Last week the California legislature passed a bill that significantly expanded the opportunity for students to be able to attend a school outside of a student’s district of residence as part of its Race to the Top package. Unfortunately, the state’s current budget woes may end up having the opposite effect of stopping choice from [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'Equity'
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
School Funding’s Tragic Flaw
Public education costs a lot of money — over $500 billion per year. Over the last century, there have been huge changes in where that money comes from and how it’s spent. In 1930, only 17 percent of school funding came from state sources, and virtually none came from the federal government. Today, the state [...]
If I Only Had a Gun
Various Nazis have been apocryphally quoted as saying “Whenever I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my gun.” When people like Cato’s Brink Lindsey, writing in the New Republic($), identify culture as the chief source of educational inequality, I feel the same way.
The “riddle” Lindsey purports to solve is why low-income people are less [...]
Population Projections Per Pew’s Passel (& Cohn)
The Pew Hispanic Center has a new report by Jeffrey Passel and D’Vera Cohn projecting national immigration trends to 2050. Since most know that immigrants make up an increasingly big slice of the American pie, it may not be surprising to learn that nearly one in five Americans will be an immigrant in 2050 (vs. [...]
On Kozol
A few years ago, Jonathan Kozol and I were among a group of people giving presentations at an event in Chicago tied to the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board. He spoke first and gave the kind of eloquent, morally severe speech one would expect, asserting that the nation’s increasingly segregated schools were an insult [...]
Winerip on Poverty, Etc.
Micheal Winerip covers a new ETS report in the Times today, exploring the relationship between out-of-school factors like single parenthood, TV watching, reading at home, etc. and student achievement. The report–which I have no quarrel with, Education Sector co-director Andy Rotherham was a reviewer–finds, to the surprise of no one, that these things make a [...]
The Same Same-Sex Story
Peter Meyer, writing in the newest Education Next, tells us a familiar story of same-sex schools. He cites NAEP statistics that show boys aren’t doing as well as girls, spotlights a handful of successful single-gender schools and quotes people who reference but do not cite “study after study” that demonstrates that both boys and girls [...]
Poverty, Schooling, and the Urban NAEP
One of the foundational arguments in education centers on poverty and schooling. All reasonable people agree that poverty has a negative influence on education, just as all reasonable people agree that quality schooling has a positive influence. The point of argument is how much these things matter, relative to one another. Some people think the [...]
Note to High Performing High Schools: Mind the Gap
On the front page of the Washington Post today, there’s an article about racial achievement gaps in SAT scores at local “high performing” high schools. The gist of the article is that high overall SAT scores at some high schools hide the fact that average scores for African American students at these schools are much [...]
Courting Unfulfilled Promises
I’m an editor, not a blogger. And I often cringe at the lengthy prose of many blog posts, saying to myself, “they sure could use a good editor.” But the recent Supreme Court ruling on race and schools has brought out the blogger in me. First, I do respect our justice system, the Supreme Court, [...]
Let’s Not Do Away with Public Education
It’s hard to know where to start on conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg’s recent column arguing that the U.S. ought to “do away with” public schools. Goldberg comes to this conclusion based on the Washington Post’s recent series focusing on the horrible state of the District of Columbia Public Schools–which is sort of like concluding we [...]
Nightmare on the Potomac
A few years ago, I took a tour of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s castle outside of Prague (if you’ve seen The Illusionist, a lot of the scenes were shot there). After a while, it became apparent that our tour guide, while friendly, polite, and knowledgeable, was also completely insane. Not “kind of eccentric” insane but “I [...]
More School Time
There are a lot of people celebrating the merits of Time right now. Policy proposals to add time to the school day or school year are popping up in states, districts and even on the national front. More school time is seen as the best way to help schools and students meet higher academic standards [...]
The 99th Percentile of Intellectual Dishonesty
Charles Murray, in the first($) of a three-part(!) series on the relationship between IQ and education in the WSJ opinion page, says:
What IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP’s basic achievement score? Remarkably, it appears that no one has tried to answer that question.
He then goes on to [...]
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.