Fix Online Charter School Policy: It’s Past Time
Today CREDO, Mathematica Policy Research, and CRPE released three papers as part of the first comprehensive rigorous national study of online charter schools. The findings show that even using the most careful methods given the available data, the results for online charter schools are very bad. In nearly every state, CREDO’s results show that students […]
District-Charter Collaboration Takes Root in Florida
As collaboration between districts and charter schools ebbs and flows in the now 21 cities that signed Compacts with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, new relationships are forming in Florida. In a unique move, the state department of education itself has decided to spearhead a competitive grant process. They’ve placed a […]
Can City Schools Address the Achievement and Opportunity Gap?
This blog was first published in the Brookings Brown Center Chalkboard. In a recent report, we looked at how public education is delivering on the promise of educational opportunity in 50 mid- to large-sized cities in the United States. The project grew out of a practical problem we encountered when studying big city school systems: […]
Measuring Up: How American Cities Are Shortchanging Black Students and What We Can Do About It
We recently published Measuring Up: Educational Improvement and Opportunity in 50 Cities, a report that provides a citywide assessment of the changing and complex public school landscape in the U.S., where multiple agencies oversee public schools and enrollments are spread across a variety of school types. Though it comes as no surprise to anyone who […]
More Than One Path Out of the Bottom
Five years ago, the Obama administration’s School Improvement Grants (SIG) famously targeted extra resources to the nation’s most struggling schools. The feds defined “struggling” schools as those performing in the bottom 5% of their state based on performance. As is often the case with sweeping policy initiatives, the results were mixed. It’s probably unsurprising, then, […]
The Policy Framework for Online Charter Schools
CRPE partnered with Mathematica and CREDO on a rigorous analysis of online charter schools. Our paper examines how state policy shapes the online charter school landscape.
Measuring Up: Educational Improvement and Opportunity in 50 Cities
A groundbreaking new report that measures the health of school systems through a citywide lens.
Rethinking High Schools: Past Efforts Should Inform New Models
Pundits on the left and right have criticized Laurene Powell Jobs’ new $50 million initiative to develop new high school models. Some say earlier efforts to create new models have been a bust, others say that the new models might be good but they can’t possibly survive in the harsh environment of public education. But, […]
Realizing the True Power of State-Run School Districts
As the nation reflects on the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the impact of Louisiana’s Recovery School District (RSD) has been the subject of reasoned, evidence-based analyses as well as fiery, often baseless, attacks. Meanwhile, the record of the Louisiana RSD seems to be speaking for itself. In state legislatures across the country, laws establishing […]
A Court Decision Only the Kremlin Could Love
This blog was first published in Fordham Institute’s Flypaper. Last Friday, in a 6-3 decision, the Washington State Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the state’s voter-approved charter school law, throwing nine new schools and more than 1200 students into chaos. The ruling was not based on the merits of the law (one of the strongest in […]