Publications

Golden Peaks and Perilous Cliffs: Rethinking Ohio's Teacher Pension System

Michael Podgursky / June 7, 2007

Robert M. Costrell

Despite its long history and prodigious size, all is not well with Ohio's teacher pension system. In this Fordham Institute report, nationally renowned economists Robert Costrell and Mike Podgursky illuminate some of the serious challenges facing STRS.

The Autonomy Gap

Steven Adamowski / April 11, 2007

Though most public school principals believe that effective leadership of their schools requires authority over personnel decisions (e.g., staff selection, deployment, dismissal), they report having little such authority in practice. Based on a series of interviews with a small sample of district and charter-school principals, the report shows that most district principals encounter a sizable gap between the extent and kinds of authority that leaders need to be effective and the authority that they actually have.

Fwd: Teacher Education: Coming Up Empty

Kate Walsh / March 16, 2006

The nation's leading teacher educators made a startling admission last year in their tome, Studying Teacher Education, by conceding there's little evidence that what happens in ed schools helps in the K-12 classroom. Kate Walsh explores why teacher educators are ignoring the achievement gap and, thus, consigning their field to irrelevance.

Personality Test: The dispositional dispute in teacher preparation today, and what to do about it

William Damon / September 8, 2005

The standards of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Excellence (NCATE) are of critical import for America's future teaching corps and will wield disproportionate influence for decades to come. Over the past fifteen years, 25 states have outsourced the approval of teacher preparation programs to NCATE by adopting or adapting its standards as their own; the other 25 have various 'partnerships' with the organization. Which makes it all the more disturbing that central to these standards is the call for teachers to possess certain 'dispositions' such as particular attitudes toward 'social justice.' As Professor William Damon of Stanford University explains in Fordham's latest Fwd: Arresting Insights in Education, NCATE's framing of the 'dispositions' issue has given education schools 'unbounded power over what candidates may think and do.' This is leading to (understandable) charges of ideological arm-twisting and Orwellian mind-control.