Education Next, Author at Education Next https://www.educationnext.org/author/education-next/ A Journal of Opinion and Research About Education Policy Tue, 02 Jul 2024 13:24:43 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.5 https://i0.wp.com/www.educationnext.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/e-logo.png?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1 Education Next, Author at Education Next https://www.educationnext.org/author/education-next/ 32 32 181792879 The Education Exchange: Are Teachers Paid Enough? https://www.educationnext.org/the-education-exchange-are-teachers-paid-enough/ Mon, 08 Jul 2024 08:50:11 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718444 An ambitious Chicago union proposal would make city’s educators among highest compensated in U.S.

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Photo of Chad AldemanChad Aldeman, the founder of Read Not Guess, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss how teachers are paid, and how recent demands by the Chicago Teachers Union could impact the teacher salary landscape.

Watch Aldeman’s panel from “A Modern Teaching Profession,” a conference hosted by the Program on Education Policy and Governance, here:

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The Education Exchange: Catholic Education at a Crossroads https://www.educationnext.org/the-education-exchange-catholic-education-at-a-crossroads/ Mon, 01 Jul 2024 08:49:44 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718423 Triumphant through the pandemic, Chicago’s Catholic schools face headwinds with the end of Illinois’s tax credit scholarship program

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Photo of Greg RichmondGreg Richmond, the superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of Chicago, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss the challenges Catholic schools have faced through the years, and how they are navigating the current school choice landscape.

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The Education Exchange: When Presidents Speak on Education, They Only Divide the Public Further https://www.educationnext.org/the-education-exchange-presidents-do-not-influence-public-opinion-on-k-12-education/ Mon, 24 Jun 2024 08:40:12 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718345 An analysis of polling since 2009 finds neither Obama, Trump, nor Biden have been able to change overall public opinion

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Photo of David HoustonDavid Houston, an Assistant Professor at George Mason University, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss Houston’s latest research, which investgiates what happens to public opinion when prominent partisan officials intervene in education policy debates.

Houston’s working paper, “How the Engagement of High-Profile Partisan Officials Affects Education Politics, Public Opinion, and Polarization,” co-written with Alyssa Barone, is available now.

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The Education Exchange: Charter Schools Better at Preparing Girls to Vote https://www.educationnext.org/the-education-exchange-charter-schools-better-at-preparing-girls-to-vote/ Mon, 17 Jun 2024 08:50:46 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718342 Evidence from Boston charters elevates female—but not male—attendance, SAT taking, and civic participation

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Photo of Sarah CohodesSarah Cohodes, an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss Cohodes’ recent research, showing how education can increase civic participation.

Why Education Increases Voting,” co-written with James J. Feigenbaum, is available now.

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Why Some Charters Care Less About Learning https://www.educationnext.org/why-some-charters-care-less-about-learning/ Thu, 13 Jun 2024 09:09:33 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718167 Urban charter schools have shifted their mission from excellence to social justice

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Education Next senior editor Paul E. Peterson recently spoke with Steven Wilson, senior fellow at the Center on Reinventing Public Education and a founder of the Ascend Learning charter-school network, about how some urban charters have changed their educational mission.

Paul Peterson: The tentative title of your forthcoming book is The Lost Decade. We had school closures for a year or two. Why do you say a “lost decade”?

Steven Wilson: I would point to a change in what schools in the reform movement are driving toward. For a long time, the essence of urban charters in the KIPP mold was to do whatever it takes to advance student achievement—to attend to what was called the 101 percent solution, because there’s no silver bullet for raising achievement. Internally, the test for every decision in the network or the school was “Does this advance student achievement?”

But now, that has really changed, as what I would call social-justice education has begun to substitute for the focus on an academic education. The new test of decisions is to make them as anti-racist as possible. So, in the largest sense, academics are less of a focus, and the new focus is on social justice.

Photo of Steven Wilson
Steven Wilson

You mentioned that everything was done with student achievement in mind. At Ascend Learning and other schools like it, what were you doing to maximize student learning?

The essence is an operating system that was much more favorable to student achievement than district schools. That operating system is the charter bargain. In starting a charter school, you have a degree of authority and autonomy to do things that really matter, like being able to hire and fire the faculty of your choice, being able to choose the curriculum that works best, control your budget—all things which principals in traditional, large urban schools have relatively little control over. The charter bargain was this fundamental change in the operating system on which we could build good schools.

But then you need an effective program, and that was a much more rigorous curriculum, enormous attention to who was in the classroom, an outsized investment in teacher professional development, a degree of internal accountability, frequent assessment, unalloyed conviction that testing matters and is our guide to whether students are actually learning—all of those things.

These schools, beginning with KIPP, put a focus on having an orderly, engaging classroom where students can achieve a little bit of academic success reliably every period. And those little successes add up academically, but also in terms of student motivation and commitment to the learning project. Those were some of the big drivers.

Given the success story, why is there a change developing within this very sector? Is it being forced upon them by some kind of external pressures, or is this coming from within the charter sector?

No, it’s not coming from within so much as from new employees. If we think back to 2008 when Teach for America was at its peak of popularity, 11% of the graduating class of Yale applied. Teach for America was thought of as a very sexy, exciting thing to do. Well, that changed. It began with a change in the culture on campus, a turning away from a liberal education. There was a new progressive left that emerged that was wary of traditional liberal arts commitments. The idea of exposing students to multiple competing points of view to have them spar with different ideas shifted.

