- On the same day that Jeb Bush unveiled his education agenda, thousands of families in his home state marched in Tallahassee to support some of the very school choice programs he championed in office. The first-of-its-kind Florida Tax Credit Scholarship program, which helps generate funding for poor children to attend the private schools of their choice, has recently been contested in court by Florida Education Association (the state’s largest teachers’ union). In protest against the lawsuit, swarms of students, parents, and educators from charter schools made their voices heard. The most persuasive speaker of all, however, was none other than Martin Luther King III. “What choice does,” said the son of the civil rights icon, “is essentially create options, particularly for poor and working families that they would not necessarily normally have.” We couldn’t have put it better ourselves.
- Useful policy ideas don’t spring only from the campaign trail, or from earnest direct action. (To be honest, they almost never come from the campaign trail.) This week, the Council of Chief State School Officers opened an important new front in the war to close America’s skills gap. In partnership with the National Association of State Directors of Career Technical Education Consortium, the chiefs are helping to conduct a $35 million grant project aimed at seeding new career and technical education programs. Underwritten by banking giant JPMorgan Chase, the initiative will award prizes between $100,000 and $2 million to states that develop meaningful pathways for students to attain well-paying jobs in fields like medicine, IT, and manufacturing. Winning states will incorporate input from their local employers and emphasize career readiness heavily in their school accountability systems. The competition is a great example of policy craftsmanship through teamwork, and states should position themselves to take advantage of a privately financed windfall in the name of the public good.
- By a whole variety of measures, the United States doesn’t do a good enough job training its teachers. Huge numbers of our newest educators enter the profession with too few hours of classroom training and pathetically inadequate content knowledge of the subject they’ll be teaching. To remedy the situation, experts are now searching overseas for examples. The National Center on Education and the Economy has recently released two reports looking closely at school systems in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, and British Columbia, all of which earn high marks on international measures of student achievement. The organization’s recommendation is, basically, to rip those guys off: emulate their practice of exposing prospective instructors to much more in-class practice and assigning “master teachers” the task of bringing along newer cohorts. The prescriptions are compelling, but stateside scholars need to be very careful about grafting foreign approaches atop our own context. The combined populations of those four jurisdictions would add up to just one (large) U.S. state, and their cultures and political systems differ drastically from our own. There’s nothing wrong with studying success—or going your own way.
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