K-12 Education

  • Conversations 2017-2018

    Co-sponsored by the Albert Shanker Institute and the American Federation of Teachers.

  • Teaching in Context Book Reception at AERA 2018

    Teaching in Context book reception at the American Education Research Association annual meeting, Sunday April 15, 2018, 6:30-8:00 p.m., New York Marriott Marquis Hotel, 1535 Broadway, Astor Ballroom, New York NY.

  • Puerto Rico: The Road to Recovery and Reconstruction

    With the future of Puerto Rico hanging in the balance, this national conference focused on what needs to be done to rebuild the Puerto Rican economy and its educational system in the wake of the devastation caused by Hurricane Maria.

  • Deborah Meier Book Event and Reception

    These Schools Belong to You and Me - Why We Can't Afford to Abandon Our Public Schools

  • Daniel Koretz Book Reception

    American education today has one goal. And it’s not teaching students. It’s raising test scores. High-stakes testing, launched as a way to evaluate Teaching and determine whether students were learning, has become an end in itself. And it’s ruining education.

  • Charter School Expansion & the Viability of Public Education

    There is vital economic dimension to the American promise of a free, quality public education for all of its youth. In its simplest aspect, government needs to provide adequate funding to public schools.

  • Academic Freedom in an Age of Political Polarization

    From a variety of different perspectives, our panel addressed the issues raised by the need to defend academic freedom in an age of political polarization.

  • Is the Promise of ESSA Being Actualized?

    Now that the states have completed and submitted their first ESSA plans, it is an appropriate time to ask if the promise of ESSA is being realized.

  • Teaching Democratic Citizenship When Democracy is at Risk

    Today, the U.S. finds itself in a crisis of democracy, in which the future of our liberties and our republican form of government hang in the balance.

  • Austerity Politics and American Education

    A decade after the start of the Great Recession and eight years into the U.S. economic recovery, almost half of the states have failed to restore K-12 education spending to pre-recession levels; almost all states have yet to restore higher education spending to pre-recession levels.

  • Improving Education Through a Focus on Partnerships Slides

    The Social Side of Education: How Social Aspects of Schools and School Systems Shape Teaching and Learning.

    April 8, 2016, Washington, D.C.

  • Systems, Networks and Relationships Slides

    Social Side of Education: How Social Aspects of Schools and School Systems Shape Teaching and Learning

    April 8, 2016, Washington, DC

  • Competing Strands Of Educational Reform Policy: Can Collaborative School Reform and Teacher Evaluation Reform Be Reconciled?

    As school systems devote tremendous resources to examining the effectiveness of individual teachers, how can we encourage schools to make room for collaborative practices? This paper begins to conceptualize one avenue for reconciling these ideas: Rigurously measuring team teaching and making room for the assessment of team work in schools' evaluation processes.

  • The Social Side Of Education Reform: A Research Primer

    This publication pulls together six important research essays from the social side of eduction blog series. Collectively, these essays make a compelling case that increasing the instructional capacity of schools requires looking beyond individual teacher effectiveness. 

  • Does Money Matter in Education? Second Edition

    A comprehensive review of the empirical evidence on whether and how money matters in education, written by Rutgers Professor Bruce Baker. This is the second edition of this report.

  • The State of Teacher Diversity in American Education

    At the same time that the minority student population in the U.S. has increased dramatically, the percentage of nonwhite teachers nationwide only increased from 12 to 17 percent between 1987 and 2012. This report analyzes the national trends and takes a closer look at what has been happening in nine major U.S. cities, finding that substantial representation gaps between minority teachers and minority students persist.

  • The State of Teacher Diversity Executive Summary

    The State of Teacher Diversity Executive Summary

  • The Evidence on the "Florida Formula" for Education Reform

    A review of the high quality evidence on the "Florida Formula for education success," a package of policies put in place during the late 1990s and 2000s, which focus generally on test-based accountability, competition, and choice.

  • Video: Let's Talk

    This 5-minute video, a part of the Institute’s Let’s Talk initiative, explains how children’s knowledge and language develop in tandem, forming the foundation for all subsequent learning, and what parents and caregivers can do to help.

  • Let’s Talk Foundations: Oral Language Development I

    Oral language—listening and talking—is the primary means by which young children learn about and interact with the world. This training module for early childhood educators offers simple but powerful ideas to support young children build the skills, knowledge, vocabulary, and attitudes that can help prepare them for future academic learning across the content areas. Here, we offer excerpted materials for a workshop on supporting English language learners.

