New Orleans: Building a Strong Teacher Pipeline for Tomorrow’s Schools
New Orleans is in uncharted territory. As recently as 2010, just three non-selective admissions schools had strong enough academic programs to earn an “A” or “B” from the state. A student in an open-enrollment public school had about a 1 in 20 chance of attending a high-quality school. Today, 1 in 3 New Orleans students […]
New Orleans: A City That Works—Together
Imagine a city where all high school students have had a series of job experiences by the time they graduate. When many of us think back to some of the essential lessons we learned growing up—lessons around hard work, reliability, punctuality, a service ethic—we find that we developed many of our habits of mind through […]
Brand Name Reforms in Rural Education
This is the last in series of four blogs originally published on eduwonk.com. Brand-name reforms common in urban education reform – e.g. alternative sources of teachers, technology-based instruction, family choice, charter schools – can have promise in rural areas. But these ideas need to be adapted to the circumstances of rural places and subjected to […]
Resource Constraints in Rural Education
This is the third blog in a four-part series originally published on eduwonk.com. Rural schools are highly constrained, both in the resources that receive from state and local sources and in the ways they are required to spend money. As a result schools have difficulty recruiting all the teachers they need, especially in science, mathematics, […]
College and Career Connections in Rural Schools
This is the second blog in a four-part series originally published on eduwonk.com. Though rural K-12 education in most places is performing reasonably well on traditional academic instruction, schools need to give young people better linkages, both to further learning and employment close to home, and to higher education and jobs in urban areas. Students […]
Ten Years After: What’s Next for New Orleans?
Last week educators, researchers, and policymakers gathered in New Orleans to take stock of how the public school system there is faring 10 years after Hurricane Katrina. The school system, as most know, was radically restructured in the post-Katrina recovery. To avoid recreating a centralized system that was rife with corruption and patronage, and that […]
World-Class Standards and Place-Based Education in Rural Schools
This is the first blog in a four-part series originally published on eduwonk.com. Place-based education is vitally important for rural (as for urban) areas, but it can’t be pursued to the point of denying rural high school graduates a real choice about whether to attend college or do something else. As a country we need […]
Front-Runners and Dark Horses: How Districts Are Faring on Portfolio Strategy Implementation
Every spring for the past three years, CRPE has reviewed how school systems implementing the portfolio strategy are faring. Through phone interviews with key contacts in these districts—sometimes the superintendent, sometimes a cabinet member—we look at each of the strategy’s key components, catalog work underway in each area, and score results based on a rubric. […]
How Choice Strengthens Schools and Families
In the course of a small study with Tricia Maas about the “backfill” issue in charter high schools (question: What are the schools doing to offer vacant seats to transfer students, and how are they helping the newcomers come up to speed?), I’ve been struck again by the importance of informed choice. Choice is a […]
Uncovering the Productivity Promise of Rural Education
The Council of Chief State Schools Officers is meeting this week to discuss rural education. While worries about America’s public education system often focus on large cities, rural districts educate millions of American students, and they do so with less support and attention than their urban and suburban counterparts. CCSSO deserves praise for providing a […]