Category Archives: School Choice

It’s a long way away from here, but let’s just call Florida my unofficial second state. Writing on Jay Greene’s blog, Matt Ladner has posted an inspiring video from the recent record-breaking Florida school choice rally. You simply have to take 3 minutes and watch it:

My friends at the Education Policy Center recently ordered a couple of new books by big names in the field: Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System and Paul Peterson’s Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning. If you want to whet your appetite for one or both books, or just to get a flavor of what their argument is, you need to check out the authors debating on the Eduwonk blog. I’ll boil down their arguments for you with excerpted quotes (or you can read Marci Kanstoroom’s summary at Education Next):

When you write about a lot of education policy, you often get tied up in talking about laws and systems and structures and statistics — you know, big picture stuff. Once in a while, it’s refreshing to read about the real-world impact of a dedicated teacher who excelled at her work. In that spirit, you really have to read a nice tribute to recently deceased Cole Arts and Science Academy kindergarten teacher Mary Pat Holliday. It’s written by Jason Janz, who serves on the Cole leadership team, and more importantly, whose son was on Mrs. Holliday’s “bucket list.” Here’s an excerpt to stir the heart and moisten the eyes (so you go read the rest of it):

This week was a good one for school choice. Let’s start with Florida (two days in a row!), a national leader and superstar in education reform. This week 5,500 Floridians came to Tallahassee to rally for a proposal that will increase private school choice opportunities for economically challenged families. Watch this excellent 2-minute video news report of what may be the largest school choice rally in American history (H/T Jay Greene):

Yesterday brought news from the U.S. Department of Education of the new state-by-state NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores in 4th and 8th grade reading. These tests are the gold standard for comparing student performance between states and over time. The big headlines note that in the short term (since 2007) the nation’s reading scores stayed flat in 4th grade and ticked up slightly in 8th grade. In the long term (going back to the first comparable tests in 1998), the results are exactly the opposite: with 4th grade scores going up modestly and 8th grade scores essentially remaining the same. Colorado’s achievement at both grade levels remains above the national average, but continues to track at about the same level of progress. The real long-term winner is still the state of Florida — which, as Matthew Ladner reports on Jay Greene’s blog, not only is boosting student performance across the board but also cutting the achievement gaps based on race and poverty.

I’ve got spring fever and want to run outside and play in the almost-70 degree weather! So rather than one of my famous commentaries, today I’ll just point you to a great Wall Street Journal column by Harvard’s education policy guru Professor Paul Peterson on charter schools and competition (H/T Jay Greene). Here’s a couple key sections to grab your attention: To uncover what is wrong with American public schools one has to dig deeper than these recent developments in education. One needs to consider the impact of restrictive collective bargaining agreements that prevent rewarding good teachers and removing ineffective ones, intrusive court interventions, and useless teacher certification laws. Charters were invented to address these problems. As compared to district schools, they have numerous advantages. They are funded by governments, but they operate independently. This means that charters must persuade parents to select them instead of a neighborhood district school. That has happened with such regularity that today there are 350,000 families on charter-school waiting lists, enough to fill over 1,000 additional charter schools…. What makes charters important today is less their current performance than their potential to innovate. Educational opportunity is about to be revolutionized by powerful notebook computers, […]

Education employees have their powerful lobbying interests representing them — to a lesser extent school board officials do, as well. So isn’t it about time we kids pay our dues and band together for a good education? That’s why I’m so excited about the brand new organization called the American Federation for Children. Okay, well, it’s not exactly like that. It’s not like some union that I can join or that will automatically take hundreds of dollars in dues money each year. In fact, it’s not really a membership organization at all. From yesterday’s press release announcing the new group:

I’m pretty partial (OK, I’m very partial) to the School Choice for Kids website (or Opcion Escolar Para Ninos, en espanol) as an invaluable source of information for parents in Colorado who want to exercise their educational options. But it’s not the only source out there. Denver’s Piton Foundation and 9 News have teamed up to create the Colorado School Choice / Escuela Para Mis Hijos site. The site provides some different information than is available on SCFK — with special emphases on schools’ academic growth ratings and student demographics. Click the play button below (or follow this link) to listen to my Education Policy Center friend Pam Benigno discuss the newer site with Van Schoales of the Piton Foundation on an informative 18-minute iVoices podcast:

Are great teachers just born that way, or is there a proven method to train many instructors to become much more effective? In one of the most fascinating (and longest) education articles out there, Elizabeth Green wrote in the New York Times Sunday magazine about “Building a Better Teacher.” The experts she talked to suggest that the answer may be the latter, that there are specific methods and techniques (and a new vocabulary of teaching terms) that can be used more successfully train high-quality instructors. However, over at Education Next, Harvard’s Paul Peterson says one of Green’s key conclusions is misguided: …She says we will need millions of additional teachers to cover baby boom retirements, and wonders how we can find enough good ones. The answer is that we can’t–not even with more effective education schools or elaborate merit pay programs or by ruthlessly dismissing ineffective teachers.

The Denver Post‘s website yesterday published an opinion column by Alliance for Choice in Education executive director Norton Rainey, decrying the “unsurprising” but disappointing defeat of House Bill 1296: HB 1296 would have provided low-income families with an annual $1,000 tax credit for enrolling their child in a private school. The bill would also have provided a grant of $1,000 to any public school that loses a student to a private school as a consequence of the tax credit. The legislation would have given low-income families a financial incentive to send their child to a private school, reduced public school class sizes as more children took advantage of the tax credit, and provided public schools with a $1,000 grant to help them give the children that remain a better quality education. What’s more, HB 1296 would have saved the state millions of dollar, according to the official fiscal note prepared by Legislative Council: $4.9 million in savings for the first year, $6.9 million in the second year, and as much as $26 million by 2022. [link added]