  • Future of Work Series

    A special issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy (Vol. 34, Issue 1, Spring/Summer 2022) featured essays on the topic of the Future of Work which were solicited by the American Federation of Teachers for a conference on the subject it jointly hosted with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Albert Shanker Institute on July 13, 2022. Each week for nine weeks the Shanker Blog featured one of these essays.  See the entire series below.

  • Reimagining Teacher Mentoring Programs: A Key to Solving the Teacher Shortage

    It is officially that time again. The time when teachers start returning to their classrooms for another school year. For an estimated 310,000 teachers (Perry-Graves, 2022), this will be their first time in the classroom, and back to school also means meeting their assigned mentor. Most districts use a formal mentoring program in which districts place new teachers with veteran colleagues. While many believe that mentors are only responsible for providing feedback on their mentee’s classroom instruction, the mentor’s role is much more complex. A good mentor can be an essential resource for helping novice teachers navigate the hidden curriculum of their new workspace, find a sustainable work/life balance, juggle the countless demands of the profession, and rely upon a consistent sounding board for what is sure to be a rollercoaster of a year.

    As a former teacher, I was lucky enough to have an active and caring mentor during my first year of teaching, and was able to model those relationships as I moved from mentee to mentor later in my career. My mentor and my mentees were all good matches for my personality, and we were able to establish strong relationships through shared goals and reciprocal trust. But I know my experience might be an outlier, as the effectiveness of mentoring programs is often questioned. Given these concerns, I have identified several interconnected areas that need further consideration to improve the mentoring experience for novice teachers.

  • Tennessee Trains Thousands of Secondary Teachers in Reading Science

    Guest Author Barbara R. Davidson, President of StandardsWork, Inc. and Executive Director of the Knowledge Matters Campaign, looks at how to address and elevate the literacy needs of secondary students.

    For all the welcome attention being paid to the Science of Reading, and literacy in general, there has been little focus in public policy on how to address the learning needs of secondary students who, for whatever combination of reasons, have failed to learn to read in elementary school.

    Earlier this year, the “What Works Clearinghouse,” an arm of the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute for Education Sciences (IES), made steps to elevate the narrative about secondary literacy when it issued a practice guide entitled, Providing Reading Interventions for Students in Grades 4-9.

  • What the Science of Reading Misses

    Time just published the latest high profile story on the Science of Reading – adding to the list of major news outlets (The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist) that have covered this topic in the years following Emily Hanford’s seminal reporting.

    Many of these stories go like this: U.S. students underperform in reading; a literacy crisis plagues the country. Why? Despite the consensus among experts and researchers, reading continues to be taught in ways that are inconsistent with the science because teachers don’t know (or weren’t taught) this body of knowledge during their training.

    This narrative has (understandably) created alarm and put literacy front and center, spurring a public conversation and related wave of legislation to address the state of reading instruction and achievement across the nation. However, this narrative is not one hundred percent accurate; rather, it neglects a few key elements that I worry need to be understood and addressed to achieve and sustain real progress.

  • New York State Continues to Lead the Way in Education Innovation through P-TECH Schools

    New York State Senator and Chair of the New York State Senate Education Committee Shelley B. Mayer discusses her state's leadership in educational innovation and policies, particularly in the development of the Pathways in Technology Early College High School Program or P-TECH which are school to career programs that create a successful pathway from high school to college to career.

    New York State has long been a leader in educational innovation and policies. In 1890, New York City’s first kindergarten was established; and, after World War II, New York State was one of the first states in the union to make high school mandatory. And while New York State continues to lead, particularly with a focus on equity for all students, regardless of zip code, we know we have more work to do.

    Among our recent achievements, in 2021 and again in 2022, New York State finally fulfilled its promise of full funding under the Foundation Aid Formula. It was established almost 15 years ago based on the promise of a “sound basic education,” and as a way to depoliticize the funding of public education and base state funding for public schools on quantifiable need. And equally important, with strong leadership from the Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Speaker Carl Heastie, NYS has now begun to greatly expand full day Pre-k for 4 year old’s to hundreds more school districts, while New York City already led the way with federal funding and then local funding for full day Pre-K for all 4 year old’s several years ago.

    New York State has also led with the development of innovative school to career programs that create a successful pathway from high school to college to career. The P-TECH program, or Pathways in Technology Early College High School Program, continues to grow stronger and expand to more districts. I am proud to support this program, which provides a grade 9-14 combined high school and community college program linked directly to real career opportunities. P-TECH began in New York City over 14 years ago and now has been replicated across New York State. Former President Barack Obama featured P-TECH in his 2015 State of the Union address and came to visit the initial school in Brooklyn, New York. And as a further sign of success, New York State’s P-TECH innovative model has spread now across 13 states and 28 countries with large numbers of P-TECH schools in Texas, Maryland and Colorado and other countries, including Australia, Hong Kong, Ireland, France and Taiwan.

