The Thomas B. Fordham Institute is the nation's leader in advancing educational excellence for every child through quality research, analysis, and commentary, as well as on-the-ground action and advocacy in Ohio. The institute advances: (1) High standards for schools, students and educators; (2) Quality education options for families; (3) A more…

For the past two decades, lawmakers from both parties in Ohio have invested heavily in the public education sector. As a consequence, total K-12 education funding, measured in constant dollars, has grown by over 60 percent since 1997, even as Ohio's K-12 student enrollment has shrunk by more than 24,000 students (1.4 percent) during that same…

As the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation chronicled in its last year's Fordham Sponsorship Accountability Report, "Seeking Quality in the Face of Adversity", the 2008-09 school year was a brutal one during which schools, and their peers, faced many existential threats. The 2009-10 school year was Fordham's fifth year as a charter school authorizer…

This report is the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation's first ever comprehensive analysis of education reform and results in the 50 states. For each of them, this report examines: (1) student achievement, with a focus on poor and minority students; (2) achievement trends since the early 1990s for these same students; and (3) reform efforts centering on…

The author defines "middle schoolism" as "an approach to educating children in the middle grades (usually grades 5-8), popularized in the latter half of the 20th century, that contributed to a precipitous decline in academic achievement among American early adolescents." She argues that many middle schools are on the right path, but those that…

Two-thirds of schoolchildren in America attend class in states with mediocre (or worse) expectations for what their students should learn. That's just one of the findings of Fordham's The State of State Standards 2006, which evaluates state academic standards. The average state grade is a "C-minus"--the same as six years earlier, even though most…

Education policy leaders from across the political spectrum identified and evaluated four models that national standards and testing could take. These models are: (1) "The Whole Enchilada," the most direct and aggressive approach in which the federal government creates and enforces national standards and assessments, replacing the current 50…

"Miracle" is a word you would expect to hear from people familiar with the Assumption Catholic School story--but don?t wait for it. More likely you will hear a name: Mary Anne Stanton. In just more than five years, Stanton has led Assumption and 12 other Catholic schools from high-poverty Washington, D.C. neighborhoods into a consortium--the…

Findings from this Fordham-sponsored survey--the fourth survey of Dayton, Ohio parent/community attitudes toward education since 1988--present a fascinating array of opinions about today's schools (and those who are responsible for them) and the changes that could be made tomorrow. Over 70 percent of Dayton-area parents support the idea of…

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) requires states and school districts to act aggressively to turn around failing schools. NCLB lists 31 different interventions of varying degrees of severity that are available to state and local policymakers when faced with schools whose students fail to make sufficient academic progress and sets forth…

Two decades after the United States was diagnosed as "a nation at risk," academic standards for our primary and secondary schools are more important than ever?and their quality matters enormously. In 1983, as nearly every American knows, the National Commission on Excellence in Education declared that "The educational foundations of our society…

This report presents the testimony of the president and program director of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Based in Washington, DC and in Dayton, the Institute is a nonprofit organization that supports research, publications, and action projects of national significance in elementary/secondary reform, as well as significant education reform…

Does it matter where public-school teachers send their own children to school? If so, how and why? What can we learn from them? What we are grappling with here is the question of connoisseurship. Stock analysts, for example, watch carefully when corporate directors buy or sell the stock of companies on whose boards they serve. Similarly, we can…