Michael Lewis’ latest book “The Big Short” was released on Tuesday. As a Lewis fan, I was looking forward to getting the book. But not the big, heavy, expensive hardback version. I wanted to download the book to my Kindle.
But alas, no Kindle version was available. And consumers are getting testy–the book now has 37 [...]
Educational Choice
Education Sector's educational choice work focuses on research, analysis, and outreach on policies that promote parental choice and diverse schooling options in public education with a commitment to high quality schooling, equity, and public accountability. Quick and the Ed blogger Erin Dillon directs Education Sector's choice work.
A Kindle Revolution
Washington State Enters the Race to the Top
Congratulations to education reformers from my home state, Washington, for helping to pass a package education reform bills that take a significant step forward for a state that did not even bother to apply for the first round of Race to the Top. Basically the state knew that it did not have a chance of [...]
Cliffs Notes to Race to the Top Applications
Trying to figure out what the 16 Race to the Top Finalists are doing that your state is not? Too lazy to read the thousands of pages of applications to figure it out. You are in luck. The Partnership for Learning in Washington state has summarized it for you. If there are other summaries out [...]
KIPP Works
It’s relatively obvious to anyone who looks that the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), the nation’s largest charter management organization, produces results. Just by seeing its classrooms you start to figure this out: the students are in matching uniforms, they chant and seem energized about learning, and, other than the chants, they’re orderly and respectful. [...]
LA Teacher’s Union Wins the Day
When it was adopted last summer by the Los Angeles School Board, the Public School Choice resolution has heralded as a huge victory for education reformers in California. Under this resolution, charter schools, Mayor Villaraigosa’s Partnership for Los Angeles Schools (PLAS), the teacher union and the district itself would compete to operate not only a [...]
The Muddled State of K-12 Virtual Learning Policy
K-12 virtual schooling’s rapid growth continues, but state policy remains muddled. More ominously, many state funding decisions are disappointingly unrelated from quality, performance, or demand for these programs.
In states like Missouri, state-run virtual schools that are funded by appropriations outside of the traditional funding formulas are easy targets for budget-cutters.
Other state programs, for example in [...]
Is an Adequacy Perfect Storm Brewing?
Last week, the Superior Court in my home state of Washington ruled that the state’s finance system was unconstitutional. The court concluded that the current finance system perennial underfunds a basic education, and that the current funding in not ample, stable, or dependable. It also has to rely too much on local supplemental funds to [...]
When Policy Becomes Ideology
Last week Andy and I offered some ideas on the best way to characterize the theoretical and ideological divisions in education policy. Justin Cohen followed up:
I like Andy’s “Choice/Accountability” matrix, it’s far superior to the dichotomy that both of their posts reject. I worry, though, that it conflates “choice” and school-based “autonomy.” Right [...]
A National K-12 Virtual School? Not Likely.
One of the big recommendations from “Expanding Choice in Elementary and Secondary Education,” the new Brookings Institution report, is to help establish national virtual schools:
To support the development of that sector of schooling, we recommend that Congress authorize the establishment of accrediting bodies for online K-12 education, incentivize states to participate in these accrediting efforts, [...]
We’ve Got a Map for That
The Wall Street Journal takes a look at the struggle over high school boundaries in Plano, Texas — a debate involving changing demographics, protests against busing, and questions of educational opportunity and equity. A well-to-do suburb of Dallas, Plano has experienced growth over the past two decades in the number of minority students attending (like [...]
Charter Laws
Charter school laws have been all over the news lately, with a second national organization releasing their rankings of state charter laws at the same time states are revising their laws in order to be eligible for the Race to the Top (RTTT) Fund’s $4.35 billion. Charter laws vary tremendously state-by-state, but the federal Department [...]
New Charter School Law Rankings
Back in June, the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools released a model charter school law, outlining the key elements of autonomy, accountability and support that are necessary for charter schools to thrive in a state. Today, NAPCS released a ranking of states based on the model law criteria. This is a report well worth [...]
A Common Application for the Common Good
Gotham Schools reported yesterday that charter schools in New York City might begin using a common application to make the charter application process easier and more accessible for students and their parents. This is a great idea. One of the biggest challenges to developing a well-functioning school choice system is ensuring that all parents are [...]
