In Colorado, a hard-fought defensive victory for charter schools
When history looks back upon the coronavirus period and its effect upon schools, one redeeming aspect may be the spotlight that’s been cast upon parental choice in all its forms.
When history looks back upon the coronavirus period and its effect upon schools, one redeeming aspect may be the spotlight that’s been cast upon parental choice in all its forms.
A trio of researchers from the University of Chicago, MIT, and UC Berkeley recently released a working paper that indicates a multitude of positive long-term effects—very long term, in fact—associated with attendance at public preschool.
Today, forty-four states—plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam—have public charter school laws on their statute books, laws that have led to more than 7,500 schools employing 200,000-plus teachers and serving 3.3 million students.
In 1908, the Ford Motor Company unveiled the Model T and introduced a reliable, affordable automobile for the middle class. While revolutionary, the Model T also took twelve hours and 7,882 tasks to assemble 1,481 parts, and increased production time meant increased costs. In 1913, Ford introduced an assembly line and cut production to ninety-three minutes.
On this week’s podcast, Doug Tuthill, president of Step Up for Students, joins Mik
Eli Broad, who passed away late last month at the age of eighty-seven, long sought to rectify the excessively bureaucratic, overly politicized, and woefully underperforming big city school district. But should he have pivoted instead to charter schools?
Can parent choice survive the cancel culture that is becoming ever more prevalent on both the political left and political right? What happens when the principles of diversity and choice in schools conflict with either the left’s or the right’s firm view of truth and falsehoods?
In the coming weeks, the House Appropriations subcommittee that decides on education spending will consider how much money to allocate to the federal Charter School Program (CSP).
When we imagine the typical school, at least one from the pre-pandemic era, generally the first thing that comes to mind is a teacher instructing a classroom full of students.
Full-time virtual charter schools received a great deal of attention as schools scrambled to transition classes online back in the Spring of 2020, and have experienced booming enrollments over the past year.
In part I of this two-part series, I wrote about three of the most common practices teachers implement in elementary schools that successfully personalize learning: giving each child a learning plan, organizing instruction around class-level and individual mastery, and using grouping an
Earlier this month on her “Answer Sheet” blog in the Washington Post, Valerie Strauss ran a lengthy rebuttal written by Carol Burris about a study that we recently published. Robbers or Victims?
The CDC’s revised guidelines for pupil spacing in school—three feet under most circumstances rather than six—opened a floodgate of gratitude from superintendents and parents.
In a previous Flypaper post, Mike Petrilli described the challenge of personalizing instruction for our youngest learners as the “Mount Everest” of education.
School choice proponents argue that when parents vote with their feet—and dollars—schools listen. But choice is no match for the pandemic of wokeness that has seized K–12 education. The most advantaged, privileged, and powerful parents in America have been cowed into submissive silence when elite schools of choice adopt neoracist practices masquerading as “anti-racism.”
The Fordham Institute has published a two-part piece by Checker Finn on giving “power to the people,” as well as
Editor’s note: This is the fifth and final installment in a series of posts about envelope-pushing strategies that schools might embrace to address students’ learning loss in the wake of the pandemic.
Centering the work of charter schooling and authorizing in communities means listening to the aspirations and needs they have for students—especially communities that have been overlooked and not prioritized, like communities of color, those from lower-income tax brackets, and those with disabilities—and delivering with, not to, them.
High-dosage tutoring is receiving a lot of buzz as a promising tool to address learning loss in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. But unlike vaccines, successful tutoring programs are challenging to scale with fidelity. In this paper, long-time educators Michael Goldstein and Bowen Paulle explain how leaders can smartly scale promising tutoring programs that can boost student outcomes.
Yes, I blurbed it—and I like it. Yes, a visitor to our home, a worldly and skeptical sort, hefted it and looked at the title and asked me “Isn’t that awfully thick for a book about optimism regarding American public education?”
Education funding is sticky. Once dollars are sent to a public school or school system, they tend to stay there.
Should President Biden follow through on his campaign promise to grant local school districts veto power over the creation of new charter schools within their borders, on the assumption that their expansion harms traditional public schools?
Opponents of charters contend that they drain district coffers, while proponents argue that it is charters that are denied essential funding. Yet too often, the claims made by both sides of this debate have been based on assumptions rather than hard evidence.
If the pandemic vanished tomorrow and all U.S. schools instantly reopened in exactly the same fashion as they were operating last February, how many parents would be satisfied to return their daughters and sons to the same old familiar classrooms, teachers, schedules and curricula? A lot fewer than the same old schools and those who run and teach in them are expecting back!
The father testifying before Virginia’s Loudon County school board
Let’s start with a little game. Trust me, it will be helpful if you play along… Grab a piece of paper and a writing utensil. Complete the following sentence: First-year or early-career teachers typically struggle most with… (Try to come up with a few answers.)
Beware the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” President George W. Bush’s trenchant warning resonated across the political spectrum when he voiced it to the NAACP in 2000, and it has more or less driven federal education policy ever since. For many, educators and noneducators alike, it remains a touchstone of how to think about racial equity.