Annual poll of education performance ranks Mississippi 48th
Mississippi ranked 48th — ahead of only Idaho, Nevada, and South Dakota — in an annual ranking of states’ educational performance and policy. Quality Counts 2013, released by the weekly newspaper Education Week and the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center, grades states on a variety of indicators, including school spending, overall student performance, and [...]
Charter schools expanding rapidly in more U.S. cities
Charter schools now enroll more than 20 percent of public school children in 25 school districts across the country, according to a new report from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, which tracks charter-school growth annually. Overall, charters enrolled more than two million students in 41 states and the District of Columbia during the [...]
Study: African American voucher students more likely to go to college
African-American school children in New York City who received a voucher to attend a private school were more likely to enroll in college than their public school counterparts, according to a study released last week by the Brookings Institution and Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. For more than a decade the study tracked [...]
Reforming the way we write about reform, education and more
Several years ago, an older and wiser colleague of mine at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel gently chided me for using the phrase “inner-city” in my newspaper articles on Milwaukee’s schools. My co-worker, Jamaal Abdul-Alim, pointed out that most of the neighborhoods and sections of Milwaukee to which I ascribed that label were not part of [...]
