Originally published in the Poverty & Race journal, this post is a summary of a new research brief that I co-wrote with my friend James Noonan. James worked for the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment (MCIEA), one of the promising alternatives to test-based school quality measurement that we highlight below. When James started in the faculty…
In part 1 of this post, I looked at SchoolSparrow.com, an equity-oriented school ratings site that is positioned as an alternative to GreatSchools.org. In the lead up to its national launch, I had an email conversation with the founder, Tom Brown, where I outlined some mixed feelings about the site. As I say in part…
If you’ve followed the debate about GreatSchools.org ratings, you might have also heard about SchoolSparrow.com. Positioned as an equity-oriented alternative school rating site, SchoolSparrow started about ten years ago in Chicagoland, and it went national in 2021. On its website, you can search for your own school/the schools in your town, and you can read…
Things aren’t looking good in Massachusetts’ suburban schools these days. Last month, the Boston Globe released a series of articles on a culture of racism and homophobia on the Danvers High School hockey team. On “hard R Fridays,” students on the all-white team shouted the n-word in team huddles. When one player refused, others welted…
After long decades of silence or backsliding, state legislatures are newly beginning to think about policy solutions to contemporary school segregation. A bill in North Carolina, for example, would require public reporting on levels of segregation at each school, and my home state of Massachusetts is considering a bill that would establish a grant program…
Though it might go unnoticed in the hailstorm of coronavirus, election, etc news, the pandemic has caused cities to reconsider a bastion of racial segregation: gated entry for so-called “elite” public K-12 schools. Boston, for example, has three “exam” (or, I prefer, “restrictive enrollment”) schools, which determine entry based on student GPA and scores on…
A few weeks before Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, the National Coalition on School Diversity (NCSD) published a list of model state school integration policies. It was important then, but it takes on added significance in light of the protests that have followed Floyd’s murder, the heightened attention to racial justice and segregation, and repeated…
Today, teachers in the Little Rock School District (LRSD) are engaged in a one-day strike to protest a multi-year State effort to limit democratic engagement in Little Rock schools and divide the district. Tim Jackson wrote an update for Diane Ravitch’s blog after a crucial State board of education meeting in early October. I’m thrilled…
If you could create an ideal dataset of students’ and teachers’ experiences at their schools, what would be in it? How might you use it? And, specifically, would you ask about school diversity or school integration? I’m asking myself similar questions now, as I start a new position as the director of School Quality Measures…
School Diversity Notebook 