Category Archives: Educational Choice

Apparently, today is some kind of big day, with a lot of big people here in Colorado and in other states making some important decision about the future of the country or something. It sounds like some sort of big deal. But as elections go, I’m more tuned in to some key education reform races around the country — compliments of Mike Petrilli at Education Next. (In addition to the local education tax issues on the ballot in many Colorado school districts.) I’m watching a few of them, too. Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett has been one of the nation’s boldest education reform leaders. Choice? Accountability? Labor reforms? Check marks on all three. How will he fare seeking re-election? That’s for Hoosiers to decide. Even more interesting to me is a trio of Idaho ballot initiatives the teachers union is backing in an attempt to toss out some yummy tater tot reforms. Petrilli points out that New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg of all people has thrown some tangible support behind the reforms and against the union. Why can I almost imagine some bemused Pocatello denizen proclaiming: “New York City?”

A few weeks ago I shared with you about a “parent trigger” debate triggered by the release of the movie Won’t Back Down. In that discussion, New Schools for New Orleans’ Neerav Kingsland argued that “the best parent trigger is parent choice between non-governmental school operators.” Yesterday another division erupted in the “parent trigger” discussion between two supporters of the concept and the legislation. Conservative ed reform guru Rick Hess says liberal supporters lost him when they “needlessly attacked for-profit charter providers in a cheap effort to score political points.” Apparently, it’s okay to empower parents to choose to turn around their children’s failing school, but then limit their choices to operators who won’t seek to make some money along the way? In a state next door to Kingsland’s, we learn that 35 failing schools are eligible to be converted by a parent petition through Mississippi’s new “parent trigger” law. Meanwhile, parents at California’s Desert Trails elementary are getting ready to select an operator for the school’s conversion process. As Hess points out, Parent Revolution executive director Ben Austin would not be inclined to let those parents choose an operator who happens to be a for-profit entity. Families should have […]

I’m getting too excited to wait much longer. Tonight is the special Colorado screening of Won’t Back Down, the new feature movie about empowering parents to improve failing schools. Put simply, it brings the “Parent Trigger” reform concept to the big screen. So as you look forward to catching the movie, either tonight or when it premieres this weekend for general audiences, you might appreciate some thoughts from a couple of prominent education reform voices to chew on first. It started yesterday with New Schools for New Orleans’ Neerav Kingsland, who argues that “maybe we shouldn’t support Parent Trigger laws at all” and “the best parent trigger is parent choice between non-governmental school operators.”

About a month ago, I pointed out to you the somewhat disturbing views about parents held by certain figures within the education establishment. Well, here’s going way out on a limb to guess the same crowd won’t be lining up in excitement to watch the new movie Won’t Back Down: The feature-length film starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis and Holly Hunter is a story about parents who take charge of transforming their children’s failing inner-city school. In other words, it’s a real Hollywood movie with a powerful education reform message that should resonate with American families facing challenging educational circumstances. Maybe it can pick up where Waiting for Superman left off.

Today’s big education news comes from The Windy City, where thousands of Chicago Public Schools teachers have walked out on strike. Students pay the price as the American Federation of Teachers union affiliate turns down an offer to boost an average salary of $71,000 (or $76,000?) by 16 percent over the next four years. Even if CPS officials wanted to be so generous and approve across-the-board-raises for educators who already make about 50 percent more than the average Chicago worker with a college degree, the money isn’t there. I can’t help feeling a connection to the story. After all, friends of my Education Policy Center friends are on the case. The Illinois Policy Institute’s labor policy director Paul Kersey posted the facts and some scary pictures from a Labor Day union protest march. While many of the 400,000 CPS students may be cheering today to be out of school, the 50,000 attending non-union charter schools are not affected. Which interestingly prompted Chicago union president Karen Lewis to say: “Real school will not be open [Monday]….” That certainly sounds like she has a low opinion of many parents’ public school options. Too bad for her. But I wonder what the anti-reform […]

