Education

On March 13, 1997, Dr. Howard Fuller, Director of Marquette University's Institute for the Transformation of Learning and former Superintendent of the Milwaukee Public Schools, addressed a Pioneer Institute Forum about the need for urban school reform.

On November 20, 1996, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Department of Education, The Center for Innovation in Urban Education at Northeastern University, and Pioneer Institute's Charter School Resource Center sponsored a day-long conference on charter school accountability. The keynote address was delivered by former U.S. Secretary of Education and Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander.

On October 23, 1996, a forum co-sponsored by the Harvard Graduate School of Education and Pioneer Institute focused on the continuing controversy surrounding Massachusetts' charter schools.

On July 25, 1996, Pioneer Institute held a forum that focused on the state and direction of the Boston Public School System. The forum was co-sponsored by the Boston Private Industry Council. Our panelists represented viewpoints that ranged from a positive appraisal of the city's current school reforms, to the opinion that only a fundamental restructuring of the system can bring real progress. Though the panelists have obvious policy differences, they share one characteristic: each is a Boston parent.

On April 19, 1996, Pioneer Institute held a forum to preview our new book, Bilingual Education in Massachusetts: The Emperor Has No Clothes. For 25 years, the Commonwealth has mandated a single approach to teaching students with limited English proficiency (LEP) in Massachusetts public schools, called transitional bilingual education (TBE), despite the fact that there is virtually no reliable evidence to support its effectiveness.

On January 31, 1996, Pioneer Institute Executive Director James A. Peyser delivered an address to the Boston Economic Club in which he proposed radical reforms to the structure of public education. After 30 years of stagnation and decline, only fundamental structural change can bring about lasting improvement in public education.

In our November 1995 Policy Dialogue, "Responses to a Harvard Study on School Choice: Is It a Study at All?" we gathered nine school choice experts to critique a draft manuscript of Who Chooses, Who Loses? Culture, Institutions, and the Unequal Effects of School Choice, edited by Harvard Professors Richard Elmore, Gary Orfield, and Bruce Fuller.

A draft of a book entitled School Choice: The Cultural Logic of Families, the Political Rationality of Institutions, soon to be published by Teachers College Press, is receiving a lot of attention in new papers and in education circles- due to a widely circulated Harvard press release.

Pioneer Institute recently organized a roundtable for school officials to discuss their experiences with inter-district public school choice. The participants exchanged view s on the current state of the choice program in Massachusetts.