While several charter schools are among the best in the state in outperforming academic expectations, overall, charters fare poorly in Bridge Magazine’s top-to-bottom list of Michigan schools. The analysis offers ammunition to charter advocates and critics alike; mainly though, it raises questions about why Michigan charter schools are so wildly inconsistent, even when teaching similar […]
Talent & Education
To prosper, Michigan must be a more educated place. Bridge will explore the challenges in education and identify policies and initiatives that address them.
Posted inTalent & Education
Helping teachers improve will help students learn, education group argues
Amber Arellano is the executive director of Education Trust-Midwest, Michigan’s only statewide, nonpartisan advocacy and research organization focused solely on education. Arellano has testified before legislative committees on a variety of education-related bills, and is a strong believer in using data to help gauge what works and doesn’t work in public schools. Arellano responded to […]
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Bolger backs bigger dollars for early childhood
House Speaker Jase Bolger, freshly elected to a second term to head Michigan’s House of Representatives, added his voice Wednesday to a growing coalition of political leaders in favor of increased state spending on early childhood education. “We should expand early childhood education opportunities as investments to help kids succeed. Those investments also will provide […]
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Schools struggle to pass digital test
Two years from now, hundreds of thousands of Michigan students will be expected to go online to take computerized statewide math, language arts and other standardized tests that now are conducted with paper and pencils. The benefits include quicker results for school districts, tests that more accurately track what individual students know and longer test […]
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Proposed changes to state loan program could limit schools' ability to buy tech
Michigan school districts are vying for $50 million in state money for technology – the first such investment by the state in about a dozen years. Yet, at the very same time, school leaders are watching warily as legislation that could make it harder for them to borrow money to make technology investments may get […]
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Land O Links
* The Nation rounds up data on why U.S. children struggle in comparisons with youth in other industrialized nations: “In one long-term study of roughly 200 children born into poverty in Minnesota, the quality of the mother-child relationship during the first three and a half years of life strongly predicted whether the child would drop […]
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School choice: not your father's classroom
Imagine a world where your teenage son chooses high school courses like picking dishes in a cafeteria – a serving of Advanced Placement chemistry in the white collar enclave across the river, Spanish online at the dining room table, an English class at the local community college, band at his home school. Now imagine that […]
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Ad campaign leaves voters, experts unimpressed
Conventional political wisdom about ballot proposals says that they’re almost always an uphill battle. The “no” side has an advantage with an electorate that often looks on change with skepticism. So says Robert Kolt, whose Okemos-based Kolt Communications specializes in advertising. (He also teaches at Michigan State University.) But, he adds, that’s not to say […]
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Proposal 5: Supermajority rule on taxes
The signal moment in the budget reform agenda of Gov. Rick Snyder came by a margin of one, as the state Senate voted 20-19 in May 2011 to approve a $1.7 billion tax cut for business and impose a variety of changes to Michigan’s personal income tax. Lt. Gov. Brian Calley cast a rare tie-breaking […]
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Global schooling for a smaller world
What started as a curriculum for children of diplomats and leaders of multinational corporations is being adopted in an increasing number of Michigan schools. The International Baccalaureate Programme — “IB” as it’s commonly called — has special emphasis on internationalism. At the high-school level, a world language is a requirement. Those students also write a […]
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