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WILL: The Assembly is currently considering AB900—a bill that would “decouple” public school spending from spending on the voucher and independent charter school programs. While the concept likely sounds quite confusing, it’s actually relatively straightforward, and will benefit public schools, taxpayers, and choice schools as well. We’ll explain how below. PUBLIC SCHOOLS Currently, when a student […]
Erin Geary: For school choice to be realized, parents must create a mass movement When trying to find the best restaurant in an area, people tend to turn to the internet, look for a list of eateries in the area, and visit their website. The more diligent may search out Yelp for reviews. If at […]
CJ Szafir: Despite having a new liberal majority, the Wisconsin Supreme Court refused this month to hear a challenge to the state’s school-choice programs. The lawsuit, supported by the Minocqua Brewing Co.’s progressive super PAC, would have deprived more than 60,000 students of funding. The episode carries a lesson for advocates of education freedom. Families […]
David Blaska: Here in Madison, the proponents of one-size-fits-all government monopoly schooling are rewriting history to cover their misdeeds. The occasion was the recent passing of barely remembered Daniel Nerad, superintendent of Madison public schools between 2008 and 2012. Capital Times publisher Paul Fanlund marvels that the same problems that beset Nerad a dozen years ago plague the […]
Chad Adelman: Public charter schools are more productive than traditional school districts in terms of their ability to translate a given level of investment into math and reading gains for students. That’s the finding of a new report from researchers at the University of Arkansas. Charter schools in Indianapolis; Camden, New Jersey; San Antonio, Texas; and New […]
Wall Street Journal: From pandemic learning loss to racial achievement gaps, many U.S. education ailments can be addressed by schools outside the traditional, union-dominated system. More evidence comes from a new report showing that the largest charter school network in the country helps students get into college, and then to get a degree. Students who […]
Act 20: Beginning with the accountability report published for the 2024-25 school year, for a school district other than a union high school district and for each school that offers grade 3 in that school district, the percentage of pupils reading at grade level by the end of 3rd grade. Section 8 . 115.39 of […]
George Will: Ian Rowe, a charter school advocate, notes thatsince the “nation’s report card” was first issued in 1992, in no year “has a majority of whitestudents been reading at grade level. The sad irony is that closing the black-white achievement gap would guarantee only educational mediocrity for all students.” Mysteriously (or perhaps not), California’s most recent […]
Wall Street Journal: These changes bring the scholarships to 73% of per-pupil union school funding from about 61%, according to the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL). It’s the biggest school-choice advance in the state in years. Charter schools also get a per-pupil boost of $1,727 to $10,991. A voucher program for special needs […]
Colleen Hroncich My oldest child is graduating from college tomorrow, so it has me thinking about our educational journey—which could best be described as eclectic. At various times, we used private school, district school, and cyber charter school. But we ultimately landed on homeschooling. That doesn’t mean they were literally learning at home every day. […]
Emily Hanford notes the “surge in legislative activity” amidst our long term, disastrous reading results [link]. via NAEP 4th grade results 1992-2022. Longtime SIS readers may recall a few of these articles, bookmarking our times, so to speak: 2004: [Link] “In 2003, 80% of Wisconsin fourth graders scored proficient or advanced on the WCKE in […]
Frederick Hess: The reason for this success isn’t hard to fathom. During the pandemic, mediocre remote learning, bureaucratic inertia, and school closures taught many parents that they couldn’t count on school districts when families needed them most. Parents were left hungry for alternatives, especially amidst bitter disagreements over masking and woke ideology. This was all […]
Levin Mahnken: Diana Smith stands at the head of a cluttered classroom at Washington Latin Public Charter School. The lights are dimmed, and projected on the wall behind is one of the most famous images in European art, Raphael’s The School of Athens, which acts as the anchor for today’s lesson in art, history and philosophy. […]
Kaleem Caire, via email: February 28, 2023 Dear One City Parents, This is an important time for One City Schools and for education across the state of Wisconsin. Over the next several months our legislature and governor will be engaging with one another and individuals and organizations from across the state to inform what will […]
