This post was written by guest-bloggers Carrie Bakken, Program Coordinator & Teacher at Avalon Charter School, and Julene Oxton, Innovation Coordinator for Lakeville Public Schools and a lead developer of Impact Academy. They are ambassadors for the Teacher-Powered Schools Initiative, run by Education Evolving and CTQ.
As long time educators and members of teacher teams that have started teacher-powered schools in Minnesota—Impact...
On Tuesday, the Senate confirmed Betsy DeVos as education secretary, 51-50. In an unprecedented move, Vice President Pence had to cast the tie-breaking vote after two Republican senators went against party lines.
After her confirmation, American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten issued a press release, in which she wrote, “DeVos shows an antipathy for public schools;...
Across the country, a growing movement of teacher teams at over 100 schools in 18 states are transforming student learning and the teaching profession through teacher-powered schools—that is, schools designed and run by teams of teachers. Over the weekend, 275 educators and advocates from 22 states gathered in Los Angeles for the second Teacher-Powered Schools National Conference.
The conference, hosted by Education Evolving (EE) and the Center for Teaching...
Yesterday, the Minnesota House of Representative’s Education Finance Committee, chaired by Representative Loon, convened to hear an overview on Minnesota charter schools. This was the first time since 2009 that the Committee had a meeting dedicated to the state’s charter schools.
The meeting began with testimony from Ember Reichgott Junge, a former democratic state senator and author of the state’s original 1991 charter school law.
Junge provided an overview of the history of chartering and made the point that the original law received bipartisan support and was the middle...
Last summer the 74, an education news nonprofit, published the book, The Founders, by Richard Whitmire. The book chronicles the history of charter management organizations (CMOs) and how they have brought “high-performing” chartered schools to scale throughout the country.
While some may question Whitmire’s narrow definition of high-performing (namely test scores), his book brings up a couple of questions about chartering for Minnesota: Why...
For the past five months, we have followed the development of Minnesota’s state accountability plan as mandated by the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). While the US Department of Education (USDE) has defined what must be included in four of the plans' required indicators, states have the freedom to choose which measures they will include in their fifth indicator, of school quality/student success (SQ/SS).
As...
Two studies published by Education Next (EdNext) earlier this month conclude that parents seem to be happier with their children’s schools when they are able to choose them.
The first study was an analysis of data from the 2012 National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) survey, which was given to a representative sample of 17,166 households. In the survey, the US Department of Education asked parents about their satisfaction with their child’s school. While the data was...
On December 15, the US Department of Education (USDE) announced the launch of the Education Innovation Research (EIR) grant competition, which was established under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), for 2017. President Obama has requested $180 million for the program in his FY 2017 budget, though the money has not yet been appropriated.
The purpose of the bi-partisan grant competition is to support...
This post is the third in our series (see earlier posts June 27 and Sept. 21) on the progress that the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) has made developing the state’s new accountability plan, as required under the year-old federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)....
On December 6th, the Minnesota Association of Charter Schools (MACS) hosted a luncheon in St. Paul to honor the winners of the first Minnesota Charter School Innovation Awards. The award program, which is the first of its kind in Minnesota, was created to showcase some of the most innovative practices being used in Minnesota’s charter schools and to also focus attention on the important role innovation should be playing in the development of charter schools, according to MACS...
