Chalkbeat

Education news. In context.

Chalkbeat

economics

Childcare crisis

Detroit
June 13, 2018

As caregivers struggle to make ends meet, 28,000 Detroit children go without care

The financial demands of providing early education in Michigan have contributed to Detroit’s status as a child care desert.

How I Teach

Tennessee
March 30, 2018

How one Memphis teacher brings the lessons of MLK to life – and how his students teach him back

Kyle Grady, a 12th-grade government and economics teacher, said the activism he has seen among his students has been inspiring.
New York
May 13, 2009

Mayoral control supporter says effects hard to quantify

A vocal supporter of mayoral control says that though he’s an economist, it’s tough for him to base his belief in the school governance structure on numbers. Marcus Winters, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research who has touted Mayor Bloomberg's school reforms in newspaper op/eds and academic papers, says mayoral control is the best way to govern schools because it provides more accountability for education reforms — but he can't prove that using test scores. “It makes me a little queasy to talk about researching positive effects of mayoral control,” Winters said today in a meeting with reporters about the governance structure. He said it’s “inappropriate” to draw a correlation between student performance and mayoral control because mayoral control is a broad governance structure, not a specific reform. “It’s really difficult to study because there’s a period before mayoral control and a period after, but other things have changed in the world besides mayoral control in that time,” he said.