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This week’s Isthmus includes a damning internal assessment of Reading Recovery, “a remedial first-grade reading program considered a cornerstone of Madison’s school iteracy efforts.” “The district would be ‘well-served to investigate other methods’ to reach struggling reaaders, says the report.” One of those other methods will be presented Sunday, at 1:00 p.m., at the Madison […]
Please plan to attend a presentation by two principals of Milwaukee elementary schools that use a curriculum that won Barton Elementary federal recognition as a Blue Ribbon school, the only one in Wisconsin: Could Madison Use Milwaukee�s Successful Reading Programs? Norm and Dolores Mishelow 1:00 p.m. Sunday, November 7 Madison Senior Center 330 W. Mifflin […]
Wisconsin DPI just released statewide third grade reading test results: DPI Superintendant Elizabeth Burmaster’s comments: (6 page pdf) Sarah Carr: Still, at the state level, educators need to work on closing a persistent achievement gap between students of different races and socioeconomic classes, said Joe Donovan, state Department of Public Instruction spokesman. This year, 64% […]
At the May 13th MMSD Budget Hearing parents and community representatives spoke against the proposed elementary string fee, calling it outrageous and equivalent to cutting the program. “We are not a good-things-come-to-those-who pay town,” said parent Maureen Rickman, adding that the proposed fee would “cut out a big chunk of the students [in the middle […]
Howard Blume: “To end overreach from Washington and restore the rightful role of State oversight in education, the Budget proposes to eliminate the misnamed English Language Acquisition program which actually de-emphasizes English primacy by funding [nongovernmental organizations] and States to encourage bilingualism,” the administration stated. “The historically low reading scores for all students mean States […]
Kimberly Wethal: The law calls for a multi-faceted overhaul of the state’s elementary school reading curriculum. It aims to improve reading proficiency by emphasizing phonics and prohibits some methodologies, such as one in which young readers use clues to learn unfamiliar words. Critics say that leads to more guessing and lower rates of reading proficiency. The law, known […]
Philip Hamburger: The current institutional players are in no condition to rethink higher education. Having cultivated and tolerated violations of civil-rights laws, universities and colleges can’t afford candid introspection, lest it be understood as an admission of wrongdoing. They are controlled, moreover, by administrators who generally don’t have the stomach to recognize the damage they’ve […]
Philip Hamburger: The current institutional players are in no condition to rethink higher education. Having cultivated and tolerated violations of civil-rights laws, universities and colleges can’t afford candid introspection, lest it be understood as an admission of wrongdoing. They are controlled, moreover, by administrators who generally don’t have the stomach to recognize the damage they’ve […]
Alex Gutentag: On May 17, the Oakland, California, teachers union ended a two-week strike—the union’s third strike in five years. The district offered a substantial salary increase for teachers before the strike even began, but negotiations remained deadlocked for days over the union’s other demands. The Oakland Education Association (OEA) put forward several “common good” proposals that included drought-resistant […]
Madison Education Partnership: When we dig deeper on summative and formative exams, we find extreme inequities in performance by student demographic group and in specific content areas. For example, in 6th grade, the typical student from a low-income family is two or more grade levels behind in algebra and in numbers and operations while the […]
WILL: The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) has issued a warning to the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) and its Superintendent, Jill Underly, to comply with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, or potentially lose federal funding. The U.S. Department of Education (ED) has set a deadline for Thursday, April […]
Karen Vaites: Last year, I wrote about a specific, promising development in Wisconsin: the state published the strongest ELA curriculum list in the country. Unfortunately, the work in Wisconsin prior to that development, and since, underwhelms. I’m overdue to write about the broader context in Wisconsin, mostly because progress on curriculum improvement has stalled, and I should […]
Dairyland Sentinel: Sixty-four days have passed since the Dairyland Sentinel filed an open records request with the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) and State Superintendent, Dr Jill Underly. Underly and the Department have yet to hand over the records, despite the legal requirement to do so. The request, submitted Jan. 21, seeks details on controversial changes […]
