High-quality high schools: The next frontier for Ohio’s charter sector
Each year, school choice advocates celebrate National Charter Schools Week. This year, they had an extra reason to break open the champagne: U.S.
Each year, school choice advocates celebrate National Charter Schools Week. This year, they had an extra reason to break open the champagne: U.S.
On this week's podcast, special guest Matt Chingos, a senior fellow at the Urban In
NOTE: This piece originally appeared in The Cincinnati Enquirer in a slightly different form.
On this week's podcast, Mike Petrilli, Ian Rowe, and Alyssa Schwenk discuss whether and how schools should teach the “success sequence.” During the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines the cross-subject effects of English language arts instruction.
When news broke the other day that LeBron James was starting a school in his home town of Akron, some commentators assumed it was going to be a charter.
It’s well established that some charter schools do far better than others at educating their students. This variability has profound implications for the children who attend those schools. Yet painful experience shows that rebooting or closing a low-performing school is a drawn-out and excruciating process.
Last week, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) announced that the long-awaited Charter School Program (CSP) grant funds will soon be available. The federal program will provide $32 million in FY 2018 for high-quality charter startups and replications.
Are you a school choice supporter or just interested in learning more about this issue that is gaining national prominence? Ohio parents, students, schools, and advocates will be holding a rally on Tuesday, May 2, 2017, at 11 a.m. on the steps of the Ohio Statehouse. And you’re invited to attend.
On this week's podcast, Kentucky State Senator Mike Wilson joins Mike Petrilli and Alyssa Schwenk to discuss charter schools in the Bluegrass State, which recently passed its first charter law. During the Research Minute, Amber Northern examines efforts to improve content knowledge and comprehension for English language learners.
Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, the federal School Improvement Grants program is gone, but the goal of school improvement remains. States must now use seven percent of their Title I allocation for these efforts, but are no longer constrained by a prescribed menu of intervention options.
E-schools, a.k.a. virtual charter schools, have been so thoroughly mired in controversy that they’ve become radioactive in most education discussions. Or in most discussions, period. The current dispute in Ohio is largely technical and centers on the extent to which e-schools provide learning opportunities to students rather than merely offering them.
Although it’s been almost seven years since many states took the important step of elevating their academic standards by adopting the Common Core, teachers and administrators across the country still bemoan the lack of reliable information about which instructional materials are high-quality and best aligned to the new standards.
Citizens Leadership Academy (CLA) is preparing Cleveland middle schoolers for success in high school, college, and life—and not just academically. CLA, whose population is 79 percent economically disadvantaged and made up almost entirely of students of color, is second among all public schools in the city on student growth.
A report released today outlines the facilities challenges facing Ohio’s public charter schools.
“Winners never quit and quitters never win.” There's a lot of truth in that cliché, but it doesn't seem to apply to education. When it comes to chronically low-performing schools, in many cases, the better – and more courageous – course is to “quit” and close a school that is simply beyond repair.
Parents make choices about their child’s schooling based on a variety of factors: location, safety, convenience, academics, extracurriculars, support services, and more. Many families choose their school by moving to the neighborhood of their preference, thus exercising “choice” when making homeownership decisions.
The American Federation for Children (AFC) recently released its third annual poll on school choice. The national poll surveyed just over 1,000 likely November 2018 voters early this January via phone calls.
Peter Cunningham recently called district-charter collaboration the “great unfilled promise” of school choice.
Ohio’s charter school reform discussions have mostly focused on sponsors—the entities responsible for providing charter school oversight. Overlooked are the important changes in Ohio’s charter reform law (House Bill 2) around operators.
One in seven adults’ ages 18-24 in Ohio lacks a high school diploma and faces bleak prospects of prospering in our economy. Dropouts earn $10,000 less each year than the average high school graduate according to the U.S.
On this week's podcast, special guest Lisa Graham Keegan, executive director of A for Arizona, joins Mike Petrilli and Alyssa Schwenk to discuss the pros and cons of a big federal push on school choice. On the Research Minute, David Griffith teams up with Matthew Ladner, Senior Advisor of Policy and Research for the Foundation for Excellence in Education, to examine the effects of teacher turnover on instructional quality.
It would be an understatement to say that the 2015–16 school year was one of transition. Indeed, over the past twelve months, we lived through the implementation of the third state assessment in three years, the rollout of Ohio’s revised sponsor evaluation, and the introduction of a new state superintendent at the Ohio Department of Education (ODE).
KIPP Columbus achieves extraordinary outcomes for its students, predominantly students in poverty and students of color—a fact worth celebrating by itself. In 2015-16 in Ohio’s Urban Eight cities, KIPP Columbus was in the top five percent of all schools (district and charter) on student growth and among the very best (top 3 percent) in Columbus.
Hopes are high for a new kind of school in Indianapolis. Purdue Polytechnic High School will open in the 2017-18 school year, admitting its first class of 150 ninth graders on the near Eastside.
Over the past quarter-century, charter schools have gone from an upstart education experiment to a prominent, promising, and disruptive innovation in K–12 education. Indeed, few observers present at the creation of the first charter schools could have predicted how rapidly this movement would spread or how thoroughly it would come to dominate the education-reform agenda.
The Ohio Department of Education (ODE) recently released the results of its revised sponsor evaluation, including new ratings for all of the state’s charter-school sponsors.
Tens of thousands of individuals across the United States volunteer their time, energy, and expertise as members of charter school boards. Yet as the charter sector has grown, we’ve learned remarkably little about these individuals who make key operational decisions about their schools and have legal and moral responsibilities for the education of children in their communities.
Twenty-five years into the American charter school movement there remains little research on the impact of charter authorizers, yet these entities are responsible for key decisions in the lives of charter schools, including whether they can open, and when they must close.
Politicians are wise to pay attention to public opinion data, but they are also responsible for crafting sound policies based on research and evidence.
By Andrew Scanlan