The High School Challenge to Districts and Charters
Despite little bits of progress here and there, the problem of big-city high schools—how to motivate students to stay engaged and learn what they need to be eligible for college and good jobs—remains unsolved. Graduation rates for African American boys remain below 50 percent in some cities. New York City stands out as the one […]
Schools Can’t Innovate Until Districts Do
Every sector of the U.S. economy is working on ways to deliver services in a more customized manner. In the near future, cancer treatment plans will be customized to each patient based on sophisticated genetic data and personal health histories. If all goes well, education is headed in the same direction. Personalized learning and globally […]
Charter High Schools and the “Backfill” Debate
A debate about “backfill”—whether charter high schools should add students to replace those who drop out—has just begun (see here, here, and here). Some argue that successful charter school models should not have to deviate from their focus by admitting children who don’t enter at the beginning of 9th grade. Others believe that a school […]
Is There a Third Way for ESEA?
This blog was originally published in the Huffington Post. Last month, a highly polarized debate waylaid a House vote on the federal government’s most important education legislation: the LBJ-era Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). Known since 2002 as No Child Left Behind (NCLB), it provides more than $13 billion annually to support education for […]
What Africa Can Teach Us About Educating Low-Income Kids at Scale
A recent Wall Street Journal article reported that the Mark Zuckerberg-backed Pershing Square Fund is investing $6 million in Bridge Academies, a private school chain in Kenya that serves more than 126,000 kids at a cost of $6 per student per month. I first learned about Bridge about two years ago after traveling in South […]
Real-World Governance Change
This blog was originally posted onFordham’s Flypaper. We need to take issue with a point in Andy Smarick’s thoughtful review, published in Flypaper, of our new book, A Democratic Constitution for Public Education. As Andy describes, the book proposes a new local oversight body for public education, the Civic Education Council (CEC). The CEC would […]
Can We Agree on School Accountability?
Last week, California’s State Board of Education took another step toward a new school accountability system, including the launch this spring of new tests that call for higher order thinking skills. At the same time, the board detached the tests from automatic high-stakes sanctions (federally mandated under the No Child Left Behind iteration of the […]
Special Education Governance in New Orleans
In recent years, schools in New Orleans have made outsized progress in educating students with disabilities. This is due first and foremost to the efforts of educators and entrepreneurs who have worked relentlessly to develop new and better ways to serve these students. But they do not work in isolation. New Orleans’ success is a […]
When YES Means No
News broke today that YES Prep pulled out at the last minute from an agreement to take over a Memphis school under control of the Memphis Achievement School District. It will take a while to uncover all the lessons from this story, but one thing is obvious: we need more charter providers who are willing […]
Time for Charters to Lead on Special Education
Last week I jumped all over Andy Smarick on Twitter for suggesting that practices like the DC Public Charter School Board’s Secret Shopper program (where staff pretend to be parents searching for a school for a child with a disability) and requiring charter schools to take students mid-year place the needs of a small number […]
