Tired of Winter, Bad News and Business as Usual? This will pep you up!
We love anything called Permissionless
…but especially this piece by Stand Together’s Adam Peshek, who brilliantly explains why the wave of education freedom efforts shouldn’t be compromised by some academics’ proclivity to regulation and bureaucracy. Read Don’t Charter-ize ESAs.
Edreform Revived
The impetus by some to want to institutionalize and regulate a definition of quality, not trusting that parents can figure it out, was the subject of Charting a Course, the Case for Freedom, Flexibility and Opportunity through Charter Schools, a diverse set of essays resulting from the conference we held in 2016 called Edreform Revived, dedicated to precisely the issues Adam is getting at. In it, Max Eden helped me crystallize the problem with some reformers then, and some now.
System-centered reformers want to arrive at higher-quality educational options through expertise-driven management. They believe that bureaucrats and politicians should have ample authority to decide what schools may open and what schools must close using standardized test scores to make data-driven decisions.
Parent-centered reformers trust parents more than bureaucrats when it comes to determining school quality. They want to see a more open and dynamic system, where educational entrepreneurs are freer to open new schools and parents decide which schools should close and which should expand based on whether they want to send their children there.
Listen to Those Closest to Our Kids - and Their Challenges
It’s incredible what you learn when you listen to the people who are actually running the schools where the students are, either by virtue of their parents’ choices - in every income and genre - or by the efforts of responsive educators to make their work student-centered. Watch - or listen - to these two amazing episodes of In Piazza taped at the National Press Club earlier this month that drive home the points above.
Listen to the audio podcasts here:
Or watch the video versions here:
And how does this work?
In Why Some Education Innovators Are Going Back to The Future published in Real Clear Education this week, I share the stories of three of those leaders who are making it happen for kids in innovative and outstanding ways.
Finally, as has been evidenced from the start, students in charter schools particularly in urban communities outperform their public school counterparts, begging the question again, why do so many want to stop them, limit them or malign them? Learn the latest happenings in NYC for black New York City charter-school students.
Take this out with you today…
Educational freedom drives innovation that shocks the status quo, inserts competition, and ultimately contributes to the superior outcomes that result from content excellence delivered through great schools. (EdReform Revived, Nov, 2016)
Until next time! Jeanne