It's commonly observed that a school's culture for children is a mirror of a school's culture for adults. At Mt. Pleasant's Renaissance Public School Academy, as you can see in today's interview, we find a culture where passion and curiosity,…
Michigan Future Schools (MFS), a seven-year long initiative of Michigan Future, Inc., to fund and grow high schools in Detroit that are committed to high school graduation (read more here) wound down its work last summer. We’ve spent time this…
A couple weeks ago, U.S. Secretary of Education John King paid a visit to Detroit, during which time he offered some advice to Michigan education leaders in an interview with Chalkbeat: stop shuttering failing schools, because the schools we’re replacing…
Good article in the Atlantic on Detroit schools entitled Detroit's Education Catastrophe. Worth reading! The article describes the consequences of an unregulated education marketplace with little or no quality standards. You end up with too many schools chasing too few…
Two recent editorials laid out the path we should be on when it comes to k-12 education. The first from Stephen Henderson, editorial page editor of the Free Press, entitled "State must get tougher if charter schools fail to make…
We are proud investors in the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy (JRLA). It is one of seven new open enrollment high schools our Michigan Future Schools initiative has chosen to make grants to from more than 40 applicants over the past…
We and the country always frame stories about Detroit as nothing ever goes right. Even when they go right. This has got to stop! The latest example is a spate of stories about k-12 education in the city. All of…
In writing the three previous Transforming Education posts – in the pursuit of being brief (apparently the rule for blogs) – I have skipped topics I think are important. So here in summary form are my thoughts on some other…
In my last post I suggested that all schools should be held accountable for a "every student meets a without remediation at the next level " standard. That leads to the question “what levers do we have to make that…
As bad as the current results are from our entire k-12 education system, I'm optimistic that we can get big gains in student achievement. My optimism is based on a decade of progress made by schools here and around the…