-
Campus antisemitism, Islamophobia reports prompt ‘huge influx’ of federal civil rights complaints
Amid reports of heightened antisemitism and Islamophobia in schools and colleges since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, a senior Education Department official said the agency has received a “huge, huge influx” of civil rights complaints that have led to a surge in federal investigations. Since the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas terrorists on Israel...
By Mark Keierleber | January 18, 2024
-
Are there really ‘fast’ & ‘slow’ learners? Study could help all students succeed
A November 2023 report debunking “The Myth of the Quick Learner” prompted an outcry of disbelief online and led to a closer look at the original paper, “An Astonishing Regularity in Student Learning Rate,” published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal. The March 2023 paper asserted: We found students...
By Alina Adams | January 17, 2024
-
The ‘Godfather’ of top charter schools: A tribute to the late Linda Brown
The woman who was arguably one of the most influential U.S. educators in decades died on Christmas day in her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the age of 81, with her fingernails freshly painted bright red — as always. That would be Linda Brown, who tried very hard to remain private, and succeeded. To date, there...
By Richard Whitmire | January 16, 2024
-
From California to New Jersey, ‘Nation’s Report Card’ is fueling efforts to close learning gaps worsened by COVID
Alabama recently deployed math coaches to low-performing schools; New Jersey is creating new statewide civics and history assessments; and California leaders are planning major investments in professional development to turn around achievement declines. Those are all efforts fueled by data from the Nation’s Report Card to close learning gaps worsened by the pandemic. It’s encouraging...
By Lesley Muldoon | January 11, 2024
-
Emergency-hired teachers do just as well as those who go through normal training
When K-12 schools closed their doors for in-person instruction in spring 2020, it had a variety of negative effects on students and teachers. It also shut off the training opportunities for future educators. In response, states instituted a variety of short-term waivers allowing candidates to teach without fulfilling their normal requirements. Those policies helped candidates...
By Chad Aldeman | January 10, 2024
-
A rose-colored recovery: Study says parents don’t grasp scope of COVID’s academic damage
Last week, as leading education experts gathered — again —to ponder the nation’s sluggish recovery from pandemic learning loss, one speaker put the issue in stark relief. “This is the biggest problem facing America,” Jens Ludwig, a University of Chicago professor, said flatly. Nonetheless, he told those assembled at the Washington, D.C., event sponsored by...
By Linda Jacobson | January 9, 2024
-
New analysis finds charter school sector still has plenty of room to grow
The conventional wisdom in some quarters is that the charter school movement has run its course. Abandoned by an increasingly progressive Democratic Party for being “neo-liberal” and by an increasingly populist Republican Party for being “technocratic,” charter schools (the story goes) are falling into the chasm that has opened up in the political center of...
By Michael J. Petrilli | January 8, 2024
-
One-on-one tutoring program bets big on teaching kindergartners to read
High-dosage tutoring is one of the most effective tools to help students recover from lost learning, including in subjects like reading, where many are far behind. But what if schools didn’t wait until students fell behind? What if all kindergartners got a reading tutor from the start? That’s what the early-literacy tutoring company Once is...
By Julian Roberts-Grmela | January 4, 2024
-
14 charts that changed the way we looked at America’s schools in 2023
For K–12 education, 2023 was a year spent over a threshold. Schools had one foot in the shutdown era, still struggling to restore a sense of normalcy that disappeared in 2020. A steep rise in behavioral and disciplinary issues, which many teachers hoped would be only the temporary product of COVID’s generational disruption to routines,...
By Kevin Mahnken | January 3, 2024
-
7 artificial intelligence trends that could reshape education in 2024
The future of education has never looked more creative and promising. Since making its public debut last year, ChatGPT has profoundly impacted my perspective on generative AI in education. As a writer and former high school English teacher, I experienced an existential crisis watching the chatbot effortlessly generate lesson plans and rubrics — tasks that...
By Edward Montalvo, The XQ Institute | January 2, 2024