Public charter schools are one of the most enduring—and successful—educational innovations over the past three decades.
Kevin Shafer, president of City Fund, joins Mike Petrilli and David Griffith to discuss
“What we’re going to do for our kids’ education” might be the single most common discussion I have had in my social life as a parent. Like many parents in NYC and across the country, I was captivated by Nikole Hannah-Jones’s essay in the New York Times. Parents are constantly asking themselves, “Have I done right by my kid” when it comes to education.
When Nikole Hannah-Jones writes that her daughter finally told her, “Sometimes I wish instead of always thinking about other kids, you would have thought about me,” every parent who works in education should stop and sit with those words. I did.
A defining feature of charter schools is the oversight structure provided by the authorizer. It is an authorizer’s job to determine whether schools are fulfilling the terms of their charters across numerous areas, not least of which is student outcomes.
“If you build it, they will come” makes a great tagline for a mythical baseball movie but a poor strategy for educational improvement. Markets are not magic and are shaped by external factors that encourage or discourage participation.
Echoing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s sentiments distancing herself from wokeness, a common sentiment among reformers seems to be that the bipartisan education reform era was “craazzy.” Standardized testing pep rallies, the glorified grant writing beauty pageant called Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, guarantees of
For those of us who have long pushed for charter schools to receive fair funding, progress has been slow, uneven, and hard-won. That’s why we at the Thomas B.
In 2022, the state of Missouri made a concerted effort to eliminate its charter school funding gap. But how much progress has it actually made? And what have charters done with the additional funds?
In Philadelphia, a young person leaving Launchpad Philly’s post-high school graduate training track is on pace to earn nearly $30,000 within nine months and $50,000 within one year. That far outpaces the roughly $12,500 a young Philadelphian with only a high school diploma typically earns.
Patrick McAlister, principal of PM Str
National Charter Schools Week (May 10 to 16) rightly focuses our attention on the millions of students attending public charter schools. Less attention goes to the federal program that helped make much of that growth possible.
Within ten years, a successful school or district will almost certainly experience at least one superintendent change, multiple principal transitions, substantial staff turnover, curriculum reviews and technology initiatives, school board elections, and shifts in funding or political priorities.
School choice has expanded and diversified over the last 30 years. No longer is it just “public vs. private” or even “district vs. charter vs.
In this first entry in a three-part series, Pondiscio tackles American education’s failure to learn from its success stories. The problem is not that we’re incurious about successful schools—it’s which models we seek to learn from and the lessons we take from them.
Mississippi has earned well-deserved plaudits for its outsized literacy gains in recent years, ranking first
Dear governor, Do you want to be remembered for your leadership on education? Your state may be spending nearly half its budget on schools, and yet test scores continue to fall, especially for the students who need the most help.
A recent study offers a new look at charter schools’ special education performance. The Michigan findings show that special education students performed better in charter schools than in traditional public schools.
Traditional school districts have increasingly embraced giving students more options within their systems in recent decades, in response to growing charter and private school competition and the desire of district parents for more specialized programs and services for their children.
It is no secret that the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted K–12 education in the United States.
In the 1990s, Sweden overhauled its public education system. Previously run almost entirely by local governments, public schools could now be operated either by districts or by private providers—similar to U.S. charter schools.
By all accounts, urban charter schools are an uncontested victory of the bipartisan education reform movement.
Last week’s Denver school board election made clear that 2030 will likely be the next real opportunity for Denver Public Schools (DPS) to chart a new course.
As a Los Angeles Unified School District parent during the pandemic, I had a front row seat as my fellow Democrats and their teachers union allies lit the match that turned a global health crisis into an education inferno.
Last month, Education Secretary Linda McMahon expressed hope that Donald Trump will be remembered as an “education president,” arguing that “sending education back to the states” warrants
Nearly twenty years ago, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Among other sweeping institutional changes, the unprecedented school reforms enacted in the immediate aftermath have left long-lasting effects on the city’s K–12 public education system. But are New Orleans schools still operating in the way that reformers intended?
With eighteen words tucked into a 37-page education bill, the Indiana state legislature took a major step towards easing the lives of educational entrepreneurs. Those words? “A public school, charter school, or nonpublic school shall be considered a permitted use in all zoning districts.”
Editor’s note: This was first published by The 74.
Michael Petrilli recently made a sensible case for charter school regulation—not for its own sake, but because charter authorizers should concern themselves with how our public schools are being run.
Many pundits claim that the charter schools sector once had great potential for innovation, but because of dastardly authorizers and other red-tape-loving bureaucrats, charters instead became overly cautious, impeding innovation in a way that has hamstrung and limited the entire charter school movement. Is that true?
