CHEERS
Scholarship Prep South Bay charter school reports a 0 percent chronic absenteeism rate among a substantial number of children without stable housing. Jason Watts, Scholarship Prep’s CEO, shared the school’s strategies with Jed Wallace’s CharterFolk, noting that “the 54 scholars…didn’t stop experiencing homelessness because they enrolled at Scholarship Prep. Their circumstances didn’t change, but the support around them did.”
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Also on the good news front: Sarah Schwartz discusses new NWEA dataindicating reading growth among elementary and middle school students, though they still aren’t back to pre-pandemic levels. Sarah notes that multiple assessments now show “tentative signs of progress for younger students,” but older kids are still struggling.
JEERS
Indianapolis Public Schools will no longer use Enroll Indy, reports MJ Slaby, exiting the nonprofit platform that streamlines enrollment for traditional public, charter, and the city’s independently operated Innovation Network schools. The legally questionable change means families will lose a coherent system, a decision that the Mind Trust’s Brandon Brown says “will take us back to the days of a disjointed, difficult to navigate system that can easily be gamed.”
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You might be shocked—shocked!—to learn about an Alpha School connection to a private equity-funded preschool network that collapsed in what teachers describe as “a Montessori Ponzi scheme.” Claire Suddath traces how a “skillful pitchman” entered the early childhood education business, how his overpromising and underdelivering led things to fall apart, and how, inexplicably, the founder remains undeterred.
Editor's note: This was first published on Mike Petrilli's Substack, SCHOOLED, a free Substack and email newsletter restarting the education-reform conversation. Click here to subscribe for sharp analysis of the week’s biggest K–12 debates, curated commentary from across the ed-policy world, and lively discussion—including reader reactions and pushback.
