A SILVER ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION. While the establishment and others are crowing over charter schools and trying regulate, slow or limit their growth, you may want to pause a moment to read the Wall Street Journal piece, “Charter Schools Are Flourishing on Their Silver Anniversary." As we noted last week, City Academy, the nation’s first charter school opened in St.…

REINVENT IT. A lot of people still don’t know that the #edreform movement is supported by a varied group of actors: From researchers to practitioners; and, thought leaders to parents. Since its inception, the cause of school choice, in particular, has been a mutual affinity among left, right, center and none of the above.  That’s why David Osborne’s…

MAKING LINCOLN PROUD.  Tomorrow, August 30, Governor Bruce Rauner (R-IL) could sign into law new path-breaking legislation creating the state’s first tax credit scholarship program, part of the state’s new education funding bill.  The $75 million tax credit scholarship program could serve as many as 20,000 students and will be the nation’s largest first-year school…

JUSTICE FOR ALL – A MESSAGE FROM CER’S DIRECTORS. Since 1993, the Center for Education Reform (CER) has worked to advance a bold agenda to help our nation’s children achieve the education they deserve. We fight hard and relentlessly for parent power because we know that education not only paves the way for everyone to…

In a statement released earlier today, a comparison was made between Education Next polling data from 2015 and 2016, which showed public support for charter schools remaining consistent from one year to the next, and questioned news reports to the contrary. The data covered in media reports, however, compared 2016 polling information to 2017data and…

EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT OPPORTUNITY’S OPPONENT….but were afraid to ask. The NAACP’s report on charters has set off a firestorm of criticism from charter leaders across the country. CER directors Donald Hense and David Hardy released as statement decrying the association’s conclusions, saying it put the association “…sadly, and uncharacteristically, on the…

FIRESTORM. AFRICAN AMERICAN LEADERS SPEAK OUT AGAINST NAACP’S EDUCATION QUALITY HEARING REPORT. The NAACP’s recent report on education quality, which challenges the value of charter schools for minority families has African American ed reform leaders in an uproar. Two of the most prominent to speak out: CER directors David Hardy, founder and Chair of Boys’…

THE GREATEST HITS OF 2017 SO FAR... …but before we get to that, a couple of late-breaking notes from a mid-summer swirl of ed-related news SMART ALEC.  It was great to attend the 44th ALEC Annual Meeting that went off in Denver last week. The program featured Education and Workforce Development Task Force meetings on…

Opportunity advocates storm Capitol Hill, Congress deals with ESSA implementation, advice to the DOE and more in this week's edition of Newswire...

PERSONALIZED LEARNING GAINS…  a big endorsement from a newly released RAND report which finds that students who engage in PL do better in math than their peers and gives an added boost to kids who are behind their classmates and trying to catch up.  The report also found that schools in the study “were pursuing…