Tag Archives: Fordham Institute

Happy Friday, fellow policy explorers. I usually try to let you off easy on Friday afternoons when it comes to policy discussions, but this week’s ridiculous distractions in Douglas County forced me to push back a post I’ve been meaning to do for a while about ESSA and how it relates to high-performing students. With the next ESSA Hub Committee meeting scheduled for this coming Monday, it seems appropriate to talk about that interesting issue sooner rather than later. Plus, there’s no such thing as a bad day for policy discussions! A big focus of the ESSA conversation has been on accountability systems. What will we measure? For whom? How? When? What about weights? In Colorado, we just had a major conversation about the notion of combined subgroups and what they might mean for accountability systems. All these discussions tend to revolve around how we best help lower-performing kids, schools, and districts. And don’t get me wrong, that’s an incredibly important question for those of us who view education as an opportunity to provide every kid with a chance at a fair fight and an opportunity to build his or her own success story. But what about the other side […]

We’ve covered quite a bit of positive research regarding private school choice in recent months. Back in May, I wrote about a meta-study by researchers at the University of Arkansas that found positive effects from vouchers in the U.S. and a couple of other countries. The following month, we dug into the Friedman Foundation’s latest review of random-assignment studies on private school choice programs in the United States. Fourteen of the 18 studies included in that review found positive effects for at least some groups of students. Two found no visible effects, and two more—both from Louisiana—found significant negative effects. As I’ve said before, there are good reasons to believe that program design and implementation issues played a role in the negative findings in Louisiana. Now, though, I’m sorry to report that I’ve become aware of less easily explained bad news on voucher programs in Ohio and Indiana. But don’t fret just yet; there are some major caveats that need to be considered before we start jumping to broad conclusions. Buckle up, today’s post will be a long and nerdy one.

As you probably guessed from the long absence after my last post about two abominable “snowbills,” I’ve been spending a fair amount of time in the shiny hallways of the Colorado Capitol talking about the importance of choice and accountability. Today, I’d like to take a break from politics and get back to policy. We’re going to do that by taking a look at the new Education Choice and Competition Index ratings from the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. Everybody likes ratings, right? I’d bet the folks at Denver Public Schools are especially fond of ratings these days. Why? Well, because they sort of won. First, they took third place in a Fordham Institute analysis of America’s best cities for choice. And last week, Denver was revealed to be the highest-scoring large district in Brookings’ 2015 ECCI report—a pretty significant improvement from the district’s fifth-place finish in last year’s report. It was also the second-best district overall, surpassed only by New Orleans. In fact, it only lost out to the pretty awesome “Recovery District” by a single point (81-80) on Brookings’ 100-point scale. First off, congratulations Denver! Woot! Please conduct the obligatory victory dance now. I’ll wait. With that out […]

I’m only six years old, but even I know that poverty is a terrible thing. I see the other kids at school whose clothes have holes in them, or who can’t afford new toys like the ones I have, or who are having serious family issues unlike anything I’ve experienced. And yes, I’ve noticed that they tend to do worse in school than my friends from higher-income families. Out in the big wide world of education policy, you won’t find anyone credible who will argue that poverty does not have a significant impact on academic achievement. For proof, all you need to do is take a look at the familiar income-related achievement gaps seen in last year’s PARCC scores, or the data illustrating these gaps on the most recent NAEP exam. But why? Do we have an education problem, or a poverty problem? Are we talking about the chicken, or the egg? Most of you know that I absolutely loathe the common argument that we have to fix poverty before we can fix achievement gaps. I fully reject the argument that low-income kids are liabilities who should be simply shuffled through a school system that callously shrugs its shoulders and […]

I’m starting to get pretty excited for the holidays. School’s out, the tree is decorated, the lights are up (dad only fell off the ladder once this year), and a healthy pile of presents has accumulated in the living room. Meanwhile, the holiday policy doldrums have officially arrived, which that means that yours truly will soon be riding off into the snowy sunset for a few days of family, fun, and rest. I hate to send you away empty handed, though, so I’d like to humbly present Little Eddie’s First Annual Loosely Connected Holiday Mashup.

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 […]

Things are changing in Washington, DC, and my friends in the Education Policy Center are wondering what the new presidential administration will mean for school reform. That’s why they agreed to publish a paper by a really smart group of people – three professors from the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. The new paper is called The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly: Will President Obama’s School Reform Bring the Change Kids Need? (PDF). The authors are Robert Maranto, Gary Ritter, and Sandra Stotsky. You really need to read this paper if you care about education and the future of America. As a candidate, Barack Obama gave a lot of different messages about education reform. The authors of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly sort out the different competing proposals, and encourage the President-elect to “appoint a Democratic reformer who embraces the good, opposes the bad, and avoids the ugly, to serve as the nation’s next Secretary of Education.” The Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly has its ears to the Beltway grapevine, running a daily line to see who the favorites are to fill the Cabinet-level post. The latest entry has Chicago Schools CEO Arne Duncan […]

In a new Education Next article, Michael Petrilli gives a little primer on the education blogosphere – what he calls “the far end” of the long tail of the blogosphere at large. That makes someone like Joanne Jacobs, one of the more well-trafficked edu-bloggers, “a big fish in this small pond.” One way to measure the influence of blogs is by Technorati Authority, which simply tracks the number of different blogs that link to you in the past 180 days. Since I’ve been out there “watching” for more than 180 days now, I thought it would be neat to know where I stack up compared to Petrilli’s list. (Ironically, the article, intended for a non-savvy audience, is already out of date – or as Jay Greene puts it, “like so two months ago”. Meanwhile, Robert Pondiscio at the Core Knowledge Blog wonders why his site was left off Petrilli’s list.) Anyway, in the world of the education blogosphere, it seems there are no education policy blogs in the top 10. Hmmm. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised by that. Anyway this small “top 10” section at the end of the long tail includes respected friends like Mike Antonucci’s Intercepts, the […]