Reality Check With Jeanne Allen

20,000 North Carolina teachers took to the streets of Raleigh for what was billed as a march and rally against low wages and underfunded schools. It was neither. “My heart goes out to the teachers that did turn out for the rally. The problem is, the rally organizers have an anti-charter school agenda,” said North Carolina Association of Public Charter Schools’ Executive Dir. Rhonda Dillingham. North Carolina is the latest in a wave of coordinated efforts to engage charter school teachers to abandon their classrooms and their students under the façade of solidarity. This is the fifth in a series of walk-outs and sick-outs being encouraged by the National Education Association (NEA). In this Episode 21 of Reality Check, Jeanne Allen is joined by charter school advocates, Rhonda Dillingham and Pamela Blizzard, the founder of two highly innovative charter high schools to unpack the messaging and hidden union agenda.

Darla Romfo is the president and COO of the Children’s Scholarship Fund. CSF provides partial scholarships for low-income children in grades K-8 to go to private school. CSF has provided scholarships to more than 166,000 children and currently serves almost 26,500 children nationwide. Ms. Romfo has served as CSF’s president and COO since the organization offered its first scholarships in 1999. Prior to joining CSF, her positions on Capitol Hill included legislative director and counsel to Sen. John Breaux (D-La.) and legislative director and tax counsel to Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) She’s also been an attorney in private practice. A frequent speaker on education and school choice, her vision is clear as CSF marks 20 years of making educational opportunity possible with thousands of new scholarships that empower families. “The real issue is that every parent should be able to decide for their kid what is the best option for them and to make that choice. And that money should follow them.” Episode 20 of Reality

If there’s one person who’s been-there-done-that in the world of education, it’s teacher, author, scholar, advisor and sought-after speaker, Sarah Tantillo. She taught English and the humanities in both traditional public and charter schools in New Jersey for 14 years. She chaired the Humanities Department at the highly-regarded North Star Academy School in Newark, and her students achieved an extraordinary 100 percent passing rate on the High School Proficiency Assessment for Language Arts and Literacy. She founded both the New Jersey Charter Resource Center and the New Jersey Charter Public Schools Association. Her books include The Literacy Cookbook and Literacy and the Common Core: Recipes for Action, with a new one out later this year about how the charter school concept became a national movement. She holds degrees from Princeton, Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Rutgers. Episode 19 of Reality Check with Jeanne Allen

Laura Sandefur is the co-founder of Acton Academy. She and her husband Jeff began with one school in Austin, Texas in 2009 initially motivated to give their children a different kind of education than they could find anywhere. They began as they say, “with a blank piece of paper” to build their dream school. Today, Acton Academy is a growing network of more than 80 innovative schools all over the world. Incorporating blended learning, the Socratic discussions, multi-aged learning environments, hands-on real-world apprenticeships, adaptive game-based programs, and teachers who are referred to as “guides” Acton Academy’s rigorous program has literally turned learning upside down. Episode 17 of Reality Check with Jeanne Allen

“We’re criminalizing common sense and rationality and we’re elevating hysteria to not only the common good but also what you must be to be an ok parent.” How do we overcome this? Jeanne Allen’s guest Lenore Skenazy has made overcoming this hysteria her life’s work. And for it, she’s been labeled “America’s worst mom”! But in this Episode 16 of Reality Check, we’ll hear frank conversation about how an innocent solo train ride by her 9-year old son spawned a movement to allow kids to be more resilient and independent, beginning with a book and a blog entitled “Free-Range Kids” and now 10 years later, is still going strong through her new organization Let Grow—in schools, homes and communities across the country.

Matt Greenfield is Managing Partner of ReThink Education, a venture capital firm focused on educational technology. He is on the boards of BrightBytes, Allovue, CareAcademy and Southern New Hampshire University. His non-profit affiliations include the leadership council of NewSchools Venture Fund and the board of Mouse.org. But Matt mostly thinks of his role as a problem solver. “As an investor, I start with solving a problem.” He wrote the business plan for the step-by-step modules for behavioral therapy in the treatment of autism which became “Rethink Autism”—now simply “Rethink.” With a background in academia and educational technology, he insists there’s more to moving students toward their goals and ultimately a career path, “It’s not just technology but a respect for students,” Greenfield asks, “Does it delight and engage the students?” Episode 15 of Reality Check with Jeanne Allen

In 1983, President Reagan urged students to understand the new world in which they lived: “Your generation is coming of age in one of the most challenging and exciting times in our history. High technology is revolutionizing our industries, renewing our economy and promising new hope and opportunity in the years ahead . . ." “Make sure you get the training and skills you need to take advantage of [these] new opportunities… Get a good education. That’s the key to success. It will open your mind and give wings to your spirit.” On the eve of the 35th anniversary of the release of ‘A Nation at Risk’ our students’ wings are clipped. National achievement has been stagnant for too many years, according to the results of the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress. It’s as if we’re in 1983 all over again, when A Nation at Risk declared that “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of

Robert Pondiscio is a senior fellow and vice president for external affairs at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a senior advisor to Democracy Prep Public Schools in Harlem, New York. He writes and speaks extensively on education and education reform issues with an emphasis on literacy, curriculum, teaching, and urban education. He came to the field of education as a second career and never intended to stay. He has become one of its most passionate spokespersons for reform and innovation. “I have a complicated relationship with testing and accountability.” Episode 13 of Reality Check with Jeanne Allen.