Demand Reasons
This week New York City announced that it was closing four public schools. It’s rather unusual to hear of a school system closing schools for any reason, let alone justifying it on academic, as opposed to population and enrollment-related, grounds. Yet, that’s exactly what they did. In a detailed email announcing the move, the Department [...]
Digging into Disparities in Gifted Education
The Washington Post reports today that the Virginia Department of Education will study minority participation in gifted education programs in the state. As the press release notes,
Data reported by school divisions to VDOE show that while African-Americans make up 26 percent of the statewide student population, only 12 percent of students identified as gifted are [...]
Bricks-and-Mortar Money for Virtual Schools?
It’s worth keeping an eye on what’s happening to virtual schools in Georgia. Last week, a group of charter schools bypassed the traditional route to charter authorization and sought to be funded exactly like any other public school in the state. (For the record, Georgia has 122 charter schools but only one virtual charter school.)
We’ve [...]
Assault on Online Learning? Not Really.
“A largely unnoticed assault upon the nation’s vibrant market in online learning” is how Rick Hess, writing for the National Review Online, characterizes the Obama Administration’s proposal to spend $500 million over ten years to develop online high school and college courses. Hess argues that there is already a robust private market and invokes the [...]
Got choice?
Last week, it was the ES Online Chat, “School Choice a la Carte.” This week, it’s Jeb Bush who makes the connection between education and food.
Education, he says, should be more like milk. “You can get flavored milk — chocolate, strawberry or vanilla — that doesn’t even taste like milk,” he said. “Most of the [...]
Education as a Consumer Good
Last week, Education Sector hosted “School Choice a la Carte”, an online discussion about expanding school choice beyond the ‘brick and mortar’ options that are usually discussed (e.g., traditional public schools vs. charter schools) to allow for even more customization and choice in education. Much of the discussion focused on the opportunities this type of [...]
Open Thread: Radical Choice?
Our fascinating discussion on the future of educational choice winds up today (read the transcript). In the discussion, a couple of different threads are coming together.
The first is that there is enormous potential for more personalized learning and the educational landscape is changing—rapidly. Tom Vander Ark opened up the discussion with his prediction that [...]
Is School Choice Passe?
What if educational choice meant every student could have a personalized educational experience? Today and tomorrow, our panelists debate the premise that our current focus on choice between schools (Public or private school? Charter or neighborhood school?) is a very limited way of thinking about educational choices.
Tom Vander Ark, of Vander Ark/Ratcliff Partners and former [...]
NYC Parents and Students Line Up for Choice
Yesterday’s High School Fair, which ES authors Chad Aldeman and Thomas Toch praised in Matchmaking: Enabling Mandatory Public School Choice in New York and Boston, was the most successful ever. More than 34,000 parents took advantage of the opportunity to enroll their child in one of New York City’s 700 high schools. This is school [...]
New York City High School Fair
Over a warm, sunny weekend last September, 40,000 middle-school students and parents converged on Brooklyn Technical High School, a venerable, Art Deco structure in Fort Greene, to learn about New York City’s many high school programs. It was the New York City Department of Education’s annual high school fair, where representatives of hundreds of high [...]
Good Schools are Scarce Resources
From tuition vouchers for private schools to charter schools to voluntary transfer programs within and between public school systems, school choice has been at the center of the school reform debate for two decades. But with the voucher movement unable to sustain much momentum, charter schools still serving a small percentage of the nation’s students [...]
Chad Aldeman Discusses Mandatory School Choice in New York and Boston
Chad Aldeman discusses Boston’s and New York’s mandatory school choice programs with Professors Alvin Roth and Atila Abdulkadiroglu, two of the economists who developed them. The choice matching systems are examined in detail in a new Education Sector report entitled Matchmaking: Enabling Mandatory Public School Choice in New York and Boston.
Green Dot Has a Long Way to Go
A couple of months ago, I postulated that Green Dot’s new high school takeover, Locke High School, would start to outperform two other chronically low performing LA Unified schools—one run by the mayor and one run by the district (here) . Now Green Dot and the mayor just took possession of these schools at the [...]
Charter Schools and Unions—One Size Fits All??
Unionization of charter schools seems to be the hot topic these days. A recent NYT article raises the critical question:
“…whether unions will strengthen the charter movement by stabilizing its young, often transient teaching force, or weaken it by preventing administrators from firing ineffective teachers and imposing changes they say help raise achievement, like an extended [...]
