K-12

by Owen Davis FOR PEOPLE LOOKING to “disrupt” public education, it’s become requisite to bemoan the “educational status quo” — a phrase meant to evoke images of poor kids striving against the impediments of failing schools and…

Using a tax increment financing scheme, since 2006, over $5 million dollars have been diverted from the cash-strapped public schools and given to Ann Arbor SPARK officials. WHILE ANN ARBOR  Public Schools officials, parents and students…

SPENDING ON LOBBYING was down across the board in 2012, but  the education industry led the way in tightening the purse strings. According to OpenSecrets.org, “In 2011, the industry, which includes both for-profit and nonprofit colleges and…

THE DISCIPLINE GAP. Put simply, the term describes the gap between the number of minority students (primarily Black and Hispanic) and white students who are formally disciplined and/or expelled from the public schools they attend. Data from…

by Warren Liverance LATELY, BOTH LIBERAL and conservative blogospheres are abuzz with discussion of the “The Common Core.” It seems that for once, the majority of both sides oppose something that would be bad for the country. Since this…

IN A RECENT issue of The Ann Arbor Independent, the newspaper published an article which identified a cluster of Ann Arbor elementary schools at which fewer than 10 percent of the fifth grade students have scored “Advanced” on the MEAP in…

Listening her way across the city. Budgeting her way to perdition. Dr. Jeanice K. Swift was not the Ann Arbor Board of Education’s first choice to lead the Ann Arbor Public Schools. The search for Dr. Patricia Green’s replacement began…

ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT SHOULDN’T be predicated on which of Ann Arbor’s 21 public elementary schools a child attends. The AAPS elementary curriculum is standardized throughout the District, and teachers are uniformly compensated, qualified,…

THE NATIONAL CENTER for Safe Routes to School released the results of a study that concluded more K-8 students are walking and biking to school. The 43 page study, titled “Trends in Walking and Bicycling to School from 2007 to 2012” was…

THE SUPERINTENDENT OF the Ann Arbor Public Schools, Dr. Jeanice Kerr Swift considers “both organizations, the AAPSEF and the PTO Thrift Shop as tremendous partners in our work on behalf of Ann Arbor children.” Mary Cooperwasser, a former…