Closing the Discipline Gap
In the wake of the police shooting of teenager Michael Brown and the mass demonstrations that followed, community leaders in Ferguson, Missouri, are working to address years of racial injustice in their city and surrounding areas. Among their calls to action: change how area schools handle student suspensions and expulsions. Why would changing school discipline […]
No One Has a Monopoly On “Beating the Odds”
We recently released a report that looked at nine indicators to measure educational improvement and opportunity in 50 cities across America. Despite a few bright spots, the results paint a sobering picture of the state of urban public education today, especially for students from low-income households and students of color. With few exceptions, students eligible […]
We Need a Common Yardstick for Cities
The most recent results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are out and generating a lot of discussion, including some cautions about how to interpret the results. I know the benefits and limits of the NAEP all too well. In our recent report, Measuring Up: Educational Improvement and Opportunity in 50 Cities, we […]
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, […]
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 […]
