One of the secrets of Success Academy schools’ success is “holding parents to account for honoring the agreement they signed when enrolling their children,” writes Robert Pondiscio. The high-scoring charter network — with mostly low-income black and Hispanic students — requires parents to get kids to school on time and in uniform, avoid unexcused absences and monitor homework and reading logs. “We’ve… Read more →
School reform advocate Derrell Bradford and policy writer Andy Rotherham hit on it. Illinois education writer Tracy Dell’Angela has a blog focused on it. Teacher/education writer Robert Pondiscio said it was a factor in the anti-charter vote in Massachusetts last fall. And former Education Secretary Arne Duncan famously broached the subject in 2013. “It” is the long overdue conversation about… Read more →
The school choice war has gone hot, writes Neal McCluskey on the Cato @ Liberty blog. New America’s Kevin Carey lamented “dismal voucher results” in the New York Times, which followed with an editorial calling choice an academic “failure.” However, “the vast majority of random-assignment studies of private school voucher programs — the “gold-standard” research method that even controls for… Read more →
In his latest burst of fragging, conservative school reformer Robert Pondiscio recently argued that social justice-minded school reformers have only themselves to blame if suburban Massachusetts voters reject a ballot proposal to lift the cap on urban charter schools. Under this reasoning, I qualify as culpable because I recently called out white middle-class voters for organizing against a ballot measure… Read more →
I have six words of advice for people who want to develop their writing talents: “Read a lot. Write a lot.” American students aren’t good writers because they don’t write enough, asserts Andrew Rotherham in U.S. News. That’s because English teachers “see far too many students to be able to assign the quantity of writing students need to do to become… Read more →