Blog Posts
CNN's Misleading Story on Homework
Last week, CNN ran a back-to-school story on homework with the headline, “Kids Have Three Times Too Much Homework, Study Finds; What’s the Cost?” Homework is an important topic, especially for parents, but unfortunately, CNN’s story misleads rather than informs. The headline suggests American parents should be alarmed because their kids have too much homework. Should they? No, CNN has ignored the best evidence on that question, which suggests the opposite. The story relies on the results of one recent study of homework—a study that is limited in what it can tell us, mostly because of its research design. But CNN even gets its main findings wrong. The study suggests most students have too little homework, not too much.
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Implementing Common Core: The Problem of Instructional Time
This is part two of my analysis of instruction and Common Core’s implementation. I dubbed the three-part examination of instruction “The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly.” Having discussed “the “good” in part one, I now turn to “the bad.” One particular aspect of the Common Core math standards—the treatment of standard algorithms in whole number arithmetic—will lead some teachers to waste instructional time.
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Common Core and Classroom Instruction: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
This post continues a series begun in 2014 on implementing the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The first installment introduced an analytical scheme investigating CCSS implementation along four dimensions: curriculum, instruction, assessment, and accountability. Three posts focused on curriculum. This post turns to instruction. Although the impact of CCSS on how teachers teach is discussed, the post is also concerned with the inverse relationship, how decisions that teachers make about instruction shape the implementation of CCSS.
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The Gender Gap in Reading
This week marks the release of the 2015 Brown Center Report on American Education , the fourteenth issue of the series. One of the three studies in the report, “Girls, Boys, and Reading,” examines the gender gap in reading. Girls consistently outscore boys on reading assessments. They have for a long time. A 1942 study in Iowa discovered that girls were superior to boys on tests of reading comprehension, vocabulary, and basic language skills.[i]Girls have outscored boys on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading assessments since the first NAEP was administered in 1971.
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High Achievers, Tracking, and the Common Core
A curriculum controversy is roiling schools in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the past few months, parents in the San Mateo-Foster City School District, located just south of San Francisco International Airport, voiced concerns over changes to the middle school math program. The changes were brought about by the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). Under previous policies, most eighth graders in the district took algebra I. Some very sharp math students, who had already completed algebra I in seventh grade, took geometry in eighth grade. The new CCSS-aligned math program will reduce eighth grade enrollments in algebra I and eliminate geometry altogether as a middle school course.
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