Month: April 2024

Start High School Later for Better Academic Outcomes – by David Figlio

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Many proposals for improving student performance involve very costly interventions. And while quite a few of these costly interventions surely pass benefit-cost tests, they can be extremely challenging, politically or financially, to implement. One possible source of “low-hanging fruit” involves changing the ways in which schools are organized. As one example, in a very useful...

In the News: As New York Once Again Targets Religious Schools, a History Lesson in Communal Resistance – by Education Next

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Tablet magazine features an article by Marvin Schick, who is in his 46th year as president of the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School, about New York State’s effort to regulate the curriculum in Jewish private schools. Schick recounts an earlier such effort, between 1939 and 1941, in which the state warned the Jewish schools that their practices violated the state’s compulsory education ...

Can We Learn from How Other Countries Empower Their Educators? – by Chester E. Finn, Jr.

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Linda Darling-Hammond, smart as she is, doubtless has many fresh thoughts and insights. In her new book series on “empowered educators,” however, after bringing in a sizable body of information on how other countries go about it, she and a number of colleagues recycle many of their sturdiest old thoughts and insights. Subtitled “how high-performing systems shape teaching qualit...

In the News: ‘Separate Programs for Separate Communities’: California School District Agrees to Desegregate – by Education Next

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The New York Times recently highlighted an action by the attorney general of California, Xavier Becerra, to desegregate the Sausalito Marin City school district, which includes both a charter school and a traditional public school. The Times reports that “The Sausalito case focuses attention on a hotly contested argument in policy circles: whether charter schools significantly ...

What Happened in the Bayou? – by Patrick J. Wolf

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Children carry their books into Alice Harte Elementary charter school in New Orleans. The state’s scholarship program took place in the context of other recent reforms. “Everything works somewhere; nothing works everywhere,” writes Dylan Wiliam in his book Creating the Schools Our Children Need. To that I would add, everything works at something; nothing works at everythi...

In the News: Trump Should Capitalize on Vouchers’ Newfound Popularity – by Education Next

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In an op-ed for Real Clear Education, Paul Peterson notes that public opinion surveys are finding that public support for vouchers is growing. A year ago, the 2016 Education Next poll of a representative sample of adult Americans (which I oversee) found only 31% of the public support the use of “government funds to pay the tuition of low-income students” while 55% opposed, with...

“More Play Will Save Our Schools,” a New Book Claims – by Chester E. Finn, Jr.

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Let The Children Play by Pasi Sahlberg and William Doyle Oxford University Press, 2019, $24.95, 472 pages As reviewed by Chester E. Finn, Jr. The education solar system is endlessly distorted by the extraordinary presence within it of two separate suns with gravitational fields that tug the policy planets in different directions. Around one sun revolve the satellites of utilit...