John Schilling is the President and CEO of the American Federation for Children, which was chaired by Betsy DeVos until she became Secretary of Education last year. John is a veteran of more than two decades in the field of education reform. “Choice works,” he says. “When you put parents in the driver’s seat, you find that giving parents the power to find the best educational environment for their child means that you’re going to give options to a lot of kids who don’t have them right now and really need them.” John Schilling is Jeanne Allen’s guest in this Episode 12 of Reality Check, a National Review podcast focusing on education issues.

If there’s one thing that America’s public schools could use, it’s the spirit of entrepreneurship and innovation. This week’s guest on Episode 11 of Reality Check with Jeanne Allen is Carl Schramm, former president and CEO of the Kauffman Foundation, who found himself spending many years studying what really makes a business succeed. The title of his new book, Burn the Business Plan, rips apart one of the most cherished assumptions in the world of business schools. As a professor at Syracuse, he’s seen it all, and his experience brings him to a lot of unconventional ways of thinking. Under his leadership, the Kauffman Foundation became the first grant-making foundation to own and operate its own charter school. Learn what allows some to succeed and some to fail in this Reality Check.

Can a private organization force someone to pay them to speak on his or her behalf? That's the question before the U.S. Supreme Court as it hears oral arguments in Janus v. AFSCME on Monday, February 26. The case may well mean the end of mandatory dues under agency shop agreements, the major source of funds for public employee unions, including the teachers' unions which have a stranglehold on the nation's public schools. This week's guest on Reality Check with Jeanne Allen is Mark Mix, President of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which represents Mark Janus, the plaintiff in the case. Learn all about one of the most important Supreme Court cases of the year on this Episode 10 of Reality Check.

The late Milton Friedman once wrote, "The tragedy, and irony, is that a system dedicated to enabling all children to acquire a common language and the values of U.S. citizenship, to giving all children equal educational opportunity, should in practice exacerbate the stratification of society and provide highly unequal educational opportunity." This week's guest on Episode 9 of Reality Check with Jeanne Allen is Robert Enlow, the president of EdChoice, which was founded two decades ago as the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. Enlow, once a man of the left, now devotes his life to making Friedman's vision of equal educational opportunity for all a reality.

This week's Episode 8 of Reality Check with Jeanne Allen features a discussion with Gerard Robinson, whose career includes running the education departments of not just one but two states, and a passion for focusing on the nexus between criminal justice reform and education. From Historically Black Colleges and Universities and his work at the Thurgood Marshall Fund, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Center for Advancing Opportunity, there are probably few education experts in America who have a broader understanding of the challenges and opportunities that await education reformers today than Gerard Robinson.

This is National School Choice Week, and so this week we have a special hour-long edition Episode 7 of Reality Check with Jeanne Allen with a constellation of guests. You’ll hear interviews with some of the brightest lights in the school choice world, including Johnny Taylor and Sylvia Simms, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Senator Ted Cruz, and House members Paul Mitchell, Virginia Foxx and Luke Messer. You’ll also hear from some of the beneficiaries of school choice tell their heartwarming personal stories, including Denisha Merriweather and Walter Banks. Get excited about school choice this week, with Jeanne Allen!

The major tax reform law that passed Congress in mid-December 2017 included a provision expanding the use of so-called 529 plans—tax free savings accounts that allow parents to put away money for their children’s college education. Now, they can be used for elementary and secondary education too. In this week’s Episode 6 of Reality Check with Jeanne Allen, Thomas Carroll, a leader in the effort to include the measure in the tax bill, explains why it’s so important: “it’s the first time that a national school choice measure has been adopted [at the federal level] in the past 20 years.” Carroll knows what he’s talking about—he helped create New York’s charter school law and founded a network of high-performing urban charter schools.

Why has a college education become so expensive, throwing millions of students into debt before they’ve even entered the work force? This week’s Episode 5 of Reality Check with Jeanne Allen explores that and related issues with John Katzman, one of he nation’s leading experts in higher education. “Technology in every other industry has lowered costs,” Katzman points out. But “in higher ed, it’s actually raised costs.” Moreover, “The reality is that education has gotten more expensive, but not the teaching part. The actual teaching is about 20 percent of what a school spends on a student.” For more, check out this week’s podcast on education with Jeanne Allen.

This week’s Episode 4 of Reality Check with Jeanne Allen features a discussion of the extraordinary 20 year history of BASIS Schools with co-founder Michael Block, who launched their international network of schools with his wife Olga back in 1998. From a single school in Tucson, Arizona BASIS has now grown to more than 30 schools which set the pace for private, public and charter schools alike. “Very early on,” he says, they “recognized that hard work and perseverance and failure is important. The ability to learn from your failures is really very important.” Today, four of the top five high schools in the United States are BASIS Schools. Find out how they did it!

This week, Episode 2 of Reality Check with Jeanne Allen features a discussion with guest Joe Nathan, Director of the Center for School Change in St. Paul, Minnesota. Joe has been at the cutting edge of the education choice movement in America, and helped write the nation’s first charter school law. He’s a prime example of the wide philosophical range of those who embraced choice at the outset in the early 1990s—he describes himself as a “Paul Wellstone Democrat”—and who have been making common cause with political conservatives in creating real choices and opportunities for lower-income children, whose lives a good education will change.