Charter Schools and Unions
The New York Times reported yesterday on recent efforts to unionize charter schools and the ongoing debate over the impact unionization could have on the growth and performance of charters. It’s an important discussion, but no one knows where it will end – will unionized charter schools be a small part of the larger movement [...]
Reviewing the Review of What Happened in Montgomery County
Jay Mathews reviews the new book Leading for Equity, which chronicles Montgomery County’s successes, so far, in closing the achievement gap. Straight out of the gate, Mathew’s is right about one thing —the six “lessons” are convoluted and sound more like titles for paper submissions to AERA than book chapters (Lesson 1, for example: Implementing [...]
A Next Step for School Choice?
A fascinating proposal is being considered by the Los Angeles school board (here). Yesterday was the first meeting on it. The district has 50 schools that will come on line in the next couple of years. Instead of having the district run all of these new schools, Yolie Flores Aguilar, the vice president of the [...]
The Truth About New York City’s High Schools
Dana Goldstein and Ezra Klein both linked last week to a graphic showing the school choice process in New York. The graphic is originally from an excellent report by Clara Hemphill and Kim Nauer on the impact small high schools are having in New York City, but, unfortunately, Goldstein and Klein continue the media’s misinterpretation [...]
Changing the Game
Typically video games are associated with violence and turning kids into couch potatoes. But a report released by the Sesame Workshop this week challenges this stereotype. The report, titled “Game Changer,” discusses the potential benefits digital learning has on educating children and motivating them to make healthier choices.
Panelists commenting on the report at The Woodrow [...]
Tale of Three Turnarounds
Turning around a low performing high school may be the most difficult task in K-12 education. This week Sec. Duncan has suggested that charter schools should play a critical role in the effort to turn around low performing schools. Perhaps this comparison will start to suggest why. There is a lot to learn about two [...]
IDEA Stimulus Money…Gone?
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (commonly known as the stimulus bill) provided $12.2 billion in new funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Could one Supreme Court decision eat it all up?
Turnaround Jumper
Michael Jordan was a great, great basketball player, both for his God-given abilities and his drive to succeed. He could float above the rim in awe-inspiring ways, and it was his determination that led him from being cut as a high schooler to the world’s best all-time player. These things are well known. What’s less [...]
Iowa’s Charter Schools
I’m proud to say I attended Iowa public schools from kindergarten through college, and it so happens that my education almost perfectly corresponds to the heyday of Iowa’s education system.
In 1992, when I was 8, Iowa’s fourth-graders scored higher than all but one state in math and all but four states in reading on the [...]
Testing Dropouts
Evidently, there’s a run on GED classes. Some say this is because the economy is so bad that 16-21 year old dropouts are making the rational choice for education over unemployment. Others say it’s b/c getting the GED is easier than finishing high school (and in some cases taking state exit exams). An NCES report [...]
Charter Schools and Budget Battles
ConnCAN sent out an alert last Friday about Connecticut’s Governor Rell’s latest budget, which includes substantial cuts to the state’s charter schools. Nevermind that Connecticut’s charter schools already receive less per-student than traditional public schools and face caps on the number of students they can enroll. Or that, according to this report, they have greater [...]
The Condition of School Choice
Dana Goldstein at The American Prospect wrote last week about the importance of opening up school district boundaries to allow parents in urban areas to send their kids to suburban schools, and vice-versa. Making district boundaries more porous is one step toward reducing the growing resegregation of our communities and schools, and it may be [...]
Informed Demand
Ed is Watching responded to my recent report about school choice and pointed me to this website from the Education Policy Center – a website designed to inform Colorado parents about available school options. I took a quick look and the website looks helpful, providing a step-by-step guide for parents on enrolling in schools out [...]
Choice gone bad
Generally school choice is a good thing except when it is not. Some districts have struggled with school choice open enrollment policies running the risk of further desegregation of schools if transportation options are not provided. These two districts, however, have taken school choice to a whole new level. These two districts have created legacy [...]
Erin Dillon on Successful School-Choice Markets
In this podcast, Erin Dillon discusses the findings from her report, Food for Thought, in which she examines successful grocery and banking initiatives in low-income neighborhoods. She also discusses what choice-school operators can learn from banks and grocery stores, and how these lessons can help create functional school-choice markets in underserved neighborhoods.
