Blog

Few states have had as exciting a journey for public education as Delaware. Fueled by multi-million dollar grants, a committed coalition of public and private stakeholders, and a consistent focus on a few key areas, Delaware has witnessed improvements on critical indicators such as graduation rates and children receiving high-quality preschool. We at Education First had the privilege of chronicling...
Read more >

As a Hispanic, first-generation college graduate teaching in Houston, one of the many ways I connected with my students was through our shared identity. When I taught elementary school, my second graders acknowledged that “I looked just like them,” and parents felt more comfortable when I could speak with them in Spanish. These were small—but significant—relationship builders. When I taught...
Read more >

“Pretty much everything you could do under No Child Left Behind is still authorized,” notes Stephen Sawchuck in a recent edition of his Education Week Teacher Beat blog that explores the differences between Title II-A in ESSA and NCLB. I’ve been hearing that a lot lately. I think we can do better with the more than $2 billion in Title...
Read more >

The year was 2013. Opposition to the Common Core—and to the new assessments aligned to these more rigorous standards—was running high. And states were suddenly questioning their prior commitment to using high quality assessments, like PARCC and Smarter Balanced, to measure student progress on the Common Core. Enter philanthropy: With support from Education First, five major funders—the Gates, Lumina, Schusterman...
Read more >

Think back to your days as a high school student. Did you take the SAT or ACT test? Did you take other standardized tests, maybe an end-of-course exam or graduation test? Was it more important to know how well you understood the material you learned in your current classes or to know how ready you were for college? Are those...
Read more >

Education First hires the most talented and passionate educators and policy advisors in P-20 public education so that we can bring deep, practical expertise to our partners and deliver with quality the premium solutions we promise. It turns out that we also are a pipeline for practitioners who come to us from the field and serve our high-impact clients with...
Read more >

“Formative assessment is the way we ensure that the kids are learning. I can stand up there and spout stuff all day long. If I don’t do anything to figure out who’s getting it and who isn’t before it’s too late, then we have a problem.” – Kristy Hobart, Austin teacher Every day in their classrooms, teachers face a perpetual...
Read more >

Sailors for centuries have used the North Star to gauge their relative location to their ultimate destination. Its remarkable light and reliability as a celestial marker, even as the earth spins, means that no matter where ships sail, they can rely on the North Star to shine bright and inform them. It guides them. As states work to finalize plans...
Read more >

One of the biggest changes ESSA brings to education policy is a requirement that states start including a broader range of measures for student learning and school success in their accountability systems (you can see an approach Education First proposed in a recent design competition here). But even as every state redoes its accountability system to add more measures, the...
Read more >

Rachel Tapp once described herself as “math phobic,” but now she’s a superstar math teacher. She has coached other math teachers in her district—Cincinnati Public Schools (CPS)—on shifting their instruction to align with the Common Core State Standards, and she models effective math teaching for colleagues who visit her classroom at the Oyler School in Cincinnati. But how did Tapp...
Read more >