Do school vouchers improve results? It depends on what we ask
Joshua Cowen, Michigan State University Do school voucher programs help improve educational outcomes? Lower Columbia College (LCC), CC BY-NC-ND A set of reports on Louisiana’s statewide school voucher program recently revealed a number of important features of that program’s operation and overall performance. The most startling of these reports indicated that students who used school […]
College Readiness: Laying Blame
The phrase college-ready has dominated discussions about K-12 education for the past decade. The familiar story goes something like this. Today’s college students struggle because they are no longer prepared for college-level work … the way they used to be. Because of failing schools and incompetent teachers, a high school diploma no longer means much […]
Make Time to Chat, Eat, Act: reflections this #PeaceCorpsWeek
The scents, emotions, and images of my Peace Corps experience remain crisp in my mind, even as the years sneak by. There’s a certain spice mixture – yazzi – I eat on eggs, greens and rice till this day, as long as my supply chain holds out. I remember long walks in the bush with […]
Hollywood, We Need a 'Spotlight 2' Exposing the Abuse in Our Schools
The film “Spotlight” deservingly took home the top Oscar Sunday night for its portrayal of the Boston Globe’s hugely consequential investigation into cases of widespread and systemic child sex abuse in the Boston area by numerous Roman Catholic priests. The story was published in 2002, and the investigations into clergy sex abuse mushroomed around the […]
Giving Kids Choices
This week high school offer letters will be going home to tens of thousands of NYC eighth graders, who participated in the public school process. There will inevitably be an uproar about the lack of diversity at specialized high schools. Diversity though isn’t quite the right word — many of the schools have diverse populations. […]