Download or read book A Smarter Charter written by Richard D. Kahlenberg and published by Teachers College Press. This book was released on 2014-09-19 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Moving beyond the debate over whether or not charter schools should exist, A Smarter Charter wrestles with the question of what kind of charter schools we should encourage. The authors begin by tracing the evolution of charter schools from Albert Shanker's original vision of giving teachers room to innovate while educating a diverse population of students, to today's charter schools where student segregation levels are even higher than in traditional public schools. In the second half of the book, the authors examine two key reforms currently seen in a small but growing number of charter schools, socioeconomic integration and teacher voice, that have the potential to improve performance and reshape the stereotypical image of what it means to be a charter school.

Download or read book The Charter School Experiment written by Christopher A. Lubienski and published by Harvard Education Press. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When charter schools first arrived on the American educational scene, few observers suspected that within two decades thousands of these schools would be established, serving almost a million and a half children across forty states. The widespread popularity of these schools, and of the charter movement itself, speaks to the unique and chronic desire for substantive change in American education. As an innovation in governance, the ultimate goal of the charter movement is to improve learning opportunities for all students—not only those who attend charter schools but also students in public schools that are affected by competition from charters. In The Charter School Experiment, a select group of leading scholars traces the development of one of the most dynamic and powerful areas of education reform. Contributors with varying perspectives on the charter movement carefully evaluate how well charter schools are fulfilling the goals originally set out for them: introducing competition to the school sector, promoting more equitable access to quality schools, and encouraging innovation to improve educational outcomes. They explore the unintended effects of the charter school experiment over the past two decades, and conclude that charter schools are entering a new phase of their development, beginning to serve purposes significantly different from those originally set out for them.

Download or read book Reinventing Public Education written by Paul Hill and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-02-15 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A heated debate is raging over our nation’s public schools and how they should be reformed, with proposals ranging from imposing national standards to replacing public education altogether with a voucher system for private schools. Combining decades of experience in education, the authors propose an innovative approach to solving the problems of our school system and find a middle ground between these extremes. Reinventing Public Education shows how contracting would radically change the way we operate our schools, while keeping them public and accessible to all, and making them better able to meet standards of achievement and equity. Using public funds, local school boards would select private providers to operate individual schools under formal contracts specifying the type and quality of instruction. In a hands-on, concrete fashion, the authors provide a thorough explanation of the pros and cons of school contracting and how it would work in practice. They show how contracting would free local school boards from operating schools so they can focus on improving educational policy; how it would allow parents to choose the best school for their children; and, finally, how it would ensure that schools are held accountable and academic standards are met. While retaining a strong public role in education, contracting enables schools to be more imaginative, adaptable, and suited to the needs of children and families. In presenting an alternative vision for America’s schools, Reinventing Public Education is too important to be ignored.

Download or read book School s Choice written by Wagma Mommandi and published by Teachers College Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Access issues are pivotal to almost all charter school tensions and debates. How well are these schools performing? Are they segregating and stratifying? Are they public and democratic? Are they fairly funded? Can apparent successes be scaled up? Answers to all these core questions hinge on how access to charter schools is shaped. This book describes the incentives and pressures on charter schools to restrict access and examines how charters navigate those pressures, explaining access-restricting practices in relation to the ecosystem within which charter schools are created. It also explains how charters have sometimes responded by resisting the pressures and sometimes by surrendering to them. The text presents analyses of 13 different types of practices around access, each of which shapes the school’s enrollment. The authors conclude by offering recommendations for how states and authorizers can address access-related inequities that arise in the charter sector. School’s Choice provides timely information on critical academic and policy issues that will come into play as charter school policy continues to evolve. Book Features: Examines how charter schools control who gains and retains access.Explores policies and practices that undermine equitable admission and encourage opportunity hoarding.Offers a set of policy recommendations at the state and federal level to address access-related issues.

