Search

Denver Public Schools traditional and charter schools combined to create a single system that allowed all students to indicate their school choice preferences, replacing a system of more than 60 different selection processes. The new system also gave families a wealth of information regarding school quality. A study of the new system found it was fairer than its predecessor to students from disadvantaged backgrounds but that families nonetheless tended to chose schools closer to home regardless of their quality ranking.

The purpose of this study was to inform the upcoming and overdue reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) by exploring whether rural school districts face disadvantages as they attempt to follow the law's provisions and, if so, if the law's rural-specific section ameliorates these disadvantages. The research drew upon interviews and survey results from rural Colorado as well as from a comparison group of non-rural school districts in the state. The findings suggest that rural districts are indeed uniquely administratively disadvantaged when it comes to the law. However, they also share certain challenges with their non-rural counterparts. The article concludes with policy recommendations that address challenges experienced by districts across the rural-urban continuum as well as challenges that are specific to the rural context.

The Bunkum Awards are a sort of beauty contest for ugly people. Bestowed by the National Education Policy Center housed at the University of Colorado at Boulder, they reward the most "nonsensical, confusing, and disingenuous" studies of education published each year. Contestants are drawn from reports critiqued by the Think Tank Review Project, a five-year-old initiative that provides peer reviews of think-tank reports about education. Though any think tank is eligible, the Bunkum Awards are annually dominated by one subsector: advocacy-oriented think tanks that often value ideology over methodology. They might be tongue-in-cheek, but these awards are also symbolic of a serious concern among many academics who study K-12 and higher education. Education professors worry that think-tank reports are more widely distributed than peer-reviewed research through the mainstream media and, as a result, have an outsized influence on policy and practice. Yet surprisingly little research exists on the nexus between the news media and schools and universities, despite the fact that education is among the nation's most significant public interests and expenses. So, in 2009, the National Education Policy Center commissioned the author to look into who was actually conducting the educational research mentioned in the news media. In this article, the author discusses the results of her study and provides some recommendations for professors who are interested in increasing mentions of peer-reviewed research in the news media.

The purpose of this study was to inform the upcoming and overdue reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) by exploring whether rural school districts face disadvantages as they attempt to follow the law's provisions and, if so, if the law's rural-specifi c section ameliorates these disadvantages. The research drew upon interviews and survey results from rural Colorado as well as from a comparison group of non-rural school districts in the state. The fi ndings suggest that rural districts are indeed uniquely administratively disadvantaged when it comes to the law. However, they also share certain challenges with their non-rural counterparts. The article concludes with policy recommendations that address challenges experienced by districts across the rural-urban continuum as well as challenges that are specifi c to the rural context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]