Blog

By Rich Bagin, NSPRA executive director Recently, I spoke before a group of superintendents when I received an Outstanding Friend of Public Education Award from the Horace Mann League. I most appreciate that honor and I also used my acceptance to speech to share some messages with these leading superintendents...

Editor’s note: Dan Domenech, executive director of AASA, the School Superintendents Association, led a delegation of educators to study the education system in his native country of Cuba last month. Following are his reports on the Cuban system of education. A Look at the Educational Structure in Cuba Havana –...

Apprenticeships are one of the oldest forms of job training and are quite common in Europe. Yet the education community in the United States has given them scant attention, even as we have focused on college-and career-readiness for all students, and policymakers and educators need to take a fresh look....

School choice advocates who want to allow students to use public money to attend private school recently had a major win with a little-known school choice policy in Arizona . There, Republican Governor Doug Ducey signed into law a bill allowing any of the states’ students access to education savings...

By Rebecca Sterling The US is struggling with a significant gap between employers' expectations and young adults' skills sets. Recent data shows that: By 2020, 65 percent of jobs in America will require postsecondary education—which only 60 percent of Americans currently have. That leaves a gap of 5 million jobs....

Education Savings Accounts are an indirect way to use taxpayer money to provide funding for private, parochial, and other forms of non-public education. A recent webinar with the Learning First Alliance and representatives from the Arizona School Boards Association (ASBA) examined the nuts and bolts of this type of tax...

By Brad Gustafson You might be thinking, "I don't have time to write a grant" or maybe even "How can a single-sentence lead to anything meaningful?" The fact remains, we’re asking educators to make some really important pedagogical changes, but we have not changed how we think about school finance....

Over the next six months states will be filing their plans with the U.S. Department of Education to put in place the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). This new law restructured many of the actions state and local education agency officials will need to make to design their educational services...

It’s time to Stand Up for Public Schools Providing tens of millions of children with a world-class education every day is a daunting responsibility, but our schools are making “incredible progress” in meeting the challenge thanks to committed and innovative problem-solving school leaders across the country. That was the message...

Helping students learn to read and comprehend complex texts, think critically about what they read, and synthesize information from multiple sources is one of the most crucial things schools do. How do we support students to achieve that level of literacy and finish high school ready for work or college...