Parents are more satisfied with their child’s learning environment when they choose it. Indeed, as economist Tyler Cowen put it recently, “the single most overwhelming (yet neglected) empirical fact” about educational choice programs is that “they improve parent satisfaction.” A slew of new reports add a number of hefty boulders to the mountain of evidence.
Read more about it here.
Henry Eichner’s son may share his name and his disability, but Eichner was determined to not let him share his schooling experience.
Eichner was bullied in his public schools for having muscular dystrophy. So Eichner enrolled Henry Jr. in a private school in Florida, a financial challenge for a single father.
Then one day he met Wendy Howard, a school choice advocate, at a networking event. Howard asked him if his son was attending his private school using the Florida state-funded Gardiner Scholarship Program, which provides funds for students with disabilities to use on private school tuition or therapy services. That was the first time Eichner had heard of the program.
Continue reading here.
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Though sixteen year-old American expatriate Christian Billman has lived in Recife, Brazil, for six years, in that time he has been able to fulfill all the educational requirements of a typical teenager in the U.S. and will soon graduate with a U.S. diploma, all from the comfort of his home in Brazil through International Connections Academy.
Of those who applied to college from the school’s 2016 graduates, 100 percent were accepted, photo courtesy of the International Connections Academy.
For the past several years, Christian has been enrolled in International Connections Academy, an accredited, online private school serving students in grades K-12 worldwide. The virtual school allows English-speaking students living abroad with expat parents to receive a high-quality education that meets U.S. standards, with only a computer and an internet connection.
Read more here.
President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, a prominent supporter of charter schools, said the time has come to “make education great again,” at a recent rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. But it is not clear an approach as newfangled as it is controversial - cyber charter schools - will be part of her plan.
Cyber charter schools merge two types of reform - the charter school movement and online learning. Like traditional charter schools, cyber charters are considered public schools that deliver instructional material to students online and are paid for with state funds.
Keep reading here.
Should our school systems be uniform or plural? This question lies at the heart of school-choice debates in the United States. Most democracies — including the Netherlands, England, Sweden and Canada — fund diverse schools as a matter of principle. Educational pluralism is embedded in nations as different as Australia, India and Singapore. These countries do not cast common purpose to the wind; they regulate their schools’ curricula, admissions processes and hiring protocols. Education is considered a public good that may be delivered by civic organizations and the state alike.
More here.
In 2014, The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss., launched an investigation into the state of special education in Mississippi. They uncovered a range of abuses and troubling trends, most notably that, on average, only 23 percent of Mississippi's students with special needs were graduating from high school. In many districts, that number was in the low single digits.
Read more here.
n “Lost opportunity for charter schools,” Robert Pondiscio says education reformers should blame themselves for the failure of a ballot initiative last month to establish more charter schools in Massachusetts. The vote on “Question 2” wasn’t even close: 62% of voters were against it. That’s embarrassing. Only one other ballot question was answered more decisively: 77% of voters were against “extreme farm animal confinement.” No more eggs from cramped chickens.
But that’s another story.
Pondiscio explains that education reformers have been “too enamored of our own civil-rights-issue-of-our-time rhetoric to worry much about building a constituency among the middle class.” In other words, we’re out of touch.
Continue reading here.
The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty Inc. is trying to add momentum to the push for Milwaukee charter schools with a study released Thursday arguing they have a substantial positive economic impact.
The study argues students attending voucher schools or participating in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program generate a higher economic benefit than those attending Milwaukee Public Schools. William Flanders, research director for the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, or WILL, said the study lends weight to arguments for lifting income caps for students eligible for the choice schools program, or toward easing the process for private schools to buy vacant MPS buildings.
Read the rest here.
What should be done when a beneficial service or product is in such demand that many who want or need it can’t get it?
In business, the answer is obvious: Increase supply to satisfy all of the demand.
Not so in government, in this case the New Jersey public education establishment. Its answer to more parents and students seeking to use the state’s school choice program is to limit statewide participation to about 5,000 students a year, maybe indefinitely.
Keep reading here.
Noel Candelaria, president of the Texas State Teachers Association, criticized school choice reforms in a recent guest column.
As an advocate for school choice, I have to agree with his criticisms that some school choice programs in the past have been too small and have only benefitted some children. I believe that the best program for Texas would be education savings accounts that would allow every child in Texas, public or private, rich or poor, black, white or brown to take their share of their education funding to the school of the parents' choice, public or private.
ESAs would be a voluntary program, but in the best-case scenario, they would be available to every Texas child.
Keep reading this article here.