Mitchell Schmidt: The coalition argues it is Congress, and not the executive branch, that holds the legal authority to incapacitate or dismantle the department, and previous legal decisions have reflected “the uncontroversial understanding that only Congress may abolish an agency it created.” Throughout the week, Democratic lawmakers and the state Department of Public Instruction have […]
John Nichols summary The contest pits two people with very different views against one another. Underly — who taught in rural schools before becoming an elementary school principal, school district superintendent, university academic advisor and administrator, and assistant director at the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction — was elected to serve as superintendent in 2021. […]
Joshua Dunn For several decades, the high priestess of the balanced literacy movement has been Lucy Calkins of Columbia University, who directed the now-defunct Teachers College Reading and Writing Project. Calkins once estimated that her Units of Study reading curriculum had been adopted by as many as one in four U.S. elementary schools. Irene Fountas […]
calfac.org Whereas, there is a long history of workers and unions challenging the introduction of new technologies in order to maintain power in the workplace; and Whereas, other unions have begun to address AI in their CBAs (e.g., SAG, AFTA, and WGA) and have had significant victories in this arena; and Whereas, there are concerns […]
Institute for Reforming Government DPI has yet to fulfill a June 17, 2024, records request from IRG concerning their role in MPS’ late financial reports. Seven months later, it raises the question, what are they hiding? THE QUOTE: “The Institute for Reforming Government is calling on the Department of Public Instruction to immediately release IRG’s requested records,” said Jake […]
WILL An estimated 14% of students in Wisconsin school choice programs have a special needs disability, according to a new analysis conducted by the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) and School Choice Wisconsin (SCW). The Quotes: Will Flanders, Research Director at WILL, stated: “The data is clear. Wisconsin’s school choice programs serve thousands […]
Kari Gensler Santistevan: This report is prepared pursuant to Wis. Stat. § 118.51(15)(c), as amended in 2011 Wisconsin Act 114, which requires the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) to: Annually submit a report to the governor and to the appropriate standing committees of the legislature under Wis. Stat. § 13.172(3). The report under this paragraph […]
Corrinne Hess: More than 40 percent of Wisconsin parents believe their child is “above grade level” in math, and 45 percent said the same about reading, according to Wisconsin survey results. Only 9.5 percent of students were ranked “advanced” in math and just over 8 percent rated “advanced” in reading on the 2022-23 Forward Exam, […]
Pamela Snow: There’s no such thing as a quiet year in education, but 2024 has been a notably non-quiet year, especially for reading instruction in the state of Victoria, Australia. On June 13, the Victorian Deputy Premier and Minister for Education, the Hon. Ben Carroll MP released a media statement signalling a new direction of travel for Victorian […]
IRG Senior Research Director Quinton Klabon: The Joint Committee on Finance was forced to dispute the actions of the Department of Public Instruction once again on critical Act 20 reading reforms. The Institute for Reforming Government calls for DPI to follow the law as written so Wisconsin can catch up to leading literacy states. What […]
Christopher Peak: For decades, schools all over the country taught reading based on a theory cognitive scientists had debunked by the 1990s. Despite research showing it made it harder for some kids to learn, the concept was widely accepted by most educators — until recent reporting by APM Reports. Now, state legislators and other policymakers are trying to change […]
Mark Lisheron: Through a formal records request, the Badger Institute also was able to determine the district spent at least $15,000 to send school officials on three fact-gathering trips in October, November and December 2023 to schools in Atlanta and Macon, Georgia, and in Washington, D.C. Nine school officials, including former Superintendent Keith Posley and […]
Nadia Scharf: The Unified School District of De Pere is under investigation by the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction after board member Melissa Niffenegger accused the district’s reading curriculum and its director of curriculum and instruction, Kathy Van Pay, of violating Wisconsin law. “That is retaliation. You are retaliating against the board for disagreeing with […]
Jackie Longo and Christopher Maynard In the fall of 2022, more than 49 million studentswere enrolled in public elementary and secondary schools across the U.S. About 32% ended the last academic year performing below their current grade level in at least one subject. Unfortunately, many of these kids were afforded different levels of assistance to help […]
Alan Borsuk: “Instead of focusing on declining academic achievement in Wisconsin, the Department of Public Instruction is working to hide the problem,” wrote Will Flanders, research director at the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, a conservative law firm and think tank. “Unfortunately, changing standards for political correctness and to avoid accountability will hurt students today, […]