Texas Education Agency: Each school district and open-enrollment charter school shall provide for the use of a phonics curriculum that uses systematic direct instruction in kindergarten through third grade to ensure all students obtain necessary early literacy skills (TEC §28.0062)
Texas Education Agency: Each school district and open-enrollment charter school shall provide for the use of a phonics curriculum that uses systematic direct instruction in kindergarten through third grade to ensure all students obtain necessary early literacy skills (TEC §28.0062)
Scott Girard and Jessie Opoien: The results, as Vos mentioned, have been poor. Reading and math scores on what’s known as the Nation’s Report Card dropped across the country last year, including in Wisconsin, where the gap in scores between Wisconsin’s Black and white students is the highest of any state, with only Washington, D.C. having […]
Laurie Roberts: Charter schools would be exempt from the cuts. They didn’t exist in 1980 and so they aren’t subject to the spending cap. Ditto for the state’s universal voucher program. The kids who are getting public money to attend private schools would see no decline in state support. Only the children who attend traditional […]
Christina Smallwood: In Reading in the Brain (2009)—which Hanford recommends on the Sold a Story website, writing, “I’ve never filled a book with so many sticky notes”—the cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene identifies three stages of learning to read: the pictorial, where children memorize a few words as if they were pictures (these are likely to […]
“Prioritize Your African American Students” over all others: ⚡️New @WILawLiberty lawsuit against @MMSDschools for failing to turn over public records related to this policy below pic.twitter.com/iSGgLGQM9Z — Dan Lennington (@DanLennington) January 17, 2023 2011: a majority of the taxpayer funded Madison School Board aborts the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School in a 5-2 vote. The data […]
Scott Girard: UPDATE: In a letter to the editor submitted to the Cap Times after the article below was published, One City Schools founder and CEO Kaleem Caire wrote that the school would not count the ninth and 10th grade students who will be leaving for enrollment purposes. “This would be disingenuous, and we do […]
Alan Borsuk: Here are thumbnail sketches of issues that will be fueling action in the hives: Revenue caps. Since the mid-1990s, the state has imposed caps on the general spending by school districts. Increases in the caps have been minimal in the last dozen years. Two years ago, Republican majorities in the legislature did not […]
By: John O. McGinnis, Max Schanzenbach: Public employees unions have wielded huge influence to gain perquisites for themselves at the expense of the public. Early retirement, job tenure, high wages, and generous defined-benefit pension plans have gained increasing attention from commentators and voters, though many public sector perks are intentionally shrouded and confuse the public […]
Jessica Winter: The 2022 midterm elections offered many snapshots of the contemporary school wars, but one might start with the race for Superintendent of Education in South Carolina, a state that languishes near the bottom of national education rankings and that’s suffering from a major teacher shortage. Lisa Ellis, the Democratic candidate, has twenty-two years of teaching […]
Molly Beck: “The proposal appears to be largely more of the same with some targeted funds at special education,” Bender said of Evers’ proposal. “After surprisingly vetoing bills on reading improvement last year, a bit unexpected that there are not more resources aimed at improving not only the low proficiency rates, but the nation’s worst […]
David Withun: In an 1891 essay penned as a student at Harvard, future civil rights leader W. E. B. Du Bois asked a provocative question: “Does education pay?” Anticipating the rivalry with Booker T. Washington that would define much of his early career, Du Bois writes true education is more than just practical job training. Genuine education, […]
David Kaufman: Indeed, 32 percent of Mississippi students hit literacy targets in 2019, up from 27 percent in 2017 and just 17 percent in 1998, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Despite the successes so far, Ms. Wright — who retired from education this year — believes there are plenty of challenges left to […]
Scott Girard: Two years into the job, Madison Metropolitan School District superintendent Carlton Jenkins received praise from the Madison School Board for his handling of the district’s 2022-23 budget and leadership. A summary of the board’s annual performance review of the district’s top staff member was released Wednesday evening. While most of the review was […]
Despite claims that there are “strong signs of recovery,” proficiency in Reading is actually lower than last year once you account for student opt out. Proficiency is slightly up in Math, but still significantly lower than 2019. #wiright pic.twitter.com/KDJUg9AniT — Will Flanders (@WillFlandersWI) September 29, 2022 Olivia Herken: Middleton-Cross Plains and Wisconsin Heights were among […]
