Broken record
Kudos to ABC6 News in Columbus for keeping a spotlight on the continuing transportation problems for district and choice students in the city. Their most recent piece leads with a charter school family whose members must get up at 4 am daily to be at the bus stop on time…waiting for a bus that may not even show up.
“Kids can’t wait”
Cleveland mayor Justin Bibb released the results of his recent listening tour related to education in the city. You can read all the details in this Ideastream piece, but Bibb’s urgency to address problems he sees is palpable. He proposes “doubling down” on the Cleveland Plan, especially the need to make more high-quality schools available for families. And this story suggests that might include additional charter school seats.
Fordham lauds the Mountain State
Fordham president Mike Petrilli joined with colleague Nathaniel Grossman to pen an op-ed in the Coal Valley News looking toward a bright future for charter schools in West Virginia and laying out the data to back up that sentiment.
No bargain?
Teacher Joan Walden published an op-ed in the Indy Star last week opposing closure of undersubscribed district buildings in Indianapolis because of the possibility that charter schools may purchase them. And she may have a point (about the possibility, not the opposition, which is flat out wrong) since state law sets the price for such a purchase at $1.
Parental compromise
An interesting research report was recently published attempting to quantify the difference between parents’ ideal school choices and what they opt for in the real world. While the findings from Kansas City, Missouri, indicate that traditionally-underserved families there have to compromise more when they make choices, parents are still opting for non-zoned schools at very high percentages and are likely happier with their choices than they would be with no option other than a district assignment.
The Year of School Choice rolls on
Corey DeAngelis, executive director of the Education Freedom Institute, is one of the loudest school choice cheerleaders in the country. Following this week’s midterm elections, he took to the pages of the Wall Street Journal to tout the “school choice wave” that he sees based on the outcomes of a number of important races across the country. “For far too long in K-12 education,” he writes, “the only groups that commanded politicians’ attention were unions representing the employees in the system. Now the kids have a union of their own: their parents.”
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