Holly Korbey In schools, the podcast was a shot across the bow in a longstanding battle over the best way to teach young children to read. “A lot of teachers didn’t know about this research. It was very clear to them, when they started to learn about it, that it has huge implications,” says Hanford. […]
Daniel Buck: Surveying American institutions, one searches in earnest for even a few organizations or systems that progressives have been unable to control. News story after news story confirms that indeed that one, that one, and, yes, that one too have all succumbed to ideological capture. Naïfs like myself once held out hope for science and mathematics. How could geometry be […]
Benjamin Yount: Wisconsin is getting millions of dollars from the federal government to grow charter schools in the state, but the haul for 2024 is tens-of-millions of dollars less than in the past. The Department of Public Instruction this week announced an $11.4 million grant to either open or expand charter schools across the state. […]
Victoria Albert: The Bible and Ten Commandments are cornerstones of Western civilization, Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s state superintendent of public instruction, said in a memorandum. He said the decision was effective immediately. “This is not merely an educational directive but a crucial step in ensuring our students grasp the core values and historical context of our […]
Kelly Meyerhofer: The percentage of Wisconsin high school graduates going directly to college is plummeting. In 2022-23, it was less than 52%. That’s down about 10 percentage points from six years ago, according to state Department of Public Instruction data. It’s a trend experts say could threaten Wisconsin’s economic competitiveness. Michael Ramsey, another job fair attendee, […]
By: A.J. Bayatpour: In an interview Thursday with CBS 58, Gray said his review of what went wrong begins with the district’s use of financial reporting software that doesn’t fit with the system used by the state Department of Financial Instruction (DPI). While other districts have transitioned to newer software that allows those districts to […]
DPI: The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction is announcing NCS Pearson was selected to supply the statewide reading readiness screener under the requirements of 2023 Wisconsin Act 20. Bids for the universal screener were evaluated by Department of Administration experts following state procurement rules. The DPI will need to negotiate a final contract before July 15, 2024, with […]
Brian Fraley: State Superintendent Jill Underly put out a written press statement today (Thursday) wherein she shared startling, detailed statistics regarding the historic failure of DPI and MPS to educate hundreds of thousands of Milwaukee Public School students over the last several decades. She included information regarding the district’s increased spending and the flow of […]
WILL: The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) strongly condemns the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) for changing the terminology regarding student performance as well as once again considering changing the cut points for proficiency on the state’s Forward Exam. This represents a blatant effort to conceal lackluster academic performance for Wisconsin students. […]
Jessica McBride & Jim Piwowarczyk State School Superintendent Jill Underly’s executive director, the powerful leftist ex=campaign operative Sachin Chheda, donated to the committee working to push through a $252 million Milwaukee Public Schools referendum at the same time DPI was failing to tell the public that the district had not turned in key financial data as far […]
Jill Barshay: This week I challenged my editor to face off against a machine. Barbara Kantrowitz gamely accepted, under one condition: “You have to file early.” Ever since ChatGPT arrived in 2022, many journalists have made a public stunt out of asking the new generation of artificial intelligence to write their stories. Those AI stories […]
By Shannon Whitworth It’s been a rough cultural transition back to schools since the lockdowns, and we are starting to see the price that will be paid for keeping our kids out of the nation’s schools for as long as we did. We are fighting to reclaim our schools for the sake of the children […]
Maddie Hanna We have seen success in the classroom with what teachers are using,” Ashwina Mosakowski, the district’s director of elementary teaching, learning, and innovation, told the school board in January, explaining why the district continues to use Units of Study — a reading program that experts say is deeply flawed. ‘A disservice to all students’ […]
Matt Barnum: A legal battle over a proposed charter school in Oklahoma could unlock a new avenue for religious education—and some of the fiercest opposition is coming from within the existing charter-school movement. State laws have long barred such schools. Supporters, including conservative lawyers and religious-education advocates, call those laws discriminatory and say they run […]
