Tag Archives: bookmark

This week brings a couple of big days for supporters of school choice. First of all, bet you didn’t know that it’s 2009 Colorado Charter Schools Week, celebrating the 15th anniversary of charter schools in Colorado. The big day to commemorate the occasion is this Thursday, April 2 – as charter school families and supporters rally at 11:30 am at the State Capitol. Public charter schools represent an important educational option that has established itself in our state. If you want to keep track of charter school issues here, you absolutely have to bookmark two sites: the Colorado Charters blog and the new A Parent’s Voice. The very next day – Friday, April 3 – is the annual Homeschool Day at the Capitol, with a chance to meet elected state representatives and senators, to participate in two workshops, and to join in a noon rally. And younger homeschooled kids can participate in the Future Statesmen Program, which sounds pretty neat to me. Show up at the Homeschool Day at the Capitol, and you might just meet one of my Education Policy Center friends there with information on the new, exciting paper Colorado’s Homeschool Law Turns Twenty (PDF) – a real […]

Over on Jay Greene’s blog, Dr. Greg Forster has a valuable update for those of us who want a handy place to go to answer all those objections to school choice: …the Friedman Foundation has released a set of “myth buster” guides to the research on the six most common school choice myths. For each myth they’ve provided a brief, handy reference sheet and a slightly longer, more detailed guide to the research. Even the detailed version of each myth buster is still less technical than the other lists on my “meta-list” page, compiled by Jay and other scholars, but it does go over the most important technical issues (how do we distinguish the impact of vouchers from the impact of other factors like family influence?) and provides the references you’ll need to dig further if you wish. Mythbusters, eh? I hear there was a movie made a long time before I was born. Seems it had this memorable song. I think we could rewrite some of the lyrics to fit the topic at hand: If you’re stuck at school in your neighborhood Who you gonna call? – Mythbusters! If the unions say school choice is no good Who you […]

I haven’t really gotten into list-making yet. Learning to read and write has to come first. But for those of you who are interested in finding out what the research has to say about school choice, having all that information in one place in a list would be handy. Right? What about a list of all the different lists? Writing over at Jay Greene’s blog, Greg Forster has come up with “The Meta-List: An Incomplete List of Complete Lists” (now, that’s a mouthful). The lists are broken down into sections of research on: Effects of school choice on participants (for example, how much more is the voucher kid learning?) Effects of school choice on public schools (does competition bring improvements?) Racial segregation in voucher programs vs. public schools Tolerance and civic values of voucher students vs. public school students Of course, more lists might yet be added to the incomplete “meta-list.” But the next time you are bugged by a question about what the research really says about vouchers and education tax credits, you have a handy one-stop online resource (have you bookmarked it yet?). That’s pretty cool, isn’t it?