Education policy is prone to extremes. Cozy bipartisan cooperation brought big, messy compromises like the Bush-era "No Child Left Behind." Then, an oppositional fervor stoked by Tea Party-flavored federalism attacked the Common Core, and now bitter battles with big labor consume the school choice…
What happened to Common Core—that is, abolishing it? President Trump's promise to get rid of the controversial program of standards for elementary and secondary schools is gone from his speeches.
New test results place American high schoolers well below their global contemporaries in mathematical literacy. The Program for International Assessment 2015 scores, released Tuesday, confirm a downward trend that appears to track the rocky implementation of the Common Core State Standards.
In yet another installment of "nothing new under the sun," the Fordham Institute has put out a survey-analysis assessing the controversial Common Core math standards. As the first of its kind, the survey of teachers' reactions to the overhaul-alignment of American public schools is overdue and…
A joyless rite of passage, the SAT is a source of dread that most adults get to ignore until they're forced to confront it anew along with their high-school-age children. And as critics and reformers of the SAT have long pointed out, students would put down their pencils, close their booklets,…
In a 2014 article on Common Core, Andrew Ferguson wrote, "Conservative hostility to the Common Core is also entangled with hostility to President Obama and his administration. Joy Pullman, an editor and writer who is perhaps the most eloquent and responsible public critic of Common Core, wrote…
In the Gates Foundation's annual letter, dreamily entitled "What If...," CEO Sue Desmond-Hellman writes of past progress and future goals. The foundation aims to save the world from what Bill and Melinda Gates consider its greatest problems: namely, infectious diseases, cigarette smoking and the…
New York
Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina was asked this morning on CNBC how she's different than Jeb Bush. "Everything about me is different," said Fiorina.
Jonathan Easley of The Hill writes:
The school house for American children is, increasingly, the same one where they eat and sleep and live with their parents. As Genevieve Wood of the Daily Signal reports:
As Michelle Maitre at EdSource reports, when people learn more about the Common Core educational standards, they like them less. The Common Core is the latest attempt to apply universal standards of instruction and performance across American schools. It has the support of big names like Bill…
Senior editor Andrew Ferguson joined Reason's Nick Gillespie to discuss his recent WEEKLY STANDARD article, "The Common Core Corruption." Ferguson explains how the education reform-industrial complex keeps getting it wrong. Watch the video below:
It has been five years now since America got the news, or was supposed to: Henceforth our children would enjoy a revolutionary new approach to learning in the public schools, in the form of national educational standards. They’re called the Common Core State Standards, or Common Core for short—or…
It is the “Cubs Fail to Reach World Series” of news stories. American students are found to be doing poorly at their job which is, of course, learning. Today’s iteration of that story comes from Libby Nelson of Vox who reports:
Athens, Ga.
The educrats have decided that if students are to be taught about Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, then it might be best to leave out any mention of that … well, that war that was being fought at around that same time.
There is widespread opposition to the latest federal initiative aimed at improving education in this country. And the secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, knows why. It is because the imposition of something called the “Common Core State Standards”has exposed a terrible truth to many:
When President Obama unveiled his Race to the Top initiative in 2009, the idea was to award $4.35 billion in federal grant money to states to replicate policies that boosted student achievement. That quickly changed and the federal money was instead used to persuade states to adopt…
A strongly-worded statement from Education Secretary Arne Duncan last week revealed his distaste for federalism, since it undermines his goal of having all states agree to one set of education standards.
A coalition of right-leaning education reformers have recently and sharply broken with the growing federal influence Republicans and Democrats have broadly supported in recent decades. This edusphere tussle connects education to the wider debate Americans (evinced most loudly by Tea Party…