Season 1, Example Episode

NAEP: What you’ve always wanted to know, with Chester Finn, Jr.

In this episode, we dive deep into the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the national report card. Chester Finn, Jr., author of the new book Assessing the Nation’s Report Card: Challenges and Choices for NAEP, joins Susan to discuss the NAEP assessment. Together, they unpack how it works, what it is and isn’t, and what benefits and opportunities it provides as the achievement gap continues to grow.

Portrait of an older man with gray hair, glasses, and a suit, set against a gray background with a patterned border of books, pencils, and light bulbs.

Meet Our Guest(s):

Meet our guest: Chester Finn, Jr.

Meet our guest: Chester Finn, Jr.

Scholar, educator and public servant Chester Finn, Jr. has devoted his career to improving education in the United States. A native of Ohio, he holds an undergraduate degree in U.S. history, a master’s degree in social studies teaching, and a doctorate in education policy, all from Harvard University. He is now distinguished senior fellow and president emeritus at Fordham University, and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Finn was Fordham’s president from 1997 to 2014, after many earlier roles in education, academia, and government. From 1999 until 2002, he was the John M. Olin Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and at Hudson Institute.

Meet our host: Susan Lambert

Susan Lambert is the Chief Academic Officer of Elementary Humanities at Amplify, and the host of Science of Reading: The Podcast. Her career has been focused on creating high-quality learning environments using evidence-based practices. Lambert is a mom of four, a grandma of four, a world traveler, and a collector of stories.

As the host of Science of Reading: The Podcast, Lambert explores the increasing body of scientific research around how reading is best taught. As a former classroom teacher, administrator, and curriculum developer, Lambert is dedicated to turning theory into best practices that educators can put right to use in the classroom, and to showcasing national models of reading instruction excellence.

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Quotes

“It must be acknowledged that there is more scientific research, or there has been more scientific research, conducted with monolingual English-speaking children, and that additional research related to teaching literacy development for English learners and emergent bilinguals is needed to advance our understanding of their literacy development.”

—Kajal Patel Below

“We have an underserved area that’s experiencing a massive growth in student population. And so it’s really important to then focus on it. Schools are adjusting, they’re quick, they’re doing the best they can, but we need to be having these conversations around research [and] best practices so that we can set schools up for success and students up for success.”

—Kajal Patel Below

“I just think we have an exciting future in this country. I was in a classroom last week, I saw some of their writing. I saw them speaking, heard them speaking in two languages fluently, easily, excitedly. I just got very excited. These kids are going to be our doctors and our teachers and our engineers and they’re bilingual or multilingual.”

—Kajal Patel Below

“Their language is an asset, whatever language it is and however much it is.”

—Kajal Patel Below