A new report by the Fiscal Research Center at Georgia State University seeks to quantify how much families were willing to pay for a greater likelihood of receiving access to a charter school between the years 2004 and 2013.

Author Carlianne Patrick examines thirteen metro Atlanta start-up and conversion charter schools that have priority admission zones within their designated attendance zones. Each school has three “priority zones.” The rules governing when a priority zone comes into play and how it interacts with the lottery are quite complex, but the idea is basically this: You get a higher chance of getting into a particular charter school if you reside in priority zone one.

Patrick limits the analysis to home sales within close proximity of the border between priority-one and priority-two attendance zones because they represent a change in admission probability. She claims that residences close to the border—in this case, less than half a mile—should be similar in both observable and unobservable ways, including access to jobs and amenities, styles of houses, foreclosures in the area, etc.

Patrick measures the effect of being on the priority-one side of the border between zones one and two. She also controls for transaction date,...




The first few weeks of September make up a sweet spot between seasons, with summer's last days of warmth and play mingling with the beginning a new school year. All that beauty and excitement can make it easy to forget the significance of today's date: Fourteen years have passed since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. Though the distance of time has made it gradually easier for that anniversary to pass by unnoticed, we should all take a few moments to remember the thousands who were taken from their families and communities. Their lives are as worthy of consideration today, after fourteen years, as after five, ten, or twenty. 

But the job of an educator, or a society, is not merely to commemorate. We must also teach. Freshmen entering high school this month have no memory of the horrors of 9/11. Indeed, many were born after the events took place. For the sake of their education and our democracy, it's crucial that they learn what the attacks meant to our nation—their place in American history, their impact on law and citizenship, and their effect on our geopolitical posture around the world. This is complex and sometimes...

Miriam Kurtzig Freedman

In the vast “how-to-fix-education” universe, early childhood programming seems to be the new elixir. Governors and mayors push it, as does our president, viewing it as a smart investment in the future. Many children come to school unprepared to learn, so we have to intervene earlier. Right? An instinctive response is to advocate for more early childhood education. Who can argue with that? Some seek universal full-day programs for three- and four-year-olds, while others focus on babies from birth to age two.

As an early childhood observer (though not a practitioner), I suggest we step back to ask whether a different, more direct approach might be better. Before we create new programs, let’s consider Sutton’s Law. This delightful decree is named after Willie Sutton, who robbed banks because, as he put it, “that is where the money is.” Thus, when diagnosing challenges, consider the obvious first. “When you hear hoof beats behind you, think horses and not zebras.” 

When children come to school unprepared, think home! Build on the reality that home is where children reside with their first teachers, their parents and caregivers. The road to improve early education—especially in the area of language skills, so vital to school...

Linda K. Wertheimer

In Faith Ed: Teaching About Religion in an Age of Intolerance, Linda K. Wertheimer argues that American schools should do more to teach students about world religions because it reduces ignorance and encourages coexistence. She tells stories of students who have taken these classes and, in many cases, experienced personal growth. One such pupil is Celia Golod, who was a sixth grader in 2010–11 at Wellesley Middle School in suburban Boston. What follows is her story, as excerpted from the book.

Some students brought heavy baggage with them. Long before middle school, they were picked on because they were members of a religious minority. Celia Golod had been teased for being a Jew ever since her family moved from a largely Jewish area in New Jersey to the mostly Christian town of Wellesley. At the time, Celia was in third grade. During the first year in a Wellesley school, a kid came up to her with a ruler to measure her nose. Celia hid in a corner afterward. In fifth grade, around Christmas time, she clashed with peers who wanted to know why she did not believe in...

One of the biggest debates raging in education policy today is whether schools of choice are serving their fair share of the hardest-to-educate students or abandoning them to traditional public schools.

I have been more willing than most education reformers to acknowledge that some degree of selection bias is inevitable in a system of choice. The parents who seek out options for their children are, by their very nature, different than parents who do not, and this will likely have an impact on the academic performance of their children.

Furthermore, I have been happy to defend some degree of selectivity, both explicit and implicit. I support exam schools, for example. High-achieving students, especially those growing up in poverty, have not been well served by our traditional public school system, and I believe they deserve a place to go to school where they can learn to their full potential.