Download or read book The Charter School Landscape written by Sandra Vergari and published by University of Pittsburgh Press. This book was released on 2002-07-19 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charter schools are publicly funded entities that enjoy freedom from many of the regulations under which traditional public schools operate. There are, however, state and local variations in charter school legislation and implementation. The Charter School Landscape is the first book to analyze and compare charter school politics and policies across a broad range of jurisdictions.The first charter school opened in Minnesota in 1992. Within nine years, there were more than 2,000 charter schools operating in thirty-four states, Washington, D.C., and Alberta, Canada. Public discourse on the charter school reform is often passionate and politically motivated. Sandra Vergari has assembled a group of experts to present a more reflective and scholarly discussion of the reform, its performance to date, and its implications for public policy.Each chapter focuses on a single state or province, and systematically addresses such issues as charter school laws, the politics of policy implementation, charter school accountability, controversies and trends, and prospects for the future. In addition, the contributors emphasize significant issues specific to each state that offer lessons for analysts and policymakers everywhere. As a whole, The Charter School Landscape suggests that charter schools are having a significant impact on the institution of public education and how we think about the concept of the "real public school."

Download or read book The Charter School Challenge written by Bryan C. Hassel and published by Brookings Institution Press. This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charter schools have become a national phenomenon, garnering praise from both Democrats and Republicans. Because they appear to sidestep both political stalemate and the practical difficulty of implementing widespread change--the traditional barriers to improvement in American public education--charter schools hold great promise as an educational reform. Now, with charter laws on the books in more than thirty states, Bryan Hassel investigates whether charter schools have been able to avoid the pitfalls that have tripped up so many other "revolutionary" school reforms. After a broad overview of how charter laws have been adopted nationwide, this book focuses in depth on charter schools in Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Michigan. Hassel reviews the four states' implementation of charter laws and whether their programs are providing sufficient autonomy, resources, and potential to influence the broader education system--all essential components for charter schools' success. He concludes that if states want to give charter schools a full test, they should empower nonlocal entities to approve charter schools, establish the schools as distinct local entities, allow full per-pupil funding to go with students to the charter schools, and impose minimal constraints on the source and number of charter schools. The schools themselves will need to improve their infrastructure, and charter-granting agencies will have to rebuild the systems for monitoring schools' academic results and compliance with regulations. These policies are vital if charter schools are to realize their potential as a significant educational reform.

Download or read book Charter Schools in Action written by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2001-07-30 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can charter schools save public education? This radical question has unleashed a flood of opinions from Americans struggling with the contentious challenges of education reform. There has been plenty of heat over charter schools and their implications, but, until now, not much light. This important new book supplies plenty of illumination. Charter schools--independently operated public schools of choice--have existed in the United States only since 1992, yet there are already over 1,500 of them. How are they doing? Here prominent education analysts Chester Finn, Bruno Manno, and Gregg Vanourek offer the richest data available on the successes and failures of this exciting but controversial approach to education reform. After studying one hundred schools, interviewing hundreds of participants, surveying thousands more, and analyzing the most current data, they have compiled today's most authoritative, comprehensive explanation and appraisal of the charter phenomenon. Fact-filled, clear-eyed, and hard-hitting, this is the book for anyone concerned about public education and interested in the role of charter schools in its renewal. Can charter schools boost student achievement, drive educational innovation, and develop a new model of accountability for public schools? Where did the idea of charter schools come from? What would the future hold if this phenomenon spreads? These are some of the questions that this book answers. It addresses pupil performance, enrollment patterns, school start-up problems, charges of inequity, and smoldering political battles. It features close-up looks at five real--and very different--charter schools and two school districts that have been deeply affected by the charter movement, including their setbacks and triumphs. After outlining a new model of education accountability and describing how charter schools often lead to community renewal, the authors take the reader on an imaginary tour of a charter-based school system. Charter schools are the most vibrant force in education today. This book suggests that their legacy will consist not only of helping millions of families obtain a better education for their children but also in renewing American public education itself.

