A new Harvard study suggests another good reason to expand school choice: Reduced crime rates. High-risk male students who won a public school choice lottery in North Carolina committed about 50 percent less crime than their peers who lost, according to the research by David J. Deming, an assistant professor[Read More…]
Parent Empowerment
Voucher, school choice families are not pawns for the ‘corporate agenda’
Families who benefit from expanded school choice options – charter schools, virtual schools, vouchers, tax credit scholarships – are increasingly being portrayed as pawns in a coordinated campaign to privatize public schools. That’s especially troubling given that the voices of those families are so rarely included in the conversation. The[Read More…]
Louisiana’s push for vouchers is historic, rewarding – Eric Lewis, podcastED
Louisiana is the center of the school choice universe right now. Last week, the state House passed a bill that creates a statewide voucher program for low-income students (expanding the one now limited to New Orleans). And this week, it passed a bill that creates a statewide tax-rebate scholarship (which is something[Read More…]
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Michelle Rhee’s evolution on school choice
Michelle Rhee and I are members of the same political tribe. We’re progressive Democrats. Throughout most of the 1800s and into the mid-1970s, our tribe supported school choice, including allowing parents to use public funds to help pay for private school tuition. Our group’s position began to change in the[Read More…]
Parent trigger founder: Teachers unions launched “sweep and destroy” mission to deny parents
Two weeks ago, Gloria Romero, the former California state senator who wrote the original parent trigger law, wrote in this redefinED piece that the “status quo” killed the parent trigger bill in Florida. Today in this op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, Romero uses much tougher language – and singles out[Read More…]
Expanded school choice means education reporters must adapt
I’m not an education reporter anymore, but from my new gig I’m getting even more dizzy watching education evolve. So many states are adding or expanding school choice options – charters, vouchers, virtual schools, tax-credit scholarships – that it’s hard for reporters to keep up. To make it worse, newsrooms[Read More…]
Parents and schools both deserve scrutiny
It’s a common refrain in ed reform debates: If only more parents would do the right thing, schools would be a lot easier to fix. Especially, it seems, black parents. Whenever I wrote a newspaper story about struggling black students, it was guaranteed to make the web site’s “most commented”[Read More…]
Low-income parents are also underdogs in ed reform
Everybody loves the underdog except when it comes to education reform. More than a week after the Florida Senate rejected the parent trigger bill, the story line is now David v. Goliath, with David (played by established parent groups like the Florida PTA and Fund Education Now) squeaking out a victory[Read More…]