Imagine if 20 years ago on the south side of Chicago two thousand low-income, predominantly African-American families were given an opportunity to take their children out of failing and violent schools and send them to a school where they had a chance to graduate and attend college. What if this program had numerous studies that showed the students within the program were making statistically significant gains in reading? What if the program was so wildly popular that for every one scholarship that was awarded, there were four applicants? And then, …
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cqWuVb7FNc[/youtube] “Be bold,” says James Tooley when you want education reform. He’d know. For the last decade the Newcastle University Professor has been traveling throughout the world’s poorest regions studying systems of education. What he’s discovered may be surprising. In the poorest countries on earth, parents are choosing private schools because they don’t want to acquiesce to the mediocrity of public schools…Our research has shown that these schools are outperforming the government schools at a fraction of the cost.
D.C. School Choice Supporters Protest Education Secretary Duncan This morning, Education Secretary Arne Duncan held a joint press conference at a school in Washington, DC marking the start of the new school year. Sec. Duncan was there to speak about the challenges schools face related to the flu and H1N1 virus. But the Secretary was reminded about the administration’s decision to take away school choice scholarships from 216 children living in DC by a group of protestors led by school choice activist Virginia Walden Ford. As children in D.C. head …
On Thursday, Senator Daniel Akaka [D-HI] convened an education sub-committee hearing on the state of reform in the D.C. public school system. D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee testified, and was met with both support and opposition. Over the past two years, she has brought sweeping reforms to the DCPS and has worked to reduce waste in the system. Despite her successes in a steep uphill battle, opponents of her reform efforts held signs reading “Oppose Rhee-form” outside of the committee hearing. While Rhee’s star-power garnered considerable attention during the …
