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High Stakes Tests For 3-Year-Olds?
If you’re a parent of a young charter school student in DC – or just someone who cares about early education – you need to know what’s happening here in the nation’s capital, and fast. In less than a...
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Is It The Tests or the Stakes?
As DC grapples with whether or not to adopt an accountability framework that would assign between 60-80% of a charter preschool’s overall rank to its students’ reading and math scores, it’s worth...
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The PCSB Responds
As the deadline for public comment on the PCSB’s proposed accountability framework for early childhood programs nears (August 28) — and as public reactions to the proposal intensify — PCSB’s executive...
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How Should We Evaluate Our Preschools?
Imagine, for a second, that you are in charge of more than $600 million in taxpayer money. You live in a city that has made deep investments in early education, and that aspires to provide universal...
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DC’s Plan to Assess Early Childhood Programs: Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down?
In case you missed it, the Public Charter School Board (PCSB) of DC has proposed a common framework for assessing the quality of all preschool and lower elementary programs. The original proposal...
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Should Integration Be a Goal of DC Public Schools?
From 2000 to 2010, the white share of the District of Columbia’s population grew from 30.8 percent to38 percent . And from 2000 to 2012, the median household income in the city rose 23.3 percent while...
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Turning School Chance Into School Choice
There are a lot of smart people in Washington, D.C., and one of them is Evelyn Boyd Simmons. A longtime D.C. resident, an effective parental advocate, and a firm believer in the unmatched promise of...
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Something’s Happening Here . . .
In the span of a few weeks, all of DC seems to be abuzz with the prospect that our elected officials may actually try to ensure greater racial and socioeconomic equity in the city’s public schools —...
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This is what a community conversation about school reform looks like
Now that my new book is out, I’m doing a series of public talks around the country to explore core issues of choice, reform, and community. My first event was at the legendary DC bookstore, Politics...
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Is it time for schools to rethink, well, time?
On a recent weekday morning in Washington D.C., several hundred teenagers hurriedly made their way through their high school’s hallways in a frantic effort to get to class on time. I know – nothing new...
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A Public Charter School Is Trying to Model Itself After A Private School: Is...
Yesterday, Senator Lamar Alexander stuck his foot in it when he suggested that not all charter schools are, in the end, public. “There are some private charter schools, are there not?” Alexander said...
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