Download or read book The Public School Advantage written by Christopher A. Lubienski and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly the whole of America’s partisan politics centers on a single question: Can markets solve our social problems? And for years this question has played out ferociously in the debates about how we should educate our children. From the growth of vouchers and charter schools to the implementation of No Child Left Behind, policy makers have increasingly turned to market-based models to help improve our schools, believing that private institutions—because they are competitively driven—are better than public ones. With The Public School Advantage, Christopher A. and Sarah Theule Lubienski offer powerful evidence to undercut this belief, showing that public schools in fact outperform private ones. For decades research showing that students at private schools perform better than students at public ones has been used to promote the benefits of the private sector in education, including vouchers and charter schools—but much of these data are now nearly half a century old. Drawing on two recent, large-scale, and nationally representative databases, the Lubienskis show that any benefit seen in private school performance now is more than explained by demographics. Private schools have higher scores not because they are better institutions but because their students largely come from more privileged backgrounds that offer greater educational support. After correcting for demographics, the Lubienskis go on to show that gains in student achievement at public schools are at least as great and often greater than those at private ones. Even more surprising, they show that the very mechanism that market-based reformers champion—autonomy—may be the crucial factor that prevents private schools from performing better. Alternatively, those practices that these reformers castigate, such as teacher certification and professional reforms of curriculum and instruction, turn out to have a significant effect on school improvement. Despite our politics, we all agree on the fundamental fact: education deserves our utmost care. The Public School Advantage offers exactly that. By examining schools within the diversity of populations in which they actually operate, it provides not ideologies but facts. And the facts say it clearly: education is better off when provided for the public by the public.

Download or read book Charter Schools and Accountability in Public Education written by Paul T. Hill and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2004-05-13 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Charter schools are among the most debated and least understood phenomena in American education today. At the heart of these matters is a contested question of accountability. To survive, charter schools must make and keep promises about what students will experience and learn under their purview. However, unlike public schools, charter schools do not rely exclusively on their relationship with school districts. They must also look to parents, teachers, and donors to cooperatively establish expectations of a particular school and its mission. Aimed toward elected officials, school reform activists, and educators, this book is the result of the first national-scale study of charter school accountability. The authors researched one hundred-fifty schools and sixty authorizing agencies in Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Massachusetts, and Michigan. These states contain the majority of charter schools that have been operating for three years or more and represent the major differences in state charter school legislation. The authors include interviews from a range of participants in the field©¡from state legislators and administrators to principals, teachers, and parents. In assessing the structure of accountability as it works internally to bolster external confidence, Hill and Lake suggest the struggle of charter schools actually complements those of standards based reform. Both seek to transform public education to make schools responsible for performance, not compliance.

Download or read book The B A Breakthrough written by Richard Whitmire and published by . This book was released on 2019-04 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Future of Educational Entrepreneurship written by Frederick M. Hess and published by Harvard Education Press. This book was released on 2008-09-01 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Future of Educational Entrepreneurship examines the challenge of creating innovative and productive entrepreneurial activity in American education. In the course of exploring these challenges, the book considers a number of crucial issues and circumstances: existing “barriers to entry” that prohibit or obstruct entrepreneurial efforts; the availability—and frequent lack—of venture capital for fueling entrepreneurial activities; the effort to sponsor and create a sufficiently large population of talented educational entrepreneurs; and questions about research, development, and quality control in the burgeoning entrepreneurial sector. A field that is likely to grow in size and importance in the years to come, educational entrepreneurship receives much-needed attention, analysis, and elucidation in this lively, wide-ranging book.

