State Takeover Not the Whole Answer
Children in a city need much better schools, but the local board and union prevent change. Is state takeover the remedy? Perhaps. State action has broken logjams in a lot of cities, but it hasn’t always worked out. For every Memphis or New Orleans, where high proportions of children have new opportunities, there are examples […]
Washington State Can’t Waive Need for Strong School Principals
Washington has become a national curiosity as the first state to have its No Child Left Behind waiver revoked. Last week Washington State was forced to announce that more than 400 schools haven’t met their progress goals for five years straight. Without taking sides in the fight between Olympia and the feds, it is safe […]
How To Improve Annual School District Report Cards
In this video blog, Christine Campbell looks at typical annual school district report cards and explains how districts could make information more meaningful for families and provide better evidence to inform community decision-making.
In New Orleans, the Work Has Just Begun
This week marks nine years since Hurricane Katrina forced evacuation of New Orleans. The rebuilding of public education there has been a real accomplishment. But the schools there have a long way to go. Due to Katrina, 80 percent of the city was flooded and the floodwaters lingered for weeks. The vast majority of families […]
Making School Choice Work Requires Leadership
This commentary was originally published in Education Week on August 18, 2014. It’s a truism in public policy that every solution breeds a new problem. School choice has created new possibilities for families desperate for better options, but it can also create serious access challenges for disadvantaged families. In localities where many state and local […]
How the Portfolio Strategy Evolved from Idea to Action
In 2003, Paul Hill and I, along with James Harvey, wrote a book called It Takes a City. The book was written for mayors, civic leaders, school board members, and involved citizens, as a practical guide on how to formulate a reform plan bold enough to work while dealing with political opposition to change. It […]
Real-Dollar Spending Analyses: One of the best things we ever did
In our 20th anniversary publication, Russlynn Ali wrote about CRPE’s research on real-dollar spending within school districts. Russlynn was the perfect person to assess the impact of our work in this area, because she had drawn on it twice to great effect: once in California to advocate successfully for a more transparent state funding system, […]
District-Charter Texas Two-Step
You may have caught John Merrow’s PBS show featuring a Texas school district’s interesting partnership with KIPP and YES Prep! charter schools. Today in Education Next, Richard Whitmire highlights the same district and other district-charter “compacts.” Spring Branch Independent School District (SBISD) is a large semi-suburban school district in Houston. About two years ago, the […]
Chartering Schools: We Have to Get It Right
A core insight behind the school reform movement is that no single entity should both operate a school and be the sole judge of its performance. Any entity, public or private, that both operates and judges is in conflict of interest, and can be expected to accept levels of performance and service to children that […]
Taming the Many-Headed School Choice Monster
I’ve been closely following the Detroit Free Press series on charter schools, having spent time in the Motor City recently. The series concluded somewhat sensationally that charter schools spend $1 billion per year with little transparency or accountability. Predictably, charter advocates in Michigan and elsewhere have dismissed these conclusions while those in favor of traditional […]