The research for this report [...]
Harlem Miracles?
Elizabeth Green asked for my thoughts on a recent study of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), especially in relation to two counter-claims on its findings: either the HCZ is, as David Brooks posited, a “Harlem Miracle,” or, as argued by Aaron Pallas over at Gotham Schools, Brooks is “gullible” and “dumbstruck,” and it’s just too [...]
Grocery Stores, Banks, and…Schools?
It costs money to be poor. As the feature article in yesterday’s Washington Post Style section lays out, individuals living below the poverty line pay more for many things middle and upper income people consider basics, including food and banking services.
These markets–for fresh food from grocery stores, and checking and savings accounts from mainstream banks–have [...]
I Think Maybe It’s Both
Ten days ago David Brooks wrote a column praising Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone, citing dramatic achievement gains of its students, and calling it a miracle of the no-excuses model of education. Brooks took the opportunity to praise reformers who believe schools should be the focus of education policy, angering those who think our education [...]
Civics 101
Jay Greene continues to fight the fight on vouchers:
the suggestion that DC vouchers were not democratically created because they affected DC and DC does not have a vote in Congress wouldn’t just call into question the legitimacy of DC vouchers. All federal laws affecting DC would be undemocratic by this standard. This would include NCLB [...]
Jay Greene’s Long Strange Voucher Trip
Jay Greene has published a long and weirdly incoherent response to this post on DC vouchers. Most of it I’m happy to let stand, but this (you have to run it through a negative de-sarcasticizer to find the meaning) deserves comment:
…vouchers aren’t really accountable because even though they were democratically created, subject to oversight and [...]
Why DC Vouchers Don’t Matter
President Obama wants to appropriate enough money to keep the DC voucher program going for the children currently enrolled. Good–this is the only ethical position to take. I know some Democrats in Congress wish the program had never been implemented, but that’s the price of losing elections. Dragging low-income and minority students out of their [...]
The Realities of Disruptive Innovation
Many thanks to Cathy Cavanaugh and Erik Black for their thoughtful guest post below reviewing Gene Glass’s policy brief, “The Realities of K-12 Virtual Schooling.” As virtual schooling becomes increasingly prominent, it will rightfully deserve increasing amounts of scrutiny and attention. This is all good if the focus is on ensuring good outcomes for the [...]
Guest Blog: The Realities of K–12 Virtual Education
“The Realities of K–12 Virtual Education” is a policy brief released this month (April 2009) by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice. Written by education policy expert Gene Glass, the brief summarizes the growth in virtual schools over the past decade and discusses questions of costs, funding, and quality before recommending regulation, [...]
Charter Schools Feel the Squeeze As Belts Tighten In D.C.
The D.C. City Council held a press conference today announcing that the council would support a $309 cut to the per-pupil facilities funds provided to charter schools – for charter schools, that’s an improvement from potentially bigger cuts in Mayor Fenty’s budget. This cut in facilities funding clearly poses some large problems for charter schools [...]
Choice and Chance
This weekend, I had the privilege of drawing names for the E.L. Haynes Public Charter School enrollment lottery. E. L. Haynes is a high-performing charter school located in what a real estate agent might describe as a “transitioning” neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Its Board of Trustees is full of influential local leaders from the field [...]
Pulling Back the Welcome Mat
The front page of Saturday’s Washington Post included an article on why there are so many charter schools in D.C. and yet so few in neighboring Maryland and Virginia. The article does a good job of outlining how differences in state law impact whether charter schools open – in Virginia, for instance, charter schools must [...]
Sons and Daughters
Secretary Duncan talked with the New York Post editorial board yesterday and had some interesting things to say:
Duncan was surprised that Albany had added $405 million in state aid to public-school districts while hitting charter schools with what amounted to a $50 million cut.”That doesn’t make sense,” Duncan said, after shaking his head for a [...]
Update on Florida Legislation to Curtail Virtual Schooling
On Monday, I wrote about pending legislation in Florida that would severely curtail educational choices available through the public, state-run Florida Virtual School. The bill would eliminate enrollment in any elective courses and funding for any courses beyond a standard six periods. Students would no longer have an option to take electives, including some AP [...]
A Move to Limit Educational Choice in Florida
While reformers hope that the country’s fiscal crisis will lead to much needed educational changes, there’s at least one move underway to do the exact opposite. Under the guise of budget cuts, the Florida legislature is attempting to severely curtail educational choices available through the state-run Florida Virtual School (see page 12 of bill text).
