Thomas B. Fordham Foundation

The media gleefully reported the news that a big interim Reading First study from the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Educational Sciences (IES) found the program to have no impact on reading comprehension.

America's urban Catholic schools are in crisis. Over 1300 of them have shut down since 1990, mostly in our cities. As a result, some 300,000 students have been displaced—double the number affected by Hurricanes Rita and Karina. These children have been forced to attend other schools at an estimated cost to taxpayers of more than $20 billion.

Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us. For those of you I haven’t met, I’m Mike Petrilli. I was a Bush Administration appointee at the Department of Education during the president’s first term, and I’m now a vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

Sol Stern
It is an in-depth and devastating expose of the scandalous efforts by the executive branch and Congress to sabotage the Reading First program. As is pointed out in the report, Reading First is a highly successful and effective program—the only one contained in the No Child Left Behind act that has received the stamp of approval from both the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

By Michael J. Petrilli
George Will doesn’t much like the federal government, and he certainly doesn’t much like the federal government getting involved in education. So it comes as no surprise that he doesn’t like No Child Left Behind. More precisely, he loathes it.

Over the ten years of Fordham's modern existence, we have panned vigorously for gold--curricular gold. This quest has frequently left us disappointed, as our reviews of state standards have consistently shown that expectations for American primary and secondary students are typically weak and watered down.

Chester Finn
It's fairly widely agreed nowadays that schools should be judged by, and accountable for, their results, not just their intentions, services, or inputs.

The political strategy of George Miller and Buck McKeon, respectively the chairman and top Republican on the House Education and Labor Committee, has now come into focus: to get an NCLB reauthorization bill through Congress

by Liam Julian
The idea is simple: Allow low-performing schools to extend learning time by using money previously allotted to students for out-of-school tutoring.

By Martin A. Davis, Jr.
There is an old adage among lawyers that says, "if you have the facts on your side, pound the facts; if you have the law on your side, pound the law; if you have neither the facts nor the law, pound the table."

by Chester E. Finn, Jr., Martin A. Davis, Jr.
For more than three decades, advocates of "whole-language" reading instruction have argued--to the delight of many teachers and public school administrators--that learning to read is a "natural" process for children. Create reading centers in classrooms; put good, fun books in children's hands and allow them to explore; then encourage them to "read," even if they can't actually make out many of the words on the page. After all, they can use context clues and such. Eventually, they'll get it. So say the believers.

Primary reading programs aren’t always what they claim
WASHINGTON, D.C.— Amid ongoing debate about the federal Reading First program, a new report from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute exposes ineffective reading programs that dishonestly claim to be “scientifically-based” and thereby qualify for millions of dollars in public funds intended to help struggling children learn to read.

Though it's not the fundamental rethinking of No Child Left Behind that we would have preferred, the President's reauthorization proposal represents a pretty decent repair attempt. It's 50% "stay the course," 30% "tweak and tuck," and 20% "bold new ideas." Not bad for a president with 33% approval ratings, though the package as a whole has about a 0% chance of getting through Congress.

Chester Finn
An authority on Vietnamese education I don't pretend to be, but a recent trip yielded a couple of surprises.
First, even Vietnam, still in many respects a doctrinaire communist nation, is opening up its education system (both elementary/secondary and postsecondary) to competition and privatization, including for-profit providers.

Some parents in Michigan were none too pleased by the conclusions reached in Education Week's Quality Counts 2007: From Cradle to Career, especially by the report's "Chance-for-Success Index," which measures how likely are students to succeed in school by calculating the socioeconomic standing of adults.