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Educational Choice News

"Betsy DeVos Waiting for 'Right Time,' Circumstances for a Choice Initiative" from Education Week

on Sunday, 17 September 2017.

U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, who has spent decades advocating for private school vouchers and charter schools, came to Washington with one item at the top of her agenda: to push for a new federal school choice initiative.

Her vision is running into trouble on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers in both chambers have failed to fund either of the school choice proposals in the president's budget. And it's looking less and less likely that the White House will push to include a federal tax credit scholarship program in a sweeping tax overhaul package that's slated to be unveiled soon.

So where does that leave the secretary? She is not giving up, she said in a wide-ranging interview with Education Week last week. And she wants to make sure the administration pursues the best possible school choice policy.

Continue reading "Betsy DeVos Waiting for 'Right Time,' Circumstances for a Choice Initiative" from Education Week.

"New Survey Finds High Support for School Choice Policies Among Millennials" from the Washington Examiner

on Wednesday, 13 September 2017.

Support for charter schools and voucher programs is high among millennials, and especially high among minority millennials, according to a new poll released Tuesday.

The poll was conducted among 1,836 adults between the ages of 18-34 over the summer by GenForward as part of its bimonthly survey of millennials, which is administered by NORC at the University of Chicago. The data published Tuesday focused on how young people view education, probing respondents on three different questions related to school choice policies such as charter schools and vouchers.

Continue reading "New Survey Finds High Support for School Choice Policies Among Millennials" from the Washington Examiner.

"Borsuk: School Choice Expansion Continues in Wisconsin" from the Journal Sentinel.

on Saturday, 09 September 2017.

School choice? Man, we’ve got a heap of it, and the heap got bigger Wednesday in the last hours of work by the Legislature’s budget committee on plans for 2017-'19.   

The last step, involving students with special-education needs, left this a pretty good budget season for school choice advocates.

Given that — and given the large number of people who don’t understand the complicated school choice picture — it’s a good time to offer a general primer on choice in Wisconsin.

Continue reading "Borsuk: School Choice Expansion Continues in Wisconsin" from the Journal Sentinel.

"The Big Picture On School Choice In Detroit" from Forbes

on Thursday, 07 September 2017.

For years, school choice has been expanding nationally. There’s good reason for this steady growth: parents, especially low-income parents, want to decide where to send their kids to school. And the bulk of the evidence shows that school choice – charters, tax credits, vouchers and homeschooling – leads to significant positive educational benefits.

But when parents have a choice, some schools “win” and some “lose.” Unsurprisingly then, the bipartisan school choice movement has witnessed somewhat of a backlash, especially from groups that have a vested interest in the status quo, such as teachers unions.

Continue reading "The Big Picture On School Choice In Detroit" from Forbes.

"Michigan Gambled on Charter Schools. Its Children Lost." from the New York Times Magazine

on Tuesday, 05 September 2017.

Toss a dart at a map of Detroit, and the bull’s-eye, more or less, would be a tiny city called Highland Park. Only three square miles, Highland Park is surrounded by Detroit on nearly all sides, but it remains its own sovereign municipality thanks largely to Henry Ford, who started building Model Ts there in 1910. Ford didn’t care for the idea of paying Detroit taxes, so he pressured Highland Park to resist annexation by the larger city. By the end of the decade, his Albert Kahn-designed factory had revolutionized mass production. Five years later, Walter Chrysler started his own car company a few blocks away.

Sylvia Brown lives in the suburbs now, but she still proudly calls herself a Parker, the local term for a Highland Park native. When Brown was a kid, she’d tell people she lived in the capital of Detroit. Her father worked for the city, and her mother taught at the public elementary school. In high school, Brown played on the volleyball and tennis teams and won a scholarship her junior year to study abroad in Japan. She fretted about traveling such a long distance — she never expected the judges to pick a black girl from Highland Park — but her guidance counselor encouraged her not to be afraid to cross 8 Mile Road, the famous divide between city and suburbs.

 Continue reading "Michigan Gambled on Charter Schools. Its Children Lost." from the New York Times Magazine.