Navigating Political Tensions over Schooling: Findings from the Fall 2022 American School District Panel Survey
Public schooling has always been politically fraught, but current disagreements over issues related to race, sexuality, gender, and Covid-19 have reached a tipping point. According to a new report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education and RAND, half of school system leaders say that these disagreements are disrupting schooling. Almost one in three district […]
Three Years of Studying Charters in Washington State: What We Learned
The pandemic prompted major shifts in public school enrollment and models for learning in the Pacific Northwest and across the nation. After three years, our study of these effects on Washington state’s charter schools has generated a number of important findings, which we invite you to explore now that our project has ended. We sought […]
Black Education Leaders say Leaving Public Schools Can Help Save Our Kids
For Black children, the public education system is like a dirty fish tank. They’re swimming in toxic conditions like discriminatory discipline and low expectations. But before the water can be treated, those students need to be moved to a clean bowl where they can live and breathe. Then, it’s time to clean out the tank. […]
Reinventing Education: Following AI and Pandemic Recovery in 2023
Happy 2023! Did you, like me, take time over the break to play with one of the new artificial intelligence bots? I asked ChatGPT to write a blog in the style of Robin Lake on the topic of helping students recover from the impacts of Covid-19 and related school closures. Here’s what it offered: As […]
What do Washington parents think about their students’ charter schools?
In 2014, the first public charter schools opened in Washington state. The development led to years of controversy, but the debates often bypassed the opinions of people with important experience: parents of enrolled students. To begin to remedy this, we conducted a mixed-methods study that asked parents how they selected their student’s charter school, how […]
Can districts rise to the challenge of new NAEP results? Outlook’s not so good
If schools & families revert to pre-pandemic habits, millions of kids may never recover lost knowledge and skills.
District leaders eager to tackle learning loss face ongoing challenges
Administrators wanted to tackle learning loss. Other needs came first.
Back to school, but not caught up: After school reopenings, administrators eager to tackle learning loss continue to face challenges
In this report, we update our ongoing research on five school systems to reveal the academic, social, and political challenges posed by the pandemic and what system leaders and their staff are doing to address student learning loss. The report is part of the American School District Panel, a research partnership between the RAND Corporation […]
The alarming state of the American student in 2022
Kids may be back at school after three disrupted years, but a return to classrooms has not brought a return to normal.
Amid school closures, Oakland REACH parents created a path into higher-performing schools. Here’s how they did it.
Lakisha Young writes about building pathways for minoritized students to access higher-performing schools when their current schools were closed during the pandemic.