Educational Choice News

School choice has created unique challenges for cities—especially when it comes to making sure parents can navigate all the school options before them. 

Civic and community leaders across the country have been experimenting with solutions to help ease the process parents must face when applying and enrolling their children in cities with lots of public schooling choices. Indianapolis is the latest city to launch a single application and enrollment system for all of its district, magnet, and charter schools.

Continue reading "School Choice Creates Challenges for Parents. What Are Cities Doing to Help?" From Education Week. 

A team of economists from elite universities recently published a study suggesting that parents can’t truly assess school quality. Profiling the paper, The Atlantic notes that “if these results hold up under scrutiny by other economists … they could prove problematic for school-choice advocates.” But fortunately for them, this study merely shows that professors are far more ignorant than parents.

The study, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, examines the preferences revealed by families’ choices when applying to New York City high schools. The authors found that families can identify and select quality schools that drive better outcomes for their children. So how is this happy story evidence of failure?

Continue reading "Parents – Not Economists – Know Best" From RealClearEducation. 

Accountability. On its surface, the word simply means a willingness to accept responsibility for one’s actions. Accountability as applied to schools, however, has become so twisted and polarizing that it is now the equivalent of a dirty word. To mention it is to risk being met with stern, disapproving looks and accusations of being anti-teacher and a corporate raider looking to profit off the backs of kids. What? How did we get here?

As with all polarizing issues, the truth is much more nuanced and requires us to look beyond the sound bites. The “A” Word seeks to do that through conversations with recognized education leaders.

Continue reading "The ‘A‘ Word: Accountability — The Dirty Word of Today’s Education Reform" from The 74.

Dozens of educators, researchers, and students gathered at the Graduate School of Education Tuesday to discuss research on school choice in New York City public schools.

Princeton sociology professor Jennifer L. Jennings headlined the event, the second installment in the Center for Education Policy Research public seminar series. Jennings’s research focuses on finding a way to level the playing field in New York City’s school matching program—since 2004, eighth graders in the city have been required to rank their preferred high schools, a program that Jennings and other have found to lead to disparate educational outcomes.

Continue reading "At Ed School, Researcher Talks New York City School Choice" from The Harvard Crimson.

The Black Alliance for Educational Options is shutting down for good at the end of the year, the group announced on its website Wednesday.

Founded by school choice pioneer Howard Fuller, BAEO is the only group at the national level focused exclusively on expanding school choice for low-income and working class African-American families—both through charter schools and school vouchers.

But the school choice advocacy world has become increasingly crowded in the 18 years since BAEO's founding, said Fuller who sits on the group's board, and that's meant more competition for visibility and funding.

"Some organizations, and ours is one of them, have a shelf-life," he said. "And we just reached a point where we had done great work but didn't see the ability to continue to do that work going forward."

Continue reading "The Only National Black School Choice Advocacy Group Is Folding" from Education Week.