The Education Exchange

In the most recent ratings put out by the state of Florida, Miami-Dade County Public Schools earned an "A" designation and had no "F" rated schools, unusual achievements for a large urban district. Ron Matus, Director of Policy and Public Affairs at Step Up For Students, sits down with Paul E. Peterson to discuss some factors behind the school district's success: dynamic and stable leadership, an understanding of how to intervene in and support the most struggling schools, and many different options for families if they are not satisfied.

Families in Milwaukee gained access to the nation's first private school vouchers nearly three decades ago. Today the educational landscape in Milwaukee also includes charter schools and many other forms of public school choice. But standardized test scores are still low and the achievement gap between black and white students remains large. Alan Borsuk of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and Marquette University talks with Paul E. Peterson about some of the challenges Milwaukee has faced despite the long history of school choice in the city.

Robin J. Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, sits down with Paul E. Peterson to discuss what Indianapolis has done to make charter schools work.

Jim Blew, assistant secretary for planning, evaluation and policy development at the U.S. Department of Education, sits down with Paul E. Peterson to discuss some of the work of the department, including a new federal tax credit initiative and proposed changes to Title IX.

For over 50 years, a limited number of students of color living in Boston have been able to enroll in schools in the suburbs as part of the METCO program, run by the Metropolitan Council for Educational Opportunity. Charles Glenn sits down with Paul E. Peterson to discuss who benefits from the program and whether it distracts from larger issues related to urban schools.

A new study finds that students who receive vouchers to attend private schools in Louisiana are outperformed by students in a control group. Some argue that regulations in Louisiana that discourage many private school leaders from participating in school choice programs are to blame for the poor results. Paul Peterson talks with Patrick Wolf about two recent studies, one looking at the Louisiana Scholarship Program and one looking at what school leaders say about their willingness to participate in school choice programs when those programs have regulatory strings attached. "Heterogeneous Impacts Across Schools in the First Four Years of the Louisiana Scholarship Program," by Matthew Lee, Jonathan Mills, and Patrick Wolf is available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3376234 "The Effects of Regulations on Private School Choice Program Participation: Experimental Evidence from California and New York," by Corey DeAngelis, Lindsey Burke, and Patrick Wolf is available at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3349453

Jeff Bergner, author of The Vanishing Congress, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss how Congress has stopped doing its job and how that could change. The book is available at https://www.amazon.com/Vanishing-Congress-Reflections-Politics-Washington/dp/0989040232

What is social and emotional learning, how does it relate to academic learning, and how much should schools focus on it? Chester E. Finn, Jr., a distinguished senior fellow and president emeritus at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, joins Paul E. Peterson to discuss “What Social and Emotional Learning Needs to Succeed and Survive,” a new paper co-written with Rick Hess. The paper is available at https://www.educationnext.org/what-social-emotional-learning-needs-succeed-survive

Some studies have found that schools can get substantial gains in achievement by changing textbooks. But a new analysis by the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard finds little evidence of differences in achievement gains for schools using different math textbooks. Paul E. Peterson talks with Thomas Kane, of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, about the new study, “Learning by the Book: Comparing math achievement growth by textbook in six common core states.” https://cepr.harvard.edu/files/cepr/files/cepr-curriculum-report_learning-by-the-book.pdf

In a new book, Love Your Enemies, Arthur Brooks describes the rise of a “culture of contempt”—a habit of seeing people who disagree with us not as merely incorrect or misguided, but as worthless--and considers what we can do to bridge divides and mend relationships. Today he talks with Paul E. Peterson about how contempt corrodes our own happiness, about remembering the difference between people we disagree with and the ideas they embrace, and about the role universities can play in repairing our culture.