Heather Smith: During his rough and tumble 1997 campaign Evers directly criticized fellow Democrat Benson saying he had failed to call attention to the problems in our state’s education system, and that continual promotion of the good without sounding the alarm on the bad “wrecks our credibility.” Evers said students and districts were in trouble […]
Elita: Elita Williams is the heart of a bustling home in Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood. She and her husband preside over a household of six children plus extended family, three dogs and a cat. In addition to managing the comings and goings of her active family, she’s a teacher’s assistant at nearby Milwaukee Math and Science Academy. […]
Betsy DeVos: The cost to you for all of this? Not one cent. Your state passed an education-savings-account law five years ago. Instead of sending the dollars allocated to your child’s education to a school building you didn’t select, the new law puts them into an education account you control. Your daughter’s love of learning […]
Kathleen Porter-Magee One reason we often overlook the American Catholic school “system” is that it isn’t much of a system at all. Rather than being led by a central authority, American Catholic schools are a great example of our country’s commitment to local civic institutions. From the dawn of Catholic education in the United States, […]
Will Flanders & Dylan Palmer: How does Wisconsin stack up against other states in K-12 education? An eye-popping list from U.S. News and World Report ranked the Badger State K-12 system as the 8th best in the country.i But this rosy picture contradicts other key indicators that Wisconsin students are falling behind. So what’s going […]
Natalie Wexler: In fact, the evidence is equivocal at best. Some studies have found positive effects, at least from moderate amounts of computer use, especially in math. But much of the data shows a negative impact at a range of grade levels. A study of millions of high school students in the 36 member countries […]
Kaleem Caire: I have grave concern for our children in Dane County and Wisconsin. We face no greater long-term crisis in America than the widespread underperformance, diminishing motivation and poor preparation of children and young people in our nation’s K-12 schools, and the rapidly declining number of educators available to teach our children. Student performance […]
Will Flanders: Here are the biggest findings: Students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program continue to outperform their public-school peers. Proficiency rates in private choice schools were 4.6% higher in English/Language Arts (ELA) and 4.5% higher in math on average than proficiency rates in traditional public schools in Milwaukee. Charter school students in Milwaukee continue […]
Jonathan Chait: Over the last decade, evidence has grown increasingly strong that public charter schools create better educational outcomes, especially for low-income, minority students in cities. The question hovering over the Biden administration has been whether it will encourage and work to improve charter schools, as the Obama administration did, or instead try to smother them, as teachers unions […]
Dr Howard Fuller: Let me cite some of the specific concerns I have: First, the proposed rule to demand that charter schools partner with a local district is obviously aimed at ending their independence and forcing them under the control of the traditional public school system. Charters should be free to determine whether partnering with […]
Libby Sobic: Gov. Tony Evers’s recent vetoes put him at a historic rate of total vetoes compared to previous governors. Of the more than 100 vetoes he executed a week ago Friday, about a quarter were related to education. In many veto messages, the governor cited his previous role as state schools superintendent. Yet his […]
Melissa Gomez: California public school enrollment has dropped for the fifth year in a row — a decline of more than 110,000 students — as K-12 campuses struggle against pandemic disruptions and a shrinking population of school-age kids amid wide concerns that the decrease is so large that educators can’t account for the missing children. […]
Robby Soave: On March 16, Washington, D.C., became one of the very last major metropolitan areas in the country to finally end mask mandates for students. According to Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, kids who attend D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) no longer have to wear masks. That’s not always what happens in practice, of course. Earlier this […]
Wisconsin State Senator Alberta Darling: Wisconsin has a reputation for reform. It’s time we regain our status as a national leader and innovator for education reform,” Darling said, “We are putting parents and their children firstw , we are going to increase transparency and accountability, and we will be funding students, not systems.” Parental Bill […]
PDF: Move to modify the ARPA federal funding plan submitted by DPI on April 1, 2021, as follows: 1. Reduce funding for administrative costs by $662,189, so that $1,200,000 remains for administration of ESSER III. 2. Delete the $600,000 minimum aid proposal provided under DPI’s plan, except increase the minimum aid proposed under DPI’s plan […]
