A study of southeast Wisconsin offers some useful policy insights for school improvement industry marketeers and advocates.   more »

Recruitment is to afressing the teacher shortfall as adding water is to fixing a leaky bucket.   more »

School boards and providers: Beware the "one-trick pony"   more »

Brenda Belton shows us just how easy it is to hire friends and family instead of qualified providers.   more »

The market effect is significant and, in the case of Alabama, easy to see.   more »

"And for the most part, not all, but many of them consider the requests coming from parents and teachers - they think it's a nuisance." Not the best rhetorical strategy for DC Public Schools' new boss.   more »

It's a false choice. The arts contribute to literacy and numeracy, and there's no reason the stuff of math and reading can't be the great works of world culture. School improvement providers that fuse the two worlds can only do well as educators wake up to the possibilities.   more »

Norm-referenced tests aimed at an accountability regime based on average student performance give way to criterion-referenced tests based on every student’s performance. There are industry implications.   more »

It's unconscionable, but rational, hard to prove, and might make it easier to serve the kids. Still....   more »

If the back office doesn't work, why should the shop floor?   more »

The battleground is the school district, not the state capital. The antagonsts are parents, not policy wonks. The school improvement industry has an interest and a possible opening.   more »

Better late than never, Superintendent Roosevelt decides teachers should be part of curriculum reform. And an interesting admission from Kaplan management.   more »

School managers serve a purpose beyond raising achievement; it's not clear whether providers dodged a bullet or took one; it will take more than marginal improvements to current operations to get politically significant improvements in student performance.   more »

Not unless you have friends in high places, can recover your customer acquisition costs quickly or the switching costs from your offerings are very prohibitive.   more »

1) If we knew now what we didn’t know then about the influence of tutoring on student proficiency.… 2) The school improvement industry's reputation for quality is no higher than its lowest quality provider....   more »

Pay me now or pay me more later.   more »

Blessing a "race to the bottom" or making the case for national standards?   more »

What can school improvement providers learn from their experience with Paul Vallas? Should Edison or Victory Schools follow him to New Orleans?   more »

Do you?   more »

Superintendents and Chancellors don’t turn school districts around – that's the job of principals and teachers. What they do is establish conditions that make turn-around more likely – budgets, infrastructure, incentives, empowerment, buy-in, and accountability. Michelle Rhee has a record of some sucess in teacher development, but she is not being hired to improve DC's teaching force, she's supposed to manage the district. Can she? Will she?   more »

Here’s where we need to draw the ethical line. It's not the size of the bribe that matters, but breaching the duty of loyalty to students, teachers and taxpayers.   more »

Assignment: Read SES provider spokesperson and Education Industry Association President Steve Pines’ letter to the Chicago Sun Times discussing the poor showing of most local SES providers on state tests. Then read the letter of the law. Identify the gaps and overlaps. Discuss the implications for SES providers and the broader school improvement industry in NCLB reauthorization.....    more »

The private sector is no more entitled to waste federal tax dollars than the public schools. When it comes to poor student performance, the defense that that parents feel good about their children’s teachers is no more relevant for SES providers under NCLB than it is for schools or districts. Applying the rule of student performance equally to schools and providers is about “accountability” to the taxpayer, “equal protection under the law” between schools and providers, and, in the end, the credibility of the entire school improvement industry. Is the taxpayer getting real value here?   more »

When the "product" is people, the imposition of uniformity and top-down directives is no way to achieve high quality outcomes consistently. Seattle's Santorno and DC's Reinoso disagree. Is anyone familiar with the fate of East Germany's Kombinats?   more »

The state's announcement and our earlier take on the effects of the move for the Big Easy and the City of Brotherly Love   more »

Your editor is sympathetic to the idea that school districts might prefer to bargain over wages, salaries and working conditions with the representative of a teachers' union rather than set the rules by fiat or negotiate with every individual teacher. But the extension of bargaining to all variety of management decisions, for example, assigning teachers to schools based on their own choices according to seniority, rather than where managers believe they can do the most good, takes too much authority away from the citizens who elect school boards preceisely to make such high-level policy decisions. The proposal is bad public policy.   more »

A company that will lose its contract has a greater institutional incentive to make sure its employees do right by these wards of the state than any agency that monoplizes the function.   more »

The first question for the industry is whether this means the end of Edison in Philadelphia... and maybe time to sell off the company for parts and re-brand what's left. If you were a superintendent, would you propose the firm to your board?   more »

Could private contractors do better than the state in operating juvenile justice detention and education? If there was ever a time to make the proposal for a pilot project, this is it.   more »

The Oregon Department of Education gives a bit more of its story on the dispute with Vantage, and hires nonprofit research organization AIR (American Institutes of Research) for next year's TESA administration.... The corporate website of Vantage Learning lists no press releases on the dispute. To paraphrase George Bush I, that decision "doesnt seem prudent."... Vantage counsel did speak to Education Week Reporter Andrew Trotter, but make note of the reporter's decision to cast the story as Vantage "leaving the state in the lurch" rather than, say, "being denied $4.7 million dollars in payments owed by the state." Both characterizations tend to prejudge what looks to be a legitmate business dispute - complicated by the end of a multi-year contract and Vantage's failure to win the new competition. But the underlying issue is now a matter for the courts. In the American legal system the facts and the law here are not decided but in dispute, and it is a bit unfair for Education Week to permit one of its reporters to pre-judge Vantage as straight reporting. The more legitimate place for this opinion is an Op/Ed page.   more »

It is clear why the California School Boards Assiciation opposes the idea. It hopes to constrain competition with traditional public schools. San Diego has decided that charters are here to stay, and if it hopes to compete, it must focus on running traditional schools better. But why should we believe that multiple chartering authorities prompt a "race to the top" for quality, when in every other sphere of policy they generally start a race to the bottom?   more »