Great news: Kansas is cool again! The Sunflower State’s House and Senate have emerged from a cyclone of negotiations with a school-finance bill that increases aid to poor school districts, reduces teacher-protection measures, creates a tax-credit scholarship program, and does not ban the Common Core (or counting to 100 or reading)! Phew. That was a close one, Kansas.
The U.S. House education committee passed two bipartisan bills on Tuesday. The first would reauthorize the Institute for Education Sciences. The second is a charter-school measure meant to foster more high-quality schools and encourage them to do better by English-language learners and special-needs students. Both are worthy measures, and even getting them out of committee feels like cause for applause in today’s political climate. But, of course, many hurdles lie ahead.
Officials in Washington, D.C., have issued a proposal for the first comprehensive overhaul of the district’s school boundaries in four decades. The city unveiled three policy proposals for how D.C. might assign students to its public schools. The least drastic proposal would continue to assign families a neighborhood school while giving some charter schools feeder rights into DCPS middle and high schools. The most drastic proposal would base admissions largely on the results of a lottery, with considerations for socio-economic balance, eliminating the “right” to a neighborhood school. The third is a middle-ground option, which would maintain neighborhood elementary schools but create a lottery system for middle and high schools. It’s hard not to notice echoes of “controlled choice” in a few of these proposals; play back our lively debate on this topic from last month for more background.
In the latest round of the voucher war between state of Louisiana and the DOJ, Judge Ivan Lemelle ruled that the Bayou State needed to provide the DOJ with a list of all of its voucher applicants and recipients, leading the DOJ to claim victory. But before the feds break out the celebratory fruit basket, recall that the DOJ had originally demanded the authority to certify participating private schools and review and potentially deny voucher awards—a clear attempt to wrest control of the choice program. Importantly, Judge Lemelle did not provide the feds with this power. Pass that fruit basket over to Bobby Jindal.
