The fiscal problems consuming states and school districts have gotten their fair share of press recently. The narrative is somewhat formulaic: _________??
Over at the Education Next blog, Martha Derthick laments the decline of "stately" schools:
Our friends at the State of Ohio Education blog rightly call Ohio's recent move to eliminate social studies tests in grades five and eight a "short-sighted decision," not just because a basic understanding of history, geography, civics, and current events is critical, but because Ohio students h
Don't miss this week's special edition of the Ohio Education Gadfly! One year ago, the Fordham Institute released a report titled Accelerating Student Learning in Ohio.
State education budgets across the country were temporarily buoyed by an infusion of federal stimulus money earlier this year.????
Yesterday's NY Times article points out that 97 percent of??NYC schools had received an A or B on city report cards. Given all the lamenting that goes on about the sorry state of public education in America (and rightly so), news like this is amusing.
Education Week features an insightful new study that finds excellent teachers tend to raise the performance of their peers.
Do you want a nitty gritty view of how funding issues and accountability ratings affect local school districts? Then you won't want to miss this week's Ohio Education Gadfly.
One frequently hears arguments that redirect blame from failing schools (and their teachers and principals) to ubiquitous social monsters that are bigger and hairier (poverty, broken families, crime) but also impossible to hold accountable.?? I get this. There are undeniable correlations between student achievement and socioeconomic status.
Our friends at School Choice Ohio have joined the education blogosphere. Visit http://scohio.org/wordpress/ for the latest news and updates about choice in the Buckeye State.
While funding for most public schools will be flat - and schools will be lucky with that - for innovative schools at both ends of the state's pre-K-12 education ladder, the budget is nothing short of doomsday.
Terry Ryan, Fordham's vice president for Ohio programs and policy, talks about the recently released performance data for Ohio's urban district and charter schools. Watch here.
The Cincinnati Enquirer reported on Friday that Cincinnati Public Schools will be the focus of a study by The New Teacher Project (TNTP).
This weekend saw a flurry of news stories on education in Ohio, and Fordham was in the middle of these in our usual roles of analysts and prognosticators.
Terry Ryan of our Ohio offices offers a concise explanation of our Ohio 2009 Education Report Card Analysis in this video.
In February, during the heated political debate around Governor Strickland's education reform plan, I wrote an opinion piece for the Columbus Dispatch that argued the governor's attack on for-profit charter schools "wou
Okay, I know I'm about the 31,487th person to pick up on this, but there's one factoid in the 2009 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll of Americans' attitudes toward public schools that is driving me especially nutty.
Here in Ohio, the annual report card release from the Ohio Department of Education is like Christmas.
Since 2003, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute has been analyzing the academic performance of schools in our hometown of Dayton and in other Ohio cities. We continued that analysis this year, taking a close look at the local report card data released by the Ohio Department of Education yesterday (see here).
Teachers and administrators arrive at Columbus Collegiate Academy by 7am.
Winning the award for pretty much the least surprising news ever is that the National Education Association (NEA) has slammed President Obama's Race to the Top (RttT) initiative, a $4.35 billion competitive grant program fo
School-choice foes in the Buckeye State are getting smarter about the strategies they employ to undermine the choice movement.???? Since the birth of charters here in 1998 and vouchers in 2005, opponents--namely Democrats, teacher unions, and the education establishment--have fought a "districts = good, choice = bad" fight.????
An editorial in the Dayton Daily News from this Monday argued that Ohio should bring Teach For America (TFA) into the state.
An op-ed by Cleveland State University education professor Karl Wheatley in the August 9 Cleveland Plain Dealer argues that the pursuit of improved student achievement in our public schools is largely a waste of time (see here).
While Ohio's higher education cyber-learning landscape is firmly established (see here), the K-12 cyber-school landscape is still in its infancy. Of Ohio's 1.7 million students, 23,000 were enrolled full-time in one of the state's 28 cybercharters in 20-2008.
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute and the Ohio Grantmakers Forum, with the support of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, are hosting a one-day conference, "World-Class Academic Standards for Ohio," in Columbus October 5.
Ohio may be lagging in the numbers of students taking Advanced Placement courses, although students who do take the AP science tests are among the top scorers nationally, according to a recent survey.
The National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) recently released a report, Quality, Diversity and Choice: the Value of Multiple Charter Authorizing Options (see here), which outlines various types of charter school authoriz
