Thomas B. Fordham Institute

The Fordham Institute promotes educational excellence for children by focusing on high expectations, quality choices, and personalized pathways. These focal points are pursued through research, analysis, and commentary. This grant supports an effort to analyze the country’s civics and history standards.

The Thomas B. Fordham Institute is a national think tank providing research, analysis, and commentary on education reform as well as on-the-ground action and advocacy in Ohio. The Institute will conduct state- and federally-focused work to advance rigorous educational standards, aligned high-quality assessments, and better accountability systems. Policy design, analysis, and outreach highlighting strong educational goals and appropriate measures of student accomplishment are important to engaging decision makers on issues related to college- and career-ready knowledge and skills.

With this funding, Fordham would develop a report addressing potential governance and sustainability models for the multistate Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium. These consortia, which promise to dramatically improve testing of deeper learning knowledge and skills for a majority of U.S. schoolchildren, presently have no clear plans for operation or oversight after federal funding ends in the 2014–15 school year—when they deliver the first Common Core assessments.