Chris Rickert: Berg lives with his family on the Near West Side and sends his children to the Madison School District, which WILL sued in 2020 over its policy directing teachers to keep information about student gender-identity changes confidential — even from a student’s parents. In fact, Berg was the lead attorney on the case, […]
Mitchell Schmidt: The Legislature argues Act 20 is the mechanism that empowers the state’s GOP-controlled budget committee to directly fund the literacy programs with dollars already approved in the state’s biennial budget, which Evers signed last summer. The committee has not yet allocated the $50 million in state funds. “Act 100, as passed by the […]
Christopher Peak and Emily Haavik Pressure is mounting on two universities to change the way they train on-the-job educators to teach reading. The Ohio State University in Columbus and Lesley University near Boston both run prominent literacy training programs that include a theorycontradicted by decades of cognitive science research. Amid a $660 million effort to retrain teachers that’s underway in […]
Abbey Machtig: Still, at least once major American leader of the balanced literacy movement, Lucy Calkins, has rolled out changes to her reading curriculum under pressure from the science of reading movement. And initial test scores from around the country show this science of reading model seems to be working. Mississippi was one of the […]
Kara Arundel: In 2018-19, the first year that Lori Webster was director of Mountain Mahogany Community School, the previous school year’s data showed only 32% of students in grades 3-8 were proficient in reading, she said. To improve reading proficiency rates, the K-8 public charter school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, “started very small,” Webster said. […]
Jeff Myers Public education in Oregon, and around the country, has become both an important and divisive topic. COVID-19 lockdowns, classroom disruptions and violence, shifts in instructional content and approaches, and ongoing declines in student achievement brought many new faces into school board meetings. Education has become highly partisan as well, turning school board races […]
James Bosco: How new laws will affect children and parenting “Till at last the child’s mind is these suggestions, and the sum of the suggestions is the child’s mind. And not the child’s mind only. The adult’s mind too—all his lifelong. The mind that judges and desires and decides—made up of these suggestions. But all […]
By Sue Loughlin Under a new law, HEA 1558, the state of Indiana is mandating instruction and curriculum that aligns with the science of reading; use of Reading Recovery must be phased out by fall of 2024. Science of reading is a methodology that uses direct, systematic use of five elements in literacy instruction: phonemic […]
Will Flanders: WILL Research Director Will Flanders’s new policy brief, Needs Improvement: How Wisconsin’s Report Card Can Mislead Parents, provides an important explanation of how Wisconsin’s school report cards work and how the various inputs work towards a school’s score. Specifically, Flanders highlights: The Report (PDF). Underly and our long term disastrous reading results…. WEAC: $1.57 million for […]
Dale Chu and Chad Aldeman My favorite study on this question is work by Dan Goldhaber, Malcolm Wolff, and Tim Daly. They investigated how accurate early measures of achievement are in predicting later high school outcomes using data from three states, North Carolina, Massachusetts and Washington State. Here’s their conclusion (emphasis added): A large literature shows that […]
Daniel Bice: Back in 2021, Democratic operative Sachin Chheda played a major role in helping Jill Underly get elected state school superintendent. Now Underly appears to be returning the favor. Underly announced Monday that she is hiring Chheda to a $138,000-per-year job at the Department of Public Instruction, which Underly oversees. Chheda started his new job on Monday as […]
WILL: The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) and School Choice Wisconsin (SCW) released a new report examining amount of special needs students in Wisconsin’s choice schools serve students with disabilities. Serving All: Students with Disabilities in Wisconsin’s Parental Choice Programs shows that schools in Wisconsin choice programs serve far more disabled students than […]
Brian Conrad: When I decided to read every word of California’s 1,000-page proposal to transform math education in public schools, I learned that even speculative and unproved ideas can end up as official instructional policy. In 2021, the state released a draft of the California Mathematics Framework, whose authors were promising to open up new […]
Corrinne Hess: But data shows that most teacher education programs at colleges and universities are still not fully teaching the science of reading. Instead of learning how to read through pictures, word cues and memorization, children will be taught using a phonics-based method that focuses on sounding out letters and phrases, with the hope of addressing […]
