Listening to the rhetoric of Democratic presidential candidates, one would think charter schools were a Republican initiative opposed by all progressives. Bernie Sanders calls for a halt to all federal funding for charter schools. Elizabeth Warren joins him in condemning for-profit charters. Former Vice President Joe Biden, who served under a president enthusiastic about charters, told the American…
Family Structure and Student Outcomes If we are honest with ourselves, there comes a turning point moment in the life of every education reformer when we must confront the limitations of education reform. Such an experience happened to me around 4 p.m. on July 11, 2016, near Third Avenue and 149th Street in the heart…
Stop me if you have heard this before: People have complaints about standardized testing. This is not new. It is the same dance we see around this time every year, but this time it’s to a different song. All over the country schools, parents, and other stakeholders are crying foul over plans to go through…
The collegiate curriculum now includes capstone projects, which allow students to apply their academic knowledge to real-world problems. These programs are crucial to education in the U.S. and Brazil, although their execution and impact vary due to educational philosophies, resources, and institutional aims. This essay compares these disparities with teacher perspectives from both countries. The…
It’s been an excellent year for school choice! 2021 has rightly been called a “breakthrough year” and “The Year of School Choice,” as 18 different states enacted seven new school choice programs and worked to expand 21 existing programs. And 2022 may prove to be even better! What’s really impressive is that school choice is…
If there is one thing we know for sure about this pandemic, it’s that interest in homeschooling has been on the rise as families search for a learning environment that meets all their childrens’ needs. In fact, the number of families choosing to homeschool has more than doubled since 2020! As families took control of…
Looking for a state that can innovate on education? Give Idaho more than a glance. So argues a new Manhattan Institute policy brief on the advent of microschooling in the Gem State. For decades, Idaho has been an easy place to homeschool, with few regulations. And Idaho’s many small, mostly rural districts have been unusually…
The continued killing of unarmed Black men by police has spurred action across the country. Some people are looking at how we fund law enforcement. Some people are looking at their own biases and participating in training about diversity, equity, and inclusion. Me? I’m looking at how we educate children of color. I’m the founder…
Just a glance at student attendance rates confirms what many have suspected for a while now: The pandemic had a profound impact on public school enrollment — and not in a good way. Across the country, enrollment in public schools declined by over a million students during the 2000-2021 school year. And this year enrollment…
Months after issuing a letter that called on President Biden to use federal agencies to stop “threats and acts of violence” at school board meetings, the National School Boards Association (NSBA) is walking it back. It’s the latest update in a debacle that has been brewing since the letter’s publication last month, in which the…
The latest numbers on public school enrollment last school year show that states lost more than 1 million students (Delaware and Illinois are not in the count, yet.). While the loss is concentrated in preK and kindergarten, which suggests families may have chosen to hold off on starting their young children in formal school, families…
As a Black homeschooling mom, I am most irritated by the mere thought of my children being trapped in a failing school. But there are a couple of recent misconceptions about Black homeschooling families that have also been getting on my nerves. First, the media attention to Black homeschooling portrays us as an anomaly. Our…
Arianne Craig Jolla had the dream of teaching since she was in fourth grade. But after getting her bachelor’s in education, teaching wasn’t what she expected at all. School after school leadership pushed teachers to teach to the test and that just wasn’t working for students that lacked basic math and reading skills. After having…
While researching my new book, “Hybrid Homeschooling: A Guide to the Future of Education,” I spoke with a group of families who send their children to a hybrid homeschool in the Midwest. When I asked what drew them to their school, one dad’s answer stopped me in my tracks. When this dad got home from…
Many families took one look at their school district’s remote or hybrid learning offerings this fall and said “no, thank you.” That’s the message gleaned from national and state-specific data on the surging number of homeschooled students this academic year. Prior to the pandemic and related school closures last spring, there were just under two…
These past few weeks, I have been working from home while supervising my children, ages ten and twelve, as they work on the packets we downloaded from their school’s website. Back when my son was six years old, I homeschooled my son for a year. While that gave me a head start on adapting to…
I wish my kids loved to read. But they don’t. They don’t even like it very much. And this may present a challenge as we move forward into a pandemic that will likely have our kids out of school for the foreseeable future. Changing the very nature of our children is a tall order but…