Category Archives: Urban Schools

Last week I introduced you to some kids from Washington D.C. who would be hurt by Congress’ attempt to take away their school choice program. These kids asked President Obama to step in and save their D.C. Opportunity Scholarships. Yesterday, a writer for the Wall Street Journal introduced us to two more kids who could lose their scholarships, kids that go to school with the President’s daughters: Dick Durbin has a nasty surprise for two of Sasha and Malia Obama’s new schoolmates. And it puts the president in an awkward position. The children are Sarah and James Parker. Like the Obama girls, Sarah and James attend the Sidwell Friends School in our nation’s capital. Unlike the Obama girls, they could not afford the school without the $7,500 voucher they receive from the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. Unfortunately, a spending bill the Senate takes up this week includes a poison pill that would kill this program — and with it perhaps the Parker children’s hopes for a Sidwell diploma. You can follow the link above to see a picture of Sarah and James. I am so glad to see Joe Williams from Democrats for Education Reform write truth to power on […]

Education policy is often as much art as it is science. But Colorado’s education policy still can benefit from the informed perspectives of non-Colorado experts. Denver’s own Piton Foundation convened a panel of six national education experts who observe what Colorado has done in many reform areas, and asked for their honest assessments. The result is a brand new report Colorado’s 2008 Education Reforms: Will They Achieve the Colorado Promise? (PDF). In today’s Denver Post, education writer Jeremy Meyer sums up the findings: Six national education experts took a look at Colorado’s education landscape and found the state is on track in some areas but has a long way to go in others.

In a recent article in The New Republic, John McWhorter from the Manhattan Institute wants to know why the Direct Instruction method for teaching reading that has proven so effective is so little used to help correct the achievement gap for poor minority students: Yet a solution for the reading gap was discovered four decades ago. Starting in the late 1960s, Siegfried Engelmann led a government-sponsored investigation, Project Follow Through, that compared nine teaching methods and tracked their results in more than 75,000 children from kindergarten through third grade. It found that the Direct Instruction (DI) method of teaching reading was vastly more effective than any of the others for (drum roll, please) poor kids, including black ones. DI isn’t exactly complicated: Students are taught to sound out words rather than told to get the hang of recognizing words whole, and they are taught according to scripted drills that emphasize repetition and frequent student participation. In a half-day preschool in Champaign-Urbana they founded, Engelmann and associates found that DI teaches four-year-olds to understand sounds, syllables, and rhyming. Its students went on to kindergarten reading at a second-grade level, with their mean IQ having jumped 25 points. In the 70s and […]

Update: In a column for the New York Post, Manhattan Institute senior fellow Marcus Winters explains in more detail the potential problem posed by unionizing charter schools. Yesterday brought a report in the New York Times that the teachers union – namely, the American Federation of Teachers – is seeking to organize two New York City KIPP charter schools. In the article, a friend of the Independence Institute’s Education Policy Center brought up the problem with that development: “A union contract is actually at odds with a charter school,” said Jeanne Allen, executive director of the Center for Education Reform, a Washington group that supports charter schools. “As long as you have nonessential rules that have more to do with job operations than with student achievement,” she said, “you are going to have a hard time with accomplishing your mission.” To elaborate on this point, and to look at the development in the broader context of charter schools and unions, syndicated columnist and former Colorado education commissioner William Moloney joined Ben DeGrow for a 10-minute iVoices podcast discussion: Meanwhile, the Eduwonk tries to take a more “middle-of-the-road” approach in dealing with the conundrum of charter schools and unionization (H/T Alan […]

Updated with more specific information about open enrollment Some things we learn about the world of education seem so obvious, yet when we hear about them they really seem to trigger a “light bulb” moment. Here is one in a press release from the University of Arkansas’s School Choice Demonstration Project: Parents report that having a choice of where to send their children to school boosts their satisfaction with and involvement in schools, a study of the publicly funded school voucher program in Washington, D.C., has found. You can hear some of the D.C. parents speak for themselves at the Voices of School Choice website. If there’s one thing we know with great confidence about school choice, it’s that parents who participate find great satisfaction with the opportunity. Parents overwhelmingly respond well to the consumer empowerment that comes with school choice, in part by getting more actively involved in their child’s education. The four-year focus group work of Patrick Wolf and his Arkansas team just have made that clearer than ever. And should we be surprised? Do you like being a savvy consumer when it comes to purchasing cars, clothes, electronics, or Legos (I had to throw that last one […]

