Educational Choice News

Government-dictated school segregation through much of American history was a gross injustice, treating people unequally under the law and crushing their rights to associate freely with others. School choice is the opposite, grounded in the right of all to freely choose their schools rather than have government decide to whom school doors will be opened or closed. Yet a column in the New York Times asserts that “choice is the enemy of justice.”

Columnist Erin Aubrey Kaplan is frustrated that charter schools enable people to attend institutions that are not racially integrated, violating “a social contract” that, she intimates, promises integration. She doesn’t identify where or how that contract is spelled out, but her frustration is utterly understandable: Long after legally mandated segregation ended, racial integration still seems incredibly far off.

Continue reading "School Choice: Friend To Justice And Integration" from Forbes.

In 1947, my father was one of a small group of black students at the largely white Fremont High School in South Central Los Angeles. The group was met with naked hostility, including a white mob hanging blacks in effigy. But such painful confrontations were the nature of progress, of fulfilling the promise of equality that had driven my father’s family from Louisiana to Los Angeles in the first place.

In 1972, I was one of a slightly bigger group of black students bused to a predominantly white elementary school in Westchester, a community close to the beach in Los Angeles. While I didn’t encounter the overt hostility my father had, I did experience resistance, including being barred once from entering a white classmate’s home because, she said matter-of-factly as she stood in the doorway, she didn’t let black people (she used a different word) in her house.

Continue reading "Opinion: School Choice Is the Enemy of Justice" from the New York Times.

Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, in a speech last year, gave a strong hint at his views on taxpayer support for religious schools when he praised his “first judicial hero,” Justice William Rehnquist, for determining that the strict wall between church and state “was wrong as a matter of law and history.”

Mr. Rehnquist’s legacy on religious issues was most profound in “ensuring that religious schools and religious institutions could participate as equals in society and in state benefits programs,” Judge Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to succeed Justice Anthony M. Kennedy on the Supreme Court, declared at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research organization.

Continue reading "Kavanaugh Could Unlock Funding for Religious Education, School Voucher Advocates Say" from the New York Times. 

Proponents of school choice offer many arguments for charter authorizations, vouchers and education tax credits. For parents, the reasons are often straightforward. Some cite better discipline, dress codes and an emphasis on teaching their traditional or religious values. Others mention plentiful school supplies, increased personal attention or a shorter commute to school.

Continue reading "The Moral Logic of School Choice" from the Wall Street Journal. 

When the diocese in Memphis shut down the once promising Jubilee Catholic Schools, I was surprised like many others in the Catholic education community. What happened, and what can we learn from it?

There is a range of views, but a diagnosis of lessons learned from what we can see from outside Memphis is in order. An autopsy is a growth opportunity to learn from failure. A post mortem of a failed school or network requires a thorough examination to determine the cause and manner of the failure and an evaluation of any practices or characteristics that may be present for further research, network development or educational purposes. These procedures, while tough, are vital if other Catholic schools and networks hope to avoid the same fate and, instead, thrive in an ever-diversifying educational marketplace.

Good leaders learn from failure. To do that, we need to understand what happened in Memphis. Here is what I learned from a post mortem of Jubilee Schools, along with solutions to transform Catholic education—especially in high-poverty communities.

Continue reading "The Next 200 Years: A Post Mortem of the Once Promising Jubilee Catholic Schools" from EdChoice.