Phyllis Jordan: These are among the findings of a FutureEd analysis of the Covid-relief spending plans of nearly 2,100 school districts and charter school organizations in 48 states, local education agencies serving some 40 percent of the nation’s public-school students.* The analysis covers districts and charters receiving $46 billion of the $122 billion in Elementary […]
Denisha Merriweather, Dava Hankerson, Nathaniel Cunneen and Ron Matus: The shift to an increasingly choice-driven education landscape for Black students in Florida has been driven by Black parents, who have enrolled their children in choice programs in growing numbers and made it so they cannot be ignored politically. “Options make it so that I can […]
Aaron Garth Smith: Preliminary data on the 2019-2020 school year released by the U.S. Census Bureau reveals that the state of New York now spends more than $30,000 per K-12 student, further entrenching its position as the most expensive public education system in the country. Despite this new public school spending milestone, falling enrollment and dissatisfied parents indicate education […]
Andy Kessler: Public-school education has gone from bad to worse. In the Chicago Public Schools, only 26% of 11th-graders were at grade level in reading and math in 2019. Remarkably, the school system had a record-high graduation rate of nearly 84% in 2021. Those students must have had strong senior years! This is why over […]
Governor Evers: TO THE HONORABLE MEMBERS OF THE SENATE:I am vetoing Senate Bill 454 in its entirety. The bill would mandate school boards and independent charter schools to assess the early literacy skill of pupils in four-year-old kindergarten to second grade using repeated screening assessments throughout the year and to create a personal reading plan […]
James Hankins: In 2020 the American educational system was attacked by two viruses: Covid-19 and an unusually virulent strain of hyper-progressive ideology. Many parents and educators have been shocked and disoriented to find that institutions they trusted appear to have been taken over by zombie Marxists, filled with self-righteous anger. Unless they are from “URMs” […]
Matthew Ladner: In the process, Arizona districts became choice operators themselves. Scottsdale Unified, for example, currently has about a fifth of their students coming into the district through open enrollment. The key to spurring open enrollment wasn’t laws. It was incentives. The bureaucracies needed the money, and as some suburban districts got more active in […]
Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty: The Problem: Current school funding is a complex combination of state, local and federal aid. Funding in districts is largely based on antiquated revenue limits that have cemented in place funding gaps for 25 years. Students are worth more, or less, depending on where they happen to live, or whether […]
Libby Sobic: On Thursday, the Joint Finance Committee (JFC) finalized the state budget, which now heads for a full vote of the legislature. Legislative Republicans voted to invest in our students, their families and Wisconsin taxpayers. Here are four takeaways you should know: JFC Republicans updated the budget and addressed the issue of the federal […]
Libby Sobic and Will Flanders, Ph.D. Wisconsin invests in our K-12 schools by creating options for families. On average, Wisconsin school districts average revenue (of local, state and federal funding) per student was $14,737 in 2019-2020. The majority of K-12 education funding is directly distributed to school districts. Under current law, even the lowest funded […]
Will Flanders: The school finance structure is based on systems—not students. The testimony highlighted the archaic nature of school finance in the state in funding particular school districts and types rather than students themselves. School funding in Wisconsin is based on two student-count dates, and a three-year-rolling average of enrollment. The student count dates are […]
John Roach: I worked with Caire when he headed the Urban League of Greater Madison and on his effort to launch Madison Prep, the earnest but quixotic attempt to address Madison’s embarrassing racial achievement gap. The failure to launch that school was a bitter blow. And the gap has remained unchanged. Madison Prep failed because […]
Institute for Reforming Government, Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce, Wisconsin, Federation for Children School Choice, Wisconsin Action ExcelinEd in Action, Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, The John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy Badger Institute, FreedomWorks and Building Education for Students Together: Dear Governor Evers, Speaker Vos, Majority Leader LeMahieu, and State Superintendent Stanford Taylor, […]
Will Flanders and Libby Sobic: For many years, Wisconsin has reserved the position of state superintendent of schools for someone steeped in union politics and promising the status quo. But over the past year, COVID-19 has turned many such situations on their heads and polarized politics in a way never seen before. The superintendent election […]
