#872: The religious charter school debate, with Kathleen Porter-Magee
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Kathleen Porter-Magee of Partnership Schools—a network of Catholic school
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Kathleen Porter-Magee of Partnership Schools—a network of Catholic school
It being National Charter Schools Week, I thought I would look at the progress that we have made since last year’s celebration.
Join us to discuss the implications of Fordham's recently published report Charter Schools and English Learners in the Lone Star State.
The number of English learners in charter schools has increased markedly in recent years, but our knowledge of how well charters serve these students hasn’t kept pace with that growth. That’s why we conducted our new study, "Charter Schools and English Learners in the Lone Star State." It finds, among other things, that compared to their traditional public school peers, English learners in Texas charters are more likely to graduate high school and enroll in college. They also earn more money in the post-college years.
This year’s state legislative sessions, now coming to a close, have yielded a blizzard of high-profile victories on school choice, from the enactment of universal education savings accounts (ESA) programs, to the expansion of private school choice policies to serve many more families, to fairer funding for charter schools.
When it comes to K–12 education policy, the post-Covid period has become, more than almost anything else, the era of school choice. This success has opened new avenues for its growth and confronted choice supporters—particularly Catholic school supporters—with an important decision.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast,
This study uses nearly two decades of student-level data to explore how charter school enrollment is related to Texas English learners’ achievement, attainment, and earnings.
Aaargh. Here we go again. The new National Assessment civics and history results are as deplorable as they were predictable. Whether they’ll also serve as the action-forcer that we need is far from certain.
This April marks forty years since the National Commission on Excellence in Education issued its blockbuster report “A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform.” The commission, which worked for eighteen months, was created in August 1981 by U.S. Secretary of Education Terrel Bell early in his tenure with President Ronald Reagan’s administration.
There are many reasons to be skeptical of the universal ESA programs that are sweeping the nation, but they are worth rooting for anyway because they’ll likely lead traditional public schools to improve.
The Georgia Department of Education has released a new version of proposed English language arts standards for public comment, and they contain a big surprise. If you dig into the “Texts” section and go to grade eleven, you’ll find this requirement:
When Tennessee House Republicans expelled, albeit briefly, two young, Black Democratic lawmakers late last week, it raised a number of unsettling questions—not only about the contours of our politics, but also about the future of educat
A little-noticed event in late 2022 destabilized a pillar of contemporary American K–12 education, namely that all schools considered part of the public system must be secular.
The ongoing debate over when students shoul
If we put all our education hopes in markets, self-interest, competition, and “invisible hands,” will that contribute to the other fissiparous forces that are weakening the valuable shared assets we inherited from earlier generations? Recent surveys certainly suggest that mounting public support for school choice is coinciding with diminishing confidence in shared institutions and public values of all kinds, including patriotism itself.
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast,
Districts that lose students to charter schools can and ultimately will adjust their behavior. And indeed, recent research implies that, while charters marginally reduce districts’ total revenues per pupil, they also make them more efficient. The challenge for policymakers is managing whatever transition costs may be associated with moving to a more choice-based system in a way that is fair to students and taxpayers.
Here is a list of ideals and values commonly held within a particular group of people in American life. Name the group of people who prize the following things: a belief in personal responsibility and individual merit; a respect for order, rules, and self-discipline; and a personal commitment to vibrant institutions that are critical to civil society.
Within a few years of their 2010 rollout, the Common Core State Standards for math and English became a popular scapegoat for a host of perceived ills in K–12 education.
Opponents of public charter schools claim that they drain resources from traditional public schools. This brief argues that this assertion misses lesser-known realities and ignores obvious truths.
Student effort is the secret sauce at Success Academy charter schools, says their founder and CEO, and they teach and celebrate it religiously. Indeed, after seventeen years of educating tens of thousands of students, careful analysis of homework, classwork, and assessment data has taught the Success Academy team that a large proportion of errors, up to 70 percent, don’t result from not knowing or understanding the content, but from a lack of care and attention to detail.
In the summer of 2015, I sat at my desk and Googled “health savings account providers.” At the time, I had been in states across the country advocating for creation of education savings account (ESA) programs.
What does it mean to “prepare young people for adult work,” an oft-used saying to describe one of schooling’s primary goals? Though it surely means that we prepare them to earn a living and move up the income ladder, work is more than a financial way to provide for ourselves and those we love.
From 2015 to 2018, the start of spring meant I could expect to hear from parents across Florida. At the time, I worked for Step Up Students, the Florida-based organization that administers the nation’s largest education scholarship (i.e., voucher) program. My job was not in customer service. I was the editor of a blog focused on school choice issues.
We were glad to function in that capacity for Virginia as we’ve done for many other states over the years. But it’s also been implied by some that we tried to inject the draft standards with conservative bias, even to “whitewash” history, and that is completely false.
Reversing decades of economic struggle in America’s former manufacturing centers is a high priority for leaders in cities and regions across the nation. Many would like to see technology-focused industries lead such a resurgence, but do they have enough qualified workers? And if not, how can they increase those numbers?
On this week’s Education Gadfly Show podcast, Mike Petrilli and David Griffith talk with
A common observation made by critics of school choice is that it has little to offer families in rural communities where the population isn’t large enough to support multiple schools, and where transportation is already burdensome. I’ve made the point myself, and I’m a school choice proponent.
One hallmark of charter schools—distinct from their traditional district peers—is flexibility in their HR practices.