Sarah Schwartz The Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, the instructional consultancy housed at Columbia University and founded by the popular and controversial literacy icon Lucy Calkins, will soon be shutting its doors, Teachers College announced Sept. 1. The college is dissolving TCRWP and Calkins will step down as director. Calkins, who remains a tenured faculty member […]
Joseph De Avila: “I really resent being forced into a position where my role as an educator is all of a sudden somebody who is in charge of censorship,” said Cleaver, who teaches at Ferry Pass Middle School. “That’s not my role as an educator.” Teachers in Florida said a wave of recent educational-policy changes […]
Danyela Souza Egorov: Tim Castanza admits that he was “triggered.” The year was 2016, and Castanza, then working for the New York City Department of Education, attended a Community Education Council meeting in Staten Island, where several mothers of kids with dyslexia spoke. The public schools didn’t have any programs for their children, they said, […]
BIANCA VÁZQUEZ TONESS Across the country, students have been absentat record rates since schools reopened during the pandemic. More than a quarter of students missed at least 10% of the 2021-22 school year, making them chronically absent, according to the most recent data available. Before the pandemic, only 15% of students missed that much school. All […]
Christina Gomez-Schmidt: An essential duty of any school board is to help plan and approve the annual district budget. Like most budgets, household or business, the goal of a school district budget is to match revenue with expenses to produce a balanced budget. This goal ensures that school districts are managing local, state and federal […]
Alliance for education Waukesha: The School District of Waukesha is doing harm to the students, but it’s not as simple as the School Board blaming pride flags, or disaffected teachers blaming the Superintendent. The system itself is a cancer that has metastasized and crept into every classroom across this massive district, and we know it’s […]
Tyler Katzenberger: The new version of the bill, passed Wednesday afternoon by the Assembly in 67-27 vote, would prescribe an “intensive” personal literacy plan, including summer classes, for incoming fourth graders who failed to meet third-grade reading benchmarks. Students would exit the plan after they pass a grade-level reading test and their parents agree the […]
Corrinne Hess In the 2021-22 school year, Wisconsin’s public schools received a total of $16,859 per student, which came from a combination of local property taxes, federal sources and the state. Of that, about $7,728 came from the state, according to the Department of Public Instruction. “In fact, some of the federal funding factored into […]
Alex Baumhardt: Carl Cole was alarmed by the growing number of students sent to him for special education in the late 1990s. He was director of special education for the Bethel School District near Eugene, and he doubted that so many kids had learning disabilities. One of the district’s elementary schools was referring nearly one […]
Jon Levine, Mary Kay Linge and Matthew Sedacca One education consultant confirms that some of the city’s top private schools now ask about a child’s gender identity and preferred pronouns on their kindergarten admissions applications. The schools — with kindergarten tuition north of $60,000 — shamelessly boast about the instruction in their online course materials. […]
Alex Gutentag: What makes the NEA’s bargaining approach so remarkable is the fact that this union and its counterpart, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), have recently inflicted profound racial and social injustice on the country’s school children in the form of extended school closures. As an Oakland public school teacher, I was a staunch supporter of […]
Rick Tobey: After the top pick for Easthampton’s superintendent lost his job offer when he used the term “ladies” in an email, the second choice for the district has withdrawn herself from running the school system amid students reporting her past Facebook posts. The Easthampton School Committee is back to the drawing board following this […]
David Griffith: Q: Do charter schools increase or decrease districts’ total revenues per pupil?A: Charter schools may increase or decrease districts’ total revenues per student, depending on who authorizes them, how they impact the local housing market, and the policies that states and localities adopt. Q: Do charter schools increase or decrease districts’ instructional spending?A: […]
Wall Street Journal: Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin won election in 2021 in no small part on education policy, including a promise to ban critical race theory in schools. His first executive order instructed the Superintendent of Public Instruction to review curricula and end the use of “inherently divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory.” The Black […]
Audio Transcript One of the line items in Wisconsin Motion 57 directly connects to our ED prep programs and reading. It states that Wisconsin will [00:11:00] contract with a vendor who will conduct an analysis of reading program coursework in our UW institutions. After engaging in our very robust and required state procurement process, the […]
