late 1990s when Checker Finn came to speak before the Massachusetts Board of Education. My state had passed ambitious education reform legislation five years earlier, and its controversial high-stakes provision—requiring passage of the tenth-grade MCAS test as a graduation requirement—was scheduled to kick in.
Emboldened and empowered by newly elected Democratic Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, efforts to dismantle New Mexico’s many strong education policies are now underway. Last week, as the state’s legislative session ended, lawmakers took their first big step in rolling back years of laudable progress made by former education secretaries Hanna Skandera and Christopher Ruszkowski and many others.
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.
On this week’s podcast, Celine Coggins, executive director at Grantmakers for Education, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss philanthropy’s shift to the left on education policies. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines America’s persistent achievement gaps.
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!
In recent years, we have reached a homeostasis in education policy, characterized by clearer and fairer but lighter-touch accountability systems and the incremental growth of school choice options for families—but little appetite for big and bold new initiatives.
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
On this week’s podcast, veteran education writer Richard Whitmire joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss his forthcoming
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.
On this week’s podcast, Susan Schaeffler, founder and CEO of KIPP DC, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss the Capital Teaching Residency and other efforts to build an effective and sustainable teacher corps. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines whether targeted text messages to parents can improve literacy in pre-kindergarteners.
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.
The provocative Fordham-Hoover “Education 20/20” speaker series resumes on March 26th with another star-studded duo.
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.