Now, the focus was on eradicating racism, which was identified as the cause of the disparities in educational outcomes. That’s a very different premise. In the previous premise, the cause of the disparities that everybody laments and views as intolerable is that they’re getting a bad quality education. The new school of thought was that the cause of the disparities was racism. This gathered further steam, of course, with the murder of George Floyd and the racial reckoning, when the ideas of Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo took on enormous force, both on campus and in these networks. And those ideas are in very substantial tension with the traditional commitments of no-excuses schooling.

Allegedly racist dimensions included things that we would take as absolutely ordinary, if not admirable: the notion of excellence, urgency, objectivity—all those things were now deemed to be symptoms of white supremacy culture.

I’m aware of this argument, and I know that it’s being articulated on college campuses. But how does it penetrate into charter schools?

It penetrates very deeply. This list of supposed characteristics of white supremacist culture are in circulation, both in elite higher ed institutions like Harvard, but also in community colleges. In New York City, educators were trained in that very same dictate. So it’s very pervasive. And when you introduce that into these kinds of high-performing school networks, you can imagine it introduced a tremendous amount of rancor, because long-standing staff members did not conceive of themselves as racist. They had extraordinary results in their own classrooms, in the schools that they ran as principals, but suddenly they were being called out as effectively racist.

I want to be careful. Equity is a very, very good thing. But that’s what we all thought we were doing. We were advancing equity by offering children an exceptional education. And the results were stunning. KIPP students who attended both a KIPP middle school and a KIPP high school were achieving four-year college graduation rates just about equal to white non-disadvantaged students. Really a remarkable record.

Is there evidence that these schools have in fact become not as effective? Do we see anything in terms of student achievement that suggests this is all that harmful?

What we are beginning to see anecdotally is that very high-flying, no-excuses schools are starting to turn in results that have often plummeted to the level of the surrounding district. You might say, “Well, they had closures; there was Covid.” But why would they have fallen so much more than the school systems that they compete with? Both institutions suffered from school closures and the other pandemic effects.

Let’s turn to the future. You say in the tentative subtitle of your book “returning to the fight for school reform.” Returning sounds optimistic. You are saying we can return?

Yes. It will take time to turn back to a focus on excellent academics. A lot of people of all kinds of ideological predispositions are beginning to question what has happened. We can say all children, not just the privileged, should have a super engaging liberal arts education where they grapple with different ideas, competing ideas, other cultures—that is the most stimulating place you could possibly be. That’s the classroom you want to be in. We can absolutely return to that. And that is, I think, what we need to do.

This is an edited excerpt from an Education Exchange podcast.

This article appeared in the Summer 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Education Next. (2024). Why Some Charters Care Less About Learning. Education Next, 24(3), 83-84.

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The Education Exchange: Universal ESAs Elevated as Key Issue in Texas Primary Runoff https://www.educationnext.org/the-education-exchange-universal-esas-elevated-as-key-issue-in-texas-primary-runoff/ Mon, 10 Jun 2024 08:50:17 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718327 Governor Abbott orchestrates victory for pro-voucher GOP candidates

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Photo of Cal JillsonCal Jillson, a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Southern Methodist University, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s effort to oust Texas House Republicans in primary races who have opposed his statewide Education Savings Account initiative.

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The Education Exchange: Biden Budget Cuts Would Block New Charters, Advocate Says https://www.educationnext.org/the-education-exchange-biden-budget-cuts-would-block-new-charters-advocate-says/ Mon, 03 Jun 2024 08:50:33 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718253 But bipartisan coalition in Congress expected to keep funding intact

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Photo of Christy WolfeChristy Wolfe, the senior vice president for policy, research, and planning for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, joins the Education Exchange to discuss what the budget cuts proposed by the Biden Administration could spell for charter schools.

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The Education Exchange: Should Homeschooling Be Regulated? https://www.educationnext.org/the-education-exchange-is-the-pandemic-era-surge-in-homeschooling-holding/ Tue, 28 May 2024 08:50:04 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718252 Home education is expanding in multiple directions, but some want to rein it in

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Photo of Dan HamlinDaniel Hamlin, an associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Oklahoma, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss efforts to regulate homeschooling rules in states, and the upcoming Emerging School Models: Maintaining the Momentum conference, which will be hosted by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance on Sept. 12 and 13, 2023.

Learn more about the conference, and register to attend, here.

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The Education Exchange: Beware of the Easy A https://www.educationnext.org/the-education-exchange-beware-of-the-easy-a/ Mon, 20 May 2024 08:54:13 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718184 Evidence from North Carolina shows the folly of education policies that lower expectations to improve achievement

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Photo of Brooks BowdenBrooks Bowden, an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss Bowden’s latest research, which looks into the effects of lenient grading and standards on student learning.

The Unintended Consequences of Academic Leniency,” co-written with Viviana Rodriguez and Zach Weingarten, is available now.

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The Education Exchange: Social Media and the Struggle for Happiness https://www.educationnext.org/the-education-exchange-social-media-and-the-struggle-for-happiness/ Mon, 13 May 2024 08:55:25 +0000 https://www.educationnext.org/?p=49718162 A grassroots movement strives for the wellbeing of youths in the digital age

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Photo of Larissa MayLarissa May, the founder of #HalfTheStory, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss how May’s organization is working to help teens change social media.

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