Nate Joseph: Over the years, I have on numerous occasions seen the claim that 95% of students can learn how to read proficiently, so long as they are provided adequate tier 1/2 instruction. Truthfully, it has always stuck out to me as a strange figure, for three reasons. First, most academic research does not typically […]
Wisconsin Senate (and Assembly) Committee on Education: Department of Public Instruction Laura Adams -Policy Initiatives Advisor for the State Superintendent Duy Nguyen – Assistant Superintendent for the Division of Academic Excellence Tom McCarthy – Executive Director for the Office of the State Superintendent ExcelinEd Dr. Kymyona Burk – Senior Policy Fellow University of Wisconsin–Madison Mark […]
Christine Smallwood: One night, while searching in the woods for food, Frankenstein’s monster discovers a leather suitcase containing three books: The Sorrows of Young Werther, Plutarch’s Lives, and Paradise Lost. Goethe is a source of “astonishment” but also alienation; the monster can sympathize with the characters, but only to a point—their lives are so unlike […]
David Blaska: 1) Amend the Wisconsin Constitution to place the Department of Public Instruction in the governor’s appointive cabinet rather than as an elected office. Education should sit at the same table with the governor as transportation, natural resources, prisons, public health, and revenue. 2) Revise the criminal code to automatically charge custodial parents or guardians with a crime […]
Thomas Toch: While teacher shortages dominated education news coverage during the summer, the tremendous amount of federal pandemic-relief money that states and school districts are pouring into the profession—and the funding’s substantial consequences for longstanding policies and practices in the more-than-three-million-member occupation—has received far less attention. Local education agencies are on pace to spend as […]
Will Flanders: Recently, results from the National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP) have caused shockwaves around the country. At least partially-related to teachers’ union-led shutdowns that kept schools closed well past when it was reasonable to do so,[i] decades of progress in scores were erased over the course of three years.[ii] Despite declining scores across the […]
Robert Pondiscio In 1925, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an Oregon law requiring that parents or guardians send their children to public school in the districts where they lived. The Society of Sisters, which ran private academies, claimed that the law interfered with the right of parents to choose religious instruction for their children. The […]
Robert Pondisco: In 1925, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an Oregon law requiring that parents or guardians send their children to public school in the districts where they lived. The Society of Sisters, which ran private academies, claimed that the law interfered with the right of parents to choose religious instruction for their children. The […]
Libby Sobic: WILL Director of Education Policy, Libby Sobic, is the author of Empower School Board Members With Policy Solutions, a new publication from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). The rising tide of parent engagement and activism requires policy thinkers to turn their attention to the local level where school boards can debate and pass reforms […]
Marginal Revolution: The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.” This is one of the most crazy things […]
Adrian Mehic: This paper examines the role of student facial attractiveness on academic outcomes under various forms of instruction, using data from engineering students in Sweden. When education is in-person, attractive students receive higher grades in non-quantitative subjects, in which teachers tend to interact more with students compared to quantitative courses. This finding holds both […]
America First Legal Unlawful actions by the most notorious school district in America include: Knowingly, systematically, and willfully violating the Plaintiffs’ fundamental constitutional rights to care for, nurture, and direct the education, moral instruction, and upbringing of their children; Knowingly, systematically, and willfully taking advantage of the schools’ coercive power over children to impose a […]
By Shawn Hubler All together, America’s public schools have lost at least 1.2 million students since 2020, according to a recently published national survey. State enrollment figures show no sign of a rebound to the previous national levels any time soon. A broad decline was already underway in the nation’s public school system as rates of birth […]
Alan Borsuk: Amidzich and Maggy Olson, director of equity and instruction for the district, said that they told all involved that, in fact, the material being taught would have more depth and that a wider range of students would bring additional and good ideas to classrooms. They said they were raising the floor, but they […]
