Winners of the Early Learning Race to the Top competition

—UPDATED— The announcement of nine winners in the Obama administration’s latest version of its “Race to the Top” education competition will push forward reforms that early learning advocates have lobbied heavily for over the past several years. The winners of the “Early Learning Challenge,” as the grant competition was called, are California, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts, […]

California ballot initiative seeks to expand access to online education

For public school students in California, where you live usually determines where you can learn. To David Haglund, that’s not right.

This month, Haglund, principal of the Riverside Virtual School, an online independent study program run by the Riverside Unified School District, introduced a statewide ballot initiative [PDF] that would give students unrestricted access to publicly funded courses – wherever they are.

Charter-school enrollment: Two million students and counting

The charter-school movement reached a milestone this week: Charter schools, which are publicly funded but typically privately managed, now educate more than two million students, up from around 1.8 million last year. Despite the heated debate over charter schools, the number is still relatively small considering the size of the K-12 student population in U.S. […]