Eddie of Ed is Watching fame brings us news on school choice from Denver via The Denver Post. The Post is reporting that more than 1 of every 2 families in Denver Public Schools is opting out of their assigned schools and taking advantage of the district’s liberal open-enrollment policies[Read More…]
Parental Choice
Nation’s top public virtual leader endorses private competition
by Kenya Woodard As a bill allowing other virtual education vendors to bring their services to Florida makes its way through the Legislature, the president and CEO of the nation’s largest public online school told an audience gathered Thursday in New Orleans at the Education Writers Association conference that she welcomes the competition.[Read More…]
Enjoy the victory, but remember who needs our help the most
If there was a central theme that drove last week’s conference on school choice at Berkeley, Calif., it was the moral imperative of empowering the parent. Not all its participants agreed on how best to accomplish this goal within public education, but if you surveyed the assembly, it’s likely a majority would favor a design of private[Read More…]
School choice as a moral imperative
At the edge of the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, there is today unfolding a conference that has brought together advocates for school choice of varying ideological stripes. There are some participants who support public school choice among charter academies but who are skeptical of the success of publicly funding private[Read More…]
An unsettling setback
It may have drawn bigger headlines if President Obama had supported the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship, but his continued opposition to the program is all the more disappointing for its tenor. The White House’s most recent assertion that the program has proven ineffective reads more like a screed from the National Education Association, not from a president[Read More…]
The Washington Post on Obama’s opposition to D.C. vouchers
The Post editorial board tonight challenges the White House’s assertion that the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship has failed to demonstrate progress in raising the achievement of the low-income students who benefit. “The White House has a right to its own opinion, as wrongheaded as we believe it to be,” it begins. “It doesn’t[Read More…]
Avoiding a rush to judgment in Milwaukee
UPDATE: A team of university researchers is releasing data showing more comprehensive results on the performance of students in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program than the state of Wisconsin has shown, according to a story in today’s Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. The team, which includes professors John F. Witte of the University of Wisconsin[Read More…]
What the common school was — and what it has become
Jay Bookman at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is among the more faithful opponents to school vouchers and has frequently criticized a Georgia measure, as he did today, as representative of “another step in an incremental, largely undeclared assault on public education …” Leaving aside Bookman’s hyperbole, his current argument is a useful entry[Read More…]