Does going to the best school matter? Only if it's the best fit.
RedefinED host Doug Tuthill is fond of talking about his choice of high school years ago for his son in St. Petersburg, Fla. While Tuthill is known in these parts for launching the first International Baccalaureate school in Florida, the magnet school he chose for his youngest son has long been considered a failure in terms of academic achievement. Of all the schools he could have picked, he picked a school the state had graded an “F.”
Read More >Bipartisanship over choice is becoming contagious
Today, redefinED host John Kirtley appears on the St. Petersburg Times' education blog, the Gradebook, with an essay that showcases the increasing bipartisanship evident in providing school choice for underprivileged students. "For far too long, the important debate over whether we should provide private learning options for low-income schoolchildren has been a source of friction in education circles and partisan combat in political quarters," Kirtley writes. "But when Oprah Winfrey spotlights the desperate needs of these children and some of the private schools that are turning around their lives, we can safely conclude this issue is now mainstream."
Read More >Brookings: Stop shortchanging charter schools
Our discourse over educational options for underprivileged children clearly has advanced when the Brookings Institution draws a conclusion that could also find a home at the conservative Heritage Foundation: “Charter schools are by definition schools of choice. The promise of education choice includes improving quality and efficiency through competition among schools, enhancing opportunity for students of low-income families who may otherwise be trapped in ineffective schools, and spurring innovation. But the promise of choice in public education is constrained by the quality and timeliness of information on school performance that is available to parents.”
Read More >One legend's call to today's civil rights leaders: Erase the lines we have drawn in the past
After listening recently to RiShawn Biddle's podcast calling on civil rights leaders to change their approach to education reform, I was reminded of an unpublished column written by one Florida legend in the civil rights movement, the Rev. H.K. Matthews. Matthews shared the piece with me and others after several civil rights groups last summer demanded that President Obama reconsider the core elements of his education agenda, which included the expansion of charter schools and the closure of consistently low-performing schools. These iconic groups, which included the NAACP and the Urban League, had good intentions in presenting their education policy framework, but Matthews found their arguments irrelevant today. Their call for equal opportunity, he wrote, was "limited by some familiar boundaries of generations past -- those of neighborhood and family income."
Read More >Parents are ready to make choice the norm. Are states ready to accommodate them?
These events are not isolated. If we are to accept Manno’s analysis, more than half the nation’s 57 million elementary and secondary school students are attending a K-12 school of their choice. Public education to these families no longer represents the traditionally zoned neighborhood school, and the leaders who they elect are taking notice.
Read More >Rhee: Nothing should stand in the way of great schools and parental choice
The brainchild of Rhee's ambitions will be called Students First, a 501c4 nonprofit that she said would be politically active in supporting reform-minded candidates for political office. Just minutes after she announced her news to Oprah Winfrey's viewers in the Chicago area, Rhee identified four parts to a legislative agenda she said she "hopes to be a gold standard for what policymakers should have in place."
Read More >Klein is close, but his call for choices falls short
Outgoing New York schools chancellor Joel Klein is right to identify that low-income families deserve to have the best educational options available to them, but he frames the argument for school choice in a way that stops short of advocating for equal opportunities for our most disadvantaged families.
Read More >The blueprint for digital learning recognizes no distinction between public and private
For traditional school districts to adopt the digital innovations at the core of education reform, they will have to recognize private providers – with all their human and financial capital – as partners.
Read More >Duncan gave us the guidebook for creative destruction in public education
When Duncan outlined the “new normal” in public education today, Vander Ark writes, he reminded us of the forces shaping other American industries that were browbeaten to renew themselves in the throes of the Great Recession.
Read More >Duncan wants to "personalize" education, and so do we
Arne Duncan is right when he recently told an assembly at the American Enterprise Institute that it’s time to innovate in the schoolhouse, that the century-old, industrial-age factory model of education is wrong for the 21st century. But even the education secretary may not fully understand the implications of his remarks.
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