Policies that work

The National Governor's Association for Best Practices. "Providing Quality Choice Options in Education" says that the following are being used to increase student achievement and graduation rates across the nation.

Innovative school choice policies highlighted in the report include:

• strengthening and broadening charter laws;
• supporting transportation costs for low-income students;
• expanding eligibility for students to take college courses in high school;
• increasing the availability of virtual course offerings;
• providing equitable funding for all education providers;
• adopting school-based funding mechanisms; and
• offering tuition assistance for students to attend non-public K-12 schools.

Tennessee has a long history of hindering many of these sorts of innovations. Our charter schools law is exceptionally constraining and seems designed to make them fail. Despite Al Gore inventing the Internet and helping inact a tax to provide online access to schools his own home state doesn't lead in e-learning which can be a very efficient and cost effective education delivery system. And we should surely understand by now that the folks best able to determine how to spend the money are usually those closest to its intended use.

The problem with most of these suggestions is that it requires someone to give up the power and authority they have. Power and authority that they've held for a long time and they will not give up easily.

Page 12 mentions our value-added system as being helpful.

This morning's Nashville City Paper has an article on this report. And for some odd reason their article left off the suggestion of offering tuition assistance for students to attend non-public K-12 schools.