Tag: Chartering

Recently in the Wall Street Journal and Education Next there were accounts of the origins of chartering. We thought we might take the liberty of adding our version, since the first legislative implementation of the idea occurred in Minnesota and a number of those now in Education|Evolving were involved.

Laura Weeldreyer is deputy chief of staff for the Superintendent of Baltimore City Public Schools. In this guest post, pushing against a recent report from the Fordham Foundation, Weeldreyer describes the reasoning behind that district’s move to create conditions inside the district that provide more autonomy to innovative schools and programs.

A senior administrator from a major public university said recently, about technology, “We could say we use technology, that it’s in all our classrooms and labs—we spend enormously on IT—but really it’s not an effective improvement.”

He was alluding to a point that there really are two fundamentally different ways of applying technology. The first is in support of existing practice. The second way to apply new technologies is to use them to enable fundamentally new kinds of learning. To be successful this often requires combining innovations in technology with innovations in school models.

Doug Thomas, Executive Director of EdVisions, describes how the EdVisions cooperative organizes its members into site teams to run schools, and supports teacher-run schools throughout the country.