The Thomas B. Fordham Institute

High Tech, Low Standards: High School in the Age of Distraction

Wed, 09/09/2026 - 00:01

Foreword By Amber M. Northern and Michael J. Petrilli After years of mounting concern about students and screens, the techlash came to a head in June when the Los Angeles Unified School District made headlines for approving a new screen-time policy for students. The policy is blunt by design. It limits students’ school-assigned screen time on district-issued devices (such as laptops and tablets),[1] counting both in-school use and homework. Students in pre-K through first grade cannot use… Read More

Gadfly Bites 8/26/26—Putting in the effort

Wed, 08/26/2026 - 09:47

News stories featured in Gadfly Bites may require a paid subscription to read in full. You have been warned. As the new school year gets fully underway across Ohio, NBC 4 News is here to remind us that this is the first full year that all Ohio schools are subject to a bell-to-bell cellphone ban for students. (NBC 4 News, Columbus, 8/26/26) The first day for most Norton City Schools students was last Thursday. Which means that today is the first No-Tech Wednesday of the school year, a new… Read More

The “state share” of school funding and the 20 mill property tax floor

Tue, 08/25/2026 - 08:21

Ohio’s school districts receive and spend more money than ever before. Hard to believe, given headlines about “starving” public schools, but it’s true. In fiscal year 2025, public schools spent on average $16,976 per student, or 17 percent above spending in 2013 (adjusted for inflation). In urban districts such as Columbus and Cleveland, spending exceeded $25,000 per pupil—amounts that we’re more accustomed to seeing in high-tax coastal states like New Jersey and New York. Even in some rural… Read More

Digging into the findings of The American Teenagers Survey

Tue, 08/25/2026 - 08:16

How are today’s teenagers different from previous generations? Daniel Cox, a senior fellow at AEI and director of their Survey Center on American Life, dug into some new data to find out. The American Teenagers Survey project raises the specter of today’s young people eschewing traditional teen experiences—like eating regular family meals, reading for pleasure, and spending time with friends—in favor of whiling away hours a day on social media, playing video games, and trying to figure out the… Read More

Ohio takes its eye off the teacher shortage ball

Mon, 08/24/2026 - 10:12

A few years ago, teacher shortages were a hot topic in Ohio. In the wake of the pandemic, a perfect storm of issues—too few students enrolling in or graduating from teacher preparation programs, too many veteran educators retiring, teacher burnout, and low pay—coalesced to elevate a familiar, consistent concern into somewhat of a public panic. Seeking solutions, policymakers established two statewide initiatives aimed at strengthening Ohio’s teacher pipeline. First, as part of the state… Read More

Gadfly Bites 8/24/26—Churchillmaxxing

Mon, 08/24/2026 - 09:56

News stories featured in Gadfly Bites may require a paid subscription to read in full. You have been warned. Fordham’s research guru Aaron Churchill is all over the news at the moment. Which is good news for anyone looking for clear-eyed and data-driven analysis of…well…anything First up: The latest long-term trends assessment from NAEP, which indicates that younger students—those who entered school after the main Covid closures/disruptions of 2020 and 2021—are faring better than… Read More

Ohio Charter News Weekly – 8.21.26

Fri, 08/21/2026 - 12:44

Stories featured in Ohio Charter News Weekly may require a paid subscription to read in full. Charters on the rise in Cleveland – pt. 1 Signal Cleveland brings us a terrific, in-depth look at four new charter schools coming to Cleveland—two this fall and two more in 2027. The leaders of each school are given plenty of room to describe the educational missions driving them, and it makes for fascinating reading. FORWARD Girls Leadership Academy, for example, is modeled after several well-known… Read More

Gadfly Bites 8/21/26—School choices on the rise

Fri, 08/21/2026 - 09:50

News stories featured in Gadfly Bites may require a paid subscription to read in full. You have been warned. Unfortunately, the full text of this editorial is subscriber-only content and I ain’t one. But, because it highlights our newly-released science of reading implementation report and because its authors appear to be in full support of Aaron’s recommendations of how to continue the good work underway, here it is for the record. (Tribune Chronicle, 8/19/26) School choice is on the… Read More

What we’re reading: August 21, 2026

Fri, 08/21/2026 - 09:00

WHAT WE’RE READING Emily Oster digs into curious data within New York State’s preliminary 2026 assessment results. She walks us through the wonky details of year-over-year test score calibration and identifies a potential error in 2025 that likely inflated that year’s scores—making the apparent drops in the preliminary 2026 data look particularly bad. And note her two lessons from the exercise: First: The fact that it’s possible to make so much progress on this question even without asking… Read More

Cheers and Jeers: August 21, 2026

Fri, 08/21/2026 - 09:00

CHEERS Cheers to Houston Independent School District and Superintendent Mike Miles: “Three years into Texas’ takeover of the district, one of its most troubled schools has risen from seven consecutive F ratings to its first-ever A,” reports Naaz Modan. And cheers, too, to Texas’s A–F system, which allows high-poverty and struggling schools to get credit for rapid student growth by ignoring their proficiency rates. JEERS Ohio has supported interdistrict open enrollment since the late 80s,… Read More

Can charter schools survive universal school choice?

