Much like the typical American fourth grader, education news tends go on a ten-week vacation each June after a year of intermittently joyous, raucous, and bizarre happenings. While parents take their precious ones to Disneyland, education commentators—who have spent months poring over testing data and marveling at the intricacies of “supplement, not supplant” language—unwind with a Moscow Mule and a sheaf of white papers.
But Fordham hasn’t gone anywhere. We’ve stoically kept off the beaches and chronicled the important developments in education politics and policy. And to ward off the summer slide, we’ve compiled a list of the ten biggest ones.
10.) Education reformers find common ground
This one actually kicked off at the end of last school year, when our own Robert Pondiscio wrote a scalding philippic against the perceived encroachments of progressive politics into the reform movement. The reform Left didn’t take kindly to the piece, arguing that any mention of education would be incomplete without addressing issues of race, class, and social equity. With the conversation threatening to devolve into a Hobbesian war of wonk against wonk, Fordham leapt into the fray to convene a roundtable on points of concordance across the political spectrum.
9.) A turning point on teacher tenure?
Many reformers were disappointed this spring when a California appeals court overturned the two-year-old Vergara v. California ruling. The case held the promise of dramatically uprooting the state’s entrenched tenure laws on the grounds that they violate students’ rights to an equal education. As predicted, the California Supreme Court declined to review that decision in August, likely foreclosing that litigation strategy as a means of change in the future. But union foes needn’t give up hope just yet: Public support for teacher tenure has sunk in opinion polls over the last few years, and similar lawsuits are proceeding in New York and Minnesota. The courtroom may yet be the deciding arena here.
8.) Correspondence campaign to Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan
There’s a long and storied tradition of persuasive folks seeking to tell rich people what to do with their money. But that perfectly reasonable instinct doesn’t usually give way to discussions of the nature and utility of philanthropy. Fordham President Emeritus Checker Finn recently penned an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan to encourage them to spend their fortune where it would move the needle furthest: outside the district education monolith, to expand priorities like high-performing charters and alternate teacher certification programs. That led to follow-up letters from Marc Tucker and Diane Ravitch, both disagreeing forcefully with Checker’s analysis. (He made sure to have the last word, though.)
7.) The “enrichment gap” wins overdue attention
One of the underappreciated causes of the academic disparities between rich and poor kids is the “enrichment gap”—the lack of access to activities like field trips, summer camp, athletics, and the arts outside of the middle and upper classes. Such elective (and often expensive) auxiliaries, especially on weekends and vacations, do a lot to stoke learning and curiosity among kids; one group has even estimated that the dearth of summer learning opportunities for low-income elementary students can be blamed for nearly two-thirds of the achievement gap that opens up by ninth grade. Fordham President Mike Petrilli blew the whistle on that disparity, calling for experiments to open up enrichment opportunities for all kids.
6.) Secretary King recommends a discipline overhaul in charter schools
When Education Secretary John King called for charter operators to change their discipline practices in June, some in the choice community shuddered. In the name of limiting suspensions and expulsions (a laudable, if challenging, goal) would charters be stripped of the autonomy that makes them attractive in the first place? In response, Fordham moderated a weeklong conversation of how to make discipline work for kids with disciplinary problems, their classmates, and their teachers. The resulting articles, on topics ranging from the duty of charter boards to overall school climate, are detailed and engrossing.
5.) Bad news for Ohio’s EdChoice program
Reform organizations want to root for statewide voucher programs like Ohio’s EdChoice; ostensibly, they provide access to private alternatives for kids assigned to lousy neighborhood schools. Sometimes, though, the returns from such initiatives don’t live up to the hype. That’s the conclusion of our July report by David Figlio and Krzysztof Karbownik, which dispiritingly found that EdChoice participants actually performed worse than their matched public school peers. The news wasn’t all bad—the authors attribute improvements in certain districts to the program’s injection of private competition—but that’s not a happy topline finding.
4.) Really bad news for Ohio’s e-school sector
The shortcomings of full-time virtual charter schools (“e-schools” for short) aren’t exactly news; Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes offered perhaps the definitive takedown of the sector last year. But Fordham wanted to see for itself just how poorly the schools—which primarily exist to serve kids who have left brick-and-mortar schools for reasons like bullying or health problems—were really doing. Our August report, authored by June Ahn, makes it clear: E-schools are dragging down the performance, and good name, of charters across the state of Ohio. Online learning advocates have argued that data limitations prevented us from offering a more fulsome analysis, but in the meantime, we’ve come up with a list of key fixes that could help cure what ails virtual schooling.
3.) The Department of Education proposes ESSA accountability regulations
When Congress passed the Every Student Succeeds Act late last year, their intention was—as just about everybody noted at the time—to revert authority over schools back to the states. When the Department of Education issued its draft accountability regulations in May, it didn’t seem to have received the message. The rules were derided as clumsy, inflexible, and peremptory—an extension of the worst failures of No Child Left Behind. In the months that followed, a thoughtful discussion brewed on how best to preserve the meat of results-based accountability without yielding to an overly expansive role for federal regulators. With another Fordham study leading the way, reformers are also beginning to ask whether states can use their systems to better attend to the needs of gifted and talented students. When final state accountability plans are due next March, we’ll see where that discussion has gotten us.
2.) Yeesh, 2016
This year’s presidential election hasn’t been anybody’s idea of a garden party, but education observers have special reason for dismay. The Democratic candidate is engaging in a classic bit of Clintonian posturing on both testing and charters, and the Republican candidate seldom bothers to complete his thoughts on the subject. Both parties’ platforms are weak on schooling (the Democrats’ after some truly sordid giveaways to the Sanders crowd), and even the vice presidential nominees leave a lot to be desired: Tim Kaine is widely considered to stand outside the reform camp, while Mike Pence has waged war against Common Core in Indiana. Wake us when November ends.
1.) African American groups versus charter schools
Among the most important (and appealing) voices in favor of public charters in the past few decades have been black parents of charter school students, who argue passionately for school choice as an escape route from dreadful urban districts. And the latest Education Next poll shows continuing support for charters from black participants. Yet vanguard leadership groups like the NAACP the Movement for Black Lives have called for a moratorium on new charters, arguing…well, something about segregation and corporate financiers, it seems. Some of chartering’s staunchest allies have rushed to its defense, among them Democrats for Education Reform President Shavar Jeffries and civil rights icon Howard Fuller. The conflict challenges many of the closest-held premises of the reform movement, and it directly involves the underserved communities that many reformers rightfully prioritize above all else.
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So that’s what Fordham did on its summer vacation. We hope you were reading along with us, and we’re also available if you need to review some of the material we covered last year. Welcome back.