Joanne Jacobs: The more a state provides parents with the freedom to choose their child’s school the better the state’s students score on the National Assessment of Education Outcomes (NAEP),” writes Patrick Wolf on Project Forever Free. His University of Arkansas research team created an Education Freedom Index ranking each state, then correlated access to private and […]
Mengchen Dong: Status holders across societies often take moral initiatives to navigate group practices toward collective goods; however, little is known about how different societies (e.g., the United States vs. China) evaluate high- (vs. low-) status holders’ transgressions of preached morals. Two preregistered studies (total N = 1,374) examined how status information (occupational rank in […]
Shannon Whitworth: Miguel Cardona’s confirmation this month as President Biden’s secretary of education has left the nation’s school choice advocates wary but hopeful. Certainly, they appreciate the fact that Biden decided against elevating a number of teachers union executives to the position. In fact, after Cardona put in a good word for Connecticut’s charter schools and was […]
Fordham Institute, via a kind reader: In school districts and charter school networks nationwide, instructional leaders are developing plans to address the enormous challenges faced by their students, families, teachers, and staff over the past year. To help kick-start their planning process, we are proud to present The Acceleration Imperative, an open-source, evidence-based document created […]
schoolhouse rights: On December 22, 2020 a single-mother and her son, who is a high school student at a public charter school, filed a civil rights lawsuit in the US District Court of Nevada. Schoolhouse Rights is proud to help support the plaintiffs’ landmark litigation. The student and his mother argue that he was coerced, […]
Jack Schneider and Jennifer C. Berkshire: Together, led by federal policy elites, Republicans and Democrats espoused the logic of markets in the public sphere, expanding school choice through publicly funded charter schools. Competition, both sides agreed, would strengthen schools. And the introduction of charters, this contingent believed, would empower parents as consumers by even further […]
Robby Soave: Betsy DeVos became President Donald Trump’s education secretary on February 7, 2017, following Vice President Mike Pence’s vote to break a Senate deadlock—an inauspicious first for a Cabinet-level confirmation. Furious opposition to her nomination came from the nation’s teachers unions: American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten called DeVos an “ideological” opponent of […]
WDPI: The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction today released information on fall student counts and school district revenue limits for the 2020-2021 school year. Wisconsin school districts, independent charter schools, and private school parental choice programs reported overall slowdowns or declines in enrollment, particularly in 4K. Districts also reported summer school participation declined by more […]
Eliot Kaufman: Why is the elephant afraid of the mouse? Your child’s teacher may not know, but his union does. In September the National Education Association, America’s largest labor union, produced an internal “opposition report” on Prenda, a tiny Arizona-based “microschool” provider. I obtained a copy of the document, which picks apart Prenda’s vulnerabilities but […]
Corey DeAngelis and Neal McCluskey: State policymakers should • enact universal education savings accounts; • allow any students who so desire to enroll in virtual charter schools up to a school’s capacity to serve them, and allow their public education dollars to follow them to such schools; and • let schools and districts determine whether students […]
Tyler Cowen: “…this is seemingly starting to be a big deal in OK, but flying under the radar. Background: • 10-15 years ago Oklahoma passed a law allowing online-only charter schools with a separate regulatory structure from physical charter schools. • Critically, the unions did not think to push for an enrollment cap. • There are 5-10 schools, all […]
Wisconsin Policy Forum: According to U.S. Census figures, Wisconsin relied on state revenues for over half of its K-12 per-pupil spending (54.3%) in 2018, compared to an average of 46.7% nationwide. In fact, aid to schools is the largest spending category in the state budget, comprising $6.0 billion (or 35%) of state general purpose revenue […]
Douglas Harris: New Orleans is the new Finland in Douglas N. Harris’s new book, Charter School City. An obsession with Finland swept through the education policy world in the first years of this century, when that country’s students posted particularly strong results on some international tests. Researchers, advocates, and policymakers flocked to Finland to identify […]
