Education

Charters & Choice News Roundup: Keeping Teachers, Closing Schools

By Arianna Prothero — November 14, 2014 1 min read
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Initiatives to retain teachers, best practices for closing schools, weeds overrunning Detroit playgrounds, and weed-funded Illinois charter schools ... all those stories and more are on tap for this week’s school choice news roundup.

Long hours and high turnover is an issue for many schools serving high-poverty areas, be they charter, district, or private. Here’s what the KIPP charter network is doing to improve retention:

Lots of school choice, yet none at all ... A paper from the Center on Reinventing Education looks how hard it is for Detroit parents to find a quality programs.

Whose job is it to fix the problems facing parents in Detroit? Our interviews with leaders in the city suggest that no one knows the answer." "It's a free-for-all," one observer told the report's authors.

The charter bargain is perform or fail, but how do you close a charter school? Turns out there’s an art to it...

New leadership for private schools in the Aloha State... The Hawaii Association of Independent Schools named a new Executive Director, according to the Star Advertiser.

U.S. private schools aren’t the only ones struggling with low enrollment ... numbers in Scotland have reached a 25-year-low.

And now for the kicker... Marijuana investors offer $1million to Effingham Ill. schools to sweeten the deal over a zoning request. In addition:

[One of the investors, Jon Loevy] told The Associated Press on Wednesday that his group wants to use profits from medical marijuana to open charter schools in Illinois. He said it makes sense for the company to give money to Effingham schools. 'We believe it is in the company's interest to fund vocational education because we need trained workers,' Loevy said."

If you have an idea for next week’s roundup, tweet me @ChartersNChoice.

Chart from Fixing Detroit’s 
Broken School System by Robin J. Lake, Ashley Jochim and Michael DeArmond.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Charters & Choice blog.