Thu, 08/20/2026 - 00:06

Echoing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s sentiments distancing herself from wokeness, a common sentiment among reformers seems to be that the bipartisan education reform era was “craazzy.” Standardized testing pep rallies, the glorified grant writing beauty pageant called Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, guarantees of 100 percent reading proficiency by 2014—maybe we went a little overboard, folks. (Though I’m sympathetic to Mike Petrilli’s Ahab-like insistence that standards-based reform, for… Read More

Education’s ambulance-at-the-bottom problem

Thu, 08/20/2026 - 00:05

There’s an old adage that it’s better to build a sturdy fence at the top of a cliff than station an ambulance at the bottom. This wisdom has been conveyed through a variety of metaphors, but the underlying lesson is the same: preventing problems before they occur is almost always more effective than responding after the damage has been done. Yet K–12 education too often embraces the opposite instinct. For instance, schools aren’t held accountable for reading and math outcomes until the end of… Read More

Ohio’s implementation of the science of reading

Thu, 08/20/2026 - 00:04

Approximately half of American adults read at a sixth-grade level or below, according to the Barbara Bush Foundation. The consequences of poor literacy skills are profound: higher unemployment rates, lower-paying work, and struggles with routine tasks such as reading prescriptions or bills. From a societal perspective, widespread illiteracy means slower economic growth, a less vibrant democracy, and greater taxpayer burdens. Adult illiteracy rates of course include many who attended school… Read More

Expanded review process for determining school quality leads to minimal improvement

Thu, 08/20/2026 - 00:03

New York City Schools piloted an external qualitative review (QR) in a subset of its schools for the first time in 2005, intended to expand the definition of school quality via a school inspection-type model and to broaden the scope of educational accountability. Along with traditionally examined outcomes like test scores, disciplinary actions, attendance, and graduation rates, outside analysts aimed to capture schools’ quality across three additional dimensions: their instructional core,… Read More

What early test scores can tell us about a student’s future

Thu, 08/20/2026 - 00:02

Third-grade proficiency is one of the most consequential milestones in a child’s academic career. Around this time, students transition from learning foundational skills to using those skills to engage with more complex content. This period has become the gateway to state testing, and test scores at that age are highly predictive of later outcomes, including success in high school and graduation. The question remains whether third grade is uniquely significant or simply the point at which… Read More

Ohio explores improvements to its statewide assessment

Wed, 08/19/2026 - 09:53

All across Ohio, students, families, and teachers are gearing up for the start of a brand-new school year. The last thing on everyone’s mind as they shop for school supplies and decorate their classrooms is state testing, which largely won’t occur until the spring. But it’s important to know that earlier this summer, lawmakers tucked some interesting provisions into Senate Bill 276 that could make state tests a lot more useful to families and schools going forward. The topline takeaway is… Read More

Gadfly Bites 8/19/26—What passes for math

Wed, 08/19/2026 - 09:46

News stories featured in Gadfly Bites may require a paid subscription to read in full. You have been warned. In case you missed it, Fordham’s Aaron Churchill authored a new report released yesterday, looking at the implementation of the science of reading in Ohio so far. We’ve come a long way, as State Affairs/Gongwer summarizes it, but there’s a lot more still to do. Thanks for that coverage, gang. We appreciate it! (State Affairs/Gongwer, 8/18/26) You can read the full report here.… Read More

Why it’s finally time to rethink age-based schooling

Wed, 08/19/2026 - 08:00

The past century has seen enormous developments in virtually all areas of life, from medicine to transportation to living standards and even to social and cultural attitudes. Yet our education system has not followed suit. One of the greatest illustrations of this is in the continued emphasis on age as the primary determinant of educational placement. Rather than ability determining what students are taught and which classrooms they are placed in, it is their birthday. This emphasis on age… Read More

The Next Chapter: Ohio’s implementation of the science of reading—and where to next

Tue, 08/18/2026 - 01:00

Executive summary Approximately half of American adults read at a sixth-grade level or below, according to the Barbara Bush Foundation.[1] The consequences of poor literacy skills are profound: higher unemployment rates, lower-paying work, and struggles with routine tasks such as reading prescriptions or bills. From a societal perspective, widespread illiteracy means slower economic growth, a less vibrant democracy, and greater taxpayer burdens. Adult illiteracy rates of course include many… Read More

Ohio Charter News Weekly – 8.14.26

Fri, 08/14/2026 - 11:38

Stories featured in Ohio Charter News Weekly may require a paid subscription to read in full. A new model of transportation Here’s a fantastic look at Columbus’ United Schools, a charter network that last year took on responsibility for transporting all of its own students for the first time. The details are interesting and important, especially the comments from school families. United Schools CEO Andy Boy reminds us that this was an expensive endeavor—$1.8 million last year—with the state… Read More