Chris Stewart discusses our long term, disastrous reading results with Kaleem Caire. mp3 audio transcript 2011: A majority of the Madison School Board aborted the proposed Madison Preparatory IB Charter school. Kaleem Caire notes and links. Let’s compare: Middleton and Madison Property taxes Madison property taxes are 22% more than Middleton’s for a comparable home, […]
Wall Street Journal: So were many religious schools including those in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. “Our goal is to strike a balance between preventing the spread of COVID-19 and providing children with the education, nutrition, physical activity, and mental health benefits provided through the reopening of Catholic schools,” the Archdiocese Superintendent of Schools Paul […]
Mike Antonucci: When I wrote that the National Education Association and its state affiliates were big business, I got it only half-right. It turns out they are small business, too. Under public pressure, the federal government released a partial list of fund recipients from the Paycheck Protection Program, a project created as part of a package […]
Annysa Johnson: Howard Fuller announced this month that he is retiring from Marquette University, where he is a distinguished professor of education and founder and director of its Institute for the Transformation of Learning. At 79, Fuller has served in many roles in his lifetime: civil rights activist, educator and civil servant. He is a former superintendent of Milwaukee […]
Kevin Huffman: Schools and teachers are mobilizing to roll out instruction. Many are showing entrepreneurial spirit and creativity, and the ad hoc home-school universe is awash in ideas and resources. District leaders are working long hours, trying their best to serve kids. While larger districts have at times struggled with communication and rollout, some schools […]
On January 21, 2020, I sent this email to board@madison.k12.wi.us Hi: I hope that you are well. I write to make an open records request for a list of invitees and participants in last week’s “community leader and stakeholder” meetings with the (Superintendent) candidates. Thank you and best wishes, Jim Hearing nothing, I wrote on […]
Karin Chenoweth: In the words of the report, Montgomery County’s curriculum does “not include the necessary components to adequately address foundational skills.” If you’re not immersed in these issues, you might not recognize just how scathing this language is. Montgomery County fails to do what just about all cognitive scientists and most reading researchers agree […]
Scott Girard: Tuesday afternoon, he spent 15 minutes taking questions from the press and another 15 minutes answering questions from seven students at Glendale Elementary School, where the press conference was held. “There is some division in the community, so we’ve got to bridge that gap,” Gutiérrez said. “There is some division between the Doyle […]
Kelly Stuart & Gina Fugnitto: Dr. Louisa Moats: The body of work referred to as the “science of reading” is not an ideology, a philosophy, a political agenda, a one-size-fits-all approach, a program of instruction, nor a specific component of instruction. It is the emerging consensus from many related disciplines, based on literally thousands of […]
Steven Elbow: The problem, some say, is that disparities impact a population that has little political or economic clout. And white people, who control the levers of commerce and government, address only pieces of an interconnected web of issues that include child development, education, economics and criminal justice. Brandi Grayson co-founded Young, Gifted and Black […]
Jim Bender: More than 43,000 families in Wisconsin’s school choice programs likely will be surprised to learn that they constitute a “threat” to the state. The editorial board of the Capital Times offered up that opinion in a recent attack on programs that serve these low-income and working-class families. The impetus for the editorial — […]
Jon Gabriel: This week, reporters revealed that the state Department of Education released the personal information of nearly 7,000 families who use Empowerment Scholarship Accounts. Worse still, they sent it to Save Our Schools, staunch opponents of the program and educational choice in general. ESAs enable parents, mostly those who have children with special needs, to […]
Dillon Rosenblat: The Arizona Department of Education likely violated federal student privacy laws when it released a spreadsheet that inadvertently named every parent with an Empowerment Scholarship Account in the state. The spreadsheet then fell into the hands of a group that opposes expansion of the program. The Yellow Sheet Report, a sister publication of […]
Bryan Caplan: Suppose you strongly desire to drastically increase the amount of education that people consume. What should you do? The obvious answer: Make education completely free of charge – and have the government pay the the entire cost. I say this obvious answer is obviously right. As I explain in The Case Against Education, I favor extreme educational […]
Nikima Levy Armstrong: In the years leading up to my run, progressives talked a good game about their desire for equity, diversity and inclusion. I watched as they marched in the streets with us during Black Lives Matter protests. They put #BlackLivesMatter signs up in their windows and on their lawns. Some of them helped to […]
