School Boards

How School Boards Should Respond to Coronavirus – Rick Hess Straight Up

1 month ago Jennifer

As families, educators, and community leaders wrestle with COVID-19, we’ll be trying to bring conversations to readers that will be helpful in confronting the challenge.

AJ Crabill, 2019 recipient of the prestigious James Bryant Conant Award, is a national school board guru and director of governance at the Council of the Great City Schools. Prior to this, AJ served as deputy commissioner in Texas. I recently had the chance to talk to AJ about the role of school boards during the coronavirus. Here’s what he had to say.

Rick: How should school boards be thinking about the challenges of

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Hacked and Cut Off From the Public: This Is School Board Business in the Coronavirus Crisis

2 months ago Jennifer

The school board in Scranton, Pa., hosted a public meeting on Zoom to discuss the annual budget.

Before the pandemic banished them from meeting in person, hundreds of people had packed Scranton’s school board meetings. The Pennsylvania community’s distrust of the board had been mounting ever since the state auditor discovered years of neglect and fiscal mismanagement, landing the district in more than $200 million of debt.

So when the Scranton board moved its meeting online March 6 to discuss how to close its deficit, more than 350 people logged on, overloading the YouTube video conference tool it was using.

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A Conservative Agenda for School Board Members

3 months ago Jennifer

Opinion

—Vector art: Doyata/Getty; background image: Photodisc/Getty

The center right must check the “progressive” left

By

Michael J. Petrilli & Chester E. Finn Jr.

Let us start with a confession: As card-carrying members of the school-choice and testing-and-accountability wings of the education reform movement, we have at times been dismissive, even hostile, to local school board members. That’s because these elected officials, constrained as they may be by laws, regulations, and the leanings of those they employ, have often seemed willing to protect the status quo and resist changes intended to overhaul the jalopy we call American public schooling.

But

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A Losing Fight to Keep Schools Desegregated

10 months ago Jennifer

Letha Muhammad, of south Raleigh, sends her children to district magnet schools in Wake County, N.C., including Moore Square Magnet Middle School pictured behind her. An education activist, Muhammad says it’s critical that the school board be sensitive to how all communities are impacted by any changes to the district’s school assignment plan.

—Caitlin Penna for Education Week

| Corrected: August 13, 2019

Few districts have done as much as Wake County, N.C., has to keep its schools racially and socioeconomically diverse.

It is a battle that the school board says it has been losing.

Now, the

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These School Boards Wanted to Be More Effective, so They Went to Harvard – District Dossier

10 months ago Jennifer

Nearly 100 school board members from 18 large districts descended on the Harvard Business School earlier this week to dig deep into a major existential question: how to be more effective stewards of their districts.

It’s the start of a unique professional development program for a group that rarely gets a lot of training—school boards—and marks the beginning of a new relationship between the venerable university and the Council of the Great City Schools, which represents large, mainly urban school districts.

The council has worked with its members on capacity building, including by offering on-the-ground technical assistance and consulting, but

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Voter Turnout Drops for School Board Elections Where Charters Thrive

12 months ago Jennifer

Most charters operate outside the purview of elected school boards, but the publicly funded, independently operated schools have rarely been studied for their impact on school districts as civic institutions.

Now, one of the first studies to take an empirical look at this question finds that the rapid increase in charter enrollment in Ohio in the earlier part of the decade appears to have modestly depressed voter turnout in local school board elections.

A 1 percentage-point increase in charter school enrollment was linked to a decline in votes cast in elections for school board seats of about 2.5 percent to

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Students on School Boards: Balancing Representation and Fairness – District Dossier

12 months ago Jennifer

Earlier this week, I published a story for Education Week on the phenomenon of students with real, consequential votes on their local boards of education. 

As part of our exploration of how students experience civics in public school—beyond just their government classes—this story hinges on an imminently logical question: Students are affected by every board decision. So why do they seldom get a say on them? 

While it’s relatively common for students to serve in an advisory capacity, they very rarely get a full board vote. 

My story looked at this issue mainly from a conceptual standpoint. It also profiled

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Few Student Board Members Can Vote. Should That Change?

12 months ago Jennifer

Senior Ananya Tadikonda, the student member on the Montgomery County, Md., school board, says the pledge of allegiance at the opening of the board’s May 30 meeting.

—Kaitlyn Dolan for Education Week

In the final months of her tenure on the Anne Arundel, Md., board of education, Josie Urrea doubled down on her efforts to dismantle the student ranking system she says promotes too much competition and stress among students.

Urrea’s hard-charging approach on a tough topic belies the fact that she is just 18 years old and one of only a handful of U.S. youths who hold full or

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Los Angeles School Board Takes Stand on Abortion. Should It?

1 year ago Jennifer

The Los Angeles district’s school board has passed a resolution to “stop the bans” on abortion, an unusual move that prompts several broader questions for the nation’s more than 14,000 school districts: Should boards wade into divisive social issues? And how common is it for them to do so?

The resolution, approved as a special order of business May 21, is a clear rebuke to Alabama lawmakers, who recently passed a law banning nearly all instances of abortion in that state.

“This is an anti-choice movement that will particularly impact women of color and low-income women,” the Los Angeles

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Other News

How We Talk About the Achievement Gap Could Worsen Public Racial Biases Against Black Students – Inside School Research

17 hours ago Jennifer

Three SOS Instructional Strategies for Supporting Social Emotional Learning with New Resources from Discover Your Happy

1 day ago Jennifer

A boy’s telling answers on worksheet about police

2 days ago Jennifer

Addressing Student Mindfulness | Discovery Education

2 days ago Jennifer

Financial Literacy Counts – Now More Than Ever

3 days ago Jennifer