Not everything in the world of Colorado K-12 education is a serious statement about policy. Sometimes the more compelling story comes in the heat of a dramatic moment, when more is at stake than grades on a test. The Colorado Springs Gazette‘s Matt Steiner reports on a high school freshman who, when confronted with a potentially life-threatening situation, (literally) charged forward and took the wheel: [Jeremy] Rice, 14, remembered noticing the bus driver reach down for a garbage pail that had been knocked over by a student. While the bus was in motion, the driver attempted to right himself in his seat and make sure his safety belt was secure. Then, the driver tumbled to the right and down into the bus’s stairwell, Rice said. From eight rows back, Jeremy raced into action. With some instruction from the bus driver, he was able to steer the large vehicle, and the students on board, to safety.

A quick hit this afternoon. The Cato Institute’s Adam Schaeffer today has released the summary of a new data analysis by RAND Corporation economist Richard Buddin, seeking to explain what he calls “The Charter School Paradox”: On average, charter schools may marginally improve the public education system, but in the process they are wreaking havoc on private education. Charter schools take a significant portion of their students from private schools, causing a drop in private enrollment, driving some schools entirely out of business, and thereby raising public costs while potentially diminishing competition and diversity in our education system overall. I’m still wrapping my little mind around the information presented and what he has to say, but let’s clear up one thing right away: being anti-charter is not the answer. But Cato has made a case to be considered, namely that learning will better thrive, and be more cost-effective, with both a healthy private education sector and adequate choices within the public system.

Update, 8/22: Intercepts blogger Mike Antonucci makes some incisive observations about the need for better-informed voters while asserting that the PDK/Gallup results are not that significant, noting he “wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot poll.” It’s late August and back-to-school season, which means it’s once again time for the new Phi Delta Kappa (PDK) / Gallup “poll of the public’s attitude toward public schools.” Right up front, let it be known that this won’t be as “Pretty Darn Klever” as my commentary on last year’s results, but a few things of interest need to be pointed out from the results. The headline and the first question featured is “What do you think are the biggest problems that the public schools of your community must deal with?” Far and away the #1 answer at 35 percent was “lack of financial support.” Coming in a distant fourth was “overcrowded schools” at 5 percent. More interesting is what’s missing on the school finance topic from the poll of 1,000 American adults. Just a few weeks ago the Fordham Institute released its own national survey (with a nearly identical sample size). The question of what approach local school districts should take to meet existing […]

Edublogger extraordinaire Joanne Jacobs brought my attention to Opportunity Culture, a new website project of the group Public Impact. The idea? How to extend the reach of excellent teachers with innovative uses of time, space, technology and professional roles. Opportunity Culture has a smart group of people advising the project, and of course Public Impact itself is co-directed by the Hassel team, who recently wrote a relatively concise Education Next piece on how the reach of excellent teachers can be enhanced.

The latest edition of the Olympic Games is almost here (who else do you know who gets to live through two different Summer Olympics at age 5?), so what better time to hand out some figurative medals to states for K-12 student learning success? A new Harvard study by Eric Hanushek, Paul Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann sheds some helpful light on trends in Achievement Growth among nations and states. The authors examine gold-standard test results of 4th and 8th graders to see where the United States’ progress from 1995 to 2009 ranks among 49 nations and how 41 individual U.S. states with enough data stack up against each other from 1992 to 2011. The good news? American students cumulatively picked up nearly a year’s worth of additional skills learned in math, science and reading, with stronger gains at the earlier grade level. The not-so-good news is we’re stuck in the middle of the pack: Students in three countries–Latvia, Chile, and Brazil–improved at an annual rate of 4 percent of a std. dev., and students in another eight countries–Portugal, Hong Kong, Germany, Poland, Liechtenstein, Slovenia, Colombia, and Lithuania–were making gains at twice the rate of students in the United States. By […]