Blog: School Choice

When you ask that question, the usual answer is something about the kids, equity, and the unfairness of all the flexibility that charters get. It’s hard to get a superintendent to go beyond the platitudes. Perhaps the superintendent will raise all the...

For the past decade and a half, February has served as the month during which the state’s Board of Education votes on proposed charter schools. The process is a long one, involving during the previous year the submission of concepts, detailed applications,...

The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education’s vote later this month on a new set of charter school proposals is an opportunity to give thousands of Massachusetts kids access to a great school. The list of proposed charters includes new proposals...

On January 6th the Boston Globe published a thoughtful opinion piece on the cost of dropouts by Alan Leventhal, who in his day job serves as chairman and chief executive officer of Beacon Capital Partners. It opened with a good overview of...

More than 100,000 students in 10 states - including Rhode Island and New Hampshire - are currently educated under tax credit programs. Massachusetts has so many exceptional private and parochial education options, and our school children deserve the same options. Jewish Day Schools, for example, are facing a perfect storm of rising costs and declining philanthropic support.

One of two kids in the Lawrence Public School system do not cross the 12th grade finish line. Even that is beyond what the “soft bigotry of low expectations” crowd can explain away on the basis of factors like poverty and family...

There are two issues that matter in K-12 education – what you might call the twin achievement gaps, those between the inner city poor (often including English language learners) and the rest of the state, and the international achievement gap whereby the...

Happy Birthday to Milton Friedman, who would have been 100 today. A great way to understand Friedman’s contribution to the field of education can be summed up in the following series of videos associated with his renowned Free to Choose series on...

Two-and-a-half years have passed since the passage of the reform law (“An Act Relative to the Achievement Gap”) that will, over time, double the number of charter school students and established a new category of in-district reform called innovation schools. (The law...

Today’s lead story in the Globe relates the three years of “reform” by Sito Narcisse at English High: An extraordinary three-quarters of English High’s teachers and administrators have quit or been let go during the past three years, school records show, as...