This 13th report in WestEd's evaluation of the K-8 Early Implementers Initiative for the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) provides an extensive response to the following question: What does NGSS science teaching look like in the classroom? The report first discusses Initiative teachers' experiences with four instructional practices that…

As the charter sector has matured, its critics have multiplied. While charter schools enjoyed bipartisan and substantial public support for their first 20 years, the tide of public opinion now flows in more varied directions. Policymakers and leaders across the country are facing pressure to limit charter expansion, with public support for charter…

The challenges associated with educating students with disabilities in charter schools in Connecticut are symptoms of two broader issues--the state's inequitable public education funding system and problematic ambiguity in the state charter law. Fundamental changes to the state education funding system are required to better position urban…

Speakers of languages other than English are positioned as problems within education systems and 'low' academic English proficiency is viewed as something to be fixed. Alternative education programs are typically viewed as punitive, substandard, exclusionary academic settings. Therefore, speakers of languages other than English (ELs) enrolled in…

Throughout the pandemic, the Getting Smart team (which Tom Vander Ark leads as CEO) worked with public school districts in Kansas, Missouri, and Texas, as well as charter schools in six additional states to support hybrid, virtual, and return-to-school strategies and plans. During the year and a half that education systems spent in crisis…

This technical brief is part of an ongoing series the Center for Learner Equity (CLE) launched in 2015 that examines the enrollment and experiences of students with disabilities in different school settings. Using the 2017-2018 U.S. Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) data released earlier this year, this brief focuses on specialized charter…

The record of charter schools has been a mixed bag. They have become racialized, radicalized into business-generation schemes, scorned by teachers unions, and in some cases rammed down the throats of poorer communities. But charter schools sometimes have spotlighted best practice in urban education. In this article, Samuel D. Henry, a former…

This paper addresses the convergence of inequality across social and economic dimensions in the United States. Chief among these are wealth accumulation, labor, and education. Specifically, I discuss the transference of wealth to the top of the income hierarchy, the automation and polarization of labor, and threats to public education.…

Can Dewey's Moral Principles in Education throw light on a contemporary policy issue in education, namely the privatisation of education through the establishment of academy schools in England? The article first considers what the policy entails, in terms of its conception of education as a market commodity. The next section suggests an…

A sustained policy press to improve quality and reduce disparities in public education is driving U.S. public school districts to organize and manage instruction for excellence and equity. The purpose of this analysis is to elaborate and to animate patterns and dilemmas in this work. The analysis identifies five domains of work central to this…

As schools of choice, charter schools typically have the flexibility to enroll students from across an area, rather than being bound to a neighborhood attendance zone. And as schools usually created from scratch, charters can build diversity into their design, choosing educational models designed to appeal to a wide range of families. In practice,…

New York State's system of public elementary and secondary schools is in steep decline, but it is salvageable. The roots of its problems pre-date the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, but the system's response to that challenge accelerated discontent with the schools and harmed students. The damage of those years will not be undone if…

This conceptual analysis centers two historical periods in which Black communities in the United States secured educational rights for themselves in spite of (not because of) intervention from the federal government. Drawing from the Critical Race Theory, the authors argue that Reconstruction and the post-"Brown" era offer valuable…

In Texas, local taxpayers fund the majority of educational facilities construction and maintenance costs, with local wealth influencing facilities outcomes. The traditional school districts that comprise the predominantly Latino and segregated San Antonio area vary considerably in property wealth as well as district capacity and expertise. We…

By law, a student's admission to one of New York City's eight elite high schools is determined by his or her score on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT). Only a very small number of black and Hispanic students make the cut, a fact that has led Mayor Bill de Blasio to engineer what he regards as a more equitable racial distribution…