The Education Gadfly Show: How the pandemic could lead to smarter school spending
On this week’s podcast, Brandon Wright joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss his and Rick Hess’s new edited volume,
On this week’s podcast, Brandon Wright joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss his and Rick Hess’s new edited volume,
On this week’s podcast, Timothy Daly, co-founder and CEO of EdNavigator, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss
Six months into the pandemic, the nation’s forced experiment in remote learning has resumed. But our education system’s design is ill-suited to the unique quandaries posed by Covid-19. District officials continue to ask parents for grace and patience, and many have continued to oblige, but if current conditions persist into next year and beyond, demand for choice will almost certainly increase as a large number of parents keep their children at home.
Covid-19 is upending what parents think about America’s schools, motivating them to seek different ways to educate their children. It’s also inspiring enterprising individuals and imaginative policymakers to create new ways to support that parent demand for change.
The first-ever virtual political conventions have come and gone, during which neither party offered a serious path forward on education reform. The Democrats belong to the self-interested teacher unions, and the GOP has become a single-issue party in pursuit of choice, leaving us with a lot of talk but little action.
Some Democrats and Republicans have an unlikely alliance these days around one thing: their sudden rejection of the federal Charter Schools Program (CSP), which funds start-up costs for new, high-quality charter schools.
On this week’s podcast, Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, joins Mike Petrilli to discuss why politics seems to be
In late July, the Democratic Party released a policy platform that included stances on a variety of issues, including education.
On this week’s podcast, Gregg Vanourek joins Mike Petrilli to discuss Fordham’s new report that Gregg authored,
Last spring, the Covid-19 pandemic upended routines for over 56 million students and challenged more than 3.7 million teachers in over 130,000 schools nationwide to continue educating kids in an online format. This transition to “virtual learning” was understandably trying for all educators, schools, and districts, but some managed to do far better than others.
On this week’s podcast, Tressa Pankovits, associate director of Reinventing America's Schools at the Progressive Policy Institute, joins Mike Petrilli a
We spend too much time talking about how much to spend on schools but not enough on how those dollars are spent. Covid-19 has made this situation worse, as schools confront massive, looming budget shortfalls and the challenges of remote learning and public health. That’s on top of familiar issues like pensions, special education, technology, and all the rest. This book offers a workable path through this maze.
One of the starkest differences between charter and traditional district schools is in the area of facilities funding.
Almost exactly twenty years ago, in August 2000, CBS News’s 60 Minutes aired a segment about a pair of charter schools—one in the South Bronx; another in Houston, Texas—founded by a duo of twenty-something White male teachers. To see it now is to catch a time capsule glimpse of a more earnest and hopeful time.
Senate Republicans released their relief bill this week, the HEALS act, which proposes to steer the bulk of education aid to schools that open for in-person instruction. This is triggering angry reactions from most of the education establishment. Here's a less controversial and more constructive suggestion: Return federal education policy to its roots and require schools to provide “targeted assistance” to their disadvantaged, low-achieving students.
School funding mechanisms are the largest and perhaps most obvious levers for policymakers to pull when attempting to reform how education dollars are distributed. To wit, a new research report from a trio of scholars tells us that there were a whopping sixty-seven major school finance reforms (SFRs) across twenty-seven states between 1990 and 2014.
With Covid-19 cases on the rise and state budgets in crisis, federal lawmakers seem poised to pass another round of stimulus. It appears that K–12 education will receive a decent portion of the emergency aid, likely exceeding the $13.5 billion-plus provided to U.S.
Given its makeup, it’s no surprise that the task force report trots out the oft-refuted canard that charter schools “undermine” traditional schools. The National Education Association (NEA) used identical language in a 2017 policy statement pledging “forceful support” for limiting charter schools. “The growth of charters has undermined local public schools and communities, without producing any overall increase in student learning and growth,” the NEA claimed.
There is a reason we’re told to respect our elders. It’s bracing and edifying to listen to voices of wisdom and experience. Those whose time grows short are compelled to speak clearly and directly. Thomas Sowell is one such voice.
Seventeen long years ago, I urged the creation of “religious charter schools,” either encouraging their start from scratch or—more realistically—allowing extant Catholic and other faith-based schools to convert to charter status
The publication date for this admirable book is Tom Sowell’s ninetieth birthday (June 30, 2020), and I doubt that’s entirely coincidental. Though Jason Riley reported three years ago that Sowell was “putting down his pen,” that obviously didn’t happen. And we’re better off as a result.
The pandemic forced schools across the country to close and institute some form of remote learning, but their methods varied widely. To see just how much, analysts at the American Enterprise Institute and the Center on Reinventing Public Education have been examining how different public school districts and charter school networks have responded.
On this week’s podcast, Michael McShane, the director of national research at EdChoice, joins Mike Petrilli to discuss how Catholic
Conservatives are right to be leery of bailing out profligate state and local governments, especially for needs that bear little relationship to—and pre-date—the virus crisis and its economic consequences. A well-crafted bill would base the amount of funding for state and local governments upon an estimate of the actual costs and losses incurred as result of the pandemic. It cannot be a blank check to fund every item on a state’s wish list. But telling states to “make hard decisions” is not going to cut it.
In the summer of 2013, After New York’s adoption of new, more rigorous testing benchmarks under the Common Core State Standards Initiative, student test scores plummeted around the state, wiping out years of paper gains.
The financial fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic is part of a triple threat facing schools this fall: (1) students who are far off track academically and socially; (2) a decline in state revenue that will result in severe budget cuts; and (3) rising costs in response to the pandemic. The silver lining is that the financial pressure could provide cover to enterprising leaders interested in tackling thorny issues like pension obligations that might otherwise have gone unaddressed.
The evidence is mixed on whether we can motivate students to work harder by offering them financial incentives.
In these uncertain days, with many brick-and-mortar schools shuttered indefinitely, one of Idaho’s leaders in online education has moved in a deliberate and intelligent fashion to transition its brick-and-mortar-based students to online learning.
No sooner had Michigan closed its public schools than the state Department of Education announced that no distance learning time would count toward the required 180 days of instruction.
A week ago, we thought we were probably going to have to close our schools for a couple of weeks. We started to plan. Our network—College Achieve Public Schools (CAPS)—operates seven charter schools on six campuses in Paterson, Plainfield, North Plainfield, Neptune, and Asbury Park, NJ.