Categories: News

Enthusiasm Grows for NJ’s Public School Choice Program

My most recent column at WHYY’s Newsworks looks at the evolution of NJ’s Interdistrict Public School Choice Program. In September, about 15% of NJ’s school districts will take part.

Take over Camden Public Schools! Reform tenure and evaluate teachers and principals on student growth data! Strengthen and expand charter schools! Enact a school voucher bill!

Education reformers in New Jersey and elsewhere sure do love radical change, seven-league strides towards the imagined Bethlehem of high-achieving schools accessible to all children. We’ve no patience for baby-steps that gingerly transverse the mired ruts of the status quo, no time for triangulated compromises that slap a coat of paint on failing schools and call it an improvement.

But sometimes meaningful change does occur incrementally. This is hard to hear for die-hard reformers. But one particular Jersey-grown school reform measure argues for a gradual approach: the state’s Interdistrict Public School Choice Program.

Read the rest here.

Laura Waters

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