Over the past few weeks, the growing animosity between different education organizations and advocates regarding the merits of charter versus traditional district schools has dominated the news cycle.
Last week, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), released a report which concluded that “even the best charters are not a substitute for more stable, adequate and equitable investments in public education in communities...
Yesterday, a twelve-member task force, convened by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), released a report on “Quality Education.” The task force was formed in December 2016 after the NAACP’s October 2016 call for a national moratorium on expanding charter schools until a set of conditions were met.
The charge of the task force was to bring forward “...
Yesterday, the Minnesota House and Senate’s Education Policy Committees held a joint hearing on the state’s Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) accountability plan. Even though ESSA does not require that a state’s legislature approve the state accountability plan, it does indicate that it should be developed with “timely and meaningful consultation” of the legislature. Also, there was a provision included in Minnesota’s 2017 legislative session’s...
On July 4th, the vast majority of the 7,000 delegates from the National Education Association (NEA) voted to adopt a new charter school policy statement. The new statement is an overhaul of NEA’s former charter school policy statement that they had adopted in 2001.
A lot has changed since 2001, when chartering was just ten years old and the national enrollment was only 571,...
Over the past 20 years, the number of English learner (EL) students in Minnesota has increased by 300 percent, making them the state’s fastest growing student group, and they currently constitute 8.3 percent of the state’s K-12 public education student enrollment. However, despite the rapid growth, their academic progress, as compared to their non-EL peers, has stalled.
In order to address the gaps that EL students face in the state’s public education system, the Coalition of Asian American Leaders and the Minnesota Educational Equity Partnership founded the...
“How can you meet the needs of each student?” New Hampshire’s Deputy Commissioner Paul Leather asked a crowd of teachers, administrators, legislators, and organizational leaders. “Hold that question in your mind as you do the work.”
Last Thursday, about 100 attendees gathered to hear and learn about New Hampshire’s first-of-its-kind Performance Assessment of Competency Education (PACE) state accountability system from two of its architects—Deputy Commissioner Leather, and the state’s PACE curriculum director,...
This past week over 4,200 advocates, teachers, policymakers, administrators, consultants, and board members attended the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools’ (NAPCS) 2017 National Charter School Conference in Washington DC.
The conference boasted over 135 sessions, which were broken into five different strands—governance, policy, leadership, operations, and instruction. Some of the “featured” topics included social-emotional learning, innovation in K-12, in-house teacher prep, the role of charter authorizers, and how ESSA will...
This post is the fourth in our series, (see earlier posts from June 2016, Sept. 2016, and Dec. 2016) on the progress that the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) has made developing the state’...
Last night, Governor Dayton signed the policy and funding bills that laid out Minnesota’s next two-year, $46 billion dollar budget, which includes over $18 billion for K-12 education.
However, even though Governor Dayton signed the bills, he used his line-item veto power to eliminate funding for the Legislature, which will likely force another special session. In a letter to the Speaker and Majority leaders, Governor Dayton asserted that he would only...
The word "innovation" is in vogue. Back in March, during our committee testimony on the Innovation Zone bill in the Minnesota Senate, I used the term myself. But what does it really mean? Is it synonymous with "invention," or does it include spreading existing ideas? Is it about creating new schools, or about improving what's being done? To clarify this sometimes fuzzy term, and to explore its role in the strategy for improving public education, I offer here a definition.
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