Mark Tapscott from the Washington Examiner explains why it’s happened. The Rev. Al Sharpton has come out against teachers’ unions and in favor of charter schools. “I’m not anti-charter schools. I’m pro-good charter schools. We want what’s best for our kids, even if it doesn’t follow the liberal status quo.” “I think there’s a new [...]
Michael Petrilli at Education Next has a very interesting video interview with Chester Finn and Terry Ryan about the new book they’ve written with Michael B. Lafferty. All three are from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The book– Ohio’s Education Reform Challenges: Lessons from the Front Lines–chronicles Fordham’s attempts to help what they refer to [...]
Reason TV notes that out of the tragedy and devastation of Hurricane Katrina came at least one good thing. It meant a fresh start for schools–and kids– in New Orleans. Most of the new schools built since the hurricane are charter schools and, so far, their results look quite promising.
Sharon Cohen reports for AP about Urban Prep, an all-boys charter school in Chicago. There are many things that make Urban Prep different, but perhaps the most important one is that 100% of its first graduation class is headed to college. Along the way, boys’ lives have been changed — and very possibly saved. Urban [...]
Kevin Carey’s post at The Quick and the Ed clarifies what’s going on in education reform right now and how’s it’s changed since the passage of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2001. We’re in what Carey calls the “post-NCLB era of education reform.” For one thing, today’s major players are different: When I began [...]
Sam Dillon at the NYT reports on the cost of trying to turn around a failing school. Readers of Donna Foote’s Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America will remember the problems at LA’s Locke High School, a school that has been described as the worst of the worst high schools [...]
If you’ve been thinking that the mainstream media has been more critical of teachers’ unions of late, Terry Cowgill at Big Journalism confirms your observations and names names. For instance: A story in yesterday’s Washington Post on the recent ratification of a new D.C. teachers contract, which calls for using student improvement as a measure [...]
Today in the WSJ, Miriam Jordan straightforwardly describes what makes a school successful. What works is not a really a secret– high standards, high expectations, no excuses. Jordan looks at two similar kids who went to two different kinds of schools–schools with different philosophies– and the difference that made in their lives: In middle school, [...]
There’s a lot of well-deserved buzz about Madeleine Sackler’s new documentary, The Lottery. The film follows four families who have entered the lottery for admission to kindergarten in the hugely-successful Harlem Success Academy, a charter school in New York. It’s hard to argue that parents of poor kids don’t care about their kids’ education– or [...]
A judge in Idaho recently ruled that a charter school could not use the Bible in class. But the case is about much more than that. As the recent controversy over the work of the social studies textbook selection committee in Texas makes plain, the issue isn’t just textbooks—as my own students point out, they [...]