  • The Gap Between Policy and Practice: Where Textbooks Fail Teachers

    Guest author William Schmidt, university distinguished professor and founder and director of the Center for the Study of Curriculum Policy at Michigan State University and Shanker Institute Board member, discusses how mathematics education must provide all children not only the formal ideas, concepts, algorithms, and procedures that define mathematics, but also focus on opportunities to experience quantitative reasoning to solve higher-order real-world applications.

    The world in which we now live has become increasingly complicated, not just in terms of artificial intelligence (AI), computers, robotics and other forms of technology, but in terms of the ways in which we acquire the knowledge we need to live, work and respond to the complicated issues that now confront the world’s population. Pandemics rage, economies plunge, and the occurrence of floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes increase exponentially in conjunction with climate change. Understanding these issues not only requires literacy in the sense of being able to comprehend what you read, but also requires mathematics literacy, such that a person is able to comprehend the necessary information that increasingly is numerical in nature and is often presented in graphical or tabular form.

  • Reflecting on What DACA Has Meant to Me

    As June marks the 10th anniversary of DACA, Guest author Karen Reyes, a special education teacher and DACA recipient, recounts her personal experience.

    June 15, 2012 is a day I will always remember. It was the day that President Obama announced DACA. I can remember exactly where I was and what I was doing—because it was a day that provided some relief. I would be able to put my education degree to good use; I would be able to get a license and drive; I would be able to live without the overwhelming fear of deportation.

    Two weeks ago marked the 10th anniversary of this program and I’ve been thinking a lot about it.

  • Effects of COVID-19 on Students’ Academic Achievement, Behavior, and Social-Emotional Well-Being

    Our guest author today is Dr. Alvin Larson, Director of Research and Evaluation at Meriden Public Schools, a mid-sized urban Connecticut school district that serves about 8,700 students in Meriden, CT.  Dr. Larson holds a B.A. in Sociology, M. Ed., and M.S. in Educational Research, and a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology.  The work and social-emotional instruments utilized below were made possible with the support from Meriden’s community, leadership and educational professionals.

    Over the past year or two there have been many reports, and predictions, in the media of students losing “years” of academic and social development as a direct or indirect result of the COVID-19 pandemic.  Many of these reports are based on first-hand views of school professionals such as understaffed school psychologists, counselors, and teachers who have witnessed large increases in concerning student behaviors and a decrease in academic skills.

    I am an Educational Psychologist embedded in an urban school district, where 77 percent of students are eligible for free/reduced price meals, 75 percent are minority, 20 percent are classify for special education, and 17 percent are English Language Learners. These students are exposed to many of the typical urban issues which add to our education challenges. Thanks to the support of the Meriden community, leadership, and educational professionals, I have been able to reliably measure student academic, behavioral and social-emotional development over the past ten years. In this essay, to estimate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on students’ well-being; I am reporting cross-sectional data from three academic years 2019-20 (pre-COVID), as well as 2020-21 and 2021-22 (during/post COVID). While I will share aggregate changes in students’ academic measures as well as data on students’ suspension and teacher level data on perceptions of students’ behaviors across the pre-post COVID years, my primary focus is on students’ social-emotional well-being and how it has changed over the past few years. 

  • The Ongoing Journey to Equitable Practices

    Guest authors Allie Tompkins, Marie Collins, Bryan Mascio, and Beth Fournaf share efforts to balance the need to address concerns about equity and social justice in their schools and the need to engage in difficult conversations with colleagues, students, families, and the broader community.

    Introduction
    While education has been the site of many contentious battles throughout history, the last year has been rife with conflict around public school curriculum, including how issues of race, gender, and sexuality are discussed, or in some cases, silenced. These and other topics often referred to broadly as "divisive concepts" have been particularly polarizing among politicians and parents, and within school walls (The New York Times, November, 2021). As a result, educational leaders are in a challenging position: balancing the urgent need to address concerns about equity and social justice in their schools and the need to be prepared to engage in difficult conversations with colleagues, students, families, and the broader community.

    In this article, the authors share our efforts to balance these concerns in our work with early career educators teaching in K-12 public schools. We share our experiences with these individuals in a rural teacher preparation program in the northeastern United States. The program focuses on building teacher capacity in high-need rural schools by preparing new teachers over the course of a 15-month graduate program, which included a full-year teaching residency alongside an experienced mentor.