This essay is part of the The Moonshot for Kids project, a joint initiative of the Fordham Institute and the Center for American Progress. This is the second of two parts.
On this week’s podcast, Jal Mehta, an associate professor of education at Harvard, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith
Having recently unburdened ourselves of seven large gobbets of advice for the champions of today’s surging interest in Social and Emotional Learning (SEL), we intend occasionally to point to developments that strike us as problematic or promising. Our goal isn’t to point fingers—though that can be kind of fun. It’s because we see a clear and present danger that SEL could go off the rails in any number of ways, and wind up compromising academic instruction or serving to advance ideological causes and agendas.
Teachers will always have to figure out how to provide the right level of instruction to each student that’s neither so difficult it's overwhelming, nor so easy it's boring. Fitness studios face a similar challenge: provide a great, challenging experience for thirty-some students that accounts for great variation in fitness levels and goals and enables participants to gauge their own progress on metrics that they trust and understand. The approaches of one studio and one educational model are especially promising.
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 ran in two parts.
On this week’s podcast, Jessica Sutter, a newly elected member of the DC State Board of Education, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss the politics of Washington’s ed reform scene. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines how Philadelphia school closures affect academic and behavioral outcomes.
From AOC to Stuyvesant to the Varsity Blues scandal, high-stakes assessments have returned to their role as punching bags after a brief hiatus.
Three years ago, we released a study on school closures in Ohio that found mostly positive results for displaced students, particularly when those students transferred to higher-quality schools.
The Data Quality Campaign, an organization dedicated to advocating for effective educational data policy and use, recently released its third comprehensive review of school report cards in all fifty states and D.C.
The Fordham-Hoover “Education 20/20” speaker series continued with our penultimate event on May 1, as we brought you another awesome duo. Rod Paige opened by arguing that tomorrow’s school reform needs to focus not just on changing schools, but even more on boosting student effort. Then Pete Wehner made a forceful, principled case for reviving old-fashioned character education in America’s schools.
“Build new, don’t reform old,” says Jason Bedrick as he attempts to use my experience on the Maryland State Board of Education to prove that “the system is beyond reform,” and to imply that school
Tom Vander Ark is a very smart guy who cares deeply about education, has wide-ranging experience in it (including service as a district superintendent), and knows far more about technology than I do. I like and respect and often agree with him.
Fordham’s newest study on career and technical education finds that, although students take more CTE courses in fields for which there is local demand, this is less true when those available jobs are in higher-wage industries. Perhaps the reason is that those lower-wage jobs also require less expertise. They include exactly the kind of low-skill work for which America’s inadequate CTE apparatus prepares students. We need to fix this, which will require better collaboration between local employers, high schools, and community colleges.
On this week’s podcast, Checker Finn joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss his new paper with Rick Hess on how the social and emotional learning movement can avoid going off the rails. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines the big new RAND study on principal pipelines.
I’m as appalled and disgusted as anyone over the Varsity Blues admissions scandal, and it’s fine with me if those parents end up in prison. But I also worry about hypocrisy. So many of us now throwing up our hands in outrage have tiptoed in our own ways onto a continuum at the far end of which is the bribery and conspiracy that’s recently been revealed.
Perhaps George Orwell was thinking of a moment like this when he said, “We have now sunk to a depth at which restating the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” The obvious now is that the Republic faces a seemingly overwhelming number of crises.
For the last seven years, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC) has published data on college completion rates.
Warning: this one’s going to get super wonky.
The debate about private schools often centers around vouchers and poor families. I want to bypass that here, examine four points about private schools and middle class families, and then tie them together.
Each year, the Education Commission of the States (ECS), based in my adopted home of Denver, reviews the governors’ State of the State addresses and offers an analysis of their main education components. Mentioned by at least thirty-six governors, this year’s top education priority was school finance, followed by workforce development, teacher quality, early learning, postsecondary financial aid, and school safety.
That line comes from a lawyer who interviewed witnesses in a major education scandal. No, it wasn’t the recent college bribery bombshell that led to dozens of federal indictments. It was in relation to an epidemic of cheating in Atlanta Public Schools that came to light more than a decade ago.
To our knowledge, no study has empirically examined the degree to which CTE course-taking in high school aligns with the kinds of work available in local labor markets, as our newest report does. It shows that the country needs local business, industrial, and secondary and postsecondary education sectors to join hands. At the top of their to-do list should be better integration of what is taught in local high school CTE programs with the skills, knowledge, and positions needed in area labor markets, both now and in the future.
A little over a year ago, Education Week ran an op-ed arguing for “gradeless classrooms” and an “end to the perpetual lies” that numbers and letters tell about learning. “Honor and merit rolls would disappear.
This is the second installment of an essay originally published by Education Next.
In the U.S. we call it “math phobia”; in the U.K. they call it “maths anxiety.” Either way you dub it, a negative emotional reaction to mathematics, which can manifest as a fear of or aversion to doing math-related work, is a real threat to mathematical competency. A new summary of research from the University of Cambridge adds a huge amount of detail to the picture of what causes math phobia in young people and what if anything can be done to mitigate its effects.
On this week’s podcast, Cameron Sublett, associate professor of education at Pepperdine University, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss the findings of Fordham’s newest report, How Aligned is Career and Technical Education to Local Labor Markets?, that he and Griffith coauthored. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines how the New Leaders’ Aspiring Principals Program prepares school leaders for success.
The recent reauthorization of the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act—the principal federal education program supporting career and technical education (CTE)—expressly aims to “align workforce skills with labor market needs.” Our latest report examines whether students in high school CTE programs are more likely to take courses in high-demand and/or high-wage industries, both nationally and locally.
Last week, as part of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s and the Hoover Institution’s Education 20/20 speaker series, renowned Princeton University professor of jurisprudence Robert P. George addressed the importance of “viewpoint diversity” in American colleges and universities. Are you a high school teacher or administrator, a school board member, parent or state education leader? Please watch the eight minute segment now.
As I gird my loins for several upcoming events where we will wrangle over the “social and emotional learning” approach to educating-the-whole-child, I benefited—and perhaps you could, too—from a conceptual reset, courtesy of a fine new book by Anne Snyder, who leads the “character initiative” at the Philanthropy Roundtable, of which Fordham is a member and where I once had the honor of serving on the board.
