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Lessons from Newark
Since the release of A Nation at Risk in 1983, the school reform movement has generated significant insights and promising practices for improving schools for children in poverty and students of color. The work of trying to radically improve student outcomes also produced glaring missteps and tough lessons. Few efforts demonstrate the complexity of attempting to provide a bold citywide plan to ensure educational excellence for all children better than the experiences in Newark, New Jersey. Much has been written about the political drama during my tenure as superintendent from 2011 to 2014. However, very little has been written about the actual playbook, results, and implications for educational policymakers and leaders.
Teach For America’s Fast Path to the Classroom Accelerates Performance Over the Longer Haul
Since its founding 34 years ago, Teach For America has prepared nearly 70,000 recent college graduates and career-changers to teach in high-poverty schools across the United States. The selective program recruits mission-driven applicants, with annual admissions rates as low as 12 percent. Unlike traditional teacher-preparation programs, it places “corps members” in short-staffed public schools after an intensive summer seminar, before they are fully certified to teach, and provides additional support and training during a two-year stint in the classroom.
How Morgan Freeman and Robin Williams Derailed America’s Schools
My new book, Getting Education Right, dropped last week. In it, Mike McShane and I do our best to sketch a principled conservative vision of how to improve early childhood, K–12, and higher ed. But rather than get all wonky here, I thought it worth addressing a broader thread we dwell upon near book’s end: how Morgan Freeman and Robin Williams derailed America’s schools.
Doing Educational Equity Right: School Closures
This is the fifth in a series on doing educational equity right. See the introductory post, as well as ones on school finance, student discipline, and advanced education. At the center of the modern framing around “educational equity” is the reality of racial and class disparities in virtually every aspect of the American school system. The “good stuff” disproportionately flows to White, Asian, and rich students (school funding, advanced education, high-quality career-tech opportunities) while the “bad stuff” disproportionately goes to Black, Hispanic, and poor students (exclusionary discipline, grade retention, special education identification).
The Education Exchange: A Chronic Case of Truancy
Nat Malkus, a senior fellow and the deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss Malkus’s latest report, which looks at the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on chronic absenteeism in schools. Malkus’s report, “Long COVID for Public Schools: Chronic Absenteeism...
Tucker Carlson’s Civic Nihilism
The journalist’s deference to Russia reveals a profound deficit in American civic education. Earlier this month, Tucker Carlson went to Moscow. The media personality and former FOX News bigshot did his best Walter Duranty impersonation—fawning over Moscow’s grocery stores and subway system, while declaring that, “The city of Moscow is so much nicer than any city in my country.” (For readers under a certain age: Duranty was the New York Times Moscow bureau chief who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his star-stuck coverage of Stalin’s Soviet Union, in which he defended the Soviet gulags, denied that millions died during the great Russian famine, and celebrated Stalin as “guardian of a sacred flame.”)
If You Love Evidence, Set It Free
We are big fans of using evidence to improve education. That’s why we wrote a book on it. But when it comes to promoting more and better evidence use in the field, more requirements are not necessarily better. The U.S. Department of Education is updating the Education Department General...
Bringing Business Leaders Back to School
In 1988, Xerox CEO David Kearns co-authored a book titled Winning the Brain Race: A Bold Plan to Make Our Schools Competitive. Three years later, Kearns became deputy secretary of education under President George H. W. Bush. Three years after that, IBM CEO Lou Gerstner co-authored Reinventing Education: Entrepreneurship in America’s Public Schools, a book summarizing and synthesizing promising programs and practices developed by schools that had received innovation grants from RJR Nabisco. In 1996, Gerstner hosted the National Governor’s Association (NGA) at IBM’s headquarters in New York for an education summit where 43 governors, each accompanied by a CEO from their home states, discussed K–12 education standards. A direct outgrowth of that gathering was the creation of Achieve, a joint education reform project of the NGA and corporate executives, which Gerstner co-chaired until 2002. In 2003, Gerstner established and chaired the Teaching Commission, composed of education and business leaders, which published the report Teaching at Risk: A Call to Action.
The Education Exchange: A Strike No One Bargained For
Jim Stergios, the executive director of the Pioneer Institute, Jim Stergios, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss the teachers strike that took place in Newton, Mass., and if it could lead to future strike activity in the state. Stergios recently published an op-ed in the Boston Globe, “Teachers strikes hurt...
The Party of Education in 2024
For decades, the Democrats were “the party of education,” ringing up double-digit leads in polls asking Americans which major party they trusted most to handle education. During parts of the Clinton and Obama presidencies, that lead topped 30 points. Now, though, the Dems’ edge has shrunk to just a few points, with the occasional poll showing Republicans nosing ahead. Even so, an increasing share of voters have confidence in neither party when it comes to education.
The Education Conference as Epiphany
Over the past few weeks, I did a couple plenary sessions at big education conferences (a higher ed gathering and a convening of state school leaders). I came away reminded why it feels like the education community has so much trouble talking to red America. A bit of context: For...
Doing Educational Equity Right: School Discipline
This is the third in a series on doing educational equity right. See the introductory post and part two on school finance. If school funding is the issue around which it’s easiest to find common ground across left and right, school discipline might be the hardest. That shouldn’t be...
The Education Exchange: Are Colleges Failing to Adapt to 21st Century Realities?
Jacob Light, a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Stanford University, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss Light’s latest paper, which examines how quickly universities react in creating new courses and making popular courses available, based on the needs of students. Light’s paper, “Student Demand and the Supply of College...
What We’re Watching: Paul E. Peterson on Alaska’s Charter Schools
On Thursday, Feb. 7, Education Next senior editor Paul E. Peterson spoke before the Alaska state legislature to present his findings from The Nation’s Charter Report Card, which ranked states by their charter school performance and found that Alaska had the top-performing charter sector in the United States. He presented to both Alaska’s House Education Committee and its Senate Education Committee.
Doing Educational Equity Right: School Finance
This is the second in a series on doing educational equity right. In a previous post, I identified three rules for “doing educational equity right”:. 1. When aiming for equity, we should level-up instead of leveling-down. 2. We should focus on closing gaps between affluent students and their...
Are Student Surveys the Right Tools for Evaluating Teacher Performance?
In the 1990 standardized tests became entrenched in American K–12 schools as nearly every state, and later the federawl government, adopted policies that mandated annual testing and held schools accountable for the results. In the ensuing decades, however, educators and policymakers began to recognize that high-stakes testing was not living up to its promise and that the single-minded focus on test scores had produced unintended (although, in retrospect, entirely predictable) consequences.
Elite Colleges Need to Offer Less Affirmation. And Insist on More Work.
Recently, I offered a not-so-sophisticated explanation for the histrionics we’ve seen at elite colleges: too many students are simply aimless, lonely, and bored. Well-meaning concern about the mental and emotional state of college students today has fueled a lot of affirmation and hand-holding. But much of this may ultimately be counterproductive, exacerbating fragility rather than supporting well-being.
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Education Next aims to provide news and research to bring evidence to bear on current education policy. Bold change is needed in American education, but Education Next partakes of no program, campaign, or ideology. It goes where the evidence points.
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