Download or read book Charter School City written by Douglas N. Harris and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2020-07-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the wake of the tragedy and destruction that came with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, public schools in New Orleans became part of an almost unthinkable experiment—eliminating the traditional public education system and completely replacing it with charter schools and school choice. Fifteen years later, the results have been remarkable, and the complex lessons learned should alter the way we think about American education. New Orleans became the first US city ever to adopt a school system based on the principles of markets and economics. When the state took over all of the city’s public schools, it turned them over to non-profit charter school managers accountable under performance-based contracts. Students were no longer obligated to attend a specific school based upon their address, allowing families to act like consumers and choose schools in any neighborhood. The teacher union contract, tenure, and certification rules were eliminated, giving schools autonomy and control to hire and fire as they pleased. In Charter School City, Douglas N. Harris provides an inside look at how and why these reform decisions were made and offers many surprising findings from one of the most extensive and rigorous evaluations of a district school reform ever conducted. Through close examination of the results, Harris finds that this unprecedented experiment was a noteworthy success on almost every measurable student outcome. But, as Harris shows, New Orleans was uniquely situated for these reforms to work well and that this market-based reform still required some specific and active roles for government. Letting free markets rule on their own without government involvement will not generate the kinds of changes their advocates suggest. Combining the evidence from New Orleans with that from other cities, Harris draws out the broader lessons of this unprecedented reform effort. At a time when charter school debates are more based on ideology than data, this book is a powerful, evidence-based, and in-depth look at how we can rethink the roles for governments, markets, and nonprofit organizations in education to ensure that America’s schools fulfill their potential for all students.

Download or read book A Vision of Hope written by and published by . This book was released on 2021-01-20 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book reviews the benefits of Catholic education in Massachusetts, and offers recommendations to help these schools increase student enrollment. It includes nine chapters from a range of authors; a foreword by George Weigel, author of an international bestselling two-part biography of Pope St. John Paul II; and an introduction from former Ambassadors to the Holy See Raymond Flynn and Mary Ann Glendon. The book contends that Catholic schools in Massachusetts must focus on the characteristics that make them academically successful and distinguish them from traditional public schools, but must also seek new models and governance structures that will help them achieve financial sustainability. At the same time, barriers to public support of the schools should be eliminated. Catholic schools in Massachusetts deliver high test scores, high college attendance and graduation rates. The majority of elementary schools in the Archdiocese of Boston are in urban areas and disproportionately serve poor and minority families. Parents of all faiths and beliefs are also drawn to the unrelenting focus on achievement, classic liberal arts education, discipline and values that are part of a Catholic education. Despite these outstanding results, the number of Catholic schools in Boston has fallen from 225 in 1942 to 124 in 2020. Twenty have closed since 2015 and another 10 have shuttered during the pandemic, with a disproportionate impact on poor and working-class communities. Catholic educators are developing new models to address these challenges, and the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue was an important step toward invalidating so-called Blaine Amendments to the constitutions of Massachusetts and many other states that prohibit public money from flowing to religious schools. The book includes a proposal for a tax credit scholarship program for Massachusetts that would likely have been impermissible prior to Espinoza.

Download or read book Resources in Education written by and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 836 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Hearing on Charter Schools written by United States. Congress. House. Committee on Education and the Workforce. Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Youth, and Families and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Learning on the Job written by Steven F. Wilson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The organizations -- Business models -- School designs -- School culture -- Execution -- School leaders -- Politics and schools -- Academic results -- Business results.

Download or read book Evidence Based Education Policy written by David Bridges and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-06-15 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book raises important questions about the extent to which policy can be derived from research and about the kind of evidence which should inform policy. Challenges contemporary orthodoxies and offers constructive alternatives Critiques the narrower conceptions of evidence which might inform policy advanced by the ‘what works’ movement Investigates the logical gaps between what can be shown by research and the wider political requirements of policy Examines the different educational research traditions e.g. large population studies, individual case studies, personal narratives, action research, philosophy and ‘the romantic turn’ Calls for a more subtle understanding of the ways in which different forms of enquiry may inform policy and practice Discusses the recognition and utilisation of the insights offered by the rich variety of educational research traditions available to us