Much has been said about the wholesale firing of teachers at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island, both in opposition and agreement. We have learned that only 50% of the students there graduate, and 7% are proficient in math. The superintendent hasn’t been on the job very long, and her goal is to create [...]

Public schools in the United States continue to be governed by appointed or elected school boards – except in cases of takeovers and charter schools that report directly to states. But some seem to be asking if school boards are relevant in today’s world.  Often there is no mention of them in national conversation about [...]

One thing for sure when folks attend a high school reunion, it’s the one place where no one has to guess how old anyone else is. I recently attended my high school reunion, and it was more fun than I could have imagined!  The icebreaker was walking up to someone and saying,  And who are [...]

Dover Elementary was once part of a emerging suburban scene in the Richardson ISD as families with Texas Instruments came, looking for good schools. Things changed for Dover in the 1980s, as federal law was passed prohibiting discrimination of families with children. Nearby aging apartments filled up with other families looking for good schools, eventually [...]

One of the hottest topics in public education these days is charter schools.  According to a recent article in Education Week: President Barack Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have been championing charter schools for months, creating what some advocates believe is the most forceful national momentum to expand the largely independent public [...]

Public school parents have a huge stake in their children’s education and therefore in the laws that govern the schools their children attend. As an engaged and concerned parent myself, I had the privilege of serving on my local school board in Richardson ISD (TX) from 1997-2006.  It was the era of No Child Left [...]

Julie Owen is a public school parent in Jackson, MS and active with the Jackson chapter of Parents for Public Schools. She is passionate about the role of the arts in education and shares her views here as a guest blogger. Her own blog may be viewed at http://caseyarts.blogspot.com/ From tiny white eggs found on [...]

Parents for Public Schools works to bring parents into an advocacy position concerning their children’s education. Nationwide research such as the Henderson/Mapp report supports what we have known for many years –that children and schools improve when parents are more involved at all levels. Parents for Public Schools has launched a statewide program in Mississippi [...]

When I served as a trustee and school board president of Richardson (TX) ISD form 1997-2006, the hiring of minority staff became a very important goal of our school board. The district was becoming increasingly diverse, and yet the teachers, principals, and other staff remained predominantly Anglo. Our school board recognized that all students deserve [...]

It was a cold, cloudy, February morning in Portland, Oregon, as about 250 parents from Portland Public Schools gathered at daVinci Middle School (which has an art focus) for the annual Parent Leadership Conference sponsored by Community and Parents for Public Schools of Portland. It’s a given that each of these parents could have found [...]