Alec Johnson: The Shorewood School Board decided unanimously Wednesday to fire the district’s director of instructional technology after a hearing over how he handled what he said were messages with “deficit-based and racist language” found on a district laptop. “Deficit-based language” is language that reinforces negative stereotypes. Board members voted, 5-0, to end Michael Chavannes’ […]
Robert Meyer for Governor: Wisconsin is one of the last states to move on from antiquated “three cueing” K-2 reading instruction. Pre-service teachers are actually still taught this disproven theory at the UW! A lifelong, bureaucrat, Dr. Evers has determinedly avoided this problem despite our African American 3rd graders (and other subgroups) reading an entire […]
Emily Hanford and Christopher Peak The new, federally funded study found that children who received Reading Recovery had scores on state reading tests in third and fourth grade that were below the test scores of similar children who did not receive Reading Recovery. “It’s not what we expected, and it’s concerning,” said lead author Henry May, director […]
Balaji Srinivasan: Why a new school? Confidence in public schools is at historic lows. Parents want a change. And people can sense that the Prussian education system, the model for American schooling, just isn’t working anymore. Perhaps fifty years ago you might well pull the same lever every day on an assembly line, but today you hit a different key […]
John Fensterwald: The analysis, which looks at performance over time, shows that students fell behind each year incrementally even before the pandemic, starting in third grade when tests were first given. Progress completely stalled last year, when most students were in remote learning. Eighth graders overall scored at the same level that they did when […]
Anna Nordberg, via a kind reader: California’s reading scores are dismal, with 68% of fourth-graders reading below grade level. This is the result of the disastrous decision in the 1980s for the state to embrace whole language, the idea that children should learn to recognize words and phrases through context, guessing and memorization. But evidence […]
Madeline Fox: “I plan to focus on a broad spectrum of issues, including making sure students have access to high quality schools across the state, curriculum transparency and making sure that schools follow the constitution in enacting policies that respect and empower parents and their constitutional right to direct the upbringing of their child,” Brewer […]
Michael Thaddeus: The 100% figure claimed by Columbia cannot be accurate. Among 958 members of the (full-time) Faculty of Columbia College, listed in the Columbia College Bulletin online, are included some 69 persons whose highest degree, if any, is a bachelor’s or master’s degree.12 It is not clear exactly which faculty are supposed to be counted in this […]
Dylan Brogan: The Madison school district is delaying its plan to eliminate standalone honors classes at its high schools. The district hasn’t publicly announced the policy shift or if it’s considering scrapping the plan entirely. At its Dec. 6 meeting, school board members were told by Director of Advanced Learning Sharon Alexander that the district […]
Chester Finn Monday’s Washington Post featured a long, front-page article by the estimable Laura Meckler titled “Public schools facing a crisis of epic proportions.” In it, she skillfully summarized a laundry list of current woes facing traditional public education: The scores are down and violence is up. Parents are screaming at school boards, and children are crying […]
Charles Schifano: To care about the state and quality of writing today is to scream into a void while knowing that the void does nothing but laugh. Of course gripes about writing standards are a timeless and rather trite pastime: there’s always a market for shouts about how the kids these days are inarticulate. Or […]
Kareem Weaver: Where is the humility? Where is the institutional courage to admit mistakes and move forward? Individuals in leadership positions often derive their credibility from being the most knowledgeable person in the room, the unquestioned oracles of knowledge. This moment in education, however, requires leaders who will publicly position themselves as the best learners, […]
Kim Feller-Janus: Several years ago I became disenchanted by my profession. I was not happy with the results of my work as a Reading Interventionist in a large school district. Yes, the students assigned to me made progress and the principals, teachers, and parents were pleased with my work, but I wasn’t. Year after year […]
Ruth Wisse: On January 1, 1993, I arrived at Harvard to take up a newly endowed professorship in Yiddish literature. It seemed preposterous: me at Harvard, Yiddish at Harvard. The university had never figured in my aspirations. My impressions of the university had been formed mostly from what I knew of its program in Jewish […]
Noah Diekemper: It’s little wonder that the American Enterprise Institute’s education research fellow Max Eden has denounced college requirements for preschool teachers as “regressive,” declaring that there is “ no evidence to support this will help with student outcomes .” Why, then, are lawmakers considering a federal law that would fund preschool programs only if lead teachers […]