If [...]
The Unmatched
New York City released the results of its mandatory high school admission process last week. It’s receiving a lot of negative attention at online parent forums (like this one) for the fact that 7,500 students (nine percent) received no placement at all. These students will have to submit preferences to a supplementary round for placement [...]
The Test for Cyber Schools
Interesting article in today’s Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on the fate of Pennsylvania’s cyber charter schools—publicly funded, fully online schools that students “attend” on a full-time basis. With over 19,000 students, the state is a bellwether for the growth of cyber charter schools. Many of these schools are facing renewal decisions at the end of their five [...]
The Potential for Obama’s Promise Neighborhoods
Every week, Geoffrey Canada’s hallmark Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) provides well over 10,000 students with the kinds of educational and developmental supports and opportunities that suburban students enjoy as a matter of course. Almost two years ago, then-candidate Barack Obama announced his plan to replicate the HCZ’s efforts in twenty “Promise Neighborhoods” across the country. [...]
Obama Draws the Line on Charter Schools
One of the most important education lines in President Obama’s speech was “We will expand our commitment to charter schools.” This is best understood not in terms of any particular public policies but rather in terms of the awesome power presidents have to define the boundaries of public debate. To see evidence of this in [...]
Kahlenberg on KIPP
Rich Kahlenberg published a review of Jay Matthews’ new KIPP book (Work Hard. Be Nice.) in the Washington Post Book World back of the Washington Post Outlook section yesterday. Rich spends the first half of the review giving Jay good marks before devoting the second half to warning readers that:
…there are also two misguided “lessons” [...]
The Sugar
If you drive away from the center of Washington, DC on East Capitol Street, around RFK Stadium and across the Anacostia River, you eventually come to the intersection with Benning Road, and a Denny’s. For the last decade, the pancake emporium has been the only-sit down restaurant in Ward 7 and as such a symbol of [...]
Love Your Children, Go To Jail
Via Eduwonk by way of DFER, the story of Yolanda Hill, a Rochester mother of five who has been shackled and thrown in prison for enrolling her children in a good school system:
Greece [school district] officials hired a private investigator to look into Hill’s claim that her children lived with their grandmother. According to his [...]
Big Edu-cuts Proposed for Stimulus Package, Maybe
The latest tin can to come flying out of the maelstrom over the Congressional stimulus package is a document purporting to be recommendations for education cuts by the staff of centrist senators Ben Nelson, a Nebraska Democrat, and Republican Susan Collins of Maine, increasingly key players in the stimulus debate.
Passed along by folks with a [...]
Bill-Board
Bill Gates, borrowing a tradition from his mentor Warren Buffett, has published his first Annual Letter, his reflections on the work of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where he has been full-time since leaving Microsoft last summer.
Education commentators have focused on what they’ve characterized as a quasi-mea culpa in Gates’ discussion of the foundation’s [...]
Why KIPP Matters
I first heard the word “kip” in seventh-grade gymnastics class. It was a special move where, lying on your back, you pulled your legs to your chest and then quickly pushed them forward. The momentum would propel you up and into a standing position. This was all theoretical of course, at least for me; I [...]
"Work Hard. Be Nice."
Famously, that’s the slogan of the much-discussed KIPP network of charter schools that have had great success in helping low-income and minority students learn. Now it’s also the title of veteran Washington Post education reporter Jay Matthews’ new book chronicling how the organization came to be what it is today. Education Sector is sponsoring an event [...]
Investing in the Downturn
Budget cuts and fights to preserve funding will dominate the headlines for at least the next year. But, sometimes, even in a downturn, it’s important to invest new funds in particularly promising areas. It’s why even in the face of massive financial uncertainty, GM is doing what it can to continue investments in ideas such [...]
Journalists and Charter Schools
Eduwonkette has some beef with the Washington Post’s recent coverage of charter schools, specifically the Post’s claim that public charter schools are outperforming district-run public schools (thanks Chad) on student achievement measures. Accompanying the test score results, the Post reported on the successful practices many schools engage in as reasons for their high scores – [...]
Public Goods
The Washington Post deserves praise for the series they’ve been running recently on charter schools. But this graphic is mislabeled and misleading. Charter schools are public schools too, and it’ll be nice when they’re seen as complementary, friendly competition to traditional public school systems.
