- With the initial buzz over virtual schooling on its way out, questions about quality and effectiveness are on their way in. Erin Dillon and Bill Tucker admit they don’t have all the answers, but in their Education Next article “Lessons for Online Learning,” they outline several issues policy makers and educators will need to address in order to make virtual schools effective: the rigor and universality of virtual school performance standards; the need for data and research on virtual school effectiveness; and the murky policy questions related to funding and access to virtual schools, among others.
- Realtors, meet the education policy wonks. Chris Lozier and Andrew J. Rotherham’s new study Location, Location, Location: How would a high-performing charter school network fare in different states? explores the possible effects of re-locating the much-lauded Aspire charter school network from California to various other states. Lozier and Rotherham find that, depending on the charter-friendliness and per-pupil spending in a given state, Aspire (a proxy for other high-performing charter networks) would make a small fortune or go bankrupt accordingly. In Ohio, Aspire would run a mere $38 per-student surplus, which would make for a miserly 0.5% operating margin.
- South Carolina is the latest buzz in school choice news. State legislators recently proposed the South Carolina Education Opportunity Act, which, according to Education Next’s Joshua Dunn, “would provide tax credits to parents choosing to send their children to private school, extend smaller tax credits to homeschooling families, and provide scholarships for low-income students to attend private schools.” Both Dunn and the Cato Institute’s Andrew Coulson heralded the bill as among of the strongest school choice legislation in the country yet.
- Facebook, step aside. The latest teen social network map comes courtesy not of Mark Zuckerberg, but of Robert W. Faris, an assistant professor at the University of California, whose new study seeks to map young adults’ social circles and determine what kind of student is most likely to be the class bully. He concludes that most bullies come from the middle rungs of the social ladder—they’re neither “cool crowd” elites nor outcasts—and push other students around in an attempt to raise their social standing among their peers.
