On Tuesday, the Louisiana Supreme Court issued its decision on the state’s private school voucher program, enacted last year with support from Gov. Bobby Jindal. I’m probably one of the few people in education policy who don’t have strong views either way about vouchers.* In general, I see far greater potential in strategies that seek to grow the supply of high-quality, autonomous schools in thContinue Reading »

I’m at an age when a lot of my friends are trying to figure out where to send their children to preschool. Because of what I do for a living, and because I serve on a board that oversees charter schools in the District, some of my friends ask me for advice about preschool options. More often, they simply want to complain to me about the frustrations of navigating what is an incredibly fraContinue Reading »

Since President Obama called for a federal investment in universal preschool as part of his February State of the Union address, early childhood advocates have been eagerly awaiting the answers to several key questions:

Conventional wisdom says that public sector pensions are far too optimistic in assuming an 8-percent investment return. Indeed, the stock market has far underperformed that goal lately, leaving pension plans in precarious financial shape.

But, if we expand our time frame to a longer horizon of, say, 25 years, it turns out that conventional wisdom is false. Using actual investment return Continue Reading »

In 1997, Jonathan Levin, the son of former Time Warner Chair Jerry Levin and a dedicated high school teacher in the South Bronx, was murdered in his home by one of his students. The apparent motivation was robbery.

Levin’s murder sent shock waves throughout New York City and its public schools. In honor of Levin’s memory, a new high school was founded five years later; the Jonathan LevinContinue Reading »

Even in a perfect world—say, Missouri in the mid-1990’s—enhancing pension benefits for teachers creates winners and losers. A new report on Missouri’s teacher pension system shines a light on just how stark the difference is—and how damaging these changes will be for the teaching profession overall.

From 1995 to 2002, Missouri implemented a series of retroactive benefit enhancements to tContinue Reading »

The research field of teacher pensions has been a relative backwater, but lately it just keeps getting more interesting. Yesterday, the Fordham Institute released a new paper from Marty West and Matt Chingos analyzing a 2002 policy change in Florida which allowed teachers to choose between a traditional defined benefit pension plan and a 401k-style defined contribution plan. The authors were abContinue Reading »

Conventional wisdom states that when politicians make hard decisions, they’re punished at the polls. But Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island is proving to be the exception to the rule.

In 2011, Raimondo, general treasurer of Rhode Island, spearheaded the painful but necessary public pension reform that Rhode Island passed on November 17, 2011. (Many of those reforms were anticipated in an EducContinue Reading »

Last spring I completed a study of American high schools; I looked at five schools serving very different economic and social communities. Here is the headline: If a student is not lucky enough to attend a high school located in an upper-middle or middle-class neighborhood, he or she is likely to get a watered-down, uninspiring, and inadequate set of academic choices—often taught in a hit-or-miContinue Reading »

The Department of Education’s planned release of the first year of School Improvement Grant (SIG) data has important implications for the future of the program – and for reform generally.  While much of the early attention devoted to SIG has focused on its cost-effectiveness, in light of the ongoing debate over school and district human-capital policies the question of which of the four SIG modContinue Reading »