National Education Policy Center (University of Colorado Boulder)

For decades, politicians have struggled to make educational opportunity more widely avail able and less tied to where a child's parents can afford to live. The reviewed Bellwether Education Partners' recent report attempts to examine the availability of low-income rental units in school districts to understand whether districts in the largest 200 metropolitan areas are accessible to families in poverty. While the report's focus on the intersection...

Research suggests that public schools serving advantaged students are more likely than other public schools to benefit from private fundraising. The reviewed report fails to conclusively demonstrate two key claims: that schools serving wealthy student bodies are more likely to have private fundraising groups, and that larger shares of white students are associated with increased private spending. Nonetheless, the report's approach of calculating per-pupil...

Summit Public Schools, a charter school organization operating schools in California and Oregon, published Pathways to Success: Exploring the Long-Term Outcomes of Alumni from Summit Public Schools in September 2021. The report claims that Summit alumni graduated from college at nearly double the national average and self-reported high levels of well-being, fulfillment, and workplace satisfaction. It also reports that alumni from socioeconomically...

This brief offers model legislation to govern the financing of publicly funded Online Education and Virtual Schooling (OE/VS).

K12 Inc. enrolls more public school students than any other private education management organization in the U.S. Much has been written about K12 Inc. (referred to in this report simply as "K12") by financial analysts and investigative journalists because it is a large, publicly traded company and is the dominant player in the operation and expansion of full-time virtual schools. This report provides a new perspective on the nation's largest virtual...

The U.S. test-based accountability model holds schools and teachers accountable for student outcomes with little attention to school improvement processes. Many other countries enact more school-centered accountability efforts, such as school self-evaluation followed by inspection (SSE/I) to examine school quality, as in similar systems in England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and the Netherlands. Accountability models from other countries cannot be naively...

This brief investigates whether closing schools and transferring students for the purpose of remedying low performance is an option educational decision makers should pursue. The logic of closing schools in response to low student performance goes like this: By closing low-performing schools and sending students to better-performing ones, student achievement will improve. The threat of closure may motivate low-performing schools (and their districts)...

A summary of the larger report "Discipline Policies, Successful Schools, and Racial Justice." Each year, more than 3.25 million K-12 students are suspended at least once. African American students are suspended three times as often as white students.Hispanic students and Native American students are also suspended at higher rates than white students. This paper presents the facts about the following myths: (1) Suspending disruptive students is necessary...

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students face a unique set of safety concerns each day. Over 85% report being harassed because of their sexual or gender identity, and over 20% report being physically attacked. Far too often teachers and administrators do nothing in response. In part because of this, the suicide rate for LGBT students continues to be 3-4 times higher than that of their straight counterparts, and in some parts of the...