The argument only grows stronger that charter schools work. While some will dwell on the exceptions, the big picture becomes clearer and clearer. A new study by the Boston Foundation finds that in their city “charter school students consistently outperform their peers at pilot schools and at traditional schools.” As Core Knowledge blogger Robert Pondiscio notes, even factoring out the selection bias of more motivated parents shows charter schools doing more to improve student achievement. And the well-read Dr. Greg Forster puts the Boston study in context to note that “charters are an improvement over the status quo, even if only a modest one, as a large body of research has consistently shown.” He observes that “more freedom consistently produces better results, and more unionization consistently doesn’t.” Charter schools are one good way to bring more freedom to the education system so good ideas and practices can blossom while bad ones are rejected.

The Obama girls have their first day at their new Washington, DC, private school today. And I’m back from vacation, too. I’d be lying to say I’d rather be doing this than playing with Legos or Matchbox cars, but there figures to be a lot of important education policy to discuss in 2009. Today we start back by wondering what the fallout will be from the big appointment of Denver Public Schools superintendent Michael Bennet to fill a vacancy in the United States Senate. From the standpoint of the Senate and federal education reform policy, there’s no doubt this selection represents a net improvement. The optimism of Democrats for Education Reform is justified. Where Bennet stands on many other important issues of the day, however, is not known. (For a wild and interesting piece of trivia, the last sitting U.S. Senator to have served as a school superintendent was none other than the well-aged and controversial late Strom Thurmond.)

According to reliable Rocky Mountain News education reporter Nancy Mitchell, the name of Denver Public Schools superintendent Michael Bennet is being bounced around as a serious candidate to serve as Secretary of Education: The Newsweek columnist who broke the story of Barack Obama’s presidential bid is betting on Denver Public Schools Superintendent Michael Bennet as the next U.S. secretary of education. “I have my money on Bennet,” Jonathan Alter writes in the soon-to-be-printed Dec. 15 issue. The others on Alter’s short list are Chicago Public Schools Superintendent Arne Duncan and Paul Vallas, head of New Orleans’ public schools. The usually accessible Bennet is being coy about the column. He declined to comment directly. Being superintendent of an urban school district is a tough job. From the standpoint of teacher innovation, parental choice, local empowerment, and student opportunity, it’s easy to argue that Michael Bennet has done better than most. The CSAP results that have come in show some small positive gains in DPS, but there is still much work to be done. As this 2007 New Yorker feature story (Word document) shows, Bennet has worked tirelessly to take on the challenges. He has hit his share of bumps and made […]

With her column published yesterday, Independence Institute senior fellow and Face The State columnist Krista Kafer drops a fly or two into the early childhood education debate soup: In Colorado, taxpayers spend $29 million a year on state preschool programs. Denver voters passed a sales tax in 2006 to subsidize preschool. According to a Denver Post article by Jeremy P. Meyer, 3,650 students receive subsidies. James Mejia, director of the Denver Preschool Program, told Meyer that “Studies show that for every dollar you spend on early childhood education, you will get back $10 to $12 in services you would otherwise be spending on social services, incarceration, remediation.” Sounds great, but upon closer examination, this just isn’t true. The cost-benefit analyses routinely bandied about by advocates come up short. The analysis is largely based on exaggerated claims from a tiny subset of studies misrepresented as the whole. When the vast majority of research is considered, it becomes clear that preschool does not reap the amazing benefits touted by advocates. Four decades of legitimate research actually shows that the majority of low-income children experience only short-term positive impacts and there is little long-term impact from preschool participation. Research also shows that preschool […]

I find it kind of nice to be not-so-famous, without all the media attention. We should just let kids be kids, right? That must be a lot tougher when your dad has just been elected President of the United States. To show its support for the burgeoning public school choice movement, the people over at Democrats for Education Reform were circulating an online petition encouraging the Obamas to send young Sasha and Malia to a Washington, D.C., charter school. In response to the petition, the Center for Education Reform’s Jeannie Allen wrote over at the Edspresso blog why choosing a charter school would be a bad idea for the First Family: While my organization is the nation’s leading advocate for charter school choices, I’m not so sure I want to see the Obamas choose a charter school. Though I disagree with our president-elect on many issues and fear that obsessive government solutions and spending will push us further into a government dependency, I want the best for him and his family when they come to Washington. I want him to have no distractions other than those that impact us all. With a clever, tongue-in-cheek tone, Allen explains the rigorous challenges, […]