With old-school civil rights groups complaining about President Barack Obama’s embrace of the school reform movement — and its commitment to improving the quality of education for all children — listen to this Dropout Nation Podcast from February on why their approach to educational equity doesn’t work. The only way educational equity will actually be [...]
Steve Barr probably didn’t think he was taking a new, grassroots-centered approach to school reform when he started the Green Dot collection of charter schools back in 1999. A decade later, before stepping down as chairman of the charter school operator, Barr managed to rally the city’s Latino parents to revolt against the systemic incompetence [...]
A dominant debate in education reform is over whether or not students should have to take on high-quality, college-preparatory curricula or should be able to choose a vocational-oriented curricula that allows them to get jobs immediately. Defenders of the first group (including the Gates Foundation and Kevin Carey of the Education Sector) rightly point out [...]
On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I discuss how poor-performing teachers damage the educational destinies of students, bring down the morale of their colleagues and foster the nation’s dropout crisis. The damage wrecked by ineffective teaching — and the culture of mediocrity they foster — is promoted and sustained by schools of education, collective bargaining [...]
As a titan of economic theory, Milton Friedman more than deserved his Nobel Prize. But perhaps his greatest contribution came not with the Monetarist theory or the concept of permanent income hypothesis, but in developing the concept of school vouchers — the first step in expanding parent and student choice over education. Although vouchers remain [...]
Editor of Dropout Nation and Co-Author of "A Byte At the Apple: Rethhinking Education Data in the Post-NCLB Era". Conttributor to The American Spectator and Labor Watch. Author of "Left Behind: A Star Editorial Board series" and longtime editorialist on education and economic affairs.
With old-school civil rights groups complaining about President Barack Obama’s embrace of the school reform movement — and its commitment to improving the quality of education for all children — listen to this Dropout Nation Podcast from February on why their approach to educational equity doesn’t work. The only way educational equity will actually be […]
On this week’s Dropout Nation Podcast, I offer some important steps towards recruiting and developing more high-quality teachers. Eliminating tenure, eliminating seniority-based benefits and embracing the use of student performance data — along with moves such as the dismissal of 241 poor-performing teachers last week by D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Miche […]
As part of a further discussion about the importance of Beltway school reformers to embrace the grassroots, here is a rewind of a February Dropout Nation Podcast on the subject. Inside-the-Beltway policymaking, important as it is, will mean nothing for improving the educational destinies of children if school reformers don’t reach out to urban groups […]
