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What will Marie Kondo's appointment at ED mean for federal education policy?
We were as surprised as anyone with Betsy DeVos’s announcement that renowned tidy-guru Marie Kondo will join the U.S. Department of Education as a senior advisor. As for whether this move “sparked joy” for us—well, yes and no.
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Curriculum & Instruction
From great materials to great instruction
Three years ago, two districts with similar enrollments, proficiency scores, and student demographics—not twenty miles apart—chose the same curriculum for middle school English language arts: Expeditionary Learning. But that is where the similarity in this story ends.
Commentary
Charter Schools
At the wheel of Idaho’s public charter school program
A willfully one-sided and misguided “study” emerged the other day from something that calls itself the “Network for Public Education” that purports to show that the federal government has wasted a lot of money trying to expand and improve America’s public charter schools. This outfit, which appears to get support from the teacher unions and their fellow travelers, cites several states that, in the authors’ view, have mishandled the money and bungled the program.
Event
Career & Technical Education, Curriculum & Instruction
Education 20/20: Arthur Brooks and Adam Meyerson
The Fordham-Hoover “Education 20/20” speaker series continued on April 11 with another star-studded double feature.
Commentary
The misplaced focus on New York City's selective high schools
The time and energy that Mayor Bill de Blasio and Chancellor Richard Carranza are devoting to revamping admissions for New York's eight selective exam-based high schools are misplaced. Those institutions provide a unique and valuable service that drives excellence and upward mobility. Leaders should instead focus on how the city’s black and Hispanic students are failed by Gotham’s other 1,700 schools, and how the exam schools' diversity problem is exacerbated by the lack of policies that would bolster those kids' achievement.
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Five lessons from my time on the Maryland State Board of Education
This essay, originally published by Education Next, will run in two parts.
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A guidebook for high schoolers who want to be teachers
Working for the National Council on Teacher Quality can’t be fun or easy. Since 2003, the organization has set itself to the task of evaluating the nation’s teacher prep programs, which can only be compared to a department-store photographer telling mothers their babies are ugly. No one is glad to hear it, even if it’s observably true.
Commentary
Strengthening and diversifying the teacher workforce
Each year, teacher candidates across the nation take licensing exams designed to check their mastery of pedagogy and of content knowledge. Though each state selects its own licensing tests, the Praxis Elementary Education: Multiple Subjects assessment, created by the Education Testing Service (ETS), is the most widely used elementary content exam.
Podcast
School Finance
The Education Gadfly Show: Are schools ready for an economic downturn?
On this week’s podcast, Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab and a research associate professor at Georgetown University, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to remind schools to prepare for a rainy day, which is likely coming soon. On the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines students’ reading habits, and which books are most popular from K to 12.
Commentary
A moonshot for kids
Our schools are nowhere close to delivering the learning outcomes that our kids deserve and our country requires. What we need is a Moonshot for Kids. That’s what we at Fordham, in conjunction with the Center for American Progress, now propose to stimulate. During the next twelve months, we will explore the rationale, potential, and possible design of a sizable new investment in basic and applied research and development that leads to innovation on behalf of America’s children. At its heart is an open competition meant to elicit and highlight breakthrough ideas that could best leverage a major public or private investment of $1 billion or more to improve outcomes for school-age kids.
Commentary
Kamala Harris comes out swinging on education and picks the unions over students and parents
Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris must have been one of the people AFT president Randi Weingarten was referring to when she said on C-Span, in the context of the 2020 hopefuls being “eager for the teachers’ backing”, that her “phone had rung a lot” because Harris has quickly morphed into a union mouthpiece. The language is so familiar it reads like the same old script. Students are nowhere to be found in her comments, parents are absent from her tweets and learning outcomes don’t even get a single mention.
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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
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Accountability & Testing
Liberation theology is no savior for low-income schools
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.
Commentary
Achievement quandaries
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?
Commentary
Are grantmakers giving up on education reform?
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.
Commentary
New Mexico lawmakers just ruined the state's strong system for rating schools
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.
Commentary
What charter school applications and approvals say about the state of authorizing
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.
Commentary
Is teaching's diversity problem getting worse?
Decades of research show increases in teacher diversity, encouraging for a profession that’s long been disproportionately white and female.
Podcast
Accountability & Testing
The Education Gadfly Show: Education’s philanthropic shift
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.
Commentary
At a tough time for education reform, Colorado defeat of charter school-defunding bill offers a ray of hope
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.
Commentary
This week proved that the media still live in an upper-middle-class bubble
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!
Report
Evidence-Based Learning, Curriculum & Instruction, Teachers & School Leaders
Toward a Golden Age of Educational Practice
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.
