Choice

Can Education Polls Be Scientific? Or Is It All Interest Group Politics?. Paul E. Peterson. August 22, 2013.

Three polls have come out within the past week: the Education Next (EdNext) poll, the Associated Press poll (about which I have commented previously), and, now the Phi Delta Kappan (PDK) poll, published by a journal with close ties to schools of education across the country.

The Public Supports Accountability and Common Core Standards. Paul E. Peterson. August 21, 2013.

While many in state capitols and Washington, D.C. are placing bets against state and national accountability systems that range from No Child Left Behind to Common Core State Standards, the public remains faithful to its long-standing commitment to hold schools, students and teachers accountable.

Latest Results on Common Core and Other Issues in EdNext and AP Polls. Paul E. Peterson. 2013. August 20, 2013.

Can we believe education polls? Do different education polls yield different responses? We know from presidential election polls that most polls yield results that do not differ more than a few percentage points, but, then, the question posed is almost exactly the same: Who do you plan to vote for? Further, those polls are about a topic that has been given intense publicity for a prolonged period of time. How about education polls, which ask people their views about matters to which the media give much less attention?

While K–12 Schools Resist, Digital Learning Disrupts Higher Education. Paul E. Peterson. 2013. August 14, 2013.

“By 2019 about 50 percent of courses will be delivered online,” wrote Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn in a pathbreaking essay in 2008 (“How Do We Transform Our Schools?” features, Summer 2008).

Peter Flanigan
Peter Flanigan: A True Friend of School Choice. Paul E. Peterson. 2013. August 05, 2013.

School vouchers never had a better friend than Peter Flanigan. It was not Peter’s direct philanthropic contributions. Although he gave generously from the wealth accumulated as an investment banker, others—such as the late John Walton—drew upon deeper pockets to donate more to the common cause. Nor was Peter a theoretician who could expound the case for vouchers with Friedman-like brilliance.

Common Core State Standards: Do You Need To Be Proficient In Order To Be Proficient?. Paul E. Peterson. 2013. July 12, 2013.

In response to the article on the disparity in state proficiency standards that Peter Kaplan and I published earlier this week, one reader, Scott McLeod, referred (in a comment) to an article arguing that that “proficiency” as defined by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) does not really mean proficiency.

A Reply to NCTQ’s Defense of its Rating System. Paul E. Peterson. 2013. June 28, 2013.

In my June 25 blog post, I reported that effective Florida teacher preparation programs received no better ratings by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) than ineffective ones.

Do the NCTQ Rankings Identify Schools of Education that Produce Graduates Who Are Effective in the Classroom?. Paul E. Peterson. 2013. June 25, 2013.

The National Council on Teacher Quality, in conjunction with U. S. News and World Report, has issued an ambitious report evaluating the quality of teacher preparation programs in schools of education across the United States. But its critics argue that the report fails to show that its measure of program quality is correlated with the classroom effectiveness of a school’s graduates. If the information available to us for a few teacher preparation schools in Florida is at all representative, the critics may have a point.

U.S. Institute of Education Sciences Weighs In on Voucher Impacts on College Enrollment. Paul E. Peterson, Matthew M. Chingos. 2013. May 14, 2013.

Last summer, we released the first experimental study of the effect of school vouchers on college enrollment. Our study, which is published in the current edition of Education Next, generated significant controversy.

A Generation of School-Voucher Success: African American kids in New York were 24% more likely to attend college if they won a scholarship to attend private school. Matthew Chingos, Paul E. Peterson. The Wall Street Journal. August 23, 2012.

President Barack Obama last month signed an executive order promising to "improve outcomes and advance educational opportunities for African Americans." The order instructs federal agencies to "promote, encourage, and undertake efforts" to increase "college access, college persistence and college attainment for African American students." Unfortunately, his administration remains opposed to the Opportunity Scholarship program in Washington, D.C., which lets students—mostly low-income and African-American—use a voucher to attend a private school.

A quiet revolution. William G. Howell, Paul E. Peterson. The National Law Journal, A21. July 08, 2002.
Rigorous Trials and Tests Should Precede Adoption of School Reforms. Paul Peterson. The Chronicle of Higher Education, B4-B5. January 22, 1999.

Few doubt that education in our inner cities is in desperate need of improvement. Decades after the civil-rights movement began, equal educational opportunity remains more a slogan than a reality. Minority-group students in U.S. elementary and secondary schools continue to learn much less than their white peers, as measured by a wide variety of tests of student achievement, such as the SAT and the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

What Do Parents Think of Their Children’s Schools?. Paul E. Peterson, Samuel Barrows, Martin R. West. Education Next, 17(2). 2017.

Over the past 25 years, charter schools have offered an increasing number of families an alternative to their local district schools. The charter option has proven particularly popular in large cities, but charter-school growth is often constrained by state laws that limit the number of students the sector can serve. In the 2016 election, for example, voters in Massachusetts rejected a ballot question that would have allowed further expansion of charters in communities that had reached the state’s enrollment ceiling.

How Satisfied are Parents with Their Children’s Schools?. Albert Cheng, Paul E. Peterson. Education Next, 17(2). 2017.

All four sectors in K–12 education compete for the support of their customers—that is, the parents of their prospective students. Those parents have more choices today than in decades past: they may send their children to the public school automatically assigned to them by their school district, or opt for a private school, charter school, or district-run school of choice. These choices include a range of cost and convenience—and, not surprisingly, a range of customer satisfaction levels.

The Ideal Blended-Learning Combination. Paul E. Peterson, Michael B. Horn. Education Next, 16(2). 2016.

As the use of technology in schools grows rapidly—whether in blended-learning environments, for project-based learning, or just because it’s the fad du jour—how much time students should spend learning on a computer is a point of contention. More and more people seem to agree that digital learning in K–12 classrooms works best when it is used with the oversight of a teacher. The chants of “teachers not technology” and “laptops for layoffs” increasingly appear to be relics of the past.