UPDATE: Robbed and Judges look at whether charter schools are public by Valerie Strauss

Robbed:

Judges look at whether charter schools are public

by Valerie Strauss

Charter schools are publicly funded but increasingly people are asking whether many of them more resemble private schools. Here's a different look at this notion from Julian Vasquez Heilig, an award-winning researcher and Associate Professor of Educational Policy and Planning at the University of Texas at Austin. A version of this appeared on his Education and Public Policy blog.
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Robbed

by Valerie Strauss

To start off the new year, here’s a personal look at the problems that face public education  from Brock Cohen, a teacher and student advocate in the Los Angeles Unified School District. Cohen believes that school reform begins with social justice and that school reformers everywhere have to stop trivializing the role that poverty plays in student achievement. His students were featured in this NPR piece.

By Brock Cohen

I stared into the now unlocked and vacant steel filing cabinet drawer that formerly contained three valuable tools of my trade as a high school English-Hanguage Arts and Humanities teacher: an LCD projector, an Elmo projector, and a Macbook Pro – all resources that I had fully incorporated into my daily instruction. Now they were gone. My classroom had been robbed.

After reporting the incident, I was informed that the perpetrator likely acquired a duplicate