Edu-Jobs
If you’re looking for a job in the education world, this might be a good place to start. It’s the Public Charter Schools Job Board, and it lists openings nationwide for everything from teachers and principals to assessment specialists and chief financial officers.
Equality
Nordic countries are famous for their egalitarian attitudes and social policies, and so far the Finns have said nothing to contradict this. In the U.S., there’s significant variance in funding between school districts. (Contrary to popular wisdom, this is not primarily a function of differences in local property wealth–state funding passed local funding as the [...]
Two Steps Back
Two pieces of bad news today for those working to build a quality supply of public schools:
First, the 1st District Court of Appeals in Florida ruled that a 2006 law creating the Florida Schools of Excellence Commission conflicts with the Florida state constitution. According to the court, the Commission, which would be an independent, statewide [...]
Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers,, Part 1
Malcom Gladwell’s new book, Outliers, was released last week. I read it over the weekend, on the theory that I had roughly 60 days–90 at the outside–before I’d heard it referenced at so many conferences that mere mention of the central anecdotes would cause me to reach for a hotel pen and stab myself in [...]
Philadelphia Public Schools Gain Market Share, Blames Charters
In the private sector when an enterprise gains customers it’s a good thing. Apparently that is not the case in Philadelphia School District, where their chief budget officer says charter schools are costing the district $105 million because 27% of their students were previously home-schooled or educated in a private school. Putting aside the idea [...]
Sweating the Big Stuff
The Washington-based National Alliance for Public Charter Schools reports that about 400 new charters have opened this fall, bringing the total number of charter schools to 4,600, with a national enrollment of 1.4 million. But charters rely heavily on the credit and bond markets to finance buildings, start-up, and cash-flow. And such funding is becoming [...]
Special Ed Vouchers
Governor Palin’s speech on special education last here has drawn a fair amount of commentary; Sara Mead provides a comprehensive analysis here. As Mead notes, one of the main proposals was to create a voucher program for students with disabilities modeled on the McKay Scholarship program in Florida. Sara wrote a comprehensive analysis of that [...]
Supply and Demand in D.C.
I’m finally getting around to reading the full version of the research report, “Quality Schools and Healthy Neighborhoods,” that the Washington, D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education put out in September. And it’s good. Based on research conducted by the 21st Century Schools Fund, Brookings Institution, and the Urban Institute, the report takes [...]
The Old New Thing
Education entrepreneur Chris Whittle is out of work again. Ousted last year from Edison Schools, where he spent sixteen years and upwards of half a billion dollars trying to turn a profit running public schools, the Channel One founder and former Esquire publisher recently cleared out his Midtown Manhattan office at Nations Academy, an international [...]
DC Teacher Chic
Is one of the more interesting teacher blogs up right now, providing a ground-level perspective on how things are playing out in DCPS amidst all the national attention, ongoing reforms, tense contract negotiations, general tumult, and of course the day-to-day challenges of a very difficult job. Check it out.
In other news, preliminary 2008 enrollment numbers [...]
Doing School Choice Wrong
Today, ES released a Charts You Can Trust (a Maps You Can Trust, really) showing the failures of Massachusetts’ interdistrict choice program–failures which mean that affluent students are more likely to benefit from the interdistrict choice law. Problems with the law include a lack of transportation to get students to their new schools; a lack [...]
The Competition Effect Emerges
I like the Council of Great City Schools and it’s director, Mike Casserly, but I confess I’m not really sure what he’s getting at here. He’s right that muddled governance and Congressional meddling have done DCPS no favors through the years. But his thesis that the lack of coordination between DC’s three-part arrangement of a [...]
Say No to Cheap Choice
On Tuesday, Matthew Yglesias commented on the report ES released this week on interdistrict school choice (see below for more posts about this). Yglesias questions my use of the word “only” to discuss our finding that 10 to 20 percent of students would likely benefit from interdistrict choice. Instead he argues that for the students [...]
Space, Time, and Inter-District Choice
Just to amplify a few points Erin makes below about Education Sector’s new report examining inter-district school choice: One of our main goals in conducting this analysis was to try to get a handle on how the generalized–and very worthwhile–idea of expanding school choice across school district boundaries plays out given real world contraints like [...]