Kaleem Caire: With regard to K-12 education, Madison has known about the widespread underperformance of Black children in our city’s public schools for more than 50 years, and the situation has gotten worse. Instead of creating important and transformationl systemic changes, we act like “programs” alone will solve our problems, when we know full well […]
Will Flanders: Conservatives are often accused of being “science deniers” when it comes to issues like climate change. But recent events reveal that those on the left suffer from significant confirmation bias when it comes to a stance that is increasingly central to the liberal education agenda — opposition to charter schools. In December, the […]
Scott Girard: Behavior Education Plan Vanden Wyngaard: “Just like in previous districts I have been in, it appears we have a perception issue in the community.” Gutiérrez: “What I’ve seen is a rather comprehensive plan. I think it may be a little overwhelming for folks. How can we simplify that to be user-friendly, easy to […]
CJ Safir and Libby Sobic: Across the country, parents, many of them low-income, are using school choice to educate their children at schools outside their public neighborhood options. Twenty-nine states, and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico provide some school choice program for students to attend private schools, including tax-credit scholarships, school vouchers, tax […]
Neal Morton: A year after Seattle voters approved the city’s largest-ever education tax, money has started flowing from the $600 million-plus levy to expand preschool classrooms and get more students into college. The city’s education department also recently announced a $400,000 initiative with the YWCA Seattle-King-Snohomish to help youth experiencing homelessness. And for the first time, charter […]
Laura Waters: On Monday the New Jersey Working Families protested at a New Jersey State Legislative hearing about tax breaks in cities like Camden. NJ Spotlight described the skirmish as the result of “heavy criticism from Gov. Phil Murphy and progressive activists who make up his base and have called for major reform” of the tax breaks. This […]
Will Flanders: The vast majority of academic research still shows that more spending on schools is not the answer to improving outcomes. And one would think that MPS would understand this given that they have evidence right in their own backyard that lower spending schools can achieve better results. Milwaukee’s choice and charter schools have […]
Wall Street Journal: This social-justice dressing is intended to compensate for the deficits in accountability. Under the new contract, a joint union-school board committee will be convened to “mitigate or eliminate any disproportionate impacts of observations or student growth measures” on teacher evaluations. So instead of student performance, teachers will probably be rated on more […]
Chris Stewart: Finally, a Democratic presidential candidate brave enough to focus less on classroom instruction and more on factors outside of schools; a candidate informed enough to know there is nothing wrong with teaching and learning that won’t be fixed by big-budget infrastructure upgrades along with housing grants and health care. For unions, this must […]
Matthew Ladner: While last week’s NAEP news was glum nationwide, Mississippi students performed relatively well. You have to dig into the details to see just how well. First, a bit of backstory. Mississippi is one of the nation’s poorest states and has the largest African-American student population in the country. The state has ranked at […]
Will Flanders: While DPI is willing to acknowledge the gravity of the achievement gap, the agency remains stubbornly opposed to proven solutions. Year after year and study after study reveal that public charter schools, freed from the mandates of bureaucracy and unionization, do a better job educating exactly the type of students that need the […]
Will Swaim: State testing shows that Palm Lane Elementary School students are performing at levels unthinkable just one year ago. In 13 of 14 learning categories, students showed improvement for the first time in more than 10 years. In many cases, these gains were significant, with up to 41 percent increases in academic achievement. There’s […]
Neel Kashkari: This commentary was first published in the Star Tribune. Today, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis released a comprehensive report on the performance of Minnesota K-12 schools in preparing our children for their futures. On average Minnesota schools perform well compared with other states. Unfortunately, those averages mask some of the worst educational […]
Matthew Ladner: Americans thus seem to see their public education system as falling short in a variety of ways and aren’t especially optimistic about future improvement. Republicans exhibited the greatest amount of optimism, with 24 percent forecasting that the American public school system would be a “model of excellence around the world” in 20 years. […]