New U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos faces an uphill battle to sell her voucher-heavy, uber-market brand of school choice to an American public that’s choice-friendly, but voucher-skeptical. Which makes it hard to fathom why she would choose to throw stones at a city that sits atop the school choice mountain. DeVos spoke this week at a Brookings Institute event that…
Tag: Colorado
Touchdown, Colorado! A school rating system that gets the basics right
By David Griffith So far, watching state ESSA plans roll in has been a bit like rooting for the Washington Redskins (or, if you prefer, the Washington Football Team). Every fall starts with fresh hopes. Yet every spring fans are asking the same questions: What went wrong? Why can’t management learn from its mistakes? Why does it always have to…
Five Reasons for Parents to Care about the State’s School-Accountability (ESSA) Plan
About the same time that this week’s deadline passed for feedback on Colorado’s school-accountability plan, the US Department Education pretty much said: don’t bother—continuing its hands-off, eyes-off, everything-off approach to implementing the new federal education law (the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA). And despite ESSA being in the news quite a bit lately, I’m sensing that it’s not exactly…