Assumptions
In Dianne’s response below, she talks about two important assumptions we’ve made in ES’s recent report on interdistrict choice–one assumption about driving distance and the other about school capacity. Richard Kahlenberg, an ES Senior Fellow and a well-known advocate of using interdistrict choice as a means to achieve economic integration also takes issue with the [...]
Dianne Piché on "Plotting School Choice"
If advocates for children were able to draw school district boundaries anew, nobody in their right mind would configure them with the high levels of inefficiency, inequality and segregation we find today in states like California and Texas (included in the study) and others like New Jersey, Connecticut and Ohio. Education Sector’s report on interdistrict [...]
Down and Out of District
That’s the title of a Beverly Hills 90210 episode in which Andrea is nearly found out for attending West Beverly High instead of her assigned high school, located in a lower-income part of town. While Andrea gets away with her illegal transfer, many students aren’t able to cross district boundaries to attend a better school. [...]
Another Step into the Mainstream
The Southern Regional Education Board launches its Online Teachers Web site. SREB was one of the first mainstream educational policy organizations to focus on building high quality virtual schooling options. The number of southern states with strong state virtual schools is no coincidence.
The Times Magazine on New Orleans Schools
In late 2006, Paul Tough wrote a lengthy article in the New York Times Magazine about the challenges of educating disadvantaged children. Exploring–and in some instances taking sides on–the fractious debate over how much schools can accomplish for poor and minority students, it became one of the most widely-discussed pieces of education journalism in years. [...]
Boundary Changes
This situation in Fairfax County, VA has some relevance to recent discussions about socioeconomic desegregation plans (see also here and here).
In Fairfax, kids aren’t being transported away from their neighborhood school for integration, but the school board did decide to change attendance boundaries to balance enrollments among schools, and took socioeconomic integration into account in [...]
IKEA-Operated Schools?
The Associated Press writes about school choice in Sweden, where students and parents have, since 1992, been able to attend publicly financed, privately run schools of choice (they sound a lot like charter schools to me). And it’s popular – 17 percent of high schoolers are now enrolled in one of these independent schools.
The article [...]
Teaching in the Digital Age
Earlier this month, the Quick & Ed team discussed (here and here) what schools might look like in the future, as online learning continues to take hold. Today, the Washington Post takes a look at how virtual learning changes how teachers teach. According to the article, online teaching jobs can be highly competitive – because [...]
Get Thee Some Graduate Students!
In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Emily Bazelon writes about the recent shift among school districts to integration policies based on economic status – not race – in light of last June’s Supreme Court decision. Bazelon’s review of the research on the impact of integration on student achievement highlights a serious problem for integration proponents [...]
Will Data Save D.C. Vouchers?
The Year 2 evaluation of the D.C. voucher program was released today. Given the current debate over whether the program should be funded for another year, I’m guessing this study will see a lot of spin in the next few weeks, since there’s a little something for everyone.
Those who’d like to end the program can [...]
False discoveries: Interpret with caution
Despite my best efforts to persuade, the folks at Fordham’s Flypaper blog are again trumpeting the results of the DC voucher program. While they admit the study found no significant difference in academic gains between students who received a voucher and those that did not, they cherry-pick this quote:
However, being offered a scholarship may [...]
Lowering Student Loan Default Rates: What One Consortium of Historically Black Institutions Did to Succeed 
College and Career-Ready: Using Outcomes Data to Hold High Schools Accountable for Student Success
03/19/10 | Ben Miller is quoted on college graduation rates and the NCAA Tournament in the Detroit Free Press.
03/19/10 | Linda Perlstein links to Education Sector's "College- and Career-Ready" event.
03/17/10 | Ben Miller's column on graduation rates and NCAA Tournament eligibility is mentioned on The Wall Street Journal's The Daily Fix.
03/17/10 | Kevin Carey's critique of Diane Ravitch's latest book is quoted in Doublethink's Conventional Folly blog.
03/15/10 | Ben Miller pens an op-ed for US News & World Report on using graduation rates to determine NCAA Tournament eligibility.
Commendable Commentary
This blog hasn’t had comments for that long, and I’m hoping more people will use them as a chance for substantive dialogue that focuses on the topic of the post in question, as opposed to anonymous shot-taking and/or general complaint. In that spirit, let me heartily commend the second comment in this post, in which [...]