Still, wherever you stand on these debates, it’s certainly worth knowing whether the demographics of schools of choice match those of the larger community. This has driven many rigorous analyses of charter school populations, such as the proportion of their students ...

In a few months, education reformers will begin celebrating the twenty-fifth birthday of Minnesota’s groundbreaking charter school legislation, which passed in 1991 and inspired a wave of similar laws across the country. The charter movement can now vote, drink, and carry a concealed weapon. (But hey, maybe not all at once.)

The millennial era has been a time of rapid growth in the sector: Over six thousand charter schools now serve almost three million kids across the country. And all those ribbon-cutting ceremonies have given rise to a simultaneous flowering of research into the effects of charters. This meta-analysis from Columbia University’s National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education set out to comb through the existing data to identify the specific impact of “no-excuses” charters on math and reading. Offering a brisk tour through the mission and methods of no-excuses schools, it should make handy reading for a public audience that still trips over some of the details even at the quarter-century mark.

After wading into an ocean of some five thousand initial titles, the authors finally ended up weighing the results of sixty-eight relevant studies published on schools that generally fit the no-excuses model...

Lisa Hansel

“Programmatic series of studies”—that’s how one of my psychology professors described research on learning and memory around twenty years ago. Do a study, tweak it, try again. Persist.

I was reminded of that while reading this new volume by Tony Bryk and colleagues. After thirty years of constant reform and little improvement, it’s clear that there’s a fundamental flaw in how the education field goes about effecting change. Quick fixes, sweeping transformations, and mandates aren’t working. Ongoing professional development isn’t working either.

What might work much better is a sustained, systemic commitment to improvement—and a willingness to start with a series of small pilots instead of leaping into large-scale implementation. Guided by “improvement science” pioneered in the medical field, Learning to Improve shows how education could finally stop its reform churn. As Bryk et al. write:

All activity in improvement science is disciplined by three deceptively simple questions:

  1. What specifically are we trying to accomplish?

  2. What change might we introduce and why?

  3. How will we know that a change is actually an improvement?...

A set of general principles guides the approach: (1) wherever possible, learn quickly and cheaply;...

A new study in the Journal of School Choice explores whether charter schools open in “high-demand” areas of New York City. In particular, the authors ask whether they situate themselves in high-density areas with lots of children, near schools with low academic performance, or in neighborhoods where parental satisfaction is low.

The study examines fifty-six new elementary charter schools that opened between 2009 and 2013, along with 571 traditional elementary schools. Data sources include parental satisfaction survey data from the New York City Department of Education (with 2008 as the base year for the traditional public schools), school proficiency rates on math (because math scores are more school-dependent than reading scores), and Census data on poverty and population.

The analysts compare parents’ dissatisfaction with their children’s current schools (relative to the number of charter openings in the area) and that area’s poverty rate. They find pockets of parental dissatisfaction scattered throughout southwest Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens. Yet charter schools didn’t open in these areas. They tended to locate instead in clusters around central Brooklyn and along a stretch in western Manhattan, where parent satisfaction varied but was generally moderate or high.

Next, they detect a modest but imperfect relationship...

Last Friday, in a 6-3 decision, the Washington State Supreme Court declared unconstitutional the state’s voter-approved charter school law, threatening the future of nine new schools with more than 1,200 students.

The ruling was not based on the merits of the law (one of the strongest in the country on accountability). Nor was it based on the words of the state constitution. Instead, the majority cut off all funding from charter schools (the specifics on when and how to be determined by a lower court) by relying on an obscure 1909 judicial interpretation of the words “common schools.” These words are found in the state constitution, but aren’t defined. The majority held that under this century-old definition, the charter school law did not subject those schools to enough “local control,” and therefore is unconstitutional.

The holding hinged on this idea of control—despite the fact that these charters are subject to more accountability than the state’s traditional public schools. Parents choose whether their children will attend. Charters performing in the bottom quartile of all public schools must be closed if they continue to fail. And local school boards are free to sponsor charters. (In...