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 [...]
All Posts Tagged: 'School Choice'
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, [...]
California’s New Choice Policy May be Overshadowed by Budget Woes
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
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 [...]
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 [...]
Late Choices
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today released a letter to chief state school officers regarding regulations passed back in October. In what is no April Fool’s joke, his letter rolls back a regulation that could have helped provide parents of children enrolled in unsuccessful schools the option of choosing a better one.
No Child Left Behind [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Grover Norquist is Right
So I’m sitting at home last night catching up on Tivoed episodes of The Daily Show, and come upon Tuesday night’s interview with uber government-hater Grover Norquist, who was flogging his new book. He tried to be funny–a fatal mistake when you’re a guest on a comedy show–and then offered a bunch of lame generalities [...]
NCLB Face-Off
The CATO Institute’s Andrew Coulson and I face-off at the Reason Foundation’s Reason Roundtable over whether NCLB should be scrapped or mended.
Coulson argues that NCLB is a federal intrusion on states’ rights and blocks the way for more meaningful, market-based education reforms. I argue that NCLB is critical to getting the kind of information on [...]
School Choice in Little Beirut
I’m traveling in Portland, Oregon right now and noticed the December, “Best Schools” issue of Portland Monthly magazine, with 631 private and public schools rated. I picked it up, curious to see what characteristics they felt were important when ranking schools, figuring this might hold some relevance to the characteristics parents consider important. Now, this [...]
Preschool and School Choice Movement Leaders Combine Forces to Form New Pornographers-style Education Advocacy Supergroup
(No, not really, but keep reading)
Cato’s Adam Schaeffer highlights a debate within the school choice community: On one side are activists pushing targeted voucher programs to help kids with specific needs–kids with disabilities (as in Florida), foster kids (Arizona), and poor kids in urban districts with crappy schools (in Wisconsin, Ohio, D.C.). On the other [...]
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.